Do we have any legit 'Form Yuan' strategies?

[MiniaAr]

Thank Gnostek for your strategy. It's a bit too much hoops for me personnally, but it looks like a lot of fun. This might tempt me into a Timurid playthrough.

To get EoC, you have to switch religion to eastern religion or pagan. When do you do it and isn't it destabilising for your country?

About RCC, in a simple Mongolia > Yuan campaign, Admin (-25% RCC) + Yuan/Horde Ideas (-25% RCC) + Meritocracy (-10% RCC) gives you -60% RCC everywhere and -85% RCC on Greater China (China + Tibet + Mongolia + Manchuria) with permanent claims. For me, it's pretty decent.

 

[Gnostek]

You can't really aim for a date on religious conversions. I started spawning both hindu and vajrayana rebels in 1450, but they died crossing my neighbor's lands, lol. Sadly, I think it's all about keeping religion fragmented, ideally you'd be 33% coptic, 33% catholic, 33% eastern.

 

[powerguy]

I'm a bit suprised by Expansion (or did you mean Exploration?) as a choice. Really America isn't going to bring you enough money in the early game to make a difference. On the other hand, I used vassals as well as direct coring to expand really quickly in the beginning. For example, I had Yeren as a vassal with 90% of the Manchu culture lands while I conquered all Altaïc lands directly. Other potential vassals are Chagatai, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan/Persia. Influence will help you greatly annexing those faster or keeping them in line if you're not annexing them immediatly (Persia is a great march to have for example).

After influence, I picked Humanism, which is great to completely negate revolts in your lands (I went yellow shamanism). Also a couple more accepted culture will allow you to accept Chinese ones in the long term (to avoid the cultural disaster once you get Emperor of China) as well as Manchus and Buryats. I'll be keeping those accepted all game long.

Then, I found that Administrative is a great choice. You should rush the first two ideas for reduced coring costs. Then, you slowly advance in the group, and I found that the Mercs ideas are really useful because I need to use Mercs to fight so many wars: China, India, Persia, Russia. Also, Age of Reformation doesn't have a lot of useful splendor bonuses, but the +5% discipline for mercs is a good one.

Finally, I'm not convinced you should rush to get rid of the Horde government. I still have it in 1600 and it helped me winning a 1v1 war against Russia, who had more troops and MP than me. But with the Horde CB, horde bonus and carefully picking battles in the steppes around Astraskhan, I was able to get a good peace deal: cutting them off Siberia, the gold mine in Bashkiria and a first foray in the Crimea region for the Great Khan achievement.

Next war against Ming is going to be the "5th war of Mandate of Heaven" and this time, I'll take the title of Emperor of China and form Yuan. No need to reform the government with the Yuan decision now.

Yeah I meant Exploration (i.e. the actually usable idea group lol). The main advantage to taking Exploration is that if you time it well and don't get bogged down you can get a colonial nation set up within the 50 years of Colonialism -> Printing Press. This means you don't need to develop to getting Colonialism because you get a ticking gain in ports when you have a colonial nation (I actually had one game where I got an event which caused me to get 100% Colonialism in one of my ports before I had the colonial nation set up), and can quickly jump from just Feudalism and Renaissance to having the next 2 as well (and get a big tech boost/catchup). Econ wise you get very solid income from gold fleets, and can make good money from trade (this probably works better if you kill Korea rather than ally). I've generally found that with the income you have to work with + all the expansion you are doing + stuff like keeping Horde unity at an acceptable level you don't exactly spam out ideas if you want to stay in touch with tech, so I typically go Humanism first (usually take the first 3 ideas or so then stop, I went Confucian as my secondary religion), then Exploration (rush the first 3-4 ideas if you are in position to do so) and then Admin (which I usually finish before Humanism). However if taking the Emperor title causes you to auto convert to Celestial Empire (which it sounds like it does) taking Admin 3rd probably isn't worth it, because you are doubling up on Admin ideas early and a military idea would really help. Haven't got that far yet so don't know for sure.

On equal tech with 40 infantry in front and 40 artillery in back, Ming with 0 mandate was able to beat me with similar generals. I had offensive (also naval due to turtles all the way down), they had defensive. Despite allegedly taking 50% more damage they won the fight straight up.

I responded to this by slapping another 160 troops into the region, beating them down before they could recover. However 0 mandate isn't quite as paper-shred inducing as implied. The tactics penalty they used to have from running wrong faction was more crippling than current mandate lost penalty.

Hordes benefit from also sapping their morale due to the disaster, which helps a lot.

Yeah I'm really not see much in the way of obvious penalties for the low mandate at the moment. On the military front I can sometime believe they are taking more damage in terms of men, but it never seems drastically more than what I would expect for the shock bonus on flat terrain. I think a big part of the problem is that their damage back to you doesn't change and as it gets later their morale only goes above yours (the disaster pulls it down to about the same or slightly less, but they are rich and can afford advisors and thus ideas), so you have to really punch them hard in the face to beat them and then their huge manpower and economic engine keeps them going.

This is rapidly turning into one of my most frustrating runs I have done in this game, Big Blue Blob was really tough because of the time limit and despite being an incredibly powerful western nation there were still heaps of things that could break you (i.e. coalitions are a serious problem, unlike with Mongolia where no one cares who you kill). It was however interesting because the framework of the game is grounded in western Europe and you were just pushing that framework as hard as you could. With Mongolia -> Yuan I feel like I am really fighting with unfinished/unbalanced game mechanics more than anything else. I have been slowly improving and in my latest run I broke free from Ming, took Beijing + surrounding provinces in the first war and then a bunch more high development provinces + forts in the next war (which was much harder because I had no allies to help me in that one). However a few years after that truce expired they declared a Reconquest on me (should they be doing this? It's a good CB for them but it's not going to solve their Mandate problem) and even with Korea, a fairly large Jaupaur and a La Nang (which was about half of Indochina) they had teched up to equal with me and I think finished some mil idea and were suddenly beating everything they came across. I was still bleeding them hard but the ~40-50k I could put up against them would lose to their 60-80k on flat terrain. I then go and look at the ledger and see they have nearly 60k Mercs, and then look at their tributaries and see they still have nearly 20 having sat at 0 mandate for 40 odd years.

A big part of the problem to me is that the AI doesn't seem to recognise a weakened Ming at all. I don't see nations break away from Ming even with the Mandate at 0 and more importantly the AI doesn't ever see any incentive to attack them because they don't seem to factor in the low mandate/disasters etc. While I don't expect an AI to fully play like a player would in that situation (i.e. gank Ming) and I'm happy to see the Mingsplosion disappear, normally the AI is actually fairly alert to expansion opportunities with weakened nations but with Ming it seems like they just look at the huge raw development/army size and that's it. You can't call in allies for offensive wars because of this (and distance/opinion modifiers) and I think more importantly, because they maintain their tributaries there is absolutely no opportunity for another alliance (say Tibet and Dai Viet) to declare on them in the middle of your wars against Ming to take their own piece out of them. Compare this to western Europe, where if say Hungary starts getting wrecked by the Ottomans you would expecting Poland to come knocking and take a piece out of the North. If Ming isn't going to explode to internal conflicts at 0 Mandate then there needs to be some way external influences can cause them to actually break, and I have literally never seen Ming under threat (other than from a player, usually a late game Western powerhouse mid WC) in this patch. I'm probably going to take a break from this until the next patch where there are hopefully some more tweaks to the way countries treat Ming when it has no Mandate.

 

[THE_6r]

Also, Yuan have better ideas, possibly the best in game ...

Traditions:
Manpower Modifier +25%
Cavalry Combat Ability +20%

First:
Core Creation Cost -25%

Second:
Army Morale +10%

Third:
Technology Cost -10%

Forth:
Shock Damage done +10%

Fifth:
Army Movement +15%
Envoy Travel time -10%

Sixth:
Administrative Efficiency +5%

Seventh:
Goods Production +10%

Ambition:
Max States +5

Only thing it doesn't have is Infantry Combat ability and Discipline, but the other military amplifiers make up for it

What? Why Paradox? I haven't really had time to sit down and actually look at Yuan ideas, but now that I do I'm legitimately terrified.

 

[bbqftw]

I was still bleeding them hard but the ~40-50k I could put up against them would lose to their 60-80k on flat terrain.

This is really an issue of army control more than anything else.

Just because you could win such a battle (with shock bonus + mandate penalty) doesn't mean its wise to do so, since even if it won, you are getting flanked so its extremely inefficient casualty wise on your end. Wait for their stacks to split to siege your land, this opens up a lot more opportunities for picking off isolated stacks. Its also why having allies is nice, since it can mess with the AI's target prioritization.

Its also why having forts is bad in such wars, as it forces you to commit to certain battles and allows the AI to leverage its numbers advantage by parking multiple stacks next to a fort.

 

[Gnostek]

I guess you could go tributary->expand til your force limit is 60-> cancel tributary -> keep expanding while mandate tanks -> by the time it's 0, your forcelimit is 70, if on top of that you have 30 tributaries, you can come out on top (assuming you can afford 12 cannons and have a half decent general)

 

[MiniaAr]

Still going well in my Mongolia > Yuan campaign:

Timurids, Chagatai, Astrakhan and Afghanistan are my vassals. I'm keeping Chagatai because this severed link to my capital means that I'm not getting -mandate from my European provinces. I started annexing Astraskhan a little bit after this screenshot.

Ottomans have a surprisingly very historical expansion in this game, and they're my end-boss. But first, I need to finish Russia. Of course, Ottomans also allied Bahmanis to keep things interesting.