Montferrat: Part 13: 1581-1599: Monumental Expansion

I was planning to cycle between Castile, Mamluks, and France, but I noticed Aq Qoyunlu holds just a few provinces I need for mission that gives me permanent +25% manpower. And that manpower is really useful - for building monuments faster.

I eliminated the Mamluks, got another monument when I annexed Morocco, attacked Timbuktu for yet another monument.

Then it was time for a big war - take Paris and London and 4 new monuments. I didn't take anything more, as I'm already tempting coalition a bit. There's a lot of untruced Sunni countries out there, but what's the worst that could happen? If I spend some time removing all the tiny African and Middle Eastern Sunnis, this would actually help me a lot. In a way it's a bit my fault, if I didn't steal so many maps, they wouldn't be getting any AE on me. So far I didn't even have an opportunity to use the guarantee-unguarantee exploit for free truces.

Right now I'm mostly interested in how stupid I can get my monument bonuses stack, and getting to press the Roman Empire button.

There are five tier-3 monuments, and the other monuments except the London, Paris, and Timbuktu ones I just got are tier 2 and most of them in process of being upgraded.

Monument bonuses I already got:

• Administrative Efficiency: 0.05
• Advisor Costs: -0.3
• Autonomy: -0.025
• Average Monarch Lifespan: 0.05
• Caravan Power: 0.2
• Clergy Loyalty Equilibrium: 0.25
• Diplomatic Relations: 1
• Diplomatic Reputation: 3
• Envoy Travel Time: -0.33
• Fabricate Claims Cost: -0.2
• Governing Capacity Modifier: 0.05
• Governing Capacity: 100
• Idea Cost: -0.05
• Income from Vassals: 0.1
• Liberty Desire in Subjects: -10
• Missionaries: 1
• Missionary Strength vs Heretics: 0.03
• Monthly Splendor: 2
• Papal Influence: 2.0
• Prestige Decay: -0.01
• Prestige: 2.5
• Reform Progress Growth: 0.35
• Resistance to Reformation: 0.3
• Tariffs: 0.1
• Tolerance of Heretics: 0.5
• Tolerance of the True Faith: 1.0
• Trade Efficiency: 0.05
• Treasure Fleet income: 0.1
• War Score Cost vs Other Religions: -0.15

It about double once I finish upgrading just the monuments I have. And the best monuments are in South-East Asia, so I guess I could take a trip there.

Overall I'm not hating the monuments mechanic, even if another round of nerfs would help. It's a decent mid-game goal, so you can do monument game even if you don't go for world conquest.

Before, Paradox added a lot of silly late game mechanics like furnaces, revolutions etc. that I never got to. This one is much more relevant.

Oh and I maxed out innovativeness already without doing anything special about it. It's a lot easier in recent patches as they doubled innovativeness gain. The whole "take innovative ideas first for bigger bonus" concept still feels silly to me - other groups are way stronger, and locking yourself out of whole idea group to get max innovativeness twenty years earlier feels silly.

Roman Empire is going global, I'm racing Castile for Indian Ocean islands, and I diplovassalized Warsangali and allied Ethiopia for some East African positioning.

The main goal are of course monuments. Especially two overpowered monuments, one in Pegu, and one in Ayutthaya - the rest there are mostly religion-locked. There's also decent trade bonuses monuments in Persia and Lisbon that are on my list.

In-game ledger is absolute trash for monument game, they put massive pictures, and zero information there, really their worst ledger page. I'm working of a list generated by a script.