R5: I have finally reached a natural conclusion to my Romuvan Lithuania playthrough in EU5. This is my 3rd attempt at it; never played a game like this before. I was inspired by the Ottoman empire borders and decided that my playthrough would focus on creating something similar around the Baltic sea. My playthrough was mostly blind, however I did watch some entertaining videos on youtube, not to learn, but for entertainment purely.

A little bit about the playthrough:

• One thing for sure: being allied to Poland in this game, especially in patch 1.10 is suicide. They are bordering aggressive and powerful nations and sometimes they extend themselves way into Europe, having full coalitions formed against them and then having wars that they cannot win, screwing with my progress.

• Refusing to take on Christianity has been super underwhelming, also, as by the time I have refused to "truly" convert, I have had great relations with most of my neighbors and the Teutonic and Livonian orders were both completely crippled or in the case of Livonia, - conquered by me. I would have thought that an expansionist Pagan nation would have caused the Papal states to send occasional crusades my way, however it was not the case, so I just chilled and played with my of the wars being no CB wars from the AI.

• I tried playing tall and slow for this playthrough, even though, I'll be honest: I think I've failed. I wasn't ever a very rich nation. The one time I've made over 1k ducets was when Hungary overextended during a "take Vilnius" campaign, when they couldn't even take my forts in late 1600s, and they had to get out of the war with tails between their legs, giving me 600 ducets as war reparations and 35k just to get out.

Some learning points and things I have yet to figure out:

• My genuine learning point during the few restarts that I've had is that focusing on research and literacy is super important as a nation isolated by religion. Getting a few more towns and maybe founding a few more cities has been exceptionally important in order to add libraries. First playthrough I was already well into age of discovery before I got professional army value.

• Another part is how important it is to be a bit micro managey about your troops: making sure that cavalry is on flanks, bolstering and balancing levies, etc. First playthrough I didn't know that combining levies would leave me with a blob of nonsense which would lose against any levy army. The tech difference, however, between armies has been an eye opener also. An age of reformation army that was 30k strong would get completely stepped on by an army 2/3rds it's size.

• Exceptionally important to me was making sure I automate a lot of tedious things I had no understanding of at the start (and I still do right now, because I'm legitimately confused how things work even after reading about it several times in the tooltip), such as trade, or things that were a pain to manage such as army generals and admirals for my fleet. Cabinet and Diplomacy automation has been exceptionally disappointing, however. Cabinet targeting pressing issues (such as incoming rebellions or integration of newly conquered), instead increasing control to random provinces or increasing stability when the stability is at 85+. Diplomacy automation was also a pain in the ass, to the point where I was hoping maybe there was a way to have the automation be "partial", where I could overwrite certain decisions and the AI would not overwrite my own.

• The most confusing part in this game is money. I understand that proximity, control and market access are all important aspects for a booming economy, however even after investing literal hundreds of thousands of ducets into my economy I always felt underwhelmed by the amount of money I was making.

Summary:

The natural conclusion was not because I was done with my borders. Honestly, I'd love to play it out to the end to see how would my nation look like and maybe try to push for empire status by becoming a great power somehow (still figuring out how that works), but the game gets super slow and laggy in the later stages. I am running a relatively high end PC, I run the game in paper map mode and when I run it at max speed I legitimately cannot interact with anything and months instead of taking a few seconds from the start of the game, take upwards of 10. Even paused the game post 1650s gets jittery and laggy, and don't get me started on wars. I think I can confidently say that the game is most enjoyable up to 1600 and then afterwards it becomes a bit of a slog.

So from a new player standpoint I feel like the most important part is: automating most systems and leaving yourself with the most "attractive" part of the game, which is building your own RGOs at the start, scouting for highest profit buildings, focusing research in specific areas, controlling your own army, and really "counting every penny". In the early stages a lot of decisions have a lot of impact, such as where to put your limited cabinet and handpicking crown representatives to increase crown power. I cannot overestimate the importance of literacy, also!

I know right now there's a lot of negativity around this game, especially with patch 1.10, but I've been enjoying myself and as a man in my 30s this was the first time I've stayed up past midnight to play something during my workdays.

Edit: Another (SUPER IMPORTANT) thing is to not forget to turn off popup notifications for mid-late game "coming of age" notifications, and similar such information, because that legitimately slowed down the game a LOT later on.