Final Chapter: Post-Game Talk

The Three Attempts

AE and Coalitions

Great Britain:

Iberia:

Scandinavia:

Russia:

Ottomans:

The PUs

The Vassals

End Game

Clever Mechanics, Cheese, Exploits, Cheats

Aaronomus said: Exploits exist on a sliding scale:



Ordinary Play---Clever use of game mechanics-------Cheese-------Exploits---------Cheating



Naturally, where you'd place various strategies is rather subjective, but differences must be drawn. Click to expand...

Good Side

Bad Side

What's Next

My Thanks

Hello! Now that the game is over, I can talk to you guys a little bit about the strategies, the game, the good moments and bad moments.First, I'd like to tell you a little funny moment. As you know, this is my first AAR. The first chapter was actually never meant to be. Yeah, that's right. I actually didn't meant to post it. I was just typing to see how it would look like, after @Kanno_FR and @atwix told me I should make an AAR. So, here I had the first chapter ready, but all I wanted was to preview it. I didn't want to start this without any knowledge of the natives like I did. But I missclicked, I clicked on post. Hahaha. This is one of those mistakes I'm actually glad I did. I don't know if I would ever start this AAR, if not for that missclick.Anyway, before I go back into the game, let me show you a few more screenshots.The score. It makes no sense to me. Did you notice we finished 2nd? That's because France still exists. We are clearly far ahead, but the game gives us too few points because what matters is the rank we are in. We're 1st in everything, France is 2nd in everything, so we get about 1 point more than them! That's absurd.The techs, leader and advisors. I tried to keep a Dip Rep advisor for as long as I could. We kept the focus on ADM for most part of the game, only changing it to DIP when we were annexing Austria and Poland.Diplomacy tab. France didn't like our conquest of Italy, even though it received all the provinces. Our Dip Rep suffered from our low legitimacy ruler. There's still a little OE left from our last conquests, not much though.The economy and the trade. So many ducats.Nothing much to talk about, I reduced the WE and improved the Stability for no reason.The religion map. Still quite colorful.And the culture mapmode. I think it looks pretty cool.Let's talk about the game now. Going back to the first attempt, it was clear I didn't know enough of the natives to do a WC. It was my first attempt at anything besides the achievements on a native. So, the treaty of tordesillas and total lack of colony knowledge made that a complete disaster.Now, the second attempt, it went pretty well, until the moment I realized how badly the AE was pilling up on Burgundy and what it meant for my main strategy. The fact that we didn't have a strong enough economy or manpower were decisive on the restart.So, here comes the third and final attempt. I knew from the start that I had to do something different, no matter how painful and boring it was. So I spent many hours giving subsidies to many natives for them to colonize. I had to be really picky on whom to conquer. I think I spent more time planning that than planning the rest of the game.Later comes the European conquests. Let me talk about that. Many would recommend conquering around the world, splitting the AE. But I had experience on WC before, I did many of these: Aragon, Castile, France, Austria, Tuscany, Ottomans, Ryukyu, Uesugi, only to name a few nations I've done a WC before. Yeah, I'm this crazy. haha. So, I knew from my European WCs that I could conquer Europe before attacking the ROTW. I knew that I could make a few protectorates in Asia if I did this. It was much easier than the conquer around the world that I used for Uesugi and Ryukyu. Mostly because these two start in the other side of the world and I had no protectorates on them.Let me explain a little bit about how AE works. It mainly considers 3 factors: Distance, Region and Religion.Here we have 5 regions that are really easy to conquer with little AE. One by one:It's an isolated area with its own cultural region. So, the first factor Region only affects the islands. Distance will only affect a few nations because Burgundy and France are huge and are basically the only close nations.It's another isolated area with its own cultural region. To the south, you have a huge Sunni region. So Religion prevents it from gaining much AE. Distance will only affect France. So, you're pretty much fighting only the three nations here.Another isolated area. Denmark is a little bit tricky because there are many Germans near. But Sweden and Norway don't affect many nations from Distance. Religion prevents the Russians from getting that extra high AE, although it will be affected a bit for being a Heretic, not a Heathen. Distance will also matter, but only to Russia.Here what matter most is Religion. The Sunnis won't care for the Orthodox Russia. Russia has a region of its own. And Distance will only affect a few nations, like Poland-Lithuania, Teutonic and Livonian orders, Norway and Sweden.Here we have the Sunni equivalent of Russia. The only one who will care for it are their Sunni neighbours, which aren't strong and the Ottomans themselves usually are the ones to beat them.There are a few other factors in AE, such as:Allies and subjects: they receive less AE than normal. Vassals receive no AE.HRE: extra AE for taking a HRE province.Claims: claims reduce AE from taking province.Direct target: the target of your actions will get double the AE.Co-belligerent: taking land from no co-belligerent also increases the AE.So, the strategy is to pick one or two of these regions and focus only on them. It doesn't matter if they have 300 AE, as long as the rest of Europe doesn't have more than 50. The second part of the strategy is to manage truces. The AI can't join a coalition if it has a truce with us. So, as long as you keep Iberia in a truce, England can't form a coalition with them against you.Notice that we allied Austria and France really early, it isn't only for their strength, but because they are in position to receive AE. So we're reducing their AE by being allies. We also made many claims to reduce AE, always made enemies co-belligerent when we were taking too much. And, lastly, we avoided the HRE for as long as we could.But, what if I focused on Africa and Asia at the same time? It would be much harder to handle rebels and truces! The wars in Europe would last much longer, these high AE nations would last much longer. A coalition would form then. Did you notice? In the third attempt, there were almost no coalitions. Coalitions slow us down in this patch. I wanted to avoid them as much as possible.There was a huge luck factor here. We kept the Royal Marriage with Austria and France going for such a long time, I knew one of them would get our Dynasty. But both? That I didn't expect. The plan was: form a PU with France, integrate it and by the end game conquer the HRE using two Germans and one Italian vassal.I chose our vassals based on position, size and ideas. The largest they were, the closest to the enemies and farther apart between other vassals and if they had core cost reduction along with religious ideas, those were the deciding factors. The ideal vassal was the Ottomans, but they grew too large. In a perfect game, I'd have made them a vassal really soon and fed it as much as I could. On this same perfect game, I'd have Persia as a vassal as well to give it its cores back from Timurids.In the late game, it was all about the size. The diplomatic relation max isn't a limit, it's just a number set to discourage us of making too many vassals. But this late in the game, with all the ideas and techs, there was no reason not to cross that barrier.By the end game, I regret integrating Austria. But I didn't want to take the chance of Austria not annexing Wurzburg in time. Austria was in the same situation as France, its liberty desire was really low and it was quite strong. If I instead of integrating Austria had annexed someone else, like Kazan, the liberty desire of all my vassals would be lower and the game would be a little more clean.About clean, I think I could've done a better job by the late game of reducing the number of nations. But I only thought of that after the end game, up to that point I was only thinking of finishing this run asap. The game was running way too slow. That's also the reason for my lazyness and my lack of a better carpet siege job when we had a deadline coming. I simply couldn't move my units too much or check everywhere if the enemies were moving. The game simply would break down. I think I had, at least, ten crashes in the last 20 years.I read this in this forum once:This stuck to my head. In the same topic, I found people talking about usage of Easy and Player bonus. I already knew about these exploits/cheats, but I want to make it clear that I didn't use these in this AAR. After the second attempt failed, I thought of using it. I even discussed it. But in the end, I don't think it would be fair for you guys or rewarding for me after completing this if I used these. So I stuck to the default Ironman mode.I don't remember using many things I'd consider an exploits. I'm sorry, my memory isn't the best. The exploits I remember are: using subjects of subjects for no AE and using culture conversion to reduce the DIP cost on peace deals in the early game.The only other exploit I used, which I didn't explain here is crashing the game when I had a regency or a terrible ruler. We finished this game close to the last year. Can you imagine what would happen if we had a 15 year regency? I couldn't let this run fail because of that. I also didn't want to lose because of a 0/0/0 ruler (which actually happened). So, I crashed my game on purpose because of that.So, you decide, where would you place this AAR? Mostly on clever use of mechanics? Clearly on Cheese? Or was it a blatant usage of Exploits?I had a lot of fun playing this game. I had to make so many plans and so many little things had to go exactly like planned for it all to work. I had to get creative many, many times. This made this game feel so rewarding. So, in terms of gameplay and overall time spent in the game, I give this run a big plus. Paradox made a great game.Now, we have the problems. Just like in my Uesugi game, the game ran really, really, really slow in the late game. After 1750, my game was running slower than speed 1. The game was using 100% of one of my processor cores. I don't have a bad CPU by no means, I have an i7-3770 here. It should be more than enough to handle a single game. But I understand that this game is really complex and considering the wars I was in, it should be expected to run slow. We had millions of units running around.I mentioned a few times the problems I faced during the game in this AAR. The 133% for La Plata and the impossibility to demand Münster in a peace deal comes to mind. These are problems that I simply don't understand.The last one is the AE when I released vassals. I wish there was some kind of consistency here. Keep all the modifiers or don't keep any, that's what I wish for. It's pretty bad when I release a vassal that has +100 improved relations, +50 for returning cores and -200 for AE and the only one remaining after releasing it as a vassal is the -200 AE. Just like it's pretty convenient to have a -400 AE nation become a 0 AE vassal.Next I'll be learning the new 1.13 beta patch. I don't know if I'll like it, at the moment, I don't. So, let's wait and see. It's still a beta, many things can change. I'll continue to post on the regular EU4 forum. I hope to see you guys there!Let me start by thanking those who directly and indirectly made me start this AAR. @atwix is the one who pushed me into making this AAR by encouraging me and doing a brainstorm along the first two attempts as to what I should do and what I could do better. His ideas were essential to my third attempt success. @oblio- for picking my curiosity and mentioning the natives as a next goal. @TheMeInTeam for his comments on the Uesugi topic, his strategic point about westernization and feeding of natives were the basis for my early game strategy. Thank you all.I'd like to thank all the readers, without you all I could never have made this far. The only reason I made three attempts at this was because you guys are so awesome. I really can't thank you enough. Thank you for taking your time to read this AAR. Thank you for all the discussion, comments and suggestions. I really appreciate it. Thank you!This is all, folks.See you later!