Re-form

I'm continuing to love my Bohemia run of Europa Universalis IV. Or, as it has now become, my Saxony run of EU4. If you spend even a little time on community sites for EU4, you'll see a lot of discussions about "tag-switching", which means changing from one nation into another. Some of these are very common in-game evolutions, like creating Spain from Castile or the Commonwealth from Poland; others might involve starting as a smaller country, defeating and completely annexing a larger country, and then turning back into that country (like Fars into Timurids); some are very challenging and advanced goals (like forming Rome).

 

I'd mentioned before that, based on my early strategy-guide reading, I changed Bohemia's primary culture from Czech to Saxon, which is one of the prerequisites for forming Saxony (along with owning a few specific provinces like Wittenberg). After winning the League War and being crowned Emperor I had mostly finished the Bohemia mission tree so I planned to switch quickly to Saxony; but I realized that Bohemia has some specific HRE-related Missions that Saxony doesn't get. (I think that "regional missions" can be continued even after tag-switching, but nation-specific ones definitely cannot).

 

 

Fortunately, I was earning a good 0.7 Imperial Authority per month, thanks to aggressively splitting up large countries into smaller countries and absorbing smaller countries into the HRE. I also had quite a few helpful modifiers, like Protestant Empire and the Bohemian Ideas, plus upgrading the Historical Center of Prague to the highest level. My Aggressive Expansion was finally burning off. Despite regular warfare, I wasn't directly taking provinces for a couple of decades, just forcing minors into the Empire, so I could time my wars to end right around reaching 50 IA and immediately take a Reform without needing to buffer more IA.

 

 

My previously-stated plan to extend the HRE around the Black Sea has paid off. It sounds more interesting than it actually is, there are only maybe 5 nations around here, but it's still fun. I've been releasing more small nations from Muscovy as well, which can be tricky: if they get vassalized then I can't Expand Empire on them, and if they make an alliance and get dragged into a war against me, they'll lose my protection and then Muscovy eats them again. It's slightly annoying to have small nations defeat each other without waiting to be defeated by me first. Also to have them switch religion back to Catholic or Orthodox, though I'm now getting the hang of doing this: I'll usually wait to Force Religion until they're down to just 1-2 provinces, and otherwise try to release nations or maybe feed provinces to a vassal. 

 

 

More recently, after England lost a war against Spain, I was surprised to see Ireland was populated once again with nearly a dozen OPMs. "Cha-CHING!" I said. Getting close enough to Expand Empire on them took just a little while. I already held London, and one more war gave me contiguous territory all the way up to the strait to Ireland. I made Gaeldom and Cornwall imperial princes along the way, then pushed across into Munster. It's been slow going but also pretty fun, taking one country at a time and waiting for truces to expire before continuing.

 

Speaking of truces - I'm getting a more and more nuanced understanding of strategy in this game. Up until now, my main goal in war and peace has been to extract the maximum possible concession: drive up the Warscore as high as possible (given any constraints I have on time and resources), then try to figure out the best goodies to knock out of the pinata (specifically important provinces, trade concessions, breaking up alliances, etc.). If I've really trounced a small country as a non-co-belligerant, I'll just demand everything I can short of annexation.

 

The thing is, though, that the more you demand from a nation, the longer your truce lasts. If you sign a White Peace with no concessions, it's a 5-year truce. If you demand a full 100 Warscore's worth of a shopping list, it will last for 15 years. And it scales in between, like 10 years for 50 Warscore of demands. So, if I've dragged a minor Irish duchy into a war, and I can't Expand Empire on him now but I plan to get to him soon, then do I really want to add another 4 years to our truce so I can get 16 more ducats out of him? No, not really! I'd rather just white-peace him. Or maybe I do want to make a particular change, like forcing them to drop an alliance with France or convert to Protestantism, but I'll gladly leave the rest of the Warscore on the table, just so I can fight the proper war against them without waiting too long.

Similarly, even if I don't want anything from a non-co-belligerant, I'll still separate-peace them rather than include them in the final negotiations. The truce terms apply to everyone left in the war at the end; so if Force Religion and Expand Empire cost 30 warscore, then that's an 8-year truce with all of the allies. I'd rather do 5-year truces with the allies. Who cares how long the truce is with the new Prince, I'm not gonna fight them again anyways.

And while I haven't gotten into this myself yet, I'm finally understanding what people mean when they talk about resetting truce timers. I fought a big war against Muscovy and took a ton of stuff, ended up with like a 13-year truce. I want to fight them again but have to wait a while. But, if I attack an ally, and separate-peace them, then maybe I'll be able to attack Muscovy again after 7 years instead (assuming 2 years for a war plus a new 5 year white peace truce).

Let's talk about religion!

 

Austria finally organically converted to Protestantism, so I only had a single, lonely heretic Prince in the Empire, the Reformed city of Frankfurt.

After a very long period of religious strife, England eventually turned Reformed as well. Their provinces are probably about 1/2 Reformed, 1/3 Catholic and 1/6 Protestant, which looks pretty funny on the Religious Map. What's even funner is that Scotland is also Reformed, but Scotland and England are mutual rivals.... and England took Defender of the Faith. Years late, I made Scotland the co-belligerant in a war, and England refused to defend them. I find that hilarious: declare yourself Defender of the Faith, when "the faith" is only one specific other country, who you have no intention of defending!

 

I'm continuing to love being Protestant. I'm Defender of the Faith there too, and have yet to receive a single call to arms to defend the faith; I'm pretty certain that's because I'm so powerful that I'm effectively deterring all potential foes of my brethren. What I hadn't anticipated is all the Protestant-on-Protestant violence (though, given history, I probably should have!). That is one downside to me forcing religion on nations; just doing it on one would be safe, but doing it on two makes them threats to one another.

I've comfortably been the #1 Great Power in the world for quite a while now, even when deliberately lagging on taking an Institution. My allies Spain are consistent #2s, and the Mamluks are high too, I think maybe #3 or #4. That seems to be a pretty common situation in EU4: the player will be the biggest power, and the player's allies will be the next-biggest tier.

The Ottomans have been almost completely destroyed by now. For a while they just held Anatolia, then just the north and west, and now only a few inland provinces. The Mamluks own everything else down to Ethiopia, and have started warring against the Mughals to the east. So far the Mamluks haven't seemed interested in the Balkans, Greece or Italy, so hopefully we have some more friendly years. Spain has a huge colonial empire, particularly in the Caribbean but all throughout the Americas and Australia. They also have much of north Africa, a small chunk of France and the south of Italy. France isn't doing as poorly as the Ottomans, but are heading in same direction, squeezed between me and a determined rival, unable to follow their normal expansion plans.

I suspect that in the long term I'll likely go to war against Spain and/or the Mamluks, but I don't have any specific plans for it right now. I did get to drive a wedge between Spain and Portugal, who had been long-term allies, by calling Spain into a war against The Isles where Portugal joined as Defender of the Catholic Faith. That wasn't too necessary for this war but will make a potential future break a lot easier. I might eventually try to take Spain's colonial nations, which would probably mean fully annexing their Old World provinces. For the Mamluks, I do kind of like the idea of conquering Jerusalem, and maybe eventually getting down to share a border with Ethiopia, who I've been friendly with and often married to for most of the game.

I'm not sure yet if I want to move into Asia or not. As a German nation, I have terrible range: even with the Dutch provinces on the Atlantic coast, I can't even reach the Ivory Coast with claims. (It's all colonized already, of course, so I'd have to take land in a war.) Getting into Asia would be interesting, and there are some Saxon and Prussian missions that involve Asia, but I also have more than enough to keep me entertained in Europe.

The map reveal has been very slow and interesting. I got eyes on the New World relatively early, and Australia was revealed before India was. By the 1600s I still hadn't seen any land east of India, although some of Indonesia was being revealed. It took me to the 1630s to finally see any of the China coast. I would have thought that just following the coast of the continent would be a lot easier than striking into the Pacific, so it's interesting to see how things have been revealed when the AI is leading exploration instead of me.

 

 Quick tangent: one meta-problem with playing EU4 is Googling certain things, specifically the word "reform". In this game, "Reform" can refer to a ridiculous number of things: a Governmental Reform (e.g., choosing your Tier 2 Noble Privileges); "Reforming" into another country (like Bohemia into Prussia); your "Reform Progress", which is used for Governmental Reforms but also for other things; "Reforming" as a primitive tribe into a modern society; and passing "Reforms" within the Holy Roman Empire. I'm now writing about the last of those items.

I've been passing Reforms at a pretty good clip, but after the Perpetual Diet I needed to decide whether to continue with the last two standard Reforms, or switch over to the Centralization Reforms. I knew that long-term I wanted to get at least to Revoke the Privilegia in the Centralization Reforms, but I ended up putting that off in a while, partly because I wanted to burn off more Aggressive Expansion so more of the Princes would follow me after Revoking. The last standard reform "Ewiger Landfriede" disables internal wars in the Empire, which turns out to be really great. First of all, it solves the problem I complained about above with small states eating one another. Secondly, though, it keeps HRE princes allied to non-HRE nations from accepting calls to arms against an HRE attacker (that is to say, me!). The years with Ewiger had some of the cleanest and best wars, I think because potential targets will fill out their alliance slots with partners who won't actually show up when I attack them.

I did eventually Revoke, and it was pretty dark awesome. When you click the button, each prince who supported the reform will become your vassal (not filling a diplomacy slot and not looking to other vassals to compare strength), so you want as many as possible to support it. But just letting your IA continue to climb past 50 is hugely impactful, so even nations that didn't particularly like me came along for the ride. In the end only four didn't join. I didn't think that Frankfurt would, but it surprisingly and spontaneously flipped Protestant right before the reform. My big Personal Unions Lithuania and Hungary also left due to having too much development; I was a little nervous that doing this would make me lose the Unions, but it didn't, phew. All of their provinces got removed from the Empire, but existing Imperial territory on the other side of their borders is still valid even if it no longer connects back to the capital.

The other two nations that didn't join up were Austria and Switzerland, both of which still had mountains of Aggressive Expansion from my earlier unjustified wars against them. They were the first victims of my Vassal Swarm. I'd heard of the Vassal Swarm online, and actually seeing it in person is very powerful and very funny. When you look at any individual Prince they look dinky, with maybe 4-5 regiments. In my game I had 80 princes left after revoking, and it's insane to see them literally swarm over my opponents. So far I've only seen them at work in Europe; I'll be curious to see how well they fare on other continents, but from what I've read online they're pretty effective far from home as well.

 

Taking a pause here - part of the power of One-Province Minor vassals is that they can build tall while you're building wide. Small nations get roughly the same number of Monarch Points as big nations, and research the same tech and ideas, but they end up dumping all of their surplus points into their sole province instead of spending it on peace deals, coring, a dozen Generals, etc. So they can generate a huge amount of tax and provincial trade power and a relatively large force limit. When you can tap directly into those, you get much more benefit than if you just took the land for yourself.

Another way to put it - in my first post about this run, I mentioned how I'd successfully beaten off a lot of larger opponents, but lost in a war against a coalition. That coalition was made entirely out of HRE OPMs. And now those same guys who were trying to kill me a century ago are all working for me now!

In my previous Portugal run, I'd primarily used vassals to expand and grow, feeding them enemy provinces and letting them take care of coring, then integrating them before they got so big that their Liberty Desire became unmanageable. In this game, because my HRE vassals don't really grow, I don't need to worry as much about their Liberty Desire and can exploit them more. 

One thing I've been looking forward to for a while is consolidating my trade power. An early goal of mine in this game, dating back to the mid-1400s, was to conquer all the Centers of Trade in Saxony; but even after taking all of them, expanding the CoTs and building Marketplaces, I still had less than 50% of Trade Power in that node. And I couldn't move my main collection node to the English Channel, despite having significant trade there, because I had almost no power in Rheinland or Lubeck and so no way to push my trade value through to England.

 

Oh! A quick follow-up to my last post. I mentioned there that I was curious if I'd be able to force-spawn Global Trade in one of my provinces. Each Institution is pretty different; some of them are very random and can appear in any one of hundreds of eligible provinces, others have far more constrained possibilities. Global Trade is probably the most deterministic of all: if it spawns at all in a given year, it has to spawn in one particular country, which has the highest trade power in the wealthiest trade node in the world. I already had a strong shot at the English Channel with the Burgundian Inheritance, and fighting a war for London gave me an even stronger position. Setting a large fleet of Light Ships to Protect Trade could push me over the top... but then I lost a ton of trade power due to collecting in multiple nodes. I turned all my Merchants to just steer... but then I saw that I wasn't eligible unless I was also collecting in the Channel. I was finally able to get the top power, then double-checked the Ledger, and was dismayed to see that Seville and, uh, I think maybe Rhineland were wealthier than the English Channel. Nertz! I ended up setting all my merchants to Steer towards the Channel, which tanked my overall trade income, but bumped up the incoming value just enough to make it the wealthiest in the world (by maybe 5 ducats or so). I then went back to my collecting-in-multiple-nodes thing until November 1599, then swapped back once more to make sure it was still on target, got the Institution, and finally got my merchants back to multi-collecting again.

After Revoking, I first used the "Seize Province" subject interaction to take another Center of Trade in Lubeck. This works pretty well: you get some Liberty Desire from that vassal, but my Diplomatic Reputation is so high that I didn't have anything to worry about. But most CoTs are in capitals, which can't be seized. I was thinking about diplomatically annexing those princes, which is a mixed bag, since I'd need to wait 10 years, spend a lot of Diplomatic points, and then lose that Prince from the Empire.

But then I noticed the "Transfer Trade" button (which is on the Subject Interaction panel and not a Diplomacy option). This transfers 100% of their trade power to you (not 50% like in a peace deal). I tried that on the 4 or so princes with CoTs in Lubeck, and the next month, my trade power share shot up from like 15% to 40%. Yay! You do get a static Liberty Desire malus from this, but it's really light, and I still ended up with overall 0% Liberty Desire from these subjects.

Fiddling with Trade usually involves a fair amount of measurement and experimentation. I paused, noted that I had earned 130 trade income in one month, then clicked through all the rest of my 80 (!!) vassals to Transfer Trade Power, then unpaused and waited for another month tick. My trade income went up to I think 155 or so - enough to notice, but not as big as I'd assumed. I dug into the Trade Node UI. The results looked odd: a few countries like the ones in Lubeck were showing 0% trade power due to "transfers power to Saxony", but others still had their normal power, even though I'd taken their trade power as well. That's weird. I kept playing, checked a few months later, and found that my trade income was now around 300 a month. Wowza! Clicking back to the trade nodes, I saw that everything was now much more like I expected: I now held around 75% trade power in Rheinland, Wien, and other shared nodes. I'd assumed that everything would update on the next month tick, but maybe it takes more time; or maybe there are some cascading changes that take multiple months to resolve, like checking for downstream trade power pulls or something.

Last trade update for this post: I finally went ahead and transferred my trade capital to London while keeping my political capital in Prague. Once again, it was an improvement, but not as big an improvement as I thought: just 330 or so. I finally updated all my merchants to Transfer unlike the multiple Collections they'd been doing earlier. I also reorganized some geographical assignments: now that I'm just steering, I don't really care about merchants in nodes that only have a single outlet. Conversely, I do want to steer in nodes that can feed into Venice or Genoa, even if they're smaller amounts. That bumped it up to 360 a month or so. But this was all while I was suffering Overextension from a war, which hurts Trade Power. Once that was all done, I was easily north of 400 a month. Tripling my trade income in a couple of years: not too bad! (But also the result of a lot of ground work.)

I kind of glossed over this above, but I did finally convert from Bohemia into Saxony after passing the Perpetual Diet reform, which finishes some Missions that give really nice permanent bonuses (like bonus Monarch Diplomatic skill, IA growth modifiers, etc.). I chose to keep the Bohemian Ideas since I liked them more, especially the Imperial Authority bonus as I hadn't yet Revoked the Privilegia. As Saxony, I could finish a bunch of Missions right off the bat from previous conquests and annexations. I was worried about one that has to do with spreading your Dynasty; but my Personal Unions already counted for that, and I realized there's a Subject Interaction to force your dynasty onto a vassal's throne, so it ended up being way easier and faster than I expected. The ones I have left now require me getting a lot of trade power in Canton, which, yeesh. As I previously complained about, I have no range outside of Europe, so I'll need to decide whether it's worth fighting a bunch of wars over land across Africa and India to be able to reach Canton, or if I'll just call this tree done.

 

 

When starting this game, my vague plan was to finish by reforming into Prussia. I would have done it by now, except I've discovered a crucial piece of into: the Prussian Monarchy imposes a crushing -50% penalty to Governing Capacity. I've been basically at my cap for about a century now, and while going a little over isn't a big deal, blowing past it would cause huge problems with Administrative Efficiency (and hence war score, coring costs) and Aggressive Expansion. Fortunately I have a ton of money, so I'm going to see how much headspace I can free up by building Courthouses in all of my provinces that don't already have one, any missing State Houses, etc. I'm also getting close to the "L'etat c'est moi" government reform; I was hoping to use that on War Score or Coring Cost, but may grab that juicy 250 Governing Capacity instead. I've also recently read some posts about using Centralize State, so I'll need to spend a bit of time in the Macro Builder to see if that's worthwhile for me.

Let's talk quickly about conquests before I wrap this up!

Again, most of my recent wars have been bullying people into the Holy Roman Empire. I did take a lot of land from Muscovy and have been building out some Trade Companies there, which in turn have given me some very useful Merchants. I fought a war against Sweden and took Stockholm and only Stockholm so I could finish my domination of the Baltic Sea trade node. Denmark is probably my most tempting target to the north as they hold about 25% of the Lubeck trade node; but we've been very friendly, so I kind of hate to turn on them.

 

 

As mentioned before, I fought a lightning war against England where I basically zipped up the middle of their country so I could start expanding the HRE into Ireland. I'll probably fight England and Scotland some more, but at the moment they're fighting each other - the only two Reformed nations on the planet hate each other so badly! Scotland is down to only 4 provinces, but they're all 30+ dev, so I'm not sure yet how to handle them; I may annex most of them off to Irish vassals and then force the remnants into the Empire.

 

I've fought a few wars against France and Venice, they're still holding on but are looking very rough. I was really hoping to take Venice proper during an early war, but a noble uprising wiped out the artillery-only siege stack I had on the island, and then their 90+ navy kept me from attacking again. The second war was more effective, I was prepared to move a big army over quickly and deal with the attrition. I mostly wanted Venice for the Glass and the Trading In Glass bonus, but they also have a really good Monument as well as a mediocre one. Venice still has some land in Italy and the eastern Mediterranean, they're a small thorn in my side as they are strong enough to kill OPMs before I can bring them into the Empire.

 

France has been a lot of fun to kick around. My first few wars against them were challenging, but in this most recent one they just melted before the Vassal Swarm. What I really want from them are their Ivory Coast holdings, but I can't take any of those lands without taking a fort, and my attempt to take a fort failed. I'll need to build more transports so I can land a bigger army. I took Paris for the monument and Orleans for the CoT, then realized that I don't need to actually take CoTs myself to get the benefit, so assigned all the other CoTs along the Atlantic coast to various HRE OPMs: they'll be able to Accept those cultures, won't get too big to cause liberty issues, and will still give me 100% of their Trade Power: win-win-win! France is on the ropes now, they still have a good amount of territory but no trade power, I think it's just going to be a race between me and Spain to see who takes the most from them.

 

Oh, and I'm doing the Court and Country disaster again. It seems less important in this patch than in previous ones, since there are more sources of Max Absolutism; but there isn't a major downside to doing it, I haven't had to slow down my wars during this disaster like I did for the Lowlands Revolt. I have been making use of the 4-week delay between when an event pops and when you need to click a button, which is usually enough time to move an army into a province that's about to revolt.

I think that's it for this report! I'm still having a blast. At this phase of a blobbing game, you're spending more more time in the Macro Builder and less peering at individual cities: it's much easier to blast through building 35 Trade Depots in specific provinces than to carefully peer at each individual city to see who needs one.

Lion come forth! Come from the North! Come from the North!

My brother (no, my other brother) recently asked how one would go about "easing into" playing Europa Universalis IV. That's a good question, in my mind roughly equivalent to asking how one would ease into trigonometry or ease into ballet. I thought a full response could make for a nice short (for me) blog post!

First, to set expectations: EU4 does have a relatively steep learning curve, so if it feels daunting, that isn't on you, just part of the overall experience. But I think it's nicely broken down into multiple systems, each with their own "hook". As you play, you get to learn those systems better, and can gradually grok how the whole works together.

Also on expectations, I like to think of Europa Universalis as being a "history simulator" more than a "strategy game". The experience is a bit closer to playing something like Sim City. You typically set goals for yourself as a player, which might be something like making a clean and vibrant home, but could also involve a rampaging Godzilla. People who have played other historical strategy games like Civilization before might assume that the goal is to conquer the world, but it really isn't: it's more of a sandbox to tinker around in.

There is an in-game tutorial which you can and should play through to get familiar with the interface and some of the major game modes. When you're ready to start in earnest, try not to get too attached to your first couple of games. They'll be opportunities for exploration and experimentation. Pick a country that looks interesting, play for a while until you're feeling stuck or bored, then start over with that country or pick another one and apply what you learned in the last run.

There are multiple "bookmarks" for starting years (like 1776 for the United States), but I recommend beginning in the default year of 1444. Among other reasons, the game is simpler earlier on: for example, you only have Infantry and Cavalry in 1444, as it will be a few decades until Artillery makes an appearance.

For picking a country, keep in mind the "simulator" frame, so if a particular region or theme is interesting to you then that might be a good one to pick. I will say that in general larger countries are better to pick than smaller ones, as they are more resilient to setbacks. The "easiest" overall country may be Portugal: they are friendly with Spain and England and isolated from the rest of Europe, so they can focus on internal development, with maybe some occasional adventures in North Africa. Other good choices could include the Ottomans, France, Poland, Castile, or another large country.

As you play, bad things will almost certainly happen: you may lose a battle, or a war, or some provinces. This is okay! One of the coolest things about EU4 is how well it models the sort of power dynamics we've observed in history: when one country occupies another, that other country will generally be restive, and often will regain its independence. So it is in EU4. If you lose territory, the conquerer will need to deal with rebels and intransigence, while you will get large bonuses to re-conquer it later. Conversely, if you conquer a lot of territory from a competitor, you'll likely need to invest time, military resources and money into pacifying your new subjects. EU4 gameplay feels like a squishy ball that tries to regain its shape, while Civilization and other games are more like snowballs where success breeds success and failure breeds failure.

Having zen to deal with setbacks is helpful. So is the willingness to ignore things. There are a lot of systems in Europa Universalis, and they all serve a purpose, but none of those purposes are essential. You don't need to learn everything all at once. In your first game you might just focus on using your military and growing your economy. There are other systems, like diplomacy, that you can dip your toes into, or invest a lot of time into mastering. One system I especially appreciate are the "Estates", which simulate the Nobility / Clergy / Burghers estates that dominated post-feudal Europe. There are a lot of fun things you can do with estates - summon Diets, grant privileges, seize land, and so on - but you can also just 100% ignore them and nothing bad will happen.

What should you focus on, then? One of my favorite parts of Europa Universalis are the "Missions", which give specific goals for specific countries to work towards. Most of these are based on historical developments, so in pursuing the missions you'll be at least running parallel to historical movements. Portugal might get missions related to exploration and trade, while Brandenberg will have missions related to military professionalism, and the Ottomans will have missions nudging them towards conquering Byzantium. I really like having concrete goals to work towards, which helps things feel less overwhelming and give a few specific areas to focus on and learn more about.

I think those are the main things! A few random tips before I go:

• Money is precious, especially early on. Treat it as a limited resource and only spend on things you (1) can afford and (2) know will be useful.
• Specifically, you'll rarely want to spend money on Buildings in the early game (with a couple of exceptions like building a Marketplace in a Center of Trade). This is a big change for Civ veterans who want every city to always be building something.
• Fighting a war and losing or ending in a White Peace isn't terrible. You'll likely have gained Army Tradition and maybe Prestige, as well as trust from any allies.
• Likewise, when winning a war, you may decide you don't want to take any provinces from the loser. It could be better to take money and war reparations. This results in all upside for you without any of the overhead of absorbing new territory.
  
• You'll probably want to Ally a powerful neighbor to discourage enemies from attacking you.

 When you're ready to dive deeper. Europa Universalis like the other Paradox games has a fantastic official wiki. It can look overwhelming at first, but once you have the rough overall framework in mind it's terrific for explaining details, showing connections, and offering guidance on strategy and tactics.

Splintered Fate

I've been having a blast playing "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate". I had been totally unaware of this game until my brother brought it up a month or so ago; we picked it up (I think during a Steam sale) and have been continuing our tradition of Co-Op Turtle Power.

 

 

This game doesn't seem to be at all connected with the earlier "Shredder's Revenge", which felt like a revival of the property. Shredder's Revenge was a very loving homage to the early-90s Turtles In Time side-scrolling beat-em-up arcade game, with an elevated take on the original gameplay and an aesthetic very closely tied to the 80s/90s cartoon. Splintered Fate is still the Turtles, of course, but feels closer to the later animated series in visual style and humor. As I've gotten deeper into the game I've come to realize that the gameplay is basically a ripoff of Hades - which is a good thing, as Hades is one of my favorite games of the last few years!

Unlike Hades, though, Splintered Fate is designed for multiplayer. You can play single-player, but narratively all four turtles are moving through the story at the same time, and mechanically it's more satisfying if you have multiple bodies on the field at the same time. I don't have a sense yet for whether the game scales up based on the number of players.

 

Like other rogue-lites, SF combines a per-run temporary build economy with a persistent game-wide economy. During a run you will pick up "Dragon Coins" and "Dreamer Coins", which are useless during a run but can be cashed in at your base later for permanent upgrades, much like Gems or Darkness in Hades. The actual upgrades are almost identical to the ones in Hades, although to be fair I think just about any game would have them: extra lives, quicker movement, more damage, higher rarity powers, and so on.

There are also "artifacts", which are like the Keepsakes of Hades: you pick one at the start of your run but can swap it out during the run. You can use them to force-draw certain upgrades (like a "Manhole Cover" that guarantees getting a Water power and boosts the chance of getting better Water powers), or for other upgrades that last during your run (like an increased Dodge chance). Unlike Keepsakes, you unlock Artifacts by defeating specific bosses for the first time or achieving certain other milestones.

As you play through the story, you also unlock some possible developments that will impact the game. The biggest one I've noticed so far is a "care package", which results in hacked Stockman Mousers who will fight on your side instead of against you. Once unlocked, you can use Coins to further upgrade the odds of it happening.

The actual run is, again, a lot like Hades. Instead of Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium and Styx, you have the zones of Sewers, Docks, Streets and Rooftops (even mirroring the rising elevation). Environmental impacts come into play similarly: you didn't need to worry about lava until you reached Asphodel, and in Splintered Fate, you don't need to worry about rain or lightning until you reach the Docks. You start a zone by getting a Turtle Power, which is basically a Boon. Each chamber you clear gives you a choice of rewards, which could be Scrap (Obols), Pizza (Max Health), Dragon/Dreamer Coins (Gems/Darkness), limited time boosts (Well of Charon), or enhanced Tools (Daedalus Hammer). So that's a bit different from Hades, where you chose the next chamber based on the advertised reward: here there's a single exit from each room but each room has multiple reward choices.

Like Hades, there seems to be a fixed number of chambers in each zone, but the actual map selection and enemies are randomized each time. The first chamber is a freebie that gives you a particular type of upgrade (a Turtle Power / Boon for Sewers, an Inspiration for Docks, etc.). Most chambers are standard encounters with a mix of regular and elite enemies. You'll face a couple of minibosses, which are especially tough and have their own attack patterns and mechanics. There's a shop, with "The Chairman" sitting in for Charon; like Hades, you can spend Scrap along the way on in-run or persistent currency, but if you make it all the way to the last shop and have saved a lot, you can buy some big-ticket items. Each zone ends with the same boss, although they seem to randomly sometimes have a tougher variation.

 

One thing I really like about Splintered Fate is that your Special and Tool are charged up by attacking enemies, and not just on cooldowns. This makes "trash" mobs actually a kind of valuable resource: if you have a few weak unarmored Foot Soldiers or Mousers at the beginning or end of a fight, I'll just wail on them with my standard attack to fully charge my special abilities, then when facing tougher foes, I'll unload on them.

I've pretty exclusively been playing as Donatello for this campaign, other than a short outing as Leonardo when playing the tutorial. As my brother happily reminds me, playing Donatello feels like cheating: he gets free health regen between each level, and his Special also makes him immune to all damage for a short time, so he's way more survivable out of the box than any of the other turtles. What I like best about him, though, may be his Special, which is a spinning bo attack that does AOE inside a decently wide radius. There are a lot of fights where you'll be fighting around a dozen weak Foot Soldiers, who can take a while to take out individually but go down quick if you can cluster them together and spin to win.

I'm finding that my many many hours playing Hades has prepared me pretty well for this game; as my brother noted, Elden Ring probably helps as well. You learn to read enemies' attack patterns, attack when there's an opening, avoid being greedy, be ready to dodge and get out of the area when things look dangerous. In particular, I've taken the mantra of "dash dash dash" from Hades: enemies can't hit you while you're dashing. I've prioritized getting the Dash upgrades, which has helped a lot. During a run I usually try to pick abilities that add more utility to the Dash: there are some that do damage where you start the dash (similar to Ares' Blade Rift), some that do damage where you end the dash (similar to Aphrodite's Passion Dash), and one that throws a shuriken out in front of you (like Demeter's Mistral Dash).

Also somewhat like Hades, you kind of need to decide whether to focus on a particular aspect and pick Powers and Upgrades related to that, or go more broad and get a wider variety of weaker abilities. I've gone both ways, and think it's probably better to focus on one or two main damage sources, but of course it does come down to RNG and what you get offered. It does feel really nice when synergies start kicking in, though. One of my best runs so far had multiple things that could proc Light Shell, which briefly deflects all projectiles, and then multiple abilities that enhanced Light Shell by damaging the enemies.

As of this writing, we've played, hrm, maybe close to a dozen runs. The game feels very well balanced and tuned, with us consistently getting a bit further each time we play. We've made it to what I think is the last boss (and even has a similarly bogus refill-health-bar-once-near-death move), and who knows, we may be able to beat it next time!

 

The game isn't perfect, of course. While the chambers are varied and have great atmosphere (some remind me of Shadowrun Returns levels), there are a few maps where the isometric walls extend into the battlefield, making it impossible to see your turtle and the enemy when you're behind them. The controls are generally good but don't feel quite as fluid at Hades, especially the Dash execution. While we've gotten better, we had a lot of frustration in our first few runs when we would keep mashing buttons at the end of an encounter, accidentally picking the first reward offered without being able to read them. We've had a couple of odd glitches, including one time when the game soft-froze when my turtle died during a boss fight.

None of those have interfered with our enjoyment, though. It's been fun to scratch that action-rogue-lite itch again, and doing so with the Turtles is surprisingly satisfying.

Then We Take Berlin

I'm really, really loving my Bohemian run of Europa Universalis IV. Maybe even more than my Portugal run, though I've been surprised by just how different the games are. Portugal was incredibly expansive, filled with exploration and traveling over vast distances and building long trade chains to funnel exotic goods into Sevilla. Bohemia is exclusively focused on Europe, and especially in the Holy Roman Empire and its immediate neighbors; despite the smaller geographical footprint, though, there's a significantly larger number of nations involved, with webs of alliances and rivalries and regional politics. I'm totally ignoring some systems and mostly ignoring others, while mastering others I never encountered while playing as Portugal.

I'm not going to try and give a chronological recap of my game so far. Instead I'll try and cover the areas I've focused on. In no particular order:

Actually, let's rotate clockwise, starting from about 2 o'clock. My first Personal Union was with Poland. I had allied Muscovy and the Ottomans to take them over, but Muscovy never was willing to join due to their crippling debt, and the Ottomans weren't very helpful either, but eventually they became willing. When my first monarch died, I was shocked to read that I had directly inherited the Polish lands. From reading the wiki I didn't think that was possible, since their development was so large: I had already started the lengthy annexation project and was about 20-25% of the way through. On the one hand I wish I hadn't "wasted" all that diplomatic mana, on the other hand I was happy to save the other 75-80%.

Since this was unexpected, it pushed me over my Governing Capacity, especially on top of the Burgundy Inheritance. That initially freaked me out, as I've been careful to keep near but not over the cap. It turns out to not be a huge deal, though. The biggest issue is slowing down your Aggressive Expansion decay, but that isn't too painful and is more of a long-term thing to address. It did mean that I needed to start prioritizing building Courthouses and State Houses in addition to the other things I wanted to spend ducats on. When I finally got some headroom in my Governing Capacity, I was able to begin Stating areas of Poland to get lower autonomy and more money and resources.

The other wrinkle has been culture. Bohemia starts off with Czech primary culture, which is in the Western Slavic group along with Polish, Silesian and other cultures in that area. So it's pretty natural to expand east and absorb them, since other cultures in the same group have lower penalties, and once you rise to Empire (more on that later) you automatically accept all cultures in the same group. From reading an online strategy guide, though, folks recommended switching to a German culture, ideally something like Saxon. There are a lot more subcultures within the Germanic group than within the West Slavic group, so you need to promote a lot fewer cultures of West Slavic than you would of German. Being Saxon also allows you to form other nations, including Prussia. They advise doing this early on while your empire is still small, because it can become impossibly expensive to switch later. Changing culture is a very very long process, with a single province easily taking a decade to switch and eating a lot of diplomatic mana.

I eventually spread enough Saxon culture to be able to switch primary. It's been all right. At this point in the game I think I would actually still be better off with Czech culture, because I haven't been directly taking very much HRE territory (more on that later), while I have directly taken almost all West Slavic provinces. But I can see how that would shift in the future. It's also kind of interesting since my primary culture is now Saxon but my ruler's dynasty is still Czech, so there are some occasional events that pop up about the tension that creates.

Lithuania has remained in Personal Union with me. I'm really glad that they hadn't merged with Poland prior to me creating our union; a single Commonwealth would have been a lot more powerful, had more Liberty Desire and made a far more abrupt impact when integrated. Lithuania is still plenty powerful on its own, does a good job at looking over its vast territory, and serves as a helpful buffer state against Muscovy. One minor annoyance with all my PUs is that they grant Orthodox Autonomy rather than convert the provinces to Protestant. I sometimes have spare Missionaries and would happily do it myself, but can't. Once I do eventually take over the territories I then have a bunch I need to do all at once. Not the end of the world, especially as my empire grows enough that it doesn't affect Religious Unity too much, just a minor annoyance.

Speaking of minor annoyances: the Teutonic Order was a thorn in my side for a while, but actually a kind of good thorn. I think I alluded to this near the end of my last post, but they were a Catholic nation, on the opposite side of Europe from the revolving-door Catholic Defender of the Faith, so any time I wanted to reset the DoF I'd declare on the TO, beat them up, take all their money and end the war before armies from Portugal or Spain or England or France could reach me. The TO did eventually join the HRE, which made things a little more tricky but just meant I needed to get an appropriate Casus Belli before attacking. I was nervous when they eventually flipped to Protestant as I was concerned they might form Prussia and I wanted to keep that door open for myself; but from some online research I saw that I had already taken away the provinces they needed for that, so they can just chill out in Malbork Castle indefinitely.

And speaking of blocking country formations! As I mentioned before, I initially allied Muscovy, but they were completely useless allies. Once I made the union with Lithuania, Muscovy broke our alliance and became extremely hostile, due to wanting Lithuanian land. I wasn't too concerned about this; the Bohemian-Polish-Lithuanian-Hungarian union was beefy enough to take on Muscovy, plus I had other allies in my pocket. But looking to the long-term I wanted to defang Muscovy before they would have a chance to form Russia.

Russia usually emerges as the end boss in Europa Universalis games. Way back in EU3, my Mecklenberg juggernaut was almost brought down at the end when swarms of Russians invaded over the Mongolian steppes into my wealthy Asian holdings. In my EU4 Portugal game I blocked them from reaching the Pacific, but then had to defend those lands against an endless stream of bodies. Russia tends to not be a threat for much of the game since they aren't strategically located, but once fully-grown they have a functionally infinite number of soldiers and reserves, territory so vast it can never be fully occupied, and punishing attrition that will bleed enemies dry before a single shot is fired. (Which, to be fair, is pretty realistic!)

So, to be kind to the 1750s version of myself, I wanted to keep Muscovy from ever creating Russia. Once again I consulted the wiki. I saw that they had already taken all of the provinces they needed to form the nation and were just waiting on the right Administrative Technology. Looking over what to take from them, I eventually settled on Novogrod, which was very close to the Lithuanian border. I think I might have called the Ottomans in on this war if I remember right, and they kept Muscovy busy in the south while I took their lands in the north.

After this I stopped worrying so much about Muscovy/Russia, but several decades later, my Nobility Estate made an interesting proposal during a Diet to take two other provinces in modern-day Estonia. The provinces by themselves weren't exciting, but Moscow didn't have any strong allies and was behind me in tech, and I needed to burn off some Germanic Aggressive Expansion, so I liked the idea of pounding the east for a bit. My big prize this time was Moskva itself, mostly because of its awesome Great Project. They have two: the Kremlin isn't very interesting to me since it requires Slavic culture, but Saint Basil's Cathedral looks awesome: fully upgraded, it gives a beefy +10% Loyalty Equilibrium to all Estates, along with some other goodies like cheaper advisors and higher Tolerance of the True Faith.

This was kind of a weird war, in that I don't think I fought a single battle the whole time. Muscovy supposedly had like 70k troops, versus around 45k I directly controlled and maybe 120k for my entire side. They never once appeared, though. Maybe they were trying to lure me into Siberia.

Continuing clockwise: much like Muscovy, the Ottomans were early allies of mine that turned into rivals, in this case after they helped me enforce the union with Hungary and so we ended up with competing claims over the Balkans. A big chunk of Bohemia's Mission Tree involves this area, with some fun and creative missions like building up a system of forts, then retaking provinces in the Balkans and eventually removing the Turks altogether. That's pretty much how this went down. After losing Muscovy and Ottomans, I picked up Venice and Mamluks as my next allies. Venice doesn't have a huge army, but they have possibly the biggest navy at this point of the game, had many naval bases near the Black Sea, and were eager to take on the Ottomans. The Mamluks were powerful in northeast Africa and the near Middle East and had ambitions of their own against the Ottomans.

This was a big campaign that involved multiple wars. I think that the first time I pretty much just took Constantinople, along with provinces in, hm, I think Silestria for a mission. Taking Constantinople is expensive but really important, as for all future wars it is a chokepoint that separates Ottoman armies in the Balkans from those in Anatolia, letting you easily divide and conquer them. In the second war I took Greece and the coastal provinces, then in a final third war I took the few remaining inland provinces, while avoiding personally encroaching onto Anatolia.

I had a lot of extra warscore for this third war, since I didn't need many more provinces and by this point was easily thrashing them. I ended up forcing the Ottomans to release a lot of nations, mostly along the southeast coast of the Black Sea and extending into Armenia and Azerbaijan. This will be a recurring theme for this post, which I'll definitely write more about later: during my Portugal game I always wondered what the point was of releasing a nation instead of taking the provinces directly, while in Bohemia I've probably liberated more provinces than I've conquered. Anyways, I tend to think of peace negotiations as being basically a shopping trip: spending war score to get the most bang for my buck. I think it took me over half an hour to figure out how to end this war, and I used one and a half sheets of notebook paper to plan things out.

There are a lot of releasable countries. My long-term scheme (not yet implemented) is to extend the Holy Roman Empire all across Europe, from the Atlantic Sea to the Black Sea. That means creating small Christian nations that I can force into it. Ideally small Protestant nations. Thanks to the Orthodox Autonomy, lots of these provinces are still Orthodox and will take that faith when liberated; then, you can "Force Religion" in a future war (or, I suppose, as a vassal) to switch their denomination.

So, what I was trying to do was to make as many small Christian countries as I could, which meant pulling up the peace negotiations, clicking "Release Nation", selecting a potential candidate, seeing which provinces it would get, seeing how much War Score they cost, closing the negotiation window, clicking into the provinces, checking their religion, checking to see whether they were European or Asian, jotting those values down in my notebook, and then repeating for the 30 or so releasable nations. Oh, I also wanted to see if they were contiguous to me, or across a sea zone, or could be contiguous to another nation I was releasing.

I finally did this, getting all those nations released. It's kind of fun to see how quickly baby nations start up their own Game of Thrones: in almost no time they were allying and rivaling one another. Which makes sense, they aren't nearly big enough to vie with the Ottomans or myself.

In the time since then, I've already intervened in a couple of wars (thanks to a "Babbling Buffoon" warning) between them, in the process smacking around Muscovy some more and enforcing quite a few of them to embrace Protestantism. That will be an interesting region in another decade or two.

The Mamluks have been good allies to me, as we're both very powerful but at least so far content to be in our separate spheres of influence. I wouldn't be surprised if we start butting heads in another century or so. From what I've read online, when the player (me) intervenes to thwart the typical mega-powerful lucky nations, another AI nation ends up blobbing in its place: if Russia never forms, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth usually gets huge, and if the Ottomans don't get big, the Mamluks do.

Right now I have very little visibility into the world east of the Caspian Sea, with no lines of site on India, China or anywhere in the Pacific. I can see the Mughals, who seem like they may be the main power in the Persian area. I'm really looking forward to getting visibility into Asia, at the very least so I can open diplomacy with any major powers out there, and who knows, late in the game I might want to hop back into the global trade realm.

Moving back up the Adriatic Sea: my third Personal Union junior partner has been Hungary. They were the problem child for a long time: they were large and angry after I forced them into the union, and were disloyal even without forcing religion on them. By this point in the game I'd accrued a lot of Aggressive Expansion and a lot of countries were very mad at me, so I think at one point Muscovy, France, Castile and England were all supporting Hungary's independence, which in turn made them so disloyal that there was no mathematical way to make them loyal again.

I stumbled across the solution: war! Apparently when you have a truce with someone, they can't support your subjects' independence. After peeling off Muscovy, my wars against the Catholic Defender of Faith managed to knock out the other supporters. Once those were gone, Hungary flipped to fully loyal (0% liberty desire). I finally enforced religion, then immediately started paying a stipend to support them (keeping LD below 50%) until they were back in the clear.

Collectively, Hungary and Lithuania are amazing. Big armies, decently smart AI, incredibly loyal. They more than pull their weight in our wars.

Venice has been an interesting one. As noted before, I recruited them as allies after rivaling the Ottomans, and we had close to a century of good cooperation, with my army and their navy acting as a hammer and anvil to smash the Saracens into the Bosporus. While Venice and I are geographically close, we haven't been competing much, with me focused on northernish Germany and Eastern Europe while they focus on Italy. Again, aggressive expansion proved my undoing, and they eventually broke our alliance.

I'm jumping way ahead in time here, but my most recent major event before writing this point was a shooting war against Venice. I'd been eyeing two Imperial Provinces that Venice owned, one in Corsica and the other on the north Adriatic coast. The problem was they were allied with France, and Spain was Defender of the Faith, so it would be a very challenging war. But I was delighted to see that Spain attacked France and pulled Venice in as an ally. Now I could declare on Venice: I'd still need to contend with France, but not Spain, and France and Venice already had their hands full with Spain and its allies.

France is another nation in this game that's typically a major power but has been relatively subdued so far in my play-through. Since I won the Burgundian Inheritance and kept it all I've blocked out their typical eastward expansion. Savoy has been pretty powerful in gobbling up the old lands around Genoa, and Savoy is allied with France. So while France has consolidated it hasn't really expanded like normal.

In this war, Spain had already started sieging the south of France. Paris was just a Level 1 fort, two provinces away from the front, so I marched in a small army and captured it in a few months. The rest of the nation was much beefier new Level 4 Forts, which kept me occupied for a while. There was a bit of the large tactical dance and fakery that I love in Europa Universalis, with large armies positioning and forcing each other to move without committing to battle. A few times I initiated a siege to draw back forces from Italy, then withdrew behind my safe lines, picked off stragglers, then settled in for longer stays after the armies retreated.

My other major goal of this war was, yes, to militarily convert provinces to Protestantism: specifically, Sienna (who Austria had made a Free City) and, hm, I think Urbino or something. But they were below Venice, who had most of the peninsula north of Rome. Again, lots of Level 4 Forts, and the Alps always make that area hard to navigate. Venice itself fell pretty easily, as it was just a Level 1 Fort, and their navy left for long enough for me to cross over. (I definitely called the Mamluks into this war, and they have a surprisingly beefy navy.)

Speaking of navies: for probably the first hundred years or so I didn't have one. Bohemia is landlocked, and even after I started getting a handful of coastal Polish provinces I didn't really care about booting it up. I'll never be a great maritime power, but I do have a moderate fleet now that probably punches above its weight. At first I just got Light Ships to boost Trade Power in some key coastal Centers of Trade, but in the last few decades I also bought a chunk of Heavy Ships along with a handful of Transports. My main goal here is to avoid the -2 penalty when sieging coastal forts, and I can usually squeeze some War Score out of sinking a few enemy boats when fighting small nations. Venice has like 120 ships though, so I definitely can't face them in a fight.

I did get to do my first naval invasion of the game, and it may end up being my last: Corsica. Transporting troops in this way takes about a month, and I was nervously watching the main Venetian fleet on the other side of Italy, delighted when we finally landed.

As often happens with large wars in EU, it felt like things ground on slowly for a long time, then everything quickly wrapped up. France was unwilling to even accept a white peace even after I had captured their capital and several forts. I think the AI is extremely reluctant to sign peace within a year of a war starting. Before long, though, they were close to 100% occupied: maybe 70% by me, 20% by Spain with a single fort and a handful of provinces left. They still had a large army, but it was off conquering Spanish land in Naples.

I had initially declared this war with the Imperial Ban (more on that later), and I realized that I couldn't take arbitrary provinces from them. Which is fine, I wasn't expecting to; I did have my eye on Caen and some other Centers of Trade in the English Channel, but it wasn't a requirement. My main goal with France was to get rich, taking lots of money and war reparations from them. I think I cleared over 2k ducats, which was enough to get to Level 2 of a Great Project. I also canceled all of their claims on me (but of course they made another claim just a few months later). And once again I released a nation. Because French land is so rich / high dev I wasn't able to free up the vast territory that the Ottomans had given up, but still, by this point in the game I'm having a big blast just breaking people up.

I think my overall warscore prior to peace-ing out France was like 67%; after doing it, it jumped to 99%. I was a little surprised; usually warscore drops after eliminating an enemy, since you no longer get credit for their occupied provinces. But this also removed their substantial armies from the calculation, and by now I had solely occupied all Venetian land. So this ended up being an even richer peace than I had expected: the two provinces I wanted, maximum money, and I ended up releasing, hm, I think four or so nations: Dalmatia along the eastern Adriatic and a bunch of inland Italian states. Again, long-term my plan is to turn them Protestant and hopefully absorb into the HRE.

I mentioned Spain earlier. Spain is now my ally, replacing Venice. It's been a surprisingly good relationship. They're the Defender of the Faith, but by this point in the game I don't need to declare on many Catholics, so so far it hasn't been a problem. Geographically it seems to be working out all right, with the Mamluks willing to aid me against Muscovy and Ottomans, and Spain willing to aid me against western Europe. So far it's mostly been a defensive relationship though: I like having their numbers on my side to discourage coalitions from declaring, but haven't felt the need to call them in to any offensive wars yet. The Venetian/France war was a pretty fun and interesting cooperation though, as we were technically fighting separate wars and not allies but in practice attacking the same people at the same time.

Burgundy and Holland have been really quiet since the Lowland Revolt. The most interesting development here has probably been, well, development. In another first for this time, I'm now directly collecting from trade in multiple nodes instead of trying to steer everything. I automatically collect in Saxony, where I have a bit over 50% Trade Power; due to caravan power, it's really hard to get more than that. I also have merchants collecting in the English Channel, the Baltic Sea and, hm, I think Krakow. The English Channel is the most profitable of those, despite me having a relatively small share and England dominating. Anyways, I've been developing those lands, building marketplaces, upgrading Centers of Trade, accepting cultures and generally making it into a cash cow.

Er - on cultures, I guess it hasn't been universal. I did accept Dutch and Flemish early on to try and keep the Lowlands under control. The Walloons were a smaller minority, so I've been culture-converting them to Flemish for a while now. Which, again, seems historically accurate, especially in how mad it makes people! After I switched primary culture to Saxon and became an Empire, I was surprised to see that Dutch and Flemish were automatically accepted as part of the Germanic culture group; for some reason I'd assumed they were separate. So that freed up two valuable Promoted Culture slots; I promptly promoted Burgundian, who have a relatively small portion of provinces but a relatively large share of development. I think I've pretty much completely eliminated the Walloons from my border.

Anyways, this may be a long-shot but I'm curious if I'll be able to force Global Trade to spawn in my empire. Right now the English Channel is the second-wealthiest Trading Node in the world, behind Venice but within shooting distance of it. England has roughly a 2/3 share to my roughly 1/4 share, BUT I experimented for one month with making all my merchants steer towards the Channel instead of collecting, and that pushes me up to about 40%. My harebrained scheme now is to take London: not so much for its wealth or its Great Project, but just for its Provincial Trade Power, which I think could tilt the scales in my direction. I've fabricated claims on Sussex and Kent, and will decide in the next decade or two whether to take the plunge. Which, again, is a good reason for my navy. I'm ahead of England in tech, so this could be a good time to strike. Oh, and similar to taking Novograd, I'm 99% sure that taking London will keep England from being able to form Great Britain, which again will help me avoid a more dangerous foe in future centuries.

I'll write more about Protestantism later, but real quick on the Reformed movement - I successfully squashed the first two Reformed Centers of Reformation in Europe, which has been awesome, as only a handful of countries converted. It took me a while to realize that the third one had spawned in the north of Scotland, which is too far away for me to do anything about, but also it's actually been pretty great to have it up there. It's almost exclusively been converting in the UK. Scotland flipped to Reformed, which made tensions with England stronger, which mitigates the risk of Great Britain forming soon. Britain has remained Catholic again like they did in my last game, rejecting Anglicanism; but a good chunk of their provinces and most of Ireland have since become Reformed. I can only imagine that this is creating significant unrest in the country, which makes me smile.

I don't think I chatted about Institutions yet. I was lucky enough to get Printing Press to spawn in my lands, very near the Austrian border. I did everything I could to encourage its spread, including taking Church Powers, trying to stay at peace, and using the Edict everywhere to encourage it. Still, I ended up being one of the last countries to Embrace it. It takes a lot longer for large countries to get enough Institution spread to take it, while small nations can immediately switch for free as soon as a single province gets it. My memory is slightly fuzzy, but I think I wasn't overly concerned about the next sets of techs unlocking, so even once I could afford embracing it I let it continue spreading naturally for another year or two, finally unlocking a few days before an Innovative technology bonus was about to expire. This ended up saving a ton of ducats and monarch points.

Continuing north: I've had pretty great relations with Denmark and Sweden for much of the game. All three Protestant Centers of Reformation were pretty close to Scandinavia, and they got a decent number of provinces converted early on; then one day I looked, and they were totally Protestant. I suspect that this is connected to a Mission or Decision or something, as it seemed way faster than normal.

For quite a while I was toying with the idea of allying Denmark and/or Sweden, as they like me a lot and can influence my north in the same way Spain influences my west and the Mamluks my south and east. I haven't pulled the trigger on that yet, though, mostly because their armies seem so puny that it doesn't seem worth it.

Okay, let's plunge ahead into the Holy Roman Empire!

My goal all along has been to be the Emperor of a Protestant Empire. For the first century-plus of the game I was effectively a saboteur within the Empire: an Elector who voted for weak Emperors, and a Hussite who fought internal wars and forced religion on other Princes. Austria was deposed as Emperor after two early humiliating wars against me, and never rose again as a Great Power. The emperorship rotated through a series of other weak princes. I think Austria had managed to pass the first Reform, but a subsequent Emperor was forced to revoke it, and Authority stayed low.

Once the Reformation started, I flipped Protestant, as did nearly all the other Hussites, and I aggressively focused on converting still more princes to Protestantism. With the head start of Hus, the Leagues were dominated by Protestants by 1553 or so. Austria had finally regained the Emperorship, while I think 6 of 7 electors and maybe 2/3 of the princes were Protestant. As Austria was no longer a Great Power, all of their alliances and rivalries were within the Empire itself. Unlike in my Portugal game, no external great powers had declared yet for either league. The only even medium-sized nations to declare were Denmark and Sweden, both on the Protestant side.

I obviously planned to join the Protestants, but wanted to be strategic in doing so. By this point I was the #1 Great Power and was rivaled by Muscovy, Ottomans, France and England. If I declared for Protestant they were almost guaranteed to join the Catholic League. I had to wrap up another war first, though, and was nervous about the League War firing too early: the Protestant side dwarfed the Catholic side, and the current Protestant leader (I forget who, but maybe Friesland?) was probably tempted to get the party going ASAP.

I eventually did something I've never done before: broke a truce. Once my previous war wrapped up I joined the Protestant League and became the League Leader. I still had a couple of years left on my 15-year truce with Austria after our last war, but I went ahead and started the Religious Superiority war with them anyways. Thanks to having completed the Diplomatic Ideas, this was merely a -3 Stability hit rather than the typical -5.

I wrote a long post earlier about World War Zero during my Portugal game. This time around I started calling it World War Negative One: it was to WW0 as WW1 was to WW2. WW0 was a truly global conflict, with battles raging all throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South American colonies invading North American ones, epic naval battles off the coast of Sumatra, island-hopping marine invasions throughout the Pacific, and more. By contrast, WW-1 was exclusively a European struggle, and mostly focused in central Europe, with the larger nations watching from the periphery.

The timing was pretty different as well. WW0 had started right around 1600 and delayed my embrace of Absolutism; WW-1 kicked off around 1553 or so. As another nice benefit, that meant the Counter-Reformation was much shorter in this game. I think the Reformation fired shortly after 1500, the Counter-Reformation began around 1540 and ended around 1553, so the Catholic countries had a very short time; being outside the church I couldn't check the status of the Council of Trent but even if they had unlocked everything they only had a couple of years with those modifiers.

Militarily, it was a much easier fight than WW0, but still my favorite war to date in this game, with significantly more participants than usual. The AI is actually pretty good, managing to sneak around to some underdefended areas, and less suicidally attached to ongoing sieges than they were in earlier versions. I could have enforced religion relatively early, but looked at the whole war as a great opportunity to reshape the HRE in my own image, so I separate-peace'd all the Catholic members of the league (as opposed to all the Catholic League members), force-converting them to Protestantism before letting them go. Austria stood alone in the end before I finally enforced my will. I took a few more provinces from them too, getting a few steps closer towards my centuries-long goal of creating a land bridge between Burgundy and Bohemia. This made my Aggressive Expansion soar to previously unseen heights; I'm curious if trucebreaking to start a war increases the AE of any provinces you take in the end.

Most of my focus since then has been on whipping the HRE into shape and speedrunning Reforms. I had to put in a bit of work early to ensure my continued leadership of the Empire: I had annexed Saxony and Brandenburg during the war, so I had a big malus from that on top of maluses from AE; but as the new Emperor I got to appoint the new Electors, so I chose two new Protestant nations that I had released from Catholic League losers. I think the new ones are Lippe and Nassau. They come with a huge relations boost from liberating them, so despite not being vassals they actually supported me more than Saxony or Brandenburg had. The other four Electors hated me, but fortunately they couldn't agree on who they preferred to replace me, and as the Emperor only requires a plurality of votes I was set.

We emerged with the League War with a strongly positive Imperial Authority monthly amount, further aided by the Historical Center of Prague and my Bohemian Ideas. I was still getting some small maluses from heretical princes and for four Imperial territories held outside the Empire. When I got opportunities, I would start a war to enforce religion; often this meant attacking some third party and pulling in the heretics. It isn't necessary to co-belligerant them since you aren't taking provinces and there are no extra penalties on Force Religion for non-belligerants.

After finally (re-) passing the first Reform, I unlocked the Imperial Ban. My first target was Denmark. I didn't have any particular animosity towards them, as they had helped in the war and weren't actively threatening us, but I still wanted those provinces. I think this was the first time I actually made use of my own navy in a war, having invested in a few Heavy Ships along with my existing English Channel trade fleet. This one wasn't a total war, and I think we peaced out right around the time we took the capital; I mostly just wanted those specific provinces. I was able to return one to its original owner, and only had a small amount of AE for directly taking the other.

Oh, man! I haven't talked yet about the Protestant religious mechanics. Here we go:

The more I play EU4, the more impressed I get at how not just dense but also varied it is. Religion is a great example. My assumption would be that, similar to Civilization, religions offer different flavors and maybe alternate bonuses, but are all the same system. That's not at all the case in EU4, though. Catholicism has its own system with completely unique user interfaces, mechanics, and strategies than Protestantism, which in turn is very different from Orthodox, Coptic, Sunni, Shiite, Buddhist, and so on.

I'd gotten to know Catholicism very well during my Portugal run. The gameplay there is oriented around the Holy See. The Papal States are the in-game manifestation of the Church, and like other countries they own territory, command armies, have diplomatic relations and so on. But there is also a "Curia Controller", which is the country that "controls" the Pope; sometimes this is the Papal States but often it's a major Catholic nation like France. The Curia Controller can make major decisions that affect all Catholics throughout the world, like excommunicating disliked monarchs, calling for a crusade against infidels, issuing Golden Bulls that give a specific bonus to all Catholic nations, appointing new bishops, conducting the Council of Trent and so on.

The vast majority of Catholic nations will never become the Papal Controller and need to abide by the Pope's decisions. But they do gain "Papal Influence". You can get small amounts through various means, like events, having a loyal Clergy estate, buying an Indulgence, and so on. But you can also get a lot of Papal Influence by converting heretics and heathens to Catholicism; as Portugal, I had an entire world of natives to convert, both in my own direct territory and those of my colonial nations. You can then spend Papal Influence to unlock powerful bonuses, like increased diplomatic efficiency, higher morale for your troops, or a one-time boost to Mercantilism. You can also use your Papal Influence to lobby to become the Papal Controller for the next Pope, but this tends to be a very inefficient usage; everyone else is competing and you're much better off spending on known results than taking a gamble.

Thematically, then, Catholicism is very pyramidal and hierarchical in gameplay as well as in lore. At the very top are the Papal States and the Pope, who receive a flow of money throughout the whole game pouring into the Curia coffers. Then there are the large and wealthy major Catholic nations, who have the geographical and financial resources to get the most Papal Influence and earn the most benefits while influencing the course of Catholicism. And the vast majority of Catholic states are the small, poor and powerless ones who just passively accept whatever Golden Bulls are handed down from on high but don't have any way to influence the Church.

Protestantism is completely different. There is no global Protestant organization and no inter-national bodies; the decisions I make as the Protestant church in Bohemia have zero impact on Protestant churches in other nations. You do get the standard "Same faith" relationship bonus with other sect followers but that's it.

Internally, Protestantism is much flatter (more egalitarian) than Catholicism. Each nation gains "Church Power" over time. Once you reach 100 points, you can select a Church Aspect, which gives an ongoing bonus to your nation: you can pick something like steady increases to Legitimacy, or Army Morale, or  lowering National Unrest. You can have up to three Church Aspects available at a time, and can cancel one and replace it with another once you have sufficient Church Power.

Mechanically, this gives you the flexibility to shift your Aspects, such as focusing on military ones during times of war and economic ones during times of peace. Thematically, each state is in charge of its own destiny, with no central authority dictating how to worship or how to behave.

Annnnyways, back to the HRE! I'd long since become the Protestant Defender of Faith and have well over 50 Protestant nations in the fold. Surprisingly, nations don't get very mad at me attacking them and forcibly converting them, those maluses typically burn off in a couple of years while the Aggressive Expansion from taking only a few provinces can last for decades.

In a couple of cases I had to beat up the same people twice. Inglostadt was probably the third-largest HRE member after myself and Austria. I forcibly converted them to Protestantism, but only a decade or so later they flipped back to Catholic. That's annoying but understandable: only the capital province actually changes religion when the nation undergoes a Force Religion change, so if it's a large nation and all the other provinces are Catholic, then they'll probably choose to switch back once they can. This time around, I decided to follow my tried-and-true approach of hitting big guys to turn them into multiple little guys; specifically, I released Landshut, which automatically came out Protestant. I forced Inglostadt back to Protestant; I'd seen through the Religious map mode that their two remaining Catholic provinces were already being converted by Protestant Centers of Reformation, so I think there's basically zero risk of them returning to their old faith again.

I had a similar fight against Switzerland, this time taking some provinces for my under-construction land bridge: I don't think they had similar releasable nations, or if they did, they would have come out Catholic and not really helped me with my whole Heretic Princes problem.

The last big war I had was against Venice. I wrote about that up above! Venice isn't in the HRE, but some of its allies were, and once I forcibly converted Sienna and Geneva I was down to just two Heretic Princes left. Austria is one, which I want to leave alone for a while: I'm definitely going to fight them again, and would love for them to be unpopular outcasts when I do so. The other is Frankfurt, a lone Reformed Free City. I check its alliances web every few years and it always ends up looking like way too big of a pain. A mere 2 heretic princes (not electors) out of 58 nations in the HRE isn't bad at all! Now that I have all our Imperial Territory back, I'm earning Imperial Authority at a whopping 0.50 IA per month, which is awesome. I've already taken the second Reform and am more than halfway to the third.

What I'm really looking forward to is unlocking the "Expand Empire" casus belli. Once I have that, I plan to start declaring on the Black Sea Christian nations to try and expand the HRE out there. Most of central Europe is already in the fold, but there are a few stragglers like Ragusa I'd like to take in, and longer-term I may try to re-establish the Empire in Italy. (Though I also may want to take some, most or all of those provinces for myself, I still need to figure that out.)

Playing in the HRE continues to be great fun. I very much feel the Machiavellian "it is better to be feared than to be loved" thing. Most HRE nations have a negative opinion of me due to my Aggressive Expansion, which I can somewhat offset via Improve Relations; and yet, the Electors are currently unanimously supporting me, just because I'm so powerful. Whenever I have Overextension the Princes oppose my reforms, but as soon as I finish coring they're willing to support me. It's a fine tightrope to walk, and fun to balance.