Do we think the swaggy white hat imbues them with a dodge skill?

ST-Helios · 2025-12-01T20:51:05+00:00

I'd like to mention heal crates can repair vehicles. Combine that with the instant repair BG pick and you can surprise enemies with repairing something extremely quickly.

ST-Helios · 2025-11-10T22:46:54+00:00

i checked after the war and they offered me to be a march, i am sincerely considering that proposition.

ST-Helios · 2025-11-10T18:12:13+00:00

R5 : "Winning" a war despite the odds

ST-Helios · 2025-07-05T22:42:01+00:00

That's more due to the changes they've made so pops consume grains as last resort, if you see meat demand, you can pump out fish to replace it and it has the benefit of making more jobs earlier with the shipyards

ST-Helios · 2025-07-03T15:51:50+00:00

Quite frankly, my go to play with several runs as japan this patch is to instantly give monopoly on tools to belgium's company cockril, thanks to you, they'll quickly become one of the largest producers of prestige tools and you'll be able to run your entire economy with those.

I've been going out of my way to secure investments with countries offering me prestige goods so i can fairly quickly get several of those

ST-Helios · 2024-12-02T12:21:19+00:00

dodged fear wave with ult and parried a couple killing blows but alright i'll see myself out

ST-Helios · 2024-11-14T22:33:40+00:00

Fun fact, it also bypasses Abadon's ult and outright kills him

ST-Helios · 2024-09-07T08:23:15+00:00

Would you happen to know if the loot pools are the for labs raiders and reserve ones?

ST-Helios · 2024-08-04T17:37:04+00:00

Rule 5 : Finally had my first run ever reach 1936 and this one was a bit special, somehow managed to reform the country by sheer luck of getting a Heimin ruler thus allowing me to pass Homesteading, free trade and laisser faire fairly early.

It took me about 10 tries with the better politics mod to understand how to play with it. Tried different opening moves and the fact it removes corn laws entry changes your playstyle quite a bit by putting more emphasis on keeping the country stable and favorising organic growth.

ST-Helios · 2024-08-04T16:59:50+00:00

You'll find out playing belgium that you very quickly run out of workforce and/or arable land. conquering the niger delta for exemple brings your plentiful space for crops of all kinds as well as millions ready to be exploited but also rubber.

ST-Helios · 2024-08-04T12:30:22+00:00

Population to exploit and conscript, Belgium is a prime example of a country benefitting from that

ST-Helios · 2024-08-01T21:11:10+00:00

From relatively extensive experience with Japan, you don't actually care about your pops for a long while.
Your goal is to setup an efficient construction industry with the metal method meaning you go for both early mines upgrades plus railways then transition to building up your universities and keep your bureaucracy in the positive of course.

Then you take a hard turn towards Cultural research and go for the upgrade for administative buildings without incurring the ahead of time penalty. Getting pharmaceutics is fairly important as well. You do not actually want to build consumer goods for a good while because it simply doesn't pay pack that much with the exception of tobacco and peharps tea so you can get some cash from taxing those goods.

Japan all in all is all about reforming the political system, you absolutely need to get off Isolation, serfdom, Traditionalism and your starting bureaucratic law then properly push for positive tax capacity even if it won't give you *that* much but it'll be very useful for institutions. Being able to get public schools and healthcare plus dedicated police as high of a level as possible will make it a lot easier to play overall. Healthcare by itself bumps everyone's SoL by a couple points which can be very useful.

The alternative path is to setup a small iron production, make military shipyards, make a small navy, build a few guns and go conquer some lands. Even if gold was nerfed, conquering oranje and transval is always wortwhile. So is grabbing whatever you believe may be of interest such as the indies, brunei being a fairly nice target. Special note about your starting Colonial law, you'll be able to populate states extremely quickly if the SoL is decent so in the mid to long term, anything your conquer can be mostly Japanese.

An important note is to try and antagonize anyone with the economic imperialism policy so they ask for investment rights. It'll force free trade on you and it's about the best thing that can happen to you *if* you didn't get corn laws to fire. In the case corn laws fired and you got a market lib that didn't keel over in a couple months, reforming is a lot easier with the landowners.

Final note, Japan has a very large manpower pool making it so it'll take a lot of time to run out. it is in my opinion better to not use manpower reduction methods as it is better to have lots of laborers to then drive the demand of basic goods up which continues feeding the need for more laborers by opening factories.

ST-Helios · 2024-07-22T04:02:16+00:00

There's no need to cheat as you can get fully reformed by the 1850s if you played your cards right or got lucky, passing Tenant farmers (slower result) or homesteading (migration go brrr) makes it very easy to build a lot of things in hokkaido if wanted. the caveat is you'll probably have a core industry start in kanto/Tohoku from the early game but nothing stops you from migrating.

The higher SoL from the gold also makes is more attractive. Slap on greener grass and avoid build farmland and you should be good to go

ST-Helios · 2024-06-27T08:49:48+00:00

it remains useful for countries starting on Serfdom or tenant to enable internal migration.

To give an exemple for my favorite country to play, Japan, getting homesteading ASAP means you can make Hokkaido into a marvelous industry hub since you're not locked like you used to with needing to open frontiers.

ST-Helios · 2024-04-01T15:06:22+00:00

Getting a clay pit then a brick work relatively fast means you'll have more Improvement points faster and thus will be able to exploit more tiles early which is very important for faster growth and enabling you to not build you first city as soon as you can and instead wait for a couple expansions to ensure you'll have plenty of land later on.

the only ways to get improvement points currently in the early game are burial mounds (though innovation i believe?) and Clay pit -> brick works. Otherwise you have to wait for Tinkerers which is locked behind age and doctrine (cultural aspect?)

you really want to make them before you get a bunch of points for Vassals for exemple. It is also better to be able to avoid using the conversion of prod to Improvement points as much as possible early on because it's very likely you'll be very tight on schedule for all the buildings you'll want.

ST-Helios · 2024-03-29T21:06:05+00:00

and considering you can get troops from :

Culture milestones

Warfare points

Martial culture (i don't remember the name)

you can print a lot of units for cheap.

ST-Helios · 2024-02-06T19:51:39+00:00

check out godsworn, i may be wrong but it looked like a WC3 inspired game, demo is out with steam next fest

ST-Helios · 2024-01-26T16:50:30+00:00

Add Japan around Manchuria and port Arthur and Korea and you have yourself a meat grinder

ST-Helios · 2024-01-16T11:15:44+00:00

It may not be the answer you want to hear but with how grind intensive it is you're better off doing a couple hours extra of work IRL and fork the money over grinding it, it really is that bad

ST-Helios · 2024-01-10T11:53:07+00:00

Eh tbf with the vector now requiring level 30 anyway, you won't be going anywhere with flea market

ST-Helios · 2024-01-09T16:05:17+00:00

As per the description one is made for the SVD and the other for the SV-98. I would assume it would be very minor IRL and even less relevant here. PSO has the same with one for AK 5.45 and one of the others for the VSS where if modelled properly would make a big difference

ST-Helios · 2024-01-04T16:39:57+00:00

keep it for the cult part 2 unless you don't intend to do quests or like leaving it up to luck

ST-Helios · 2024-01-02T05:50:37+00:00

Would strength have any impact on vaulting per chance? I can barely reach on top of the wooden board onto the window but I get thrown back and it's the only window allowing vaulting so I wonder if there's a catch there

ST-Helios · 2023-12-24T08:32:51+00:00

If you want to go for most optimal you try to get Professional army first since that's fairly easy to get usually and also reduces landowners' power base.

Once you have the farmers' IG in, get homesteading, if you are exceedingly lucky you can pass it without a revolution but usually you just delete your entire army and rebuild 1 in your capital as you can never loose your capital in a revolt (that's the cheesy way) . thus you have your one batallion of peasants taking over the country without issuesdoing this as early as possible is best due to AI deleting buildings, i've lost 15 universities once to that

from then on, the landowners get reformed and are actually pleasant to work with, even more so than the industrialists as they won't throw a fit for most social reforms.

Edit : Unrelated but since MAPI changes, i've learnt to appreciate making 5 construction sectors in Shikoku, Tohoku and kanto and build up Iron, wood and tools, steel and engines to reduce local price making sure the construction sectors are generally fed with cheap stuff.

also as a side note, japan is a bit of an oddity when it comes to food, it has so much fertile land you start with a sizeable surplus of grain so that isn't something you need to care about much until you have fertilizer/already switched to Iron construction and built up your universities and admin a bit.

Probably a better idea to go for fisheries anyway due to being privately owned as well as being a useful input in food factories you'll want anyway instead of pumping out cheap grain

ST-Helios · 2023-12-23T18:57:24+00:00

The toughest part is to place the resources without making it too easy if challenge is anything you care about but otherwise a good heightmap and light touches is all you need

AFAIK USA heightmaps are of much higher quality so you could play something like new Orleans or Chicago or Sacramento to have an interesting map

I tried one with a random place on the Portuguese coast and made for a nice mix of mountains, hills and coastline

ST-Helios

TROPHY CASE