EU4 starts on the 11th of November, 1444, one day after the Battle of Varna, where the Christian Crusaders were defeated by Ottoman forces. Before that I played a game as the Ottomans, again a very powerful and easy nation at the start of the game.

Seriously, I think theyвЂ™re going for AI Prussia, which is just nuts. It actually did end of being a bit of a challenge, with England getting in close with the Holy Roman Emperor all game, first Austria and then a scarily big Brandenburg. Shockingly, pre-renaissance France is a pretty easy nation to play. And so, I maybe tomorrow-ed it for three or four months, until I got tired of not playing EU4 any more.Д«ack in September, I started a new game of Europa Universalis 4. It would be long, it would be tough, and it would require a lot more planning than I usually do in my games. And thatвЂ™s kind of what happened with A Tale of Two Families. I didnвЂ™t want to look through all of them again, so I gave up. Yes, I know the last one is underground, it wasnвЂ™t that one.

Trying to get all of the phones in the city, I missed just oneвЂ¦while crossing off all of the ones on the map. And thatвЂ™s not something new, the only other time IвЂ™ve tried any long-planned achievement hunting is in Halo 3: ODST, both the original version and the Master Chief Collection version. I didnвЂ™t play any Europa Universalis for months, because I was a bit intimidated by the challenge of the achievement. ThereвЂ™s a limit to what you can take every war youвЂ™ve got peace treaties to wait out, and back to aggressive expansion, you canвЂ™t just keep picking on the same country over and over again. Even if I were able to completely obliterate Bahmanis as Vijayanagar, IвЂ™d have to do it slowly. Completely defeating the other is a challenge.Д«ut achievement hunting can be hard, and time-consuming. Vijayanagar is big at the start, but so is Bahamanis. Less than half the medium score of 3, kind of lame. I currently have sixteen very easy achievements and fourteen easy ones, for an average (keep in mind IвЂ™m just making these numbers up, I donвЂ™t think the community uses them) of 1.47. A medium, worth 3, would be pretty nice to have. So I set up a plan: I would figure out my вЂњdifficulty scoreвЂќ for achievements, with very easy being worth 1 and impossible being worth 6, calculating the average of everything I had. As Vijayanagar I would probably have to deal a bit more with aggressive expansion, which is other countries getting mad at me for growing too fast, but it still would it probably be the easier route. Vijayanagar, the larger one, would probably be easier, save for Bahmanis being in central India and having more directions to go and more small nations to pick on. You need to capture their capital and fully annex all of their land. The Tale of Two Families achievement requires you to start as either Vijayanagar or Bahmanis, the two largest countries on the Indian sub-continent at the start of the game, and completely destroy the other. And so I picked one I thought I could do: вЂњA Tale of Two FamiliesвЂќ And so I thought, вЂњwhy not try to get a medium level achievement?вЂќ An easy medium, of course, because going all-out on my first attempt at a higher level would be, well, hard. It came about after I got the feeling that all of my EU4 achievements were ones considered either вЂњeasyвЂќ or вЂњvery easyвЂќ by the community. Back in the spring, I was planning to do an article documenting my attempt at a more challenging game of Europa Universalis IV.

A tale of two families eu4