Guys, I keep having internet problems. My computer will be fixed on friday. The deadline won't move, but the topic will be updated on saturday and a new challenge will be opened next sunday. In the meantime, people can also discuss the next possible challenge. I've posted 2 ideas before. People can react why they would be good/bad ideas and offer alternatives.
Challenge game: (12)Fullfill the conditions of the "around the world in 80 years achievement
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I don't understand that sentence.
War reps are a separate section in your list of sources of income.
"Creative" can be subjective. By "creative" I meant something different than better blobbing. Better blobbing doesn't involve micromanagement only (however micromanagement seems unavoidable), there are obviously important strategic decisions involved.
Only "regular" income counts towards maximal loans. So looting or privateering won't increase the amount you can take in loans. War reparations do, but you are largely limited by what wars you can win. If you defeated someone large you get better income gain from keeping them occupied than what you would get in war reparations. Not sure about condottieri fees, opportunity to get them is obviously luck-dependent, but I suspect you would get more income if you used those troops to occupy more land. You could try to get subsidies, but that goal is somewhat contradictory to growing your own nation. Maybe it's possible to engineer something in Europe, but AI seems reluctant to subsidize other great powers. Besides, it's a relatively minor percentage. Someone who will manage to add a lot of land to the relevant trade companies will get a much bigger bump in income (due to goods produced modifier mostly). I was actually surprised you had only one war at the end of your run - I expected that people trying to maximize the income would have half a screen filled with the current wars
I would like to invite people to try Madurai - I am not sure if it's in an ideal start for this challenge, but it's quite competitive and it's fun to play. Besides - how often efficient blobbing strategy opens with counter-espionage?
The biggest things going for Madurai is a large number of cored development (unfortunately hold by a neighbouring yellow blob) and it's in a perfect place. The monarch is not as good as Ternate's and NI (that we can reach) are weaker too. However it can likely get away with only one no-CB (to enter Africa) and it can quickly start working on expanding into Ceylon/Bengal nodes and setting up escape to Africa (and its gold mines). More importantly, it's a fun start where you are at risk of getting annexed
The biggest things going for Madurai is a large number of cored development (unfortunately hold by a neighbouring yellow blob) and it's in a perfect place. The monarch is not as good as Ternate's and NI (that we can reach) are weaker too. However it can likely get away with only one no-CB (to enter Africa) and it can quickly start working on expanding into Ceylon/Bengal nodes and setting up escape to Africa (and its gold mines). More importantly, it's a fun start where you are at risk of getting annexed
I think that the rule for loans is the same as for advisors - the income has to be regular, so you can't get more loans via looting or privateering just as you can't get early level-3 advisor by the same means. If it worked for loans, fairly good strategy would be to get footholds across the world to be able to privateer in the rich nodes where you can't collect (or feed to your collector)
Great attempt. I did know that Gold income would easily surpass trade and other such incomes. However I did not think that any OPM in Afrca that could get the mines.I nearly doubled the record: appx. 445,000 ducats.
As I thought, there was plenty of room for improvement with more innovation, though I didn't expect to have this large of an improvement. I will share my strategies this time around, because I don't think this can be beaten short of savescumming very hard for a better ruler. The strategy behind this run could not possibly have been better; every aspect lines up perfectly. You get a larger income return from developing gold mines than any other possible use of monarch power, so you only want to take the provinces needed and no more, because more is a waste of points that could be going into gold. However, you do also need land to give away for Revanchism. Mahafaly is perfect because Madagascar is isolated; you can conquer three of the nations on it and then leave the last one with one province, who is not threatened by anyone else and will not ally anyone else, making revanchism perfectly secured with almost no war exhaustion. The power base from Madagascar is enough to get you into Kilwa, and it's smooth sailing from there.
One of the priorities for this run was maximizing Goods Produced percentage modifier, which happened to synergize very well with what I was already doing: Golden Ages and Prosperity both reduce development cost as well, meaning more development on top of the better modifier. Fetishist is also the only religion in the game with the potential for a bonus to goods produced, from the Hindu cult, which I obtained by declaring a quick no CB war on Madurai. Beyond that, the rest of the run was spent at peace until time to give up my land for revanchism, to ensure that I would maintain prosperity for the end. This was another example of how perfectly everything worked out; because the land I was giving up was on an island, I had no chance of losing prosperity in my gold mines from the final war. Altogether, I had +45% goods produced. I was also able to get all of my gold mines down to 0% autonomy just in time through a combination of the Advanced Centralization edict and manually reducing autonomy by 25%.
As a note for anyone who hadn't realized, each 1 ducat of monthly income provides 4800 ducats at the end. Therefore, taking any amount of debt to expand rapidly with mercenaries, even over force limit, will greatly pay itself off at the end long as doing so generates a single extra ducat of monthly income. This was one of the principles behind my Ternate attempt, and I used it here as well to hire Lv. 2 advisors, and then Lv. 3, as well as build forts ASAP to reduce devastation and guarantee that I would have prosperity by 1485. My Ternate attempt ended with 5,000 ducats of debt as I continued to expand while over FL, but this attempt ended up being able to directly pay for its own expenses before taking loans due to the sheer profitability of gold mines.
I am incredibly satisfied with this attempt, and glad that I decided to try again, since I wasn't that happy with how my last one ended. I would be very impressed if someone came up with a strategy that could surpass this, short of finding a major new exploit.
Here is another of my failed attempts using Ternate.(~173 K)
Some of the lessons I learnt and mistakes to avoid:
1. First of all the MAIN point of this challenge is to maximize Income and YES income>dev. The dev you have does increase your loan size but increasing your income and sacrificing dev for income is the main crux of the challenge. Also debt/inflation is a non issue for the challenge.
2. The main and most effective source of income is Gold mines and trade. Infact gold mines trump trade who trump production and taxes. Ternate has access to only 1 and maybe 2 gold mines.(as dem. by EmpressKaori gold is the best)
3. Finally making a small,prosperous nation with high income will net the challenge winner. Also Kara Del may be the dark horse of this challenge.
Some of the lessons I learnt and mistakes to avoid:
1. First of all the MAIN point of this challenge is to maximize Income and YES income>dev. The dev you have does increase your loan size but increasing your income and sacrificing dev for income is the main crux of the challenge. Also debt/inflation is a non issue for the challenge.
2. The main and most effective source of income is Gold mines and trade. Infact gold mines trump trade who trump production and taxes. Ternate has access to only 1 and maybe 2 gold mines.(as dem. by EmpressKaori gold is the best)
3. Finally making a small,prosperous nation with high income will net the challenge winner. Also Kara Del may be the dark horse of this challenge.
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Funny you mention Kara Del, I just started an attempt. Opening move was a no CB on Sarig Yogir -> vassalize, to open the way to India. Once Ming declares on Oirat I plan to jump in and carve a path to Buryatia goldmine, then Chagatai for Yarkand goldmine. Further down the road should be Kazan or Mong Yang goldmine depending on circumstances, and at least one of the two in India, while also collecting some CoT on the way. Ruler and heir are absolute trash tier, need them to die in battle. On the bright side I won't have to spend diplo points for conquests and can pump it all into developing the goldmines. This of course all goes against the small, prosperous but high income approach but it seems worth a try.
I believe Kara Del can get enough mana,land,gold and later throwable land for revanchism.
This challenge sure is entertaining as there are so many possible strong opm nations to win the challenge.
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w o wI nearly doubled the record: appx. 445,000 ducats.
As I thought, there was plenty of room for improvement with more innovation, though I didn't expect to have this large of an improvement. I will share my strategies this time around, because I don't think this can be beaten short of savescumming very hard for a better ruler. The strategy behind this run could not possibly have been better; every aspect lines up perfectly. You get a larger income return from developing gold mines than any other possible use of monarch power, so you only want to take the provinces needed and no more, because more is a waste of points that could be going into gold. However, you do also need land to give away for Revanchism. Mahafaly is perfect because Madagascar is isolated; you can conquer three of the nations on it and then leave the last one with one province, who is not threatened by anyone else and will not ally anyone else, making revanchism perfectly secured with almost no war exhaustion. The power base from Madagascar is enough to get you into Kilwa, and it's smooth sailing from there.
One of the priorities for this run was maximizing Goods Produced percentage modifier, which happened to synergize very well with what I was already doing: Golden Ages and Prosperity both reduce development cost as well, meaning more development on top of the better modifier. Fetishist is also the only religion in the game with the potential for a bonus to goods produced, from the Hindu cult, which I obtained by declaring a quick no CB war on Madurai. Beyond that, the rest of the run was spent at peace until time to give up my land for revanchism, to ensure that I would maintain prosperity for the end. This was another example of how perfectly everything worked out; because the land I was giving up was on an island, I had no chance of losing prosperity in my gold mines from the final war. Altogether, I had +45% goods produced. I was also able to get all of my gold mines down to 0% autonomy just in time through a combination of the Advanced Centralization edict and manually reducing autonomy by 25%.
As a note for anyone who hadn't realized, each 1 ducat of monthly income provides 4800 ducats at the end. Therefore, taking any amount of debt to expand rapidly with mercenaries, even over force limit, will greatly pay itself off at the end long as doing so generates a single extra ducat of monthly income. This was one of the principles behind my Ternate attempt, and I used it here as well to hire Lv. 2 advisors, and then Lv. 3, as well as build forts ASAP to reduce devastation and guarantee that I would have prosperity by 1485. My Ternate attempt ended with 5,000 ducats of debt as I continued to expand while over FL, but this attempt ended up being able to directly pay for its own expenses before taking loans due to the sheer profitability of gold mines.
I am incredibly satisfied with this attempt, and glad that I decided to try again, since I wasn't that happy with how my last one ended. I would be very impressed if someone came up with a strategy that could surpass this, short of finding a major new exploit.
I am so sorry for dismissing it early on and feel like I absolutely have to apologize.
I should've never dismissed it right away. A challenge that starts with "pick whatever you like" obviously has more paths than I could possibly know.
And I'm glad Miss Kaori joined us.
Enjoyed your Reddit runs, but rarely looked at your stream. Glad you contributed to the challenge
I should've never dismissed it right away. A challenge that starts with "pick whatever you like" obviously has more paths than I could possibly know.
And I'm glad Miss Kaori joined us.
Enjoyed your Reddit runs, but rarely looked at your stream. Glad you contributed to the challenge
That's my current situation with Kara Del. Only 7 years to go so I don't think I will make it. First my crappy heir died in battle, got an awesome 5-3-4 new heir. Then my crappy ruler died while heir was underage, so I got a new young ruler: 1-1-2
Those alliance blocs in India are also a royal pain. I suppose I could go all in and declare on Bengal, who is allied to Mong Yang and Bahmanis, to get 2 more goldmines in one war. Kazan has a long truce with Muscovy and Uzbek is in rebel hell, could make it to that goldmine more easily. If only I had more time left Travel times are atrocious in the north, something I should've kept in mindI can state them and decrease autonomy on the last day to get them somewhere in the 30%-35% range with current corruption level. Sure the rest of the land is worthless, but dev still increases loan size and accumulating dev fast is something hordes excel in, so it's not impossible to get to somewhere like 200 to 250 ducats per loan at the end (I managed to get much slower expanding Ternate to 250 loan size before revanchism), which means I would only need like half your monthly income for the same result. So I don't think Kara Del is as bad as you make it sound. It's just much more luck dependent than your strategy because in the end it boils down to abusing allies to fight your wars in India, something I admittedly didn't manage in that run. Does this make it inferior to your strategy? Yes of course. Could you win this challenge with Kara Del? I'm still convinced it's doable under the right circumstances and will certainly give it another try
That's a nice result. I particularly like your strategy because it side steps all the micromanagement issues. I am trying to get both gold income and trade - it doesn't have to be one or another. I definitely won't get 80 income from gold (because I've spent some DIP on conquest and Madurai has a ruler and heir with terrible DIP), but I'm going to get around 50 in non-gold income. Not sure if it will make up for lesser gold amount or not. What is that prosperity and advanced centralization? Is it part of some DLC or I've somehow missed those features?
Assuming you don't go bankrupt. For example, I've discovered that even on normal difficulty DoW Vijayanagar straight away doesn't really work (at least not with my skill level) - I would have to go ~ 4-5 times over FL with mercs and I can't avoid going bankrupt. Similar problem if you are trying to occupy Ming with some other small nation.
I believe that to get level 3 advisors you need to get your regular income over 25. Is there some trick to get them with lower income?
Generally, getting more dev increases income too, so it's not really one or another. Since you don't need to core for the purpose of this challenge, conquering/occupying as much dev as possible always increases your score. debt/inflation is not completely irrelevant - for example I expect to be around 10-20K in debt at the end and that is subtracted from the final total. But it's a relative minor factor
You can get African gold mines with Ternate, the bigger gain in gold income comes from the development, so there's some advantage in having Africa mines and 3 Asian ones.
It's not as good as making a large prosperous nation with high income
Yeah, Kara Del has a great potential, but it's on another level as far as micro required. It can raise immense amount of DIP to develop your gold minesI think it might be better to noCB some Indian minors to have easier wars in the early game, though Kara Del has many viable openings.
You can get a lot of monarch power via razing - in multiple thousands range. The conquered land won't be great, but few thousand of development in poor high autonomy provinces still bring some non-negligible income. Since that can be combined with gold and trade, the cumulative amount can be significant. If you can manage to revoke before 1485, you will almost certainly have bigger income
There are few things to consider (in case they might not be obvious). Besides 5 gold mines in East Africa there are 2 more in Ethiopia, 2 in India and 2 in SE Asia (there are more, but these ones are fairly easily accessible). Since almost all of them are in different states you need to have enough states to hold them, which means starting as a kingdom (or becoming one - need development for that). Autonomy is not really a big issue, it's easy enough to get it down to 0 if you don't mind a bit of unrest - conquer, core, state, lower LA, lose to the original owner (or anyone who has a core on it), later reconquer and lower LA again. Now you have it at 0%. Spreading development across many provinces will make it cheaper (DIP cost of acquiring those provinces is small in comparison to development cost).
It is possible to stash away some cash and go bankrupt, but it seems that you lose more potential income by sitting in bankruptcy for 5 years.
It is possible to stash away some cash and go bankrupt, but it seems that you lose more potential income by sitting in bankruptcy for 5 years.