Beginner's guide

Meppers basic guide to playing M.E.I.O.U. and Taxes 3.0

In this guide I will try to explain how to play 3.0, focussing mainly on how you interact with the new systems, not on how the new systems exactly work. I will try to expand this guide later and update it when things in the mod change. Please hit me up if there are inaccuracies, or things that could be explained better. For this guide I assume you are familiar with the basics of EU4 and M&T 2.52.

Strong nations
For the first times playing 3.0, I would recommend that you pick a strong nation. Its easier to get the hang of the new version if your existence is not constantly under threat. The best starting region is without a doubt Europe, since you won’t have to pass a lot of reforms to get all the institutions. Some strong nations in Europe are:

-England (triumphant in the HYW in 1356, good isolated start, can colonise easily)

-Bohemia (as long as you get a few strong allies France won’t attack the HRE and you can pass HRE reforms/conquer Poland or whatever you like)

-Flanders (rich and urbanized, requires you to win the starting war, but that shouldn’t be too hard, keep your alliance with France and improve relations with Bohemia to join the Empire)

-All the big Italian city states (Milan, Florence, Genoa and Venice, they are all rich and you should be able to expand easily using mercenaries)

-Ottomans (powerful start, strong army, weaker neighbors, and gains Ghazi manpower reinforcements through victorious wars against infidels)

-France (probably the strongest nation in the game later on, but starts initially in a bad spot. requires some early game manoeuvring)

-Portugal (slow start, but best poised to exploit Colonialism late game. Good for a purely economic playthrough)

Starting a new campaign
Contrary to 2.52, there is no initialisation at the start of the game. A simulation is ran every now and then and included with the files. The only thing to pay attention to is that you do not receive any income in 1356, just wait for the first of January, check your income, and then possibly delete starting troops/ships if they cost you too much. You might notice your provinces start with very high levels of devastation, especially in Europe and Asia. This is intended, and a result of the impact of the Black Death before game start.

Things that 3.0 doesn’t have yet
It is important to know that a few basic parts of 2.52 have not yet been implemented in 3.0. Most notably, Dei Gratia and flavour events. Religious minorities have been reworked, and each individual in your nation now has an own religion, but conversion by the state has a temporary implementation (check policies), and neither are church influence and fanaticism nor are religious idea groups. For playing the game you can for now pretty much ignore religion outside conversion. Plagues also aren’t in yet.

Setting up taxes
In 3.0, you gain tax and manpower through taxes, implemented by hijacking the building system. All taxes can be set to None, Low, Medium or High. Taxes consume mana each year in exchange for tax/manpower, with higher rates providing more but costing considerably more mana. Every January, an event will show your mana costs for the year, with a per-tax breakdown. Simply, the more you tax, the more mana it costs. Other factors increase the mana cost, especially Local Autonomy (LA). In 3.0, LA doesnt decrease the amount collected at all, it only increases the mana cost of collecting it.

If you're feeling overwhelmed, you can automate tax collection across the entire realm, using a reliable method called Tax Delegation. To use this:

1. Click the '107) Select Estate: Select Individually' decision until the mode is Select All Provinces. Due to a EU4 display bug, the best way to see the current mode is hovering over the tick/toggle button for the decision.

2. Click any province, and in the bottom right corner of the province view, below your buildings, click the estate button, and select the 'Select' estate (with the hand and axe). You should notice red pins on all your provinces now, showing they are selected. - As a note, this is how you 'Select' provinces in 3.0. You can add or remove the Select marker through the estate button and clear them or change the selection mode through decisions. 3. Click '106) Show Taxes Decisions', then '106.1) Delegate Tax Code'

4. Assign the amount of mana you are willing to delegate to collect tax. This is 'up to', it may spend less if theres no need to spend more. 7-10 mana will provide a good balance between mana spent on tax, and mana spent on ideas/tech.

5. Click the Delegate option.

Fundamentally, smaller nations can collect more revenue at less cost, while larger ones may need to spend more to extract more. The single best indicator of how much you can get from a province is Local Autonomy, it is the single biggest increase to the mana cost to tax a province. Additionally, 'Obligations' type taxes, like Tribute, Levies or Dues may increase their cost based on loyalty, where low loyalty can make collecting these very expensive.

It is very important to note that the automatic tax system DOES NOT update taxes in response to changing conditions. Rather, it sets taxes that will consume the delegated amount of monarch points given current factors, such as autonomy and estate loyalty. When these factors change, the taxes remain the same, so the monarch point cost will shift instead. If you need to update your taxes in response to changes like these, you must clear the taxes and delegate them again.

Setting up merchants
Collecting and steering trade still works, just like in 2.52. However, the trading of goods between provinces and between borders has changed a lot. For the specifics of how trade works, please read this dev diary: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/m-t-4-0-dev-diary-1-path-to-modernity.1345020/. In order to use the system when playing, the most important thing is that you have chains of merchants going from your home tradenode, and never have a node in between without a merchant (only your home node doesn’t need a merchant). In order to facilitate this system, you will generally get a lot more merchants in 3.0 than in 2.52, especially when your nation and cities grow larger. Trade volume will go down as opinion fades, every further -50 opinion below 0. Good relations ensure healthy trade.

Building up your provinces
Since the normal building interface is used to set up taxes, building buildings works very differently (the only buildings you can still build in the buildings tab are forts). In order to build buildings, you have to first select the province(s) in which you would like to build. You do this by assigning the select estate to provinces. This can be done via the assign estate button in each province, or with the autobuilder menu. There in decision which changes how many provinces you select if you select one, which you can use to select e.g. entire areas or all your provinces. Cycle through the options by clicking the decision multiple times (in order for the tooltip to update you need to unpause the game). Selected provinces will be marked by a big red pin on the map, if you do not see any such pins, make sure you select the graphics option that allows ambient objects to be shows (the red pins are technically Great Projects). Once you have selected the province(s) you want to build in, you can click the decision to build buildings. You can then either:

1. Expand resources, e.g. open more farmland for your peasants to work on. Expanding resources allows the size of you rural industries to grow. There is a limit to how much resources your province allows for. E.g. you cannot open more farmland if all the available land is already used. In the province modifiers you can see how much of the maximum has been opened.

2. Build districts in your cities. Districts allow for an increase in size of urban production. E.g. you can build commercial districts to produce more commerce (more commerce produced leads roughly more tradepower in the province).

3. Build infrastructure. Infrastructure works in levels attained by how much infrastructure you have. The levels are shown in the province building overview. A higher level always gives more bonuses. For example pathing increases movement speed and CE, amenities increase how much population can happily live in your city, harbours increase naval FL and help with overseas/river CE, and capitol infrastructure helps with the efficiency of your bureaucracy. You can either build a certain amount of infrastructure, or build up to a certain level of infrastructure.

4. Directly invest in the industry of your province. You can do this by going to the "Buildings" macrobuilder, and selecting the numbered buttons at the bottom. They will indicate which industry you wish to invest in, and how much money you can invest. You can then "construct" these in the province you wish to invest in. Be careful though, as investment will change many things such as wages and available land, which could result in the industry becoming unprofitable. Best to take it slow.

Your provinces and their elites can build all of these things themselves if they have spare money, if they are losing money they will reduce the amount, since all of these cost upkeep.

Provinces will however not open up new industries (e.g. start making armaments themselves). You need to do this yourself. Simply select a province or more and click the open industries decision to open new slots. Every province can at max have 12 industries.

When starting the game, I would recommend you open an armaments, shipbuilding and knowledge industry in your biggest city/cities if you don’t already have such industries. Every year an event will pop-up that will tell you how much your nation produces of every good. If you are heavily relying on imports for certain goods, drops in availability might cost you a lot of money, since their price will increase a lot!

The state buys a stockpile of the necessary goods every year (using the price for the goods in your capital). If a supply of a certain good falls away, e.g. because of a war or embargoes, the price can spike and the cost of maintaining your stockpile can increase a lot. Therefore autarky (producing everything you need yourself) might be a good thing to strive for. You can check your monthly stockpile costs in a decision. The price is recalculated yearly. If you are done with your selected province(s), you can select the decision to unselect all selected provinces.

If you want to check information in the provincial tooltips about your economy and population, note that you can cycle through different UI layers with a button, to show different information. (This is a hijacked button, with the side-effect that you cannot cycle through layers if you have no admin power.)

An important thing to check in your province tooltip is Concerns & Treatments. Positive Welfare will keep down unrest and banditry (the last is new and does pretty much what you’d expect banditry to do). Spirituality, Consultation and Hierarchy will make respectively the Clergy, Burghers and Nobles loyal. Diversions will make any Elite happy.

The Elites and Factions, don’t mix them up! (Formerly Estates)
The estates have been changed quite a bit. Most notably the Greater- and Lesser Nobles have been merged, and there is now a bureaucracy estate. Also in game there is now a distinction between Elites (the provincial estates), and Factions (their national representatives in the government). The Elites each have a loyalty and power percentage per province. Note that the loyalty value you see for the bureaucracy is actually their corruption percentage, and that each estate individually can have a power percentage from 0 to 100% (so the total is not 100%). E.g. the Nobles and Burghers can both have 100% power, meaning the Burghers rule the cities, and the Nobles rule the rural areas.

You can interact with the Elites via the estates menu, simply take you time to go through the interactions. You should always check first if your Nobles have the decorative officer posts privilege, if they they do, immediately revoke that privilege, it reduces your discipline by 5%. Estates will not demand privileges like in 2.52 at the moment.

You can promote each Elite if you so desire. Expanding the Bureaucracy is a good way to increase State Reach, which increases the efficiency of taxation of money (not manpower, and not Obligations (e.g. Feudal or Noble Dues)), reducing mana cost.

Via the Bureaucracy estate menu you can now also interact with the commoners. The most important thing to know is that you can buy grain for the commoners, this is expensive, but gives you stability.

You can check the power of Factions in the Factions menu in the bottom-right corner of the screen. Different Factions in control of the government provide different bonuses and maluses. The best way to impact the power of Factions is by hiring advisors of the faction you want to promote. Every time you get a new ruler you can also choose to align with a certain faction, which will give you available advisors of that faction. You should always promote your advisors for more monarch power since they cost very little money (but beware that they do give corruption). Changing alignment and changing advisors will cost stability points.

Factions also have opinions of other factions and the state. Relations between factions don’t do much yet, but Faction relations with the state is used to determine legitimacy gain from them. (Legitimacy from Factions is: relations x influence x elite power.)

There are also the Clans. Like State Reach, they don’t have gravity for power. Their power only changes if acted upon. Clans are a replacement override for all other Elites. All other Elites power is inverse capped by Clans. The only ways to extract from Nomads are the Tribute and Tribal Host taxes, all other taxes are inverse capped by Clans.

Corruption
For corruption there is both national corruption and provincial corruption. Provincial corruption mainly represents the power of the Elites in your provincial administration, which they try to use for the benefit of themselves. The corruption value of the bureaucracy estate is the provincial corruption.

National corruption is mainly from a lack of executive authority. You can view executive authority in the country modifiers tab. The main source of national corruption is the power vacuum in the government, especially under weak rulers. Generally corruption is much higher in 3.0 than in 2.52, at least at the start of the game. Don’t worry if you start end up having about 40 corruption early game, the game is balanced around this. If you have the money, using the Root Out Corruption slider is recommended, since country corruption is tied to the corruption of your bureaucracy.

Reforming your nation
Reforming your nation is a key part of playing 3.0. Reforming is done via decisions, and will always cost stability and loyalty of Elites who are effected. There are reforms associated with every faction. Generally you want to reform to higher level reforms, which will make your nation more ‘modern’, and empower the State (Bureaucracy Estate) and Burghers. Higher level reforms give access to more taxes, improve the quality of your armies, reduce corruption and more. It is highly recommended you read through the list of reforms to look at their requirements and effects, and plan on when and what you will reform. Usually being able to reform requires certain (lack of) levels of influence of Elites and Factions (remember the difference between those two!).

The game is designed around you slowly reforming your nation to be more modern, but it is possible to pass a lot of reforms quickly after each-other. This will piss off your estates, lose you all your stability, and cost you a lot of tax and manpower gain (with manpower loss you will also lose forcelimit), but with a big bank, strong allies, and a mercenary army (mercenaries give forcelimit, 1 merc is one FL, up to 80 extra at start) you can live through all the unrest. This might not be viable after the reintroduction of disasters, but for now this can be a viable strategy for the adventurous players.

Institutions
Institutions still have starting dates, but after that they can invent simultaneously and completely independently in any province that fulfils the requirements. There is no longer a single province in which an institution is invented and spread from. Institutions also no longer give a penalty in tech cost when not embraced, but reduce your tech cost a lot (each tech costs more and more). They spread from all places they have been invented, but just like for inventing, there may be requirements for the institution to spread (but spread requirements are always lower than invention requirements). Most institutions will invent in Europe (only Global Trade requirements are never fulfilled by the AI due to colonization mechanics not being finished). However, if you play in any part of the world, and fulfil the requirements of any institution, you can invent them separately, and don’t need to wait for them to spread to you from Europe. The requirements can be found when hovering over the name of any institution in the institutions menu.