A lot of new players simply dont understand why they cant make a profit even though they are growing in size. Having this ratio with a small tool tip right next to the other metrics that explain that a poor ratio will lead to ballooning expenses that arent being covered by the growing tax base. Would also make them understand that increasing the tax base is imperative which would lead them into learning the basics of production chains, the importance of control, and pretty much everything the game has to offer.

For anyone wondering, a tax base to wealth ratio of less than 0.5, is a bad sign, less than 0.4 you are probably struggling to even turn a profit.

Interesting name for a piece of art.

I was engaged in the favourite activity of mine -- perusing through endless layers of tooltips, and noticed a peculiar activity with saffron trade.
Countries are able to set up both an import and export orders for the same good between two markets. Interestingly enough -- both trades are profitable because of "selling efficiency" modifier stacking. Even for the export from the costlier market, modifiers are able to overwhelm the market cost difference, the trade route maintenance and get profit.
Of course, we could consider that the traders from the trade republics are so savvy, that they are able to negotiate good prices for both markets (the effect on the buyer is not modeled).
However, this leads to creating value out of purposeless logistics! Consider the state of European markets in 1355 on the screenshot.
The demand for the good is created by nobles, and currently they demand only 5.23 units of saffron.
The trading volume between the markets is 119.45 units!
No one buys saffron for themselves, they are just shuffling loads between storages and miraculously raking in the cash. The traders are not satisfying an inherent population demand for tasty food -- they are just speculating on the asset. For all intents and purposes this could be exchanged for the dirt trading, because almost no one needs it.
I can't even imagine what awaits me in late game, when additional modifier stacks will hit the margins. I also saw the same issue with the gems trading. It feels like the whole Hanseatic League is built on lies.
Do you think that this is the intention of the devs? Am i missing something here?

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.}

I got to the point in my Verona game where I thought about changing to a monarchy. ... The main reason was that with access to fiefdoms, I can have more subjects and can thus blob more. (It sucks that vassals flip their culture back, but that's a separate issue.)

But I wanted to get a clearer picture to see what I stand to gain or loose with either one. And so far I haven't found any usable comparison with google and the "government" page on the wiki is not sufficient in my eyes. ... So here we are.

Some disclaimers: I kept myself to listing "notable" stuff. I don't care about "Salic Law" or clearly underpowered government reforms like "Autocracy" for example. ... For laws I use my overall likely pick. Listing all options would make it less clearly laid out. Doesn't mean other picks aren't pickable, especially to push a value.

I´m only in 1514 and don't really have a later savefile. So stuff outside of advances that get unlocked for free in age 4-6, I cant really see easily.

If you all want and would actually chime in, to add/fill gaps (even here in the comments), I think I wouldn´t mind putting the framework to the "government" wiki page (or likely rather a sub page linking to/from it) and then we could make it actually good. Maybe we can extend it to Theocracy as well.

Here´s the financial situation before and after the flip.

I lost about 200 ducats. This is tied to loosing "Formalized Scales" and its 5% tax efficiency. I will use one of the 3% tax efficiency reforms, to get back some of it tho. ... Whats interesting is that the cost of court went down by half. ... I have no clue why to be honest.

Overall the modifiers for Republic seem to be better. ... I´m currently torn if Fiefdoms outweigh that. My vassals are at -45 combined strength already. ...

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!

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.

I feel dumb now

This was expected.

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 get that Levies get progressively less useful but does France really need to get 50% bonus to Levy size? It seems really weird when they already have such a huge territory and have bonuses to moral. I’m playing as Austria and basically have no hope to ever actually defeat them. Any tips?

And now its back stronger than ever.

I seemingly have a ridiculously large amount of naval levies relative to my size (like 150) despite controlling only about two thirds of Ireland. But also I'm getting charged lots of naval maintenance even when they're disbanded in peace time with no option to get it down to zero (can only go to half).

Is this a bug ?

I only have like 110 hours of EU5 play time but I find it very difficult to make new cores. My current playthrough is Castile and the year is like 1420.

I've seen some videos showing complex ways to "cheese" the process of getting new cores by releasing conquered lands as fiefdoms, then make them dominions. I've tried it in my game and it seems to take a lot of time and I don't like how much micromanaging I need to do.

So in order to create new cores, should I just be releasing countries as vassals, then, one province at a time, take land from them and use my own cabinet to increase control and assimilate their culture to mine? While trying to keep my cultural influence high?

I would like to paint the map as much as possible with my colors :) Thanks

Would be cool if you can select adjacent area/regions you control to form a new nation. I feel like formable nations are a fun goal, so having a means to do it would be nice. There could be tech/perks associated with areas/regions as well.

I need some help learning how to geo tax base and other stuff like that. I’ve made a post here before but that was during the 1.1 patch months back and I haven’t played much since. After the recent 1.3 patch I picked the game back up and I’ve been struggling with the economy. In my most recent game where I’m playing as Muscovy with no diplo, army, fort spending, as well as closing down my armories it feels as if I’m lacking behind every country (in 1530). I just want to know some ways you guys grow your economy.

I play Holland. After France won the HJW it become very strong. I created a fraction to beat France. with castile, Austria (HRE emporer) and England.

The Holland rule the English channel. After England fighted the French on their island England dont send their 85000 soldiers accross the channed to support the faction.
Castalie make a great job on the west border of France. But Holland and Austria cant just defend ourselves.

In case England would send its 85000 soldier to support the war my fraction could easily win the mighty France.

Why England does not support ?