The actually impossible Eu4 start 

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We found the fate of that Roman Legion that supposedly wound up in China

I just tested this, you can become a tributary of ming day 1, which automatically completes the mission.

how playing your first eu4 campaign feels like:

Not wrong culture nor wrong religion in province you hold? 4/10 could be harder. :v

"Constantine and all his successors, except Julian the Apostate (r. 361-363), were beardless. Phocas again introduced the wearing of the beard. This fashion lasted until the end of the Byzantine Empire." - Best Byzantine Emperor and you can't prove me wrong

The hardest start is actually France. They are unable to get any allies because they have too many useless vassals that require you to trigger(scary) rebels to annex. They start game in the middle of a war against a great power with boats so advances they are essentially cars. They are close to the HRE and another scary great power. And their only source of early game income is tax(sucks) it’s impossible to find a single eu4 guide for France because it’s so difficult, and every time someone tries the people riot and Nazi Germany invades

Should've used Nahuatl for the doom mechanic.

I could see someone abuse the hell out of that negative tax income with negative tax modifiers

How many likes for you to do a WC as them?

Make the king a queen so you can almost never get rid of the 0 0 0

I found a strategy besides tributary shenanigans! If you become their vassal, and then declare independence wars on truce cooldown, they will accept peace for max money and war reps. I continually did this untill I could get enough mana (I continually restarted until I got a 6 5 6 heir in 1447) to fill out two idea groups, then beat Ming in the independence war in 1510.

FlorryWorry already did a 1 culture, 1 religion WC no loans, mercs, tag shift and no birding with this nation. He also did a Victoria 3 run with the savefile into a HoI3 run and ending into Stellaris Grand Admiral(no scale) 25x crisis at the earliest time.

I hate when people with like 5,000 hours in the game says the game isnt actually hard, but is easy. Dude almost anything with that many hours invested is going to be easy

The Playmaker: Makes Impossibly Difficult strats designed to make you impossible to defeat. Lemon Cake: Makes Impossibly Difficult starts designed to make you impossible to win.

“I created an impossible start in EU4” 80% of Victoria 2 nations: “bruh”

Im a fan of difficult starts with huuuuge upsides later on. you should definitely do more starts, but not as difficult as this one.

Bro did Phocas dirty

I don't have the time to try this challenge by myself, but I have an idea of how to solve it, in case someone wants to try it. Declare war to as many nations as you can before Ming sieges you, so when you become a vassal, they are at war with Ming. Some extra consideration, check if they can see Ming and if Ming can see them. Also, you need to consider stability and admin mana since declaring war with no CB is a limiting factor in how many people you can declare war. Another idea is to alf f4 everytime you province falls, until something external happens to Ming.

Also: Justice for Maurice.

The only issue here is that Ming tends to send it’s vassals gifts, so if you survive long enough and somehow get 51% liberty desire you can’t loose.

I thought this was the Mahafaly WC, but this is even better

You can’t even afford the real Byzantium, UNACCEPTABLE! (Great video though)

Loved the video. The absurdity just cracks me up

"Mom can we get Byzantium?" "we have byzantium at home" Byz at home:

I've been subbed to you before you even had 1k subscribers, crazy to see you (as of now) almost beating playmaker. I remember when Ludi et Historia at 10k subs. who knows maybe in 1-2 years you'll have 100k subs? we shall see!

When you're creating custom nations, you can make your ruler immortal

wouldn't it be possible to declare infinite independence wars until you've ammassed enough ideas to beat ming? (assuming they never collapse, never annex you and your truce runs out before the vassal timer)

Have you tried Miskito in the 1579 or later start dates.

Seems like a FW relaxation run

there's only one thing that scares me more than Phokas II...Phocas III

I can't wait to see someone actually making a world conquest with this one.

13k? Congrats! Your channel really grew a lot. Also isn't one of the nations in both Vietnam and in Madagascar regions a really just, bad country to do your things around?

having so much bad taxes it turn around is some magical thing i cant explain

Even without becoming a vassal and tributary you can sometimes get away with the ai opm peacedeal bug. Go stackwhipe your own army on them and offer them full money and they sometimes ( 2 out of my 4 tests) accept

You should have made them Stateless society

if you want a fun challenge mod, you could try internal strife. it makes internal management a lot harder, for everyone, so no massive ai blobs either. its quite fun

God, hearing you talk about how eu4 is "easy" it makes me reflect on how system mastery really warps someone's perspective on how things work. Like I understand its part of the joke, etc etc, but god it really is wild. Eu4 is difficult, it's really, really hard, it's an impossible brick wall of difficulty, it's just easy for you, because you have mastered all of its systems.

Finally a real challenge for florryworry! This battle will legendary!

I like this start, but is it possible to play this mod in EG's version & with no DLCs?

The way to make byzantium fun is to try to win by not fleeing or do something cheesy.

Having the king be an immortal 0/0/0 is excellent is fine, but then you negate that by making him a general, which allows him to die. I instead recommend you make the government some form of theocracy which disallows ruler generals and doesn't have heirs so he's much harder to dispose of

That sounds like an Absolute Habibi challange

I now want to do a world conquest.

dec war to rest annex timer. ask for maps, gain supporters, wait for mingsploation. if it doesnt work wait until tech 7 when your ideas pop and you should be fine (also dev until your income is positive) will test this strat soon

The Theodosian Naval Batteries

Closest thing to this that actually existed was Chimu before patch 1.5 (raze province force field trick). Back then, Peru was only Inca + Chimu, and Chimu was OPM. It was certainly not impossible, I was able to do it and several other players managed too, but I'd say either that or some of the patches where declaring independence as Sukhothai would call in Ming were the worst. I don't think there has ever been a patch where Byz was top 5 most difficult/RNG/whatever in EU 4 :p. This custom nation monstrosity in the video is clearly worse than all of the actual vanilla starts though.

how did you create this nation? In the sense that how did you get such good ideas and the immortal trait it would cost a lot lot points

Make a custom nation. Give it the Pacifist trait so you can't declare wars. Make it overpowered. Fight proxy wars and try to diplo vassalise the world.

If you switch to respublic you can quickly get immortal 666 ruler.

Won't AI ming accept peace for tributary or they won't accept if they have core?

Seems like you could've given them like Aboriginal tech or something instead which would make your armies even weaker if you were to try to declare a war

phocas moment

looking forward for you playing it!

I mean. The moment you said "challenge" Youve already won.

Ah finally a worth challenge!

0/0/0 generals are possible, they require 0 army tradition, no pip ideas, and really bad luck.

This sounds hella fun with x10 mod :D EDIT: EZ challenge. Managed to fulfill both conditions on day 1 by becoming a tributary instead.

damn Phocas that was the guy between Justinian the second and Heraclius right?

All my homies hate Phocas.

But why do you have to mod these conditions, when you have already them in vanilla? Why everyone forgot about Russian vassals?

hold my beer...

Well im not good player so I genuinely pass this challenge) For hard starts try navarra, granada, animist county near bengal or 3 animist statless tribes near cham

I would like to see budget Ottomans for beginers

Phocas was a funny choice, is it a reference to Unbiased History of Byzantium?

What can you do in Europe

Quick, send this to Florry!

I was able to peace out Ming for a couple ducats and making me their tributary state on 11.11.1444, instantly completing the mission 😎😎

So you basically need to convince Ming to take you as a tributary, then you do the usual WC?

If you think that the game is too easy for you then maybe go try out Xorme ai mod. Did a Persian campaign with it and it was so much harder then vanilla. As far as i remember the mod was not about giving ai some crazy bonuses but about making it choose better ideas + much better military tactics.

what is this thirty years war between lemon cake and playmaker? im not aware

Someone will beat this

So something I found out about the wiki recently is that it’s incredibly inaccurate when it comes to permanent sources of modifiers gained from missions. I wanted to try and stack overextension impact as well as admin efficiency but according to the wiki there are no missions for that. But Aragon has one and so does either Mamluks or Egypt. You should do a video for that modifier to save me the time of going thru all the mission trees 😢

I think I never lost Eu4 after some start over and reload. But Nevers without dlc is impossible, try to start it 20 times now and lost every time :(

My impossible start is Start as Mali, release and play as Gabu, instantly go colonial and start colonizing Brasil, next step is survive to Portugal. You can move to New World, or stay in africa, but trying to remain small as posible.

that initial negative idea gave me an idea what if, EU4, but every country's national ideas get inverted like, for example, take Moluccan ideas (i use this as an example because i just played a cursed Ternate game) Traditions: -10% production efficiency, -10% goods produced 1) -10% trade efficiency 2) -1 yearly legitimacy (or equivalent, i.e. -0.3 republican tradition) 3) -1 merchant 4) +2 national unrest 5) -20 global settler increase 6) -15% light ship combat ability 7) -1 diplomat Ambitions: +10% sailor maintenance Regular idea groups are the same otherwise you would just never take ideas to circumvent this Could be interesting to see the countries with normally incredible ideas suddenly become bad, plus everyone is downgrading slowly over time (also for those curious: Ternate, no CB Tiwi, flip to Alcheringa via rebels, go north, fight the Mingsplosion states, become Emperor of China)

Should've been a theocracy, so you wouldn't be able to abdicate or make your ruler a general (at first at least)

just 45 seconds atm, never heard that strat actually as byz, ignore ottomans and build up to fight ottomans later, sounds kinda meh when you can just fight them and win

Kaizo EU4!

Ming could lose their core by event.

can't you just give max money and war-rep and then instawin?

rofl. not attempting that.

Fire video but when are we going pub?

expand infrastuture, dev slowly during 10 years, and you'll get a solid 25stacks, no loans to make inde war.

Can you just explain to me why giving it the mesoamerican tech group wouldn't have worked better than the western one? Would that not have given you the same kind of maps but with worse troops?

I always thought it weird that byzantium can just ally large nations did they try this historically? Why did it fail if so

dude, i just become tributary, is simple as that.

Does the audio quality make this barely audible for anyone else?

Change tech group for West African to have less tech and no feudalism and still no vision

Zwelikk could save this

I mean, why?

Phocas II 😂😂

I fear florryworry would win this

Nobody tell florry

but if you know what you do you don't blow up chernobly so your first arguments that eu 4 is to easy with all starts is at least faulty

Has anyone did that yet?

0:18 Wait those are valid strategies? Those work out horrible in my experience. The most reliable, consistent way of defeating the ottomans is by taking out a fuck ton of loans, getting good military advisors, spamming ships to block the straight, hire as many mercenaries as possible and defeat the ottomans right away. Then you can either slowly pay off your loans or if you played badly, declare a bankruptcy. I feel like this is what it often comes down to and what marks the difference between an inexperienced and experienced player. The willingness to destroy your nation in the short run so it can grow in the long run.

Make the country wrong (unaccepted) culture + mughal diwan so you can't accept culture and if rebels happen, they'll be separatists... as it is, bankrupting (even several times) wouldn't mean much, you'd be better off drilling your king and deving your province 'till you get lucky and he dies early. In fact, bankrupting IS the main strategy to replace your ruler, as it sets legitimacy very low and that means pretenders are very likely to fire, either via event or from unrest.

Make the playermaker play it

Old Florry could do it.