My attempt at WC.

[TheBloke]

Are you getting the Papal Controller and defender of the faith bonuses and all the decisions (like the Society of Jesus -- Jesuits) that boost your missionary power? Get your missionary strength up to snuff and it's a piece of cake to convert those bastards? I had lots of Sunni provinces where it said "at this rate the province will never be converted". I still don't have religious ideas but now the longest province takes about 16 months.

I have Curia Controller with 3 cardinals, Counter Reformation, and two Decisions that boost Missionary +1% each. I don't have DotF yet, I plan to get that soonish. I haven't seen that Society of Jesuit thing.

I just started converting Tadmekka and it's going to take 47 months. Not the end of the world but yeah could be better.

I'm toying with the idea of getting Religious next (for my fourth - still quite a few decades away, though, as I'm only Admin tech 11 at the moment and just the next one is 7 years ahead of time.)

I find Religious is an annoying idea group, because most of the individual Ideas I find to be a bit meh: not bad, but hardly exciting. But the final one, 100% BROT, is absolutely awesome. So it might be worth it for that alone, so I can continuing conquering fairly freely.

 

[hauptman]

I have Curia Controller with 3 cardinals, Counter Reformation, and two Decisions that boost Missionary +1% each. I don't have DotF yet, I plan to get that soonish. I haven't seen that Society of Jesuit thing.

I just started converting Tadmekka and it's going to take 47 months. Not the end of the world but yeah could be better.

I'm toying with the idea of getting Religious next (for my fourth - still quite a few decades away, though, as I'm only Admin tech 11 at the moment and just the next one is still 67 years ahead of time.)

I find Religious is an annoying idea group, because most of the individual Ideas I find to be a bit meh: not bad, but hardly exciting. But the final one, 100% BROT, is absolutely awesome. So it might be worth it for that alone, so I can continuing conquering fairly freely.

Lol it takes me 5 months to convert those provinces, and I can do 5 at a time. Sucker. =P

Everything in religious is AWSOMESAUCE! Well everything but the +2 tolerance of heretics. That should be number 2 or 3 idea set every game man, I'm tellin you!

 

[RMcD94]

If you got 15 AE per annexing a vassal then a larger vassal it could be beneficial to constantly release and reannex right? Since the -2 from all their provinces, something like France as mentioned

 

[TheBloke]

Lol it takes me 5 months to convert those provinces, and I can do 5 at a time. Sucker. =P

Everything in religious is AWSOMESAUCE! Well everything but the +2 tolerance of heretics. That should be number 2 or 3 idea set every game man, I'm tellin you!

Haha OK I'll try it then. I suppose I'm not conquering enough provinces then, because I always seem to have 90+ % religious unity, and my biggest source of non-unity tends to be the Americas, which I can convert in 7 months as long as I have Counter-Ref, Curia and DotF. And I can do four at once with that combo. And once I've converted the Americas and handled the Reformation provinces, I've rarely had below 98% unity.

But I suppose when you're taking large parts of Protestant/Reformed and Eastern Europe, or Asia (which I've barely touched at all, yet) then religious unity is going to tank, and it's going to take forever to convert, so yeah I can see the benefits there.

It just never seemed as immediately beneficial as + diplomats, merchants, colonists, DipRep, DipRel, or any kind of military stuff. But maybe I'm not thinking strategically enough

Anyway even if I did have a handle on religious unity and didn't need it for that, the 100% BROT is hard to turn down, even if I wasn't getting huge benefit from the 2800+ admin points it costs to reach it.

 

[unmerged(780209)]

I have Curia Controller with 3 cardinals, Counter Reformation, and two Decisions that boost Missionary +1% each. I don't have DotF yet, I plan to get that soonish. I haven't seen that Society of Jesuit thing.

I just started converting Tadmekka and it's going to take 47 months. Not the end of the world but yeah could be better.

I'm toying with the idea of getting Religious next (for my fourth - still quite a few decades away, though, as I'm only Admin tech 11 at the moment and just the next one is 7 years ahead of time.)

I find Religious is an annoying idea group, because most of the individual Ideas I find to be a bit meh: not bad, but hardly exciting. But the final one, 100% BROT, is absolutely awesome. So it might be worth it for that alone, so I can continuing conquering fairly freely.

Society of Jesus (form the Jesuits) may not be available for Austria then. It provides +1 to missionary strength.

But, I rechecked my latest game and realized that most of my missionary power is due to a mod -- HaREM Heirs and rulers education mod. This mod allows you to direct the education of your monarch, like in CKII.

I chose "religious training" and after my ruler's training was completed that gave me a +4 to missionary bonus.

So, it would be harder in the vanilla game.

But, religious ideas would do much the same thing. I started out disliking and ignoring it. But it can be quite powerful. Next game it's definitely going to be my first administrative idea group. Stronger missionaries are key to keep revolt risk down and converting in a reasonable time.

Obviously, better reputation over time is enormous advantage in reducing AE.

 

[unmerged(780209)]

Well the first 3 idea groups are the most important... that's the longest game span. After that they come much faster. So not having diplo and expansion when I did, would have given the portugese and spanish more time to decide to rival me, or dow an ally, and ruin my chance of vassalizing them. Religious was all so important for the ae/annex malus reduction as well as conversion power for making sure everyone is catholic.

That leaves No room for explorers until they simply arent even needed anymore. I mean I can now see all of asia pretty much already. Even the stuff russia hasnt colonized is visible to me. Explorers Just will not be useful to me this game... Unless I have to go search out inca myself.

In your case, I would have gone with Religious Ideas #1 and Expansion or Exploration #2. Don't even get a military Idea group for the 1st 100 years or so. The problem with that of course would be that you're lagging in Admin tech while you research religious ideas.

 

[RMcD94]

Diplo is always first for Austria I don't think there's a question there.

 

[TheBloke]

Society of Jesus (form the Jesuits) may not be available for Austria then. It provides +1 to missionary strength.

I'm playing England / Great Britain, but yeah it's not listed so I don't think we get it. But there are several +1 missionary strength decisions.

 

[LDSkinny]

So when playing this fast and loose strategy with vassal releasing and reintegrating, do you just let legitimacy fall to the wayside?

 

[TheBloke]

So when playing this fast and loose strategy with vassal releasing and reintegrating, do you just let legitimacy fall to the wayside?

Legitimacy isn't a factor in this. Legitimacy only gets hit by taking RMs. You need a RM to diplo-vassalise, you do not need one when you Release a Vassal.

In fact, this is one reason why you should annex and then Release Vassal. I listed it in the Further Benefits section of the post I made after hauptman's: if I had done a Release Nation on Jolof, making Mali release them, I could never have diplo-vassalised Jolof. Because they're a different religion, and so no RM, and so no vassal. Instead I annexed those provinces, then did a Release as Vassal. That meant I didn't need a RM, they were already my vassal and I could Integrate them after 10 years whenever I wanted. And as a double bonus, they got released with my religion anyway!

 

[drake000666]

This pic is from a fail WC I tryed some time back, unless you pull off something big your already way behind any chance at WC because in this try I already had more land then you with more time lift.

View attachment 94943

 

[grommile]

Legitimacy isn't a factor in this. Legitimacy only gets hit by taking RMs.

You lose 10 Legitimacy every time you annex a vassal.

 

[TheBloke]

You lose 10 Legitimacy every time you annex a vassal.

Oh duh sorry, of course, I forgot about that.

Still not really a factor I think. Especially not in how I do things, because I still only integrate once - annex (through conquest), release as vassal, later integrate. But even if you integrate, release, then re-integrate, that's still going to be over the course of many years by which time I'd expect the legitimacy to have re-generated. I'm gaining at 1.8/year at the moment and I've seen it much higher than that in other games. I can't imagine ever annexing more than two vassals at once, because of the multi-year diplomat usage, and a 20 hit to legitimacy in a short time period is not too worrying. I usually have legitimacy drop to 50 or 35 or even 0 at least once or twice a game through bad heirs, and it's never more than a mild inconvenience and slowdown.

 

[TheBloke]

One question on diplo-annexing a vassal. I was sure there was some limitation that you could not annex a vassal if you had already done so in the last 10 years?

But I can't now find any mention of that in the Diplomacy -> Annex Vassal option or the tooltips.

Was this removed? Or does it only appear after I've recently completed integration of a vassal?

 

[hauptman]

Well I just played through another 20 years... Cleaned up the British Ilses to make more room for the Balkan states. Grew Morocco and made Algiers vassalisable, Vassalized a blobbing Ethiopia, And added some land to Crimea and Georgia.

Getting the empire spread to the isles (while russia went and dragged me into a silly war) took quite a while... Cant wait for that new diplomat. I just dont have enough of em. =(



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And here is the state of the Empire. Wonder what will happen when There are too many states to fit in the box....



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I like how brandenburg and burgandy, two of my vassals, would actually refuse to become, my vassal there.

 

[Saintrl]

Ah man, this should be an AAR!
Nice job!

 

[AnonHobo]

There use to be a Judea crusade mission you could get as Austria that let you get a huge head start in the East... I think a good way to help Austria expand fast is to get into Syria and get Persia as a vassal early so you can start eating up the Islamic provinces.

 

[hauptman]

Things should speed up as soon as I dont feel like I need to add more to the empire... Once I have France (and hopefully Russia Via PU, because I dont know If I'll out tax him enough) And the turks in the fold... I wont need to add many more, because anyone east of there cant really fight... So I'll just need feeders, that I can annex and just keep the land.

 

[Teije]

One question on diplo-annexing a vassal. I was sure there was some limitation that you could not annex a vassal if you had already done so in the last 10 years?

But I can't now find any mention of that in the Diplomacy -> Annex Vassal option or the tooltips.

Was this removed? Or does it only appear after I've recently completed integration of a vassal?

This isn't the case now, perhaps it was before. I've had as many as 4 vassal annexations going on at once, and no restrictions on starting another one right after.

 

[bleakie]

A remark for Russia: I am afraid the -5 base tax modifier difference cannot be overcome. It is a gigantic leap from -86 to -80: you need to expand your tax base to 2.5 times of the current value in order to achieve that, assuming Russia is not expanding its tax base. You may need to wait for the +5 diplomatic reputation event, and choose admin and economic idea groups and pick up the +1 diplomatic reputation from judiciary act.