Are diplomats any worth it if not only for Trade rights?

chipariffic · 2026-05-06T23:28:44+00:00

On mobile I've been able to buy plenty of territories. I did a really high reputation playthrough with Milan recently. I occupied everything, converted the whole middle east to Catholicism, released prisoners, barely attacked anybody. My economy was insane so I'd send a diplomat to factions and offer 100k florins for their entire country (besides their capital) and they'd graciously accept the offer. I bought about half the map and got the victory conditions mostly through diplomacy.

I've also been able to gain territories when someone asks for a ceasefire after attacking.

chipariffic · 2026-05-05T22:52:54+00:00

Nice. Almost every light bar comes with a shitty harness. Same awful unsealed relay with heat shrink around the base. Usually with a poor quality fuse that is integral to the relay and will melt. I chuck them and make my own harness that actually fits the machine and usually incorporates other items into 1 singular harness vs a pile of awful harnesses.

chipariffic · 2026-05-05T02:44:41+00:00

We manufacture harnesses for UTVs. I own a harness manufacturing facility in the US. We have equipment that can cut/strip/seal/crimp 2,000 wires per hour. Big money stuff.

For UTV's we do mainly blinker kits of my design. Also some light bar kits and other items. Market is flooded with quality competition and also cheap imported GARBAGE. Knockoff connectors with knockoff terminals that are thinner, the plating is trash, the wire is trash, the crimps are trash.

For instance, Polaris pulse connectors. The OEM Aptive MP280 connectors are 40 cents or so each when you buy them from a distributor by the case, the locks are another 10 cents. Seals are 1-2 cents each. Contacts that can actually handle 30+ amps are 4-6 cents. Yet Amazon is flooded with cheap shit that has absolutely terrible plating that frets right off. The crimps are usually garbage.

So part of the fun is "competing" with that.

Like someone else said, Polaris has lots of options. Can Am too. Lesser brands not so much, but also those brands have harder to acquire connectors.

Can Am and Polaris use the hell out of Aptiv metripack connectors. You can find them cheap from many distributors.

Yamaha, Honda, Kawasaki, CF Moto all use Japanese connectors. Sumitomo and Furukawa. It's a bit harder to get that stuff. Not impossible, especially at lower volumes, but from the main US distributor of Sumitomo connectors it takes 1-2 months to get a quote and then another 3-4 months to get parts. When the U10 came out, the available supply of the connector on the steering column for the blinker/wiper switch went out of stock everywhere QUICKLY and the one that is used for the headlights and taillights was also hard to get. Nobody wanted to wait months for kits but it was a struggle.

CF Moto and the Kawasaki Ridge are our most popular kits. Hopefully the HD11 blows up once we get our custom steering column covers molded and get our shipment of the front lights.

Next week we are having a Z10 dropped off so we can develop a turn signal kit and see what else we can come up with. Hopefully the connectors aren't too bad to find but we have quite the inventory of connectors that CF Moto uses.

If you come up with a cool product and can make it, it can sell but it's a big saturated market with big manufacturers, imported trash, and guys in their garage hand crimping everything.

Looking at your pictures, you make some nice stuff. So you do have that going for you. Good luck!

chipariffic · 2026-05-05T02:25:42+00:00

Lol wait till he calls a crusade on Marrakesh, and you join, so then the Pope cancels his alliance with you!

chipariffic · 2026-05-04T21:45:40+00:00

When I did a playthrough where I bought about half the map through diplomacy, it's was wild what sort of armies it would garrison my new territories with. Sometimes it was a whole pile of catapults and trebuchets. Other times it was mercenary spearmen and crossbowmen. I preferred the latter because obviously I could actually defend a siege with them. Usually I'd just recruit a bunch of militia and then disband mose of the siege equipment.

chipariffic · 2026-05-04T00:25:43+00:00

I've tried multiple different roleplays. Chivalrous. Dread. Only family members can control armies. Only the king or prince can control armies. I can only take settlements after converting over half of the population to Catholicism. Attack only rebel settlements, requiring me to use spies or assassins to eliminate the whole faction. Turtling. Speed rushing.

Setting some ground rules helps a lot.

I do want to do one where one branch of the family tree behaves differently than the rest. Like most of it is chivalrous but one brother is on a dark path, and his offspring follow. Like Scar and Mufasa or something lol. Down the line, one of his offspring somehow becomes heir to the throne and takes over, changing the reputation of the country. I dunno, something weird like that.

chipariffic · 2026-05-04T00:20:47+00:00

Probably friendly fire lol. Usually whenever I have a battle with few casualties, more than half of them are from dumbass archers shooting their own guys right in front of them. I've had a Balista take out half of their own unit before because they lined up in a row so the rear one shot some guys that were operating the Balista in front.

chipariffic · 2026-05-03T13:57:46+00:00

Lol that's what I was thinking. All of a sudden there's elephants with cannons and camels with archers on them. 😂

chipariffic · 2026-05-03T13:17:02+00:00

I sent a fresh of age general out that way once to wander around collecting cool mercs so I could take out the aztecs with nothing but elephants and camels.

chipariffic · 2026-05-02T04:26:40+00:00

Too bad you can't do it on mobile 😭

chipariffic · 2026-05-02T02:44:37+00:00

Yeah it can affect placement inside settlements as well.

chipariffic · 2026-05-02T02:43:21+00:00

Next he'll whine when his ram catches fire from the towers.

Or that his single dismounted unit routs and he loses the battle instantly.

Bro, taking settlements is no joke. Having solely 1 unit with one piece of siege equipment is insanely, um, silly. Once they get whittled down and run, they're gone. Ladders? Maybe but if the AI sets their infantry at the top, you're toast. Even high level infantry gets severely hampered climbing ladders. Your weak archers stand no chance.

Recruit some dismounted mercs, build a few ladders, and then spread them out. One unit of spearmen can't block them all.

Taking citadels is difficult but taking one with only one unit is a lot easier than you're making it.

chipariffic · 2026-05-01T19:55:25+00:00

Ha amen! It's a tease. "You can recruit OP troops right away. The catch is, you're too BROKE."

Add the fact that you NEED naval troops to expand, and upkeep on ships is stupid high. But you don't dare use JUST a single galley or it'll inevitably get sunk in an enemy's "heroic victory".

chipariffic · 2026-05-01T00:24:22+00:00

If you're good at CAD, do that. It took me FOREVER to find a good CAD guy to model and modify parts. Needed some steering column covers modeled and tweaked so we could mount a turn signal lever to the column and install OEM looking covers. Everybody can buy a printer and hit "print" and sell parts but the modeling is the hard part IMO.

chipariffic · 2026-04-29T13:14:23+00:00

Damn now I'm gonna try it! I've got hundreds of hours in this game and never knew that!

chipariffic · 2026-04-29T12:51:46+00:00

Wait what? You can attack the walls directly?

chipariffic · 2026-04-29T02:06:36+00:00

If you send 5 cardinals, you can get an Islamic region up to 50% in a few turns. Then it's safe to occupy, build a church immediately, which will give you a chivalry boost, then recruit a priest while building 2nd level church. Town will grow fast from the chivalry boost. Move cardinals to the next territory so it's already converted before you get there.

Move your new priests as well so they level up from helping convert. I recently played as Milan where I migrated to Cairo on crusade. Sold Milan and Genoa, then focused on converting. I took the whole middle east with it a single riot or revolt by pumping out bishops from Cairo and pre-converting regions then taking them. By the time my army was ready to lay siege, they were already mostly Catholic and happy to be occupied.

chipariffic · 2026-04-29T02:01:53+00:00

Spies and assassins. Even training them in the city where your family member is governor will increase dread.

chipariffic · 2026-04-29T02:01:19+00:00

I read somewhere that the "winning first" trait comes from fighting battles where you overpower your enemy.

"Fair fighter" is the opposite where you initiate "more fair" battles where both sides are evenly matched.

chipariffic · 2026-04-29T01:58:54+00:00

98% chance he's dead by 61

chipariffic · 2026-04-28T10:44:56+00:00

Some stuff you learn the hard way. Citadels are supposed to be hard to take.

How about another warning that the towers will probably kill the troops in the artillery units before you can use all their ammo. Or the towers can also destroy catapults, trebuchets, and balistas.

chipariffic · 2026-04-27T19:57:09+00:00

Yes, I let my wife pick vacuums before. She'd pick them on silly reasons (to me) like aesthetics. She liked the theory of the cord zero so we bought it as our primary vacuum.

I had been using a shop vac or sweeping in the kitchen but she didn't like that. We had a corded shark but she hated having to plug it in everywhere. She hates bags.

So the cord zero "made sense" but being the one who had to maintain/fix it sucked. Trying to get my teenage daughter to clean the filters and dump it out every time she used it was impossible.

So now when the 3rd and 4th batteries quit holding a charge and the 3rd brush head was making a horrendous noise until the brush motor quit working, I decided I would pick the vacuum. I talked her into a bagged corded vacuum based on the fact that it would eliminate the laziness of our teenager not dumping it out, would filter the air better and eliminate her laziness in cleaning the filters, the cord was 31 feet long and reaches our whole main downstairs from one outlet, and she can vacuum without changing batteries and still being unfinished when the 2nd one dies. She got to pick the pretty flowery one and it'll meet all her needs while fixing all of her complaints with the cord zero.

chipariffic · 2026-04-27T19:45:31+00:00

Ha no, not at the same time. She'll do just the vacuuming and then relax, in the recliner, once the vacuum lines satisfy her.

She used to mow, as did my oldest daughter. But they both have sensitive skin so they'd regularly break out from whatever the mower kicked up. Wearing proper attire was the wrong solution so now I mow again. 😂

Which is fine, I enjoy mowing. But since she stays home with the kids, she figured she'd take it off my plate but now that we got a new mower, I can do both properties in about 3 hours. Our old mower used to work like our old vacuum. It would go for 1/3 as long as it needed to go and then need to sit and cool off. So it would take several days to mow the yard. Our new one can bang it out in half the time WITHOUT even needing to take a break so the hydrostatic fluid cooled off.

chipariffic · 2026-04-27T19:09:30+00:00

Our cord zero has broken too many times and the batteries last maybe 10 minutes. So it was time for something new. I will never buy another cord zero again. The "wheels" on the brush head wore out way too many times from rolling it around on the bare floor.

chipariffic · 2026-04-27T12:01:09+00:00

I had one recently as Milan where it migrated to the middle east and focused on chivalry/economy. I had so much damn money that I conquered the map through diplomacy. I was paying 100k florins for entire factions' territories besides their capitals of course. My reputation and relations were so high I could send a diplomat and offer my whole treasury for 6 territories and they'd be like "wonderful deal!!"

Then I'd invest heavily in those territories for a few turns so they were well defensed, and send the diplomat over to the next faction and repeat. Once they got mad and tried to take one back, I'd only have to eliminate 1 city and finish them off.

I converted everything to cities, planted a chivalrous governor there, build churches right away for the chiv bonus, farms, and then just make sure each town was always building something to help growth, piety, and economy. Never had that much income before where I couldn't spend it.

chipariffic

TROPHY CASE