2. Truce timer / coalition management
Imgur album if you like this format :
http://imgur.com/a/mnyid
Let me briefly explain coalition:
1) Countries having 50 or more agressive expansion (ae) and having negative opinion can form coalitions
2) Countries having truce with me cannot join coalition
3) Coalition can form if armies of countries which can join coalition is greater than target(usually player) plus target's allies and subject armies minus current target's war enemy forces.
Therefore, in early game, generating less ae (with influence idea), burning ae faster (diplomatic or humanist idea or diplomat advisor etc), or keeping opinion positive are important to avoid coalition.
AE formula is comlicated ( see :
http://www.eu4wiki.com/Relations )
Most important part is
1) Countries of same religion or religion group take more ae
2) Countries of same culture or culture group take more ae
3) distance between province of conquest and countries taking ae
4) HRE or vassal takes more ae
To illustrate this, I took old screenshots below:
The reason why HRE states have less ae is
they are protestant/reformed and I took mainly Catholic provinces. That's why I stacked ae only on Catholic countries.
Regarding ae rule, most stable method of early-mid game Europe conquest is to focus on Sunni Ottomans, Orthodox Russia, protestant or reformed Britain/Scandinavia, Catholic Iberia. They are all different religion/culture and corner of Europe. This way keeps ae in mid-Europe below 50 and puts all those countries on truce timer, preventing coalitions.
What about mid-late game? My rule of thumb is complete conquest of religious group by religious group.
Old worlds(Europe, Asia, Africa) roughly consists of Christian Europe, Sunni Africa-Middle East-Central Asia-India, and Eastern East Asia.
According to coalition rule 3 : Coalition can form if armies of countries which can join coalition is greater than target(usually player) plus target's allies and subject armies minus current target's war enemy forces,
for example, in East Asia, if I pur all major blobs of Eastern religion group such as Ming, Korea, Japan, Ayuttaya on truce timer, and if the rest of Eastern religion group countries' forces are less than my forces, coalition cannot be formed. In this case, I can safely ignore ae/coalition and full-scale conquest in this region.
Now back to Ming example, Europe ae is already high enough
And the armies of first page AI blobs outnumbered Ming armies.
However, most major countries are on truce timer. That's why no coalition formed against Ming.
This is how to avoid coalition in late game. Late game, we need to focus major blobs, contrary to fast blobing through easy wars in early game.
To avoid coalition, we need to dow those major great powers on the day truce over. In other words, truce timer is your war plan, so deploy your forces to next war target according to truce timer.
Let me talk about idea pick.
Administrative is mandatory for wc Religious or Humanist is mandatory.
Exploration is great if you want to reveal America TI faster(I took it 2nd and deleted) Influence/diplomatic is great if using vassal feed/annex. The rest are up to choice.
Back to Ming campaign. GBR war is over.
Manpower is still low but need alot soon up to truce timer. So I decided clearing minor phase - easy war to recover manpower pool.
This is another advantages of deploying forces before dow.
Some poor AI turned off fort. Prepare army nearby, dow on the 1st of month, move a stack on the 0 garrison fort befor month goes,
We can get sweet free forts after 1 phase.
Admin tech 27. Final admin eff tech.
Clearing minors of 100% oe worths in this coring time.
This kind of easy wars is useful to recover manpower or save up admin points for key tech(admin efficiency).
