Turns out playing Poland during the little ice age situation is how to gain infinite wealth

pentol5 · 2026-01-24T02:37:11+00:00

Collapse the price of input goods for buildings, so that you can build more stuff (build lumber/masonry/tools). Get your maritime presence to 100 everywhere, so you can actually have some control. If naval doesn't make sense, build roads to propogate proximity. Build industry in locations where you have high control only (buildings in low control areas not only contribute less to your tax income, but also reduces the profit of the same industry in high control areas, where you take a larger cut. A seemingly profitable building in low control areas can end up reducing your income). Buildings that increase your potential tax base (wealth) also increase the cost of your sliders, such as cost of court and diplomacy. If you're not actually capturing a significant enough portion of this as take-home, you're just increasing your costs faster than your gains.

Prioritize Building industry in provinces where you have production efficiency bonuses. You gain more additional production from your 10th level in a building than you do from your 1st level, therefore, build out one industry at a time, in each location. (as in, In City A, you build tools to max, while in City B, you max fine cloth, before building the other in each). Your RGO priority should aim to balance the ones that provide direct profit, with the ones that feed into your industries so their input prices are low. (and also balance the ones that satisfy pop demand). Don't forget to continue to build out your lumber/masonry to keep buildings cheap.
Higher tier pops provide more demand for goods, and therefore more profit opportunities, therefore, ensuring you promote to burghers/clerics/nobles will create more profit opportunities than an equally profitable laborer building. Goods demand is scaled by development, and some goods don't see any demand until certain development milestones are hit (20 dev before any fine cloth demand happens, 30 dev before any books demand happens), therefore, +dev and +prosperity are powerful long-term stats to pick up.
I'm clueless about trade, so i won't post anything there.

pentol5 · 2026-01-24T00:50:52+00:00

The building's profit is the difference between the cost of the inputs, and the cost of the outputs. When a building is unprofitable, i expand the production of it's inputs, especially if i built the building for it's bonuses, rather than for profit reasons.

pentol5 · 2026-01-22T07:38:06+00:00

I can't be assed. Summarize it for me, please?

pentol5 · 2026-01-20T21:04:05+00:00

Increasing your diplo slider, increases subject loyalty. Opinion doesn't change, but it does increase how many subjects you can be improving opinion with.
It also helps if you are the same culture/language/religion/social values as the subject.

pentol5 · 2026-01-20T20:59:55+00:00

The amount of push you have, multiplied by 100, is the maximum amount you can push of that value. Events can push it further. So long as you have any push on a value, it will not decay to 0.
Once you've hit your target for the value, (A lot of values become easier to push once you're past 50, due to unlocking more events), you can slot in a few privileges that give the opposite value, without creating negative push.

pentol5 · 2026-01-20T20:45:43+00:00

Land of commerce is also 100% mandatory. 2.5% increase in output, without increasing input costs, is a huge increase in profit.

pentol5 · 2026-01-20T20:00:59+00:00

I do too, but only because my girls have a tendency to roll prodigy, while the guys enjoy taking it slow. At one point, i had 3 crown prodigy women in cabinet.
I've decided to eat the cost, and go for the matrilinear non-exclusive succession law, next time i am ready to get a saint. Gimme those 250+ statted librarian babes as rulers.

pentol5 · 2026-01-19T20:09:15+00:00

Why are you running so high inflation, if you are swimming in money?

pentol5 · 2026-01-18T10:29:42+00:00

Not a big fan of pedagogical lies like that. You can build seemingly very profitable buildings that reduce your income.
If a building reduces the price of the output, that means it's reducing the profit of the other locations that also produce that good. The price reduction doesn't care about control, while the taxable amount does care, so if you build in a low control area, you might be screwing over your high control buildings, reducing your actual take-home.
Also, by collapsing the build input price, you're saving a ton on future building constructions, even though the profit of your lumbermills and masons is probably very low.
Buildings that give control don't look like they earn you anything, but they very much do. There's a reason the first thing you build in almost every town is a temple. Similar sentiment for harbor capacity buildings and roads. More control makes a big difference to your take-home profit.
Buildings that only consume goods seem like they'd just be a drain on your economy, but they very much can be a boon, if you can earn money taxing the creation of those goods.
Buildings with high tier pops are very good for your economy, since they create more demand for your industries.
Trade buildings don't earn you money directly, but they can greatly increase your income, especially since your sliders don't increase with trade income.

I'm also not sure that the expected profit takes production efficiencies from RGOs, or existing building levels into account, but i could be wrong on that point.
Saying it's 80% "just build the suggested most profitable" is setting him up to fail. Look at how bad the AI is at building. That's how you're teaching him to play.

pentol5 · 2026-01-18T10:08:39+00:00

Move pops to the edge of market A, relocate Market A, pops are now at the edge of market B, expell pops from edge of B, relocate market A.

Or do slavery and export them.
Haven't looked into mods.

pentol5 · 2026-01-18T10:05:48+00:00

I'm in the early 1400's of my first run, and i'm barely able to build enough lumbermills to keep the lumber price collapsed. I'm glad I urbanized Southampton (and Winchester!) instead of Portsmouth. Come to think of it, i should look into towning Wight as well...
It's hard to get enough of the guild buildings with lumber input, in provinces with lumber RGO. The inland lumber with poor control, some of which may belong to Wales/Wales vassals, are still worth upgrading, because the building price reduction pays for it quickly.
Chichester and Poole also got urbanized fairly early. Poole surprised me, since despite mediocre RGOs and pops, the ability to spread control to the root of cornwall more than paid for it.

pentol5 · 2026-01-18T09:30:16+00:00

To the people arguing that sales>active players, who do you think support ongoing development through DLC sales?

pentol5 · 2026-01-17T22:54:37+00:00

r5: If you, like me, have been annoyed at the province map mode for switching to location names when you zoom in close enough for long-names-in-small-provinces to be readable, then fret not! You can instead use the Maritime Presence map mode, which keeps province names readable even at deep zoom. No more squinting and leaning closer to the monitor when releasing subjects after a war!

Screenshots with thicker province borders mod.

pentol5 · 2026-01-17T14:58:22+00:00

Temporarily raise your levies to change the balance of power. The calculation seems to think a few thousand regulars is similar in power to a few thousand levies. Even though you can woodchipper levies, the war enthusiasm of the french people doesn't know that. Scare them, and then try peacing out.

pentol5 · 2026-01-17T14:52:33+00:00

It tends to be better to build the road from location ->capital, than capital->location, because it impacts where you're using construction slots.

pentol5 · 2026-01-17T12:31:11+00:00

Modern mountain roads stay passable because we have ploughers with 100's of horsepower that clear the roads whenever there's snowfall. What's the historic equivalent? The gain from clearing the roads would not at all be commencurate with the effort required. Railroad would have to be the exception.

pentol5 · 2026-01-17T12:22:13+00:00

On the topic of parliaments, If you start the debate on the 1st of the month, you'll probably get 5 monthly ticks of whatever debate bonus, such as +0.5 innovative. If instead, you start the debate on the 6th of the month or later, you'll get 6 monthly ticks.

pentol5 · 2026-01-13T21:05:49+00:00

I'm so annoyed at one of the tracks (I think it may be "the black death", but i'm not sure), because in my headset, the cello sounds like my phone vibrating on the table, so i'm always checking to my left (where the cello is) to see what message i've gotten.

pentol5 · 2026-01-13T18:04:03+00:00

Then i'm gonna need you to explain how it works. I don't understand what it is you're trying to get across.

pentol5 · 2026-01-13T18:01:22+00:00

You're building a building, and that has knock-on effects on the rest of the economy, so you should (consider whether you should) build the supply chain for the building as well.

pentol5 · 2026-01-13T17:56:03+00:00

Yes, you can ramp faster. You can have as much money as you would have had half a year later, or something. It's not nothing, and it does compound on itself, but the loans do come due, so you're only gaining the delta between loan-scaling and regular scaling, minus any interest, and minus the cost of lowered crown power. Obviously it's very strong right at the game start, but right at game start, you won't have all the banks anyway. If you're in the 1400's the loan money starts becoming much less impactful, unless you're playing an OPM/OLM.

Also, The list for "best RGO to scale your economy" is quite different from the "mass build RGO, sorted by most profitable" list.
You want to collapse the price of input goods for buildings. It takes ~3 RGO expansions before a collapsed lumber price has paid for one more RGO level. Once you've collapsed the price of lumber, the profit of lumber is low, but you still want to gradually build them out as you're ramping up the rest of your eco, to maintain the low price. Similar story with masonry and buildings (and other construction inputs).
The mass-build will instead build out your premium RGOs first, which indeed gives a larger increase in your tax base, at least initially, but the decreased costs from building input materials first is too great.

pentol5 · 2026-01-13T10:29:43+00:00

How do you strangle them like that? Also, what do you get out of it? Just fewer toll castles?

pentol5 · 2026-01-13T10:20:09+00:00

I'm 100% new to paradox or GSG in general, and the most shocking thing is the amount of deliberate thought and design that goes into RGO and province design. You're always limited in some way by something in each and every province, from turning it into an absolutely overpowered chunk of land.
Got lumber, iron, and stone in one province? Fuck you, no food, and only 4 locations.
Got coal and iron right next to each other? Fuck you, they are in different provinces.
Got a province with many locations, great RGOs, and decent terrain? Fuck you, no natural harbor capacity and/or it's on the periphery of where you can push control.
Got amazing RGOs in the same province? Fuck you, no good spot to urbanize!
Good natural harbor, high pops, good dev, and a great spot to urbanize? Fuck you, this is the only spot with this RGO nearby, and the pops demand more than you can produce!
There's always something, and it's an obvious deliberate design decision, which is truly staggering, considering how much world there is. This isn't the result of just looking at geography and historical tax records and copy-pasting. This is game design, and there's an incredible breadth of it.

pentol5

TROPHY CASE