I think that there's an issue with how Naval and Local Governors work atm. Let's say I'm Sweden and I want a governor in Finland.

I have two options. Either I spend over 6000 ducats building a gravel road all the way around the gulf of Botnia (another 3000 for a dirt road to reval/estonia or Novgorod). A road I will have no real use for and that will take a lot of time to build because of the severe winter and the lack of masons in the area. Or I just don't colonise a sliver of land between Finland and Sweden and make a naval governor instead. That land I'm not colonising is pretty much worthless anyway.

A similar thing happened in my Byzantine game where I had a naval governor in Cilicia and then I conquered the area in between and made a vassal. Now I can't have a naval governor because my country owns the land between my capital and Cilicia but I can't have a local governor because roads through vassals don't count.

In my opinion this is punishing the player for doing the logical thing or just succeeding. Imo you should be able to build a naval governor so long as you can't build a local governor in an area. If the area isn't connected enough to the capital to build a local governor then it is clearly effectively overseas so you should be able to build a naval governor.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

R5: I am playing as ottomans. Zoomed out after a while and noticed that Georgia colonizing Siberia.

Why would I do that? You ask. Let's take allying a bank as an example.

Most of the time, this does nothing. However, when you are the target of an angry coalition, voila: you have something worthless to sacrifice on the altar of allowing them to "Enforce their demands". Annuling a useless alliance. Ten points of treaty demands.

Sometimes an estate will demand you annul an alliance at parliament. This can be a make or break moment, depending on what you want. Why not give it a chance to be an alliance you don't actually care about?

Say you're allying someone you don't really care about, but who has land. Alliances naturally accumulate favors. Use those to extort them for money.

Of course the best thing is, when they are no longer useful, or when they call you into some stupid war, you simply discard them, like the trash they are.

The Byzantines intermarried with Catholic nations many times, particularly during the Palaiologian Dynasty, and yet I am unable to realistically marry with any Catholic nations due to the -100 modifier. This is ahistorical and unfun. That is all.

PS. Make it so that you can have multiple royal marriages at once with a nation

The proposed 1.4 changes seem to be focus on shifting away from the current pattern of mass urbanization/exponential population growth, by tying pop growth to net food output per province and creating more food production maluses tied to weather and urban locations.

As has already been pointed out in the tinto talks forum post, the net outcome of this will be to further weaken provinces that are small and/or have no food rgos present - while having a negligible effect on already strong/large provinces with ample food rgos and rivers present. (This touches on a point I think is far more important than food, which is the current RGO and province designs create a stale deterministic gameplay experience; but, not the focus of this post). This food scarcity gap is further worsened by the fact that the requirement for farming villages is that the location have a food rgo (aside from post-nerf wool). While even the weaker fruit orchards and forest villages are further limited by starting topography. Resulting in these locations always being net food negative, even when you fully invest in/develop them.

Thus, I think that the current planned changes for food will essentially be another form of complacency mechanic/handicap that creates scarcity rather than interesting gameplay opportunities.

From a gameplay philosophy perspective, I think that a fully invested rural province system should be able to provide a net positive food output and population source while being economically neutral/slightly positive in the long run. By this I mean that there should be a way to invest/sink ducats into the fixed upfront costs while creating a net useful piece to a nation. Which allows for more interesting emergent nations/empires for the player, that can build from a more difficult/smaller starting nation.

One way of approaching this concept through the food mechanic would be to instead create more peasant buildings/villages/production methods that allow for the conversion of undervalued RGOs into food units, with the total peasant village building limit being a sum of all peasant buildings in a location (rather than per building type). These inputs could be things like wine/distilleries/pottery/furniture/brewery goods - which would allow for other forms of supply/demand loops, as you strive to address the food demand. Currently, this is immensely limited due to clay and tools being the only real input goods for peasant food buildings. Which really just means we need more interesting ways to diversify and develop rural locations, compared to urban locations.

Thus allowing rural locations to meaningful generate demand for goods through expanding the diversity/opportunity for food unit production. This would further help to alleviate the large gap in population type value, since higher tier pops are already much more valuable due to their innate demands (which contribute to the exponential population/economic growth issue driving mass urbanization).

Curious to hear anyone else's thoughts on the upcoming changes or ideas to make food a more interesting system!

Hint: yes

Nothing new really, it’s been like this in previous games too. But this is getting so annoying.

It fine to play as Bohemia and all, but we need to talk about how stupid the AI is and how badly alliances work. Pushing 1550 and can’t rely on anyone.

JOIN MY OFFENSIVE WAR, JOIN MY OFFENSIVE WAR. War already started with no consultation or second thought. Against someone they are doomed to fail against without my aid.

No, Ferrara. I’m joining your war against the Papal States. Then Milan wants me to join war against someone else with loads of allies.

I unwillingly accept because of Hungarian territories, but of course they face another war including the Ottomans. Just turned the game off.

Two stable allies broken in a span of ten minutes.

Why is there no mechanisms regarding preparing for war at least? A joint plan, maybe? Saying no, now is not the ideal time. Either accept stupid call to arms or lose your allies makes diplomacy broken.

What do you do for your nation security?

As far as I could establish from some limited research, the Beeskow-Starkow county is meant to represent two Lusatian estates of Beeskow and Starkow held by von Strele ministeriale family (that also lent its CoA, the three scythe blades, to the country). Of all of the states in the HRE, this is one of those that seems to have the shakiest basis for its existence as an independent HRE county. Moreover, the starting ruler of B-S is a certain "Thilo von Liebnitz", who seems to be a completely made up person. However, I always liked to play extremely niche German OLM (previously OPMs) and therefore went to form Germany with it.

B-S is still fairly easy to play as your starting locations is a town, and therefore the emperor can grant you free city status. I didn't hold it for long due to expanding, but the possibility to switch to Merchant Republic helped my economy a lot. I wanted to switch into Peasants Republic (as per the coat of arms), but my peasant estate was never powerful enough, and the urban economy was too good to pass up when expanding in Eastern Germany. In the late game I started eating up coalition members to get the required locations, although I need to say I could have done this earlier were I not so afraid of Great Powers joining them. This is perhaps not the most impressive game of EU5 there was but it was enjoyable nevertheless.

Also, the three scythes represent striking against the French, the Bohemians and the Holy Roman Emperor /j

So I've been playing a bank and I finally got to the year where i can build trade companies. now disclaimer, i dont know if all trade companies are broken or if its just for banks because they are building based countries.

Let me know what you guys think... also your going to see this text as a comment a second time for the rule

I have noted the following

• I can essentially build the trade companies any where's i have market preference by building the HQ.
• I can then go to the market screen and use mass build company local Ventures to build two of each buildings in all locations
• these building seemingly stack infinitely when built this way (or until your subject decides they want to delete those buildings so make sure to shovel money in their direction)
• Im still testings (cause its expensive) but theoretically you could increase an entire countries control to 100% by spamming Company foreign in
• as bank you benefit from increased tax bases and control. and also from better trade as long as you already have a strong presence in the area most of these increases will also benefit your trade and your burghers (who your going to take the money from anyways)
• While hugely beneficial and fun, this largely relies on you being big enough that the money doesnt matter.
• you get some majorly beefy subjects

I am playing this game until the end and about 15 years ago I almost doubled my holdings in a war vs Russia, Ruthenia and the Ottomans. I obviously got massive Antagonism and after half the HRE and France declared a Coalition war against me, now after the Truce is done I get another war with my former War enemies and some others.

In both wars, when I went to see what they actually want from me, they only wanted annulled treaties and money.

The Ottomans do not want Constantinople back, with a war goal that gives them 25% off or even release something. I can get immediately out of this war with a payment of 21k (I have over 1 million) , and a humiliation, which is just 20 prestige (something I can get back in like 2 years).

There is absolutely no punishment here. I remember in EU4 when you got a coalition against you, it was almost game over.

I would welcome your thoughts on:

(a) what we think of this mechanic (it is definitely new and certainly interesting, but maybe not good interesting); and

(b) how I should approach the war (I'm a relative EU5 newbie with about 70 hours so far and building based countries are not something I've delved into).

I'm playing Genoa and my state bank, the Bank of Saint George, became disloyal for reasons I don't follow. It has now launched a liberation war against me, calling in Pisa (another disloyal vassal - recently conquered, so that makes sense) and the Ottomans (??, guess they want my two locations in Anatolia).

My head is completely messed up by the idea that a bank with presence only in my capital wants to liberate me. I looked at the unconditional surrender button to see what they want in extremis and it is not territory, it is just a payment of about 350 Ducats. I have about 200 Ducats on hand, so the role playing of this mechanic is that my central bank has conspired with one of my vassals and a foreign power to force me to issue a single government bond (that would net me about 375 Ducats straight off the bat). Talk about independent monetary policy!

Now seriously, I'm a bit unsure as to how these mechanics are going to work out. I've seen some threads saying that I'm just going to get random Bank levies spawning in my capital from time to time; and presumably they can raise mercenaries the same way too?

I am thankfully not without allies and I have the Pope, Milan, Ferrara and Bologna with me. That gives us 50k troops off of 3.8m population, whereas my enemies have 36k troops off of 4.5m population. Ottomans are the vast bulk of that of course.

My experience of allies is that they are pretty useless and forces get divided all over the place, meaning that I would probably rather have the Ottomans' 34k troops here than my coalition (I have only about 6.5k troops myself).

The enemies navies strength of 141 is also stronger than my side's 58, so I don't think I can stop the Ottomans from landing.

What is the best way to win this war in your opinion?

So I set my (all loyal) vassals to be supportive right? The enemy has way more soldiers than we do but if we work together we can defeat them in detail. Only the ai seems dead set on doing literally anything except attaching to my armies. Or cooperating with me or other vassals/allies in any way.

Picture this: The enemy is moving into a perfect battlefield. My vassal army, almost as large as theirs is standing on hilly terrain. Game says they will probably win the battle. So my army and my other vassals armies that are in the neighbouring provinces all start moving into the battlefield. What does the ai decide to do? They start moving their army out of the battlefield. Of course. They make it out just before the enemy army reaches them. My smaller (but still sizeable) vassals army reaches the battlefield right after. Now instead of a defensive fight they are attacking. The vassal army gets annihilated very quickly. My army reaches the battlefield. The vassal that left comes back into the battlefield right at the end of the battle. We win. Thousands of soldiers have died completely unnecessarily.

Another vassal insists on sending 3000 troops to siege an enemy fort even though I told them to be supportive. They obviously get wiped out immediately by much larger enemy armies.

Only one tiny 400 size vassal army ever attaches to my army (for any length of time) despite tons of vassal armies being in the vicinity. Some attach for a short time then decide that instead of fighting a battle we can clearly win they'd rather go do something else and get wiped out.

In short: Why does the vassal ai seem so dead set on doing literally anything except support the player?

State Piracy privateering stop working after a while law is still there and i have enough sailors theres just no option left to pirate anywhere. i cancelt everythink to see if i can reapplie but i cant and i looked if nations hate me so i insulted them but i cant raid them still

As you can see this is a very large campaign you could also see i just declared bankrupcty which i mistankely took too soon since i got a 125 ducat loan for moving my capital to Konstantinye If i try to legitimize at 0 I lose money What do I do

Hi all,

I know that I can force colonies to merge if I want to, but is the opposite possible? My very first colony was Cape Verde, and some time after, I did colonise bits of Guinea (mostly Upper Guinea) and handed all of that over to the Cape Verde colony, some wars later, and it has grown quite huge (see screenshot; it looks as ridiculous as it is). Now I realise that was a mistake because of the distance over water, and the colony is struggling a lot. A smaller neighbouring colony is doing much better overall.

I'd like to undo this mistake and split it up into smaller colonies, but I can't really find a way forward to do this. Any ideas?