I was really struggling with gov gap despite building Town Halls everywhere. Because I spam Town Halls everywhere, trade company and territory land should cost 1% of its dev, so it shouldn't cost any gov gap. But I forgot that recently conquered land before it's cored and has Town Halls built costs 25%, and that's hundreds of gov cap.
The solution to it was building State Houses in stated provinces, but EU4 macro builder display incorrect information about that, so I had to write another script to extract that data from save to tell me optimal places to build them.
My ally Japan decided to become my vassal by event, as my world domination was inevitable anyway. Soon after that I had to dissolve all my remaining alliances including with Poland and Korea, as world conquest was calling. I kept the Polish alliance until I owned 90% of the world. I could rush 100% with a few truce breaks, but the world was only ~80% Catholic at this point, and you can't truce break missionaries.
In 1687 there weren't enough independent nations to fill Great Powers list.
Once my truce with Poland expired, I had the last proper war to fight.
The last truly challenging war was Naples War of Independence in episode 3
After that it was just cleanup. I could even really easily truce break. -5 stability penalty gets reduced by 2 by diplomatic ideas, and by 1 by Machiavellianism Reign government reform (which I took for its +10 maximum absolutism), so it's just -2. And I'm flooded by pope mana from converting so many provinces and flat +21/year, so I could use just 80 for stab level. I also have huge stack of stability cost discounts (cost -112.5% total not counting OE, so it costs are at minimum cap).
I didn't really need it, as I would need to wait for one faith anyway, but I truce broke Poland once this campaign, when it was the last independent country in the world. It wasn't even anything cheesy, I was just at 0% OE, there were literally nothing else to do, and there was still 9 years of truce timer.
I got World Conquest in January 1699. Pope mana recovered to cap before 1699 was over. I even popped Golden Era at this point, even though I didn't really have any mana spending to do. By 1705 even rebels stopped bothering me, I had base unrest in true faith provinces stacked up to -27. That's also when the last uncolonized province disappeared from the map.
I had one province with Protestants and -25% missionary strength until 1714, which would delay my One Faith, but I had bonuses stacked so high I just brute forced that anyway.
I continued on speed 5, and in 1710, empress Ana was succeeded by emperor Basileios II de Trastamara. I'm a bit confused by this name, as I never had Basileios I. Remaining even pool was tiny, so I got Cultural Conflict again. It then took until March 1717 to One Faith the world.
I didn't try to One Culture, but there's no much time left in the game it could likely be done. One Culture is also really bad for you, as you lose access to all the overpowered culture-locked monuments.
Time for some retrospective on the vibe-coded Succession Wars mod, which I used together with traditionally developed Fun and Balance.
My intention was for succession events to be mostly negative, but they turned out to be overwhelmingly positive - here's vassal Vijayanagar, here's free inherit of Vijayanagar, here's PU over Bohemia, here's PU over France, here's vassal Japan etc. Now I mostly got those positive events at the point where I snowballed so much it didn't really matter, but the added challenge I expected just wasn't there.
In the original design, I had all such free PUs trigger succession wars, but I couldn't get it to work properly due to engine limitations. I wanted the CB to only allow the challenger to PU the junior, but EU4 engine insisted on making it possible to get PU over the senior as well, and that would just be broken. In the end, you could get PU without any downside, which was not the intention.
I also added so many disloyalty events from instant revolt to pile of liberty desire, that instant annexation seemed like a small reward for all that hassle. This didn't quite work in practice, as the overlord (as an independent country) had a lot bigger event pool, so the chance of rolling bad events wasn't actually that high; while instant annexation was being rolled in a much smaller pool.
In the end, events that worked best were instant wars, free cbs, and diplomatic reset.
The rest were either low impact (like all the rebels), or had balance issues (free PUs, free subjects, free annexations).
If I were to play it again, I'd change the following:
- make vassal event pool based on liberty desire - very low ld enables instant annexation, religion change etc.; high ld enables vassal revolt
- limit free vassal to very low dev
- maybe keep free PU event, but make anyone with free PU get instantly attacked by all their rivals challenging it, so there's serious price to pay for it
- a lot more cbs and a lot more instant wars
It's fine to keep some low impact events in the pool, so not every succession steals the show.
And it's sort of against making it equal for players and AI, but to keep things interesting, maybe player should have higher chance of getting high impact events (especially negative ones).
It was a fun game, and developing mods with clankers is more fun as it saves a lot of debug time, but you still need to do just as much playtesting.
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