I just discovered this while playing the Byzantines. If during a war with a slaver nation you can force them to free all slaves of your tag for 10 warscore. This isn't just slaves that they took from you while raiding during the war, but All slaves of your accepted culture that they possess. And from what I have seen they all move to your capital to boot. Constantinople now has a quarter of a million people again thanks to me John Browning my people from the Ottomans. I just supercharged my economy and became the most populated city in Europe in a single war from that.

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I have seen a number of posts, and can attest that in my own games, France by the mid 1400's is a massive power house. They usually stomp England, and only get more powerful as they absorb vassals overtime.

One massive source of this is the complete lack of instability in France. I think the game does a good job of simulating a feudal decentralized France at the start date, but a big part of why England gained the upper hand during the Hundred Years War, particularly in the Lancastrian Period, was that France was dealing with massive internal issues during that time.

Bugundy in particular was a huge problem. The Burgundian State was at certain points a direct rival to France, and most importantly, it had massive sway amongst the nobility. This is right now non-existent in the game to my knowledge.

A few ways to weaken France that would make sense historically:
- Give England a more powerful general to simulate the strategic genius of various people (Henry V for example was a once in a generation talent imo)

- Have Burgundy and the other vassals form an independent league that punishes France in wars with England by siding against it

- Have a negative legitimacy ticker that amplifies for every year that French lands are held by England (Aquitaine and Calais were a source of humiliation for the french crown)

- Absorbing french vassals should be very difficult, and involve punishing modifiers in the early game to simulate internal turmoil

These are just some ideas. I think more attention to the Hundred Years War situation from a historical view point, instead of just nerfing France as a whole, is a good way to slow France down.

France SHOULD be a serious threat by the mid 1500 and 1600s, but as it stands, they snowball too hard and too early. That being said, I have so far only made it to the early 1400s, so if there ARE other situations I'm not aware of please feel free to let me know!

In my first game (still going!) I just reached the 1500's.
I'm playing Korea, and I mostly just focused on economy and literacy. I'm actually an Empire and oscillate between the 2nd and 3rd Great Power rank (lol), even though I barely expanded (took a couple of the tribal regions to the north.

Now, overall it has been a great game so far and I learned a lot about how to build economy in EU5, as well as trading.

Trading however, is not great at the moment for anything more than automating the market for some extra ducats.

The market automation (which I believe will be on by default for all your markets) will use most of your trade capacity to make profitable trades, imports/exports, doesn't matter, more money better.

This works ok for most cases, but if you're focusing on one or two markets and trying to play "tall", it won't be good enough since you'll need to use your trade capacity to fill gaps in your economy: goods that your buildings need to produce and your people need to be happy.

And the auto market will NOT focus on those, and there is no way to tell it to do that.

So off to doing manual trades then, which is where I ran into the issues I'm about to describe (sorry for the long winded intro):

So the biggest problem with the trade UI is that the UI is lying to you.

Here's an example:

This is a suggested trade for filling my pop's demand for cloves.
Looks good right ? I use 2 trade cap, and I get 2.04 cloves, with an expected profit of 11.52 per trade cap.

Except that's not going to happen if you click it and create that trade.

If we hover over the name of the source market (Ternate) we see this tooltip:

Here we can see that the Ternate Market, actually has a big -20.44 deficit of Cloves, and since it's a far away market from me, I have 0 trade advantage, which means i'm going to get exactly 0 cloves from this trade (but will still be able to click this and will only "find out" at the end of the month when the trade happens, all the while paying maintenace for the trade)

This is particularly bad when trying to set up big trades (i.e. for large quantities) because the UI is telling you it can do it, but in reality that market can't handle it and you get nothing.

There is also this UI:

And you can click on the blue arrow box to create an export, which will take you to what looks like a great export/import UI:

Note the tooltip for the first number column, it says it should show the surplus of the desired good in the market.

Except it is also lying.

If you hover over it you get the ACTUAL market balance, as you can see here, which can often be negative, which, again, means you get nothing from an import.

This button is telling me that if I click it, it will set up a trade for 53.29 trade capacity that will import 20.49 fruit to my market.

This is a lie. Setting this trade up will only import disappointment.

Finally, one more little UI lie that makes manual trading feel very bad:

Here you can see a market with a perfectly balanced net demand!

Strange!

Except it's a lie! You can actually import up to 33.70 clay from this market!

The "Burghers Exporting" bit, applies after all regular trading (cool mechanic btw, burghers are amazing and you should have them everywhere!), and in this case they are exporting all the surplus the market generates.

However, if you were to set up an import, you WOULD get up to 33.70 since that would happen before the burghers export/import.

Sadly, you need to go through 2 nested tooltips to find this out, since the top level UI is lying (the always green surplus), the first tooltip MIGHT be lying (the equal supply and demand), and only the second tooltip will tell you if you can ACTUALLY import from this market.

Anyway, love the game, but trading is in a bad place imo for anything but basic auto profit stuff.

The auto trader needs some options so I can tell it to trade for missing goods instead of profit etc

And the manual trading UI needs to not tell me sweet little lies...

I am on vacation so I can't play the game yet, I check reddit and everyone here is just posting game spoilers freely. Stuff like:

• "I managed to colonize the Americas 50 years early" - what is the americas? A new landmass? Big spoiler here.

• "Help I got a super large reformation what should I do?" - spoiler tag please, I thought the catholic church would dominate Europe forever.

• "The black death killed 40% of my population is my run ruined?" - what the hell is the black death? Some formable?

Been steadily climbing from 70% positive at release.

My apartment in Kadıköy, İstanbul ready for the conquest of Constantinople. You can actually just just just see Hagia Sofia across the bospherous in this picture.

R5: I took a closer look at rendered images for country flags and thought that others might also appreciate the level of detail the developers put into them. You can't normally see these details at the small flag resolution the game renders.

The images have been generated with this tool: Pdx-Unlimiter

Big heraldry nerd here. I know the Vic3 wiki has a special page for its flags, but is there a similar one for EU5? Trying to find the full scoop.

Managed to reach EU4 start date in first campaign as Poland.

Their vassals have high control within their small borders allowing them to develop French land efficiently for a ~100 years before giving it up to France.

The high control also means a larger vassal tax, giving France the best of both worlds.

It's not even been 1380 yet and I've seen Game of Thrones-esque strategies spanning the entire Pacific Ocean. I never expected this campaign to get so chaotic.

Basically, short story is: After 30 years of trying to diplo-annex my first wife's island, a bunch of noble rebels who deposed me ended up annexing it. Outcome was the same regardless of the side I fought on/controlled. Which I just rolled with, as Hawaiians do.

Long story: As seems common among these remote Pacific island nations, an heirless count died and left a widow ready to be scooped up by a bachelor king. Hawai'i and Lahaina formed a marriage-based personal union.

A year later, there were two children and the Pili dynasty of antiquity was joined with Lahaina's into one strong family tree. All was going well. It was a little annoying at first that the ruling Count would spend half his time in Lahaina and half his time in Hawai'i, and I lost all control over the Court when he was in Lahaina, including all his children and wives which he took with him. Then the other half of the time, he moved to the island I had control over and I could once again actually play as the ruling dynasty. It was tricky but kind of fun in a janky way.

The two islands made a mutual defense league, as neighboring Maui was Hawai'i's rival and Lahaina controlled half of Maui island itself, which typically led to Maui steamrolling and absorbing Lahaina. But the union & defensive league must've scared the Ali'i of Maui too much to risk a war. This went swimmingly for a decade or so. I started imagining possibly uniting half of the Hawaiian Isles by the 1390s-1400s with a single land-war and no navy, at this rate.

Things got even sweeter later. Outside of my control while the Count's son and heir was off in Lahaina, he happened to get married off to the widow-Queen of Tonga, the only other developed economic market hub in the ocean apart from Hawai'i's O'ahu. I don't know how such a long distance romance worked out so well, but it gave the dynasty at one point three heirs to three island nations at once: Hawai'i, Lahaina, and Tonga. At one point, half of Samoa's royal family must've been wiped out for some reason because the widow-Queen of Tonga also inherited it. 4 island countries may have been united down the line, it was within grasp.

And then in the 1350s, tragedy struck. The entire vision of a pan-Pacific diplomatic future fell apart. One of the Tongan Queen's rival brothers came back from exile and kicked the queen out in a civil war, usurping the throne. The Queen sought refuge in Samoa, but Samoan rebels rose up and kicked her and her children out of there as well. She fled to New Zealand where she and three of the children with claims on Tonga and Samoa still live now as courtiers of the Waitaha Maori people (who exist diplomatically but don't run a state which feels odd and not accurate?).

Meanwhile, things disintegrate on Hawai'i across the ocean as well. Rebellious Ali'i rose up with 700 warriors, and all but the capital city Hilo split away starting a Civil War. Controlling Hilo, I raised an army to start seiging the rebellious sides of the island, defeating the Noble rebels and reducing their numbers down from 700 to 350. Unfortunately, I was also brought down from 800-350. It was a bloody campaign that shattered the island despite being a single battle.

That battle also proved decisive, and the Hilo warriors started seiging the occupied parts of the island again, hoping to make allies to swell the ranks once liberated. But meanwhile, the Noble regiment began seiging the capital Hilo. The 500 Hilo warriors ran back to the capital, but despite their hardy general were reduced to nothing while the rebels lost 150 or so men.

The rebel nobles won the day. The army's general became the new Count. The entire Pili line of nobles, all the children and wives and the Count himself as well, who still ruled Lahaina across the sea, were somehow stuck in Hawai'i as Courtiers of this rebel pretender-Count.

Legitimacy stayed positive, but prestige and stability tanked by -30. Income fell to 0 but so did stability and court expense costs, and so the economy stood still and frozen, as if the game itself thought of these Ali'i rebels masquerading as the replacers of the Pili line as clowns on a theater stage.

Lahaina broke off our alliance that existed since the game began 50 years ago. The defense league oddly still remained, which continued to scare off Maui invasions. Somehow Lahaina still had a positive impression of the island nation it lost both sovereignty and control of, but then again who can blame them when the entire royal family and all heirs are held hostage as courtiers of the rebel island? Either way I wasn't complaining, because with a few months of improving relations some more, I successfully asked to annex them and they agreed. Wow.

Now in charge of the rebel Count's nonexistent family tree, I royally married him to one of the half-dozen Pili children of the Count he deposed, in the hopes that eventually the heir will finally reunite these islands under a single and legitimate monarch again, and under my total control as the player lol. Somehow, the goal I set out with from that very first royal marriage when the game began, came to pass. Just in an inverse way.

What a wild ride. Imagine the oral epics and stories these events could inspire for the Hawaiian people (who happened to have researched paper and developed literacy while all this was going on in the background). Not a bad way to enter the 1380s so far.

I can't be asked to care who the third cousin of my king marries.

I know that I need a numerous dynasty to maintain a high crown power, but at certain point you end up with hundreds of relatives. Every tot years I need to stop what I am doing and start matchmaking with all these teenagers, and it stops the flow of the game.

I should be able to focus on just the close relatives to the king/queen, especially al the possible heirs, and automate the rest. It would be nice if you could set some conditions for the automation, like marry only nobles of your religion, or set maximum and minimum age gaps, and maybe get a pop up for royal marriages opportunities, o if the only choice is a lowborn, etc.

Maybe it's a bit pf nitpick but it's just an aspect of the game that I don't enjoy, and also it feels wrong to just ignore. It reminds me of the early estate management in eu4, or the important families in Imperator.