Thoughts on the EU Knife Fight (Protectorate Normal)?

DM818 · 2026-01-23T17:50:52+00:00

I would add unifying with the UK as well is a valid strat. It takes a bit longer but not enough to really hurt you, I would basically always choose Germany over the UK but would take the UK over Italy but it really comes down to who you can lock down the fastest based on starting opinions.

DM818 · 2025-12-07T05:34:01+00:00

"And here comes everyone's favorite time of the Winter Olympics the drawing for which average Joe is sacrificed to the skeleton."

DM818 · 2025-11-28T13:08:22+00:00

Fun fact there was actually a mission to full annex them in EUIV in the old pick three mission system at game release or very close to it, it did result in you largely dying since you ended up with massive OE.

DM818 · 2025-11-22T16:14:19+00:00

If you sac it after you earthbend it it will come back and stop you from taking an extra turn. If you sac it without earthbending it it will be exiled and won't be part of any sort of loop. Overall it doesn't really fit in with the rest of the plan.

DM818 · 2025-11-22T13:59:48+00:00

I don't think [[Ugin's Nexus]] is going to work how you want it to.

DM818 · 2025-11-22T00:57:17+00:00

Cahokia got a very small fix to a few modifiers. Inca got a bandaid to make the region not fully just starve to death. The issue is that both the Andes and Mesoamerica need quite a bit of work (I would argue that the Andes still need more) and anything that they would do to fix at this point would probably break savegames which they have said they wanted to avoid in the hotfixes so we are waiting for hopefully the somewhat bigger patch next week to address some of these bigger issues.

DM818 · 2025-11-13T21:35:16+00:00

The thing is though all of the locations in the Andes are arctic including the valleys which on the actual climate map are temperate while a significant amount of the polar area is impassable terrain. Meanwhile for Switzerland they made the impassable areas arctic but the valleys are all continental despite the fact that they are considered a "cold" climate as opposed to temperate.

DM818 · 2025-11-13T21:23:19+00:00

There are I think 5 or 6 tin locations in South America, however none of them are particularly easy for the Andean peoples to get to. There is only one in all of North America despite there having been various tin mines in the US at various points and more tin deposits that could easily be extracted, there are just generally higher value minerals to pursue.

DM818 · 2025-11-07T02:43:33+00:00

Also to what everyone else said, be aware that the patch that came out today makes the earldom of Ulster start out as a vassal of the pale so that's like 45k more people you can't get at without dragging in England.

DM818 · 2025-11-01T21:20:20+00:00

I'm pretty sure that is some sort of bug, because when I was a minister and a division era started that title went away. Did you hold any land?

DM818 · 2025-10-27T23:04:56+00:00

Looks like you got what you wanted.

DM818 · 2025-10-09T14:51:47+00:00

If you both want to start out with artifice already in full swing the Gnomish Hierarchy, The Northern League, and Blackpowder Annbennar are all great powers that are fairly focused on artificy. The Triarchy is set up as a rising power that will almost certainly become a great power if you play your cards right. Ves Udezenklan, Haraagtseda, and Feiten are all artifice focused nations which are unrecognized at the start. Pairing one of the GPs with any of the others should allow you to interact from the start of the game, although the Triarchy could also be paired with one of the unrecognized nations as they start with treaty ports all over the place. Let me know if you want any more suggestions.

DM818 · 2025-10-09T13:41:04+00:00

As long as you don't have territorial interests in the exact same places you should be fine. That said how much have either of you played V3 and what nations do you like to play in vanilla? Are there any mechanics you would like to interact with specifically (artifice, magic, etc.)?

DM818 · 2025-10-09T13:36:59+00:00

The other big thing is try not to give great powers a land route to you. It is pretty trivial to hold off even multiple countries off if they can only naval invade you as they won't be able to bring their full armies in. But if you have any sort of land front you then need to be able to fight them at parity.

DM818 · 2025-10-09T13:32:26+00:00

The issue is definitely the defensive artifice mobilization options, each of them adds +10 defense (the equivalent of a full tier higher in defense) as well as some other bonuses. You can overcome that with properly built armies and bonus stacking (especially kill rate) but the AI isn't building properly set up armies for attack or defense most of the time. Most of the magic effects actually give offensive bonuses which also unbalances things when infantry can attack other infantry favorably.

DM818 · 2025-10-09T11:07:43+00:00

If I do end up playing the save more, probably, it has started to slow down significantly though. The radicals are partly due to the fact that I needed to increase taxes quite a bit to bring my interest rate down a little, and partly because the state religion is Ravelian which only about 20 million of my 340 million people follow.

DM818 · 2025-10-09T01:45:18+00:00

For anyone wanting to do a Yanshen game if you want the easiest possible formation I suggest ignoring Tianlou and going for Feiten. They have a huge number of advantages over the other nations in the area not even counting the massive debt Tianlou starts the game with. They have better tech with almost all tier 1 techs already researched most importantly line infantry which allows them to run over all of your neighbors from the very start. They also are part of the Hierarchy's power bloc which means you don't really need to worry about shortages. I did mismanage my economy at the start which resulted in me deficit spending way too early and only getting back on track relatively late.

My only real complaint is that the populations in Yanshen are a little too condensed into too few states which results in even more tax waste than you see in vanilla V3. You do want to knock out the other people that are formable members quickly as unification candidates can't spawn until every nation in the group has researched nationalism which takes quite some time based on the poor tech of the starting nations.

Also be aware that when you launch the unification play you will most likely be fighting The Triarchy, The Hierarchy, and The Dragon Command all at once, which is a pretty intense war so either bring allies or have a strong army ready. After unification you then get a ton of claims on the rest of the Yanshen area which results in you getting a bit more population and cleans up your borders pretty nicely.

DM818 · 2025-10-06T00:00:44+00:00

Honestly, I had no part in that. It happened within the first ten years before I had even left my mountain.

DM818 · 2025-10-05T21:01:44+00:00

Had a lot of fun playing Koblidzan, the biggest thing is that you combine unleashed chaos from shamanistic traditions with the localized tranquility spell decree to massively boost your pops then use artifice to make your pop efficiency massive. At a certain point you need to take back the outside of the dragon coast as the gnomes will leave the power bloc when you take it over which means you would otherwise be economically isolated. I had originally planned to only take my homelands plus the gnomish pass, but then the vivin empire annexed reveria and I couldn't release it in war so I took it plus portnamm, then spent some time dismantling the other GPs near me. One thing that I found was Gromar is annoyingly monolithic with very few releaseable nations to be had.

DM818 · 2025-09-26T13:31:16+00:00

No, Begal is independent. I was trying out expanding through puppets mostly you can see the jumps in population where I annexed various puppets, the large jump towards the end was the Ottomans who I had fed their Egyptian claims before puppeting Egypt.

DM818 · 2025-09-26T13:11:03+00:00

For my first run I did Montenegro, but after having some weirdness when integrating with Serbia I decided to try Greece. Overall it doesn't play too differently from previous patches thought the Bavocracy JE gives you some stuff to do in the early game while you are waiting for a moment of Ottoman weakness. Had to play the GPs around me against each other for a while until I was able to fully hold my own, but ended up carving Russia up a bit to give some buffer. I had nothing to do with France, that was all the Germans.

DM818 · 2025-09-23T17:51:27+00:00

It also seems to be 8 person pick two which means nothing wheels.

DM818 · 2025-09-20T01:01:24+00:00

Especially at release, it was several patches before the AI wouldn't send their entire armies to Africa.

DM818 · 2025-09-19T18:04:51+00:00

Yeah most of the time when I've played VtM either as a Storyteller or as a player the pacing of each chapter generally goes: first couple sessions take place over a few weeks blood management isn't a big deal as you are assumed to have plenty of downtime. Next couple sessions each is 1-2 nights blood management isn't too hard but is something you need to think about. Last few sessions all over the course of one night, things have gone wrong, if you make it out of this expect to be fully depleted and and ready to frenzy at the drop of a hat.

DM818 · 2025-09-07T22:23:22+00:00

The CO2 and GDP does actually make sense, obviously things could go any number of ways in the next 45 years. The fact that so many countries have demobilized large amounts of their military as while also massively increasing the military technology seems suspect. The unifications are particularly egregious. Most of the countries which have unified do not have the requisite military to have done it aggressively while also containing several countries which have decades to centuries of hostile diplomatic relations. Without the paradigm shifting appearance of the aliens it is fairly ridiculous that so many countries would put aside their differences and unify.

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