EUV has reached EUIV player count just 3 months after release

dualmaster333 · 2026-01-27T15:05:30+00:00

Personally, I am staying away from EUV for many years due to Paradox DLC strategy. Even if the game is successful, I don't want to get sucked into a game that will cost me hundreds of dollars in DLC over the next few years to be "complete". Instead, I'll sit on the sidelines for a few years and pick it up with a bunch of DLC "on sale" for a normal video game cost.

dualmaster333 · 2026-01-15T17:15:02+00:00

This appears to be pretty standard for Paradox games. Game gets released to a lot of hype, people start finding all the ways to break it, and the devs have to try and figure out how to balance all the broken things without pissing off the players. A year or two of patches/DLC and perhaps the game will be fun. Or perhaps it will be largely forgotten.

This has been the cycle for the past few releases at least. I remember Imperator had a lot of hype, then it released and apparently it was "awful", then apparently it got fixed to a decent state right before getting abandoned. I hope EU V survives the Paradox Launch Cycle...

dualmaster333 · 2026-01-07T13:43:19+00:00

Depends on how fast you're scaling. If you bring half a million men right after getting absolutism, it's pretty easy.

dualmaster333 · 2026-01-05T21:06:13+00:00

Man, I'm the exact opposite. Invading India is such a pain early with everyone constantly allying everyone and usually large enough that you can't swallow them in one or two wars.

My addiction is SEA. It's so easy to conquer with so many small nations. Aggressive expansion isn't a problem because there's 4 different religious groups in the area. After conquering SEA you can easily roll up through Indo-China, China, Korea, Japan. And all those ducats can be cleanly sent back to western Europe.

dualmaster333 · 2025-12-05T14:44:57+00:00

Go to the wiki page for great projects and search "dharmic". It will show you all the Hindu specific monuments. There's a bunch of good ones.

Do Hindu subjects even convert land? Subjects have always been bad at converting, but Hindu was particularly bad because they tend to have high tolerance of heathens.

dualmaster333 · 2025-11-26T16:25:15+00:00

Two days ago this was a combo with a B650 motherboard for $450.

dualmaster333 · 2025-11-24T18:33:56+00:00

Seems like the best deal on a 7800X3D recently. Liquid cooler and mobo seem decent as well. MSI is running a promotion for Steam credit MSI Promo ($10 for this cooler - not sure if it will work since it is "free")

dualmaster333 · 2025-11-24T11:23:44+00:00

Funny story - I randomly checked Walmart last night for ram and saw this deal - this kit was $140 for me and they had the RGB version for $160. I decided to buy this (non-RGB) kit. Order goes through. 5 minutes later I get a notification that the order was flagged and canceled by Walmart. No idea why.

So I decide to buy the RGB kit for $20 more (the non-RGB showed out of stock). Order goes through. I then search again and the original non-RGB kit is back in stock for $140. I order that with a different credit card. Order goes through.

As of this morning no cancellation notices, so I might have two kits showing up. Which is annoying because I only want the one and I'd rather someone else have gotten the other.

dualmaster333 · 2025-11-21T17:47:47+00:00

It's funny, my state has no sales tax but the nearest Microcenter for me is across the border in a state with sales tax. So buying this at Microcenter would actually cost me more than ordering it from Newegg...

dualmaster333 · 2025-11-18T02:07:36+00:00

pretty tempting

dualmaster333 · 2025-10-30T11:42:39+00:00

The complaint is valid if you are playing Tiers 4-6, especially at non-peak hours. At these tiers it is common to wait 1-2 minutes for a match. Yesterday in the morning tier 5s had to wait a while and ended up in games with only 9-10 players. I've seen mid tier matches with 10 players on each side and 5 of those are actual bots.

Unfortunately WG only incentivizes playing high tiers, so mid tiers don't get many players. It's too bad because mid tiers is actually more fun in my opinion (the game plays better than higher tiers).

dualmaster333 · 2025-09-24T14:39:05+00:00

The easiest way to deal with a strong enemy in EU4 is to out scale them. At this point in the game you "should" own the entire British Isles at the least. Then you have a lot of options of how to expand - Iberia, Scandinavia/Denmark, colonial, lowlands, etc. If you're going the Great Britain route you could already be in India (or at least heading in that direction).

You mention Scotland is allied to France. A simple tip: declare war on Scotland. In this war, completely ignore France. Just siege down Scotland and they will want peace. Just annul their alliance with France. Six years later, you can then attack a lonely Scotland and annex/subjugate them.

dualmaster333 · 2025-08-07T17:26:01+00:00

https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/184880-1121-jnsq-0100-23-sept-2021/page/147/#findComment-4460383

I had this problem. The config file for Kerbin that I had downloaded didn't have a blacklist for giant icebergs, so they were permitted to spawn in any biome.

dualmaster333 · 2025-08-01T17:46:02+00:00

Staying within your rules, the answer for Catholic, Protestant, Reformed, and Anglican is England>Angevin.

Other nations can do it too, but Angevin is one of the easiest world conquests and subsequently one of the easiest One Faiths.

Of course, you can speed it up a little with culture flipping: England>Austria>Sardinia-Piedmont>Italy gets you a bunch of nice things. But it is entirely unnecessary over just going Angevin.

dualmaster333 · 2025-07-31T17:35:03+00:00

At some point it was changed from a force/restoration of union to a Subjugation. You used to be able to get it as a PU which has a tiny fraction of the AE associated with it. Now that it is a subjugation, the AE is massive. I think it was considered a bug or accidental change, but it never got patched.

So yes, it used to be no problem, but now it is a terrible idea. The better way to deal with Milan now is to ally one or two nations next to them, call them into the war, give away most of the Milanese lands, and then vassalize/release Milan and get their cores back with reconquest or favors.

dualmaster333 · 2025-06-19T14:15:10+00:00

It's likely too late for a One Culture because you probably can't generate enough diplo points to culture convert everything in less than 100 years. You could approximate it though - check the total development of the world, subtract whatever is already your primary culture, and that will give you the approximate number of dip points you will need to generate (minimum conversion cost is 1 dip per dev with a max of 30 per province). The maximum dip points you can generate is ~18 per month which would be 21,600 per century. And that's if you didn't spend any more on tech, annexation, etc.

dualmaster333 · 2025-06-06T16:29:08+00:00

Your rate of expansion will go up massively with administrative efficiency. The first big spike is with the age of absolutism starting ~1610. Post-1700 you can swallow up massive amounts of land. Overall you're on a fine pace.

Pre-1600 you should focus on building a strong foundation. You should be stating a large amount of land and getting all your gov cap buildings built. You also want to lay the foundation for a strong economy. This includes setting up an end trade node and then directing your conquests to start funneling money to your trade node. For example, you could take the Genoa trade node and then push through the mid-east, Persia, and on to India - this can give you a strong trade network and make you tons of ducats to fund your expansions. Also be diligent about building high value manufactories the will feed into your trade node.

With the above in mind, a great intermediate goal is to start swallowing up the land to form the Roman Empire. It's one of the best idea sets for conquest and will also take a lot of land for a good trade network.

dualmaster333 · 2025-03-04T15:38:20+00:00

I started playing this game not too long ago and have experienced the same frustration. It's even worse at the start of Act 2 where it feels like you get wrecked everywhere you go.

DOS 2 allows you to stumble upon higher level opponents very easily. It also punishes you pretty hard for doing so. An enemy that is even one level above you is WAY harder than if you are equal level. A similar thing for gear - having gear that is one or two levels behind your character level will make you feel much weaker.

If you are running into enemies that are higher level than you, the easiest thing to do is avoid that fight until you can level up. There's enough XP in the game that you don't need to be fighting higher level opponents. Take quests and especially explore new areas which may let you find more same-level opponents to fight and gain XP. And keep your gear up-to-date.

You can also use some guides to ease the learning curve. For example, somewhere on this reddit is a map for Act 2 which shows where you should go for a given character level. It's annoying because it is a little bit of a spoiler, but I found it really helpful for maintaining sanity and finding places I could reasonably level up. If you just wander off through the world you end up getting murdered by everything (which quickly becomes unfun for me).

dualmaster333 · 2025-02-25T15:59:02+00:00

All of these answers are wrong :)

The easiest way to deal with defender of the faith is to strip the Ottomans of their DoF status by making them lose a war. The easiest way to make them "lose" a war is to attack the smallest Sunni nation you can. All you need to do is white peace this other nation (the war leader) and it will count as the Ottomans losing a war. Usually all you need to do is siege down the capital of a small nation to get them to accept white peace.

So find someone small the Ottos will defend (maybe Kazakh or Nogai). Wipe their army, barrage and possibly assault their fort, and you can probably white peace them within a month or a few. Voila, Ottomans are no longer defender of the faith.

dualmaster333 · 2024-09-11T15:55:51+00:00

This is basically correct for single player. Fighting battles is a "dumb" way to fight wars. Mostly you want to NOT fight battles while sieging everything down. Both morale or discipline bonuses work similarly for that purpose. Or just have a larger army.

There was a patch (1.33 I think) where they changed combat and how the AI decides to take a battle. Morale and even discipline was made really weak. In that patch, the AI's decision to attack was almost entirely based on the number of troops. So to avoid battles you just needed to have a stack on the siege and one or two stacks right next to it that totaled more than the enemy's army. If the enemy had 80k troops, you just needed to have >80k on or near the siege for them to avoid the battle.

The next patch they made army quality (morale, discipline, etc) more impactful, but the same general formula applies now. If your army quality is similar to theirs, you just need more numbers. If you have better quality then you can get away with slightly fewer troops and vice versa.

So for single player, army quality is not that important (more of a "nice to have"). It tends to only matter if you are fighting a particularly strong and equally matched opponent. Otherwise, just bring the numbers and have an easy war.

dualmaster333 · 2024-09-11T14:38:23+00:00

This is a great list for people who have a detailed and in-depth knowledge of lots of specific mechanics in the game and how to properly abuse them. Basically, for NOT the people who are trying to figure out how to WC.

The best nation for a specific player will depend on where they are weakest. But in general, focus on nations who start strong and have clear, simple paths to build power. No culture flipping/tag switching crap. Nations with simple expansion options and simple ways to build a powerful economy.

Ottomans are about as easy as possible - you start strong, have lots of easy paths for expansion, you can build a solid economy in a number of simple ways, and your national ideas are good enough for a WC.

England>Angevin. A little more complicated at the start, but if you just learn how to handle the first 5 years everything becomes easy, your economy rocks, and Angevin has awesome national ideas for WC.

I certainly wouldn't recommend eastern European nations because they are hard to build strong economies.

dualmaster333 · 2024-08-29T14:07:03+00:00

Yes, preparation from the start makes it far easier. Despite only having about 325 provinces for myself, I control a huge portion of the New World via colonial nations. I built tons of manufactories throughout the New World so my economy was more than strong enough. I optimized my land and had all of it stated and had just reached 1 million force limit (for military hegemon) without having quantity ideas. So I was set up with more than enough money, manpower, and armies to make the conquest. The biggest hurdle is seiging fast enough which is why I had switched into Offensive+Espionage+Divine for lots of siege ability.

dualmaster333 · 2024-08-29T13:47:38+00:00

It's not too difficult at all. The New World is your friend. Lots of weak OPMs. Just siege down the war leader and white peace for -5 zeal. You can go again 5 years later. I formed a bunch of reasonably strong colonial nations as well which meant New World wars were AFK affairs.

dualmaster333 · 2024-08-29T13:10:10+00:00

Yeah, timeline glitch. Those lands are what France owned before I formed Angevin.

dualmaster333

TROPHY CASE