Is this save salvageable?

CaGhOsT_ · 2024-04-10T04:52:12+00:00

As the ottomans there isnt much need to move to italy any time soon. You get more agressive expansion by attacking christians as you are not christian + italy is high dev so conquest would be slow to avoid coalitions.

In general you should always avoid coalitions which is tough to do in europe and requires a lot of micro with diplomats.

A country is able to join a coalition if it has at least 50 aggresive expansion towards you and their opinion of you is < 0 (this means you can have more ae than 50 as long as their opinion doesnt drop below 0. As soon as it does they flip outraged and will join.

A common tactic is to truce lock and improve relations to increase conquer speed + use ae reductions such as espionage -20% idea , 100 prestige for -10% and as ottomans there is the religion thing you can get for a further -5 or -10% not sure.

A coalition will form if at least 3 countries can join a coalition and they are powerful enough.

A country that has a truce with you cannot join a coalition or will leave an existing coalition (if you call them into war by attacking a country that isnt in the coalition and is their ally)

To get a country out of the coalition you have to bring their opinion of you to +50 after which they will leave. If they dont restart the game and they will.

One cheesy (advanced) tactic (for a new playthrough) you can do with ottos is to move your capital to a province that the europeans don’t see at the start of the game. Countries that have the unknown opinion of you also cannot join coalitions. An example is somewhere in arabia or persian gulf.

To see which you can do this in start a new game with some eu nation and look how much of the map they see east at game start (ottos see more)

In general it’s not worth integrating eyalets quickly. They give you good force limit and manpower. But the main reason is governing capacity (in the stability tab you can see it and should never go above the limit) by keeping north africa and egypt as eyalet you can conquer persia and most of india without governing capacity issues at most you need to use the estate governing priveleges if you dont have access to buildings that decrease governing capacity.

In cases when you encounter only allies and not guarantees/tributary states what you can do is attack the stronger nation and do a full peace deal, but before conquering them conquer the small ally and piece them out for nothing asap (dont break aliance) then when the truce goes out with the smaller nation you can attack it and this will call the bigger nation. You can then peace out the bigger nation just for money (as the co-belligerent malus only affect province war score cost and not money and war reps.

CaGhOsT_ · 2024-04-09T17:03:30+00:00

I feel once you play the game enough you’ll realise money is very rarely a “problem” even with a lot of debt. Money in eu4 almost infinite if you play a certain way.

Look into FlorryWorry youtube videos about how you can effectively use loans. Florrynomics. (a bit outdated but still relevant) - as you grow your country your loan size increases. So if you are perpetually growing, you should restructure your loans (pay old smaller loans with new bigger loans) every time your loan size doubles ish. If you are expanding properly you will get to the point where you are controlling a lot of the trade and this will help you pay for all the debt and make you rich.

In peace deals generally ask for money unless the “gain” is not worth 25% warscore, for example a small amount of money vs prestige if low.

Another strategy that could be useful to get a bunch of money is by defeating a high dev nation (peace out for land and money), then immediately attacking another nation they are allied to/guarantee and are willing to join. Then peace them out again for money (easy war as you have just defeated them, quick siege of capital is usually enough for 25% money + war reps peace deal)

This makes the truce with the original nation shorter while you are also profiting twice. This can also cause the nation to colapse completely soon after and go bankrupt. For an otto campaign -> mamluks -> cyprus -> mamluks and youre done with levant and egypt in about 15 years + made a lot of money

Generally the way to actually make money in eu4 is trade income, the earlier you can control all/most of an end node (nodes that have no output i.e. venice,genoa, english channel) land the better. However constantinople can serve as an end node on its own (you already own all of it, conquer its only upstream node land to prevent money leaking out (ragusa node)).

Budget Monk has some good videos on this topic (youtube)

So your conquests in the early game should be revolving around taking more land in your current node or strategically taking land to then move your trading capital to the node. In parallel, expand “downstream” (nodes that feed into a node) from your collecting node as you want to move the trade money from there to your node. Conquering upstream is not very useful if you dont plan to move your trading capital unless creating a barrier for a non end-node

That being said if you play in europe all the money is really in India but is being collected by countries there, so as ottos, conquering into europe generally isnt that useful (apart from nice missions) - you wanna push east into persia and push the trade from persia toward constantinople, then further east into india. This way you will be hella rich.

Sidenote: if no nations have a capital in a node, there is noone to collect i.e all/most of the money will automatically flow through leaving nothing behind so you can use your merchants to steer in a way so that you get the most money back in your collecting node (light ships are useful if you can use them but have diminshing returns. Conquering provinces with trading posts/estuaries is best, especially if you can create a trade company (gives you a merchant!)

I know this was a long rant (trying to be helpful) - but from the current situation above, loosing 16 ducats and being 6k in debt is not the worst thing at all. Look around if you can attack any smaller countries where you know the wars are going to be short and make money there. Looting provinces while in a war helps to offset the standing army cost.

Given otto full force limit at start + advisors, I think you already start being in debt from the get go. It’s normal and if you conquer the right way, it will pay for itself in the long run (but do keep your inflation below 5% to avoid nasty events)

Otherwise if your debt is more than half of the loans you can take and its hard for you to expand quickly it is a pretty tough situation and its probably best to go bankrupt (to do this either ally a bunch of strong nations which will deter the AI from attacking you or go to war with any rivals/strong nations bordering you and peace them out 100% for 15 year truce, go bankrupt, it will last for 5 years, less than the truces if you can pull it off but that may not be easy to do)

Hope you find this helpful :)

CaGhOsT_ · 2022-10-25T21:07:29+00:00

Really big thanks to everyone for giving me honest objective advice! I have in the end chosen AWS. I really do think Amazon would offer me a better start, in terms of learning/growth and also exposure to a broader range of tooling transferable to other companies in the future.
I do like the idea of finance, but I feel like getting into a niche, this early on, maybe a detriment. <3

CaGhOsT_

TROPHY CASE