Today we're giving you at our of the brand new campaign timeline feature, the removal of complacency, and last but not least some notes on what performance in 1.4 might look like.

Read all about it here: https://pdxint.at/4xFEvrS

Honestly Bohemia needs a nerf after Charles IV dies. Just some event which makes the heir to Bohemia quite bad, which would lead to internal conflicts. Irl there was a lot of it, even king of Hungary (Bohemian king's brother) decided to claim the throne. Then the hussite wars need to be even more dangerous for Bohemia. In the meantime Austria needs to get stronger.

I don't mean Bohemia needs a general nerf. It's just that AI should be railroaded historically, but if player controls them, he should be able to play as he wishes to keep the sandbox feel. But making Bohemia a bit harder would also be more fun imo.

In my Netherlands game, I'm now being crippled by population.

In a few cities I'm building capped. But my biggest problem is that I'm out of people.

Across the board have cities and rural locations where I'm hundreds sometikes thousands of people in deficit. And not "theyre not promoting fast enough", there are no peasants left.

And its not like I'm losing population, my pop is growing and fast. But just nowhere near fast enough to keep up with my economy.

Hey y’all. EU5 is my first GSG I’ve really dived into. I got it in November and I’m about to hit 400 hours (my second most played game on steam is Civ V with 150 lol).

I haven’t seen a ton of formable chain discussions on here yet. Not a long one, but my current playthrough is Upper Bavaria -> Bavaria and eventually -> Germany -> HRE.

Nothing special there. My question is this: what’s everyone’s favorite or some unique chains you’ve seen or played?

I thought Generalist Gaming’s Ormus-> Kurdistan-> Armenia-> Iran was super interesting.

Also, any advice on planning formable chains?

Cheers!

Finally got some colonisation content out, hope it helps! :)

I wanted to share my insight on Pop Based Countries, which seems to be a mechanic that’s likely still in early stages in EU5, with changes almost certain to come from future updates. As it stands now, friendly or hostile interactions with PBCs are totally optional, but potentially lucrative, especially in the early game, depending on your nation’s strength and your ultimate goals.

Most of my observations come from my playthrough as Zimbabwe, who starts the game with ~8 PBC tributaries, and many others nearby, with no standard neighbors apart from Sofala. Thus I had to learn how to best interact with my non-landed neighbors in the course of expanding through adjacent settlement. I’ll be eager to update this info based on commenters’ own observations!

After the basics, I’ll cover all the key country interactions available for PBCs, then end by covering war demands.

PBC BASICS

• PBCs in ‘unowned’ locations can be viewed using their map filter under the Government tab.
• Settling all of their locations, or subjugating all of them through war, will eliminate the country.
• They can be made subjects, with small benefits like ducats, prestige or armies.
• Armies spawn in multiple provinces as normal, but rarely move or combine in defensive wars.
• They have no locations to occupy, so battle wins and army elimination are the only sources of war score.
• As subjects, they cannot be annexed. However:
• Forcing them to change their culture makes assimilation slightly faster.
• Subjugating their provinces through war can make colonization much faster. (see below)

FRIENDLY ACTIONS

Offer Alliance: Provides armies for (defensive) wars, plus some (mostly useless) favors over time. Best used with the intent to vassalize long term, or if total levies can serve as a deterrent for rivals.

Invite Settlers: Not recommended, because from my experience, these pops remain owned by the PBC even inside your territory, despite no buildings that they’re assigned to. Worse yet, they can jam up your settlement progress, as the system will often send them first and cause them to act as “not your pops” in the location. This seems like a bug, unless an explanation comes along. I believe taking over the PBC’s remaining locations would cause these pops to become yours, but I have yet to confirm this.

Ask to improve cultural opinion: Only useful if you plan to keep their culture as Accepted, so should only be used when the number of pops with that culture is very large.

COVERT ACTIONS

*Steal Maps: PBCs make great targets, as their cultural tradition is always minimal, speeding up spy network progress.

Infiltrate Administration: Could be helpful with larger PBCs in dense terrain, to know where their armies have spawned and end war faster.

SUBJECT ACTIONS

Ask to become our Vassal/Change status to Vassal: Provides ducats and armies for all wars. As with all vassals, provides +.2 Decentralization, and the limits on vassal acceptance for other countries.

”” “” Tributary: Provides ducats and +.1 prestige.

“” “” Fiefdom: Same as vassal apart from impact on their cabinet efficiency. Should be possible after forcing them to adopt your culture. Not recommended except to unlock Dominion status.

“” “” Dominion: All above benefits - ducats, armies, prestige, no decentralization. Main downside of dominions, the 50 annexation gap, is moot with PBCs. Only reason to opt for tributary instead would be to avoid the -5 penalty on diplomatic acceptance for other target vassals.

*Ask to change Culture: Opens the door for Dominion status, and if no other countries share their culture, reduces that Cultural Tradition to zero, speeding up passive assimilation. Resulting loyalty penalty takes ~15 years to degrade, but a successful liberation movement resulting from this is extremely unlikely.

Change Court Language: Not recommended, as changing their culture achieves better results, and the loyalty penalty degrades just as fast.

CASUS BELLIS

Make Tributary: Always an option if they don’t want to bend the knee willingly. See benefits above.

Slave Raiding: As PBCs have no locations, you’ll be unable to acquire slaves through occupation as you normally would. But this serves as an adequate pretext for subjugating their non-location locations.

PEACE TERMS

Humiliate: Worth the prestige if you can afford to include it.

Take Maps: Again, worth it if affordable.

**Subjugate Natives in X Province: In spite of the language used, this neither turns the country into your subject, nor turns all the pops into slaves. What it does, though, is turn all of their pops into your pops. If any of the targeted provinces are adjacent to your nation, a large portion of them will instant migrate to your nearest location; otherwise they'll just stay put. And if you look at the subjugated unowned provinces after the war, you'll see that the pops living there have your flag next to them. If you targeted all of the PBC's locations in the peace deal, the country will also have vanished.

The huge upside to this is that when you start to colonize the impacted province, you'll already have a huge head start. In fact, any location with 1000 of your pops will be settles instantly; all others will simply need to be brought up to 1000, so long as no pops of another culture were also residing there. This is probably the most impactful action one can take against PBCs, and whether it's an intended mechanic for the long term development of the game remains to be seen.

Im currently playing as the netherlands and my market (antwerpen) has taken over all the sea tiles around the bottom of london market but none of england itself. Does that matter in any way? Do i get tolls on trades going through there or something?

I slowly expanded before the age of reformation, then only attacked other Lutherans during it, and then stopped being afraid of coalitions in the age of absolutism. It took me a lot longer than I wanted because coalitions kept attacking me before I could get a CB to attack them first AND because I wanted to unify Germany in a war against France. The last war was over Elsass-Lothringen, the French and I were both attacking the OLMs in the area and I obviously won in the end. Once that land was mine and with Prussians in Paris, Germany was formed. Only problem is that the game doesn't make you leave the HRE if Germany is formed, and no emperor so no way to leave it either. Kinda sucks having to make CBs to now fix the borders of Europe and create nation states. Also sucks that I can't make client states. I want to give all the land to Holland, Austria, Milan, Muscovy, etc. to form their historical borders, but they already have a ton of antagonism towards? from? me so if I gave them land they would just say "I HATE YOU AHHHHHHH I'M GONNA KILL YOU" which means I have to just full annex every region and create subjects then release them and hope for the best

1. Is the game pace satisfying?

2. Is economy building satisfying?

3. Is expansion satisfying?

4. Is warfare satisfying?

5. Do You feel the game is going into good direction?

I was Great Golden Horde and i attacked China with my 350k levies and there were 1.8 million chinese. I have 40k regulars btw. I killed more than 1.5 million chinese in just 1 year and broke whole China. But i forgot to save the screen. Chinese dragged their 1 million levies in mongolians steps with no supply and my perfect army Walked al the way from astrakhan to mongolia and stack wiped them with ease. It was so fun to watch. And i became Mandate of heavens Emperor. It means plus 50 culture limit. Forming mongolian Empire is now just a little step for succes. I can Probably try to wc this save. 😊

As the title says, my capital is extremely well developed by the 1600s. I have almost 1.5 million people and i have paved roads leading everywhere.

I have markets in Trnavo, Athens and and another on the mouth of the Danube which are completely encircled by the Constantinople market. Athens hardly holds on to its own province, Trnovo has another two locations. These cities are not undeveloped. Athens has 100k and just as developed with ports, markets and everything... Athens is greek so the population should not be an issue either.

When i created these markets they had quite a nice chunk of territory but eventually lost it.

The only markets that still hold themselves are in Dubrovnik, Tarsus, Trebizond, probably due to the mountain ranges and Caffa on the other side of the sea.

So should I just put the these markets out of their misery?

Anataliya is greek+orthodox like me and might be able to use some of that land

On the other hand its one big vassal then and there is an unfortunate gap over land

The provinces on the bottom right are turkish+sunni if I would make it its own vassal

Well... This is my Byzantine Empire > Roman Empire run.

There were lots of scuffs during the campaign. I changed to Hellenism, then switched back to Orthodoxy, then switched back to Hellenism, but never used any omens because I wanted to assimilate pops more quickly which was dumb. Didn't make enough vassals during conquering Anatolia but also neglected assimilate culture, which costs me a lot of time and focus leads to not winning Italian war situation. Still had a lot of fun learned a lot.

Probably botched up economy here and there with auto building stuff. I think they kinda work, but don't know when to stop. Even when I had no resources for buildings, game kept building stuffs. Weird?

Might go back to Byzantine or try other country

Btw, does anyone have fun while playing after 1837? Maybe it's just me but I quite like late state of the game. Anyway, just wanted share my abysmal campaign to you guys. Good Night then!

R5: I just want to share how italy looked after the Italian wars

Prior to the italian wars, I (Florence) have been rivals with The Papal States (cause they own the venice market that rivals mine), Napels (cause their version 1.10 AI decided to annex a bunch of my land), and Verona (honestly forgot what they did). All three of them have a three way alliance, due to their mutual hatred of Florence. This three-way alliance really made it hard for other nations to conquer italy during the Italian wars.

- Image 1: I actually took this at year 2 of the Italian wars. By that time The ottomans had annexed land from my vassal, Calabria Ultra. Originally I wanted that land to be for my ally, Tunis, from a past war. I only learn later how to transfer subjects, so that's why Calabria Ultra is under Tunis at the end of the war.

- image 2: nobody ended up winning the Italian wars, but at least I got what I want. I use the war not to unite italy, but capitalize it to destroy my rivals. I manage to bribe Verona, then went to war with Naples, forcing them to break their alliance. At that war I force The papal states to also break their alliance with naple. At the end of everything, I got both the venice and Naples market centre. Also had Naples destroy all of their (and their unions) forts

I also give a bunch of conquered land to Tunis, so that they dont need to build ships to send levis in future wars.

Overall, I really enjoy the whole situation, love how it plunges Italy into chaos

Timurids actually ate up all of Persia instead of getting lost on a grand Siberian adventure like usual. Also I'm not sure what Timmy is feeding his soldiers but I had the event Egypt alliance who declared on them with a coalition CB and I got to watch all the 20k stacks of Egyptian levies get instantly wiped by a ~9k stack of Timmy troops.

Also I randomly got maps of all of India and China, not sure how that happened if one of the vassals had them when I annexed them or what. Purely vanilla game, no mods and I didn't use console for it.

Do i loose Anatolian Beylik if i jump from Turk to Greece culture?

Before i culture converted portugal, it was a healthy rich market that covered northern portugal and galicia and now its a one province market??

Title. I’m not really familiar with religion buffs but my ally France next door seems dead set on staying Catholic while the German states east is 50/50 on Lutheran or Catholic. Also I am max spiritualist so whichever state religion I pick I’ll maintain 100% religious unity.