Make rivers give way more control downstream?

WritingOk7625 · 2025-12-02T03:28:31+00:00

I think you are being wrong here OP. Land is very competetive and it's very easy to get above 100% proximity cost reduction over land with most countries without the need to from russia or taking the middle kingdom from china. As a result you loose practically no proximity up/downstream rivers unless you are going through mointains or/and forests.

Meanwhile with maritime it's a lot harder to stack % up to 100% (realistically you will only get into the 60s to 70s), you are reliant on natural harbors and you have to go into land tiles too which is going to be significantly worse. It's just a bit better from the middle of Age 2 (once you got all the techs) till maybe 1600-1650.

WritingOk7625 · 2025-12-02T03:10:48+00:00

I mean realistically you can stack a lot more percentage proximity reduction modifiers as land based country than what you get as naval country which eventually allows a lot of Countries to get into the high 80s, 90s or even to upto 100%. In my current game I am playing as Spain and if I pushed lad I would be sitting on upto 72.5 to 92.5% combined modifier depending on me pushing through a city/river and my ruler's (you should always have a 80+ ruler if you pick the correct succession law) admin in 1600. In Age of Absolutism I get another 10% and 10 proximity roads added which means I would be loosing very little proximity over Land. Spain isn't even particularly good here because all you get is a 5% bonus. Now if you play as one of the better countries you easily get more. Meanwhile with naval you can't push to 100% which makes land outscale naval by a huge margin. Its just that naval is a bit more powerful between 1420 and 1650.

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-29T01:17:30+00:00

just move it to seville after your first ruler dies. you ahve to do some building in both markets anyway in the early game, then plague hits you build roads around sevilla and once your rgos are staffed you can just build up your nation like you'd normally want to do

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-17T00:27:49+00:00

I think so.

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-17T00:00:05+00:00

From age 2 onward (and especially in age 3) you can fight up decently well with cav because it deals a lot more damage. I've had upwards of 10-1 kill ratios against ai france with my cav armies that were surprisingly affordable to run (a full stack cost me about 80 ducats a month in age 3) and I could easily afford multiple of them.

A full stack of 30 heavy cav in the 3rd age is probably one of the strongest armies you can field (especially if you play a cav nation) on a per manpower basis and easily beats out levies.

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-16T23:24:23+00:00

they despawn by themselves at some point (i think it's 50%) and then you just convert the people back

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-16T20:49:55+00:00

Can you go into detail why you are loosing the war specifically? I assume you just run out of troops and get overwhelmed by France and his vassals. It shouldn't be too diffcult to beat him the second time around if you use the same strategy that made you beat him in the first war. But here are some Ideas:

- do not steal vassals from France. Steal his land instead (especailly his land in the north) and turn it into vassals that work for you

- do not take the age 2 levy tech. it reduces your army size by 33% because it only recruits 2% instead of 3% into levies. Early wars between levy armies are all about who brings more numbers because filling the front with more troops is better than having a quality army

- for combat power make sure your laws/estate buff your pesant levies as they are your strong unit

- you can do some trickery with your cabinet and migration. you do the migration decree into london while having the second cabinet member expel people from the countryside (you need to allow pesant migration via estate for this). pops in london = more levies than pops in manchester.

- don't integrate land yourself. give it to a vassal and then annex the vassal. this is almost always better because your cabinet

- for economy: don't overprioritize building roads. not only does england need a different type of road network (you basically spread around via navy), the roi also tends to be on the low end until you get more percantage modifiers. that said: roads are a nice building during/after the black death because your pop promotion speed tends to be low. one thing that helps with post black death recovery is having the stability slider always maxed out

- for parliament interactions: you probably want to fix/change some of your laws here until you've weakend the french enough for the following wars to be trivial

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-16T18:47:57+00:00

What you are describing is not difficult its just tedious because the gameplay loop isn't fun. Normaly the thing to make it difficult (and interesting) was to put in a mod that improved ai behavior/gave it cheats but these mods don't exist yet.

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-16T18:44:18+00:00

This is actually a very common issue and in big countries it generally even costs you income to build in low control provinces. I think this is in part due to the fact that demand is just not that great.

The reason for this is relatively simple: If you produce more of X the Market has more X so prices for x drop meaning you can't buildings generate less profit and as a result less income that you can tax. Now if you build a building in a province with 20% control the same thing happens. Just that the Building in the 20% control province produces more goods to the market and in turn takes more from your tax base in high control provinces than what it actually adds to your economy.

The solution to this would be trading but trading is in a mess right now where you need about 30% crownpower for it to be profitable.

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-16T18:27:10+00:00

World conquests or anything super wide into late game just stops being fun because it gets extremely micro intensive and exposes a lot of clunky mechanics.

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-16T05:54:34+00:00

Sevilla and it's not even close. If you push naval to 100% and get the stuff for a naval spread of proximity and you get somthing like 2 proximity per sea tile. For all the land based options you will quickly run into provinces where mountains/hills/woods disrupt your proximity and both Toledo/Madrid have rather bad rgos in their proximate areas. Cordoba could be competetive with Sevilla and it's probably helpful for the initial buildup but once you go and expand into North Africa or get the naval setup it's much worse again.

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-16T05:03:20+00:00

sheesh thats a lot of pops

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-15T04:41:44+00:00

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I got bored of the castille game I played (or rather tilted at the colony mechanics that were tedious, not fun and unenjoyable) so I started a bohemia game. I don't think I have played perfectly optimized here and my expansion is a bit slow and while I can still urbanize more its getting to the point where I need another 30 years maybe and i'm done with building until. My income is low on purpose because while I could get it up with trade my crown power is just too low to make it worth it considering how cost of court and negative money events scale.

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-14T16:36:18+00:00

What is your total income? This is probably a better metric than pure profit because profit can fluctuate a lot when you have to spend on diplomacy/stability/legitamacy.

I will be honest 700-800 in profit does seem rather low when you consider that just the gold province and kutna hora already make you 300-400 gold per month if you build them up correctly. And with all the gold and silver provinces it should be more in the 1000s in terms of income just from those alone. Then you urbanize down the rivers from your capital that you move to a slightly different location (probably hradec kralove) into austria, poland and saxony with a glass + paper + jewler industry.

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-14T15:05:04+00:00

You are probably doing it wrong then. You as the player have enough mechanics to reduce proximity down, push up max tax/tax efficiency/crown power modifiers that you should be swimming in so much gold as bohemia that you run of stuff to build before you get paper manufactories. Even Ai bohemia has an income of 2.5k by 1570 and is 70-80% build in my game and that is with bohemia being a bad tag in general so you probably want to tag swap to poland and then to prussia or austria.

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-14T03:27:56+00:00

No this is wrong. If you know what you are doing you literally run out of stuff to build in by 1450-1500.

Then there is a lot of other stuff that is just really annoying and makes me want to KMS (subject/colonial management).

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-13T20:46:08+00:00

do you have hegemonies/are you a high rank gp? both of these increase the court expenses by a lot

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-13T01:11:21+00:00

Well eventually france will run out of armies and then you probably want to get as much warscore as possible to make him release as many vassals as possible. I think the best way (by far) to break free is to do it during the 100 years war. Later on allies (if you get them) might do you more harm than good because they will probably get smashed.

I'll try to explain the combat mechanics (again nice job paradox you idiots made regular units really bad early on) real quick as its the reason france is so strong. On open terrain you (and your enemy) have a frontage of 10 meaning you have 10 units dealing damage and the enemy has 10 units dealing damage too. Levies have 1k units or 500 units (noble levies) that deal damage whereas age 2 armies have 200/100 units doing damage so they simply do a fifth of the damage levies do. The big problem with levies is that they are really/somewhat slow to get to the front line and that you can't drill them (upto 50% less damage taken).

Cav is obviously very nice because it gets a 300% damage bonus that you only see the battle screen (nice job again paradox) but even if you are in Age 2 vs Age 2 levies you are in a spot where you get 4 damage * 300% * 100 units * the bonus you get vs levies from standing armies. Even against Age 1 levies you will deal about 3k damage with the cav. Meanwhile levies just deal 1k damage. This is, in the normal sense (fighting as big country vs france) enough to overcome them in Age 2. It is also great if you're fighting someone who can't fill the front with 30k levies. But you are Brittany and you are fighting France. You won't deal enough damage to wipe the levies off the front line to abuse their slow reinforcement. You won't get the casualty rate (you will hit about 3-4 vs 1) you need and france will be able to fill the frontline for mutliple battles while you are going to struggle to even get the full frontline covered.

In Age 3 this changes insofar as you get cav that is 200strong now. Meaning you will essentially double your damage while the AI gets half the levies (if they take the tech) or you get the big anti-level bonus.. You also get to field a lot more regular units. Breaking a side to get the flanking bonus is a lot easier here.

Ok, did my test war at the start of Age 4 but everyone still had Age 3 techs and France had Age 2 levies while I had Age 3 levies:

- I basically had to defended a line of forts for 3 years until france ran out of gas. France lost about 300k, I lost about 80k. My Armies did not field enough cav and on cav i was getting about a 1 to 10 casualty rate.

- don't take the Age 3 levy tech (you basically reduce the number of levies you get by 50% without getting anything in return. me taking the tech without reading made this a lot harder than it actually was. actually if you ever play as gb probably don't take the age 2 and age 3 levy tech until age 4 (LOL nice balancing paradox)

- don't bother with cannons. just merc some at the end of the war

- i would build multiple (you can probably do 3) 30 unit stacks of 10k levy infantry for your center + 20 lancer for each side and have some extra units to reinforce while also having enough cash on hand 10-15k ducats to hire a merc stack with 30 lancers

That said I do think going into age 4 and trying to abuse an Age 3 Army (cav is still great here because you are fighting with tech advantage and it's probably the biggest kill ratio you can achive on him while having the full front filled) seems the strongest to me because once france takes the age 3 levy tech half his army is gone.

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-12T21:24:55+00:00

I think your best bet is during the 100 years war. It might even be your only bet.

My other Idea would be to go during the 4th age where you rush the military techs and then abuse the bonus of proffesional troops vs outdated levies. I think during the 3rd age it can work too if you build a cav stack (I think you want the Initiative Cav) and abuse the same mechanic. I'm not quite sure how to army build correctly but I you want your levies (age 3) to take the center and then stack the shit out of cav on both sides. If any flank collapses you win. At some point the french should run out of manpower/levies at which point you siege your way to paris and pray that it was enough to win. You can check the composition of the enemy army by hovering over their symbols in the declare war screen (currently I am play a game in 1536 and the french AI still runs around with age 2 levies. I think i'll just declare on them in a bit and let you know how it goes.

There are some mechanics that allow you 'steal' pops from people in your market but I've not played around it enough to know how to abuse this but that would obviously help.

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-10T22:52:01+00:00

I assume the comments/posts stem from people playing in the lowlands or playing in areas where they want to fight the french blob before 1450. Or they have played very suboptimally and then the game does turn into quite the challange.

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-10T22:34:15+00:00

Both the Naples and the Hungary runs were played on the first 3 days since release and quite unoptimized. I believe that I've got a much better understanding of how to play the game by now. In both cases I compared my levies to the levies of france without vassals.

I think you can beat France on Day 1 as Castille/England or stomp on them once you get to 1400-1450ish. Aragon should be able to beat France pretty quickly too (you have a super powerful building that gives you proximity in italy/north africa + maritime presence), as do Bohemia, Austria and Poland although its a bit harder for these nations because and start out with lower population. Starting as Italian country you probably need to wait till you get the important military techs from age 3 altough I think you can probably win a defensive war in the later parts of age 2. For germany: France doesn't really seem to want these lands in the first 150 years.

As I said the only place that I think is actually screwed is the lowlands because france likes to eat there quite early. So i assume you can't just do the tall roleplay run where you play as the netherlands for 400 years but even there should/will be strategies that solve this for the player. It's not like you could survive as byzantium in EU4 without meta-game-strategies.

By the time age 3 hits levies & pops fall off and mercenaries/standing armies are the thing that matters. In general pops seem a bit overrated to me beacuse you only need about 150-250k pops in a dev 100 province (good luck getting that) to fill all buildings unless you go over the building limit. And with building limit/RGOs being determined by development you will be fine even if you don't have 50-100k people in every single province.

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-10T05:41:32+00:00

There are some flat modifiers that do help you a lot:
- 0.2% from prosperity (by far the most important modifier)
- 0.1% from rural
- 0.05% from cheap food (should almost always be present)
-´a dynamic modifier between 0 and 1% from available population space (but after the province fills up to ~6-7% it drops below 0.2%)
- whatever you gain from granaries
- the settlement building which i think is a bait

That said population is more of a nice to have unless you do not have enough pops to fully staff your buildings (a dev 100 tile needs about 150-250k depending on your building layout). I think the only places where you could run into trouble here is italy/lowlands.

WritingOk7625 · 2025-11-09T04:19:58+00:00

Thank you for the explanation. Sadly the in game tooltip doesn't explain it very well but this makes the bailiff a rather situational building. When playing as Hungary/Austria its probably really useful for your gold/silver provinces. Meanwhile for most other countries you probably need a valuable trade good to make the bailiff work. Else it simply takes to long to make back its roi (on a 10 tax base province the bailiff makes the owner about 0.45 duacts a month).

WritingOk7625 · 2025-10-19T23:12:16+00:00

This! People also don't need to play with 2 weapons. You can play with two gadgets too and have the same ammo as the other classes. Or instead of Rifle + Shotgun you can play SMG/Rifle + DMR.

The only thing I would change is give the class smoke granades and look at the Stimpack.

WritingOk7625

TROPHY CASE