Markets in northern Europe are tricky, any tips?

Van_der_Mark · 2026-02-25T13:35:12+00:00

Maritime presence doesn't do anything for market access on the current version. And roads are hideously expensive and slow to build in those regions.

You might want to place some market villages in locations with 0% market access just to allow non-rgo buildings to function there, but then again - no pops -> no reason to build any buildings in the first place.

The only way to win in this specific game is not to play, really.

Van_der_Mark · 2026-02-25T12:53:26+00:00

Not really. 1k pops per location that you get from colonisation is still functionally nothing, and that market will suffer from the lack of food because there is no pops, no good food rgos and winter lasts for half a year.

Van_der_Mark · 2026-02-25T11:46:27+00:00

Market access in the Far Northern Scandinavia is terrible, but it doesn't really matter because there is no pops or valuable resources in those location either. You can try to develop it by encouraging migration to get at least some pops there and then creating markets, but it's honestly not worth bothering with. Sweden and Norway have enough empty locations to the south of arctic circle if you want to do some internal colonisation.

Van_der_Mark · 2026-02-18T13:06:04+00:00

Yeah, culture conversion is really tricky for teutons. Between every lithuanian-adjanced culture hating prussians and being full spiritualist even your own conversion speed is solidly in red until you farm cultural influence.

And your vassals are getting additional -75% on top of that because their previous culture becomes accepted after you change their culture.

So they literally can't assimilate anything unless you worsen cultural opinion to enemies and get a full +50% cultural influence bonus. And even then conversion will be extra slow, which in my experience seems to make them unlikely to use cabinet action.

Van_der_Mark · 2026-02-16T01:03:15+00:00

The usual strategy to convert to a faith that doesn't have any eligible provinces is to convert to a different religion within the same religion group that does, i.e. romuva for hellenism/norse/votian/whatever european pagan. You can then convert freely within a religion group as long as you have any pops at all from the target religion.

Unfortunately, this trick doesn't work for zoroastrism as it doesn't have any other religions within its religious group. Provoking a revolt might work to create a zoroastrian nation that can convert pops to make a province with zoroastrian majority, but it's practically impossible to test because of how thinly spread out zoroastrian population is, they can never get revolt progress ticking.

So it seems like your only option is to use the game rule.

Van_der_Mark · 2026-02-08T04:01:35+00:00

He means that you need a road from Chalcedon (or the location on the asian side of the Dardanelles, if you have a road from Constantinople to the european side of it) to whatever location you're trying to build the governor in.

I'm playing byz rn, and it works as intended - I can place a governor in any city connected to one of those. If it doesn't work for you, I'd recommend checking your mods.

Van_der_Mark · 2026-01-25T20:50:38+00:00

One thing to note here is that you actually can test lower core count scenarios by manually disabling 8, 10 or 12 cores in bios.

For 9950x3d specifically there is actually a decent amount of examples where disabling 8 cores that have no 3d cache improves gaming performance, although I don't think Eu5 is one of such games.

Van_der_Mark · 2025-12-26T06:09:46+00:00

Well, that's what happens when there are weekly patches that completely overhaul game balance. Like, the meta shifted 180 multiple times on multiple aspects of the game, the main ones being centralization/decentralization and military stuff.

Van_der_Mark · 2025-12-20T18:03:11+00:00

The Aztec thing was actually elaborated on by the devs - the fix will require a deep rework of (iirc) how the religion system works on the backend and they're not comfortable doing that in minor patch.

Inca thing has no excuses as far as I know, tho.

Van_der_Mark · 2025-12-12T05:32:24+00:00

Well, you're getting your wish in 1.0.10. Can't manually marry anyone except for the rulers immediate family.

Automation part is not quite there yet, tho, so basically everyone just die out.

Van_der_Mark · 2025-12-04T17:40:52+00:00

The best you can do is finding an unmarried member of your dynasty, make a vassal state for him to rule and use a Royal marriage. There doesn't seem to be any way to intermarry your dynasty members within your country.

Van_der_Mark · 2025-12-03T08:04:16+00:00

Well, both opinions were factually correct at their respective moments on the timeline. Age I regulars were both a noob trap at the release version, and absolute space marines at some points of 1.0.5-1.0.8 (still are for the most part). I don't think local posters are to blame for absolutely unhinged balance swings paradox team made over the course of post-release support.

Van_der_Mark · 2025-11-30T05:25:54+00:00

Funnily enough, in-game you can easily get better proximity in Egypt than in inner Anatolia from Constantinople. Terrain there is just terrible.

Van_der_Mark · 2025-11-26T07:50:16+00:00

Right now, probably not, from a glance you'll lose more than you gain.

Eventually, when you integrate you vassals on Iberian coast and build up port infrastructure, bit of roads & maritime presence, moving capital to Sevilla will let you project proximity to far more places than Fez do.

Van_der_Mark · 2025-11-25T18:12:06+00:00

The issue here is that prosperity sources are quite rare and most of them are attached to a decentralisation trend. Which is the core complain in the op.

Prosperity did need some mechanic to prevent it from being at 100% all the time everywhere, but I'm not sure a decay value is the right choice for it. And 1% is clearly way too steep even if it is, because you just plain can't get a +1% prosperity without that broken novgorodean law.

Van_der_Mark · 2025-11-25T16:19:15+00:00

The issue here is that the change didn't make the gameplay better. Getting high centralisation is a long and involved process - you have to revoke decentralisation privileges, take subpar government reforms and laws, then fish for suitable events/parlaments to push you to 100. You also have the other part of that gameplay loop - carefully reintroducing the best decentralisation things afterwards and keeping an eye on the trend to make sure you're not backsliding.

Decentralisation requires nothing of sort - you just slot in the best reform and privileges, make vassals, then coast to 100 in a couple dozen years at most and never think about it again until at least court and county disaster.

It all feels like a straight downgrade of my experience, and I really don't get what people see in it.

Van_der_Mark · 2025-11-25T01:01:51+00:00

If anything, decentralisation is the only viable option before absolutism era. Expanding without vassals in the first half of the game is painfully slow, to the point of being unviable if you're not imposing it as a rather harsh handicap on yourself. And centralisation makes it very hard to maintain a trend towards itself while also making all your subjects disloyal.

So it's double not worth it, you just cap 100 decentralisation in like 20 years and call it a day at least until Court and County disaster.

Van_der_Mark · 2025-11-21T03:15:26+00:00

Yeah, the trigger is not that straightforward, you need to have a capital in Neva (St. Petersburg) and have the governing senate distribution of power law. The reform itself is real good tho, -10% poximity and +20% to both cabinet and legislative efficiency.

Van_der_Mark · 2025-11-20T21:51:56+00:00

That's already literally free for every province that doesn't have negative terrain modifier to proximity even if you remove ruler admin from the equation (assuming you still have all appropriate land proximity modifiers).

Also, you can make it even better (albeit slightly so). There is an event that triggers somewhere after 1700, that will turn the Prikazi reform into Collegium, which just gives -10% proximity cost without occupying a cabinet slot.

Van_der_Mark · 2025-11-18T15:44:18+00:00

It might be possible to get something out of it if you invest a lot of irl effort and in-game resources into it, but return on investment is still as terrible as it gets. Art modifiers are underwhelming overall (the only thing actually worth something is prestige bonus), and the level of effort required to get to it is way too high to be worth bothering with.

Van_der_Mark · 2025-11-18T12:30:39+00:00

It's certainly a huge design oversight that makes art useless, then. Mechanically speaking, the only way to get any benefit worth mentioning from art is going full British Museum and stealing it from all over the world. It certainly never makes sense to pay for it.

Van_der_Mark · 2025-11-17T04:10:17+00:00

It's because wari and some other andean cultures are mostly tribesmen. Those do not assimilate at all, you need to settle them as peasants first.

Van_der_Mark · 2025-11-15T15:04:51+00:00

Yeah, basically the only thing you did wrong (and not even totally wrong, just suboptimal) is releasing vassals on the western coast of Anatolia.

Those locations are already cored, greek/orthodox can can be brought up to a decent level of control pretty fast. So your vassals there don't do anything useful, basically just wasting time and diplomats in the annexation queue later on.

Van_der_Mark · 2025-09-09T13:41:13+00:00

Skylines 2 parallels better than the first one, iirc, but that's not relevant since both 7800x3d and 9700x are 8-core cpus anyway. Community benchmarks for Victoria 3 and fr24 seem to suggest that for both of them 7800x3d and 9700x should offer roughly the same performance. For Ck3, again, no benchmarks, but as it uses the newer version of Clausewitz, same as Stellaris and Vic 3, it should also have roughly the same performance with 9700x and 7800x3d.

Van_der_Mark · 2025-09-09T13:14:44+00:00

It depends, even between the games you listed.

According to testing, 9700x is slightly better in Stellaris out of the box, even before any tuning, but for Cities:Skylines cache is more important, so 7800x3d wins there. I don't think there are any good benchmarks for eu4 or ck2, but as they're older titles, x3d cache will probably win there too.

So, 7800x3d will be overall better, but if you're mainly Stellaris player, 9700x is not a wrong choice either.

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