I'm having a lot of fun playing Ottomans in EU4, I've gotten up to around 1630, got 110 provinces, and my economy is rather awesome. I have a surplus of around 150 ducats per month, and I'm running out of ways to spend it. I spend a lot on building out my provinces, but since all buildings cost monarch points (adm/dip/mil) as well, I can't just spend all the money there.

I suppose I could use it to hire all available mercenaries, but my 134K strong army doesn't really need reinforcing.

Using it for improving relations could be attractive, but it seems no matter how much you spend, you can never get more than 15 relation points, and I tend to get that with just 25 or 50 ducats.

I've hired all level 3 advisors, to try and convert some of the gold into monarch points, but I'm still running with a huge surplus.

So now I'm just accumulating money, got over 30K in the bank, but that just seems wasteful.

Any suggestions on how I could use some of all that money to further my quest for world domination?


After a certain point, money becomes virtually useless. The only thing you can spend it on effectively without using ruler points is mercenaries, and since mercenaries cost exponentially more as you go over force limits it starts to be a waste.

In EU3 the massive money sink was the ability to spend gold to gain technology. Now that EU4 has removed the ability to do so, so your gold is pretty useless.

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    Not entirely useless; if you lose a war, you can often throw money at them to limit your territorial losses. Playing as the Ottomans, I was halfway occupied with skyrocketing WE and couldn't touch Austria's forces in battle, and then the Mamelukes declared war to pile on. I got out of the western war for 1500 ducats and two tiny countries (Morea and Armenia) released, then proceeded to mop the floor with the Mamelukes. – mmyers Dec 5 '13 at 22:33
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    @mmyers That's an excellent point. Normally I don't lose any wars by the time I have arbitrary amounts of gold but its definitely true that you can use it for peacing out of wars. – Lawton Dec 5 '13 at 22:36
  • It was my own fault, really; I attacked Serbia knowing it was allied with Austria, but I forgot that Austria could then call Castille/Aragon/etc. into the war. I rarely declare war on countries with powerful allies, so I'd never been bitten by cascading alliances before. – mmyers Dec 5 '13 at 22:39

Build Buildings, mainly military, naval, and production. Higher production means more manpower, better navies allows you to dominate in wars, and military buildings lets you recuperate from wars and fight better in said wars. You don't REALLY need to build the other buildings because you have a pretty penny already. Also, do not forget that buildings also cost monarch points!

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As Castile (at the time Spain) I had the same problem. I had maxed out all of my buildings in my Europe territories. I got around the problem by constantly building a better navy. My force limit for the navy was 600 and I barely hit 300. I simply had the poor Iberian Peninsula building ships 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. At the end of it, I had too many light ships so I sent them to Bordeaux, The Channel, Genoa, and Venice to steal everyone's money. But after that I couldn't spend the rest of my money so I just decided to go to war with everyone to take their colonies in the new world (so I don't have to deal with them afterwards) I also decided to build 8 colonies at a time to secure the new world

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Simple, Mercenaries, mercenaries, and paying off your allies' debts. Apart from that there isn't much to get rid of your surplus without going over force limit and having more colonies (if there is any uncolonised land left) than you have colonists, that easily tanks the amount of money you make per month.

Also you could go for reaching the money cap (around 1 million ducats or so)

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