Top strongest countries in 1.30.3.0 (2024)

bestbrian said:

Burgundian Inheritance

Click to expand...

The Burgundian Inheritance is completely devoid of player agency. Unless the player is Burgundy.

The best countries, outside of HRE revoke strats are (in no particular order):

Mughals
Ottomans
Ming
Yuan
Qing

Europeans need not apply.

All the nation's that get free PU's now are very powerful. Hungary, Bohemia, and Austria all have missions for PUing Poland, as well as other nations. Their national ideas are all good too.

Meanwhile despite having amazing military ideas, and a extra 10 percent discipline, Prussia may very well be harder to play this patch.

PU's are the singl best way to expand when you can.

klingonadmiral said:

The Burgundian Inheritance is completely devoid of player agency. Unless the player is Burgundy.

The best countries, outside of HRE revoke strats are (in no particular order):

Mughals
Ottomans
Ming
Yuan
Qing

Europeans need not apply.

Click to expand...

Best for what? If you mean for world conquest type games, Qing probably shouldn’t be there. It has amazing ideas, but the fact that you cannot remain a horde on forming Qing makes it seems to be substantially worse than forming Yuan even if it gets off to a bit of a quicker start

Overall:

Austria is clearly the best with HRE vassal swarm, although not nearly as broken as in 1.30.1.

Castille into Spain extremely good as a European, with PUs over Aragon, Portugal, Austria, and England. Yeah, there is now a good chance of losing Naples and Burgundy isn’t guaranteed, but that is offset by Austria being much beefier in basically every game I have played (and Hungary generally being better at resisting the Ottomans so they are bigger when Austria PUs them). The Valencia trade node also can effectively make Seville and end node once you form Spain so you don’t need to worry about Genoa. Spain probably wouldn’t win a world conquest race, but it would probably be one of the most reliable to get it done by 1821 for moderately skilled players.

Timurids into Mughals are as powerful as ever. Probably the best non-horde or HRE option.

Oirat into Yuan got a bit of a hit from razing (the cash early and reduction in MP later) but is still the most powerful horde option. And they have really really benefitted from the TC and governing capacity changes. I find the borders are much better at getting their economies up and running now as they get the extra merchants to drive trade and can get more value out of high autonomy lands. My pick for best outside of Europe.

AI Ottomans are much slower now, but I don’t see why they wouldn’t be their old selves for a human.

In terms of world conquest, the only real change I see in 1.30 is that Austria is much more powerful and the second tier HRE tags are also better, but they aren’t in the league Austria is.

klingonadmiral said:

The Burgundian Inheritance is completely devoid of player agency. Unless the player is Burgundy.

The best countries, outside of HRE revoke strats are (in no particular order):

Mughals
Ottomans
Ming
Yuan
Qing

Europeans need not apply.

Click to expand...

France and Spain would disagree with you.

Had my first full run-through with a game on this patch.
Papal State -> Kingdom of God.

Didn't get a massive blob by 1821, but held all of Italy/Croatia/Tunisia regions and had massive fleets dominating Genoa/Venice collection and steering from Seville-Valencia-Genoa and Constantinople/Alexandria-Ragusa-Venice. Earning well over 300 a month in trade alone. I think the big advantage Papal State has in the early-mid game is the lack of Stability Hits, plus being near where all the Institutions start.

Fun fact, though....In my game, the Ottomans got destroyed by 1650 by a combination of Serbia/Commonwealth to the North and Mamluks to the South. There were some nasty wars between the DoF's (myself and Mamluks) that lasted on and off for the best part of 50 years of pure chaos with everyone fighting. I managed to keep strong alliances all the way through with France/Commonwealth/Brandenburg, as well as crazy Revolutionary Spain and Portugal and their 75k rebel stacks.

It was really good fun to play as a European country with limited Colonial ambitions, for a change.

No criteria?

Jan Mayen

it even has 4.5/5 in tourism score

try beating that

Provence and Bavaria seem particularly strong this patch. Their diplomatic strength allows them to easily maintain alliances with early game big neighbours France and Austria (too bad Ai allies are also pretty much useless though), and their PU’s and missions allow them to snowball extremely rapidly.

The Knights’s situation has improved disproportionally, IMO, compared with previous patches. Their mission tree now allows them ‘a way out’ and the Ottomans seem to have much more trouble consolidating the Aegean quickly, to the point where they’re often broken by stiff resistance from a christian alliance only to be dow’ed by Mamluks. I’ve even been playing them in MP and have fared extremely well.

The Papal States is also a good contender, as besides the perks of improved catholic mechanic and mission trees, they also very consistently get opportunity to confront Naples early on. The one problem they face this patch though is that excommunication is now nigh useless.

Josar said:

All the nation's that get free PU's now are very powerful. Hungary, Bohemia, and Austria all have missions for PUing Poland, as well as other nations. Their national ideas are all good too.

Meanwhile despite having amazing military ideas, and a extra 10 percent discipline, Prussia may very well be harder to play this patch.

PU's are the singl best way to expand when you can.

Click to expand...

I actually find it easier to play Prussia in 1.30
I'm doing a Prussia campaign at the moment, started as Teutonic Order and my main goal is to complete the new mission tree.
It's 1610 and I'm steamrolling everyone (I can upload screenshots when I get home) - I have the whole HRE in a coalition against me but no one has the guts to attack.

The Synthetics are for sure the strongest. After that Jan mayen.

It'll be easier if I do a list. Note this is player controlled only and by no means scientific:

1. Synthetics
2. Jan Mayen
3. Custom nation full points.
4. Mughals/timurids
5. Austria
6. The Ottomans
7. The Commonwealth
8. France
9. England
10. Spain

Ignoring synthetics: potential wise, any horde (even karadel or whatever) is way stronger than any non-horde -- razing is just that powerful. I'm actually pretty confident I can do a kara del WC faster than a Jan Mayen WC, but maybe that's a bit more controversial so I'm also going to leave jan mayen out of the comparison.

Of all the hordes, the top potential wise is Oirat. I'd then rate Kazan next, who, although is "easier," is still much weaker because it lacks the OP Mongolian mission tree (-15% pwsc).

If we leave hordes out, then you get Mughals as #1 and then idk.

santajtd said:

I actually find it easier to play Prussia in 1.30
I'm doing a Prussia campaign at the moment, started as Teutonic Order and my main goal is to complete the new mission tree.
It's 1610 and I'm steamrolling everyone (I can upload screenshots when I get home) - I have the whole HRE in a coalition against me but no one has the guts to attack.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure if I would say that it is easier than before, but some elements definitely are. In my 1.30.4 campaign as Brandenburg to Prussia, I am, for the first time in EU4, finding it easy to maintain full Militarization bonuses while expanding to be fairly large. Previously I had never gotten much mileage out of Militarization, but this time it has ticked up at a fairly decent pace and I'd need to expand *a lot more* for it to go negative.

The tradeoff on building a large-ish, fully-Militarized Prussia is that I have needed to use Privilege slots, spam a lot of Courthouses, have a Statehouse per state, and spend about 100 Government Reform. Even after taking Diplo ideas in my first slot, I expanded fairly slowly and steadily to prevent serious HRE-wide coalitions from forming. (Though I'm not particularly worried about a bunch of angry OPMs when I have a large army that has 130 Discipline led by Generals with about 15 pips each.)

Here's a map of Prussia in 1590:

(FYI I have Kurland, Munster, and Dithmarchen as Marches. Ideas were Diplomatic, Economic, Quality, and Offensive.)