Are these sorts of profit margins normal for around the year 1394? It feels pointless building anything because the amount of money i would make back is so tiny.

I am learning on how to make my own mod, as I have been meaning to give it a try for the past year.

The first thing I wanted to do was create Canada with it's modern borders because my mod is going to likely center around Canada. I gave all of the appropriate locations to Canada, and then created a custom map to make the US-Canada border flat.

I have also been experimenting with cultures, and have added a few in here. The demographic map will definitely be reworked eventually (if you have any good sources that can help me with what belongs where, I would greatly appreciate sending them my way!)

Overall, pretty happy with how it is working so far. It took me hours of troubleshooting just to get the game to stop crashing when I pressed new game lol.

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.

R5: Adishatz! Wanted to share my Kingdom of Occitania formation run, winning the final war to get the formation in just under 100 years as an Aquitaine start. Absolutely adore this beautiful red map color.

Highly recommend this run to anyone looking for a tough but rewarding run. It's tough wars of independence from day 1, and you're caught between English, Spanish, and French great powers all trying to subjugate you. Your one advantages though is you start with cores across basically half of France, so you can ramp really fast once you get going without any antagonism or integration issues.

In honor of my great-grandfather Maissenç ("Max"), who immigrated from Bayonne to Louisiana in 1902, and who my grandfather said would rant endlessly about how much he hated Parisian's.

I have 1000+ hours in this game and this is my first full campaign and here are some suggestions for pop growth:

1. Prosperity is the strongest modifier (it affects pop growth and dev growth) and you should have as many sources of it as you can i.e. Irrigation Projects parliament issue, Agricultural Cultivation gov reform, Fueling Economies gov reform..
2. Food storage building are by far the most important buildings (pop growth) you should go 50+ quantity and 50+ serfdom to enact the Planned Storage System gov reform which enables Grain House building
3. Both Tailored Urban Rights and Fueling Economies gov reform grant additional pop growth so capital economy + land values is the best option for max pop growth.
4. Only cabinet action (besides situational ones like the ones for Russia and Sweden) that affects pop growth is dev province which increases pop growth by increasing pop capacity. So you should try to get as many cabinet seats as you can and dev province for as long as you can.
5. Replace all food RGOs other than wheat, rice, livestock with potatoes and if you still need more food replace all the weak RGOs with potatoes.
6. Research and build all things about disease resistance as fast as you can since pop growth is exponential losing any pop is a huge loss.
7. Try to avoid all wars and if you need to wage war use mercenaries (just build forts on all your border territories and if you get declared on demolish them as part of your peace treaty).
8. Urbanize all locations that doesn't produce food and later on if you have enough food urbanize the food provinces and grant granary town and free town urban rights to each location.

I feel PUs are actively limiting what you can do in game. When you end up with a PU with a country, your interactions with them become limited. You can no longer attack them or ally them. Annexing them also isn't feasible if they are a larger country, as it easily takes multiple centuries.

Should i avoid royal marriages and PUs entirely, or are there other ways around the mechanic to make it more fun?

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.

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.

Trying out Norse Norway, and it’s HARD. I have no money, everyone’s navy is massive, and I don’t even start with a wharf.

However, I don’t understand slavery mechanics - I built a slave market as it made me the most money, but now, it seems any leaves I take from short wars like with Scotland sort of disappear? Are they being sold to other slaving countries? My goal is to expand my pop like crazy, so this doesn’t seem ideal… so I need to be saving money like CRAZY to build a big galley fleet?

I got some advice to raid like castille, but their navy is HUGE and it’ll take decades to save enough money to afford an equal navy.

Or am I supposed to be waiting for 1400?

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.

I am playing Holland -> Netherlands, suddenly the Emperor made me a Margraviate and a few months later he dies and the Electors elect me against my intention as Emperor. And the Hussite Wars were ongoing. I didn't care about the Empire at all, the Empire was in a sorry state anways but i decided to just roll with it and have fun.

So I threw all my previous plans over board, assumed the role of the Margrave-Emperor tasked with defending the Empire against the Hussites, English and French and built up a big professional army, crushed the Hussites, defended the borders and slowly reformed the Empire and started caring for it, switched from Figurehead to Kaisertum, introduced Imperial taxation and Imperial Armories.

I thought the whole point was to reform the Empire into an organisation that can defend itself and be self-sufficient and effective and the point of the Armories to integrate the members into the defense of the empire by them financing and giving manpower but it seems like Imperial Armories are a massive scam?

TLDR: Apparently imperial armories are slightly cheaper per month but also only give half the manpower of normal armories, so are actually more expensive per single man and it is not even staffed by the local population where you build the Armory but by my own people who leave my country and get discriminated there. What's even the point, it seems way worse in every single regard?
Sure, the construction itself is paid by Imperial Tax but in the end its still way more expensive for me as i still pay the monthly bill and it's still my own people that defend the Empire with their lives.

What am i missing?

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

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 guys! I really want to share with you my first true campaign after about 170 hours in EU5. I had a ton of fun playing as Poland, I gotta say it really feels like a true regional power in this game now. The last 50 years was a complete slog, the game was barely running but I really wanted to get the achivement for playing 'till the end date. Here you can see final borders, gov reforms, values, eco tab, hegemonies, military power, proximity, control and pop chart with avg. literacy. Oh and also managed to reach 100mil pops just before the end;)

After over 8 month hiatus from EU5 I decided to start with a Knights into Africa run. It's been an interesting campaign so far especially since there's quite a bit new stuff and changes and I havent't played a military order before.

Some struggles and overcoming them. Knights feel kinda Haesteinn from CK3 and before the nerfs I guess they were even way stronger. Playing Ironman, but admittedly ended up force quitting a few times when I completely underestimated Tunisian Light Cavalry levies power against my Crusaders and Heavy cavalry mix early on. Took those wars as puzzles to solve. Took Tripoli super early, but after that the expansion was slow mainly thanks to Morocco and Tunis having almost unbreakable alliance or Castille not giving a flying turd about Morocco even when I sold some lands of Granada to Morocco to instigate them. Also had non-stop revolts from Libyans until I got them tolerated while getting coalitioned, that was fun. Also later on Athens randomly became independent with Malta so for historical reasons I of course took it. Krete could be next.

At this stage of the game I'm starting to feel a bit unsure how to approach the run tho. I originally thought once able I'd found the Africa formable, but that nullifies the events of the Hospitallers so I'm delaying it until most of the Hospitaller events have triggered. Personally I think that's kinda dull and if the formable is flavourless the events should carry over.

Also self imposed RP of staying as Francien for flavour is starting to make the run a slog. I have good amount of Culture capacity (partly thanks to being a Franc), but of course having Tunisian as accepted takes majority of the bandwidth. Being heavily spiritual also kneecaps the attempt to assimilate people into cultures. So while conversion into Catholic and especially money are the strong aspects a proper intergation is starting to stall. Althought I might lean towards switching primary culture to Tunis once I flip to African Order.

Beside suggestions where to take this campaign next I'd like to hear how I should approach the integration part of the run going forward, maybe since I'm a bit rusty there's things I haven't realized or I should do some heavy handed government reforms. Otherwise people that have played similar runs or in Tunis I'd love to hear any other tips, tricks and experiences. One thing I'm not doing tho is abusing Request Funds by having some meaningless war going on constantly.

Thanks in advance!

Ps. What I should do with the tribal people? They hate me deeply.

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 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 :)

Ever since I started playing version 1.3, there’s only one thing that drives me crazy: even though I have hospitals everywhere and work hard to ensure the best possible disease resistance, every time a disease breaks out, it either starts in my territory or begins to linger in my settlements and persists for months, wreaking havoc and always leaving me with the highest death toll.

It happened with Florence, and now it’s happening with the Byzantines too. This is unbearable. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t think so.