Easy Way To Buy Buildings?

[TheMeInTeam]

Once you have +3 advisors, you're going to cap out on your ideas well before you can invest in a new one unless you have an absolutely awful ruler. There's simply no way to spend enough points late game to prevent capping unless you buy buildings, which at that point are of marginal utility anyways. The last 150 years or so of most games I just end up sitting at the cap for large periods of time.

I wouldn't go that far. If you're confidently swimming in DIP, go over #relations to expand more rapidly. If you're that far over in ADM, add coring to 100% or more OE on top of that.

Even culture converting > sitting at 999, but in reality that's usually bad too.

Military is harder to avoid going over on, but you can generally compensate that by taking more idea groups in that category.

 

[DominusNovus]

I wouldn't go that far. If you're confidently swimming in DIP, go over #relations to expand more rapidly. If you're that far over in ADM, add coring to 100% or more OE on top of that.

Even culture converting > sitting at 999, but in reality that's usually bad too.

Military is harder to avoid going over on, but you can generally compensate that by taking more idea groups in that category.

I agree on diplomatic relations 100%. But the value there is so weighted heavily in favor of vassalizing/annexing that spending points on coring seems pointless. Coring scales with the value of the province, while diplo-annexing doesn't scale with the value of the vassal (well, until the vassal is absolutely huge). Assuming the typical integration takes around 10 years, thats roughly 120 DIP points per vassal over your limit, give or take by a large margin.

 

[RandomZach]

I wouldn't go that far. If you're confidently swimming in DIP, go over #relations to expand more rapidly.

I've never found dip relations to be a problem, personally. I find the annexation penalty on vassals to be a far bigger limitation if I can't return cores.

If you're that far over in ADM, add coring to 100% or more OE on top of that.

Coring times are so long for a large empire that it's more practical just to completely annex a country w/o coring then release them generally. Use adm on stability after breaking truce if over 100 OE, but thats about it, and that's only if no one will take their provinces.

Even culture converting > sitting at 999, but in reality that's usually bad too.

As I think you were alluding to, the return on investment isn't very good. At that point in the game a marginal amount of tax, manpower, and RR aren't going to make a difference.

Military is harder to avoid going over on, but you can generally compensate that by taking more idea groups in that category.

There's still large periods of time in the end game where you'll have capped out an idea group but not be able to start a new one. A single idea group costs 2800 monarch points, and will be spread out by at least 4 techs, 52 years, which has a base cost, as western, of 2400 points. Thats 5200 points in 624 months, or 8.3 points per month. That means a mediocre to average leader will exceed the amount of military power you need with a +3 advisor. The gap between the 5th and 6th group is worse, because it's a 5 tech spread so you only need ~7.4 power per month. This is assuming no research bonuses, which is frankly pretty unlikely after 1600.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I've never found dip relations to be a problem, personally. I find the annexation penalty on vassals to be a far bigger limitation.

In practice, this is actually a #diplomats and dipreputation issue. You want to cycle them. Keep in mind, however, that coring can replace this on occasion if you don't care about more adm techs. Still, this is why I think aristocratic might be underrated for steamrollers; the extra diplomat is worth it just for that so you can annex more vassals and still DoW, which means that you can progress more quickly w/o a vassal bottleneck.

Coring is just a small supplement; might as well make use of that too if you can handle the rebels.

There's still large periods of time in the end game where you'll have capped out an idea group but not be able to start a new one. A single idea group costs 2800 monarch points, and will be spread out by at least 4 techs, 52 years, which has a base cost, as western, of 2400 points. Thats 5200 points in 624 months, or 8.3 points per month. That means a mediocre to average leader will exceed the amount of military power you need with a +3 advisor. The gap between the 5th and 6th group is worse, because it's a 5 tech spread so you only need ~7.4 power per month. This is assuming no research bonuses, which is frankly pretty unlikely after 1600.

At that point you're best off building some buildings, yes. Military points are quite abundant.