Espionage is S tier for me because it allows for a lot more easier and larger expansion with less AE and giving you thus faster expansion for wide play. The claims will lower admin costs and AE as well, and is useful as a Humanist expansionist play.
They took that out because it's broken with the "can claim entire states" bit. In the past if you had tsardom government rank (so you had access to claiming states) and you claimed areas bordering your vassals but not yourself, you would still get the claims, not your vassal. Claiming for vassals was better for vassal play though, as you could just create vassal snakes along borders or throughout large enemies and feed them very cheap to fabricate cores.
@@Skrymaster I remember running into that sort of issue. Claiming whole states is still cool though. I feel like they could have resolved it by having you be able to choose who would get the claim (if multiple tags could). Similar problems exist with return unlawful territory and return core buttons.
The vassal can claim for himself, you know. Just mark the province as vital interest and the vassal is going to claim it. You can then declare over your vassals claim.... and take it yourself. Its that easy.
@@DylanSargesson I dare say the matter of how fast they will claim a province depends on luck (same as you). If the target took espionage ideas, or is trading in something increasing spy defense... you kind of gonna have to tough it out failing at 25 spy net all the time. So no more than 1 claim per target. I admit, i dont usually use those claims to expand myself. In fact, ive used it only when playing Oman - to get a claim on some minor and quickly vassalize him before Mamluks get to him (and cut them off from the southern tip of the peninsula). Other than that? Not really... i get free claims on my rivals, since vassals constantly claim their lands when they border them, but thats not the direction i want to expand most of the time, so the vassals just waste time. I use vassals as legit buffer states - to give the enemy something to siege down as im focusing on depriving them of manpower in the field. Other than that, i just annex the vassals. Then you have the more permanent solution (for late game) - client states. Now the claims they make i will act upon frequently. I want them (the clients) to be fairly strong, as i will ditch allies in favor of client states, anyway (allies keep dragging you into wars you have zero interest in, most of the time), but at that point in the game you just declare with imperialism anyway...
I'll be honest, Espionage is my favourite idea group. It also allows unique gov reform "puppeteer estates" or smth like that. It lets you enact and revoke estate privileges whenever you want so you don't care about their loyalty/influence at all and that enables a very interesting play style when you constantly change privileges to what's best for you. Also building spy network is underrated (chipper tech, reduced ae, chipper coring, siege ability). And stacking ae reduction is also very satisfying for playing wide. I once played as Saluzzo (-15 ae from tradition), took espionage -20, 100% spy net -30, 100 prestige -10, I stayed catholic and allied pope, so was I a curia controller every other time that's -20. To sum it up that's 95% ae reduction. I annexed a 4 province country with almost 30 dev in each that's over nearly 120 dev for 6 ae. Definitely S tier for me
Yo the best part of the Espionage Ideas imo has got to be that straight Vassalization Acceptance +15 modifier! But yeah I totally agree that you can just stack AE reduction so well with this Idea group.
That reform is also a big deal in Anbennar for any country who is getting a lot of artificier capacity, being able to swap out between peace and war time on 5+ privileges on the fly is great.
I think the tier list could've benefited from one more tier. As it stands, B tier is kind of crowded, and there's some ideas over there that shouldn't really be together. If you had D tier, you could safely put the worst ones from B into C, without making people think that those ideas are bottom of the barrel.
The issue is that people are pretty conditioned to understand that D is a failing grade, and there's no idea group that makes your situation worse. What it maybe could have done with is a little notifier for situational benefit or something like that, to have a bit of division within a tier.
@@AGrumpyPanda I guess you are right, I'm not American so I only use this grading system for tier lists. But indeed, it would be nice if there was some kind (any kind) of separation within the B tier.
Espionage with divine, offensive and innovative really stacks the siege ability, along with the better spy networks I’ve had siege ticks down to like 3 days it’s so over powered
yes, I've done it too and it's insane. But I'm still not 100% sold. The duration of wars barely limits me. Usually, it's admin points, AE, manpower, over-extension, and all that.
@@Feeber2 Well espionge also give AE reduction, so it also tackles that point. Faster sieges = less manpower losses from attrition, which somewhat tackles another bottleneck.
@@Vincrand well I have nothing agaisnt espionage. I was replying to the specific 4 idea group setup to max out siege ability which I really like in the late game but until then it's too much investement for the return imo. Now I pick offensive literally every single game. Espionage is fine too but it depends. When I go the vassal route I usually need influence first and diplo is without a question the top diplomatic idea. Divine is good, but sometimes you have to go a long route to be able to pick it. And innovative? I dislike that idea group so much. Sure amazing policies, but such bad ideas.
What you said about trade ideas in very true. I used to take them a lot when I was newer to the game. Now I almost never pick them, unless I strongly lean into some kind of 'trade empire roleplay', which I sometimes do. At the end of the day it all comes down to the fact that making money isn't that hard and it's better to pick idea groups that help in other areas.
It used to be a lot more necessary before trade company rework. It was the king at making money when the only way to get merchants was to be European and make colonies.
The main problem that i have with Espionage is, that i do not really usually find a moment to really slot it in, not matter where i am playing. If i want to play in the HRE and to have less aggressive expansion, i usually rather go with Diplomatic to improve relations and more diplomats, since more simultaneous actions on that front are better than having a little less AE - which will stack up anyway even if its less than before - and the other bonusses are just not strong enough. The 10% Siege Ability are nice, but i can get better with Offensive right from the start and in the group there are simply better bonusses. If i go with Espionge, i can never shake that nagging feeling that i took something that might be ocasionally have some nice bonusses, but i'm losing out on other things that may be better or at least good on the same level, but more numerous. For that reason for me, its B-Tier.
I have same thinks. Espionage it's bad on start. In chill games I take something mil next something admin, and trade. In more aggressive games I take Diplo+religious or influence+admin, next it's something for mil or humanist. In late game usually I don't care about AE. I never use espionage except one time when I want to test it. In my opinion it's closer to C tier than A tier
@@TugaThings Espioage is great for every run imo. The cav policies are barely worth going for, becaus there are over 3 other policies that make your cav army more powerful than those 2 from espionage.
@@TugaThings I'll start of with an important explanation so you'll know why some policies are better. My knowledge come from 7k+ hours in the game, testing mechanics and creating spreadsheets. Some generic army modifiers are better than the specific modifiers. The 5% discipline you get at the end of quality ideas is better than the 10% infantry, cavalry and artillery combat ability combined. That discipline adds 5% damage and reduces incomming damage by 5%. Combat ability only adds damage dealt. Damage reductions are more powerful than damage increases. F.e. 50% damage increase has the same value as a 100% damage increase. Stacking the same damage increase has diminishing returns. The first 10% cav combat ability allows you to do 10% more damage, but when you already have 50% cav combat ability, then the next 10% will give a relative increase of 6.66% damage. For damage reductions the opposite is true. The first 10% will reduce relative damage by 10%, but if you already have 50%, then the next 10% will reduce relative damage taken by 20%. Discipline is always great as it does both. 10% morale of armies is slightly better than 5% discipline. Disicpline loses less units, but the morale wins you the fight. Same is also true for unit pips. Morale damage always goes through even if you don't take casualties (I experienced this when I had 100% fire and shock damage received reductions in a mod). -Horde + Expansion: .5 yearly army tradition and +10% shock damage. -Religious + Mercenarie: +10% morale of armies (also +2% missionary strength). -Quality + Economic: +5% discipline -Religious + quantity: +10% morale of armies & +5% army morale recovery speed -Humanist + Quantity: +1 leader shock -Diplomatic + horde: +10% shock damage & +10 siege ability -Indigenous + exploration: 10% morale of armies & 2.5% discipline Similar tier as the cav combat policies: -Horde + Innovative: -5% fire & shock damage received. -Expansion + quality: +1 leader fire (potential damage reduction during fire fase) -Court + defensive: -10% morale damage received & -10% AE -Court + offensive: +10% morale damage & +25% power projection from insults Siege related. They don't improve combat, but wars are also won by sieging. -Offensive + innovatie: +10% siege ability & +1 leader siege. -Religious + quality: 10% siege ability & +5% morale damage dealt. -Divine + espionage: +10% siege ability & +1 artillery level modifier Situational If you have banners then reinforce speed increases are also very good to counteract their own reduces reinfoce speed.
Espionage on A tier is fair enough, still S tier imo considering how it has a hidden province war score cost modifier: you can claim entire areas, build spy network a lot faster and then fabricate claims for cheaper. That makes you waste a lot less time with claims AND makes you get more clay for both less AE AND less cost. Then theres the huge -20% AE impact and the 10% siege ability compounds with the massive +50% spy network that which at 100 grants you another massive siege bonus. Then you save a lot of money with both corruption and advisors and the icing on the cake is how you can spam favor actions very quickly and really shape the world around you.
Exactly, it's REALLY good for expansionist gameplay. Lots of siege ability makes for shorter, cheaper wars without needing mil ideas (It's more efficient to focus on mil tech early on).
The claim part of your comment is incorrect. Claims only reduce AE and PWSC with certain CBs, which are quite niche. Certainly does not apply universally enough. Rest is okay... Siege ability is great, for expansionism and AE I have diplo tho. Personally for me Espionage is border B/C tier
@@stiopagaming9050 incorrect? You pay tons of diplo points for each province you take that is not part of your claims. That's what I refer to "hidden cost modifier"
@@gustavosanches3454 I have yet to find a person referring to unjustified demands as hidden "province warscore cost modifier". Noone uses such nomenclature. In fact, your expression includes "war score cost" - not really relating to the diplo cost.
@@stiopagaming9050 holy fuck, pedantry kills, and anyone with half a functioning brain would understand Im talking about how you end up saving points in peace deals. So its like a "hidden WS modifier". Kinda sad you can't comprehend such simple concept.
I think maritime definitely deserves at least B tier. Picture this: if youre a nation with a lot of coastline, that means you can have a lot of sailors. For most of the game, those sailors wont be used for anything at all, however, if you take maritime ideas, you can get marines, meaning you can essentially turn your sailors pool into manpower. This is extremely overpowered if you can stack a lot of bonuses to sailors and to marines (on a country like great britain), because it means you have basically double the manpower you would usually have. Not to mention that you can build manpower and sailor buildings on the same province, meaning youre getting way more soldiers out of that one province than you would normally. Its basically old quantity on steroids, however not all countries can do this trick. You need to have a lot of coastline in order to maximize the amount of sailors you get. But it can definitely be game breaking, and you should look into this if you ever find yourself playing one of those nations.
Maritime/naval is almost 100% needed for MONEY gameplay! trade protectorates are broken! i had a venice campaign with maritime influ merc idea sets to get very nice! gameplay mechanic! you can release client states from every province you conquer -> make trade protectorate for 2%goods produced each! with maritime, you get to 100 naval tradition very easily! and trade steering will go brr to get all those goods back to your home node
honestly, if you are nation with a lot of coastline, you literally outnumbered everyone (except maybe ottomans) and it really doesnt matter if you have marines- no matter if its by quantity and provinces or by economy with mercenaries. But most important part is that you can use much better bonuses from different ideas that maritime almost always just take place
I love espionage ideas since this Update. Especially when you can combine it with divine ideas because it doubles the bonus you get from the artillery at the sieges
They really need to rethink trade ideas. They need to remove the merchants it gives you and replace those with other things, perhaps allowing you to have new or stronger trading policies, maybe lowering minimum autonomy in territories. Maybe making it so merchants have more trade power each like the kilwa monument. Maybe allowing you to attack someone in a trade league without calling in the other members. I do think Goods produced should be party of trade ideas. Maybe some sort of war score cost reduction for taking money, maybe you can take 50 warscore of money now instead of 25 warscore. It just feels very lackluster at the moment.
It is lacklustre, but I wouldn't remove the merchants. They are useful if you are in a region with more nodes than merchants and you can't build trade companies, like in Western Europe. I think goods produced and ducats in peace deals is more an economic thing than a trade thing, though. One that I think would be a good small buff is to not have trade centres decrease when annexing or conquering them. Not only would it make your trade better earlier and save thousands of ducats, but it would also provide the only way to get more level 3 centres of trade then you have merchants. Another possible small buff would be dev cost in centres of trade and estuaries. It's already a policy, so doubling down on that could be good. Both of these are small buffs that would make it relevant to a player who's good at the game
I.would love for trade ideas to finish with the ability to bypass one trade node / connect a trade node that two connections away. Thst would be unique and crazy.
Half your message (2nd half) is about how you basically want to replace trade related things with non trade related things. Trade power from merchants is a bad thing, because the trade power between regions differs a lot. Goods produced would be strong, but it's called trade ideas and not manufactoring ideas. Trade ideas should be about making money from the goods that others prouces. Taking more money in a peacedeal sounds more like something for how espionage is handled. If you want to add war related things to it I do have some suggestions: reduce warscore cost of trade steering and transfer trade power. Gain trade war cb against nations that have provinces in the same trade region as where you have merchants.
Espionage - you've convinced me to try it out with my next game in HRE. I often overlooked this idea. I mostly saw reducing AE which I was ignoring mostly because I always prefered diplo. After that later in my gameplay I would always find somethng else which I needed more atm. Trade (and similarily Inno from your admin video) - is so true. They used to be much better. I used to take both of them in most of my gameplays. Especially with Trade I was relying on Merchants and (already nerfed) 20% Goods Produced Modifier - Commonwealth in Age of Reformatons was great. Even though I'm still green with Trade companies and getting extra merchants and I'm still far away from maximazing profits efficiently - I've noticed in my last playthroughs I've stopped taking Trade ideas. Diplo - that is a no brainer. Can't recall a campaign I went without it. Usually my first diplo idea to take. I used to take it early with Inno (guilty pleasure idea) to spam 5* advisors and get an edge at the start of the tall gameplay. Court - that's probably the only one I could argue with. I would be very tempted to put it in (high) D tier. It seems very situational, probably too much. I haven't taken it once and I'll probably take it only in my next HRE game. Most of modifiers are completely non important or as you've said - you can stack them somewhere else (prestige, progress, power projection). Taking this idea for policies seems useless while 6 out of 8 ideas are pretty much skippable and the other 2, although very good, are very circumstantial. Definately the weakest from the new ideas. Infrastructure is pretty good. Mercenary is again very situational but as a whole seems stronger than Court ideas. Thank you for those videos. They're very educational (as is the comment section). Even though I've spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours I'm not a hardcore player and I always learn something from you or you explain (as with Inno or Trade) why my last gameplays changed in a certain way. You;ve also gave me ideas for new gameplays in HRE to try out Espionage, IInfrastructure, Mercenary (Swiss gameplay?) or go full Emperor.
I'd still put Trade ideas in low A tier, mostly for the policies. You can get up to +35% goods produced modifier from it's policies with Quantity, Religious, and Infrastructure, among several others that give trade efficiency.
Imo espionage ideas S tier cause of 45% ae (idea 20% + spynetwork 25% = 45% less ae) 30% of siege ability ( idea + 20% form spynetwork= 30% combining with offensive gave 50%) advisor cost and yearly coruption save our money to scale more. Spynetwork decetion reduce annoying actions like Sow Discontent and don't forget the bonus from stealing technology (more mana to develop and not staying back to others. Vassalize acceptation with winter palace is giving huge bonus to conquering for free by vassalizing. Claims on huge ammount of provinces. Playing as moscovy with espionage is so broken, u can claim everything with cost of 5+% spynetwork. So if u want to expand a lot of without any coalition espionage fill great. But in other hand they are not fiting in all builds
I think you are a bit overestimating the spy network bonus, since ae/siege bonus works only on a target country, it's great, but not scalable unfortunately :)
@@ZlewikkTV Spynetwork construction is huge so you need only a few months to take it to 100% + more diplomats = more targets at the same time. Also there are a few good combinations
Maritime on C Tier is a little bit of an insult I think... :/ a) I mean after all just the +50% Sailors (which quantity has only 33% for manpower) and +25% Marines Force Limit alone is worth so much more than only roleplay (obviously only for nations that have a relativly big amount of coastal provinces), because using Marines (and Sailors) is after all also Manpower as you are using your sailors pool on land battles as well while the +10% shock damage received is more like a joke because it is only 10% and it is only on sailors. And together with the new tier 5 gov. reform for the marines you`ll even pay the sailors maintanence and reeinforcement cost of only 750 Sailors for 1000 sailors regiment which not only negates the shock damage completly, but makes marines even more effiecient than manpower troops (if you have a good amount of the sailors pool)!! And the other Tier 5 Reforms are not really that valueable in the gameplay in most of the cases if we are fair. b) But mostly I think that there cannot be a real argument for ranking Maritime into the C Tier while ranking exploration in B Tier: Because if you take maritime + expansion ideas then you`ll have such an enormously stronger Maritime-Colonial Gameplay than you could ever have with explo. 1. Maritime and Expansion give a crazy +83% Naval Force Limit modifier together (while explo + expansion would only give a useless +25%) And Naval force limit means mostly more trade ships --> more money; or more transport ships --> easier overseas conquest (matches really nice with the marines btw) in single player and probably more fight ships --> naval dominance in multiplayer (but that is just assumed) 2. With the estate Privilege "grant new world charter", for which you only need one colonist (as with expansion), that gives you a decision, that gives you an explorer (so there is no need for the "quest of the new world" idea anymore except for spawning Colonialism) 3. You get (significantly) less colonial growth with maritime instead of explo... Yes. BUT if you are in singleplayer, then +50 more colonial is not worth missing out on the Marines, the insane Naval Force limit, and the navy quality (such as "repairing in sea zones" which makes the first world circumnavigation basically for free)(or the navy tradition which gives +100% trade steering at maximum and is quite difficult to hold up without any ideas for that). And in the New world there are mostly your CN anyways, so faster colonization is not giving you a lot there anyways. 4. MARITIME GIVES YOU A UNIQUE DECISION AND WITH THAT A UNIQUE TIER 8 REFORM!!! And although I`ll admit that Tier 8 is quite late, the bonus of that Reform is just insane, as it gives you access to the unique "Trade Protectorate" subject type, which is the most broken thing in game for basically infinite trade money (as you can stack those subjects without a relation slot)! So after all I can just recomment to try Maritime out (with a naval..ish nation of course) because I expierienced Maritime as a really nice snowballing idea group because of it boosting the overseas gameplay a lot. And please @Zlewikk, rethink your C Tier... at least compared to the explo B Tier with the current Naval Meta in 1.35 (because I think in 1.34 it was very different) :)
Was already looking for your comment :), yea i 100% agree, i feel like maritime should at least be a B especially with court there. (explo is still somewhat usable cause I still take explo as holland to colonize before portugal with the extra range.)
I think you made the case for Exploration to be C-tier instead of Maritime being a B-tier. If you are going colonial, naval force limit is not an issue as your colonies will be be providing all the limit that you could ever need (your shortfall will be with sailors instead of force limit). Also, the cost of exceeding the naval force limit is fairly negligible. Your point A is valid and a good justification for taking Maritime under an extremely niche scenario (needing more sailors). Your point B shows how weak both Maritime and Exploration are as naval force limit is extremely weak and unnecessary in colonial gameplay.
I could say espionage is a very good idea group. The reason I drop it from S to A is this. I does not scale to late-game as good as its competitors. The best bonusses it gives are not issue in late game. AE, vassalize, fabricate claim, you can see the pattern. this is purely based on single player tho.
Since i've been playing Anbennar more than Vanilla EU4 i see trade as an A tier idea mostly for the policy with offensive. In vanilla extra movement speed isn't very important but in anbennar (where multiple races have speed maluses) it becomes much more important, may god have mercy on your sould if you play with undead army without some movement speed buffs.
diplo is by far the best to me but espionage and influence are also S tier, its just that those two are a bit more situational. In non-colonizing games I practically always end up with taking 2 of those groups out of 3-4 ideas picked. Its also important to understand that all diplomatic idea groups are very easy to pick and fill up in your games, especially at adm tech 5. You just dont need to use a lot of diplo points earlygame. You can be behind in dip tech and the few things that do cost dip isnt that large like integrating small subjects, lower war exhaustion and peacedeals. On the contrary Mil tech is always important besides filling the group and at adm tech 5 you want to go to level 7 quick and also expand/core a lot. That understanding alone makes me rate all diplomatic ideas higher. I usually pick one first and pick a second one as the third or fourth group. I rarely do that with adm and mil ideagroups.
@@Pieczorka meg. Definitely gives the best combat ability, so for MP absolutely. But for SP you'd still prefer siege ability (Offensive) or more razing power (Horde + Economic).
@@MrThisissparta999 nah, diplo only does one thing basically, albeit very well. Espionage ideas on the other hand is like the Aristocratic ideas but for diplo, it has a bit of everything in a single idea group.
I agree with you on espionage. It's something I'm always like "That would be really nice to have.... But this other idea group is just necessary right now." and I almost never end up taking espionage because of it. I will say on trade, absolute fucking S tier if you're inexperienced. Used to literally be my favorite. Easily third idea group to take every time then. You go from no economy at all to actually being able to afford stuff. Outside of that though, there are some highly specific situations where I think it's still at least A tier. Some achievement/rp runs might have you expand within the same subcontinent mostly, so you never get trade companies, it's great then. Like doing Switzerlake for example, you're going to have at most 1 trade company, trade could be pretty good then. I still like trade ideas with hordes since you can usually benefit from caravan power. Then there was this highly specific weird situation I was in, I forget the exact cause, but I was a custom nation in the new world, and I could never form any trade company anywhere, and also since new world, no colonial nations. Trade ideas was the only way for me to get more merchants.
I feel that Trade ideas used to be a lot better in the past, but with patches it's become less and less impactful. I couldn't really understand why, but your analysis is pretty much on point here. There's now a lot more sources of merchants and trade power in the game for me to really notice the difference. Also to add on top of it - Quantity nerf really hit it hard, since the +20% Goods Produced policy from it is awesome. However, I think that it scales a lot better with time than some of the others - basically, it went from being great as first or second diplo set idea groups to like your 6-8th pick overall. 1. Its policies are wonderful... but they scale much better if you have a lot of developed, well-built up provinces. The mentioned 20% Goods Produced, lots of Trade Efficiency, all of that scales a lot better once you already have a solid economic base. 2. It still combo's greatly even with Trade Companies thanks to the +15 merchant trade power - that trade power will get boosted by its own +25% global trade power, as well any other bonuses to that you might have - as well as caravan power and steering. Suddenly each of your merchants gets around 20-50 extra trade power in the node he's in, and he's steering 25% more trade your way, and if you already have like 10 merchants then it becomes GIGA. I really liked it when I took it as lategame Russia, essentially giving me infinite money as I channeled the entirety of Asian trade for huge profits.
You can always tell the difference between a beginner and an advanced player by whether or not they put Espionage in S-tier. Espionage is good but it is a crutch, and if you know how to manipulate other game systems (like aggressive expansion), then it is 100% of the time better to take diplo than espionage. Diplomatic is simply the best diplo ideas and is a good pick for pretty much any game, from WC wide to Netherlands tall.
I've done a WC as Three Leagues without diplomatic ideas, but I did have espionage (no HRE). Diplo is good, but overrated imo. The war score cost reduction isn't all that important because even without it you can keep expanding as long as your admin/ diplo points can keep up. The -1 stab hit is only really useful for christians that cancel their royal marriage, which is a very niche thing. Improve relations is good for reducing AE over time, but straight AE reduction is better because it allows you to take more without need to juggle. Diplomats are good, but with the one from espionage you'll have enough imo. Diplo gives cheaper diplo avisor, but espionage gives cheaper advisors for all 3 power points. War score cost reduction -> shorter peace deal. Siege ability -> faster war -> earlier peace deal.
@@Vincrand just don’t agree. Province warscore cost is a hard roadblock, while siege ability is a soft roadblock. If I’m WCing I don’t need more siege ability (offensive + artillery + assault is more than enough), but no matter how good I play I can’t *take more provinces* without some kind of war score cost reduction, whether admin eff or province warscore cost. Plus if we’re talking WC, the ability to truce break for half cost is insane. I can truce break the same country, for 100% warscore TWICE instead of once, potentially and likely deleting them from the map in end game.
@@hellodolly7989 the war score cost can be enough for the full annex, but there is no guarantee. When you are at the point you can truce break there is basically no difference between losing 1 more or less stab, because in both cases it's only 1. On top of that when truce breaking warscore cost doesn't really matter. Getting espionage + divine ideas on top of offensive roughly halfs your war time. So whether you truce break or not you'll annex most countries faster with espionage + divine + offensive than only having offensive . The exception to this might be countries that cost near 100% warscore if you have diplo. When I do a war against 4k+ dev Ottomans. The peacedeal will happen within a year and that is when I use auto siege on my armies. Also I often do take either diplo or influence at some point. Diplo when I already have ccr in national ideas, influence when I have vassal bonus/ diplo annex in national ideas. In case I have neither I do whatever I feel like.
I went Espionage second in my latest Brandenburg -> Prussia -> Germany WC. Definitely really liked it. Mid game siege ability was really nice, and combining with AE impact from national ideas meant that early game HRE expansion was a lot faster. It's generally better to stack modifiers, so if you have AE impact in national ideas I think it can compete with Diplo for early game in high AE areas. I agree with the A assessment overall, good idea group, but not universally the best one
Honestly, court ideas are a great temporary / early game 2nd idea group. Take them for the extra +20% reform progress growth, which is HUGE early game especially if you're not playing a republic, along with the extra privileges + loyalty equilibrium, and you can snowball your way through your entire government tree by the 1600's. Taking full privileges is what you should be doing early game anyways, and then you can drop it for something different once you've finished all your reforms / when the age of absolutism starts, whatever comes first.
I think espionage is S tier when playing in the HRE. First of all, because of the AE reduction. This requires no explanation. Secondly, siege ability helps with fighting a lot of small nations with many capital forts. Advisor cost lets you get level 2 or 3 advisors faster or simply have more money in the early game. Extra diplomat is always nice, especially in the HRE. Some of other bonuses can be useful in certain situations too. It was my first pick in my last Prussia game, albeit it was in patch 1.34 so some ideas were different.
Dude, I love espionage ideas. With some nations it's stupidly broken. Take Russia for example -15% AE from ideas, -10% AE from Orthodox icon, -10% from 100% prestige, -10% from 100% spy network that espionage helps you make happen, another -20% from espionage and cap it off with deus vult CB that has -25% lower AE. That's 90% AE reduction! And if you get to the grand palace of Bangkok and upgrade it to level 3, another -10% AE plus 15% gov cap. You're at -100% AE. You can take land everywhere and there will never be a coalition.
@@robertalaverdov8147 are you sure that's how that works for CBs? I always assumed that CBs were multiplicative with your other modifiers, the reduction of the CBs being applied first and the reduction of the modifiers later. For example a conquest for 100 ae with 50% reduction from modifiers and 50% with CB you only would get 100*0.5*0.5=25 ae
@@noriantiri9310 Maybe, I don't know the paradox formula exactly. But what I do know is that I've not had a coalition form against me in ages. And I always take 100% of the land in piece deals. My usual fist four is admin, diplo, religious and espionage. Though not necessarily in that order. And I'm almost always the #1 GP within 100 years by doing so. And I know admin efficiency also reduces AE, which is why I switch out espionage for offensive or quality by the 1600's. But none the less it's massively helpful in the beginning to blob without constantly worrying about coalitions.
Espionage is s-tier considering how much siege ability you can stack with it and its policies. Winning battles is nice and all but being able to siege down forts quickly is what wins you wars. Especially in recent patches where the ai tends to avoid battles.
And then you got all the other bonuses with ae, more and cheaper claims, easier to steal vassals and offer vassalage etc. Can really supercharge you in certain regions of you're going wide.
do we play the same game tho? just yesterday, the austrian and spainish ai attacked my ottomans while they were 2:1 outnumbered (and ofc lost) so i cant agree on the ai tending to avoid battles, at least not in my game x)
The most annoying thing with Influence is that a lot of their buffing is specifically to vassals. Here I am, with 5 PU's and 2 Vassals, and I am almost forced to choose Influence for integration cost modifiers, but won't actually get many other buffs despite having massive subjects.
@@vladislavkorol902 You don't get force limit. It requires "vassals" not just "subjects". At least, that's what I've largely found searching the internet for the specifics. Aside from 2/6 of the ideas being basically useless in this case, don't overlook the policies. Several give additional 100% force limit or some such modifiers.
Espionage is s tier for me, cause i like to troll, get admin next and have policy to reduce advisor cost even more, then i run at least lvl 3 advisors and get shit loads of mana when it's most needed. Solo gameplay of course
I chose espionage as my first idea group at the ottomans as i like to stack the AE modifiers, you can easily get to -40 AE reduction in the first 20 years or so. The extra siege bonus you get is also very decent when combined with the Ottoman's age objective, early acces to cannons and the jannisaries unit, aswell as getting another 20% extra siege abilty when your spynetwork is at 100 which due to taking espionage idea shouldnt take long. After diplo tech 9 you can get up to -30% tech cost by having a spynetwork as 100 in a country with higher tech than you (-5% per tech) Also, the +25% chance to capture chips can be stacked nice with the shipboarding or french naval doctrine if youre too lazy to build up an actual fleet and just leech off of other nation's ships
I might even say Trade Ideas is C tier personally, Trade Companies in general killed trade ideas, because even before the sub continent change it was pretty easy to get Merchants, now it is too easy. Besides that all trade ideas does is get you more money, and if you are investing well, conquering the right lands, keeping your autonomy low, money isn't an issue. It doesn't help you win wars, it doesn't help you win wars faster, it doesn't lower AE, it doesn't help you diplo annex faster, it doesn't help you take more land in peace deals, it doesn't help you core cheaper or faster. Maybe when money was harder to come across it was worth more, but money is pretty easy to get in the current patch. Money from wars, from crownland, from Burgher loans, it just isn't that hard to make money. And when you really need money, you need it right now, trade takes time to make you money. Trade gives you more of what you already have, it doesn't give you something you don't have.
I think trade has a niche, which is when most of your natural expansion route happens withing your subcontinent, like central germany being divided by 4 nodes but that'd also mean you're needing money and the cost of an idea group, which is quite rare still, it has a niche and its a reliable group for newer players I agree with it
once in my life I took a trade idea and I played with Milan to Italy for me C, because you can always find money on the other side and you can always take another idea to help you with that
That -.2 corruption in espionage helps you take the Dynastic Administration government reform which gives +1 monarch admin skill, reduces all estates influence by 10 and to a lesser extent +1 possible advisor. I know it can be reduced by a good economy, but that's still around 7 ducats a month and for countries that have a small economy and need to blob that extra 1 admin monarch point can be useful.
One other use case for Maritime: Pirate Republics. By default, they have +50% marine force limits, which combines with the +25% from maritime to essentially allow you to use marines for your entire infantry (especially once cannons start taking up any amount of your FL). The +50% sailors from Maritime essentially becomes +50% national manpower for infantry (which are the units most likely to suffer casualties in most scenarios anyway). This strategy also means the sailors from raiding coasts essentially turn into free manpower. The policy with economic also gives +25% more sailors (and +10% marines). Combined with the other ideas in the group being useful for pirate republics, and the ability to take the "form thalassocracy" decision for a few more bonuses without needing to take naval ideas instead, a pirate republic might find use in taking maritime at some point even outside of roleplay. Plus, ships repairing in coastal zones is often nice for reducing headaches. Of course, other governments can try something similar, but a PR requires less investment into marines with their base of 50% FL, and raiding coasts meshes with it very well. Perhaps a maghrebi nation or the Knights could make use of this strategy too.
That said, I remember watching Florry's attempt at using Marine-only for conquering. Eventually, he gave up. Admittingly, that was several patches ago but I don't think enough has changed to make a Marine-heavy playstyle significantly more successful.
One thing which increases Trade's value is that it gives you the "Trading in" bonus on trade goods way easier than just blobbing (because the Trading in bonus is evaluated from trade power multipled by goods produced). This means you get the +2 diplo rep from ivory with 5 provinces instead of 15, tech cost from paper, glass, etc. which adds up to a lot. You can even get the grain/fish bonuses which are usually impossible unless you WC. This means that the idea set is basically 50% more efficient than just money making.
Espionage is definitely an A tier for me, I liled it when I was a noob and it was bad and now it keeps getting better and better so I love it. It's definitely a tier above Court. I'm really glad you put Exploration as a B tier. When you need it it's great, but 90% of countries either won't use it or will use expansion instead. I've never taken trade ideas since there are so many other ways to make monry and I'm glad to see someone thinks the same as me :)
For me it's simple- both Diplo and espionage are S tier, just they have other purpose When you playing for cavalry build or tall you pick espionage - they pair well with aristocratic (i love economic+espionage+aristocratic build on Poland) and when you're playing tall you can grab more in wars without caring about the AI, again with aristocratic/Pluto which give development cost they pair very well (cheap claims) and you have money's for larger cavalry army which is better than infantry army in most cases. Remember also claims give -15ccr cost :) Diplo when I'm playing wide or for pus, i love the stab cost reduction(free pus), province war score cost is pretty op, and diplomats Means taking less but more often and more and especially with Austria you have unlimited diplorep, and you have like 30% chances of annexing, and you 300development Hungary but you also need influence ideas. Summary Espionage- going tall or not really wanting to conquer all world, great for OP stupid cavalry armies, more all rounded bonuses Diplo- Going wide or playing in the HRE, overall putting efford into a game My pick: I personally like more espionage beacuse I'm playing lazy putting 30% efford into game and I don't need to conquer all world, and with espio i have OP cavalry and also ship capture chance is sooo unterrated literally free ships 😂😂😂, however i think Diplo are slightly better
Considering that I avoid trade companies like the plague, (I know it’s not optimal, that doesn’t change the fact that I despise them, even after 2k+ hours in the game) so trade ideas are generally a decent enough pick for me if I need another Diplo group to round out my idea selections.
@@viniciusyugulis7278 I just don't like them, don't know what else to tell you. Brain is just happier full stating everything even though I know that it isn't always optimal
Interesting that you didn't mention multiplayer at all for trade. There its much harder to conquer lands to trade company and the extra money is much more necessary.
Espionage was ALWAYS at least A tier for me, even when it was much worse than it is now. For me this idea is must have in most games as I don't play long (1600 is usually end) so spy network construction, AE impact and above all corruption growth is for me priority for first idea. Now that it has siege ability, advisor cost it is S tier for me without doubt
Espionage is definitely A-tier, especially the AE impact right off the bat and upto 30% siege ability (due to 100% spy network and 10% bonus from idea) is super strong. It also works well in specific tags like England (to troll Europe), Ottomans/France/Spain/Muscovy (easy vassalization with favours & +15 acceptance), Poland (cav go brr), and HRE in general. The real discussion should be on Maritime, often over-looked but very good for a coastal tag. It's de-facto trade+naval ideas combined, and has some great policies. If you're not worried about super-optimizing your game, it's a very good pick. I think it's hampered in its utility because of PDX's game design - we heavily rely on armies, but navies are often overlooked. The naval mechanics aren't fleshed out well and it just doesn't feel as good. But, I will say that playing Holland, Lubeck, Denmark, Kilwa, Malacca/Brunei (naval is arguably better here), and any trade-focused nation - it's a very, very fun way to play! Also, Marines go brr - someone made a comment about using marines for basically double manpower, which is broken
Saying spy network is guaranteed 20% siege ability is a bit of an exaggeration as it only works on target country, so it takes time, is super manual and not scalable for really wide gameplay
The biggest problem with Maritime is that it has conflicting ideas. You don't get enough sailors to justify your increased naval force limit. And if you are using Marines, you definitely can't support such a large force limit. In order to meet all the bonuses that the idea set offers (marines + naval force limit), you have to spam out Impressment Offices and Drydocks. Then you have to ask yourself whether those were really the most optimal buildings you could put in those provinces? At this point, you might be asking yourself whether you could have just invested in production/manpower buildings and conquered the same provinces with your army and taken a different idea set with better ideas? As you said in your second paragraph, if you are not concerned with optimizing your game, then it is a good pick. Tier lists, by default, are an attempt at optimization though. Maritime (and Naval) are fun picks but that is about it.
Thank you, agree with your rating. But from my point of view there should be an other kind of rating. Not from S to C, but it should be based on gameplay kind. For example: Major nation WC, Minor tall game, MP game, Colonizer kind and so on. With that its fine to get S or C mark for idea groups.
4:39 - can confirm, Diplo-Humanist made expanding into the HRE as Gothic Orthodox Theodore (East Frisia Exile path) actually doable and not torturously slow. Now I could have demolished the Empire to make it faster, but I actually preferred the challenge to destroy the Empire manually by eating everyone inside, then finishing off the emperor after eating all the electors made it Single inherit by default.
For me Maritime is a solid B tier, if only for the Confirm Thalassocracy decision and the government reform you can do with it. If you go for a tall Portugal or Netherlands it's a very solid pick. It's better than Exploration, if you combine it with Expansion and the burgher privilege you can still get explorers.
I like espionage ideas. Just completed a Mughal WC run with espionage as second idea. The claim state and wicker spy network works well with auristocratic for the lower claim cost. Whenever I did a conquest with no permanent claims I felt like I could claim most of the provinces with resulted in way less AE especially with the 20 % less AE on top. Also the -0.20 corruption felt like a lot. Basically it reduced costs when overextension was high but also allowed me to debase more often instead of taking loans. Biggest problem was that since I took diplo as a second idea I really couldn’t take Influence also but found it was not really needed since I never annexed vassals except those I had a tons of cores on already in the start as well as the Deccan.
I agree with you. Diplo is the winner. But after that it depends. If you go the vassal or PU route, with massive subjects where liberty desire might be a problem, then Influence is better. But if you don't, then espionage is better. It gives you really nice bonuses and if you don't go the vassal route, then you just don't need influence.
I take 2-3 diplo ideas, first Espionage since it's the best early, then diplo in the midgame since that's when the 20% warscore cost is useful (too early and I can't make use of it much since coalitions woud prevent me from taking too much land anyway, and it'd be too early for me to keep everyone truced via constant wars yet). If I actually manage to make it into very late game, I might take influence so I can annex big PU's like Spain, England, Russia, if I even choose to annex them at all, since there's usually no real need to annex them... I take diplo first only if I'm trying to get Emperor of HRE nowadays.
As long as Trade, Exploration, and Maritime are below Court, it's a good list. I might even argue it's better than Inno, but that's a different mana point type. It's still in 4th place among bird mana idea groups, which means you'll only pick it if you don't want to play a vassal game or have a built in swarm (HRE or Emperor of China etc).
Imo exploration is C tier, as you are only taking it for colonists and once you finish colonizing it has no relative bonus like Expansion which gives you the - 10 percent autonomy. I would rather just take expansion than take both imo.
As a player who could make roman empire as naples at 1560 (Diplo+Religious+Admin+Influence/ PU Over Aragon, Castille, Portugal, France-> this one by changing to sardinia piedmont) the only real use that i see to spionage ideas, its starting with them, then revoking it till tech 13~14, using golden era and sp ideas to complete both asap, but never tested if Spionage+Religous+Diplo+Admin~Spio->Quantity/Influence would give you more benefits than just starting with diplo, someday gonna test it
It's in fact HARD to keep up power projection when you're too big for an easy OPM rival, but too small for the ranking bonus. Court ideas has you covered there. And it gets the best policy, too. Plus, all those extra privileges... A-tier.
For Maritime ideas (and to a lesser extent naval) is NECESSARY to unlock “Thassalocracy” government reform which gives MASSIVE trade bonuses and enables Trade Protectorate subjects. Of course, this is only applicable for non England/GB trade empire, but is super good.
The Thalassocracy reform is much better than the England/GB unique one, so still good. The main benefit that England can get from Maritime is the 25% Marines. Seeing as your marines are your unique unit, which are also buffed more than your standard units, this can be useful. But realistically, unless you are roleplaying a naval power nation, or pirate republic, both Naval and Maritime are just inferior to every other choice. They are not useless, and a combination that is fun to play around with, is Naval/Maritime/Espionage, with a flagship built to add +1 to naval siege bonus, giving you a +4 bonus to all coastal sieges, without using artillery, with free naval barrage. If using marines, and also building your flagship to reduce disembark time, you can do some really fun hit and run sieges on coastal forts. But again, whilst this is a fun way to play the game, they are simply inferior to every other idea group in overall power/usage.
The funniest thing is the toilet paper act. Court ideas are good for certain countries like Congo and Japan, especially countries that can at some point revoke privileges regardless of estate influence to loyalty ratio.
We really do need to make Tier distinctions, I think. SP v MP. Wide v Tall. Horde. Colonial. Austria/Ming (in which Court Ideas make sense.) I'll defer to others except on Wide SP. There, most of your Ideas are already decided: (1) Administrative, (2, 3) Religious AND/OR Humanist, (4) Offensive for the Force Limit, and the three DIP Ideas of (5, 6, 7) Espionage, Diplomatic, and Influence. I think I will now add (8) Mercenary, since the dirt-cheap mercs makes cleanup at end-game easy. (Also renders Quantity twice as useless.) So, there's seven of your Idea Sets. Eight, if you're a real chad and take both Hum and Relig. Colonial will have to sacrifice one of those because you need Expansion, but you can't have everything. Same for Horde Ideas, a delightful blend of Espy, Quality, Religious AND Humanist, so you can jettison one or more of those (probably not Espy). But Espy is always in the mix for conquerors. Did I mention the 10% Siege ability in Espy? Mix that with Offensive's 20% (and not as a slot-using Policy, either), and now you're cooking with oil. Espy is S Tier. I will live to see Espionage nerfed, if you can believe it.
Don't forget about Divine ideas. Morale damage received reduction, fire damage redutcion, siege with Espionage, more manpower, culture conversion (can stack nice with religious and influnce) and 10% morale ith religious.
@@classiclife7204 Just become a theocracy :D. With the introduction of government reforms you don't need to stay as the same thing. There are also the other old ways ofcourse. In 1 playthrough I got artistocratic, horde, divine and plutocratic ideas. Start as Great Horde, took lands from Lithuanie and played further as Zapo. I waited with the unique government and took aristocratic, then became a horde and took horde ideas. Then became a theocracy and took divine. After that take unique reform. Divine, offensive and situationaly horde are the best 2-3 mil ideas out there.
@@Vincrand I forget sometimes how many ways there are to break this game, lol. That's a lot of MIL mana to go through, but a literally unbeatable army is worth it, I'd wager.
@@ZlewikkTV Of course it's not impossible, but it does makes it easier and more convenient, especially if you have multiple targets. I think it's worth mentioning at least, since it's in the same idea as +10% siege ability and improves it somewhat. I'd still take diplo over espionage thogh :)
Tbh siege ability is a bigger bonus for single player than it used to be since this patch. Especially since 1.35 bots started to love upgrade all forts and build new ones that are bordering you. Espio saves a lot of time and troubles in lategame
Also, changes to mercs (ideas and goverment) made them being cheap and literally endless drain of mercenary manpower which together with siege ability gives you ability to blitzkrieg countries with tier 8 forts via assaults. This made my three mountains shogun run really fun in lategame
The best part of espionage is letting you grab puppet the nobility to revoke all your privileges at once and then flip back to whatever you want if you rush gov progress so you can take advantage of all the privileges as long as possible and then switch to the absolutism game.
Honestly I feel like espio is on par with dip in terms of usefulness. Like diplo is the indisputable king if you want to play a subject/diplo-heavy game, but really outside of that the only thing it really offers is the province WS cost. Admittedly that's fucking massive, to the point of single-handedly making it a highly desirable policy, but there's nothing else over espio if you're not making good use of that dip rep, and I feel like that's pretty easy to do in a lot of games. The improve relations is good, but the AE is better, diplomats are an alright bonus, but as long as you have enough to do what you want to be doing then they're not super useful beyond that, and espio gets 1 anyways. You said that advisor cost doesn't equal more mana but I disagree. You're going to be getting your higher level advisors pretty notably sooner than you're going to be without it when you're stacking it, and in my experience that time-frame is not insignificant, especially when those extra points are going to be going towards continuing to build yourself up to continue getting higher level advisors. Obviously once you'd be running level 5's either way it just saves money, but it's a pretty significant boost in those critical years of buildup. More than anything tho I'd say is how many things it combos exceptionally well with that cover many playstyles. The espio/inno/(divine/offensive) core makes your sieges and wars so much faster that it actually appreciably saves you manpower, and makes it so you're running level 5 advisors as a middling power. It's a significant buff to your cavalry if you want to be running that (notably you can actually get to 100% ratio on sunni hordes, non-sunni tribe>hordes, or anyone who can form the latin empire or tibet which makes cavalry playstyles a lot more viable). If you're playing mp and you're playing a nation that can justify naval, you're getting 10% global combat width (though the importance of that can vary if you're playing modded, I'd imagine naval superiority might mean less when your opponent can just cross a canal into britain for example). As you mentioned the manpower is actually pretty significant in the new update, especially since plutocratic is a pretty reasonable military pick anyways if you don't have anything super special in mind. There's just so many more synergies is the main thing, for diplomatic it's you're playing the diplomatic game or you're spending however many dip points for province WS alone. Diplo is uniquely good at one thing with an overpowered bonus that makes it generically good at any playstyle that involves expanding. Espio is generically not quite as good but still pretty good, but is has a far wider berth of scenarios in which its unique bonuses in combination with certain playstyles make it outshine diplo imo. At worst I think it is a sidegrade to diplo, and I think there are a good number of situations where you would prefer to pick espionage over diplo.
Court ideas give +1 absolutism on some privileges and +2 absolutism on trade monopolies for Russia. There is a mission for Russia which when completed abolishes all negative absolutism penalties for having monopolies. Combining the two usually breaks absolutism and is equivalent to having 16-20 extra absolutism, meaning 2-4 extra privileges for the state
Court is C. Trade ideas can still be usefull if you have trouble getting to a different superregion (for example as a minor in the HRE). Maritime Naval is absolutely busted in mp and I am still laughing my ass of when I beat the british and spanish fleets with nusantara while japan wrecked havoc in the new world.
Client States can do things not only for emperor of china , but even for GB , i think you smart enough to realise how if you play Great Britain route (it`s all about trade protectorates , and it`s really fun how you became a really forge of the world with 200% goods produce with 100 protectorates) :D SO there is 1 way more to use influence idea - for colonising xD
Im playing a republic and it gives +0.50 republic thingy and thats huge! It means with other bonuses that at worse for 3 years i have a 1/1/4 when my leader dies but i can alaways upgrade em and make em 6 and never become a dictator ship. 1 time its usefull 😂
Espionage at the moment is an easy S tier for me. The only time I'll pick diplomatic over espionage is when I want to become emporer of the HRE. AE reduction > improve relations when it comes down to reducing AE as fast as possible. At base value both will turn a 50 AE with -2/ year into 20 years, but improve relations is more abundant, so in normal game play AE will outperform. AE reduction also becomes more powerful the more you get it, while improve relations becomes worse. Cheaper provinces -> shorter truces. Siege ability -> faster truces. Espionage + Divine + Offensive is really strong (innovative ideas will also improve siege, but isn't all that useful aside from that). Diplo has cheaper diplo advisor. Espionage has cheaper advisors. Diplo has 1 more diplomat, but I very rarely need that. -.2 corruption is a nice eco bonus. Early on you can basically get a free loan once in a while. When you know you won't be spending much mana in the next few years (f.e. just took 3 new techs and are recovering from war), then turn down root out corruption and debase your currency. Within 5 years it can be completly gone if you also take the policy with admin. Late in the game it will help you with counteracting the corruption from overextion. Giving/ saving you tens of thousands of ducats during the game. Diplo has cheaper tech wich will save something like 1320 diplo power if you pick it as 3th group and play untill the end.
I agree with you on Espionage. The AE reduction is great but Diplo is objectively better at mitigating AE, both because improve relations rate = AE tickdown rate, and bc more diplomats means more potential coalition members you can increase relations with. Instead, Espionage shines with its extra siege ability, great military policies, and good modifiers you can stack with more elsewhere like advisor cost and corruption reduction. So there are many situation where it's the clear choice, like as any non-horde cavalry nation. So it's a high A tier, but not enough for S.
For AE reduction espionage is better than the improve relation from diplo. Example you get stuff worth 50 AE. There is a base -2/year, so it takes 50/2 = 25 years as base. With +25% improve relations it will become 50/2.5 = 20 years. With -20% AE reduction it will become 40/2 = 20 years. So on base they are the same. However it's far more easy to get impove relations than AE reduction. So in a more natural game setting the AE reduction will help more. On top of that improve relations get's less relvant the more you have it, but AE reduction becomes even more relevant the more you get it.
The thing about Espionage is that its a really nice idea group but it doesn't bring anything special to the table, it doesn't improve your army or economy, it doesn't enable you to go wide, tall or colonial, it doesn't help with unrest or vassals what it does is speed the game up and make it easier to expand early which means you are rushing through the good parts of the game into the boring stages of the game Since eu4 playthroughs have a short life it ends up feeling like a wasted slot by idea group 4
One thing people ignore with espionage is that it helps to build the espionage networks, which increases siege ability up to 20% AND AE up to 30%!! This means that idea has the potencial to give you 50% reduced AE and 30% siege ability. It’s super strong
It's a bit of an exaggeration since it works only on a target country, so it takes time, is not on everyone and is very manual. Not scalable for a really wide gameplay
@@ZlewikkTV If the Wiki is right its also not true as the Spy Network effect seems to be mutlipicative to other AE effetcs not additative, so Espionage ideas and 100% Spy Network would "only" bring you down to 0,8*0,7= 56% AE-impact.
@@ZlewikkTV of course, but if you have the diplomats to build the networks you can get on multiple nations. I once waited like 4 months before peacing out Austria because I could PU them for less 30 AE from the network. Since the idea gives you network construction it lets you get this faster and make it more reliable
Exploration nowadays is pretty useless since you can get explorers and conquistadors through the burghers' decision available if you have colonists (and you will). You lose only 40% colonial range which you will get anyway by conquering land. I would better take trade or smth. more useful.
Tbh it seems really hard to justify Court at B tier. You basically said it yourself, it doesn't really enable any novel gameplay, and for more high pressure gameplay it is wildly outclassed. Setting aside overall "objective" strength for general purposes, things like Maritime (which I do also think is C tier) enable "LARPing" with marines or pirates, Exploration enables colonial gameplay, Espionage and Influence enable vassal-powered games, even Trade uniquely fits into a buckets-of-ducats sort of fantasy. Court just doesn't offer that. It at best encourages gameplay focused on estate management, which could be cool in some version of the game, but having stronger control over and more access to estate bonuses is just not an open-ended enough mechanic to really drive a campaign theme (imo). You have to be really committed to the concept (like a tall Emperor of China game or something) and even then it is an almost strictly inferior choice. And in overall "power" it's just not even close. Good, or even just decent, players don't really struggle with estates at all, and to the extent that they might, Court doesn't really make a radical difference. Especially because even in the worst case, if you don't want to bother with estates much, you can essentially just grab the mana-producing privileges (and maybe Strong Duchies or something) and otherwise just ignore estates beyond selling/seizing on cooldown as appropriate, and not really suffer much at all. And in a general side-by-side comparison, you can basically find an obviously superior idea for each Court Idea in Influence, Diplo, or Espionage. By which I mean for every idea in Court, I can find a different idea I'd rather have in each of the aforementioned groups without having to duplicate them (e.g. Monarch diplo skill is good but it is basically equivalent to an extra diplo relation slot assuming you are usually running at or above your relationship limit). My personal proposal for an interesting upgrade would be to have its finisher let you choose multiple government reforms within a single tier. This would be complicated because it would probably require a lot of specific limitations and probably a bunch of adjustments to a lot of the reforms (for which I don't have specific ideas), but it would unlock a lot of additional power and enable a unique gameplay style the way that other ideas groups do. One where you could focus on stacking combinations of interesting and strong bonuses in a way that no other play style would allow.
AE reduction is better than improve relations, I agree. There's only so many nations you can improve with when you're swamped by minors in Europe, especially when you have the increased AE from the HRE. The reason that diplo is better overall is because the lack of stab hit and province warscore cost are better than anything else diplo has, and the dip rep, dip relations, and diplomats are also very good. Espionage is primarily one S-tier idea (AE), one A-tier (siege ability), and a number of B-tier (good but not great). Diplo is one S-tier (province warscore cost), a couple A-tier (improve relations, less stability loss), and everything else is still good
Zlewikk is basically right about trade ideas. It used to serve a purpose, but that purpose was made obsolete when Paradox expanded the TC mechanic. Now it's a crutch for people who just need to improve their economic management.
Nothing wrong with these choices. Bang on with Trade Ideas, pre 1.30 they would have been a high A tier group, Back in the old trade company system it would massively help countries outside of Europe, Hordes especially benefitted from it as you needed to buff up trade to make money. These days it isn't as necessary with trade companies, but i still pick it in my more chill campaigns. Still a decent B tier pick in my eyes, especially if your playing as a non-coloniser and have national ideas that could be boosted by it. Thinking Countries like Genoa/Venice/Hamburg/Lubeck - small nations that don't have an easy way into the colonial/trade company game early on.
i get your point about innovative not being as good as people say they are, but putting them in the same tier as court ideas is very questionable to say the least
11:53 explo are useless on 1.35 with domination dlc. I think that only time i would pick this if i making navigator for portugal or playing for colonies countries like wolgast, which are so far from new world
Explo has a decision to pass similar to the explorer from the expansion, that gives -50 chance. Combine that with the policy explo+expan for another -50 and you can run the +20 global settler with no chance of uprising and keep all the native assimilation
Exploration got a stealth boost. There is a Clergy Estate Priv called Establish New World Missions. This enables a National Decision called Clergy New World Missions. You need Exploration Ideas for this. Long story short it allows you to use the Native Suppression Policy (+20 Global Settler Chance) while getting bonusses for native assimilation and the uprising chance is 0 so you don't have to send soldiers. You can fiddle fart around with the explorer you get from the burgers and still be colonizing in the 1600's or you can get 'er done by about 1570 or so. Once you've explored every thing you can replace Exploration with Diplo or influence. You're not married to it.
@@bartekkrzysik7730 Once you are done exploring the world you can trade out exploration for what ever you want. You lose 90% of the monarch points but you get the slot back.
Espionage is a low A tier. The AE and such are really nice, but I really miss the diprep of influence/diplo and unless you stack it the AE reduction is about as good as 25% imp relations. Then the policies, I think they're all really weak compared to what diplo and influence can get you. I sometimes pick espoinage because I dont want to go diplo again and influence lacks the AE management (and diplomats), but I always feel like I would be better off just running diplo.
For me Espionage goes up to S tier if I'm playing with Divine ideas. 30% siege ability + 20% from 100 spy network was making my wars so much less annoying lol
Espionage went from being useless to being a must ( even if the rebel mechanics is stil quite useless ) . In general Diplo category has the best ( diplo , espio ) the game shaping ( explo , influ ) and the most useless ( court and marittime , those need a complete rewriting ) . i totally agree about trade , i considered it to be mandatory to gain money , but when i became more experienced it became a plus and not so important .
I fully understand putting Maritime C tier. To me, it's only use was ever to maximize maritime trade to get "Rags to Riches", and even then it wasn't necessary, but my point to get big trade income without high dev, and it certainly did that. What I don't get is how you can say anything is worse than court ideas. You even said in the video that it's only good for the HRE or China, and even then not the best. So it's only good for one subset of one gameplay style, and even then worse than Duplo/Influence (for HRE) or Humanist (China). Meanwhile, maritime is justifiable for MP, for trade empires, and if you're limiting yourself to one region like the Spice Islands. Certainly not good, but far far just useful than court ideas. You need a D tier for court ideas
100% Agreed. Diplomatic reputation is much more important for HRE than a measly +5% IA growth. And that's the finisher. Everything else in Court doesn't help HRE play at all.
P.S. GB is only country good with maritime Ideas , just because GB marines really strong (well only +5% discipline and didn`t took +10% shock dmg , but well , having another pool of recruits ,but even biigger... yup thats really good, but not for solo game and early game in MP) :D
I'll be bold and say that Diplomacy should drop a tier. It's been S tier for a very, very long time, but now it doesn't give anything that you can't get elsewhere. You can get an extra diplomat from Aristocratic ideas and diplomatic reputation from estates and reforms. Even the amazing 20% province score cost isn't really needed unless you're set to blob during the age of absolutism. When it comes to picking diplomatic as one of your first four idea groups, the only nation I can see myself doing so is Austria. Yeah, the Trade ideas aren't amazing. But they will still boost your economy at a point in time where you'll need every ducat you can get to build courthouses and manufactories.
I say trade is depended on u gaols and where u expand i dont like to do a world concquest and restrict me to a eria and to make my income as high as posibel what for me means stronger nations to face and defend agaist if i het to strong i get bored so in that way trade is useful if i cant tradecompany alot but yes in a wide play i woud say its even c tier
just like you pointed out yourself (i think it was during your last ottoman campaign), trade ideas are crucial for tall playstyle, but kinda useless besides that.
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If you want to role play and do one religion,culture and do not want trade companies,trade is great.
Espionage is S tier for me because it allows for a lot more easier and larger expansion with less AE and giving you thus faster expansion for wide play. The claims will lower admin costs and AE as well, and is useful as a Humanist expansionist play.
When Espionage had "Can Fabricate Claims on behalf of subjects" it was absolutely amazing, especially in the HRE
They took that out because it's broken with the "can claim entire states" bit. In the past if you had tsardom government rank (so you had access to claiming states) and you claimed areas bordering your vassals but not yourself, you would still get the claims, not your vassal. Claiming for vassals was better for vassal play though, as you could just create vassal snakes along borders or throughout large enemies and feed them very cheap to fabricate cores.
@@Skrymaster I remember running into that sort of issue. Claiming whole states is still cool though.
I feel like they could have resolved it by having you be able to choose who would get the claim (if multiple tags could). Similar problems exist with return unlawful territory and return core buttons.
The vassal can claim for himself, you know. Just mark the province as vital interest and the vassal is going to claim it. You can then declare over your vassals claim.... and take it yourself. Its that easy.
@@LiezAllLiez That is of course true, but can be unreliable. Sometimes they will just refuse to do so, or not do it as quickly as you want.
@@DylanSargesson I dare say the matter of how fast they will claim a province depends on luck (same as you). If the target took espionage ideas, or is trading in something increasing spy defense... you kind of gonna have to tough it out failing at 25 spy net all the time. So no more than 1 claim per target. I admit, i dont usually use those claims to expand myself. In fact, ive used it only when playing Oman - to get a claim on some minor and quickly vassalize him before Mamluks get to him (and cut them off from the southern tip of the peninsula). Other than that? Not really... i get free claims on my rivals, since vassals constantly claim their lands when they border them, but thats not the direction i want to expand most of the time, so the vassals just waste time. I use vassals as legit buffer states - to give the enemy something to siege down as im focusing on depriving them of manpower in the field. Other than that, i just annex the vassals.
Then you have the more permanent solution (for late game) - client states. Now the claims they make i will act upon frequently. I want them (the clients) to be fairly strong, as i will ditch allies in favor of client states, anyway (allies keep dragging you into wars you have zero interest in, most of the time), but at that point in the game you just declare with imperialism anyway...
I'll be honest, Espionage is my favourite idea group. It also allows unique gov reform "puppeteer estates" or smth like that. It lets you enact and revoke estate privileges whenever you want so you don't care about their loyalty/influence at all and that enables a very interesting play style when you constantly change privileges to what's best for you. Also building spy network is underrated (chipper tech, reduced ae, chipper coring, siege ability). And stacking ae reduction is also very satisfying for playing wide. I once played as Saluzzo (-15 ae from tradition), took espionage -20, 100% spy net -30, 100 prestige -10, I stayed catholic and allied pope, so was I a curia controller every other time that's -20. To sum it up that's 95% ae reduction. I annexed a 4 province country with almost 30 dev in each that's over nearly 120 dev for 6 ae. Definitely S tier for me
Yo the best part of the Espionage Ideas imo has got to be that straight Vassalization Acceptance +15 modifier! But yeah I totally agree that you can just stack AE reduction so well with this Idea group.
That reform is also a big deal in Anbennar for any country who is getting a lot of artificier capacity, being able to swap out between peace and war time on 5+ privileges on the fly is great.
I think the tier list could've benefited from one more tier. As it stands, B tier is kind of crowded, and there's some ideas over there that shouldn't really be together. If you had D tier, you could safely put the worst ones from B into C, without making people think that those ideas are bottom of the barrel.
The issue is that people are pretty conditioned to understand that D is a failing grade, and there's no idea group that makes your situation worse. What it maybe could have done with is a little notifier for situational benefit or something like that, to have a bit of division within a tier.
@@AGrumpyPanda I guess you are right, I'm not American so I only use this grading system for tier lists. But indeed, it would be nice if there was some kind (any kind) of separation within the B tier.
Espionage with divine, offensive and innovative really stacks the siege ability, along with the better spy networks I’ve had siege ticks down to like 3 days it’s so over powered
yes, I've done it too and it's insane. But I'm still not 100% sold. The duration of wars barely limits me. Usually, it's admin points, AE, manpower, over-extension, and all that.
@@Feeber2 Well espionge also give AE reduction, so it also tackles that point. Faster sieges = less manpower losses from attrition, which somewhat tackles another bottleneck.
and taking the names of the idea groups into consideration, it makes sense that they affect siege ability which is kinda nice.
@@Vincrand well I have nothing agaisnt espionage. I was replying to the specific 4 idea group setup to max out siege ability which I really like in the late game but until then it's too much investement for the return imo.
Now I pick offensive literally every single game. Espionage is fine too but it depends. When I go the vassal route I usually need influence first and diplo is without a question the top diplomatic idea.
Divine is good, but sometimes you have to go a long route to be able to pick it. And innovative? I dislike that idea group so much. Sure amazing policies, but such bad ideas.
@@Feeber2 Unless meming I also wouldn't pick innovative ideas. Divine and offensive are by far the 2 strongest mil groups if you aren't a horde.
I lost the hope that you will make the tierlist of diplo and miliarty. Im happy that i was wrong.
I lost the hope that you will make the tierlist of diplo and miliarty. Im happy that I was
What you said about trade ideas in very true. I used to take them a lot when I was newer to the game. Now I almost never pick them, unless I strongly lean into some kind of 'trade empire roleplay', which I sometimes do. At the end of the day it all comes down to the fact that making money isn't that hard and it's better to pick idea groups that help in other areas.
It used to be a lot more necessary before trade company rework. It was the king at making money when the only way to get merchants was to be European and make colonies.
@@hellodolly7989 It is still necessary if you do not want to play with trade companies.
The main problem that i have with Espionage is, that i do not really usually find a moment to really slot it in, not matter where i am playing. If i want to play in the HRE and to have less aggressive expansion, i usually rather go with Diplomatic to improve relations and more diplomats, since more simultaneous actions on that front are better than having a little less AE - which will stack up anyway even if its less than before - and the other bonusses are just not strong enough. The 10% Siege Ability are nice, but i can get better with Offensive right from the start and in the group there are simply better bonusses. If i go with Espionge, i can never shake that nagging feeling that i took something that might be ocasionally have some nice bonusses, but i'm losing out on other things that may be better or at least good on the same level, but more numerous. For that reason for me, its B-Tier.
I have same thinks. Espionage it's bad on start. In chill games I take something mil next something admin, and trade. In more aggressive games I take Diplo+religious or influence+admin, next it's something for mil or humanist. In late game usually I don't care about AE. I never use espionage except one time when I want to test it. In my opinion it's closer to C tier than A tier
Exactly it has good bonuses but if I'm not going cavalry run I'm never sure when to pick it
@@TugaThings Espioage is great for every run imo. The cav policies are barely worth going for, becaus there are over 3 other policies that make your cav army more powerful than those 2 from espionage.
@@Vincrand What policies?
@@TugaThings
I'll start of with an important explanation so you'll know why some policies are better. My knowledge come from 7k+ hours in the game, testing mechanics and creating spreadsheets.
Some generic army modifiers are better than the specific modifiers. The 5% discipline you get at the end of quality ideas is better than the 10% infantry, cavalry and artillery combat ability combined. That discipline adds 5% damage and reduces incomming damage by 5%. Combat ability only adds damage dealt. Damage reductions are more powerful than damage increases. F.e. 50% damage increase has the same value as a 100% damage increase.
Stacking the same damage increase has diminishing returns. The first 10% cav combat ability allows you to do 10% more damage, but when you already have 50% cav combat ability, then the next 10% will give a relative increase of 6.66% damage. For damage reductions the opposite is true. The first 10% will reduce relative damage by 10%, but if you already have 50%, then the next 10% will reduce relative damage taken by 20%. Discipline is always great as it does both.
10% morale of armies is slightly better than 5% discipline. Disicpline loses less units, but the morale wins you the fight. Same is also true for unit pips.
Morale damage always goes through even if you don't take casualties (I experienced this when I had 100% fire and shock damage received reductions in a mod).
-Horde + Expansion: .5 yearly army tradition and +10% shock damage.
-Religious + Mercenarie: +10% morale of armies (also +2% missionary strength).
-Quality + Economic: +5% discipline
-Religious + quantity: +10% morale of armies & +5% army morale recovery speed
-Humanist + Quantity: +1 leader shock
-Diplomatic + horde: +10% shock damage & +10 siege ability
-Indigenous + exploration: 10% morale of armies & 2.5% discipline
Similar tier as the cav combat policies:
-Horde + Innovative: -5% fire & shock damage received.
-Expansion + quality: +1 leader fire (potential damage reduction during fire fase)
-Court + defensive: -10% morale damage received & -10% AE
-Court + offensive: +10% morale damage & +25% power projection from insults
Siege related. They don't improve combat, but wars are also won by sieging.
-Offensive + innovatie: +10% siege ability & +1 leader siege.
-Religious + quality: 10% siege ability & +5% morale damage dealt.
-Divine + espionage: +10% siege ability & +1 artillery level modifier
Situational
If you have banners then reinforce speed increases are also very good to counteract their own reduces reinfoce speed.
Espionage on A tier is fair enough, still S tier imo considering how it has a hidden province war score cost modifier: you can claim entire areas, build spy network a lot faster and then fabricate claims for cheaper. That makes you waste a lot less time with claims AND makes you get more clay for both less AE AND less cost.
Then theres the huge -20% AE impact and the 10% siege ability compounds with the massive +50% spy network that which at 100 grants you another massive siege bonus. Then you save a lot of money with both corruption and advisors and the icing on the cake is how you can spam favor actions very quickly and really shape the world around you.
Exactly, it's REALLY good for expansionist gameplay. Lots of siege ability makes for shorter, cheaper wars without needing mil ideas (It's more efficient to focus on mil tech early on).
The claim part of your comment is incorrect. Claims only reduce AE and PWSC with certain CBs, which are quite niche. Certainly does not apply universally enough. Rest is okay... Siege ability is great, for expansionism and AE I have diplo tho. Personally for me Espionage is border B/C tier
@@stiopagaming9050 incorrect? You pay tons of diplo points for each province you take that is not part of your claims. That's what I refer to "hidden cost modifier"
@@gustavosanches3454 I have yet to find a person referring to unjustified demands as hidden "province warscore cost modifier". Noone uses such nomenclature.
In fact, your expression includes "war score cost" - not really relating to the diplo cost.
@@stiopagaming9050 holy fuck, pedantry kills, and anyone with half a functioning brain would understand Im talking about how you end up saving points in peace deals. So its like a "hidden WS modifier". Kinda sad you can't comprehend such simple concept.
I think maritime definitely deserves at least B tier. Picture this: if youre a nation with a lot of coastline, that means you can have a lot of sailors. For most of the game, those sailors wont be used for anything at all, however, if you take maritime ideas, you can get marines, meaning you can essentially turn your sailors pool into manpower. This is extremely overpowered if you can stack a lot of bonuses to sailors and to marines (on a country like great britain), because it means you have basically double the manpower you would usually have. Not to mention that you can build manpower and sailor buildings on the same province, meaning youre getting way more soldiers out of that one province than you would normally. Its basically old quantity on steroids, however not all countries can do this trick. You need to have a lot of coastline in order to maximize the amount of sailors you get. But it can definitely be game breaking, and you should look into this if you ever find yourself playing one of those nations.
I think maritime lower a tier, maybe B+
yh but most naval powers get marines in other ways, especially GB and the Dutch and also dont they take ages to reinforce for some reason?
Maritime/naval is almost 100% needed for MONEY gameplay! trade protectorates are broken! i had a venice campaign with maritime influ merc idea sets to get very nice! gameplay mechanic! you can release client states from every province you conquer -> make trade protectorate for 2%goods produced each! with maritime, you get to 100 naval tradition very easily! and trade steering will go brr to get all those goods back to your home node
they gave you special gov reform which is really good too
honestly, if you are nation with a lot of coastline, you literally outnumbered everyone (except maybe ottomans) and it really doesnt matter if you have marines- no matter if its by quantity and provinces or by economy with mercenaries. But most important part is that you can use much better bonuses from different ideas that maritime almost always just take place
I love espionage ideas since this Update. Especially when you can combine it with divine ideas because it doubles the bonus you get from the artillery at the sieges
They really need to rethink trade ideas. They need to remove the merchants it gives you and replace those with other things, perhaps allowing you to have new or stronger trading policies, maybe lowering minimum autonomy in territories. Maybe making it so merchants have more trade power each like the kilwa monument. Maybe allowing you to attack someone in a trade league without calling in the other members. I do think Goods produced should be party of trade ideas. Maybe some sort of war score cost reduction for taking money, maybe you can take 50 warscore of money now instead of 25 warscore.
It just feels very lackluster at the moment.
It is lacklustre, but I wouldn't remove the merchants. They are useful if you are in a region with more nodes than merchants and you can't build trade companies, like in Western Europe. I think goods produced and ducats in peace deals is more an economic thing than a trade thing, though.
One that I think would be a good small buff is to not have trade centres decrease when annexing or conquering them. Not only would it make your trade better earlier and save thousands of ducats, but it would also provide the only way to get more level 3 centres of trade then you have merchants.
Another possible small buff would be dev cost in centres of trade and estuaries. It's already a policy, so doubling down on that could be good.
Both of these are small buffs that would make it relevant to a player who's good at the game
I.would love for trade ideas to finish with the ability to bypass one trade node / connect a trade node that two connections away. Thst would be unique and crazy.
Half your message (2nd half) is about how you basically want to replace trade related things with non trade related things. Trade power from merchants is a bad thing, because the trade power between regions differs a lot. Goods produced would be strong, but it's called trade ideas and not manufactoring ideas. Trade ideas should be about making money from the goods that others prouces. Taking more money in a peacedeal sounds more like something for how espionage is handled. If you want to add war related things to it I do have some suggestions: reduce warscore cost of trade steering and transfer trade power. Gain trade war cb against nations that have provinces in the same trade region as where you have merchants.
Espionage - you've convinced me to try it out with my next game in HRE. I often overlooked this idea. I mostly saw reducing AE which I was ignoring mostly because I always prefered diplo. After that later in my gameplay I would always find somethng else which I needed more atm.
Trade (and similarily Inno from your admin video) - is so true. They used to be much better. I used to take both of them in most of my gameplays. Especially with Trade I was relying on Merchants and (already nerfed) 20% Goods Produced Modifier - Commonwealth in Age of Reformatons was great. Even though I'm still green with Trade companies and getting extra merchants and I'm still far away from maximazing profits efficiently - I've noticed in my last playthroughs I've stopped taking Trade ideas.
Diplo - that is a no brainer. Can't recall a campaign I went without it. Usually my first diplo idea to take. I used to take it early with Inno (guilty pleasure idea) to spam 5* advisors and get an edge at the start of the tall gameplay.
Court - that's probably the only one I could argue with. I would be very tempted to put it in (high) D tier. It seems very situational, probably too much. I haven't taken it once and I'll probably take it only in my next HRE game. Most of modifiers are completely non important or as you've said - you can stack them somewhere else (prestige, progress, power projection). Taking this idea for policies seems useless while 6 out of 8 ideas are pretty much skippable and the other 2, although very good, are very circumstantial. Definately the weakest from the new ideas. Infrastructure is pretty good. Mercenary is again very situational but as a whole seems stronger than Court ideas.
Thank you for those videos. They're very educational (as is the comment section). Even though I've spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours I'm not a hardcore player and I always learn something from you or you explain (as with Inno or Trade) why my last gameplays changed in a certain way. You;ve also gave me ideas for new gameplays in HRE to try out Espionage, IInfrastructure, Mercenary (Swiss gameplay?) or go full Emperor.
I'd still put Trade ideas in low A tier, mostly for the policies. You can get up to +35% goods produced modifier from it's policies with Quantity, Religious, and Infrastructure, among several others that give trade efficiency.
Imo espionage ideas S tier cause of 45% ae (idea 20% + spynetwork 25% = 45% less ae) 30% of siege ability ( idea + 20% form spynetwork= 30% combining with offensive gave 50%) advisor cost and yearly coruption save our money to scale more. Spynetwork decetion reduce annoying actions like Sow Discontent and don't forget the bonus from stealing technology (more mana to develop and not staying back to others. Vassalize acceptation with winter palace is giving huge bonus to conquering for free by vassalizing. Claims on huge ammount of provinces. Playing as moscovy with espionage is so broken, u can claim everything with cost of 5+% spynetwork. So if u want to expand a lot of without any coalition espionage fill great. But in other hand they are not fiting in all builds
I think you are a bit overestimating the spy network bonus, since ae/siege bonus works only on a target country, it's great, but not scalable unfortunately :)
@@ZlewikkTV Spynetwork construction is huge so you need only a few months to take it to 100% + more diplomats = more targets at the same time. Also there are a few good combinations
Maritime on C Tier is a little bit of an insult I think... :/
a) I mean after all just the +50% Sailors (which quantity has only 33% for manpower) and +25% Marines Force Limit alone is worth so much more than only roleplay (obviously only for nations that have a relativly big amount of coastal provinces), because using Marines (and Sailors) is after all also Manpower as you are using your sailors pool on land battles as well while the +10% shock damage received is more like a joke because it is only 10% and it is only on sailors. And together with the new tier 5 gov. reform for the marines you`ll even pay the sailors maintanence and reeinforcement cost of only 750 Sailors for 1000 sailors regiment which not only negates the shock damage completly, but makes marines even more effiecient than manpower troops (if you have a good amount of the sailors pool)!!
And the other Tier 5 Reforms are not really that valueable in the gameplay in most of the cases if we are fair.
b) But mostly I think that there cannot be a real argument for ranking Maritime into the C Tier while ranking exploration in B Tier:
Because if you take maritime + expansion ideas then you`ll have such an enormously stronger Maritime-Colonial Gameplay than you could ever have with explo.
1. Maritime and Expansion give a crazy +83% Naval Force Limit modifier together (while explo + expansion would only give a useless +25%)
And Naval force limit means mostly more trade ships --> more money; or more transport ships --> easier overseas conquest (matches really
nice with the marines btw) in single player and probably more fight ships --> naval dominance in multiplayer (but that is just assumed)
2. With the estate Privilege "grant new world charter", for which you only need one colonist (as with expansion), that gives you a decision, that
gives you an explorer (so there is no need for the "quest of the new world" idea anymore except for spawning Colonialism)
3. You get (significantly) less colonial growth with maritime instead of explo... Yes. BUT if you are in singleplayer, then +50 more colonial
is not worth missing out on the Marines, the insane Naval Force limit, and the navy quality (such as "repairing in sea zones" which makes the
first world circumnavigation basically for free)(or the navy tradition which gives +100% trade steering at maximum and is quite difficult to
hold up without any ideas for that).
And in the New world there are mostly your CN anyways, so faster colonization is not giving you a lot there anyways.
4. MARITIME GIVES YOU A UNIQUE DECISION AND WITH THAT A UNIQUE TIER 8 REFORM!!!
And although I`ll admit that Tier 8 is quite late, the bonus of that Reform is just insane, as it gives you access to the unique
"Trade Protectorate" subject type, which is the most broken thing in game for basically infinite trade money (as you can stack those subjects
without a relation slot)!
So after all I can just recomment to try Maritime out (with a naval..ish nation of course) because I expierienced Maritime as a really nice snowballing idea group because of it boosting the overseas gameplay a lot.
And please @Zlewikk, rethink your C Tier... at least compared to the explo B Tier with the current Naval Meta in 1.35 (because I think in 1.34 it was very different) :)
Was already looking for your comment :), yea i 100% agree, i feel like maritime should at least be a B especially with court there. (explo is still somewhat usable cause I still take explo as holland to colonize before portugal with the extra range.)
Having a blast with my first idea maritime Genoa campaign.
I picked that campaign because of your video 😊
I think you made the case for Exploration to be C-tier instead of Maritime being a B-tier. If you are going colonial, naval force limit is not an issue as your colonies will be be providing all the limit that you could ever need (your shortfall will be with sailors instead of force limit). Also, the cost of exceeding the naval force limit is fairly negligible. Your point A is valid and a good justification for taking Maritime under an extremely niche scenario (needing more sailors). Your point B shows how weak both Maritime and Exploration are as naval force limit is extremely weak and unnecessary in colonial gameplay.
I could say espionage is a very good idea group. The reason I drop it from S to A is this. I does not scale to late-game as good as its competitors. The best bonusses it gives are not issue in late game. AE, vassalize, fabricate claim, you can see the pattern. this is purely based on single player tho.
Since i've been playing Anbennar more than Vanilla EU4 i see trade as an A tier idea mostly for the policy with offensive.
In vanilla extra movement speed isn't very important but in anbennar (where multiple races have speed maluses) it becomes much more important, may god have mercy on your sould if you play with undead army without some movement speed buffs.
diplo is by far the best to me but espionage and influence are also S tier, its just that those two are a bit more situational. In non-colonizing games I practically always end up with taking 2 of those groups out of 3-4 ideas picked.
Its also important to understand that all diplomatic idea groups are very easy to pick and fill up in your games, especially at adm tech 5. You just dont need to use a lot of diplo points earlygame. You can be behind in dip tech and the few things that do cost dip isnt that large like integrating small subjects, lower war exhaustion and peacedeals. On the contrary Mil tech is always important besides filling the group and at adm tech 5 you want to go to level 7 quick and also expand/core a lot. That understanding alone makes me rate all diplomatic ideas higher. I usually pick one first and pick a second one as the third or fourth group. I rarely do that with adm and mil ideagroups.
Espionage an Idea that used to be bad, but now one of the best in the game
Diplo is still better
@@MrThisissparta999 usually, but for the HRE I'd disagree
@@DavidLodgeclassof And for Hordes espio + aristo is a must have
@@Pieczorka meg. Definitely gives the best combat ability, so for MP absolutely. But for SP you'd still prefer siege ability (Offensive) or more razing power (Horde + Economic).
@@MrThisissparta999 nah, diplo only does one thing basically, albeit very well. Espionage ideas on the other hand is like the Aristocratic ideas but for diplo, it has a bit of everything in a single idea group.
I agree with you on espionage. It's something I'm always like "That would be really nice to have.... But this other idea group is just necessary right now." and I almost never end up taking espionage because of it.
I will say on trade, absolute fucking S tier if you're inexperienced. Used to literally be my favorite. Easily third idea group to take every time then. You go from no economy at all to actually being able to afford stuff. Outside of that though, there are some highly specific situations where I think it's still at least A tier. Some achievement/rp runs might have you expand within the same subcontinent mostly, so you never get trade companies, it's great then. Like doing Switzerlake for example, you're going to have at most 1 trade company, trade could be pretty good then. I still like trade ideas with hordes since you can usually benefit from caravan power.
Then there was this highly specific weird situation I was in, I forget the exact cause, but I was a custom nation in the new world, and I could never form any trade company anywhere, and also since new world, no colonial nations. Trade ideas was the only way for me to get more merchants.
I feel that Trade ideas used to be a lot better in the past, but with patches it's become less and less impactful. I couldn't really understand why, but your analysis is pretty much on point here. There's now a lot more sources of merchants and trade power in the game for me to really notice the difference. Also to add on top of it - Quantity nerf really hit it hard, since the +20% Goods Produced policy from it is awesome. However, I think that it scales a lot better with time than some of the others - basically, it went from being great as first or second diplo set idea groups to like your 6-8th pick overall.
1. Its policies are wonderful... but they scale much better if you have a lot of developed, well-built up provinces. The mentioned 20% Goods Produced, lots of Trade Efficiency, all of that scales a lot better once you already have a solid economic base.
2. It still combo's greatly even with Trade Companies thanks to the +15 merchant trade power - that trade power will get boosted by its own +25% global trade power, as well any other bonuses to that you might have - as well as caravan power and steering. Suddenly each of your merchants gets around 20-50 extra trade power in the node he's in, and he's steering 25% more trade your way, and if you already have like 10 merchants then it becomes GIGA.
I really liked it when I took it as lategame Russia, essentially giving me infinite money as I channeled the entirety of Asian trade for huge profits.
You can always tell the difference between a beginner and an advanced player by whether or not they put Espionage in S-tier. Espionage is good but it is a crutch, and if you know how to manipulate other game systems (like aggressive expansion), then it is 100% of the time better to take diplo than espionage. Diplomatic is simply the best diplo ideas and is a good pick for pretty much any game, from WC wide to Netherlands tall.
I've done a WC as Three Leagues without diplomatic ideas, but I did have espionage (no HRE). Diplo is good, but overrated imo. The war score cost reduction isn't all that important because even without it you can keep expanding as long as your admin/ diplo points can keep up. The -1 stab hit is only really useful for christians that cancel their royal marriage, which is a very niche thing. Improve relations is good for reducing AE over time, but straight AE reduction is better because it allows you to take more without need to juggle. Diplomats are good, but with the one from espionage you'll have enough imo. Diplo gives cheaper diplo avisor, but espionage gives cheaper advisors for all 3 power points. War score cost reduction -> shorter peace deal. Siege ability -> faster war -> earlier peace deal.
@@Vincrand just don’t agree. Province warscore cost is a hard roadblock, while siege ability is a soft roadblock. If I’m WCing I don’t need more siege ability (offensive + artillery + assault is more than enough), but no matter how good I play I can’t *take more provinces* without some kind of war score cost reduction, whether admin eff or province warscore cost.
Plus if we’re talking WC, the ability to truce break for half cost is insane. I can truce break the same country, for 100% warscore TWICE instead of once, potentially and likely deleting them from the map in end game.
@@hellodolly7989 the war score cost can be enough for the full annex, but there is no guarantee. When you are at the point you can truce break there is basically no difference between losing 1 more or less stab, because in both cases it's only 1. On top of that when truce breaking warscore cost doesn't really matter.
Getting espionage + divine ideas on top of offensive roughly halfs your war time. So whether you truce break or not you'll annex most countries faster with espionage + divine + offensive than only having offensive . The exception to this might be countries that cost near 100% warscore if you have diplo.
When I do a war against 4k+ dev Ottomans. The peacedeal will happen within a year and that is when I use auto siege on my armies.
Also I often do take either diplo or influence at some point. Diplo when I already have ccr in national ideas, influence when I have vassal bonus/ diplo annex in national ideas. In case I have neither I do whatever I feel like.
I went Espionage second in my latest Brandenburg -> Prussia -> Germany WC. Definitely really liked it. Mid game siege ability was really nice, and combining with AE impact from national ideas meant that early game HRE expansion was a lot faster. It's generally better to stack modifiers, so if you have AE impact in national ideas I think it can compete with Diplo for early game in high AE areas. I agree with the A assessment overall, good idea group, but not universally the best one
Honestly, court ideas are a great temporary / early game 2nd idea group. Take them for the extra +20% reform progress growth, which is HUGE early game especially if you're not playing a republic, along with the extra privileges + loyalty equilibrium, and you can snowball your way through your entire government tree by the 1600's. Taking full privileges is what you should be doing early game anyways, and then you can drop it for something different once you've finished all your reforms / when the age of absolutism starts, whatever comes first.
Wszystkiego najlepszego Zlewikk. Dziś jest Twój dzień.
I think espionage is S tier when playing in the HRE. First of all, because of the AE reduction. This requires no explanation. Secondly, siege ability helps with fighting a lot of small nations with many capital forts. Advisor cost lets you get level 2 or 3 advisors faster or simply have more money in the early game. Extra diplomat is always nice, especially in the HRE. Some of other bonuses can be useful in certain situations too. It was my first pick in my last Prussia game, albeit it was in patch 1.34 so some ideas were different.
Dude, I love espionage ideas. With some nations it's stupidly broken. Take Russia for example -15% AE from ideas, -10% AE from Orthodox icon, -10% from 100% prestige, -10% from 100% spy network that espionage helps you make happen, another -20% from espionage and cap it off with deus vult CB that has -25% lower AE. That's 90% AE reduction! And if you get to the grand palace of Bangkok and upgrade it to level 3, another -10% AE plus 15% gov cap. You're at -100% AE. You can take land everywhere and there will never be a coalition.
@@robertalaverdov8147 are you sure that's how that works for CBs? I always assumed that CBs were multiplicative with your other modifiers, the reduction of the CBs being applied first and the reduction of the modifiers later. For example a conquest for 100 ae with 50% reduction from modifiers and 50% with CB you only would get 100*0.5*0.5=25 ae
Great Opener for Prussia is Infrastructure, Aristokratic, Espionage. ( In which Order you want)
@@noriantiri9310 Maybe, I don't know the paradox formula exactly. But what I do know is that I've not had a coalition form against me in ages. And I always take 100% of the land in piece deals. My usual fist four is admin, diplo, religious and espionage. Though not necessarily in that order. And I'm almost always the #1 GP within 100 years by doing so. And I know admin efficiency also reduces AE, which is why I switch out espionage for offensive or quality by the 1600's. But none the less it's massively helpful in the beginning to blob without constantly worrying about coalitions.
@@robertalaverdov8147 There's a cap on AE impact, just like trade efficiency is at 200%. But, good points - I've ejoyed Espionage since 1.33
Espionage is s-tier considering how much siege ability you can stack with it and its policies. Winning battles is nice and all but being able to siege down forts quickly is what wins you wars. Especially in recent patches where the ai tends to avoid battles.
And then you got all the other bonuses with ae, more and cheaper claims, easier to steal vassals and offer vassalage etc. Can really supercharge you in certain regions of you're going wide.
My dude placed Espionage above Admin lmao
do we play the same game tho?
just yesterday, the austrian and spainish ai attacked my ottomans while they were 2:1 outnumbered (and ofc lost)
so i cant agree on the ai tending to avoid battles, at least not in my game x)
The most annoying thing with Influence is that a lot of their buffing is specifically to vassals. Here I am, with 5 PU's and 2 Vassals, and I am almost forced to choose Influence for integration cost modifiers, but won't actually get many other buffs despite having massive subjects.
Don't u get force limit from pu? And besides that only thing u're missing is vassal tax which is nice, but rarely crucial
@@vladislavkorol902 You don't get force limit. It requires "vassals" not just "subjects". At least, that's what I've largely found searching the internet for the specifics. Aside from 2/6 of the ideas being basically useless in this case, don't overlook the policies. Several give additional 100% force limit or some such modifiers.
I have been waiting for this video. I like rankings.
I pretty much agree with everything you said except trade should be C it's really useless.
Espionage is s tier for me, cause i like to troll, get admin next and have policy to reduce advisor cost even more, then i run at least lvl 3 advisors and get shit loads of mana when it's most needed. Solo gameplay of course
I chose espionage as my first idea group at the ottomans as i like to stack the AE modifiers, you can easily get to -40 AE reduction in the first 20 years or so.
The extra siege bonus you get is also very decent when combined with the Ottoman's age objective, early acces to cannons and the jannisaries unit, aswell as getting another 20% extra siege abilty when your spynetwork is at 100 which due to taking espionage idea shouldnt take long.
After diplo tech 9 you can get up to -30% tech cost by having a spynetwork as 100 in a country with higher tech than you (-5% per tech)
Also, the +25% chance to capture chips can be stacked nice with the shipboarding or french naval doctrine if youre too lazy to build up an actual fleet and just leech off of other nation's ships
I might even say Trade Ideas is C tier personally, Trade Companies in general killed trade ideas, because even before the sub continent change it was pretty easy to get Merchants, now it is too easy. Besides that all trade ideas does is get you more money, and if you are investing well, conquering the right lands, keeping your autonomy low, money isn't an issue. It doesn't help you win wars, it doesn't help you win wars faster, it doesn't lower AE, it doesn't help you diplo annex faster, it doesn't help you take more land in peace deals, it doesn't help you core cheaper or faster.
Maybe when money was harder to come across it was worth more, but money is pretty easy to get in the current patch. Money from wars, from crownland, from Burgher loans, it just isn't that hard to make money. And when you really need money, you need it right now, trade takes time to make you money. Trade gives you more of what you already have, it doesn't give you something you don't have.
I think trade has a niche, which is when most of your natural expansion route happens withing your subcontinent, like central germany being divided by 4 nodes
but that'd also mean you're needing money and the cost of an idea group, which is quite rare
still, it has a niche and its a reliable group for newer players
I agree with it
i recently played a saluzzo game with espionage trying to stack ae modifiers and it was super fun
once in my life I took a trade idea and I played with Milan to Italy for me C, because you can always find money on the other side and you can always take another idea to help you with that
That -.2 corruption in espionage helps you take the Dynastic Administration government reform which gives +1 monarch admin skill, reduces all estates influence by 10 and to a lesser extent +1 possible advisor.
I know it can be reduced by a good economy, but that's still around 7 ducats a month and for countries that have a small economy and need to blob that extra 1 admin monarch point can be useful.
One other use case for Maritime: Pirate Republics. By default, they have +50% marine force limits, which combines with the +25% from maritime to essentially allow you to use marines for your entire infantry (especially once cannons start taking up any amount of your FL). The +50% sailors from Maritime essentially becomes +50% national manpower for infantry (which are the units most likely to suffer casualties in most scenarios anyway). This strategy also means the sailors from raiding coasts essentially turn into free manpower. The policy with economic also gives +25% more sailors (and +10% marines).
Combined with the other ideas in the group being useful for pirate republics, and the ability to take the "form thalassocracy" decision for a few more bonuses without needing to take naval ideas instead, a pirate republic might find use in taking maritime at some point even outside of roleplay. Plus, ships repairing in coastal zones is often nice for reducing headaches.
Of course, other governments can try something similar, but a PR requires less investment into marines with their base of 50% FL, and raiding coasts meshes with it very well. Perhaps a maghrebi nation or the Knights could make use of this strategy too.
That said, I remember watching Florry's attempt at using Marine-only for conquering. Eventually, he gave up. Admittingly, that was several patches ago but I don't think enough has changed to make a Marine-heavy playstyle significantly more successful.
One thing which increases Trade's value is that it gives you the "Trading in" bonus on trade goods way easier than just blobbing (because the Trading in bonus is evaluated from trade power multipled by goods produced). This means you get the +2 diplo rep from ivory with 5 provinces instead of 15, tech cost from paper, glass, etc. which adds up to a lot. You can even get the grain/fish bonuses which are usually impossible unless you WC. This means that the idea set is basically 50% more efficient than just money making.
It's really easy to get the trading in through just trade companies I think 😅
Espionage is definitely an A tier for me, I liled it when I was a noob and it was bad and now it keeps getting better and better so I love it.
It's definitely a tier above Court.
I'm really glad you put Exploration as a B tier. When you need it it's great, but 90% of countries either won't use it or will use expansion instead.
I've never taken trade ideas since there are so many other ways to make monry and I'm glad to see someone thinks the same as me :)
The good thing about maritime is that you can confirm thalassocracy
For me it's simple- both Diplo and espionage are S tier, just they have other purpose
When you playing for cavalry build or tall you pick espionage - they pair well with aristocratic (i love economic+espionage+aristocratic build on Poland) and when you're playing tall you can grab more in wars without caring about the AI, again with aristocratic/Pluto which give development cost they pair very well (cheap claims) and you have money's for larger cavalry army which is better than infantry army in most cases. Remember also claims give -15ccr cost :)
Diplo when I'm playing wide or for pus, i love the stab cost reduction(free pus), province war score cost is pretty op, and diplomats Means taking less but more often and more and especially with Austria you have unlimited diplorep, and you have like 30% chances of annexing, and you 300development Hungary but you also need influence ideas.
Summary
Espionage- going tall or not really wanting to conquer all world, great for OP stupid cavalry armies, more all rounded bonuses
Diplo- Going wide or playing in the HRE, overall putting efford into a game
My pick:
I personally like more espionage beacuse I'm playing lazy putting 30% efford into game and I don't need to conquer all world, and with espio i have OP cavalry and also ship capture chance is sooo unterrated literally free ships 😂😂😂, however i think Diplo are slightly better
Considering that I avoid trade companies like the plague, (I know it’s not optimal, that doesn’t change the fact that I despise them, even after 2k+ hours in the game) so trade ideas are generally a decent enough pick for me if I need another Diplo group to round out my idea selections.
Why do you dislike them?
@@viniciusyugulis7278 I just don't like them, don't know what else to tell you. Brain is just happier full stating everything even though I know that it isn't always optimal
Interesting that you didn't mention multiplayer at all for trade. There its much harder to conquer lands to trade company and the extra money is much more necessary.
That's actually a really interesting observation, given how much Zlewikk is seen as the MP guy on youtube.
Espionage was ALWAYS at least A tier for me, even when it was much worse than it is now. For me this idea is must have in most games as I don't play long (1600 is usually end) so spy network construction, AE impact and above all corruption growth is for me priority for first idea. Now that it has siege ability, advisor cost it is S tier for me without doubt
Espionage is definitely A-tier, especially the AE impact right off the bat and upto 30% siege ability (due to 100% spy network and 10% bonus from idea) is super strong. It also works well in specific tags like England (to troll Europe), Ottomans/France/Spain/Muscovy (easy vassalization with favours & +15 acceptance), Poland (cav go brr), and HRE in general.
The real discussion should be on Maritime, often over-looked but very good for a coastal tag. It's de-facto trade+naval ideas combined, and has some great policies. If you're not worried about super-optimizing your game, it's a very good pick. I think it's hampered in its utility because of PDX's game design - we heavily rely on armies, but navies are often overlooked. The naval mechanics aren't fleshed out well and it just doesn't feel as good. But, I will say that playing Holland, Lubeck, Denmark, Kilwa, Malacca/Brunei (naval is arguably better here), and any trade-focused nation - it's a very, very fun way to play! Also, Marines go brr - someone made a comment about using marines for basically double manpower, which is broken
Saying spy network is guaranteed 20% siege ability is a bit of an exaggeration as it only works on target country, so it takes time, is super manual and not scalable for really wide gameplay
The biggest problem with Maritime is that it has conflicting ideas. You don't get enough sailors to justify your increased naval force limit. And if you are using Marines, you definitely can't support such a large force limit. In order to meet all the bonuses that the idea set offers (marines + naval force limit), you have to spam out Impressment Offices and Drydocks. Then you have to ask yourself whether those were really the most optimal buildings you could put in those provinces? At this point, you might be asking yourself whether you could have just invested in production/manpower buildings and conquered the same provinces with your army and taken a different idea set with better ideas?
As you said in your second paragraph, if you are not concerned with optimizing your game, then it is a good pick. Tier lists, by default, are an attempt at optimization though. Maritime (and Naval) are fun picks but that is about it.
I love espionage for one thing, cav combat ability
Thank you, agree with your rating. But from my point of view there should be an other kind of rating. Not from S to C, but it should be based on gameplay kind. For example: Major nation WC, Minor tall game, MP game, Colonizer kind and so on. With that its fine to get S or C mark for idea groups.
Well, I prefer approach where I explain wach idea use cases and based on them give fairly objective tier :)
4:39 - can confirm, Diplo-Humanist made expanding into the HRE as Gothic Orthodox Theodore (East Frisia Exile path) actually doable and not torturously slow. Now I could have demolished the Empire to make it faster, but I actually preferred the challenge to destroy the Empire manually by eating everyone inside, then finishing off the emperor after eating all the electors made it Single inherit by default.
For me Maritime is a solid B tier, if only for the Confirm Thalassocracy decision and the government reform you can do with it. If you go for a tall Portugal or Netherlands it's a very solid pick. It's better than Exploration, if you combine it with Expansion and the burgher privilege you can still get explorers.
You're still limited in exploring certain Atlantic/Pacific zones without exploration 1, right?
I kinda feel like espionage is S tier. It's almost a military idea group, but it uses Diplo mana. Like, the siege ability and AE impact is amazing
I like espionage ideas. Just completed a Mughal WC run with espionage as second idea. The claim state and wicker spy network works well with auristocratic for the lower claim cost. Whenever I did a conquest with no permanent claims I felt like I could claim most of the provinces with resulted in way less AE especially with the 20 % less AE on top. Also the -0.20 corruption felt like a lot. Basically it reduced costs when overextension was high but also allowed me to debase more often instead of taking loans.
Biggest problem was that since I took diplo as a second idea I really couldn’t take Influence also but found it was not really needed since I never annexed vassals except those I had a tons of cores on already in the start as well as the Deccan.
I agree with you. Diplo is the winner. But after that it depends. If you go the vassal or PU route, with massive subjects where liberty desire might be a problem, then Influence is better.
But if you don't, then espionage is better. It gives you really nice bonuses and if you don't go the vassal route, then you just don't need influence.
I take 2-3 diplo ideas, first Espionage since it's the best early, then diplo in the midgame since that's when the 20% warscore cost is useful (too early and I can't make use of it much since coalitions woud prevent me from taking too much land anyway, and it'd be too early for me to keep everyone truced via constant wars yet). If I actually manage to make it into very late game, I might take influence so I can annex big PU's like Spain, England, Russia, if I even choose to annex them at all, since there's usually no real need to annex them...
I take diplo first only if I'm trying to get Emperor of HRE nowadays.
Spy ideas is S teir Because on top of what you said it fits perfectly in a siege ability stacking run
As long as Trade, Exploration, and Maritime are below Court, it's a good list. I might even argue it's better than Inno, but that's a different mana point type. It's still in 4th place among bird mana idea groups, which means you'll only pick it if you don't want to play a vassal game or have a built in swarm (HRE or Emperor of China etc).
Imo exploration is C tier, as you are only taking it for colonists and once you finish colonizing it has no relative bonus like Expansion which gives you the - 10 percent autonomy. I would rather just take expansion than take both imo.
As a player who could make roman empire as naples at 1560 (Diplo+Religious+Admin+Influence/ PU Over Aragon, Castille, Portugal, France-> this one by changing to sardinia piedmont) the only real use that i see to spionage ideas, its starting with them, then revoking it till tech 13~14, using golden era and sp ideas to complete both asap, but never tested if Spionage+Religous+Diplo+Admin~Spio->Quantity/Influence would give you more benefits than just starting with diplo, someday gonna test it
dont you think court is viable as 5/6 in mp for its 10moral damage received and 10moral damage bonus policies?
It's in fact HARD to keep up power projection when you're too big for an easy OPM rival, but too small for the ranking bonus. Court ideas has you covered there. And it gets the best policy, too. Plus, all those extra privileges... A-tier.
For Maritime ideas (and to a lesser extent naval) is NECESSARY to unlock “Thassalocracy” government reform which gives MASSIVE trade bonuses and enables Trade Protectorate subjects. Of course, this is only applicable for non England/GB trade empire, but is super good.
The Thalassocracy reform is much better than the England/GB unique one, so still good. The main benefit that England can get from Maritime is the 25% Marines. Seeing as your marines are your unique unit, which are also buffed more than your standard units, this can be useful.
But realistically, unless you are roleplaying a naval power nation, or pirate republic, both Naval and Maritime are just inferior to every other choice. They are not useless, and a combination that is fun to play around with, is Naval/Maritime/Espionage, with a flagship built to add +1 to naval siege bonus, giving you a +4 bonus to all coastal sieges, without using artillery, with free naval barrage. If using marines, and also building your flagship to reduce disembark time, you can do some really fun hit and run sieges on coastal forts. But again, whilst this is a fun way to play the game, they are simply inferior to every other idea group in overall power/usage.
The funniest thing is the toilet paper act. Court ideas are good for certain countries like Congo and Japan, especially countries that can at some point revoke privileges regardless of estate influence to loyalty ratio.
We really do need to make Tier distinctions, I think. SP v MP. Wide v Tall. Horde. Colonial. Austria/Ming (in which Court Ideas make sense.) I'll defer to others except on Wide SP. There, most of your Ideas are already decided: (1) Administrative, (2, 3) Religious AND/OR Humanist, (4) Offensive for the Force Limit, and the three DIP Ideas of (5, 6, 7) Espionage, Diplomatic, and Influence. I think I will now add (8) Mercenary, since the dirt-cheap mercs makes cleanup at end-game easy. (Also renders Quantity twice as useless.) So, there's seven of your Idea Sets. Eight, if you're a real chad and take both Hum and Relig. Colonial will have to sacrifice one of those because you need Expansion, but you can't have everything. Same for Horde Ideas, a delightful blend of Espy, Quality, Religious AND Humanist, so you can jettison one or more of those (probably not Espy). But Espy is always in the mix for conquerors. Did I mention the 10% Siege ability in Espy? Mix that with Offensive's 20% (and not as a slot-using Policy, either), and now you're cooking with oil. Espy is S Tier. I will live to see Espionage nerfed, if you can believe it.
Don't forget about Divine ideas. Morale damage received reduction, fire damage redutcion, siege with Espionage, more manpower, culture conversion (can stack nice with religious and influnce) and 10% morale ith religious.
@@Vincrand Yeah, for Theocracies, it's mandatory!
@@classiclife7204 Just become a theocracy :D. With the introduction of government reforms you don't need to stay as the same thing. There are also the other old ways ofcourse.
In 1 playthrough I got artistocratic, horde, divine and plutocratic ideas. Start as Great Horde, took lands from Lithuanie and played further as Zapo. I waited with the unique government and took aristocratic, then became a horde and took horde ideas. Then became a theocracy and took divine. After that take unique reform.
Divine, offensive and situationaly horde are the best 2-3 mil ideas out there.
@@Vincrand I forget sometimes how many ways there are to break this game, lol. That's a lot of MIL mana to go through, but a literally unbeatable army is worth it, I'd wager.
06:30 don't forget that 100% spy network also gives 20% siege ability, so with espionage it's very realistic to get +30% siege ability
You are saying it like it's impossible without espionage :). It's a nice boost, but still it's fairly easy to keep high spy network on key enemies
@@ZlewikkTV Of course it's not impossible, but it does makes it easier and more convenient, especially if you have multiple targets. I think it's worth mentioning at least, since it's in the same idea as +10% siege ability and improves it somewhat. I'd still take diplo over espionage thogh :)
showing in game ideas on ryukyu, three mountain achievement video ? or it just speculation
I actually like trade. In my current Lübeck game it got me to like 200 income after 100 years. Ideal for trade city larping.
Tbh siege ability is a bigger bonus for single player than it used to be since this patch. Especially since 1.35 bots started to love upgrade all forts and build new ones that are bordering you. Espio saves a lot of time and troubles in lategame
Also, changes to mercs (ideas and goverment) made them being cheap and literally endless drain of mercenary manpower which together with siege ability gives you ability to blitzkrieg countries with tier 8 forts via assaults. This made my three mountains shogun run really fun in lategame
The best part of espionage is letting you grab puppet the nobility to revoke all your privileges at once and then flip back to whatever you want if you rush gov progress so you can take advantage of all the privileges as long as possible and then switch to the absolutism game.
Honestly I feel like espio is on par with dip in terms of usefulness. Like diplo is the indisputable king if you want to play a subject/diplo-heavy game, but really outside of that the only thing it really offers is the province WS cost. Admittedly that's fucking massive, to the point of single-handedly making it a highly desirable policy, but there's nothing else over espio if you're not making good use of that dip rep, and I feel like that's pretty easy to do in a lot of games. The improve relations is good, but the AE is better, diplomats are an alright bonus, but as long as you have enough to do what you want to be doing then they're not super useful beyond that, and espio gets 1 anyways. You said that advisor cost doesn't equal more mana but I disagree. You're going to be getting your higher level advisors pretty notably sooner than you're going to be without it when you're stacking it, and in my experience that time-frame is not insignificant, especially when those extra points are going to be going towards continuing to build yourself up to continue getting higher level advisors. Obviously once you'd be running level 5's either way it just saves money, but it's a pretty significant boost in those critical years of buildup.
More than anything tho I'd say is how many things it combos exceptionally well with that cover many playstyles. The espio/inno/(divine/offensive) core makes your sieges and wars so much faster that it actually appreciably saves you manpower, and makes it so you're running level 5 advisors as a middling power. It's a significant buff to your cavalry if you want to be running that (notably you can actually get to 100% ratio on sunni hordes, non-sunni tribe>hordes, or anyone who can form the latin empire or tibet which makes cavalry playstyles a lot more viable). If you're playing mp and you're playing a nation that can justify naval, you're getting 10% global combat width (though the importance of that can vary if you're playing modded, I'd imagine naval superiority might mean less when your opponent can just cross a canal into britain for example). As you mentioned the manpower is actually pretty significant in the new update, especially since plutocratic is a pretty reasonable military pick anyways if you don't have anything super special in mind. There's just so many more synergies is the main thing, for diplomatic it's you're playing the diplomatic game or you're spending however many dip points for province WS alone. Diplo is uniquely good at one thing with an overpowered bonus that makes it generically good at any playstyle that involves expanding. Espio is generically not quite as good but still pretty good, but is has a far wider berth of scenarios in which its unique bonuses in combination with certain playstyles make it outshine diplo imo. At worst I think it is a sidegrade to diplo, and I think there are a good number of situations where you would prefer to pick espionage over diplo.
Court ideas give +1 absolutism on some privileges and +2 absolutism on trade monopolies for Russia. There is a mission for Russia which when completed abolishes all negative absolutism penalties for having monopolies. Combining the two usually breaks absolutism and is equivalent to having 16-20 extra absolutism, meaning 2-4 extra privileges for the state
Court is C.
Trade ideas can still be usefull if you have trouble getting to a different superregion (for example as a minor in the HRE).
Maritime Naval is absolutely busted in mp and I am still laughing my ass of when I beat the british and spanish fleets with nusantara while japan wrecked havoc in the new world.
Client States can do things not only for emperor of china , but even for GB , i think you smart enough to realise how if you play Great Britain route (it`s all about trade protectorates , and it`s really fun how you became a really forge of the world with 200% goods produce with 100 protectorates) :D SO there is 1 way more to use influence idea - for colonising xD
Im playing a republic and it gives +0.50 republic thingy and thats huge! It means with other bonuses that at worse for 3 years i have a 1/1/4 when my leader dies but i can alaways upgrade em and make em 6 and never become a dictator ship.
1 time its usefull 😂
Espionage at the moment is an easy S tier for me. The only time I'll pick diplomatic over espionage is when I want to become emporer of the HRE.
AE reduction > improve relations when it comes down to reducing AE as fast as possible. At base value both will turn a 50 AE with -2/ year into 20 years, but improve relations is more abundant, so in normal game play AE will outperform. AE reduction also becomes more powerful the more you get it, while improve relations becomes worse.
Cheaper provinces -> shorter truces. Siege ability -> faster truces. Espionage + Divine + Offensive is really strong (innovative ideas will also improve siege, but isn't all that useful aside from that).
Diplo has cheaper diplo advisor. Espionage has cheaper advisors.
Diplo has 1 more diplomat, but I very rarely need that.
-.2 corruption is a nice eco bonus. Early on you can basically get a free loan once in a while. When you know you won't be spending much mana in the next few years (f.e. just took 3 new techs and are recovering from war), then turn down root out corruption and debase your currency. Within 5 years it can be completly gone if you also take the policy with admin. Late in the game it will help you with counteracting the corruption from overextion. Giving/ saving you tens of thousands of ducats during the game. Diplo has cheaper tech wich will save something like 1320 diplo power if you pick it as 3th group and play untill the end.
I agree with you on Espionage. The AE reduction is great but Diplo is objectively better at mitigating AE, both because improve relations rate = AE tickdown rate, and bc more diplomats means more potential coalition members you can increase relations with. Instead, Espionage shines with its extra siege ability, great military policies, and good modifiers you can stack with more elsewhere like advisor cost and corruption reduction. So there are many situation where it's the clear choice, like as any non-horde cavalry nation. So it's a high A tier, but not enough for S.
For AE reduction espionage is better than the improve relation from diplo. Example you get stuff worth 50 AE. There is a base -2/year, so it takes 50/2 = 25 years as base. With +25% improve relations it will become 50/2.5 = 20 years. With -20% AE reduction it will become 40/2 = 20 years. So on base they are the same. However it's far more easy to get impove relations than AE reduction. So in a more natural game setting the AE reduction will help more. On top of that improve relations get's less relvant the more you have it, but AE reduction becomes even more relevant the more you get it.
Is the music you use from the game? I don't play with music on, but I like it very much.
The thing about Espionage is that its a really nice idea group but it doesn't bring anything special to the table, it doesn't improve your army or economy, it doesn't enable you to go wide, tall or colonial, it doesn't help with unrest or vassals what it does is speed the game up and make it easier to expand early which means you are rushing through the good parts of the game into the boring stages of the game
Since eu4 playthroughs have a short life it ends up feeling like a wasted slot by idea group 4
I’m glad someone else says court ideas isn’t that good. The Reddit disagrees with me so hard I thought I was doing something wrong.
The eu4 reddit is braindead
Espionage you need to account that high spy networks equals faster sieges. It’s a good policy for playing wide
One thing people ignore with espionage is that it helps to build the espionage networks, which increases siege ability up to 20% AND AE up to 30%!!
This means that idea has the potencial to give you 50% reduced AE and 30% siege ability. It’s super strong
It's a bit of an exaggeration since it works only on a target country, so it takes time, is not on everyone and is very manual. Not scalable for a really wide gameplay
@@ZlewikkTV If the Wiki is right its also not true as the Spy Network effect seems to be mutlipicative to other AE effetcs not additative, so Espionage ideas and 100% Spy Network would "only" bring you down to 0,8*0,7= 56% AE-impact.
@@ZlewikkTV of course, but if you have the diplomats to build the networks you can get on multiple nations. I once waited like 4 months before peacing out Austria because I could PU them for less 30 AE from the network. Since the idea gives you network construction it lets you get this faster and make it more reliable
Exploration nowadays is pretty useless since you can get explorers and conquistadors through the burghers' decision available if you have colonists (and you will). You lose only 40% colonial range which you will get anyway by conquering land. I would better take trade or smth. more useful.
Good material
Tbh it seems really hard to justify Court at B tier. You basically said it yourself, it doesn't really enable any novel gameplay, and for more high pressure gameplay it is wildly outclassed. Setting aside overall "objective" strength for general purposes, things like Maritime (which I do also think is C tier) enable "LARPing" with marines or pirates, Exploration enables colonial gameplay, Espionage and Influence enable vassal-powered games, even Trade uniquely fits into a buckets-of-ducats sort of fantasy. Court just doesn't offer that. It at best encourages gameplay focused on estate management, which could be cool in some version of the game, but having stronger control over and more access to estate bonuses is just not an open-ended enough mechanic to really drive a campaign theme (imo). You have to be really committed to the concept (like a tall Emperor of China game or something) and even then it is an almost strictly inferior choice.
And in overall "power" it's just not even close. Good, or even just decent, players don't really struggle with estates at all, and to the extent that they might, Court doesn't really make a radical difference. Especially because even in the worst case, if you don't want to bother with estates much, you can essentially just grab the mana-producing privileges (and maybe Strong Duchies or something) and otherwise just ignore estates beyond selling/seizing on cooldown as appropriate, and not really suffer much at all. And in a general side-by-side comparison, you can basically find an obviously superior idea for each Court Idea in Influence, Diplo, or Espionage. By which I mean for every idea in Court, I can find a different idea I'd rather have in each of the aforementioned groups without having to duplicate them (e.g. Monarch diplo skill is good but it is basically equivalent to an extra diplo relation slot assuming you are usually running at or above your relationship limit).
My personal proposal for an interesting upgrade would be to have its finisher let you choose multiple government reforms within a single tier. This would be complicated because it would probably require a lot of specific limitations and probably a bunch of adjustments to a lot of the reforms (for which I don't have specific ideas), but it would unlock a lot of additional power and enable a unique gameplay style the way that other ideas groups do. One where you could focus on stacking combinations of interesting and strong bonuses in a way that no other play style would allow.
I honestly personally prefer espionage over diplo. AI reduction feels more tangable than just better relations. And the siege bonus is also very nice.
Someone with more than 0 opinion of you can't join a coalition against you and diplo helps in making ae go away faster
@@noriantiri9310 I mean, diplo with 25% improve relations makes the AE go away 25% faster. Espionage makes you take 20% less AE in the first place.
AE reduction is better than improve relations, I agree. There's only so many nations you can improve with when you're swamped by minors in Europe, especially when you have the increased AE from the HRE.
The reason that diplo is better overall is because the lack of stab hit and province warscore cost are better than anything else diplo has, and the dip rep, dip relations, and diplomats are also very good.
Espionage is primarily one S-tier idea (AE), one A-tier (siege ability), and a number of B-tier (good but not great). Diplo is one S-tier (province warscore cost), a couple A-tier (improve relations, less stability loss), and everything else is still good
Zlewikk is basically right about trade ideas. It used to serve a purpose, but that purpose was made obsolete when Paradox expanded the TC mechanic.
Now it's a crutch for people who just need to improve their economic management.
Nothing wrong with these choices. Bang on with Trade Ideas, pre 1.30 they would have been a high A tier group, Back in the old trade company system it would massively help countries outside of Europe, Hordes especially benefitted from it as you needed to buff up trade to make money. These days it isn't as necessary with trade companies, but i still pick it in my more chill campaigns. Still a decent B tier pick in my eyes, especially if your playing as a non-coloniser and have national ideas that could be boosted by it. Thinking Countries like Genoa/Venice/Hamburg/Lubeck - small nations that don't have an easy way into the colonial/trade company game early on.
i get your point about innovative not being as good as people say they are, but putting them in the same tier as court ideas is very questionable to say the least
There is b+ and b-, that's the difference between these two, probably court is even b-- :)
11:53 explo are useless on 1.35 with domination dlc. I think that only time i would pick this if i making navigator for portugal or playing for colonies countries like wolgast, which are so far from new world
Explo has a decision to pass similar to the explorer from the expansion, that gives -50 chance. Combine that with the policy explo+expan for another -50 and you can run the +20 global settler with no chance of uprising and keep all the native assimilation
@@leviathan5530 but isn`t better to pick diplo or quality or aristo or whatever? This is good, but not good enough to waste 1 idea slots.
Exploration got a stealth boost. There is a Clergy Estate Priv called Establish New World Missions. This enables a National Decision called Clergy New World Missions. You need Exploration Ideas for this. Long story short it allows you to use the Native Suppression Policy (+20 Global Settler Chance) while getting bonusses for native assimilation and the uprising chance is 0 so you don't have to send soldiers.
You can fiddle fart around with the explorer you get from the burgers and still be colonizing in the 1600's or you can get 'er done by about 1570 or so. Once you've explored every thing you can replace Exploration with Diplo or influence. You're not married to it.
@@bartekkrzysik7730 Once you are done exploring the world you can trade out exploration for what ever you want. You lose 90% of the monarch points but you get the slot back.
👋🏽
Espionage is a low A tier. The AE and such are really nice, but I really miss the diprep of influence/diplo and unless you stack it the AE reduction is about as good as 25% imp relations. Then the policies, I think they're all really weak compared to what diplo and influence can get you. I sometimes pick espoinage because I dont want to go diplo again and influence lacks the AE management (and diplomats), but I always feel like I would be better off just running diplo.
Is all 7 policy must have on groups or we can chpose ?
Espionage is top 3 in my opinion and is especially good for small nations with less love from the recent dlcs.
For me Espionage goes up to S tier if I'm playing with Divine ideas.
30% siege ability + 20% from 100 spy network was making my wars so much less annoying lol
Espionage went from being useless to being a must ( even if the rebel mechanics is stil quite useless ) . In general Diplo category has the best ( diplo , espio ) the game shaping ( explo , influ ) and the most useless ( court and marittime , those need a complete rewriting ) . i totally agree about trade , i considered it to be mandatory to gain money , but when i became more experienced it became a plus and not so important .
I fully understand putting Maritime C tier. To me, it's only use was ever to maximize maritime trade to get "Rags to Riches", and even then it wasn't necessary, but my point to get big trade income without high dev, and it certainly did that.
What I don't get is how you can say anything is worse than court ideas. You even said in the video that it's only good for the HRE or China, and even then not the best. So it's only good for one subset of one gameplay style, and even then worse than Duplo/Influence (for HRE) or Humanist (China). Meanwhile, maritime is justifiable for MP, for trade empires, and if you're limiting yourself to one region like the Spice Islands. Certainly not good, but far far just useful than court ideas.
You need a D tier for court ideas
100% Agreed. Diplomatic reputation is much more important for HRE than a measly +5% IA growth. And that's the finisher. Everything else in Court doesn't help HRE play at all.
P.S. GB is only country good with maritime Ideas , just because GB marines really strong (well only +5% discipline and didn`t took +10% shock dmg , but well , having another pool of recruits ,but even biigger... yup thats really good, but not for solo game and early game in MP) :D
I'll be bold and say that Diplomacy should drop a tier. It's been S tier for a very, very long time, but now it doesn't give anything that you can't get elsewhere. You can get an extra diplomat from Aristocratic ideas and diplomatic reputation from estates and reforms. Even the amazing 20% province score cost isn't really needed unless you're set to blob during the age of absolutism. When it comes to picking diplomatic as one of your first four idea groups, the only nation I can see myself doing so is Austria.
Yeah, the Trade ideas aren't amazing. But they will still boost your economy at a point in time where you'll need every ducat you can get to build courthouses and manufactories.
I really think court should be in C, I just don’t see a situation where you take it over any of the other policies
I say trade is depended on u gaols and where u expand i dont like to do a world concquest and restrict me to a eria and to make my income as high as posibel what for me means stronger nations to face and defend agaist if i het to strong i get bored so in that way trade is useful if i cant tradecompany alot but yes in a wide play i woud say its even c tier
just like you pointed out yourself (i think it was during your last ottoman campaign), trade ideas are crucial for tall playstyle, but kinda useless besides that.