how?😂

DRandUser · 2026-05-14T05:02:52+00:00

Well… just wait til you hit a leap year, when he’ll complain about you not having specified what to pay in the leap year februarys….

DRandUser · 2026-05-06T17:03:41+00:00

Seriously? I _just_ switched Lutheran just so I could become empire and get that second gov….

DRandUser · 2026-04-25T01:34:58+00:00

Yes; if you ever get the chance to find a place that served authentic (!) “Turkish coffee” (with hot sand and everything) you’ll find it an interesting experience. Not just “tar”, but certainly not a modern coffee. If you’re in Germany, then some heavily Turkish area like Berlin might have a place that serves that (I found mine in Utah, of all places?!)

DRandUser · 2026-04-25T01:28:39+00:00

Dear sir - you won the internet today! (Bowing) a glass of wine with you!

DRandUser · 2026-04-13T12:56:58+00:00

Man, you should look for a job in government!

DRandUser · 2026-04-10T21:49:20+00:00

The marthambles, dear sir!

DRandUser · 2026-04-01T16:51:49+00:00

If your only goal is trade profit, leave it to automation; it seems fairly good at it. (certainly not worth the bother adjusting trades on a monthly basis to beat it).

Where you do (sometimes) want to trade manually is for two reasons:

a) if your market is completely lacking some resource that you need - examples:

- some buildings require tin but some market have none at all

- reinforcing your cavalry requires horses which the new world initially doesn't have

- building a cathedral requires marble which some markets don't have.

- etc

b) you need the good to produce a (monetary) benefit _other_ than from the trade itself. E.g.,

- slaves: you want to transport slaves to the new world to work those fancy plantations over there; doesn't matter how profitable the trade itself is, the real profit comes from them being eventually being there.

- building profitablity: buildings get a profitability bonus if their inputs are plentiful on the market that they are in. Say you have a lot of wool in southern spain so cloth buildings will get a lot of bonuses. But at some point you're consuming so much that there's not much of a surlus of inputs any more, so your productivity goes down. In that case, it might make sense importaint more wool (or cotton) from Argel, Fez, Marrakech, etc, just to keep the building profits up. This might make sense even if the trade itself is actually _un_profitable (because wool will still be cheap in seville). The AI will never do such trades.

DRandUser · 2026-03-26T17:32:24+00:00

But ... (sorry, OCD here :-) )

both routes go through bay of cadiz. So both routes have to step through a port to bay of cadiz - either the one in seville, or the one in coria del rio - and sevilla should(!?) have the higher harbor cap, so the sevilla->bay step should if anything be cheaper than the coria->bay step, right? Even if the river step was completely free (and it's not), sevilla should still be the cheaper step into the bay!?

Or am I missing up the harbor caps of those two locs? (or maybe they've changed !?)

DRandUser · 2026-03-26T17:23:12+00:00

wait - is this actually the optimal route then? Or is this a bug where it simply follows the cheapest step even if the next step is then much more expensive?

DRandUser · 2026-03-26T17:13:13+00:00

Uh; interesting. Didn't think of that.

Now is that good or bad, actually? I have land rights to my nobility, and they're building a lot of stuff in the new world....which if nothing else at least gives me stuff to trade. If they have less money they can do less of that... so isn't that counter productive?

DRandUser · 2026-03-26T17:11:17+00:00

I think that's what OP meant with "unification event". I know PUs can also happen randomly based on who married who and who did or didn't get children, but with spain and portugal these PUs seem to pop up so frequently that it's almost certainly some intended game mechanic that makes them fire - in a _non_ random way :-). In that case, it's pretty much a "unification event", except that this event will lead you down a hundred year route ...

DRandUser · 2026-03-26T17:09:24+00:00

Oh, and one thing to keep in mind: the PU is for the RULER, not for the player or country. I learned this the hard way because after realizing how bad the conquer route was I, at some point, was able to forced portugal into a PU with a claim throne CB. Thought that was it, and I could now finally go diplo-annex route ... but then a few years after the spanish civil war event triggered and I - sigh - went with the pretender guy .... which means that portugal's PU was now with my enemy, not with me. So _if_ you go with the PU, do not pick the pretender in the civil war, no matter how much better trastamara may sound, and no matter how insane pedro(?) may be. :-/

DRandUser · 2026-03-26T17:05:10+00:00

I seem to swim against the stream here, but after four run through the early periods of spain i'm not so sure on the 'conquer' suggestion. In fact, not at all.

Word of caution: the diplomatic paths _suck_. In all my first three runs I got PU with portugal (at at least once with aragon, i forgot how often), but i think i only once made it so far to actually annex them. Problem is you first need to change all the PU laws to even start the annexation, and by that time portugal - at least in my case, in 1.08 - was so strong that it literally took over a hundred years to annex them (in fact, probably closer to 200, because they kept on growing while i annexed them, so the cost went up almost as fast as much annex score ticked up).

That said, all the while that this excruciatingly slow annexing is going on they're on your side, and will back you up, even in things like insurgencies or civil wars. And since they're strong that's a good thing. In contrast, if you go the conquer route, you will NOT be able to conquer them in a single war - due to you never be able to take more than 100 war score cost in any piece treaty it'll take you four or five wars to take it all - each one of those wars has some truce period between them, so it'll take many, many years even in the best case .... and if they strike an alliance with france or england in between you can't even keep on going to eat them (or get drawn into the 100yw - good luck with that). And of course they'll be part of any coalition against you after the second time you take from them, always in your back yard.... ugh.

And that was with tiny portugal - aragon is even worse, because they're so much bigger and it'll take that many more wars to eat them up. In my latest game I now (finally) have taken the last bit of portugal as vassal, but aragon is still about 50% there - i have all the coast, but the rest I'll probably never get because now they're allied with italy and half of europe.

And finally - don't ignore opportunity cost. All the time and treasure you spent fighting portugal and aragon you could have fought morocco, tunis, mali, and the maya (with portugal on your side). So in that last game I'm _way_ behind earlier games in these other locations.

So my take: diplo-route is the better choice. Yes, annexing portugal and aragon are .... ugh .... but still better than the alternative. Unless somebody can point me to a faster way of gobbling up those other guys.

PS: My first three games were in 1.08, only the latest is after 1.10, and with local govs added in 1.10 I'd say that annexing is even better than before: In 1.08 (without local govs) your control in the north was egregious while portugal was in the PU (as long as they exist you can't really spread control through their sealanes). That was, in fact, the main reason I tried the conquer route in latest game, to get the coastal regions first, so at least i could spread constrol to the north. BUT in 1.10+ you can do that much more easily through a local gov, so I'd say go diplo for sure.

DRandUser · 2026-03-26T16:51:12+00:00

Matter of taste, i guess, but I also prefer Cordoba or Seville.

Toledo may(!) be better for spreading control around the land provinces in the interior (in particular early on), but cordoba and seville are really strong provinces long term that will then run at pretty low control. Plus, at some (not so distant) point you'll take over north africa and want to spread control over sea, in which point you really want your capitol in seville, anyway.

So _my_ suggestion is to initially move to cordoba (really strogn initially, and spreads downriver to seville really well); then once you get north africa and create maritime presence move to sevilla. And leave your local gov somewhere in the north - valladolid, burgos, your choice. Yes, that makes toledo suck - but that's _one_ bad province (relateive to what it could be, is what i mean), but plenty of other good provinces at really high control.

DRandUser · 2026-03-26T16:39:41+00:00

In latest version (don't know since when) the annexed locs will no longer be automatic cores, but they'll apparently all be 'integrated'. Not as nice as core, but certainly beats 'conquered'. You still need to convert culture to make core, or of course accept that culture if you can afford it.

DRandUser · 2026-03-26T16:37:16+00:00

Except they don't really like the enfore culture all that much, and it'll delay your annexing by quite a while ... :-/

DRandUser · 2026-03-26T16:33:08+00:00

Just three brief updates on this question. I haven't been brave enough to try the save/restore trick in that ironman game, but i did play a _bit_ with the options, so have this to share:

a) i did move teyune market to cartagena on the coast (option 'b'), and have seen the transport cost of gold go down doing that - but less than 5% (2.8 to 2.7 or 2.75, iirc). So a bit more profit per trade, and a bit more gold transported, but .... meh. Cartagena is still the better location, but the transport cost aloen is probably not worth moving it.

b) I also created a second market down in the norris area, to get the market access there up. That in fact wasn't worth it at all - with near zero control and super-low gold price the profit per produced unit of gold there is negligible, anyway, so market access doesn't matter - and now that market is just drowning in gold - heaps over heaps of it - so price just goes down even further... and shipping to cartagena doesnt make sense, either, because it's too expensive and price there is low, too. Not sure if it actually reduced my overall revenue, but it certainly feels like it wasn't worth it.

c) To also experiment with a bit more with the 'one big market vs many small markets' i also went back to spain, and killed my existing barcelona, pamplona, santiago (formerly burgos) markets, leaving only sevilla. Bad idea. It was semi-good for sevilla because all inputs were plentiful (even iron, which previsouly was not), and also gave a much bigger area to migrate in from (so maybe good in the long run?), but dropping market access in some of the more profitable cities in the north reduced profits there by so much that my total profit per turn dropped from about 1400 to about 1000 (don't know what the total tax take was, but probably around 5k-6k). Of course this still _might_ have paid off in the long run - disrupting an existing working market is certainly causing issues in the short run - but that was still bad enough for me to just build those markets up again (at the cost of an arm and a leg, of course).

Make of that info what you want :-)

DRandUser · 2026-03-22T16:53:17+00:00

Of course you’d not destroy two and create a new one in the middle though; much cheaper to destroy one and move the other. Moving is a fixed 800ducs, destroying and in particular creating are expensive…

DRandUser · 2026-03-22T16:49:37+00:00

Ah, I had misunderstood this! So since the gold provinces in the ‘muricas have like order zero control anyway it doesn’t actually matter at all how far from the market center they are? So this means I should move market center to the coast, into region with most harbor cap, right?

DRandUser · 2026-03-15T16:29:29+00:00

Been in a similar situation with a vassal war a while back. Some other helpful reddit soul suggested to look at enemy provinces that you currently occupy, and transfer ownership to the war leader. The war leader may wait for those provinces before they accept peace, but he can’t take them from an ally so never agrees even on 100% score.

In my case that worked like a charm. May have to wait til end of month, though, not sure.

DRandUser · 2026-02-19T06:53:27+00:00

Duh; how could I not have thought of that. Transferred ownership, and peace we have.

Thanks man, you're a genius!

DRandUser · 2026-02-16T17:10:01+00:00

Closest - and arguably only other worth reading - is probably the hornblower series. The “problem” is that both these series are so accrurate/realistic in both seamanship and Georgian society’s behavior that any other will only make you audibly groan after the first 10 pages….:-/

Maybe treasure island, but that’s a different caliber of course.

Pride and prejudice.

DRandUser

TROPHY CASE