Montferrat: Part 18: 1661-1671: On the Verge of Roman Restoration

I was overflowing with mana of all kinds, so I tried my best to stay at just below 100% overextension so I'd have a way to spend it all.

Anyway, HRE was a big problem. HRE has three big issues:

• higher AE - that's actually the easiest to work around
• demand unlawful territory
• stupid restrictions on declaring war on HRE member if at war with emperor or allied to emperor - this can mostly be worked around

Demand Unlawful Territory is the most annoying feature, but it was also the easiest to work around. If you stayed at war until you cored it, emperor couldn't demand it. Unfortunately they changed it in 1.32, and now war does not protect you at all. It wasn't in the patch notes, so I ended up checking Paradox forums, where a lot of angry players complained about it, but devs said it's intentional.

This is extremely annoying as that's completely uncapped relationship penalty with all HRE members, including my PU junior Austria, and my ally OPM Pope who respawned in the HRE (with all the butthurt about Australia wiped out). Taking 10 provinces means -250 penalty, on top of all the other penalties, not really reasonable.

So my options:

• force vassalize 4 electors, become HRE emperor
• dismantle the HRE - actually quite hard if I cannot ally electors
• destroy the HRE by taking the whole HRE by force
• ally the emperor - not really possible anymore
• expand through vassals - technically possible, but such a massive hassle
• declare new war against the emperor while the provinces are coring - that's the only thing that still blocks the request

Then I thought about it some more, and it's just dumb the way it is, even though there are workaround. This penalty needs to be capped by the mod. Just as Tordesillas penalty. The problem isn't that HRE Emperor demands some territory - that makes sense. The problem is that this request can be spammed and the penalty is not capped in any way. EU4 has a lot of really stupid opinion modifiers, and the Fun and Balance mod fixes a bunch of them, but not in any systematic matter, just whenever I find something obviously too annoying. Maybe I should do a full rewrite of opinion tables.

Technology for town halls happened, so I spammed them everywhere, and from this point on I'll never have any governing capacity shortage. Basically courthouses make territories cost no capacity (25% base, -25% courthouse), but territories are shit. Town halls make trade companies cost no capacity (50% base, -50% town hall), and these are good. And there's tons of spare capacity to assign to states as well (100% base, -50% town hall; you can lower it with state house but there's no need).

As the right tech got unlocked, I started building canals in Suez and Panama, but these cannot be sped up by throwing more men and money an them.

I'm quite close to finishing things. It's just one war each with Aragon, France, Cilli, and Flanders, but awkwardly the emperor Bohemia wants to get involved in all of them. Oh well, I guess I'll fight them 4 times.

Mostly expanding in Africa to find something to do with spare mana.

There's not really that much point to this expansion, I have way over 3k monthly net profit and all the manpower I might want, but feels bad to waste mana.

Yellow everywhere, with about 8 converted provinces per year.