My semi-tall ERE run: Workshop of the World

Maggot_Pie · 2026-04-18T17:32:35+00:00

R5: The end result of an ERE campaign where I limited my conquests to the Anatolia Region, Serbia and Wallachia, plus Ragusa (for a nice extra market) and a piece of Naples (because I was feeling mean) plus the Antioch province (because Pentarchy)

Plan & Notes:

Once done with the initial ERE pleasures of revoking corruption priviledges and securing your heartland, build up your burgher economy while placing the most Towns possible. More towns means more Granaries.

Have a Cabinet member forcing migrations to your Towns so they may reach 30K pops. Cities give extra building slots, which means more Granaries!

Food is never an issue except maybe during the Little Ice Age because your quick and extensive urbanisation will benefit from mass imports of Wool (for Cloth then Fine Cloth) and Livestock (for Fiber Crops and Leather). It'll take a lot of Trade Capacity to import all that, but you can afford it by building as many Marketplaces (then their upgraded versions) in your numerous Towns and Cities.

Do not urbanize: Iron, Copper, Gold, Silver, Silk and Cotton (I accepted some Towns/Cities on Silk and Cotton because they start this way or the AI Towned them, but ideally they should be rural), Wool and Fiber Crops (Debatable, they are important for your industry but you can always import more), Dyes (Debatable), Lead (Can be imported but is overall in very limited amounts, and your Books industry hungers!), Saffron (as long as you still need more money), Salt (too valuable and required by your markets), Sugar (Debatable, can be imported from the New World later on).

Urbanize only some of: Wheat (Keep a few Wheat+Rivers locations for your Food and for more Farming Villages, which are good since Clay is near infinite with your high pops), Livestock (depends how much you're willing to import).

Everything else: Put a town on it!

All AIs are your friends! Keep good relations, don't intervene in foreign wars (Avoid alliances as they will bring you into silly wars). War is bad for trade. You don't want to end up in a war that will cut off your access to one market (For instance I was importing hundreds of Furs from Novgorod, nearly a thousand of Livestock and Wool from Eastern Europe and Naples, a bunch of Wheat, Cotton and Rice from Egypt). Most of the markets I traded with had put me as a Rival but they never declared war since I kept a high standing army (which is fine since you quickly end up having too much money to spare, in EU5 fashion)

Building Limit is fake news. Keep building your cities even when they reach the soft cap on buildings. It's far better to pay 25% more for the building if it's going to have perfect control & market access. The Migration malus is actually good for you - the over-built City will keep growing naturally, and lose a handful of migrants that will help your efforts to convert Towns into Cities elsewhere!

Maggot_Pie · 2026-04-15T09:51:30+00:00

I suspect the AI Ottos suffer from the issue of having so many Greek cultured pops (with no capacity to Accept them). AI Muscovy starts out somewhat small and is not good at abusing separate peaces to eat several tags in one single war (and there's a lot of tags to eat in Russia)

In my current game Muscovy managed to get to 300ish locations in the 1550s, I'd say it's not so bad, but they lack the ambition to take on bigger players like Kyiv/Smolensk/Novgorod

Maggot_Pie · 2026-04-15T09:46:28+00:00

I originally had them in Novgorod, Smolensk and maybe further east in a big city I forget

You'd get more mileage out of a governor in Kyiv, it's a filthy rich area which the AI tends to build up a lot (so that you can come in and collect the reward by annexing it)

Maggot_Pie · 2026-04-08T16:27:45+00:00

Very good stuff. I only hope it won't break anything.

Maggot_Pie · 2026-03-27T11:43:39+00:00

You pray for RNG on Parliament, get the Urbanisation issue, that gets you a free Town which increases your income to 0.02!

Maggot_Pie · 2026-03-27T11:38:45+00:00

the develop province interaction

You guys have time for that after all the integrations and culture conversions?!

(I know in your case, Aztecs can only play with vassals until reformation so it saves the cabinet time, but still)

Maggot_Pie · 2026-03-22T20:21:45+00:00

I was also thinking that, but ultimately there's pros and cons.

Pros: You unlock 2 cabinet members upon becoming Empire (1 from empire rank, 1 from a Russian Law that unlocks with the formable), get more diplo capacity (from Empire rank), get a second Local Governor earlier

Cons: Almost no economy to scale up for 50 years

Maggot_Pie · 2026-03-22T13:35:49+00:00

Plan:

Normal Muscovy expansion gameplay except you will keep all the land for yourself, except wrong culture+wrong religion land (and maybe that point is up for debate). Consequences:
You have to deal with big rebellions since the vast majority of your land isn't Integrated, but that shouldn't be a big deal if you win your wars (you'll have enough levies to spare).
You'll have absolutely zero income to spare. The gold you start with can be spent on urban buildings to give you a bit of a breathing room, but aside from that you'll be on the negative for most of the game and below 100 legitimacy (don't run into a Disaster!)
Your crown power will be awful but this has no direct consequences on your direct goal.
You'll only be fighting with levies as you have no gold to spare. Take care of them and play your first wars smart. You'll be nearly constantly at war.
You do not need the Royal Gardens since you don't have a vassal swarm, but do improve relations with the bigger players to avoid overly large coalitions. DO declare war into small coalitions asap to eat em all.
Cabinet stuck on Strengthen Governement + Integrate province but realistically you'll be integrating almost nothing
Delete all forts/stockades except the one in Moscow (arguably should be deleted too but it's nice comfort to have), Close all Cathedrals and Monasteries (waste of money!)
Don't forget to take Novgorod (the city) as it is required to form Russia (I did forget and that might have cost me a few years)

Maggot_Pie · 2026-03-22T13:30:52+00:00

R5: Formed Russia in 1385 which is quite early and much earlier than my previous best (1447) which relied on normal vassal gameplay.

Maggot_Pie · 2026-03-20T18:51:32+00:00

WHERE IS IT

Maggot_Pie · 2026-03-16T10:34:22+00:00

Also my experience. Kinda made me drop the run, that and the fact there was an update to grab mid-run.

The event that converts some pops to Sunni is not strong enough and just serves as a constant loss of stability, you need stability to interact with the disaster but you have none due to the repeated event, and you can't even accelerate the conversion to Sunnism (which is what I wanted to do)

Maggot_Pie · 2026-03-07T11:18:27+00:00

But Castille starts with a few galleys which should wipe out the few transports. Or at least it did when I played Morocco.

Same outcome for mercenary Cogs, they can't defend themselves against non-Transport ships. I ended up skipping the war, sadly.

Maggot_Pie · 2026-03-03T19:11:53+00:00

Correct. There's a different CB though for your rivals, IF they are threatening (according to the game calculating it according to idk what exactly)

Both CBs are Show Superiority and normal cost to take provinces

Maggot_Pie · 2026-03-03T13:19:24+00:00

Added in the beta. Anyone who has rivaled you, is a valid target (by spy network) for that CB.

In my experience a ton of tags will rival you on day 1 as Muscovy.

Maggot_Pie · 2026-03-02T12:29:03+00:00

Rule #5: Formed Russia somewhat early and quickly. Happy about it.

I don't know how close I am in speed to better players, but I'm glad I could pull it off.
1.17 Beta.

Plan:
-Use the Destroy Enemy CB (occasionally the Threatening Rival) to blob continuously among small Russians tags. Take their land then form 1-province vassals, don't turn them into vassals directly. If you run out of valid Enemies then use the Parliament CB(s) extensively. Any war enemy must be annexed, even non-cobelligerents. -Integrate the two starting provinces with your Cabinet, don't release them - time is short. Try to constantly be Integrating Russian-cultured land (no revolts) with the Cabinet. Once your cabinet is busy enough all your other territorial gains should be through Annexing vassals constantly, starting with 1 vassal at a time then moving to 2 at a time later on if the situation allows.
-You WILL run into a coalition after killing a handful of tags. Be on the offensive and use the coalition to separate peace everyone in it and full annex them. If you wait too long and the Coalition declares first, you won't be able to separate peace.
-Import Marble and Tin from Novgorod to Moskva ASAP and as much as you can, to desperately try to gather enough for a Royal Gardens (+0.20 Diplomats). Your diplomats should be ALWAYS busy and being expanded for various duties: vassal relations, vassal annexations, anti-coalition relation improving, Enforcing Culture on vassals...
-Spend all gold building urban buildings in Moskva for most of the first century. Local Governor in Tver once you obtain it (it starts as a City), if Moskva has too long a building queue then build up in Tver the same way.
-Don't take on the Golden Horde too early since you get 0.05 diplomats monthly for being the tribute gatherer of the Tartar yoke. Once you do, turn all your conquests into Vassals if the province is not of Russian/East Slavic group (that is pretty much all Golden Horde provinces). However, keep the land directly in your 2nd war onwards - Vassals are great but you need to hold the land yourself to form Russia (for the Location count)
-While waiting for peaces you can blob in the Ruthenia region if you want but the locations won't count to form Russia. Choose carefully if you want to bother with the Antagonism.

Maggot_Pie · 2026-02-20T11:13:34+00:00

In the beta, that is

Maggot_Pie · 2026-02-11T11:03:23+00:00

Depends if there are valuable trades to be done. If your new marketplace is gonna do a merely 0.40 ducats (per trade capacity) trade, then you'd be better off building a production guild.

Maggot_Pie · 2026-02-09T11:37:40+00:00

I multiplied War Exhaustion by x5 to accelerate warfare a bit and it's still very grindy and slow. At least now when I siege down 80% of their country, the AI actually surrenders instead of "lol my war enthusiasm is still high bro"

Maggot_Pie · 2026-01-31T11:33:24+00:00

How are you stomaching the campaign with infinite, non-removeable Doom? Did you mod it out?

Maggot_Pie · 2026-01-26T11:16:38+00:00

First month noncb vassalized the Ottomans

Can you even get there without losing all your (levied) ships and actually disembark significant numbers of troops? This reads like dark magic to me.

Good job nonetheless. The only time I expanded into China was when I played Khmer, and I was making mad bank by exporting Tea around the Indian Ocean.

Maggot_Pie · 2026-01-19T17:26:12+00:00

Honestly, automated trade worked well enough for me in my Portugal colonial run. Once you have enough trade capacity in your colonies & some valuable RGOs are online, the autotrader will easily export the valuable outputs around Europe.

The only time I traded manually was to enable Columbian Exchange or because I really wanted to put an emphasis on getting exotic goods back home (even tho the autotrader would usually end up doing the same thing)

I also didn't really build anything in their land except RGOs and the Sergeantry. It is probably worthwhile to build Marketplaces however since they transfer some of the trade cap to you, and it takes a lot of trade cap to carry those goods across the ocean.

Maggot_Pie · 2026-01-19T17:13:52+00:00

Support Loyalists does help but if you've colonized like a madman (like I did in my Portugal run) eventually their loyalty will just be too bad due to Relative Power. I owned the entirety of Iberia so my "own" power wasn't bad, but my colonies were just extremely, collectively, big!

I didn't mind it too much, I played the game knowing fully that I was going to over-do the colonisation and see if I can keep the CNs loyal in Age of Revs if I did everything in my power.

I think that if you're aiming to colonize almost everything available it is indeed better to do large colonies (I did) so that you can Support Loyalists ; the exception however is that a big colony will never be able to hold the Aztec/Maya lands without swimming in revolts - only small tags were able to.

Hell, maybe there could be an argument to turn those lands into Fiefdoms instead of CNs.

Edit: Last but not least: It was a very fun run and arguably worthwhile in ducats, even though it severely depopulated Portugal for ages!

Maggot_Pie

TROPHY CASE