Published On Feb 25, 2017
In this video I take a look at the nation of Milan and how recent changes to the game allow for effectively infinite re-elections, generating tons of monarch points.
Here are some other tips that didn't make it into the video:
Merchant republics are pretty bad as of 1.19, so I don’t recommend playing them if you plan to get big. You also shouldn’t play as an Administrative Republic, as they have elections every 5 years instead of every 4. If you want to play any given nation as a republic, your best option is to become an Oligarchic republic, which is available via decision by taking Influence and Aristocratic/Plutocratic. You can also become an Oligarchic Republic if you gain a second province as a Free City in the HRE Your lategame government should be either a Constitutional Republic or a Revolutionary Republic
The Ambrosian Republic has one small drawback to generic republics: it’s can’t change manually to another government type. I’ve found 5 ways around this. First, you could just collapse your tradition and become a monarchy. Next, if you want to reform a republic, you can take Influence and Aristocratic/Plutocratic to get the decision to go into an Oligarchic Republic, and from there you can change into a Constitutional Republic when you get ADM 22. Third, if you want to become a monarchy without collapsing tradition, you can switch your culture to Tuscan. This will put the “Form Tuscany” decision in your back pocket, which turns you into a despotic monarchy and allows you to switch to other monarchies. You can save this for when you need it. Note that forming Italy no longer automatically makes you become a monarchy. The fourth method is waiting to 1700 and getting revolutionary rebels, which should turn you into a Constitutional Republic directly. Finally, you can wait until 1750 and become a Revolutionary Republic by spawning the disaster as you would normally. This is the path I chose.
An alternative strategy to using the Strengthen Government option is to float your RT (Republican Tradition) around 40-50. Most republics get an event on average every 10 years that gives you 20(!) RT for the cost of 1 stability. Milan’s Ambrosian Republic gets a special variant of this event on average every 5 years. This event will fire if you have RT below 50, and you shouldn’t collapse to a dictatorship if your RT is above 40, making this a balancing act. The drawback to saving mil points is some bad events for lowish RT, and having to live with the normal effects of lowish RT (notably giving +100% increased stability cost)
Hindu republics are overrated. Yes, you can change your personal deity when you get a new ruler, but frequently swapping rulers to get minor buffs is detrimental to your overall power. You’d be far better off retaining rulers and just taking policies with the points you’d save.
The Dutch Republic got nerfed some patches ago. Normal republics following this strategy are now superior to them.
You really shouldn’t bother trying to get the Tenures Abolition Act policy. It saves you less than 2 monarch points a year compared to Strengthen Government, forces you to go through really awkward maneuvers to get it, and cannot be easily cancelled if you get close to 100 tradition. You’ll probably end up wasting far more points from RT overflow than you’ll ever save with it.
The Formalized Scales, Weights, and Measures policy is irredeemable garbage and should never be picked.
SOURCES:
The Monarch point distribution chart was taken from Meshkent:
http://imgur.com/a/2qy3z
/ monarch_point_probability
The post that inspired this video is here:
/ republics_are_really_good_with_the_strengthen