Holy Trinity No Agressive Expansion Battle Pope!

Guide to Holy Trinity achievement and no agressive expansion

Introduction

Welcome everybody to my Holy Trinity No Agressive Expansion Battle Pope! Although the name is quite long, it's also self-explainatory. This is a guide for an achievement called Holy Trinity but also my personal achievement which is getting the smallest amount of agressive expansion (unfourtunately you need to go to the very late game to get that but it was a lot of fun nonetheless).

Showcase of my empire:

I was rather focused on getting the monarch points that I need than blobbing around so that's why my empire is so small.

Firstly I will guide you how to get Holy Trinity and then how to get no AE.

Holy Trinity - Early Game

NOTICE THAT I PLAY ALMOST ALL OF MY GAME ON MEDIUM DIFFICULTY SINCE I'M BAD BUT IF YOU ARE A LITTLE MORE EXPERIENCED, THIS GUIDE WILL WORK ALSO ON HARD OR VH.


So, let's start with setting the game up. It should be that hard since really you only need two things that happen really often.

These things are:

• Austria needs to be friendly to you
  
• France needs to be friendly to you

Yup, that's all. But DON'T ally them right away, the part that you need to do now is really important and needs to be done in right order:

• Ally Austria first
  
• Send your diplomat to France to improve relations
  
• Get Austria to 193 relations
  
• Join Holy Roman Empire by adding Rome into it (you don't need to add anything else)
  
• If France is still friendly, ally them, if not, either restart or wait for them to become friendly again

Joining HRE is important for early game expansion. I was trying to get into Tlemcen, vassalizing Granada and Byzantium and even destroyed Ottomans in 2 or 3 wars but it is less efficient and more risky which I'm going to explain in a while.

Also, one quick note, remember to not set your rivals right away since Austria or France might ally them and you would need to restart. Fabricate claims on Florence with your free diplomat and get mission to reclaim Ferrara. If you do that quickly, Florence or Ferrara might not get any allies making your day a lot easier. I recommend setting your target (either of these two but Florence is obviously better for a start) as a rival and excommunicating them. I went for Florence since both of them had no allies but Florence is much richer. I full annexed them (excommunicating gives you lower agressive expansion penalty and you start as a curia controller) and while waiting, looked for other potential targets.

Holy Trinity - Middle Game

So by 1500s I had all of middle Italy under my control. Your goal since now should be getting all of Italy under your reign. I focused my sight on northern Italy since they were easier to get. Remember that you might want to balance between vassalizing other guys, feeding them land and annexing them and coring the land by yourself.

I lost my alliance with France really early but if you still have it, you might want to go for Naples (which is probably under union with Aragon or Spain).

It doesn't matter which way you will go, but if you ever find yourself in a war with Venice drop your guys on Crete and take it in a peace deal. You will get new area for expansion - Africa. From Crete you are able to fabricate claims on Egypt and get further into Africa as a result. Sure, you might want to go into other directions like into Spain, Balkans or even HRE but in Africa you will find easiest enemies and quite profitable regions like Egypt, Ethiopia or eastern coast of Africa.

I will not give you any advices on what ideas to take since I was going for no AE run and all the goods coming from ideas weren't intresting me. I can give you one tip - take Humanist. These ideas are still fantastic and will stop rebels from rising even in provinces that you just aquired + if you are fast enough - it will stop Religious Turmoil disaster.

From this point on, focus yourself on expanding. Look for the best opportunities and be sure to make your provinces states. Italy doesn't have much states itself so you will have plenty of free room for new states in Africa. Even if you don't have enough points to core them, make them states anyway - going down from 75% to 50% autonomy is good anyway and it will not give you any overextension.

Holy Trinity - Late Game

Late game is dependant on the situation on the world.

• If Poland annexed Teutonic Order and someone annexed Livonian Order, you need to force your way up there and get back TO and LO on the map before their cores expire.
  
• If TO and LO are left with less then 100% warscore worth of provinces and you are afraid that they will be annexed soon, you might want to no CB them and vassalize them.
  
• If Poland gets beaten by TO and LO is still alive and will be for some time, you might want to wait for Imperialism CB.

Remember that you need to take Jerusalem and vassalize The Knights too. I wouldn't be so worried about these two things since Mamluks/Ottomans are weak late game and The Knights are probably still alive since nobody cares about them. Also, keep in mind that you need to make these three monastic orders your marches too.

To be honest, this is anything that I have to say about this achievement. It is really easy to get unless you are fighting with time (TO and LO cores). I had lots of luck myself since as I got my Imperialism, Poland was getting beaten by TO and Russia left LO with no allies and one province.

No Agressive Expansion

No Agressive Expansion is quite simple, you need a plan and get points. Actually the Papal State is the easiest and most efficient country to do so. You could do this as Ryukyu but it's far more challenging and I don't know if necessary (Ryukyu has 25% aggresive expansion reduction and with all bonuses possible it would give you -100% AE impact. The problem is, I don't know if game would allow you to have that).

Results:
My tactic resulted in giving me 90% aggresive expansion reduction in best case (although it could give me even over 100% but I wasn't lucky enough) and 70% most of the time. That meant that 40 AE penalty that I would've gotten went down to 12 and Imperialism CB made it 75% of total AE - 9. (If I had 90% - 40*0.1 = 4 and 4*0.75 = 3). By the way, these provinces were like 400 development.

But it wasn't the end. I knew that if I can't have max AE reduction all the time, I can have something else to deal with it. Improved Relations bonuses. Initially, country starts with +2 relations each year. All of the bonuses I aquired gave me just over 200% Improved Relations making it from 2 to 6.1. That means that conutry that got robbed of 400 development would completely forget about it in... 2 years. Yup, 2 years. (Again, same thing, keep in mind that if I had 90% AE it would go down in an entire year)

This is which ideas I picked and lower you have all the things that lower AE and gives bonuses to IR.

Let me list you things that lowers aggresive expansion impact:

• Papal idea 7: The Holy Father - 10% reduction
  
• Influence idea 4: State Propaganda - 20% reduction
  
• 100 Prestige - 10% reduction
  
• Curia controller - 20% reduction
  
• Sometimes also an influence idea group event gives you 20% reduction
  
• Naval-Diplomatic policy: Overseas Embassies - 10% reduction
  
• Administrative-Aristocratic policy: The Licensing of the Press Act - 10% reduction
  
• Influence-Innovative policy: Foreign Advisors - 10% reduction

And thing that gives bonuses to Improved Relations

• Diplomat advisor - 20% bonus
  
• 100 prestige - 50% bonus
  
• Humanist idea 6: Benevolence - 30% bonus
  
• Diplomatic idea 4: Benign Diplomats - 25% bonus
  
• Naval-Diplomatic policy: Overseas Embassies - 20% bonus

• Administrative-Aristocratic policy: The Licensing of the Press Act - 20% bonus

• Humanist-Influence policy: The Foreign Aid Act - 20% bonus

• Humanist-Diplomatic: Multilingual Diplomats - 20% bonus

Remember two things:
1. There are other policies that you can enact but you can only have 5 at the same time. Maybe it's better to go for Quality - Expansion combo with 10% extra AE reduction, maybe not. You can try it yourself but you will have to resign from one of the other policies.
2. As you can see, prestige is important to maintain high giving you 10% AE reduction and +50% IR. Probably you are wondering how the hell am I able to maintain prestige at maximum level. Well, not only I am able to maintain, but I'm not able to lose prestige because of decay. Here are all the things that will help you stop your prestige from decaying:

Epilogue

Thanks for reading this guide. Sorry for very low amount of screenshots from Holy Trinity but in the first place I wasn't thinking about getting this achievement back then and in the second place I wasn't thinking about making this guide. Once again, thank you for sticking with me until the end, I hope you will be able to test these things by yourself and stay tuned for other guides. See ya!

[Mkk grx.]

MateuszNH Well ideas always depend on what your target is and in what situation you are. I love taking humanist since it makes my rebels completely disappear but it really depends. If I played this game normally, I would go for some better military ideas like quantity or defensive.

[Miedzic]

have u any idea of "multiplayer ideas" for pope ?