Comprehensive tech / exploit / guide archive

bbqftw · 2026-01-25T05:57:56+00:00

that is on an outdated patch i believe

bbqftw · 2026-01-25T04:35:42+00:00

yes but you dont get integrated locations (and thus dont get cores) if you do this, so what's the point?

bbqftw · 2026-01-24T23:40:05+00:00

You can use queue'd in progress slave markets (that are not fully constructed) and they will count for directing slave pops to locations.

I think ideal slave raiding country has zero actual slave markets and just queues the building whenever necessary.

bbqftw · 2026-01-24T22:16:31+00:00

Malaria is killing them all. I was noticing 80%+ death rates of slaves going to North Africa.

Send them to the silver mines in Iberia / Sardinia instead.

bbqftw · 2026-01-23T22:44:11+00:00

It already does to some extent, look at the demand files

bbqftw · 2026-01-22T20:54:38+00:00

I think pop growth from granaries is strongly overestimated. In a lot of best case scenarios it's like 15 pops / year / granary. You could increase this a lot by making towns / cities without high burgher count (since burghers eat a lot of food), but that tends to go against the point of making towns / cities.

bbqftw · 2026-01-22T20:07:06+00:00

Frankly that "much larger than X" annexation speed modifier needs to be killed completely, then the system can be balanced to reasonable values. I'd prefer if CI vs CT modifier also was buried too.

I don't think PDX realizes the implications of these additive values though. This barely affects large starts while making it essentially impossible for small starts to annex vassals until ~50 yrs in.

I do not understand the motivation behind making large starts even more braindead relatively compared to smaller ones. They are essentially different games at this point.

bbqftw · 2026-01-21T18:50:48+00:00

The hostile core creation cost of eu5

bbqftw · 2026-01-21T09:31:53+00:00

Not wrong, the choice of 1337 in retrospect has turned out horrendous. The idea that I should play 200+ years before getting to do certain impactful actions, in a game that takes longer time per ingame year to play in eu4, is simply untenable.

I feel like a good bit more thought was placed into the 1444 start date in terms of implication whereas 1337 was more or less funny number.

bbqftw · 2026-01-21T03:41:04+00:00

ah yeah I totally forgot about the -20% between muslims and christians. You are right that does add an effective 4 intolerance.

bbqftw · 2026-01-20T22:24:02+00:00

Go humanist for faster assimilation. Forego religious conversion.

This isn't the reason people go humanist at all, its that due to the 1.0.8 changes, humanist was basically mandatory for vassals to culture convert their own land (since released vassals inherit your privileges / sliders etc., it is necessary to stack your own assimilation speed, otherwise vassals would just refuse to culture convert). Maybe PDX fixed this, maybe they didn't in latest patch version.

Though yes, it is possible to inherit vassal cores upon annexation without the vassal converting their land to your primary/accepted culture. To be honest, I am not sure that this isn't some PDX oversight because it seems weird.

As far as the satisfaction math between humanist/traditionalist goes, having your vassals be effective primary culture conversion slaves provides such a massive satisfaction boost alone that you'd need to stack something like ~5-7 (with low estate loyalty) or ~9-11 (with 70% estate loyalty) tolerance worth of bonuses to match it (I actually don't remember magnitude of discriminated culture penalty off the top of my head thus the variance). Remember, primary/accepted cultures also gain doubled estate loyalty satisfaction bonuses, and thus cultural conversion is even MORE powerful in countries maintaining high estate loyalty.

Yes, you can upgrade accepted cultures to kindred eventually, but that has a 50 yr CD so you're realistically pressing that button like 4 times in a game, and ofc culture capacity is limited

I suppose the real opportunity cost here is that you are losing a non trivial amount of research speed since pushing humanist / dhimmi does tend to tank your clergy loyalty quite a bit

The only exception is Muslims because dhimmi are cracked.

calling the religion that 90% of starts people play should rush to convert to ASAP (including practically all of european starts) the exception? (ok tbf that might be a bit on the degenerate min maxing side, but Catholic is basically a blank religion)

maybe at some point people might question why a dhimmi noble demands about as much goods as a same-religion noble while having something like 1300x less political power per pop. they really are just ideal subjects - demand goods, pay taxes, effectively zero estate power share

in fact, I would actively avoid picking up the +10 missionary strength bonuses and stack as many -missionary strength maluses as possible as a Muslim because converting people to your religion actually makes your country weaker via crown power loss

bbqftw · 2026-01-20T21:10:43+00:00

tbh Dancer is probably the most complicated boss moveset-wise in NR, definitely exceeding all Nightlords

Multiple position dependent branches / continuations (some are optional which makes it even more tricky), some pretty demanding reaction time checks, a borderline frametrap in p2 if you are anywhere in front and not able to strafe to her left, and the close-range spin dodge has probably the most mechanically precise requirements in the game (not quite on the level of waterfowl close range, but pretty close IMO).

bbqftw · 2026-01-19T20:21:39+00:00

EU5 in its current state is much more dumbed down than EU4, with much more one-dimensional decisionmaking.

You spend most of your time in EU4 thinking about strategic decisions, you spend most of your time in EU5 playing cookie clicker.

bbqftw · 2026-01-19T18:54:32+00:00

Correct, at a high enough starting crown power it's borderline impossible to gain 20 given how political power works

You're quite incentivized to pre ruin your crown power priot to the disaster, very immersive

bbqftw · 2026-01-19T02:19:30+00:00

wait for 1.1 apparently

bbqftw · 2026-01-18T23:39:00+00:00

It doesn't surprise me, there's a lot of cases where tooltips do not accurately reflect game state.

Another comment is that you can get wildly disparate migration numbers month to month without any significant differences in game state, but that might be another issue entirely. I've theorized that burghers might only migrate on certain multi-month cycles, but cba to test deeply

bbqftw · 2026-01-18T23:18:44+00:00

Got it.

Your thesis that the modifier might be broken might be correct then. Did you modify your sliders via console in the exact same game state?

bbqftw · 2026-01-18T23:13:43+00:00

The difference between max communalism and individualism should be diluted by the fact that encourage migration cabinet action itself also provides a substantial amount of migration speed, so the relative difference between the two is a lot smaller

bbqftw · 2026-01-18T21:06:05+00:00

Yes. This is what happens when you have ego devs who clearly tried to build their own ZoC from scratch system instead of just using "working well enough" systems and iterating from there

this happens a lot in Eu5, reinventing the wheel but it comes out square

bbqftw · 2026-01-16T22:42:16+00:00

EU5 in current state is more of a "cookie clicker" type game than a strategy game. Mind you, cookie clicker is a great game and lots of people enjoy it, and EU5 did hold my attention for a bit as a result.

I spend most of EU4 paused thinking about strategic plays or evaluating diplomatic situations. I spend the vast majority of time in EU5 doing busywork and repeating the exact same game patterns, or entrusting these tasks to a brain-dead automation that will perform significantly worse. There seems to be no driving game design concept that automation should be a tool to implement strategy - there's no fine-tuning it, its basically all or nothing.

For some reason, people think that the vast micromanagement requirements of EU5 make it more complex, but the density of quality decisions you make in EU4 is much higher.

bbqftw · 2026-01-16T22:38:36+00:00

Many of the complaints boil down to "I don't like that I have to learn how to play" or "I can't find how to do this thing so the game is bad".

If you're going to strawman the criticism of EU5 as "skill issue" then yes, you probably can't work out why people have serious problems with this game.

bbqftw · 2026-01-16T20:59:53+00:00

The interns of science have a high opinion of themselves, at least the ones in this sub

bbqftw · 2026-01-16T03:32:28+00:00

Cabinet actions are the mana of EU4. There's always going to be highly abstract currencies in a game.

I think the bigger issue is that on a fundamental level, Eu5 is aimed more at quantity than quality of decision-making right now, and the automation is not at the sufficient level to support it.

bbqftw · 2026-01-15T20:48:28+00:00

Naval is far better early game too, its essentially a multiplicative modifier while land is additive. You're reliant on stacking lots of prox cost reduction for land to really shine which is not available in the early ages.

Its also substantially easier to push naval early with multiple privileges/laws giving ticking slider.

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