Hello, I decided to post here instead of in AAR since the main content of this post is about general fast conquest strats instead of a recollection of my proof of concept run.
I conquered the world in 60 years (and one day because I forgot to pause!) starting as Antigonids on 2.0.1 - 2.0.3 with all DLCs. No savescums/birding since I wanted to set a baseline for speedrun.com. Here is my first and possibly my last big Imperator Rome run. Due to the timing, I'm going to have this post act as my tribute to the game; although I've only played 150 hours of this game, I loved every bit of it and spent lots of outside time studying, theorycrafting, and strategizing about this game. It's a shame that it's going to lose attention from Paradox. Hopefully it comes back.
Tl;dr
One tag WC (or Pax Aeterna, but I like calling it WC) on normal difficulty starting as Antigonids. I started playing on patch 2.0.1 but did not use the mission spam trick for infinite stab, although I employed other tricks that are not patch specific. I upgraded versions as patches were released, and to my knowledge this run is reproducible on 2.0.3 fully since I did not rely on any tricks or exploits that were patched between 2.0.1 to 2.0.3.
- The timelapse shows me as Hellenistic Empire, but I started as Antigonids, formed Macedon, and eventually formed Hellenistic Empire.
- The first two vods from 450-455 showcase how to fight the Diadochi wars as Antigonids. With better RNG, Egypt would have declared on me, saving me way more AE/WE.
- Don't watch them with 100% of your attention. Maybe skim them if you're curious. A lot of the gameplay is "boring" micro.
Please read on for some observations that I had on the game in terms of fast conquest and my objections to some popular opinions w.r.t strategy in this game. Do note that unlike in EU4, I don't consider myself too knowledgeable about the game -- I focused my time on learning how to conquest starting as a very strong nation; I'm not an all-rounded "good player." Therefore, take my opinions with a grain of salt especially if it's not directly related to speed WCs.
Some info about me: I mainly play EU4. I'd like to think I've established myself as a sweaty micro heavy player in that game. Anyway, I was casually challenged to play with IR, and one afternoon (right before the 2.0.1 release), I caught the game on sale and so purchased it. I noticed that this game didn't have (at least I tried to look hard) a community of speed conquest lovers, and people even told me WC in IR is much harder than in EU4 (perhaps that was based on pre 2.0.1 info? It seemed fairly easy to me...), so I thought I should spend some time figuring out how to optimize conquest.
Some observations I had; sorry for poor format. I'm sleepy... I might revisit and reformat if I wake up tomorrow and see that it's really bad.
- Taking ideas: Early tech ideas aren't very useful; they're going to be eventually replaced anyway, and PI is too important to use on minor buffs that don't give anything important. On that note, gov bonuses from right idea type aren't to die for in the gov types I've looked at. I'd rather take the good ideas like loyalty/prov. loyalty than forcing myself to take something I don't need.
- Imperial Challenge CB: It's amazing if you can micro hard (see first 5 years of my vod -- it's excruciating amounts of micro). It's worth it.
- Pig stabbing (or PI -> stab clicks): PI is more important. You can deal with stab through other means, and it doesn't scale well anyway.
- Micro buildings placements: I rarely built any buildings in my run. I mean be my guest and build buildings if you'd like, but I did not find buildings to be at all impactful.
- Farm military experience by raising/disbanding levies: I couldn't find a way to abuse it too much given my constant warring and pre-emptive truce placements. I don't think it fits in a fast WC.
- Levies/legions: Don't use legions. Levies only. Change your law to the noble one that gives 10%? levy size. Number of troops are the most important not quality, since carpet sieging and multi-fronting capacity are way more important than having extra discipline to fight battles you already would win anyway.
- Sieges: Don't bother with siege ability/other minor optimizations... just assault forts; it's so cheap and you save so much time. Huge credits to Wethospu (on reddit -- not sure if he/she frequents here) who taught me about assaulting (I believe he wrote the wiki article on assaulting too, which is quite extensive).
- Wonders: Some you can conquer, like Religious for stab, Navy one (Rhodos) for fleet recovery (lets you ignore attrition and recover high level ships without the port level), Halikarnassos, etc. Those are very important to grab early. What's more important though is that you build at least two wonders with the highest tier possible so you can rush T4 wonder bonuses. Pop happiness, provincial loyalty, AE reduction, etc. are all extremely crucial, and you need to start the prestige ticking as soon as possible.
- Inventions: This is well known by now, but I found that the right traits are the most important for researchers over skill for the +1 invention event. I've yet to play around with espionage, which is a fairly cheap option to get more invention events -- that could be worth.
- martial: You only need force march -- rest are irrelevant
- civic: Nothing useful until you go far down, so don't take
- oratory: The best tree. Most points go here. You eventually want imperial challenge (not necessary to rush) in the left tree. On the right, go for PI. Overall, look for character loyalty, AE reduction (both ticking and %), and dip rep. Don't forget provincial census which unlocks best wonder and avatar of glory. I think wonder from casus belli is very nice too, although I didn't get it in my run.
- religious: Nice tree. Early provincial loyalty is nice, and you eventually want to go to the left side to unlock militant epicureanism for stab spam and major syncretism. Lots of minor happiness buffs which are always helpful fillers while going for the major ones in the left tree.
- Advisors: aside from AE, the rest are all about loyalty for maximizing PI gain. You should generally give free hands to up their loyalty and simply replace them when their corruption gets too out of hand. Keep in mind the massive loyalty hit when you do this, so make sure you follow the common wisdom of not giving family heads advisor slots. Also don't forget that wrong religion people can only have 90 loyalty max. You really want to get a full (aside from AE) 100 loyalty cabinet asap.
As for the overall strategy, the idea is to blob on areas that you don't expect big boys to expand towards. For me, that was all of Europe except Italy, since I didn't expect Rome to expand too far out from Italy within 50 years. Since PI is a major bottleneck, you want low tag density to minimize fabricating, which is why I want big nations to snowball in their respective regions. Diplomatically obtaining feudatories/client states is very powerful, although be mindful of your integration speed.
AE deserves its own section:
In the early game, do be mindful of AE. You have to pace your conquests. Eventually though, you can stack so much AE reduction through wonders, Alexander bloodline, toggling Greek mission, inventions, stance, etc. that your AE rests around 60 to 70. You would also have enough stab modifiers and pop happiness/provincial loyalty modifiers that you can actually survive while almost permanently working in that line of AE. Towards the last spurt, you can use militant epicureanism to ignore stab and therefore AE.
A list of exploits/tricks that I used, piloted, or discovered for reference:
- Releasing tribs for AE reduction (see: oratory invention, I think it's tributary concessions) and then reconquering them. This relies on the fact that when you diplomatically cancel a tributary, you do not get a truce, and you get to keep claims on provinces that you conquer and release. Therefore you can continuously burn AE by releasing trib -> breaking trib -> full annex. I used this early on for a nice boost, but I didn't need it after AE didn't matter through enough modifier stacking. Credits to a twitch viewer who taught me this -- if you are reading this, feel free to PM me if you want me to disclose your name/twitch handle.
- Revanchism farming -- lets you be stable even with close to 0 stab. You gain revanchism when you lose a war in proportion to how much WS you lost. Simply declare on a nation and then offer to lose tribs/client states. As long as you keep the game paused after the peace deal, the former subjects' opinions don't update, so you can trivially diplomatically obtain them again. It helps to change subject policy? in the economy tab to increase their relations. This was one of my first discoveries in the game, and I used it early on like the previous one when I needed the extra stability.
- Selling land -- you can sell any land to anyone with enough dip rep. This is useful for getting countries who have close to 100 provinces to the 100 province mark for imperial challenge war and for getting free claims. The latter is a major optimization that I've discovered too late, but the idea is that you start a matter of XYZ mission tree, consult the court, and then sell any land that you already own that you will get claims on through the mission to nations you want to get a CB on; this lets you save a lot of PI, and in fact is the biggest way to improve the record I set. Spamming this trick sort of invalidates most of my claim about how PI is super important, so if you accept to abuse this, then just be aware that some of my earlier points are invalid since PI is worth much less when you can generate most CBs using missions.
I'm happy to discuss about this run or about general fast expansion strategies. Also, I apologize again for the poor quality -- I could have written the post much better if I wasn't sleepy nor rushed. It's just that I've been putting off on writing it for a while, and there was a high chance I wouldn't write something up if I didn't do it now when I mildly felt like it. I hope the content/my perspective is interesting enough that it makes up for the low effort I put in the writeup.
Also, one more thank you to many people in this forum, on reddit, and on my stream who taught me a lot about this game. My "fast" learning of the game wouldn't have been possible without all the resources and help I had the pleasure of having.
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