Fastest WC?

[lambda x.x]

I've been working on bringing degeneracy and intense micro to imperator rome. I'm currently in the middle of my first playthrough, which is a casual WC for me to learn the mechanics and gain intuition about this game.

I'm not done with the current run, but I've been on the side planning out a WC speedrun, which I think can be done within 50 years, although given my lack of experience, it'll most likely take on the order of 70 years.
Anyway, my understanding (I've never played this game until 2.0) is that this version in particular makes WCs really easy, but I was still wondering if there are any documented fast WCs in previous patches (of course, in this patch would be amazing, but I doubt they exist) just so I can see some numbers and references.

 

[Lord Lambert]

I have 1700 hours in this game... 50 years? FIFTY YEARS?!?!??!

Jesus I have no clue what fire is in your arse to make that possible but please, document it so I can grab pax aeterna

 

[PAnZuRiEL]

Militarily the AI is a complete pushover, so it does seem like it would be much easier than a WC in EUIV. But I foresee a lot of issues with sitting on 0 stability and pop happiness forever due to your arbitrarily high AE.

 

[lambda x.x]

I know of two neat tricks (or exploits) to effectively ignore AE. One of them I discovered by accident and another I was given by someone. Assuming that you abuse these tricks, I think the biggest bottleneck is going to be the political influence for CBs -- I'll most likely have to mix in aggressive no cb wars for small nations.
Basically, my experience so far is that I don't have to worry about provincial loyalty with revanchism farming and aggressively lowering the impact of AE using one of the two tricks, and so the run comes down to effective CB generation (try to find the biggest alliance chains to abuse) and fast war micro.

Also even without the aforementioned tricks, I have experimented with perma 0 stab, which I will inevitably have to deal with when accruing mass AE -- I don't think it's that bad in terms of provincial loyalty if you farm revanchism and stack some modifiers. I found that you can ignore the "can't declare war" restriction by just threatening war for claims.

IDK how accurate my estimate is, but I did give a fairly tight estimate -- in EU4 terms, it's like saying a 1515 WC is possible in current patch (I think it is, but it requires near perfect execution and a couple variables to align).

Anyway, most of what I'm saying is still in theory land, I need to actually try my ideas out.

 

[Lord Lambert]

Currently watching your casual WC as the Antigonids. Very impressed shall be nabbing a couple of the strats I've seen

 

[nikkythegreat]

I've seen your video in twitch. I believe you're the same guy.

I was amazed at how fast you united Alexander's empire. But the way you play the game is just too micro intensive for me. Hahaha

 

[dakapes]

Hi ,

indeed impressive video with some fine ideas.
Just one question from my part , about the 4 tech people. You mention some traits , but i find different ones in the events file.
I find
obsessive, intelligent,polymath,scholar

Also I do not quite understand the effect, I cannot read properly the events file. Is it +25% speed on tech speed? All the time?

PS : Also what do you mean by revanchism farming ? Maybe you mention it in your video , I am just in the first hour of it.

 

[Wagonlitz]

The invention allowing you to eat any major or great power in a single war certainly speeds things up.

 

[lambda x.x]

Hmm, to be honest, I'm reluctant to present my "playstyle" as a good reference to IR gameplay since I've yet to produce any results and I'm still new to the game, so please take whatever I do with a grain of salt -- it could be just totally misleading or wrong. In fact the purpose of this post was for me to look at good references

Re: traits, I believe those 4 was what I said, but I could have misspoke. Each character can trigger an event that gives innovations with uhh roughly, I'd like to say around 2-3% annual probability. There is a catch that once you get the event, your nation is not eligible to get the event for a couple years, and your character who got the event won't be eligible for a couple more years after that.

Revanchism farming is done by intentionally losing a war. I do it at almost no cost by offering to release feudatories which I promptly diplomatically re-obtain the same day I release them.

 

[dakapes]

I appreciate your suprisingly humble approach , but after about 2k hours in this title , I am sure that you know what you are doing here and it was clear from the first minutes.

happy to see your campaign, though I think 50 or 70 years is quite ambitious.
Funny thing I always play in the very difficult setup , but it seems that I always get to copy the finest strategies from people playing in normal difficulty

 

[Lord Lambert]

Oh one thing I did notice from the video is that when you were fabricating on Rhodes, you were looking up the province name and then going back into the list to click on it there. What you can do is just click on the map to start the fabrication on whatever province you've clicked on

 

[Lord Lambert]

Just watching your latest stream where you ask about the day 1 WC, back in 2019 it was possible as one could open the console from within the nation selection screen and still have it be ironman.

 

[IceGuerilla]

I assume you will be using the infinite stability/infinite innovations/(infinite?) ruler stats exploits in 2.0.1?

Edit, to clarify: by abusing the Hellenic Empire mission (which you can probably get 5-10 years in as the Antigonids), you can spam a button which gives you 35 stab and 4 innovations as many times as you like every day. Day 1 of that, you get space marines, winning land by the spear and subsequently your stab never goes below 100 if you can be bothered to micro.

That means big money, no revolts, build any choice of wonder quickly (probably siege). Oh yeah, so much siege stuff that you probably insta-gank any fortifications.

 

[moyang]

If you enact anti-piracy law you get anti-piracy CB. Which can be used against a country that 1) have a pirate haven 2) you have a land connected to their capital.
But with this CB you can only use show superiority wargoal where demanding land is more expensive. Demanding to be client state would cost normal.
You can sell a territory with pirate haven to get the CB, but you'll need +11 diprep if the territory isn't adjacent to the target country nor the interest of the country.

Monarchy has to invest in some useless inventions for this law, but with infinite innovations exploit it wouldn't be a problem.

 

[Pro]

If you can get someone to be a tributary and then have them disloyal enough to stop paying tribute you get a claim on their capital. But I don't know how easy that is to achieve.

 

[IceGuerilla]

Do you need a CB when you can press 6 button clicks every ingame day to get +100 stab?

 

[dakapes]

I am a bit worried that we miss the meaning of the game here trying to find some gaps-exploits that bypass game mechanisms that exist for specific reason. Some mechanisms are implemented in a good/realistic way , some no. They exist for a purpose , to make hard to expand infinitely .

On the other hand , finding these gaps makes you understand the game better.

I enjoyed a lot @lambda x.x videos on twitch , what I will keep as a nice strategy is heavy vasalization as a way of expanding. I really think that such good players should play in very difficult , there is absolutely no challenge ( except endless micromanagement) in normal diffculty.

By the way , with the new CB and no forts by the AI the game as any diadochi nation is ridiculously easy. Even at higher difficulties. I think there must be a balance there , by allowing mercs for the AI or allowing more forts or having some kind of more powerful drawback in the new mechanic.

 

[lambda x.x]

I'm currently deciding between whether to use that or not. That certainly was one of my two ways to "avoid impacts of AE," though I guess the exploit's been public for a while (I think I discovered it day 2 and asked people to keep it quiet, but it's not that hard to find it so probably just other people independently found it). Because no cb spam does indeed get around CB restrictions given infinite stab.

If I play the game "normally," I'd need to savescum or find a way to prevent the anthologika decision from going away (or rather, prevent the Athenian/Eretrian relics from going away in certain forms of annexations) since those 6 innovations from the tree is pretty crucial. Generally, save scumming (even for a bug) is frowned upon.
On the other hand, if I use the infinite stab, I don't care about missing out on 6 innovations and so that bug doesn't affect me.

It's a tough call really.

 

[IceGuerilla]

Guy who did Day 1 WC by glitching into console on Ironman or whatever is now concerned about savescumming or not being able to annex Athens militarily... sounds legit.

I guess the pro way to do fast WC in any Paradox game is not to cheese and find exploits, but to figure out how to cook the save game files to just have all territories owned on Day 1.

 

[Torugu]

Guy who did Day 1 WC by glitching into console on Ironman or whatever is now concerned about savescumming or not being able to annex Athens militarily... sounds legit.

I guess the pro way to do fast WC in any Paradox game is not to cheese and find exploits, but to figure out how to cook the save game files to just have all territories owned on Day 1.

Some people like to find and use exploits in game. Whether you like it or not, it's a perfectly legitimate way of enjoying the game.

But every competition requires rules, even those that are explicitly about breaking the rules. That's why even glitched pokemon speed runs ban the glitch that lets you teleport to the end of the game in zero seconds. And it's also why save scumming to exploit a bug is borderline - savescumming is against the most common unwritten rules of playing PDS games to a high level.

But I'm sure you know that already. You're smarter than that. You were just trying to score a cheap point against somebody having bad-wrong-fun..