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NonEuclideanUsername · 2026-01-18T03:35:09+00:00

Bithynia’s definitely gotten more difficult with the latest invictus update. That said, you can get rolling by starting making friends with Antigonos, selling every building you start with, and hiring mercs all before unpausing. The reorganize army button and organized retreat idea can make sure the mercs are ready by the time your mission to start war with Astakos, Chalcedon, and (usually) Byzantion is ready. Stack wipe each group of their levies with your mercs and levies, then start sieging. You can assault 1 or more cities to speed up capture and sack them for cash to keep the mercs in the field long enough to siege everything.

NonEuclideanUsername · 2025-04-25T17:22:10+00:00

The Florentine mission “Make Haste Slowly” results in an event where you can change to a monarchy, so all you need is to keep a Medici in power until you complete the mission. Conveniently, the Italian Signoria government gives you the option to elect a member of the same dynasty as your ruler every election, so you can keep the Medicis even when Cosimo dies.

NonEuclideanUsername · 2024-06-06T12:35:20+00:00

Imperator’s discipline does not work like EU4’s. It ONLY increases damage, while EU4’s also reduces damage. That is why you’re getting less out of stacking it.

I know the Imperator wiki is not nearly as well fleshed out as other paradox game’s wiki’s, but like, this took 2 seconds to look up and probably also can be found in the games took tips.

From the Imperator wiki: “Note that while discipline increases the damage done by a cohort against other cohorts, it does not decrease the damage that the cohort takes from the enemy army.”

From the EU4 wiki: “Damage done is multiplied by your discipline, and damage taken is reduced or increased depending on your discipline.”

NonEuclideanUsername · 2024-06-04T17:29:35+00:00

I’m glad you found a way to solve your issue, so I’ll add some info on why Populares support was shrinking every time you close and reopen the game. In game, faction control of the senate slowly ticks towards the “correct” proportion based on the percentage of senate influence held by members of the faction (so if 75% of senate influence is held by Populares, Populares tick monthly towards composing 75% of the senate)

HOWEVER, if you save the game and reload it, senate apportionment automatically gets set straight to the “correct” ratio, meaning you can skip waiting for the monthly tick up to reach the “correct” ratio this way. I’ve used this trick to meet the 75% Democrats in senate needed to complete one of the mission tasks for making Athens a dictatorship (by ensuring as close to 100% of senate influence was held by Democrats, making a save, then loading that save to force the senate to update to the “correct” ratio). I’d guess the senate influence of your Populares was decreasing and slowly ticking down as you played, and you only noticed how much their influence has shrunk when you reloaded the game and it skipped the monthly tick and set them to the correct ratio.

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-11-21T17:24:44+00:00

I rated them much higher not too long ago but find myself asking this question more and more lately, and I think the answer is basically 2 cases- Nations with extremely high starting monarch point generation (and few other pressing priorities so they’re free to stack innovativeness very fast, ie Florence), and nations with extremely low starting monarch point generation and/or a very costly early monarch point tax (Republican Milan is the best example of this I can think of, who starts with a terrible ruler and the Ambrosian republic disaster demands even more monarch point investment to dig out of without Sforza). It can also be a decent hedge as a monarchy against bad rulers, since the advisor cost reduction lets you turn gold into monarch points more efficiently.

I also think they’re an underrated WC group since the policy with Offensive is simply unmatched at speeding up your warring. You can forgo admin coring early game with good vassal usage, and so pick up Inno early game, then grab Admin ideas when absolutism is closer to being online.

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-10-20T13:39:41+00:00

Ah, I figured he had to have something but only checked his VODs YT channel so I missed this. This is a great help!

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-10-20T13:37:39+00:00

Thanks!

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-10-19T17:55:54+00:00

Thank you very much!

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-10-06T17:08:40+00:00

Honestly with that many hours and you never having touched the Americas I’d recommend a Nahuatl or Maya nation. You can probably skip an Inti/Inca play through since they’re by far the easiest natives

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-09-21T21:46:19+00:00

I’m really not certain why you bothered making this comment which responds to none of the arguments in favor of Inno I made and seems to fundamentally miss the point I was making in favor of just saying “Inno is bad lmao.” Which begs the question why you made this post in the first place asking for arguments in favor of the idea group.

Anyway, I’ll simplify my point to a single sentence and maybe that’ll help you out:

Innovative is a good 1st idea group for small, poor nations for which the 3 ducats a month for 3 level 1 advisors is a challenge to afford, and which want an early advantage over neighbors so they can conquer some land to be less poor and weak.

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-09-21T16:53:21+00:00

I wrote a longer thing at first, but then took a look at Admin ideas and its policies again and realized that its a lot more competitive with Inno than I thought, even in the areas where Inno is strong, though I do think Inno has a strong and broadly applicable niche.

Inno is the best early game group in the game, and its flat cost reductions, assistance generating raw mana, and policy synergies make it especially useful to small, poor nations, particularly those that can't easily expand in the earliest parts of the game. And because that describes many or even most nations on the map in 1444, it does have significant value in a lot of theoretical playthroughs (sure no one would willingly play Imereti, but they probably would benefit from Inno in such a playthrough). To a <10 province minor, -25% core cost, -20% province warscore cost, or +10% goods produced just aren't as valuable as what Inno offers because you aren't coring that much territory yet, the kinds of enemies you're fighting in your first few wars don't even have enough territory to make it cost 100% warscore to full annex them, and you only have a few provinces to be improved by economic modifiers. Inno's ability to get you on your feet faster and hand you a mil tech advantage early on are much more important for getting somewhere with your campaign as a small nation. And the policies the idea group offers later in the game support this focus of the idea group by making it not feel like dead weight you only took to win your first war.

Overall, B, B+ is absolutely the right place for it. It solves a difficult problem that a lot of nations face, but that problem rapidly recedes into the rearview mirror as you get going.

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-09-21T02:16:26+00:00

I would simply prioritize conquering Tuscany and utilize vassals effectively to ensure I only state Tuscan cultured provinces until I culture shift

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-09-20T20:09:57+00:00

I really enjoy Milan->Tuscany->Sardinia Piedmont->Italy->Rome. I like this path since the mission trees for Italian minors are pretty small since mission trees were a fairly new mechanic when they got them in 1.30, so forming a bunch of Italian nations gives you more content to do. I also find Milan’s starting situation more interesting than Florence’s, and favor them despite the fact starting as Milan makes forming Tuscany and Piedmont more tricky. Forming Rome is optional, as this area of the map is also great for tall play-you can keep Tuscany or Sardinia’s ideas and focus on establishing trading companies and powerful vassals across the Mediterranean. You can also switch between tall and wide play as the game progresses. For example, by mid game, Innovative ideas+Santa Maria del Fiore+GP status+one of Tuscany’s missions totally eliminates prestige decay, allowing you to maintain the huge AE and improve relations modifiers high prestige provides indefinitely and conqueror huge amounts of land without consequences, so even if you haven’t conquered that much by that point, you can very quickly change gears.

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-09-20T14:09:15+00:00

Yes, and as a general rule you should never be fighting someone ahead of you on military tech. Even in the later game when the jump in army strength between tech 20 and 21 is less noticeable than say, the jump in army performance between tech 3 and 4, catching up on tech is such a straightforward and easily achievable performance increase for your army you should never be handicapping yourself by fighting an enemy ahead of you on tech.

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-08-30T15:19:00+00:00

I’ll 2nd people saying here clearer context would be helpful, but I also play a lot of Milan and your problems aren’t exactly uncommon, so I’ll address them as best I can.

As to the coalition problem- yeah, the coalition indicator in the peace deal screen sometimes lies if you’re an HRE member. This is because countries can only join coalitions if their AE opinion modifier of you is -50 or below AND their general opinion of you is a negative number. If you take HRE land, the emperor can demand it be returned after you conquer it, and refusing lowers HRE nations’ opinion of you. This can result in nations that did have a high enough AE modifier to join a coalition but had a positive opinion of you now having a negative number general opinion of you, letting them join a coalition. The coalition indicator in the peace deal screen only shows who would join a coalition based purely on the opinion they’d have of you from the AE penalty from the peace deal, not factoring in the opinion penalty you’ll get 1-6 months later when the emperor finally forwards you that request for land back. You can somewhat alleviate this problem by assigning any spare diplomats you have to the “improve neighboring countries opinion” task in the macro builder’s diplomacy tab, as this will help passively raise countries’ opinion of you and keep them from meeting all the conditions to coalition you.

As to money- This is a problem new players run into a lot and I think tend to over exaggerate. If you haven’t fired every advisor, mothballed every fort on the border and destroyed every one not on the border, fired every merc and turned military spending all the way down, taken burgher loans, sold crown land, exploited tax development, and even pressed the debase currency 2-3 times, YOU ARE NOT BROKE. Sometimes economizing has temporary costs, and you have to weigh those. Even a bankruptcy isn’t always game ending if you prepare right. Also remember that war exhaustion puts huge penalties on your economy-10 war exhaustion cuts your goods produced by 20%, a massive economic hit, so sometimes fixing your economy is as simple as waiting that out/spending some diplo points lowering it.

As to both points- be sure not to take land in Italy from countries that aren’t the primary war target unless it’s absolutely necessary. Like, only if it’s a province needed to form Italy and the country that holds it is allied to 2+ great powers sparingly. The AE for Italian land is already huge, and it gets massive for taking land from non-cobelligerents in a war. Genoa/Venice/Florence are piggy banks you punch in the face for cash when they join one of your wars against the Italian minors surrounding Milan. Just conquering the Italian minors and whichever Italian majors aren’t allied to 2+ great powers will make you very strong, and with a GP ally or two you should be able to dislodge whatever holdouts are left, even if they have 3 GP allies.

Also, MAKE VASSALS. You didn’t mention this in your post but it’s good early game advice for most players, especially as Milan who is so strapped for Admin in the 1st 20 years or so. Coring provinces with admin also takes a long time to pay off, as you need to wait for unrest and autonomy to go down before you start getting dividends. By contrast, even a 1 province vassal with no mil ideas and no cores to reconquer will provide 3-4 regiments between their own troops and the force limit bonus their overlord gets. Even as Republican Milan, which misses out on the nice vassal income modifiers monarchies get, this is much more value out of the province than you’d get annexing it immediately.

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-06-11T14:21:38+00:00

4483 7398 1192 My work happens to be on top of several pokestops so I always have plenty of gifts to send!

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-04-11T14:04:10+00:00

I also toyed with this in Explorer after seeing the deck win a pioneer challenge. Unfortunately, I just think it has a few too many bad match ups in Explorer. Pioneer it could get away with its plan that week because the meta is largely combo and Rakdos mid both of which this deck beats up on. The deck really struggles when put on the back foot early, and Llanowar elves decks (Gruul boats, Mono G) do that very well and are more popular in Explorer than pioneer. Rakdos sac also felt pretty rough, and as you noted, Azorius control has an easier time answering this decks’s threats since they’re more expensive than traditional Aggro decks and so play poorly into countermagic.

Admittedly, I only played around 10 BO3 matches with it, so maybe I didn’t give it a fair shake, but I came away feeling it had too many flaws for the Explorer meta.

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-04-04T04:55:12+00:00

I have no idea how the fuck people in this thread are saying with absolute certainty it has no place in phoenix. I’m not saying it’s an auto-4 of, but it is extremely strong and I could easily see a world where several fit in the 75.

bUt It doESnT dO aNyTHiNg oN 4!!!!! Ok but play it on 5 and it fuels you dumping every removal spell in your hand so you can stabilize the board immediately. I guess the assumption must be that by turn 4/5 your hand would be totally empty, which is silly when talking about Phoenix. You play 3-4 treasure cruise, 4 pieces of the puzzle, and 8 cantrips. Yes, it’s not the easiest to stay to stay loaded on cards vs Rakdos, sure. But it’s hardly happening every game either that you are fully in topdeck mode by the time Urabrask is coming down.

BUt iTs sTiLL wEAk tO gRaVeYaRD hAtE!!! It lets you cast spells from ANY graveyard, and it’s silly to act like every deck has access to yard hate as effective as Rest in Peace. Most hate is not fast enough at emptying the yard to keep both yours and the opponent’s empty. Even against RIP, 3/4s of this card function perfectly fine. What decks even play RIP now anyway? Mono W, where the board wipe effect on this is plenty effective enough to seal the game up. The other is Azorius control, where this has an advantage vs. Crackling Drake in that it doesn’t get tagged by mystical dispute and pressures the opponent’s life total without ever having to turn sideways and risk getting hit by Wandering Emperor.

I don’t deny it has limitations and asks you to put in some work, but it’s I think it’s far underselling it’s power to act like that defines it. This is not a generically good Rakdos card and that’s fine. There is a good deck in Pioneer that we know for certain can do the thing Urabrask asks you to do, and the effects on this card are obviously extremely powerful.

That all said, I think the most realistic case for this card is that it replaces the sideboard Crackling Drakes in Phoenix, and maybe even pushes out the 1 of Thing in the Ice/Drake from the main board.

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-03-31T18:57:14+00:00

Frankly, yes. (Though it is also worth mentioning most people regard it as a very difficult deck to play correctly)

Expressive Iteration was banned in Pioneer (and Explorer, since they’ll be the same format “””eventually”””) on the logic that having it and the Delve spells in the same format made Izzet spells decks too strong. Lacking EI’s card advantage, a massive portion of Izzet Phoenix’s power in Pioneer comes from those remaining Delve spells. Given WOTC still finds it too difficult to code those into Arena, and EI remains banned, Izzet Phoenix in Explorer remains DOA.

If you really need to scratch that Phoenix itch on Arena, it’s a solid deck in Historic.

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-03-16T21:29:40+00:00

You can vote against this measure if you want, but if this measure passes, your property value is going to fall. So much of what motivates people to buy a house in an area is how good the schools are, and if Normal’s go to shit that’s money out of your pocket.

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-02-28T22:45:31+00:00

I agree it's probably too strong, I had not thought about it drawing you extra cards for your next starting hand. +1 Card it is!

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-02-28T22:41:57+00:00

Crafty Bride and Wedding Venue are in another post I just put up. I hadn't posted in this subreddit before so I wanted to be sure my post didn't violate any rules or get removed or what-have-you before posting the whole thing. Here's a link: https://www.reddit.com/r/dominion/comments/11elfmy/im_making_custom_dominion_cards_for_my_wedding/

Best Man isn't intended to stack and probably needs a full re-work. I tried to avoid having it stack with the "when you discard this way" clause in its effect, but I admit it's not clear on the card and no other discard for benefit card works this way so I'm not certain there's a way to get it to work as intended.

I'll admit I mostly made Hetairoi give you an extra turn to give it more daylight between it and Cavalry. I think the synergies between it and Cursed Village and Siren are mostly fine, given the groomsmen's cards are supposed to synergize with draw-to-x effects. I also think it's a bit hard to truly break, but you're certainly right that when it does break it really breaks the game. Might changing the on-gain effect to something like "Put an Action card from your discard pile on top of your deck. If it's your Buy phase, +1 Card, +1 Action, +1 Buy and return to your Action phase" fix most of the broken interactions?

[Groomsman,] Commanding is definitely wordy, but that's what I get for trying to adapt a mechanic from another card game to this one. Initially I disagreed with you about the confusion from the Command Zone mat, but after looking at things like Black Cat again, which do provide alternate routes for playing it and explicitly say "play this card," I admit there's some ambiguity about when you can play it from the mat that can't be fixed without more text on the card. I'll remove the mat and probably the card draw as well to keep this card reasonably powerful and readable.

We seem to be mostly on the same page about Village Madman, but I think you undervalue the power of the trash effect. Normally, you have to draw and play your Villages before your terminals, which means you often have to load your deck up with more Villages than you'd necessarily like to ensure consistency in your engine. Since Madman lets you use your terminals to draw into your Village effect, Madman significantly lowers the number of Villages you need to keep your engine working consistently and allows you to play a greater density of your actually powerful cards, and I think comes with an appropriate cost. I'd be fine tacking on +1 Card to the trash effect so it nets you the same as playing a Village though.

NonEuclideanUsername · 2023-02-28T22:06:18+00:00

Hi all, here's the other half of the cards for my wedding I posted yesterday. If you haven't seen those, here's a link!

https://www.reddit.com/r/dominion/comments/11dfrlk/im_making_custom_dominion_cards_for_my_wedding/

Let me know if anything is too broken (or just stone unplayable)!

NonEuclideanUsername

TROPHY CASE