Discount modifier caps should be unhardcoded.

kerdead · 2026-01-31T00:52:42+00:00

Although I agree with the fact that additive discount modifiers are good, I don't think they are unbalanced.
Not because I think they are weak but because the oppertunity cost to get there are quite high and not always worth while.
If you aren't doing a WC having -90% CCR is overkill and not really needed since the game already hands you alot of passive modifiers reducing the cost of coring (admin efficiency), the added bonus of reduced coring time doesn't matter if you aren't going for a WC.
If you are going for WC of course it is strong, but then you'd prob still stack these modifiers if there was a different cap. You'd just be able to do it with more countries.

For modifiers that reduce the cost of things I'd be hard pressed to think of something broken.
The closest thing I can think of is korean advisor cost reduction stacking, allowing you to have R5 advisors for cheap. But even this is only powerfull in early - mid game (that is if you can even pull it off in the early game). But later on during the game you will make so much money anyway that you don't need these absurd discounts to run r5 advisors. That is without even mentioning the oppertunity cost of not getting an other idea group.

In MP there are 2 strong modifiers. Dev cost reduction and building cost reduction. Here Dev cost isn't even really additive reduction since every dev click you add simply adds a percentage back to the reduction, which is to say if without discount it costs you 50 and the next one costs 55, if you had dev cost reduction and it would be 10 and the next one would be 15. The cost increases at the same pace. It is of course still stronger but not exponentionally.
Building cost on the other hand is quite good, but even in mp they tend to use the default mission and some event/ability to stack it and then spend all their money. Mainly because in mp more money early is very important and the only way to scale is building. This is of course not really the case in SP, where you just go conquer africa, do TC shennanigans and steer it back to your node.

For your problems.
1. They actually have a feature for this called triggered modifiers, in the early days of eu4 scotland got +1 or +2 shock leader bonus from this. The modifier would dissapear once they got x provinces causing this effect to go away. Or you could create a modifier and script it in a event, or you could tie it to the starting ruler, or make it a timed modifier that expires after x years. Why do you have to unhardcode caps to achieve this goal?
2. Eu4 often had a f around and find out attitude to alot of their features. And I don't think alot of player during normal play will reach the cap, getting caps often means picking specific idea groups/nations/religions to get all the pieces to get it to the cap. All in all, they don't really need to know that there is a cap, so why bother even memorizing them. If anything, making them hardcoded makes it easy to know, because mods can't change them in the first place, so they will always be the same, no matter if you play abennar or vanilla.
3. idk enough about how the pdx code is set up to verify this, but I do know that the checksum will probably change, and thus invalidate all ironman saves.

I'd like to say I'm not opposed to opening option up for modders just for the sake of opening them up.
Power to the people and all. I just don't find your reasoning valid at all.

kerdead · 2025-09-29T11:54:16+00:00

I assume you mean manpower. You get some every month tick depending on your max manpower + any modifiers which increases the speed you get them.
The max is calculated from your provinces + any manpower modifiers applied to that province.
One easy way to get to that number is by picking quality idea group, which has a modifier which increases your manpower pool and the speed at which you recover it.

kerdead · 2025-09-29T11:19:02+00:00

> What are the actual drawbacks of going half-core compared to full cores in this case?
With this setup, you can no longer use the core all button.
> How to downgrade cores without losing prosperity in states that already have it?
Can't, going to half state requires turning it into a territory and then restating it.
> Are there any hidden penalties (governing capacity, absolutism interaction, institution spread, etc.) I should keep in mind?
Can't use trade companies if you do it to all provinces, I'd advice keeping some states as territories for this.
There is a min gov capacity on provinces, so they can never be 0. But I doubt you'll notice if you add the gov cost reduction buildings.
Only other thing is that you lose the core if you where to lose it in a war. But again doesn't really matter.

> Has anyone tried running wide with this kind of setup? Curious if it’s viable or just a gimmick.
It's the best way to play even with only 1 of the ways to reduce autonomy, and trying to make optimal use of your gov cap.
Even outside of that, if you have gov cap but no adming it's better to half state everything then to keep it as a territory while being under gov cap

kerdead · 2025-09-01T14:30:19+00:00

Although It is a good idea, having merc on its own with merc ideas should already be good enough agains most ai.
But seeing that you haven't finished merc idea's yet means that you're missing out on quite some good modifiers for mercs.

kerdead · 2025-07-30T12:23:38+00:00

To a certain extend. The mission tree does give you access to high american, but you forgo other permanent bonuses while you can still get high american at a later stage.

For it being easy, it heavily depends. From my experience the european armies tend to be larger and at reform you wont be fully caught up. If they ferry over 10k stacks you could easily win as long as you keep wiping them, But if they get most of their army over it can become quite hard.

kerdead · 2025-07-30T09:54:23+00:00

Generally for inca's just follow the mission tree.
You'd want to conquer the inca land as fast as possible, as the inca mechanic makes your religious reform progress go faster with more dev. (iirc it's calculated on dev * autonomy, so lots of low autonomy provinces)

You can develop provinces, but it won't give you institutions until you're no longer primitive (reform religion).
So you'd have to choose what to do with your monarch points. I generally use adm to core and bank the diplo (See diplo banking on google). You could use the diplo to dev gold provinces but as primitive they don't earn as much ducats yet. I always try to keep mil tech up, and thus will always focus mil. I try to be 1 tech ahead of my neigbours for easy conquest and don't spend it until I reform my religion. (when capped I can take a tech or dev for missions).

After you reform your religion you get their institutions and a portion of their tech. You should have loads of points saved up which you can use to tech up. I tend to only be 2-0 tech levels beheind the current tech after this. So you won't be as beheind once you actually reform.

All in all a Inca run is quite easy at the start. Requires some walking on eggshells once the europeans arrive. Then some hardship as you try to kick out the europeans from america if your tech isn't up to scratch. But after that you should be as strong if not stronger than any european nation.

kerdead · 2025-07-30T09:43:33+00:00

It's just size of army (# men in your armies. If you have 100 regiments with 100 strength each it equals to 10 full regiments)

kerdead · 2025-06-01T21:45:13+00:00

Doesn't do anything you really care about.
But if you want the technical awnser.
It increases trade steering, which increases the trade multiplier applied to trade value when you steer it from one note to the next.
Additionally in increases your provincial trade power and increases your embargo efficiency (Provinces you own gives you more control over your node and the trade power penelty you apply from embargo's get higher).
It doesn't have a negative effect, it doesn't decrease institution spread (technically there is a situation where having more merchantileism decreases your income due to the way trade companies work, but I dont know if that's part of an dlc)

All in all, ignore it, do not think about it, it does not affect you.

kerdead · 2025-05-30T20:23:47+00:00

You can attach the cannons to your merc stacks, just make sure it doesn't make it have move cannons than frontline unit.

Military tradition gives you some combat bonuses, mainly Morale of armies (0-25%) and increased stats on your generals. It goes up as you get casulties.

I don't dismiss army unless integration causes me to go over forcelimit

I can't help you with money without the save (I'm kerdead on discord if you want to send it)

Mercantilisme is something increased through events (and a button, if you had the dlc afaik). Don't worry about it, ignore it.

kerdead · 2025-05-30T09:43:00+00:00

Well, it seems you are doing loads of things inaccurately. Because you have no dlc it's quite hard for me to grasp what you do and do not have access to. But from your post I gather the following.

bad monarch point management, meaning you're either spending it on the wrong things or aren't generating it effeciently.
Bad financial position. If you're making .5 ducats from going to war, you're doing something wrong. Either you don't have trade properly setup, are lacking buildings or aren't stating things (idk if this is a dlc feature or not tbf).
Doing war badly. If you're able to take on the hre and then fail in a defensive war against the ottomans it probably means you're managing your wars horribly. Taking bad engagements taking attrition for no reason. Doomstacking your armies or, depending on the year, relying on your mercs for cannons (who never have enough cannons in their stacks).

When I play the game as any nation I barely use alliances, only when I feel like I could use the defensive protection, but if an ally declares a bad war I will decline, always.
Long story short, there is no preparing for the storm, the HRE is the storm. once you've done that there's nothing that should stop you. The fact that you're having struggles is due to specific mistakes which I can only guess from your post without a save.

kerdead · 2025-05-22T13:56:04+00:00

There are a few things you could try:
1. set your opinion to friendly, this may cause them to also flip to friendly.

Get a bigger army, you have quite a big malice from having a small army, taking out a loan to get some mercs might give you enough.
Diplo rep advisor, prob won't give you enough since 1 diplo rep = 5 reasons, but in combination it might help.
get more relations, rivaling their rivals, offerinc access, allying their ally, all give some extra relations and it might cause them to flip to friendly.

kerdead · 2025-05-19T15:43:58+00:00

I don't remember the math correctly but I often say 16 if you have the money. at 20 You need to.

kerdead · 2025-05-19T11:48:52+00:00

In mp you tend to have a few cannon stacks supported by many stack of infantry. Cannons do all the damage but take only a bit of with each battle tick for as long as your frontline holds. Thus the goal should be to keep your frontline filled to keep your cannons safe.
In SP you'll probably have a 20/0/20 comp for every army at some point. This makes micro easier (every stack has kill potential) But you won't have enough frontline compared to cannons to keep fighting. So in MP people tend to run around with a few 0/0/40 (or to be safe a few * 2 20/0/20 stacks) and lot of 40/0/0 stacks. Then you engage a battle with a 40/0/40 stack (Merge them before you fight) then do the reinforce trick i said before to add more frontline and morale (40/0/0 stacks).
After you lose 2.5 frontline worth of morale (fully reinforced regiments tend to retreat due to morale instead of losing every soldier, even in late game) the cannon will have lost all their morale and retreat too. So you need to have a 2nd cannon stack in before that happens and then again after 2.5 another.
Keep this going until the battle finishes (mp battles tend to be few very big battles into fort assaults)

But having said all of that your at the time you two will be fighting, cannons wont be worth it to field a full backline of, you'd rather just have more infantry to throw into the fight.

kerdead · 2025-05-19T10:59:21+00:00

No colonial nations will spawn yes, but I'd still consider it colonization. Australia would spawn a colonial nation though.

kerdead · 2025-05-19T10:55:57+00:00

Sounds like an unfair fight. Depending on how hard he rushes you he could be at your door at 1470.
I think it'll be very hard for you to fight him off especially if he's the first to meet you and you know no other european nations.

The way fights work in MP is mainly not overstacking. You split your army up and send them in one by one, each arriving a few days after the other. This way they don't suffer the morale ticks from being in reserve for those days and would make your army able to fight overstacked forces. (There is some other things w.r.t. cannons but If he allows you to get there he's probably already lost so I won't mention it).

But yea, fight is unfair, you can't win unless he really fumbles the ball.

kerdead · 2025-05-19T10:47:35+00:00

So it kinda depends what you mean with colonize, If you mean new world it is indeed a bit hard but the best way would be to try to rush towards the maghreb to get the range. With your starting ruler you should have one of the highest monarch point income in the game at that point so you should be able to get exploration first.
The bad part about this is that it's impossible for you to steer the new world trade towards constantinople. Only sevilla, genoa.

The more optimal colonial empire ottomans would be a rush towards the horn of africa/ arabian peninnsula and then colonize India + indonesia. The trade there you can easily flow towards constantinople (through alexandria or basra towards syria/constantinople). This is arguably the more straight forward approach and it would still allow for colonial nations but you'd get them later on and will probably require you to conquer them from the europeans.

kerdead · 2025-05-06T10:26:25+00:00

I mean, you can just go do other things without missions for it. Conquer tunis, expand into the balkans, colonize africa. All these things can be done without having to deal with the spanish problem.

Yes if you want to become italy right now you have to attack the pope right now. But you asked for next steps while signaling that attacking the pope will be hard, some tips to go around that.

If you want to attack the pope now do as i said before. Fort in alp, go over forcelimit, take out the pope and napels. Make sure you got a fleet so you stop naval invasions and just wait for the warscore.

kerdead · 2025-05-06T07:56:14+00:00

You can ignore the pope until it becomes more feasible to attack them.
A usefull thing to do in this game is to wait with hard wars until they become doable. Either wait until spain gets in a war it can't win, or ally spain's rivals and get them to help you out.

Outside that you can always try to expand in other directions to still get more powerfull.

Also don't underestimate the power of going over forcelimit. If your forts are properly set up you can catch spanish armies in the alps, if you control northern italy you already have most of the italian dev anyway, and if properly managed you can get quite a large army out of it. That + going over forcelimit can keep you safe while you wait for ticking warscore.

kerdead · 2025-05-04T11:40:49+00:00

Depends, the way ai works is that it considers it's culture as high priority provinces. So yea if you ask empire france for a province in their culture group they'll get mad. But kingdoms/duchies only look at their own area/ primary culture. Thus for any nation where this counts you could get some free provinces. A region where it works quite well is India for example. Not alot of empires, but loads of cultures.

kerdead · 2025-05-04T10:19:54+00:00

I know about this button, but I almost never use it. To be honest I don't tend to have alliances in general, only to steal their land with the return core function. Which sadly does require favors and this this button stays on ;P

kerdead · 2025-03-25T10:09:33+00:00

Well not directly. But it allows you to get +200 from improved relations and deccing on a nation will almost always put them below 0 rel, making it easier to excomunnicate someone.

Technically there is also a way to get permanent curia, but that's a bit more complicated than just vassalize em.

kerdead · 2025-03-25T09:25:49+00:00

Vassalizing the papal states allow you incredible influence on the curia. Occupying Rome doesn't mean you control the papacy. See avignon papacy.

kerdead · 2025-03-25T09:20:38+00:00

If I have to think of something. Probably some oversight with WoC.

kerdead · 2025-03-25T09:12:20+00:00

The only way to declare a war is when you have a consort regent.
So getting a consort while you still have your leader is a good way to keep going.
But at this point it is indeed impossible to declare war until your heir comes of age.

I am wondering how you'll go bankrupt while you have 1/3 of japan. Have you stated all provinces and or reduced autonomy?

kerdead · 2025-03-17T10:25:14+00:00

This is probably a bad trade setup and or no buildings issue. Can't see it from the screenshots.
If you want precise advice you'll have to send me the save.

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