I liked the other link better.

Step-by-step process:

1. First day, immediately declare war of reconquest on England. Lose it on purpose. Offer to end the vassalization of all seven of your vassals to start the game.
2. Immediately set about annexing all the vassals with reconquest CB. This shaves a good 60-65 years off of uniting central France compared to the typical diplomatic annexations.
3. Get in good with the Holy Roman Emperor (relations >100), and add provinces to the HRE via the "Join the HRE" provincial decisions. You need to add Ile-de-France specifically, but you can't add provinces unless an adjacent province is already in the HRE. Take as direct a route to Paris as possible; the Emperor can reject your attempts to join, and aside from usual AI jerkish shenanigans, will be more inclined to reject offers from states larger than itself. You should eventually get in.
4. Get elected Emperor. Now that you're in the Empire, you get a 200 point swing in electoral votes (-100 penalty for not being in empire -> +100 bonus for being a large state in the empire), and you should thus be able to win election easily.
5. Fight a bunch of wars with other big HRE powers (Burgundy, Milan, Austria, Bohemia) and force them to release HRE states; each one released gives you 10 imperial authority.
6. When you're not busy, release some vassals after adding their would-be-capitals to the empire; you'll get 10 IA for this too.
7. When you get the chance, add the other provinces too, because each province added to the HRE gives the emperor 1 IA.
8. Use money from fighting the wars in (5) to pay for gifts to a significant majority of the HRE states (I had all of Germany + the Lowlands at >100 relations). A small HRE state with >100 relations with the emperor is a surefire lock to pass any reform you try to get through.
9. Pass reforms one at a time as you get to 50 IA. Get relations with everybody high before passing the second-to-last reform; anyone who refuses the reform leaves the empire and triggers a crazy civil war that's either exciting or a severe headache depending on your point of view.
10. Once you pass the last reform, congrats, you are now the Holy Roman Empire, which is still neither holy, nor Roman, but at least it's finally an empire.

^ and that's why EUIII is an arcade game.

Only if you let/make it be. Usually I'm better about this. But I got bored of conventional rule and decided instead to unite Western Europe as France in 40 years.

Always was like that. Almost 6 years ago just like today. The fact you can make a 10 point list of completely throwing history out of the window is a testament to that. Sure you can make houserules, but those don't change the internal mechanics.

Also, that's not a criticism of EUIII, just what pops in my head everytime I see some AAR.

And how's the Empire faring now? You probably didn't get cores on a good chuck of it (unless the version I play has some differences in that respect, you only get cores on adjacent countries). I've heard that when the AI manages to unite it, it usually falls apart due to the rebellions; never really got how you could lose to rebels... Too big to fail and all that jazz. ;D

Vexx.. forming HRE empire in this manner gives HRE cores on every territory that the member states had cores in, if I recall correctly. It was this way in HTTT anyways.

I formed it as Austria, quite by accident, actually, and I was so huge and stable and unstoppable that the game got boring very quickly.

Also, on this note, I'm extremely pumped because I just finished my abstract and am about to go home for the first half-day off I've had in about two weeks. I will be spending the whole time playing Crusader Kings two and drinking soda.

Lucky you. I kind of want to play CKII too, but not being able to form an empire (started as Sweden, took Denmark and Norway) was a turn off--I /want/ those thrones, dammit.

I thought that uniting the empire would get me cores on everything too, but, whenever I did it, large chucks of it were always not core (on divine wind). I played around with it a bit and discovered that you only get cores on bordering countries... but I do play on a Mod (the EU3 map is hella ugly), so maybe that changes things?

Either way, they're both fun games, even if they're not the most historically accurate game to ever be created in the history of everything ever.

@ulytau - EU IV will cut back on the arcade-ness now. They're doing away with a LOT of stuff and revamping the whole game, making dynamic events, etc (like if you're England and have a Lancaster on the throne, you can trigger the War of the Roses at any point)

Vexx you can form empires in CK2. Sometimes there are cultural requirements though...though if you want to form Scandinavia I'd imagine Swedish would be acceptable.

You need to look at the "de jure" hierarchy of your 3 kingdoms, see what Scandinavia's requirements are.

I didn't see any of that--I'd even researched it online and some sites told me I couldn't. I think I had even looked in most places, for anything resembling a form empire button. Yeah, just googled a bit...

Might dive in again sometime soon. Especially now that I noticed new updates allow my beloved Sweden to form it's rightful empire. 8

FOR SWEDEN. o/

They have to get rid of event chains and go for event pools. Anyway, I'll go for the big mods once they get ported and so long vanilla EUIV :)

uly - could you clarify what you mean by event pools? And what sort of mods are you looking for? I'm not sure if you've read the weekly updates they're putting on the forum, but a LOT of stuff is getting cut out of EUIV

The difference between event chain and event pool is event chain is a series of events that continually progresses in a line towards the final event. In an event pool, linearity is avoided by opening more venues for progress by assigning probabilities to which event might fire and which road you therefore take.

Definitely looking forward to SRI if Helius gets back from Magna Mundi trainwreck.

I've been reading the DDs but those never tell the big picture. At least, they're keeping in Native American states which is complete bullshit and a disgrace to actual states not included in the game :)

I took cleves-> nearly unified German Europe. I was obsessed with trying to do a similar thing with Ireland but although I created a huge new world empire i could never crack into europe effectively

I may have read the DD's wrong, but isn't it more of an event pool system that they're working towards in EUIV? From what i get there is no series of events that automatically fire, but rather tons of built in events that fire if certain conditions are met.

I really like how diplomats and such won't be a 'commodity' but rather something you must strategize with

Aren't you an undergrad, President Eden? You should either be studying or going out each night, not playing video games.

That's a standard event chain, goldfinger, just parametrized with conditions. An event pool draws from multiple possible events, each with its own conditions. Some events you won't even encounter in a typical game since the probabilities might be low and the event pool is not activated that often.

That's a strange policy, Invictus. Going out every night is for losers unable to cope with themselves alone.

Don't listen to Invictus, PE. I played video games all through undergrad and look how I turned out :P

EU IV is coming out? Awesome!

Invictus: You have no idea how addicting Europa is. I'm careful not to play the game at college because I'm afraid I won't stop, ha ha, not because I like to party.

President Eden: I have two challenges for you.
1. Reestablish the Roman Empire as Trebizond, starting the game after Morea has already fallen and you are indisputably the last Byzantine/Roman state.
2. Reconquer the mainland (all of it) as the Ming exiled to Taiwan. You start out without any cores anywhere.