Of your don't haves I'd say get Wealth of Nations next. Good time too, less than four dollars, assuming Steam. Thing is, I don't know which features of any DLC might have come from the associated patch, or later included anyway from another patch.

Like I'm thinking now about how we talk about trade and I'll talk about moving trade ports, or assigning provinces to a trade company or say that Hindu Republics are awesome not realizing that you might not even have these features which are all part of Wealth of Nations.

Well my Naples game crashed and burned. Before I describe that calamity, I want to say I am rather amazed at how much more complex EU IV is with all of these new expansions. It's going to take a bit to wrap my noggin' 'round all the changes and additions. I want to say I like what I see but it will take more time to get a good handle on it and see how these new mechanics play out over the course of a full run. Certainly longer than the 30 years I played Naples for.

So Naples of course begins the game as a junior partner in a PU with Aragon. There's no way Naples can muster the forces to win an independence war on it's own, so we need nations to support that action. Castile and the Pope formerly known as SuperPope agreed. But Aragon had England and Austria as allies, so at best we might hope for a draw, but to gain independence we would need to win. And since the war goal is to protect our capital, I knew that would never happen in a war where I would be responsible to defend it. Castile isn't going to come and park a 25k stack in Naples.

So we waited...and waited...for 20+ years. We had to fight alongside Aragon in two concurrent wars, but the upshot was at the end they were forced to cancel the alliance with England. Austria then got in to two wars and once their war exhaustion was high enough that they wouldn't answer Aragon's call we were ready.

But whats this? Castile has let Andalucia become overrun with rebels and after losing half their manpower defeating them, they then chose to sit their entire army on a siege to reclaim their occupied cities and that took years. Good grief.

Finally after what seemed forever, and allowed Aragon to build their Army back up, we declared Independence. The war got off to a great start, we were winning easily on land and at sea and sieging down Aragon. I particularly wanted to get Sicily in the peace deal so we were busy getting that occupied when an event fired. And man did I blow it.

The event was France asking me to abdicate. Two choices. First was to refuse, lose 1 stab and 13 noble rebel regiments rise up in Naples. The other said agree and France would be very pleased. Now, my dynasty had literally started two months before when we declared war, so I had no particular attachment to these people (there are queens now by the way, so will rule in place of regents, nice change). So I interpreted this as agree to abdicate, a new family will rise to rule, and France will be my chum for the rest of the game.

So OK, that's not so bad. Let's just click that and get on with sieging down Sicily! Ooops, sorry, you just agreed to end the war and become Aragon's lapdog again. But France thinks you're swell. Well if that isn't a kick in the nuts. Of course being ironman, no way to take a mulligan and that game came to an end. *whistles*