Why use byz when trebizond exists?

[Mr.Zombie]

Is there any downside for using trebizond instead of byzantium? Trebizond seems to get more modifiers from what I've seen.

[grotaclas]

Use them for what? Trebizond has a weaker starting position and it is not formable.

[Mechenyi]

Byzantium is easy mode after the first war against the ottomans. There's really no benefit to playing Trebizond other than a potentially faster expansion into Persia, at the cost of being squished between four tags that all seemingly want to kill you.

[Narrowmind]

They do have a better color..

[Mr.Zombie]

So byz is better, I wanted to ask cause I never played both byz and trebizond and I wanted to see which is better, and apparently byz is from what I'm seeing.

[Xi Jinping]

Cause georgia drag trebzond to death all the time with qara qoyunlu*
95% this happens




My byzantine army are at galipoli>Georgia are usually being punished at the same time

[Totally Innocent Chatbot]

Trebizond is a much harder start that, if you can endure it, has the possibility of leading you to re-form a slightly stronger Byzantium. The issue being, if you just start off as Byz in the first place you'll likely get the ball rolling significantly sooner, and be stronger anyways than you would be by the time you took them over as Trebizond.

[cayenne_spicy]

I did a campaign recently starting as The Knights, forming the Latin Empire to get Latin Ideas, then switched to Orthodox and formed Byzantium while keeping Latin Ideas. Latin Ideas went super strong with Byzantium vassal play, since Latin Ideas boost your force limit increase from having vassals, and the higher your force limit the more pronoia you can have, so the more vassals you can have, which makes for higher force limit, which makes for more pronoia, etc. By the time I formed the Roman Empire (around 1600, I spent too much time warring elsewhere in Africa and Persia that I didn't need to, so it wasn't an efficient timeframe) I had over 20 pronoia. It was basically like forming my own alternative HRE. Good wholesome fun.

[Unreliable_Colon]

Originally posted by cayenne_spicy:

I did a campaign recently starting as The Knights, forming the Latin Empire to get Latin Ideas, then switched to Orthodox and formed Byzantium while keeping Latin Ideas. Latin Ideas went super strong with Byzantium vassal play, since Latin Ideas boost your force limit increase from having vassals, and the higher your force limit the more pronoia you can have, so the more vassals you can have, which makes for higher force limit, which makes for more pronoia, etc. By the time I formed the Roman Empire (around 1600, I spent too much time warring elsewhere in Africa and Persia that I didn't need to, so it wasn't an efficient timeframe) I had over 20 pronoia. It was basically like forming my own alternative HRE. Good wholesome fun.

Slightly off topic but how do you form Roman Empire so fast? I have never once managed to do it before 1820. If I expand too hard I get swamped by AE, regardless of how many times I've tried to alter my strategy.

[RCMidas]

Keep circling between cultures and religions. Just conquered some Sunnis? Start hitting Catholics. Finished with them? Grab the North African Ibadis. Are they dead? Oh look, some Orthodox minors in the Balkans. Are the French and Germans at each other's throats? Ally with one and the other won't care how much of their enemy you eat. Huh, it's been a few years and seems like the Sunnis are back on the menu...

The other part of it is simply to make sure that your alliance web is so strong that nobody who would normally join a coalition against you will DARE to. Plus making use of strategic vassal release for later Reconquest wars (avoiding most of your usual AE) and the ubiquitous Big Three idea groups (plus Exploration if you're an early coloniser like Portugal, Castile, maybe England).

[cayenne_spicy]

Originally posted by Unreliable_Colon:

Originally posted by cayenne_spicy:

I did a campaign recently starting as The Knights, forming the Latin Empire to get Latin Ideas, then switched to Orthodox and formed Byzantium while keeping Latin Ideas. Latin Ideas went super strong with Byzantium vassal play, since Latin Ideas boost your force limit increase from having vassals, and the higher your force limit the more pronoia you can have, so the more vassals you can have, which makes for higher force limit, which makes for more pronoia, etc. By the time I formed the Roman Empire (around 1600, I spent too much time warring elsewhere in Africa and Persia that I didn't need to, so it wasn't an efficient timeframe) I had over 20 pronoia. It was basically like forming my own alternative HRE. Good wholesome fun.

Slightly off topic but how do you form Roman Empire so fast? I have never once managed to do it before 1820. If I expand too hard I get swamped by AE, regardless of how many times I've tried to alter my strategy.

Check this post for some further writeup on it:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/236850/discussions/0/4338734745073411159/

But in a broader sense RCMidas is spot on. Expansion rate is a balancing act between four constraints: Regency, Manpower, Monarch Power, and Aggressive Expansion.

Regency is what it is, you can't really control if the game's RNG will make your rulers and heirs have inconvenient deaths, so sometimes you're forced by bad luck to just have to chill awhile (unless you alt-F4).

Manpower is what your economy is ultimately for. You're perpetually either using ducats to generate future ducats, or using ducats to increase your maximum manpower. If your manpower is depleted, you don't have much choice but to chill awhile... except if you have either strong allies, or a vassal swarm (and Byz can do both - leaning on the former until the latter occurs, and then the latter exclusively). If you have that, then you can often wage wars and just keep your own direct armies in your home territory to deter enemy Hannibaling.

Monarch Power largely is what it is, you can't really control how good your rulers will be. But if you have a good economy you can afford better advisors, and if you're thoughtful with choosing your rivals you can stockpile a lot of power projection, and if you're thoughtful with how you set your national focus you can often avoid hitting spots where you're having to chill and wait for MP to stockpile. But this is also where the pronoia system shines hard for Byz, which you can read more about in the linked post. By the time you've hit 1500 you won't have much pressure on your MP.

Aggressive Expansion is good to balance how RCMidas mentioned. Toggle between multiple expansion fronts based on religion, culture, and geographic distance, and try to maintain a high Improved Relations bonus since that escalates the decay rate of Aggressive Expansion. But the main reason you even care about AE is to avoid getting a coalition called on you, which only matters to a point. If the AI doesn't think it could win, it won't form a coalition to begin with, so if you have strong allies, strong vassals, and your country itself is strong, you can roll thick AE and it doesn't matter in the slightest.

I suppose a possible fifth constraint might be rebel-slapping, since if you have a lot of unrest issues you'll need to keep your armies on your home turf to manage rebellions. But there's lots of ways to mitigate that and I don't find I have hardly any issue with it at all as Byz due to using the pronoia system to its fullest and converting everything to Orthodox. You get a whole flock of missionaries and you'll tend to run high on Clergy estate loyalty and influence, and one of the estate privileges reduces missionary cost, so it's effortless to keep the conversions flowing. I almost never had directly owned provinces that weren't Orthodox after awhile, my missionaries were just always converting subject provinces (just make sure to force your subjects to be Orthodox if they aren't already, otherwise your missionaries will convert to the subject's religion, which is no use to you).

[Marquoz]

Originally posted by cayenne_spicy:

Originally posted by Unreliable_Colon:

Slightly off topic but how do you form Roman Empire so fast? I have never once managed to do it before 1820. If I expand too hard I get swamped by AE, regardless of how many times I've tried to alter my strategy.

Manpower is what your economy is ultimately for.

I don't agree. I'm swimming in manpower by the mid 1500s as pretty much any nation and can't spend it as fast as I generate it. Blobbing + the right buildings + mercs solve the manpower problem early and permanently.

Your economy is really for:

1) Monarch points. You want to be able to have +5 advisors in all three categories as fast as possible.

2) Maxing out any new monument you capture in three days by throwing 1K + 2.5K + 5K base cost + 1.25K + 2.5K + 5K speed construction cost at it instantly (a total of 17,250).

3) Reducing governing cost to the absolute minimum possible by building statehouses in every state and courthouses/townhalls in every province that's not in your capital state.

And to do that, you of course construct all the normal and TC buildings that produce more money from your investments.

[Totally Innocent Chatbot]

Originally posted by cayenne_spicy:

Monarch Power largely is what it is, you can't really control how good your rulers will be.

This is also vastly untrue if you're not playing as a Theocracy, or some other special government form that has unique heir mechanics you can't control. As any normal Monarchy, you have no control over the stats of your starting ruler (unless you're one of the 3 countries or so that starts in an Interregnum), but you can and should disinherit any heirs that you decide are not up to par. As the minimum number of points a ruler can have is 0 (0/0/0) and the maximum is 18 (6/6/6), one can consider the "average" point value of a ruler to be a combined total of 9 points across all three stats. A common strategy is to immediately disinherit any heir that has any less than 10 total points. Yes, doing this costs Prestige, but as long as you're declaring plenty of wars and occasionally farming some extra Prestige from your war targets' irrelevant allies (taking as much warscore from them as possible without incurring unnecessary extra AE, as long as having a long truce with said ally isn't an issue; typically done by forcing them to break alliances or end rivalries), it shouldn't be any issue. It's entirely possible to disinherit 4 or 5 heirs within the lifespan of one ruler in the process of fishing for a good one - and some of the best events scripted to give you an heir with high stats are locked behind being heirless while having a ruler of at least a certain age. Sure, sometimes you can have a streak of bad luck, every heir you get sucks, your ruler has an untimely death before you can disinherit, you finally get a good heir but he magically has a "hunting accident" while he's still a toddler... but these cases are generally the exception, not the rule.

As a normal form of Republic (not really relevant for Byzantium, but still worth mentioning), the goal is to get Term Length down as low as possible, and repeatedly re-elect each ruler for as long as they live, increasing each of their stats by 1 each term and turning every one of them into a top-tier 6/6/6 over time. If you start running too low on Republican Tradition or a ruler rolls a particularly bothersome negative stat, then just cycle through new rulers for a couple terms then start re-electing the next guy.

Theocracies, as stated earlier, are the main exception here, as you cannot disinherit heirs normally, nor can you see your potential heirs' stats prior to selecting one until a later government reform. The best you can hope for is the ability to make them generals in order to maximize the chances of death for "undesirables".

[Marquoz]

Originally posted by Totally Innocent Chatbot:

A common strategy is to immediately disinherit any heir that has any less than 10 total points.

Yup. I do this frequently.

[cayenne_spicy]

Disinheriting is well and good, but my point was that the game is going to give you whatever it gives you. You can control getting up to 10 monarch points if my math is right, but the part your ruler contributes represents an uncontrolled swing from 10 to 16. You can influence it by disinheriting, sure. But you can't control it. If the game craps enough bad heirs at you, inevitably your ruler will die and you'll have what you have.

Agreed I oversimplified on economy = manpower, but, my point wasn't that manpower is all that matters. The question was about expansion rate, and if you're out of manpower your options to spread your borders decrease significantly (excepting as noted, if you have strong allies or lots of vassals who can do the war on your behalf). If you're swimming in manpower, then sure, of course, divert economic resources to something else that you find important to what you're doing.