Challenge game: (12)Fullfill the conditions of the "around the world in 80 years achievement

[SPAMbuca]

I have a hunch this challenge is surprisingly hard. Am I wrong? I personally find it hard to balance overextension and AE and being too passive.

 

[SPAMbuca]

'Aragon has allied France' - I've given up, can't even get a game where France rivals Aragon.

Aragon has other potential starting rivals. Castille, but nations like Burgundy as well. Burgundy could probably beat France 1 on 1 considering they start with more troops with all their subjects and have a 10% bonus in morale. Castille starts with 15% morale as well if I remember right. Otherwise, there are other nations available, so I'd say keep trying.

 

[PhoenixG]

'Aragon has allied France' - I've given up, can't even get a game where France rivals Aragon.

At the start of the game, kinda keep restarted till aragon rivaled/get rivaled by castile and france. Although in my 5 tries they did that 2 times. I guess you're unlucky

 

[SPAMbuca]

1 Could be done.

2 The 1 week mark is mostly for my own comfort and organisation. So far, we also had challenges that were heavily contended for most of the week.

3 I don't mind exploits being used. It's how we all started on this challenge in the first place. Remember disbanding the HRE in 5 months simply because we could take many more allies than intended. As long as you can tell us how you did it afterwards.

I don't consider the challenge too hard. It's perhaps a strategy that is hard to replicate or to execute, but there are plenty of other nations and strategies left.

 

[Hessian Mercenary]

I was up to about 10 tries by the time i gave up, I would say it was more of a case of you being lucky, rarely do I see France ever rival Aragon, which is also the reason why Spain never forms as Aragon always wins against Castile.

Also since we're discussing the challenge being too difficult, I thought I might add some of my opinions on the way this thread works:

1) It would be nice to see some more discussion on these challenges before they go live. This would involve maybe making challenges and posting them with rules, then discussing the rules before voting on the next challenge. This way we would not have to make corrections to the rules, as happened with this challenge (nations being removed), as well as giving participants a chance to vote on the challenge they want, so that they are more likely to participate. It would also mean the challenge rules would not be changed after the challenge starts, I had already planned an Aragon game when I then found they were removed.

2) The time limit is unnecessarily long and should be changed to start at 72 hours and be reset every time someone breaks the last record as this would stop challenges going on longer than they need to, i.e. if the challenge is too difficult. Since most of the records will be set earlier in the challenge, there should be no problem with running out of time.

3) A few other small things like being clear on no exploits should be added, and on the topic of explaining one's strategy, i.e. on a twitch stream (which was mentioned earlier), I don't think this is necessary, if people want to post/link a video of their game/strategy, then that is fine but screenshots with text explanation is enough for me.

If I missed anything or anyone here disagrees with this, then add to this and discuss below and hopefully we can get some better rules for challenges set up.

1) since the winner can suggest the new challenge I think it's unnecessarily wasting time to have a long discussion and voting procedure about the new challenge. Of course it's unfortunate if rules get changed after a challenge is announced but you can't expect people to know everything about the game and e.g. Aragon getting the PU when the wedding fires is a quite recent change which is easily to miss when not actually playing as Aragon. And corrections happened fairly quick so I don't see much of a problem here

2) 72 hours is a bit short but I think one week instead of two is a good time window

3) no exploits is difficult to control (let alone the discussion what counts as an exploit and what not) but since we're doing this for fun I hope everyone is behaving sportsmanlike anyway

 

[Dominion]

Maybe you guys should get some benchmarks I was kinda waiting for some times to come in, but I'll probably start my own before I get new screens

 

[SPAMbuca]

With the 72 hour extension, a challenge would still most likely go on for a week, it would only end challenges that are not being contested. After a challenge has finished, we could then have 72 hours to decide the next challenge. With 48 hours being the limit on submitting a challenge to be voted on to be up next and a vote up from 48 hours to 72 hours with the most voted for challenge being the next challenge.

My definition of exploits is something that is not working as it should be, i.e. a bug like editing Custom Nation save files.

This challenge has too much RNG after the removal of all the 'Overpowered nations', all but Bohemia have to fight an independence war against a major power as a minor power, which requires luck, a good start and good AI (AI obviously being not good). Playing a small nation is fun and is a good challenge, but this challenge forces you into a major war at the very start of the game, and you then have very little control over the outcome of the war.

As discussed before, I can't remove the RNG completely due to how the game works.

Custom nations are never allowed so far and we have other rules that should minimize the risk of doing something that I do not intent to happen with the challenge. I feel it's not impossible to win an independence war as any of the nations mentioned, but you can adapt your strategy depending on your preferences. If that still isn't enough to beat the current high score, that is no problem.


I'll try and think of a next challenge and have it posted around wednesday or thursday I suppose.

 

[Politic Revolutionnaire]

I thought of Sweden first too, but it all depends on your independence war. It has to be quick and easy. Sweden has a harder time to find allies than Naples. In my run I had England, France and Castile backing me. I doubt Sweden can get that kinda support.

Independence is the easy part of playing Sweden, the hard part is managing AE and being able to defeat Muscovy, but once you accomplish that you should have free reign over the steppes. Granted that run failed soon after because I got coalitioned by Muscovy and declared war on while my manpower was depleted and my armies in Scotland of all places.

 

[PhoenixG]

Swedish steel is OP

 

[Hessian Mercenary]

45 provinces in 1452. Haven't played Sweden since the patch that buffed Denmark and Norway, but it's still easy mode. Asked England for support, started to build some galleys and waited for Denmark to ship their troops on Gotland (they also mothball Lund once the rebels are defeated). English navy kept norwegian navy in check and when my galleys finished I was able to block 10k Danes on Gotland. Novgorod was easy after Muscovy attacked them. My only problem is that Muscovy now allied Denmark and my ally England is weakened from war against France. Need to find some other allies to boost my numbers so I won't get attacked soon

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I just tested it and we were only half right.
If it's not connected to your capital but there is a port connected to your capital, I could core Crimea due adjacent to a vassal. After I cored that I could core anything inland upto my colonial range, 160 pre dip tech 7. Beyond the 160 I can only core adjacent to a cored province.

I see, that makes sense/explains the inconsistency. Typically after the early-mid game you have so much range that it doesn't matter, but it's good to know for this scenario.

America is possible, but if you focus on conquering stuff in the same colonial region, they will turn into colonial nations, thus subjects. Africa might seem more useful for this.

Since provinces don't have to be core going way over 100% (even to 1000%+) right at the end is a viable option for winning this challenge, and CN regions are worth considering as part of the end-game (near 1500) warpath since I doubt a winning submission will be coring much of anything from those last wars regardless.

 

[Tobias Schwarz]

Bohemia is one of my favorite HRE countries, because of the Interregnum. Today I went for a Bohemia-Poland-Lithuania-Union.

Not really efficient for this challenge, cause I can't integrate the provinces in time. In the first 50 years I got the BI, integrated Silesia and Danzig (had all TTO provinces). Result: only 39 provinces. My Subjects Poland (20 provinces), Lithuania (38 provinces), Crimea-Marsh (21 provinces). My development 560 and subjects development 752. Maybe I have time to try it with another strategy and without handicap (I play on very hard for harder diplomacy).

What ideas do you prefer in general/ for this challenge? I did pick Influence and Administrative.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Few things could junk the credibility of a competition like this faster than a generic "no exploits" rule.

 

[SPAMbuca]

Bohemia is one of my favorite HRE countries, because of the Interregnum. Today I went for a Bohemia-Poland-Lithuania-Union.

Not really efficient for this challenge, cause I can't integrate the provinces in time. In the first 50 years I got the BI, integrated Silesia and Danzig (had all TTO provinces). Result: only 39 provinces. My Subjects Poland (20 provinces), Lithuania (38 provinces), Crimea-Marsh (21 provinces). My development 560 and subjects development 752. Maybe I have time to try it with another strategy and without handicap (I play on very hard for harder diplomacy).

What ideas do you prefer in general/ for this challenge? I did pick Influence and Administrative.

If you had a screenshot, you'd go in the list.

 

[SPAMbuca]

I see, that makes sense/explains the inconsistency. Typically after the early-mid game you have so much range that it doesn't matter, but it's good to know for this scenario.



Since provinces don't have to be core going way over 100% (even to 1000%+) right at the end is a viable option for winning this challenge, and CN regions are worth considering as part of the end-game (near 1500) warpath since I doubt a winning submission will be coring much of anything from those last wars regardless.

True, forgot that. Guess it's a good option then as long as you keep your eye out.

 

[pratik_maitra]

Personally after trying out both Bohemia and Sweden,my conclusion is that Sweden has an easier expansion route but suffers from money problems a lot. On the other hand Bohemia with its rich gold can field a decent army without a sweat but would struggle to core lands.

 

[pratik_maitra]

Here is my successful run with Sweden.

Provinces 86

 

[PhoenixG]

dat 88 corruption. You really like printing money

 

[alexti]

I have a hunch this challenge is surprisingly hard. Am I wrong? I personally find it hard to balance overextension and AE and being too passive.

In what sense "hard"? Most of the eligible nations aren't in any danger so one could simply do nothing and still produce some sort of a result I am pretty sure AE needs to be actively managed to get a decent result - you definitely don't want to fight any coalition wars.

Few things could junk the credibility of a competition like this faster than a generic "no exploits" rule.

I think if "exploit" is reasonably well defined that's fine. For example, one could define "exploit" as anything done outside of the game (for example, save game editing, editing the game files, altering memory content etc...)

 

[alexti]

No I didn't go beyond 100% OE.. The AE control was already a pain and all the sunni land you take is already rebelious. I fought more rebels than countries. I could go more gungho in the last few years, but my last war was against Timi, and it wasn't pretty. While the fight was pretty even, I couldn't split up my units + I was constantly fighting rebels.

Yeah, the rebels are painful in this type of runs. But the way I understand the rules you only need to own the province, not necessarily control it, so rebel-occupied provinces would still count. I don't think it's worth fighting anyone strong - too much effort when what you can take is limited by 100%WS anyway.

I thought of Sweden first too, but it all depends on your independence war. It has to be quick and easy. Sweden has a harder time to find allies than Naples. In my run I had England, France and Castile backing me. I doubt Sweden can get that kinda support.

Sweden can often win independence on its own (unless Denmark ally someone strong). England will support you in most cases and there are usually other nations interested in supporting you too (depending on how alliances/rivalries fall).