Age of Absolutism

[Narrowmind]

Curious if someone would please explain the timeline? What should efficiency look like? How long does it take to max absolutism, and how quickly can Court and Country fire? Maybe I'm just slow.

[Totally Innocent Chatbot]

Kinda depends how heavily you focus on it. Max efficiency requires you to be at or near 100% crownland by the time the age flips, with all estate privileges (except the +1 monarch point ones if possible) already revoked. One common strategy for making a lot of Absolutism fast is to try to provoke Particularist rebels to spawn (an easy way is to seize crownland while the Burghers are below 50 loyalty) and immediately accept their demands, which raises autonomy throughout your country; you can then use the Lower Autonomy interaction everywhere autonomy got raised to print a huge chunk of Absolutism. If you need more, spend your spare mil points on Harsh Treatment or Strengthen Government for a bit of extra Absolutism (keeping Legitimacy high also increases your max).

How fast you can trigger Court and Country is mostly just an issue of how quickly you can reach 50 Absolutism, which is the minimum threshold necessary for the disaster to tick. After that, you can meet the other requirements simply by taking a big chunk of land in a peace deal (ideally without getting coalitioned in the process) and waiting a year or two before you start coring it, then no-CB'ing a couple of random nations that pose no threat to you in order to tank your stability. Then you can simply sit on one of those wars until the disaster fires, which should take 34 months simply from meeting the requirements and having negative stability, or 25 months if your Absolutism is additionally at least 60.

Just bear in mind that your maximum Absolutism is reduced by 20 while the disaster is ongoing; in order to get the most beneficial outcome, you must reach 65 Absolutism before the disaster ends. Therefore, since you cannot go over your maximum, your max Absolutism needs to be at least 85 before triggering the Court and Country disaster for it to really even be worth fishing for it in the first place.

[Narrowmind]

Thank you for all the tips. Seems like it may be possible to have it down by 1620, maybe?

[Marquoz]

Note that Court and Country is entirely optional. Most nations can get to 95% max absolutism with no trouble even without era bonuses: 65% base, 10% from legitimacy, 5% from Empire, 5% from Great Power, 5% from religious unity, 5% from the tier 5 Royal Decree reform. I revoke all estate privileges except the monarch point generators starting around 1550, so the +15% from crownland offsets the monarch points. If you're swimming in points, you could even ditch one of those to hit 100%.

Is Court and Country worth it for 5%? Going over 100% gives you a cushion for when things go wrong (say, with legitimacy), but the disaster can be a pain. Your choice.