Socotra: Part 08: 1516-1526: Going East

Haasa rejoined as my vassal, and this way they forgot that I once demanded their religious conversion from them, Breenter scenario. This costs 25 prestige and a lot of hassle, vs spending 100 prestige on placating them 5 times, but it's so much more hassle. It's even better when making someone forget that I changed their religious group, that would normally cost 200 prestige to forget.

I got to max prestige, became empire, then threw all that prestige away into negatives to disinherit bad heir, and placating some vassals.

Something I didn't really know until now is that generic missions are no longer totally bad. They basically stapled "get claims on all neighboring provinces/areas" on half of the missions, extremely convenient.

I got some Indian vassals, then waged a few small wars to return their cores. Well, might as well keep going East, so I took parts of Ceylon, then finally got to some Indonesian wars.

I paid Hungary for Colonialism, but it's going to take quite a while to reach me. With capital area fully colonial, I was still at only 6.5% of adoption.

I used a small new exploit with Espionage Ideas, where there's government reform that lets you revoke privileges from estates ignoring their loyalty and influence. This sounds trivial (other than for things like bypassing Ottoman and Polish disasters, and rushing absolutism) but there's an exploit. There's merchant privilege that gives +3 mercantilism on being granted, and just -20% loyalty (capped at 0%) at being revoked, so I got my mercantilism to 100%, and they'll get over it soon enough.

Technically, maxing out mercantilism is not optimal for world conquest, as it's only helpful in contested trade nodes, and eventually you'll be having 100% of most of your trade nodes. And then you want to give trade companies as much trade power % as possible with minimum land. Mercantilism gives trade power bonus to both trade companies and non-trade-company land, and the way Paradox math works, for really huge empires mercantilism is potentially bad, and there's no way to get rid of it. But that only matters when you're so ridiculously huge you don't care about money anyway. For normal countries, this exploit is great, +200% province trade power, and also +10% merchant loyalty equilibrium (ironically), and +100% embargo efficiency. As well as colonial nation liberty desire penalty, but for the player it doesn't even matter that much.

My income went from 420 to 630 in another decade, even with pissed off merchants. It's really not far for economic hegemony.

So much beautiful purple, but still very poor map placement due to Socotra's shape. Even if we do Indian  Ocean Mare Nostrum, it won't fix my font placement, as EU4 won't color the ocean purple.

Conversion has been going quite well even without religious ideas. Religious ideas used to be A tier, but the game is throwing so many conversion bonuses at the player (especially monuments and government reforms) these days, I don't think it's still the case as at some point they just become redundant. Religious isn't bad, just less key.