I've had EU3 vanilla for a few years and love it. As a graduation present, my mom is getting me EU3: Chronicles. So I'm upgrading from vanilla to Divine Wind all in one shot. Any tips?
Oh man, gameplay's changed so much from vanilla to DW that it's hard to know where to start. It's practically a completely different game. The big things are the changed colonization model, decisions, heirs, the Holy Roman Empire and Shogunate, casus bellis, missions, advisers and cultural tradition, national ideas, and the new DW building system.
For the first, have you played one of the mods that allows variable trade goods in colonized provinces? Yeah, they put that in in In Nomine, so now you won't know what you're getting when you settle. Plus, colonial trade goods are now strongly affected by technology (indirectly; building certain buildings dramatically boosts demand for colonial trade goods in that province. There are tooltips, so don't worry too much about which buildings do that), so they're worth a lot more later than they are early on, especially if you can get control over the centers of trade the provinces are attached to.
Past all
that, the way you colonize provinces is completely different. Instead of colonial provinces needing repeated colonist dispatches to get up to size, since they hardly grew at all on their own, now a colony will grow at 50 people per year, base (the rate is modified by sliders, natives, tropical/non-tropical, and one NI), so it would take 16 years to grow to full size if you just colonized a province and then did nothing. Because of this, you get a lot fewer colonists than you did in vanilla, maybe 2-3 per year if you set things up right (and you're not exploiting the system). That means it takes longer to colonize large swaths of land, but OTOH the colonies will (slowly) grow to full size on their own, although they're quite expensive to maintain while they're just colonies. Something similar was done with missionaries, now you just plop one on a province and he has a certain chance per year of converting it, but you pay a yearly maintenance fee. However, it's a lot cheaper to run a bunch of missionaries at once than a bunch of colonies.
Furthermore, overseas provinces more than a certain distance from your homeland are now considered "distant overseas" (if you have a land connection or they are on the same continent, the provinces don't suffer an overseas modified, so Venice, for example, has no problems with that). Instead of generating production income, they generate tariffs. For every tariff-generating province, you need a small or large ship (not a galley or transport) to "protect the sea lanes" and allow full tariff efficiency. That means that navies, the naval slider, and the naval NIs (particularly Grand Navy and the new Press Gangs, which both make it more economical to have large navies) are much much more important for colonial nations.
Getting off the subject of colonization, we come to decisions. This, thankfully, is a lot simpler, actually rather straightforward when you come to them in game. Basically, they replace a lot of events, letting you see what things you need to work towards to achieve something rather than leaving it mysterious. All of the nation formation events are now decisions, for example (and there are several more of them; Hindustan, Japan, the HRE, and Scandinavia are the ones that stick out to me as not being in vanilla).
Heirs are also pretty important, and also pretty simple. No more random chance of inheriting, PUing (which by the way is now permanent, provided relations and prestige are maintained!), or having a regency council. All of those can be predicted beforehand, and you can exploit even a temporary prediction of any of those, for example by claiming someone's throne and forcing them into a PU instead of waiting.
Next, there's the Holy Roman Empire and Shogunate. These are a lot more interesting than they used to be in vanilla. The HRE now protects all members against foreign invasion and internal wars, so it can be a lot harder to successfully wage war against HRE states (and you get a lot more badboy for doing so, too. I mean a
lot, especially if you're in the HRE yourself and don't have a core on the land you take!). Both have decision chains that allow the HRE or Shogun to centralize the country and form the Holy Roman Empire or Japan as a single country.
Casus bellis are another big thing. No longer do you just get a generic casus belli that lets you do what you want; instead, each one is linked to specific outcomes that it makes easier and less penalizing. In particular, there are a number that are specifically oriented towards land acquisition, sometimes even making it free in BB terms to get provinces! However, each one is linked to particular provinces or particular outcomes, and offer no BB advantage for doing other things.
Missions are not so big. They help orient you by giving you something particular to work for. Many nations have historical missions which can be quite powerful (one of Byzantium's missions shuts down the Papacy, for instance, while Muscowy's missions greatly accelerate their ability to form Russia), but even the generic ones can be useful.
Advisers and cultural tradition are another important change. Nowadays, you can only have one adviser of a particular type at a time, meaning that you can't stack diplomats to get a super BB reduction or masters of the mint to greatly reduce inflation (which combined with the building system changes means that National Bank is much more worthwhile, as it is considerably harder to get inflation reduction overall). However, you can buy advisers of a specific type with tradition, usually cultural tradition but for some advisers also army or naval tradition, in the same way that you buy admirals or generals. This greatly facilitates some decisions or events. There are a number of ways to get cultural tradition; Patron of the Arts now grants it, as do Fine Arts Academies, making both of those much more powerful. There are also a number of decisions that grant cultural tradition.
Paradox added a bunch of new national ideas, but the most important thing about them is the new tech level requirements system. You can't select some NIs until you reach a certain level of technology, such as Quest for the New World. Since different NI trees are based on different technologies, this provides an incentive to fund advancement in not just government, army, and naval.
Finally, we have the new building system. Essentially, there are a lot more buildings you can build, but there are now severe limits on how many you're allowed to build, as every building needs a magistrate (similar to things needing diplomats or missionaries), which are also required for provincial decisions and possibly some national decisions. Some buildings are also unique, so you can only build one in the entire country (among these are the tax assessor, which is why it's a lot harder to get inflation reduction), and there are advanced buildings in each "tree" (identical to the tech trees) that are exclusive; if you have the level 5 and 6 trade buildings in a province, for instance, you can't have the level 5 and 6 production buildings in the same province, so there's an incentive to specialize. Some provinces have the army buildings and give a lot of manpower, some have the naval buildings and can build ships fast, boost ship force limits, and repair ships fast, some have production buildings and give a lot of tax, and so forth.
What the hell! Mameluks on a quadriple dosis of steriods 