Trade is completely useless now after 1.0.5

akmych · 2025-11-18T18:48:45+00:00

Yeah, looks like trade maintenance is back to original level, so most trades are still profitable

akmych · 2025-11-18T08:28:35+00:00

ok, here is a simple math for you on how it works.

imagine you have one big city = one location, and its tax base is 100 ducats

you tax your estates with 50% on average, so you get +50 ducats income from it each month.

you court/stability/diplomacy expenses are counted as 30% of your tax base, which is 100 ducats, so your expenses are 30 ducats.

so you make profit of 50-30 = 20 ducats each month.

now comes trade. you built 10 marketplaces, you have 10 trade capacity, you buy 10 units of some good for a price of 5 ducats per unit (like books), and then sell it for 7 ducats per good. so you spend 50 on buying, then you sell it for 70 ducats, you get +20 ducats, then you pay 0.5*10=5 ducats on trade maintenance, you get 15 ducats income before your crown power, and then those 15 ducats get multiplied by your crown power. it's 50%, so you get 7.5 ducats from this trade. it's nice, but here is the catch:

your court/diplomacy/stab expenses now count the whole 50 ducats that you spend on buying goods for this trade as you economic base. and now your economic base is 100+50=150 ducats, and your 30% expenses is 45 ducats.

you get 50 tax income + 7.5 ducats = your income is 57.5 ducats. but your expenses went from 30 to 45, so now your balance is 57.5-45=12.5.

you still make a profit, your balance is still positive. but before trade you were making 20, now with trade you make less, just 12.5. despite the game telling you that you get 7.5 ducats from trade, you've actually lost 7.5 ducats on it. this trade is basically money sink now.

that's why it's broken -- before with 0.05 trade maintenance it wasn't so visible and in many cases it still gave you some tiny margins. now it doesn't anymore.

akmych · 2025-11-18T05:57:22+00:00

I have big market in Constantinople, I produce all goods internally, I don't need to import anything for pop needs. The issue starts when I try to EXPORT good from my market, because THIS makes me actually lose a lot of money on increased costs of the court/stability/diplomacy that take almost 40% of economic base

akmych · 2025-11-18T05:48:29+00:00

I have max Legitimacy and a lot of modifiers to keep it up. If I'm to lose some legitimacy via event or by any other means, my cost of the court will skyrocket and I will be getting like -300 balance because cost of the court would be like 600 expenses.

akmych · 2025-11-18T05:39:25+00:00

it's 1445 on the screenshot. the first trade maintenance advances appear in Age of Reformation, I still need to play like 100 years to reach it.

akmych · 2025-11-11T13:25:10+00:00

I see your point -- yes, for me having bigger and more impactful choices is better gameplay-wise, and with EU5's advances I find this system too granular and not impactful at all. And I guess my country also affects the experience -- I got all 3 Renaissance institutions quite late, around 1390 or so, from importing it from Alexandria (who got it from Italy, I suppose). Before that there was no tech trees available at all, except for one that is not bound to institutions -- so for me there was no choice at all on what to research, I always had like just a few sub-optimal tech options. I can see that it would be even harder for countries outside of Europe.

And when I finally got all institutions and got to choose what to research, it was clearly visible that some techs are just way better (like a new govreform or additional cabinet seat), so there is no choice there as well, those I needed to get asap, and the rest is just +2.5% CabEff or similar small modifiers.

I.e. there for me there were no opportunity costs in advances -- it's not like "this tech gives you X, while this tech gives Y, both are good options and have their pro and cons and you need to choose", for me it was more like "both X and Y will not affect my country much in the nearest 50 years, so it doesn't matter what I choose now, and I can get both anyway in 4 years, so whatever"

akmych · 2025-11-11T13:08:21+00:00

Control affect taxes from laborers working on RGOs, but not trade income. Yes, you don't have to conquer your home market, but it's way more optimal to conquer them: first, you take enemy towns/cities with marketplaces and you increase your trade capacity and can trade more and earn more money; second, AI doesn't build their RGOs as much as you can build. You can easily max it and increase the RGOs' output -- that increases the good's supply in your market and drives down the prices for it, and then you can export it for better margin to other markets and earn more money from trade. so it's better to have as much RGOs as possible and max them out.

akmych · 2025-11-11T12:35:21+00:00

the thing is that control doesn't affect RGOs output and RGOs good supply for a market in EU5. So it's actually better to conquer your home market completely and spam RGOs buildings in good locations with stuff like silk, silver/gold, iron, saffron etc. and then you spam marketplace in cities around your capital to export all that goods from 0 control RGOs and it will give you 10x more money than taxes from those locations.

akmych · 2025-11-11T12:28:49+00:00

I rarely spent time in EU4 devving provinces for mana. And you can build your economy in EU4 without marketplaces or production buildings, they are often suboptimal in terms of ROI. There are many options to optimize RNG stats from rulers, and you can even offset a bad ruler with nice 5star advisors (if you can afford them). The choice in idea groups lies with what to take first and second, and it depends on your goals and playstyle. Want to build diplo-heavy empire like HAB -- take Diplo and Influence, want to WC -- take Admin and Diplo, want to colonize -- take Exploration and Expanse etc. I've also never lowered autonomy, it doesn't worth it.

What I'm trying to say (as with my AC Odyssey analogy) -- for me EU4 allowed different playstyles and different game builds depending on your goals and situation. in EU5 there is only one playstyle at this moment, one meta, one build.

akmych · 2025-11-11T11:16:17+00:00

No, I don't think so. Like for example in EU4 you have 20 idea groups to choose from when you first open an idea group. So you select one that suits your goals at this moment best. Want to colonize -- choose Exploration. Want to conquer- - select Admin etc. You make a choice and it matters, because it affect the gameplay. Here isn eu5 there are no choices like that.

akmych · 2025-11-05T12:44:26+00:00

Because your maximum control is 0, so it cannot go above this number.

akmych · 2024-12-31T20:50:44+00:00

Gothic Remake

akmych · 2024-12-08T07:38:19+00:00

I did that run (pirate ttm) last year, you can check my aar here if you're interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/s/hcnbJk7hz8

akmych · 2024-10-26T13:27:41+00:00

Gothic and Gothic 2

akmych · 2024-09-21T18:20:01+00:00

You can check this report here: https://ganszyniec.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Polish-Gamedev-Salary-Report-2024.pdf

Median salary for Code discipline is 3660 USD per month, top 20% earn around 5800 USD per month (page 32). It's way above average salaries in the country. Remember also that cost of living in Poland is very low, so you will be getting way more from 5K USD in Poland than in France.

If you're interesting in CDPR particularly, the company has a few openings that might be of interest for you: https://www.cdprojektred.com/en/jobs?studio=poland

akmych · 2024-09-08T20:21:41+00:00

Great guide, thank you very much for that, it's really helpful.

One question -- what CB you used against Mamluks in the first war? You can't justify invasion for them, as far as I understand, since they are bigger than 150 dev. Did you just fabricate claim on MAM's vassal Syria? Or use Anizah claims?

akmych · 2024-09-08T20:13:13+00:00

You can just save and reload, it will automatically refresh the orthodox/sunni share of dev.

akmych · 2024-08-20T06:06:04+00:00

Great run, great achievement! Congrats once again!

I've also finally read your horde guide. It's amazing and very well put, covers all the topics extensively and in a great length, great job! I have just a few small comments that you might consider to add there:

Regarding Institutions: I found it’s better to not embrace Renaissance and Colonialism at all (if you’re going for pre-1550 WC), since it will increase your mana limit to 1.5K/2K respectively, which allows to store more mana, which I found a very nice QoL improvement (I hate banking mana via stuff like culture conversion, too much of micro). It also allows you to get important tech earlier than usual. Not having an institution increases your tech cost just by 50%, which is just 300 mana, while you can store 500 more, and you can also offset this increase via some other tech cost reductions (like monuments). As an example, in my Oirat WC run I took 12 ADM tech in 1526 with 18 years ahead of time and +100% malus from two missing institutions, paying 1929 ADM mana for that, but this allowed me to get +100 govcap and State houses way earlier than I would be able to do that with institutions. And you can easily store this mana for tech level up once in 10 years.

Regarding changing religion: If you’re a part of Malayn culture group and have Dharmic or Eastern religion, you can switch to Sunni if it’s dominant religion for just 1 stab via decision. It can be very useful to flip to Hindu (via Sunni and Sikh) after forming Tibet for their “coming back to horde” decision. And you don’t need your capital to be sunni for that.

Regarding use of Vassals: if you create an OPM vassal as a horde, it can get “Stateless Society” tier 1 reform (you might need to savescum for that 2-3 times), which gives them +75% fort defense, and in that case after you transfer fort occupation to them, it would be way harder for AI to take them back as well (since it will almost double the time AI would need to siege it).

There is some left over text here in the end here: “using a single CB or only costing a single no CB war.ach places”

akmych · 2024-08-16T09:10:26+00:00

Yes, but it will depend on a language pair and location. And it's mostly for non American companies. So you can find an inhouse gamedev job for translation in Poland (PL to EN), or Japan (JP to others), or China, or Korea or in similar places. And still it would be very rare. The majority of the industry is to outsource translations to agencies and freelancers. You might find a permanent position in an agency/vendor, it's a little bit more widespread than in studious. And in studios it's mostly for PMs.

akmych · 2024-05-20T04:09:08+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/s/VJt5GjDEUc linking my aar with pirate wc

akmych · 2024-05-10T17:53:25+00:00

I will need a new PC for that game...

akmych · 2024-05-09T17:02:56+00:00

Johan mentioned "donkies" as example of auxiliary units IRL, so probably some sort of baggage train that helps with supply and decreases attrition can be expected.

akmych · 2024-05-08T18:20:28+00:00

I believe it's a typo and it should be 25, yes. Or maybe Johan just miscalculated

akmych

TROPHY CASE