The post is translated from Chinese. Sorry in advance if it reads not good.

Hi r/EU5! I've been making Standard of Living (SOL) since the game came out and have never posted it here, so this is the full introduction. The mod also just got a major update. The short version:

• Pops spend what they actually earn.
• Expensive goods get swapped for cheaper substitutes. (new)
• Living standard counts hospitals and pollution, not just money. (new)
• A new SOL bar and four map modes. (new)
• An optional balance layer so the richer economy doesn't snowball.

Have you ever looked at your estates 150 years into a campaign? In one of my France games, the nobles were sitting on 245k ducats while the whole country's tax base was around 3,000. That's more than ten years of national income, doing nothing. It happens because vanilla pop demand is basically fixed, and fixed low. (Although pdx has been trying to adjust, v1.4 is still quite broken currently.) Pops buy the same small basket whether they're starving or rich, nothing substitutes for anything (a region can be drowning in wheat while people still go hungry for millet), and estates can only spend their surplus on rebels or the odd building. The market only keeps going because the state keeps building end-consumer buildings and buying the goods itself.

SOL starts by making pops spend what they actually earn. Every month, each estate in each location looks at the money it really has: its share of local income, minus building upkeep, adjusted by how its national savings compare with a savings target. It then compares that with what a calibrated baseline basket costs in the local market, and the ratio between the two is its purchasing power, which scales how much it buys. Rich nobles end up buying far more horses and fine cloth, while poor peasants cut back. Hoarding now peaks and then falls back, because savings above the target push spending up, and a country-level solver keeps the national totals consistent. Development no longer gates or scales demand at all; SOL replaces that system entirely.

The headline of this update is goods substitution. 56 goods are sorted into 20 substitute groups, covering staples, protein, clothing, heating, crude goods, seasoning, household goods, drinks, fine drinks, luxuries, spices, precious metals, treasures, medicine, ritual goods, weapons, mounts and more. Each estate needs whole categories rather than specific goods, so peasants need a staple, not wheat in particular. Within a group, seven price tiers shift where the money goes: when wheat costs twice its base price, people move to rice, millet or legumes, and when something is dirt cheap, they buy more of it. You can see the result for each country as "Goods substitution (good)" modifiers.

Fun fact: I first built this back in EU5 1.1, together with Engel curves, and then a 1.2 engine change broke the interface it ran on and left it dead for months. It's now rebuilt on a new foundation that's much lighter on performance.

The other big addition is that living standard is now more than money. Purchasing power decides what people buy, but living standard is a separate score: money plus the things money can't buy. Hospitals, lazarettos, pest houses, aqueducts and famous medical institutions raise it, while tanneries, putrefaction works and iron and steel mills pollute and drag it down. Theaters, opera houses and libraries raise it by a percentage. It also feeds back into the world, since a higher living standard attracts migrants, a very low one slows population growth and a high one speeds it up.

All of this finally has a proper UI. A four-section bar sits under the country buttons and shows your living standard (with its tier and year-on-year change), purchasing power, goods substitution and world ranking, each with a detailed tooltip. Hovering a section previews its map mode and clicking opens it. On top of that there are four map modes in total, goods tooltips that show substitute groups and price tiers, and a SOL button in the location window.

A richer economy snowballs harder, so SOL also ships a balance package based on Anti Snowballing, and every part of it can be toggled through Community Mod Framework. Base tax efficiency starts at −15% by default (you can adjust it), and the difficulty tax bonuses for Hard/Very Hard AI and Easy/Very Easy players are halved. Each new age makes things more expensive: building efficiency, RGO expansion cost, city and town upgrade cost and food consumption all get harder, and roads cost two to five times as much, so you can't pave the whole country in 20 years. Normal winters and raised levies hit local food harder, which means you need to grow food before you build an economy, though Little Ice Age events are softened so they don't turn into pure death spirals. War hurts more as well.

• SOL started as a combination and extension of two discontinued mods, SoL Based Pop Demands by 1onepower and Anti Snowballing by Ethereal, so huge thanks to both of them.
• You can find the mod on the Steam Workshop
• compatibility submods in their own collection
• full feature list on the wiki.
• Feedback and bug reports are very welcome on Discord.

Happy to answer questions in the comments!

Just wanna post this saying this is the most fun game I've ever played and wanna give a thanks to the devs and everyone involved. Going to leave a steam review in a second. Ive gotten over 400 hours, more than 100 hours in the past few weeks.

Basically the title, I'm strugling to distribute my limited local governors in Muscovy considering all the river paths avaliable in game, would enjoy any suggetion!

I'm playing as Milan in this campaign and I was planning to form Italy but I think I got quite unlucky.

First af all France won the Hundred Years War which is pretty rare in 1.4.

Second the Pope was ultra aggressive and took a massive chunk of Italy not allowing me to go further in the South.

Currently I dont know how to progress because the Pope is much stronger than me militarly and France once every few years starts a war against me (even though the last wars France lost).

The main problem is that Bohemia, which had an alliance with me, decided to rival me so I'm left with 0 great alliances that can help me militarly.

Has someone some suggestions?

I'm trying to make my mercury mines profitable by subsidizing their export, but instead of making money from my own mercury, I'm automatically importing everyone else's mercury and then selling that at a loss. Is there a way for me to stop this? I thought slapping on a tariff would help, but it seems I don't pay tariff on my own trades (which I guess makes sense).
Do I really need to disable automatic trade to do something like this?

So I'm a man of my habits, right? And I knew I wanted to participate in the Italian wars. So I began preparing early by stabilizing my French holdings, joining the HRE, ensuring the Ghuelphs didn't lose (couldn't make them win because they wouldn't let me and very intensely raising opinion and currying favors with everyone I could manage within the lands I'll eventuall own.

Lo and behold, despite accepting every single culture I can (there's the 2.5% minimum in nation requirement), I still have cultural capacity left. Mind you, Francien is only 20% of my cultural landscape, so that's 80% of my nation.

Edit: I almost forgot to add that, by this point of the game, I have all cultures within the empire, Iberia and Italy have kindred cultural opinion of me, so even unifying the empire wouldn't be an issue.

R5:

As our first Chronicle draws ever closer, it's time we began to prologue your ambition with the Official Across the Pillars OST!

Immerse yourself in 9 tracks from each side of the straight, each with distinct and culturally authentic musical expressions that expand the palette of performances compared to the base game soundtrack.

The OST will slowly be releasing across major streaming services as the weekend progresses, but until then you can listen right here and now on our YouTube channel; https://pdxint.at/AcrossThePillarsOST

So Europeans can hunt for / buy slaves in lands they do not directly own, but as soon as they own it, they refuse to get slaves there. So European colonists will gladly use Aztec slaves on my plantation, but that's just as long as the slaves were bought from another country that enslaved them. As soon as I own the Aztec lands, no more slaves can be procured there?

Never mind that the Spanish (and other colonizing nations) historically widely used indigenous Americans as slaves in their colonies I guess...

I'm playing as Muscovy in the early 15th century. I have both Velikiy Novgorod and Nizhny Novgorod under personal unions, with me as the senior partner.

I've already passed every law required for annexation, and Nizhny Novgorod is actively being annexed. Only 3 years remain until full annexation. https://imgur.com/a/CCOJh01

Then, out of nowhere, a rebellion breaks out in Velikiy Novgorod. One province rebels and starts a war against Velikiy Novgorod.

And somehow, Nizhny Novgorod, MY junior PU partner, decides to join the rebels without my knowledge or consent.

I get no say in this whatsoever.

And here's the most ridiculous part: THE REBELS LOSE THE WAR. The rebellion is crushed, Velikiy Novgorod wins, and yet somehow Nizhny Novgorod emerges from this defeat as a completely independent country with a new government. My personal union is gone, and years of annexation progress are thrown in the trash.

How does a country that's been under my personal union, has accepted all the annexation laws, and is THREE YEARS away from annexation suddenly get to join a rebellion in ANOTHER country, LOSE THE WAR, and walk away independent?

Where exactly is the logic here?

I'm the senior partner. We share a ruler. How can my own junior partner independently decide to fight against another one of my junior partners without me having any control over the situation?

And why does a rebellion in Velikiy Novgorod have the power to magically dissolve my personal union with Nizhny Novgorod?

Is this intended behavior, a broken mechanic, or an outright bug? What the actual hell?

The food situation in Aragon is crazy, early game full imports cost like 23 ducats which js insane. Even when dedicating trade fully to food imports it’s not enough.

Anyone else who tried playing as Aragon?

Ive been testing trade on early game 1.4 beta and manual trade is terrible compared to just creating import orders for the highest value goods available. This is a random hre republic. The game seems to over value export trades even with 0 export efficiency.

Inspired by the couple prior posts here and TheWarRoom's campaign on YT, started to think about how to make the most optimal Norse start. Norway into Denmark is very strong as it stacks the proximity cost over sea tiles advances both have. Norway already starts with 50 naval and harbor admin day 1 (+1 naval governor).

The first wars against denmark are very micro intensive, but usually you can win. Just dance around the danish and their inevitable HRE allies, starve them in the winter when the food runs out and attack and stackwipe when morale is 0. Sometimes the danish even fall in the water and stackwipe themselves when the ice melts lmao.

Then to form denmark you need to flip to danish culture (easiest to just accept danish rebel demands to save 40 PI), and move capital to Skane or Denmark. After you form denmark, you will get a free event to move capital to copenhagen anyway, which has 100% harbor cap.

I have not been able to reliably make the norse rebels grow enough so I can accept their demands and swap norse for free, if anybody wants to try and has any ideas would love to hear

Also keeping the PU with sweden is finicky, but would be great to accomplish reliably, you can eat even the largest PUs in 50 ish years now with everything minmaxed.

Any ideas?

Title. Has anyone ever formed the commonwealth without annexing directly annexing Lithuanian lands? I read the event conditions on the EU5 wiki, and it says I need to betroth one of my children to theirs but it isn't possible due to differing religions.

Lower Bavaria to Duchy of Bavaria to Holy Roman Empire

It was a hard one, especially during the Italian Wars, cause damn France kept attacking my subjects in Lombardy. After finishing the Italian Wars, it was relatively easy to win wars against other great powers. Finally, in 1605, I united the HRE princes, and by 1625, I had united most of the HRE.

My future plans are to conquer Gaul and Italia, Denmark, parts of GBR, Spain and Egypt. In short, all Roman lands.

I’m trying to patrol around various colonies – why can I patrol some areas and not others?

I'm hitting the point in the game as the ottomans where my common language Turkish is becoming more powerful than Arabic and with posts like the Egyptians under my rule Arabic is actually getting weaker. I can't change islams liturgical language but I can convert religions. Issue with that is that it feels very unlike the ottomans to do that.

Is there anything I can do about this or do I gotta suck it up and convert and tank my pops happiness.

Bought EU5 a while ago. Almost couldn’t run it at the time. Now that has improved I wanted to give it another try. However, it is quite overwheming, even after running through the in-game tutorial. How do I learn this game? Are there any good tutorials or playthroughs on Youtube?

I have never seen the AI snowball this fast. I thought people said france was really weak after the control nerfs. This nation puts the fear of god in me and it's just the AI. France keeps harassing even though I am the ottomans. I do not know what I did to them. My navy has been obliterated several times now and they want something from me but i do not know what. They are now coming for my cultural hegemony. They are also keeping in on Qings economic hegemony. They don't even have acess to to new world yet.

On top of this I am surrounded by super powers. Since when was I the victim. The ottomans are not supposed to this scared.

I am playing as Morocco and have won a few wars against the Iberians. The year is 1422 and I am currently fighting the 5th crusade against me with half of Europe behind it. Even France and England paused their 100 years war, which is in full swing, to take a stab at me.

Frankly the first few crusades felt interesting and a challenge. After the third one I realized the Pope was basically calling them on cooldown and half of Europe would happily join. It apparently did not matter that every single crusade is a devastating loss where they land on my coast with no food, resulting in many stack wipes and much attrition. Every single crusade there are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dead.

Does anyone have a mod that turns off crusades on steam? I would love to subscribe to continue my campaign. As of right now, its simply unplayable.

Im playing byz and has taken over italy. I have had 7 catholic rebbelions or more and they will just continiue. Same when i stopped accepting turkish and bulgarian. I under stand that they should be rebbelius and mad but bro. The rebbelion proggress bar should not come back imidietly after the rebbelion. Rebbelions never worked that way historicaly.
If a rebbelion triggers and i crush them, WHY the heck would they just give it a round 2 or 7 in my case. What is the logic here. Please fix this before 1.4 paradox🙏

So I played a number of runs, I'm genuinely enjoying the game... But holy f***, I cannot for the life of me understand the economy and it dooms me every run through eventually. Ive tried focusing on building tall, where I don't conquer anything, but sure enough even with upgrading rgos and buildings focused on that only, and locking buildings that are negative profit, I seem to always end up in debt due to cost of buildings... My best runs seem to be ones where I conquer territory but ultimately I end up in a negative death spiral... Even declaring bankruptcy which Ive tried a few times I always then immediately have to ask for a loan and end up further in the hole. I've played ck3 and coliv games before this but I cannot seem to stay above water here and willing to take all advice. I try to integrate new territories (which takes forever), I build roads, I do the rgos, the profits le buildings, I work on my trade (I hate the new trade screen by the way). Please help I'm hitting my head on desk now.

I mean, I'm not entirely complaining that Corsica took the Median lands. That being said, this will be a nightmare. They'll try and culture convert or they'll lose them all to some fucking rebel. I'll let it fly to see how it goes, since they saved me the antagonism and the lands count towards my victory. This is, however, weird as all fucks :')

think about it: gneral/admiral traits no longer have a fixed bonus like +0,25 tactics but instead the number could be randomized with it usually still being around +0,25 but the possibility being there to get a whole +2 or +3 army tactics but chance is extremly low.

there could also be events that spawn scripted characters with really high stats and traits like napoleon.

and that should also happen to the ai of course..