EUII - Is Ireland supposed to be really hard or something?

[Drake Tungsten]

Got EUII about a month ago. Played my first game with Japan. Stopped at around 1650 now as I'm so much richer than the rest of the world that it's starting to get boring. I've conquered almost all of China/Manchu/Korea, colonized all the East Indies, most of India and am starting on Siberia. Once I claim Siberia there won't be much to do as I'm not going to get another explorer and the tech that allows all navies to explore is still a long way off. No chance for wars with the European powers or colonizing the South Pacific/Australia, unfortunately.

So, I started a second game with Eire. More difficult than with Japan (the lack of a starting COT and poor provinces really cuts down on your income), but I'm still doing pretty well. Kicked the English out of Ireland and conquered Scotland early. Nothing happened for a while, then I managed to steal all of coastal Brazil from the Portugese, which should help my finances greatly once I get all the colonies built up.

Ireland seems like it would play really differently from game to game. You don't get any historical explorers or conquistadors (as far as I know), so you have to be really opportunistic if you want to start a colonial empire. I was curious about how other people had played Ireland, so I went to the Paradox forums to find some Ireland AAR's or guides. But there's nothing there. No guides, no AARs; Ireland doesn't even get a mention in the guide to picking your starting nation. What's the deal? I have a hard time believing no one's ever played with Ireland before, so why the dearth of information? Even Gelre has a guide...

[CerberusIV]

Difficulty level?

[Drake Tungsten]

Normal/normal. I just took over the Inca/Chimu and my money problems are now a thing of the past, however, so I might bump it up to hard. My manpower is still pretty crap though (Ireland + Scotland only gives you 7.5), although the gaining of a bunch of grain provinces has helped.

I've just finished promoting Tax Collectors/Governors in all my Inca/Chimu provinces, so now it's time to start converting. Not looking forward to that at all. Cuzco is about 1500 ducats per conversion attempt...

[CerberusIV]

Sounds good - when I've tried Ireland I usually get swamped by a large alliance (like Scotland + France + others) in an early war. If you can avoid that I guess they are quite playable.

You've just discovered the main drawback with minor nations - crap monarchs giving low success rates for conversions. Without a random "Excellent Minister" event it can be tough to get conversions.

[Drake Tungsten]

Sounds good - when I've tried Ireland I usually get swamped by a large alliance (like Scotland + France + others) in an early war. If you can avoid that I guess they are quite playable.

I joined the Scotland/France alliance right from the start. Scotland refused to join a war at some point and England quickly invaded and took them down to just Lothian. Then I moved in to take all the Scottish provinces owned by England and force-annexed Scotland.

Denmark joined the Eire/France alliance later and dragged us into innumerable wars against Sweden, so I eventually jumped to an alliance with Spain/Portugal when my war exhaustion got too high. Now I'm in an alliance with both Spain and France. England hasn't declared war on me in over a century.

You've just discovered the main drawback with minor nations - crap monarchs giving low success rates for conversions. Without a random "Excellent Minister" event it can be tough to get conversions.

My chances of conversion don't seem too bad (around 50% for all but a few). The cost is what's worrying me, though. I can easily mint to get the money with my new gold provinces, but my inflation is at 9% now and I don't want to get too far into double digits again. Then again, the inflation's probably worth it to make South America Gaelic...

[Drake Tungsten]

I finally found an Irish AAR over at the Paradox forums while looking for LOTM's "Whither Spain" AAR. Of course, if I had known that it originally appeared on these forums I could have found it a lot faster, but I guess it worked out in the end...

edit: Unfortunately, the Irish AAR I found never got past the first war with England...

[Asmodean]

Sounds like your game is going quite well, though. Perhaps you should be the first to write a killer AAR for the Gaelic nation.

Asmodean

[Drake Tungsten]

I suspect writing an AAR is a huge commitment and the fact that so many AAR's are abandoned soon after being started seems to support that assumption. I shouldn't really be wasting as much time on playing EUII as I am; I really don't need to waste even more time writing about it...

Anyway, I have a newb question for you guys. How do you find out the base tax value of city of over 5000 people? You can figure it out for smaller cities/colonies/TP on the colonization screen, but I don't know how to do it for built up cities. I'd like to convert the Inca/Chimu provinces with the highest base tax value first, so it'd be nice if I could figure that out.

[CerberusIV]

There is a tax figure in the ledger for each province (I think that one is modified though).

Click on the province and hover the mouse pointer over the numbers at the sides of the shield showing the type of good produced. You will get a tooltip showing trade from one number and a tax breakdown from the other.

[Drake Tungsten]

Gotcha. Thanks.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
I finally found an Irish AAR over at the Paradox forums while looking for LOTM's "Whither Spain" AAR. Of course, if I had known that it originally appeared on these forums I could have found it a lot faster, but I guess it worked out in the end...

edit: Unfortunately, the Irish AAR I found never got past the first war with England...

I recommend reading it here, as then you get the benefit of the community comments, which I did not copy over to Paradox Forums.

Yes, writing is NOT easy. I found it fun, but then I was basing my style less on the PEF AAR's (of which Ive only read a few) and more on the style of the what ifs on Soc.history.what-if. Id always had difficulty writing WI's. I started Whither Spain to get help and feedback on my first real game of EU2. Then, since Im very interested in the intersection of gaming and serious alt history, i decided it would be fun to see if I could ask all my questions in character, and describe the game with no explicit reference to game mechanics, and try to make it flow more like an AH than an AAR. At some point it began to flow pretty naturally, I wrote it in my head as I played, and it was only a matter of typing and refining it. I thought it worked, but it helped that I wasnt that good a player. If you are good, and youre not really committed to RPing, you start doing things that make sense in game terms, but make no sense as alt hist. It also helped that id read a fair bit about the period.

IMHO good AARs and AHs have memorable characters. I really liked the first Don de la Frontera. I also liked Moshe Cordovero Pasha, but somehow "Turkish Taffy" never really took off.

[Drake Tungsten]

I'm not really into role-playing, but the way the game is set up makes it difficult for people playing minor nations to do so, in my limited experience. For example, I started my game with Ireland hoping to unite the Gaelic provinces of the British Isles and then start a colonial empire in North America. Seemed the most logical place for Ireland to expand and it would be fun to continue the fight against the English on the other side of the North Atlantic.

At this point in my game, however, I've pretty much written off my limited posessions in NA and have no intentions of fighting the English there. I didn't get an explorer until late and still haven't had a conquistador, so most of my knowledge of the world has come through map trading. Given the shared enmity between Eire and England, I've never traded maps with them and I've never been strong enough to take Anglia in our limited wars and steal their map. As such, I never got the geographical knowledge of NA that I needed to beat the English to the punch and now they're too well established for competition with them in that area to make sense.

Knowledge of the Portugese/Spanish maps, OTOH, provided me with a golden opportunity to conquer a one province Portugal under rebel control while taking the Azores and their undefended Brazilian provinces. Control of Brazil gave me easy access to the South Atlantic and, with bases at St. Helena and in South Africa, the Indian Ocean. It also allowed me to be the first to discover the Inca with my explorer and conquer them. All very logical outcomes based on my knowledge of the world and areas of strength, but also completely ahistorical. Of course, if I had played Ireland in a more believable, role-playing fashion I'd probably be limited to my poor home provinces and a few scattered colonies aroung the mouth of the St. Lawrence at the moment and in great danger of annihilation should the English come calling again...

[lord of the mark]

It would be hard to RP Ireland, cause the AI isnt good enough. In particular, an independent Ireland would immediately be grabbed as an ally by France or Spain, but probably France, and France would go to considerable lengths to keep them independent and allied. In fact I dont think the EU2 AI would value such an ally as much as in RL. Of course even in RL England could have bribed or threatened France to drop such and alliance, and then youre stuck fighting for your life, but I think the alliance would be more stable in RL.