Europa Universalis IV

Just park another 30 stack or two near the siege stack. They should be afraid and stay away even if they're not all in the same province (as long as you're actually more powerful).

Araysar said:

One issue I'm running into is that I can typically siege the enemy forts with a single 30 unit stack. So I'll attach generals with high siege pips to my "siege stacks" and then send them out to siege all reasonably possible forts at once. But AI will form some 65 unit stack, stick a 2 star general on it and then start fucking up one siege after another for me when I'm not looking. Since I'm fighting multiple wars at once it's easy to miss something, so I started doubling up the 30 unit stacks into 60 unit stacks to avoid getting blindsided and been eating a lot of attrition from that.

Maybe I should switch up my template to 42-44 unit stacks, right now I'm doing 13-2-15 stack composition

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Not a big fan of 13-2-15. The second any infantry takes damage your artillery is going to start getting moved to the front line. I prefer to have it slightly unbalanced in favor of infantry. This could be part of the manpower problem as well.

Furry said:

I tend to pick a side and blob across a tough enemy from one side. I’ll get the occasional whoops stack wipe pop up, but generally if you have a huge army all close to each other they leave you alone. Coming in from multiple angles against someone like a full on HRE war will make them far harder than they need to be. I don’t worry if some of my shit is getting seiged down. Now if it’s a weak enemy, I’ll go everywhere. Even if they winsome battles, I usually just think I’m wearing their manpower down.

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Yep, totally agree with this strategy. Weak opponents get the fort rush and strong opponents get the slow wave, or at least I don't leave any army by themselves on a fort. Plus, when your army is close, it's way easier to support the inevitable AI pile on stack that happens (and easier to bait them to do that, to your advantage).

Yeah, I usually have 2-4 infantry over in the later stages of the game where I do a lot of artillery. 16-2-14 would be a common one for me. Sometimes I'll go 4-6 infantry over if I'm expecting a lot of fights. If I have a lot of cavalry bonuses I'll often have 4 in the later game and more earlier in the game if I can afford it. I just think having less infantry than artillery (or equal) is riding the edge too closely.

In many games since Domination I have used mercs a good deal simply because I found manpower to be a precious resource than before. Taking merc ideas gives you merc companies with insane amounts of manpower so I like to send them into absorb the first wave of the enemy and then bring in my actual army to do some real work.

Also worth noting about Professionalism: at 80% your reserves take 50% less morale damage, which can help a lot when you have to overstack and don't or can't micro reinforcements easily.

Just shy of 1700 and I'm about done with my world conquest starting out as Shun. Just a couple wars to wrap up and it's all mine, subjects, or tributaries. This has probably been the breeziest game of EU4 I ever played. It was definitely a little rough in the beginning juggling wars and low Mandate but it really snowballed in the mid 1500s. Outside of the first two decades, I was too strong to ever have a rival. Stacking all the permanent modifiers from the various mission trees (Shun, Lan Xang, Siam, Manchu, Mongolian culture, and now Qing) has been insane, most notably with getting 3 monarch points for every tributary. At one point I had almost 100 and could have had a lot more but I was overflowing with mana so there was no point (they could be annoying as they could still ally with countries I wanted to fight). Development cost was super low and I must have devved a 1000 times. The tributaries also allowed me to keep my prestige up at all times. I killed tons of heirs because until I got super strong ones because I always had excess prestige to take from tributaries.

Confucianism is kind of a great religion. A little rough at the start when it doesn't make sense to convert and you're still harmonizing your first or second religion, but then it along with Humanism means you never have to worry about rebels ever. Even the separatism events from OE weren't enough to make a province rebel. Since Domination released, they also get a Deus Vult style CB when taking either Humanist or Religious that allows you to attack countries even if their religion is harmonized.

This was also the first game I've ever played where I had enough CCR to avoid rebels from spawning because it would be either 8 or 9 months to core anything. So doing as much OE as possible wasn't an issue at all.

Really love how the game is fucking up the Qing in the middle of the map, haha.

I'm thinking of doing an All Faiths One Culture run now. Still have 120 years left and if I take Religious I can get my culture conversion cost down to the minimum. It's funny I didn't start out the game with the idea of a WC (in fact, after my one culture run I figured I'd never do it again) but this was such a fun campaign that I figured why not.





An idea of what all the development cost stacking gets me:

Araysar said:

I have a couple vassals now in 1750 but I cant improve their opinion to annex them. I have Portugal with all their private enterprises and crown colonies, Delhi, Khmer, Tuscany.

Problem is that my aggressive expansion malu is off the charts with them, so I can never hope to get to 190+ opinion to annex them. For example Delhi has an aggressive expansion opinion modifier of -287 against me and they have been my vassal for 20+ years. How are you supposed to solve for this?

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The only realistic option you have is to release and annex.

Finished my all faiths, one culture, one tag run. It was one of the more fun campaigns I've done. The tributary abuse was pretty amazing. I've never had this much mana without being a Horde or Republic -- an insane amount of development and I could have even done more if I wanted to but at the end I just let the mana hit the cap while the culture conversions were in progress.





Instead of switching my capital to the new world, I tried the "create and annex 75 colonial nations" trick and it was horrible. It's not just 75 CNs, but 75 uniquely named CNs, which I didn't know at first. And weird stuff can happen where it still forms after the 75 limit is hit if your colony was one of the CNs that existed before the 75 limit was hit -- I'm not really sure what was going on, just that I basically had to annex twice after I hit the 75 limit. Do not recommend.

Araysar said:

Finally got the world conqueror achievement by 1806

View attachment 484627


Not gonna lie, it was a nail biter until the end, hitting 500% overextension sometimes

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Then in the end I figured out that I can annex Commonwealth and Austria, and feed them all their provinces right back with no overextension hit to them, and thats when I was able to get 1500+ of their development vassalized in 5 years instead of spending 3000 admin points coring it.

but im sure someones gonna tell how thats the #1 tactic for a WC run

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Haha, nah, I think a lot of people just core at the end, but your route makes total sense when you're against the clock and aren't stacking a lot of core cost reduction.

Good job on the WC. Always a worthy achievement.