Unify China CB gives free cores, so it's pretty obvious what I was going to do. It's still limited by truce timers, and my allies Dai Viet and Korea were both doing their best to be a nuissance. I tend to be too sentimental about AI allies and almost never backstab them, even when they really deserve it. At least in old patches it made sense, nowadays AI actively tries to undermine you by guaranteeing your targets and such.
Eventually I got tired of Dai Viet, as they not only grabbed some Chinese provinces themselves, they also made 3 Chinese minors their tributaries, and that was definitely too much.
I passed the first reform just one year in, as I had mission for +25 mandate, so I didn't spend even one day at negative mandate, but before I could even think of passing second I got two flood events for -10 mandate in a row. I only passed the second reform in 1567.
Ming was doing its best strat of losing so many wars simultaneously that none of them could get decent warscore, so it would survive longer.
And finally in 1569 I pretty much united China. There's still 8 provinces protected by truce timers, but it hardly matters.
Turning China into a bunch of trade companies not only saved gov cap, it also got me to over 400/gold income, 40% into setting up Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. If I continued, I'd probably get economic hegemony by 1600 or so. I'd probably need to conquer Korea and Brunei for it, as they are major leaks in my trade networks. And Ayutthaya and Pegu for their monuments. Other than that there's no particular direction I need to go.
East Asian trade network is just terrible for everyone. Japan can't go to Malaya without basically conquering China. Chinese trade splits in two and both directions leak. Malaya used to be easy to plug into Zanzibar, but they changed it too, as it goes into Cape, so you might want to conquer India or African coast for what used to be easier.
There's still a small complication that Portugal and Spain both showed up in Malaya and Australia, and I still don't have the Printing Press, but I have 4x the income Spain does, so I'd be able to crush them if I wanted to.
Anyway, I think this is a good conclusion of the campaign.
For some tips:
- as Japanese minor there are early two limitations - mana for coring and AE. Doing some show strength for mana and better AE management could have helped
- if you want to unify it's much better to break alliances and get rid of all other daimyo in the last war rather than be a shogun and wait 10 years before you can start integrating them
- if you play without dev pushing (I don't plan to release that), just no-CB someone in Middle East and vassalize them. If you play with dev pushing, obviously dev push early.
- if you're strong enough for it, it's better to take the mandate early rather than wait for Mingsplosion
- once you have the mandate cleaning up China costs almost no mana and they are all easy wars, so it might be a good time to open second front elsewhere. Ayutthaya for monuments is the most obvious direction
Time for some after thoughts about Asia in 1.35 and the mod setup.
Institution setup I was testing (very slow spread, no dev pushing) really takes over the focus of the game when playing outside Europe. I tried to deal with it in the least cheesy way - try to meet Europeans early, and use knowledge sharing. This suffers from lack of player agency - AI can offer knowledge sharing, but there's no way to request knowledge sharing, so it's basically AI decision RNG, even though for the AI it's pure upside so it should always take it. In vanilla it doesn't matter, as you're far more likely to just dev push anyway, but without dev pushing, poor design of knowledge sharing system is a real problem.
I wanted to give this no-cheese method a try, and it's sort of viable, but realistically early no-CB on some Arabian minor, then either taking over Egypt when Mamluks are busy with the Ottomans, or allying Mamluks or Ottomans, is likely a far better way, and doesn't require any colonists.
And unfortunately all this institution lag didn't quick achieve quite what I hoped. In EU4 there's no way to change tech speed, it all goes through the mana system. Making tech more expensive is the same as applying mana penalty. So nobody in East Asia was even meaningfully behind Europe on mil tech. And since Ming wasn't expanding, it wasn't behind Europe on any tech, even paying 100% penalty for missing two institutions.
I think it's still possible to force slow tech spread with mods with a lot more complex scripting. Some sort of calculate target tech level based on year, tech group, and institution, and just ban going over it by a trigged modifier with +1000% tech cost.
Japan plays pretty much like it did before. There's some new missions, which use the new very complicated mission system, where you need to alt tab to wiki to read mission requirements and rewards. Many missions are: do A, B, or C. But reward varies based on which of these paths you choose, and some of this information is buried in tooltips, some isn't anywhere, and overall it's an overcomplicated mess. I was quite annoyed when I misread the mission which was supposed to give me Echigo gold mine, but the gold mine didn't appear. It was a quick reload, press some buttons in different order, and the gold mine appeared.
I guess if you play the same country over and over you get more choices, but did I ever play any country more than once or twice, other than 1066 Matilda of Tuscany?
Confucian got buffed significantly. It started by being the worst Old World religion in the game, now it's like C tier with the Buddhists.
There are some complicated monument religion rules. Originally religion-locked monuments required specific religion. Now some require specific religion, but some also allow some combination of Tengri-syncretized, Confucian-harmonized, or Buddha-personal-deity, or Fetishist-with-cult etc. Different monuments support different combinations of these extra religions.
For examples none of the monuments in Malaya support Confucian-harmonized, but they support Tengri-syncretized, and I was confused by the tooltips and went out of my way to get these monuments in unbroken state. But the ones in South-East Asia and India mostly support Confucian-harmonized. Why? Probably a different person was responsible for each region.
Arguably if Confucian could get monuments from every religion that would make it quite good, but it's definitely not there.
New China mechanics are pretty decent. There's still the problem that by the time Ming explodes and you conquer China and pass a few reforms it's like 1600 and you're economic hegemon, and what are you even trying to do at this point? If you don't want to wait for Mingsplosion, as Oirats, Korea, Dai Viet, Ayutthaya, or such, then it could be really rewarding to take over China early, but I spent early game unifying Japan, and had to chase institutions.
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