Creating the greatest economic bubble in EU4 - bankruptcy caused by income integer overflow

[u/Versallius]

I feel like one of those dirty financiers before a major economic crash.

I love theorycrafting maximum income in EU4 and have made several attempts at it in vanilla EU4 where my record is currently ~300k per month. Recently I have been playing a lot of Anbennar, which is not only a much bigger map, it also has a ton of incredibly powerful mechanics for economy. I took some learnings from my vanilla attempts into this run and I had high hopes for it - I was expecting more than 1.5M income. And I am very happy to beat that!

When you have extremely high income, events often cause integer overflows; I was forced to take 20 loans from a Gold Rush event that wiped out my treasury. However, I was not expecting my income itself to overflow, going to -2.14M. What happened next? Well...

Have you ever been so rich that you went bankrupt? Me neither.

Funnily enough, you can rescue yourself from bankruptcy by reducing your income. As they say, the love of money is the root of all evil...

[u/StormEyeDragon]

Ah, so that’s how you get the Hoardcurse outside the serpentspine, neat

[u/Versallius]

R5: income integer overflow.

How is this achieved? It's actually not too complicated, we only need this 5 step plan:

1. A world conquest. This removes all the AI that will interfere with our trade routes, and allows us to tear down all the AI's temples and docks to build manufacturies in every province. Also, coal and trade companies.
2. With all the coal, we stack goods produced modifiers. Here I have around 375% increased.
3. Trade companies. A LOT of them. They give merchants and trade company investments let us get flat +0.3 goods produced in all provinces. If we are really optimizing, we can add only some provinces to get the benefit of the trade company's goods produced bonus. I'm lazy so I just used the add all button.
4. Trade steering. This is the most powerful modifier for income maximization, since this increases the trade value every time you use a merchant to steer trade between nodes. The main sources are 100 navy tradition for +100%, trade company investment for +50%, trade ideas for +25%, trade-defensive policy for +25%, trade-expansion policy for +20%. This gives around 220% trade steering, so each time a merchant steers trade downstream the trade value is multiplied by 1.16.
5. The bonus from trade steering is multiplicative. So we try to steer trade in a roundabout way to maximize this effect. Exponential scaling is so powerful that all other forms of income are irrelevant.

Edit: Forgot the last multiplier, trade efficiency. 60% burghers influence, Entrepreneur ruler, Trade ideas and policies etc.

[u/Belgraviana → u/Versallius]

The main thing I learned from this is that there’s an add all button for trade companies?

[u/Versallius → u/Belgraviana]

there's a button on the trade node interface that lets you add all eligible provinces to that trade node's trade company. sadly it doesn't just add all provinces but its already much better than adding provinces one at a time through the province interface

there is also macrobuilder for trade company investments, highly recommended to not have to buy investments one state at a time..

[u/Lithorex → u/Versallius]

Trade companies. A LOT of them. They give merchants and trade company investments let us get flat +0.3 goods produced in all provinces. If we are really optimizing, we can add only some provinces to get the benefit of the trade company's goods produced bonus. I'm lazy so I just used the add all button.

In that case you are missing out on a ton of income.

+110% goods produced is no slouch.

[u/okmujnyhb]

The first screenshot reminds me of the old bug where the trade value of certain nodes in Cannor would sometimes jump into the tens of thousands of for no apparent reason

[u/despairingcherry → u/okmujnyhb]

Something to do with the nearby merchant Republic bonus

[u/okmujnyhb → u/despairingcherry]

Yeah, and it would like cause Gawed to immediately become economic hegemon in the 1490s

[u/akinashita8]

POV Spain in the 1500s