I Played EU5 For 200hrs & Here's MY HONEST TAKE. ( This Might Get me in Trouble )

Summary

In this video review, Ludi et Historia shares his unfiltered thoughts after playing Europa Universalis 5 for 200 hours. He starts by discussing the game's user interface and optimization issues, which are currently being worked on by the developers. He also provides details about the game’s performance on various computer setups. Ludi dives deep into the strengths and cultural flavors of various nations, the combat system, the game's AI behavior, and the role of diseases like the Black Death. He notes the necessity for more diverse national events and expresses a desire for in-game idea groups. Despite its challenges, Ludi is optimistic about the game’s depth and strategic possibilities, while calling for more development ahead of the game’s official release.

Highlights

• Ludi has played 200 hours of EU5, providing him with deep insights into the game's mechanics. 🕒
• The review dives into comparison of gameplay on various PC setups and highlights performance issues. 💻
• He outlines the importance of specific feedback in improving the game’s user interface. 💬
• Ludi explains the challenge of managing levies and regular units in the game's combat system. 🏹
• Discusses the strategic depth provided by cultural assimilation in managing territories. 🗾
• He critiques the automation feature, finding it both helpful and, initially, unnecessary. 🤔

Key Takeaways

• EU5 has significant UI and optimization challenges, but the developers are aware and working on these issues. 🎮
• Many nations lack in-depth flavor and unique events; Ludi wishes for more immersive national experiences. 🌍
• Despite some performance issues on older computers, EU5 offers a rich strategic experience for dedicated players. 🖥️
• The game's AI is impressive, exhibiting smart and strategic behaviors during combat situations. 🧠
• Ludi appreciates the diversity in military units and the complexity of army composition. ⚔️
• Automation features in EU5 are surprisingly useful for managing complex gameplay scenarios. 🤖
• Cultural assimilation and control are crucial for managing rebellions and expanding effectively. ⚙️

Overview

After playing EU5 for 200 hours, Ludi is ready to spill the beans on everything he’s learned. This marathon session has shown him everything from the UI challenges to the intricacies of nation flavors. Paradox, the game devs, are asking for constructive feedback for improvements, especially with the game’s aesthetic and performance issues.

Ludi dives into the game’s complex mechanics, from the innovative unit compositions to the strategic necessity of cultural assimilation. The environments in EU5 reflect rich histories but he’s hoping for even more unique national flavor, especially among smaller nations. It’s like being on a worldwide strategic tour with unique stops needing more zest.

The game's AI takes the spotlight, showing impressive strategic enhancements. However, performance can vary widely depending on hardware. Ludi enjoys the automation feature, allowing players to focus on aspects they enjoy. He’s candid about what works, what doesn’t, and what could make this potentially epic grand strategy game a success.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction The chapter introduces the new game, Europa Universalis 5, and mentions the speaker's experience with approximately 200 hours of gameplay. The focus will be on answering frequently asked questions, starting with discussions on the game's UI and optimization issues. The speaker plans to share details about the different PCs they have used, including specific hardware like graphics cards and CPUs, to help the audience understand game performance.
• 00:30 - 02:30: UI and Optimization The chapter titled 'UI and Optimization' discusses the current state of game optimization and whether further improvements are needed. The speaker provides an honest and unfiltered opinion, acknowledging that it might be controversial but necessary for transparency. Following this, the chapter delves into discussions about the strongest nations in the game, exploring their unique characteristics and the overall 'flavor' or style present in the world of EU5, highlighting distinct cultural influences such as New World and Asian elements. Lastly, the chapter touches upon the topics of military and combat, focusing specifically on early armies.
• 02:30 - 04:30: Game Performance and Personal Experience The chapter discusses the transition from levies to regular units in a game, addressing common questions and concerns about this shift. It promises to cover the strength comparison between levies and regular units, the reasons behind the transition, and community reactions. The chapter also mentions upcoming discussions on topics like the 'black death'. The focus initially is on the frequently debated issue of the game's user interface (UI).
• 04:30 - 07:00: First Impressions and Developer Insight The chapter discusses the initial negative reception of the user interface (UI) of a particular game. The creators acknowledge that the UI was severely lacking upon the game's release. Despite improvements through updates, it remains subpar by their own admission. The developers are aware of these criticisms and are seeking constructive feedback from the community to guide further enhancements, rather than generalized negative comments.
• 07:00 - 10:00: Concerns and Suggestions The chapter emphasizes the importance of giving specific feedback for improvements. The speaker encourages viewers to use the comment section to express their concerns and suggestions clearly, as this feedback will be forwarded to the Tinto team. They note that the team is likely aware of repeated concerns and changes, especially concerning the user interface (UI), are already in progress. The team values precise feedback, such as preferences for icon size or text adjustments, to ensure that common requests are addressed.
• 10:00 - 15:00: Strongest Nations and Flavor The chapter "Strongest Nations and Flavor" discusses user feedback and optimization issues in a game, encouraging viewers to comment on necessary UI changes. The narrator shares personal experiences of playing the game on various systems, indicating performance problems encountered on a GTX 1070 i7700700 K setup in Romania. Optimizing the game appears to be a common concern among players.
• 18:00 - 27:00: Army Mechanics and Composition This chapter discusses the performance and issues encountered with various computers when running an unspecified program, likely a video game or similar application. One computer, presumably a desktop in Romania, struggled significantly, taking 10 minutes to load before crashing. In contrast, another PC in Japan with an RTX 2070 and i9 9900K performed better, reflecting the varying experiences with different hardware configurations. The discussion touches on the frustrations of using old and potentially underpowered hardware, suggesting the importance of understanding machine capabilities in the context of running specific software efficiently.
• 30:00 - 43:00: Culture and Assimilation Importance The chapter titled 'Culture and Assimilation Importance' seems to focus on the technical performance and optimization aspects of a game related to different GPU models, specifically highlighting the GTX 1070 and 1080s. There is an emphasis on the game's current performance issues, such as stuttering, and a reassurance that these are known issues that the development team plans to address before the official release. The chapter advises readers with similar equipment to consider upgrades for better performance and to remember that current experiences may not reflect the final product.
• 43:00 - 55:00: Blobbing and Expansion Challenges The chapter discusses challenges faced during 'Blobbing and Expansion' in a PC gaming context. The user reports that their current PC setup performs well with no issues, except for having to lower the level of detail (LOD) to 80% to prevent crashes, which the developers are aware of and may have addressed. The setup includes a 1070 RTX and i9 3900H, and the user played on medium settings to avoid stutters and ensure a smooth experience. The chapter seems to focus on technical aspects of gaming, such as UI and optimization.
• 55:00 - 65:00: AI and Automation Systems The chapter discusses the narrator's initial impressions of a game developed by Paradox. It is mentioned that the narrator was not sponsored or financially incentivized by Paradox, except for receiving early access to the game. Paradox's decision not to sponsor them was deliberate as they sought genuine, critical feedback from players to enhance the game.
• 65:00 - 78:00: Comments and Questions This chapter discusses the development and quality of a particularly well-regarded grand strategy game, likely Europa Universalis IV (EU4). The speaker highlights the game's superiority and the dedication of the development team. It is noted that many members of the team are passionate about the franchise, having been either longtime players or modders before becoming official developers. Their deep love and commitment to improving the game is emphasized, indicating a focus on enhancing and surpassing other games in the same genre.
• 78:00 - 89:00: Conclusion and Personal Story The author begins by discussing certain aspects they are not fond of, particularly the lack of unique identity or 'flavor' for smaller nations in games or contexts. They highlight the absence of specific events for these nations, mentioning that while there are general events related to religion, culture, or region, there is a lack of distinct events for individual countries like Mines. This reflection appears to relate to a broader critique of universality where uniqueness is often overlooked.

I Played EU5 For 200hrs & Here's MY HONEST TAKE. ( This Might Get me in Trouble ) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 Pew pew pew pew. Europa Universalis 5 has just been announced. I've got about 200 hours in the game already and I'm going to be answering some of the most asked questions. I've got an actual list over here and we're going to start this up by talking about the UI and optimization. I know this is an issue. That's going to be the very first topic we're going to approach. I'm also going to tell you what PCs I've used and what the performance was with those particular PCs. I'm talking graphics cards, CPUs, and such. so you make up your mind on
• 00:30 - 01:00 whether you think the uh game has been optimized enough or if it needs more optimization. I'm also going to give you my honest super unfiltered opinion. This might piss off a lot of people, but it is what I feel about the game and I think you deserve to know that. Then after we get that out of the way, we're going to talk about the strongest nations as well as what flavor these nations have as well as overall the flavor in the world of EU5. Talking about whether there's new world, Asian flavor right now. Then we're also going to touch upon armies and combat. And I'm going to be talking about early armies,
• 01:00 - 01:30 how leveies are, how strong are leveies compared to regular unit when the switch from levies to regulars happens, why it happens like that. I've seen a lot of people asking about that and I've seen a lot of concerns about that as well. So, we're going to address all of that. Don't stress about it. We're going to talk about the black death and there's more that I'm going to talk about. These are just the first things that came off of the top of my mind. All right. So, the first thing I'm going to address is the UI. This has been pretty much one of the most controversial things I've seen on the forums. As well as I know this is
• 01:30 - 02:00 something that us creators did not really enjoy. The UI is not the best. I'll be completely honest. When I first played the game, it was even worse. So, they did patch it in the meanwhile. The initial UI was insanely bad. This is 10 times better. And they still know that the UI is not what it should be. They are aware of the issues, but what they want from us is to give them specific things that we would like to see changed. Not just go on the comment sections and be like, "Oh, UI is trash. Haha, it's so bad. Oh my god, it's so bad." No, don't say that because that's
• 02:00 - 02:30 not how you improve things. Say specifically why you don't like. Do it in the comment section of this video. I will 100% forward this to the team in Tinto and they will more than likely already be aware of this and either they're in the process of changing it cuz I do know a lot of the UI is going to be changed, but I also know that the team needs specific information. the more something is said, for example, oh, I like that particular icon to be smaller or bigger, that text to be removed. If there's a 100 people that say that, rest assured, they will be aware of it and they will know that that
• 02:30 - 03:00 needs to be changed. So, make sure you comment that in this video. This is your chance. I know for a fact Paradox goes through the comments in this particular video and they will take note of whichever UI issue is prevalent and needs to be changed. Now, when it comes to optimization, I played the game on five different rigs. Three of them are desktop, two of them are laptops. So the first one I played which is when I was back in Romania was the GTX 1070 i7700700 K. It was not enjoyable. So every time at the end of the year when I
• 03:00 - 03:30 got the auto save it was about 4 to 5 seconds to uh autosave. It did stutter but randomly not very often. And I did play it. So there's that. Right. On the opposite spectrum on my laptop back in Romania I couldn't even play it. So that was just flat out loading for 10 minutes and then crash. So, I wouldn't even try with that. I know what you're saying, Ludy. These are horrible computers. Why do you even own these? These are old computers that I had. Okay, don't judge. Now, the mid one, the mid-range would be the old PC that I have back in Japan. That's an RTX 2070 i9900 9,900K. It did
• 03:30 - 04:00 work. Surprisingly, it did work pretty well. It didn't stutter as much as the 1070. It did stutter a little bit though. But if you have a rig similar to this, I would recommend you upgrade before you get the game. I the development team is aware of the optimization issues. They do need to optimize it more. They know it's going to be seriously way more optimized before the game comes out. So, what I say right now is just the way that the game is at the current time. Remember that it's going to be way different when the game comes out. On my 1080s, the
• 04:00 - 04:30 current PC, it was an absolute be. No issues whatsoever. Uh I did have to lower my LOD to 80% because when it was at 100% it did have some crashes, but they are aware of that. So, I'm pretty sure they maybe even already fixed that. The 1070 RTX i9 3900H, it was okay. It didn't have any stutters, but I did play on medium uh settings just so I would have a fluid playthrough, I guess you could say. Now that we got the UI and optimization talk out of the way, what
• 04:30 - 05:00 was actually my first impression of the game? Well, I'll be completely honest. I really enjoyed it. I wasn't sponsored by Paradox. I didn't get any money from Paradox. Only thing I got was the early access into the game. Now, you got to remember that Paradox intentionally did not sponsor us. They could easily have sponsored us, but they told us they're not sponsoring us cuz they want us to give them our honest opinion on the game. And they actually encouraged us to be as critical as possible and you guys as well to be as critical as possible because they really want this to be the
• 05:00 - 05:30 greatest grand strategy game that was ever created. The spectrum on which this game is is way above anything else. What I mean by this is they they've put so much work into this game and the team that created the game is just EU4 players, man. Half the development team that I met in Tinto is people that have either been modding the game for years or people that have been playing the games and have become programmers and ended up working on the game simply because they absolutely love the franchise and they want to see a game that is better than all the other Europe
• 05:30 - 06:00 by Universalists that have been up until now. I'm going to start with the things that I don't like as consequence because obviously there are things that I don't like, right? I don't like the fact that there's very little flavor for some nations that are smaller. For example, there's OPMs in the H that have basically just no flavor. They just have like unique religious and culture flavor, but there's not like many specific events to that country in particular. Say you play as Mines, right? You will have as Mines events because you're German, events because you're Catholic, events because you're in that region or something of the sorts. you don't have events because you
• 06:00 - 06:30 are playing as mines. That's my biggest gripe. There are a lot of nations. I think there's more than 60 nations that have right now unique event for them, but I would like to see, and I know I'm being greedy now, but I'd like to see 300 nations that have unique events. There's 2,200 nations in the game, guys. Make it 300 at launch that have unique flavor. I know I'm asking for a lot, I know, cuz the nations that do have flavor, they do have a lot of flavor. I'm talking about the entire campaign, they have unique flavor. For example, in my Byzantine campaign, the one that you see right now in the background, I
• 06:30 - 07:00 actually saw that there are technologies not only in the second and third age, but all the way to the fifth age. And for example, in the fifth age, as the Byzantines, you have technology that allows you to convert people to your culture faster, which is one of the more powerful technologies, but that means that you have to survive until the last age, of course, because culture in E5 really in influences everything. We'll actually have a specific section of this video for culture alone cuz it is that important. But my point is with my first impression, I really do like the game. I
• 07:00 - 07:30 was skeptical about a lot of things, but one thing that really sold the game to me personally is the fact that the scaling is on point. They definitely I know they have people that have played the game for 5,000 hours plus. I know that, right? And I know that they've played all the way till the end a lot. So, the scaling is one thing that they really wanted to put down above anything else because they don't want you to just play the first hundred years and get bored and not play because, oh, I'm so powerful. What's the point in playing anymore? I'm looking at you, E4 blobers.
• 07:30 - 08:00 Yeah, that's right. You're not the main target here. The target is the person that wants to enjoy the game the whole campaign. That's why I'll be straightforward when I say that a world conquest is impossible as it is in the current version. The only nation that could potentially do a world conquest is the Ottomans over here here because they have unique flavor that allows them to expand a little bit easier than any other nation in the game. But aside from the Ottomans, even a nation as big as Castile, which starts insanely strong from an economic and a military perspective, the Castilians start with
• 08:00 - 08:30 57,000 levies from day one, my dude, and 2,000 duckets from day one. And they can get up to 250 duckets if they set up their trade properly from day one, which is crazy. And the Ottomans would still outshine that because of the unique flavor that they got, right? They also have a lot of events the Ottomans such as once uh the earthquake happens in Gallipoli, the Ottomans can take Gallipoli. They can change their capital to Adrianopoulos, which becomes Adway uh would uh become an integrated part of the Ottomans. You don't have to spend 60 years to integrate it. It instantly
• 08:30 - 09:00 becomes yours like that. Same with Constantinople. You take it, instantly becomes yours like that. You don't need to wait for 100 years to integrate it. It's crazy. Like they have a lot of really cool stuff. I like it. I enjoy it. It's a little bit blobby. It's a little bit of Maybe you should maybe nerf the Ottomans. Just saying. But this leads me to the other thing why I actually have a good impression about the game. Any nation that you play out of the ones that have flavor is completely different, man. It's not the same flavor repeated. It's not like the early mission trees for EU4 where oh, you have uh this mission tree gives you conquest, that one gives you also
• 09:00 - 09:30 conquest. Oh, the third one, you guessed it, it gives you conquest. No, it's not like that. Okay. In fact, as a general note, it's really tough actually expanding in U5. The AI is really good. I've heard people say that they've seen other people's videos and they think the AI is bad. You got to remember people have played for different amounts of hours. People have played on different difficulties as well. I played on normal difficulty, and I can tell you for sure that the AI is not bad. I had situations where, and we'll get more into this when we talk about combat, but I had situations where I was sieging a fortification down, and because the AI had an army closeish, but not too close,
• 09:30 - 10:00 but the second I pressed the assault button, which drained my morale, and it drained the half of my army when assaulting, the AI instantly started marching their units towards the army that was assaulting their fort because they knew that they would win the battle. So, I lost the war. I had to restart because of that. Why? Because the AI is not bad. It wouldn't have done that in E4 in my opinion. Not only that, but another time I got baited. They left some a small stack of units for me to attack and then they had a bigger army sitting right behind that behind fog of war which I couldn't see. So they wiped
• 10:00 - 10:30 out my army as consequence. The AI does that a lot on normal difficulty from what I could see. I don't know on very high or high difficulty. I would assume it's even worse, right? As in better, but worse as in you get your ass-handed. Aside from that, I've seen the AI do really well with trade. I've seen the AI convert everything to their culture which is basically the most important thing because culture in EU5 is how you can more easily integrate provinces you cannot integrate the difference I'm talking about is 20 30 years if you
• 10:30 - 11:00 integrate a province that is not your culture primary so like if you don't have majority of the people in that particular province your culture you will struggle significantly more to convert it to integrate it sorry not to convert it similarly if you have a lot of different divergent cultures in your country it would lead to rebellions or to unsatisfied pops which means you get less control which means you get less levies, manpower, etc., etc. So, you always want to be integrating everything. The AI does that. The AI knows how to do it. The AI is better than the player from what I've seen at doing that. AI handles its issues very
• 11:00 - 11:30 well, handles wars very well. It builds way too many forts. That's one issue I've noticed that if you play after the 1450s, every single freaking province is a fort after 1450. I'm not even exaggerating. After 1450, you literally need to assault every single province. Me, when I played the game and I had 50 hours, I was like complaining, "Oh, there's a fort in every single province. I hate this game. It sucks ass. Ah, bad game." But then when I started playing more and I hadund and something, 200 hours, I realized, hold on a second. Why are there so many creators giving the
• 11:30 - 12:00 feedback that you should make the AI not build a fort in every province? And Paradox actually agrees with them. And this is one of my hot takes. I think that they should keep that. And I should think the AI should be building a fort in every single province because they're doing it if they can maintain the fort and they don't go economically and they don't collapse economically, right? So they don't build over the economical limit. But more importantly, in the 14,500s, you will have cannons. And the first cannon, the hoofness is enough for you to assault twice maybe a
• 12:00 - 12:30 fortification and you take it. Compared to the early game where taking a fort is horrible. Either you have to wait for the ticks, in which case you wait for two years or maybe a year, or you assault it and you lose half your army to take one fortification. So yeah, expanding in the early game is horrible. But in the 1400s, 1500s, everybody's got cannons. So it's going to be like this, instantly taking fortifications both for AI. AI takes I don't know how, by the way. I'm I'm pretty sure the AI is cheating to be honest. I was taking in the Bulgaria uh war that I had here. Let
• 12:30 - 13:00 me see if I can show you this one, bro. I was taking forts. The AI was taking forts back from me in a single assault. It took me two, three assaults to take a fort. They had an army half the size of my army and they took the freaking fort instantly. What is up with that? I even refilled the G gathererson and they still took it instantly. What the hell, man? The point is that if you don't have a fort in every single province by the 1500s, it will be a two-month war. Wars in EU5 already are extremely short. And
• 13:00 - 13:30 again, I'll talk about this. Okay, let's actually stick to the schedule cuz I that was my first impression. Press impression good. There are things to improve. UI optimization is massively required. More flavor cuz there's not enough nations that have unique flavor in my opinion. I I'm not okay with 60. I want 300 flavors. I want 300 nations to have flavor. I know it's not going to happen, but I want three I want Muldova Valia to have flavor. I asked Paradox, is there going to be any flavor? They said no. I want flavor. Why is there no flavor? Make it two events. Make it Dracula. I don't know. Make Give me some flavor, man. Now, let's move on to the
• 13:30 - 14:00 strongest nations and the flavor that the nations have. Okay? Cuz there's a lot of flavor from the 60 nations that have unique flavor. Aside from that, there's other flavor too that is not country unique. The strongest nations in Europe are going to be Castile with 57,000, like I said, levies from day one and a standing army and a lot of money. The Mammaliks are extremely powerful. Look at this. They start day one with 2,000 duck. You guys can see it over over yonder, right? It's 2,000 duckets from day one. You have a really strong army. I'm saying insanely strong,
• 14:00 - 14:30 massive army. Huge population. Six or seven million population. You actually see it over there. A lot of manpower. You have 9,000 standing manpower. That's a lot of manpower. But then we have the uh English. The French also really powerful and they also have unique flavor. The French surprisingly have half the levies that the English have, but the French do have a lot of um appanages and such. and the French rely on their subjects to do most of the fighting early in the campaign. Then of course, Bohemia, Hungary is really
• 14:30 - 15:00 strong. Yuan is by far the strongest with Delhi having 4,000 soldiers, standing soldiers, not levies, 4,000 regulars that they cannot pay for. So you have to make sure you get some money to pay for it. But yeah, the point is that they are really strong. Now, I want to say some things about this though. See, the English and French war, I have not seen in all my playthroughs, and I've got a lot of them. I haven't seen England once win the hundred Years War. I get it. Historically, the French won. That's true. But not once have I seen the English. I feel like maybe they should tune it so that there's at least
• 15:00 - 15:30 a chance that the English win. Cuz the way it is right now, the the French, they're too strong, man. They really are too strong. You cannot do anything about them. And after they win, they consolidate all of the French realms. It's just ridiculous the the strength that they have. In the Age of Discovery, you have the hedgeimony mechanics, which is different from EU EU4. There's five hedgeimis compared to EU4 and it's always the French and Yuan. That's it. And they alternate between each other, right? Cuz they haven't put a timer in yet. And one month is France, the next
• 15:30 - 16:00 month is Yuan and again the next month is France cuz they're about the same strength in most of the hedgeim. And they can be multiple hedgemonies at the same time. And I'm sure that they're going to add a timer. So once you click to become a hedgeim, you have to wait um for at least a few months before you can someone else can click, right? Like defender the faith in you for hopefully it's going to be a thing. The way that the hundred years war also works is you have a situation that appears and then you have people that support either side, the English or the French. And then there's phases. There's the first phase of the 100red years war, second and so on. And then eventually it leads
• 16:00 - 16:30 to either complete domination of France and the mainland or English domination, one of the two. But from flavor perspective, not only do we have the 60 nations now that uh have the flavor, and it's mostly the big nations as you would imagine, but we have this. We have native Americas that have unique flavor actually. We have a little bit of flavor in Central America too. It's not really finalized though, so keep that in mind. We have a lot of flavor in the Middle East and the Balkans and I'm talking a lot of flavor like the earthquake here and stuff. Have some flavor in North Africa too with the marinades and the
• 16:30 - 17:00 castillians and such. And then obviously flavor. There is some maja pahit and Southeast Asian flavor. And I actually really like this. I feel like all the things that I could have been surprised about, this is the one I was surprised about the most. So, Maja Pahit is really fun to play. You have the whole dynamic between Hindus and Muslims and the transition to either going full-on Hindu or full-on Muslim and the wars in that area. It's just really enjoyable. It's not necessarily like they spent a lot of time developing the flavor here. It's just like it is itself without even the
• 17:00 - 17:30 flavor very enjoyable. So, I'm curious to see when they finish the whole work in progress part of East Southeast Asia what it's going to look like. It's probably going to be even better. Now there are a lot of parts of um Asia in general that are not done like the Japanese shogunut for example you can play as Japan you can play as the daimos but the problem is the dios have no system right now I mean there is a dio system don't get me wrong however uh if you say play as any of the daimos you have 100 soldiers which is your standing neo samurai and you have your building cuz you're technically a building you're
• 17:30 - 18:00 not an actual you are a country but you are a building that is the country and there's no way for you to make money right now there at least I couldn't figure out how to make money. I was making literally peanuts cuz I couldn't just build a marketplace. I couldn't build any other buildings. So, I don't know. I didn't have the money to build anything. It was just it was not fun. Now, for the Americas, we do have unique North and unique South American uh units. Next topic in the video, guys, is armies, composition, units, how they work, how exactly the AI uses the
• 18:00 - 18:30 armies, and everything you need to know. Now, the reality is that this uh spreadsheet I've got over here is not finalized. I've got all the units, the unit types, close-up, range, cavalry, artillery, auxiliary, heavy cavalry, and the size depending on the age. And then we have the six different tiers. But I'm also going to add the levies. I'm going to add the special units, and I'm going to add the modifiers. That spreadsheet is not yet finalized. I actually have it on my uh my notepad. So, I have to copy all this into the spreadsheet. I also
• 18:30 - 19:00 have a navy one that I've done. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to it's going to take a few days. So, when I'm done with that, I'll just make a separate video where I go ind depth into army mechanics for EU5, navy mechanics, compositions, everything. This is like a highlight for this video, cuz this video is already getting to be really, really long. Now, we have six tiers. As I said, there's two types of infantry. I like to call them close-up and ranged. The difference between these types of infantry is that the close-up one is usually the better one because it doesn't have any debuffs. And, and I'm reading from here, by the way, cuz I
• 19:00 - 19:30 wrote everything down. Uh, and it has an extra 5% strength damage taken reduction. So, minus 5% strength damage taken. Okay, that's huge. Whilst the ranged unit is also an infantry unit. However, it has the same stats, but it inflicts 10% more morale damage, which is important because more morale damage means the enemy army is going to be crushed faster and you can win the battle a lot faster, right? However, it consumes 0.05 05 more food than the uh
• 19:30 - 20:00 close-up unit and it also has minus0.05 combat speed compared to the regular infantry, the close-up infantry. So, ideally, you want to have a good amount of footmen to take the brunt of the damage and also deal as much as possible. But you also want to have ranged units in order to destroy the enemy army's morale so they can withdraw faster and as such get slaughtered in the process of withdrawing cuz that's when a lot of units also get lost. cavalry. There's two types of cavalry.
• 20:00 - 20:30 There's the regular light cavalry and there's heavy cavalry. And similarly, light cavalry has the same stats as heavy cavalry with the exception that it has 5% more initiative and it takes 20% more strength and morale damage. So, they're very weak compared to heavy cavalry. Now, take note, cavalry is about 220 duckets to hire for the heavy one and 200 for the light one. So, cavalry is not cheap. It is extremely expensive compared to the 34 duckets to
• 20:30 - 21:00 higher footmen and archers. So they do of course more damage overall. There's less units. They're important for the flanks. They're important and especially as you progress in the ages. So you need to have a good composition of uh infantry and in a cavalry. I'll talk about composition and stuff in the dedicated military video. The size is 100 for tier one. That's the age of traditions. 200 for all the regiments in the tier to the age of renaissance. Age of discovery is 400 size. then 800 size 1,600 and 3,200 for the age of
• 21:00 - 21:30 revolutions the last age. So every single regiment will be 3,200 strong. Now the uh close-up or the frontline unit for the first few ages is going to be the footman, men at arms for renaissance, halbirders for discovery, pikemen for absolism, and then range is going to be archers, handguners, early archabooers, araboozers, and then as you progress for the fifth and sixth tier, both of the infantry are technically
• 21:30 - 22:00 shooty shooty pew pew units because musketeers and hunters both of course have guns. The only difference is that like I said earlier, the main frontline dedicated unit doesn't have the debuffs while the ranged one has the debuffs but inflicts the morale damage. So the range one's going to be hunters, sharpshooters, although also ranged musketeers and fusilyers are considered the frontline unit overall. Then you have lighthosaurus. Then you have draons, curacas for the cavalry, the flying uh battery, I like to call the flying schnitle battery, etc. One thing
• 22:00 - 22:30 to note here is that for the tier five, musketeers are researched first and hunters are researched last. I think this actually is a mistake from Paradox's side. I think they meant to make hunters first and musketeers last because throughout all the ages, the first unit that you'll be able to research is the ranged unit. So you research handoners first and then later you can uh research man at arms which are a little bit lower in the advanced tree. That's the same case for all of these. Halleberts are really down in the advanced tree. Early arc abusers are the
• 22:30 - 23:00 second technology to research with the only exception being this. This is reversed. So I'm honestly thinking that this is a mistake. They they meant to put musketeers last and hunters first, but they put musketeers the first one they can research and hunters one of the last ones. So anyway, now the artillery hoofness, falconet, etc. gets better with each new uh unit. Way better stats, more units. Uh also the size is only for the footman archers by the way. The cavalry is only half the size. So if the
• 23:00 - 23:30 footman's 100, cavalry is 50. If uh for the last stage, the sharpshooters fuji layers are 3,200. The cavalry is 1,600. Similarly, the batteries is smaller as well. I think it's half the size if I'm not mistaken. And for the logistics unit, the auxiliary unit, you get an extra one food for the first one, two food, 4, 6, 12, and 24. So for the last tier, you get an extra 24 per each unit of auxiliary that you get. Now, in my Byzantine campaign, I have a few moments where I show off some battles. Right
• 23:30 - 24:00 here, we have a battle that is in the age of renaissance. And my units are a composition of hand gunners together with gooners. Okay, I like to call them gooners together with the men at arms. And the enemy army is only handguners. They have not yet researched men at arms. And they have one auxiliary unit as well and some hoofness, which is the first cannons. I am absolutely crushing them. If you watch the video, and I will link the video in the description if you guys want to go through it again or if you haven't seen it yet. What happens is I start winning against the enemy army very fast the moment that the center of
• 24:00 - 24:30 the uh enemy army dies. So if the enemy loses the center or if they lose the one of the flanks then the damage gets increased significantly. You see here the composition we have left right flank center and you have the reserves. And when you go to the formation tab you see over here this is what the formation looks like. Now this is definitely a work in progress. this part of the UI especially is going to be changed because they received a lot of feedback about this. So, they want to improve it significantly. So, you have the units and the reserve at the bottom here. You
• 24:30 - 25:00 cannot really see it. I don't know how to hide this part of the video to be honest with you. The part of the media player, I'm not good with computers. I know it's ironic, but uh yeah, the reserves over here, you have the option based on whether you click left, right, or center. You can send them to the center, right, or left flank and then bring them back with the big button here behind. So you could technically rearrange all your units. Send them all back in the reserves. Ideally, you want to have your infantry or frontline units in the front. You want to have the ranged units in the back row or middle
• 25:00 - 25:30 row or second after the infantry. And then at the very last row, you want to have the artillery. It's very basic, very easy to understand. The AI itself, if you leave it to the UI, AI does this, but not always. Tries to mimic the skills. I'm I'm assuming that's what I kind of got the feeling that if a general has bad skills, then he's not going to have the right army formation composition. So, he's going to put artillery in the front, infantry at the back. I've seen it happen. I don't know if it's just bad AI or if it's actually
• 25:30 - 26:00 bad general because whenever I fought an enemy general that had really high military skill, he had the composition that I had, you know, infantry at the front, uh, ranged units right behind the infantry and artillery at the back. And that happened a few times, right? Every time I saw the enemy have a good composition, it was a good general. the two times only two times I've seen that they had a bad composition. They had a general with like 20 skill or something. So I don't know if it's because of that or not. This is my experience. Maybe it's different. Maybe I just got lucky. I really don't know. That's want to tell you that so you know what to expect. It's not confirmed by Paradox. It could have been just luck on my side. I don't
• 26:00 - 26:30 know. One more thing to note here is that early in the campaign you will rely 100% on your levies as most countries with a few exceptions that can actually afford infantry, regular standard infantry. The biggest limitating factor to that is your manpower. So, usually most countries don't start with any manpower. The only way to get manpower is either if you have access to the serargentry advance, which is an advance that not all nations have. Only a few of them. And that's a building you can build in your capital or in your town or city that is a capital better yet because if your capital is a rural
• 26:30 - 27:00 settlement, you cannot build a sergeantry even if you have the advance. So, Brandenburgg starts like that. Their capital is Portam. You have to change your capital to Berlin, which is a town in order to build your sergeantry. That gives you five monthly manpower which means you can have two regiments because at the start a regiment has an upkeep of around two manpower per month. So two regiments means you have minus four manpower. So you end up with plus one manpower. So even though you have two professional regiments, one manpower a month is nothing. It's going to take you a trillion bazillion years to get back to max manpower as consequence as you
• 27:00 - 27:30 would imagine. So until you research in the age of discovery the armories or unless you have unique buildings like the thema headquarters for the Byzantines, the unique building for the Ottomans, a lot of other countries have unique buildings also that give them manpower. The Indians have, the Chinese have, and a few other countries have as well. That's an exception. But if you're not part of that exception, you can only have a professional army from the moment when you have researched armories. An armory gives plus 10 manpower per armory. It requires a thousand soldier
• 27:30 - 28:00 pots to be filled in and that's when you start actually having a professional army. So early on levies are horrible. However, remember my spreadsheet here that actually I didn't talk about this did I? So you have different tiers of levies as well. The first tier are the one you start with. They're horrible. Okay. Now as you progress through the ages you have second, third, fourth all the way up to six tier levies. If you have a thousand soldiers that are leveies from the first tier and they're fighting 200 uh units from the second tier that are professional, they will lose because the 200 professionals are
• 28:00 - 28:30 way better. However, if you have a thousand leveies from the second tier that are fighting 200 professionals from the second tier, the leveies will win because leveies get better weapons, better equipment, better uh stats in essence, right? Uh as you advance in the ages. So 5,000 late game leveies would kill 5,000 tier 2 professional soldiers to put things into perspective, right? That's why once you're doing your advances, it kind of depends. Do you want to have a levy strong army? Do you want to have a professional army? The
• 28:30 - 29:00 reality is that if you have a levy strong army, you got to remember whenever your levies die, it's your actual population that dies. So if you have 50,000 levies, which is something the Castillians can field from day one, and you lose 50,000 soldiers, that's 50,000 pops that you lost. That takes like 5 10 years to recover. That is a big big hit for most nations. Now, of course, that depends on the actual population that you have and the modifiers that increase your population or not. But the reality is after the first age, you want to just stay away from levies. Use them as a last resort
• 29:00 - 29:30 sort of thing unless you really have no other option, right? And I've noticed the AI also does this. And I actually think it's a good thing. I don't think it's a bad thing. On the other hand, I haven't really shown navies too much cuz I had to cut off a lot of content. So, I didn't really keep much. But navies work similar to armies. You have at the start of the campaign only galleys, traditional galleys and hulks. There are unique ships for different countries. Majid, I think, has unique ships. A lot of nations have a lot of unique ships. Actually, Majid has like 10 or something unique uh technologies, advances. They
• 29:30 - 30:00 have a lot of unique stuff as Maja. Anyway, so as you advance in the ages, you start unlocking light ships, heavy ships, and they obviously have their own unique purposes, and you start unlocking upgrades also for your transports, for your galleys later, better upgrades for the heavies, for the lights, and so on. So, it works similar to how armies work. Again, I'll get more into navies and the dedicated military video that I'll have in a few days. I guess I want to make a little bit of a pause here because I know a lot of people have asked both when I streamed and I've seen a lot of comments about why did older streamers
• 30:00 - 30:30 go for administrative uh focus when the first age arrived. So if you don't know every age you have three different focuses and depending on the focus you will unlock different technologies advances. Okay, technologies advance the same thing. Okay, so for admin focus you unlock the devil's folk advance. That means that for the rest of the campaign after you've unlocked that you can attack heretics and heathens. All you have to do is build a 20 spy network size with your diplomat. And then after you've built a spy network, you have to physically start getting the devil's
• 30:30 - 31:00 vula's belly. That takes a while. It's not instant. Everything in E5 is not instant. Everything takes a while. You want to enact the reform early on. It takes a while until it gets implemented. You want to enact the law. It takes a while. Everything takes a while. The reason everybody went for admin focus as the first one is because of the devolt, but honestly, all the advances on admin are way better than uh the diplomatic one and the military one. Another really important thing that I've seen a lot of people ask about the black death. Very simple. It triggers on the 1st of July 1346 always. It finishes in uh 1362 I
• 31:00 - 31:30 think January. I'm not sure. I think January though and usually around 145 to 155 million people die. The average would be 150 million. I've seen in my country less or more depending on luck cuz it is RNG. But yeah, half the world population in the old world quote unquote does die from the black death. You have a few options you can do to prevent more people from dying. You can isolate the cities, move a court into hiding. Moving court into hiding doesn't make much of a difference to be honest. That's why I never go for that. You can segregate the infected which gives 15%
• 31:30 - 32:00 disease resistance which is huge. And why do you really actually want your population to be affected by the black death cuz you do want to because every single disease and there's a few of them in the game after it affects your population what happens is they get a disease resistance. So if the black death or whatever other disease appears in your country later in the campaign and you've had that disease in the past, the population will have a disease resistance. So even though it's infected, not that many people will die compared to how many died the first
• 32:00 - 32:30 time. So you can actually use that if you want. Say you get an outbreak of measles, you have 500,000 people died. That's horrible. But then 100 years later, you get measles again and you have disease resistance. So only 20,000 people die. But your neighbor never had measles in the past. So you can muster up some units, declare war on your neighbor, make sure your units have measles, spread the measles to the enemy lands, and watch your neighbor lose half of his population from measles whilst you're just sitting there like, "Yo, boys, we got resistance in here." There are other options you have during the plague, such as mass forgiveness, which
• 32:30 - 33:00 has a negative part. It gives you increase in stability, but mass forgiveness does lower your disease resistance by 10%. So that means more 10% more people are going to die from uh the plague which is not ideal for just 12 stability if you ask me. Also repelling isolationism does uh cost stability too. So everything you do in the game honestly is it cost stability. Stability is basically mana points guys. I'm going to say it. Stability is mana points because stability is required for repelling privileges for changing
• 33:00 - 33:30 legislation for doing most of the actions during the situations like here cuz this is a situation the black death basically everything requires stability. It's kind of like influence in Emperato Rome which was added to not need mana points but it's mana points in a different form in essence. Stability in my opinion it's really vital though because the reality is if you have less stability it affects everything in your country too. So less stability affect your equilibrium satisfaction for the nobility and all the other estates and that can be up to minus 25 if I remember
• 33:30 - 34:00 correctly. I might be wrong but it's really high. You also need stability to embrace institutions. You see over here we have uh had a professional army spawned in uh Paris. However, it's not spread to our country. So after we have 20% spread for that particular institution, we can embrace it. It costs money and stability. If it's spread only 20%, it's going to cost 100 stability. So you go really bad. You don't want to do that. You probably want to embrace it when it costs like 20 stability or something. So that's like 80% spread over in your country, which is more
• 34:00 - 34:30 acceptable. So then you can embrace it, right? But hey, if you really want to embrace it early, it means you can get the guns, you can get better units faster, but there's a sacrifice to pay, the stability sacrifice. So, that's kind of one of the things that I really like about E5. You have a ton of different ways in which you can actually play the game. There's ways of playing it risky, which can backfire on you and it can really just collapse completely economically. You can collapse from a lot of perspective, but you can also gain from it. So, it's up to you if you want to risk it or not. It's kind of the the beauty of the game, you was it's a
• 34:30 - 35:00 very different game from E4 in the sense that it's still E4 but less blobby that's for sure and that's the next topic we're going to discuss in a second now and more flavorful like I have to say if I think about all the things that E5 has right now there's definitely more flavor than E4 has right now only exception to that is the missions which will be revamped before release and there's no idea sets I like idea groups I want oh I should probably have asked added this to the complaint I want idea groups I'm tired of just values values are great we have over here a lot of different values and based on whether
• 35:00 - 35:30 you go left or right, you get different bonuses or different malicees. But this is something that affects your country as you progress in the campaign, right? I want something that allows me to make every single playthrough as the same country unique. and idea groups is that the reason why idea groups makes EU4 such an amazing game compared to EU3 which also had these sliders is the simple fact that you could go super naval strong, you could go super playing toll strong, you could go super quality, super quantity, whatever you want by getting different ideas. You don't have
• 35:30 - 36:00 that in EU5 and you really should. And I really don't want ideas to be in a DLC. Now, if I was sponsored, I wouldn't be able to tell you this guys. I really don't want ideas to be a DLC. I want ideas to be in the game from day one. I don't know if that's going to be the case because I know that it would take a lot to script that in already, it's a big deal, but the fact that that's likely going to come in a DLC, disappointing in my opinion. Now, before we move to the next topic, when it comes to values, I have to mention that I love the way they depict values in this game compared to E3. It's a completely
• 36:00 - 36:30 different thing. You can, of course, assign one of your cabinet members to go towards a particular value. However, every single action that you make in the game will push you towards a specific value more or less. So, if you see here, we've got Byzantine law. That's a legislation that we have that allows us to go towards centralization more. So, that's 0.10 reduction for decentralization. Okay? So, that's laws that affect that value. There's privileges, fortification, licenses, market fair, embellish works of faith.
• 36:30 - 37:00 These are privileges that affect it. There's the average development in the country. So whether you develop your country, you stay and you stay smaller, you develop or you get bigger, you blob. Average control, how much control you have makes a big difference. Again, this is has to do with how big you are as well cuz it's easier to control increase your control in a smaller country compared to a bigger country. Then you have the government reforms that affects this. So that's the thing. There's a ton of things that affect every single value. It's not just like, oh, it's the privileges and that's it. No, it's everything. every single decision you
• 37:00 - 37:30 make, every single event depending on what you go during the event, every single reform, unique flavor, even advances, there's a lot of things that affect your values. So, from what I realized from all the games that I've had, by the time I got to the 16, 1700s, my values without me influencing them would always go towards the same side. Why? Because I have a unique play style and my values reflected that. I went almost all games without even trying to change my values like using a cabinet
• 37:30 - 38:00 member to change the values almost always. I went super centralized cuz that's how I like to play the game. I went super humanist cuz I like to assimilate a lot. So I go towards options that allow me to assimilate faster. I go towards land. I never go towards navy because I always go for options that don't go towards navy. I always go capital economy towards the end of the game and so on this because that's my play style. But I've seen other people go towards other things. And if I play as a different country, I have a slightly different play style. Then I go towards other values towards the end of the game because again, it's something that mimics your play style.
• 38:00 - 38:30 But I love this. I really love this. This is really unique. This is really great. But I want freaking idea groups, man. Give me idea groups. This is awesome. But you know what would be really awesome? Having this together with idea groups, man. National ideas. What's the point of forming a nation if it gives nothing? Right now, nations give a map color, they give a a name change, and a new flag. That's it. I don't like that. I want ideas. So, I get new ideas when I form that nation. Otherwise, there's literally no point to forming that nation. My opinion at least. I'm actually curious what you guys think about this. Let me know in the comment section. Also, I'm actually curious what you guys think because I've
• 38:30 - 39:00 seen people on the Reddit say that instead of having the icon here, have only the flag like you have in E4. I kind of like that idea, actually. Just have the flag and that's it. Not the ruler's face, just the flag. I like that. What do you guys think about that? Let me know also in the comment section about that. Next topic I want to address is blobbing. A lot of you have asked and I've seen also posts on Reddit and everything about how you think that blobbing is extremely easy in EU5. I actually disagree with that massively. So, I'm going to address the three uh
• 39:00 - 39:30 situations of blobbing. Mine is Leix and Habibi's um in which you guys mentioned how it was very easy for us to blob. First off, let's go with my video here first and foremost. And before we get into it, I just want to mention you guys see how we have here some uh cores around the coastline of Anatolia. This allows me to get claims on um these particular lands. Okay, so that's how I got my spin spinet. Where can I attack? Unless you have this, you cannot attack. So you need to have either the deis vult
• 39:30 - 40:00 or you have to call the parliament to attack or you have to just attack with the nocb which is really bad cuz it has a plus 100 cost for taking provinces when you do an OCB and U5 unlike U4. Also insult also has basically the same situation. The claim one is the only one that you have the one I have right now where you manually get yourself a claim with the spy network because you have cores on these lands. then you actually can take a little bit more land and the
• 40:00 - 40:30 same with the dose with the religious war you can take more land using that particular CB. However, the religious war the doseville CB you get over after the first stage the age of renaissance and the advance is the last advance in the age of renaissance uh advance tree. So that means you would have to research a lot of technologies or advances beforehand in the early phase of the campaign also wars are extremely fast as they are as you progress in the campaign. They get a little bit slower, as in they get a little bit tougher to finish as you progress because nations
• 40:30 - 41:00 actually have professional armies as you advance in time. And every single province pretty much has a fortification, which I'm actually on board with because otherwise wars would last even little less time. Right now, on average, wars last a year. Late game wars last 2 years, maybe three. It's not that long compared to EU4 wars where you have 10, 20 years wars. Massive difference in my opinion. And the reason for that is because early on, as long as you've taken out the enemy army, it's jo. It's not like they can just create levies after leveies an infinite amount
• 41:00 - 41:30 of times. No, you're going to end up with no levies eventually, and the war is going to be finished very fast. And usually in EU5, when you win a battle, you wipe out 80 to 90% of the enemy army in one battle. So, they end up with no army after three, four battles. And that's actually pretty historical. So, I'm personally on board with that. after you get professional armies and you have manpower pools, you will be able to sustain wars a little bit longer, but not for too much longer compared to early game. Plus, because there's uh castles in every province afterwards, it
• 41:30 - 42:00 might seem a little bit more difficult, but it's not because you assault all your castles, and if you have cannons, it's going to be very easy to take those castles down. But anyway, wars are easy, fast, and in my particular video, I actually fully annexed the Ottomans as well as the Audedins and I think Sroan, actually I didn't annexed Srohan and um also annexed most of the Karasids. Now, this actually was not supposed to be as such and they've made it so that you cannot easily annex a nation like that.
• 42:00 - 42:30 Let's just say it was a bug. And what happened was when you annexed a nation that was the war target, if you annexed it and it was not the war leader because a stronger nation in that particular alliance block took over leadership of the war, it invalidated the war goal. And because it invalidated the war goal, it allowed you to take more land than you would be able to take. Basically, you could only take the war goal and a couple more provinces from the war target. And then all the other members of the alliance, you could take as much
• 42:30 - 43:00 as you want. In essence, that's not normal. Paradox is aware of it. They patched it by now. So, they actually patched it as I was recording the the session. So, you're noticing how after the first war, I basically have all of the Ottoman coastline. All the other lands I said I annexed. However, as you see in the rest of the video, it's significantly more difficult to grab lands. 30s, 1420s, I only have a percentage of Anatolia, about half of Anatolia, not the entirety of Anatolia. And they said that, "Yeah, that's not normal. We're going to nerf it. Now, I don't know what the final iteration of
• 43:00 - 43:30 this is going to be. Maybe they're going to go back to this. Don't know. But I personally like it like this. Habibi's case and in Zik's case, they managed to expand a lot because of personal unions. So, currently the way it works, personal unions after you've gotten them, you can integrate them all at the same time. If you got them all at the same integration level, I don't know if they're changing that, but I hope they are because you literally can integrate in seven years the Mammal. That's crazy, bro. You can literally integrate instead. Okay, I'll give you example. My England game. My England game, I got unions over Castile
• 43:30 - 44:00 and France. I had all of that integrated. So, I had all of Western Europe as England. Not okay. So, they know they already said they're going to nerf the schnitle out of personal unions, which is good. This is why we play tested this, right? Because if we didn't play test this, maybe you would have been the one that saw this when the game was launched and you've been like, "Holy [ __ ] this is not cool." Right? Aside from personal unions being nerfed and the amount of lands that you can take is also nerfed already. One most important thing to take note of and this is very very important. Well, actually there's two things. First off, there's
• 44:00 - 44:30 the control. Okay, control determines how much you can get out of your provinces. It determines how fast you can assimilate your provinces. It determines how fast you can convert them. Determines how much manpower you're getting from them, how many levies you're getting from them. Determines a lot of things. So, the higher the control, the better it is. As you progress in the campaign, you will have more buildings that you can build to increase control such as baifts such as uh temple, bridges, roads, lower the proximity debuff, so you can uh get more control as consequence too. Rural and
• 44:30 - 45:00 urban cathedrals also increase your control early on in the campaign. So the average control I had in my lands was 44 around everywhere with a few exceptions. And you see here there's provinces where there's like 20 control, zero control. These are non-Greek provinces. These are provinces which majority of population is either Turkish or Serbian or Bulgarian or something of the sorts. So that's the other thing I'm going to explain as to why expansion is not that easy and why I think world conquests are not doable right now. And I'm actually on board with that by the way. It's
• 45:00 - 45:30 because the amount of cultures that you have is limited. you have a cultural capacity and once that's reached you cannot accept any more cultures unless you want to get massive debuffs that completely [ __ ] your cabinet and other parts of your economy and the only other option is to convert other provinces to your culture. In fact, converting provinces to your culture, assimulating people is the most important thing in the game because it determines how fast you can integrate a province. It determines how many rebellions you're going to get, etc., etc. Somebody also asked if you can get
• 45:30 - 46:00 rebellions if they're your culture but they're a different religion. Yes, you can. and that's a religious war. But if they are your culture, they will not rebel as in a separatist war, which is a big deal because separatist wars happen a lot in this game. And let me put things into view. It's 1421 and when I pause the game now, and out of all my provinces, I've got 78 or 77% of the province is Greek. And I had four cabinet members, all four of them, pretty much the entirety of the campaign working on converting provinces to Greek
• 46:00 - 46:30 as I was conquering and so on. I I with some exceptions early on I did have one on stability cuz stability is horrible as the Byzantines and war exhaustion but then after I changed predominantly to either one of them integrating and two of them is simulating or three of them is simulating and one of them integrating pretty much that's why I also didn't expand too much so the goal with the Byzantines would be to get the lands I got now convert it all to Greek increase the control so this is your power base from where you can get really strong and then you can start expanding around but cuz that would allow you to have the economy and the manpower to
• 46:30 - 47:00 expand having all of this properly converted and properly increased in control. But even so, with this power base really the size that it is right now, you wouldn't be able to get more than say the Egyptian and the Middle Eastern parts for the next 200 years cuz you would have to slowly convert it, slowly assimilate it, slowly integrate it. To put things into view, the province of Sultanonu, this one over here right above, because it was still like 80% Turkish when I got it, and by 1421 it was also 80% Turkish. It took me 74 years to integrate, my dude. 74
• 47:00 - 47:30 years. That's not possible. I'm not going to even try to integrate it. Then in order to lower the integration time for that, I have to convert them all to Greek. So it's a lot less. It's like 20 years if I convert them all to Greek. But in order to convert them all to Greek, I have to first increase the control. So I have to assign a cabinet member for a few years to increase the control. After the control has been increased, then I start integrating, sorry, assimulating cuz if I do it without the control, then I'm just wasting my cabinet member in essence. So the exception to this, this is basically
• 47:30 - 48:00 the standard for most nations, okay? The exception to this is nations that start with the massive amount of their primary culture such as England, such as the Ottomans cuz there's a lot of Turks and all the other adjacent bails, they will also be converting to Turkish. So even though they start with a small bit of Turkish, they basically get all of Anatoya Turkish in 30 years if you play as the Ottomans. It's really easy as them. And there's other cases of course in Asia, in the French areas and so on, right? Castile is really powerful as well. They have a big culture at the start of the campaign. But even with all that and even with the special mechanics
• 48:00 - 48:30 the Ottomans have with the special abilities to expand super fast and their their events, they also have how many technologies? I think I counted like 20 something 30 technologies. The Ottomans have 30 freaking technologies including discipline advances. They have a Janisary unit for every single age after they get gunpowder. So they have five Janisary units alone. They have Akeni which is the unit the cavalry unit. They have a lot of insane units to be honest. They are really overpowered and even then I don't think it's possible or if
• 48:30 - 49:00 it is possible I'd say the Ottomans would be the only nation that would be able to do a world conquest. Uh you might have also noticed towards the end of the campaign here I've got a little frame where you can see the uh Timurids. There you go. That's it. This is the Timrids here. So the Timrids are basically at the border with me. They don't only own this though. They own all of the Golden Horde. The Timrids actually annexed the entire Golden Horde. So that's the other thing I was going to say, namely that the hordes have a unique mechanic where they can actually more easily annex the entirety
• 49:00 - 49:30 of another rival horde. So that's separate. Don't need to think about that too much though because that works in the early part of the campaign, but eventually those hordes are going to get easily annexed by other nations. Most situations I've noticed the muskavites eat all of the golden horde by the 1480s and you get like basically modern-day Russia borders as muskav by 1480 AI muskav. So yeah, good luck with that if you're next to them. Now you can actually see a lot more here. The Aritinets also managed to break away cuz they start as a uh junior partner well as a uh tributary of the Jerids and now
• 49:30 - 50:00 they're independent. So they're probably fighting with the Karamanits to see who's the ultimate Turkish lord here. And actually we do have a frame here where we see the culture. As you can see, there's way more Greek culture than there was at the start of the campaign. Even uh the Bulgarian ports are converted to Greek. This entire area is like 90% Greek now and it starts with like 0% Greek. So, I did quite a lot of Greekification, let's say, but it still wasn't enough. And the Greeks that were in central Anatolia got completely wiped out. This area, which belongs to me, is
• 50:00 - 50:30 just me starting to reverse the Turkification. And I started converting these areas to Greek. So, that means there's about more than 10% Greek in these lands. I'm assuming 20 30% Greek and 70% Turkish. But everywhere else in Karaman and as you can see, pretty much 100% Turkish. That's how powerful the AI is when it comes to converting. They really convert like absolute crazy. So, this leads me to the next question. How good is the AI and how good is the automation in the game? First off, the automation is illustrated right above me
• 50:30 - 51:00 here. Here, I guess. And you have three four types of automation. You have conqueror, which basically automates your armies. It automates whatever moves you do with your soldiers and your navies. Um, you have explorer, which pretty self-explanatory. It actually automates exploration as well as diplomacy. Keep that in mind. It's not just exploration, it's diplomacy as well. Trader automates your economy. And I'm talking everything. If you set that up, you automate uh your trade, you automate your taxes, you automate your production, your building, your
• 51:00 - 51:30 constructing, everything. And gardener automates uh your estates as well as your cabinet. So, if you have gardener on, you don't need to do anything when it comes to the cabinet. the C. Honestly, if you have all four of these on, you don't need to play the game. You literally watch the game play itself. That's how it works. If you want to do that, you can do that. But as I said in the video itself, I didn't do that for the 200 hours that I played simply because I wanted to learn the game, understand the ideas behind it. I did turn it on just to test to see how good it is. And I have to say that the uh AI is doing a pretty decent job when it
• 51:30 - 52:00 comes to using uh the automation. Actually, really decent job, but it doesn't have the same priorities or the brain power that a human does. For example, as the Byzantines, I really struggled early on with finances. And when I set the auto trade, the trader used to just try and reach trades that would fill the needs of the pops as well as get some profit out of it. Whilst I would only go for profit, wouldn't give a [ __ ] about the needs of the pops because we would go bankrupt and get eaten up by the Ottomans if we did that. And the AI didn't think about that, right? So having trade off helped me
• 52:00 - 52:30 restabilize the country, get the money I needed to fight against my enemies. If I left it on auto trade, I would have died. So that's the difference there. That being said, after the first 80 or so years, I did click automated trade. Why? I was making around 300 duckets to two to 300 duckets with automated trade. And I was making around 600 duckets if I manually did the trade. But the problem with that is that every single month that you do trade, trades routes reset,
• 52:30 - 53:00 trade priorities reset, the needs of different uh areas, different countries reset. So you would have to pretty much redo your trade routes every single month. Not all of them, but a big chunk of them you would have and when you have like 300 trade capacity like I had in the 1400s as the Byzantines, you would have to redo 80 trade routes. And that's extremely tedious. So that's when automated trade comes into play. I don't mind losing out on 400 extra duckets every month as long as I don't need to have to do that [ __ ] every month because
• 53:00 - 53:30 it's just annoying, right? That's a lot of micro that's not necessary. So this is one thing that I like about the game. Actually, initially when I just played the game for a few hours, I was like, "Oh, what's the point of this? This is annoying. You don't need this. This is so useless. I might as well just watch the game and not play it myself." But then I realized the point is when you're playing the game, as you progress, you will have certain aspects that you want to focus on more. For example, you're in a massive war and you don't want to stress about trade. You want don't want to stress about your cabinet members, all that stuff. You just automate it. Whilst the war is happening, you have
• 53:30 - 54:00 fun in the war, do whatever, handle the war. War is over. You can automate war. So, they disband the levies by themselves. They do the recruitment. They do everything they need to by themselves. And then you unautomate trade or you unautomate the uh gardener. So, you handle your estates yourself. You handle your cabinet members yourself. you uh redo the trade route yourself in case you lost a lot of money during the war. So that way you uh recover whatever you might have lost during the war. So actually the automation system is a genius idea to be
• 54:00 - 54:30 fair guys and I don't know why they came up with it but I'm actually really happy. I genuinely enjoy it and I say this after the first 150 hours cuz prior to that like especially before the 50 hours I actually didn't like the automated system as well. I actually thought the automated system is pointless. This is another thing, and I'm not trying to diss anyone here, but I know some of you have heard from other creators that, oh, this is bad, this is bad, this is that. I am willing to bet that a lot of these creators haven't really played that much the game, and they've only had a surface level understanding of it because I know that 80% of the creators only played for 10
• 54:30 - 55:00 to 20 years the campaign. They haven't even gone more than 20 years into the campaign. Very few people, I can literally count them on on my hands who did that. So, that changes your perspective of the game massively. Again, not trying to diss anything. Everybody had their own approach to it and I fully understand and respect that. Now, I also want to read some of your comments and answer some of the questions because there's a lot of really good questions in here. And before we continue, I also want to mention that I'm going to do another follow-up video when I talk a little bit more about the late game, how the AI behaves in the late game, and what you
• 55:00 - 55:30 can expect from the overall stability of the game, and a lot of other topics I'm going to address. So, do make sure you also leave the comment in this video to let me know what exactly you like to see from me. I love how they call it the Eastern Roman Empire instead of Bzantium. That's a setting in the in the game rules. You can allow to change the name from Baantium to Eastern Roman Empire when you begin the campaign. Now, when it comes to performance, cuz I see this is a issue for a lot of people. From what I noticed, the population itself is not necessarily causing performance issues. If anything, the game performs about the same from
• 55:30 - 56:00 beginning to end of campaign with very, very small increase in power requirements. I'd say 5% difference between 1337 and 1600s. Really not much of a difference. And I think that's also due to the fact that all nations do culturally convert everything they see in their path as they're expanding. The autophilis or organization that's basically a religious organization. You cannot really interact with it too much at the start cuz you don't have the religious influence to do anything cuz you have a debuff as the Byzantines. But as you progress in the campaign, you
• 56:00 - 56:30 will get religious influence and you can change laws. You can change a lot of things about your religion. the international organization. In essence, it allows you to decide whether priests can marry or not, whether they can be taxed or not, stuff like that. And at the start, everybody that's Orthodox is a part of the Byzantine or international organization. So, Orthodoxy, you basically have the Byzantines as the pope, quote unquote, as the papal states of Orthodoxy. That will change once Bzantium falls, not at the start of the campaign at least. That's another question there about advances. How fast
• 56:30 - 57:00 will Europeans advance in technology compared to Asian nations? There is no such thing as difference in technologies. It's more about how fast you can adopt certain institutions which allow you to start researching certain advances and that's influenced by your research speed, your innovation that you get, right? Which is influenced by literacy. So reality is you could have Asian nations that are more advanced technologically than European nations right now. There's literally nothing to stop them as long as they have the institutions embraced. That might be the
• 57:00 - 57:30 only thing that will stop them. I guess wherever the institution spreads first in essence there is no uh deving mechanic but there are mechanics to bring the institution to you like improving relations etc etc. Very similar stuff to U4. Actually, I do hope they add some sort of mechanic that differentiates the Europeans from the Asian nations cuz in the late game, Asian nations are a little bit more stronger than European nations are, or if not on par, which doesn't seem like it should be like that, at least I don't know, at least from my POV. Now, I also
• 57:30 - 58:00 want to do a video where I actually react to my video as Baantium because I said stuff in that video that's like 30 minutes short. That was a 4 hours long video and I want to react to everything that I do in it in order to explain better why I did that. What's the spreadsheet mechanic behind that, why exactly is good or bad and how it influenced my game and where I was wrong because I have an extra 50 hours after I played that particular save. And those extra 50 hours I learned a lot of things and I realized what I made as mistakes
• 58:00 - 58:30 in that particular run, right? So let me know if you're interested in that. I would love to do that. It would be like an hour long video like pretty much this one is at this point. And if you have any other questions, again, ask me in the question section, comment section below. I'm uh going to finish with the day. I was going to actually do a longer video, but honestly, I'm feeling really bad. My throat is killing me right now. I need to go to the doctor tomorrow. And it's also my birthday. It's actually 12:00 a.m. It just became my birthday. And uh Waifu brought me a nice little happy birthday message. And she gave me
• 58:30 - 59:00 a gift. Can you guys guess what my gift is? So, I'll tell you guys a little story, right? I've had this wallet since I was 14 years old. I bought it with 20 LE when I was a teenager. That was some of the first money I made. So, this wallet was empty for a really long time after I bought it. Nothing to put in it. Uh, but yeah, this is really old wallet. If you look at it, it's actually extremely old, fake leather, etc., etc. 20 plus years old w it's 20 exactly years cuz I'm 34 today. So, my wife got me an actual proper new one. The irony. I know. It's actually a
• 59:00 - 59:30 nice one, too. So, um yeah, I love her and um I'm um going to see you guys tomorrow. I'm going to stream tomorrow. I want to do a 6-hour stream tomorrow where I explain a lot of things about the game. Hope to see you in the chat. Hope to see you asking questions. And if I don't see you, then day after we're going to see that reaction to Baantium that I was talking about. Love you all and I'll see you in the next one. Take care of yourself.