europa universalis 4 best starting nation

#Europa universalis 4 best starting nation series#

The most practical way of defeating an enemy is to force them to release vassals, and then working your way on diplomatically annexing them, or even better, annex territory, release that territory as a sovereign state and then start integrating them into your realm.

A bit more advanced, but remember that outright annexing provinces is costly and it will take a long time to fully convert their culture and religion if you have to.

So smashing an Ottoman army in Tunis might make them waltz all the way to the Caucasus if they have a massive empire spanning North Africa, for example. If they're fighting on your ground, it's easy, but armies defeated in their homeland will automatically quickly retreat to the furthest province in the realm.

As for strategy, the simplest thing to do is waltz your massive doomstack into their doomstack and chase it a bit to completely thin them out, preferably destroying the whole thing.

Getting generals is very important because they make a huge difference.

Expanding is a lot more focused on warfare than CK2, and there's a deeper combat system.

Just truck on and keep dicking around for a century or so and then change to another country until you get the gist of the mechanics. Setbacks are very common when the AI decides to gang up on you for some reason.

Don't reload when you lose a war or territory.

(The gist of it is that either you need rulers of opposite genders and they don't have a heir during the 15th century, and during that whole century the chance has an effect of triggering, but no longer afterwards.) Castille is also neat because if you get cordial relations with France you basically don' thave to care about much invading you at all and you can work on uniting the peninsula and/or colonising stuff. If you get good relations with Aragon, there's a high chance to get an event that downright gives all of their shit to you.

Castille is also a good nation for starters.

A lot of info about mechanics is hidden in those.

Other than that, pay attention to the tooltips.

They have a decent army (but are held somewhat in check by a few of their neighbours), interesting events and some options about which direction to expand in.

The Ottomans is a good starting nation for a first game.

Turning off 'Lucky Nations' takes their (and a few other powerhouses, like Austrias) I-Win button away, but they remain a challenge. By the middle of the game, they can take on the rest of Europe and stand a decent chance at winning. They get big armies, their traditions make those better and they have insanely good leaders.

France is bullshit (or easy-mode if you play as them).

It is, generally, a poor choice to pick a Military group as your first pick, since you gain much more by just straight up teching up military a few times early. Try to pick a category where you will have points to spare.

When choosing idea groups, be aware that you need more points to unlock the sub-ideas.

Admin power is probably the most valuable of the three types, since it is used to unlock idea groups and increase stability.

It stacks up quick and can take a long time to go away again.

The 'Improve relations' advisor not only make improving relations faster, it importantly also makes negative penalties that decay, decay that much faster (such as 'aggressive expansion' from grabbing a lot of provinces quickly).

diplomats fabricating claims) harder to detect, and will earn you an 'Enemy of Enemy' relation bonus with their other rivals (+1/month up to +20).

Setting a rival makes it cheaper to demand stuff from them in peace deals, makes your spies (f.inst.

The default setup for most countries works well enough, so until you want to play with it, you can just leave it like that and forget about it entirely.

#Europa universalis 4 best starting nation series#

Each node in the upstream chain gets a multiplier for forwarded trade, so having a lot of trade power in a series of linked nodes, and forwarding it all means you invent money out of thin air, and it adds up.

Trade is obtuse, but the basic idea is to use merchants to forward trade from upstream to your capitol node (or some other node you are collecting trade in).

A detailed beginner's guide can be found at the EU4 wiki: NOTE: Due to the ongoing additions and changes to the game mechanics, the info on this page may become outdated over time.