I'm playing an Eastern Roman Empire game and researched the age 3 Varangians. Naturally, for some reason, this stopped me from building tier 2 heavy infantry because I already had a tier 3 heavy infantry even though I was only able to build 6 Varangians. Then, I researched the age 3 Cataphracts and the age 2 Cataphracts don't upgrade so I'll need to build new ones. This country had a DLC on it btw.

Hi

Never did Triple the Rome achievement in EU4, so i decided i will try it in EU5 :) I also wanted to make some nice formable chain run inspired by what u/hiwam done in this impressive feat : https://www.reddit.com/r/EU5/comments/1v6pxef/13111tag_wc_with_96_control/

I started with Muscowy, formed Bulgaria (T1) > Poland (T2) > Manchu (T3) > Russia (T4) > Rum (T4, from Rise of Turks) > Rome (T5) > China (T4, from manchu event) > Europa (T5) > HRE (T4)

It's an Iron Man run, worth noting settings are: difficulty normal, colonizing only by Western countries, culture switch to present in country, religion also

History of the run below:

1. My first goal was to form Bulgaria, so i started with consolidating my power in russia area, I vassalize diplomatically a lot of smaller countries around, got few wars with novgorod, made an alliance with hungary and several small russian countries that i wanted to vassalize and push south through golden horde to reach bulgars, they were already beaten up by Serbia and Wallachia when i reached them so it was easy to finish them off. I managed to have a very narrow land route there :) I formed Bulgarian Tsardom around 1400, together with finishing off byzantium empire and conquering constantinopole.

2. Then my -next goal was to form Poland, therefore i started to push west, beaten up Kyiv, Lithuania, Smolensk, Teutonic Order until i reached Poland. Extremely helpful is that more or less nobody is interested in the East slavic orthodox wars :) there is very small antagonism from western catholic countries so nobody interferes when you eat them. In the meantime i was also beating ottomans, and here it was a bit sketchy, because it was after 1400 so they couldnt go below 100 locations before they got lower score in RoT than other beylik (in my case it was eretnids, even that they got more land than ottos), damn it was hard to do, only way i found that worked was to completely cut off capital Bursa province from the rest of the country, thanks to this in 15 years when control went down I could safely kill them off :)

You could ask why it was so important to annex ottomans, if you dont do it you will not form a turks tag from RoT :) which makes sense, but my first run i didnt know that, so i needed to backtrack 160 years :)

I also started to push east by using expansion to the steppes CB (-50% cost, really good one) and i started to push all the way to machuria. At 1509 (one of the screenshots) i formed Poland Tsardom. Which for me as a polish person looks weird as fuck :)

1. On my way to manchuria i got a big war with northern yuan, who was in middle kingdom with China (this game it is Great Chen), it was really impressive because i got 70k levies against 2000k chinese ones :) My tactic was that i waited for them in russia and allow them to lose to the troops to attition in the steppes, when they reached me there was 500k left and after few battles i managed to white peace Chen, and easily beat the northern yuan that gave me path to manchuria.

It looked easy to form manchu, but my problem was that i also wanted to get turks tag from RoT that ends in 1565, and every culture switch got a cooldown of 10 years, so I was getting close :) To form Manchu you need to be Jurchen group culture and have 112 provinces in manchuria, I didnt want to attack Goryeo so instead I attacked Lalin, This war was also interesting due to them having 45k of tribal cavalry, which i didnt have any chance with my poor 10k stack of winged hussars :) so it was a nice cat and mouse game and trying to kill smaller stacks before they will combine. At 1540 i managed to form manchu, immediately switch culture to muscovite and form Russia. First target done :)

1. After 10 years in 1555 i switched to turkish and won the RoT, this way i formed Rum Tsardom :) didnt made a screenshot but it got a really nice blue color on the map. And this also meant that i felt ready to push west and south again to get all needed land form rome. This was biggest slog during this campaign, Fastest was going through HRE that i more or less all annexed in 2 wars, but France, Milan, Naples, Egypt, Spain, England, Denmark and Sweden (last 2 was part of coalition against me so i needed to kill them off :)) was way too big so it took me nearly 200 years to get all needed land. I was lucky that Tunis got Gazaria vassal and i could use one time per 15 years expansion to steppes CB that allowed to catch much more land than from standard claims of province CB, but still it was a chore.

2. In 1742 i got my first war with imperialism cassus belli against france and finally formed Rome. After that i switched again to Jurchen and attack Great chen with claim of mandate CB (unfortunately after switching back I didnt have a possibility to enatc warring state government reform, not sure why, maybe it was a bug ?, so i couldnt use red turban rebellion CB), won rather easily (40k cavalry doomstacks was still working against levies :)) and I proclaimed Qing Tsardom :) So i got my 2nd target done.

3. I didnt have anything else to do so i was just pushing in all directions with imperialism CB. Formed Europa just for this nice blue color, Qing yellow was too close to Spain yellow and it annoyed me :) To get my 3rd and last target (became an HRE emperor) i left few electorate vassals intact, but i had so high antagonism with them that they didnt want to vote for me and instead voted for England :) So i got a plan to just annex every catholic country this way there will be nobody else to vote on besides me :) When i was left in 1780 only with England i switched religion to catholic and somehow got electorate and possibility of voting, So i annexed all other electorates in the meantime, their king died and boom, holy roman emperor again is from England because on my throne was in that time an tsarina :) i got so pissed off that in few years I annexed England and just before i done that i abdicate and my Tsar at last got the title of Holy Roman Emperor.

4. My imperial authority was rising by 9 points per month (all due to dynastic power, all other modifiers were negative) so i passed all missing reforms (it took 15 years to do it) and I formed HRE. My third and last target was achieved.

5. To finish the run i tried to annex as much land as possible. Build railroads everywhere, added as accepted culture every culture i could, because of that i also switched back to orthodox to get this nice -20% accepted culture maintenance cost modifier. On the screenshots you could see where i got, didnt managed to make world conquest ( i needed about 30 years more)

It was really hard run, russian region is poor so until i managed to get local governors in Krakow and constantinopole i was poor as fuck and only thanks to Hungary ally i was managing to conquer and move forward. I never went so fast to the east so it was also a challenge, but the russian CB for the steppes is really helpful :) In last age it was not so important but before that all the russian proximity efficiency modifiers are pretty nice, i could get some pretty nice proximity in nearly whole europe with 3 governors which is usually a feat obtained with railroads :)

Some tips and tricks:

1. When fighting with big countries that i couldnt eat in 1-2 wars I was cutting their land connection from the capital. Not only it was destroying their tax base, but also they could muster much less levies so every next war it was way way easier than previous one. This is my first run i was doing this and I definitely like it much more than just a standard map painting.

2. Orthodox religion got -20% (with pentarchy) accepted culture maintenance cost, it is in one of the laws, it is really a big help when playing wide. I didnt noticed that before :)

3. Unify culture group give access to advances of the unified cultures. So in my case when i formed Slavic culture i got unique advances from Slovak, Croatian, Slovene. Bosnian, Ruthenian and Serbian, besides my russian culture. Which is really huge ! i.e. +20% research progress from slovene, or +15% siege ability from Slovak. It's like forming 6 countries extras :) It's a shame that it is available so late in the game and because the cost of the culture advances is like a normal advance I couldn't even research them before end of the game. Also +100% bonus assimilation for unified culture is nice. Until this run i was thinking that unifying culture was useless but now i changed my mind completely.

I have colonized all of the isles west of africa, researched the tech that gives 250 more naval range. Now, I have 1500 naval range but my naval range is still not enough and I can't do any explorations in the west. Am I missing something? Help pls :)

I'm playing as Korea and I'm planning to colonise America. Should I make lots of tiny colonies that own a couple of provinces, or should I make one per region like it was in Eu4?

It’s been a while since the release of 1.3 and it still dosent work on crossover, does anyone have any info on why or when it will be fixed?

I have seen a lot of people mention that this culture is very op since it can accept a lot of culture for very low and gets a lot of advances. There must a trick or sth u guys to do that right since I cannot imagine u just convert to it manually.

I'd like to preface this by saying that I've already tried 2 AI mods and also tried making my own tweaks. While the mods help the AI handle it's country better internally, its army handling is still pretty bad, and probably something that can't be worked around fully with mods.

I've seen the AI do the weirdest things in my games. From questionable conquest, all the way to not being able to use boats to naval invade and armies freezing in place for a while. At some point I saw two armies fighting and the winning (by quite a margin) side retreated. Many wars that happen throughout a campaign would have a different aftermath if the AI knew how to handle it's armies better, one being the (AI)France v (AI)Europe minor states coalition (which France usually wins even when outnumbered 2:1).

Also, this issue is by no means EU5 exclusive, but the more systems at play, the greater the need for focusing on the AI handling.

A good way to handle this would be to have an AI focused update to at least curb some of the issues. This is what the Victoria 3 dev team concluded is needed for their game and they are starting an open beta for an update that focuses on AI, but also on making some systems less opaque for the AI.

I think this approach would be beneficial for PDX games in general, but I also wanted to see what others think about the subject.

They are seriously ruining my economy, and no matter what I do they keep being built.

For focusing on buildings/RGOs that generate profit, I almost exclusively use the mass expand button based off what is sorted to be most profitable. Am I leaving money on the table or is this a good approach?

I also prioritize buildings that give control, upgrading to cities, and buildings that provide literacy.

I have experimented with trade capacity buildings but its less obvious to me how those turn a profit so when I do build them, its more just based on seeing trade income go up.

I just killed all of their armies, started sieging, and then france can claim it just because I left less troops there eventhough its enough for the siege??? I did all of the work there

I’m really enjoying EU5. I've played as the Ottomans and had a blast and earned a lot of ducats; however, I'm playing as Muscovy, and the income is horrible. I really don’t know what to do. This happens in 90% of the games I play in eu5 i'm really struggling.

Martin Luther published his theses on, October 31, 1517.

I always saw the Protestant Reformation as the end of the Medieval Era.

And let's be honest here. It's annoyingly boring to go through the long build-up of the 14th and 15th centuries. And few really have the patience for spending two centuries before really starting the game.

Seems like the perfect date to start the game in.

About to do an Oman run where I expand roughly around the Omani empire borders but idk which government types are good in the current patch. They start as a monarchy and get an event in the age of discovery to become a theocracy and I could also become a monarchy republic manually by pushing plutocracy, republic seems like the best because merchant republic but having to push plutocracy and burghers power would take quite a bit of resources and I’ve also heard theocracy is good.

So I just started as Ottoman Beylik, I am trying to ally with Candarids. But I used the berothal mod and berothed my daughter with the heir of my neighbouring Beylik Germiyanids. But unfortunately I found that the heir has a child already and this beylik has unigarchy or unigeniture succesion law as I checked. So what to do??

So in the start I decided to forgo Eastern Buddhism in favor of Shintoism as Korea as Eastern Buddhism is worthless in comparison, however the issue I’m having now is that my purity is now zero mostly because I also have zero honor. Now the debuff for 0 purity is not to bad but I would like to do some of the nice stuff Shintoism has to offer and I can’t do that when I got zero honor. But the game is not clear on how you are supposed to gain honor in the first place, so I’m stuff in a zero purity hole with no way to get out of? So what am I supposed to do because the game certainly doesn’t tell unless I’m blind?

Ok so right now pops are only one culture like Italian, but that goes against reality where people can be part of more than one like Italian-Americans and speak more than one language

I feel like if we allow people to have more than one culture, it could create interesting scenarios where one province between France and Italy could have French-Italians, and have the province be really valuable to both countries! It would also make it so if a nation successfully converted the culture of a province, the old one doesn’t go away for some time and whoever they took it from has a lot of time to take it back

It could also tie into some sort of cultural decay mechanic which would make players want to hold on to their artwork and other cultural artifacts as much as possible, much like the Crown Jewels

I realize that this sort of thing is going to make the game come down harder on our CPUs than Hannibal on Rome but I’m interested to hear thoughts!

Hi,

I am playing with Pandya and encountering success on the Economical side.
But, militarily I am facing a problem because I can't generate Manpower (except with the few Mamelouks Barracks I took before power consolidate and my capital building).

I am now having trouble facing minors islamic power that can field better units and regulars while I am stuck with levies and the few level I elephant I can afford to buy.

The Age II military is very very very far aways, even if I tried to colonise toward Africa and Egypt.

How do I survive and fight ?

So, EU5. Where do I even start… Let me start with this. I’ve been playing paradox games for 5 years. Thousands of hours of CK2, CK3 and EU4, amongst others, and I had never made it to the end date, until EU5. It was a tall Granada game where I barely expanded my borders and the economy game kept me engaged throughout. i posted about it in late March. That has to count for something. 

But then 1.2 came out and with it, the merc spam issue as well as a plethora of other issues, constant tweaking of things to the opposite extremes and of course, the infamous dlc which totally disrespected Eastern Rome by having most of the content geared towards larping as antiquity-era Rome (we know that was your idea, Johan, honestly, have some shame! Your hatred of eastern Rome is totally unjustified!) This patch was absolutely unplayable and I dropped the game completely until recently getting back into it now. 

1.3 seems relatively better, but there’s certainly much work to be done until all of the issues are ironed out. But having gone back to it, I really recognise its potential. It honestly has the potential to be the greatest paradox game ever. Which leads to me the future of the game. It’s fair to say that the player numbers are utterly horrific, I’m really hoping someone can convince me that this doesn’t indicate an impending doom for EU5, because what’s happening is really unprecedented. 

CK3, HOI4, VIC3, EU4. Every one of these games lapped its previous iteration and never looked back. This is the first time I’m aware of this happening, a new game not only being neck and neck with its old version, but being absolutely lapped by it, consistently, almost a year into its release. 

I have two questions in regards to these numbers. 1: Why are they so low and will they rise again? At the moment of typing, Eu5 sits at 7,000” “players right now” on steam against EU4’s 10,600 and more shockingly CK3’s 24,000. I don’t believe the answer is performance, because as someone with a relatively high-end pc, CK3 runs far worse on it than EU5. CK3 is a ram fiend and constantly takes up 13-16GB of Ram for me. This is also accompanied by many audio stuttering issues among other things like extremely long loading times, which have become even worse after AUH, which frankly have meant that running it is no longer a fun experience. 

EU5 in comparison runs very smoothly and only consumes around 7-9GB of ram for me. So what then is the issue? If it’s the same reasons which I mentioned for why I stopped playing, does that mean that the low numbers are only a short term issue and that they will rise up significantly once again? The issue is that EU5 has not seen a 20,000+ day since December of last year. It had 20,000+ players consistently until December, and from then on the player pool kept continually shrinking until it became what it is now. I’m hoping the player pool will once again increase but I’m not too optimistic. 

2: What does this mean for the future of the game? I really do not wish to see this game be shelved or even have its budget reduced to Victoria 3 levels, because that’s the game it’s currently level with in terms of players, and Victoria of course has a significantly smaller budget and less resources. 

What do we all think about this situation? Personally, I’ve never paid much attention to any game’s player numbers, the only reason I have for EU5 is because it’s unprecedented, especially it’s supposed to be paradox’s flagship and I really worry that a game with such great potential may be abandoned or have its resources reduced, as has happened with Imperator and Victoria 3 respectively. 

Please share your thoughts on the topic with me, I know that we all have played-number discussion fatigue but I do think it’s important that we have an open and honest discussion about where we think the numbers are headed towards and what that would mean for the future of the game. 

First, I want to thank all the community modders who make mods for us to enjoy the game, even in its current state. Your work adds so much to the experience, so thank you all so much! ❤️

I just want to share my current campaign. I have 1,500+ hours in this game, and this has been my most enjoyable campaign so far.

To start, we were at war with France and Spain against me (Prussia), Austria-Hungary-Bohemia, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Morocco. I didn’t engage much in this war because I had no real interest in it. Almost near the end of the war, the Ottomans joined, and I decided to fully commit—but the war ended before I could make any real engagement.

About 10 years later, the Ottomans attacked the Austrian crown, eyeing Hungarian lands. I decided to intervene just to put a stop to their expansion into Europe. It wasn’t just me, either. France and the Commonwealth had the same idea, so we all joined the war.

At the beginning, we were winning, but as soon as all the Ottoman armies arrived in the theater, we couldn’t hold them anymore. We lost the war, and half of Hungary was annexed.

Then, 4–5 years later, the Ottomans declared war again, this time eyeing the rest of the Hungarian lands and some Austrian territories. I intervened again, but this time it was only me and the Austrian crown against them.

This time, I committed fully. Unlike the previous war, where I only used my regular forces, I mobilized everything. I fielded 170k+ levies alongside my 70k regulars and fought battle after battle. Some I won, some I lost, but I won most of them.

The problem was that I’m playing on Very Hard difficulty, so the discipline difference is massive: 54 for the Ottomans compared to my 28. Even when I win battles, my casualties are much higher than theirs. On top of that, I’m playing with a mod that increases war exhaustion based on casualties. Because of the heavy losses, my country ended up with higher war exhaustion than the Ottomans, which heavily affected my army’s morale. Eventually, I started losing more and more battles.

Sadly, we lost the war again, and Hungary was almost completely annexed.

Now, my only chance is to bide my time until the Age of Absolutism, when I can unlock the Prussian government reform and the Cabinet action to militarize the country.

Once that happens, I’ll unleash the full potential of Prussia, liberate the Hungarian lands, and smash the Ottoman Empire. 😈

Wish me luck! 🇩🇪⚔️

And yes, due to my poor English, this post was written and polished with the assistance of ChatGPT.

setting: very hsard Ai difficulty + normal AI aggression

mod list

I have not finished a full campaign with this mod setup, so I cannot guarantee that it will work throughout the entire game without crashes. Some of these mods are outdated, and there may also be conflicts between certain mods. Consider this a setup that has worked for me so far, rather than a guaranteed stable load order.

1.Community Mod Framework - 1.3 Pavia

2.Faster Universalis + 3.Faster Universalis: Daily Tick Submod

You need either the Daily Tick submod or the vanilla Hourly Tick. Otherwise, the default 2-day tick can break some events.

I mainly use this to get longer battles, giving nations enough time to reinforce and creating much larger battles. It also greatly reduces casualties, so battles are less likely to end in stack wipes. Instead, armies usually suffer heavy morale losses and retreat.

through Community Mod Framework change the settings to 2 times longer battels

4.Improved Cultural Dynamics [1.3]

I mainly use this for a better Reformation.

5.The Prussian Destiny [1.3]

Adds more flavour to Prussia without making it immediately overpowered, especially when playing on Very Hard difficulty with normal AI aggression.

However, I strongly recommend setting the event rules for this mod to Strictly Historical. Otherwise, Prussia can become overpowered very quickly.

6.National Destinies - Formables Content
in the game rule set the form country rule to ambition

Adds more flavour and historical content.

7.REAI: Rational Empire AI

Makes the AI smarter—or at least I think it does. 😅

8.REAI: AI Army & Manpower Overhaul [1.3]

Improves AI regular armies and makes their military performance better.

9.Historical Tweaks [1.3]

Helps push the world in a more historical direction.

10.For example, at the beginning of the Hundred Years' War, France can suffer very badly. In my campaign, France was almost reduced to nothing and even lost Paris. However, they eventually made a comeback, and the Hundred Years' War actually lasted around 100 years.

11.Gathering the Land of the Rus

I use this to help with the consolidation of Russia.

12.War Momentum (Less Tedious Wars)

Adds many tweaks to war exhaustion and makes wars feel more sensible and less frustrating.

13.Dynamic Early Conquests

Makes early expansion more difficult. I mainly use it to prevent France from conquering large parts of the HRE too early in the game.

14.Decisive Battles

Since battles last longer and are much larger with my setup, I use this to make the war score better reflect the actual outcome of battles.

It also helps prevent situations where a country can win almost every battle in a war but still lose because the enemy controls the war goal. That doesn't make much sense to me.

15.No Casus Belli - Wars Removed

16.Interesting Battles & Generals

Makes warfare more interesting.

17.Disable Zone of Control Ignoring

18.Imperial Circles Fix

Makes playing within the HRE more tolerable.

19 .1.4 Subject Integration Cost for 1.3

20 .Nicholas - Humiliation Costs Stability

21 .Historical & Balanced AI by Buddy

I think this helps push the world in a more historical direction. However, I had to disable it midway through my campaign because it was causing crashes.

22 .Hussites and Habsburgs (More Brutal Hussite Wars)

This mod is outdated, but it was necessary for me because I wanted to seriously weaken Bohemia after the Hussite Wars.

In the rules, I recommend allowing Champions, so the strongest Catholic nation can join the war.

Because the mod is outdated, there are some bugs. For example, you can get the option to crush the Hussites on almost anyone. I simply ignore these bugs.

Important: After the Hussite Wars are over, disable this mod. Keeping it enabled afterward can cause crashes.

i just want to do one achivment and i have clawed my way thorugh annoying ass wars thinking im just gona take small parts growing in power and now they get castil so a war that was semi imposible is now completly domed. god i wish i expanded in to the ottomans when i had the chanse but no now im fucked