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[Andrew425]

I almost always go quality as my first idea choice. It uses up military points and it gives me a solid bonus in every fight. When its maxed out all your units do 25% more damage. Hard to beat for a nation that goes on land and sea.

[Wiles]

I prefer offensive, not that quality isn't good,  but getting forced march before your neighbours is amazing.

[Drakale]

The way I see it Quality is always good, while offensive will be better for smaller nations and defensive awesome for the big ones. That max defensive 1 unblockable attrition is extremely valuable if you have huge territories as you will slowly deplete your opponent manpower while you keep your own stacks safe and then strike them down as they are overextended.

[Tobel]

I prefer offensive, not that quality isn't good,  but getting forced march before your neighbours is amazing.

When I played recently with Brandenburg I saw the usefulness of this since I'm ALWAYS chasing armies to their retreat points.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

I'm rather found of Plutocracy (as a republic) for a first military idea. You'll be trading off a lot military power but the net increase in leader points from the tech discount should help to speed ahead and overcome some of the bad event spam. The bonus economy stuff should help you stay afloat if a country with other military ideas come knocking.
If you're not a republic then the choices are between offensive and defensive. The size of your country should really dictate what choice to go with first. Offensive for small to mid size countries so you can get forced march and start expanding. Defensive as a large country can brutalise invaders and the leader siege and minus attrition will allow you to still push an offensive game. There can be a case made for quality if you plan to be very naval focus.

Apparently (according to the forums) there are some really nasty events if you pick conflicting ideas like offensive and defensives.

[BlindKitty]

Well, since there are apparently enough people who have come up with idea of creating new ideas (this never gets old), I think I will pass on the opportunity to do the same. Got enough on my mind right now, and I think it's better to specialize than overextend. In real life, of course, not in EU IV. Fighting coalitions got tiring, by the way, and I'm back to CK 2 creating the biggest, meanest reformed Paganism possible.

[Tarran]

1.1.2 hotfix is out.

1.1.2
- Filter on tags now works
- Fixed issues with joining/inviting friends from friends list
- Server requests password if it ain't provided
- Fixed dedicated server not displaying the correct version
- Fixed sorting on server names
- Improved joining server status message
- Keep server browser scrollbar position when adding new servers to the lis
- Fixed a better oos-message. The client now gets an error-code so we can know what it was that went oos. (revision 8323)
- Supply, demand, total_produced, num_supply_provinces and num_demand_provinces for tradegoods are now saved in savegame (fixes hotjoin OOS).
- Fixed pause-bug on standalone server.
- Added better information for the client during hotjoin-request.
- Connection popup no longer in front of password popup
- You no longer get password rejected message when getting an invite to a password protected game
- No longer possible to filter on empty tag, either all servers or some tags
- If you search for a tag, steam will now return a global search enableing any player to find any game if his searching for the tag

[Catastrophic lolcats]

Suprised they haven't fixed the exploit where you can can select another country in ironman mode by spamming the "random nation" button.

[Digital Hellhound]

What is it with these coalition mechanics? So you, the starter of this war, decide to peace out by giving away a shitton of my territory ('return core to ___') because you're feeling a bit worried about your chances even though everyone else is well still in the fight. I had zero occupied or sieged provinces and was in fact on the offensive - we had plenty of occupied provinces, even, but the wargoal was ticking it down. I didn't even realize until several years later that I'd lost around eight provinces.

The AI is terrible with cooperation in general. Sure, you can siege a lot with 3k stacks on every single province, but if you combined them and not let them be picked off piecemeal you'd notice you have triple the enemy's numbers. If the enemy has doomstacks on the field, the AI should not divide its forces.

It's kinda weird that the AI doesn't seem interested in taking on the Native American nations. They haven't had a single war - Central America is still dominated by Aztec, Inca is still in its original borders, etc etc while all of the unclaimed area is colonized.

[Wiles]

I haven't fought in a coalition war so I may be mistaken, but can you untick the option that lets the ai negotiate territory for you like you can in regular wars? (It's in the war information screen at the top right). I was shocked the first time I had the AI negotiate away my territory. Never again!

[Rakonas]

Nope, you can't. Yet sometimes in coalition wars the AI has it unticked. Shit's bugged.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Anyone using mods yet? I've got a few I'm toying around with and enjoy, along with my own custom changes. Particularly idea ones. Trade routes too, those severely needed work to keep it from being 'blob all trade to x and collect' traderush. There's now a few that add entirely new nodes and make the routes more complex that I cannot recommend enough, gets rid of the All-Roads-Lead-To-Antwerp mindset the vanilla trade system brings.

[EnigmaticHat]

After complaining about coalitions I might as well offer my thoughts on how to fix them.

Spoiler: kinda long (click to show/hide)

First of all coalitions should be built around a Casus Beli the same way wars are, and that should dictate who can/will join.  So for example you should be able to form an offensive coalition to cut down a country provided everyone involved has a decent sized "aggressive expansion" relations penalty on the country in question, or a defensive coalition against a larger nation provided everyone involved is both smaller than the target nation and has a province close to the target nation.  Religious leaders with a lot of prestige should be able to form coalitions with little or no justification because of the influence they have over people.

Coalitions should have a leader, and larger nations joining should be able to demand becoming leader of the coalition (that way you don't have a large nation joining a tiny nation and then the tiny nation remaining leader).  Joining a faraway coalition should require tying up a diplomat due to the difficulty of coordinating, and joining a coalition lead by a nation you hate or one with a different state religion should carry negative events once the war is joined, especially if it goes badly.  The idea is that instead of a single coalition spanning the globe, you would have several different coalitions of like minded nations working separately.

ALL of the normal diplomatic options should be available, but the consequences for going against the coalition should be different.  Firstly, not joining the war or peacing out separately from the leader should give the dishonored call CB and relations penalty on all the coalition members.  Secondly, if the leader of an offensive coalition decides to start the war and someone refuses the call, they should be allowed to call off the attack (presumably before an official declaration of war, for the obvious reason), and the one who refused the call should suffer all the dishonored call stuff.  Thirdly since its not an alliance, members of a coalition should be able to wage war on each other with no stability penalty, at least before the coalition gets called to war.  Finally, the coalition leader should always be allowed to negotiate for everyone in the coalition, however they have to first send the peace treaty to the other coalition members to be accepted and then to the enemy.  I guess there would have to be some system for intra-coalition conflict and the coalition splitting up as its members disagree on things.

[WealthyRadish]

Out of curiosity, how does the performance/optimization compare to EU3? Things were a bit choppy on my crappy system... anyone try it on, say, a laptop? I could always wait for performance mods, just wondering if they went overboard on having DA BEST GRAFIX. A 2D strategic mode or the like would be perfect.

[Rakonas]

I have a laptop that plays EU3 fine and it works fine. No lag or anything. about 2 years old.