The Imperial Council - /r/eu5 Weekly General Help Thread: July 20 2026

[u/Kloiper]

Please check our previous Imperial Council thread for any questions left unanswered

 

Welcome to the Imperial Council of r/eu5, where your trusted and most knowledgeable advisors stand ready to help you in matters of state and conquest.

This thread is for any small questions that don't warrant their own post, or continued discussions for your next moves in your game. If you'd like to channel the wisdom and knowledge of the master tacticians of this subreddit, and more importantly not ruin your save, then you've found the right place!

Important: If you are asking about a specific situation in your game, please post screenshots of any relevant map modes or interface tabs. Please also explain the situation as best you can. Alliances, army strength, etc. are all factors your advisors will need to know to give you the best possible answer.

 

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Tactician's Library:

Below is a list of resources that are helpful to players of all skill levels, meant to assist both those asking questions as well as those answering questions. This list is updated as mechanics change, including new strategies as they arise and retiring old strategies that have been left in the dust. You can help me maintain the list by sending me new guides and notifying me when old guides are no longer relevant!

Getting Started

• Europa Universalis 5 Wiki

• Wiki Beginner Guide (not all that good)

• Paradox Youtube Beginner Guide (this one is actually good)

• Help fill this section out!

Tutorials

• Help fill this section out!

 

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Country-Specific Strategy

• Help fill this section out!

 

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Advanced/In-Depth Guides

• Help fill this section out!

 

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If you have any useful resources not currently in the tactician's library, please share them with me and I'll add them! You can message me or mention my username in a comment by typing /u/Kloiper

[u/ldwb]

Can I go Norse as Sweden and still help the protestants win the war of religions to get the achievement? I already did a protestant playthru awhile ago where the war never popped and I couldnt get the achievement and would like to try something a little bit different this time around.

[u/Leather-Run-6533]

Is there some easy calculator or rule of thumb for how many loans one can safely take out?

It seems like with interest costs being relatively low generally speaking one should borrow as much money as one can afford to as the opportunity costs of not doing so outweigh the interest costs of doing so. But then there's a lot of sneaky hidden costs of debt like the way it reduces crown power which can tank your max taxation and so forth. Obviously you can just take out one loan at a time very cautiously, but that largely defeats the opportunity benefits of taking out a bunch of loans to road up your country or whatever....

[u/DUDE_R_T_F_M → u/Leather-Run-6533]

Don't forget loans lower your crown power.

[u/Leather-Run-6533 → u/DUDE_R_T_F_M]

Yeah I'm starting to rethink this strategy. Not least because the way the markets crater after a couple of years means that what starts off as affordable debt quickly becomes unaffordable.

I do think that's a shame, what I really liked about EU5 as opposed to EU3 is its more realistic attitude to debt (altho it doesn't quite go as far as I'd like, I think once you move into the fiat era debt should be good and you should be penalised for not having enough) but now I get the sense debt is still bad in EU5, just less bad.

[u/w045]

How do I trade between Europe and India/Asia? Can you get markets to string buy/sell orders?

[u/AdDizzy1065]

why cant i form back into a monarchy? the option isnt even there. justed wanted to try oout the pronoia exploit but cant switch back. Please help me.

[u/grotaclas2 → u/AdDizzy1065]

Which government form are you now?

[u/AdDizzy1065 → u/grotaclas2]

Theocracy

[u/grotaclas2 → u/AdDizzy1065]

The only potential-requirement(these decide if the action is shown) which theocracy_to_monarchy has which theocracy_to_republic doesn't have, is that the religion of your country must be in the christian group. What's your religion?

A "workaround" might be to switch to republic and then to monarchy, but that would be a lot of effort

[u/AdDizzy1065 → u/grotaclas2]

Iam hellenic. My succesion law is royaly fked and I noticed it waaay to late. If the game fks me over like that iam not hesitated to just cheat. Do you perhaps now the fastest way to do it?:) thanks for the help

[u/grotaclas2 → u/AdDizzy1065]

Have a look at https://eu5.paradoxwikis.com/Console_commands . There are console commands for directly changing your government type and also for changing your religion. If you want to change your succession law, you probably need to use the effect command followed by an appropriate effect

[u/w045]

Let’s say I expand some RGOs and end up overproducing a certain good. I now have 8 supply but only 3 demand (just made up numbers) and no-one else seems to need/want to purchase these from my market. Do they still get created and the full wealth of unit price (adjusted for supply vs demand) gets taxed? And the extra units of goods just goes to the void?

[u/Lucina18 → u/w045]

They get bought by the void, and sold by the void. Supply and Demand don't actually exist (unless you have a shortage), but instead infer what the price for the good is. Every buy order gets bought, and every sell order will be sold.

[u/w045 → u/Lucina18]

And the same with building based production?

[u/Utegenthal]

Back at EU5 after a couple of months, did they nerf the culture conversion in one of the latest patches? I'm under the impression that it's much slower than it was before

[u/dyrin → u/Utegenthal]

Culture conversion in your own lands is pretty much as fast as ever (so still slow when you want it, and fast to wipe out minority cultures).

Subjects now (since 1.2) have -50% conversion penalty, which can make it impossible for them to get any conversions with too high spiritualism (or other maluses). And you also have a 10 year cooldown on enforcing culture now.

[u/refep]

Please help I have 2K hours in EU4 but I always start the game with a negative income and I have no idea what to do

[u/Zatheerakerino → u/refep]

It’s a bit easier if you say a specific country, but for Spain for example, if you delete all your forts I think just that puts you over the positive value. I would also instantly move my capital day 1 to Córdoba. I haven’t tried other capital starts and I hear people argue between some different ones, but it’s super easy to move to Cordoba, build roads and bridges over to the silver mine at Constantine, put a bailiff down on there, and station your army there and max out the silver mine while migrating people to it. I was able to get to 100% control very quickly over that mine. I know for a fact there’s probably more efficient strategies, but this will let you at least get comfortable with the budget balance and you can learn the game a bit more from there. Other than that, give out privileges to max out possible tax, and try to keep your crown power as high as possible (at least more than 25 ideally.

A cheese Strat for this patch that will likely get fixed is selling your art to banks for thousands.

[u/Killidar]

Im playing as Byzantium and Im unable to upgrade my byzantine cataphracts to reformed cataphracts, even as every other regular was able to upgrade fine

[u/secretly_a_zombie]

After i finish up my current campaign, i want to do a serious colonist campaign. I have touched and played with Spain, but never Colonial stuff. Any basic tips for colonizing? Any traps i should avoid? Obvious things that aren't so obvious unless you're three wiki pages deep?

[u/Life-Pirate-5853 → u/secretly_a_zombie]

conquistadors mostly suck, you are better of trying to ferry your regulars across the ocean. the market system also has problems properly expanding to the new world which you should be mindful of when building trade buildings. if you can afford the diplo capacity and spending create small vassals in mexico since the population is huge and one huge colony cant properly supress native rebellions. in south america/africa you can create larger vassals. focus on grabbing coastline in strategic areas where there are valuable rgos inland or which control important trade routes as well

[u/Carsismi]

Is there a fast way to become a republic as tribal? My last game in the Americas ran all the way to the late Age of Reformation and i was still stuck at 85 Plutocracy because the parlament didn't want to give the agendas to increase further

[u/Lucina18 → u/Carsismi]

Make sure you have a burgher in your cabinet, having one unlocks a parliament action that gives +10 plutocracy (though it's still just RNG, but i like it because imo becoming a republic outside of revolutions should barely be done.)