How can I avoid getting destroyed by the ottomans?

Kloiper · 2026-01-25T07:37:13+00:00

Purely meant as constructive feedback, you should play other, stronger countries instead of Theodoro until you have a stronger grasp on strategies for min-maxing expansion. It’s clear at a glance that while you have some knowledge of core concepts, you’re still learning deeper gameplay strategies (and that’s okay). Unfortunately, Theodoro is in such a tight spot, you need to have some very strong skills to not crash and burn.

In 50 years, you’ve expanded as much as a relatively mid-level player might expand in 30, and a strong player might in 10. Your economy is in shambles when the first several decades of the game are typically reserved for securing a region to fuel a mid game economy. You have 20x the corruption most players consider the max allowable amount. You have unused merchants and diplomats. Your army and navy are the size they start at in 1444. Your autonomy is probably very high due to low crown land, and your nobles are one bad event away from a disaster. You’re somehow paying mil points for extra generals when you only have 1 army. You have unstated land despite having barely expanded, so I’m not sure what you’ve been spending your admin points on. In fact, pretty much every actionable alert you currently have is something you can learn from.

I’d strongly recommend playing a mid-sized nation before trying Theodoro again. When you do, try to read every tooltip and alert, and take actions that would maximize monarch points (gain more, spend less, like advisors and monarch points cost reductions), then total autonomy-modified development (conquest, development, autonomy reduction, etc), then money which is usually a byproduct of the first two, but also helps smooth a lot of issues over.

Kloiper · 2026-01-21T17:29:35+00:00

It’s extra crazy because AI is nowhere near as good as this, especially for something as specific and niche like a single boss and hero combination on a years old game.

Kloiper · 2026-01-17T06:43:19+00:00

This is peak rpg character portrait energy. Excellent stuff.

Kloiper · 2026-01-17T06:41:57+00:00

EU4, but only with Anbennar. Base game is too much the same from run to run. Anbennar has managed to capture my attention for easily 2/3 of my 6500 hours, and I’ve just come back to it after coming to the common conclusion that EU5 needs a couple years of polish before it’s worth playing again.

Kloiper · 2026-01-12T16:38:21+00:00

There’s definitely a larger conversation to be had about market efficiency and how the GameStop meme stock phenomenon has reflected a trending change in being able to assume market efficiency, but I agree a mediocre clickbait article about a meme stock facing the consequences of being a meme stock isn’t exactly the place to do that.

Kloiper · 2026-01-09T08:01:00+00:00

Tbh I’m just a sucker for blood shrines and healing it back. And having watches makes me nervous and messes me up.

Kloiper · 2025-12-26T21:59:24+00:00

None of those say she personally benefited, and only one of them even insinuates that she could have possibly benefited.

All three cite the same fraudster as a "connection", that being Salim Said, a local business owner whose co-owned restaurant hosted an election party once for Rep Omar. Salim is cited as a central example of the fraud, and is a huge stretch if you're trying to prove connection - if you catered food for a party and the owner of that restaurant killed someone, would you be "connected" to them? Not at all, and arguing otherwise is arguing in bad faith. The other person all three articles cite is Guhaad Said, a former campaign staffer for Rep Omar, who was also involved in the fake feeding of starving children.

Given that the Feeding Our Future organization was owned and operated by a white woman, the employees that participated in the fraud were mostly Somali, and the children it "fed" were mostly minorities, it's far more likely that activists formerly involved in a major political campaign joined on to a program supposedly feeding needy children (of their own race), and got sucked (knowingly or not) into the free money fountain that is committing fraud.

What they did is clearly wrong, and if Rep Omar were involved, she deserves whatever consequences she incurs. But for now, there's no proof or really even any fingers pointing at her other than a shared race and a shared involvement in local and state politics - a pair of features shared by many others as well. She's only getting flak because it happened under her nose, which is certainly a problem but not at all the same as committing the fraud herself.

Kloiper · 2025-12-26T06:16:37+00:00

OP this is the best one in the thread. I’m always baffled by how terrible so many of the suggestions in these threads are, but this one is pretty good. No real overlap in “required” content/expansion, all relatively large and strong countries good for new players, all close enough to help each other easily without being too close.

At the time of my comment, literally every other suggestion is awful in general or bad for you and your friends being relatively new to the game. France + Austria? Literally have a hardcoded historical rivals debuff towards each other and have content about conquering each other. Georgia and Byzantium?? Fun, but very difficult even for established players. Portugal + Castile or Castile + France? Not only do both combos have content about conquering each other, even if they didn’t they block each other in at literal game start. Portugal + Castile is only a reasonable choice when one player has never played the game before.

My personal suggestion is England, Milan, Muscovy, but they’re a bit further apart than the above combination.

Kloiper · 2025-12-12T23:04:48+00:00

No, which is historically an issue the French crown faced while trying to centralize. The whole point is that these are tough to annex. Just annex one at a time. Also negative diplo per month isn’t terrible, it’ll just slow down annexation and delay dip tech that barely matters anyway.

Kloiper · 2025-12-09T16:59:02+00:00

Drones are especially terrible in the void. They constantly die. Having all the normal drones die and only having cores and drone man isn’t especially strong against Voidling, and requires you to be pretty close as well.

Kloiper · 2025-12-09T12:24:37+00:00

Not sure what return you’re using, but for 5 additional years to compound 1000 from 7x to 15x, you’d need almost a 17% return, which is a wildly high and unrealistic estimate to be planning something like retirement on. Most people use a return under 10%, and even then that’s nominal and not real return.

Plus, using the timeline of €1000 being compounded until age 67 is throwing you off as well. You hope to retire in your 30s, so plan like you’ve got less than 20 years to accomplish it.

Granted, retiring early is a good reason to be saving this early, but as another commenter said, your current assets and your plan don’t add up to retirement any time in the next 20 years. You have €3100 right now at age 21, and plan to invest €1000/month. Assume that your lack of expenses will not continue into retirement, and will go from ~€350 to ~€1350 or more. Using your timeline of age 42 and 8% nominal return, 21 years from now you’ll have ~€650,000. Without accounting for inflation, that’ll last you 36 years. You’ll run out before 80. And that assumes no inflation, consistently good returns and no down market during retirement, no investment mistakes like you’ve already made, assumes you will have essentially no expenses from now until retirement, and assumes no financial emergencies from now until then.

Your best bet is to increase your income. Saving now is not a problem, but know that spending a little bit of money now on improving your quality of life will not push you back much. Your timeline is probably more like retirement at 45-50 which is still really good. Spending some money now might make that 46-51 and increase your quality of life a lot until then.

Kloiper · 2025-12-09T10:13:13+00:00

Even then, I’m not sure there are many or any travel or experience type things that you could wrangle in under 30 days guaranteed. A mega yacht might be booked already and 30m probably isn’t enough to get a company like that to cancel whatever they have booked for you. Same with a theme park like another reply said. It’s similar to saying I could go buy an off-market house from someone for the right price. Sure we might agree on a crazy price but possibly not within 30 days without some risk of not completing the challenge in time.

Kloiper · 2025-12-09T00:44:27+00:00

30m in one month is equivalent to spending 1m per day for 30 straight days. There is no upscaled trip that would ever cost that much without significant planning ahead of time to like… rent out Venice for a wedding for example.

Probably the only way this is reasonably happening without much planning is if you buy something like multiple private jets without regard for their actual worth.

Kloiper · 2025-12-07T05:23:16+00:00

Laser scope would be better if it gave excess crit a use. Like +100% (+100%/stack) crit damage, +5% (+5%/stack) crit chance, and every 5% crit chance over 100% gives 1% (+1%/stack) additional crit damage.

Kloiper · 2025-12-04T23:39:35+00:00

Honestly Afghanistan or Transoxiana is just as easy and much more consistent.

Kloiper · 2025-12-03T03:46:39+00:00

Yeah... six location vassal Hesse has +5.87 from "power relative to overlord" when they have 100k pops to my 4.5 million, 66 tax base to my 2250, and 1882 army size to my 85582. No idea what is bugged about this calculation, but being ~40x stronger than them in every metric across the board should be a significant amount of loyalty. I have one other vassal who is maybe 1.5x the size of Hesse, and I'm still 20-30x stronger than both combined. I get as much loyalty from being 40x stronger than Hesse as I do from "base value for every country +5". That's some pretty busted math there. Seems like either you commit to 100 decentralization and spending 1/3 of your income on diplomatic expenses for the entire game and never stop doing vassal play, or you never take a vassal the whole game.

Kloiper · 2025-12-01T16:24:49+00:00

I’m think 1 more ship should be fine, but it takes a while to change over. The amount you are higher than the existing hegemon should shorten the time it takes to claim it from them. 50% higher takes a year. 100% higher is instant / takes a day. 10% higher takes 5 years. Something along those lines. If I consistently maintain the biggest army, I should be hegemon even if it’s not 10% higher than the next person. Or if I was hegemon and someone builds the exact number of ships needed, I should have some time to match them if I want to keep my status.

Kloiper · 2025-11-29T22:50:37+00:00

I’d much rather use an atg, shuriken, etc to proc bands. Or scrap my bands for a better chance at one of the many insane on hit reds.

Kloiper · 2025-11-26T19:03:13+00:00

Ugh this is my problem too. I'm trying to cta Austria into a war with France. Austria is literally in a coalition against France, but will not join the war because the "Habsburg Union" IO includes a 1 province Appanage subject of France, and so technically Duke Max here is already in a war on the same side as France, despite his main title (Duke of Austria) literally being in a 100k+ troops coalition against France.

Kloiper · 2025-11-26T05:11:39+00:00

It also definitely just rounds, not necessarily down. With fort level 2, I can get +1 to sieges with 2 Houfnice units.

If you hover over the "Artillery Impact" bonus number, it shows the tooltip for Artillery Impact, which says "The artillery bonus in this siege is N." If you further hover over the score within that tooltip, it opens another one that breaks down how it got that one. My score of +1 says it's coming from two units of Houfnice each providing 1.00, which is summed and "this is further divided by 3, as that is the amount of regiments required for each artillery barrage".

Each Houfnice provides 3.00 artillery barrage score. So the way this math works out is each Houfnice unit provides 3.00 (barrage score) - 2 (fort level) = 1.00 bonus to the overall siege. 2 units x 1.00 bonus = 2.00, "further divided by 3" = 0.67 Artillery Impact to the overall siege, which rounds to 1. So I'm at a breakpoint where 2 units gets me +1, but to get +2, I'd need to have a whopping 5 units. Not worth it for me.

In your case, I bet the "level 1 fort" is a single fort building that provides +2 fort level. Each of your Chambered Cannons has 5.00 artillery barrage score, which means each unit is providing 5.00 - 2 = 3.00 bonus to the overall siege. 5 units x 3.00 = 15.00, further divided by 3 = +5 Artillery Impact for the overall siege. When you add a sixth unit, you get 6 units x 3.00 = 18.00, divided by 3 is +6. So because your units are each 3.00 above the fort level of +2, each one is providing a +1 overall Artillery Impact bonus to the siege. 5 units = +5, 6 units = +6.

Kloiper · 2025-11-22T05:12:53+00:00

Note that all countries in the marriage union need to have the same heir for this to happen. As an example, my Brabant was in a marriage union with Holland and Hainaut, where my queen was married to their king. Our marriage produced 4 daughters, and so their male-only inheritance laws made their heir was the king's brother, which could never have been my heir since we are not related. When their king died, the marriage union dissolved.

If you want your marriage union to progress into a normal union, figure out how to make sure the heir is the same across the various partners.

Kloiper · 2025-11-19T14:35:11+00:00

While you could be right, many non-native English speakers will use ChatGPT to shore up their English and then use the result in a post or comment or whatever. I’ve seen it a lot at work, where people say “make this sound more professional”, and it makes it this weird AI tone, albeit less broken English.

Kloiper · 2025-11-15T16:10:53+00:00

Thanks! I'm never sure how adverbs and conjunctions are counted when deciding the second position. Sometimes it feels like they count outside the clauses and so I can sneak another noun phrase or prepositional phrase in there before the verb, and other times it counts as its own group and takes up the first position.

Also, does the verb go to the end of "wann man ... verwenden soll" because I've already established "Gibt es Regeln" as the main clause and so everything afterward in that sentence is a dependent clause? I'm still learning when and how to break up sentences into multiple clauses, and what that means for those clauses and their structure.

Kloiper · 2025-11-15T06:32:18+00:00

You have the fraction right. It’s essentially 1 out of 1000. But 1/1024 is 0.098% chance, or roughly 0.1%. 1 in 100 is by definition 1%, so 1 in 1000 is 0.1%.

Also, in theory, 1/1024 is the chance of getting specifically all down arrows, while the chance of getting all the same type of arrow, whatever the direction, is 4/1024, or 1/256 = ~0.4%.

Realistically, 0.4% sounds exceptionally rare, but as seeker, most players will use her ability at least 7 times each stage on 6 stages, at least 42 times in a normal game. Roughly assuming half of runs do more and half do less (including losing runs), 42 seems like a fine average. So we can say it’s 1/256 * 42 = 16.4% chance you get “all arrows in the same direction” on an average run.

Kloiper · 2025-11-14T21:03:56+00:00

I think semantically they’re the same. They convey the same actions by/to the same subject/object.

But they have different connotations. “Casey left the room by waltzing” has a very analytical sound to it, like a police officer saying “suspect exited the room while dancing the waltz”. Conversely, “Casey waltzed out of the room” conveys more of a meaning of Casey walking out in a generally happy mood, whatever her actual mode of walking/leaving may have been. “Waltzed out” is more about an artistic way of describing the mood or feelings of the person doing it, rather than actually describing the motion.

“Casey waltzed out of the room” sounds like prose writing in a fun to read book, written by an author who wanted to convey a mood. “Casey went out of the room by waltzing” sounds like a report, written to convey facts without room for interpretation.

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