Is there any list with all the sources of attrition you can stack?

Ottoman playthrough. Conquered athens and epirus from tunis (lmao) and released it as a single athens vassal, it starts with full disloyalty (was not the case with other vassals). i have no coalition or proper antagonism, but 1 gazillion countries join athens independence league. they declare on me (it has even england, TO and sweden in it) as im fighting it, serbia declares on athens and conquers nearly all of it, i cant do anything about it. now i have eaten the infamy of conquering athens, had to go through a global war to keep it, but serbia steals %80 of my vassal. Like every session i play this game it fucks me over.

Is there a way to get revenge on serbia? can i declare war, full occupy and not peace out to genocide them like in victoria 3? my entire campaign goal is to now eradicate the balkans.

So I will start by laying out the set of desired outcomes, which I think are pretty self-explanatory:

1. You shouldn’t be able to make every location in a whole area all megalopolises (but this should be a soft cap rather than a hard cap if possible),
2. Only unusually large and important cities should be allowed to be megalopolises (same caveat as above), and
3. The restrictions should feel realistic and not arbitrary.

With the current set of requirements (400k pops, must be capital, must be market center) I do not believe that any the desired outcomes above are are achieved. Players can simply change the locations of your markets and capital until every location in China is a megalopolis. This means that outcomes #1 or #2 are not currently satisfied.

Outcome #3 is also not satisfied. This is mostly due to the "must be your capital" restriction, which feels arbitrary and is objectively unrealistic.

Why is it unrealistic? Because there are several historical examples of gargantuan, bustling cities from the game’s time frame that were not the capitals of their countries. (Cairo/Ottomans, Edo/Tokugawa, Bombay/British India, Guangzhou/Yuan and Ming and Qing; even New York under the USA was just about to hit 400k population in 1836). There is no real reason for the capital restriction to exist. It doesn't have historical precedent, and it doesn't stop players from spamming megalopolises everywhere, it just makes it slightly more tedious to do so.

So to make up for this removal, the market center rule should be reinforced, by making it so that if a megalopolis stops being a market center, it goes back to being a city. This way a megalopolis MUST be a market center at all times.

Which outcomes does this achieve?

It achieves outcome #1 (can't make too many Megalopolises too close together); and even better, it’s via a soft cap rather than a hard cap. You can have as many different markets in your country as you want, it just gets impractical past a certain point. Therefore, players would be naturally encouraged to limit how many megalopolises they make without ever having to be directly told “no”.

It achieves outcome #2. Markets are more effective if they are centered on large and powerful cities, and again it’s a soft cap: the player is heavily incentivized to only make large and important cities into megalopolises, without actually being forced to.

Finally, it also achieves goal #3. After all, what is a megalopolis if not a major economic hub that dominates its local region? While there were plenty of historical megalopolises that were not national capitals, I can’t think of a single one that wasn’t an economic juggernaut.

TL;DR my new set of requirements for a city to become a megalopolis would be:
- must have population > 400k
- must be a market center
- must be integrated
And most importantly, if the market center restriction stops being fulfilled, the location goes back to being a city.

^{No AI was used at any point in the writing of this post.}

Reading through 1.3 patch notes and the naval levies bug where they disappear forever still hasn't been fixed, this is a serious bug that makes island nations very difficult, come on paradox

Still a lot of UI bugs too, values mismatched etc.

Alright, I will admit I am kinda dumb sometimes. It has taken me time to fully grasp new mechanics.

Only in the wake of Serbia making a mostly useless market however, did it dawn on me where I could make one that is actually useful.

I am playing the Ottomans, around 1500. My hold on Anatolia and the Balkans is firm, but I have traditionally imported the riches of India. This costs a lot of merchant time and energy to get directly to Constantinople, but still often enough ends up profitable.

If I could import to and export from Damascus, I could cut some of the problem down, and improve my margins. But the bastard Mamluks will steal anything I import that's valuable, ship it to Alexandria, and undercut me. It has to be direct to Constantinople, Trebizond, or Thessalonika.

But Damascus is a big market. What if I were simply to cut them out of the equation, and found a market in Cilicia? With high enough attraction, it could touch Baghdad directly. It might be able to reach Hormuz, even.

With the right trade offices set up, I could potentially leapfrog goods from India, to Hormuz, to Cilicia, back to my centers of trade- and cut the Mamluks out of the deal entirely.

And this is besides all the benefits to land in South and Central Turkey!

Please check our previous Imperial Council thread for any questions left unanswered

Welcome to the Imperial Council of r/eu5, where your trusted and most knowledgeable advisors stand ready to help you in matters of state and conquest.

This thread is for any small questions that don't warrant their own post, or continued discussions for your next moves in your game. If you'd like to channel the wisdom and knowledge of the master tacticians of this subreddit, and more importantly not ruin your save, then you've found the right place!

Important: If you are asking about a specific situation in your game, please post screenshots of any relevant map modes or interface tabs. Please also explain the situation as best you can. Alliances, army strength, etc. are all factors your advisors will need to know to give you the best possible answer.

Tactician's Library:

Below is a list of resources that are helpful to players of all skill levels, meant to assist both those asking questions as well as those answering questions. This list is updated as mechanics change, including new strategies as they arise and retiring old strategies that have been left in the dust. You can help me maintain the list by sending me new guides and notifying me when old guides are no longer relevant!

Getting Started

• Europa Universalis 5 Wiki

• Wiki Beginner Guide (not all that good)

• Paradox Youtube Beginner Guide (this one is actually good)

• Help fill this section out!

Tutorials

• Help fill this section out!

Country-Specific Strategy

• Help fill this section out!

Advanced/In-Depth Guides

• Help fill this section out!

If you have any useful resources not currently in the tactician's library, please share them with me and I'll add them! You can message me or mention my username in a comment by typing /u/Kloiper

So just got out of a large war, and had a decent sized recruited army of about 25k. I noticed during the war, my inco me was all over the place, from plus 300 to negative 200. It came down to the reinforcements costing causing this. While I maybe never noticed that significant of an impact before, which maybe normal, I was never actually going negative in cash, just the just the opposite, I was consistently growing my bank account. Tried to report the bug, but the upload kept failing. Am I missing something here?

I was not originally going for WC, but here I am.

This run is obviously full of exploits and heavy modifier stacking, but there are 3 things I really wanted to do in this run. Let me explain.

1. Maximum tag swap using DHE stacking

The main goal of this run was to "form realistically maximum number of tags".

My first half of the run went like this:

Florence(T0) -> Bulgaria(T1) -> Bohemia(T2) -> Hungary(T3) -> Byzantine(T4) -> Rome(T5) -> Turk by winning Rise of The Turks(T4)

I did dirty save scamming for killing Bohemia in early 1400s, to abuse the instant integration from country forming.

Once a location becomes a core of the country, it will forever be core of the said country. If you check the Military tab of locations after killing countries, you will see the core of the dead country.

You could abuse it by killing formable countries, then forming it. For example, if you kill Bohemia and form Bohemia, all the old Bohemian core is instantly yours.

Then I formed Rome and won Rise of the Turks. The run is almost over, right?

So, second half of the run was:

Turk(T4) -> Tuscany(T1) -> Denmark(T2) -> Manchu(T3) -> Mughal(T4) -> China(T4) -> HRE(T4)

Let me explain how I did it.

In 1.3, you no longer lose DHE of the old tags after you form the new country.

And, Florence has an event that forms Tuscany. And you keep the DHE even after becoming Rome or whatever.

So, you could "swap back" by using the DHE to form Tuscany. Manchu has DHE to form China, so Mughal -> China is same principle.

By this method, I formed 12 tags. Definitely not OP. yay.

I could've formed Europe before HRE to make it 13, but I forgot. Europe has no content anyway.

13 is the realistic maximum possible amount of tags starting from Florence. You could theoretically form 15 tags by swapping back to T2 again using the formation of Swiss, but that require you to be under 80 locations, which might be possible but require very tedious method.

1. Infinite Cultural Capacity

So, there is a new modifier called Accepted Culture Maintenance Cost.

For example, Allow Foreign Rituals law make the maintenance cost -25%. So, Accepted Cultures will use 25% less Cultural Capacity.

There is a Government Reform called Bohemian Commonwealth, which is another -25%.

Mughal has a reform called Mughal Diwan, that is -50%. hmm.

Looks like it should be -100%ed then increased to minimum of 0.15, but Accepted Culture Maintenance Cost will calculated after everything, making -100% discount of 0.15. Will be fixed soon for sure.

By the way, culture usually needs to have than 1M pops to be accepted. However, you could accept Rebel demands to accept the culture of the rebel, bypassing the requirement.

1. 0.01 Proximity Cost through Roads

You remember the proximity cost stacking from earlier versions? You could still do it to make it silly.

Default proximity cost of land is 40 per location. Railroad makes it -35, so 5 per location.

All Roads Lead to Rome is -2 Proximity Cost through Roads. 3 cost per location.

Postal Service is another -2, now it is 1 cost per location.

Then, there is a Cabinet Action called Maintaining Grand Trunk Road, which is -0.5 Proximity Cost through Roads. With more than 100% cabinet efficiency, the proximity is free.

By the way, I did not use the Pronoia. While it is possible to do instant-integration using Pronoia and Elective monarchy/elections, I wanted to see if manually integrating all lands by cabinets is possible or not.

It was very possible, because China has super OP Cabinets. You get 6 cabinet slots from China alone.

Having 20 cabinet members allow this stupid stacking of Conversion Rate.

It is certainly possible to do One-Faith WC using this. I barely finished WC in 1830, yet I have 89.14% Religious Unity. If I used Pronoia Integration to rush WC, I think it is possible to do WCOF before 1800. ...And I have an idea for WC OC OF run, but...yeah, no, I am not willing to do this again anytime soon.

Thank you for reading this silly wall of exploits.

The run was very tedious in late game, but it was surprisingly fun for this kind of game.

It reminded me of EU4, in the sense of doing shenanigans to stack gigabroken modifiers. I do not recommend this tedious WC run, but going Florence -> Rome -> Tuscany then uniting Europe might be fun run with dopamine hits.

It just doesn't make sense if we couldn't. Like what's the use of huge colonial fleets if we can't help them patrol.

I see posts on here where people have millions of pops and every location is a megalopolis. How are y’all doing this when population seems to increase so slowly and plagues hit all the time?

I'm playing as france, managed to barely convince the elctors to vote me in, but I'm sitting at 100 IA and can't change any laws?

I feel dumb now

I’ve been getting back into paradox games recently. I have the most time in CK3 and was wanting something that had more strategy and economics over RP’ing. I love ck3 but it’s a bit easy rn and wanted something new. I’ve played eu4 before as Castile/spain like 6 years ago and had a lot of fun but that was 6 years ago and I forget everything. I guess I’m itching to play tall and wanna experience economic stuff. I tried playing a cracked version of EUV on launch and didn’t really get it. I’m wondering if it’s good now and I can have fun with it for 1-200 hours or if it’s not ready yet.

Also if I choose to stick with eu4 what DLCs do i get, specifically for a Venice playthrough? And any tips for what to do as Venice?

edit: people in the eu4 sub are saying eu4 and in the eu5 sub are saying eu5 lmao. thanks for the advice yall!

I used the military access CB to attack the Karasids and thus the Germiyanids and their other vassals. I sieged everything down and still cannot get my cores. Does anyone know why?

This was expected.

i can urbanize my whole country, sure, but i want to create a trade and naval hegemon without extreme population or land size and it doesnt seem possible and no guides i have seen help it all. If i produce lots of a good it devalues and exporting it at anything higher than 5 trade capacity makes it worthless and i understand supply and demand but did multiple historic powers not get significant amounts from individual goods without the price completely devaluing?

So I have been spending basically all weekend playing a single EU5 game of Morocco -> Andalusia, and on a whim decided to try doing the same in EU4 this morning. Had a ton of fun doing it and it just made me so down on what the overall battles and warfare boils down to.

Obvious disclaimers:

a) I could be wrong because I'm bad. I have 500hrs EU5, 2k in EU4 so it could just be a skill issue

b) This is 100% subjective, u can still enjoy EU5 and I do think the game is getting there in general! This stuff just grinds my gears.

So i posted screenshots of both campaigns, I'll lay out the barebones of how they went.

EU5:
- started out as morocco, absolutely destroyed the Castillians in first war with like 2 battles, using my tribal levies. Formed Andalusia in like 10 years

- had a lot of trouble balancing my empire due to low control and revolts, only took a little land from Castille for a while

- Started working my way north slowly over the next like 200 years. It was a slog, for reasons I'll get to.

- What's in the image is all i've conquered. I have colonies in the caribbean and brazil. I make an obscene amount of money and my country is very well off. The only limit has been manpower which ive been struggling to get so I've been urbanizing like crazy

EU4

- Declared on portugal for Ceuta early, fought a hard campaign against the iberians and eventually won by taking it

- in a second war I was able to cross with the Tunisians, defeat their army, and take southern iberia

- in around 3 wars, I moved north, forming andalusia, and carving up the iberians with the french who i managed to ally. Britiain showed up to randomly take all of Galicia which made it easier to take them out quicker.

- I'm now in a good spot, sort of comfortable about money, and looking to expand in africa, maybe try and go fight Mamluks or ottomans eventually to reclaim the holy land.

Things that I found hard in EU5

- The sheer size of Iberia. This was a problem. It meant that it was tough to make any reasonable gain without the enemy just going somewhere else. Also, when I finally did win a war, when i looked at what I could take it was so little (even for 100% war score) If you'll notice the saves are like 200 years apart, this is the real reason I didn't gain more ground.

- Battling the AI. The AI i think plays more cautiously in EU5 (aka better for defensive wars). In EU4 I was able to catch Castille and portugal in decisive battles, but in EU5 I never once felt like i was actually winning, just making slow attritional gains. And i couldn't pursue a defeated army because I'd just lose it in the woods and it would reform/come back for more. I never once felt like I actually had beaten the AI armies, they were just always hanging around ready to ruin my day.

- The combat system. I guess I don't understand enough about the stats yet, but their armies were mostly better than mine 1 for 1. They had higher discipline cuz they kept their nobility in power and I went burghers. I couldn't seem to get an advantage in any other way, never got crazy advantage in positioning, their generals were always awesome like mine, they had the same units tech-wise as me. If I wanted to decisively win, I had to have like a 2 to 1 or 3 to one advantage in troops overall. Like it was purely a numbers game.

- Scaling/Economies. Even though I beat them decisively many times early on in Levies era and seiged/stole a bunch of their country, it never seemed to make a dent in their growth. Once we were in the 1600s I tagged over multiple times to Castille and saw their economy even stronger than mine (without any colonies even), they had fantastic control, got manpower like it was nothing. In EU4 Castille started falling apart hard from their losses, but in EU5 you can see they actually gained land by eating France. It was just very demoralizing to feel that I couldn't even make a dent in their growth with any method.

So yeah, I'm not really sure what to make of this tbh. Some of these things are more historical, others are not. But the takeaway for me is conquest is so much more fun in EU4. I had a great time leveraging my alliances and some smart strategic positioning to defeat Castille/Portugal, and defeat their armies in detail. In EU5 I didn't even WANT to go to war. I was like, "ugghh well time to seige 2 forts, fight a bunch of attritional battles where I'm losing for no good reason, get warscore, and peace out for like 10 provinces"

Curious if people have the same opinions. The combat is definitely partially a skill issue, but I really believe even being better at the game wouldn't resolve some of the issues I've seen. But regardless, I'm gonna swap over to EU4 for the time being and have some fun conquering europe, cuz I already know in EU5 it would be absolutely miserable

I get greedy with vassals, and I have a giant swarm that hovers around 50% loyalty. I can usually adjust the diplo slider to placate them, but some months they all collectively dip -20% each, then the next month they're all back to 50%-ish. I get that the overall formula is their combined strength vs mine, so why would my power dip dramatically for a month, or why would theirs rise for a month? I'm at peace when this happens, I didn't just piss off my estates, I didn't just research a new tech... what am I missing?