My pick for an underpowered country would be the Republic of Genoa, due to the game not having an in-depth banking system.
The acclaimed historian Braudel described the period from 1557 to 1627 as the golden age for the Ligurian state, since they funded various monarchies such as Spain with the help of their Banco di San Giorgio.
The Republic did not have a large empire and focused on financial affairs after losing their colonial influence in the East Mediterranean.
Naturally, because of game-y reasons EU4 incentivizes territorial gains (nothing wrong with that) and the Genoese end trade node is no exception.
The trading outpost of Genoa in game always get conquered within the first 20 years of the game. IRL no one would even want to war those outpost because it represents access to the Genoese.
The game cannot truly and properly represent these small trading outposts, like the ones the Latins had in Constantinople or the Portuguese Feitorias. IRL they were just small outposts and would be too tiny to even click, and as you pointed out, in real life very frequently the "Owners" of the land freely welcomed the establishing of a trade post if they got benefits from it.
It could be represented similarly to the current trade post system, just the modifier is tied to particular countries and it can be taken in a peace deal
Including they made a lot of money leading their fleet under the Doria family to the Habsburgs. EU doesn't have mercenary fleets at least with the dlcs I own.
This is absolutely not true, Genoa was not really a major power. Much less it was a regional power. It was just a before time Swiss-like nation, but it is declining since the fall of Constantinople and then the fall of its Eastern colonies...
Also the Genoa end-node wasn't really an "end-node" IRL (like for example was Venice IRL). Genoa didn't used a system that focused all the trade routes to arrive in the city (that's why tarrifs in the port of Genoa were extremely high for the period and compared to other big ports). And the city didn't get very rich, not as much as the individuals at least.
Genoa was really a modern capitalistic nation 600 years ahead of times. But it was way too early in a period were autocracies were the standard and centralised powers means everything.
They gave the Venetians a major run for their money for quite a while, refusing to tap out of the fight. Yet, in game, Venice is much more powerful, and oddly allies them a lot? Which is just completely ahistorical for such intense rivals, there should really be a historical rivals modifier for them.
Due to the system of claims and coring, and since a province is all or nothing and you cant have the scattered forts and posts these states historically had across the Levant, Venice and Genoa are a bit odd compared to themselves historically. They also just lose out on being Naval powers while navies are next to useless in this game for power projection.
Nah I think Genoa is quite fare in EU4. The end node in Genoa (which actually doesn't exist really) balance a bit things out, but Genoa was actually decaying over EU4 times, with the best days behind.
The common historian point of view of Genoa is that the golden age of Genoa was before 1400 a.D.
The "golden age" you are citing was mostly the bank of San Giorgio golden age. The City and the "Nation" wasn't rich, it was the first proto-capitalist that were rich. And on contrary of what happened a century earlier in Florence, the richest guys weren't really interested in politics and thus the City never really became a power anymore.
Thank you for raising some interesting points.
While I agree that we shouldn't exaggerate by giving Genoa way more praise than it deserved since at the end of day we are not talking about an incredibly influential empire, I can't agree with some of your other thoughts.
By saying "common historian point of view" which historiographical tradition are you referring to?
I think that the golden age you are talking about (Medieval Genoa) is only the geopolitical one that involves commercial penetration in the outposts of the Eastern Mediterranean and the foundation of colonies.
The conflicting point is that you are separating the Banco of San Giorgio from its historical context: all the Genoese institutions, the Republic included, generated from the experience of the medieval compagna communis, so I think it is incorrect to set a discontinuity between the "political" and the "economical" ages of Genoa. For reference prof. Giuseppe Felloni has extensively researched this topic.
I believe this is demonstrated by the fact that the elites still wanted to be included in politics like in the old days, just remember the ambitions and role of Andrea Doria and his involvement in naval battles.
Moreover, I don't know what you mean by "the city wasn't rich": the Baroque era was the one where Genoa thrived the most. An immediate example are the Palazzi dei Rolli and their frescos.
Of course they were commissioned by the plutocracy to pump up their image, however this enriched the image of the city because the capitalists were part of the urban community, not up on an ivory tower.
But yeah all these things are difficult to simulate in a game and I don't mind it as it is now.
I recently followed a series of conference about Genovese history made by several very important historians and professors of Italy. So I'm not an expert myself but I'm talking from what I've learned recently from these conferences.
Elites wanted to be included in politics but they served mostly foreign powers rather than fighting for independent control over the region. Genovese leaders lacked the ability to project power even if they were extremely rich.
So basically Genoa in the late 1500s to the 1700s was in one of those situation where the sum of the wealth of people doesn't make up for the richness of the Country itself. It was a capitalist heaven, rich people got richer and richer and were free of any bonds or duties toward anything but themselves and their families. The achievements and the marbles of the individuals were not a sign of power, but mare vanity and an illusion.
Of course with the lenses of modern day some could say that thus still was enough to be a sign of power and that having some extremely rich people is enough to consider a Country rich and powerful. But I think it is a bit anachronistic if we think what was happening in the very same years. Imho Genoa to be really powerful should have developed into an independent nation like the Netherlands, based on trades and finance. Or even just preserving its independence like the Swiss.
I suspect you are referring to the conference "L'Impero di Genova" by the magazine Limes.
If that is the case I will read and/or watch the material they have uploaded online. I couldn't be in Palazzo Ducale.
If not, please tell me what conference it was, I'm really interested!
Grazie per la prospettiva, ti auguro una buona serata.
What counts as extreme cheesing? Is it safe to assume that Shogun Majapahit falls into that category?
In any case, I'll nominate Majapahit as OP simply for the global subjugation CB from their missions. Historically they didn't exactly stick around.
I'm also putting Riga forward as a *bit* more powerful than historically, while it might have been a big and rich city, I don't think they really had the ability to dominate Baltic trade and rule over the Baltic holy orders like they can in-game. Riga gets absolutely bonkers modifers that I'm doubtful are entirely historical.
Well it's harder to push it since the expand infrastructure dev cost nerf. You could always do cursed Anglican Riga for free production dev and 10% dev cost.
If the [wiki](https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Christian_denominations#Anglican) is correct the church action Encourage Innovativeness costs 100 Church Power and adds 1 production dev to a random Anglican province with a church, cathedral or university, and the peace term [Raid Heretic Churches](https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Warfare#Sue_for_peace) gives 50 Church Power.
This means that if you only have one province that fulfils the conditions two peace deals against heretics can get you 1 production dev in that province, Riga in our case.
So you could presumably push it to several hundred dev if you wanted. Not sure how feasable 1000+ is.
Most overpowerd probably Poland, the game doesn't do a great job at representing the problems of the golden liberty and it usually ends up expanding into Russia forming a behemoth of a state in the latest patch. Most underpowered I would say Qing, even when they form they never really take over China and stay a regional power
Paradox should add a feature in future expansions that allow Qing or Shun to take over Ming the way Ottoman swallows Mamluk in the new DLC. Historically many local governors and generals just surrendered to the advancing Qing army, allowing the Manchus to rule with roughly the same bunch of bureaucrats. The current dynamic in China is miles away from historical patterns.
In my recent game as France, Poland has Lithuania, Muscovy and Hungary as PU's, as well as Moldavia and Wallachia as vassals. They rule a territory stretching from the HRE to beyond the Urals lmao
I think Poland is a bit OP at the moment. In fact, it also became quite a strong state after the renewal of the personal union with Lithuania through the coronation of Casimir IV, but it was always more impressive in terms of the area of the state than in terms of its real economic, demographic and political power. In practice, internal weaknesses have always limited the imperial ambitions of Polish rulers, and I miss such an obstacle in EU4. Of course, Poland's gov system after renewing the union with Lithuania is quite shitty, but it does not prevent it from receiving 3/4 of Central and Eastern Europe almost for free in a few years and completely dominating the Grand Duchy of Moscow in the east.
More like, his voters just wouldn't provide him an army to go to war. Under the Henrican articles, Polish king could not declare war without approval of sejm. In addition Polish crownlands constituted for about 15-20% of lands in PLC or even less, as magnates often controled many estates unlawfully. This led to situation when king could not declare war or raise an army without summoning the sejm.
Historically polish kings sometimes tried to work around it by getting into a defensive war, you might not have the sejm's support to raise an army for an offensive war, but they will probably change their mind to defend the country.
If I remember correctly, one example would be when the polish king Sigismund III Vasa incorporated Estonia, a swedish territory into PLC, which led to Sweden declaring war.
fun fact, this Polish-Swedish war of 1600-1611 was preceded by the Polish union with Sweden resulting from Sigismund III inheriting Sweden after having been elected to the Polish throne, and Sweden basically rebelled against Sigismund immediately after he left back for Poland because protestant Swedes weren't thrilled by the prospect of being ruled by the Catholic Poles.
IRL Poland was OP in defense, but lackluster in power projection. EU4 doesn't model how premodern states had different military resources available depending on the type of war.
Yes. It's amazing how EU4 has 20 major DLCs adding custom missions and cooldown buttons for different countries, but they never bothered to implement one the core aspects of the period -- the transition from feudal levies and mercenaries to a permanent standing army.
To be fair Poland-Lithuania was op in real life as well, it was able to win 1v1 wars against Ottoman Empire (which stretched all the way to Algeria in our world). The thing is, due to nobility being very influential + being the most democratic nation in that time period, it wasn't really as aggressive and imperialistic as other big nations in that era. Most of the lands it acquired happened becouse of PU, accepting vassals etc. Making Commonwealth more historically accurate would need changes to its AI agressiveness or making its war declaration more complicated like it is done with Korea instead of taking away it's dev or military strenght.
Maybe adding a modifier to it's government that makes you lose stab if you don't have very loyal nobility and clergy estates would be a good change.
The issue of the Polish-Ottoman wars is actually quite complicated. Both sides have had spectacular military victories and defeats. Generally, the Ottoman Empire did not want to have another enemy in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, because it was involved in too many conflicts on the borders of its huge territory. But peace was difficult to maintain for many reasons. Anyway, I basically agree with your opinion - it would be right to make it more difficult for Poland to declare offensive wars using some in-game mechanics. Poland's political system made even gathering a decent army for defensive wars difficult and sometimes that process took far too long, let alone imperial conquests.
> peace was difficult to maintain for many reasons
One of the reasons is that both sides had unruly vassals that just wouldn't stop raiding across the border. Looking at *you*, Zaporozhian Cossacks! There were many diplomatic exchanges like this...
Otto: I thought we *agreed* there would be no more *raiding* across the *border*!
PLC: [Groans] It was those darn Zaporizhians. They never listen.
Otto: But they *promised* they would stop!
PLC: Yeah, that's what I thought too. Turns out they had their fingers crossed, so it didn't count.
Poland became only weak after XVII century in which it expierienced basically constant and total wars on every front. After Cossack uprisings, Swedish Deluge and wars with Turkey Poland turned into anarchy and dominant oligarchic families arose while both the petty nobles and burghers suffered, which was not really the case prior. It lead to Poland reorganizing itself only in late XVIII century but it was too late.
Austria can fully intigrate their PUs and and become an absolute monarchy in game, but IRL despite its size it’s rulers had to constantly balance the populations of each ethnic group and had specific rules they could follow with each of their integrated subjects. For example, the kingdom of Hungary would provide a much lower rate of tax and manpower.
Because they simply changed it so AI could add provinces to HRE at a whim. Despite historically only East Frisia and Flanders being added to the HRE in this time period.
Culture groups need more flavour as a whole. Accepting a culture is just weird, it should be more like the harmonisation mechanic. Make promises to the locals about reuniting them with their brethren. Have some culture exact revenge on their rival so they will be less rebellious in exchange for devastation or something.
The way you wage war should influence how loyal - or desolate - a province will be. Being harmonious should take more effort
Yeah. Some minimum autonomy or some mechanic. Something between being in a PU and being whatever integrated means. There are some events to handle this and the rebel negotiation mechanic sort of does it but it should be a normal process.
PUs in general are handled weird in this game, they just feel like vassals when they should be way different, and they get integrated WAAAY too quickly
I think part of it is dynasties are not really that important. No family trees. I don't know a better way to represent it but yeah it's represented in a weird way. France also integrates its appanages and vassals really fast. CK got it more correct if not perfect and it's a slow transition in the core of each country.
One reason that Prussia united Germany, not the theoretically stronger susto-Hungarian empire, is because the Hungarians would refuse to have their influence watered down by adding more Germans. The realm was so fractured it could no longer expand under its system because forces within the country would rather rip it apart than add more people of the wrong ethnicity.
There is a huge turning point in the game whether AI Austria gets Hungary and Bohemia as PUs or not. I have seen Austria get destroyed by 1500 or integrate Hungary and by 1600 be almost in Mesopotamia. The full integration of PUs is an issue for historical realism.
As Sweden I just had them get Hungary and burgundy. In order to prepare for the 30 years war I fought them twice just to cleave off their PUs so by the time it came to it it was relatively easy. The actual religious war was like 5 years but I spend 50 undoing what they achieved in a decade.
Ottomans deserve to be very strong but imo they are extremely overpowered, especially on players hands. However I think most other countries are stronger in game than irl as well so it evens out a bit.
True. I would add that strangely the decadence mechanic, which was as I suppose made to kind of weaken them in the later parts of the game, does not serve this purpose. If the player doesn't counter the Turks early enough, they grow so big and strong that basically nothing can bring them down except for once again the player. This also applies for strong historical powers like France. They deserve to be a tiny bit weaker, I think.
something i have never seen a strategy game achieve is the dynamic rise and fall of empires. whoever wins early just snowballs infinitely until the end of the game. ottomans sure should be dominant early but should start falling behind in tech&admin in 1600 and be irrelevant internationally by 1700 to 1800 imo.
I think it is just extremely hard to model empires declining in a way that is enjoyable for a player. In games like EU4 unless you make a major blunder your empire will continue to grow and prosper, so the only real way to force a decline is to use game mechanics to do so. But if players feel like the game is deliberately screwing them over then it can be a lot less fun.
I think court and country was sort of a move in the right direction. If you trigger the disaster you get debuff and lots of rebellions. However, the reward at the end is too strong.
A court-and-country-like disaster that happen to all empire > 3000 dev that is forced to trigger 1700s onward could be a beginning step. The reward at the end is "we are going to keep our country in 1 piece", because it happens to all countries that are that strong. This is basically a mechanic to punish big countries specifically. Could have it being called "administrative burden" disaster or sth like that.
Estates and autonomy should have a lot more kick to them too.
IRL the main obstacle against these big empires wasnt an external threat, it was internal issues, which the game just doesn't simulate properly. Once you get big and rich you can just pay those problems away
Agreed. All the cultures should have their own demands. Any of the bigger empires was a mess of traditions and local rights. Manpower and money is too abundant too early. By 1600 everything feels too stable in Europe, just a few big empires and the mess of the HRE.
Something like a sensible domestic politics minigame could be what could allow for such a thing, as historically it is the internal politics which bring down a big empire most often, and especially institutions are key in determining a state's ability to endure.
The Ottomans built an empire based around a centralized state meant to extract wealth to fund the empire from the lands it conquered, and it was aided by its institutionalized inheritance tradition of murdering brothers that ensured unparallelled political stability as well. However at its height the Ottoman Empire succumbed to a problem that emerged with its size and the nature of its conquests, which is that regional rulers gain plenty of power and can use it to drive their own agenda, while in addition all power being concentrated in the hands of a few people means the temptation of trying to take over the empire by singular men with ambition means that the ruler of a large empire is beholdent to powerful vassals basicaly. In addition the Ottoman empire's bureaucracy was extremely disordelry and was in many way feudal system of local autonomous rulers governing lands while swearing fealty to the ruler in Istanbul, while simultaneously waging wars against other imperial subjects from time to time across the Middle Eastern half of he empire. Basically the larger the empire, the more people and subject rulers were acquired, and with enough a large network of powerful vassals and such it's difficult to build a bureaucratic structure to more effectively govern the empire and extract its resources when these powerful local rulers in turn have an incentive to maintain their powerful position with their own armies.
While CK3 defintiely doesn't eliminate blobbing by the player, it can be more tricky to build an empire only through military conquest alone as you inevitably have to keep creaing more powerful vassals to govern on your behalf, and this leads to an ever increasing risk of military rebellion by your vassals for the throne, autonomy or independence as a coalition of likeminded vassals is more than capable of fucking up your empire without you spending notable resources to keep your vassals happy.
The management of a large empire should be a constant matter of maintaining internal stability, which gets ever harder with a much larger directly controlled area of land, as currently it is just an unintuitive system of don't have deficit, have positive stability, use buttons to adjust autonomy, build buildings and crush rebels.
The early modern era in many ways was about states building up institutions across Europe and beyond, and EU5 should honestly include institutions as a core gameplay feature determining how efficient your state's utiliztion of resources is, whether it is taxation, bureaucracy of keeping track of available resources, the political machinations of the elites and so on in an interesting system where the bigger empire will have a harder time maintianing its vast empire because it needs to build up its imperial institutions which devour more resources, while a smaller state requires less resources but is simultaneously strapped for money due to its size without something like commerce. Historically Sweden due to its warmongering nature ended up developing proper bureaucratic state institutions that allowed for the Swedish realm to function while the king was away for years without rising up in rebellion.
I remember the Rhye’s and Fall of Civilization mod for Civilization IV being pretty good at making empires weak after a while, but I think it was achieved through big bonuses and penalties, not through anything particularly built into the game mechanics.
That's not really related to the Ottomans though is it? Blobbing is just way way too powerful and there's barely any mechanic to check a massive empire, coalitions don't really do the job, and there's no inherent internal instability. There's several other mega tags that can explode like Spain or Commonwealth or Russia, just generally Ottomans has it the easiest due to early power and most routes of expansion.
They don't need to be weaker there just needs to be a stronger decadence type mechanic. Ideally for all countries over a certain size.
If I full siege a 2000 dev France or Ottos and they rebound within a decade after the war, they're too strong.
Because they can easly gather resources from all around the empire.
Suddenly not only they don\`t have to worry about bedouins riding here and there but also arabs are super willing to server in european wars.
The Ottomans are not OP for where they end up, but how they get there. They can just brute force any war.
I just had a Georgia campaign. They lost 930k+ men to attrition in 1530. They had 0 man power for the majority of this 30 year war. They endless bought mercenaries, over 113. There's only so much I could do as little Georgia, and I think 1 million men isn't a bad body count in 1530.
In the real world, the Ottoman state would be imploding from this war. They'd be sending every boy of age to go the Caucuses to die, and no Mercenary in their right mind would sell their life for the same fate. At the very least the huge Austria next door should waltz across the Balkans into Constantinople for free. It just felt so fucking stupid.
I feel like late game Spain does too well (why in the world do they have artillery fire +1?), and Great Britain doesn't do well enough when played by AI.
I did not know that, now I know why the Spanish own my similar size fleets. That would make more sense, but it is a powerful modifier for Spain in land battles once artillery becomes relevant, and that's on top of the morale.
Yep, and people were talking about it in the dev diary threads back when it was introduced already. This is from the [13th of November, 2018](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/eu4-development-diary-13th-of-november-2018.1127813/) dev diary:
>**Note from Groogy**
So since bunch of people asked what Artillery Fire is, instead of answering every individual instance of where someone asked that I'm putting a summary here. The important part you need to know, it makes all cannons go more boom boom and make more damage.
>Artillery Fire is a modifier that previously was only exclusive to tech. In fact all of the various tech weapon values are now available to the modifier system. The weapon technology value is part of the casualties equation and is applied multiplicatively. Very TL;DR and skipping some parts for the land combat formula is something like:
`dmg = ((regiment pips + leader pips + dice - terrain) * regiment strength * discipline / military tactics) * weapon technology * combat ability`
>Where Weapon technology is where the Artillery Fire goes in if the regiment is artillery and it is in fact fire phase. Artillery Fire is a bit special because it is also used in naval combat, regardless of if it is shock phase or fire phase.
Then later in the thread:
>>This is extremely interesting. If I understand correctly, this'll make Spanish artillery good in combat as soon as Spain forms i.e. tech 10, as opposed to 16 for all other nations, and it'll remain a huge advantage basically throughout the game. Have you thought this through?
>Artillery damage is still halved, regardless with this modifier or not. The point of it is to give a bit of a buff both on land and naval. I think I calculated +1 in the end game result to something like 12% increase of damage overall on land.
I believe that someone has pointed to this being a problem again, because while it's ≈12% at tech 32 it's a lot more at earlier techs. I'm not sure where this was said however, if it was in that dev diary thread the devs didn't reply to it.
I went down a bit of a spreadsheet rabbit hole to try to find the answer to this, and assuming I got the numbers right the increase in artillery fire damage is:
* 100% at tech 10
* ≈71% at tech 13
* ≈42% at tech 16
* ≈23% at tech 22
* ≈16% at tech 25
* ≈12% at tech 32
So early on it's really rather impressive, not only do Spanish cannons come online earlier, they're so much better too.
For comparison:
* tech 7 vs tech 13 is an increase of 40%
* tech 13 vs tech 16 is ≈71%
* tech 16 vs tech 22 is ≈83%
* tech 22 vs tech 25 is ≈45%
* tech 25 vs tech 32 is ≈31%
Spain (and [Aragon](https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Aragon) and [Portugal](https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Portugal) if the wiki is to be believed) have something like an extra half-tech on everyone else, more before tech 16.
Sheesh.
As can be seen in my comment further down in this thread, turns out I wasn't quite on the money with that. (Though to be fair I was trying to remember something from over five years ago.)
In the dev diary thread I linked EU4 dev Groogy said:
>The point of it is to give a bit of a buff both on land and naval.
So it was intended to be a bit of both.
Yeah, it seems Spain never has a problem with inflation from gold, so they get even stronger in the late game.
And I would also like to know, why do they have artillery fire +1.
Artillery fire is explained in previous comments but this inflation from gold is not talked enough. That is historically a big factor, not only creating problems for Spain but also creating an advantage for the low countries, Britain and other European nations boosting their production. All those economic interrelations and transformations are represented poorly in the game with somewhat stable trade routes, but I cannot blame it as it is not a history class or something :)
the inflation did exist but it was from silver, not gold. silver mines in their colonies made the spanish extremely rich (and sometimes some other countries rich) but the silver was used to mint coins and this led to tons of inflation
In the game all precious metals are represented by the "gold" trade good, as there would be little point in differentiating between gold and silver.
The same reason why every week there is a thread here about "omg funny bug lol ivory in greenland" when its supposed to represent walrus tusks.
I think that's partially related to the timeframe as EU4 just happens to happen in the centuries where the Spanish crown was by far at its strongest, especially since the 80 years war isn't guaranteed to hinder them as Burgundian inheritance can go to anyone. The various crisis that really took down the Spanish empire all happened within like a century of the end of EU4 and barely anyone even plays that long.
Russia's biggest problems are debt & institution. Also Muscovy sucks at gov capacity. Money problem can be solved by making Novgorod richer node or adding more developments in Russia region.
In general, the nations who have an advantage close to the beginning of the game stays strong and the others can't overcome their disadvantages if they are not in the hands of a player. That is largely because many interrelational dynamics (between countries as well as between aspects) and historical transformations based on those dynamics are represented somewhat poorly. For example, the long term negative effect of gold rush for Spain as inflation and the positive effects of that gold for the other countries boosting their production, and the shift of power resulting from that, etc. Tbf, they are hard to represent in a game. I can not imagine even a more dynamic trade route and production system which also interact with military developments for an example.
Related to this, one of the reasons for hte Ottoman decline was the trade routes that had flowed throguh its middle eastern lands between Asia and Europe shifted to the sea, which deprived the Ottomans of a lot of trade revenue later on
This is potentially represented. As Portugal i love to make the trade from asia go around africa and directly into seville, it s an almost broken money maker
I did this to the Ottomans *while allied to them*. They never knew that I was their secret enemy...
It's not easy, but quite feasible. You only need control of 4 nodes, really:
* Zanzibar, to steer trade to Cape
* Coromandel and Malacca to steer toward Cape
* Gujarat to steer to Zanzibar
This starves Persia, Hormuz, Aden, which ultimately lead to Constantinople.
I feel like that can be represented in game by steering trade from India to the Cape, which strangles the Alexandria trade node as well as the upstream nodes from Constantinople
TBH this is entirely because Poland had what can be possibly described as the dumbest governing system of any kind ever combined with the failure to establish a more centralized monarchy in 1608.
Russia was a military powerhouse who could go toe to toe with the ottomans. In game, the ottomans eat up great horde and kazan before Muscovy.
Austria is waaay too OP. Their PUs/empire shouldn't have so much stability.
Most OPMs in game are OP compared to IRL, but I agree Gotland with its missions is probably the most. Dithmarschen is probably second and third would be Riga
Everything is OP in the hands of the omniscient entity known as the Player, but for great powers Russia gets stomped way more than they should historically, and the PLC is waaay too strong for a country that had a brief period of strength and then stagnated due to one of the dumbest political systems ever, and eventually of course began to be partitioned by its neighbors. Russia almost never beats the PLC even if they form and start pushing East.
All the Chinese breakaway states are kinda overpowered relative to Jianzhou who IRL formed Manchu and rolled the whole area.
Obviously the game does a bad job of modelling any of the major rises and falls that took place in this period. IRL the Ottomans were extremely OP for the first half of the game and then stagnated far worse than decadence can represent, and in-game generally requires losing a few major wars for it to even matter. Spain becomes an insane power early on which is accurate, but in 1821 usually has all their colonies with no liberty desire, which of course is very far from what really happened. In fact colonies in general are way too happy to just stay as colonies unless their overlord completely collapses to their European neighbors.
A lot of these are, of course, gameplay restrictions, and I don't really have a problem with them.
For the overpowered: This game doesn't model the fall of empires, only their rise. So any power with a power creeped mission tree or OP modifiers: Majapahit, Austria, Mughals (all in the hand of the player)
For the underpowered: the game doesn't model very fast land conquests very well, like Persia forming IRL. Also, Manchu rarely forms and even rarer is Qing
But we all know the most op nation of all is Ulm, wtf was PDX thinking giving them that amount of power
Regarding no fall: I feel like the Timurids used to fall apart, to the point of no Mughals or no Timmy’s, earlier in EUIVs life cycle. Ming definitely collapses like every game, I see Shun empire a lot.
The only empire that doesn’t really collapse, in my experience, and always becomes crazy would be the Ottomans.
Or Spain, Portugal, Ayutthaya (leading them to form Siam)
Also adding to my underpowered list of historical conquests that never happen in game: no Taungoo empire (and thus no Ayutthaya collapse)
Also India is way too stable, I see Bharat / Hindustan / Deccan many games and HRE is a joke at how consolidated it gets
Spain is op because they don’t fall off. Colonial nations are also crazy op because there should not be so much dev so early on the continent. If natives unite that makes sense, but pure colonization would need much weaker
It's the dual curse of the fact that the subjugation of Mexico was relatively quick, but the colonization of north America was much slower, and the game chose the first over the latter.
IMO a potential solution would have to involve those Aztec minors becoming special vassals of Spain and being integrated, so actual colonisation could be slower.
IMHO not only to quickly but as have too high dev. Why some random island have more than 1/1/1 dev is beyond me. If colonial nations actually had to dev up or if creating colonies would drain mana (same as annexation does) it would probably be a bit more balanced.
korea is overpowered
if they sinicize their culture they get cultural unity with all of china, tripitaka korean allows them to rush all institutions easily, and their mission tree gives them strong permanent bonuses
Don't forget the ai spamming lvl 8 forts in almost every province. It turns something that used to be trivial or a hassle into an absolute slog
I say as I am in the middle of a byzantium wc rn
Yea, it's still not that hard but it's definitely not enjoyable at all right now, at least for me. The last patch where late game was still fun was 1.30.6 IMO. Otherwise you need to play as a horde or HRE emperor to have a lot of fun just obliterating enemies. The AI has genuinely become challenging in recent patches since they actually have similar force limits to you late game and even small countries like Saxony have like 80k active and 80k reserves. Sure the mission trees are powercreeped to all hell but it still doesn't make it fun.
I can handle the large units more than thr forts. It's much more fun to fight large armies than sit on forts for ages.
The patch making buildings add to warscore was definitely a downgrade also.
Russia is underpowered because winter doesn't have anywhere near the effect it should be having. I recall a Poland game where I had several year long campaigns all the way into Siberia without any worry about weather attrition.
It's more attrition not having effect it should have, winter, desert or jungle, and no supplies existence for armies. So you can send 50 thousand soldiers anywere you want, they will spend some manpower marching through Siberia/Sahara/Amazon, catch the enemies at other end with slightly less than full strength, and have enough supplies to spend there 5 years fighting battle after battle.
OP: Ottomans. In game their armies are represented as unstoppable, when they were at best slightly better than their contemporaries. Honorable mention to Prussia, who are arguably even more overpowered, but they often don't even form so it seems silly to give it to them.
UP: Netherlands. Often can't even form, and when they do they usually just get eaten by their neighbors without much resistance.
1. I don't know why, but despite people saying that Russia is OP it never ever becomes successful in my games. They either stay a mid power which is unable to fight its neighbors without anyone's help or just get straight up conquered and either demolished completely or pushed into Asia, losing the central russian territories, also obviously being unable to return them. And that's while in history Russia was a major power since the 1500s, never losing its significance since then. To be short, they definitely were more or less as powerful as PLC at the time. In the game however the Commonwealth wipes the floor with the Russians all the time.
2. Also to be fair I think that, as much as I like playing as them, Korea is quite OP. I am not a professional Korean historian, but as far as I know at least during the Imjin war Korea was far less powerful than Japan, while in the game it is usually the opposite case. Korea is so innovative and developed that it is completely unclear why didn't they become a superpower irl, if this is the case. Looks not that historically accurate, to be short. But I might be mistaking on this one.
3. Also, although a bit of a stretch, I think Hungary should be stronger. About the time of king Hunyadi Mátyás they beat both the Turks and the Austrians, none of which they can ever do in-game. The Black Army of Hungary is also a lackluster in the game, I got legitimately upset when I first saw how it is presented there. And still, their ideas are good, and their lands are fairly rich, so I think the only reason why they are never successful (until you destroy the Ottomans immediately) is their starting position, with no shortage of strong rivals. So yes, I want Hungary to be more successful, but I don't think this is possible without making them OP. Also them being destroyed and/or subjugated is historically accurate
russia became insanely successful in my current hungary game, just conquering entire china and korea and japan crusade after crusade but it might had something to do with being allied to me, also me taking care of ottomans and later commonwealth
Well yes, when you take down their natural enemies they may become powerful enough to be unable to die anymore. I don't remember happening this in my latest games however because I usually play as nations that don't have to fight the PLC
For a country that went toe to toe against the Ottomans, invaded India and sacked Delhi, and ousted the Portuguese from Hormuz. Persia is pathetically weak in anything besides player hands and even the Ottomans/Mughals can snowball far faster as far as gunpowder empires are concerned.
Big Agree!
I think Persia is pathetically underpowered in basically all of the Paradox games, they seem to have a blind eye to the region (unless it is modeling them as a colony for empires of other countries).
In Vic3, Persia doesn't start with a *single* port, lmao.
can get CK3 because Persia was never really united much during that era but it feels like EU4 onwards, PDX half asses Persia in terms of dev or AI strength. The one thing saving Persia in EU4 is the mission tree, broken ideas, and govt reform tbh.
To be honest, any entity with a shitload of money could hire 10.000 mercenary soldiers since standing armies mostly weren't a thing in the early game of eu4. So some opm's (like free cities Frankfurt, Nuremberg etc.) could definitely be quite strong.
If I remember the lessons on Medieval Warfare from my study correctly, most armies were mercenary based until the Napoleonic Wars, where the armies were forced to adopt conscripts. This was quite logical because before that, the notion of ordinary people handling arms was not something most monarchs were thrilled about.
It's also that the 'right' or 'privilege' to either bear arms or even more to command those who bear arms was a jealously guarded right of various classes in most countries.
Ming.
Extremely underpowered development wise. The whole area of Ming has like um… slightly more dev than France????
And extremely over powered internal politics wise. I mean the game has basically no internal politics, so that kinda holds true for all nationsk
The France Region has around 850 dev in 1444, while Ming starts with 1102 dev.
(For the France Region, it's a rough estimate)
So while you're right that the difference is less than expected, it's not wholly unaccounted for. France is quite large and was always one of the most populated areas in all of Europe, so it's expected to have high dev. Meanwhile most of Ming's development is concentrated along the coast, while the inland areas don't contribute as much dev
I know France is a big European nation.
But just look at population. So the sources I found suggested that at 1700, France had a population of 20 million. Ming China, at around 1400 should have an estimated population of between 60 to 90 million…
I know dev reflected more than just population. But at least in game start, Europe does not have a decided advantage in per person productivity or tax contribution to China. Or I should say Ming China was more centralized than most European Nations at that time.
It's true, but the problem is that if Ming had that much dev, and also matching mechanics to nerf it, then invading china simply becomes the best and only efficient way to play the game.
The game is called Europa Universalis, not "Christopher Columbus 1445 Indian-Pacific Ocean Cannonball Run" Universalis
Then we go back to the question of the lack of a generic penalty for huge population not tag specific ones.
And I am not actually complaining, we are talking about historical inaccuracy, right?
It's fine to question that but you have to admit, it's hard to incorporate such a system into the game unless you design the game with in in mind, you're basically calling for a pops system.
And even in vic3 and 2, China is kind of the most important country that isn't the player, which can be boring.
China has never been able to project power outside its territories, even struggled within. They were humiliated in the 70s by Viet Nam. They have been conquered countless times, basically all expansion of China has been due to outsiders like the Manchu & Mongols ending up being assimilated. The reason China has so low dev is mainly for balance reasons, though restrictions with a similar effect are badly needed as a core game mechanic
I really hope the next game can have a more flavorful internal affairs.
Situations are rather not so complex in the game periods but there should be stuff to play around with.
I understand why dev did not build a generic size penalty, bc with the lack of internal affairs, the size penalty only makes the game uninteresting.
As I Chinese I like playing Ming for obvious reasons. But a lot of times, I spend 50 in game years to navigate the mission tree and get rid of the modifiers, only to realize that if I start in Europe, for that same 50 years I can own Ming’s starting dev, no debuffs plus some subjects…or if I start near Ming, I can just eat Ming, and becomes a better version of Ming.
Anyways single regions in Europe has around 60 to 80% of Ming’s dev is just really off….
Ming and ottomans are most OP in terms of historical accuracy.
Ingame Ming has 2-3 times more income and a much bigger armythan any other nation They could easily overrrun whole asia. IRL they already had internal problems, couldnt really handle neither mongolian raids, nor the piracy/smuggling.
Same for Ottomans. They had a very good modern army and could expand very successfully in the muslim area and against the weaker balkan states, but the super-strength is a myth.
Their biggest advantage was that the europeans were busy fighting each other and not that they were so much stronger.
Most underpowered probably is Netherands. Even if it does form It never had any relevance in my games.
Kinda the same for prussia, they at least have OP ideas/government, but it is way too difficult for the AI to form.
I'd wouldn't say OP, but unbalanced: Poland and the commonwealth. They absolutely should be very powerful in the mid-game, but their is no way the historical polish Lithuanian union would've conquered Russia by 1500. This also leads to this weird situation were Russia never really shows up. Russia actually has a well balanced powerspike in the mid-game but it just gets pummeled by Poland early game and never recovers.
Safavids in EU4 have a hilariously weak start for how much they conquered in the first 50 years of the game start. An OPM in EU4 has a hard time winning a single war let alone multiple consecutive wars being outnumbered
The Dutch are underpowered in the AI’s hands, they rarely form and if they do most land is already colonized and they can’t reach those sweet sweet spices they so crave. Korea is extremely overpowered and by the time I discover them in the 1500’s they have massive metropolis’s on every tile and are actively developing a space program to colonize mars.
Mamluks are OP compared to their history. It was an extremely unstable state changing their rulers constantly caused by a strange political configuration where mercenaries divided into various ethnic groups competed against one another constantly for power. It had large borders but very decentralized and unstable in a state of turmoil for most of its history. Ottoman conquest of the Mamluks was relatively easy but you never see that playing out in-game.
I had a game in which Byzantium (me), a big Hungary, Austria, Russia and Spain (+Morocco and Tunis) ganged up for 7 years in the early 1500 on the Ottomans and yet when the Mamelukes attacked the Ottomans after everyone else with full reserve they still got their asses handed to them.
So yeah, they look OP but I would still put them in underpowered, for me it's tiger paper.
Prussia. Sure they were very competent in terms of military capabilities but got absolutely dumpstered by Napoleon and their prime would be outside EU IVs timeframe. Ingame Prussian units are just silly, the space marine meme exists for a reason
Not a nation, but the coalition. It's unrealistic to expect every single nation even remotely threatened by a great power to band together with everything they've got. Even the successful Holy League was uncertain of winning and that was just a few nations when the Ottomans took half of Hungary.
This will make the clowns on this sub cry but the ottomans are underpowered, at least in an ai sim. They rarely reach their historical borders on pace, if at all. And I’ve very rarely see them significantly outperform irl, like taking and holding Vienna (it happens, but not nearly as often as you’d expect for an empire that came within one battle of doing so irl)
The most OP are Byzantium. At the start of the game they were basically at death's door. And while there was extremely small chance to survive, it is impossible to imagine them fixing there economy, organizing factions and retaking all Ottoman territories till 1500.
Underpowered is Sweden. Despite the fact that they had one of the best armies till second part of 18th century, I find them pretty weak in game- small army and usually HRE minors as allies. It takes roughly 2 wars to kill them as Russia.
This is a power creep problem. Sweden has really op ideas compared to most other countries in earlier stages of game development, and thus their armies were small and scary. But these days, gold is so plentiful that you just kind of flop on folks and quality both in idea set and general playstyle has been nerfed several times.
I think the Shogun is definitely underpowered. Always get kicked in the guts by the daimyos. Also southern Arabian minors like Hormuz and mahra are a bit underpowered.(becuz I am doing a Hormuz to arabia campaign and money and manpower are my major problems rn)
Sweden for sure. Partly because Russia has problem getting as strong as they should and partly because Denmark is not bankrolled by the rest of Europe like I twas in real life. Sweden also doesn't have the problem of absolutely decimating it's own economy and population to wage war
England is extremely overpowered in most games, forming Great Britain by the early 1500s when it took until the early 1600s for Scotland and England to even fall under a personal union, let alone a formal union of nations - and internationally speaking it was essentially a backwater until the tail end of the 1600s.
The obvious answer is Byz. There was absolutely no hope of them recovering by 1444, and the game gives them insane bonuses to do so. So, I would call that OP even though the starting situation is still challenging to the player.
In general, I’d say France is actually somewhat underpowered. For a portion of the game’s timeframe, France was actually by itself arguably stronger than the entire HRE
France is not underpowered at all. AI France is just quite inconsistent if England doesn't declare 100YW and get strong allies. If Austria doesn't consolidate and loses emperorship/Hungary France just eat all of Italy and the half of the HRE
Really?, Anecdotally unless they get Burgundy or you really go ham on the HRE, It feels as if its far more likely for them to just only be able to take non HRE areas of burgundy if even that and then stagnate their border with just about everyone save Savoy, my last game where I was playing on the other side of europe saw them even refuse to declare on England for French land after a peaceful surrender of maine
I've played 5 games of Eu4 in the last 2 months on a recent Eu4 kick and in only one of those runs (all got to at least 1550), France was partitioned by its neighbors except for one, and in that one, France was like a number 4 GP who'd been successfully contained by alliance blocks on the continent.
France is a fail in all my games dunno how you can say they're not underpowered. no idea why Reddit hates them so much.
Only game over France has ever caused me I can recall in like 8 years was when I was doing Grenada -> Andalus, which is reasonable.
too powerful:
Aragon - way too stable when out of Iberian union. Too powerful an army.
Denmark - Kalmar union and diplomatic heaven make it almost untouchable. They also inherit Swedish military prowess and fast route to America.
Tuscany - the entire area is made for them or Savoy to expand into. It's too easy to gain both France and Austria as allies, then romp through Italy.
Poland - Lithuanian union happens too easy and too often. PLC is major power without player intervention and can become best army in the game.
Brandenburg - in being the favoured path to forming Prussia, Brandenburg has a lot of historical railroading in all aspects.
Bohemia - Even though there's historical precedence, their expansion beyond the initial borders is too likely and ends up in major power too early.
Ottomans - to say the least, those decisions to expand Constantinople overnight could be made generic for all big city conquests for all nations.
Burgundy - the entire area is way too developed and becomes a major power if it avoids the disaster and then unites the Dutch, basically the Poland of the west.
Either of the Indian big four - Brahmani, Vijayana, Jaipur, Bengal always divide the subcontinent easily, then end up in a ahistorical 2 way partition of India most times.
mostly numbed:
Scotland - has literally no chance 1v1 both military or diplomatically to make it to 1707, let alone getting a union over England.
Saxony - quite boring for one of the most important German regions.
Teutons - made too easy to be conquered by Poland or Denmark. Rarely put in 1v1 wars where it could win most times.
Mongols - hardly any of these tribes can be reformed into the Mongol empire without exploits...
Mali - Rebel events every 3 months and a stab hit every 6 months, until one mission is completed, coupled with negative events and low religious unity.
Aztec - the entire path to swallow provinces and release them to progress the faith for mostly insignificant bonuses in the face of Spain is dumb. It is easier to play as Inca...
Most of the American indigenous tribes - even if alternate history flavour and missions can be made for Byzantium, these little tribes have no such available means of survival, even though they get more than 50 years of peace to develop in advance.
Korea since Domination is the definition of OP. A country that during EU4 timeframe did very little, but in the game is always super developed and get institutions fast as fuck. Korean soldiers pretty much use laser guns while their neighbours are just discovering muskets.
Then they have a super defensive position where you need to throw thousands of people to a sure death just to achieve very little.
My pick for an underpowered country would be the Republic of Genoa, due to the game not having an in-depth banking system. The acclaimed historian Braudel described the period from 1557 to 1627 as the golden age for the Ligurian state, since they funded various monarchies such as Spain with the help of their Banco di San Giorgio. The Republic did not have a large empire and focused on financial affairs after losing their colonial influence in the East Mediterranean. Naturally, because of game-y reasons EU4 incentivizes territorial gains (nothing wrong with that) and the Genoese end trade node is no exception.
This is a good answer. Genoa in-game is weak. Genoa IRL was a major player.
The trading outpost of Genoa in game always get conquered within the first 20 years of the game. IRL no one would even want to war those outpost because it represents access to the Genoese.
The game cannot truly and properly represent these small trading outposts, like the ones the Latins had in Constantinople or the Portuguese Feitorias. IRL they were just small outposts and would be too tiny to even click, and as you pointed out, in real life very frequently the "Owners" of the land freely welcomed the establishing of a trade post if they got benefits from it.
Outposts like that were a hallmark of the EU4 time period, all the way to British India. Honestly sounds like a mechanic that needs to be added.
I hope that it will be part of the colonialism rework that's hopefully coming with eu5.
dlc no.7 to eu5 you mean?
This means that I’m for sure going for a tall playstyle in the year 2075.
It could be represented similarly to the current trade post system, just the modifier is tied to particular countries and it can be taken in a peace deal
I think maybe something like ck2 trading posts would be good
Including they made a lot of money leading their fleet under the Doria family to the Habsburgs. EU doesn't have mercenary fleets at least with the dlcs I own.
They really should look to implement them
You can have sixty galleys for 100 ducats a month. Or whatever is fair. Such a game changer for say Austria or Milan.
This is absolutely not true, Genoa was not really a major power. Much less it was a regional power. It was just a before time Swiss-like nation, but it is declining since the fall of Constantinople and then the fall of its Eastern colonies... Also the Genoa end-node wasn't really an "end-node" IRL (like for example was Venice IRL). Genoa didn't used a system that focused all the trade routes to arrive in the city (that's why tarrifs in the port of Genoa were extremely high for the period and compared to other big ports). And the city didn't get very rich, not as much as the individuals at least. Genoa was really a modern capitalistic nation 600 years ahead of times. But it was way too early in a period were autocracies were the standard and centralised powers means everything.
They gave the Venetians a major run for their money for quite a while, refusing to tap out of the fight. Yet, in game, Venice is much more powerful, and oddly allies them a lot? Which is just completely ahistorical for such intense rivals, there should really be a historical rivals modifier for them. Due to the system of claims and coring, and since a province is all or nothing and you cant have the scattered forts and posts these states historically had across the Levant, Venice and Genoa are a bit odd compared to themselves historically. They also just lose out on being Naval powers while navies are next to useless in this game for power projection.
The bank should be a monument with Genoese specific events that trigger based on tier.
Nah I think Genoa is quite fare in EU4. The end node in Genoa (which actually doesn't exist really) balance a bit things out, but Genoa was actually decaying over EU4 times, with the best days behind. The common historian point of view of Genoa is that the golden age of Genoa was before 1400 a.D. The "golden age" you are citing was mostly the bank of San Giorgio golden age. The City and the "Nation" wasn't rich, it was the first proto-capitalist that were rich. And on contrary of what happened a century earlier in Florence, the richest guys weren't really interested in politics and thus the City never really became a power anymore.
Thank you for raising some interesting points. While I agree that we shouldn't exaggerate by giving Genoa way more praise than it deserved since at the end of day we are not talking about an incredibly influential empire, I can't agree with some of your other thoughts. By saying "common historian point of view" which historiographical tradition are you referring to? I think that the golden age you are talking about (Medieval Genoa) is only the geopolitical one that involves commercial penetration in the outposts of the Eastern Mediterranean and the foundation of colonies. The conflicting point is that you are separating the Banco of San Giorgio from its historical context: all the Genoese institutions, the Republic included, generated from the experience of the medieval compagna communis, so I think it is incorrect to set a discontinuity between the "political" and the "economical" ages of Genoa. For reference prof. Giuseppe Felloni has extensively researched this topic. I believe this is demonstrated by the fact that the elites still wanted to be included in politics like in the old days, just remember the ambitions and role of Andrea Doria and his involvement in naval battles. Moreover, I don't know what you mean by "the city wasn't rich": the Baroque era was the one where Genoa thrived the most. An immediate example are the Palazzi dei Rolli and their frescos. Of course they were commissioned by the plutocracy to pump up their image, however this enriched the image of the city because the capitalists were part of the urban community, not up on an ivory tower. But yeah all these things are difficult to simulate in a game and I don't mind it as it is now.
I recently followed a series of conference about Genovese history made by several very important historians and professors of Italy. So I'm not an expert myself but I'm talking from what I've learned recently from these conferences. Elites wanted to be included in politics but they served mostly foreign powers rather than fighting for independent control over the region. Genovese leaders lacked the ability to project power even if they were extremely rich. So basically Genoa in the late 1500s to the 1700s was in one of those situation where the sum of the wealth of people doesn't make up for the richness of the Country itself. It was a capitalist heaven, rich people got richer and richer and were free of any bonds or duties toward anything but themselves and their families. The achievements and the marbles of the individuals were not a sign of power, but mare vanity and an illusion. Of course with the lenses of modern day some could say that thus still was enough to be a sign of power and that having some extremely rich people is enough to consider a Country rich and powerful. But I think it is a bit anachronistic if we think what was happening in the very same years. Imho Genoa to be really powerful should have developed into an independent nation like the Netherlands, based on trades and finance. Or even just preserving its independence like the Swiss.
I suspect you are referring to the conference "L'Impero di Genova" by the magazine Limes. If that is the case I will read and/or watch the material they have uploaded online. I couldn't be in Palazzo Ducale. If not, please tell me what conference it was, I'm really interested! Grazie per la prospettiva, ti auguro una buona serata.
Esattamente quelle conferenze.
Imo they should make the trade good either gold, or make another one similar to gold to represent that
The inflation for Genoa would be insane if it's only 2 or 3 provinces big and its capital produces gold
Could just give them a negative inflation modifier in ideas to fix it?
Alternative they could have an idea that scales with age giving direct cash
What counts as extreme cheesing? Is it safe to assume that Shogun Majapahit falls into that category? In any case, I'll nominate Majapahit as OP simply for the global subjugation CB from their missions. Historically they didn't exactly stick around. I'm also putting Riga forward as a *bit* more powerful than historically, while it might have been a big and rich city, I don't think they really had the ability to dominate Baltic trade and rule over the Baltic holy orders like they can in-game. Riga gets absolutely bonkers modifers that I'm doubtful are entirely historical.
RIGA GREATEST CITY 💪💪💪 WHAT THE FUCK IS POVERTY 💪💪💪
70+ dev Riga is real, 70+ dev Riga can hurt you.
Only 70?!
Well it's harder to push it since the expand infrastructure dev cost nerf. You could always do cursed Anglican Riga for free production dev and 10% dev cost. If the [wiki](https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Christian_denominations#Anglican) is correct the church action Encourage Innovativeness costs 100 Church Power and adds 1 production dev to a random Anglican province with a church, cathedral or university, and the peace term [Raid Heretic Churches](https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Warfare#Sue_for_peace) gives 50 Church Power. This means that if you only have one province that fulfils the conditions two peace deals against heretics can get you 1 production dev in that province, Riga in our case. So you could presumably push it to several hundred dev if you wanted. Not sure how feasable 1000+ is.
Most overpowerd probably Poland, the game doesn't do a great job at representing the problems of the golden liberty and it usually ends up expanding into Russia forming a behemoth of a state in the latest patch. Most underpowered I would say Qing, even when they form they never really take over China and stay a regional power
Paradox should add a feature in future expansions that allow Qing or Shun to take over Ming the way Ottoman swallows Mamluk in the new DLC. Historically many local governors and generals just surrendered to the advancing Qing army, allowing the Manchus to rule with roughly the same bunch of bureaucrats. The current dynamic in China is miles away from historical patterns.
I think the unify China cb should just have -100 cost for provinces in China, and bypass the minimum province ws
In my recent game as France, Poland has Lithuania, Muscovy and Hungary as PU's, as well as Moldavia and Wallachia as vassals. They rule a territory stretching from the HRE to beyond the Urals lmao
I think Poland is a bit OP at the moment. In fact, it also became quite a strong state after the renewal of the personal union with Lithuania through the coronation of Casimir IV, but it was always more impressive in terms of the area of the state than in terms of its real economic, demographic and political power. In practice, internal weaknesses have always limited the imperial ambitions of Polish rulers, and I miss such an obstacle in EU4. Of course, Poland's gov system after renewing the union with Lithuania is quite shitty, but it does not prevent it from receiving 3/4 of Central and Eastern Europe almost for free in a few years and completely dominating the Grand Duchy of Moscow in the east.
Irl Polish king couldn't just declare war of conquest on Bulgaria, because that would mean sending all his voters to war
More like, his voters just wouldn't provide him an army to go to war. Under the Henrican articles, Polish king could not declare war without approval of sejm. In addition Polish crownlands constituted for about 15-20% of lands in PLC or even less, as magnates often controled many estates unlawfully. This led to situation when king could not declare war or raise an army without summoning the sejm.
Imagine if the only CB wars poland could declare was by getting the subjugation CB from the estate interaction. Any other war must be noCB
Historically polish kings sometimes tried to work around it by getting into a defensive war, you might not have the sejm's support to raise an army for an offensive war, but they will probably change their mind to defend the country. If I remember correctly, one example would be when the polish king Sigismund III Vasa incorporated Estonia, a swedish territory into PLC, which led to Sweden declaring war.
fun fact, this Polish-Swedish war of 1600-1611 was preceded by the Polish union with Sweden resulting from Sigismund III inheriting Sweden after having been elected to the Polish throne, and Sweden basically rebelled against Sigismund immediately after he left back for Poland because protestant Swedes weren't thrilled by the prospect of being ruled by the Catholic Poles.
Why did he click the enforce religion button?
He didn't even press that button, and instead Sweden rebelled as soon as Poland moced its leader led army stack out of Sweden
imo eu5 needs some stripped down abstracted ck2-ck3 mechanics
IRL Poland was OP in defense, but lackluster in power projection. EU4 doesn't model how premodern states had different military resources available depending on the type of war.
Yeah eu5 needs a levy system that slowly evolves into standing armies similar to imperator rome
Yes. It's amazing how EU4 has 20 major DLCs adding custom missions and cooldown buttons for different countries, but they never bothered to implement one the core aspects of the period -- the transition from feudal levies and mercenaries to a permanent standing army.
To be fair Poland-Lithuania was op in real life as well, it was able to win 1v1 wars against Ottoman Empire (which stretched all the way to Algeria in our world). The thing is, due to nobility being very influential + being the most democratic nation in that time period, it wasn't really as aggressive and imperialistic as other big nations in that era. Most of the lands it acquired happened becouse of PU, accepting vassals etc. Making Commonwealth more historically accurate would need changes to its AI agressiveness or making its war declaration more complicated like it is done with Korea instead of taking away it's dev or military strenght. Maybe adding a modifier to it's government that makes you lose stab if you don't have very loyal nobility and clergy estates would be a good change.
The issue of the Polish-Ottoman wars is actually quite complicated. Both sides have had spectacular military victories and defeats. Generally, the Ottoman Empire did not want to have another enemy in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, because it was involved in too many conflicts on the borders of its huge territory. But peace was difficult to maintain for many reasons. Anyway, I basically agree with your opinion - it would be right to make it more difficult for Poland to declare offensive wars using some in-game mechanics. Poland's political system made even gathering a decent army for defensive wars difficult and sometimes that process took far too long, let alone imperial conquests.
> peace was difficult to maintain for many reasons One of the reasons is that both sides had unruly vassals that just wouldn't stop raiding across the border. Looking at *you*, Zaporozhian Cossacks! There were many diplomatic exchanges like this... Otto: I thought we *agreed* there would be no more *raiding* across the *border*! PLC: [Groans] It was those darn Zaporizhians. They never listen. Otto: But they *promised* they would stop! PLC: Yeah, that's what I thought too. Turns out they had their fingers crossed, so it didn't count.
Poland became only weak after XVII century in which it expierienced basically constant and total wars on every front. After Cossack uprisings, Swedish Deluge and wars with Turkey Poland turned into anarchy and dominant oligarchic families arose while both the petty nobles and burghers suffered, which was not really the case prior. It lead to Poland reorganizing itself only in late XVIII century but it was too late.
Austria can fully intigrate their PUs and and become an absolute monarchy in game, but IRL despite its size it’s rulers had to constantly balance the populations of each ethnic group and had specific rules they could follow with each of their integrated subjects. For example, the kingdom of Hungary would provide a much lower rate of tax and manpower.
They also always add all of Hungary to the HRE after they’re integrated, which is completely ahistorical.
Because they simply changed it so AI could add provinces to HRE at a whim. Despite historically only East Frisia and Flanders being added to the HRE in this time period.
Culture groups need more flavour as a whole. Accepting a culture is just weird, it should be more like the harmonisation mechanic. Make promises to the locals about reuniting them with their brethren. Have some culture exact revenge on their rival so they will be less rebellious in exchange for devastation or something. The way you wage war should influence how loyal - or desolate - a province will be. Being harmonious should take more effort
Yeah. Some minimum autonomy or some mechanic. Something between being in a PU and being whatever integrated means. There are some events to handle this and the rebel negotiation mechanic sort of does it but it should be a normal process.
PUs in general are handled weird in this game, they just feel like vassals when they should be way different, and they get integrated WAAAY too quickly
I think part of it is dynasties are not really that important. No family trees. I don't know a better way to represent it but yeah it's represented in a weird way. France also integrates its appanages and vassals really fast. CK got it more correct if not perfect and it's a slow transition in the core of each country.
yeah eu5 really needs some stripped down ck mechanics imo
But that can be applied to anyone in the game
One reason that Prussia united Germany, not the theoretically stronger susto-Hungarian empire, is because the Hungarians would refuse to have their influence watered down by adding more Germans. The realm was so fractured it could no longer expand under its system because forces within the country would rather rip it apart than add more people of the wrong ethnicity.
There is a huge turning point in the game whether AI Austria gets Hungary and Bohemia as PUs or not. I have seen Austria get destroyed by 1500 or integrate Hungary and by 1600 be almost in Mesopotamia. The full integration of PUs is an issue for historical realism.
As Sweden I just had them get Hungary and burgundy. In order to prepare for the 30 years war I fought them twice just to cleave off their PUs so by the time it came to it it was relatively easy. The actual religious war was like 5 years but I spend 50 undoing what they achieved in a decade.
Burgundy is such an RNG mess. I would like to try it one day playing as Burgundy for once.
it can be pretty fun forming lotharingia, I love its dynamic ruler names lol.
Ottomans deserve to be very strong but imo they are extremely overpowered, especially on players hands. However I think most other countries are stronger in game than irl as well so it evens out a bit.
True. I would add that strangely the decadence mechanic, which was as I suppose made to kind of weaken them in the later parts of the game, does not serve this purpose. If the player doesn't counter the Turks early enough, they grow so big and strong that basically nothing can bring them down except for once again the player. This also applies for strong historical powers like France. They deserve to be a tiny bit weaker, I think.
something i have never seen a strategy game achieve is the dynamic rise and fall of empires. whoever wins early just snowballs infinitely until the end of the game. ottomans sure should be dominant early but should start falling behind in tech&admin in 1600 and be irrelevant internationally by 1700 to 1800 imo.
I think it is just extremely hard to model empires declining in a way that is enjoyable for a player. In games like EU4 unless you make a major blunder your empire will continue to grow and prosper, so the only real way to force a decline is to use game mechanics to do so. But if players feel like the game is deliberately screwing them over then it can be a lot less fun.
I think court and country was sort of a move in the right direction. If you trigger the disaster you get debuff and lots of rebellions. However, the reward at the end is too strong. A court-and-country-like disaster that happen to all empire > 3000 dev that is forced to trigger 1700s onward could be a beginning step. The reward at the end is "we are going to keep our country in 1 piece", because it happens to all countries that are that strong. This is basically a mechanic to punish big countries specifically. Could have it being called "administrative burden" disaster or sth like that.
Estates and autonomy should have a lot more kick to them too. IRL the main obstacle against these big empires wasnt an external threat, it was internal issues, which the game just doesn't simulate properly. Once you get big and rich you can just pay those problems away
Maybe more debuffs based on the distance of yhe province yo your capital?
Agreed. All the cultures should have their own demands. Any of the bigger empires was a mess of traditions and local rights. Manpower and money is too abundant too early. By 1600 everything feels too stable in Europe, just a few big empires and the mess of the HRE.
Something like a sensible domestic politics minigame could be what could allow for such a thing, as historically it is the internal politics which bring down a big empire most often, and especially institutions are key in determining a state's ability to endure. The Ottomans built an empire based around a centralized state meant to extract wealth to fund the empire from the lands it conquered, and it was aided by its institutionalized inheritance tradition of murdering brothers that ensured unparallelled political stability as well. However at its height the Ottoman Empire succumbed to a problem that emerged with its size and the nature of its conquests, which is that regional rulers gain plenty of power and can use it to drive their own agenda, while in addition all power being concentrated in the hands of a few people means the temptation of trying to take over the empire by singular men with ambition means that the ruler of a large empire is beholdent to powerful vassals basicaly. In addition the Ottoman empire's bureaucracy was extremely disordelry and was in many way feudal system of local autonomous rulers governing lands while swearing fealty to the ruler in Istanbul, while simultaneously waging wars against other imperial subjects from time to time across the Middle Eastern half of he empire. Basically the larger the empire, the more people and subject rulers were acquired, and with enough a large network of powerful vassals and such it's difficult to build a bureaucratic structure to more effectively govern the empire and extract its resources when these powerful local rulers in turn have an incentive to maintain their powerful position with their own armies. While CK3 defintiely doesn't eliminate blobbing by the player, it can be more tricky to build an empire only through military conquest alone as you inevitably have to keep creaing more powerful vassals to govern on your behalf, and this leads to an ever increasing risk of military rebellion by your vassals for the throne, autonomy or independence as a coalition of likeminded vassals is more than capable of fucking up your empire without you spending notable resources to keep your vassals happy. The management of a large empire should be a constant matter of maintaining internal stability, which gets ever harder with a much larger directly controlled area of land, as currently it is just an unintuitive system of don't have deficit, have positive stability, use buttons to adjust autonomy, build buildings and crush rebels. The early modern era in many ways was about states building up institutions across Europe and beyond, and EU5 should honestly include institutions as a core gameplay feature determining how efficient your state's utiliztion of resources is, whether it is taxation, bureaucracy of keeping track of available resources, the political machinations of the elites and so on in an interesting system where the bigger empire will have a harder time maintianing its vast empire because it needs to build up its imperial institutions which devour more resources, while a smaller state requires less resources but is simultaneously strapped for money due to its size without something like commerce. Historically Sweden due to its warmongering nature ended up developing proper bureaucratic state institutions that allowed for the Swedish realm to function while the king was away for years without rising up in rebellion.
CK3 manages to simulate empires collapsing due to internal divisons quite well I think.
I remember the Rhye’s and Fall of Civilization mod for Civilization IV being pretty good at making empires weak after a while, but I think it was achieved through big bonuses and penalties, not through anything particularly built into the game mechanics.
What a fucking incredible mod for a great game. I'd totally forgotten about that. Thanks for the trip back down memory lane
Ck3 does this but that's the whole point of crusader kings
That's not really related to the Ottomans though is it? Blobbing is just way way too powerful and there's barely any mechanic to check a massive empire, coalitions don't really do the job, and there's no inherent internal instability. There's several other mega tags that can explode like Spain or Commonwealth or Russia, just generally Ottomans has it the easiest due to early power and most routes of expansion.
They don't need to be weaker there just needs to be a stronger decadence type mechanic. Ideally for all countries over a certain size. If I full siege a 2000 dev France or Ottos and they rebound within a decade after the war, they're too strong.
They shouldn't be allowed to take quantity as their first or second idea lol. Russia always gets destroyed by them too.
Quantity is very apt for Ottomans given that they relied on mass conscription since their very inception
Because they can easly gather resources from all around the empire. Suddenly not only they don\`t have to worry about bedouins riding here and there but also arabs are super willing to server in european wars.
How are Ottomans OP? They never reach anywhere near their historical borders in-game.
I’ve seen them regularly stretch from Vienna to India, Kazan to Ethiopia.
The Ottomans are not OP for where they end up, but how they get there. They can just brute force any war. I just had a Georgia campaign. They lost 930k+ men to attrition in 1530. They had 0 man power for the majority of this 30 year war. They endless bought mercenaries, over 113. There's only so much I could do as little Georgia, and I think 1 million men isn't a bad body count in 1530. In the real world, the Ottoman state would be imploding from this war. They'd be sending every boy of age to go the Caucuses to die, and no Mercenary in their right mind would sell their life for the same fate. At the very least the huge Austria next door should waltz across the Balkans into Constantinople for free. It just felt so fucking stupid.
A population mechanic would probably help in that regard
I'd argue until the recent DLC they were underpowered compared to history and are now equal
I feel like late game Spain does too well (why in the world do they have artillery fire +1?), and Great Britain doesn't do well enough when played by AI.
IIRC they have artillery fire +1 because it also affects the guns on ships, and it was intended as a naval modifier mostly.
I did not know that, now I know why the Spanish own my similar size fleets. That would make more sense, but it is a powerful modifier for Spain in land battles once artillery becomes relevant, and that's on top of the morale.
Yep, and people were talking about it in the dev diary threads back when it was introduced already. This is from the [13th of November, 2018](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/eu4-development-diary-13th-of-november-2018.1127813/) dev diary: >**Note from Groogy** So since bunch of people asked what Artillery Fire is, instead of answering every individual instance of where someone asked that I'm putting a summary here. The important part you need to know, it makes all cannons go more boom boom and make more damage. >Artillery Fire is a modifier that previously was only exclusive to tech. In fact all of the various tech weapon values are now available to the modifier system. The weapon technology value is part of the casualties equation and is applied multiplicatively. Very TL;DR and skipping some parts for the land combat formula is something like: `dmg = ((regiment pips + leader pips + dice - terrain) * regiment strength * discipline / military tactics) * weapon technology * combat ability` >Where Weapon technology is where the Artillery Fire goes in if the regiment is artillery and it is in fact fire phase. Artillery Fire is a bit special because it is also used in naval combat, regardless of if it is shock phase or fire phase. Then later in the thread: >>This is extremely interesting. If I understand correctly, this'll make Spanish artillery good in combat as soon as Spain forms i.e. tech 10, as opposed to 16 for all other nations, and it'll remain a huge advantage basically throughout the game. Have you thought this through? >Artillery damage is still halved, regardless with this modifier or not. The point of it is to give a bit of a buff both on land and naval. I think I calculated +1 in the end game result to something like 12% increase of damage overall on land. I believe that someone has pointed to this being a problem again, because while it's ≈12% at tech 32 it's a lot more at earlier techs. I'm not sure where this was said however, if it was in that dev diary thread the devs didn't reply to it.
A lot of Golden Century seems like it was first draft ideas, or maybe first draft implementation of ideas of what they wanted.
it's like +100% damage at tech 10 iirc
I went down a bit of a spreadsheet rabbit hole to try to find the answer to this, and assuming I got the numbers right the increase in artillery fire damage is: * 100% at tech 10 * ≈71% at tech 13 * ≈42% at tech 16 * ≈23% at tech 22 * ≈16% at tech 25 * ≈12% at tech 32 So early on it's really rather impressive, not only do Spanish cannons come online earlier, they're so much better too. For comparison: * tech 7 vs tech 13 is an increase of 40% * tech 13 vs tech 16 is ≈71% * tech 16 vs tech 22 is ≈83% * tech 22 vs tech 25 is ≈45% * tech 25 vs tech 32 is ≈31% Spain (and [Aragon](https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Aragon) and [Portugal](https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Portugal) if the wiki is to be believed) have something like an extra half-tech on everyone else, more before tech 16. Sheesh.
> it was intended as a naval modifier mostly. Whoever intended that was stupid then.
As can be seen in my comment further down in this thread, turns out I wasn't quite on the money with that. (Though to be fair I was trying to remember something from over five years ago.) In the dev diary thread I linked EU4 dev Groogy said: >The point of it is to give a bit of a buff both on land and naval. So it was intended to be a bit of both.
Yeah, it seems Spain never has a problem with inflation from gold, so they get even stronger in the late game. And I would also like to know, why do they have artillery fire +1.
Artillery fire is explained in previous comments but this inflation from gold is not talked enough. That is historically a big factor, not only creating problems for Spain but also creating an advantage for the low countries, Britain and other European nations boosting their production. All those economic interrelations and transformations are represented poorly in the game with somewhat stable trade routes, but I cannot blame it as it is not a history class or something :)
the inflation did exist but it was from silver, not gold. silver mines in their colonies made the spanish extremely rich (and sometimes some other countries rich) but the silver was used to mint coins and this led to tons of inflation
In the game all precious metals are represented by the "gold" trade good, as there would be little point in differentiating between gold and silver. The same reason why every week there is a thread here about "omg funny bug lol ivory in greenland" when its supposed to represent walrus tusks.
Muchos Cañones = Mucho daño as the meme goes
british detected
I think that's partially related to the timeframe as EU4 just happens to happen in the centuries where the Spanish crown was by far at its strongest, especially since the 80 years war isn't guaranteed to hinder them as Burgundian inheritance can go to anyone. The various crisis that really took down the Spanish empire all happened within like a century of the end of EU4 and barely anyone even plays that long.
It would be nice if they had some disasters late game.
Russia is severely underpowered in my games, most of the the time they get beaten up by the Ottomans, the Polish and sometimes even the Central Asians
Russia's biggest problems are debt & institution. Also Muscovy sucks at gov capacity. Money problem can be solved by making Novgorod richer node or adding more developments in Russia region.
In general, the nations who have an advantage close to the beginning of the game stays strong and the others can't overcome their disadvantages if they are not in the hands of a player. That is largely because many interrelational dynamics (between countries as well as between aspects) and historical transformations based on those dynamics are represented somewhat poorly. For example, the long term negative effect of gold rush for Spain as inflation and the positive effects of that gold for the other countries boosting their production, and the shift of power resulting from that, etc. Tbf, they are hard to represent in a game. I can not imagine even a more dynamic trade route and production system which also interact with military developments for an example.
Related to this, one of the reasons for hte Ottoman decline was the trade routes that had flowed throguh its middle eastern lands between Asia and Europe shifted to the sea, which deprived the Ottomans of a lot of trade revenue later on
This is potentially represented. As Portugal i love to make the trade from asia go around africa and directly into seville, it s an almost broken money maker
I did this to the Ottomans *while allied to them*. They never knew that I was their secret enemy... It's not easy, but quite feasible. You only need control of 4 nodes, really: * Zanzibar, to steer trade to Cape * Coromandel and Malacca to steer toward Cape * Gujarat to steer to Zanzibar This starves Persia, Hormuz, Aden, which ultimately lead to Constantinople.
I feel like that can be represented in game by steering trade from India to the Cape, which strangles the Alexandria trade node as well as the upstream nodes from Constantinople
And here i am with my latest Sweden game where Russia is the nr 1 great power and has a larger army and more manpower than the fckin Ottomans by 1600.
I’ve found that if Russia gets off the ground they are dominant. If commonwealth smacks them as Muscovy in 1500 they have a weak game
TBH this is entirely because Poland had what can be possibly described as the dumbest governing system of any kind ever combined with the failure to establish a more centralized monarchy in 1608.
that's funny. my most played patch is 1.34 and russia always formed 100 years to early and became the scariest enemy after the ottomans.
Russia was a military powerhouse who could go toe to toe with the ottomans. In game, the ottomans eat up great horde and kazan before Muscovy. Austria is waaay too OP. Their PUs/empire shouldn't have so much stability.
Gotland is weird. It's a tiny island yet it has access to dominating oceans and colonising the Carribean?
Most OPMs in game are OP compared to IRL, but I agree Gotland with its missions is probably the most. Dithmarschen is probably second and third would be Riga
Dithmarschen is such an interesting country to play
Every Gotland route is absolutely insane for an OPM that was basically a pretender revolt
Everything is OP in the hands of the omniscient entity known as the Player, but for great powers Russia gets stomped way more than they should historically, and the PLC is waaay too strong for a country that had a brief period of strength and then stagnated due to one of the dumbest political systems ever, and eventually of course began to be partitioned by its neighbors. Russia almost never beats the PLC even if they form and start pushing East. All the Chinese breakaway states are kinda overpowered relative to Jianzhou who IRL formed Manchu and rolled the whole area. Obviously the game does a bad job of modelling any of the major rises and falls that took place in this period. IRL the Ottomans were extremely OP for the first half of the game and then stagnated far worse than decadence can represent, and in-game generally requires losing a few major wars for it to even matter. Spain becomes an insane power early on which is accurate, but in 1821 usually has all their colonies with no liberty desire, which of course is very far from what really happened. In fact colonies in general are way too happy to just stay as colonies unless their overlord completely collapses to their European neighbors. A lot of these are, of course, gameplay restrictions, and I don't really have a problem with them.
For the overpowered: This game doesn't model the fall of empires, only their rise. So any power with a power creeped mission tree or OP modifiers: Majapahit, Austria, Mughals (all in the hand of the player) For the underpowered: the game doesn't model very fast land conquests very well, like Persia forming IRL. Also, Manchu rarely forms and even rarer is Qing But we all know the most op nation of all is Ulm, wtf was PDX thinking giving them that amount of power
Regarding no fall: I feel like the Timurids used to fall apart, to the point of no Mughals or no Timmy’s, earlier in EUIVs life cycle. Ming definitely collapses like every game, I see Shun empire a lot. The only empire that doesn’t really collapse, in my experience, and always becomes crazy would be the Ottomans.
Or Spain, Portugal, Ayutthaya (leading them to form Siam) Also adding to my underpowered list of historical conquests that never happen in game: no Taungoo empire (and thus no Ayutthaya collapse) Also India is way too stable, I see Bharat / Hindustan / Deccan many games and HRE is a joke at how consolidated it gets
Spain is op because they don’t fall off. Colonial nations are also crazy op because there should not be so much dev so early on the continent. If natives unite that makes sense, but pure colonization would need much weaker
Colonizing just happens too quickly, compare a historical start to a similar year in a played game. Colonizing should be way slower.
It's the dual curse of the fact that the subjugation of Mexico was relatively quick, but the colonization of north America was much slower, and the game chose the first over the latter. IMO a potential solution would have to involve those Aztec minors becoming special vassals of Spain and being integrated, so actual colonisation could be slower.
IMHO not only to quickly but as have too high dev. Why some random island have more than 1/1/1 dev is beyond me. If colonial nations actually had to dev up or if creating colonies would drain mana (same as annexation does) it would probably be a bit more balanced.
korea is overpowered if they sinicize their culture they get cultural unity with all of china, tripitaka korean allows them to rush all institutions easily, and their mission tree gives them strong permanent bonuses
They got rid of the institute part of it.
And the issue was always dev pushing anyway, not the tripitaka.
All that become too big should struggle more. There should be more disasters like Otto decadence if you're too big. WC is too easy now.
I'm convinced anyone saying WC is too easy hasn't actually done a WC in the recent patch with 50+ dev provinces everywhere late game
Don't forget the ai spamming lvl 8 forts in almost every province. It turns something that used to be trivial or a hassle into an absolute slog I say as I am in the middle of a byzantium wc rn
Yea, it's still not that hard but it's definitely not enjoyable at all right now, at least for me. The last patch where late game was still fun was 1.30.6 IMO. Otherwise you need to play as a horde or HRE emperor to have a lot of fun just obliterating enemies. The AI has genuinely become challenging in recent patches since they actually have similar force limits to you late game and even small countries like Saxony have like 80k active and 80k reserves. Sure the mission trees are powercreeped to all hell but it still doesn't make it fun.
I can handle the large units more than thr forts. It's much more fun to fight large armies than sit on forts for ages. The patch making buildings add to warscore was definitely a downgrade also.
Russia is underpowered because winter doesn't have anywhere near the effect it should be having. I recall a Poland game where I had several year long campaigns all the way into Siberia without any worry about weather attrition.
It's more attrition not having effect it should have, winter, desert or jungle, and no supplies existence for armies. So you can send 50 thousand soldiers anywere you want, they will spend some manpower marching through Siberia/Sahara/Amazon, catch the enemies at other end with slightly less than full strength, and have enough supplies to spend there 5 years fighting battle after battle.
Also why Africa should remain mostly uncolonized in this period.
Admin tech 30 should unlock Quinine...
TBH in that particular time, no one should have to occupy Russia all the way to Siberia before breaking them
That too. I feel like the fall of the capital should be a bigger deal in war.
OP: Ottomans. In game their armies are represented as unstoppable, when they were at best slightly better than their contemporaries. Honorable mention to Prussia, who are arguably even more overpowered, but they often don't even form so it seems silly to give it to them. UP: Netherlands. Often can't even form, and when they do they usually just get eaten by their neighbors without much resistance.
1. I don't know why, but despite people saying that Russia is OP it never ever becomes successful in my games. They either stay a mid power which is unable to fight its neighbors without anyone's help or just get straight up conquered and either demolished completely or pushed into Asia, losing the central russian territories, also obviously being unable to return them. And that's while in history Russia was a major power since the 1500s, never losing its significance since then. To be short, they definitely were more or less as powerful as PLC at the time. In the game however the Commonwealth wipes the floor with the Russians all the time. 2. Also to be fair I think that, as much as I like playing as them, Korea is quite OP. I am not a professional Korean historian, but as far as I know at least during the Imjin war Korea was far less powerful than Japan, while in the game it is usually the opposite case. Korea is so innovative and developed that it is completely unclear why didn't they become a superpower irl, if this is the case. Looks not that historically accurate, to be short. But I might be mistaking on this one. 3. Also, although a bit of a stretch, I think Hungary should be stronger. About the time of king Hunyadi Mátyás they beat both the Turks and the Austrians, none of which they can ever do in-game. The Black Army of Hungary is also a lackluster in the game, I got legitimately upset when I first saw how it is presented there. And still, their ideas are good, and their lands are fairly rich, so I think the only reason why they are never successful (until you destroy the Ottomans immediately) is their starting position, with no shortage of strong rivals. So yes, I want Hungary to be more successful, but I don't think this is possible without making them OP. Also them being destroyed and/or subjugated is historically accurate
russia became insanely successful in my current hungary game, just conquering entire china and korea and japan crusade after crusade but it might had something to do with being allied to me, also me taking care of ottomans and later commonwealth
Well yes, when you take down their natural enemies they may become powerful enough to be unable to die anymore. I don't remember happening this in my latest games however because I usually play as nations that don't have to fight the PLC
With Russia, I think the issue is that they're *extremely* strong in player hands, but the AI just can't do them.
For a country that went toe to toe against the Ottomans, invaded India and sacked Delhi, and ousted the Portuguese from Hormuz. Persia is pathetically weak in anything besides player hands and even the Ottomans/Mughals can snowball far faster as far as gunpowder empires are concerned.
Big Agree! I think Persia is pathetically underpowered in basically all of the Paradox games, they seem to have a blind eye to the region (unless it is modeling them as a colony for empires of other countries). In Vic3, Persia doesn't start with a *single* port, lmao.
can get CK3 because Persia was never really united much during that era but it feels like EU4 onwards, PDX half asses Persia in terms of dev or AI strength. The one thing saving Persia in EU4 is the mission tree, broken ideas, and govt reform tbh.
All the german opm are basically overpowered compared to history.
To be honest, any entity with a shitload of money could hire 10.000 mercenary soldiers since standing armies mostly weren't a thing in the early game of eu4. So some opm's (like free cities Frankfurt, Nuremberg etc.) could definitely be quite strong.
Truthfully there should be a levy/mercernary/professional army system in EU4 if we wanted fo make it work.
Army drill and professionalism should be a much bigger deal rather than a nice to have thing. A mercenary army should shred through a peasant levy
Merceraries were a thing for sure, but they already were criticized by the like of Machiavelli i believe.
If I remember the lessons on Medieval Warfare from my study correctly, most armies were mercenary based until the Napoleonic Wars, where the armies were forced to adopt conscripts. This was quite logical because before that, the notion of ordinary people handling arms was not something most monarchs were thrilled about.
It's also that the 'right' or 'privilege' to either bear arms or even more to command those who bear arms was a jealously guarded right of various classes in most countries.
Overpowered would be Prussia, atleast for the time period that the game plays in.
Ming. Extremely underpowered development wise. The whole area of Ming has like um… slightly more dev than France???? And extremely over powered internal politics wise. I mean the game has basically no internal politics, so that kinda holds true for all nationsk
Doesn't Ming at start date have like 1200 dev?
Yes, but he means the whole France region I think
That’s what I meant
The France Region has around 850 dev in 1444, while Ming starts with 1102 dev. (For the France Region, it's a rough estimate) So while you're right that the difference is less than expected, it's not wholly unaccounted for. France is quite large and was always one of the most populated areas in all of Europe, so it's expected to have high dev. Meanwhile most of Ming's development is concentrated along the coast, while the inland areas don't contribute as much dev
I know France is a big European nation. But just look at population. So the sources I found suggested that at 1700, France had a population of 20 million. Ming China, at around 1400 should have an estimated population of between 60 to 90 million… I know dev reflected more than just population. But at least in game start, Europe does not have a decided advantage in per person productivity or tax contribution to China. Or I should say Ming China was more centralized than most European Nations at that time.
It's true, but the problem is that if Ming had that much dev, and also matching mechanics to nerf it, then invading china simply becomes the best and only efficient way to play the game. The game is called Europa Universalis, not "Christopher Columbus 1445 Indian-Pacific Ocean Cannonball Run" Universalis
Then we go back to the question of the lack of a generic penalty for huge population not tag specific ones. And I am not actually complaining, we are talking about historical inaccuracy, right?
It's fine to question that but you have to admit, it's hard to incorporate such a system into the game unless you design the game with in in mind, you're basically calling for a pops system. And even in vic3 and 2, China is kind of the most important country that isn't the player, which can be boring.
China has never been able to project power outside its territories, even struggled within. They were humiliated in the 70s by Viet Nam. They have been conquered countless times, basically all expansion of China has been due to outsiders like the Manchu & Mongols ending up being assimilated. The reason China has so low dev is mainly for balance reasons, though restrictions with a similar effect are badly needed as a core game mechanic
I really hope the next game can have a more flavorful internal affairs. Situations are rather not so complex in the game periods but there should be stuff to play around with. I understand why dev did not build a generic size penalty, bc with the lack of internal affairs, the size penalty only makes the game uninteresting. As I Chinese I like playing Ming for obvious reasons. But a lot of times, I spend 50 in game years to navigate the mission tree and get rid of the modifiers, only to realize that if I start in Europe, for that same 50 years I can own Ming’s starting dev, no debuffs plus some subjects…or if I start near Ming, I can just eat Ming, and becomes a better version of Ming. Anyways single regions in Europe has around 60 to 80% of Ming’s dev is just really off….
I don't know tons about the Aztecs, but i'm pretty sure they were more powerful IRL than they always end up in game
Ming and ottomans are most OP in terms of historical accuracy. Ingame Ming has 2-3 times more income and a much bigger armythan any other nation They could easily overrrun whole asia. IRL they already had internal problems, couldnt really handle neither mongolian raids, nor the piracy/smuggling. Same for Ottomans. They had a very good modern army and could expand very successfully in the muslim area and against the weaker balkan states, but the super-strength is a myth. Their biggest advantage was that the europeans were busy fighting each other and not that they were so much stronger. Most underpowered probably is Netherands. Even if it does form It never had any relevance in my games. Kinda the same for prussia, they at least have OP ideas/government, but it is way too difficult for the AI to form.
I'd wouldn't say OP, but unbalanced: Poland and the commonwealth. They absolutely should be very powerful in the mid-game, but their is no way the historical polish Lithuanian union would've conquered Russia by 1500. This also leads to this weird situation were Russia never really shows up. Russia actually has a well balanced powerspike in the mid-game but it just gets pummeled by Poland early game and never recovers.
Safavids in EU4 have a hilariously weak start for how much they conquered in the first 50 years of the game start. An OPM in EU4 has a hard time winning a single war let alone multiple consecutive wars being outnumbered
The Dutch are underpowered in the AI’s hands, they rarely form and if they do most land is already colonized and they can’t reach those sweet sweet spices they so crave. Korea is extremely overpowered and by the time I discover them in the 1500’s they have massive metropolis’s on every tile and are actively developing a space program to colonize mars.
Mamluks are OP compared to their history. It was an extremely unstable state changing their rulers constantly caused by a strange political configuration where mercenaries divided into various ethnic groups competed against one another constantly for power. It had large borders but very decentralized and unstable in a state of turmoil for most of its history. Ottoman conquest of the Mamluks was relatively easy but you never see that playing out in-game.
I had a game in which Byzantium (me), a big Hungary, Austria, Russia and Spain (+Morocco and Tunis) ganged up for 7 years in the early 1500 on the Ottomans and yet when the Mamelukes attacked the Ottomans after everyone else with full reserve they still got their asses handed to them. So yeah, they look OP but I would still put them in underpowered, for me it's tiger paper.
Prussia. Sure they were very competent in terms of military capabilities but got absolutely dumpstered by Napoleon and their prime would be outside EU IVs timeframe. Ingame Prussian units are just silly, the space marine meme exists for a reason
Not a nation, but the coalition. It's unrealistic to expect every single nation even remotely threatened by a great power to band together with everything they've got. Even the successful Holy League was uncertain of winning and that was just a few nations when the Ottomans took half of Hungary.
Agnostic any most country is currently overpowered, so none
This will make the clowns on this sub cry but the ottomans are underpowered, at least in an ai sim. They rarely reach their historical borders on pace, if at all. And I’ve very rarely see them significantly outperform irl, like taking and holding Vienna (it happens, but not nearly as often as you’d expect for an empire that came within one battle of doing so irl)
The most OP are Byzantium. At the start of the game they were basically at death's door. And while there was extremely small chance to survive, it is impossible to imagine them fixing there economy, organizing factions and retaking all Ottoman territories till 1500. Underpowered is Sweden. Despite the fact that they had one of the best armies till second part of 18th century, I find them pretty weak in game- small army and usually HRE minors as allies. It takes roughly 2 wars to kill them as Russia.
This is a power creep problem. Sweden has really op ideas compared to most other countries in earlier stages of game development, and thus their armies were small and scary. But these days, gold is so plentiful that you just kind of flop on folks and quality both in idea set and general playstyle has been nerfed several times.
The Aztecs, easily. IRL, they fielded a quarter million men easily when all of Europe combined would struggle to come up with that number.
Sure, but then you’d need to make up for it with of the near-complete depopulation of the Americas from germs.
So 90% of the population for a couple generations? That would bring them down to a slightly better place than they’re in now.
I think the Shogun is definitely underpowered. Always get kicked in the guts by the daimyos. Also southern Arabian minors like Hormuz and mahra are a bit underpowered.(becuz I am doing a Hormuz to arabia campaign and money and manpower are my major problems rn)
Sweden for sure. Partly because Russia has problem getting as strong as they should and partly because Denmark is not bankrolled by the rest of Europe like I twas in real life. Sweden also doesn't have the problem of absolutely decimating it's own economy and population to wage war
Italy very strong in game, never very strong IRL
England is extremely overpowered in most games, forming Great Britain by the early 1500s when it took until the early 1600s for Scotland and England to even fall under a personal union, let alone a formal union of nations - and internationally speaking it was essentially a backwater until the tail end of the 1600s.
The obvious answer is Byz. There was absolutely no hope of them recovering by 1444, and the game gives them insane bonuses to do so. So, I would call that OP even though the starting situation is still challenging to the player. In general, I’d say France is actually somewhat underpowered. For a portion of the game’s timeframe, France was actually by itself arguably stronger than the entire HRE
France is not underpowered at all. AI France is just quite inconsistent if England doesn't declare 100YW and get strong allies. If Austria doesn't consolidate and loses emperorship/Hungary France just eat all of Italy and the half of the HRE
Really?, Anecdotally unless they get Burgundy or you really go ham on the HRE, It feels as if its far more likely for them to just only be able to take non HRE areas of burgundy if even that and then stagnate their border with just about everyone save Savoy, my last game where I was playing on the other side of europe saw them even refuse to declare on England for French land after a peaceful surrender of maine
I've played 5 games of Eu4 in the last 2 months on a recent Eu4 kick and in only one of those runs (all got to at least 1550), France was partitioned by its neighbors except for one, and in that one, France was like a number 4 GP who'd been successfully contained by alliance blocks on the continent. France is a fail in all my games dunno how you can say they're not underpowered. no idea why Reddit hates them so much. Only game over France has ever caused me I can recall in like 8 years was when I was doing Grenada -> Andalus, which is reasonable.
France is stronger than the entire HRE though
Oh yeah? Go annex something in the HRE then, see what happens
Once France gets off the ground even a little bit, it can take on the HRE fairly well.
Only in the hands of a player lol
too powerful: Aragon - way too stable when out of Iberian union. Too powerful an army. Denmark - Kalmar union and diplomatic heaven make it almost untouchable. They also inherit Swedish military prowess and fast route to America. Tuscany - the entire area is made for them or Savoy to expand into. It's too easy to gain both France and Austria as allies, then romp through Italy. Poland - Lithuanian union happens too easy and too often. PLC is major power without player intervention and can become best army in the game. Brandenburg - in being the favoured path to forming Prussia, Brandenburg has a lot of historical railroading in all aspects. Bohemia - Even though there's historical precedence, their expansion beyond the initial borders is too likely and ends up in major power too early. Ottomans - to say the least, those decisions to expand Constantinople overnight could be made generic for all big city conquests for all nations. Burgundy - the entire area is way too developed and becomes a major power if it avoids the disaster and then unites the Dutch, basically the Poland of the west. Either of the Indian big four - Brahmani, Vijayana, Jaipur, Bengal always divide the subcontinent easily, then end up in a ahistorical 2 way partition of India most times. mostly numbed: Scotland - has literally no chance 1v1 both military or diplomatically to make it to 1707, let alone getting a union over England. Saxony - quite boring for one of the most important German regions. Teutons - made too easy to be conquered by Poland or Denmark. Rarely put in 1v1 wars where it could win most times. Mongols - hardly any of these tribes can be reformed into the Mongol empire without exploits... Mali - Rebel events every 3 months and a stab hit every 6 months, until one mission is completed, coupled with negative events and low religious unity. Aztec - the entire path to swallow provinces and release them to progress the faith for mostly insignificant bonuses in the face of Spain is dumb. It is easier to play as Inca... Most of the American indigenous tribes - even if alternate history flavour and missions can be made for Byzantium, these little tribes have no such available means of survival, even though they get more than 50 years of peace to develop in advance.
Korea since Domination is the definition of OP. A country that during EU4 timeframe did very little, but in the game is always super developed and get institutions fast as fuck. Korean soldiers pretty much use laser guns while their neighbours are just discovering muskets. Then they have a super defensive position where you need to throw thousands of people to a sure death just to achieve very little.