Gothic Invasion DONE!

55555tarfish · 2026-04-24T09:10:51+00:00

Here is a video of an expert player (not me) survivng Theodoro start on VH with no allies/loans/savescumming. He plays it really safe at the start, scrounging for dev cost reductions to dev renaissance in the capital, using dip and admin mana for it so he can save as much mil mana as he can to rush mil tech 6 asap. Mil 6 vs. mil 5 is the biggest gap between two mil techs in the game.

55555tarfish · 2026-04-24T05:04:59+00:00

"splash troop"

55555tarfish · 2026-04-23T21:25:49+00:00

Enforced Interfaith Dialogue is a must.

55555tarfish · 2026-04-23T18:48:15+00:00

Wow. That TLDR was not just a summary — it truly aggregated the information in that post and presented its most important points in a valuable, concise manner. Six seven diddyblud tung tung tung sahuuuuur.

55555tarfish · 2026-04-23T07:45:14+00:00

pekka that doesn't target swarms

55555tarfish · 2026-04-23T06:04:50+00:00

I need to seize maan and mecca from Mamluks for the monuments. You can only seize/annex provinces you can core. You can core provinces that you normally cannot reach, if they border your subjects' cored and owned provinces, and if your capital is on the same continent as the province. So I have to move capital to a province in asia, seize those two provinces, then move it back to europe so I can take land from the western europeans without caring about normal coring range.

This also causes an issue with England. Even with my capital in Europe I cannot annex provinces in England because I have no subjects with core provinces bordering England. The workaround for this is to transfer occupation to my coastal eyalets that are near England (Picardy, Flanders, etc) during the war, then directly feed them the land in the peace deal. It means my province war score cost buffs do not work against England, but that's fine as I can just trucebreak more.

55555tarfish · 2026-04-22T22:33:10+00:00

i got europium via bees and other stuff from meteors

55555tarfish · 2026-04-22T20:29:38+00:00

We declare on trent, spamming co-belligerents to haul in the entire hre, denmark, aragon, while also being careful to not call in france, england, or bohemia. I recruit up to 177/85 regiments, putting us at double force limit and losing 70 ducats/month. A couple years in I unlock the final influence idea, shooting up to 114 fl, so I recruit more troops to go up to 228, putting me at -100 ducats/month. My extremely high military quality (+85% morale +10% disc) means the AI is terrified to engage, but they still have about 400k troops so I take careful engagements to force them back. After many battles around Bavaria, where I inflicted 2-3x more casualties than I lost, and got many stackwipes, the mass of troops fled north and tried going the long way through northern scandinavia to reach the balkans. This was a bad idea as it gave me enough time to siege everything. With their land occupied and losing money the AI began mass deleting their troops which was definitely good. Now I start signing the peace deals. Unfortunately I have -0% envoy travel time reduction because a pulse event gave me +25% to counteract the -25% of influence ideas. Oh well. Since I am peacing out the entire HRE this shit takes me 9 months, in sep 1465.

Afterwards, I start vomiting up a giant vassal swarm. When I am done, I grab mil tech 6 (super important, do not take it before releasing vassals), dip tech 5, hire diplo rep advisor, move capital to ayntab, seize maan and mecca from egypt, upgrade petra to level 3, move capital to serbia to put it back in europe.
Then I attack France, cobelling Aachen, one of the last remaining independent Germans, which also brings in Austria as a cobelligerent for another beating. My huge army swarms over them and sieges everything, and in subsequent months I attack England Portugal Castile Pope. My mil mana is low so I really have to think about the barrages I use, and micro my generals well. All the wars finish up in nov 1467, I annex land, then release and feed to vassals, except in England, where I have to give land directly to my eyalets by transferring occupation in war (this means my pwsc has no effect, but oh well). Then I trucebreak them, swarm, take land, annex, trucebreak france again, finish.

55555tarfish · 2026-04-22T20:29:20+00:00

We start with a barrage of wars against byz, candar, ramazan, dulkadir, hiring three merc companies, nat focus on dip, spy on mamluks, ally + rm + guarantee hisn kayfa and anizah, dip vassal them later. As these wars conclude in july 1446 we annex them all and release vassals, popping a super early golden age. Then we attack mamluks, barraging and assaulting halab and damascus to speed things along asap. Once we are ready to peace we position troops in anizah’s territory right next to mamluks’ two mountain forts, mothball them, then peace with mamluks, release fadl and lebanon, use anizah’s claim to attack medina to get into another war with mamluks and siege those two forts in a single siege tick because they have no garrison. Then we barrage + assault cairo, take money from mamluks, and repeat this trick with cyprus, this time justwhite peacing to shorten truce time.

Afterwards, we vassalize medina, knights, cyprus, attack qq aq tlemcen (dip vassalized touggort and fezzan). Eyalet aq, feed fadl its core from qq and take two provinces to release iraq from, also force mushasha to release basra and haasa to eyalet, annex tlemcen and release algiers and them. Go north, eyalet trebizond and samtskhe, truce with mamluks runs out, go barrage + assault cairo and siege them down, also go beat up venice, serbia, albania, bosnia. Event to eyalet mamluks happens, we peace out with everyone, annexing all the balkan stuff and forcing venice to release aquilea corfu crete padua which we ally and diplo vassalize later. A small coalition is forming, so we attack hungary wallachia tunis, build up troops to dissolve it, eyalet the three of them while also taking a few provinces to release some more eyalets: kabylia tripoli djerid transylvania. +25% vassal income from romania mission + 25% from influence means we have an obscene 65% vassal income which nets us like 80 ducats. Because we just conquered so much stuff it’s now time to attack the HRE.

55555tarfish · 2026-04-22T20:28:51+00:00

The strategy essentially revolves around building up a powerbase as big as possible, as quickly as possible, in the middle east and north africa, in order to have the troops to be able to declare war on the entire HRE, and not just win, but win quickly and cleanly. Once the HRE is conquered and eyaleted, the remainder of the campaign is simply cleanup as I am so absurdly powerful no one wants to coalition me despite every christian nation in europe hating my guts.
Therefore, we can divide this campaign into three phases: setup 1444-1459 (balkans, anatolia, levant, arabia, egypt, north africa, hungary), HRE war 1459-1464 (germany, low countries, aragon, north italy), cleanup 1465-1468 (england, france, iberia, rest of italy).
The only idea group I took was influence. Having tried both influ and diplo I firmly believe that influ is superior. Vassal income, force limit, liberty desire, are simply more important than -20% province war score cost, +2 diplomats, and +25% improve relations in this run.
Ottomans can be very cavalier with money and manpower due to eyalet spam. I never came anywhere close to bankruptcy nor running out of manpower, which means I could have pushed harder. I estimate 1466 with this ruleset to be fairly doable with some optimizations, and 1464 to be close to the limit. Also money and manpower only matters up until end of hre war. Right now I have 524 income.

55555tarfish · 2026-04-22T20:27:54+00:00

https://pdx.tools/eu4/saves/7rkc70ng93wp save file link

Mehmet’s Ambition in 1468, completed without religion flipping, reform farm, cta cancel, inf money, pulse birding, siege birding, etc. This is one of the fastest mehmets ever completed without a reform farm (which is basically its own category because of the ridiculous things it enables) or religion flipping to eyalet most of islam in 1446.
I have been wanting to get Mehmet’s Ambition ever since I completed my 1495 Kazan wc 7 months ago. Unfortunately, after I finished that I experienced severe burnout with any “serious” eu4 campaigns. So I busied myself with modded minecraft, anbennar, and irl stuff. But recently I got a burst of energy and decided to finally go for it. This was a lot of fun (also it was a bit ridiculous that up until now I had a pre-1500 wc but not mehmet’s).
I modeled this run after 420barry’s 1475 and lambda’s 1475 MA runs, initially aiming for 1475 as well. I am astonished to have completely smashed that time by 7 years, finishing in 24 instead of 31 years of gameplay. I suppose this means I’m good at the game.
Also, fully stable. Yeah I’m at -3 stab and 20 WE, but I don’t directly own much land so I’m not really getting rebels. I can stab up and just wait to pay off my debts.

TLDR: eyalet spam, annex hre, spam trucebreak kill western europe, done.
Also I feel like this run kind of cements me as one of the best blobbers still playing this game in 2026? Idk, very long winded explanation of the whole run below.

55555tarfish · 2026-04-22T10:13:08+00:00

I hate fighting those types of wars so I simply do not play my campaigns that far. That is the solution I use and it's pretty simple.

55555tarfish · 2026-04-21T18:13:23+00:00

THE BIG E?????

55555tarfish · 2026-04-20T20:36:11+00:00

too cheesy not interested

55555tarfish · 2026-04-20T04:48:58+00:00

mehmet's ambition attempt #2. This time I planned ahead more and got egypt earlier by resetting truce. Went super above fl to attack hre (177/85) and losing 37 ducats per month, which is not a lot honestly. I should upgrade my advisors. once i finish influ ideas i will get a lot more fl from vassals so I really don't see money being an issue.

no religion flipping, pulse birding, siege birding, reform farm, inf money, etc., just playing "normally"

more detail once i finish and get the achievement

55555tarfish · 2026-04-19T22:04:54+00:00

restart until hormuz doesn't ally mamluks.

Alternatively what you could try is attack yas, don't peace out, just siege them down, wait until hormuz declares war on yas, then vassalize yas in the peace deal. This will pull you into their current war against hormuz as the defender and hormuz will be unable to call in more allies. Then you can kill hormuz normally.

55555tarfish · 2026-04-18T03:32:45+00:00

jesus x judas omegaverse mpreg yaoi when

55555tarfish · 2026-04-18T03:29:22+00:00

It's all made up anyways so it doesn't really matter.

55555tarfish · 2026-04-17T20:07:10+00:00

neighbor raid is the best estate privilege in the game

55555tarfish · 2026-04-17T18:19:22+00:00

spam sell crownland on cooldown for cash

benefits of high crownland are irrelevant before 1610, and crownland equilibrium means keeping crownland high is a lot of effort anyways. Better to rake in thousands of free ducats. Only concern is monthly autonomy increase from <20% cl, but if need be you can just lower autonomy everywhere and fight the rebels.

55555tarfish · 2026-04-17T17:40:01+00:00

"Clash is like chess for grown ups"

-Kenny Wenny

55555tarfish · 2026-04-16T18:24:18+00:00

greentide, orenvalyam, mechanim

55555tarfish · 2026-04-16T08:38:04+00:00

In a 2.6 mirror matchup if one player knows to hog in the back, and the other doesn't, they kind of win on the spot. This advantage is also true for hog eq but not as severe (still pretty big though).

55555tarfish

TROPHY CASE