Do Some Youtubers That Put Out Videos Use Console Cheats

[Restless Native]

So I did try the steps in his video and after several restarts was indeed able to emulate what he did.
Below is my situation after 60 years and I thought I'd share my findings.

The below was based on what he did or what he talked about doing in the video. I think I've played past that point now. ( I took different ideas, Offensive and Religious)

- You can indeed keep Trier in alliances if they only rival two electors. You just need a diplo advisor and send a gift and religious bretharen.
- Keeping four Privileges in aristocrats does indeed avoid elective monarchy when PU'ing Poland. Good idea
- With Lithuania you can easily beat Hungary and Austria. I disbanded HRE in about 2.5 years.
- As always things don't always go the same way. Hungary allied Otto's which made things harder so I actually didn't go to war with Otto's early which allowed them to get stronger. The above screenshot is actually my first Otto war. More on that below.
- Giving all Ruthenian lands to Golden Horde then taking them back later was a great idea. It was easy to retake those lands back, gave good eco bonuses early game, and allowed me to change to Orthodox. It also reduced Lithuania to make it cheaper to annex later.
- I am going to form Ruthenia just because I can once I hit Admin 10 but that's not for another 15 or so years. However I'm not sure how optimal this is, I have to avoid stating or even de state some core lands so I can get my Ruthenian culture to 50%, this means I have a lot of territory rather than states which is hurting me. I'll see how worth it it was later.
- I am winning the above war as you can see but this was down to bad AI more than anything. I declared once Otto's attacked Qara Qoyunla so they were distracted and I rushed down the Balkans and peaced out Hungary. This is AI target fixation where they go after the weakest targets rather than the biggest threat. I assume this is what happened as I couldn't see there forces. When they tried to march through Ukraine I moved most of my forces up that way, they then saw I was vunerable in Greece so turned their armies around and went to attack that way. I just redeployed my troops. So they actually have 124,000 troops still, and are still a huge threat. However I have now been able to call in France so they are finally outnumbered.
- It will probably take me another two wars to remove them as a threat. I intend to take provinces to release Byzantium and Bulgaria for now. I don't need any more none accepted cultures thanks. This brings me to my biggest observation.

**All my expansion up to now and even my future expansion plans are outside the HRE, why did I disband it? There was no need in this playthrough, by the time I core and state up as a Ruthenian empire I will have no issues steam rolling it anyway.**

 

[Lykus Cerebros]

View attachment 801104
Not really....? First statement. His. Second statement. Generalizing our opinions.

"I enjoy..."
"Overall, I think..."

Both statements are clear personal expressions. Not sure what your problem is here.

 

[egolend]

In the most general terms there is a lot of middleground too. It isn't uncommon to people trying to do something hard to take back ups of iron man saves so they can go back 10/20 years. Particuarly if you want to do 2 runs that require you to go in a different direction after the first 50 years is save replication or the really good starting rng will be saved so they can try in 3 times and see how far they can push the envelope.

It is also not uncommon for someone to play have a great 1550 empire but not the best first 20 years to talk through as they were not expecting that to be the one or something didn't happen in a typical way and wanted to talk about out to deal with the 9 times out of 10 - just imagen a poland game where you did nothing and Byzantum beat the Ottomans. Sometimes people then go back (especially if they have a backup of the start) and film the opening moves but not recreating the missteps on route (like the country that got extra relationship so you didn't get the alliance). It often makes it a lot more watchable and talking in more general principles but not single run.

 

[MrSnert]

Useful guides should account for the worst case scenario's, not the best case ones, and every step should be reliably reproducible to a certain extent.

I don't really mind certain starting conditions, for example 'Austria needs to be rivalled to Bohemia', although stuff like that obviously makes these guides already useless in MP, but guides that continue after some extremely lucky rng really piss me off. Ludi's are essentially useless for this reason, and are more like 'here's a fun run I did' than anything that's useful when starting a new run beyond a general idea for a direction to take a nation in.

 

[Blackmoore]

Useful guides should account for the worst case scenario's, not the best case ones, and every step should be reliably reproducible to a certain extent.

I don't really mind certain starting conditions, for example 'Austria needs to be rivalled to Bohemia', although stuff like that obviously makes these guides already useless in MP, but guides that continue after some extremely lucky rng really piss me off. Ludi's are essentially useless for this reason, and are more like 'here's a fun run I did' than anything that's useful when starting a new run beyond a general idea for a direction to take a nation in.

Ideally, that would be true. Some guides are definitely more useful for doing this. For example, I watched a Byzantium guide where they purposefully beat the Ottomans without allies, and where Ottomans allied Crimea and AQ from the outset -- which is probably the worst case scenario.

However, some things are probably not doable with the "worst case." Let's take the Poland dismembering the HRE at the outset of the game, since it's been mentioned on this thread. This can be done with almost any reasonable start -- the alliances with Electors is the trickiest thing. Could this even be done under the "worst case"? What would that even look like? At minimum, it would involve Austria allying Hungary and Bohemia and Hungary getting the Moldavian March instead of the player. Then have the minor electors rival and ally in such a way that you literally could not have a single war to dismember the Empire.

 

[Less2]

It's pretty much impossible to verify that anyone isn't cheating. You can just run a mod and hack the checksum back to the normal one so that ironman works and everything looks "legit". From there you could do any number of things to make the AI suck, to guarantee great player monarchs, to remove all negative events or increase the likelihood of positive events, to make player sieges more likely to progress, and so on.

Useful guides should account for the worst case scenario's, not the best case ones, and every step should be reliably reproducible to a certain extent.

Well, the worst case is the player playing from 1444 to 1821 in a regency council unable to declare war. So worst case isn't really practicable. But if anything specifically requires good luck then a guide should be pointing it out.

 

[Brynjar]

In the most general terms there is a lot of middleground too. It isn't uncommon to people trying to do something hard to take back ups of iron man saves so they can go back 10/20 years. Particuarly if you want to do 2 runs that require you to go in a different direction after the first 50 years is save replication or the really good starting rng will be saved so they can try in 3 times and see how far they can push the envelope.

It is one thing to make backups of your game to not have to restart for another 2 hours five more times if something goes terribly wrong after finally getting the right starting conditions, or keeping occasional backups if you somehow mess up a campaign 100 years in. It is quite another thing to roll back to those saves if you run into problems and post a video on youtube presenting it as one uninterrupted run hoping to earn real world money on said video. At best I would consider the latter deceitful and scummy.

I have not seen the video/youtuber in question, nor do I intend to do so. If a 'how to video' doesn't even mention that restarts may be required for a challenging run, the creator is most likely trying to hide something.

Every somewhat decent streamer I have seen playing EU4 over the years have been either savescumming, restarting repeatedly, breaking game mechanics with exploits, or a combination of those three. What they haven't done however is hiding what they are doing. Although I have heard some say something along the lines of 'I never savescum, except...', just to see them proceed to savescum due to what they call a bug when it is in fact them not knowing how the game works.

 

[currylambchop]

Why is YouTube drama allowed on this forum?

 

[Stolen Rutters]

Why is YouTube drama allowed on this forum?

It’s allowed? Awesome!

Spoiler

So I watched Ludi’s video on England from a month ago and I tried it. At first I couldn’t figure out what he did with the exploit development that got the CB’s on all of Ireland and Scotland. He spoke so fast, I missed that you keep exploiting for manpower until you get the manpower ratio right. Poof, it worked!

Spoiler

Small downside was Scotland wasn’t allied with France so I had to fight 2 smaller wars instead of one big war. I also didn’t get the York rebel army after intentionally “losing” the war of the roses. (I got a small fraction of the rebel army somehow. The rest of it disappeared into thin air… I didn’t need it anyway.)

I picked up Castile, Aragon, AND Portugal in Unions, so the inheritance RNG was better for me than for the video. I cleaned up France and Burgundy just like he did, more simple than it appeared… I don’t feed vassals properly, so this may change how I usually play if I want faster expansion. I’ve never had such a fast start with England.

I stopped before killing the HRE. HOI4 moved to 1.11.4, so I swapped games. Now there is another beta update for EU4, so time to play again.

edit - So it’s clear he didn’t cheat for that run, since I did better than the video just by following the same recipe

Spoiler

-sell land decision for crazy cash and do the thing with the estates and parliament bonuses
-cheese decision to get cores on the British isles in just 11 days, and end up with a giant army and plenty of manpower in the process
-beat up some neighbors with the big army, like France, take provinces
-don’t forget to release vassal/feed cores
-marry big country to get claim throne
-take some provinces
-integrate vassals when available
-release another vassal feed more cores
-marry another big country for Union (RNG)
-marry another one for ANOTHER Union (RNG)
-take some provinces
-Rinse & repeat

Wait I’m massively oversized for this early in the game!

Win?

 

[gigau]

Why is YouTube drama allowed on this forum?

Youtube drama is not authorised, but a discussion can be had. Checking that it remains under control.

Discussion should remain civil and respectful.

 

[gendalv]

prismaticmarcus, Isorrows played in most of his hoi4 videos with cheats and mods afaik, he's mostly making memetertainment content anyway, but it's not like he's been placing a discaimer about it in every video. I don't see a big deal, as I said, they aren't claiming anything like a world record (the procedure of which would only matter for the sake of the attempts in beating it/checking it) and they aren't sponsored to "represent correctly", whatever this means(or is interpreted as), anything; they're just "let's players" making content, not even a review, so the only metric that matters is if people are enjoying it and come back for more.​

That's like getting angry at people wearing a t-shirt on their head, e.g. to cover it from the sun, because they aren't "representing correctly" a tshirt as a product lol, control freaky if you'd ask me.

 

[JangoBunBun]

Either he cheats or scums a gorillion times until he gets perfect RNG in every single video he's made in the past few months. Either way it makes his videos totally useless as "how-to" videos, which is what they ostensibly are.

Doing a dismantle right at the start as Poland is not something you should need to cheat to do however. Religious brethren estate privilege, gifts, alliances, improving relations, scornfully insulting their rivals, etc should let you ally all of the electors that Austria doesn't ally, and they usually ally a couple. Just swing your big Lithuania stick at Austria and you're done. If Trier is rivaled to two other electors things might get dicey and require a bit of restarting but it shouldn't be too bad.

This is my problem with Ludi's videos. They're fun to watch, but he gets pretty lucky and has a "rest of the fucking owl" problem. Some of his guides are needlessly complicated too. For example, in his burgundy guide it's possible to do the mission "placate subjects" immediately. Instead, he does the estate shenanigans then waits to royal marry Nevers.

 

[gigau]

Let's keep this discussion genral, and stop singling one youtuber out, please.... or this thread has run its course.