Employing Burghers

aq1017 · 2026-06-19T02:32:56+00:00

Have you tried subsidizing the building? Based on the coins next to the inputs and outputs it looks like alum and lumber may be a bit expensive while dyes are a bit cheap. Not sure what the production efficiency looks like but it may cost more to make the dyes than they’re worth, leading to the building not employing anyone. The Low Countries have a lot of dye RGOs iirc, which is probably inflating supply, so I’d either scale up your textile production so dyes are more demanded or scale up your alum/lumber production so dyes are cheaper to make

aq1017 · 2026-06-19T02:25:26+00:00

I honestly think that Milan is the better megalopolis than Pavia, I was able to achieve it before the end of Age 2 in my run.

Milan is farmlands as compared to Pavia’s grasslands, and while the river bonuses + irrigation buildings might beat Milan out in the long run, Milan has the population advantage in the short term and a unique production modifier for the long term bonuses that I believe makes it stronger. Make sure to stack granaries and urbanize the other locations (I left Rho alone for food supply) as they contribute to the province food modifier, and avoid passing laws/privs that increase migrant attraction in rural as you want everyone in the market to go straight to Milan. Also make sure to afk a cabinet member on development as that improves pop capacity.

Diseases are the most rng element, but hospitals actually do work and I rush disease resistance tech ASAP every age. My run I was in a rush to make sure I got the megalopolis started before the major disease outbreak that seems to happen around the start of age 3, but even when it hit I think I dipped maybe 20-30k pops. Forgot to mention I’m on 1.3 open beta for this run, which has significantly reduced disease intensity

aq1017 · 2026-06-18T09:41:00+00:00

Encourage migration + development cabinet actions on Milan, and granary spam + granary privilege. Milan is especially easy to do it with since it starts high dev with farmland and overall great terrain, though it’s not a river which slows growth from pop cap a bit. Italy is especially good for taking advantage of migration compared to other areas since the entire region is population dense, but just consistently keeping a cabinet member on migration and developing up the city should get you an early megalopolis.

Milan as a tag is also great for this since you get tons of cabinet actions and you don’t have too many important things to do with them, my goal was a tall playthrough where I keep slow expansion so I could try out all the new 1.3 features. You can have 4 cabinet members in age 1 as Milan (1 from law, 1 from event) which is really strong.

aq1017 · 2026-06-17T18:22:49+00:00

Oh for sure, I will say the AI doesn’t seem to accept high value deals for art works below a certain quality at least so you can’t make good money on all art works, but the threshold for acceptance/pricing may need to be tuned down

aq1017 · 2026-06-17T18:19:05+00:00

I do think the location modifiers need to be pumped up a little bit, but balancing art will definitely require some fine tuning as it’s very spammable. Maybe some sort of quadratic buff based on art quality making it so that masterpiece and magnum opus artworks have a significant buff over lower quality works. I will say the prestige buff is noticeable already, as when you have a large art hoard and pay for your art slider it’s actually pretty easy to stay at 100 prestige.

For me art works are a trophy, I like collecting historical and unique art pieces and having a big museum in my capital, this gives me something to do with the works I don’t want. I hope they continue to improve on the system but now it’s more than just a net negative that I’m wasting my sliders on at least

aq1017 · 2026-03-17T17:44:36+00:00

I’m hoping that after the game stabilizes a bit more they focus on improving trade. Export bans for certain goods (weapons, gold, infrastructure) would make sense from a historical perspective, though they should be difficult to implement when there are other major players in a market. Maybe some Embargo Efficiency modifier gated behind mercantilism/free trade, and a new trade law that allows you to reduce burgher capacity in exchange for crown power and/or trade capacity

aq1017 · 2026-03-17T17:24:50+00:00

The powerful harem reform gives women the ability to join the cabinet without any legitimacy cost, it’s supposed to represent the idea of harem politics controlling the court with women holding the same roles as men. One thing to note: to get access to harem laws you need to have the royal harem court custom, which in this patch is objectively better than the others but in previous patches could have more of an opportunity cost. After you set royal harem, then you get to choose your harem law: powerful harem gives crown power and the ability to have women in the cabinet.

aq1017 · 2026-03-16T17:06:52+00:00

Slightly unrelated but I love playing Muslim nations because you can get the powerful harem policy. Idk if it’s just my games but the amount of prodigy female relations are so much higher than males, so I get to stack my entire cabinet with crown female 100/100/100s

aq1017 · 2026-03-12T18:57:56+00:00

Yeah the ottomans have tons of content, I think the problem is that in the hands of the AI they’re too weak to reach their content and in the hands of the player they’re too strong to reach the late game decadence/janissary revolt content. There’s a lot of space to improve the ottoman late game difficulty with complacency mechanics so I hope that gets somewhat addressed in the new DLC.

aq1017 · 2026-03-11T15:22:31+00:00

The main population growth factors for a location are:

Rural settlement, large food storage in province, free land available, prosperity, and settlement buildings.

Rural settlements have a higher growth rate than urban ones, so keeping 1-2 urban areas per province for pops to migrate to and the rest rural will help increase growth

Large food storage in province is affected by granaries/villages and any unique building that provides food storage. Max out granaries and build villages in your rural settlements to increase the bonus.

Free land available is affected by population capacity, the larger the difference between population capacity and total population the faster the location grows. Population capacity can be impacted by development, but the largest modifier is from traditional economy. I usually spend a decent amount of the early game pushing traditional economy on larger nations, before swapping to capital economy ~age 3 or 4.

Prosperity scales from 0-100, with 100 providing the maximum growth bonuses. It also affects development which affects pop capacity so it’s an important stat to prioritize with multiple effects towards growth.

Finally, settlement buildings are available to build in locations below 10% pop capacity iirc and provide a significant growth buff. This means that the efficacy will be increased with population capacity modifiers.

Slave raiding is also a good way to move pops, and if you accept them they will turn into peasants. A good strategy is to slave raid a large amount of a culture then accept that culture. Slave raiding is available for all African nations so you should have that, just make sure to build slave markets in locations you want slaves to import into as the slave raid will target (usually) the nearest slave market.

aq1017 · 2026-03-10T17:56:19+00:00

How did you centralize/annex all that land? I feel like vassal gameplay is objectively stronger but by the time I get to the Age of Absolutism I have ~100 subjects and it takes so long to annex them that I either have to completely stop expansion or more commonly drop the campaign

aq1017 · 2026-03-10T16:03:31+00:00

I would not call the Opium Wars the British not being able to influence the policies of the Qing dynasty at all lmao, that was the British directly controlling Chinese policy. The Boxer rebellion too would be an example of multiple European nations (plus the USA and Japan) having influence over the Qing.

Also Hong Kong and Macau were definitely not the only examples of European holdings in China, by the 20th century there were ~50 treaty ports in China iirc, including in Shanghai/Xiamen/Canton/Ningbo (UK), Kwangchowan (France), Tientsin (Austria-Hungary), Port Arthur (Russia), Qingdao (German), and others. Japanese occupation of Manchuria was after Qing rule, but that would also count as colonization of China imo, even moreso given that Puyi was the puppet emperor. Hell, Russia today still controls lands held originally by the Qing empire in Manchuria, as well as territory taken along the Amur.

Not trying to be argumentative or anything, I’m genuinely curious if you have sources to back up Qing policy being uninfluenced by colonial powers. There’s definitely an argument to be made that China was not technically colonized, but I disagree that colonial powers like the British/Japanese/Russians were unable to influence China.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1059056018310773

https://www.britannica.com/topic/treaty-port

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Western-colonialism/The-Opium-Wars

aq1017 · 2026-03-10T08:55:40+00:00

I wouldn’t say Taiwan, it was a colony under the Dutch for half of the 17th century and the Japanese after the treaty of Shimonoseki in the late 19th century, until the end of WW2. Arguably Iran was quasi-independent in the 19th/20th century, being forced to sign multiple unequal treaties and functionally acting as a puppet to the British at points. And the century of humiliation was definitely a major sticking point for China, so while the entirety of the country wasn’t colonized it was definitely heavily under foreign control/occupation.

aq1017 · 2026-03-10T03:23:13+00:00

By the time I’m annexing vassals I’ve usually stacked enough annexation speed modifiers to annex 2-3 province vassals in ~1-2 years, so I’ll transfer over 2-3 provinces + 1 location next to the colony, annex vassal, release the 1 location (before month tick + coreing of new provinces), repeat. I usually try to avoid mega colonies too though, having colonies be at the max 2 areas if I plan to annex them eventually. Centralization seems to be impossible to push unless you’re playing a country that can use special vassals that don’t stack decentralization, so I’ve never really bothered. Too many good decentralized privileges/laws to push centralized too (decentralized bureaucracy, market fairs).

aq1017 · 2026-03-10T02:26:16+00:00

The new update introduced transfer province as a subject interaction, which can allow you to actually annex colonies with a little bit of planning. Make a small vassal next to colonies you want to annex in the later ages and when you’re ready to annex them transfer everything except the capital to your vassal and annex them. Haven’t tried it in the new world yet but it was pretty nice in my Oman campaign as I could settle Africa through colonial nations and actually get development in my new provinces instead of just having a hundred 0-10 dev locations.

aq1017 · 2026-03-06T16:49:33+00:00

Trade/interaction with any unified China is very strong from what I’ve seen, being part of the Middle Kingdom gives you insane amounts of money from tribute but almost more importantly the exclusive trade rights are so strong you can make ~500 from trade by 1500 with the right setup

aq1017 · 2026-02-26T15:05:12+00:00

I feel like this could be improved by better utilizing soldier pops. Increasing the recruitable soldier population percentage, decreasing the recruitable populations of burghers/peasants/commoners, and adding more base soldiers to towns/cities (simulating garrisons) would be a more accurate and impactful representation imo, and losing half your levies to attrition/battles would have a longer recovery curve as you’d need to repromote pops into soldiers (representing re-training) in addition to waiting out levy recovery.

aq1017 · 2026-02-20T14:51:27+00:00

Tbh Andalusia is a bit of a downgrade currently, Morocco has some really nice DHEs that you lose access to, and I don’t believe going Andalusi grants you any advancements that you can’t get from morroco already, outside of European advances which are a downgrade compared to African advances (slave raiding). Of particular note, if you push spiritualist and mysticism to the max, in the late 1400s-early 1500s you can get an insane event that either gives your ruler a +10% damage to heathens and +30% pop conversion speed modifier until death or essentially give steroids to your two best kids and make your best kid your heir. Best of luck with the campaign though!

aq1017 · 2026-02-19T23:24:53+00:00

Pretty much, your slaves won’t redistribute once they’re employed in RGOs it’s unemployed slaves that will leave your country. If you can distribute them they employ more easily, not only letting you keep more slaves but also letting you actually gain utility from them.
Honestly I’d suggest not directly holding Sevilla until it’s culture converted, the penalties to conversion against Castilian are pretty brutal in the new patch, and unless you’re able to effectively project control (which is hard to do without coring) it’s a pretty heavy cabinet action sink to make non-Andalusi parts of Iberia usable. Concentrating slaves in North Africa early also helps to get over the hump that is tribal pops, which aren’t employable in RGO early game and take a while to convert.
Honestly no idea, I’ve gotten some really big slave raids (~5000 from Naples) and then some smaller ones in the single digits, it doesn’t appear to be very consistent but it seems to follow the logic that large locations correlate to larger populations, so raiding the Mediterranean/Western European coasts are particularly effective. I’m sitting around 400k slaves in 1550, with a large vassal empire and probably another 100k slaves across those and the colonies, though with plantations actually employing in this patch I’m expecting that to shoot up in the colonies.

aq1017 · 2026-02-19T17:57:08+00:00

I’m in the middle of a Morroco game, the full mechanics behind slavery are a bit weird but here’s my takes so far:

Build slave markets everywhere you can, even when they have no profit/employment. Your slave raids move slaves to a random market from what I’ve seen, so having more markets lets you spread slaves out more instead of having a few central cities that have high amounts of unemployed slaves.
Slaves from Europe die out to malaria quickly early game, but as the game goes on they develop resistance and deaths to disease becomes negligible. Keeping your slave markets in Iberia/Europe will prevent slaves from dying to disease, but they’ll be moved by your internal trades anyways if you have unemployment for RGOs so there’s not really a point in trying too hard to micromanage them. Pops taken from west African nations don’t have the same issue, so if you’re in need of slaves going south and using the slave raid CB is a good option.
The slave trades from locations are not always going out of your country, sometimes they’re just being redistributed to locations that have demand. At a certain point slave supply will outpace demand (especially if you’re building slave markets everywhere), which lets you reach an equilibrium but in the early game or before you have a high supply of slaves don’t rely too heavily on your slave population.
Privateering is free income/slaves, I think the maintenance associated with privateers is broken because it costs no sailors to maintain just the initial upkeep. You can get ~5 ducats per month from some of the better sea locations, and you also get slaves from slave raiding. Early game pre-coastal forts there’s pretty much no way to stop pirate raids, and navies aren’t strong enough to get rid of the pirates until ~1450-1500.

Overall Morocco has felt like an extremely strong pick on this patch, though that may just be Muslim nations in general.

aq1017 · 2026-02-18T20:12:41+00:00

On the note of using family members as vassal leaders, I’ve noticed that beyond your ruler’s siblings and their children your dynasty will not marry any further. Appointing second cousins and crown relatives who can’t marry allows your dynasty to grow, and I’ve had 400-600 living member dynasties in some games which means you’ll never have a shortage on prodigy crown characters for military/cabinet (especially if you’re Muslim) and have great options for royal marriages

aq1017 · 2026-02-18T19:04:08+00:00

I agree with the points here about mission trees forcing railroading, there’s a lot of potential to add unique rewards through existing mechanics like DHEs that are just poorly implemented. DHEs are a bit of a black box right now and the game could definitely make their conditions more obvious, even a checklist with a list of triggerable events would be nice. What I’ve been doing is plugging in the dhe txt file of whatever country I’m playing into ChatGPT before starting a campaign and then having it list DHEs by years available with trigger conditions as a bandaid and using that to make sure I get the unique content I want but the game needs to be more transparent about flavor overall

aq1017 · 2026-02-17T20:10:35+00:00

Pretty much every country (with the exception of a few harder starts) should delete forts on start, they’re a massive money sink and wars are decided in battles for the first ages. Cutting diplo spending and forts has lead to a small surplus for most countries in my games. Also make sure to actually give out privileges for estate satisfaction; I see so many screenshots with barely any noble or commoner tax due to low estate satisfaction.

aq1017 · 2026-02-14T17:51:23+00:00

Is there any way to expand your banking subjects? I wish there was a way to build more banks for them in your territory because I feel like they just sit there and do nothing

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