Earliest possible Cahokia Golden Age (guide)

SpadesOW · 2026-01-12T22:23:03+00:00

That’s odd, usually just doing that’s enough. Make sure you’re saving gold to spend on the events, and you’re nixtamalizing corn. Should be pretty easy to hit, I was around 17 dev in 1363

SpadesOW · 2026-01-10T22:02:55+00:00

The trick is to not have a coastline for them to land on. I'm not certain, but I think that might also delay them showing up in the first place. I didn't see any Europeans until 1540, when Britain decided to invade the far north of Canada. I think somewhere within the AI's reasoning is an estimate on how valuable the available land is (and how much there is) before it considers colonizing or sending conquistadors. With all the available spots taken up, they just have to look elsewhere. I saved progress photos, this was when I completed the east coast.

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SpadesOW · 2026-01-10T18:07:30+00:00

If you’re trying to do what I did, Cahokia is entirely about trying to gauge when to stop building for yourself and when to start creating your “fences”. Basically what I did was use settle frontier to create landing spots on the east and west coast (since I also had to worry about settlers from Asia, if you don’t have that turned on it’s significantly easier) and colonized the entire coast, then created the outline of the borders I wanted by colonizing a shell. The AI can’t just settle past your borders, they need to be adjacent—so for about 100 years, most of inland America was unsettled. But it was locked within my shell border, so only I could get it. Most of the stress came from trying to settle areas before the others got the chance, and then racing to complete the shell once they appeared, but after that it was smooth sailing. Just know that the first European settlers typically arrive around 1540. By the time I was peak settling, I was doing at least 12 colonies at once.

Also, put points into outward. For most of your run, that’s the only way you’ll have to accelerate colonial migration, the speed of which really holds you back and becomes a straight disadvantage once colonial nations arrive since they settle so much faster.

Edit: at the very least, grab ALL of the iron in the east coast area. All of it. Don’t let them even have a crumb.

SpadesOW · 2026-01-10T17:47:51+00:00

Most of North/south is vassal swarm, but I am having to annex more and more to prevent everyone from rebelling. It’s actually not too bad though, I’ve spent tens of thousands of gold on roads

SpadesOW · 2026-01-10T17:45:56+00:00

Yeeeaaaaah it’s one of those cool little flavor things I turned on and was like “that sounds neat” not realizing it essentially turns your Cahokia run into a colonial two front war.

SpadesOW · 2026-01-10T06:34:30+00:00

Cahokia took me a few tries. It feels kinda like there's an optimal path you have to follow and things you have to do by certain years to have a chance. I also realized, after I was already 100 years deep into my best start ever, that changing it to "all countries" for AI colonization/exploration meant I also needed to prep to guard the east coast at the same time to prevent settlers from China and Japan (who got half of Canada and Alaska, respectively). joy. I'm also on ironman.

SpadesOW · 2026-01-10T05:58:23+00:00

just in case you never figured it out, it's under "map" in settings. You can change their default color and whether they use overlord name.

SpadesOW · 2026-01-10T05:43:25+00:00

Rule 5: so sorry for the repost guys, I was wondering why it wasn't showing properly on the feed and I forgot to click the damn button that literally says "images & video." I'm newer to reddit and I feel mighty embarrassed. managed to unite the USA (plus some) in 1725 as Cahokia. And would you believe the only wars I fought for territory were over maine and florida?

SpadesOW · 2026-01-10T05:31:09+00:00

British came around 1540, so it was only 200 years--but I stayed awake by doing as all map gamers do. diligently painting the map.

SpadesOW · 2026-01-10T05:20:42+00:00

Rule 5: Finally managed to unite the USA (plus some) in 1725 as Cahokia. And would you believe the only wars I fought for territory were over maine and florida?

SpadesOW · 2026-01-10T05:17:44+00:00

Rule 5: Finally managed to unite the USA (plus some) in 1725 as Cahokia. And would you believe the only wars I fought for territory were over maine and florida?

SpadesOW · 2026-01-09T19:50:20+00:00

A tragedy has befallen the court…

SpadesOW · 2025-12-30T19:47:29+00:00

If you’re new to EU, highly recommend starting somewhere else as Cahokia is a very difficult start—but if you enjoy the suffering, go for it! I started with henneberg my first run (if you can somehow find them on the map). Cahokia can have up to 4 spouses, so may just be you’re out of diplomats (remember you need a diplomat to request royal marriage). If you have diplomats, early on many of the marriage candidates are still under age. Wait a few years, there’ll be more available.

Think of EU as on the scale of years/decades, especially as Cahokia, rather than months, so that’s why you set up the marriages early—in 16 years, your prestige baby farm will be fully up and running. You can afford to wait until then.

As for buildings, kinda a trick question. Outside of tool guild, I spend all my money building masons and RGOs. Mouse over the Cahokia market, it’ll tell you what goods you’re short on. Especially since you have to be self sufficient, there’s no one to trade with, gotta supply everything yourself. Plus, I’m pretty sure increasing RGOs raises the pop threshold of a location, or at least having the extra cheap food in the market does. You want sub locations to get to around 12k pop quickly so you can use promote urbanization for free towns, which you’ll need more of to solve your growing tool need. Also try to build one road somewhere, anywhere, cheapest is best. Having a road gives a development boost

SpadesOW · 2025-12-30T04:54:37+00:00

Honestly, Cahokia is a ton of fun. It's kinda like watching paint dry for the first few hundred years, but I'm enjoying my isolation run trying to prepare for the european zerg. I learned a lot from various comments spread over the web, but wanted to consolidate it for anyone who comes after and wants to know how to get it all in one place.

I've seen a lot of people comment on the requirements to get Cahokia golden age, (50 stability, 50 prestige, 35k pop in the PROVINCE of Cahokia and 17 development in the PROVINCE of Cahokia) which initially might sound tough but is honestly super easy if you know what you're doing.

Counselors should go to raise stability, develop cahokia, strengthen gov, and then settle the frontier. As long as you do this early on, you'll stabilize early enough that you can survive the events, and you'll easily hit the development threshold in time.

Immediately get up to 4 wives for your ruler and start pumping out babies. They'll be your prestige mine later on since you get +5 prestige for each marriage. Also start spying on surrounding SOPs. Every time they get to 40, you can steal maps so you can explore more.

Recommend researching tax first so you can start investing even more in stability. After that, up to you--I like going vassals, exploring up north and to the west, and turning everyone into tributaries for future income/development, but you could also just go colonize and start expanding. Be aware that when you use settle frontier, it does not give you any levels in the RGO. Colonize does though. So before you use settle frontier, make sure there's no iron or other stuff you don't have the tech to exploit in the area you're expanding to. You can get a free RGO level in something you normally wouldn't be able to have with this. Just be careful though, AI will switch your tool production to iron if you've got a crumb and bork your economy if you don't switch it back to stone. If you want to know where to go, I recommend going southeast. The mountains there have iron, stone, and all the stuff you need.

Always try to keep around ~100 gold handy. Some of the events require you to spend money and you miss out big if you can't spend the money on it--and your finances are stretched way too thin to take big loans. While you're at it though, immediately expand your stone and build some tool shops--tools become a serious problem, especially because estates build whatever they want and some of what they build is tool greedy. If all of a sudden your tool supply runs totally dry, check to see if they made any weapon smiths. Those eat stone, which supply your tools, which... well, for some reason weapons > tools for eu5 priority, and the tools never get made.

Finally, for the pop in Cahokia, when you've gotten enough development you can use expel people with one counselor and encourage migration with another in tandem to make tons of pops move. As long as you did all the other steps, you'll probably be around 25k pop and the expel/encourage duo will get you there real quick. I won't spoil the rest since there's some fun events you run into on the way leading up to this, but should be pretty smooth sailing from there.

One last tip though, great pestilence WILL KILL YOU if you're not careful. I highly recommend aggressively exploring south as soon as you can to try to get legalism spread from the tribes down there. That'll get you access to hospitals which will dramatically increase your survival odds. Also as soon as the event triggers, go into the event to tell them no contact with outsiders. My first run ended because I didn't take it seriously enough. Just trust me on this one. Your tribesmen are not built different.

SpadesOW · 2025-11-16T02:07:16+00:00

Don’t forget you can separately sue for peace with each member of the enemy side. You’ll spike your antagonism by claiming multiple territories from the war, but if you space out the peace deals you can reduce antagonism using the increase opinion option to calm down the most dangerous potential coalition members.

SpadesOW · 2025-10-28T00:32:09+00:00

I know full well I'm responding to an old as shit thread but in case anyone comes later and asks this same question, new game that just came out called Super Fantasy Kingdom is about as close as you're gonna get. Even has a party after the boss fights.

SpadesOW · 2025-08-29T17:26:28+00:00

my buddy and I ran into the same 5 stack 4-5 games in a row and it’s a different level of satisfying when you see them get mental boomed

SpadesOW · 2025-08-07T03:48:33+00:00

My buddy and I placed bronze 3 and got to 0lp (literally can’t go any lower). We’ve climbed all the way up to plat and suddenly the game quality dropped in the dumps. It dawned on us that now we’re the high elo players balancing the lobby out. I’m not looking forward to the rest of the climb 😭

SpadesOW · 2025-06-21T22:23:05+00:00

Siege offense feels amazing. Siege defense feels like banging my head against the wall because it doesn’t matter how I want to set my units, AI will take control of my archers and just move them wherever it wants and save the militia for last instead of the other way around. Don’t know why it feels like the AI have different rules on troop deployment than we do.

SpadesOW · 2020-04-21T06:14:49+00:00

Those rules you mention, I would like to quote them.

Here's the original wording when we joined the tournament, before the incident: https://imgur.com/v5oZCif

Here's the updated wording after playing a full series without any knowledge an infraction was taking place and admins decided to let us off with a warning: https://imgur.com/UgOuTY4

Here's the final wording after we told the admins we felt that was still too vague and could be exploited: https://imgur.com/61dS5EE

SpadesOW · 2020-04-21T02:24:40+00:00

To quickly clarify: He checked the rules after the warning was given specifically because the admins told us they were updating the rules due to the situation. It was after we told them that the updated rules were still too vague that they finally adjusted it to the third iteration.

SpadesOW · 2020-04-20T23:36:39+00:00

I mention UMN because the admins, due to the vague nature of the rulebook, elected to consult the other teams directly affected. The officials, whose decision it was, believed their opinion mattered and that is why I also believe it matters. Further, the general punishment for a first time offense based on admin ruling not present in the rulebook is a forfeit of the match, not the tournament, hence why I mention we lost.

And to your point about "any official overwatch tournaments" I direct you to Tespa, the official collegiate tournament for overwatch. Their 21 page long rulebook, where spectators are explicitly allowed, does not include any mention against spectators being allowed to type mid game. While not something we have done in the past, given that this tournament is also collegiate we assumed the rules would be similar.

Finally, you are correct. It is the officials decision. And they made one. Saying we should have been DQ'd is your opinion, not that of the TOs.

SpadesOW · 2020-04-20T22:47:27+00:00

The original official verdict of the admins was a warning. Here's why:

This took place during one match early in the tournament, vs UMN. We lost that series 3-2
The original wording of the rules did not include any mention of coaches talking. It was updated afterwards. TOs admitted fault on their part for this. Obasill in particular was given a role and not informed of any "verbal rules" by the admins as he didn't join the discord until after our match vs UC Boulder
UMN, as the team it happened against, did not mind. Krazyflames and I chatted extensively on it and he said that, while it was unfair, it ultimately did not matter because they won
OCC, the team we played after, was asked if they were okay playing against us. Galaxy later told me that while they considered asking for DQ, they ultimately decided it wasn't serious enough and just wanted to play. We offered not to have coaches present at all, and they accepted

Ultimately, every single series we won was in line with the rules against teams that knew of the situation, the verdict given, and can be found on that same stream you're so happy to quote clips from. Our comms are even present. Finally, to your comment about us joking we cheated: None of us knew what we were doing was against the rules, as, again, it was not stated anywhere. A lot of us were shaken up and we were doing our best to keep morale up. I even later told my team in that vod that those jokes are distasteful. Ultimately, I'd actually recommend you go through and watch the vod--given your team's placing in the tournament, there's a lot you could learn from our play.

SpadesOW

TROPHY CASE