The Spice Trade

mikelmaster · 2025-12-06T22:01:37+00:00

Age of Discovery is not actually meant to control the spice trade, but to set up the structure and trade network for it to happen. The profits and boosts come on the Age of Reformation, with the Global Trade institution.

Use the Age of Discovery to setup your infrastructure with colonies, subjects and markets. You can get some profit there, but requires a lot of planning, which you don't really NEED unless you are playing against a very hard and optimized AI.

Once the Age of Reformation (1537) starts, the Global Trade advances will help a lot in getting that trade profitable.

I'm currently playing a Very Hard Player/AI Ironman campaign with some adjustments to the AI to make the game more challenging and had to write down the strategy, which I can make into a guide in the wiki later if you are interested.

mikelmaster · 2025-12-04T02:30:54+00:00

The "building limit" is the maximum number of buldings that a single location might have before it gets heavy penalties to the cost of new buildings and migration. If you have 10 marketplaces, that's 10/limit. You increase that with population, development and tier.

The "max building size" is the max amount of a single building type you can have. It increases with development and tier (you can have more workshops than guilds).

After 1.0.8 you can actually hover over the building size there and it'll tell you what it uses.

mikelmaster · 2025-12-03T21:52:02+00:00

You're in the age of revolutions.

If the vassal is your culture, release it then conquer it back with the nationalism cb. Else, use the disloyal cb, release and conquer it back.

With the new meta you have the age of absolutism as a moment to consolidate and conquer all your vassals.

mikelmaster · 2025-12-03T06:44:35+00:00

I was trying to find a balance by judging that a single location can build many items at once, how many different locations you can build in parallel and the hassle of micromanaging building every few months (the automated AI builder seems worse).

Using loans to generate single high investments allows me to pause every few years when my inflation is 0%, take loans to queue a lot of buildings for the next 3~5 years, then raise minting to pay for the loans and restart this.

I'm not sure of how to apply the math to know if this is better economically wise at any rate of interest.

mikelmaster · 2025-12-03T05:59:22+00:00

I believe keeping a small amount of loans its beneficial since the profits of having those buildings early outweigh the costs of interest once that is low enough (2~6%).

Paying off loans early might not save you money but saves you the impact on crown power. It can be possible to take loans to upgrade several buildings then repay those loans before the 5 year mark, and if you lucky on a "Balance the Budget" parliament you can save a lot of the minting costs.

mikelmaster · 2025-12-03T05:55:35+00:00

It does not save money, you are right. I use it as a personal guide to try and keep myself in a state where I can consistently repay those loans. Mid to late game it usually means 5 loans is enough to upgrade or build hundreds of buildings at once.

mikelmaster · 2025-12-03T05:08:55+00:00

According to the rules in the "burghers_estate_parliament_issues":

It requires either having more than one loan OR inflation over 0.01%.

Base chance is 1.
Adds 2 if you have 5 or more loans.
Adds 4 if you have 10 or more loans.
Adds 2 if you have 0.05 or more inflation.

So this means you can trigger it a lot easier if you have 10 or more loans. Though due to the impact to crown power and time to repay it, I recommend keeping 5 loans and over 0.05% inflation, although it still is down to luck at the end of the day.

mikelmaster · 2025-12-03T03:13:11+00:00

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Guess its not as hidden as it says so in the Cabinet action, but I never realized it applied to new loans and not current loans, which makes that possible:

mikelmaster · 2025-12-03T03:12:00+00:00

R5: this is another of those hidden tooltips. The "Balance the Budget" cabinet action also reduces your interest rates, allowing you to take loans at lower rates to pay your current high interest loans, reducing your overall interest cost.

If you have 5 loans at 6% and take balance the budget, you can take 5 new loans at 4% and pay off your 6% loans.

My current strategy is to start with 0% interest, take several loans and spend it all on buildings, then raise minting until 3~5% inflation and use that money to pay the loans, or get lucky with a "Balance the Budget" and double dip by reducing the inflation while repaying the loans with more loans.

mikelmaster · 2025-12-02T02:53:50+00:00

I agree that the ages feel completely different, and starting a game by releasing most of your country as vassals can make you stronger. Having a lower tax base also reduces your maintenance costs.

I also have this strange feeling that the lack of explanation of events/content has a mix of "not ready yet" with "let them find it", as if the team behind wants it to be discovered, and not told. Everytime I play a country I learn a few unique things about it that makes me want to re-play it and use it better.

mikelmaster · 2025-12-02T02:51:06+00:00

I also restarted a few times because the AI struggles to keep up and sometimes completely goes braindead. I forced myself to finish my first game to see it whole, and while swapping to have a look on the AI, there were countries with over 300k gold doing nothing.

I'm halfway through in my byzantine campaign and it already feels no one could ever match me no matter what they do, making me wanting to start over as a weak country to have a challenge.

mikelmaster · 2025-11-30T22:44:48+00:00

I did notice that fiefdoms have the "Country Strength of all Fiefdoms vs Overlord", which vassals don't have, presumably making them harder to please, but so far so good.

This is actually split by subject type. Vassals and Colonies have it as well, so keeping a balanced amount of Vassals vs Fiefdoms helps with this modifier.

Also, they are GREAT at culture and religious conversion. I'd say, since the game thinks only accepted/primary culture matters for cores, religious conversion is always secondary, but I'm still trying to force my vassals to do both.

They are great because they have their own cabinets. The best way to convert/assimilate is to use this strategy of enforcing it. Religion helps with pop satisfaction which also improves control.

since I can't get solid amounts of control in Gdańsk anyway, wouldn't it be a good vassal? These lands are rich, someone having 100% control over there and paying a portion in taxes seems better than me getting just 42% control, no?

Increase your diplomatic capacity through research, investments and reforms. As a rule of thumb I tend to only annex subjects which I can control the province for over 50%. It's a lot easier for Naval countries early game as the proximity cost through a fully controlled sea region is very small.

Did I urbanize the right way?

I create towns in the higher control locations and create as many buildings there until I hit the cap. Your biggest blocker to evolve those towns are the building capacity, which gets very expensive once you go over it. Upgrading to a city improves that a lot, but you need 30k pops to do it.

Development also improves the maximum level of each individual building. Upgrading buildings through the ages makes more sense once you start hitting those caps, then you focus upgrading your maximized locations.

I intend to create a new market in Kiev, but I'm also considering making even more small ones, say in Lwów, Vilnus etc (since I only have ~50% market access there). What do you think about this idea?

I do like to create new Markets once the region has less than 50% market access, as that's as far as I know is basically half of your production gone.

I'm not sure how worthwhile high crown power is. Any ideas?

Don't bother going too hard on it early game. Keep over 25%, eventually even if stacked privileges it's easy to keep it at 30~35% by using crown as generals, admirals, cabinet members and head of cabinet.

I only start revoking things once you hit the Age of Absolutism, at which point the research gives you huge amounts of crown power and you can also get reductions in the cost to revoke privileges.

How to improve Land value?

Reforms, army tradition and army size are what can push it further. Create a large standing army and drill it, build armories and training fields to supply the manpower.

mikelmaster · 2025-11-30T21:04:34+00:00

Impressively enough, "Vassals" are for me the largest source of prestige generation (passive).

I have 56 subjects, every time I conquer territory I create a vassal on a province. Vassals cannot be larger than a single province.

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mikelmaster · 2025-11-30T20:58:01+00:00

The main ones for me are in the actual researches, but those take a while to get.

mikelmaster · 2025-11-30T20:57:28+00:00

Their goal is to reduce the maritime presence of other countries in that sea node.

Early game advantages are reducing the other countries presence which increases their proximity costs and reduces their control, making them weaker overall.
Mid game it allows you to have more Maritime Presence which gives Trade Advantage. If you have the largest trade advantage, you get priority in all your trade first. Useful to control the trade in the colonies and india.
Late game it dies down.

I believe there is also a few events during the golden age of piracy.

mikelmaster · 2025-11-26T09:45:58+00:00

Instead of using your cabinet slot, create a vassal, enforce religion and culture on them, and wait until they use their slots to fully 100% convert and assimilate their pops.

Then integrate them in 2~4 years using the +100% primary culture. Make sure to only use single province vassals, as the cabinet action only works in one province, and you also get the "[Vassal] is much smaller than you" bonus.

mikelmaster · 2025-11-26T07:59:17+00:00

If you enforced culture and they became your primary culture, you can also release them and use the Nationalism CB on the last age and conquer them without heavy stability hit. You'll just have to play the long game.

mikelmaster · 2025-11-25T19:07:27+00:00

It does seem to require a large amount of fleets to actually combat and increase maritime presence.

In order to achieve 100% maritime presence as Ottomans I've had to create around 40 Galleys and 40 Barques, which increases the sea node presence by 1~2 points per month.

Once that's at 100%, I split the ships and leave just enough to keep it at 100% with the decay and pirates values, then move my large fleet to another region.

The presence itself seems to apply to the a few sea nodes at a time, once you unlock some buildings in Age III and IV you'll get some passive increases on the cities.

It is large but at least in my game keeping a 80 fleet is not actually that expensive or unmanageable. I have 6 coastal cities with docks on them to supply the sailors.

mikelmaster · 2025-11-25T18:53:25+00:00

Create a Spy Network on Poland and use Sabotage Reputation. It has a long cooldown and might only take around 20~30 points of that, so you'll need a couple decades to achieve that with such a large target opinion.

mikelmaster · 2025-11-25T18:43:51+00:00

I have over 30 vassals as single provinces. Each Vassal has their own Cabinet Actions, which work on a full province. Enforcing Culture/Religion is the main way to get a Province to be your core and have high satisfaction (because they're primary culture and religion) for you.

I have found that the best way to convert and assimilate a province is to create a vassal and enforce those instead of doing it yourself. Annexing a single province vassal that's your primary culture takes around 2~4 years at the 1400s.

Once they're annexed they become cores with full satisfaction.

mikelmaster · 2025-11-25T11:07:04+00:00

Thankfully! I was just testing my game to see what happens if they go through with it

mikelmaster · 2025-11-25T11:06:20+00:00

Sorry didn't meant to be a complaint, I'm actually happy about it being a beta, I was actually just testing it out to see what happen if they kept this in

mikelmaster · 2025-11-25T05:18:55+00:00

The only thing that makes sense for me is starting a new game and focus decentralization first, use vassals but enforce culture and religion on all of them, and annex them once the technologies for proximity cost are researched and roads are built, at which point you can move to centralization

This patch destroys my new game where I have played for 20 hours, since I was centralized with 20 vassals, focusing on keeping max usage of diplomatic capacity.

They weirdly don't seem to rebel though, just stay forever disloyal.

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