With Fire and Sword: Part 01: 1444-1457: Polish Conquest of Slovakian Gold Mines

So against my better judgment, I decided to try EU4 1.31 again, with With Fire and Sword - Eastern Europe Expansion Mod v.1.2 mod focusing on Central Europe.

I decided to not use any of the Fun and Balance changes initially. There's a few reasons for this:

• It's been forever since I last played non-F&B game, and it might be useful to know which of the changes are still needed, and which are actually no longer necessary.
• I know how these changes work with the base game, but no idea if they'd somehow interfere with what the mod is doing
• a lot of the changes are for things like colonization, and Ming, and for this campaign I don't terribly care if they're not working properly
• 1.31 can't really be balanced anyway
• adapting it to work with another mod would take a lot of work, and I'm not sure if it's worth it

But I'll likely start turning on Fun and Balance features one by one if it seems necessary. Also I replaced "+1 stab hit from declaring wars" by "-10% morale" in various modifiers, as mod authors clearly have no idea what they're doing here. To be honest that mod looks terribly unbalanced, but what the hell, I'll give it a go anyway.

Opening moves

So starting as Poland, easy campaign overall. In interregnum. 183dev, and pitiful 12 income, and can't do anything until I get out of interregnum.

Rivals on Denmark, Teutonic Order, and Hungary. Deleting stupid forts. Ally Bohemia and Brandenburg, and instantly remember how much I'm annoyed by very low level of max diplo relations.

Fortunately the PU over Lithuania event triggered fast enough. It has three options:

• local ruler (which honestly is the best, as elective monarchy is trash)
• get Jagiellon, get elective, PU over Lithuania (the flavor option; and it used to be by far the best before elective monarchy nerfs)
• get Piast, get elective, instantly integrate Mazovia - some kind of mod flavor, obviously the worst except for roleplaying

I took Lithuania, and instantly declared war on Hungary and its ally Austria. Also staying Catholic. PU + Catholic is the flavor choice, but Orthodox + local ruler is probably the optimal these days.

I got a siege 3 general from merc company, so I could just siege race. I humiliated Austria, but siege race was going poorly, and Hungary got great RNG and managed to get Molvadia as a march instead of me. Between Hungary, Croatia, and Moldavia, that was a ridiculous number of 9 forts.

In the end, I 100%ed them without many battles. It just took five years.

I thought about no-CBing Byzantium, but war with Hungary took too long, event to start war with Teutons was about to begin, and the Ottomans declared too fast on them.

The much anticipated war with the Teutons did not happen. Meanwhile Bohemia went Hussite. Also Danzig did not secede from the Teutonic Order, asking for my aid. I thought it can happen as soon as our truce expires so 1449, but apparently it's a 1460+ event. Damn, I could have conquered Byzantium by now. Oh well, I'm ridiculously overpowered either way.

My development increased to 252, and my income to 22. I'm still struggling with crownlands as I have 5 estates and I believe in getting mana privileges day one. I want to take diploamtic ideas first, but all my bird mana goes to developing gold mine.

The mod changes elective monarchy mechanic, so I could actually be HRE emperor, and I'm already allied with two electors (Bohemia even votes for me), but realistically to overthrow Austria I'd need to stack a few more diplomatic reputation modifiers, and put a lot more effort into courting electors. Still, not a terrible idea for 1500 or so.

Starting map, same as vanilla

Much less expansion than anticipated, as I thought I'd get into fight with the Teutons by now

Not like it matters, my income is going up like crazy