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.

Recommended nations
For the first times playing 3.0, I would recommend that you pick a strong nation. It's 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 will not 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 colonize 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)


 * 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 maneuvring)


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


 * Bannu Rassi (slow start, but poised to explot the indian ocean trade and grow in peace in the shadow of the mamelukkes, also helps to understand how to get institutions. Abandon one idea group to get trade ideas asap!)


 * Kongo (no enemies, you can build up a nation from tribal to modern. You can learn how to grow economy, without much interference from other countries. Your exotics prices will drop to food prices)


 * Tunis (dangerous start, due to strong Fez, but large potential, because of provinces with huge empty farmlands)


 * Naples (easy start, good income, strong nobles. You will spend most time on getting your nobles under control, while carefully trying to expand. Without DG in, roman provinces are easy pickin

Note that vanilla EU4 difficulty is no longer pro-player. It's now 'World Difficulty' and will affect all players and AI equally. It raises or lowers the amount of base levies and income for every tag, making it more like a sandbox or leaving every state only with their real capacity for manpower and income.

Also, a note, any national idea set with a star is an older set, from 2.5. All new sets start with 'Legacy of', and are generally more powerful than 2.5 sets, and integrate better with our systems.

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.

Starting Difficulty
In 3.0 difficulty is handled differently from vanilla or prior versions of Meiou. Once you start the game and see the startup event, you can see a difficulty option. This cycles between easy, normal, hard, and expert in ascending difficulty. Difficulties provide the following changes:

Easy: Knowledge Output *1.05 Amenities Maintenance Cost*0.95 Administration Cost*0.95 Corruption From Nobles*0.95 Autonomy from Nobles*0.95

Normal: Default Experience

Hard: Knowledge Output*0.95 Amenities Maintenance Cost*1.05 Administration Cost*1.05 Corruption From Nobles*1.05 Autonomy from Nobles*1.05

Expert: Knowledge Output*0.9 Amenities Maintenance Cost*1.1 Administration Cost*1.1 Corruption From Nobles*1.1 Autonomy from Nobles*1.1

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 most flavour events. Religious minorities have been reworked, and each individual in your nation now has an own religion. Conversion by the state has a temporary implementation (check policies), neither church influence nor fanaticism nor religious idea groups have been implemented yet. The events and systems triggering the Reformation are also still missing. For playing the game you can for now pretty much ignore religion outside conversion which should be made possible using solely policies.

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.

Note that high manpower taxes will mean alot of raised manpower, for which you pay to maintain your entire manpower pool. If your army is expensive, levy a smaller army. Max Manpower is total men, 'real' max manpower is max manpower - men on the field.

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 should delegate them again. Note that newly conquered provinces will have all tax buildings from the previous owner wiped, so every time you conquer new land you should not forget to set taxes. Note however that you need to have stated the provinces in order to be able to assign the select estate and set taxes.

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). However, your provinces can only trade one tradenode away from a tradenode in which you own a province. So, if you want to set up a chain of merchants for your cities to directly trade with far away lands (e.g. you want to facilitate trade from South-East Asia to Europe), you will need at least one province and a merchant in every tradenode along the chain. 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). There are three ways in which you can invest money in provinces in order to increase their productivity: Investing in infrastructure, industries and paying for the maintance of production slots.

1. 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. 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 is a decision (107) which changes how many provinces you select if you assign the select estate to a province, 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 infrastructure. Each instance of infrastructure you ordered will be built seperately by the province, consuming goods and labor in the process. If you are in a confortable financial position it is recommended you build infrastructure in parralel, as this will greatly speed up the time it costs to build up new levels of infrastructure, be it at a higher cost.

2. 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 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. The more you invest, the faster an industry will grow, but also the more money it will lose initially. By investing in industries the state gains shares in said industry, and if it makes a profit you will get a cut. Industries that are profitable will automatically seek to expand, while industries that make a loss will seek to shrink in size.

3. Pay for the upkeep up certain industrial sectors. Industries need continuous funding to keep operating, to e.g. buy new materials and labor. You can choose as the state to fund a portion of their maintenance to increase their profitability. You can set this per province, per industry, but I would highly recommend you let a script automate this for you. In the long run this script will always pay back what you spend on it. Your provinces and their elites can and will build all of these things themselves if they have spare money, but if they are losing money they will reduce the amount spent.

Provinces will however not open up new industries (e.g. start making armaments themselves if the province didn't already do that). If you want to open additional industries 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 maximum have 14 industries.

When starting the game, I would recommend you open an armaments, shipbuilding, luxury and knowledge industries in your biggest city/cities if you don’t already have such industries. Armies and navies will cost armaments and naval materials in upkeep, so you want to make sure you always have enough of these. Luxury industries are simply the most profitable and thus good to attract more money to cities you want to grow. The Higher Learning industry is also very good for making money, and producing a certain amount of knowledge is a requirement for multiple Institutions, so having a thriving knowledge industry in your biggest cities is highly recommended.

You can conduct a sensus at any time for the provinces you have selected via a decision, which will trigger a pop-up event that will tell you how much your selected provinces 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 if there is scarcity! This census will also show you statistics on (changes in) population numbers and wealth.

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, especially if you have an aggressive playstyle. 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. Every estate has a set of starting privileges, with nobles using a newer, more modern privilege framework. Estates will not demand privileges like in 2.52 at the moment. Revoking them costs heavy amounts of loyalty, so take your time but remove them for a more efficient set of elites. Uncorrupted elites can be of good value to the realm.

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. Note that ruler stats are not solely made up any more of just the stats of the ruler him/herself. The state-bureaucracy also has stats: it is always 3 3 3. The more institutional authority you have, the higher the weight of the bureaucracy stats. This will make the effect the ruler has on government smaller, so weak rulers are much less of a problem, but the benefit of strong rulers is also less.

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. Note that the effect of corruption on all power costs has been halved (so 40% corruption means +20% all power costs instead of 40%).

Reforming your nation
Every nation starts with different initial rights, its best to go to the State estate and select 'Review Rights and Reforms'. You can view the current set, as well as the requirements and effects of each individual right.

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 strong army (amount of manpower is determined by your taxes, more service tax more manpower) you can live through all the unrest. This might not be viable after the reintroduction of disasters, but for now this can be a strong strategy for the adventurous player.

These reforms can be found in two places, the primary reforms are decisions, green dots mean that they give the particular elite more power, red dots mean that they take power away from the elite in question. Some Bureaucracy reforms are found in the decisions, but others are found in the bureaucracy estate menu. These mostly improve the effectiveness of your bureaucracy and are essential to curb bureaucratic corruption whilst you grow the power of the state within your country.

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 always be invented in Europe without player involvement. 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.

Note however that most institutions require the Commercialisation institution. To invent this you need to allow for a certain amount commercial freedom, which is linked to a reform for the Burghers. All nations in Europe start with the required reforms, but almost every nation outside of Europe does not start with these reforms, and the Commerce reforms are locked behind Trade ideas. So as pretty much any nation outside of Europe unlocking trade ideas should be high on your priority list.