World Conquest tips for 1.30 patch?
- Thread starter Sinuous
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One extra tip from my experience: don’t let the independent colonial nations thrive for too long.
In my game, I’ve taken out the traditional colonisers early through PUs or conquest, and the new world was colonised by Norway, East Frisia and Holland. Most of their colonial nations went independent.
Now it’s 1780, and I’m facing a 2000-development California spanning North and South America, the Caribbean and Australia, as well as massive Canada and United States. Takes many wars to gobble them up. It’s more difficult to conquer them than Europe because of their geography and massive armies. The only good thing is they don’t take admin to core.
Lesson learned, I guess!
In my game, I’ve taken out the traditional colonisers early through PUs or conquest, and the new world was colonised by Norway, East Frisia and Holland. Most of their colonial nations went independent.
Now it’s 1780, and I’m facing a 2000-development California spanning North and South America, the Caribbean and Australia, as well as massive Canada and United States. Takes many wars to gobble them up. It’s more difficult to conquer them than Europe because of their geography and massive armies. The only good thing is they don’t take admin to core.
Lesson learned, I guess!
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There are some benefits to having a cap above 100. It gives you some leeway regarding having a low legitimacy ruler, for example. It also means you could keep some more privileges going.
You're missing
Timurids -> Mughals
They're very powerful, maybe not Ottomans level given their start, but not far below them.
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The rev. mechanics are borked. The whole world will turn revolutionary by 1780 and then you're back to 1444 spy-CB or no CB. So there is ABSOLUTELY a reason to NOT go revolutionary as France. Additionaly, force limit, manpower and maintenance reduction is absolutely useless at this point, if you're doing a WC run. If it IS useful for some reason then it probably means you're not in a position to make it... Revolutionary Guard regiments are also pointless at this point because you will stackwipe mostly anything without them at this point either way.
Your rulers will die as well, rendering subject "same dynasty" bonuses moot, and preventing a (minor) chance for auto-annexation through dynasty event, even if you go Empire afterwards, at which point it's basically too late to enforce dynasty because the penalty will stay too big.
The new (and by extent the old) French rev. event tree is fun, but it's a waste of time IMO. What probably is better (I'm currently trying Big Blue Blob to WC) is to NOT go rev. and try get other countries to become rev. to get the counter CB and also keep imperialism CB. Or if you REALLY want to go rev. France then get religious for that CB (I hope it works, I had to switch ideas) and get it as 6th idea at LATEST.
When the estates are removed (Rev. Republic or Rev. Empire) you lose 2 diplo slots.
Spain PU feels vital to French WC. Any vassal over 1000 development (which you do not vassalize early/mid) will be very hard to keep loyal. Luckily by the end of the game, loyalty is not that important.
Also have Naples PU via the mission tree, that also helped a lot. Had Milan and Burgundy PU but Burgundy got auto-integrated and Milan was annexed by me later.
I did a few mistakes (as this is my first WC attempt after 2500h of fun playing):
- Underestimated the value of dismantling HRE no matter the cost early (loans, mercs, instability - doesn't matter. Dismantle HRE ASAP. late game you can ignore AE but not for a long while, and eating up Europe becomes so much easier and will give you a better head start)
- Going revolutionary
- Fed a few vassals too much, making me have to wait a bit longer to annex
- Letting colonial (minor) nations colonize outside colonial zones, making auto-vassalizing colonies more of a hassle
- I let Spain have Sicily before I PUed them and Naples (Naples get permas on Palestine/Transjordan etc. if they core Sicily)
- Went reformed (I have not played much in Europe and did not realize I would not become league leader; had to wait for way too long); thought I had to complete mission tree. I don't know if it would be more useful to do something else but it feels it was wrong. The stability focus is awesome, though.
- Waited a bit too long to fiddle with TC buildings, which meant perhaps less income in total, before I did (fewer merchants and less value/production)
- Vassalized Astrakhan a bit late, meaning they're still at 30% penalty for force religion and something something dynasty
- Underestimated reformed stability+trading in wine+humanism+tolerance bonuses, meaning I could had gone much larger parts of the game with lots of overextention.
Things I think I did right:
- Used vassal mission trees to great effect (Thuringia and Lüneburg, they're the best German vassals considering your start and expansion direction and their mission trees. If you want no interference with perma claims whatsoever, then go for just one. Thuringia is still my vassal at 1780. Novgorod is perfect as vassal after Big Blue Blob, and gives you tons of territory with little mission tree interference, annex them once tree is finished - they even get permas on Lübeck etc. Astrakhan is another vassal and at this very moment in my campaign I think I'll just ignore loyalty. They're at 1100 dev and their permaclaims are just ridicolous (on par with Mongolia) and inspires me to play as them or similar horde at another point. Knights/Epirus/Cyprus/Crete all get good perma claims in Ottoman territory. I did not get them in time before they lost cores. Kiev worked well alongside Astrakhan even though they have some mission tree interference; that did not prevent them getting permas in the opposite directions.
- Vassalized Portugal. They're great for expanding, both due to colonization and mission tree (can interfer with Spain's but still nice). They may also interfer with your own trade companies/bonus merchants. Unfortunately, their colonies got the negative 30% loyalty penalty before I annexed them, but the extra merchants are still nice.
- "Saved" enough countries/OPMs/subjects to get tier 5 defender of faith bonus.
- Kept a good balance of large and small nations so no need for trucebreak (yet)
I'm sure there are more things. But that's everything for now. Not sure if I'll make it, as I did some mistakes and wanted a play that didn't make me hate my life (lol) but I think so. I have to use spies for my last wars, as my vassals won't fabricate everywhere for me/not have perma claims, and everybody's revolutionary. (some states in africa, some areas in Asia remain (Delhi area, North China, Timurid area, half of Japan and most of Manchuria+Korea, most of Majapahit, Ethiopia area and some random areas)
Originally came here too look for rulesets on vassal loyalty and when/if they'll try actively become independent. Now that I think about it, I assume/remember it's at 100% and they'll start forming alliances in between them. They can never even get close to my strength though, not even 50% (without PU's) so it'd be interesting to see if I can just mindlessly feed vassals with permaclaims now and ignore lberty desire. Would be nice
Edit: I went on and on about vassals and mission trees, but forgot one of the most important points I had; some of their mission tree missions require them to be independent to finish, so be wary about that. Some of them requires defender of faith or allies etc. which they can not get as subjects. Spain requires catholisism to finish parts of their trees (because of religious orders in Colombia).
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Very interesting, thank you for lots of details. Learned a lot about subject management from you.
I’m now (re)running a WC attempt as Russia, after making quite a few mistakes similar to yours, most frustratingly wasting tons of time on going revolutionary.
Instead of my usual opening of taking Religious and going to India via the hordes, I took Diplo first. Through aggressive RMs / disinheriting my heirs, by 1690 I PUed England, France, Hungary and Austria, and now watching the still-sizeable Commonwealth/Bohemia PU pair with whom I share my dynasty. Vassalised and imposed my religion on Spain and Portugal through a series of early wars, just now came out into the positive relations. They still have a -200+ aggressive expansion malus on me, lol, as I had to truce break them because they were growing so fast.
After I PUed France, they went into a debt spiral until they finally went bankrupt at -17k ducats in loans. So for the last 60 years, they’ve been mostly useless — constant revolts, hardly any colonisation or war contributions. A pity. I had to pay out the French and England’s loans a few times, quite annoying I have to say.
I opened with a no-CB on Byzantium, so was able to take my usual archenemy Ottomans and Mamluks early. Finally, in 1690, reaching India and going down to the Sub-Saharan Africa.
Did the C&C disaster this time, so I could keep some estate bonuses like extra relationships and tolerance.
Edit: by the way, going revolutionary disables the religious CB too.
I have no clue how to dismantle the HRE. I guess attack the Emperor?
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a) close all your states, switch to germanic culture (dutch culture is easy iirc), use nationalism to take over the hre through 1M AE
b) attack the most electors as possible in one war, never peace them out, 100% them, peace out everyone else including the emperor, peace the emperor clearing all their allies and releasing nations to keep them easier and easier to beat each time, keep declaring wars until you got all electors and you can finally dismantle. To speed things up you can ally as many electors you can pull into the wars as you can
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Awesome. Thanks. PUed Austria and almost finished conquering Holland, so changing to Germanic will be super easy.
Will see how efficient I can be at this!
Will see how efficient I can be at this!
That's awesome, and great to hear!
Honestly, I absolutely love being helpful by sharing info/experiences when I can, if I can. Very sorry for the extremely late reply. But considering how long some saves in EU4 (/EU3) can last, maybe this is still of some value (also I will try not to repeat too much what others may have replied by now);- Diplo is an interesting choice, and I recently just realized that the -20% war score cost can be a great combo with hordes, as you can take 120 war score cost, then raze provinces, and not suffer above 100 over-extension. Maybe it can be utilized with exploiting territory, although I have to admit I've never really played around with that.
- That's a ridiculous PM bundle
I hope (and it seems) this will work out well for you. Watch for perma-bonuses in their respective mission trees, you might have to annex one (or even two) PU's or have it happen accidentally, even though PU's are awesome for WC (just remember to annex before game end if they have colonies or other subjects of their own), but if you have to choose one to annex, keep the one with the best combined bonuses (coring bonuses are most relevant for a vassal in the long run) and perma claims.- Don't worry about a subject going bankrupt. While they won't be able to help you efficiently, it doesn't matter much to their integrity, since you will protect them. Novgorod suffered heavy over-extensions and decades of trouble when I used them after Big Blue Blob. If your subject is a vassal, the bonus to loyalty (which doesn't appear to have a cap?) by paying off debts, can also be very useful. There's a ridiculous cheese you can do by changing start dates, as "tall" Ashikaga into vassal swarm (not sure if it's useful for anything/any achievements but it's fun), and part of that play is to absolutely extort your vassals via tax efficiency/percentage and feudalism and pay their debts with the very money you exploited from them, thus making them loyal no matter what, before you get all ideas in place and otherwise stabilize.
You can avoid your subjects going bankrupt, by keeping their OE manageable, building in their provinces (which will also increase loyalty up to a 100% modifier) and
letting them have some trade power. You can change ideas if you have some that boost subject tax percentage. You can also subsidize (which will give up to 15 in relations for as long as it is active, just mind you that the increase per month up to 15 is based off a percentage of income, so as the years go on, that 0.10 ducats per month you gave to an OPM at the start of the game may have decreased the ticking relations to +0.00 per month instead of+1.17 or whatever).
Colonies, for example, needs around 4-8 ducats per month in subsidies to expand efficiently in their personal early-early-mid game, until they have enough income to pay for expansion themselves.
- Yes revolutionary does indeed disable Deus Vult!!
On a side note, I finished my WC with Rev. France, and I actually had quite a lot of fun except the last 40 years
I'll never go Rev. again for a WC hehe. Only had to truce break once, but otherwise had to utilize the AI web of alliances to the fullest (to avoid truce breaks).One thing I could maybe had done better, was to split up the world just a little bit more by snaking strategically, since the Mughals had quite a lot of dev to gobble up before the game ended. This wouldn't had been a problem if the war score cost wasn't 100%, though... *cough* Revolutionary *cough*
(not to speak of claim fabrications... it can be mitigated by having subjects in range and marking province of interest, but still)I do not believe the acquisitions while Revolutionary against non-rev. provinces outweighed the late game crippling. Not at all, really. Imperialism is fine. I mean, you can even culture shift and use nationalism if you so choose late game, once you get thousands of ducats in trade income either way. Just un-state everything and state what you want to shift to. Not that you necessarily would need Nationalism CB versus Imperialism CB or Deus Vult! but it's an option.
I can't remember the details of requirements for the part of Austria's mission tree that is related to colonialism (I think it just requires you to own the Low Countries area and some stuff) but they get perma-claims on tons of trade ports in India - and here is the best part: once you have gotten 5 provinces in every trade area, if I remember correctly, you get perma-claims on EVERY SINGLE PROVINCE IN ASIA BORDERING A CURRENT ONE, plus Ming proper!
So that's worthy of note, either if playing as them or having them as a subject (double check for independence requirements).
Best of luck!
Thank you so much Paradox forum, for making me have to sift through this wall of text to find the ONE SINGLE SYMBOL that rendered me unable to post anything, not explaining WHAT was being cencored. Well, lo and behold, the horrible, offensive PLUS SIGN in front of the number 15 was too abusive for me to post, apparently. That's some 5-10 minutes wasted for absolutely nothing due to somebody else's inability/decadence...
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Haha, that’s a lot of France in your choices
I agree with your order, though. Having said that, both Austria and France are way too easy for a WC, the challenge with them is boredom.
So far, the two most non-boring WCs for me have been Aragon -> Italy -> Protestant HRE and Byzantium. The Muscovy-> Russia run was fun, by eating up the British isles and Iberia first.
Haha, that’s a lot of France in your choices
I agree with your order, though. Having said that, both Austria and France are way too easy for a WC, the challenge with them is boredom.
So far, the two most non-boring WCs for me have been Aragon -> Italy -> Protestant HRE and Byzantium. The Muscovy-> Russia run was fun, by eating up the British isles and Iberia first.
I didn't find France WC boring tbh, but then again I love following mission trees and I completed like 6-7 subject trees (or more) on the way. The Revolution made things more interesting, but not very practical and granted some stress late game.
I've never played WC for fun, just the achievement
I love underdogs and nations that you don't often see. I think my next one will be Avar Khaganate.I have 3k hours and I have not even finished any of the major nation achievements lol, excluding France and Austria (Voltaire's Nightmare). Not even colony related (Portugal) or India or British Isles lol, I might do Stiff Upper Lippe soon too though, without cheesing, as that seems more fun and I always play out my games either way.
But I digress!
Thanks for the WC tips/perspective (and apparently congrats on the Russia WC
). I've barely played as hordes, ever (just Mongolia and Golden Horde wayyyyyyy back and I guess also Quing later) so if I choose to do a WC again it might be Ryuku into horde if possible (Three Mountains).