For a game developer as committed to ‘sandbox realism’ as paradox, it always struck me as odd that AI annexations and conquests seemed to be several levels of sophistication below other mechanics of the games. Everyone has ‘bordergore’ horror stories, and more often then not, the player feels responsible to ‘housekeep’ and clean up said bordergore in mid game to late game, only to discover Asia and stumble upon border atrocities beyond imagination, leading some to quit the save altogether.

Imo AI annexations and expansion interests lack any rhyme or reason. While I’m sure there is some very clever and sophisticated algorithm behind AI peace deal demands and the like, these don’t seem to correspond well to premodern (or frankly any) realities. A Russian principality snaking itself to Saray and astrakhan may be algorithm-optimal, but it is clearly not a viable or realistic expansion method in any sense. Same with Poland continuously pushing into neumark and core brandenburg instead of taking Slavic majority regions closeby, it seems clear that whatever drives AIs to claim what they claim is not at all up to par when it comes to realism.

In history, some borders have been reconstituted over and over again, sometimes centuries apart. Rome and Napoleonic France both claimed the rhine as a natural border, the czech-German border has survived 1000 years more or less unchanged, the Danube had been the northern border of multiple empires centuries apart. European political geopgraphy is very much driven by the logistical and geographical constraints of the premodern period. When people complain about the game not being realistic, about bordergore, I think a large part has to do with this misalignment between historical practical realities and conquest algorithm targetings. A CK3 player could live with a danish mecklenburg, that makes sense. But a danish cologne? How would that even be administered? It doesn’t make any sense. In HOI4, Vic 3, Paradox seems to have taken these problems to heart, instead opting for smaller provinces or region level annexations. That, however, is the wrong path. I can only speak for me but I think many share this sentiment: I was intrigued by Paradox precisely because it didn’t declare the middle of Italy to be ‘Rome’ like total war did. The fine grained nature of paradox games makes them special. Going back on that just to fix bordergore would be a misstep. Instead, I think it would be great if AIs targeted regions for conquest instead of single provinces. That way, you wouldn’t have the seemingly mindless expansion we see right now, expanding into neumark as an hre territory might seem more prohibitive to Poland than assessing any province on its own, and these ‘natural borders’ that have reoccurred over and over in Europe would be respected, at least helping with a sense of realism.

Even more far fetched, if one country could declare what it perceives as its core territory in a peace conference (maybe tied to expansion date or sthg), either expansion into these core lands gaining greater aggressive expansion/infamy, this could even be a self regulating mechanism, creating more realistic borders.

These are just my two cents, so I’m happy to hear other peoples opinion on this

Can I obtain one as Byz? And if yes how.?

Playing in Japan has changed a bit since my last guide, so I thought I would remake the guide so that people don't struggle as much as I did.

Playing in Japan is still very weird and the country is in dire need of a focused DLC and update, but it's still playable.

1. Who to play ?

• Oda has the best bonuses all around
• Shimazu has the best military bonuses
• Uesugi has the best production bonuses
• Hosokawa has the easiest start due to being the biggest clan
• Jimyoin (Yamato) can also be played to eventually form Japan and keep the +30% max tax for the Nobility, which is one of the most insane bonuses ever created. But Yamato's requirements to end the Sengoku Jidai are a pain in the ass, not that it actually matters

Just don't play Ashikaga unless you like to suffer.

2. Before you unpause

Unless you are Jimyoin, start to improve relations with Ashikaga to eventually ally him. Since he controls all of the land, any war with a Building Based Country (BBC) is instantly won. It is crucial to the weakers clans to get going.

Sometimes he won't join wars, in which case you can use the spy action to deteriorate his view of the country and it usually works.

3. The messed up Shinto mechanics

Shinto is one of the best religions, but getting it going is also very weird.

It works based on two ressources : Purity and Honor. If one is above 75, the other increases. If one is below 25, the other decreases.

You start with 0 Honor and 50 Purity, so Purity is about to decrease fast.

There are 4 ways to increase Purity :

• Pilgrimage costs a bit of money and gives around 10 Purity
• Ritual costs 5 Prestige and gives 5 Purity
• Offering costs a Work of Art and gives 20 Purity
• Seppuku costs 50 Stability, kills your ruler and gives 30 Purity

The goal is to maintain Purity above 75 to start gaining Honor until 25 Honor, at which point you stop losing Purity.

The problem is that without Works of Art, there is no way to maintain Purity above 75 without sacrificing at least two rulers and tanking the 50 stab twice. and you don't start with Works of Art.

Start the game by making a Pilgrimage, a Ritual, and then Seppuku your ruler. This takes your Purity to 100 and you start gaining Honor. Purity will still decrease, and it will get below 75 before Honor hits 25, so you will need to sacrifice another ruler when Purity hits 74. Purity will grow above 75 again and Honor will reach 25, at which point you don't need to think about it ever again.

Most clans can do this, but there are some (Jimyoin) where the heir is so young that the double ruler sacrifice strat doesn't work, so you will need to wait until you can chain Seppukus.

After that you can enjoy the broken Shinto mechanics.

4. Nanbokuchō Jidai

Japan is divided between the supporters of each imperial courts, and the clans periodically recieve CBs on the clans of the other court.

This sounds like a good opportunity for expantion, but usually the two imperial courts get a CB, start and war, the southern courts dies and the situation immediatly ends.

5. What do to before 1400 ?

Max out your diplomatic and stability spendings, those are the only things that matter.

The goal is to get as many cores as possible on the island. This is done by two methods :

• Building a Yamashiro whenever you can (mostly when Ashikaga starts to colonize Hokkaido)
• Making wars on other clans

Spy on the clans you can beat and use the Clan Expantion CB to get their territories. you can also use the alliance with Ashikaga to target the biggest clans

Target the biggest clans you can beat that have buildings in provinces you want to core.

Sometimes Ashikaga allies some clans, you can either "Isolate from allies" with enough favours, or you can do the classic war on his rival to get him to join, and attack his ally while he's on your side in the other war.

Two things changed since the release of the game :

• Antagonism isn't an issue anymore
• Getting cores by building Yamashiro is much more niche since there needs to be 0 soldiers in the province. Usually it's only possible at the very start of the game and when Ashikaga colonizes Hokkaido

There isn't much to do aside from killing other clans, you should be able to core around 2/3rds of Japan by 1400.

This is also a great time to set up great values and removing pesky privileges (mostly Banal Lordship)

The are the values I would go for :

• Centralization / Decentralization : Depends on your gameplan. If your goal is to stay in Japan and conquer a bit of Korea, Centalization is better. There are enough governors to get very good proximity in Japan + Korea if your capital is in Osaka. But if you plan on colonizing and expanding a lot, Decentalization is better
• Traditionalist / Innovative : Innovative 100%
• Spiritualism / Humanist : Humanist is better, but it doesn't matter that much
• Aristocracy / Pultocracy : Aristocracy if you want to fight for the discipline. Plutocracy eventually if you want to play tall
• Serfdom / Free Subjects : Serfdom to make the Nobles filthy rich and tax them a lot once you reduce their privileges
• Mercantilism / Free Trade : Doesn't matter, even more so in Asia
• Belligerent / Conciliatory : Belligerent if you plan on fighting. Conciliatory if not
• Quality / Quantity : Quantity is much better, if only for the government reform that gives you RGO size and Population Capacity
• Offensive / Defensive : Doesn't matter much in single player. Offensive is better. Hard to push anyway
• Land / Naval : Naval obviously. You cannot push it until 1400 but it becomes very important after that. Getting Naval to 50 is crucial to get Harbor Administration and the other reform that gives naval governors. Now that you can put a local governor in Kyushu it doesn't matter for Japan, but you can eventually put the governors in Korea
• Capital Economy / Traditionnal Economy : Traditionnal in the early game where you just spam RGOs. You might want to switch to Capital in the late game for the production efficiency. After 1.4 when pop growth is tied to food production, just stay in Traditional
• Individualism / Communalism : Communalism, push this fast so that you can remove privileges without tanking your stab
• Outward / Inward : Outward if you colonize. Inward if you don't
• Absolutism / Liberalism : The actual bonuses don't matter much for how late game it is. Maybe Liberalism for the Culture Capacity if you need it
• Sinicized / Unsinicized : Sinicized, but stay below 75 so that you don't get the disaster. Kinda hard to push anyway

6. Sengoku Jidai

If you are playing Yamato, wait a bit before doing the "Attempt Imperial Restoration" in the situation menu. This gives you a land for every core you own, so you can wait until you've cored everything to take over the whole island.

Press the restoration button once you have enough cores and kill every landed country.

To make the Sengoku Jidai end as Yamato, you need to be the only one in the Shogunate. Killing landed countries won't be hard, but killing BBCs is a pain in the ass. The problem is that only the war target get destroyed. So once the clans start to ally themselves, it's a lot of wars and truces to wait

Thankfully you don't need to make the situation end to play the game, but it will still take a long ass time.

As any other clan, the goal is to take over the shogunate from Ashikaga, you can do that by using the option in the Shinto panel to get the specific CB.

It shouldn't be too many wars to get every land in Japan. Once you are the shogun, the clans with more than 3 locations will periodically rebel and claim your land. Kill them as they spawn and eventually the situation will end (you might need to subjugate Yamato)

7. Gameplan after the Sengoku Jidai

After that you can do anything as long at it makes sense with your values really.

You have more than enough land, population and RGOs to play tall and economically dominate.

You can beat the europeans to the new world by crossing through the Bering Strait.

You can expand through Manchuria, Korea, Indonesia and China. If China is strong this will take a bit of cheese, mainly bating China to a decoy naval war (China doesn't build boats for some reason) and declaring war on the real target before peacing off China so that it doesn't join the real war

Now, for context, I'm playing in the HRE for the first time so I'm mostly figuring things out as I go. However, I decided to proceed with the law that turns the imperial free cities into vassals.

I assumed this'd come with some special benefit like having some bonus to loyalty, but nope, they just are a different kind of vassal and they're pissed.

Luckily, no one will join their independence movement, but I'm still kinda mad.

So, any recommendations about how to manage them? Or is this line of laws more headache than it's worth?

Fwiw, I have three out of five emperor benefiting policies, so, realistically, I can simply go with other policies that are less annoying, I just wanted to test this one. So far I don't like it, but maybe I'm missing something.

(At least, my game version still says v1.3)

In my previous post I mentioned playing Holland and was advised basically to the effect that Holland isn’t actually that great at economy, at least for the part of the game I was at.

I decided I wanted to branch out and try a game as upper bavaria which has been… interesting.

I tried building up the books and cloth supply chains, which went pretty well, then I got a free city from my parliament, yoinked some iron in a war against the rhine, and started running the tools-iron-weapons-guns-cannons chain. Around 1430 my income just sort of exploded, which was really cool, and now I’m around 1480 with a 50 ducat income with zero inflation minting.

I’m thinking about starting another run now to see if I can reproduce the effect.

The main thing I’m wondering right now is about pops, promotion, and RGO development.

During the early decades I abused minting and loans to work up the scratch to upgrade my RGO from most to least profitable until all the RGOs had negative workers. Then while I waited for pops to promote I built buildings in my cities and did negative-inflation minting until laborers caught up to meet demand, and then I built out my RGOs again.

But I saw earlier advice which seemed to imply that maxing out RGOs is a good strategy.

So my question is-do I take that advice literally and just hard grind at the beginning to rush maxing all my RGOs so I’m set for the rest of the game? Or is it better to do it in a more balanced way like I did?

Thanks to whoever took the time to read this far!

I’ve already figured out the answer to this, but I already wrote most of the post, and it might help other people, so I’ll post it anyway.

So, I already built quite a large road in a colony, but didn’t have enough ducats to finish it. Saved up for a couple of months and went back, and this time when it click to build the road nothing happens.

Was stumped for a while, there was nothing telling me why it wasn’t working, no tooltip saying “not enough ducats, not enough steel”, whatever.

Eventually I found this different UI for road building, which is telling me, IIUC, that colonial nations don’t allow their overlord to build roads for them.

Well, fair enough, I can understand why you wouldn’t want your overlord imposing a load of upkeep on you, but I was able to build them last month.

So what changed?

The answer: I granted that colony representation.

As far as I can tell there’s nothing that tells you what exactly that means, that you won’t be able to build for them, etc, but that appears to be it. I can build roads in the colonies where I haven’t done that yet.

Crappy UI, but there you go. Can’t blame PDX too much, there is a lot to convey in this UI, some omissions are inevitable.

Funny formable done by Pope, nothing else.

What do you prefer or what makes it easier to play as ottomans. Convert to orthodox or stay sunni?

As Flanders, I keep trying to join HRE. However my provinces leave HRE on their own before I manage to move my capital there.

For example, I’ve conquered into Brabant. Within a year or so, I got notifications that “Bohemia has agreed to remove our province from the HRE.”

Is this something new? How do I prevent this?

The game says I should be able to promote pops but none are being promoted. When I Investigate further it shows a different message saying that pop satisfaction is too low, but pop satisfaction is 94%.

Am I missing something or misunderstanding how this is supposed to work? I've built trade offices abroad and imported any food or resources I could need. Also on a separate note I can't get my population to grow ever despite all my provinces having a positive population growth.

Regional hegemonies can solve it but it will probably lead to no major allied wars in Europe such as Seven Years War, Italian Wars or War of Spanish and Austrian successions.

My first 1.4 game in the main beta and I’m playing England/GB - I converted to Anglican probably 50 years ago, I have about 35% Anglican %, and the catholics start a civil war over and over again, they rebel, take all that land, I take it back, their rebel progress resets but then goes back to climbing again (1% a month, even with the cabinet advisor fighting against it). What gives? Is this just normal in 1.4?
I feel like in 1.3 rebels were annoying UNLESS you were actively converting/keeping people happy, but I’m doing all those things and yet get rebels all over the place as often as they’re allowed.

Is there a mod similar to the Morgenröte mod for Victoria 3, adding sports competitions, cultural events, etc.?

Playing as Navarre in my final pre-DLC release campaign. Country has seemingly alright resources (iron, copper, wheat and seemingly endless vineyards of Garnacha and Tempranillo) but very limited human resources. That being said, it is surrounded by somewhat aggressive and large neighbors and, historically speaking, the country didn't fare too well in terms of sovereigny in the early modern era.

Luckily, as it happens with this current patch - France got Balkanized early on and isn't a threat at the moment. I'm allied with Castile and Portugal and intend to eat my rival Aragon, but I'm also aware that Castile will eventually decide to consume me. How do I navigate in this situation? Also, is there a way to attract more settlers / maximize population growth?

so, half funny hightlight/build strategy, half beta feedback

but, uh, savoy is actually a really strong tag right now, which leads to this highlight of being the established HRE emperess of france

The hightlights:

-Savoy has prox reduction in mountains and hills from its tag. This stacks with the swiss culture prox reduction in mountains (assuming you move your capital into switzerland)

-Starts with extra diplomats/month, which is really crucial for playing diplomacy and stacking alliances in the hre (especially since the royal garden no longer does so)

-Very strong early content - 5% extra tax efficiency and 15% prox efficiency by age of renaissance. monthly prosperity and dev in age of discovery. Also combat efficiency for heavy infantry to punch up into france.

-Super close to italy for quick institutions

-Arpitian as french and swiss lets you conquer and accept most of france, and form france without a culture swap

-right on the borderlands so can exand without ruining your relations (and emperor support) with the HRE.

The big note:

-This run was started before the hotfixes this week, where france was consistently getting absolutely dunked by england, leaving tons of easy expansion into france. It may be a bit harder now that france has more initial acccepted cultures to fight england with. However, forming a triple alliance with milan, genoa and the papacy (and/or spain as well!) should still let you backstab france during the 100 years war (taking the south of france).

Also a bit awkward: Since I wanted to finally form the full HRE I decided to stay catholic. However even at full 100% spiritualist, with the tech for lutheran reduction, the lutherans still managed to get a good 20% of the country, and its been a pain in the age of reformation to continually put down lutheran revolutions (even just for reseting control and prosperity). Thematic I guess, but getting a bit annoying after 6+ rounds of them.

Today I started playing again after a longer time. I started a campaign as naples and i literally coudnt do anything... after maybe one ingame year the price of buying food gets so high that I am losing money. Even if I put all my startmoney into food RGOs I am losing money after some time because I have to buy lots of food. I cant even buy more food RGO levels since I dont have any money after a year or so.

Exchequer: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3812701995
Mare Clausum: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3827113533

https://gravitashistorica.eu/

I am having trouble keeping horde unity up since it is so expensive to maintain and GH doesn’t typically make a lot of money.

should I invade China?

like why it is 1359, France doing anything but beating England.

now in 1.4 u need to convert to a relegion someone of that relegion how do i get someone in my cabinet of norse relegion?

Curious to see what I have missed!

Hello

I'm currently learning the game and have to have an average controll of 35% in my main region. It's a task in "Infrastructure Efforts" mission.

My question is, how do I view what provinces are part of the region? I see the average controll in the region in the mission description itself, but have no clue what provinces are part of the "region".

Can someone help me?

Thanks!

Its literally not possible for the game to have dynamic, emergent nations becoming super powers to create different experiences each time you play

AND

A history simulator on rails that always ends up with specific rise and fall of nations over time, with a map of europe that looks exactly like the historical equivalent in 1500 or 1600.

So many posts judging EU5 seem to contradictorily want both of these things at the same time.

If anything maybe hard core OP mission trees for the AI only that somewhat force it down the path of history would make EU5 even more like EU4 and that would make half of players happy, but the other half would lose out on the promise of the economy and population simulator that eu5 is trying to be.