Unfortunately it's a bad idea to do any drastic mercenary or loan nerfs, as AI often loses all its manpower to self-inflicted stupidity such as parking a doomstack in a low supply province during peace time. Attrition, manpower buildings, manpower bonuses, all of that matters a lot less when you can just loan and merc. It doesn't matter than you just killed every military age man in a country, they'll just spam loans and mercs next day. This means defeats have minor consequences.

Mercenary limit reduced to half Both players and AI have access to infinite manpower pool of mercenaries, and close to unlimited very cheap loans. At least as long as you play with Cossacks DLC enabled. It leads to much denser alliance networks, and it's much less likely to be able to get a free attack on unprotected minor. This bumps up difficulty, as allies are much more useful defensively than offensively. So the mod just doubles base limit, and this opens a new world of diplomacy. All options such as royal marriages, guarantees, marches, local alliances, supporting independence of others etc. You absolutely need a few strong allies, a few vassals to expand, and that prevents you from having any diplomacy beyond that. Download links Fun and Balance for EU4 1. So here's the full list of changes, ordered roughly by impact, with reasoning behind them explained in detail. It doesn't try to significantly affect game difficulty - it might increase it slightly by reducing cheesy tactics, or maybe slightly reduce it if you're trying to play naturally. Playing with this mod shouldn't feel like you're playing a mod, it should feel like you're playing vanilla which finally patched silly things right. Many of previous changes I've made become obsolete because most problematic areas are likely to be addressed by future patches. The mod has very limited goals: fix any issues where poor balancing makes gameplay worse - making more options viable, and occasionally toning down anything that's overpowered enough to make alternatives irrelevant let people have fun in any way they choose, removing arbitrary prohibitions penalties reduce AI cheating, as game is more fun when everyone plays by the same rules reduce forced historical railroading via events or restrictions on player actions These goals mean that every patch the right thing to do changes, and I need to go through list of fixed I've made and decide if they're still applicable. The best kittens, technology, and video games blog in the world.

Extended timeline eu4