Byzantium Guide: Surviving the First 50 Years

Byzantium in 1337 is the hardest kind of start: an empire-rank country with a city-state’s income. You hold most of the southern Balkans, four provinces in Anatolia (one of them an exclave), an alliance with Trebizond, and Epirus as a vassal. You also hold hundreds of ducats of debt, a running deficit, high inflation, a dissolved navy’s worth of missing infrastructure, and two disasters waiting behind the unpause button. The Ottomans are massing across the straits and Stefan Dušan’s Serbia wants Thessaloníki.

The plan below follows our standard first-50-years framework: what to do before unpausing, the opening decade, the middle game, and the consolidation that turns survival into a normal campaign.

Before you unpause: economy triage

Everything in the first session is about the budget screen. The community consensus, consistent across the wiki guide and every successful Reddit run we reviewed, is a triage in four moves:

Shrink the realm to what you can hold. Release Morea and Thessaly as subjects (pronoias), and cede isolated locations — the classic example is Pyri — to them or to Epirus. Keep the corridor between Thessaloníki and Constantinople, keep the Aegean islands (cheap, quiet), and keep your Anatolian provinces in the realm for now: as subjects they’d be too weak to survive and give you nothing.

Cut every recurring cost that isn’t survival. Downsize the Thessaloníki castle, delete your starting professional troops, and stop all construction. The navy is the one genuinely contested item — see the FAQ. Maintain fort spending on Constantinople; that fort is your insurance policy.

Set the cabinet to stabilize, not to grow. Two cabinet seats go to improving legitimacy and stability. Hire at most one advisor (the legitimacy seat) or none at all. If you don’t know the trade system well yet, automate trade — a bad manual trade setup is worse than automation here.

Point every spare ducat at inflation. High inflation inflates every other cost, so it’s the highest-leverage fix. Adjust minting to hold a balanced budget or a surplus of about one ducat, keep estate taxes at the point where satisfaction equilibrium stays at 50 or above, and set court and stability spending so legitimacy and stability drift sits at zero.

One consolidation rule from the 1.3.10 community runs is worth adopting early: keep your economy centralized on the capital and inside one big market. Buildings ticking upkeep in low-control territory are a silent drain — turn them off or tear them down.

Years 0–10: the two disasters and the Anatolian question

Shortly after unpausing, two disasters fire. The Byzantine Succession Crisis threatens civil war, but if your estates are satisfied — which the triage above is designed to guarantee — you will most likely never see the war itself. The Fate of the Phoenix disaster (DLC) does little immediate damage; its function is to sit on you until you’ve reconquered enough land and ended the Rise of the Turks situation. That makes your expansion target unambiguous: western Anatolia.

The western beyliks are the right first bites for two reasons: they are the weakest, and they hold large Greek populations that integrate cleanly. The two openings with finished runs behind them:

• Karasids first. They break away from the Germiyanids in the opening months and are briefly diplomatically isolated — a clean window, and the geography gives you a direct corridor into Anatolia.
• Ottomans first. Removing the future superpower before it snowballs. One school does this as a no-CB war and accepts the stability and antagonism cost in exchange for strong event buffs and the threat simply being gone; another school considers no-CB unnecessary since your Anatolian core-reconquest wars are easy and cheap. Both positions are argued by players with successful campaigns — pick based on how much you value tempo over cleanliness.

Two money notes from the 1.2-era threads: peace-deal cash goes straight to debt repayment, and improving relations with the Pope can be converted into a donation of several hundred ducats for a small legitimacy cost — enough to clear your starting loans — provided the Pope hasn’t rivaled you (it’s luck-dependent; check before you build the plan around it).

Where less than roughly 30% of a conquered area’s population is Greek, create subjects rather than governing it directly.

Years 10–30: expand without dying

Expansion should be steady but never faster than three constraints allow: your economy stays positive, revolts stay suppressible, and no coalition forms. Watch the nearby major powers — Mamluks, Naples, Hungary — whose intervention in the early game is the single most common cause of death in the runs we reviewed.

Fight cheap: only engage armies meaningfully smaller than yours, and stack terrain, fort, and river-crossing modifiers. Byzantium cannot afford heroic battles; it wins wars by never taking a fair fight.

As income stabilizes (community benchmark from 1.3.10 runs: aim for a comfortable surplus by mid-game rather than a knife-edge budget — one detailed run reported riding production-efficiency investment and capital economy to a rapidly compounding income), start spending on legitimacy and begin revoking the estate privileges that hurt you.

Years 30–50: back to being a normal empire

Ending the Fate of the Phoenix disaster — land reconquered, Rise of the Turks concluded — is the campaign’s phase change. From there, Byzantium plays like a standard empire: the restoration events chain (see the Byzantine scripted content) points you toward the old Roman borders, and the DLC achievements give the long-game goals: Reborn from the Ashes (win the disaster) and Belisar’s Legacy (restore Justinian’s borders and mend the Schism). The base-game achievement There Can Be Only One (dismantle the HRE as Byzantium) is the century-scale project.

Common death spirals

Sources checked

Formation requirements are transcribed on the wiki directly from the game files (common/formable_countries/00_formable_countries.txt). The strategy above synthesizes the wiki’s community guide (written in the Fate of the Phoenix era) with r/EU5 threads verified on patches 1.2.3 and 1.3.10. Where the community disagrees — the navy, the no-CB Ottoman opening — we present the split rather than picking a winner. Numeric values in this guide are community-reported, not file-verified; treat exact thresholds as patch-sensitive and check tooltips in your version.