need a challenge

[amirberner]

Hi,
what usually happens in my games is that at some point (usually somewhere around 1500-1600) I'm too strong to really have a challenge so I quit my games at that point.
in my current Timmies->mughals game I'm almost at that point. it's 1600 and I have almost all of Asia including most of China, I'm fully westernized, my tech is fine and my money is endless. I'm postponing the end by not fighting with the catholics, but once I will beat the hell out of Spain or someone else, the challenge will be over.
I really enjoyed this Timmies game and also my Byzantium and Bavaria->Germany->HRE games.
I didn't like my england game, as it was practically over before 1500
well, this was a long prologue, so what do I want?
1. I want interesting and challenging games that will last till the end (or at least till 1600) - so please offer me some options
2. I want to be able to play majors like castille/burgundy/france/england without getting bored after 100 years - is there any way to make it challenging (through settings or through restrictive house rules)

 

[unmerged(463662)]

Brandenburg - Prussia - Germany.

Ryuku

Minimoto

Iroquis

Muscowy

If you only follow the missions, maybe that helps.

Usually when i play England, I try to get the conquer Ireland mission first, last time, I got recover Normandy, so I declared war on France day 1.

You can only conquer provinces that you have or will get cores on.

The majors are by nature easier.

 

[amirberner]

Brandenburg - Prussia - Germany.

Ryuku

Minimoto

Iroquis

Muscowy

If you only follow the missions, maybe that helps.

Usually when i play England, I try to get the conquer Ireland mission first, last time, I got recover Normandy, so I declared war on France day 1.

You can only conquer provinces that you have or will get cores on.

The majors are by nature easier.

Brandenburg is quite similar to Bavaria (well, bavaria have far better missions but it's the same story)
Ryuku/minimoto/iroquis are probably challenging, but are they interesting?
I already played Muscowy (very challenging at the beginning, but once you beat the horde and Novogrod and form Russia, It's piece of cake

 

[unmerged(207076)]

I found Granada challenging for the first two centuries. I took over Iberia and Italy in the first ~150 years of my game as Granada, which resulted in HRE Austria+France attacking me every 5 years once our truce ended. Things get easy once you westernize but I think it's fun for most of the grand campaign.

 

[Icendoan]

Minamoto can be quite fun. You become a major very quickly, though. Ryukyu is for the bragging rights. Iroquois + other New World countries are boring for 100 years, then really really really exciting as you struggle for your life as Castille invades you, and then boring again because you've defended the Americas, and taken over all of them, and all the fun is in another continent.

You should set arbitrary house rules for yourself, or start off giving major nations a hand (France annexing Burgundy, having Austro-Hungary and Spain form, etc), which leads to a more interesting situation.

 

[brifbates]

A few house rules that make things a lot more challenging (at least I've found them to do so)

1) No forcing PUs using spies-the most brokenly overpowered thing in the game IMO
2) No force-vassalizing electors and abusing HREmp power, in fact I generally actively avoid becoming emperor
3) Try to minimise abusing ai war-fighting stupidity
4) do all missions, no matter how stupid/annoying they are (yes that generally means having 20+ manufactories by 1650)
5) if you manage to lose control of a province you have to accept any peace offer made by the nation controlling your lands no matter how outrageous
6) if your capital province changes religion you have to change your national religion to match it

Other things that make life interesting are oddball goals-form Germany starting as England or Burgundy for example. Dismantle the HRE as Holland. Form Reformed Malaysia starting as a mid-sized European nation.

 

[killerbread]

Start of as England and let Cornwall secede and then play as Cornwall and make a Cornish empire!

 

[unmerged(463662)]

I quite like the Netherlands at the 80 years war bookmark, set your goal of taking as much territory from spain as possible.

After the war is over, it's still a challenge, as you're at tech parity with everyone else, you've no empire and it's much harder to make your mechants stick.

Ryuku are quite fun, they're traders, though I prefer Minimoto.

 

[camppa]

Tag switch after every 25 years. Start as Aragon or some other medium power, play your normal strategy. If your at war at the end of the 25 years, switch to your enemy. If not, switch to some other country that looks like it needs some help or is in an interesting situation.

 

[grommile]

1) No forcing PUs using spies-the most brokenly overpowered thing in the game IMO

Not much of a challenge.

2) No force-vassalizing electors and abusing HREmp power, in fact I generally actively avoid becoming emperor

Ditto (unless you're in the Empire).

4) do all missions, no matter how stupid/annoying they are (yes that generally means having 20+ manufactories by 1650)

This one I find... kinda ridiculous, actually. Probably because I'm playing 5.2, where the manufactory price scaling is driven entirely by province count instead of manpower. (I'll cheerfully embrace "never cancel a mission", though.)

5) if you manage to lose control of a province you have to accept any peace offer made by the nation controlling your lands no matter how outrageous

I'd love to watch someone playing under this one

6) if your capital province changes religion you have to change your national religion to match it

What do you do if your capital gets occupied by heathen zealots (or flips to Orthodox due to the Heresy event from an Innovative slider move and there aren't any Orthodox countries left to "lose" a war against)?

 

[brifbates]

I'd love to watch someone playing under this one

I do it all the time. It definitely changes how you approach fighting wars, especially against x major power and their eleventy billion OPM lackeys

What do you do if your capital gets occupied by heathen zealots (or flips to Orthodox due to the Heresy event from an Innovative slider move and there aren't any Orthodox countries left to "lose" a war against)?

Never ran into either of those situations so it's hard to say. I almost never make a slider move to narrowminded so heresy isn't often an issue and I rebel stomp assiduously. My meaning was mostly the reformation, it was pretty freaking annoying one time when I went protestant, converted about 2/3 of my territory then had the capital go reformed.

 

[cuendillar]

Ashanti's pretty fun, by far the most interesting natives. Its enemies tend to grow in strength with it, so that it never really gets too easy - but they're not ridiculously hard. I actually consider them fully playable, certainly more so than the other pagans.

While you are an unfortified pagan OPM next to a much larger Sunni nation, Kumasi is one of the best provinces in Africa (base 5 gold) and several nearby Mali provinces are pretty decent too. Even so, you'll be out-gunned for quite a while as even should Mali be permanently beaten, the Europeans are practically next door and much of the surrounding land is dirt poor - not to mention your poor tech group. Due to being pagan, too big to fail happens much later as all your provinces can immediately be seized by your enemies. TSCs and other size penalties also limits growth until you get out of tribal.

Ashanti is a rather small culture, so culture shifts are easy giving the option of forming a pagan European major. Besides, it's pretty fun to convert Mecca to worship pigs.
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A nice house rule (for a "normal" country) is to limit your own size (either absolute number or by having no non-cores), while picking an interesting target to aim at. Some suggestions for Europeans are:
Maximize the area in the HRE + get some interesting elector nations (must remove criteria that prevents AI from joing human-led HRE)
Get the "dominant" countries for every culture as a vassal and use spies etc to give each of them full control of their respective culture. (countries found in [main]/common/culture.txt)
Get every country in your trade league as a merchant republic with one (fully monopolized) CoT per continent.
Take a European minor and vassalize all EU nations under near-present borders. Requires you to let someone else form Germany, Italy and Romania to complete.

Forming a country (possibly with harsh infamy limitations) as an uncommon nation can be fun too. Smolensk (1401 start)->Russia, Cyprus->France and Knights->Spain are of the right cultures at game start. You can certainly come up with more options like that.

 

[HotHotHot]

You want a challenge? Don't play EU until EU4 is out:laugh:

 

[TalorianEmporer]

Another infuriating challenge is Arakan. First you want to build as many mercs as you can, then you want to make your ruler a general and set minting to max. then hope only pegu attacks, you should be able to fend them off. Aim to vassalise them. Get enough money to build a fort, then things get much easier. It took me 9 goes to get it right, it is purely the luck of the draw. Also you can get Malacca, Brunei and one other as allies from the beginning

 

[Kerham]

Mainz OPM Emperor was the funniest game I tried. Cleves to Germany was also rewarding.

 

[vitek69]

Tag switch after every 25 years. Start as Aragon or some other medium power, play your normal strategy. If your at war at the end of the 25 years, switch to your enemy. If not, switch to some other country that looks like it needs some help or is in an interesting situation.

This is really good, though I prefer 50 years per country

 

[unmerged(37198)]

play multiplayer, sp is just way to easy

 

[Generalmotors]

Play Moldova on very hard.

 

[fleetothemoon]

Try one of the South East nations... They are further away from Europe, and thus, will have a longer progression.

Try not to conquer everything along the way from Inodchina to Europe. It makes the game, very tedious. Note that even minor powers in Europe gets particularly annoying to deal with in late game (1700++) when they bunch up in the same war, due to frequent Marches and high level forts, as well as the disproportionate amount of troops they can field in relation to their land possessions. So, having lots of undeveloped, dirt poor provinces can make things extremely tedious when they start besieging and dodging all over the place.

Instead, try to take your time and dominate the Asian region without going too overboard (take China or India, not both+Russia) and vassalize or force threatening neighbors to release nations rather then annex lands beyond that region. Once that's done and your region is secure, send some troops half away around the world and reverse-colonize Europe!

 

[YagabodooN]

I played a game as Champa once, westernized and eventually made half the world Hindu. Fun times.