The ladies may say that out of sympathy, but you know what they really want from an Emperor!
How did you get so big!?
- Thread starter Jaggmor
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The ladies may say that out of sympathy, but you know what they really want from an Emperor!
Since there seem to be a couple other Scandinavians around...
How I did it: Exactly like everyone else said, except I did abuse the gamey tactic of opm release in the last 100 years due to the crazy amount of AE I got for taking 3 provinces as a world-spanning empire. When I was taking Poland/Lithuania and feeding Ukraine, 3 provinces from Lithuania gave me like 100 AE with Lithuania and 66 or so with Poland. Completely ridiculous and honestly the only way to bypass such a silly restriction on conquest that I had been doing exactly the same way 100 years prior with no problems was to use gamey tactics.
That being said, it involved a lot of taking a single province, releasing a vassal and having cores returned to that vassal. At one point, Nogai had conquered Uzbek, Mongol Horde, Oriat Horde and the Golden Horde. So over the series of 4-5 wars, I completely returned these vassals to their full size, fed them the rest of Nogai and then annexed them. Up until the late game, diplo points were a bigger handicap than AE or OE. Its all about using your diplomats effectively (I think I had 5 by the year 1650 and always had them improving relations) and never expanding in a direction until you have had time to recover. So its very possible and even easy in the case of the Ottomans to create vast empires as long as you are careful about AE.
How I did it: Exactly like everyone else said, except I did abuse the gamey tactic of opm release in the last 100 years due to the crazy amount of AE I got for taking 3 provinces as a world-spanning empire. When I was taking Poland/Lithuania and feeding Ukraine, 3 provinces from Lithuania gave me like 100 AE with Lithuania and 66 or so with Poland. Completely ridiculous and honestly the only way to bypass such a silly restriction on conquest that I had been doing exactly the same way 100 years prior with no problems was to use gamey tactics.
That being said, it involved a lot of taking a single province, releasing a vassal and having cores returned to that vassal. At one point, Nogai had conquered Uzbek, Mongol Horde, Oriat Horde and the Golden Horde. So over the series of 4-5 wars, I completely returned these vassals to their full size, fed them the rest of Nogai and then annexed them. Up until the late game, diplo points were a bigger handicap than AE or OE. Its all about using your diplomats effectively (I think I had 5 by the year 1650 and always had them improving relations) and never expanding in a direction until you have had time to recover. So its very possible and even easy in the case of the Ottomans to create vast empires as long as you are careful about AE.
You can also use the different CB that comes from some ideas. One is for example free CB against all asian nations with lesser tech. And you have the religious ones as well giving some free CB and defender of faith, to go jihad/crusade style conquests. If you go for colonial ideas you can become large as well, but not thru conquest and not on the Eurasian continent, and you will have to compete with the other colonial powers in the same places as they always go. Combining colonial game with huge conquests is possible but might be harder, because you would take up ideas like exploration/expansion/trade and stuff when you need other ideas for the CB, land warfare, etc. Personally i like the colonial game better, when combined with trade. And you can still do lotsa conquests and get many CB like the asian conquest, so its possible to combine. Allthough i havent tried conquering Russia yet so i dunno if its hard without specializing for that.
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Thx for the quick reply!
Can anyone confirm this as well? Is there a way to bypass the disappearance of cores when releasing a vassal?
Just because a dev says "working as designed" doesn't mean that players with any sense of history, playing a game that is so steeped in history can't look at a game mechanic like that and come to their own independent conclusion that it A) is ahistorical and B) sucks.
Just because Paradox can't come up with a better way that actually makes sense doesn't mean we have to be satisfied with the current one.
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No one said that, though. "I think it sucks" does not equal "it is an exploit."
Well, be that as it may, it still feels like...well, maybe not cheating(how can you cheat in a single player game really?) but to me it feels really just....not cool. It means making decisions like someone who is playing a game rather than as someone who is leading a nation.
And for what it's worth, I think it actually is an exploit, just an exploit that Paradox were so embarassed they didn't realize pre-launch that they now say they meant players to do it that way all along. It has to be as I simply cannot fathom that a company of their caliber(and don't get me wrong - I LOVE Paradox!) would intentionally include such a weird mechanic for expanding.
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with vassal feeding as an officially blessed way of playing and with the way how AE, coring mechanics and coalitions work, I think this game went fubar. I blame the power point system - so abstracted, so detached and so boring...
Another question: How do you manage such vast empires internally? Do you take ideas/decisions that will reduce revolts, or do you spend diplo points changing their culture or missionaries to convert? The latter one would give you more money btw, but i guess it will need a whole bunch of diplo points and religious idea group and that kinda stuff.
Anyone intent on mass expansion takes the religious group for the relations bonus and/or CB anyway. Making it much more feasible to maintain your empire through conversion is just an added bonus. Culture conversion is generally not as practicable due to the point costs involved although I have had a nearly uniformly Russian/Orthodox Empire spanning from the Danube to the Pacific (didn't convert the Ruthenian lands due to the cultural union, the rest was converted). Otherwise you just leave rebel smasher stacks scattered around. The big benefit of culture conversion is disallowing the jackals/vultures event triggering in areas far from the border thus allowing you to keep all your armies at the periphery fighting wars or patrolling new conquests instead of back in the boonies.
+1 to brifbates. Religious is one of the most powerful idea groups in the game, and the religious unity is far more important than cultural unity regarding the revolts.
Aggressive vassal expansion puts me above the diplomatic support limit for most of the game, and since the diplo points are required to demand provinces in the peace deals, I simply give up on the culture conversions for most of my games. Still, a decent stability, legitimacy and high religious unity leads to zero revolt risks for the most part. But I cannot imagine doing any kind of large-scale expansion without religious idea group, especially if you're expanding into an area that is not your religion already, which will probably be the case as you paint the map.
Don't be afraid to give into rebel demands when you're too busy. Granting local autonomy hurts the provincial income and prestige, but you can just regain the prestige through more wars and battles. Accepting demands (even to nationalists) won't make you lose the province; you lose the province only when they actually enforce demands.
Aggressive vassal expansion puts me above the diplomatic support limit for most of the game, and since the diplo points are required to demand provinces in the peace deals, I simply give up on the culture conversions for most of my games. Still, a decent stability, legitimacy and high religious unity leads to zero revolt risks for the most part. But I cannot imagine doing any kind of large-scale expansion without religious idea group, especially if you're expanding into an area that is not your religion already, which will probably be the case as you paint the map.
Don't be afraid to give into rebel demands when you're too busy. Granting local autonomy hurts the provincial income and prestige, but you can just regain the prestige through more wars and battles. Accepting demands (even to nationalists) won't make you lose the province; you lose the province only when they actually enforce demands.
What's a "gamey exploit?"
An exploit is using a bug or glitch to your advantage. But I think a gamey exploit is different. It's not using a bug or glitch. It's using a game mechanic in some way. In board gaming, we would call a maneuver "gamey" if it correctly used the game mechanics but seemed somehow "out of the spirit of the game" in some sense. This seems to come in two flavors.
A) the exploit bypasses what seems to be the intended risk-reward system in the game.
B) the exploit makes no sense thematically though it is technically by the book in terms of game rules
I'm seeing threads of both of these objections in this thread.
I think the fact that the AI vassal-feeds, and the devs have said it's WAD, shows that A) doesn't apply here. It appears this is part of the intended risk-reward system.
Does B) make more sense as an objection? Was there ever a RL case of vassal-feeding?
An exploit is using a bug or glitch to your advantage. But I think a gamey exploit is different. It's not using a bug or glitch. It's using a game mechanic in some way. In board gaming, we would call a maneuver "gamey" if it correctly used the game mechanics but seemed somehow "out of the spirit of the game" in some sense. This seems to come in two flavors.
A) the exploit bypasses what seems to be the intended risk-reward system in the game.
B) the exploit makes no sense thematically though it is technically by the book in terms of game rules
I'm seeing threads of both of these objections in this thread.
I think the fact that the AI vassal-feeds, and the devs have said it's WAD, shows that A) doesn't apply here. It appears this is part of the intended risk-reward system.
Does B) make more sense as an objection? Was there ever a RL case of vassal-feeding?
There were no any real life vassal feedings. People say it is a feature but even eu4 history files misses it. If you look different starting dates there are close to zero countries who have vassals and even less situations where they could be fed.
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So if EU4 history files are to be the final arbiter of all gameplay, does that mean I should be able to build as many universities as I want?
British East India trading company comes pretty close.
British East India trading company comes pretty close.
Also Dutch but they are bad examples because they are few, partly outside of games time period and players use that feature much more effectively than any close examples.
You really don't need vassals to create an ahistorically large empire. One of my house rules is never to vassalise anyone (vassals really are OP), and you can still become pretty big as most European nations, even minor ones. Maybe not as big as some posted here, but reaching the black sea as Sweden is not a big deal at all.
I use permanent vassals because, as a country, you can only get so big before you simply cant effectively manage your empire anymore due to monarch points/lack of free leaders. So I move to permanent vassals like Muscovy and Ming to keep on growing, since they will provide troops + moar leaders, alongside with building up their provinces with their monarch points.
The companies were different, they were empire inside empires.
Also, they conquer people mostly by themselves, they didn't need always orders from London as well the actual British Army to blob into India.
Also, they conquer people mostly by themselves, they didn't need always orders from London as well the actual British Army to blob into India.
Which is even more rediculous, because you have vassals essentially declaring war, winning, then annexing/vassalizing territory and getting AE for itself instead of the master. So it essentially allowed the British to autonomously gain even more territory without any AE, or even having to do anything.