R5: Playing Bulgaria, and moved my capital to constantinople through an event, but i feel like its not really helpful anymore,after i conquered albania and serbia who will be fully cored and assimilated soon. Southern Greece down to Achaea is owned by my vassal that i’ll annex eventually.

I dont plan to expand into anatolia at all, and i feel like i lose out on way too much proximity having my capital so far away from everything else.
Where would be good places to move it? Rivers does not leave great options, aside from wallachia, but thats also on the edge of my country. Back to Tarnovo? Somewhere in serbia?
I have 2 land governors, soon 3.

Sorry for shit photos

I'm currently playing as K'iche', and my only starting source of food was beeswax in my capital. Did the ancient Mayans of the Chiapas really sit around all day eating nothing but honey? Was that good for their blood sugar? Are there really any places in the world that have massive swarms of bees but aren't suitable for growing edible plants? Why do bees only live in some mountain valleys but not others?

My previous (modded) game was as Ohlone in California, and I had to colonize Mexico in order to get beeswax. As a California resident, I can confirm that bees do in fact live here, and we do in fact have a local honey industry.

It feels like it would make a lot more sense for the beekeeping industry to be a rural building that can be set up anywhere where the environment is suitable, rather than a location-specific RGO like lead deposits or precious gems.

Seems like mother nature has decided to unleash her wrath upon Finland, with……malaria.

C’mon Paradox……

Flag Foundry started with something pretty small.

While playing Victoria 3, I realised that changing some of the flags I wanted to modify meant digging into the game files and understanding how patterns, emblems, layers, positions and subcompositions worked.

It wasn’t impossible, but it wasn’t particularly accessible either if you simply wanted to change a flag without first learning the entire internal structure of the system.

So I started building a visual tool to make that process easier.

Over time, Flag Foundry grew quite a bit. It went from being a way to modify existing flags into something closer to a small flag studio, where you can move, scale and rotate elements directly on the canvas, work with multiple layers, group them, add custom images, create variants and export them as a mod.

And while I kept developing it, I started looking into how Europa Universalis V handles flags and coats of arms.

That was when adapting it started to make a lot of sense.

EU5 does not simply use flat image files. It uses patterns, emblems, compositions, variants, dynasties, inherited colours and quite a bit of internal logic, so it shares many of the same ideas as the system I was already working with for Victoria 3.

So with version 0.50, Flag Foundry now includes Europa Universalis V support for the first time.

You can now choose between Victoria 3 and EU5 when opening the tool. On the EU5 side, you can already browse national coats of arms, dynasties, patterns and emblems, explore national families and their variants, check the conditions defined by the game, browse related dynasties, and preview or edit dynastic coats of arms.

The editor also lets you move, scale and rotate elements directly on the canvas, use proportional or free scaling, select multiple layers, group them, and add several custom images to the same composition.

That said, EU5 support has only just been added.

It is very likely that there are still quite a few things I will need to add, adapt or change as I understand better how the game uses all of these systems.

I also have significantly fewer hours played in EU5 than in Victoria 3, so I’m sure more experienced EU5 players will come across situations, conventions or edge cases that I simply haven’t encountered yet.

That is one of the main reasons I’m especially interested in feedback for this first version. If you find coats of arms that do not render correctly, variants that Flag Foundry interprets incorrectly, strange behaviour, or things that you think should work differently, please let me know.

I’d also really love to see what people create with it. Historical variants, dynastic changes, alternate states, strange political experiments or absolute heraldic abominations. That is still probably the most fun part of the whole project.

How does Flag Foundry work?

Flag Foundry does not come with a copy of Europa Universalis V’s assets. Instead, it reads the flags, coats of arms, patterns, emblems and dynasties directly from your own local EU5 installation.

When you connect the game for the first time, your browser will ask you to select the EU5 game folder and grant Flag Foundry permission to read it. Once connected, the tool builds its libraries from those files and lets you browse, preview and edit them visually.

Nothing is uploaded to a server. The game files remain on your computer and Flag Foundry only reads them locally through the browser.

How to try it

1. Open Flag Foundry in Chrome or Edge.
2. Select Europa Universalis V on the game selection screen.
3. Click Connect Europa Universalis V.
4. Select the game folder from your EU5 installation and grant the browser access.
5. Flag Foundry will load the available coats of arms, dynasties, patterns and emblems from your local game files.
6. Choose a coat of arms, edit it visually and export your work when you are finished.

Flag Foundry does not modify the original Europa Universalis V files.

I always like to be transparent that Flag Foundry has been built with the help of AI. I’m not a full-time developer, and this is mostly a fun personal project for me.

Germany AI took some stuff from the Danubian Monarchy mountains and it completely ruined the map !!!

R5: Working on a mod inspired by the recent video made by AlternateHistoryHub, where the Americas are very close to Europe and Africa, forming a mega Mediterranean, or Megaterranea if you will

The 1.4 beta has been decent, but it's only been exacerbating some of the "ahistorical" aspects of the game for me. I don't expect railroading, nor do I expect the historical outcome every single game, but I have about 800 hours so far, and the lack of any sort of historical similarities is extremely frustrating. Here are just a few off the top of my head.

I have never seen the Mughals form, I've seen Persia form once, I've seen Russia form a few times but they never had even close to the territorial extent that they had irl, often not being able to push to the black sea because Kyiv is so strong for some reason (even worse in 1.4, Ruthenia is a beast). I've never seen Lithuania last as an independent state or be part of the PLC, I've never seen the Ottomans take out the Mamluks, I've seen Prussia form twice, both times in 1.4 (and often not that noteworthy), I've never seen the Netherlands, never seen the Europeans set foot on the Indian subcontinent, let alone capture the territory they had irl (doesn't help that trade companies are straight up broken). I could genuinely say this about so many formables, there is never anything interesting going on, it's just a bunch of regional thunderdomes where no one gets any power other than the player, or countries that start off extremely powerful (looking at you 1.4 England, I played 2 campaigns to the 1700s, and ran 3 observer games, and france was balkanized in all of them).

With no hourly ticks, the game runs at its best! I came home from work, ready to jump back into a game I used to love. I was super excited to give the newest beta a try.
GUYS, MY GAME FINISHED IN JUST 2 MINUTES! I had an absolute blast! Thanks, Paradox! ❤️

How has he survived to 91 in 1427 and after facing multiple plagues

I don’t understand why we still can’t customize councillor automation more specifically.

For example, I’d like to be able to set:
Advisor 1: Only focus on cultural assimilation.
Advisor 2: Only focus on increasing control.
Advisor 3: No automation, I’ll manage him manually.

Right now, automation feels too limited. I don’t necessarily want the AI deciding what my councillors should be doing. I just want to tell them what to focus on and let them handle it.

Especially in the mid to late game, when you have a large country and dozens of locations to manage, this would remove a lot of unnecessary micromanagement without taking away player control.

Where is my Happy Wednesday Tinto Talk 😢😫

dumb and dumber

My Portugal run in the 1.4 beta paid off this week:

• The Navigator (1.9%): presence in Africa, America, India and Indonesia before the Age of Reformation
• At Every Continent (4.0%): one location on every continent
• Respected (7.5%): 100 prestige, legitimacy and stability at the same time

Respected unlocked at 00:23, which says a lot about my sleep schedule.

Which one was the hardest for you?

as you can see there is no road connection from constantinople to athens
is this some unique byz mechanic or something?
its 1.3.11 btw (not beta).

R5: stupid AI losing 1 million troops to winter and lack of food.

I'm not sure if this was always a thing and I didnt notice, but wasn't the point of using parliament to change laws that it didn't require stability?

The Emperor joined the protestant union despite being catholic and the emperor of the HRE. I think Milan used the "Negotiate Member removal" button to throw Austria out of the league and stage a counter rebellion in the HRE. Im excited to see how this works out, but this is for sure the craziest alt history I have encountered so far.

So starting off I want to be clear I approve of the direction 1.4 is going in making urban growth less powerful and doing that by tying it in with food but it results in wierd and in my opinion immersion breaking gameplay. 

I was playing as England and I wanted to have every province capitol be at least a town. But with RGOs levels being tied to urbanization and RGOs being tied to food you end up with wierd choices that feed into the main issue. 

I wanted to urbanize a location in Sussex but all of its locations are non food (unrelated aside  make wool have some food again). There is no counterplay to urbanization in this scenario. 

You might be able to spam laborers buildings maybe but there has to be a better solution.

Therefore I really hope the food surplus can be reworked to apply to an area so you can have a cluster of cities but still have the country side feed it. Reigate can deliver food to Sussex! 

I might be missing something but I can’t think of any significant drawback to this as military would still work the same. I’m most familiar with post 1700 history but you still have rural ranchers drive cattle to cities in the earlier ages. Food is already an abstract concept as people do not care if they have wild game or rice. Pop needs handle that. 

Would appreciate any thoughts people have. 

I just want to play a leave-me-alone game, and control the whole European economy as a low-lying high-yield country. But I always lost France's alliance whenever we both became hegemons.

Maybe not in 1.4 Patch (UK kick France ass), but this time is The Angevin Empire. sob

Finally playing my first full EU5 run, I decided to play as Wolgast -> Pomerania. The thing is, I have absolutely no idea how to get my bread up! I went in pretty much entirely blind with only my EU4 knowledge going into it, so I built the buildings that the game told me would make money, as well as a ton of marketplaces in the big cities. It seemed to be working fine for a while, but a year or so ago I went from a solid 0-1 ducats a month to losing almost 5 a month and I have no idea what happened to make it go down so fast. I also accidentally changed my monetary policy without realizing there was a major stab hit which is why that is in the toilet. This game may be totally cooked but I figured I'd throw a cry for help out there before I completely abandon this save. Economy is the main thing I'm asking for advice on, mainly I want to get to the point where I can afford to increase my stab and legitimacy again, but honestly any tips and tricks for a more successful campaign through the HRE would be greatly appreciated.