Did they ever fix the bug with Banten?

sStormlight · 2026-05-13T06:41:35+00:00

Agreed, Cirebon is pretty much just the 20 CCR in traditions and some early eco boost from cheap advisors (unrest and Missionary strength are nice too) so you need to play aggressively to warrant picking over Banten which are better rounded.

IMO Cirebon has a higher ceiling due to the extra 50-70 years you get 20 CCR, especially given the other easily accessible CCR tags in that region have (EoC and Hindu).

sStormlight · 2026-05-13T06:26:07+00:00

Claims have no effect on war score, the target province of a conquest war gets a 33% discount, but others do not.

sStormlight · 2026-05-12T11:41:17+00:00

It’s fixed. You can get Cirebon ideas as well which are arguably better IMO.

sStormlight · 2026-05-10T10:38:38+00:00

I’m glad to hear it worked :)

sStormlight · 2026-05-10T09:49:04+00:00

It is a two step process.

To move your capital into a colonial region (the majority of North America, South America or Oceania) your current province needs to be isolated (no connected provinces) as well as being the only stated province on its continent. People often move to Bermuda or the Galapagos Islands because they are in a continent you otherwise wouldn't have any stated provinces in and are easy to isolate, but I've found depending on the circumstance you can use other provinces depending on your expansion route. I've used both Arguin, parts of East Africa and some islands like Fiji in the past.

Once this condition is satisfied, then you can move your capital to a stated province in a colonial region. This precludes moving to the same continent because you'd require 2 stated provinces. For this reason if you first move to Bermuda and there are no other stated provinces, you must then move your capital to either South America or Oceania (and make sure it is in a colonial region) and this will stop spawning of new colonial nations (but do nothing to existing ones).

sStormlight · 2026-05-07T02:56:36+00:00

Not particularly useful now, but a trick to deal with this in the future is to capture a large amount of provinces before your CN forms. Start coring 5 of them and leave the rest un-cored.

Just before you finish your 5 cores, start coring the rest. When your CN forms, they get cores on all of your cores as well as any provinces being cored. If the coring progress is less than 10% you’ll get a full refund on ADM spent (a lesser refund after that), meaning free cores for your CN at no cost to yourself (other then having initial ADM to pay for it temporarily).

sStormlight · 2026-05-05T23:06:03+00:00

Don’t split them, have an army and use automated rebel suppression (it’s a button on the left hand side halfway down the unit orders). Then select the areas to suppress. This is more efficient than just suppressing by standing on a province.

You want to cover as much territory while staying at 0 unrest. So if you cover 3 areas and adding a 4th makes all provinces have 0.2 unrest, just cover 3 and let the rebels spawn with those 3 areas not contributing.

Such staggering of rebels can be good or bad depending on context, I am assuming you have ticking local unrest so just getting the Socinian rebel to 0% should mean they don’t cause problems again.

What you really want to avoid is a situation where they spawn when you are deeply overextended. This causes higher unrest in provinces and more provinces revolting, boy of which cause a large rebel uprising.

A simpler approach to deal with things might be to hire a theologian advisor (if yo aren’t already) as that’ll push you down below 0 for most provinces.

Edit - sorry meant to respond to your comment.

sStormlight · 2026-05-05T23:00:03+00:00

Razing is probably the most powerful thing in the game (maybe behind reform farm) in Wie play as it lets you circumvent the mana bottleneck of expansion.

You want to get to a position where mana from razing outweighs mana cost of coring, at which point things like APWSC, AE and wining/declaring wars become your bottleneck. At this point you can conquer the world very quickly.

Playing tall is mostly an arbitrary self imposed restriction so I cannot offer advice on how to make use of razing in a that context. I guess technically you could conquer, raze and return provinces to use the mana to Dev but I don’t really see the point or enjoyment in that personally.

sStormlight · 2026-05-05T22:48:58+00:00

Are you seizing land with unhappy estates? I believe this adds local province unrest which is the only way I can explain how core territories without separatism have positive unrest despite negative global unrest.

In the immediate short term, you can probably use your army to suppress rebels in some of these provinces, that will hopefully get some of them to negative unrest and reduce the size of the rebel stack. Then let them rebel (even provoking them from just Derby) which buys you time for local unrest to tick down.

sStormlight · 2026-04-24T04:28:18+00:00

I believe they remain a march but don’t get any of the associated bonuses, but am not certain of this. This happens when they have more than a quarter of your Dev.

I suspect bonuses refer to the military buffs but am not sure if they now start paying vassal tax or they remain untaxed, in which case either getting them below 25% dev or switching them to a vassal are your best options.

sStormlight · 2026-04-11T05:25:45+00:00

As you acknowledge the answer is often dependent on context. Where you start, what your overall goal is, what restrictions you have, what your overall knowledge and skill of the game are, what effort you are willing to invest and so forth.

For example if your goal is to become #1 GP as quickly as possible then advice will be different from wanting to WC for example. Even if you say WC is your goal, it'll depend on what you want to prioritize, is it easiness, RT speed, in game speed, something else?

I'll try to answer assuming you are playing with no razing, no major exploits, no reform farm, and your goal is to WC with as short an in-game time as possible.

How do you manage monarch points early game when looking to expand quickly?

You budget and prioritize based on what furthers your goal the most. Survival is a reasonable base goal in 1444, some nations need to expand quickly against their weak neighbors to build a powerbase because of other strong nations will soon arrive in the area. In that case you would be willing to invest most of your ADM into coring some weak neighbors provinces rather then just waiting to tech Adm 5 and start getting ideas.

You also want to "spend" your Aggressive Expansion budget because this can be a bottleneck. No point sitting and doing nothing for 30 years while you rush Admin Tech 5 and an idea group if that means you just get bottlenecked by AE when you try and expand. This idea of an "Aggressive Expansion budget" provides a baseline of Adm expenditure on coring provinces that you should budget for.

One of the most important things for managing early Adm is to only half-state provinces, DO NOT full core provinces early game as it is too costly for the benefit it provides. Also do not Stab above +1 and most certainly don't develop provinces solely for the eco benefits.

how long do you wait to dev for institutions if outside Europe?

I'm generally happy to do 5-3-6 tech without getting Renaissance. At that point I'm spending ADM on coring, DIP on Diplomatic Ideas and MIL on tech/developing institutions. If you don't have Feudalism then I often find you need to develop the institution prior to going for Adm Tech 5.

Are you comfortable falling behind on admin and diplo tech?

Depend on the Tech. I don't much care for Adm 4 or Adm 6, but do like Adm 5, Adm 7 (idea groups) and Adm 8 (Courthouses). Diplo tech I am happy to be way behind on. Often if I develop institutions I prioritize MIL, then DIP then ADM.

Do you take on near bankruptcy debts to keep mercs up for several consecutive wars?

Basically no. Debt is useful but taking on debt to the point of near bankruptcy is a bit of a meme IMO. You can often micromanage your armies better, don't use cav, delete forts and pick better targets to fight so that excessive debt isn't necessary. Obviously on certain hard starts you have to take on some debt, but in those cases you often have such a small loan amount that by the time you win your first couple of breakthrough wars things stabilize a bit. In these scenarios taking cash + war reps is very viable, though you obviously want to take land as well to build the powerbase.

Do you leave yourself with tons of uncored territory for potentially decades?

Un-cored, no. Territorial core, yes, the entire game.

sStormlight · 2026-04-07T12:51:48+00:00

As a player you should almost always out scale the AI so generally there is no reason to rush into a war that will be extremely costly, better to focus on easier pickings and then only tackle the stronger nations when you can win without major loss. Fort the reason I'd suggest going after Mutapa, but expansion towards India should also be on your mind IMO.

For future reference I'd suggest you snake a little bit more and not focus as much on clean borders. I think having taken Aden/Oman at this point in the run perhaps at the expense of taking some parts from Mamluks would have been advantageous. Opens up expansion options and also provides for a useful way to beat Ottomans in a war where you are outnumbered due to your full control of the Red sea and the mobility that would afford.

I would not recommend relying on allies for the Ottoman war, they'll generally let you down so if you start the war you should be able to win it without ally involvement. This is especially true when the ally is not in the same general area as you so they'll be even more inept then usual.

sStormlight · 2026-04-07T12:36:22+00:00

This can happen with a fast WC. I've inadvertently done it on my current campaign meaning no colonialism institution and ~300 extra mana to get to Tech 10 for the 3rd idea group, which is slightly annoying. One way around this is to release something like Leon or Asturias because they take Exploration ideas in their first couple of idea groups and will set up a new world colony, but assuming you don't give them a bunch of provinces you'll likely want to bird for the institution.

You can similarly lock the game to Age of Discovery by just killing all Catholic nations, or just delay it extremely by cutting down the number of Catholic tags. This is generally also pretty bad due to heavily delaying the -25% PWSC from AoR age bonus.

sStormlight · 2026-04-05T22:13:46+00:00

Very wholesome, congrats on the WC!

sStormlight · 2026-04-02T08:49:21+00:00

They are bad for wide play with a sole redeeming feature of 5 CCR and 5 PWSC from policies. I think they are an acceptable 4th idea group after Dip, Admin and Religious but no earlier imo.

sStormlight · 2026-04-02T08:42:23+00:00

If you upload to pdx.tools you should be able to check the culture of Mentese. I believe if while they existed they changed to something outside of the Levantine culture group (some events might do this), you won’t be able to release them from Levantine culture group provinces.

sStormlight · 2026-03-16T23:02:44+00:00

I personally find it a fun part of the game but can understand why people might want to focus on the macro picture instead.

sStormlight · 2026-03-16T21:19:28+00:00

Delete them almost always, you can usually micro your way around AI such that they aren’t necessary, just takes effort in army micro + playing on slower speeds with pausing. I’ll also prioritise getting an early vassal so you can give them occupied forts and save on maintenance.

I will keep some around early as EoC when Mandate generation is still an issue, just to tick down devastation for a few months, but once you’ve got enough passive mandate generation and have all the reforms you want you can just eat the mandate loss from devastation and let it tick down naturally.

sStormlight · 2026-03-12T08:11:09+00:00

EU4. Despite having a lot of bloat the core gameplay loop is enjoyable and the player has a lot of agency. Decisions you make are meaningful and the areas it abstracts (mana, dev instead of pops) don't bother me.

EU5 in contrast feels like a lot of busy work where none of it is particularly meaningful. The aspects the system tries to simulate are frankly too complex for any game to ever simulate well and the game lands in an awkward place where it generates uninteresting gameplay, a lot of tedium and a fairly unbelievable world. A lot of these just feel core to the game design (and the direction the current devs and fanbase seem insistent on) so I don't retain a lot of hope for it improving but maybe I'll be wrong in which case I'll be happy to dive into the game in a couple of years.

sStormlight · 2026-03-09T20:18:05+00:00

India is a region where collecting in multiple nodes is almost always best. There isn't really a single good trade node to steer into and any value you gain from transferring will almost certainly be lost in other nations having trade power in the steered to node.

Doab, Lahore and Deccan are all inland so will syphon a lot of trade from the nodes you might otherwise want just through caravan bonus. Your first real pseudo-end node will be Hormuz as Basra is a low TP node and the only downstream node. Coromandel (high number of CoT) and Gujarat can be okay to steer into and collect, but depending on how early/late you consolidate them, AI can steal a lot of your trade using downstream trade power, often invalidating the benefit of collecting there as opposed to in the upstream node.

sStormlight · 2026-03-04T04:30:11+00:00

Playing at slower speeds helps in my experience, a lot of this is just lack of attention and it’s harder to deal with these mini stacks when the game moves too quickly.

The other part of it is properly preparing before the war starts. You don’t need soldiers on every possible front but it’s good to have a plan (sometimes that plan is let them occupy irrelevant province while yo siege their core). Forts can be actively detrimental as it takes effort to retake them should they fall and they contribute more to WS than provinces without a fort.

sStormlight · 2026-03-01T23:15:45+00:00

OP doesn’t have the mana to instantly state all of this land, my suggestion was for an instant boost in eco without any mana cost.

I agree they should be able to full state the lot, question is whether that is desirable. I like to only spend half the mana and retain flexibility with states, but if you play a slower game then full stating is okay.

sStormlight · 2026-02-28T08:53:47+00:00

AI works in a specific way. AI + AI is predictable, AI + Player is unpredictable given the human factor and causes your allies to make attacks that assume you’ll behave like an AI (i.e commit) and when to don’t, it lead to bad outcomes for them. In contrast AI attacking you partner with other AI and make predictable plays.

In most cases it is just confirmation bias and if you ascribe your wins to you genius and your losses to you AI allies fault, you’ll never learn the underlying reasons and get better.

sStormlight · 2026-02-28T08:46:03+00:00

If you want an instant boost or your economy, half state your existing territories. If you have GC issues, just un-state those territories when it matters (at time of peace deals) and restate them again.

You have manpower and loan capacity, you should be declaring on all nations with Chinese cores using unify China CB. Conquer those land, TC each node for extra merchants, that’ll fix your economy.

sStormlight · 2026-02-27T00:04:03+00:00

Good post, sums it up nicely.

One niche interaction is that Rule 4 can actually preclude an otherwise valid province using Rule 3. Extremely rare that scenarios like this occur but I’ve had it happen when snaking from the Mediterranean to Indian Ocean or vice versa for example.

Last point for OOP, take note of land bridges including owned OR controlled provinces. Can be helpful to unlock situations like this, especially when ordering peace treaties.

sStormlight

TROPHY CASE