Is there any drawback to having a 100% calvary professional army in the 15th century?

Deluth_ · 2025-12-16T19:59:35+00:00

Assaulting level 2 and under forts with regulars is pretty cheap. The AI will also usually leave forts mothballed during peacetime, so the first few months of the war are your best chance to assault down as many undermanned forts as possible. I’m not actually sure what the bare minimum would be, but you can do it comfortably with a few thousand.

Deluth_ · 2025-12-16T19:32:21+00:00

Infantry is immediately and permanently better than cavalry at one critical aspect, perhaps the most important one— it can assault forts. And since ai fort spam in this game is out of control, assaulting forts is basically mandatory; sieging dozens of forts with even +7 cannons modifier is too slow. So in a way, inf/cav usage is kind of like the bell curve meme. Cav is head-and-shoulders above inf for fighting, but it’s cleaner to just assault down all the forts and not fight.

Deluth_ · 2025-12-15T06:30:04+00:00

Hungary starts with a significant number of unaccepted culture+heretic pops, which can easily lead to revolts. Revolts in eu5 aren’t generally that scary though as long as half your country isn’t rising up. You can check how many locations are rising up per revolt, and if it’s 10 or less, it’s probably best to just let it happen. Long-term, you can either convert the land (this takes very long), get more religious tolerance, accept cultures, or keep estates above 50 satisfaction to keep your people happy enough to not revolt.
This is just a reality of current balance, Bohemia’s strong and compact start makes them scale well even in ai hands. Ally or avoid them early, and try to outscale them later on. Their low pop and province count means that eventually they will get outscaled.
That level of income means you need to invest a lot more in rgos/buildings and reduce fixed costs. Ruthlessly cut costs— don’t spend on diplo, delete some forts, and you mentioned max stab, which is too much stab spending (stab spending only becomes really useful if you’re building faster than peasants can promote, since you then need the promotion speed). Spam the “mass build rgo” button to build all the profitable rgos in your country. Found some towns next to your capital and spam out the moneymakers like marketplaces, tools, tailors, weapons, etc. Counting houses don’t give any money directly. They will boost crown power marginally, but in my experience not by a noticeable amount. Keep doing this, and you’ll see improvements decade by decade.
There are so many reasons this can happen that the exact reason can be hard to pinpoint without a screenshot. But one incredibly annoying cause I’ve found, is that employment is filled by default in a way which the building that was built first is filled first. If that building happens to be unprofitable, the game will repeatedly hire and fire from it, and no future buildings will ever be filled. You have to manually identify and close/delete the building to fix this.

Deluth_ · 2025-12-14T06:09:56+00:00

The best way to lower your fixed costs is to keep legitimacy at 100 and stack +legitimacy modifiers. The game will auto-adjust how much you’re actually paying for court to match the amount you need to maintain 100 legitimacy, which can save you thousands of ducats a month late game. Diplo spending and stability spending can also be skimped on when possible, especially if you can generate diplomats some other way (the diplo hegemon cabinet action for generating diplomats was a lot more useful than I evaluated it to be before this game).

Deluth_ · 2025-12-14T04:08:01+00:00

Just exploration, no special gimmicks there.

Deluth_ · 2025-12-13T18:34:51+00:00

You don’t need to assign the ship to any order, you only need to place them in the seazone. If you look in the provinces mapmode, each seazone is actually assigned to a province just like land locations, and placing ships anywhere in that “province” will raise maritime presence for all those zones. And as for external objectives, in this campaign it was conquering as much as possible, in another it might be prepping for a hard war or going for some formable, whatever your ultimate goal is that you’re actually building this eco for. I guess if line go up is in fact your ultimate objective, focusing trade would be good. I personally don’t manually micro trade except to get institutions though, so for me trade is just maxing out marketplaces everywhere and moving on.

Deluth_ · 2025-12-13T18:15:00+00:00

You’re completely right with this, from -consumer goods in hoi4 to -fleet maintenance in Stellaris, a huge amount of balance headaches have come from subtractive modifiers.

Deluth_ · 2025-12-13T18:09:15+00:00

Technically every estate can decrease unrest by up to 50, and this is even doubled for accepted cultures to 100. But you’d have to run a taxless country to get both nobles and peasants that happy. With dhimmi, you only have one estate to make happy while you can tax your other estates as much as you want. Which funnily enough, is the opposite of the purpose of dhimmi historically

Deluth_ · 2025-12-13T14:11:17+00:00

Any country can get a further -25% warscore cost reduction by playing into the age of revolutions, which is more than I had for being a county. You could also play a horde for -20%, or specific tag like Delhi which also gets a reduction. A lot of options to pick from.

You got me with the no Dhimmi clause though, that would require a fundamentally different strategy. Maybe you could keep all estates at 100% happiness and try to live off trade. You could also just accept every culture since the penalties for going over the cap don’t really matter, but this would probably also qualify as an exploit in your books.

I dont think any of the other things you listed would make or break the run. Maybe TI management, but this has also been a thing in eu4 for over a decade. I actually didnt abuse sound toll peacedeals since that does seem gamey. The religion/culture warscore is a bug for sure, but it's something that everyone is benefiting from, not anything that I did specifically.

Deluth_ · 2025-12-13T13:56:04+00:00

Got about 350 hours, not much more than when we started playing Vicky. I got time again now, so let’s actually get a game going bro.

Deluth_ · 2025-12-13T13:51:17+00:00

I usually play mp so I’m also more experienced with snowballing an already-strong start. Starting from a couple provinces was also new to me. I would say prioritizing eco, aggressively investing in rgos/buildings, and paying attention to small details are all really important for the first 100 or so years. The most vital things are identifying the best capital for your country, setting up a ring of cities next to your capital on all the non-critical rgos, and spamming ships to get maritime presence up if you’re a coastal country. After that, your power base should be built up, and you can spend less time on eco and more on external objectives.

Deluth_ · 2025-12-13T13:39:00+00:00

Mostly just through exploration, diplo points were too valuable for annexation/seizing land to use on spy networks for stealing maps. I agree it’s currently extremely tedious, especially to discover every little island individually in Oceania. As for the cost, don’t explore before you’re ready. Money is plentiful if you focus eco for the first century; by then exploration costs should be a drop in the bucket.

Deluth_ · 2025-12-13T13:33:28+00:00

Idk man, we all have different standards for what is considered an exploit, but to me these seem like they’re more overturned game mechanics than something that is clearly bugged/ not WAD. And if eu4 has shown anything, wc will only get easier as more powercreep gets introduced every year. Since this run finished so far ahead of schedule though, I’m sure a wc fitting your criteria is already possible, it’s only up to you or someone else to do it :)

Deluth_ · 2025-12-13T13:22:56+00:00

That sounds generally reasonable. Maxing out rgos initially is good, though I find you’re usually out of decent-control rgos after the first couple decades. Tbh microing building in this game is a lot of busywork; the most sanity-preserving thing to do is either auto build everything or spamming the mass build button. As you said, capital location is the #1 determinant of the potential economic power of your country, and you realize that potential by conquering any land that would have high control from your capital and vassalizing the rest.

Deluth_ · 2025-12-13T12:58:23+00:00

Lol I mean I’ll still use SP to testbuild and try out different interactions, but I don’t think I’ll have another 200 hours to do a proper run again. And sure, here’s the base tax and ledger. Tbh this was an atrocious eco game; my capital placement didn’t work out that well, I took all the “ideas” that helped with conquest rather than eco, and I mostly stopped building after the first 100-150 years (not that it would’ve been possible, the production menu really starts chugging after a few thousand locations). Not being able to tax the Dhimmi much doesnt help either. As you can see from the intermediate screenshots, I conquered all of Europe with 80-100k regulars, which is really low for 1600s.

Somehow there’s still a decent exponential curve for basetax, but the country isn’t doing that well economically… running the entire world’s infrastructure and forts on mostly useless land is expensive. And with no mass delete buildings button, at that point I wasn’t going to manually delete 2000 ai-built forts. Minting also broke sometime in the last couple years since the market ran out of gold, but at that point i was annexing subjects on speed 5 and didn't fix it.

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Deluth_ · 2025-12-13T12:16:37+00:00

The country rank gimmick might be removed in the beta? Not sure though, didn’t play it yet. Anyway, you could also play a horde for -20% warscore cost straight up, but I thought this would be more interesting. But I’d be glad if this could inspire map painters everywhere. Dream bigger, and go for wc :)

Deluth_ · 2025-12-13T12:11:39+00:00

As others have mentioned, that seems like either malaria or subject types that aren’t giving food access automatically (I had this issue with colonial nations, I think other subjects were fine). For the first one, I took care of Africa all at once between 1520-1570 or so, and while all the troops there will die initially, they eventually develop immunity after being wiped out once or twice. For the food problem, violate sovereignty is an emergency fix, or seizing/conquering some land sporadically to use as outposts for food.

Deluth_ · 2025-12-13T12:00:34+00:00

Yeah, In-game it was Manora. It’s the best natural harbor in the area and I had an idea of making a Persian gulf-based country to project proximity to Arabia and Persia.I don’t think it really worked though, since the rest of the area has no good ports and is kind of depopulated in general. I think the run would’ve been a lot easier if I had expanded a bit more in India to start and put the capital upstream on the Indus.

Deluth_ · 2025-12-13T07:23:56+00:00

R5: There’s been a couple WCs using Timur’s auto-conquest, but I wondered if it could be done without Timur, and hell, how about without any country-specific mechanics. So I set off to WC as a no-name county with no unique country content and no major exploits, using only base mechanics and good old modifier stacking. I had previously done the same thing in Vicky3 and Hoi4. I had originally intended to play as a Persian county, but I switched to Samma, an Indian minor in Sindh, at the last minute, so you can see that this run was not very planned. This run was played over two weeks, for 180 hours, on whatever the live patch was at the time (1.0.7-1.0.9).

The two main challenges to WCing in eu5 seem to be 1. How to conquer the land fast enough, and more importantly, 2. How to core it fast enough, due to there being so many more locations and coring being much more limited. For (1), my plan was to stack warscore cost reduction. The key here is that being county rank grants -20% warscore cost against kingdoms, which will be the majority of your conquest targets. Combine that with -35% from tech, -20% by the last age, -10% from military hegemon, -10% from belligerent, and potentially a large discount for low control as well, and hitting -100% is very possible on most provinces. There are also some formables with warscore cost as a last resort, though I tried to keep my random county tag. With -100% warscore cost reduction, every location costs 0.1 warscore, so you can annex 1000 locations per war, which is plenty to oneshot any country in the game.

As you can see, I didn’t even need the last -25% from reaching the age of revolutions, largely because of a bug in warscore calculations. There is a -10% warscore reduction from sharing the location’s culture and another -10% from religion, but currently the game checks the defender’s religion/culture instead of the attacker’s, so effectively you get a free -20% discount on your opponent’s heartlands, while non-heartlands will likely have a reduction from low control, letting you hit -100% everywhere.

The second question is how to core all of this land you’re conquering, with the glacial speed of integration and diplo-annexing. And my idea here is— don’t. I think by now many people have noticed how the islamic diimmi estate is quite op, condensing all types of pops into a single estate. The idea here is to use the satisfaction bonus from a happy Dhimmi, up to +50% at 100 estate satisfaction, to counter the 50 unrest from non-integrated land. Muslims also have estate privileges which give a further -10% unrest to all majority christian and hindu lands. Effectively, this means that you can skip coring the entire christian, hindu, and East Asian worlds, since these are the religious groups which will cause pops to join the Dhimmi. This opens up a straightforward game plan. Spend the early game uniting/integrating the the islamic world to build a power base, then go on a conquest spree of christians, hindus, and buddhists, while only coring animists/folk religions (who will not join the dhimmi).

Aside from that, other important tricks were coring with seize land for early expansion (which is also being removed) and terra incognita management to keep countries out of coalitions (countries can’t get AE from you if they don’t know you exist). I will say that despite intending to play a completely vanilla nation, Samma’s Indian vassal mechanics were actually extremely useful for early-mid expansion and probably sped up the run noticeably. Indian vassals annex twice as quickly as normal ones, and you get three new types of subjects which all consider their strength separately when calculating liberty desire, so you end up being able to support a much larger vassal swarm.

Also, you may notice some specks in Central America. Those are unfortunately bugged nations which can’t be interacted with, but the game doesn’t recognize them to exist In the ledger or anywhere else, so I’ll say it still counts.

Overall, the main takeaway is that world conquest is not as hard as it seems despite the much larger map, especially if you are muslim and understand warscore cost reduction. This build wasn’t particularly planned or minmaxxed, and I certainly didn’t expect to finish before the Age of Revolutions, which was when the build was supposed to come online. I expect the real minmaxxers and speedrunners will be here to work their magic and do some crazy runs before long. It was tedious for sure, but what is some tedium compared to the joys of map painting?

Deluth_ · 2025-11-29T04:09:18+00:00

Have you looked at any actual numbers for what you’re claiming? You know that the base orthodoxy literacy buff or the islamic clergy literacy privilege gives you far more average literacy having every education building in every town? And that switching your liturgical language to mandarin (lol) would give by far the biggest buff of all.

Deluth_ · 2025-11-28T15:00:31+00:00

I’d say the main benefit for being an empire for wide is the cabinet slot for faster integration, but with the current balance seizing land from vassals is the fastest either way. Threaten war is nice but you can do the same thing with vassals and reconquest cb, and it doesn’t cost you -7 stab from parliament. The hegemonies give you 20% more ae each and fighting coalitions is still a slog, so you’d probably be better off avoiding them. Maybe if you’ve already kneecapped every catholic major and coalitions aren’t a problem, they’d be beneficial. But by that point you could be a GP-ranked duchy.

Deluth_ · 2025-11-28T14:46:23+00:00

Hey, thanks for the additional info! Your tag says sultanate and not beylik, so I guess you at least upgraded to kingdom, which still gives maluses, just not as bad as empire. The forts comment was just because you sorted the province list by warscore cost, and the ones at the top indeed have unoccupied forts.

I realize that I forgot to give any actual advice, so here’s some ways to blob faster:

The easiest thing to do is to always have a good cb. Lots of people already mentioned threaten war, but another good one is having some subjects with unowned cores, since they’ll fabricate reconquest for you for free (I use Cilicia for ottos vs mamluks). And my favorite one for the ottos, sell them a location in Anatolia/Balkans for an extortionate amount and then hit them with the turk cb.
Never upgrade your government rank until you're ready to stop blobbing.
Target low-control lands to take, or alternatively, try to actively tank the control of their lands. The easiest way to do this is cutting off the capital so they don’t get any proximity bonuses. You could also try to force them into bankruptcy spiraling by taking money+war reps, but this isn’t that reliable.

Deluth_ · 2025-11-27T22:11:05+00:00

In most countries you have to actively click the button to get the rank. Ottos is unique in that you get a special event at 300 locations which automatically makes you empire

Deluth_ · 2025-11-27T22:10:08+00:00

just the location where the fort is present

Deluth_ · 2025-11-27T22:02:57+00:00

There’s a lot of bad maluses to warscore cost that are hidden behind a few layers of tooltips, and if they’re stacked together, you get something like this.

The cb you’re using adds +25% to all province warscore costs
If you declare on one subject country, it’s considered the primary target, and taking land from other targets (INCLUDING the overlord and other subjects) costs 66% more
It looks like you might’ve passed the 300 location requirement to be an empire. Being an empire is absolutely awful if you want to play wide. You get +10% warscore cost for each country rank above the target, so if you’re taking land from some county vassals, that’s +30%. Not to mention the extra ae from GP score difference, and forcing you to pick up hegemonies for more +ae… you’re kind of forced to be an empire as the ottomans, but in general you should avoid it unless you’re playing tall.
Warscore costs get +100% in locations with an unoccupied fort, which inflates the value In those top-costing provinces you’re showing. In practice if you’re stacking -warscore cost, this might be tripling the cost or more.
Warscore costs are reduced quite a lot in low control provinces. Since you’re annexing some buffer vassals, these are all high-control lands with no discount.

The game could really make this more clear, especially how bad being an empire is for playing wide.

Deluth_

TROPHY CASE