Basically a podcast on me criticizing EU4 idea group choices 

absolutely useless knowledge that in no way will ever help me in my life. gonna watch all of it 10/10

Interesting video, I agree about the Ideas in Inno being overestimated but some of the Policies are very nice. Like Inno/Off gives 10% Siege Ability and +1 Leader Siege. I know you're a speedrunner so you are probably not often after 1700, but for the more moderate players of us, those modifiers are quite important because after 1700 every country has lvl 8 forts (lvl 9 capital). So it's quite important to stack siege ability as much as possible. You could argue it's more important to prevent other countries from existing before 1700, but that's another discussion ^^

For fast WC these ideas are rally bad :) But Inno+Esp+Offence will give you crazy generals, the cheapest advisors, about +50% siege ability. For most players this is what they need to get their goals :)

Without using gamey mechanics(having your capital in a place others can't see, offering tributaries lands for coalition) I find dealing with coalition have a big oppurtunity cost as usually the nations that go over 50 are are a bit out of your reach. This is why I find ae reduction very useful because with it the only nations being able to join the coalition are the ones you actually border(or close to you) so it's pretty easy to have them truce locked. And a hurr durr math related stuff, but ae reduction is a lot more efficient at conquering dev/time compared to improve relations. When playing a nation that doesn't have a free cb available on anyone(no deus vult / horde) the fabricate cost and spynetwork construction saves you a lot of time on diplomats. And lastly my the biggest reason I enjoy esp early is it's very frontloaded. You only care for the first few as the later ideas are more for roleplay stuff. In the early game diplo mana has the least value so it also feels easy to start with a diplo idea and it's the one that has the most impact on the early game off the available ideas. Also in the latest patch the ae impact you get from the spynetwork got trippled to the point at max network it gives 30%. Ofc it's unreasonable to expect that, but on average you can have arround 10-20% ae- on nation you care about. Even though you are limited by diplomats ae wise you mostly care about the big boys(ottoman, france, gb, spain) being able to join coalitions. So you can always park one spy on the closest one making you take low ae on them. About horde ideas: It's a shit idea military power lvl wise. But you don't rly need army strength as you can just outmanoveur the ai. But it gives some non mil modifier that's pretty hard to get. Those are the ae- and the unrest. You can get -3 unrest which makes you able to be on higher oe. That makes you able to core more land/time. About the tech cost-. I don't rly like that modifier as I find the value it provides pretty meh. The thing that it can be pretty helpful is you being able to take important techs asap. After the early game you rarely struggle with mana but you can't take ideas that would cost more than 1k mana. With idea cost you can gain cruicial techs(+1 idea groups, imperialism, adm eff tech) 1-2 years earlier which can prove a lot of benefit. I don't value diplo ideas as high as other players. It just doesn't give you that relevant bonuses in the earlier stage of the game. The stab impact is irrelevant unless you fish for pu-s as you don't trucebreak in the early game. Because your biggest bottleneck is handling overextension the pws doesn't rly help you with that. Sure pws is a very important thing when you going for pre 1500 wc, but on a more average playthrough needing +1 war isn't the biggest issue in the earlier parts of the game. I also drop espionage idea for diplo in the mid game once I'm strong enough where ae is irrelevant but untill that point I find espionage just a higher impact idea overall.

I've been thinking about this again a bit lately. I wonder how extreme the modifiers which you can substitute for using expansion/raw income would need to be, before spending the group slot for them just to scale up more quickly is worth it. For example, if economic's first idea granted + 3000 ducats/mo flat income, it's the top pick, at least for a while, because you really can just slam +5 advisers and 100s of regiments immediately (then drop it once money is trivialized w/o it, coming out ahead in points most likely). Thus, there must be some point between what we have now, and that, where it would be a tough choice, despite the ability to substitute/get much more income than that eventually. I wonder where that point is.

Listening to you while working on uni project was a nice experience after all.

I think the concept of substitutability is a useful analytical tool when thinking about idea groups. Like the concept of 'brigeability' in thinking about ideas. Appreciate the sharing of thoughts that contribute to the theorycrafting about this game

42:44 to be fair, I think spies are often used during sieges. You know, to poison the water supply and find out where the walls are weakest and stuff. Great video though! Love the idea of active and passive modifiers.

I still prefer diplomacy/influence a lot more but I do like espionage as the first ideagroup in my shorter games because it works so well with the age of discovery bonus (claims can border claims and -10 AE%) but think its mediocre at best after 1510. And I honestly think espionage should be buffed more on the things its supposed to do like get an extra diplomat or give a big buff to laying claims (give it russia's government ability to lay claims on whole states or give it the claims can border claims ability or it should actually change the lowered cost of claims into the advertised 25% and not the actual -5 spynetwork on every claim it currently has). I dont think its important but something you didnt adress are the policies, those are very neat of espionage (inno policies are suprisingly good too). I especially like offensive and espionage combination for the extra diplomat and +10% spynetwork construction. The big meta changes I see from this update is not ideagroups itself but people using or combining the newly introduced government reforms with monuments and ideagroups. The gov cap exploit from an early goverment reform (2nd tier monarchies?) has allready been nerfed for example, but besides that there are crazy combinations like no stab hits from no cb's by combining a gov reform with diplomatic ideas. You can also get less years of seperatism by combining humanist with a gov reform, you can stack up a lot more missionaries as a theocracy through gov reforms for one faiths. And the crazy one I've spotted is the 9th tier goverment reform for thecracies that gives -50% envoy travel time and if you combine it with petra (25% at tier 3 iirc) and influence (-33%) you got more than -100% envoy travel time and with that you can return your diplomats in 1 day from literally everywhere on the planet, even if its going to capped at around -90% envoy travel time its still extremely useful and quite easy to obtain later in the game. very good podcast/video btw!

47:47 Totally agree, I think spying kinda needs a rework because it doesnt make the most sense - and the actual spy network construction bonuses from espo isn't enough to overcome the fact you have to wait for the spy network to build and it can then just get found and then you've lost it, no matter how strong the bonuses you can get from espionage - like You can take way less AE both from the direct bonuses and also the fact you get less AE with a country if you have high spy network - but equally the fact you have a spynetwork means it will get found, relations will lower and you could just improve relations if you were trying to micro AE that much, or even better truce timers. If espo gave the russian claim state ability then it could be more worthwhile since that's essentially CCR and a CB. It's fairly telling how the playerbase views espionage and spy networks by how increasing common universal CBs are in mission trees and how a lot of people try to go for them, understandably so. + Personally for my playstyle i quite like inno, but like I use it inefficiently because I don't take it early and don't play to end date often, and usually I'm tempted to later drop it once i conquer the monuments for advisor costs because it becomes mostly useless with them because the monuments give more than enough that even if my eco is crap (such as when I start on later start dates) Great video, like my playstyle differs greatly from what you seem to do but I still find the stuff incredibly interesting.

What do you think about the statements that Budgetmonk has made? I feel like he's been quite reasonable while staying saying that espionage is pretty good. He definetely doesn't play optimally, but he''s already playing way more optimally than the average player

A question, with the recent changes to admin cap, gov reform, etc., is the 25% admin cap from admin ideas still as useful as before?

So if the mil groups are kind of subsituting which I think is true, which substitute would you rather get in most situations? Seems to me like Quality is mostly where it's at. Or maybe with optimised play they are all kind of bad, still for my gameplay I usually like getting a mil group at some point because I run out of manpower or mercs or I think with better quality or quantity of troops I could conquer more. Plus with slacken nerfed I feel like I usually have mil points to spend on an idea group for this

In my AQ game I switched to Coptic. Coptic can get so much missionary strength and missionaries that I was conventing some lands before coring cause I was low on admin points.

Maybe its a noob way but i always now go inno+ esp. I never focus on WQ and these two offers so much QoL changes and mana savers i just can’t resist Like my Poland, that had 5/5/5 advisor from 1500 i think and i could go goverment reform that add coruption etc. (I love to state most of lands and i kinda RP while playing )

I will never not take diplo. I NEED diplomat slots.

I'm a relative beginner (~300 hours) but I have my own problems with inno ideas. I feel like the ideas are only decent early game since the inno gain and tech cost are pretty much worthless late game. Despite this, I don't see a reason to take it early game. Admin gives me ccr, gov cap, monthly autonomy reduction, and some other bonuses. Religious helps with significantly better missionaries, more manpower, and the policies are amazing. Humanist can also help with stability. All 3 of these idea groups directly help with early game problems while inno just gives nice to have buffs.

It was a very interesting video. In the future, similar videos could benefit from some editing (there are long pauses and times where you’re trying to find what you want to say that can be cut out for example), but that would of course be more time consuming on your end and I’m not sure if that’s something you’re interested in. Either way, it was nice to have on in the background and with or without editing, I’d be interested in watching more of these types of videos from you in the future.

Are you hiding your older HexaOF vods on twitch? Because when I enter the last streams, I can only see the last 3 vids, and wanted to see how you conquered Eu.

i actually did use this video to fall asleep thank you haha

what is the max amount of possible policies one can have? how?

I always find it weird when I play oirat and ottomans with 100 troops can join the coalition but no one in the world joins.

Holy shit Merry Christmas to me! Thank you Santa Lambda

Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say that basically nobody seems to have their own playstyle? Is it simply that the popular/good/prolific content creators (and the community influenced by those creators) seem to play the same way, with only minor personal deviations?

What I dislike about espionage ideas is the redundancy, both aggressive expansion reduction and siege ability increase is something you get with spy networks, why not make it so that these bonuses are just doubled instead? You pack this in one idea as well and have 1 extra slot.

Ooo,Arumba

certified lambda classic

...i would have personally preferred a clearer statement on why advisor cost is "bad" instead of a "i can get 3x lvl 5 advisors by 1500". As which nation? A major? An OPM? With the 50% cheaper advisors (which arent guaranteed to get) or normal advisors? Even assuming 3x 50% cheaper advisors - by 1500 they cost around 40 per month (total) on lvl 5. Whilst you could easily get them as certain nations, lots of others would have some trouble supporting them. Not to mention that only getting 1 cheaper advisor instead of 3 makes the price go up to 70-80 (total) Budgetmonk (is he the vaccum cleaner?) makes some fair points on this matter in my opinion, then again im not a super hardcore player myself that speedruns stuff or plays on very hard - and i also dont min max to a point where i can compare inno + espionage to, for example, admin + diplo and just conquering the economy for advisors. (My Point is not to defend inno + espionage, i just want clarification on this matter. I played 4000 hours barely ever picking any of those 2 and started picking them about a month ago)

I really like inno for the pulse events I just think they have the best pulse events but i understand the criticism about it

You can actually condense your thoughts because you basically repeated the meta video. Tldw for this vid and the last one the meta vid « it depends on what you’re trying to do » The problem is that instead of telling us specifically what is good for what reasons for which playstyles you spent an incredible amount of time basically saying « ur bad, x is not actually good because it depends on your playstyle and what ur trying to do » with a « i’m very smart » and condescending tone (my impression) which makes it really easy to hate, made worse by the fact that you unironically listen to classical music while playing. Overall i like ur vids keep going but i’d suggest putting more effort into structuring ur stuff and actually bringing something to the table

YES 1 hour lambda video lfg

I think if Paradoxes will add an idea for any fort barrage -100% cost, this idea (or policy) will be game breaking :) For now they tried to buff naval with this just for coastal provinces, but its still trash

Great video

Good video but I have to heavily disagree with you on the advisor cost on inno. If you are playing tall, take for example 2 state Switzerland, you wont be able to have a big enough economy to pay for your advisors. But with inno you can easily have 3 +5s quite early, especially with the discounted advisors you get from innovative events. Also worth mentioning innovative + quality gives +5% discipline which is a huge 2 idea group combo, especially with the war exhaustion reduction. But, if you were to play anything except super tall, I would agree that innovative might not be suitable, but I'll probably take it for the montly war exhaustion either way.

So to summarise, the player can achieve any benefit from an idea group from another source and idea groups do not lock out other idea groups?

Man, if you are doing WC, one faith and so on, then you have only one setup of ideas - Adm+Religious+Diplo+Influence+Humanist, order is a bit different in various cases. Others just for your choice :)

Just to stick up for inno: inno good because I like the flavour of the events. Also I'm amused you say inno is the worst idea group when naval is a thing

The thing you did not take into account are the policies that certain idea groups give and events correlated with them. Also who were you talking about, as "inno defender" wanted to see his counterpoints, but I guess I m not that deep into eu4 creators. Also great vid, looking for more in the future. And I really like taking inno, when I have a free slot, always like to throw it in, just good quality of life :p I guess i m bad

A Roomba kek

Man, I really appreciate hearing your thoughts on this sort of thing but it's kind of frustrating that, well, the main perspective you have is... kinda useless for me. This sounds much worse than I mean it to be. But it's like, I fully believe and can see that all your evaluations make total sense and are probably correct for your playstyle but that's a playstyle that's _extremely_ far from what I can and even want to do in my runs. I feel like there's some really broadly-applicable bits in here as well like the opportunity costs of Inno or the whole Religious/Humanist dichotomy, as well as the general framework (and I think your main point of _how_ you analyze modifiers in the context of your own playstyle). Would like to hear what you think could be useful for more "median" players, even if it requires you to take a bit of a guess at exactly how to define that.

Glad someone way better than me agrees with everything . E.g with inno. Many games I don't take it yet I'm still swimming in the stuff

Its completely diferent playstyles which lead to diferent choices. If you bird like mad and always have >15 Mana rulers you dont need much tech/idea cost reduction. And if you bird even more to become curia controller you can conquer Italy super fast which gives you both an economy and the Florence monument for advisors. However. If you play this game normal, some ideas will make your game which will never be optimal more optimal. Sure, when i play the PU/Vassal game alot i mostly take Influence + Admin. But Monks recommended ideas were also nice when i tried them. I used to savescum alot years ago but i found myself bored by this forced perfection and stopped it. But i enjoy your stuff anyways, cause you show distant boundaries of this game which are amazing. Keep it up.

Because it is no more a spy but more like an intel unit

I don't understand why the devs will take a stat that the player is not limited by, and then give a small incremental modifier to it. If you're modifying an irrelevant stat, you should just give the max value.

I think one point you didn't mention about innovativeness is that you're spending 'more valuable' early game mana points to tech up ahead of time just to get a discount on 'less valuable' late game mana points. Maybe 'valuable' is the wrong word here, but its the idea that mana points are more valuable early game because they are more scarce, whereas mana points are less valuable later on since they are more plentiful.

If you are new here and you don't know Lambda, then you are bad(not sarcastic).

I personally like innovative ideas, but when I firstly heard the statement that inno gives 10% APC, I couldn't resist my laugh

what drawing app is that?

I like those deepth videos

Religious ideas very good for Coptic nations but terrible for tengri nations.

Not sure why you seem so peeved about people advising inno ideas, even dropping f-bombs over people trying to do the math (as if there were an alternative). But carry on.

I understand that you prioritize Ideas modifiers, but aren't some polices worth hunting?

innovative is bad idea isnt it?

Humanist ideas is bad cause it's funny when my rebels enforce demands on Uzbek. Cause my rebels get my mil tech I think.

I self impose a rule set disallowing the usage of mercs, the administrative idea group has 3 modifiers related to mercs which makes it mediocre at best for me in that case

All your answers for "substitutions" as you call them, boil down to the old Just Blob More. And you mention Arumba but in a philosophical stance towards the game he is a ok, and you are a philosophical equivalent of a brick. You cannot bird that or exploit it away or take imaginary bank loans for it.

Argueably, CCR & WS cost reduction is as active as Tech, however, it is more standard to tech up than to get new provinces. A point that needs to be accounted for is that you can actively use passive benefits, for example: I would classify 10% national tax purely as passive, however, it augments the active action of getting more Tax development, either through Dev clicks or conquering provinces

But plus 1 free policies does give you a bunch of free modifers you can take

1 hour omg sry but i dont have time and patience to watch it :D

So let me get this straight. First you create a completely arbitrary goal for an EU4 compaign("WC as quickly as possible") that is in no way implied by the game itself(i.e. if you go by the original EU4 scoring system, it rewards playing until January 1821 - the literal opposite of a speedrun) Then, based on that goal, you reduce the entire game to ~1% of all countries(because if the goal is WC speedrun no one will bother with anything but the strongest countries to start with) Then, you execute said goal by any means necessary: cheesing by restarting the game over and over until the diplomatic situation RNGs your way, using obvious bugs and exploits, and even outright cheating(yes, savescumming in an Ironman mode is literally cheating) And based on all that, you, playing by your own made up rules, using one of the strongest countries in the game, and cheesing/exploiting/cheating tell other players they're being bad if they don't do what you do. Let me come up with an analogy to show just how arrogant(I guess that's the lightest word I can use) this video is: - The goal of the game is to get all government reforms(because I said so) - Best Idea groups are Court/Plutocratic/Administrative/Aristocratic - If you ever conquer land you are bad at the game

I victorum universalis mod, Paris is divided into 5 provinces, with 4 of those containing monuments. One of those monuments is the note dame cathedral, which gives 30% ae reduction when fully upgraded, anther monument (that can be built/upgraded during 1604 or later) gives upto 30% admin efficiency. England's Stonehenge monuments give up to 15% ae reduction. Combine both of these with espionage ideas and the policy that gives 10% ae reduction. Now Ae will become a non issue for the rest of the game.

I think you do a lot of contradicting yourself in this video, especially with the topic of "using an idea group slot" and then right after saying that certain ideas of the same point type aren't mutually exclusive. People say that it's either Rel/Hum BECAUSE they both use the same 'idea slot' and it would be a long time inbetween being able to take both (somewhat disregarding the fact that they and can and do serve different purposes, it's just that you are usually taking one or the other in a 100 year time frame, especially when ADM ideas are also required to be taken to more efficiently take the provinces that you want to reduce unrest from so that takes up another adm idea slot). Also, I think that the idea that passive modifiers are for "bad players" is really wrong. I think that that categorization of modifiers is better put onto playstyles than play skill, and that certain playstyles are more similar to the typical "bad player" playstyle than others. Robot Cleaner prioritizes certain passive modifiers because that his how he plays; He is very focused on making what he has as efficient as possible without having to do insanely crazy micro or exploits. Math Symbol, on the other hand, prioritizes getting the absolute most out of everything he has just by using it better; He is very focused on doing the most 'optimal' thing with every resource he has, and if this requires 200+ hours of irl time of incessant birding and exploiting the game mechanics to the maximum, that is what he will do. (It's hard to put it into text, but if you know anything about RTS games Robot Cleaner 'Micros his Macro' while Math Symbol 'Micros his Micro', which are both equally viable ways to be "good" at the game). Clearly players like Robot Cleaner, Math Symbol, Universalis Master, Beloved Multi-Player, etc... are ALL good at the game, they just play in certain ways in which different modifiers benefit them more or less. Anyways, this all goes to say that people should just play the game and find out their own playstyle to figure out which idea groups are best for them and their specific situation, and any notion of superiority about a specific playstyle misdirects arguments in a poor way. I wish that there was an easier way to discuss this stuff than in text, but alas the plights of a commenter.

I want to be gracious about your analysis, but you seem like you're just being a contrarian. You're disputing things with such a narrow view. Aside from explo, expansion, and maybe religious, every idea can only be evaluated comparatively, and relatively. Aside from combat (which is the weakest aspect of EU4 by a long stretch), EU4 is a game of balance... just like life, which I think makes it addictive. You capacity is varying and finite, which is what makes playing EU4 totally situational. I feel like you discussed modifiers l within a bias.

Quantity is a nearly useless idea set, especially compared to quality and offensive. By a certain point, numbers are far and away secondary to discipline, morale, pips, and combat ability. Quantity is pointless.

I dont really agree with how you defined active and passive. you were bascially says active is stuff people who are bad at the game dont use. CCR and warscore cost i feel by definition are a passive type of modifiers.

Sorry but your voice is too annoying, otherwise I'd like to give this a listen

I'm actually fucking impressed that this dude can write with a fucking mouse and still have a halfway decent and readable handwriting.