Post your Europa Universalis 4 Empire

[Sharkoman]

I did a casual Hussite Bohemia and converted mainland Europe except most Lithuania lands because of the Orthodox acceptance modifier they have and Portugal and Denmark which I could technically easily take before 1821.

I got a lucky PU of France late game and France was the biggest subject I've ever got with over 1M troops which helped me a lot with my constant over extension rebels. Also used France to annex Spain. Naples was reduced to a single province by the Papal States and Tunis was reduced to below 100 development so I was able to Diplo vassalize them and retake their cores. Iraq was released from the remains of the Ottomans and I wanted Baghdad and a way to enter deep into Persia territory. Lithuania is an easy PU as you just have to PU Poland which is a bohemian mission.

I consistently had over 200% overextension for the last century of the campaign but while being at war my subjects were quickly on top of the 2.5 million revolt happening every time I conquered the German states. I have over 800 agressive expansion with England, Persia, Russia and old allies Scandinavia and Portugal. I survived the coalition by truce dodging for half the campaign but eventually everyone was able to join which slowed my expansion. Managed to break the coalition in the HRE and was able to eat them up but attacking countries that weren't in the coalition or releasing new nations and letting them ally ones that were in the coalition. Coalition surprisingly never declared war even though Great Britain, Portugal, Scandinavia and Persia were all active and without a truce. Honestly looking forward to a stretched out 3 front war

The Protestant League won with ease after I destroyed the Catholic HRE to the point where only Scandinavia and the Knights of Malta were the only nations able to become the emperor. Later France was able to join the HRE being my vassal and almost formed the Roman empire as a kingdom inside the HRE which eventually only became me and my subjects. All I was missing was Portugal, which also owned Morocco and Great Britain, but I had all the German states and eastern Europe to Moscow

 

[Steckie]

Well done on the game, but your photos made my eyes do weird things.

 

[Sharkoman]

Well done on the game, but your photos made my eyes do weird things.

I just took pictures with my phone which causes those lines to appear. I should quit being lazy and just post from the desktop

 

[Blizzrd33]

I just took pictures with my phone which causes those lines to appear. I should quit being lazy and just post from the desktop

Just press F11 during the game. It'll save them to a screenshot folder right alongside your savegame folder.

 

[Sharkoman]

Just press F11 during the game. It'll save them to a screenshot folder right alongside your savegame folder.

I've always known about that feature but never used it. I am old school and just print screen, paste on paint then save or just take a picture with my phone so i can post it from there. resolution and quality is pretty good for how small the files are with f11

990 AE with Spain and 800+ with Britain, Portugal and Scandinavia

At 5k dev France is the second largest nation

I also never used f10 before

2.5 million rebels are no match against my 99 lv8 forts

Russia at its peak after taking Bejing

 

[rfcfanatic]

My first Holy Roman Empire ever:

Started the game as Hesse.

Allied with 3 electors early in the game - Trier, Mainz and The Palatinate. They remained reliable backers of Hessian emperorship throughout the game. Got voted in as emperor already before 1460, if I remember correctly. After the Austrian emperor died. Cologne, another elector, was eaten up by its neighbours and Austria, who still held emperorship at that time, appointed Wurzburg as a new elector to fill the vacancy left by Cologne. Vassalized Wurzburg in a war later and usurped their electorate for Hesse.

Kept the emperorship all the way up to 1740. Only once, I came close to losing emperorship when a middle-aged ruler had no heir. A random event prompted me to accept a female heir. I was aware of the meaning of Pragmatic Sanction, checked if requirements for the national decision had been met. They were and I accepted the female heir. It was a right decision, because the ruler died soon afterwards.

The Reformation happened unexpectedly early in this game. Already in 1495, a CoR in Goslar, right next to my border, popped up. Was far from completion of Religious ideas by then. But eventually, I managed to neutralize any CoR in HRE and also managed to prevent Religious Turmoil in Hesse. 2 CoR-s remained out of reach - one in Stockholm, another one somewhere in Scotland.

Experienced 2 major setbacks which delayed the reforms quite a bit. The first time, lost 40 Imperial Authority when I failed to "rein in" Italy by 1490. My mistake, I simply forgot it. The second time was even more costly. Should have paid attention to Brabant's blobbing activity to realize that they were in a process of forming Netherlands. I did not pay attention and it cost me 60 IA which I had accumulated for Landfriede reform which I was planning to pass as soon as final 2-3 heretics had been converted. So I had to start over again with Landfriede. Abandoned the plan of converting every heretic in the empire, because despite any forced conversion attempt, the heretics kept sporadically popping up long after Age of Reformation was over. Also, it seems that there's no point storing more than 50 IA anyway, because everything would be used up by a reform. Those 2-3 heretics were no longer an issue anyway, because by then, I had adopted Court ideas which increased IA accumulation rate.

Should have taken Offensive instead of Defensive as the first military idea group though. Then the wars would not have taken so long due to improved Siege Ability.

I think, Landfriede reform and another one - Revoke the Privilegia - were the most challenging ones. For the latter one, I improved relations, waited for AE to cool down as much as possible and scrapped every source of Diplomatic Reputation I could - policies, the advisor, the Papal action. Tried to keep as many vassals as possible. 33 or so vassals remained.

The last reform was easy, because the vassal swarm would back everything anyway. Once the country was united, it was business as usual. Relentless conquest that one can start feeling bad about. Had to abandon monarchy and adopt a Republican system because of a ruler and heir like these:

 

[Manwe_Sulimo]

Well, finally I did my first World Conquest:

I do like the date - 1683 - the year of the Second Siege of Vienna, more or less the beginning of the downfall of the Ottoman Empire. Well in this iteration, Austria became a quite loyal eyalet.

The run started quite smoothly. I went with the usual circling of conquests of the Ottomans, no really big challenges, although some of the larger wars were annoying (as usual my runs are on VH). I heavily relied on eyalets and some regular vassals. I Diplo-vassalized as much as I could (including released vassals from peace), thanks to turning them into eyalets there is no limit on that.
I think it is quite visible here in the 1500 where I already have subjects around the Mamluks and Timurids and the farthest being Kuamon in India. The Mamluks would become an eyalet very soon after this screen.
As you can see France got the Burgundian inheritance - but released the lowlands and Austria failed before any involvement from my side and was replaced by Bohemia (who later also became HRE only to lose it by converting to protestant AFTER winning the league war).

After the Commonwealth was formed I relatively quickly gobbled it up with Reconquest wars (the various releasables and of course Lithuania). In my first Post-Domination Ottoman run the latter was quite troubling, as the OPM eyalet I released was annexed in a separate peace making the war largely mute. That was rather bitter lesson to learn how eyalet works. This time I payed much more attention to that, either by not calling them into wars (immediatly) and/or by making sure they do not get sieged down. As you can see I also gobbled up much of Muscovy and Spain through reconquest wars. I took Granada for myself with the rest to the various subjecs. Granadaof course for the Alhambra: the Crown Jewel of my heavy monument hunt which I was also going on --> see my foothold in SEA.
BTW France, Bohemia and Malwa are my strategic allies, largely to avoid coalitions.

Flash foward to 1650.
After a series of relatively straight forward wars with a certain focus on Africa (a lot of Diplo-Vassalization there) and India, SEA and China, I delayed my next war against Spain and my first war against France a bit by going through the Ottoman disaster. Before, I took some time to think whether I should do the disaster, and relatively quickly decided I would like to go through it to not bother about decadence anymore, to get the rather meaty boni and most importantly for roleplay. A challenge there was to find good information, the YT reviews mostly focused on the release version of the disaster, which got toned down later and the Wiki had all the information, but lacked a bit the structure / strategy behind it. There was also no guide to find. Well I got some support here on the forum and then shared my experience: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/ottoman-disaster-or-not.1616055/

The biggest challenge shortly before the 1650s was the global war against Spain. As I only started preparing a few months before the truce ran out I was not ideally prepared. My armies and even more so my navies where quite out of position (in the Indian Ocean mostly). It was clear I would need to go for the Americas in this war and I did not have a foothold yet. It was quite a challenge to get some armies over to Brazil and I challenged for a long time to secure my bridgehead there, as the armies of the vast Spanish-Portuguese colonial empire poored in on me (Portugal was inherited). Which meant at this point basically everything south of California / Texas. This even involved a mercenary company and things like supply depots to speed up reinforce speed. I had some limits on my sailor pool. The main challenge though was simple my attention. With the main focus on America, I did not have much time to control my armies in Africa, South East Asia and the little islands in the Pacific. I chased a single relatively small army in East Africa probably for years because I simple forget about it, it even managed to take a fort there.
I took footholds in all the colonial regions (To get a foothold, but also to weaken them a bit and have a colonial nation there - I was afraid they would go independent which happened to the 2 French colonial nations around that time - one of which became the French-speaking United States ruled by a King (!) Louis.

After the war I took several months break of the run (partly of EU4 in general) because it was too tedious. I also noticed I need to replace my usual watching YouTube / Documentaries / Sitcoms next to EU4 with either the in-game music or just listenging to music. This legendary Nightwish concert was my main driver to continue with the run:

Well it is time to gobble up. At this point all the Americas are mine. Fortuantely neither Spains nor England's colonies gained independence despite high LD. Despite having practically unlimited ressources in termns of money and manpower, all wars in the Americas were still tedious, especially the war where I finally took the remaint of Spain and with it all its colonies. The huge distances and the large number of provinces just cost a long time and quite some focus to control the many armies and to either avoid or defeat the enemy.
At this point I am even slowing down conquests on some of the bigger targets as I am waiting for Tech 23 and imperialism. I largely went one war after the other, although still in relatively quick succesion, being often far over 200 % OE without problems. I try to avoid truce-breaks - that also required some attention to conquer the tributaries before I would "inherit" them. The largest remainder are my 2 long-time allies Bohemia and Malwa, as well as Ming (which emerged as rebels from Emperor Oirat and also reconquest large bits of it in the final years of the game), Japan and Oirat. At some point earlier in the run I left Oirat in peace for a while hoping to see Yuan, but that never happened. All of these I could take in one war with Imperialism (At least Bohemia would have required 2 wars otherwise).

The final moves were using Imperialism to take the last islands in the Pacific and some tribes in New Zealand. A long the way I got quite a couple of achievements - 14 in total.

The main challenge was really keeping going, especially in those tedious wars against the colonial powers. These already stopped my 2-3 previous attempts (although one of which was "serious").
Actually I also think that going a bit slower might have made it a bit less tedious, as especially Imperialism is a big QoL factor as well.

Edit: Woops this became longer than I planned

 

[klingonadmiral]

Several months ago...

Campaign 1: First Come, First Serve



Rather easy campaign nowadays since taking a single negative idea tradition gives you massive extra points. If I had started with 5 instead of 6 starting provinces, I could have also grabbed For Odin, but oh well.

Score settled