Suggestion for One Faith achievement

[PDXJon]

This. Just finished an Austria achievement run that went so well it accidentally turned into one faith. It was on 1.30.4 but has probably only gotten easier. you can crush the protestants anyway. England is the only annoying colonizer to rein in. And the vassal swarm makes the WC part a joke if you have ever done one without it. Would have been done before 1800 except needing to release and fight a couple of Colonial nations I inherited with promote settlement growth in place. Feed Asia to long snaking HRE vassals and watch them convert everything for you if you subsidize them a bit. Then inherit the whole thing to fix and provinces that a vassal made trade (Had a few in Africa from HRE colonizers)

I think Great Britain is one of the most annoying obstacles to WC. I’m doing a game right now and they have guaranteed all the remaining small tags in Africa. In the future, I’m going to take them out as fast as possible, otherwise they drag out wars while sitting on their island. Small, easy wars turn into a waiting game.

 

[Sergeant Major Gross]

Hi everyone,

I am considering a run to obtain the "One Faith" achievement. In your opinion, which is the best country to complete this challenge?

Austria (HRE Vassals) or Ottomans (very strong start, quick road to India, China).
Make sure you put Random New World on and choose the smalles RNW you can get. That makes converting the New World a lot easier. Especially because AI barely converts in the New World anymore.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I think Great Britain is one of the most annoying obstacles to WC. I’m doing a game right now and they have guaranteed all the remaining small tags in Africa. In the future, I’m going to take them out as fast as possible, otherwise they drag out wars while sitting on their island. Small, easy wars turn into a waiting game.

Don't forget that they can't join wars against you if you're already fighting them. If they guarantee a bunch of minors, they will only join the 1st war if you attack them all at once, or none, if you declare on them first and then the African minors.

 

[we need a jagellion]

Hordes are the runaway top tier choice for WC type games simply because they can do it faster/easier. Razing will even help conversion speed a little bit, too.

Yes, hordes are OP. But I don't like playing hordes.

I didn't realize you could get the Buddhist monuments with Hindu though, that's a game-changer since it should let them get enough missionaries to be functional. -75% CCR is a hell of a drug.

Yes, you need to not select a personal deity and wait for https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Hinduism_events#Paths_of_Hinduism. But if you select Buddha, that will be 65% CCR, which is still better than anything else anyway.

I find it hard to believe that the Ottomans wouldn't be a relatively easy pick, or that Sunni isn't one of the easier religions to convert everything, though. Sunni Ottomans can shut down colonizers going too wild, make a ton of cash early in the campaign, and can leave most TC land to the auto-conversion mechanic. Sunni also gets lots of missionaries and strength, so churning through land directly once you have it should be straightforward, too. This should be easier than doing it with a generic nation by a significant margin, even if practically anybody can do it as one of the major conversion religions.

It's not that the Ottomans aren't an easy pick, it's that they are not designed for it. Ottomans have tolerance of heathens + Dhimmi + Janissaries. Converting as them goes against their gameplay and removes everything that makes them special. But I picked Ottomans for the CCR and their strong starting position. I actually enforced peace of Castile and got into a war, allowing me to snag the Baleares and then steal Aragon. I killed Castile and Portugal early and crippled England. I thought I was good, but my actions sent Netherlands and France into a colonizing frenzy. So in the end I still had to conquer the new world, and in fact at some point I was sitting on almost 400% overextension because I was paranoid about not finishing on time. I was able to snag one-culture in 1817, but holy hell colonizers are annoying.

I was looking at some other countries, and monastic orders have really good government reforms, which give them huge bonuses, such as absolutism, a lot of missionary strength, and -30% warscore cost. Only Teutonic Order, Livonian Order, and the Knights have this government reform, but TO and Knights have unique ideas. Livonian Order has generic divine ideas, but they are actually fitting for a one culture: 10% CCR, -10% culture conversion cost, extra missionary and 2% missionary strength. Plus you can join the HRE, nab Sweden in the Age of Discovery, and move into India by conquering Muscovy and Persia. A challenging start, but could actually snowball really hard.

 

[Ferdinand_Bardamu]

I am going to concur with the posts above.

The most important thing is to conquer the world fast. There are more optimal ways to do it like tag-switching through tags that have missionary strength modifiers (say Austria + Sardinia-Piedmont will give you 5% extra missionary strength until the end of the game) but a sure fire way is just to have the world conquered early.

 

[petertju]

I think Great Britain is one of the most annoying obstacles to WC. I’m doing a game right now and they have guaranteed all the remaining small tags in Africa. In the future, I’m going to take them out as fast as possible, otherwise they drag out wars while sitting on their island. Small, easy wars turn into a waiting game.

This makes fighting big powers even easier, you can fight them and take land, after coring (or you can release vassal, give him the land and put him on scuttage) you can immediately fight a guaranteed country to shorten truce timers.

I think a mistake many people make is taking the home countries of colonizers. You want to conquer the small islands first so you can still acquire high warscore easier.

 

[PDXJon]

This makes fighting big powers even easier, you can fight them and take land, after coring (or you can release vassal, give him the land and put him on scuttage) you can immediately fight a guaranteed country to shorten truce timers.

I think a mistake many people make is taking the home countries of colonizers. You want to conquer the small islands first so you can still acquire high warscore easier.

It’s their navy that makes them a pain. If you don’t get a province on the island early, you are stuck trying to land while fighting their huge navy that’s so big because the bonuses received from their colonies. The key is getting a toehold at some point. I usually take London and a few provinces. That way, England still pushes trade to the channel bu I have a big chunk of the trade power. Sometime there just isn’t a real opportunity to do that.

 

[petertju]

It’s their navy that makes them a pain. If you don’t get a province on the island early, you are stuck trying to land while fighting their huge navy that’s so big because the bonuses received from their colonies. The key is getting a toehold at some point. I usually take London and a few provinces. That way, England still pushes trade to the channel bu I have a big chunk of the trade power. Sometime there just isn’t a real opportunity to do that.

True, but you only need to do this once. In the first war you either take just a foothold province, or if you want to do even better, you take the two provinces that connect Ireland with Scotland. Then you can also get warscore from occupying Ireland. The rest of the warscore you use on taking out all the small stuff they own in Africa, Asia and Oceania. This will concentrate relatively more warscore on the British Isles which should be easy to occupy after the first war, since you have bypassed their navy.

Money or defeating Britain on the land shouldn't be a problem, so it is pointless to take London and will only make accruing warscore in future wars more difficult.

 

[grisamentum]

I was looking at some other countries, and monastic orders have really good government reforms, which give them huge bonuses, such as absolutism, a lot of missionary strength, and -30% warscore cost. Only Teutonic Order, Livonian Order, and the Knights have this government reform, but TO and Knights have unique ideas. Livonian Order has generic divine ideas, but they are actually fitting for a one culture: 10% CCR, -10% culture conversion cost, extra missionary and 2% missionary strength. Plus you can join the HRE, nab Sweden in the Age of Discovery, and move into India by conquering Muscovy and Persia. A challenging start, but could actually be snowball really hard.

Warscore cost, absolutism, CCR, are very good and I think this is generally a correct way to think about things. But if we're really talking about what's easiest, then being big early (Austria, England, Otto, etc) is really the best advantage. Any Catholic OF needs to conquer Russia and Ottomans, and conquering them early just makes that much, much easier.

I hadn't really thought about it much because I mostly play smaller tags, but I was doing the Danish achievements recently and went straight into England - allied France, joined their CTA for surrender of Maine, made a separate peace for Northumberland, and then just conquered England over the next few years. Then the wars for Ireland were much easier and faster, because I was conquering the Irish minors, not Ireland from England. So by 1500, there's no England, there will never be an Anglicanism, one fewer colonizer, etc.

Any smaller tag, you are spending the first few decades just getting your foothold in your own region, and you don't have an opportunity to defeat one of the major stumbling blocks. Similar thing with Austria for example - you can easily kill Ottomans early, before they are even big enough to be a hassle later. You can likely PU Castile/Aragon or any other major Catholic power and just snowball much faster than a small start can. It's not that small starts are bad, they're just not as easy.

 

[necro84]

@grisamentum you don't need to conquer Russia, just prevent Muscovy from forming it. If you vassalize Ryazan and PLC holds Smolensk you don't need to fight them at the beginning (or you can conquer Novgorod). If Russia won't form you don't need to worry about converting Siberia.
Requirements for Russia are
owns its core provinces Moskva (295) and Novgorod (310).
owns and cores either Smolensk (293) or Ryazan (301)
owns and cores either Tver (294) or Yaroslavl (308).
owns and cores either Nizhny Novgorod (306) or Vladimir (307)

 

[grisamentum]

@grisamentum you don't need to conquer Russia, just prevent Muscovy from forming it. If you vassalize Ryazan and PLC holds Smolensk you don't need to fight them at the beginning (or you can conquer Novgorod). If Russia won't form you don't need to worry about converting Siberia.
Requirements for Russia are
owns its core provinces Moskva (295) and Novgorod (310).
owns and cores either Smolensk (293) or Ryazan (301)
owns and cores either Tver (294) or Yaroslavl (308).
owns and cores either Nizhny Novgorod (306) or Vladimir (307)

Right, but that's my point, this is something you can easily do when you start the game big. It's harder to do when you're starting as TO and need to get through Poland and Lithuania first, deal with terrible TO events, and also be big enough to stop Muscovy early. And if you do that, you're not stopping Ottomans before 1500.

Again, not saying this can't be done. Of course it can. But it just goes faster when you start as Denmark or Austria or something. Yes, TO/LO have better WC ideas, theocracies have better reforms for OF. But in a game of snowball, it just helps more to start with a bigger snowball.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I think a mistake many people make is taking the home countries of colonizers. You want to conquer the small islands first so you can still acquire high warscore easier.

Agreed, though taking forts on their homelands is worth doing too. By absolutism, you can generally do both.

Being able to blow up their stationed army and carpet provinces makes follow up wars significantly faster, as does warscore cost so you can take more with less score.

I was looking at some other countries, and monastic orders have really good government reforms, which give them huge bonuses, such as absolutism, a lot of missionary strength, and -30% warscore cost. Only Teutonic Order, Livonian Order, and the Knights have this government reform, but TO and Knights have unique ideas. Livonian Order has generic divine ideas, but they are actually fitting for a one culture: 10% CCR, -10% culture conversion cost, extra missionary and 2% missionary strength. Plus you can join the HRE, nab Sweden in the Age of Discovery, and move into India by conquering Muscovy and Persia. A challenging start, but could actually snowball really hard.

You can actually get -45% cost, via final reform + militarists in power. Stacked with diplomatic ideas and military hegemon, you get 75%. Catholic (harsh trent) or Hussite (aspect) can get you another 10%. Malta forts give 15% at tier 3, and you can also get another 10% from monument as Islam. So most nations can manage -90% province war score cost cap, when taking them from a different religion. This is a powerful tool, because it lets you full annex > 1000 development per 100% war score in the 1600s. The caveat is that -WS cost does not reduce coring cost or AE the way admin efficiency does, so you would still want a means to handle the OE (super fast coring, stacked -annexation cost modifiers).

Indigenous ideas also give 20%, though if you want OF picking any nation which can select them is nevertheless challenge mode, given it will gimp your start and you don't need it to hit cap.

It takes a while to set all of this up, because reaching tier 8 government reform is especially long for non-republics. I don't think monarchy starts can store governing capacity and then make the flip to theocracy to hit tier 8 before the game is nearly over (though they can probably get militarists in power for 15%). I think any theocracy start is allowed to flip into monastic order other than PAP, so the HRE and Islamic theocracies are options too.

Forming Tibet also lets you flip into theocracy (it also lets you flip into horde). The former should be done by 1600ish to be reasonably sure the theocracy event fires before 1642 (MTTH is 200 months, so on average you'll get it within 17 years, but let's not give RNG too many chances to screw over).

 

[enKage]

Aragon for Emperor and then Sardinia-Piedmont into 2Scicilies into Italy:

PU over Castille
PU over Portugal
control over Centers Of Reformation
Easy control of Genoa node and claims on Ottos to kill them early
Early acces to Persia / steppes / Muscovy via Genoa

Just early on heave diplogame and hunt for PUs over Muscovy / GB / Ethipia

or

Austria
Iberia rarely goes other reliion than Catholicism anyway

 

[we need a jagellion]

Welp, the Hindu CCR monument has been nerfed, so Hindu Mughals can only get 70% CCR now.

Right, but that's my point, this is something you can easily do when you start the game big. It's harder to do when you're starting as TO and need to get through Poland and Lithuania first, deal with terrible TO events, and also be big enough to stop Muscovy early. And if you do that, you're not stopping Ottomans before 1500.

Again, not saying this can't be done. Of course it can. But it just goes faster when you start as Denmark or Austria or something. Yes, TO/LO have better WC ideas, theocracies have better reforms for OF. But in a game of snowball, it just helps more to start with a bigger snowball.

I specifically said that TO does not work here because it has unique ideas. TO does not have CCR.

In any case, I have done the Baltic Crusader and Terra Mariana achievements, and it's really not that hard to get a foothold in the Baltic. It's definitely a challenge, but could be a spicy one.

 

[we need a jagellion]

-75% CCR is a hell of a drug.

Actually, it was -85% CCR. I forgot about Diwan, which gives additional -10% CCR from assimilating the Hindustani culture group. Now after the patch, the max you can get is -80% CCR though, since the Hindu monument got nerfed.

Thinking of doing a quick Mughal WC by stacking AE reduction and improve relations with diplomatic, espionage, and humanist and keeping Ganesha (so no one-faith).

 

[MatthewP]

Actually, it was -85% CCR. I forgot about Diwan, which gives additional -10% CCR from assimilating the Hindustani culture group. Now after the patch, the max you can get is -80% CCR though, since the Hindu monument got nerfed.

Thinking of doing a quick Mughal WC by stacking AE reduction and improve relations with diplomatic, espionage, and humanist and keeping Ganesha (so no one-faith).

Mughals also get even more effective CCR by conquering entire cultures. I was doing a Mughal run with Hindu where I had Buddha as my deity the whole time for monuments, and I still cored quite a lot in 6 months even with “only” 75%. And 100 innovativeness so the actual admin cost was negligible.

 

[we need a jagellion]

Mughals also get even more effective CCR by conquering entire cultures. I was doing a Mughal run with Hindu where I had Buddha as my deity the whole time for monuments, and I still cored quite a lot in 6 months even with “only” 75%. And 100 innovativeness so the actual admin cost was negligible.

Are cultures considered "promoted" or "primary" for the CCR? Also, don't you have to conquer the whole group to get the acceptance? I didn't even think about that.

 

[MatthewP]

Are cultures considered "promoted" or "primary" for the CCR? Also, don't you have to conquer the whole group to get the acceptance? I didn't even think about that.

They are. You just need to conquer the whole culture, not the group. Make sure to wait a day after making peace before you hit the core button.

 

[Wealthy_Communist]

Seems Austria

 

[we need a jagellion]

Yeah on this patch I would recommend Austria with a quick revoke. AIs are now spamming forts and defensive ideas, so WC is becoming very unenjoyable, to say the least. With the vassal swarm, you can just watch YouTube while your vassals are sieging war enemies to distract you away from the boredom of sitting on forts for years. Plus you can still form Sardinia-Piedmont -> Italy -> Rome by culture shifting and keep their ideas when uniting HRE, or even manually integrate vassals, or even leave vassals as is and just force religion if necessary for one-faith.