Hey Steemheads!

How's life treating you? I hope well.

I've been working quite a bit and haven't had much time for Steemit, but today I'm making time. As you might've noticed, I've recently begun to make videos for my blog and I thought it was fun, but the response I've gotten from the community has led me to believe I'm doing something wrong, so I decided I'd get back to my Steemit roots and do a good old text post.

Playing as Portugal:

So what I've decided is that I'm going to try and make a guide to playing EU4 for new players, or people who are curious as to how the game works. To that end I've chosen Portugal as it is one of the "easier" starts as far as difficulty surviving goes.

Portugal is a good nation to play to learn the game because of several factors, one being that they are a fairly well established European power at the beginning.

You begin with an alliance and royal marriage with England, one of the big boys of Europe, as well as historical friend relation with your neighbor Castille, who is important to playing as Portugal because they are your only border to the north and east.

To the south across the Gibraltar Strait, you own Cueta, a formerly Moroccan province that is rife with unrest due to religious and cultural intolerance. Morocco wants Cueta back bad.

Opening Moves:

One of the first things to do to get started is to send a diplomat to begin constructing a spy network in Morocco. This will come into play down the road when you prepare to expand into North Africa, which you will want to at least attempt to do.

You will also want to take the mission to "take Tangiers," which gives a hefty 200 admin points upon completion. This will give you a claim on the province and save you some time.

I find it useful to enact the 'promote trade' edict in your capital state of Alentjo as Lisboa is a coastal center of trade and this will beef up your trade power in the region. As well you should send your free merchant to collect trade from your home trade node of Sevilla, and leave the other merchant transferring power in Safi. This is important because the more trade power you can push toward Sevilla, the more ducats you bring home.

You should try messing around with the estates and see how many monarch points you can get out of them as this will give you a huge point advantage against your rivals. I managed to get 50 diplo, 100 admin, and 150 military.

Yet another reason Portugal is great is that they start with a badass general, the Earl of Avanches. He is a 3/3/3/0, which is insanely powerful in this stage of the game.

In addition, you start with the only existing explorer as no one else will get them until they unlock the 'quest for the new world' idea. He's a great naval commander as well.

In fact you can go ahead and stick him in command of your three heavy ships(!) and start exploring Africa right away in preparation for expansion later.

It is also imperative to make allies. Since we start as historical friends with Castille, we ally and royal marry them. This is of course optional as you could attempt to ally Aragon or France and decimate Castille. I have done so before, but it really depends on your rivals. Since Aragon rivaled me first, Castille is my friend. Always try to play off your enemy's enemy.

Now we can see much of norther Africa as well as Cape Verde, a small set of islands that will be imperative to our future expansion.

Something interesting that comes with the latest patch is the division of the game into ages. As Portugal, you begin with one of your age objectives completed since you already have Cueta, which is part of Africa. What you'll want to do is try to complete as many of these objectives as you can so that you can increase your splendor and get extra abilities.

One big setback to being Portugal is that you begin the game in a regency council called Infante Pedro due to Alfonso being only 12 at game start. Not as bad as Poland's regency, but still makes things a little slow in the first few years of the game.

Getting Things Going:

One of the perks of being a major Catholic power is that you have the chance to get cardinals in your lands who will give you bonuses to your papal influence. Papal influence also increases the better your relationship with the Papal State is. Papal influence can be spent on a variety of perks only available to Catholic nations and some of them are priceless.

With luck, we get a cardinal in Porto.

Now that Alfonso has come of age, we can really kick things into gear. He's an average leader and will do for now.

You'll want to declare war on Morocco quickly before they can make strong allies. Here they have allied Granada, but that's no problem as Granada is weak and we can use our mighty navy to block the Gibraltar Strait. Begin beefing up your army with infantry as they are low maintenance and you can afford a few loans if you need to take them. Unfortunately for us, Castille is in a raging war with Aragon and won't join us, but we shouldn't need them.

You will want to always try and use the terrain to your advantage. Cueta is a mountainous province, so this gives the Moroccan army a disadvantage against our troops. This coupled with the Earl of Avanches' great generalship allows us to crush them.

Portugal has an interesting event called the Duke of Coimbra that has either an option for +1 stability, or +%10 trade efficiency and tax modifier. Personally I take the second option as stability is not negative and we don't need it right this second.

RNGesus smiles upon us and gives us a 5/5/5 heir. Let's hope he isn't accident prone.

With the Moroccan army occupied sieging Cueta, we attack and use the fact that siegers count as attackers and take the terrain penalty to our advantage. We deal a devastating blow to their already crippled army.

Seeing that our manpower reserves are depleted and our economy is weak from war, we make peace, taking Tangiers.

In my 1100+ hours of gameplay, I've never seen this particular event, but I'm not mad about -2 war exhaustion.

As we end our war, England calls us to aid in their defense against Burgundy and their vassals. We accept, but make no moves as our army is still recovering.

It looks as though England is falling apart, beset by pretender rebels and France and Aragon have captured their mainland territory. There isn't much we can do but ride this one out.

I take the decision to import iron from Castille. This gives military power, which is priceless, and better relations with Castille, who will surely aid us down the road.

Once again our Catholicism comes into play, granting us +1 stability. Things aren't always good, however, so don't expect this to be every time.

The Renaissance spawns in Italy in 1451. This is good because, as a European, we will get provinces that automatically generate the institution, albeit not very quickly.

Now that we've managed to core Tangiers, we get +5 prestige as well as a whopping +200 admin. This is an insane amount of admin simply for taking a province.

It's 1454 and we're off to a good start. Portugal has a vast array of opportunities for expansion, be it aggressive, diplomatic, or colonial, so we'll explore some of those in the next episode.

Thanks for Reading!

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This is P5ych0path, signing off.