the burgundian succession was very, very strange and I think it resolved with Burgundy simply joining the HRE, blocking France. Aragon and Castille both had strong alliances and didn't declare war on each other.
I'm basically frozen in my game now. the entire HRE is coalitioned against me but the emperor, Bohemia, is my ally.
I think I hate where the game is at now because if you let things go on too long the small countries start building up dev until they're each 40 dev provinces. then you can't annex them. but I felt like I was making fucking crazy fast gains.
You lucked out with the RNG on Burgundy then, as it sounds like the AI was able to either reach 1500 without triggering the succession crisis (mostly likely rng killed Charles the Bold before he became Duke, since he has a hidden -95% heir chance flag that'll all but guarantee the crisis if he ascends) or somehow all the other ais were as nice as possible to Burgundy in their event decisions in the crisis. Even after that there's still like two more checks on events that have to be passed before it can actually enter the empire, I've never actually seen the AI pull it off.
I don't know how viable a strategy it is in the HRE, but a strategy to get around troublesome coalitions is to pick off the weaker members - declaring war on allies of the coalition members that aren't in a coalition and then vassalizing those members in the peace - after which you can declare war on the weakened coalition. You don't even have to win, you just need to get a peace since that blocks them from joining a coalition. A similar strategy would be allying an ally of a country you want to invade, calling them in as a cobelligerent in another war, and then declaring war on the target which will break their alliance with your new ally since cobelligerents in a war can't join a war against someone they're already an ally of a war in.
I was low effort trolling, but I do seriously believe the Ottomans have a stronger case for being Rome than the Christian successor states (Francia, HRE) in the West or the Russians do. It lacks the continuity of state but it did more or less absorb the same territory.
Minus the entire western half of the empire, which the Franks absorbed half a millennia prior.
Interestingly this echoes the arguments people in the sixteenth century had over what constitutes being a more legitimate successor to the Roman Empire. Charles V and Suleiman had an exchange of letters early into both their reigns where they got into an argument over who was the True and Honest Roman Emperor and Suleiman's argument was mostly territorial in nature while Charles' was more civilizational. It wound up where Suleiman would only acknowledge him as King of Spain and Charles would just call him the Turk.
If you want a better argument, you could point out that both empires were mainly interested in Europe as a source of slaves and soldiers.
@Ughubughughughughughghlug for Vic 2 the biggest overhaul mods of the base game are
TGC and
GFM.
DoD is the most popular alt-hist mod but it's pretty barebones and there's a
rework of it that add's a shit ton of flavor
I don't like the rework, it's far more railroaded and event-heavy than either TGC and GFM to the point it's clearly just trying to be the TNO of V2 mods.
Honestly you can do a pretty good simulation of the Napoleonic wars in EU/Vic2.
Hard disagree, EU4 is awful at simulating the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It's not really good at simulating late-medieval Europe either but the simulation is much better in the first hundred years of a campaign than in the last hundred. Its coalition mechanic isn't even good at simulating how Napoleonic coalitions worked - but I'm not going to really fault them for that since the only game I've played with an actually engrossing coalition mechanic (I.E members having objectives, drawing in new members, defections, etc.) is Nobunaga's Ambition: Sphere of Influence.
Honestly, I don't really read events in EU4. Like, if you're playing mods for the quality of the writing, you're already on to a loser.
Good events aren't necessary for a good mod, but most standout mods have good events. Purely gameplay focused mods get reduced to niches in discord multiplayer servers for a reason.
If I want to play an alternate history or a fantasy mod, I need a compelling reason to actually do so since there are so many. Flavor is one of those things, especially since it's the only thing really separating states in EU4 aside from their map colors.
