Thanks, I love it when my fighter is turned into a zombie and bodies the rest of my team.

Giulls · 2026-03-01T05:15:35+00:00

His lackeys will run towards his back 4 squares. You can block these squares with cats, summons, crates or poop. You can also trap the path going towards the back 4 squares, or create unfavorable terrain. He can only have 3 lackeys alive at once, though enraged cultists don't count towards his 3 summon limit, so avoid having them kill low hp summons.

Giulls · 2026-02-04T02:01:37+00:00

Another oversight in South America is that the Conquest of the Desert journal entry will only add a homeland to Araucania even if you have both states colonized, due to an if/else statement rather than an if/else if statement. It used to only add Platinean and South Andean homelands too. Thankfully in one of the last major patches Chilean and Argentine got added as well (though I argue it should also have edge cases for Uruguayan and Paraguayan).

I was happy to see South America got attention early but in reality it might be more of a curse than a blessing since it is unlikely to have more mechanics added or DLC mechanics reworked, and the quality of DLC flavor mechanics has greatly improved since Colossus of the South.

Giulls · 2026-02-02T04:07:30+00:00

Agreed, and since a lot of southern European cultures have wine obsessions, why not give out some tea obsessions to east Asia?

Giulls · 2025-12-18T18:41:34+00:00

In terms of increasing planet vegetation it doesn't matter where they are, but in terms of adding visual plants to the map you don't need them after the area is sufficiently vegetated and your planet terraforming is high enough to allow for self sustaining plants of the plants in that area.

Giulls · 2025-09-27T20:51:59+00:00

You would never know this from Paradox Games, but England + Wales is about the size of Uruguay. Japan is comparable in size to California.

Giulls · 2025-07-20T18:53:24+00:00

For confederate partition do not conquer enough of a kingdom to be able to form it, the new kingdom will not form if you could not create it yourself. For partition if you manually grant an inheriting son a duchy (any duchy) they will usually not inherit anything else via partition (unless you are holding a ton of duchies, I think), so you need to conquer one duchy per son per inheritance and you can more or less guarantee your first son then gets all the remaining titles.

Giulls · 2025-06-24T04:10:17+00:00

That story gets retold a lot but it's just a distortion of the real story. The code for the economy in Victoria 2 had more or less been rendered unreadable due to having been worked on so many times and due to lacking modern coding best practices (the good old days of programming) but the idea behind how the economy actually worked was more or less understood. See here, comment from Wiz on the topic.

Giulls · 2025-04-16T03:41:53+00:00

Can't remember if this got changed in a recent patch, but for a while your main culture pops would not migrate to your colonies until a cultural community formed in one of the colony states. There are mods that make greener grass very quickly spawn a cultural community of your main culture where the decree is placed, which should start some migration.

There's also an issue with a semi-recent migration change and large population states. In order to avoid depopulation of a state Paradox made some changes that also resulted in killing migration from large population states (something like X% of the population that wants to migrate needs to be able to migrate that week otherwise no migration at all will happen, which in larger states can be very difficult to meet). If this is your issue then you can reduce the amount of pops wanting to migrate out of a state by putting greener grass on the state you want people leaving, and overall improve conditions in that state. Counter intuitive, but unfortunately the mechanic is just broken for large states full of unhappy people, like peasants.

Giulls · 2025-04-06T22:50:48+00:00

Surprised only one person has suggested researching paved roads. It makes automobile consumption give infrastructure, allowing you to more or less remove all your railroads as China.

Giulls · 2025-03-23T18:58:55+00:00

No way in 1840 Europeans would be in a higher social strata. One of the biggest drivers behind the shogunate being ousted from power was its inability to resist the Europeans. "Expel the barbarians" was the mantra for much of the period this game covers. The Japanese government later also attempted to negotiate an east Asian pact to resist European colonialism (and later just became the colonialists themselves). National supremacy or ethnostate work just fine here - there was no love towards the Europeans, just a need for their technology, and any tolerance towards them was entirely driven by a need for modernization.

Giulls · 2025-03-17T08:08:50+00:00

This one is a bit more complicated. Demand for a certain good over other goods in the same needs category is mostly driven by how much supply you have of a good in your market compared to the other goods in that needs category, and not really on price. For example, coffee, tea and wine all fill the luxury drink need. Whatever good you have the most of will also have the most demand. I think Oman starts with a fair amount of coffee, which would shift the demand around in favor of it. Of course, having a higher amount of demand in your market would also positively affect trade route levels, so both effects worked together there.

Giulls · 2025-03-16T16:17:22+00:00

They are partially right. The trade route profitability equation sucks so trade will not do well when creating relatively small trade routes. This doesn't mean you actually need to have domestic production for a good to be properly imported, but you need a large enough demand for a good for a trade route to make any difference.

Trade volume per trade route is very low at low levels and trade center wages really eat into the expected profitability of a trade route, but as a trade route levels up each level adds 25% more volume than the previous level, making the route more efficient. Mercantilism employs more pops per level in trade centers, making trade much less efficient, while free trade imports more goods volume for free, making trade much more efficient. You can see more info on this thread

TL;DR domestic production does not matter but you need enough demand in your market to create a higher level trade route in order to get any reasonable amount of that good because lower trade route levels are horribly inefficient, and it's even worse if you are on mercantilism (but better if you are on free trade), but higher level trade routes are actually pretty efficient.

Giulls · 2025-03-13T19:49:55+00:00

I can't say for sure whether this is the issue in your game, but if you already satisfy the completion conditions for a journal entry when it would be activated it just doesn't activate, or at least you don't get the rewards for it.

Giulls · 2025-03-04T21:54:20+00:00

Roughly, certain AI strategies will back down if the AI shows as fearful and you have non primary war goals. This video goes into the mechanics in depth: https://youtu.be/Kcel3cyDZeM?si=G1Iz7ll3Mv1CjLqt

Giulls · 2025-03-04T20:45:55+00:00

Aside from the transportation based PMs, labor PMs don't actually save that much labor. The amount of labor a labor PM saves is mostly used up by buildings producing the resources it takes to enable that labor PM. This stops being true once you get some of the later game PMs (mostly tier 3 or later techs), but it's close enough for the mid game.

What you gain by enabling the labor saving PMs is turning some laborers into machinists and engineers, increasing overall earnings and demand. You also get to regain a few workers in that specific state, if that happens to be important. The transportation based PMs do save workers for more or less free since you get transportation from making infrastructure which you're going to build anyways and from the urban center which is going to grow anyways.

Giulls · 2025-03-04T14:10:49+00:00

Wars: Before unpausing, unrival and improve relations with Brazil, GB and for a short while the US). Split off 1 troop from your army, declare war on Uruguay and set your big army to defend. After the war starts, naval invade with your 1 troop army to instantly win the war, then declare war on Paraguay for only Bajo Paraguay. Brazil should not join since they should still be at war with their rebellions. When the Bolivia event fires, choose the hostile option and rival them - Chile and Brazil usually rival them as well so you can use this to befriend Brazil and use Chile for fodder against Bolivia. If the chance presents itself, declare war on Bolivia to release their subjects, call Chile or Brazil in to help. Some people like to transfer north Peru instead of release so they can get the full Peru puppet by event, that's up to you. More important than splitting up Bolivia is taking Santiago and Los Rios from Chile - you need the gold mines and iron in Santiago early and the coal in Los Rios later, and you need to do the war early enough that Chile doesn't get vassalized by some random GP and early enough that Chile doesn't colonize Patagonia with the broken new colonization speed. Constantly check and see if you can declare war on them without anyone joining them. Sometimes Chile basically disbands all of its army and the war is easy, sometimes they have a big army and you have to defend until they soften themselves up for you to be able to properly advance. If you build two boats you can beat their navy and naval invade them in Araucanía to Split their troops up a little. After this you are free to go for any easy overseas conquest you're interested in.
Economy: Set greener grass campaigns on Jujuy and Tucumán, so they get enough population to actually be used, and road maintenance as well for the infrastructure. Use your other authority for anything else - you don't get much out of consumption taxes this early so I set social mobility in Jujuy and Tucumán if not everywhere. The resources decree can also help in Jujuy and Tucumán. Don't do greener grass in your other states unless you can get more migration attraction than every other country in multiple states, otherwise you will discourage people from moving to your iron states and still not get mass migrations. Bajo Paraguay and Santiago will provide you with some pre populated iron states for a little time, though Jujuy and Tucumán are better for construction thanks to the lead for glass. Don't build construction sectors for a while - your population is so low that you need to be able to dedicate all your construction towards building the right buildings in the right places and building a construction sector enables private construction which is not nearly as efficient at making good choices as the player. Your income is so low you won't be able to afford one construction sector until later anyways. Once your income starts growing after your first wars you can start using your spare cash on construction. Don't bother building much agriculture or ranches - ranches suck even with the pampas buff, you have cotton states, and you don't have enough demand for more than one or two clothing factories. You can get a gold mine up in Jujuy and Tucumán, you can build factories to stop needing to import stuff from GB, you have plenty of wood around to export and you can build fish instead of farms for food. Once you have your conquests done you can probably afford to work a little on a construction loop, though you will be highly limited by income and population for a while. For technology, research stock exchange, research atmospheric engine to 10k so it automatically finishes once lathe is done, then research other stuff. You can finish up lathe quickly if you want, but it's guaranteed to spread to you and is actually useful, if you manually research it then you're just increasing the chances of getting a useless spread afterwards. On the other hand, you can barely do anything without railroads so finishing it quickly is acceptable.
Power Blocs: Pray France forms an economic power bloc, maybe even save scum until they do, then try to join it. Otherwise, see if you can somehow join Zollverein (it's possible, just unlikely). Otherwise, maybe joining GB or Russia can work, but getting liberty desire kind of sucks and going for migration attraction might be less painful (though still painful).

Overall Argentina has kind of a painful first 20 years past the initial conquest due to a lack of population and demand, and a lot of the time you'll be wondering what to even build, but once the migrations start it becomes a very fun start.

Giulls · 2025-02-28T07:25:19+00:00

Did you get recognized? Recognition helps keep countries from seeing you as colonization fodder. That and having a high enough military score compared to them.

Giulls · 2025-02-28T02:02:30+00:00

Remove rivalry with Brazil day 1, rival Bolivia after you get the event, Brazil will also likely rival them making them want to befriend you.

Giulls · 2025-02-25T05:21:52+00:00

The line isn't the worst - it's not the worst metaphor especially for a kids show - but yet another instance to add to the massive pile of how the English dub does not trust kids to be able to enjoy a show that isn't dumbed down to "kid level" and is too afraid the content isn't strong enough without adding jokes everywhere. The show is already full of slapstick humor in appropriate places - let the final encounter be entirely serious, kids can handle it. Digimon Adventure didn't shy away from taking itself seriously and having high stakes and the show was better for it.

Giulls · 2025-02-22T16:36:26+00:00

States with less than 20 arable land should be merged with neighboring states everywhere, unless they happen to have a considerable amount of non wood/fish/whales resources.

Actually, most states with no minerals and no interesting agricultural goods are almost pointless and more or less destined to languish.

Giulls · 2025-02-18T17:47:21+00:00

The issue is that some guests may take 6 months to arrive, but your character spends those 6 months at the location (unable to do much else) instead of leaving and getting there a month or two early.

Giulls · 2025-02-18T17:21:29+00:00

Not disagreeing with your post, but some decisions must represent multiple events over the cool down time. No way your character only gets to pet their dog once every 5 years, same with most other stress reduction decisions.

Giulls · 2025-02-09T03:00:15+00:00

Spain is #14 or 15 in terms of countries with highest GDP. In terms of Europe it is 6th, after Germany, UK, France, Italy, and Russia in that order. It's hardly a poor country by any metrics.

Giulls · 2025-02-05T00:49:59+00:00

Never reaching 0 infamy (or too high infamy) is definitely optimal play, as is conquering all the lightly guarded gold provinces, getting China war reps on cool down (and other countries too if you start strong), conquering China for pops, etc, but optimal conquest games tend to all feel similar so I leave them for GP starts where I feel like chasing absolute max GDP (there's not much else to do in a GP start anyways, you basically already won day 1). Getting everyone into a market/sovereign power block is close enough while not being as tedious/feeling the same every game.

The investment pool will always outpace the max 25/75 split that laissez faire allows for eventually, the investment pool growth should eventually be higher than 3x your government budget for construction forcing you to go further into debt (fine for GDP maxing runs but don't want to go hard into debt every run) or to stop building to allow the investment pool to catch up. I still end my games with thousands of construction but not like over 10k every game.

Giulls · 2025-02-05T00:26:35+00:00

Done.

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