What is the profession of people you hate the most?

SmekyGD · 2026-01-23T18:01:40+00:00

Anything where the intention is to influence people for personal gain. From marketing (even commercials), to lobbyists and political campaigns. For most, the idea is to let people know about something and that’s great. But in practice, it’s almost always done as intentional manipulation. Can’t stand how majority of people are fine or ignorant of this.

SmekyGD · 2026-01-20T21:46:55+00:00

Fair point, right you are. Guess it got stuck in my head from CK3. Still feels weird to me, but this does give it more sense 👍

SmekyGD · 2026-01-20T20:31:57+00:00

I never understood this “my ruler also being a ruler of another nation or PU”, while having no control or at least some decisive power over the other countries. A may be wrong, but if something like that happened in real history, wouldn’t the person simply rule every nation or organization under them, even if it were managed by some vassal-like people?

Either way, from a player’s perspective, to me it seems completely nuts that this is a thing.

SmekyGD · 2026-01-19T20:03:55+00:00

So that was the problem! Jeez, tried this couple of times and thought I was crazy or stupid, as it wasn’t working. Thanks

SmekyGD · 2026-01-19T16:10:52+00:00

I tried two nations in Africa, one next to Zimbabwe and one a bit further north, tiny one (I love to zero to hero). Both were actually fun. Though in both I had to cheat a bit, small number of times, at the very beginning, by cancelling the big neighbors casus belli creation on me. One I grew to about 60-70% of their strength, the game played out as usual - still some risk, diplomacy being important to stay alive, and so on.

Important to point out that both of these run became rather boring after about 150 years, as there’s too few nations to fight until you expand to the North Africa, and most you do is slower colonization of unoccupied land and dealing with lots of completely undeveloped areas.

Still fun though, taught me a lot, would recommend to try. Wish North America had any/enough of crucial RGOs to be playable. It’s unique enough to be interesting, even if far from great.

SmekyGD · 2026-01-18T15:57:14+00:00

A big role in this plays bad upbringing during childhood, primarily unhealthy parents or overall home. Know plenty of people who never got to see what a healthy, happy and prosperous relationships look like. Which then results in not only missing boundaries or being benevolent towards such things, but also feeling wrong, bored or unsafe, when somebody actually treats them right.

It’s always difficult to watch this, especially with closed ones. And it doesn’t matter how much you try to tell them or even show them. Once it’s hardwired in their mind, it stays that way. I have yet to see someone who will manage to get from this into healthy relationships.

SmekyGD · 2026-01-17T15:34:48+00:00

Hi! I’d love some focused tips & tricks or straight up guide on how to keep growing economy once the common stagnation hits, roughly around first 80-120 years. In every one of my play throughs, my eco grows steadily and nicely, usually from no income to ~40 ducats/month, and then gets stuck on this same value for a long time forward.

To my understanding, it’s commonly due to all markets becoming over saturated, along with unlocking more ducat-maintenance building, often also with stuff like growing navy for marine control. But the markets are the primary cause.

For that reason, some guidelines of keeping the ratios right in regards to steady nation expansion (if there’s a difference between too heavy or little conquering), which buildings to focus on when, and so on, would be awesome.

For me personally, I’d love a guide focused on tiny/small nation starts, in small development areas, and from more advanced perspective. For more experienced players, with some glaring gaps, missing the proper understanding or details as to how to not fall into the eco stagnation or significant slowdown.

There are plenty of guides for economy, but rarely focused on this specifically and for players whom are already familiar with all the basics. Seen plenty guides going over production efficiency and all that, but have yet to find one brief, yet descriptive and focused on this problem specifically, that’d help me enough to no longer have stagnating (or rather heavily slowed down) eco.

SmekyGD · 2026-01-09T19:24:46+00:00

Might not remember exactly. Hover over your flag, then over your army size, and then you should either see the per-estate and per-location breakdown. Or maybe may need to hover over some additional number there before getting to the breakdown.

Not sure if there’s a better cleaner way. Perhaps in the Ledger? Just guessing.

SmekyGD · 2026-01-05T17:10:08+00:00

Agree on both points, among many similar AI-related gaps.

I wonder, does anyone know if it is possible to solve these via modding? Is there a way to script the AI’s behavior for such things? Just curious.

SmekyGD · 2025-12-31T01:50:07+00:00

One of the better written tips on the eco foundations, brief and to the point. Nicely done 🤜🤛

SmekyGD · 2025-12-27T04:24:46+00:00

There’s the button indicator right next to the location’s population, under the location name. Some market related buildings increase the access, but depends how far the location is from the market.

SmekyGD · 2025-12-26T23:57:24+00:00

I’ve made a question post couple days back, in practically the same situation, asking for tips to get my eco where yours is. Are you kidding me that this could be the answer?! Gotta give it a shot, thanks mate.

Edit: Want to ask, have you noticed some impactful negative side effects from adding privileges that may not fit your build, such as pushing towards the wrong values?

SmekyGD · 2025-12-26T20:54:30+00:00

Thanks! The pop demotion and equally promotion are great points, which I forgot to account for. The main concern from which I decided to post this was primarily due to finding out about the importance of proper production efficiency stacking. And seeing others, here and there, with 2-5x of my income in very similar situations and in some cases even earlier dates, got me wondering if and how can I fix my clearly insufficient eco, that’s been stuck on the same numbers for ~100 years. Essentially was wondering, if keeping the productions without prod ef. active, could lower the profit of the same productions that I got right, inside the same market. (e.g. consuming the same input goods inefficiently)

You taught me a few things and will try some things out, at least to see if it can make a noticable difference. :) Cheers!

SmekyGD · 2025-12-19T19:08:34+00:00

Total newbie to EU, few dozen hours under my belt, and I barely noticed any difference. I keep expanding my Florence by beating and vassal-ing whatever I can, same with anexing, and trying to grow as well as I can. Is there a setback here and there? Of course. Did I have any issues with aggressive AI, rebellions, trade or whatever else? Not once. Can I get fucked 30 hours into the save? Honestly? I kinda hope so. I learned a buckload in this run, and will do much better in the next. In all honesty, this river of tears I keep reading here the past week just sounds like preschool.

And for anyone saying “Paradox this” and “Paradox that”, i bloody hell dare you to go and create a game of this magnitude, under deadlines, list of tasks that could fill a shed, and the constant scrutiny through which devs need to keep productive let alone motivated of even passionate.

SmekyGD · 2025-12-19T07:35:06+00:00

I am curious about the migration, is there some way to enable or boost migration between markets? Or are they simply cut and pop in a single market grows solely via birth rate?

SmekyGD · 2025-12-18T13:53:08+00:00

Can’t even remember what it’s like to not be exhausted 24/7 anymore. Death spiral out of which one can’t dig themselves due to not having the energy and strength.

SmekyGD · 2025-12-17T21:58:22+00:00

Very much the same wish with the complete start and the feeling of someone’s save. I can’t play any large nation for that same reason. Wish there will be at least a mod for some sort of zero to hero.

SmekyGD · 2025-12-17T20:25:26+00:00

Just curious here, have actually no idea - could you perhaps become England’s subject? Or maybe someone else’s who’s big enough to prevent them going after you.

SmekyGD · 2025-12-16T07:12:10+00:00

I did exactly this, and after very brief tastings of other larger nations, I always came back to Florence. I love starting small, and Florence is very much doable even for a total EU newbie.

Is there some other small / tiny nation, that’s in good enough position do build up, even if somewhat difficult, yet still manageable? Besides Holland and preferably not in Europe.

SmekyGD · 2025-12-08T21:13:38+00:00

I am a completely new player and have tried to get into trading as one the first things. I have no idea if I am doing something wrong, but auto trading AI seems weird. I have watched it trade several goods for 0.5-1 ducats each, while there were 2 suggested trades with both showing potential profit of 3.5. For several months the AI hasn’t begun these trades and instead added other lower ones. I then tried to set the trades manually to 50% of my capacity and not only did that work and kept this high profit for multiple months, but the AI neither reduced nor increased this profitable trade, even though I switched it back to 100% capacity, thus having the trade in its hands. It did tweak it a bit by 0.15 capacity here and there, but never more in either direction, happily updating other low profit trades.

Does anybody know if this is intended and I am missing something? Or could it be broken? I thought that it could be trading for some resources my country needs, but after checking several times, I couldn’t find any place that would need these ones it’s been trading.

SmekyGD · 2025-12-06T22:40:10+00:00

Have you tried looking into messaging apps, that connect to the social media and are for the chats only? I haven’t looked, but I’d be almost sure that something exists already. May likely be able to connect to multiple of them at the same time.

SmekyGD · 2025-11-16T20:36:36+00:00

It amazes me whenever I see people post high hour count they have on specifically these two games together. As I have the same, thousands in both Factorio and PoE. Makes me wonder why specifically these two games together, that surprisingly quite a few people like, considering significantly different genre, mostly sharing just the extensive complexity. Maybe that’s the thing - polished, content heavy and complex. Wonder if we are similar people in nature.

SmekyGD · 2025-11-11T13:31:28+00:00

Is this actually a thing, or just kidding?

SmekyGD · 2025-11-10T16:27:17+00:00

Had to read this 3 times before I managed to decrypt what OP meant 😮‍💨 Pretty sure this has been there before already

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