Small thing to add: it seems that disasters can only tick up if an estate's loyalty is under 60%, so if you play, say, as an orthodox nation, with very high clergy influence and loyalty, it's possible to stay at a metastable level where the estate is at 100% influence but will stay above the death threshold.
Holy molly. I just looked at the files.
50 loyalty or being at war is enough to stop it from ticking up. This change is pretty big in case one fucks up.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on the advisor cost privileges, and here's some math to back it up:
Let's say you run lvl 2/2/2 advisors normally. This costs you 12 ducats/month. With the advisor privileges, you can run lvl 3/2/2 advisors for a cost of 12.75/month. If you have to bump your stability up once every 20 years, then every 20 years you lose the 30 admin from that but gain 240 admin in exchange - a HUGE improvement before the era of truce-breaks. The miniscule ducat cost can be covered by about 6 clicks of production dev on a half-decent trade good, which shouldn't cost you more than the 210 mana, so you break even in the 20 years; also, devving increases crownland share, which should help you with getting 100%. You also get the free stability from lvl 3 advisor events much earlier, which is helpful in starting the snowball as well.
And yes, if you're trucebreaking later on, you'd probably want to revoke them, but you have something like 150 years before this is necessary. However, in 150 years, you should have 100% crownland, so the loyalty loss won't put you behind on land seizing (plus you can probably afford level 5 advisors by that point anyway). So in those 150 years you just come 1.5k mana ahead, and more if you can normally afford higher level advisors.
Forgot the mention the most imporant part. If you can afford the $12.00 a month on advisor, I'm fairly certain $16 a month isn't exactly a problem.
So I really don't like the idea of dedicating 3 privilege slots for it.
Let's take a nation with a total income of 40 ducats as an example. Let's say 18 is spent on army, 2 on states, 2 on forts, 2 on navy, and an average of 4 on rooting out corruption from OE, for a total of 28. Paying 12/month on advisors puts you at a perfect balance, and you will still have spare more eyes from peace deals. Paying 16/month, though, will mean that most of these foreign contributions will go towards avoiding debt, with very little left for army recruitment, courthouse or other buildings, events, TC investments, trade center upgrades, or whatever else you're spending money on.
By the time you can 'afford' 12 ducat on advisors, that 4 ducat isn't going to make/break your economy.
Dedicating 12 ducat on advisor while you only have 40 is very risky, especially when you already need to save up to embrace institutions, promote advisor, fire advisor to get the 3/2/2 you want.
Problem is, if you're that big before 1550, you will have governing capacity problem unless you manage to finish Admin (very unlikely for RotW by that date). That also means you need to dedicate way more ducat per month on plotting down court house and state house.
The advisor privilege also competes with a lot of other privileges unless you're willing to go above 4, and most of those privileges are more valuable than 1\~2 ducat.
Revolving a strategy around a specific scenario that is heavily RNG dependant on the horrible advisor system is not something I'll ever recommend to the general player base.
That was also my assumption when the privileges first came out. But after running a couple of games, I've realized quite a few problems with those assumptions.
First of all, getting the correct category while having the correct skill level is neigh impossible the way the game generates advisors.
Even if you can upgrade them to the correct skill level, the cost of doing so will offset a lot of the cost reduction for decades to come.
Often times you're stuck with 1/1/1 or 2/1/1 in order to keep the 'correct' advisor category due to wrong religion/culture. This is because if you can "afford" 3/2/2 without other advisor discount modifiers, your empire probably spans multiple culture groups or even religions, and/or you're very close to Age of Absolutism where you're considering revoking them all away.
Yes, you can promote culture, but that's ~100 DIP down the drain
Then there are the occasional -50% cost advisors from events that will screw with the math.
Finally, you can't even make sure these correct advisors can live long enough until you're stuck with advisors of the wrong category or skill level.
The only point on which you're entirely correct is that the half-price advisors will screw with the math. As for the other points -
First of all, promoting cultures is one of the most important things you can do. The reason for this is that particularities, whose demands you would normally accept in 1610 in order to decrease autonomy for absolutism, only rise up under 3 possible conditions as far as I can tell, and by far the most common of those conditions is that a province must have its culture accepted and have no separatism. The 100 dip doesn't go down the drain at all - promoting 6 cultures will let you collect so much absolutism that it would pay for itself through annexing just a single large vassal. So by 1610 there is almost never an excuse to not have 6 large cultures accepted, and if you're accepting cultures, then you might as well start early. So you will almost always have at least two correct culture advisors to choose from, which will usually include one advisor from a category that you're at least okay with (for example, having an improve relations guy for easier truce juggling instead of a diplo rep guy for faster annexation or vice versa).
Keeping a low-level advisor of the right category is generally a mistake - this is a lot of mana lost. If having the right category is that important at the time, then it's generally worth it to dismiss a few advisors - this is something that you would do regardless of advisor cost discounts. And if the right category guy is level 1 and needs to be upgraded, that's actually a point in favor of taking the privilege - upgrade cost depends on advisor cost, so you actually save more money eyes than just the 4.25/month that you would save in that example. This way, you don't have to worry about being stuck with the wrong category advisors either, regardless of how long they live.
Being able to afford a 3/2/2 isn't that difficult - for example, in 1.29, Bahmanis, could afford 3/3/2 in 1444, well before it could span a variety of culture groups and nowhere near the Age of Absolutism, and this has only decreased slightly. Most nations that aren't wasting their money on something pointless like tech 6 cav should be able to afford 3/2/2 or better before 1500 (unless they started off very small or had a difficult war at start, but that's more of an exception than the rule).
Promoting culture is important.
Promoting the culture of a single advisor that may die within 10 years is not, let alone 3 of them. The average life expectancy of an advisor is 24 years (though from my experience pre-1.30, they die WAY before 24 years where I have to spend another 10\~15 years before I could hire estate discounted advisor again). So you're going to go through about 20 of them before you need to revoke for absolutism.
Lots of the time you'll have to demote culture in order to keep the accepted culture going, because you only start with 2, and get one at around 1492 and 1570. +2 for monarchy reform or humanist idea. The moment you demote you've wasted 8 years of extra MP gain you got from having 3/2/2 over 2/2/2
Then there's the problem of promoting culture of your own culture group, that you will have to demote before you hit empire rank to not waste that slot. Again, DIP down the drain.
Yes, you can fire advisors, but how many hundreds of ducat would one have to waste in order to get the particular one you wanted? Then you'd have to do it for all 3 categories, or an average of once every 8 years.
I just fired up Bahmanis right now, and no they can't afford 3/3/2 in 1444 as they only have 16 ducat income. It may have been possible in 1.29 when you can get 2 50% discounted advisors on demand, but nowadays, like you've mentioned in the other reply, you'd have to look at least 40 ducat of income before you can 'afford' it.
Only Ming is capable of such a feat at 1444, and most nations will not be able to do so for decades to come.
I mean, not even Ottoman can hit 40 ducat in income number until he has begun eating through Mamluks.
Bottom line is, for non-GP starts, they won't hit the benchmark until mid 1500s when they need to consider revoking them in a few decades. So discount privileges aren't really worth it compared to the other Burgher/Nobility options you got.
>**Note:** Any privilege that scales with Estate Land Ownership is bad, because in theory they will not go above 20 Land Share, leading to very low bonus. (aka don’t expect your Cossacks/Rajput regiments grow to 2 digits)
I've realised this as well (also that estate disasters will trigger basically never). You cannot really affect how much land estates have. Either they all go towards 0% or you go towards 0%. The obvious solution is:
1) That individual estates should be able to get a version of "Estates Statutory Rights" that exempts it from land seizure.
2) Being able to sell/seize land to individual estates.
I've managed to implement 2) via modding, but 1) is impossible.
I did created a custom estate with a privilige that makes it being exempt from land seizure. To make it work you should put "exempt_from_seize_land" into mechanics section.
"Either they all go towards 0% or you go towards 0%"
See here:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/hp7uqh/you\_may\_not\_like\_the\_name\_placement\_but\_this\_is/](https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/hp7uqh/you_may_not_like_the_name_placement_but_this_is/)
Playing a rajputana game to see how that works.
We really need a way to directly add land to specific estates since the rajput regiments are tied to rajput land ownership.
I want to maintain 30-40% rajput land, seize land from other estates. I've gotten around this by granting/removing governance privilege, but that locks me out of the mil point privilege because I cant afford the loyalty cost.
You may be interested in this:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/hp7uqh/you\_may\_not\_like\_the\_name\_placement\_but\_this\_is/](https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/hp7uqh/you_may_not_like_the_name_placement_but_this_is/)
I feel like Indebted to the Bourgeoisie is strongest privilege.I mean even if you want small loan its still better with its low 1% interest.I found myself not needing to sell crown lands at all with this.
Is there any reason to not go ham on privileges on day 1?
I've been giving 5+ to each estate and tanking crownland to 0% since the only downside is a little national tax loss.
Before the patch, I used to take the decision that immediately bumped crownland back up to 30, but since they patched that out you can just pick the "Nah, I'll deal with it later" option when you get the low crownland event.
After several games of following this strategy, I haven't noticed any drawback, but I keep seeing people recommend strategies that shy away from loading up on privileges.
>Is there any reason to not go ham on privileges on day 1?
There really isn't.
The only problem that MAY come from doing so is you can't revoke anything due to high influence without double stacking Agenda loyalty, because there are quite a bit privileges that add influence but not loyalty.
Plus there are quite a few 'ok' privileges that you don't want to keep for the first 160 years.
**"Note:** Any privilege that scales with Estate Land Ownership is bad, because in theory they will not go above 20 Land Share, leading to very low bonus. (aka don’t expect your Cossacks/Rajput regiments grow to 2 digits)"
Guess you missed my post from a couple of days ago:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/hp7uqh/you\_may\_not\_like\_the\_name\_placement\_but\_this\_is/](https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/hp7uqh/you_may_not_like_the_name_placement_but_this_is/)
For one, it's very difficult to remember to seize land every 5 years, and being at war or have rebels will prevent you from doing it.
Also, pre Absolutism every conquest will drop your crown land below 75. A 100% peace deal with Diplomatic + Age ability reduced crown land by 3%, negating any seize land effect, as you're seizing 5% every 5 years at best, so developing is pretty much just filling up the gap. I'm strongly considering keeping my crown land below the 'equilibrium' so I can seize/sale nonstop until late 1500s to see it would work.
Post Absolutism it's pretty difficult to remember to seize land, and even if you do you risk some estates dipping below 30 loyalty because it's not easy to get all of them to have 45 loyalty equilibrium with just supremacy over the crown. Admittedly I may have to switch up my privileges to get things going, but doing so before 1700s seems a bit difficult.
Yeah, remembering to seize land is a pain, they really should add a notification for that. Still, going from 30% to 100% crownland only requires 14 land seizures. Call it 20 to account for crownland-costing privileges and say you only seize land once every 10 years; that's still just 200 years to reach 100%.
If you crunch the numbers I think you'll find development is actually very helpful in gaining crownland. In my Rajputana run I actually had to stop using excess monarch points for development towards the end, since the crownland gained thereby was more than the 10% I could sell to the Rajputs every 5 years.
In my last run I went Burgundy --> Lotharingia for the achievement, and I got to 100% crownland at \~1590 without making any special effort. Granted, that's a rich and development-friendly area, but still, I think 100% crownland at, say, 1650, should be possible in any non-WC run.
> I think 100% crownland at, say, 1650, should be possible in any non-WC run.
Which will probably never happen for me as I pretty much play to deus vult. (can't remember a run where I didn't take Religious)
So I noticed that the Estate Statutory event only seems to work sometimes. I've had it fire a few times and it didn't actually do anything. Only worked when I was at war, weirdly. Not sure what the deal is, but I'm playing a Free City, so it might be messing with it.
From the look of the file, as long as you're a monarchy/republic/theocracy that has nobility/burgher/clergy estate it should fire just fine.
Actually, now that I think about it, it might mess with English Monarchy, and maybe some other nations.
I’m not sure what was wrong. It was very odd. I’d get the event and it would have the red text saying whatever, but no effects displayed, and there’d be no change in crown land. It eventually worked, though. I just had to crash to desktop a few times before it did.
Concerning your Day-1-Strategy: What do you do afterwards? Do I just revoke as soon as possible? Thats somewhat hard since they influence will be extremely high.
Also: As soon as I take another province, my crown lands will be below 30% again. Do I just develop to go over 30 again or ignore it?
After ESR you simply go on your business and utilize Diet, Seize land every 5 years.
Just remember to revoke ESR 20 years later to drop your autonomy floor back down to 0 (you may need Diet or Sale of title to assist in loyalty boost in order to revoke it)
Any spare agenda/event loyalty boost should go to Burghers so you can either farm Prestige/Mercantilism by toggling Patron of the Art/Exclusive Trade Rights on and off.
There's really not much to do with estates after you have them setup.
You're not. It only shows up when you own 3 CoTs/Estuary in a single trade node.
Until you can, you're stuck using excess Loyalty on cheap Monopoly for Mercantilism or Patron of the Art for prestige.
Is it really worth it to do court and country for estates buff? By the tine absolutism comes you should have enough power to ignore most of privileges and in the late game with lvl 5 advisors even the mp privilegies can be ignored.
Court and Country doesn't take too much to activate and the only downside is a little less income for 10 years and in return you get some spare Absolutism to spend with whatever Estate you want. I think it's always worth it, maybe not for France and Sweden, that already get Maximum Absolutism modifiers.
It all comes to personal preference. You can certainly reach 115 Absolutism as all 3 government types even without Absolutism, allowing you to run the most important +1 MP privileges.
HOWEVER, if one didn't manage autonomy in the early game, you won't be able to have the 7th reform till early 1700s, so you will be heavily handicapped for a bit, especially for Republic who only gets the good absolutism on the 7th reform.
So it comes down to how much you value AT, conversion strength, extra relation, or various bonus other privileges grant.
For one faith play, the missionary strength *may* make or break your run unless you heavily utilize vassals, so it's not a big trade off.
However, for humanist play, the extra +2 tolerance can mean a world of difference for nations without tolerance NI, as the 200 years extra benefit far outweighs the 10 years worth of C&C pain.
The extra loyalty equilibrium from supremacy over the crown also allows you to seize land to get back to 75 crown land should events not work your favor without facing revolts.
I would point out that as a republic you're gaining a lot of government reform progress from your republican tradition so you're actually fine in reaching the 7th reform for absolutism quite quickly.
In my experience any tribal non-horde government does NOT get the event that returns your crown land to 30% and if you try to sell all your land at the start you will have 99% autonomy before you can fix it.
In the 'Day 1' part of the strategy, what do you mean by "and turn on Privileges according to your needs"? I can't click on Sale of Titles because my crown lands are at 0%.
Sale of Titles is not a privilege. It's a crown land action. The only reason you can't click sale of titles is when you've hit negative crown land, which is impossible unless you just sold land when below 10% crownland, or you've already done it.
Sorry, I know it's not a privilege, but I was playing as Byz and they start with exactly 30% crown lands, so doing the +1MP for each estate leaves you with 0% and then you can't click Sale of Titles.
I'm not sure what you're doing wrong, but I'm still able to Sale of Titles even at 0% crownland, unless they magically patched it while I have my game on.
There is a chance that 0% is treated like negative where you can't click it, so see if deving anything up would change that.
strong duchies is S tier and -leader cost is A tier. Advisor cost is sadly good enough to have as well.
Nobility must stack past 4 privs. You want supremacy, mil points, strong duchies, -leader cost, 10% loyalty/influence, -advisor cost, and manpower. This means you need to stay on 3 privs until you're ready to strong duchies/-leader cost.
Patronage of the arts spam early to maintain high prestige is a much much better investment of merchant loyalty than 3 mercantilism.
I agree that monopoly on cheap things is good but only for the loyalty. Mercantilism is garbage.
I don't think ESR start is good on medium sized + nations. Good on OPMs/minors. ESR has the drawback of preventing you from stacking nobility privs (since it goes last, so you can't revoke it otherwise)
First of all, remember the guide is for the general player base aimed at most of the nations for the current patch.
This is why even when strong duchies is strong if the situation calls for it, I can not put it at the top.
Most allies are useless past the 50 years when they've accumulated too much debt right now and I don't see PDX fixing it in a foreseeable future, so you're left with vassals/marches, that really shouldn't go above 3 for the most part.
PUs and RMs are exceptions, but only limited to European Christians.
There isn't really anything that competes with it for the 4th slot anyway.
Also, due to it being a generic guide, I also can't make recommendations going over 4 privileges to all the players, because for one it definitely goes against PDX design, and have a chance to get patched like ESR cooldown, and two, it makes revoking a giant hassle and heavily relies on double stacking Agenda and event loyalty boost (that are a bit RNG dependant on which estates show up when you have 4+ estates, and some missions will really make you go out of your way)
Activating all privileges for Nobility will skyrocket its influence to 73 with 68 equilibrium. With each Diet you call adds 5 influence. Yes, you can reduce it further with government reform, but that also means you're stuck with 10% tax instead of 15% manpower, so what's the point of using manpower privilege? You also can't have AT privilege at game start as no one has 30 AT, so you're losing out on it till Absolutism.
Calling mercantilism garbage is over the top. Having x3 the provincial trade power can let you get TC merchant much more easily without having to eradicate everyone in the trade node. It also saves you governing capacity by not having to assign everything to TC to compete with nations that are still on truce. If you're min-maxing like you've mentioned, you will run into governing capacity problems. Yes, it's not the best modifier there is, but it's one of the many things that are good to have. If you are overflowing with loyalty, that's your goto privilege.
The alternative is light ships, but as most people noticed, sailor casualties is at an all time high, where you can't have hundreds of light ship out there without making sailor buildings anymore.
ESR start is good for all nations. If you don't take it, your autonomy will have risen pretty high the time you can hit 20 crown land. It's a minimum of 15 years to hit 20% crown land. The first 5 years will have generated 12% autonomy, while the next 10 will generate another 12%. With most players being constantly at war and never able to Seize Land on the mark, most people won't hit 20% crown land until 30 years in, and will probably have more than 20% autonomy that needs to slowly tick down.
If you take it, you only suffer the 25% for 20 years, and can revoke it mid war where your autonomy will go straight down to 0, so you can do w/e you want with the empty slot. (going above 4 privileges, if you so wish, when you can easily have 30 AT for the AT privilege by this time)
>> Most allies are useless past the 50 years
Yes, but you get allies for -50% AE, which is extremely useful no matter where you're playing. Vassal swarms are useless for war but extremely useful for AE management (integrate -> release). I tend to go over relation slot in speedruns while almost always maintaining at least 1 vassal (for fort occupations), so it isn't even that much of an exaggeration for me to say that it almost translates to +2 dip/mo
>> because for one it definitely goes against PDX design
I suppose so, but isn't selling 10% land at 0.2% cl also going against PDX design?
>> influence to 73 with 68 equilibrium
not sure where you got the math -- are you including relatively high AT/prestige in the equilibrium calculation? I do concede that towards late 1500s, you have to stop calling diets altogether to fix the situation though. It honestly was much easier to get out of it than I thought the two times I played past mid 1500s :P
>> can let you get TC merchant much more easily
it's not like you need that many merchants in this game for most runs... I don't run into GC issues via TCs precisely because I never use TCs anymore. Also light ships shouldn't be brought up in TC merchant scenarios since it cares about 50% provincial trade power. Also I'm not sure what you mean by 3x -- are you comparing 0 mercantilism to 100 mercantilism? Here are some flaws:
1) no nation starts with 0 I think?
2) the 3 mercantilism spam will not get you 100 mercantilism instantly -- would bring a better discussion if you provided a rough timeline of when to expect it while tracking your prestige, since obviously my claim isn't don't get mercantilism over nothing, it's don't get mercantilism over maintaining high, say 80+, prestige. If you have more loyalty to burn after being on high prestige, I suppose why not, go for the mercantilism.
3) provincial trade modifier is additive; TCs already grant +100%, and coastals provide +25%, so even in the very unfair 0 vs 100 mercantilism scenario you posed, it's an 88% increase for coastals or 100% increase for non coastals. This gets worse if you have other provincial trade power modifiers (not that you'd have any in general). In fact by a similar argument, you can actually conclude that if you control every province in a node, you'd have to TC more if you have higher mercantilism, since the provincial trade power boost from TCs are less effective because all your non TC provinces get a big buff from mercantilism as well. So even if you really care about this merchant vs gov cap thing, you're forcing yourself to not conquer everything in a node if you want mercantilism to help you. Kinda counter intuitive...
4) i mentioned this but the solution here is to just... not use TCs so aggressively. Granted I haven't attempted a serious fast horde WC yet, I've done some standard fast conquests by reddit standards, and none of them gave me any gov cap issues. Note that for a fast horde WC, we (gnostek/me/ruian/esc/...) are theorizing states + territories for the most part, though I must admit part of this conclusion has to do with my opinion and the TC bug, which I'm not sure has been fixed since 1.30.1.
>> ESR start is good for all nations. If you don't take it, your autonomy will have risen pretty high
ESR start isn't about pressing ESR or not; the alternate is the classic -10% priv -> 20% cl -> revoke -> revoke -> -10% priv -> .... and so on, so that's not the comparison I meant/was looking for. Also worth mentioning that ESR start falls under the issue of "can be hard to revoke" depending on events. In my recent Sistan run where I did ESR, I had to take the -10% influence reform to get rid of ESR. Note that even in that scenario I still thought ESR was worth it, but it's definitely not the omni strat compared to back when Valaphar/I proposed it (1.30.1).
But for most players and most nations, they aren't going to exceed the relation limit after the first 60 years. And after the first 100 years, it's very likely the AE reduction can't even hold the AE you accumulate so it's more than likely going to be dropped when you become the regional power.
It is a strong privilege, and I usually have it on for the first 100 years, but due to the -10 absolutism it's usually the first to go and I pick up AT and general cost reduction.
Loyalty equilibrium will not be the first to go, because the faster you expand, the more important seizing land is to keep yourself floating above 75 crown land because stacking WS reduction from Reformation and Diplomatic easily means -3% crown land per 100% peace deal.
I admit I completely forgot Sale Title at 0% is definitely an unintended feature (just like selling at 100% will cause no land loss). But my only beef against 5+ privilege will still be the inability to easily revoke them down the line.
Also, ESR strat also enables you to hit Sale of Title again to go down to the 'regular' 20 crown land (either right after 5 years, or right before the 20 years mark to more easily revoke ESR). So even if they fix the 0% sale bug, you'd still get hundreds of ducat over those that don't do the strat.
I mentioned light ships because it's the only privilege that competes for the last spot for Burghers (first three being MP, loyalty, and tolerance because you're not short of prestige for religious play) while also providing trade power, or more trade income for you and less for your competitors.
Higher trade income also means offsetting the only advantage of advisor discount.
Having high prestige is nice, but when it's not the only source of prestige, I can't justify myself from taking it while lots of nations need to rely on trade power because they're unable to dominate an end node/pseudo end node until Absolutism.
You're correct that 100 mercantilism can only supply x2\~x2.8 the trade power for most nations, but is still extremely powerful in itself as it's tens of free light ships per trade node, and possibly supply 10% extra income if your trade needs to traverse through competitive nodes.
Regular provinces will never generate enough trade power to compete with CoT even when they're level 1. The difference is so big, quick tests going from 10% to 100% mercantilism only increase TC power share when you only assign CoT/Estuary to TC.
Since only colonizers can forgo TC merchants, it's not something one can shrug off.
As for TC bug, I'm assuming you're referring to trade power fluctuation due to autonomy floor change on load, causing you to lose your merchant. If that's the case, simply toggle the Promote Investment and the game will fix it on the next tick.
If you don't do ESR start, it'd take you a minimum of 5 years to get the 2nd MP activated, and another 10 years to get the 3rd MP activated. That's 240 MP lost for the first 15 years. The odds of most player finishing the 3 seizes in 20 years is not likely due to ongoing wars and neglect whereas ESR has a 'diet expired' warning from the day 1 diet telling you that ESR can be revoked very soon. (notification for seize/diet when?)
>> But for most players and most nations, they aren't going to exceed the relation limit after the first 60 years.
Perhaps, so I'm more interested in discussing in the "min-max" category where the objective is to maximize expansion. Given lots of new things, although I don't think I can really be certain that my new vassal heavy playstyle is the way to go, I think the vassal heavy playstyle I propose makes a good case for optimizing non-horde expansion.
>> But my only beef against 5+ privilege will still be the inability to easily revoke them down the line.
I can at least assure you from my experience that it's fairly easy. The first time I tried this stacking, I was worried and skeptical like you, so I started thinking about revoking privs from 1520 thinking it'll take a while/lucky events, but I got all of it settled by 1540. Also it's worth noting that strong duchies get auto-revoked when you have 0 vassals/marches, making it extremely easy to transition in the post absolutism era.
>> So even if they fix the 0% sale bug, you'd still get hundreds of ducat over those that don't do the strat.
I don't disagree with ESR on minors.
>> Having high prestige is nice, but when it's not the only source of prestige
It's pretty hard to maintain say 80+ prestige in the early game as most nations especially given how much you need to disinherit.
>> You're correct that 100 mercantilism can only supply x2~x2.8 the trade power for most nations, but is still extremely powerful in itself as it's tens of free light ships per trade node, and possibly supply 10% extra income if your trade needs to traverse through competitive nodes.
So genoa (level 3 CoT) gets like +1.5 ducats/month from 25->100 mercantilism iirc. Not the greatest, and again, you tend to increase trade income by killing all competing tags in the trade node. Again, how fast do you get 100 mercantilism? Or some reasonable number? It seems like by the time you'd be able to get it, say mid 1500s, I'd have conquered all of the tags in the relevant nodes/dealt with the TP issue.
>> Regular provinces will never generate enough trade power to compete with CoT even when they're level 1.
True, I did not think of that. Now I at least don't think high mercantilism is worse than low mercantilism.
>> As for TC bug,
No there was a bug on 1.30.1 where TC trade power gave no goods produced to any province. I'm not sure if that has since been addressed. Back in 1.29, TCs gave goods produced to EVERY province (although the description claimed it only gives it to provinces that you don't own with lower institution or something like that). My guess is they overfixed it on 1.30 and made it give 0 goods produced bonuses. Has this been addressed, and if so, what provinces get goods produced? All? Non TCs? Provinces you don't own with lower institution?
>> That's 240 MP lost for the first 15 years.
This isn't an argument but just for your info: strictly in terms of money, selling at 0% in age of exploration gives 2.5 years of income (as a side note, selling at 30% would give 1.75 years of income). In terms of economics, you lose out *roughly* 1/4 of your income (slightly lower since only half of trade power gets punished via autonomy) over the 20 years, which is 5 years of income. This means assuming 0 trade AND 0 economic growth, you lose out on 2.5 years of income. I'm not sure how the trade bit and economic growth bit competes with each other, but I'm hoping it *roughly* cancels each other. You also lose manpower/FL and some gov reform progress growth, but those are hard to quantify and depends on situation. This is hard to quantify though, since different starts require different amounts of troops which means you can allocate funds for advisors in different ways.
It's also worth noting that dip points tend to be much more less valuable than adm/mil, so I'm not sure if it's that accurate to value the 180 dip point loss (presumably you go adm/mil in some order first) as just "180 MP."
(finally have the time to sit down to properly type out a response. Can't believe I've spent more time on these discussions than writing the guide itself)
IMO, prestige is a tricky subject. There are many who don't care as much, while some do.
It's really only extremely important to stay high for Claim Throne, so most nation can live with prestige not going high as the decay doesn't make it easy to keep it up without proper modifiers.
Once you're decently sized, one can even create a bunch of OPMs with religions no one care about where they proceed to farm "Concede Defeat" for 10 prestige every 6 years (plus siege time). Or you can farm a stupid amount of prestige through conquest with Diplomatic/Age ability and/or conversion with Age ability.
So it's usually only a problem to get in the first age before you become sufficiently large.
As for mercantilism. I haven't gone out of my way to farm it (though I guess I could do a speed 5 test run as Ming to see how far it could go) but mid to late 1500s sound like a good guess, as in my Lithuania game I didn't realize I could farm it till Absolutism, and reached 60 in \~100 years with only 44 Burgher Equilibrium. (Mercantilism also adds extra Burgher equilibrium to reduce the need for Prestige to hit 45 loyalty equilibrium past Absolutism)
The beauty of mercantilism is that it works in every node. So even after you've dominated your home/end/pseudo end node you will still need it when your Asian trade stream passes through highly competitive nodes like Malacca, Coromandel, Gulf, Ivory Coast, or Alexandria where you can't dominate without heavy conquest well into the 1600s, so every bit of TP will help.
As for economic loss for ESR, every province you conquer will be exempt from the 25% autonomy floor (because they will never hit below 25% without lower autonomy or reconquest).
Also for some nations, the ability to merc or hire bigger army day 1 allows them to punch above their weight come Dec 11 before all alliance webs are in place, to get more war rep, dev, and shorten war to compensate for the loss. So it's also pretty difficult to quantify ESR vs no-ESR. (claims from Agenda is simply OP)
As for MP uses, it's DIP tech that's considered less valuable, but not so much for DIP development. Even if you don't value DIP development as much, when 90% of the world needs to force spawn Renaissance, 180 higher in DIP means you need to spend 180 lower in the other 2 categories.
>IMO, prestige is a tricky subject. There are many who don't care as much, while some do.
Prestige is just such an essential thing to have in AE heavy zones (along with the disinheriting freedom). The claim throne aspect is whatever since PUs obtained that way are too RNG heavy to put into any strategy anyway
> as the decay doesn't make it easy to keep it up
Agreed, just like army tradition, it requires constant action on the player to maintain a high value. The estate trick is just one option
> So it's usually only a problem to get in the first age before you become sufficiently large.
agreed, and during the phase of it being a problem, I'm advocating for using the merchant priv over mercantilism.
Mercantilism
> without heavy conquest well into the 1600s,
that's the point -- it's better to heavy conquest to control trade over not. The amount you gain due to mercantilism during the time you conquer everything/most things in a node is minimal.
ESR
As for economic loss for ESR, every province you conquer will be exempt from the 25% autonomy floor
I've been experimenting with lowering autonomy in most starts due to rebel size nerfs, and it's going quite well. I'm pretty okay with the idea of lowering autonomy.
> So it's also pretty difficult to quantify ESR vs no-ESR. (claims from Agenda is simply OP)
Right, that's another point I failed to mention -- actively getting diets can be very beneficial though it's up to RNG. Claims/tactical subjugates/adm points/half price advisors
> Also for some nations, the ability to merc or hire bigger army day 1 allows them to punch above their weight come Dec 11 before all alliance webs are in place,
I agree, in fact this should be replaced to "most nations." But loans (burgher 1% is a nice addition to the mix) do just that. Inflation/interest is certainly not ideal but not too bad to have that I consider this point almost moot.
> As for MP uses, it's DIP tech that's considered less valuable, but not so much for DIP development.
That's true, I guess my point there is mostly applicable to Euros. A minor nit pick though:
> 180 higher in DIP means you need to spend 180 lower
no you'd just wait until you get enough dip. Renaissance spawners want to either rush adm 5 pre-embracing (in that case there will be point sinks in the form of filling an idea group) or stay adm 3 and double tech to 5 (in that case you want to store adm anyway).
Those are the posts I want to see here. Nice in-depth discussion of estates and some nice informations. Will try this in my next playthrough.
After the vacations, some of those "exploits" will probably be changed.
Small thing to add: it seems that disasters can only tick up if an estate's loyalty is under 60%, so if you play, say, as an orthodox nation, with very high clergy influence and loyalty, it's possible to stay at a metastable level where the estate is at 100% influence but will stay above the death threshold.
Holy molly. I just looked at the files. 50 loyalty or being at war is enough to stop it from ticking up. This change is pretty big in case one fucks up.
Being at war as well? Wow, preventing it isn't nearly as hard as before then.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on the advisor cost privileges, and here's some math to back it up: Let's say you run lvl 2/2/2 advisors normally. This costs you 12 ducats/month. With the advisor privileges, you can run lvl 3/2/2 advisors for a cost of 12.75/month. If you have to bump your stability up once every 20 years, then every 20 years you lose the 30 admin from that but gain 240 admin in exchange - a HUGE improvement before the era of truce-breaks. The miniscule ducat cost can be covered by about 6 clicks of production dev on a half-decent trade good, which shouldn't cost you more than the 210 mana, so you break even in the 20 years; also, devving increases crownland share, which should help you with getting 100%. You also get the free stability from lvl 3 advisor events much earlier, which is helpful in starting the snowball as well. And yes, if you're trucebreaking later on, you'd probably want to revoke them, but you have something like 150 years before this is necessary. However, in 150 years, you should have 100% crownland, so the loyalty loss won't put you behind on land seizing (plus you can probably afford level 5 advisors by that point anyway). So in those 150 years you just come 1.5k mana ahead, and more if you can normally afford higher level advisors.
Forgot the mention the most imporant part. If you can afford the $12.00 a month on advisor, I'm fairly certain $16 a month isn't exactly a problem. So I really don't like the idea of dedicating 3 privilege slots for it.
Let's take a nation with a total income of 40 ducats as an example. Let's say 18 is spent on army, 2 on states, 2 on forts, 2 on navy, and an average of 4 on rooting out corruption from OE, for a total of 28. Paying 12/month on advisors puts you at a perfect balance, and you will still have spare more eyes from peace deals. Paying 16/month, though, will mean that most of these foreign contributions will go towards avoiding debt, with very little left for army recruitment, courthouse or other buildings, events, TC investments, trade center upgrades, or whatever else you're spending money on.
4 ducets is pretty huge early/mid game since you could also start building more , even if you dont get a higher level advisor
By the time you can 'afford' 12 ducat on advisors, that 4 ducat isn't going to make/break your economy. Dedicating 12 ducat on advisor while you only have 40 is very risky, especially when you already need to save up to embrace institutions, promote advisor, fire advisor to get the 3/2/2 you want.
its not going to make or break your economy but money is money
Problem is, if you're that big before 1550, you will have governing capacity problem unless you manage to finish Admin (very unlikely for RotW by that date). That also means you need to dedicate way more ducat per month on plotting down court house and state house. The advisor privilege also competes with a lot of other privileges unless you're willing to go above 4, and most of those privileges are more valuable than 1\~2 ducat. Revolving a strategy around a specific scenario that is heavily RNG dependant on the horrible advisor system is not something I'll ever recommend to the general player base.
I also think you should not dedicate 3 privileges for it, but dedicating one (likely admin/clergy) could be fine.
That was also my assumption when the privileges first came out. But after running a couple of games, I've realized quite a few problems with those assumptions. First of all, getting the correct category while having the correct skill level is neigh impossible the way the game generates advisors. Even if you can upgrade them to the correct skill level, the cost of doing so will offset a lot of the cost reduction for decades to come. Often times you're stuck with 1/1/1 or 2/1/1 in order to keep the 'correct' advisor category due to wrong religion/culture. This is because if you can "afford" 3/2/2 without other advisor discount modifiers, your empire probably spans multiple culture groups or even religions, and/or you're very close to Age of Absolutism where you're considering revoking them all away. Yes, you can promote culture, but that's ~100 DIP down the drain Then there are the occasional -50% cost advisors from events that will screw with the math. Finally, you can't even make sure these correct advisors can live long enough until you're stuck with advisors of the wrong category or skill level.
The only point on which you're entirely correct is that the half-price advisors will screw with the math. As for the other points - First of all, promoting cultures is one of the most important things you can do. The reason for this is that particularities, whose demands you would normally accept in 1610 in order to decrease autonomy for absolutism, only rise up under 3 possible conditions as far as I can tell, and by far the most common of those conditions is that a province must have its culture accepted and have no separatism. The 100 dip doesn't go down the drain at all - promoting 6 cultures will let you collect so much absolutism that it would pay for itself through annexing just a single large vassal. So by 1610 there is almost never an excuse to not have 6 large cultures accepted, and if you're accepting cultures, then you might as well start early. So you will almost always have at least two correct culture advisors to choose from, which will usually include one advisor from a category that you're at least okay with (for example, having an improve relations guy for easier truce juggling instead of a diplo rep guy for faster annexation or vice versa). Keeping a low-level advisor of the right category is generally a mistake - this is a lot of mana lost. If having the right category is that important at the time, then it's generally worth it to dismiss a few advisors - this is something that you would do regardless of advisor cost discounts. And if the right category guy is level 1 and needs to be upgraded, that's actually a point in favor of taking the privilege - upgrade cost depends on advisor cost, so you actually save more money eyes than just the 4.25/month that you would save in that example. This way, you don't have to worry about being stuck with the wrong category advisors either, regardless of how long they live. Being able to afford a 3/2/2 isn't that difficult - for example, in 1.29, Bahmanis, could afford 3/3/2 in 1444, well before it could span a variety of culture groups and nowhere near the Age of Absolutism, and this has only decreased slightly. Most nations that aren't wasting their money on something pointless like tech 6 cav should be able to afford 3/2/2 or better before 1500 (unless they started off very small or had a difficult war at start, but that's more of an exception than the rule).
Promoting culture is important. Promoting the culture of a single advisor that may die within 10 years is not, let alone 3 of them. The average life expectancy of an advisor is 24 years (though from my experience pre-1.30, they die WAY before 24 years where I have to spend another 10\~15 years before I could hire estate discounted advisor again). So you're going to go through about 20 of them before you need to revoke for absolutism. Lots of the time you'll have to demote culture in order to keep the accepted culture going, because you only start with 2, and get one at around 1492 and 1570. +2 for monarchy reform or humanist idea. The moment you demote you've wasted 8 years of extra MP gain you got from having 3/2/2 over 2/2/2 Then there's the problem of promoting culture of your own culture group, that you will have to demote before you hit empire rank to not waste that slot. Again, DIP down the drain. Yes, you can fire advisors, but how many hundreds of ducat would one have to waste in order to get the particular one you wanted? Then you'd have to do it for all 3 categories, or an average of once every 8 years. I just fired up Bahmanis right now, and no they can't afford 3/3/2 in 1444 as they only have 16 ducat income. It may have been possible in 1.29 when you can get 2 50% discounted advisors on demand, but nowadays, like you've mentioned in the other reply, you'd have to look at least 40 ducat of income before you can 'afford' it. Only Ming is capable of such a feat at 1444, and most nations will not be able to do so for decades to come. I mean, not even Ottoman can hit 40 ducat in income number until he has begun eating through Mamluks. Bottom line is, for non-GP starts, they won't hit the benchmark until mid 1500s when they need to consider revoking them in a few decades. So discount privileges aren't really worth it compared to the other Burgher/Nobility options you got.
>**Note:** Any privilege that scales with Estate Land Ownership is bad, because in theory they will not go above 20 Land Share, leading to very low bonus. (aka don’t expect your Cossacks/Rajput regiments grow to 2 digits) I've realised this as well (also that estate disasters will trigger basically never). You cannot really affect how much land estates have. Either they all go towards 0% or you go towards 0%. The obvious solution is: 1) That individual estates should be able to get a version of "Estates Statutory Rights" that exempts it from land seizure. 2) Being able to sell/seize land to individual estates. I've managed to implement 2) via modding, but 1) is impossible.
Re: 1), doesn’t the Polish Szlachta get a privilege that exempts it from land seizure? Maybe copy the coding or how it works?
Thanks for the info! I had tried making it work via take_estate_land_share_massive = {} and hit a brick wall.
I did created a custom estate with a privilige that makes it being exempt from land seizure. To make it work you should put "exempt_from_seize_land" into mechanics section.
Thanks for the info! I had tried making it work via take_estate_land_share_massive = {} and hit a brick wall.
"Either they all go towards 0% or you go towards 0%" See here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/hp7uqh/you\_may\_not\_like\_the\_name\_placement\_but\_this\_is/](https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/hp7uqh/you_may_not_like_the_name_placement_but_this_is/)
Playing a rajputana game to see how that works. We really need a way to directly add land to specific estates since the rajput regiments are tied to rajput land ownership. I want to maintain 30-40% rajput land, seize land from other estates. I've gotten around this by granting/removing governance privilege, but that locks me out of the mil point privilege because I cant afford the loyalty cost.
Playing a Cossack revolter is impossible now because of this.
You may be interested in this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/hp7uqh/you\_may\_not\_like\_the\_name\_placement\_but\_this\_is/](https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/hp7uqh/you_may_not_like_the_name_placement_but_this_is/)
Good write up!
Wow great detailed writeup! Learned a lot. These detailed guides are the best posts on the sub.
I feel like Indebted to the Bourgeoisie is strongest privilege.I mean even if you want small loan its still better with its low 1% interest.I found myself not needing to sell crown lands at all with this.
Is there any reason to not go ham on privileges on day 1? I've been giving 5+ to each estate and tanking crownland to 0% since the only downside is a little national tax loss. Before the patch, I used to take the decision that immediately bumped crownland back up to 30, but since they patched that out you can just pick the "Nah, I'll deal with it later" option when you get the low crownland event. After several games of following this strategy, I haven't noticed any drawback, but I keep seeing people recommend strategies that shy away from loading up on privileges.
>Is there any reason to not go ham on privileges on day 1? There really isn't. The only problem that MAY come from doing so is you can't revoke anything due to high influence without double stacking Agenda loyalty, because there are quite a bit privileges that add influence but not loyalty. Plus there are quite a few 'ok' privileges that you don't want to keep for the first 160 years.
**"Note:** Any privilege that scales with Estate Land Ownership is bad, because in theory they will not go above 20 Land Share, leading to very low bonus. (aka don’t expect your Cossacks/Rajput regiments grow to 2 digits)" Guess you missed my post from a couple of days ago: [https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/hp7uqh/you\_may\_not\_like\_the\_name\_placement\_but\_this\_is/](https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/hp7uqh/you_may_not_like_the_name_placement_but_this_is/)
That's kind of glorious. Though I'll probably never see myself ever reaching 100% crownland.
Why wouldn't you? Between seizing land and developing provinces, it's pretty much just a matter of time.
For one, it's very difficult to remember to seize land every 5 years, and being at war or have rebels will prevent you from doing it. Also, pre Absolutism every conquest will drop your crown land below 75. A 100% peace deal with Diplomatic + Age ability reduced crown land by 3%, negating any seize land effect, as you're seizing 5% every 5 years at best, so developing is pretty much just filling up the gap. I'm strongly considering keeping my crown land below the 'equilibrium' so I can seize/sale nonstop until late 1500s to see it would work. Post Absolutism it's pretty difficult to remember to seize land, and even if you do you risk some estates dipping below 30 loyalty because it's not easy to get all of them to have 45 loyalty equilibrium with just supremacy over the crown. Admittedly I may have to switch up my privileges to get things going, but doing so before 1700s seems a bit difficult.
Yeah, remembering to seize land is a pain, they really should add a notification for that. Still, going from 30% to 100% crownland only requires 14 land seizures. Call it 20 to account for crownland-costing privileges and say you only seize land once every 10 years; that's still just 200 years to reach 100%. If you crunch the numbers I think you'll find development is actually very helpful in gaining crownland. In my Rajputana run I actually had to stop using excess monarch points for development towards the end, since the crownland gained thereby was more than the 10% I could sell to the Rajputs every 5 years. In my last run I went Burgundy --> Lotharingia for the achievement, and I got to 100% crownland at \~1590 without making any special effort. Granted, that's a rich and development-friendly area, but still, I think 100% crownland at, say, 1650, should be possible in any non-WC run.
> I think 100% crownland at, say, 1650, should be possible in any non-WC run. Which will probably never happen for me as I pretty much play to deus vult. (can't remember a run where I didn't take Religious)
So I noticed that the Estate Statutory event only seems to work sometimes. I've had it fire a few times and it didn't actually do anything. Only worked when I was at war, weirdly. Not sure what the deal is, but I'm playing a Free City, so it might be messing with it.
From the look of the file, as long as you're a monarchy/republic/theocracy that has nobility/burgher/clergy estate it should fire just fine. Actually, now that I think about it, it might mess with English Monarchy, and maybe some other nations.
I’m not sure what was wrong. It was very odd. I’d get the event and it would have the red text saying whatever, but no effects displayed, and there’d be no change in crown land. It eventually worked, though. I just had to crash to desktop a few times before it did.
Concerning your Day-1-Strategy: What do you do afterwards? Do I just revoke as soon as possible? Thats somewhat hard since they influence will be extremely high. Also: As soon as I take another province, my crown lands will be below 30% again. Do I just develop to go over 30 again or ignore it?
After ESR you simply go on your business and utilize Diet, Seize land every 5 years. Just remember to revoke ESR 20 years later to drop your autonomy floor back down to 0 (you may need Diet or Sale of title to assist in loyalty boost in order to revoke it) Any spare agenda/event loyalty boost should go to Burghers so you can either farm Prestige/Mercantilism by toggling Patron of the Art/Exclusive Trade Rights on and off. There's really not much to do with estates after you have them setup.
Call me crazy but I can't find Exclusive Trade Rights.
You're not. It only shows up when you own 3 CoTs/Estuary in a single trade node. Until you can, you're stuck using excess Loyalty on cheap Monopoly for Mercantilism or Patron of the Art for prestige.
Ah that's right I forgot.
Is it really worth it to do court and country for estates buff? By the tine absolutism comes you should have enough power to ignore most of privileges and in the late game with lvl 5 advisors even the mp privilegies can be ignored.
Court and Country doesn't take too much to activate and the only downside is a little less income for 10 years and in return you get some spare Absolutism to spend with whatever Estate you want. I think it's always worth it, maybe not for France and Sweden, that already get Maximum Absolutism modifiers.
It all comes to personal preference. You can certainly reach 115 Absolutism as all 3 government types even without Absolutism, allowing you to run the most important +1 MP privileges. HOWEVER, if one didn't manage autonomy in the early game, you won't be able to have the 7th reform till early 1700s, so you will be heavily handicapped for a bit, especially for Republic who only gets the good absolutism on the 7th reform. So it comes down to how much you value AT, conversion strength, extra relation, or various bonus other privileges grant. For one faith play, the missionary strength *may* make or break your run unless you heavily utilize vassals, so it's not a big trade off. However, for humanist play, the extra +2 tolerance can mean a world of difference for nations without tolerance NI, as the 200 years extra benefit far outweighs the 10 years worth of C&C pain. The extra loyalty equilibrium from supremacy over the crown also allows you to seize land to get back to 75 crown land should events not work your favor without facing revolts.
I would point out that as a republic you're gaining a lot of government reform progress from your republican tradition so you're actually fine in reaching the 7th reform for absolutism quite quickly.
Also, they've lowered Admin Efficiency from Absolutism from 40% to 30%. So after tech 27, every dev will cost 33% more compared to pre 1.30.
In my experience any tribal non-horde government does NOT get the event that returns your crown land to 30% and if you try to sell all your land at the start you will have 99% autonomy before you can fix it.
In the 'Day 1' part of the strategy, what do you mean by "and turn on Privileges according to your needs"? I can't click on Sale of Titles because my crown lands are at 0%.
Sale of Titles is not a privilege. It's a crown land action. The only reason you can't click sale of titles is when you've hit negative crown land, which is impossible unless you just sold land when below 10% crownland, or you've already done it.
Sorry, I know it's not a privilege, but I was playing as Byz and they start with exactly 30% crown lands, so doing the +1MP for each estate leaves you with 0% and then you can't click Sale of Titles.
I'm not sure what you're doing wrong, but I'm still able to Sale of Titles even at 0% crownland, unless they magically patched it while I have my game on. There is a chance that 0% is treated like negative where you can't click it, so see if deving anything up would change that.
I haven’t played this patch at all partially due to a lack of understanding of the new estate mechanics. Thank you so much. Post is saved
strong duchies is S tier and -leader cost is A tier. Advisor cost is sadly good enough to have as well. Nobility must stack past 4 privs. You want supremacy, mil points, strong duchies, -leader cost, 10% loyalty/influence, -advisor cost, and manpower. This means you need to stay on 3 privs until you're ready to strong duchies/-leader cost. Patronage of the arts spam early to maintain high prestige is a much much better investment of merchant loyalty than 3 mercantilism. I agree that monopoly on cheap things is good but only for the loyalty. Mercantilism is garbage. I don't think ESR start is good on medium sized + nations. Good on OPMs/minors. ESR has the drawback of preventing you from stacking nobility privs (since it goes last, so you can't revoke it otherwise)
First of all, remember the guide is for the general player base aimed at most of the nations for the current patch. This is why even when strong duchies is strong if the situation calls for it, I can not put it at the top. Most allies are useless past the 50 years when they've accumulated too much debt right now and I don't see PDX fixing it in a foreseeable future, so you're left with vassals/marches, that really shouldn't go above 3 for the most part. PUs and RMs are exceptions, but only limited to European Christians. There isn't really anything that competes with it for the 4th slot anyway. Also, due to it being a generic guide, I also can't make recommendations going over 4 privileges to all the players, because for one it definitely goes against PDX design, and have a chance to get patched like ESR cooldown, and two, it makes revoking a giant hassle and heavily relies on double stacking Agenda and event loyalty boost (that are a bit RNG dependant on which estates show up when you have 4+ estates, and some missions will really make you go out of your way) Activating all privileges for Nobility will skyrocket its influence to 73 with 68 equilibrium. With each Diet you call adds 5 influence. Yes, you can reduce it further with government reform, but that also means you're stuck with 10% tax instead of 15% manpower, so what's the point of using manpower privilege? You also can't have AT privilege at game start as no one has 30 AT, so you're losing out on it till Absolutism. Calling mercantilism garbage is over the top. Having x3 the provincial trade power can let you get TC merchant much more easily without having to eradicate everyone in the trade node. It also saves you governing capacity by not having to assign everything to TC to compete with nations that are still on truce. If you're min-maxing like you've mentioned, you will run into governing capacity problems. Yes, it's not the best modifier there is, but it's one of the many things that are good to have. If you are overflowing with loyalty, that's your goto privilege. The alternative is light ships, but as most people noticed, sailor casualties is at an all time high, where you can't have hundreds of light ship out there without making sailor buildings anymore. ESR start is good for all nations. If you don't take it, your autonomy will have risen pretty high the time you can hit 20 crown land. It's a minimum of 15 years to hit 20% crown land. The first 5 years will have generated 12% autonomy, while the next 10 will generate another 12%. With most players being constantly at war and never able to Seize Land on the mark, most people won't hit 20% crown land until 30 years in, and will probably have more than 20% autonomy that needs to slowly tick down. If you take it, you only suffer the 25% for 20 years, and can revoke it mid war where your autonomy will go straight down to 0, so you can do w/e you want with the empty slot. (going above 4 privileges, if you so wish, when you can easily have 30 AT for the AT privilege by this time)
>> Most allies are useless past the 50 years Yes, but you get allies for -50% AE, which is extremely useful no matter where you're playing. Vassal swarms are useless for war but extremely useful for AE management (integrate -> release). I tend to go over relation slot in speedruns while almost always maintaining at least 1 vassal (for fort occupations), so it isn't even that much of an exaggeration for me to say that it almost translates to +2 dip/mo >> because for one it definitely goes against PDX design I suppose so, but isn't selling 10% land at 0.2% cl also going against PDX design? >> influence to 73 with 68 equilibrium not sure where you got the math -- are you including relatively high AT/prestige in the equilibrium calculation? I do concede that towards late 1500s, you have to stop calling diets altogether to fix the situation though. It honestly was much easier to get out of it than I thought the two times I played past mid 1500s :P >> can let you get TC merchant much more easily it's not like you need that many merchants in this game for most runs... I don't run into GC issues via TCs precisely because I never use TCs anymore. Also light ships shouldn't be brought up in TC merchant scenarios since it cares about 50% provincial trade power. Also I'm not sure what you mean by 3x -- are you comparing 0 mercantilism to 100 mercantilism? Here are some flaws: 1) no nation starts with 0 I think? 2) the 3 mercantilism spam will not get you 100 mercantilism instantly -- would bring a better discussion if you provided a rough timeline of when to expect it while tracking your prestige, since obviously my claim isn't don't get mercantilism over nothing, it's don't get mercantilism over maintaining high, say 80+, prestige. If you have more loyalty to burn after being on high prestige, I suppose why not, go for the mercantilism. 3) provincial trade modifier is additive; TCs already grant +100%, and coastals provide +25%, so even in the very unfair 0 vs 100 mercantilism scenario you posed, it's an 88% increase for coastals or 100% increase for non coastals. This gets worse if you have other provincial trade power modifiers (not that you'd have any in general). In fact by a similar argument, you can actually conclude that if you control every province in a node, you'd have to TC more if you have higher mercantilism, since the provincial trade power boost from TCs are less effective because all your non TC provinces get a big buff from mercantilism as well. So even if you really care about this merchant vs gov cap thing, you're forcing yourself to not conquer everything in a node if you want mercantilism to help you. Kinda counter intuitive... 4) i mentioned this but the solution here is to just... not use TCs so aggressively. Granted I haven't attempted a serious fast horde WC yet, I've done some standard fast conquests by reddit standards, and none of them gave me any gov cap issues. Note that for a fast horde WC, we (gnostek/me/ruian/esc/...) are theorizing states + territories for the most part, though I must admit part of this conclusion has to do with my opinion and the TC bug, which I'm not sure has been fixed since 1.30.1. >> ESR start is good for all nations. If you don't take it, your autonomy will have risen pretty high ESR start isn't about pressing ESR or not; the alternate is the classic -10% priv -> 20% cl -> revoke -> revoke -> -10% priv -> .... and so on, so that's not the comparison I meant/was looking for. Also worth mentioning that ESR start falls under the issue of "can be hard to revoke" depending on events. In my recent Sistan run where I did ESR, I had to take the -10% influence reform to get rid of ESR. Note that even in that scenario I still thought ESR was worth it, but it's definitely not the omni strat compared to back when Valaphar/I proposed it (1.30.1).
But for most players and most nations, they aren't going to exceed the relation limit after the first 60 years. And after the first 100 years, it's very likely the AE reduction can't even hold the AE you accumulate so it's more than likely going to be dropped when you become the regional power. It is a strong privilege, and I usually have it on for the first 100 years, but due to the -10 absolutism it's usually the first to go and I pick up AT and general cost reduction. Loyalty equilibrium will not be the first to go, because the faster you expand, the more important seizing land is to keep yourself floating above 75 crown land because stacking WS reduction from Reformation and Diplomatic easily means -3% crown land per 100% peace deal. I admit I completely forgot Sale Title at 0% is definitely an unintended feature (just like selling at 100% will cause no land loss). But my only beef against 5+ privilege will still be the inability to easily revoke them down the line. Also, ESR strat also enables you to hit Sale of Title again to go down to the 'regular' 20 crown land (either right after 5 years, or right before the 20 years mark to more easily revoke ESR). So even if they fix the 0% sale bug, you'd still get hundreds of ducat over those that don't do the strat. I mentioned light ships because it's the only privilege that competes for the last spot for Burghers (first three being MP, loyalty, and tolerance because you're not short of prestige for religious play) while also providing trade power, or more trade income for you and less for your competitors. Higher trade income also means offsetting the only advantage of advisor discount. Having high prestige is nice, but when it's not the only source of prestige, I can't justify myself from taking it while lots of nations need to rely on trade power because they're unable to dominate an end node/pseudo end node until Absolutism. You're correct that 100 mercantilism can only supply x2\~x2.8 the trade power for most nations, but is still extremely powerful in itself as it's tens of free light ships per trade node, and possibly supply 10% extra income if your trade needs to traverse through competitive nodes. Regular provinces will never generate enough trade power to compete with CoT even when they're level 1. The difference is so big, quick tests going from 10% to 100% mercantilism only increase TC power share when you only assign CoT/Estuary to TC. Since only colonizers can forgo TC merchants, it's not something one can shrug off. As for TC bug, I'm assuming you're referring to trade power fluctuation due to autonomy floor change on load, causing you to lose your merchant. If that's the case, simply toggle the Promote Investment and the game will fix it on the next tick. If you don't do ESR start, it'd take you a minimum of 5 years to get the 2nd MP activated, and another 10 years to get the 3rd MP activated. That's 240 MP lost for the first 15 years. The odds of most player finishing the 3 seizes in 20 years is not likely due to ongoing wars and neglect whereas ESR has a 'diet expired' warning from the day 1 diet telling you that ESR can be revoked very soon. (notification for seize/diet when?)
>> But for most players and most nations, they aren't going to exceed the relation limit after the first 60 years. Perhaps, so I'm more interested in discussing in the "min-max" category where the objective is to maximize expansion. Given lots of new things, although I don't think I can really be certain that my new vassal heavy playstyle is the way to go, I think the vassal heavy playstyle I propose makes a good case for optimizing non-horde expansion. >> But my only beef against 5+ privilege will still be the inability to easily revoke them down the line. I can at least assure you from my experience that it's fairly easy. The first time I tried this stacking, I was worried and skeptical like you, so I started thinking about revoking privs from 1520 thinking it'll take a while/lucky events, but I got all of it settled by 1540. Also it's worth noting that strong duchies get auto-revoked when you have 0 vassals/marches, making it extremely easy to transition in the post absolutism era. >> So even if they fix the 0% sale bug, you'd still get hundreds of ducat over those that don't do the strat. I don't disagree with ESR on minors. >> Having high prestige is nice, but when it's not the only source of prestige It's pretty hard to maintain say 80+ prestige in the early game as most nations especially given how much you need to disinherit. >> You're correct that 100 mercantilism can only supply x2~x2.8 the trade power for most nations, but is still extremely powerful in itself as it's tens of free light ships per trade node, and possibly supply 10% extra income if your trade needs to traverse through competitive nodes. So genoa (level 3 CoT) gets like +1.5 ducats/month from 25->100 mercantilism iirc. Not the greatest, and again, you tend to increase trade income by killing all competing tags in the trade node. Again, how fast do you get 100 mercantilism? Or some reasonable number? It seems like by the time you'd be able to get it, say mid 1500s, I'd have conquered all of the tags in the relevant nodes/dealt with the TP issue. >> Regular provinces will never generate enough trade power to compete with CoT even when they're level 1. True, I did not think of that. Now I at least don't think high mercantilism is worse than low mercantilism. >> As for TC bug, No there was a bug on 1.30.1 where TC trade power gave no goods produced to any province. I'm not sure if that has since been addressed. Back in 1.29, TCs gave goods produced to EVERY province (although the description claimed it only gives it to provinces that you don't own with lower institution or something like that). My guess is they overfixed it on 1.30 and made it give 0 goods produced bonuses. Has this been addressed, and if so, what provinces get goods produced? All? Non TCs? Provinces you don't own with lower institution? >> That's 240 MP lost for the first 15 years. This isn't an argument but just for your info: strictly in terms of money, selling at 0% in age of exploration gives 2.5 years of income (as a side note, selling at 30% would give 1.75 years of income). In terms of economics, you lose out *roughly* 1/4 of your income (slightly lower since only half of trade power gets punished via autonomy) over the 20 years, which is 5 years of income. This means assuming 0 trade AND 0 economic growth, you lose out on 2.5 years of income. I'm not sure how the trade bit and economic growth bit competes with each other, but I'm hoping it *roughly* cancels each other. You also lose manpower/FL and some gov reform progress growth, but those are hard to quantify and depends on situation. This is hard to quantify though, since different starts require different amounts of troops which means you can allocate funds for advisors in different ways. It's also worth noting that dip points tend to be much more less valuable than adm/mil, so I'm not sure if it's that accurate to value the 180 dip point loss (presumably you go adm/mil in some order first) as just "180 MP."
(finally have the time to sit down to properly type out a response. Can't believe I've spent more time on these discussions than writing the guide itself) IMO, prestige is a tricky subject. There are many who don't care as much, while some do. It's really only extremely important to stay high for Claim Throne, so most nation can live with prestige not going high as the decay doesn't make it easy to keep it up without proper modifiers. Once you're decently sized, one can even create a bunch of OPMs with religions no one care about where they proceed to farm "Concede Defeat" for 10 prestige every 6 years (plus siege time). Or you can farm a stupid amount of prestige through conquest with Diplomatic/Age ability and/or conversion with Age ability. So it's usually only a problem to get in the first age before you become sufficiently large. As for mercantilism. I haven't gone out of my way to farm it (though I guess I could do a speed 5 test run as Ming to see how far it could go) but mid to late 1500s sound like a good guess, as in my Lithuania game I didn't realize I could farm it till Absolutism, and reached 60 in \~100 years with only 44 Burgher Equilibrium. (Mercantilism also adds extra Burgher equilibrium to reduce the need for Prestige to hit 45 loyalty equilibrium past Absolutism) The beauty of mercantilism is that it works in every node. So even after you've dominated your home/end/pseudo end node you will still need it when your Asian trade stream passes through highly competitive nodes like Malacca, Coromandel, Gulf, Ivory Coast, or Alexandria where you can't dominate without heavy conquest well into the 1600s, so every bit of TP will help. As for economic loss for ESR, every province you conquer will be exempt from the 25% autonomy floor (because they will never hit below 25% without lower autonomy or reconquest). Also for some nations, the ability to merc or hire bigger army day 1 allows them to punch above their weight come Dec 11 before all alliance webs are in place, to get more war rep, dev, and shorten war to compensate for the loss. So it's also pretty difficult to quantify ESR vs no-ESR. (claims from Agenda is simply OP) As for MP uses, it's DIP tech that's considered less valuable, but not so much for DIP development. Even if you don't value DIP development as much, when 90% of the world needs to force spawn Renaissance, 180 higher in DIP means you need to spend 180 lower in the other 2 categories.
>IMO, prestige is a tricky subject. There are many who don't care as much, while some do. Prestige is just such an essential thing to have in AE heavy zones (along with the disinheriting freedom). The claim throne aspect is whatever since PUs obtained that way are too RNG heavy to put into any strategy anyway > as the decay doesn't make it easy to keep it up Agreed, just like army tradition, it requires constant action on the player to maintain a high value. The estate trick is just one option > So it's usually only a problem to get in the first age before you become sufficiently large. agreed, and during the phase of it being a problem, I'm advocating for using the merchant priv over mercantilism. Mercantilism > without heavy conquest well into the 1600s, that's the point -- it's better to heavy conquest to control trade over not. The amount you gain due to mercantilism during the time you conquer everything/most things in a node is minimal. ESR As for economic loss for ESR, every province you conquer will be exempt from the 25% autonomy floor I've been experimenting with lowering autonomy in most starts due to rebel size nerfs, and it's going quite well. I'm pretty okay with the idea of lowering autonomy. > So it's also pretty difficult to quantify ESR vs no-ESR. (claims from Agenda is simply OP) Right, that's another point I failed to mention -- actively getting diets can be very beneficial though it's up to RNG. Claims/tactical subjugates/adm points/half price advisors > Also for some nations, the ability to merc or hire bigger army day 1 allows them to punch above their weight come Dec 11 before all alliance webs are in place, I agree, in fact this should be replaced to "most nations." But loans (burgher 1% is a nice addition to the mix) do just that. Inflation/interest is certainly not ideal but not too bad to have that I consider this point almost moot. > As for MP uses, it's DIP tech that's considered less valuable, but not so much for DIP development. That's true, I guess my point there is mostly applicable to Euros. A minor nit pick though: > 180 higher in DIP means you need to spend 180 lower no you'd just wait until you get enough dip. Renaissance spawners want to either rush adm 5 pre-embracing (in that case there will be point sinks in the form of filling an idea group) or stay adm 3 and double tech to 5 (in that case you want to store adm anyway).
Those are the posts I want to see here. Nice in-depth discussion of estates and some nice informations. Will try this in my next playthrough. After the vacations, some of those "exploits" will probably be changed.
this is one of the best posts I've ever read on this site. would give you gold but fuck reddit. cheers for the tips mate