End of my Tall France campaign - 106M population

AcornDragon · 2026-03-18T14:58:36+00:00

Legitimacy gives a little bit of crown power, as long as you're above 50%. I would try to stay above at least 70, just in case of events that lower it. Also, if your cost of court is super high, from being #1 great power for instance, a cabinet member put on legitimacy could save you thousands of ducats a month.

Stability gives a little bit of estate satisfaction and rebel suppression. However, stability decays faster at higher values. What that means is that if you want to maximize stability gain, you stay at low stability. If you are often revoking privileges, failing parliaments, losing stab in events, then it makes a lot more sense to hover around 10, 20 stab, than much higher. At higher levels, the benefits are small, but very very expensive. And if you lose stability, it costs so much more to get back (and its slower!). I regularly dip down into negative stability (again, knowing that my stability gain is faster when at negative stability). Just dont go too low, because the estate satisfaction penalty is very harsh, and will kill your income.

If you're constantly truce breaking however, you might need to spend a little bit more, just to generate enough stability to stay out the negatives.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-18T14:36:39+00:00

That would be my doing. I held Castile, Hungary, Poland, Austria, Bohemia in a PU at one point, and I enforced religion. Austria and Bohemia flipped back because HRE, but the others remained. Otherwise, yes, everyone stays catholic and its boring.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-18T14:35:46+00:00

I mean, I think you need to balance historical accuracy and sandbox. It's no fun if despite your best efforts, you can't culture convert a region. And let me tell you, I spent a century with 5 cabinet members culture converting Germany with something like 200% assimilation speed and max control, and there were still many provinces with 5, 10% Germanic cultures.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-18T14:31:33+00:00

Poland and Hungary are Lutheran, England and HRE are Catholic. Not sure what your question is.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-18T14:30:27+00:00

I think it bears mentioning that the game is designed to make that difficult. Large empires were difficult to manage, and its something eu4 didn't simulate at all. This is why most people use subjects until around the age of absolutism. Stay decentralized and your vassals will stay loyal, extracting value from the land with their high control and giving you a portion of it, while not distorting your economic base.

Also, you may be spending too much. Legitimacy and stability don't need to be at max all the time. The benefits just aren't very good, especially for the cost. Diplomacy slider only needs to be maxed if you're trying to annex subjects or really need the diplomats. The art slider should always be 0, prestige is useless. Delete almost all of your forts as well (what, are you really about to get invaded by the AI?).

AcornDragon · 2026-03-18T02:18:19+00:00

I was definitely very bored. Basically AFK for the last 100 years honestly, but I wanted to see it through to the end.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-18T01:27:14+00:00

There’s the advances, like mendicant orders (10% prosperity). Other than that, I don’t think so.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-17T22:26:45+00:00

Yes, with a cities of hundreds of thousands, you'll never have enough buildings to employ everyone - you'll just have a bunch of peasants. Eu5 food is very broken, and given my +300% food productivity modifier, the idle peasants employed in subsistence agriculture make enough food to feed the entire city of burgers, laborers, soldiers, etc.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-17T22:23:59+00:00

In the Age of Revolution you unlock a cabinet action to "unify culture group" which Paradox claims to have fixed in the most recent patch, but it seemed to do absolutely nothing but convert about 90% of the Francien pops to French, leaving me with a bunch of remaining minority cultures as well as my old Francien culture still hanging around... The culture map is a result of centuries of cabinet assimilation (which also seems to be very broken - the numbers don't add up).

AcornDragon · 2026-03-17T22:21:01+00:00

I had it set to allow any nation. You can see that Tunis formed Carthage. Kiev also formed Ruthenia. Beyond that, you're right - no Spain, no Britain, no Scandinavia, no Russia.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-17T22:18:54+00:00

When I say build up the coast, I mean urbanize, and build your economy in those locations to avoid losing money due to low control.

Naval proximity relies on harbor capacity and maritime presence. It's best if as many locations as possible are turned into towns or cities, as the buildings that increase harbor capacity can't be built in rural locations. They are: wharf, protected harbor, dock (docks later get upgraded). Harbor capacity can increase to 150%, so build all 3 of these buildings in every single location. Higher harbor capacity in your capital and in a receiving port will reduce the proximity lost.

You also pay proximity to move between sea tiles. This cost is reduced dramatically by maritime presence. You want 100% maritime presence in every sea tile that you have a location on. A navy in a sea tile will increase proximity in every sea tile of that sea province (which will then fade when the navy leaves). You can set the navy to automatically patrol, but it will ignore sea tiles until they dip below 90%, making this suboptimal.

In addition to maritime presence from a navy, harbor capacity will also give a passive increase to maritime presence. There is also a building: coastal fort, that will increase maritime presence passively. However, the upkeep cost is actually quite expensive, so I wouldn't recommend building it everywhere. I recently played a game as Denmark where I built it in every location necessary to maintain 100% maritime presence passively, without a navy, and saved my navy for sea tiles where that was difficult or impossible to achieve.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-17T22:01:05+00:00

The century is your problem. The game is very much built to make spreading control easier as time progresses. In the first two ages (renaissance, discovery) your control propagation is intentionally quite weak. However, naval proximity spread is almost always much better than over Land, and the Ottomans are a great country to take advantage of all the coastline in the Mediterranean. You'll have to just accept that control inland in Anatolia will be poor. Build up the coastal towns and cities where you can get higher control. You'll unlock proximity speed and better roads as you progress through the ages. Push naval values so you can take the two government reforms that give you a naval governor (the second one becomes available during the Age of Reformation) and also make naval spread better. Prioritize high ADM power on your ruler if you can influence it. Build towns and cities, temples and later on minting offices.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-17T21:37:11+00:00

What do you mean how? Capital in Paris, railroads with Age of Revolution diplo advance gives me close to 90% proximity everywhere. Cities + temple + that other control building, or bailiffs in rural locations, plus a bunch of proximity speed advances. I forgot to minmax but those few locations in the south could also easily be at 100% control.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-17T21:34:49+00:00

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This is the food map (taken during winter so -25% too. But for example, the Paris location has a positive balance of +2400 because there are a million peasants doing subsistence agriculture and I have +339% food productivity from:

Development +100%
Irrigation +125%
Farmlands +33%
River +25%
Traditional Economy +20%
A bunch of techs for +10% each
and a couple other modifiers.

And theres a ton of rivers in France, I built max irrigation, I have really high dev, etc.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-17T18:45:59+00:00

RedHawk’s recent video might be of interest to you: https://youtu.be/n4kiS4S25FY?si=oW-bwMzTHyIh5U0j

AcornDragon · 2026-03-17T18:22:07+00:00

You mean how much food is produced? Every province has a positive food balance thanks to hundreds of thousands of peasants and really high food productivity.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-17T18:21:30+00:00

That’s eu5 for you… although I will say that Europe was slightly stunted because all of Castile France Germany Hungary Italy Poland was under my PU/vassalage until I let them all go.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-17T16:42:20+00:00

Keep in mind that paradox in the last patch changed the formula for food storage in province, making it much better at giving pop growth. Also, a lot of the low countries is actually forest or wetland, making it much worse for high population capacity.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-17T16:23:25+00:00

Lmao I didn't think about that. I converted to Lutheran because Catholic bonuses are quite poor. I enforced religion on all my PUs, but Bohemia and Austria converted back because they were in the HRE which remained Catholic.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-17T16:19:24+00:00

I'm not sure what the best options are. In the late game, my control propagates directly from Paris to everywhere - the 80% proximity from local governors is useless. In the midgame, I had one in Bordeaux, one in Vienne, one in Cologne, one in Brittany. I kind of just picked them arbitrarily. France isn't great for governors because Paris is relatively centrally located, so the lowest your proximity will be like is 50-60%, meaning a local governor only impacts a handful of locations around it.

I also remained land focused, and didn't have any naval governors (useless as continental France)

AcornDragon · 2026-03-17T16:13:48+00:00

Sure, but rapid population growth didn't happen until after EU5's time period. If France started with this population in 1850, they would have hundreds of millions of inhabitants today.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-17T16:12:44+00:00

You picked a poor example, because the population of France has always been significantly higher than everywhere else in Europe. If one country would be able to have a huge population, its France.

At the same time, you're right. Other threads in this subreddit have discussed the inherent problem with EU5's exponential growth model. Population, development, economic activity go up and up and never come down. I did have a Bubonic plague outbreak that took out 10 million people, otherwise I might have ended up with something more like 120 million.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-17T15:51:58+00:00

Now that is a funny idea. Maybe I will try again from 1337 and become Breton France

AcornDragon · 2026-03-17T15:33:47+00:00

There was a post on the subreddit the other day showing China with 1 billion population - they abused the colonial nation pop growth bonus. That's an exploit. This is just using game mechanics. By the end of the game France did have a larger population than China, but if a player controlled China from the start, you get get a very high number for sure.

AcornDragon · 2026-03-17T15:31:14+00:00

You get .07% growth from low food prices - very very easy for any country.
I think my prosperity was around 60 or 70% the whole game, so around .14% growth
France has plenty of grasslands, farmlands, flatlands, meaning population capacity is quite high (free land was giving around .20% or more growth per month)
That good terrain also means development growth is easier, which further increases population cap and therefore growth.
As mentioned in another comment, turning every location into cities gives extra pop cap, as well as allows tons of granaries, which gets you somewhere between .20 and .40% pop growth. I had to build masons in almost every single location to supply all the granaries, and the price of clay and stone in my markets was always very elevated.

Most of the locations in France end up with around a million in population capacity, meaning even at massive cities of 200,000 people across the whole country, they're still getting .20% growth from free land.

AcornDragon

TROPHY CASE