OPM WC brainstorm thread

[bbqftw]

In pursuit of the ultimate fusion of tall and wide play.

Rules - besides instant inheriting (upon which the nation must be re-released / provinces returned), no actions are allowed that would cause you to gain a province.

Here are the goals to be discussed. This thread is intended to be a resource for those interested in WC and OPM play in general.

Gold - World domination with all old world provinces under HRE vassal control. and all new world provinces under CN control. In other words, one click separates you from a one-tag WC. HRE route must be used for this one.

Silver - World domination.

EUIVAlexander has posted a nice revoke as OPM Ulm in 1640 on VH, which shows that this is not entirely unrealistic: <link removed>

Routes:

* Revoke - probably the most obvious one but it is definitely not trivial.
* Shogunate - benefits from a faster revoked
* -999 dip tank all-in. If you have valid CBs, theoretically you can annex the whole world at -999 dip. Theoretically we can combine this with HRE strats.

I think revoke is the best route as its the most amenable to staying as a true OPM.

Of course with an OPM there are a number of limiting factors, I'll list a few and how these problems can be attacked:

1. Self land force limit.

Primarily we are looking at vassal force limit contribution (available from influence and associated policies from offensive, econ, aristo), force limit from emperorship.

Note that this modifier affects force limit from large colonial nations and sword hunt.

Base modifiers: vassal +1, march +2, sword hunt +0.5, large CN +5. Yes, this means that in theory we can get +10 force limit per march.

2. Money

'Solved' by revoking tax income and / or mass divert trade. In any case this shouldn't be too limiting I imagine..

3. Naval force limit / sailors

This is not trivial, as we need to beat Brunei, Japan, GBR to secure the world conquest. For this, we get +10 naval force limit per large CN. Not ideal, but should be enough to get the job done. Note: we can get CN by directly declaring on our vassals with CNs and annexing them into another vassal.

We can extort sailors from our CNs, I guess.

At desperation point we can consider picking maritime...

As far as ideas:

Diplomatic / Influence seem pretty obvious here. Offensive / Quantity are quite decent as well.

Dip rep / dip rel would be ideal in an OPM candidate. Actually this makes German generic ideas better than Hamburg / Lubeck ideas-wise, which are probably the two strongest OPMs at game start.

List of policies that give dip rep:

• Aristocratic-Exploration: The Nobility Embassy Act
• Diplomatic-Expansion: Commercial Embassies
• Diplomatic-Offensive: The Underhanded Diplomacy Act
• Diplomatic-Plutocratic: Policy of Neutrality
• Diplomatic-Quality: Professional Diplomatic Corps
• Diplomatic-Quantity: The Pen Relies on The Sword Act
• Humanist-Influence: The Foreign Aid Act
• Innovative-Diplomatic: The Diplomatic Cooperation

So offensive / quantity seem like even better picks.

 

[creativitypersonified]

Perhaps espionage would be semi usefull with its -10% liberty desire ?

 

[SKOTy]

As for managing liberty desire don't forget great power influence as it increases trust and max trust gives -20% LD.

Perhaps espionage would be semi usefull with its -10% liberty desire ?

The rest of the group is imo pure trash when it comes to OPM WC and also none of the policies can be applied here.

 

[Horn and Ivory]

I love this idea and I'll be upset if you don't update us on its progress.

I don't have much experience playing WCs but HRE minors are almost a speciality.

Nation choices:
Bremen is my #1 pick. It has dip rep and improve relations in its ideas, a strong starting income and trade position, farmlands terrain, and free city government.
A Dutch minor might be another option - handy to be in the Channel node. But not so good for first few decades, and worse terrain over there.
Wild card would be Siena. The ideas are very suboptimal, but you have farmlands, you're in a strong trade node, and you're in a very strong position to prevent the Shadow Kingdom, which I imagine would make world conquesting at least a little easier.

Ideas:
The only meaningful contenders are Diplomatic, Influence, Quantity, Offensive, and Economic. None of the others come close. The only question is the order in which to get them.
The most natural gambit to my mind, would be to play as Bremen, get Econ as first pick, and rush a whole lot of development early before you switch away from free city government. This would definitely be a strong play in any normal Bremen game. It may slow you down too much? I don't relish the thought of trying to maintain control over the empire with 16 development, but I'm a cautious creature and not used to WC speed.
Econ, followed by Influence, then Diplomatic, then the mil groups, maybe has the most potential? Add Exploration if you need it, and that takes you up to Imperialism.
You could do without Econ and go Influence - Offensive - Diplomatic - Quantity? (I don't see a better order.) You'd build up an awful lot of dip rep, easier to get emperor, maybe revoke more quickly, and you'd maybe have more military potential. But you'd be losing heavily on your ability to build tall.

Naval:
Once you've sorted out your mass divert trade, forcelimit is just a number - it's sailors that will be the problem. You might even want to build a drydock. The strategy that calls out to me is to rely on vassals and allies to fight England at sea, and then when the time comes to invade Japan and Brunei, take the first two (or three) ideas of Maritime and then once the job's done abandon the group if you want something else. You can also threaten war for footholds - by the time you're over in the spice islands it's likely to work.

 

[bly08]

Free cities can't become emperor.

 

[Horn and Ivory]

Free cities can't become emperor.

So what?

Free cities can become duchies by tanking their republican tradition. So unless you hope to revoke so quickly that you don't have time to do that, they're still workable starts.

 

[bly08]

so it might be better to start as something else to avoid the hassle of switching govt.

 

[cuendillar]

I've considered something similar, but much less ambitious than WC myself. I decided before getting the game, due to my experiences with OPMs from EU3, to take all achievements without specified nations from OPM starts. My first games were Ansbach (disbanded HRE in June 1821) and Odoyev (eventually fell to Muscovite alliance break, but was close to reaching the Pacific even so).


I figured that any attempt at a large vassalization game while remaining an OPM would inevitably collapse at some point due to a single debilitation factor: Liberty Desire from combined vassal strength. The strongest province I've seen so far is Fido's 100 dev Ayutthaya in the Asian dev clash, but even that's peanuts compared to what vassals would have. At 1k total development, that's potentially 10 times your force limit - if it isn't capped that's a +750 LD from that alone!

I know that there are plenty players much, much better than me, but internal collapse from vast vassal rebellions just seemed inevitable.

 

[gia257]

i dont think anything but diplomatic and influence second is a good start, you need to be elected first and stay elected, unless emperorship is not until the leagues? then economic could be good but not to increase your dev but to be able to increase your pu/march dev to stack LD reduction more, but maybe paying debts is better

also pus dont add up vassal power, so rather than many vassals using some relations for pus would help

 

[Vulkandrache]

Passing reforms as an OPM is going to be stupidly hard because of the "weak emperor" modifier.
You need to go to 100 IA and have 10 DipRep just to counter that, assuming your one province has 50 Dev.

 

[Horn and Ivory]

so it might be better to start as something else to avoid the hassle of switching govt.

Hassle of switching republic to monarchy is trivial. The benefits from strong trade, strong idea set, and a farmlands province are worth many many times more. If you're getting all your dev from one province it needs to be a really good one. And it has to be coastal, to give you a navy. That doesn't leave many good candidates that aren't republics (Lubeck, Bremen, Hamburg...) or theocracies (Utrecht).

i dont think anything but diplomatic and influence second is a good start, you need to be elected first and stay elected, unless emperorship is not until the leagues? then economic could be good but not to increase your dev but to be able to increase your pu/march dev to stack LD reduction more, but maybe paying debts is better

You can't open with two dip groups one after the other. You're right that it'd be optimal though. (I suppose you could turn off idea group limitations, but that sounds too much like cheating to me.) For my money it doesn't much matter who the emperor is until the Reformation is close to kicking off. And you're going to have to develop, and develop a lot.

Passing reforms as an OPM is going to be stupidly hard because of the "weak emperor" modifier.
You need to go to 100 IA and have 10 DipRep just to counter that, assuming your one province has 50 Dev.

I think this is the biggest reason to take Econ and turbo-develop early. Stacking dev cost reductions might even end up being more important than stacking dip rep.
2% for capital; 5% for farmlands; 20% from Econ; 10% for free city; 10% with edict; 10% from prosperity; 5% from reichsreform; 5% from renaissance.
That leaves a few different ways to hit 50% reduction and I think if you had that, you could get it to work out. You'll not be spending anything or coring or integrating.

I figured that any attempt at a large vassalization game while remaining an OPM would inevitably collapse at some point due to a single debilitation factor: Liberty Desire from combined vassal strength.

When the HRE is revoked, the princes count only their own strength for the purposes of liberty desire. If you spread your conquests fairly evenly between a large number of HRE vassals and get one or two PUs, you could stretch it a long, long way. And you'll have meaty bonuses to FL and so on from being Emperor.

 

[gia257]

Hassle of switching republic to monarchy is trivial. The benefits from strong trade, strong idea set, and a farmlands province are worth many many times more. If you're getting all your dev from one province it needs to be a really good one. And it has to be coastal, to give you a navy. That doesn't leave many good candidates that aren't republics (Lubeck, Bremen, Hamburg...) or theocracies (Utrecht).



You can't open with two dip groups one after the other. You're right that it'd be optimal though. (I suppose you could turn off idea group limitations, but that sounds too much like cheating to me.) For my money it doesn't much matter who the emperor is until the Reformation is close to kicking off. And you're going to have to develop, and develop a lot.



I think this is the biggest reason to take Econ and turbo-develop early. Stacking dev cost reductions might even end up being more important than stacking dip rep.
2% for capital; 5% for farmlands; 20% from Econ; 10% for free city; 10% with edict; 10% from prosperity; 5% from reichsreform; 5% from renaissance.
That leaves a few different ways to hit 50% reduction and I think if you had that, you could get it to work out. You'll not be spending anything or coring or integrating.



When the HRE is revoked, the princes count only their own strength for the purposes of liberty desire. If you spread your conquests fairly evenly between a large number of HRE vassals and get one or two PUs, you could stretch it a long, long way. And you'll have meaty bonuses to FL and so on from being Emperor.

the fact the game allows ironman and achievements without the limitation makes it not cheating, it is an arbitrary limitation just like opm wc, perhaps it is cultural if the game originally had this forcefully on and was changed through patch, but I come from a time it was your decision

you can build a navy on your vassal lands if you go tthe sailors

 

[Horn and Ivory]

the fact the game allows ironman and achievements without the limitation makes it not cheating, it is an arbitrary limitation just like opm wc, perhaps it is cultural if the game originally had this forcefully on and was changed through patch, but I come from a time it was your decision

you can build a navy on your vassal lands if you go tthe sailors

That's fair enough. They added the limitation back in 1.10 and put in the option to remove it a bit later - I got into the game in between, when it was mandatory, and I don't play for achievements so that never occurred to me as a barometer of what is and isn't kosher. If you consider it legit I've no quarrel.

I'd still say Econ is worth it, as I don't see how you're going to pass reforms (or keep control of vassals) without developing aggressively.

Getting enough sailors to maintain a navy as a landlocked OPM sounds like a nightmare. Remember they added sailor attrition - it's trivial as a blob but my own recent experiences suggest that if you're an OPM trying to sustain a reasonably sized navy with frequent battles, it adds up.

 

[xMer]

shogunate path directly break your rules so it's not even viable option.
Ashikaga(initial shogun) start as non-OPM and any other OPM need to conquer Kyoto to become shogun. Not mentioning that game mechanic kinda force OPM world controller to be coastal which also disqualify kyoto as it is landlocked province.

 

[gia257]

shogunate path directly break your rules so it's not even viable option.
Ashikaga(initial shogun) start as non-OPM and any other OPM need to conquer Kyoto to become shogun. Not mentioning that game mechanic kinda force OPM world controller to be coastal which also disqualify kyoto as it is landlocked province.

why do you need to be coastal?, nocb best cb, also vassals can make cbs

 

[xMer]

Pretty good question is how to handle colonization.
Should it be allowed to have temporarily areas in new world before colonial nation form? (maybe with some extra limitation that you are not allowed to colonize 2 or more colonial regions at same time to avoid workaround to rules which would allow to have 4 areas per colonial region)
Only way that doesn't lead to having more than 1 province for more than 1 day is diploannexing vassal in colonial area with 5+ provinces, as next day after diploannexing Colonial Nation forms.
At this point it rather should be allowed to colonize further for existing colonial nations, even that you temporarily would have colonies.

 

[bbqftw]

You can get CNs yourself by annexing a CN into your vassal, then attacking your vassal and annexing it into another vassal

 

[Bibor]

Colonies in colonial regions shouldnt count as provinces for an OPM run IMO. Sending 1000 colonists from a high dev province (presumably 200000+ inhabitants) is a trivial % of population. Besides they switch to colonial nation, which will be hard to keep in check as it is. No need to go thru even more gamebreaking gimics. I think the point is to make the utmost from your vassals, no?

Now that I think of it, whaddabout a horde OPM with tributaries?