The most obvious way to spend your MP is with techs. Techs play an important part in the game, and that’s something even complete beginners immediately understand. But what only more experienced players tend to realize is that not every tech is equally important. Some are clearly decisive ones in almost every scenario.
For instance, military tech 3 gives an extra 25% base morale, and military tech 4 gives an extra 20% and extra tactics. I won’t go into further details regarding how battles work, but trust me if you don’t see it, that’s insanely decisive. Miltech 15 gives a staggering 33% base morale and tactics. At the same time, Miltech 10 only gives better cavalry units and flanking range, so that’s clearly not decisive unless you rely heavily on cavalry.
Military tech is generally always good, but that’s not the case of Admin and Diplo who sometimes do literally nothing. Key admin techs are the one who unlock idea groups and the ones giving you admin efficiency, in some scenarios those giving you extra states. Key diplomatic techs are… are… pretty much nonexistent. There is one, tech 23, which unlocks Imperialism and Client States. There is one very useful in some scenarios, tech 9, and I’ll talk about it later. Else pretty much everything is irrelevant unless you fight highly contested naval battles or you play the colonial game (in which case you must rush dip7). Extra accepted culture can also be nice. I’d go so far as saying that the only reason to tech up dip is that your vassals don’t become disloyal.
Yes, you read me. Falling behind in tech is often not a problem at all so long as you hit the key techs on time. Playing in ROTW and trying to conquer massive amounts of land usually means that you will fall behind, you can’t help it unless you play too passive. That’s ok to be something like Admin 10, Dip 10, Military 15 when it’s time to get tech 15. What really matters is that you catch up at Admin 17, and Admin and Diplo 23. Players usually overcommit to techs, while only military tech is almost always relevant.
A good example is the early admin techs. Tech 5 unlocks the first idea group, and let’s assume you took Administrative as many people do. The next important tech in admin is tech 7, it brings a new idea group… which you deemed less important than admin ideas. The next one is admin 8 which gives more states, as does the finisher of admin ideas. So what’s better in most scenarios, to fill out this idea group and get admin 6, 7 and 8 after, benefiting from the discounts you’ll have to the cost of admin techs, or to care about getting these techs as fast as possible? In 99% of the scenarios the answer is pretty obvious.
I mentioned discounts, so let’s dive into it and talk about the cost of technologies. As with estates, institutions made the game more interesting as you have a lot more control on what happens and there is a real space for optimization and a real difference between playing your cards good and playing them perfectly. The cost of spawning an institution depends on many factors, but with loyal and influential burghers, prosperity, edicts and proper terrain (temperate, farmlands, CoT, capital, cloth is the dream province, it’s actually also called Milan, and Warsaw after the Polish event that makes it the capital and even gives a further development discount), that’s cheaper than you would think.
Once again there is a choice to make between developing to force spawn an institution or wait for it to spread, and between forcing it now or getting that crucial miltech on time despite the +10% cost from institutions and only then forcing it even if you sacrifice monarch points in the process. I won’t go into details here, I’ll try to focus on more unknown things instead.
Techs have a basecost of 600, which increases over time. Let’s go back to our admin tech 5. I’m playing the Ottomans, I’m OP so I had it as early as 1453, with a 3% tech penalty. I chose admin ideas first. Let’s imagine I try to get Admin Tech 6 as early as possible without a ahead of time penalty and I have taken the first 2 ideas to have reduced coring cost and I spent the ret of my points coring during those years. It’s 1466, it costs me about 680 with all the modifiers. Now let’s imagine I filled up admin ideas instead of saving my admin points to tech. By the time I filled the group, I embraced Renaissance because it has spread in Constantinople naturally. The cost is as follows.
That’s about 480, I literally saved up 200 admin points by doing this. How? That’s simple. Every idea gives you -2% tech cost in that category, and the finisher of admin, diplomatic and aristocratic give you -10% in their respective category. So in 20 years of game, we earned 200 admin out of tech 6, compared to a casual gameplay. Pretty nice, hm? And I did that with console so no neighbor bonus as we’re still on the first day, but in reality, you could save some 3-60 more with neighbor bonus.
The key, especially when you play in ROTW, is actually to intentionally fall behind in admin and diplo when you’re lagging behind in institutions and to only focus on mil, and only use your admin and diplo points for ideas and expansion. And as soon as you catch up in institutions, you fabricate a spy network on a western nation and catch up in tech insanely fast. Techs can cost less than 100 monarch points each thanks to the ultimate reduction mechanic, study technology. Based on your spy network and the number of technologies you miss, you can have insane bonuses to tech from diplomatic tech 9 onwards (and here’s the hidden OP of the diplo techs).
On the other hand, you should not overcommit to military ideas and sacrifice military techs, unless this idea gives you more than a tech (extremely rare but, second idea of defensive can bring you more depending on which tech you sacrifice for it, for instance).
As we were talking about development, let’s quickly deal with that. That’s almost always the worst option if you’re playing wide, unless it’s a gold province. Keep in mind that many things come into play when it comes to the effectiveness of your goldmine, most notably the fact this is an accepted culture or not, and that you should probably minmax this development by using an edict, as it’s always a good option.
The general rule is to always be at +1 stab, as the cost is small and this prevents a bad event from putting you at negative stab which is always terribly bad (unless you try to fall into the Court and Country disaster, but that’s another debate). Keep in mind that if you have a +1 stab event, you can raise stability and then accept the event, as raising stab has an increasing cost every time. This way the event brings you more admin, in a certain way.
Raising mercantilism, tariffs and things like that is usually trash as well in wide play unless you got nothing else to do. There are also the recruit generals/admirals/explorers/conqusitadors. Most important to note is that an estate can’t give you an explorer for some odd reason, so you’ll always use monarch points for that.
Bonus from a real game to show you how tech comeback works:
Granted, ignore tech catchup mechanics if you don't do hard starts out of Europe or try to WC.
