u/Baghdaddy21

I’ve heard a lot of confusion online about how to form Japan as starting as a clan.

I have heard Japan in general is buggy but I just got through the Nanbokuchō Jidai and didn’t notice anything game breaking.

So how do you become emperor? There is luck involved and everything must be finished before the Nanbokuchō Jidai event ends. Remember than only an imperial family can form the country “Japan”. Clans are locked into taking over the shogunate which locks them out of elevating the country to “empire” status (you cannot click the “form empire” button).

The goal is to change your ruling family’s last name to Yamato (the imperial family name). For example if you start out as Shimazu clan, you eventually want an heir with the last name “Yamato” to inherit your clans throne.

You do this by ensuring that one of your daughters marries a Yamato male (diplomatically arrange marriage) and has a son who will have the last name Yamato. The children in EU5 always have the last name of the father even if the mother is the ruler of a country.

Obviously this involves some luck. One of your rulers needs to have a daughter. There needs to be a Yamato male available to marry when you daughter becomes an adult. Luckily the Nanbokuchō Jidai event goes on for a long time so there is time to get this done.

For that reason, I recommend that your ruler stick to having just one wife (there’s a law that you can change to have up to 4 wives per male). Otherwise, you will have way too many sons and it will take forever for them all to die to eventually allow the throne to pass to the daughter you want to inherit the throne.

Let’s say you are playing Shimazu and your ruler has 3 sons and 1 daughter. DO NOT MARRY YOUR SONS. Only marry your daughter to a Yamato male. Eventually your ruler will die and the throne will pass to the eldest son. That son has no children so when he dies it goes to his brothers. Brothers also have no children so eventually the throne passes to the daughter. When she dies, the throne passes to a child with the last name Yamato. When that child inherits the throne as an adult, eventually a pop up will show giving you the option of forming a new Yamato family line (I think it took a few months/years for those to occur). Your Japanese clan government reform is then replaced with an imperial family reform.

In my Shimazu playthrough, I chose early on to become a neutral faction in the Nanbokuchō Jidai situation. Once my Yamato heir rose to become Shimazu clan’s leader, the pop up to form a new imperial family line occurred. I waited until the imperial family government reform finished before I did anything else (to avoid potential bugs). I then remained a neutral faction in the Nanbokuchō Jidai (you have no choice but to remain neutral now).

Then all you have to do is destroy the two other Yamato families in the Nanbokuchō Jidai situation. The situation then ends and you are the winner. Your clan eventually changes its name to Yamato. So if your started playing as Clan Shimazu, you will notice that your name changes to Yamato.

Remember that as a Japanese clan you start out as a “building based country.” Your goal is to eliminate as many Japanese clans as possible during the Nanbokuchō Jidai and build as many of your buildings as possible. That way, when your clan becomes a land based country you have as much territory as possible. There is a casus belli with the Nanbokuchō Jidai situation allowing you to do this. If you are a neutral faction then you can attack whoever you want.

When the Sengoku Jidai starts, you remain as a building based country as Yamato.

Stay as a building based country and wipe out all the remaining building based countries. If you try to become a land based country right away, the building based countries are a pain to get rid of.

Once all the building based countries are gone, there’s a button in the Sengoku Jidai panel to restore imperial rule. Press that to become a land based country.

Next, eliminate every member of the shogunate including the Ashikaga. When the last clan falls, you get an immediate pop up that the shogunate has been disbanded. At the same time you get a pop up saying your country has changed to “court of Japan.”

Get 70 prestige and you can form an empire.

By the way, do not panic when the Ming empire and its 1 million troops declare war on you. Their vassals also have a few hundred thousands troops. They can’t transport all the troops at once so you stack wipe them little by little. As soon as they land troops, you attack and wipe them. The war takes forever though.

You do have to prepare for this inevitable war by building castles in all of your island locations around Japan to slow them down. Also build some forts at the northern and southern ends of mainland Japan to slow them down.

To delay/avoid this you can improve relations with Korea and Ming towards the end of the 1300’s which is what I did. This also prevents them from joining a coalition against you once you unify Japan. Specifically recommend allying with Korea as otherwise they will get very high antagonism against you.

I ended up allying with Korea (kingdom of Goryeo) and the Khmer empire to fight the Ming. Still very much outnumbered but at least it forces the Ming to spread out their forces.

In general, I think we should all be playing with console commands enabled to alleviate some of the bugs that occur until EU5 is fixed.

Vassal conversion of culture has been severely nerfed but there is a solution still for those who want to expand their territory. You will by no means expand as quickly as the vassals spam meta but it’s better than the game being a no conquest economy simulator.

It is not a glitch or exploit. It is a feature that has been in the game since the beginning but has not really been used since vassal spam was so strong. The goal of this strategy is to decrease the cost of accepting a culture as much as possible so you can accept several cultures without exceeding your culture capacity.

I personally find the button clicking to be boring and gamey but I guess this is what certain loud members of the player base wanted. So by nerfing conversion of cultures by vassals, all paradox has really done is slow the game down and make it more tedious and click more buttons to expand.

Here is what you need to do (I will use Byzantium as an example):

Step 1 = You decided that those fucking Neopolitan bastards deserve the benefit of your just rule.

Step 2 = you use diplomats to improve opinion and curry favors with Naples, who are the culture leader of Neopolitans.

Step 3 = Forget about Naples for a while. Do other shit.

Step 4 = once you get capped at 25 favors, start clicking “improve trust.” More trust = increase favor cap. Giving money as gifts lets you go beyond the limit. Ultimately, you have to try to ally with the country and fight some wars with them to make the favor number tick up more past the limit. The tool tip that says “max favors is 25” is misleading. The tool tip is saying that the “curry favors” diplomat action has a limit of 25 favors but you can go above 25 favors by giving money and fighting ally wars. Giving money gifts on the cooldown seems to speed the process up but it still takes a while.

Step 5 = once you have enough favors, click button called “improve cultural opinion” under diplomacy with Naples. Get opinion to good and even better kindred. Each button click costs 50 favors. So 50 to get to good, 50 to kindred Just have to wait for the favor number to tick up each month.

You get a boost to culture assimilation if the culture you are assimilating likes your culture. Since neopolitans love greeks, converting is faster.

In Anatolia, if you could manage to get Turkish culture to like a Greek culture, which would take a long time and may not be worth it, then it would be cheap to accept Turkish culture, and quicker to assimilate them to Greek. Additionally, any Greek vassals that you make in Anatolia also get that boost to assimilating Turkish culture, which reverses some of the nerfs that vassals got.

To boost culture assimilation even further, you have to reduce your cultures opinion of the other culture. So in our example Greek culture hates Neopolitan or Turkish culture. Greek vassals get the culture assimilation boost from this too.

ADDITIONALLY ACCEPTING THEIR CULTURE IS CHEAPER. You will be able to accept more cultures if those cultures love your country’s culture. Accepting Neopolitan culture should only cost you 0.15 capacity if they are kindred, which is as cheap as you can get it and remarkably cheap relative to your max culture capacity.

Please note that the capacity used when accepting cultures is influenced by cultural tradition and influence. If your culture has low tradition and influence values, the cost of accepting other cultures will be higher. If your tradition and influence are decent (it’s very easy to have good tradition and influence) you can get the 0.15 acceptance cost for cultures that view your culture as kindred. I suspect that if the culture you are conquering has low tradition/influence values that also cheapens the acceptance but I haven’t confirmed this.

Increase cultural influence and tradition by having artists and building certain buildings (I.e universities). Numbers also scale with number of pops with your culture in the world.

As the Byzantines, you can get up to 4 culture capacity pretty early on.

Let’s do the math:

4/0.15 =26.667 aka 26 kindred cultures you can accept!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Please note that if the culture you are accepting has a large % of your countries population, it will be more expensive. For example, when I conquered Naples, it cost 0.86 to accept the Neopolitan Culture but that number decreased after I made a few vassals. When I conquered Sicily, it cost 0.17 capacity to accept them since their culture’s population was a lower % of my total population.

If the cultural leader is your rival, you will not be able to use the improve culture opinion strategy easily. For example Serbia and Bulgaria always pick Byzantium as a rival, so it will take a lot of work to get Serbians or Bulgarians to like Greeks. You have to improve opinions a lot and give them money just to stop them from rivaling you. It’s not impossible but it takes so long that it might not be worth it. Additionally Bulgarian culture and Serbian culture both start with a negative opinion of Greek culture (not neutral) so it costs 150 favors each to get the opinion to kindred.

However you can cheese the system. Annex all of Bulgaria. Make vassals. Gift the vassal that is the new Bulgarian culture leader to Hungary. Then you can use the above strategy to curry favors with Hungary and then improve cultural opinion with Hungary’s Bulgarian vassal. You can also improve Hungarian cultural opinion of Greek. Then when ready just betray Hungary.

So as you can see, it’s not like nerfing vassals made it so that you have to engage in complex high-level critical thinking and decision-making. You just have to click some buttons and kill some time before you conquer a country. It’s no more difficult than the subject spam meta. All patch 1.2 does is make it take longer to expand.

I haven’t tried this yet but if you conquer most of Naples and immediately make a Neopolitan vassal, your vassal becomes the culture leader of neopolitans and so Naples can’t reduce the opinion of Greek culture anymore. I think your Neopolitan vassal will become the culture leader if they have more Neopolitan population than whatever Naples has left. This is a gamey way of maintaining a low culture acceptance cost of conquered cultures. Obviously if you can wipe out Naples in one war there’s no reason to do this.

Conclusion:

In the new patch, planning your conquests by engaging in the button clicking described above is critical to fueling aggressive expansion. If you can get numerous major cultures around your country to view your country’s culture as kindred, you can then explode outward with conquest and accept multiple cultures at 0.15 culture capacity. You will still need to use vassals to integrate much of your conquests. But after you annex them, you get immediate cores and don’t need to worry about the vassal culture conversion debuff. It is still possible to have cores in a massive amount of territory with this strategy due to the insane low cost of 0.15 for accepting kindred cultures.

WARNING ABOUT FLIPPING TO ROMAN CULTURE IN FATE OF THE PHEONIX:

Unfortunately, if you flip to Latin culture via the Latin revival event, your culture capacity goes to absolute shit if you aren’t careful. You are now Latin culture. The neoplotans you conquered love Greeks but they are neutral about your new Latin culture. So the culture capacity to accept skyrockets and you’re fucked.

What I recommend is conquering Rome first (Maritama province) and then go latinization and wait for the Latin revival movement to trigger. You then need to do the steps above to make Italian cultures love Latin culture.

The other problem you have is that when you flip to Latin culture, Latin culture starts with 0 cultural tradition and influence, so the costs of accepting cultures will be as high as they can be. When I first flipped to Latin, the cost of accepting kindred cultures was around 1-2. Eventually, as the cultural influence and tradition tick up (build universities and other buildings that buff culture to help the increase), you will notice that accepting cultures that view Latin culture as kindred decrease to the minimum possible cost of 0.15 culture capacity (you can accept tons of cultures as an empire if you can get cultures to view you as kindred).

UNFORTUNATELY, and this is a major flaw that the devs overlooked, there’s no easy way to make Greek culture love Latin culture. Your country was the greek culture leader. So basically you have to release one of the Greek majority vassals you made earlier. You have to release whoever is the new Greek culture leader and then you have to do the steps above to make Greek culture love Latin culture. That way acceptance of Greek culture in your empire is cheaper. Very tedious.

UPDATE: hotfix 1.2.3 addressed the converting to Latin problem and making Greek view Latin as kindred. When you convert to Latin culture, Greek now views Latin as Kindred right away and vice versa.

CHEESE IDEA: This idea was brought to my attention by a commenter below. If one of your vassals becomes a culture leader, you can make the vassal disloyal, get a “disloyal vassal” casus belli, release them, and then use the above tactics to improve relation with them and get them to make your country’s culture kindred. Then just conquer them and make a new vassal.