Most underrated idea groups and overrated?

[dualmaster]

It's looking like the new patch is going to change all the military options to Quantity>>Everything Else. Army quality seems to suck really bad in comparison to pure numbers both in terms of intimidating the AI into running away or in simply winning battles. Fort meta means you're going to spend tons of time sitting on high level forts which is a massive drain on manpower. And since army quality doesn't matter a whole lot, any siege needs to be babysat with extra stacks if the enemy has any decent size armies. Example: By 1650 almost every fort in Europe is Level 6 which means you'll want a 40 stack to siege a single fort. In order to prevent the AI from crushing that stack you need to back it up with another 40-60k or else the AI will jump you with a 60k army and completely crush you. So you need about 100k to "safely" siege an enemy fort. And the manpower bleed of sieging level 6 forts by 1650 is brutal as well. All this adds up to Quantity looking like the premiere military idea group and often a good pick for 3rd/4th idea group.

 

[csward53]

Finally 1 person besides me that likes Aristocratic haha. Defensive isn't bad, but I agree it's not the best in the military idea groups.

 

[Kanem Bornu]

The problem with espionage is that it doesn't scale well. It had a brief niche as a 6th+ pick to mitigate corruption in the terrcorr patches at least.

Advisor cost and corruption reduction are both ducat savings. As far as ducat savings go, they're pretty good, but by mid game the utility is starting to get smaller since you get closer and closer to running +5 advisers + army regardless.

AE impact often goes the same route. After early game, it becomes increasingly more practical to just all-in a religious/culture group region, rack up AE to the cap of 1000, and annex it directly or into subjects. Once you're doing this (and for some players, it's pretty early), AE impact loses a lot of its luster.

Finally, espionage offers extra DIP cost reduction, via more + faster claims. Again, this stops scaling well, because absolutism and -score cost modifiers allow more to be taken, but not for more claims to be made. To the point where if you don't have religious, even influence's finisher offers more savings, until imperialism removes much of this pressure regardless. Claim discount is further harmed by the fact that everyone and their dog will start slapping you with counter-espionage, limiting the + espionage modifier benefit and catching spies often enough to noticeably reduce claim rate...compared to just taking all the things at 0 DIP and similar AE reduction (idea group vs holy war reduction), in practice this isn't so great. It would be somewhat better if it allowed claims bordering claims like the discovery age ability, but I doubt that would push espionage above the top two groups for SP.

Great response - thanks.

I actually disagree regarding scaling, especially in regards to finances and advisor costs. As you get later into the game your advisors scale up in cost both in terms of the flat increase modifiers over time, but additionally due to wanting to hire higher level advisors. A discount on advisors scales perfectly IMO as the benefits get greater as you get more and more expensive advisors.

You're definitely right about the diplomatic effects in general being less impactful the later the game goes on. But that I could say goes for any of the diplomatic groups, as the longer the game goes on the more you'll want to annex land directly due to admin efficiency and absolutism. Espionage does offer some direct benefits to those things as I mentioned like siege ability. I see your points though, and it's quite clearly not as strong as Diplomatic almost entirely due to the province war score cost modifier in that group - one of the strongest modifiers in any idea group, in my opinion.

You can "just deal with" most things. However, if you don't have humanist, you will have to fight more rebels, and that implies moving your armies away from enemy borders/offensive war effort and back to kill them. In the mean time, they cost you money through occupation (provinces don't generate income for you) + devastation, and more money/manpower after you kill them via reinforcement cost. For any scenario where you avoid all of this due to humanist, the savings are substantial.

Humanist also saves a marginal amount of admin points via keeping unity high enough to not be penalized for stability, and prevents wrong religion modifiers in newly captured provinces even the instant you take them in a peace deal, so it is part of the recipe for turning captured land into productive land ASAP.

Those issues with rebel occupations are mostly mitigated by well placed forts and just watching your own rebel progress. Late game I buy them down for absolutism anyway.

I mean yes, it's obviously very great at what it does. If you don't want to bother with rebels, just take Humanist.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I actually disagree regarding scaling, especially in regards to finances and advisor costs. As you get later into the game your advisors scale up in cost both in terms of the flat increase modifiers over time, but additionally due to wanting to hire higher level advisors. A discount on advisors scales perfectly IMO as the benefits get greater as you get more and more expensive advisors.

That's kind of what I mean by poor scaling though. Where espionage does scale (money) is not that impactful, whereas where it does not scale (monarch point savings/speed) are the things you really want in SP expanding games.

You're definitely right about the diplomatic effects in general being less impactful the later the game goes on. But that I could say goes for any of the diplomatic groups, as the longer the game goes on the more you'll want to annex land directly due to admin efficiency and absolutism.

Diplomatic annexation also scales from admin efficiency and absolutism. If you have those and stack -dipannex you can annex 1000 development subjects < 10 years easily. They continue to see usage at minimum as just a way to dump OE, unless your CCR is amazing enough to core arbitrarily large % of OE in less than 10 months.

For most TAGs, dipannex is the cheapest way to get full cores by far, and is competitive with making territory cores directly until end game.

Those issues with rebel occupations are mostly mitigated by well placed forts and just watching your own rebel progress. Late game I buy them down for absolutism anyway.

You can watch it all you want, but either your troops are there, or they are in enemy territory. Not both. Across a run, having rebels you would not otherwise have adds up.

Same deal for forts, building those is a non-trivial expense that not only costs significant dosh up front and to maintain, but also is done to the exclusion of an alternative, money *generating* investment made with the same ducats.

Point is that humanist isn't "just" anti-rebel. It's a very strong financial group because it not only reduces the time and cost spent dealing with rebels, it also removes all religious penalties, ducat costs associated with conversion, and further contributes to AE decay (both directly and with policy).

Also, yeah -WS cost is one of the stronger modifiers, probably 2nd after core cost reduction. If you stack a lot of it using theocracy, diplomatic, and other sources you can annex > 1000 dev per war. Note that since doing so will often give hundreds of OE, using subjects and reducing annexation cost helps a lot.

 

[Uskayaw]

Maritime ideas. Prank Spain by privateering their home node with 100 light ships and taking 50% of their treasure fleets. It works because privateering is more powerful than trade protection. It usually takes a crane to get them out.

 

[AvengedK1ng]

Horde pretty good

Espionage is underrated. AE impact, siege ability, extra diplomat, advisor cost reduction, and passive corruption reduction are all strong to very strong. The policies that go with it are generally quite nice and pair with your chosen military groups. The issue is there are some read duds in there like privateer efficiency and even worse, rebel support efficiency. If you can look past that I think Espionage is a really nice idea group and I take it more than most I'm sure.

Overrated: Humanist. You can just deal with the unrest. Only cases I say Humanist is truly needed is in a world conquest or playing Confucian. Otherwise, situational.

Less rebels means more manpower means leaving troops on full maintenance less giving more money

 

[AvengedK1ng]

Maritime ideas. Prank Spain by privateering their home node with 100 light ships and taking 50% of their treasure fleets. It works because privateering is more powerful than trade protection. It usually takes a crane to get them out.

8 ideas or 2 heavy ships hmm

 

[KRBLACK]

Finally 1 person besides me that likes Aristocratic haha. Defensive isn't bad, but I agree it's not the best in the military idea groups.

I too love aristocratic. It is a great all-round group and I love it in HRE starts
The problem with it is that it does not provide 'reduction bonus' of any kind.

By that I mean AE reduction, CCR, siege ability, Diplo Annex Cost and modifiers that become increasingly effective.

My new go to idea group order is:
1 - Espionage
2 - Offensive
3 - Theocratic (if available)
4 - Influence
5 - Administrative

The idea is you start off with AE reduction and stacking siege ability. This allows for massive conquests. You feed large portions of the conquests to vassals.
Then when you get Influence and Admin you stack diplo annex cost for nearly free annexations.

 

[necro84]

@KRBLACK aristocratic have impact on siege by +1 Leader siege and −1% Yearly army tradition decay. Two bonuses combined can give +2 to leader siege and it could be worth more than +20% siege ability from offensive.
For me aristocratic needs better policies - except stacking cavalry combat ability there is nothing special

 

[iClipse]

8 ideas or 2 heavy ships hmm

So, Privateering is one of those things I quite literally never use, and I probably should. As someone who doesn't understand it fully, why would I use heavy ships? Does it 'conquer' more of incoming treasure fleets?

I do feel I should use the flagship + 33% trade power + privateering more in trade nodes like English Channel.

 

[necro84]

If nobody is using hunt pirates mission only trade power of privateering fleet is important but hunt pirates compares number of cannons in both fleets and heavy ships have about 4 times more cannons

 

[AvengedK1ng]

So, Privateering is one of those things I quite literally never use, and I probably should. As someone who doesn't understand it fully, why would I use heavy ships? Does it 'conquer' more of incoming treasure fleets?

I do feel I should use the flagship + 33% trade power + privateering more in trade nodes like English Channel.

Hunt pirates counters privateering

 

[subzero12479]

Hunt pirates counters privateering

its appllied additively. if you have +50% privateer efficiency and the penalty for privateering is -99% you privateers will have 49% efficiency.
you can stack up a lot of privateer efficiency:
50% maritime+offensive policy
33% espionage ideas
25% maritime ideas
25% maritime ideas decision
25% naval tradition
50% monument in caribean.
this alone makes +208%, even if the penalty from pirate hunting fleets is -99% you will still have +109% privateer efficiency in the node.

 

[Egodeus]

In my opinion the most overrated is quantity. It seems everyone is always taking it and I've personally taken it perhaps once and found it lack-luster.

Granted I am not interested in doing any world conquest runs, so I don't see the need to pump my forcelimit up so much and usually gain my manpower in other ways. Besides, by not taking quantity, I can take something that makes me more money and just pay a little extra to go over FL if needed.

 

[KRBLACK]

@KRBLACK aristocratic have impact on siege by +1 Leader siege and −1% Yearly army tradition decay. Two bonuses combined can give +2 to leader siege and it could be worth more than +20% siege ability from offensive.

That is where you are wrong.

Siege ability grants increasing returns.
0% Siege ability = 1/1 = 100% Siege speed
10% SA = 1/0,9 = 111,1% SS
30% SA = 1/0,7 = 142,8% SS
50% SA = 1/0,5 = 200% SS
70% SA = 1/0,3 = 333,3% SS
90% SA = 1/0,1 = 1000% SS

So every extra bit of siege ability is great to have. You can literally get 3-day siege phases, and at that point siege leader pips are irrelevant.

With this strategy army tradition also becomes a non-issue. IIRC you get 2 AT for every fort you siege. Which easily adds up to 100 if you get 30 day sieges.

What makes aristocratic good is that it does many things very early on in the game.
1 diplomat > lifesaver in early game mediocre late game
+1 leader siege > lifesaver early game decent but unnecessary late game
+10% nobility loyalty > great early game meh late game
+33% manpower > great early game boost, where often quantity is overkill in terms of manpower
-10% mil tech > good early game for getting MIL tech ahead of time
-1% AT deay > great early game, good but excessive late game