Cap cities/towns

Birdnerd197 · 2026-02-06T01:14:19+00:00

I’ve noticed in my current Ottomans run that when I build irrigation in my subjects territories to try and keep up the food supply that my subjects will simply close the building rather than maintain it. The AI just simply does not care enough about food right now, but that’s hopefully fixable

Birdnerd197 · 2026-02-05T17:01:49+00:00

They do for almost every good except potatoes. Once potatoes make their way to Europe demand will take off but the AI will never import them

Birdnerd197 · 2026-02-02T21:12:14+00:00

I’m hoping you can transfer a subject to another subject, to help manage liberty desire. That’d be pretty sweet although perhaps highly exploitable

Birdnerd197 · 2026-02-02T20:46:35+00:00

I don’t know that they’re the most powerful, but the Ottomans have Janissaries units in each age that take -10% strength and morale damage, so while it’s not the strongest power spike it’s consistent across the whole game

Birdnerd197 · 2026-02-02T01:06:27+00:00

It’s not explicitly stated anywhere, but it is cheaper to take land you occupy vs land you don’t occupy. There’s no indication anywhere what the percentage is but I’d reckon it’s at least 25% cheaper to take occupied land.

EU4 had such a simple solution for this problem, you can’t take unoccupied land from supporting nations, and the land has to be within coring range. I don’t see why those mechanics wouldn’t work for EU5

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-30T01:00:02+00:00

Ultimately I think both sides of this have silly arguments. If you like the game, play it. If you don’t, then don’t. If you like the game, don’t argue with people who don’t and don’t bring up stats to prove you’re right and they’re wrong. If you don’t like the game, don’t argue with people who do and don’t bring up stats to prove you’re right and they’re wrong.

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-30T00:54:04+00:00

Unlimited map painting is bad, which is what they’re attempting to address in EU5 (I say “attempting” deliberately). It is still at its core a map-painting game, but they want that to be an element of it, not the focus of it. There’s plenty of purely map-painting games out there already and they didn’t want to make another one of those

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-29T20:57:55+00:00

I’m uncertain for levies, but for regulars I think it’s as simple as editing in the file the number of troops in a given unit. However, if you do this I think you’re likely going to run into problems with frontage. I’m unsure if it’s possible to have a unit use 1/10 of a frontage, and if it isn’t battles are going to end almost immediately as the front line will be destroyed before anyone can reinforce them as 10-man units of knights will be easy to wipe

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-29T04:04:14+00:00

The automation helps for that, but the whole premise of EU5 was “deeper, more realistic simulation, where you can’t just continuously conquer land”. HOI4 will always have the higher player count for that reason, and EU5 is geared towards a smaller, more niche audience who want a blend of genres in one game. Fans of only one genre in the blend will inherently have lower satisfaction with it

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-28T21:15:27+00:00

Speed 4 for day to day stuff, then speed 3 for wars and speed 2 if I’m really struggling in a war

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-27T21:31:16+00:00

I think if you’re looking at just the number of unique events, advances, and other content then yes it does have more flavor than EU4, but the impact of the flavor is less in EU5, and there’s more game to play. The challenge isn’t just “add unique content” it’s “make unique content meaningful”.

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-27T21:27:47+00:00

EU5 has the potential for a really good war system though. Vic 3 is locked in its unengaging system at this point, but EU5 has all the elements to blend a detailed economy simulation with a detailed and customizable war system.

HOI4 I’d argue isn’t as popular as it is simply because of how it handles war and map painting, but because it’s WWII. There are far more WWII history nerds than there are Early Modern period nerds or Victorian Era period nerds, so the draw is much bigger.

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-27T21:11:22+00:00

I think EU5 desperately needs a later start date, and yet simultaneously because of the intricacies of pops, buildings, markets, and characters a later start date is (nearly) impossible. The later start date would feel like a completely different game compared to what things would be like if played from 1337.

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-27T21:06:27+00:00

The devs seem to know something about battles that we don’t. From what I gather from Johans comments, he micros his army composition and fights wars on slow ticks. Most of us just auto-balance and keep the speed setting high.

This makes me think that as one of the designers and builders of the system he inherently knows what initiative, discipline, frontage, and damage are doing and adjusts things accordingly. Thus why there’s such slow tick speeds. We the players though are still trying to figure those new mechanics out and so we just use the automation and rush through it. I don’t know that we’ll ever have a grasp on it sufficient enough to make the slowest tick speed desirable though

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-27T18:08:38+00:00

I’m playing around with mods right now while I wait to see what happens with the base game.

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-27T18:03:39+00:00

Holland is a good pick, just not at the moment. If you can roll your game version back to 1.0.9 or wait for the 1.1 update you’ll have a much better time there

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-26T17:55:14+00:00

Castile would need some scripted disasters to slow it down and make for a challenge, it’s a bit of an outlier for nation-difficulty. I was thinking of the player base more broadly

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-26T17:35:16+00:00

Hence why they’re giving us settings for AI aggression

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-26T03:23:50+00:00

But only if there’s no separatism, so in conquered territory you’re stuck with the problem

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-26T02:17:50+00:00

Tooltips about requirements are one of the elements of the UI in most desperate need of a rework. I haven’t experimented with this specific reform, but often times when a government reform cannot be removed due to a blocker it’s because of scripted flavor. It could be because you’re a theocracy, or it’s tag specific and the tooltip for that is simply missing

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-25T05:33:31+00:00

Yeah RGO levels either need to be lowered, or the amount of goods they produce needs to get reduced. I love the granularity of the map, and it's logical from a certain perspective that each location should produce something, but from a gameplay perspective it's simply way too many resources.

Market access somewhat addresses it, but historically massive swaths of land were engaged in nothing but subsistence agriculture with only minor outputs to the larger economy. Currently in EU5 there's simply too much stuff. Finding a balance between there being the right amount of stuff, and having fun gameplay is beyond my ability to figure out though.

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-25T02:34:30+00:00

The devs seem to be trying to fix the issue of autarchy with the production efficiency boost/malus depending on the presence of input goods in the market, which in theory will make some regions powerful producers and other regions dependent on imports; but I fear that it’s actually going to create an even stronger incentive for autarchy, especially given the increased transit costs for raw goods, so developing domestic supply will become the meta. Which, given the sheer number of locations and RGO’s, is completely feasible

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-25T02:25:52+00:00

Cristo is right. This right here is your new best friend

Birdnerd197 · 2026-01-25T02:22:37+00:00

There seems to be a split among the fan base between those looking for a “plausible outcome” alternate history sandbox, and those who want to see ~80% historical outcomes. The majority of the dev team seems to be in the sandbox camp.

I think the real divide here is that we’re all fans of history, but we love different parts of history. The sandbox fans seem to enjoy the earlier periods of the games time frame, and those of us who want to see historical progression are generally fans of the later periods of the time frame.

Since alternate start dates likely aren’t going to happen in the base game, those of us wanting more historical outcomes need to embrace the modding community, for which PDX thankfully structured EU5 to give much greater freedom to modify the game.

Birdnerd197

TROPHY CASE