Hardest nation to play as in Europe?

[shivan]

Id say Albania or Foix.

 

[yerm]

3 pages and nobody said France, disappointing.

IMO the worst is Knights. Hardest maybe not, but when your goals require you to just get lucky on reformation timing, it means you may have to invest hours before realizing oh well gotta restart, versus something like Albania where it takes 5 minutes to know if your game is gonna go or not.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

3 pages and nobody said France, disappointing.

IMO the worst is Knights. Hardest maybe not, but when your goals require you to just get lucky on reformation timing, it means you may have to invest hours before realizing oh well gotta restart, versus something like Albania where it takes 5 minutes to know if your game is gonna go or not.

? That's only true if you really want to form Jerusalem, and the reformation rarely happens before 1500. It's an advanced start, sure, but I'm not sure how someone who can hug box Venice in perpetuity and abuse the Berbers/opportunism on Cyprus belongs in a conversation with nations like Foix.

If you abuse Cyprus 100% to take stuff from Mamluks you really only need a Berber vassal or two and Venice landing troops to take a lot off Mamluks. If you go trade ideas and Iberian wedding doesn't fire you can probably beat Aragon with some help from Venice too and take their islands.

 

[oblio-]

How is Moldavia compared to all these countries?

Unless something changed radically, Moldavia is still quite hard. I was rating it around 8 in 1.7 (10 being the hardest difficulty). In 1.7 it was hard to get decent support for independence, Bohemia was the only constant help, Hungary was fickle. Now that Poland is lucky...

On the other hand you have 1 more province now, Crimea is weaker (I think), and there might be some new tricks I'm missing.

 

[Freudia]

How is Moldavia compared to all these countries?

You're day 0 a march. Should be easy, since you just fabricate claims on everyone and siege them down in wars Poland joins, and you should get table scraps as a result. Bonus points if Austria rivals Poland.

 

[Pellucid]

I'd imagine Wallachia is harder than Moldavia, if you want to play a challenging Romania game.

 

[Gyron]

Hesse, at least when it comes to expansion. Take one territory from anyone and every single one of your neighbours enters a coalition against you.

 

[Aries666]

Hesse, at least when it comes to expansion. Take one territory from anyone and every single one of your neighbours enters a coalition against you.

Improve relations with your neighbours first = no coalition.

 

[Gyron]

Improve relations with your neighbours first = no coalition.

I tried, but then it was my neighbours' neighbours who formed the coalition instead. It got recursive.

 

[Denkt]

You get more aggressive expansion if you expand in the HRE so limit your expansion in europe and focus on the rest of the world which will make you much stronger then rest of europe put togther.

I don't think any nation in europe is extreamly hard, some maybe need a great deal of luck but then it is still easy, rest of the world however may contain much harder stuff.

 

[ikkiks]

As mentioned before, there's not really a hard nation in Europe. But if I had to pick one, I'd say Albania.

 

[Pannonius]

I like how people are missing the point here in order to show us what hardcore players they are. Yes, I'm sure that it's possible to achieve a WC with Yaroslav or Foix, but they are comparatively much harder nations to play than Muscovy or France.

 

[anomanderus]

I've heard in order to "play" Albania you need to embark on a crazy question to conquer Bosnia to keep the ottomans from annexing you

 

[Freudia]

I like how people are missing the point here in order to show us what hardcore players they are. Yes, I'm sure that it's possible to achieve a WC with Yaroslav or Foix, but they are comparatively much harder nations to play than Muscovy or France.

Most nations are comparatively much harder than Muscovy or France. The point of the thread was to figure out the hardest starts in Europe.

 

[Skyaway]

Yes
I play Albania for my really first game with ironman, thanks to my friend's recommend...
Bosnia is the best DOW choise for survive, any other target is even impossible
just seige one province and Ottoman cant get 100% warscore over you

Albania isnt that hard indeed

 

[wergy]

In my experience:
- Albania
- Any Russian minor
- Foix
- Morea (unless you can turn into BYZ fast)
- Cyprus
- Navarra

Any HRE minor or TPM are much easier.

Surprisingly easy OPMs:
- any Irish minor
- any French minor other than Foix (more provinces or better chances to grow)
- any Greek minors (if you ally someone big enough Ottos are not a problem any more)
- Knights

 

[Osman Pasha]

Albania, Orleanais, foix...

 

[TheMeInTeam]

In my experience:
- Albania
- Any Russian minor
- Foix
- Morea (unless you can turn into BYZ fast)
- Cyprus
- Navarra

Any HRE minor or TPM are much easier.

Surprisingly easy OPMs:
- any Irish minor
- any French minor other than Foix (more provinces or better chances to grow)
- any Greek minors (if you ally someone big enough Ottos are not a problem any more)
- Knights

Cyprus and Knights are some of the most fun troll nations in the game. Trade ideas will get you to around 20 naval FL with just your island, then you jack stuff with galleys using strait nonsense. Knights are indeed easy since Venice hates Ottos and at some point when you declare their 40+ galleys will wander into the Ottomans, then you help with 20ish and the derps have no navy and no way to stop 4 regiments from making rebels shatter them into bits.

Cyprus doesn't have Venice to piggyback, but it does have more tax and 20% naval FL to stack on the +15 FL from trade's merchants. Then you add administrative ideas 5 for another 6 force limit. There are a lot of nations you can beat at war even after just having trade ideas, but with trade + admin you can beat most non-majors and damaged majors outright. Vassal a few berber nations to get more FL and have their units available.

But this leaves us with only 2 idea groups, and the reformation will come if you wait too much longer after that, so we need some missionary strength:

- 2% base
- .5% De Heretico Comburendo Act
- 1% advancement of true religion (yes, I normally hate this one, but we're desperate)
- 1% act of uniformity (maybe)
- 2% inquisitor (maybe)
- 1.5% stability (if desperate)

Unfortunately, we're not likely to get all of these. You can usually get 5% pretty reliably with stab gouge + theologian at any point. The alternatives are to feed Syria (which takes religious) then annex, but this is slow, or to take religious but be weaker in FL, relying more on Ottomans or someone else to beat up Mamluks.

When I ran a test game with the Knights I got distracted and conquered the Ottomans first then ran out of time lol.

 

[atwix]

In my Theodoro game, I beat Crimea when they attacked me, due to aforementioned alliances. Crimea really isn't that strong.

I'd say Yaroslavl is the hardest in Europe and also in the game at large. I recently posted a thread asking for input on it, and it got zero responses. Guess people don't even play Yaroslavl. Its only competition is Albania and Perm, but Albania is at least independent and has weak neighbours it can annex, and Perm at the very least borders Kazan and unclaimed Siberia. Yaroslavl? Well, you're a vassal of Muscovy, and you only border Muscovy and Tver. If you somehow manage to win your independence before Tver is gone, you can annex them and border Novgorod. So what's the problem, you may ask? Well, with states like Liège, you can at least DoW Serbia or somesuch and run away. Yaroslavl has no such saving grace — you can't get access through Muscovy. You have to tear your way through them from the inside, and may only declare yourself successful on top of its bloody, beaten corpse.

Why, you may ask, do I consider Yaroslavl and Perm way worse off than French minors? Easy: you can't get anyone to support your independence against Muscovy (except Lithuania, which gets PU'd more than 90% of the time). You're on your own, whereas if you play Foix, you can dogpile France with any combination of Castile and Austria and Burgundy and Aragon on your side.

edit: all of that said, Yaroslavl is possible, and very satisfying as well when you succeed. Their ideas are pretty bad, but I suggest defensive + offensive + innovative to make the best out of them. Float 75 tradition and get top-tier generals for the rest of the game.

i did a yaroslavl run. Hardest start i ever faced. It takes skill to get independant with an angle to conquer anything else. I put game on hold when i lost a coalition war to entire HRE, castille and ottomans (i was just testing how far i could go with new mechanics).
I might continue the game at some point.


Try to form jerusalem as the knights.. That is hard too. It all depends on what you call "hard". If you want a real challenge, try yaroslavl.

Foix? Foix is nothing compared to yaroslavl. Foix can ask support independance from three greater powers at once, and stomp france. It can stomp aragon with help of castille right after. You can even steal naples and make them your vassal after independance war. From there you might even form Italy...

 

[CaptainChiatrol]

What about all the possible release as vassal on day one options to play?