Emperor Carlos abdicated on day of his coronation.
What happened was Cultural Conflict events. Every stated province with non-accepted culture gets +25% autonomy, 20 years of +10 unrest, but culture conversions are -50% cheaper for 20 years.
I don't actually need that -50% that much. The cap is -90%. I get -10% max innovativeness, -25% religious ideas, -25% Roman Empire reform, and I could take religious/influence policy for -15% more, netting me -75% already. Then adjacent culture would be -25% hitting the cap, or and I could use Senate debate for some extra bonus so even non-adjacent ones would hit it.
And I spammed reduce autonomy to get absolutism maxed out again. And are you even a true successor to Rome without some civil wars?
As Roman Empire I got access to special vassals that don't take diplo slot, and inherit on ruler death. Did Paradox implement the mod I vibe coded already? There's a few differences:
- pronoiars are DLC-locked, so you need to pay for them
- only some countries get them (so they can sell other special subjects in other DLCs)
- inheritance is deterministic on first succession, not random
- they are much more restricted (subject needs to be a monarchy under 100dev; under 15% ld to get free inherit)
Well, I could convert 7 of my 15 vassals to pronoiars, the rest I'll integrate by event or the hard way, they're all small so it's not much mana.
And it's really pointless, but since I got Cultural Conflict event, I spammed culture convertion in cheapest nonaccepted culture provinces. It's all going to be such bordergore once they all finish.
I got game event that Roman people of my country are upset because my ruler is Catalan. You just became "Romans" a few months ago!
I got another complication - I could no longer raise tercio infantry. I still had them unlocked, but they can only be recruited in overlord provinces with Iberian cultures, and they all went "Roman" overnight. I also can't build any more special heavy ships (Iberian culture only) and special light ships (Portuguese culture only). I can still build special galleys, as that's based on Venice monument.
It was time to conquer China, and I used two slightly more advanced strategies.
Ming collapsed long time ago, but still existed as an OPM - so I force vassalized them (you can also diplo vassal, or grab province of their primary culture and release, but OPM Ming is ideal). Then since I was allied with some Chinese successor states, I curried favors and asked them for core return. Now the reason this works far better than normal core result is that Ming has cores on all of China (unless they were forced to revoke them in a war), and because I'm so much bigger, I was getting 100 favors/year! Sadly this didn't work with Korea, and their vassal Chu with a lot of Ming cores. Apparently you can use core return on PU junior, but not on a vassal? Weird. In any case, Korea eventually annexed Chu, and then handed me over all Chu's provinces for free.
I did something similar with getting what was left of Tonkin and getting Annam to hand over their shared cores one by one.
And second is directly asking tributaries for their overlord's lands. Game wants to limit you to taking at most 100% province warscore cost of land, with 15 year truces in between. The classic solution to it is to follow up any such big war with small war against a tributary, which is white peaced to reset the truce timer to 5 years.
But you can do something a little more advanced, and just attack tributary OPM, bring in their overlord as non-cobeligerent, and ask tributary for their overlord's provinces. This costs double the warscore cost, and generates a lot more AE, but if there's a lot of tributaries, you can do this without any pauses whatsoever! This works with any one sided alliances. It works best with tributaries, but it also works for anyone who spams guarantees, or against HRE emperor (but AE cost is a bit much in the actual HRE).
This campaign is not terribly exciting at this point. I control 85% of the world, there's just 26 independent countries, and just 689 non-Catholic provinces (including uncolonized). WC and One Faith are pretty much a given. I'll get to mod conclusions after the world is fully Roman and fully Catholic.
Advisor Cost Modding
Advisors in game are level 1-5. I wanted to extend them to level 1-10 to have some useful late game money sink, unfortunately game formula is silly, with base costs being quadratic: 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100. Going up a level at first costs x4, then x2.25, but going lvl9 to lvl10 is just x1.24, quite trivial.
It would be far better to just have consistent x2 cost for every level, but base cost is hardcoded. The alternative is to use triggered modifiers like "if you have admin advisor level X, you get +Y% admin advisor cost increase". This unfortunately breaks all the advisor cost discounts you can have. If we made lvl10 advisors have base cost 1000, then -20% discount saves you 200 gold. If all we can do is base cost 100 with +900% penalty, then -20% discount only saves you 20 gold, or 2%.
We have one small feature we can use. Advisor costs increase over time multiplicatively. Half price advisors from events also cost multiplicatively. So if we double cost over time from +0.5%/year to +1%/year, and apply +50% cost penalty for every level above 5, then we get, 200 years into the game:
- vanilla formula: 2, 8, 18, 32, 50, 72, 98, 128, 162, 200
- tweaked formula: 3, 12, 27, 48, 75, 135, 221, 336, 486, 675
This still makes advisor cost discounts a lot less effective, but it seems like decent middle ground.
At this point it doesn't matter, as my income is well over 10k/month without even trying too hard, but it could matter for future campaigns.
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