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I thought it might as well be time to actually play my own mod ^^

Spend a considerably amount of time on the mod, but had yet to actually play it. So this time I played at the start of the Dutch Republic, instead at 1444 (or the 1356 module)

Love your mod by the way! Can't play without it now :D
 
My latest playthrough: Qara Qoyunlu (horde) -> Persia (muslim) -> westernized.

Some big mistakes that I made and some lessons:
0. Break Russia ASAP.
0'. Break the Ottomans. Not as important as breaking Russia. This can wait until the 1700s, plenty of the time (can release Syria & Mamluks).
1. If you're fighting a big war with a major country, especially a lucky on, if their manpower isn't going down after 2-3 years and they have a better general, back out of the war ASAP and prepare the next one better
2. Unless you've beaten Muscovy/Russia early, do not stay as a Horde later than 1550; Russia has incredible generals, tons of good troops, infinite manpower and especially important, major Western lucky nation allies; you need to be way bigger to win those wars; or play on speed 1-2 and micro for long amounts of times across a huge empire.
My luck was that I had a "get out of horde" button in forming Persian. I only did it mid 1700s and it was definitely not optimal from a conquest perspective - I should have done it around 1550.
3. If you want to form Persia do not forget Kohistan - it's not a Persian core. I didn't know that I needed it and that delayed my formation of Persia by 50 years at least.
4. Find somewhere a minor Western nation, preferably alone, without allies and not in an area of conflict (Savoy = bad :) ), and get it as a permanent vassal for the Western Arms Trade bonus.
4. Don't enter the Spice Islands unless you feel you're super strong after 1600. All the European powers will get missions for the Spice Island and they will hate you. I had to sell 1 Spice Island province to each of them to get them back as allies.
5. Get to China before the Xi cores expire. Chinese provinces are damn expensive to core.
6. Get "tunnels" to your areas of interest before they get cut off. In my game at one point all my neighbors except 2 (Uzbek and Oirat Horde) were allies of the Ottomans and I could not attack anyone. I even turned down a succession war over the Timurids because of the Ottomans.
7. Do not vassalize Crimea (I'm my case I got a "lucky" PU with them) unless Russia is broken or significantly weaker.
8. You will need Religious ideas or Defender of the Faith to actually have decent religious unity. Mine was down to about 60% because I did not have Religious ideas and I forgot about Defender of the Faith until 1700 (plus as a horde I didn't really want +tech cost :( ).

So here it is:
Influence map:

Religious map (I'm quite proud of it):

Political map:


Ottoman c**kblock that almost prevented me from getting to Siberia (Nogai was a vassal):

My Western borders have shifted quite a few provinces East because of wars lost to Russia & Castille :(



Castille won this game: PUd Russia, PUd Portugal (integrated 2-3 years before the end of the game), PUd Denmark. All the Americas, half of Europe, half of Africa + all of Asia that is not mine are their protectorates. Sind is one of the few independent Asian countries. Castile actually saved me by PUing Russia since I was getting destroyed by their alliance and by Russia's drive for Asia.

I would try again to stay as a horde all game, possibly with the Timurids, if I manage to break Russia. If I do that, you will see a glorious red blob over all of Eurasia :)
 
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My Ottoman Empire, 1771. Dont think Im guna finish this one. I westernised back in the mid 1600's, so the game is basically over. Early Ottomans are pretty good fun to play. Late game Ottomans are a cakewalk, all you have to do is not piss off Europe to claim your free empire. Once you westernise your unstoppable. Because your empire is continuous, no overseas penalty's :p

I dont hold anything in mainland Europe but two provinces in Spain. But I did beat down France, Spain, Austria and Pomerainia on several occasions.

FYI thats a Welsh Great Britain. England is on the new world only. Also, the HRE has only 2 reforms at this point.

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http://i.imgur.com/Ag3X3pZ.jpg
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http://i.imgur.com/f2fh6Gb.jpg
 
That must be embarassing. Poor Ottomans, getting wrecked by my OPM Cyprus.

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I release Bulgaria as a vassal in Sofia, and do note that Bulgarian nationalist rebel stack and how Byzantium (my vassal) cuts Ottomans off from getting to them =P

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Vassals: Byzantium, Bulgaria, Crete (annexing)

Cyrpus will rule the world.
 
Love your mod by the way! Can't play without it now :D

Thank you. Sadly, as of recent the development has been grinding to a halt a bit due to me being the only one working on it at the moment. Good news is that I have reached the goal of removing 100 provinces from the game. Next goal is putting them back.

For example, Netherlands:

bDLltr7.png

What I would really like to see in an empire is logical borders, those following rivers and when overseas sticking to the coast. This is never the case in EUIV sadly. So I will mod my map to portray that I guess.
 
What I would really like to see in an empire is logical borders, those following rivers and when overseas sticking to the coast. This is never the case in EUIV sadly. So I will mod my map to portray that I guess.
Don't forget ridges, many borders follow those. (while river valleys are pretty likely part of one single province, two sides of a mountain range aren't)

The Dutch straits feel like a great disadvantage for the Dutch, should they ever come in conflict with a greater Naval power. If only they could be made so that you can only block them, if you own (or are allied to the owner of) one of the bordering provinces. Or have them count as a hefty rivercrossing penalty for the non-owning side.
 
Don't forget ridges, many borders follow those. (while river valleys are pretty likely part of one single province, two sides of a mountain range aren't)

The Dutch straits feel like a great disadvantage for the Dutch, should they ever come in conflict with a greater Naval power. If only they could be made so that you can only block them, if you own (or are allied to the owner of) one of the bordering provinces. Or have them count as a hefty rivercrossing penalty for the non-owning side.

That would be a great idea. I really hope that WoN's canals will give some of these features, but I highly doubt it =/
 
Thank you. Sadly, as of recent the development has been grinding to a halt a bit due to me being the only one working on it at the moment. Good news is that I have reached the goal of removing 100 provinces from the game. Next goal is putting them back.

For example, Netherlands:

bDLltr7.png

What I would really like to see in an empire is logical borders, those following rivers and when overseas sticking to the coast. This is never the case in EUIV sadly. So I will mod my map to portray that I guess.

MEIOU does it rather well.
 
Ugh, this one was NOT good for me as Songhai. I started out well, early westernization as possible (IE moment AI finished colony near Cayor). However, there were some issues:

1. Couldn't break up Spain/Portugal alliance, wound up having to use Ottomans to claim some African provinces.
2. Prussia formed HRE. Seriously.
3. However, Austria was one of the few that didn't become part of HRE. Nope, Austria instead had France under a PU :).
4. After I made headway on the Berbers (tricky with Ottoderps allying them), Ottoderps rival'd me and allied Spain ffs. They even allied the Prussian ideas HRE later X_X.
5. Eventually, after breaking those alliances up, Ottomans allied Russia. Seriously.

So late game my ally was Austria only, and of course their PU junior France. It took me a while to amass a competitive navy to really start to be able to threaten Spain butt buddies and mess with Ottomans. I wanted to do much more but Europe didn't shake out how I'd have liked at all.

My protectorates in India lasted pretty long. Ming was quite scary late game, westernized and miltech 31. They declared on my protectorate so I got to fight them too, albeit only briefly as when you have the kind of money I had late game, you can make problems go away :).

Early game:



Berbers took advantage of Portugal having a dip in naval assets after a different war. Iberians never gave me significant trouble, I just couldn't really invade there fruitfully either. France landed on me at one point before the PU and I killed its forces easily.







Just to cherry-tap and see if I could get away with it, my only ideas were defensive + quantity (quantity is pretty bad). AI forced march is fortunately not like human forced march. If you move your stacks at-the-ready to combine, It's not that hard to win even with less discipline and worse generals...though I did go max piety + DOTF (latter since I went economic/administrative --> keeps WE to comically low levels).
 
Ragusa! I'm calling this my first game, although I've started 2-3 other times. For whatever reason, I feel much more involved this time, and that's good because this has been great fun.

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I went into debt early to beat up on Bosnia and Serbia, ultimately annexing the remains of Serbia as a vassal for a learning experience. At the time my allies were Burgundy, Austria, and Hungary. Then I went after Venice' land provinces - by the good graces of my allies, where my greed got me into 'Unlawful Territory' trouble with the HRE. I wanted to take Lika or Zagreb to link my capital to the Empire. Austria and Hungary soured on me because of aggressive expansion. I traded up to ally with Lithuania and Milan. [Milan takes the place of Austria for Western Arms Trade.] When I did core Lika and Zagreb, Thuringia was the Emperor, making me too big to join. When Austria became Emperor again, I was again too big.
Had I been playing EUIII right now, I would be expecting to get excommunicated soon. And right on cue, I became... Curia Controller! This was great as I could annul my Royal Ties to Austria and Hungary without stab hits. I am still in mortal fear of the Ottomans, so I called for a Crusade against them. No takers on the Crusade so far, so they must scare everyone else too. I think its time to wander into North Africa - mostly to spread around the aggressive expansion penalty.
 
After more than 2 months, i've finally managed to finish my Austria/HRE game.

Played from 1444 to 1622 in version 1.3 (ironman mode):
Got a very early PU over Muscovy, which meant i had to deal with the Nomads myself later.
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United the HRE in 1564:
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My empire at the end of 1.3: Claimed the throne of Aragon and France. Rest is mostly from returning cores.
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1622 - 1821 in 1.5 (ironman bug but continued playing as if it were):
Slowly continuing to conquer with return cores to evade coalitions.
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Got a PU over GB
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Finish: Most of the end game was about feeding my colonial nations. Because of the high vassalization war score needed, most of my lategame conquest happened through taking over provinces, not coring them (because of ludicrous coring times) and just attacking the country 5 years later again.
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Still work in progress but i think that this run is a little bit failure i took expansion as second idea so i coudnt even reach through colonial range siberia and now i have big green blob on my doorstep. Finally i westernized thou i should do it after taking sth to form Korea as vassals. My tech still sucks though i am able to support 3x3+ advisers so maybe i will catch up fast. Shun. Tibet and Brunei are my vassals. Biggest surprise was obviously crushed Ottomans and Mamluks thriving thanks to this
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I've just finished my first Ireland game. I started as Connacht and it was easy until i formed Ireland. At that point England had Scotland so i had to colonice all North America. After 200 years allied with France and conquering all north amercia i allied Austria, who soon formed the HRE. But suddenly a von Hamsburg king appeared in GB and between 1650 and 1750 i only conquer two scotish provinces. In the following 50 years I conquered all Scotland and the following 20 years I conquered almost all GB except London and other two provinces. This game was really funny, the only thing that was horrible was I can get de the irish luck achivement. And, I was a protestant ireland.

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It's year 1818 and after hundreds of years full of wars, France finally knows peace (although it still has to enjoy insufferable 50 years long rule of Luis XVII the Incompetent (0,2,0), still in good health in his 70).

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I know, it doesn't look like much. Let's have a different look...

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Oh yes, France looks down on everybody.
Push the button...

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White monstrosity...

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My ironman WC achievement run. Those unholy remnants are protectorates and Ethiopia is vassal. I didn't have the strength to conquer everything :) I could have done it a bit sooner, but Ming caught me by surprise - he managed to westernize by 1780, while I was still beating the last cores from Russia. Fortunately, HRE protectorates are hungry and eats just about anything :)

I really like the empire vassal mechanics. Too bad it's not a general thing. More (formable) HRE-like empires in the game would be nice.