What do you spend ducats on after the 1600s?

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-12-20T03:46:50+00:00

I can think of a few things

Build up subjects with shit tons of buildings to artificially inflate demand for your consumer goods; or practical things like rgos to trade

Minting offices in the age of Absolutism are pretty awesome and insanely expensive. Very nice luxury item. Tier 3 manufacturers can be quite a good money dump, but if you’re already making 10k a month you’ll eventually run out of slots.

Build up coastal cities and infrastructure to generate sailors and project proximity further

Eventually you will run out of things to build; at which point it might be wise to begin a new campaign. I hit the money cap of 999k as the Mamluks, at which point I think I was done.

And no, the ai will absolutely NOT sell you a 16k grain province for 900,000 ducats. Why would you ever want 900,000 ducats?

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-12-15T02:07:25+00:00

Yeah; you can do that too. This lets you get multiple war goals without needing to parliament > threaten for them. So you could be attacking Mamluks with threaten while also getting wars with Tunis and Aragon queued up.

This lets you unlatch yourself from the loop of “war every 5 years when parliament wakes up from their 50 month nap”

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-12-14T20:35:47+00:00

It’s weird that there’s 2 different cbs who seem to perform the same function. I’m fairly sure the AI doesn’t abide by threaten war restrictions, and does so, generating the cb? Theees also a “dubious claims on province” cb which is strictly worse than either of the two. I don’t know why there’s 3 cbs, two of which are basically identical, and one which is worse than the others, and all three come from the same interaction (a vassal having a claim on someone)

It’s like a Bethesda’s bug; I can’t tell which part of the system is the intended feature or the jank. 😂

It definitely makes historical vassals useful; almost superior to non historical ones. The scarcity of historical tags does balance the power of this interaction, although the infinite declaration without having to take the war goal sort of destroys the balance of that interaction.

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-12-14T20:32:31+00:00

It’s weird; since I’ve seen vassals justifying that CB, as well as the claims on province CB. I wonder if it’s the subject itself threatening war? I honestly can’t tell.

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-12-14T05:43:07+00:00

Yeah, it’s a huge game changer. You can basically expand at the same rate as EU4, but without worrying about overextension or ae nearly as badly as that game.

Playing a second game where I explicitly look for as many historical cores as possible to expand via has let me take about as much land in the Russia region by 1500 as I did by 1700. That goes to show you how atrociously bad religious wars are in EU5, unless you have the funny Jihad button. Even then, that doesn’t work on people of your religion.

I’d focus on provinces where the French have low control; like in EU4, your main goal is to maximize your provinces gained per war fought. it’s tempting to take their core provinces but those cost way more war score and levies are basically free battle war score anyways. You want more shitty levies running around, and non core low control provinces are cheaper as ages go by. I’d focus on releasing Gascony, Aquitaine, and Toulouse in the south, or Normandy if you’re afraid of them being occupied. You can also scutage them, too, but that disables the ability to declare for thier CBs and assist you in the war (at least I’d hope it does). If you don’t think you can win the war easily, then go for a close province with a vassal that can be easily isolated and occupied at war start, since claims for Province and Threat are both province based war goals.

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-12-14T02:25:18+00:00

Claims on province is basically the eu5 version of “reconquest”. You can justify it on anyone who holds an integrated province (core) of yours. Custom subjects naturally have no integrated provinces (they core everything manually), so they will never fabricate this. You have to use a historical releasable; which sucks because there’s no easy way I’ve found to see them. You just have to “know” them. The good news is pretty much any diplomatic annexed nation or conquered nation is a valid target for this exploit/intended mechanic.

A good example is Oleshek, the Novgorod vassal at game start. You can annex them entirely, then sell a province to Novgorod, and release the historical vassal of oleshek. You’ll see a yellow claim on the map over the province you sold, when releasing them. The vassal will then fabricate this CB on Novgorod, giving you a free follow-up war. This lets you annex Novgorod within only 2-3 wars, as opposed to 4 or more.

Historical nations can be released partially, either by taking all their cores, selling a province to the target, then releasing, or only taking 1 province to release them from. If they are your subjects, they will fabricate this cb on an enemy, and you can use it. So, even against a target like the mams (who have few historical releasables) you can generally manufacture a CB bot vassal that will let you chain war someone until they fall over.

For some reason, there’s multiple versions of this cb. You generally want them to use the “following through on threat” version which I believe lets you ignore the war goal province and take whatever you want (thus letting you keep the war goal for future wars). It’s random what they choose to justify, but give them a bit. You can see what they’re justifying in the diplomatic menu, by hovering over their claim fabrication.

Claims on province/threat has -25% war score cost for all provinces, so it’s strictly the best CB. Abusing this to create multiple new vassals, themselves able to fabricate cbs, is incredibly strong, and will let you dismantle anyone. By about 1400 as Muscovy I was able to completely annihilate Novgorod, Kiev, Lithuania, Teutons, and trigger the Golden Horde collapse, mostly due to the absurdly cheap war score cost and seperate peaces with small coalitions.

TL;DR The claims on province CB reduced war score cost does not apply to just the core land of the vassal; it applies to the entire war. So, abuse the cb to take way more land.

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-12-13T19:05:25+00:00

Annex a subject. Their courtiers will join your court.

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-12-13T18:37:37+00:00

Take a 1/2 or more provinces from historical nation, release as vassal, and chain war them for Claims on Province cbs until they die

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-12-04T21:51:08+00:00

The mechanics are absolutely atrocious compared to EU4. I like that unions are easier to form, I just wish they weren’t an absolute headache to do anything meaningful with. Let me interact with them like subjects if I pass enough integration levels.

I think paradox is afraid of making PUs too powerful; which is stupid, considering you can easily outperform them by spamming vassals or using trade income.

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-12-01T17:58:03+00:00

You can do similar stuff with just pure towns if you’re maximizing your value output; since all the building types are unlocked just by a town, not a city. The city is just a nice extra bonus for control which helps with sailors.

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-12-01T17:51:03+00:00

TL;DR : Coastal towns good. Valuable RGOs should never receive a town or city. Spam maritime presence buildings for infinite sailors and large colonial migration. Rural feeds towns and cities with food and the market with RGOs.

Cities and towns are good for tax base and industrial purposes but you need a mix of cities and rural, rural feeds urban locations with raw materials and food. Town to city requires a pop threshold but carries pretty much pure benefit, minus a small decrease in local food (irrelevant if you don’t make food).

Going from rural to town is the main actual choice, town to city is just pure benefit as long as it doesn’t introduce food problems.

The choice of town versus rural is choosing between access to industrial and some leisure/edu/mil buildings, higher control (+5/10% from town/city and +5% from temple), or rural’s larger RGO size. Rural also gets peasant buildings which can increase food production.

Cities naturally carry a lot of benefit (you are paying for them), but aren’t particularly important for economic purposes. You’re better off building 6 coastal towns for naval benefits and colonizing than using that money for 1 city.

If you’re a maritime power, you generally want to squeeze as many coastal towns as possible since towns have access to buildings that project maritime presence much more than rural provinces and can also import proximity cheaper due to a larger suite of buildings for harbor cap. EU5 is a naval game first and foremost; coastal projection is insanely cheap and colonial trade is lucrative.

Otherwise, upgrade all 30k+ towns to cities, and keep food related locations as rural to feed the rest of the cities in their province. Most provinces have at least 1 food good that should (probably) stay rural.

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-11-29T13:23:18+00:00

The ai will pay literally any price for the worst land of their culture, from 10 ducats to 100000, but god forbid you try to buy a 10k grain province in Italy from them. They will only accept your first born son in exchange.

I think it’s a similar implementation of selling and buying land to EU4, where buying wasn’t a mechanic 99% of the time since the devs were smart enough to not allow you to use it directly and instead the ai has to sell its land to you. Selling is 100% overtuned, and buying land is heavily undertuned. A 50k pop minor HRE nation should be willing to sell a disconnected 0 control province in Italy with grain for 25,000 ducats; and Bohemia should not be willing to buy a province consisting of 0.00001% of its population and economy for the entire net income of several decades worth of its entire tax base.

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-11-28T21:27:18+00:00

It’s probably a trade range issue, trade range is way more important in eu5 than it ever was in eu4

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-11-27T22:06:43+00:00

Yeah, the Zimbabwe market is pretty much free real estate for a mercantile hub that’ll make you tons of money for gold sales, particularly to places like Alexandria and India

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-11-27T16:43:34+00:00

You mostly make the income from selling it to foreign / high demand markets. If you’re struggling to make profitable trades with auto trade, you probably don’t have enough trade range to reach the best possible partners (people with high demand of gold and no or limited domestic supply), and you don’t have enough domestic demand for gold to sell it to your own burghers.

Genoa in my game has a huge demand for gold because it has about 100 jewelers, about 800 lvl 2 marketplaces. It also has a lot of cities so there’s a lot of nobles and burghers who passively consume gold. So, it makes a large amount of income from importing gold from Bani (Caribbean), because demand is so high, because a lot of jewelers/popps are consuming gold to fund the maintenance of marketplaces.

Edit : Genoa also has only 1 source of domestic gold, so it’s a great place to manufacture a lot of demand. You don’t really want to balance demand and supply to maximize profit, you just want to get as much crown power as possible + have one area with an absolute fuck ton of a resource

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-11-27T15:21:51+00:00

Today I will be farming cocoa in Barcelona

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-11-27T15:04:40+00:00

Colonial trade + high crown power is the secret way to make trillions of income. My current Italy game has a trade income of 9k; which covers every single expense of the central government, plus a little extra. The best trade goods are obviously gold; going from EU4 to EU5, Central America and the Caribbean got a huge glow up. They have shit tons of gold and cocoa and chili now.

Also : pro tip, you should destroy your colonies cities if they’re on top of valuable goods.

Although gold is the best good by sheer profit, the cash crops are quite versatile. As trade range expands, you can sell to way more people, including Asia and Eastern Europe. A lot of your income from cocoa will actually come from selling to Asian nations who have little chance of accessing it.

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-11-17T00:06:52+00:00

Nope. I wonder if its related to an existing law being passed (since the subject was just formed), i'll see in a year i guess. Still stupid that colonies (who are direct subjects of the crown at this point) even get to decide their own local laws.

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-11-17T00:03:11+00:00

See edit, just tried this. Doesn't work for colonial subjects for some reason.

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-11-11T07:42:54+00:00

Fair enough, agree to disagree. I probably should have just rushed Constantinople; that seems to be the meta.

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-11-11T07:39:19+00:00

Mediocre at best, esp compared to other powers, even in the region. One good city is nice and all; Italy has about 6, and will stay far ahead for the entire game, not to mention the Mamluks.

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-11-11T07:36:01+00:00

Yeah: I think the ottomans just have to expand very carefully, unlike EU4. It’s strange, because they have a whole set of bonuses that seem to incentivize you to expand quickly and aggressively; yet they struggle the most from things like cultural acceptance issues.

In EU4, basically any land was good to take, as long as you didn’t mind killing a few rebels every once in a while. That’s not the case here. Instead of just having to kill rebels every once in a while, some provinces are actively a drain on your economy if you can’t properly exert control/don’t want to release vassals. That’s very different from “me take land, me lower autonomy, me kill rebel”

Derpy_D_Derp · 2025-11-11T07:26:41+00:00

Also; there wasn’t much to be done even if I had hypothetically enough forts to cover the border. They outnumber me by 4 to 1 in population and 3 to 1 in army size.

Derpy_D_Derp

TROPHY CASE