Europa Universalis V confirmed

[Norgy]

Is the cost of court affected by the number of courtiers? I thought it was just based off your Economic Base (which is getting adjusted in 1.0.8).

Yeah, I seem to have confused that with actual net taxation. It is an anti-blobbing device, apparently.
Because if it was the actual tax I manage to extract, I would have a Lidl court.

[Tamas]

With the beta fixing/adjusting levy recovery, for the first time I have seen Golden Horde collapse.

[Tamas]

Not bad AI borders for 1484 (I am Hungary):



In fact it is 1488 now and I have felt the need to intervene in the 1st Venetian-Ottoman war. The Ottos are allied with the Mamluks and I feel like I need to contain them before we build a larger common border. It's nice to be worried about the Ottomans finally. 

[Tamas]

The war was a bad idea. My uber general could handle the Ottomans but the Mamluk & vassals mega stacks were just too much. Bailed out wit a separate peace by releasing my Montenegrian vassal state.

[Syt]

Started a Brandenburg game with the 1.08 patch. By 1341 I was living on loans.

Started off building a market village for market access in a medium distance location (I had 100d in the bank, so wanted to keep some reserves), and used diplo to make nice with two neighbors while building spy network in a third.

Sent once cabinet member to develop my home province, and the other to assimilate me some uppity Poles.

In the first year I was hit by smallpox which tanked my economy and manpower. This caused my relationship with my fiefdom Lusatia to shift dramatically, since they weren't nearly as affected and had now had a bigger reserve of levies and for a while a better economy. Which caused my diplomatic relationships to go deep red (Lusatia cost over 4 to maintain while I could have at most 1.91 if I max out diplo spending). Which tanked crown authority. Which tanked everything else.

However, I was stubborn - didn't want to let Lusatia go (after all, my ruler is head of state of Brandenburg and Lusatia), and tried to balance my budget while still maxing diplo power. Including currying favors with my rich relatives to maybe mooch of them. The cabinet member who was assimilating Poles was tasked with recovery effort in devastated regions.

Either way, the next three years I spent trying to fix this while keeping Lusatia. I started improving relations with them (to start annexing them, hopefully), used parliament for extra taxes and changing laws to maybe get me back into the black.

No chance. By 1341 I took my first loan (a whopping 5d and change which set me on track to fail again later). I was even considering minting more coin (inflation be damned), but even that couldn't get me into the positive.

That sucked (but probably because I suck ).

I suppose I could have revoked some privileges to empower the crown and maybe get back some control, but didn't want to try to tank the stability hit (my stab was in its 30s at best).

[Syt]

Actually, looking at reddit, it appears the calculation of Relative Power between Overlord and Subjects might be a bit busted.

https://www.reddit.com/r/EU5/comments/1pclhzy/power_relative_to_overlord_in_108/

Yeah... six location vassal Hesse has +5.87 from "power relative to overlord" when they have 100k pops to my 4.5 million, 66 tax base to my 2250, and 1882 army size to my 85582. No idea what is bugged about this calculation, but being ~40x stronger than them in every metric across the board should be a significant amount of loyalty. I have one other vassal who is maybe 1.5x the size of Hesse, and I'm still 20-30x stronger than both combined. I get as much loyalty from being 40x stronger than Hesse as I do from "base value for every country +5". That's some pretty busted math there. Seems like either you commit to 100 decentralization and spending 1/3 of your income on diplomatic expenses for the entire game and never stop doing vassal play, or you never take a vassal the whole game.

[Tamas]

Well first of all one thing that may be missing is that the calculations uses all your vassals of the same type. So if you have two Marches like me in my game than the relative strength influencing their loyalty is the relative combined strength of the two.

[Syt]

Brandenburg has 1 (one) subject (a fief)

[Tamas]

I meant the reddit post.

In any case just because loyalty goes into the red doesn't mean they will declare independence. I suspect that despite the opinion modifiers being all gungho about relative strength, it is the war-declaration check that decides if the AI subject is going to go for it or not, and that's rather timid.

[Solmyr]

Paradox are currently balancing the game with a sledgehammer.

[HVC]

Plus ça change

[Syt]

I suspect that despite the opinion modifiers being all gungho about relative strength, it is the war-declaration check that decides if the AI subject is going to go for it or not, and that's rather timid.

The main problem in my game was that the Relative Power thing put me like 100% over my diplo limit (I required 4.3 diplo capacity to maintain the subject vs. 1.91 max diplo capacity) which cost me almost 50% of crown power, etc. tanking everything else in the progress and leaving me with negative income no matter what I did. The loyalty itself was less of an issue. I didn't figure out any way out of this besides letting the fiefdom go which I was trying to avoid.

[Josephus]

Playing Castille with new patch. took out three loans in the first 20 years or so. Struggling to stay afloat. I think it's more of a Nobles not paying enough taxes than anything else; but my economy did crash after a couple wars and the plague.
That said though, I found it's really easy to cut both Portugal and Aragon down to size really quickly.

[crazy canuck]

Jos, with Castile, at the start of the game, delete a bunch of the unneeded fortifications.

That frees up a lot of budget room.

[Josephus]

Jos, with Castile, at the start of the game, delete a bunch of the unneeded fortifications.

That frees up a lot of budget room.

Thanks

I also keep forgetting about the wonderful "Ask for money" diplomatic function.