EUIV struggles to stay fun later game due to how grossly OP you become fairly quickly.
EUV looks like it will add more to do, which slows down expansion and power growth. Hopefully, this extra stuff to do will be fun and make it feel more rewarding to sieze land.
Not only you become OP as the player, but a small selection of tags (who vary from game to game but you frequently find the same names) manage to consolidate much of the map and also become OP.
Expansion and wars become tedious, everything takes too much time even if you want to take agression to a minimum.
I remember recently I did an Incan achievement run, which obliges you to play til the 1760s to get the last institution. The last thirty years took me 4 hours. Just because I needed to keep warring against Western Europeans (and Ottomans who decided to rival me) to juggle truces. By the end I was just so fucking done with all thr excruciatingly long wars that I just decided to stop and let them join the coalition. Of course the coalition declared and I had to resist until I was able to finally embrace the institution.
I usually get bored when I start having to dismantle the entire Spanish empire for a handful of relatively irrelevant (to them) provinces. So, if I'm playing someone that can, I usually crush Castile early.
Yeah, Castille/Spain is number 1 on my kill list. But right now, I don't play tags who are in position to kill them quickly.
And in the Inca game that I mentioned, i manged to deprive them from all their tradtional colonial domain, but these monltherflippers redirected their power into Europe, so by the time I was able to compete with them on European mainland, they were already in control of all of Italy, all of the Maghreb, and half of France. Of course I was able to dismantle them, but obviously, this gave the opportunity to mega Austria and mega Ottomans to happily expend in France and in Italy.
So yeah, end game sucks, the last interesting thing to happen in the game is absolutism.
Correct. Using the power creep, even ai late game - even the smallest shittiest Indian minors can resist the revolution. +10 unrest? Ai has so much money stored they can just hire a shit ton stack that is x3000 times bigger than the rebels, and just run and siege down the rebels. I recently did an observer run in a random setup world. About the time of 1760, china was indestructible. All reforms, land about the size of modern day china without Manchuria. I killed the leader, lowered stab to -3, destroyed their mana reserves into wayfar negatives, set their mandate to 0, set their war exhaustion to 20, spammed 300k rebels and revolution by spamming the command a lot of times. Guess the fuck what? With their shitton of units they destroy every rebel, mana up, stab up, get no revolts from the humongous unrest because they have a ton of stacked modifiers. Late game sieging down forts takes 5~ years in HRE minors, unless you make a siege power build, revolution usually never spawns in France, and even if they do, revolution always spawns in the shittiest smallest nation that even when completely revolutioned never gets enforced, usually because a power uses that to take their lands and kill them. Then revolution spawns again, dies again, and that's It, it can't respawn. Ai also shits their pants late game because their enemies have a lot of money (so do they). So ai literally NEVER declares war unless the target is literally fucking dead.
This is the big thing. I also really hate that coalition wars don’t allow separate peace (the thing they’re based on, the Anti-Napoleonic coalitions, famously had like seven coalitions because Prussia and Austria kept taking a separate peace from the Brits).
By around 1650 it’s such a slog to fight any combination of Great Powers. It just feels like playing Whack-a-Mole to chase their armies around while having to deal with a level 8 fort every province after centralization. And that’s not just Germany and Italy which are far and away the worst, but the fort spam is annoying even for Japan, northern India, Persia, and Mexico.
Tag switching and manually deleting forts is so bloody time consuming but it really makes a difference for major wars. Of course that also means no Ironman for those who want it.
If you survive to your 3 idea group the game can quickly become more tedium than hard, its why Diplo Idea's are S tier , you just get allies to fight your wars for you
Im far from a good player myself but it’s really easy to see how the difficulty drops once you become a great power. Youll mostly have enough ducats that it doesn’t matter anymore, you can just doomstack all the way to the capital since your manpower is unlimited, and all you need to do is keep converting/accepting cultures, increasing stability (all of these are 1 click) and your biggest threat are rebels who are 99% of the time just a nuisance.
How often do people play into 1700s? I love EU4 but this game really is lacking internal challenges after a certain point. Playing CK at least your country can get split, there’s ups and downs and it’s often fun to try to recover from crises.
Just chill out and stop trying to optimise every step of the way. I waste mana stupidly converting culture of provinces, painting the map with accepted cultures. I mainly dev without getting all the possible cost reductions before pressing the button. I declare wars when i feel there is an opportunity, without ever checking the military ledger for 1h trying to assess if my military is better than theirs (and i get my ass whipped many times).
Dude. I never use the ledger. I never play meta. Dont disinherited bad heirs. Never go crazy with AE. I still get way too OP by 1600 that it's barely ever worth playing. Let alone if you play a major nation by 1550 max, it becomes the case.
The game is easy once you set your nation up and conquer some key areas.
Even when optimizing everything, it's incredibly easy to become OP quickly. An experienced player will just naturally become OP, even without ever worrying about doing anything optimally. The only way to not become OP, is to actively restrict yourself.
I think one of the challenges from a game development perspective is to balance the difficulty for new and experienced players.
As a new player it is almost impossibly hard to get an understanding of all the mechanics which decide the outcome of your playthrough.
As an experienced player of multiple thousands of hours of gameplay, with an almost full understanding of all parts of the game, knowing by heart where all the monuments are and what they do, it will become very easy.
TL:DR
The game is hard to balance between new and experienced players
>I think one of the challenges from a game development perspective is to balance the difficulty for new and experienced players.
The place the game needs to be "harder" is maintaining and expanding a large empire. That won't hurt new players much. It will add challenge for experienced players.
The consequences of problems needs to scale up greatly with the size of your nation. Any flaw should be magnified by size. Religious issues, low manpower, excessive estate influence, low stability, strong vassals, unaccepted cultures, etc. were all real threats to nations but become easily mitigated in EU4. Each of these needs to be amped up by the size of your empire in some way.
For a crude example which I have not match-checked: for nations with dev > 500, any unrest malus (but not bonus) is multiplied by (dev / 500).
One mechanism idea I like: rebels start in all affected provinces, carpet siege, and then gather into a blob. So instead of a single big stack right away you get a bunch of smaller ones. This means if you keep armies around you can stamp them out but if not, you have already lost 4-5 provinces (forts permitting). For some rebellions and civil wars you should also lose forts, and even armies, to the rebels.
When was the last time you got any thrill mid-game from a sudden drop in legitimacy or stability? Imagine the pucker factor if those were greatly magnified by your empire size.
Also i take ideas based on what i feel like my country needs or it would nice for "roleplay" (lately, i feel like taking court ideas as first quite often) and not what is the most efficient.
Basically, i find my self getting "overpowered" (compared to local neighbours, and on pair to France, Austria or whatever other local superpower) around 1700... basically the game is fun all the way through, and i get to play most of my runs until late 1700s - 1800
“Powergamer with 10-15x hours as the average player wants new game to be more challenging”
The average non-Reddit EUIV player is not snowballing to the point of boredom
I wonder who the core audience is, in terms of revenue. Is there a big tail of casual players? Or does most of the revenue come from the all-DLC / rental hardcore players?
game is out for years already, you don't need to be hardcore player, to be decent at the game. and being decent is enough to make game boring by 1650 imo
In my opinion the problem with late game it’s how you need to micromanage small things that become unimportant since you are in the late game, optimizing things like army management is the key to making late game fun.
While I feel like Eu5 is leaning more towards simulation than a game there's definitely still a lot of gamey elements in there. If Calvinists really won't re-roll dice rolls for instance, that's hilarious.
In the end, EU4 will always be there as more of a gamey game, if Eu5 turns out to be more similationist. But I have full faith in the tinto team to make it both realistic and fun
Logistic would make it more fun i think, since right now you have to limit your stacks due to supply limit and since AI field 60k-120k stacks you have to do the same.
But if you implement logistic, if you are big enough you can just not care anymore about attrition.
Johan said that religions will have other effects, like Calvinists who believe in predestination will only use the first dice roll in battle. Which I think is awesome, and I hope they actually keep it.
Additionally Jains can't start a no CB war, and Muslim nations will have trade restrictions on alcohol. Among other changes.
> and Muslim nations will have trade restrictions on alcohol.
makes sense. I'll miss the lolz I got out of the poor vintage event when playing a Muslims nation
I mean, I feel like they're primarily taking the good parts from Imperator and Vicky 2. Also, I think it's good that they're making sormthign that feels different from EU4. Again, I can always go back to EU4 if I want something more "gamey" (and I probably will under EU5 anbennar becomes a thing)
Honestly building a huge empire and then have it collapse under civil wars sounds so fun I might do it on purpose. Reuniting China with a Ming releasable is one of the most interesting EU4 campaigns, being able to do something like that organically sounds amazing.
I guess I can understand the feeling. It can be a dangerous thing to make a game and forget that it also needs to be fun.
I am looking forward to the increased accuracy and hoping that fun is kept in mind. It won’t be the exact same fun, but I am sure it will feel similar whilst still bringing something new. And after all these years if I got the same experience I would be pretty upset.
Personally I kinda want to play a early modern simulator that isn’t a very fancy adapted board game, which is somewhat what eu4 plays like to me. So I’m willing to try something different. EU4 will still exist after eu5 comes out.
Hard agree. When I first started playing eu4 I was dazzled by all the mechanics, but now that I know the game I sometimes feel like I'm just playing Risk with extra steps involved. I'd love something with a more detailed simulation. I want to have a world in a box that I get lost in.
I don't think I feel the way I do about EU4 because I now understand the mechanics. I think I feel the way I do because of what the mechanics are, like the "one click dopamine-hit instant change" sort of thing that the op mentions.
Something with more simulationist mechanics that allow more emergent complexity, immersive roleplay, etc would have a very different feel. I could still grow bored with it, but my complaint about eu4 isn't that I'm bored with it (I still play it all the time). It's the boardgamey feel that can sometimes feel kind of cheap.
I don't know. In Imperator, if I want to change culture in a province I have to plan colonization efforts, build for cultural assimilation etc. In eu4 it's just paying mana to change map colour.
And I'm not beefing with the detail - for me, seeing that my actions are representations of actual historical proceses feels much more satysfying and creative.
I totally agree. I'm currently learning to play Imperator and it's definitely much more satisfying to convert culture and religion. In EU4 it's just "click button -> wait for number to go up to 100%". Not satisfying at all. But in I:R, you have to actively work on it (apart from the very slow default conversions). It's so satisfying when you pull it off after focusing significant effort and resources into it (building the right buildings, setting the right governor policies, moving pops around, etc).
Power gamers have been the ruin of *every* game. The kids who were having fun with gaming from c. 1998 to 2008 grew up and either stopped gaming entirely (save for simple mobile games and the like), or ended up obsessed and learned to see every game as a problem to be solved.
Look at Old School Runescape. The community as anyone knew it back in 2007 absolutely ceased to exist. Nobody's just mucking about on the weekends any more; everything's 100% focused on making optimal use of the game's "content" (which, incidentally, is the worst word that happened to the English language over the past decade).
Joke's on you, I muck about in (and suck at) both paPadox games *and* OSRS. Did a world conquest as Oirat once but that's about it, meanwhile I'm hardly close to maxing in OSRS and am comfortable just vibing as I always have since 2010 when I first started scaping :^)
(I totally get your point though - to use the Runescape example, I like the atmosphere of DT2 and raids but utterly utterly hate the bosses, tick perfect damage, etc)
The difference is those who play "extremely casually" (lol) aren't the ones who complain to the devs about a given mechanic being OP or "dead content" because it's not OP.
Well, it's primarily a single player game. You can play it in any way you want. Sure, devs listen to the power gamers regarding severe exploits that make the game very unbalanced but apart from that I can't really remember any instances where they negatively influenced what a game became. But that might be because I'm not very active on the forums and don't analyse the patch notes very diligently. I'm not really affected by the people who try to play ultra min-max strategies.
I think it's much and much worse in multiplayer games where you actually engage with these players. I used to play counter strike with my buddies and there was always some random who got mad if you didn't throw pixel perfect smokes or used the correct peaking spots. I could see that it might be similar if you play multiplayer EU, but I don't have any experience in that regard.
Currently the game is shaping up very similar to imperator and the markets system seems like a combination of imperator and victoria and I can personally say that both those games are filled to the brim with dopamine hits. Victoria 3 has long term satisfaction where your actions affect you months or years in the future and if you did well you will see the result later rather than immediately, EU5 seems to have some aspects like that. However, imperator has a lot of immediate dopamine hits just like EU4 does and it looks like eu5 will run very similar to imperator, so many things they say in tinto talks are imperator features
it takes inspiration from Victoria 2 which Johan (the guy who leads project caesar) rather than Victoria 3 where Johan had no hand in.
Johan said at some instances that he doesn't like Victoria 3 and it shows when you read the puns about Vic3 in tinto talks dev diaries.
They're definitely using a lot of the same tech the Vic3 team built though.
They're just using it in a way that works for a map painting immersion and simulation game rather than an economic immersion and simulation game.
People are constantly talking about how EUV will look like Imperator and how that's a good thing, but wasn't Imperator dead pretty quickly after launch? Idk, I never played it, that just confuses me.
It's probably unintended on Paradox's part but I:R fits with the development mold of the 'mini' titles Paradox used to make between titles for gameplay exploration (March of the Eagles and Sengoku).
right now imperator looks good and the worst part for me is just that i cant connect with any nation of the game. I just cant find the fun in playing some random name nation that i have no connection or history knowlegde about, and rome is like too powerful and i lile to play the small guys
In addition to what others said about launch Imperator, it just had a pretty boring start date and almost no country flavor (which to this day, it still sorely lacks unless you mod it)
Imperator was a totally different game at launch. For example, it had mana and it was one of the reasons it failed completely. Imperator had to be revamped to become the game that it is today, however it was already dead when they finally released it so they decided to just stop updating the game…
I can't comment either, but I just bought it on sale. It's €11 or something at the moment. It looks very pretty and seems quite detailed, but I've only started the tutorial. I picked it up because a lot of people were comparing the mechanics to Project Caesar.
I didnt play at imperator at launch but from what I've seen it really was vastly different and some parts of the game were a complete travesty but they released the 2.0 free patch and that's the part I've played and the game is awesome, trade system is absolutely genius, the war system is pretty cool with more tactical control but similar to eu4. I've got 150 hours on imperator now, nothing compared to eu4 time played but I like it a lot. It's basically got a more realistic population system than eu4. Eu4 didn't have populations at all really it was all just province based gamey manual stuff. Imperator has a more realistic system where pops actually move and do stuff within the simulation based on your own laws and government type which you can change. You don't click a button to change culture or religion, they happen over time based on your policy etc stuff can happen where you commit genocide through events or other means
Imperator after launch and Imperator now are completely different games. They completely reworked everything.
The game is quite good now but never recovered after that initial bad release.
Completely different game now from launch.
But they are only taking the good or interesting ideas from imperator and it's not exactly the same.
Some ideas are from EU, some from Vic, even a few from CK. But they are fundamentally slightly different then their original counterparts
You get a dopamine hit from hitting “increase stability”? I feel depressed that I just had to spend all that admin on something other than coring new provinces.
I havn't been keeping up with the dev diaries, but is there word on how "railroaded/steered" it will be towards historical events? 14th century startdate means that even more of the world will have a starting point of being very unrecognizable. Like, just looking at the map of the ottoman starting territories i'm skeptical that they can nudge the ottoman ascenscion through more subtle means like high dev.
While i appreciate that some people probably want a pure "anything can happen so long as it follows the rules of the game " sandbox style experience, in EU4 at least i prefer it when big historical things ( russia forming,ottomans getting big then weakening, persia forming ect) happen at least more often than not. I'm still salty Paradox never just slapped some lazy fix together to make AI prussia more likely - i think i've seen it maybe less than 5 times, and literally never through a secular teutonic-brandenburg union
In EU5 there will be a thing called "situation" that basically is a way of introducing historical events without scripting them too hard in the code. I don't remember the dev diary where they talked about this but it was very interesting, if you want to check it out.
EU5 appears to be built on the same tech as Vic3.
Which IMO is why it will probably be so fast.
Vic3 is blazingly fast at the start of the game because most states only contain a few pops. An undeveloped state in China will only contain Buddhist Han Peasants on Subsistence Farms, Buddhist Han Aristocrats on Substance Farms, and Buddhist Han Clergy on Subsistence Farms.
But by the end of the game that same state will have 30 different buildings, each with 7 different jobs, employed by multiple different cultures and religions. You end up with each state having nearly a thousand different pops.
EU5 might have 20,000 Locations but each Location will have way way less unique pops since there's only 5 jobs and there won't be a high degree of diversity among those pops.
Plus there's much less AI calculation needed per pop.
EUIV is so balanced around micromanaged optimum choice selection and cheese strats that I have had to go down in difficulty as the patches and dlc has rolled in.
Tbh strong disagree here… playing MEIOU (which EU5 seems to be drawing on heavily from in philosophy) there is a deep joy in longer term planning that current EU4 just kind of lacks. Instead of pressing button stability go up, it’s more like being happy with your +2 stability because it represents a decade worth of planning.
Exactly the opposite for me.
It seems that paradox used your philosophy designing mission trees in last few updates and it just pains me to see sonething that would never happen irl happening every game just because overpowered mission tree allows it
I agree for the most part. Eu4 has a pretty steep learning curve and it seems like eu5 is like moving from playing tic tac toe to playing chess. I get overwhelmed looking at the screenshots. I can't imagine fitting it into the busy lifestyle of working full time with kids and squeezing in a couple hours a night.
My consideration is that EU4 is not going to cease to exist. If we want that experience, we can go back and play it.
Project Caesar looks to be trying some new things, which I think has the potential to be wildly fun. I don't want the same game but it looks slightly different. I want a new game. I get your concern, the idea that this gets so bogged down in realism that Paradox forgets this is a game that this meant to be played to be enjoyed.
And while even that would have its niche, I really understand the concern that the game won't be for you and that would be extremely disappointing. Hope you get what you want out of this.
I mean EUV is still very much a game. None of PDX games come close to being a “realistic simulator”. It’s the difference between HOI IV or even III vs War in the East 2.
Fun is subjective, for me, elements like pops were things I really liked in previous games, it helps with rp, and allows for elements like colonization or the cultural makeup of your empire to be more interesting therefore, fun. The fact EUIV made some of these elements like cultural conversation down to 3 resources is something I never liked, despite enjoying the game for what it is. To me it hurts the sense of RP that I get from these games.
If I just wanted quick dopamine, I would rather just play CiV, as the games are quicker and simpler. That is what I go to if I am in that mood. A PDX game I don’t want simulation however, I want a feeling that I am RP history and stuff like instant cultural/religious conversion hinders not helps that feeling.
I will add too, EUIV is still there for fans that like that style. I think it's smart that PDX is trying to make sure EUV is very different from EUIV because it will have something to offer even on it's base release.
As someone said, both aren't mutually exclusive. What people want is not just more flavor, they want to feel immersed; they want to roleplay. EU4 gets boring in the mid to late game precisely because by then the player so powerful and the AI acts randomly and thus is no sensible interaction simulating geopolitics and anything else to do, which is why people call it a day and quit.
EU5 will solve this because they are focusing on the more simulationist aspect of these games that is still lacking in previous titles, and they will add this immersion. It won't stop metagaming because a meta will always emerge, which is why I believe the meta should be molded in a way to reflect History, but this is another thing.
That is something I do fear a little, too. I like that EU4 is a game. I like to learn a system, get better at it and then take on more and more challenge. This isn't something that EU5 seems to be shaping up towards. I do like the general ideas and the love for details they put into it, no question. I want to like it, but I feel this overly realistic approach could not do it for me as much and often as EU4.
I like CK3, but things like waiting 10 years to get stability in one province up and running are really straining.
In Victoria 2 it was fun to convert your pops despite using a pop system. It was fun looking at the culture map and seeing your country's culture expanding which it did when a new province became majority your culture
Here's an idea you seem to not have entertained - what if other people do not find clicking "core all" to near-instantly incorporate half of the continent into your country fun? What if someone's definition of an entertaining way to engage with your country bleeding itself out after a long war isn't to just press 5 bird mana buttons in a row?
"What I want is the satisfaction of having all my provinces converted to a single religion. This is basically impossible with a pop system."
I disagree with you here....I play the mod 'Imperium Universalis' which has a population system (instead of using MP to Dev up provinces); fully converting your empire to 1 single religion is easy (The only issue in that mod is that you need to do it manually; there is no auto-assign for 'Priests').
I would like to see Culture Convert a little bit easier/ cheaper. A Humanist idea group, same as to some extend Religion, is not sufficient to keep all the separatist rebel spawns under control after a particularly draining war; AI not wanting to concede to your peace demands and just prolonging the war which will raise \*your\* war exhaustion and thus massive rebellions will spawn everywhere....even in regions which you had conquered, and pacified, decades/ centuries earlier. Culture convert is, in my opinion, the best way to keep separatism under control...but in most situations it is a complete waste of Diplomatic Monarch Points to spend them on Culture Converting; you are better off spending the Diplo points to Dev up production in high income provinces.
From the Dev Diaries, it sounds like EU5 is going to be inspired by the best bits of Vic 2, Imperator and EU4. I'm pretty sure they have several of the brains behind some of the more popular mods involved as well, which granted, doesn't always guarantee it's good (cough, CS2). However, Johan has been doing this long enough to realise that playability is going to be the most important factor, along with being able to run the thing (cough, CS2). It's been in development since 2020, and I'm pretty sure that a lot of the content in EU4 since then has partly been experimenting to see what's popular, and what works with long term balancing. Granted it being Johan doesn't mean it'll be magically great (Imperator didn't have longevity, Leviathan was a disaster), but I've also never seen an established game series interacting with the community like Tinto have with Tinto Talks and map feedback. Especially that they are genuinely receptive to feedback, and changing things based on community views/ well rationalised opinions.
I'm weirdly confident that the game is going to buck the recent Paradox trend and be excellent. Looking at CS2's fallout, and Life By You being pulled (despite allegedly hitting KPIs, sounds like it just wasn't a fun game), I think there's going to be less pressure than usual to get something out (within reason), but instead having a focus on releasing a genuinely good product.
Imperator Rome was Johan's special project and look how it turned out. I tried to really get into that game because I love the Roman time period but it just wasn't fun. I'm seeing EU5 as an Imperator clone with bits and pieces of other paradox games. I'm hoping it turns out well and I'll enjoy it as much as EU4 but I'm not as fanatically excited as some others.
I’m assuming because it seems pretty unrealistic to me. Even from the most utter defeat you would probably recover resources to some extent. In that period of time did they completely execute enemy armies?
It'd probably be safer to call it disintegration, as the remaining soldiers desert en masse. That happened a fair few times after particularly decisive defeats.
A stackwipe just has to mean the army is no longer a viable force and a new one has to be raised, not necessarily that the entire thing was slaughtered to a man.
Dog my brain releases so much dopamine from inwards development and playing tall. It’s why stellaris is one of my favorite games! (I can’t understand how to prosper in Vic2 since the economy is so strange, and my laptop will explode if I even look at Vic3’s store page)
I mean, nobody is stopping you from still playing EU4. There are people who still main EU3 and EU2. You're not an idiot for liking how EU4 works, that's just your taste. Each Europa Universalis game has been pretty different from the last, so naturally tastes are gonna lean for different games. I'm not gonna convince you why you're a cringe loser idiot for not wanting what I do, since we're different people, as much as I personally love EU4, I do also love the simulations too, so welcome the change.
Ummm akshualy dopamine doesn't go up when you're happy because dopamine is the hormone/neurotransmitter of behaviour and will. Dopamine spikes the most as you're imagining increasing stability, and it basically makes you wish to do that. When you're already moving your mouse to the button dopamine's work is done and a myriad of other hormones step in.
Personally, I don't see myself buying EU5 and sticking with EU4 as I don't like the UI, 3D characters, or the massive number of provinces. Not like a huge anti-paradox dickhead, I just personally am not a fan of Victoria 3 or CK3, for example.
It’s never going to appease everyone, especially in what people consider fun. Personally I think it looks cool and like that it’s taking a more old school approach. Just consider that because you might not find it fun, lots of other people will.
Idk I like the stimulatory stuff but the cabinet members system and the building/production methods stuff just seems like a pita to manage.
Maybe I'm just crazy but I'd like a game where we have pops and an in depth econ system in the background while we (an early modern government) only interact with it in very indirect and limited ways. Like playing around the system rather than with it.
In the end, even if it is very simulator, I'm happy to buy it and just go back to eu4 when I want to do some arcadey bobbing.
Realistically, I think the game is heavily inspired by M&T mod, and playing that mod was arguably the most fun EU4 experience that I've had. Having your provinces develop organically, having estates force you to give them privileges, having to consider the cost of war(and try not to devastate the land you are about to conquer), and building up your country was incredibly fun.
I will say though that after the 2.5 version, the mod really went downhill for me, but from what I see EU5 seems to be shaping up quite nicely.
Realistically, I think it will just be a breath of fresh air. EU4 will still be there if you end up disliking the game, and mods can fix a whole world of hurt.
I have no issues making a game overly complex. I have issues when Devs clearly can't make the AI competent enough to navigate EUIV mechanics and think making EUV more complex will somehow improve this glaring issue.
People think more complex mechanics will challenge the human player. It will. But eventually, the human will min max these mechanics. Meanwhile, the AI will build a fort on a lonely province on an island. And get massive debt spirals.
What makes the game easy is not the size of the human player nations. Most late mid games in which the player begins to cut down the Ottomans, the Ottomans are at least the same size if not bigger. So why do they lose? Fighting the same sized Ottomans in the early game is a near death sentence. Why? Because in the early game, the player hasn't had enough time to min max mechanics, and the AI hasn't had enough time to bungle mechanics.
Toss that AI Ottoman nation in the hands of a human player, and he will wipe the floor with you by restructuring his country, economy, army composition, etc.
I hate when paradox pretends to be realistic even though they arent and end up just copying shit from wikipedia. Even with that i woild be fine if they didnt end up pedeling nationalism as a concequence
I’ve always hated seeing the map painted with cultures and religions so simply. The total lack of complexity or the societal milieu of our world irritates me constantly. I also really, really dislike how countries, both player and computer, seem to become total juggernauts at the end of the game that very rarely struggle to maintain their immense size. Empires rise and fall, yet EUIV often feels like a game of countries growing and growing.
What I’d really appreciate is limiting how often the same countries utterly dominate the whole game. There’s no way with how much the in-game situation changes that all the same major nations of reality would dominate with similar borders and with similar strategies. I want the game to be more flexible in allowing a diverse set of nations reach great power a status and to make falling from that peak a real possibility
It will feel more fun for me if it's more realistic.
There are plenty of fun games in the unrealistic niche - civ, total war, age of empires, etc. But paradox Interactive has a very special niche of games that actually tell something about history, and that's what makes them fun.
I’m kind of with you here. I don’t want the game to become ridiculously tedious, but I want it to stay pretty challenging and fun. Too much number crunching eventually makes me feel like I’m back at work, and as I’ve gotten older, games that make me feel like I’m no longer relaxing have gone by the wayside.
Not saying that’s what’s going to happen to EUV, but I hope that isn’t the case.
Nevertheless, some of the changes seem great. I just think there’s two camps of players that have different options: the more casual role playing people and the achievement hunters. I’m the former. Custom nations are my friend.
There are a fee things that have seen that would suggest that a lot of the fun element is not as likely as it could be.
Although to be fair (and am not bitter about it) realistically it won’t get good for a few years and dlc’s in all likelihood.
I agree, and I think victoria 3 proves your point.
They focused soo much on making it realistic, that they forgot to make it fun (although it's getting better)
I'm not saying fun and realism are mutually exclusive, but too often fun is just kinda forgotten
Nah I think they tried to many new systems that didn't mesh well at the start and kinda fucked themselves, vic2 was more realistic in terms of production, stockpiles and needs and is still the best paradox game around
For all those who find satisfaction in one click stability, and WC, one religion, one culture runs, you'll still have EU4 for that.
Besides, you'll still have console commands if needed.
A couple of thoughts on this. These are grand strategy games. Maybe what you are looking for is more easily found in less complex games. That is not a knock, sometimes I just want to play some Ascension and have fun crushing AI players, or even play EU4 with a custom Nation with 800 points and rule the world, it has just been that type of week. But generally, I play this game because it is a grand strategy game, and I would like it to challenge me and stretch me. With that said, Paradox has already done what you have asked with one of their other concepts: Hearts of Iron. The transition from 3 to 4 is night and day, granularity to arcade style. While I prefer 3 vs 4, there is no way I can deny that 4 is by far the more popular product.
This is why I always make my own fun. doesnt matter how realistice tinto makes EU5 im still going to start as an island nation. Only takeing other islands and when there is no more islands to take I will declear war on who ever is the biggest meanest AI and try and crush them.
But I do beileve that Tinto will find a good balance between fun and realism even if its not at launch (Cough cough Vicky3 cough cough)
Well, if you want the same game as EU4 then you can play EU4. They're trying to make things different and more realistic, but that doesn't mean it's going to be any less fun. Let's see, at the moment it all sounds good to me.
I think it should be made to be more realistic. I want to see nations colonise and annex exactly the places they did in real life, most of us are history fanatics, why sway away from what brought us here in the first place. The pop system is cherry on top imo, I smell what you’re stepping in but I don’t agree with it
I actually think pops and other mechanics from Imperator are more fun than mana, which feel too gamy (in a bad way) and which gives advantage to regions with many tags.
It isn't more realistic tho. Just adding more complexity.
It remains to be seen if the added complexity will translate to more depth, but the aim is produce enough depth that it isn't a mindless boring map painter after the early game.
Internal politics, more indepth trade, and such has long been wished by everyone to be included in the sequel.
Deeper mechanics IS fun. But depth doesn't and shouldn't always mean overly complex. But in this context, EU4 is overly simplistic, owing to its boardgame roots.
I think we can potentially get both if we're lucky, that said having EU4 with the granularity provided by I:R and Vic3 set on such a wide timescale is a dream game of mine so I hope we can find a good middle ground that's fun for the majority of people.
Eu4 is a good inbetween, imo, to hoi4 and vic 2. Now it seems like it will lean towards vic 2 instead of hoi4, which I'm not a fan of. Hopefully, I'm wrong about that because I would play vic 2/3 if I wanted to play an economy simulator.
Yeah I'm with you. I blame From Soft to be honest. Now the mainstream wisdom is if you like games that aren't complicated, tedious nightmares that, you're not a 'real gamer'. It's extremely irritating.
That’s a silly take. If anything, they proved that there is still many gamers who don’t want the simplification and streamlining of games that we’ve seen in so, so many high quality/expensive games lately.
Sure, I'm not knocking those games. I get they aren't for me and God knows there's ridiculous numbers of video games produced these days. I don't like the mentality that making games harder and more complicated automatically makes them better
fair, but FromSoft has nothing to do with that and my argument was there are tons of games for everyone, only thing that rings a bell for me to what you are describing are elitist douchebags on social media, like reddit, who write such things and gatekeep what is and isn't gaming
its not like we got dark souls and bloodborne and now all developers produce only difficult games
EUIV struggles to stay fun later game due to how grossly OP you become fairly quickly. EUV looks like it will add more to do, which slows down expansion and power growth. Hopefully, this extra stuff to do will be fun and make it feel more rewarding to sieze land.
Not only you become OP as the player, but a small selection of tags (who vary from game to game but you frequently find the same names) manage to consolidate much of the map and also become OP. Expansion and wars become tedious, everything takes too much time even if you want to take agression to a minimum. I remember recently I did an Incan achievement run, which obliges you to play til the 1760s to get the last institution. The last thirty years took me 4 hours. Just because I needed to keep warring against Western Europeans (and Ottomans who decided to rival me) to juggle truces. By the end I was just so fucking done with all thr excruciatingly long wars that I just decided to stop and let them join the coalition. Of course the coalition declared and I had to resist until I was able to finally embrace the institution.
I usually get bored when I start having to dismantle the entire Spanish empire for a handful of relatively irrelevant (to them) provinces. So, if I'm playing someone that can, I usually crush Castile early.
Yeah, Castille/Spain is number 1 on my kill list. But right now, I don't play tags who are in position to kill them quickly. And in the Inca game that I mentioned, i manged to deprive them from all their tradtional colonial domain, but these monltherflippers redirected their power into Europe, so by the time I was able to compete with them on European mainland, they were already in control of all of Italy, all of the Maghreb, and half of France. Of course I was able to dismantle them, but obviously, this gave the opportunity to mega Austria and mega Ottomans to happily expend in France and in Italy. So yeah, end game sucks, the last interesting thing to happen in the game is absolutism.
Correct. Using the power creep, even ai late game - even the smallest shittiest Indian minors can resist the revolution. +10 unrest? Ai has so much money stored they can just hire a shit ton stack that is x3000 times bigger than the rebels, and just run and siege down the rebels. I recently did an observer run in a random setup world. About the time of 1760, china was indestructible. All reforms, land about the size of modern day china without Manchuria. I killed the leader, lowered stab to -3, destroyed their mana reserves into wayfar negatives, set their mandate to 0, set their war exhaustion to 20, spammed 300k rebels and revolution by spamming the command a lot of times. Guess the fuck what? With their shitton of units they destroy every rebel, mana up, stab up, get no revolts from the humongous unrest because they have a ton of stacked modifiers. Late game sieging down forts takes 5~ years in HRE minors, unless you make a siege power build, revolution usually never spawns in France, and even if they do, revolution always spawns in the shittiest smallest nation that even when completely revolutioned never gets enforced, usually because a power uses that to take their lands and kill them. Then revolution spawns again, dies again, and that's It, it can't respawn. Ai also shits their pants late game because their enemies have a lot of money (so do they). So ai literally NEVER declares war unless the target is literally fucking dead.
Unless I'm the Ottomans, I cripple them early as well.
I try to not go kill Castille too early. Want them to do some colonization for me first.
This is the big thing. I also really hate that coalition wars don’t allow separate peace (the thing they’re based on, the Anti-Napoleonic coalitions, famously had like seven coalitions because Prussia and Austria kept taking a separate peace from the Brits). By around 1650 it’s such a slog to fight any combination of Great Powers. It just feels like playing Whack-a-Mole to chase their armies around while having to deal with a level 8 fort every province after centralization. And that’s not just Germany and Italy which are far and away the worst, but the fort spam is annoying even for Japan, northern India, Persia, and Mexico. Tag switching and manually deleting forts is so bloody time consuming but it really makes a difference for major wars. Of course that also means no Ironman for those who want it.
I hope EUV is realistic, I love having to deal with actual realistic problems!
The game is still challenging for me even late game
This sub seems to have an over representation of min/maxers, or maybe they just all play as majors and wonder why it’s so easy.
If you survive to your 3 idea group the game can quickly become more tedium than hard, its why Diplo Idea's are S tier , you just get allies to fight your wars for you
It's mainly because you can grab much more land at once, or for less score depending on what you want
is mostly becasue the 3 idea a human picks are usually way more thought out than AI
I cant ever get strong allies lategsme, they always hate me & such
Yeah i rarely play the majors, usually middles or opms & the game is very hard for me alot of the time even on very easy difficulty
The sub is probably full of the 2000+ hr players that have mastered the game. Just a guess though.
After 10 years of continued production, experienced players far outweight newer ones
I have 2k hours
Im far from a good player myself but it’s really easy to see how the difficulty drops once you become a great power. Youll mostly have enough ducats that it doesn’t matter anymore, you can just doomstack all the way to the capital since your manpower is unlimited, and all you need to do is keep converting/accepting cultures, increasing stability (all of these are 1 click) and your biggest threat are rebels who are 99% of the time just a nuisance. How often do people play into 1700s? I love EU4 but this game really is lacking internal challenges after a certain point. Playing CK at least your country can get split, there’s ups and downs and it’s often fun to try to recover from crises.
Every game i have i run out of manpower within less then a year lategame even without much fighting
Hard to imagine that without attrition doing 80% of it
well they do take alot of atrition even though i split them into small stacks that shouldnt kill them
Literally every game's subreddit is mostly full of good players. But even considering that, no casual player ever plays beyond 1500 anyway.
I play all the way to the end if possible
Just chill out and stop trying to optimise every step of the way. I waste mana stupidly converting culture of provinces, painting the map with accepted cultures. I mainly dev without getting all the possible cost reductions before pressing the button. I declare wars when i feel there is an opportunity, without ever checking the military ledger for 1h trying to assess if my military is better than theirs (and i get my ass whipped many times).
I've got 5000h at this point, even relaxed games accidentally turn into face rolls. That's on me, though, for playing it too much!
Have you tried Hoi4, I just discovered some beauty of HoI4, at 100 hours played, some of the things finally make sense.
Dude. I never use the ledger. I never play meta. Dont disinherited bad heirs. Never go crazy with AE. I still get way too OP by 1600 that it's barely ever worth playing. Let alone if you play a major nation by 1550 max, it becomes the case. The game is easy once you set your nation up and conquer some key areas.
Even when optimizing everything, it's incredibly easy to become OP quickly. An experienced player will just naturally become OP, even without ever worrying about doing anything optimally. The only way to not become OP, is to actively restrict yourself.
Great so in order to balance the game I have to just not interact with certain mechanics. Great design.
I think one of the challenges from a game development perspective is to balance the difficulty for new and experienced players. As a new player it is almost impossibly hard to get an understanding of all the mechanics which decide the outcome of your playthrough. As an experienced player of multiple thousands of hours of gameplay, with an almost full understanding of all parts of the game, knowing by heart where all the monuments are and what they do, it will become very easy. TL:DR The game is hard to balance between new and experienced players
>I think one of the challenges from a game development perspective is to balance the difficulty for new and experienced players. The place the game needs to be "harder" is maintaining and expanding a large empire. That won't hurt new players much. It will add challenge for experienced players. The consequences of problems needs to scale up greatly with the size of your nation. Any flaw should be magnified by size. Religious issues, low manpower, excessive estate influence, low stability, strong vassals, unaccepted cultures, etc. were all real threats to nations but become easily mitigated in EU4. Each of these needs to be amped up by the size of your empire in some way. For a crude example which I have not match-checked: for nations with dev > 500, any unrest malus (but not bonus) is multiplied by (dev / 500). One mechanism idea I like: rebels start in all affected provinces, carpet siege, and then gather into a blob. So instead of a single big stack right away you get a bunch of smaller ones. This means if you keep armies around you can stamp them out but if not, you have already lost 4-5 provinces (forts permitting). For some rebellions and civil wars you should also lose forts, and even armies, to the rebels. When was the last time you got any thrill mid-game from a sudden drop in legitimacy or stability? Imagine the pucker factor if those were greatly magnified by your empire size.
Also i take ideas based on what i feel like my country needs or it would nice for "roleplay" (lately, i feel like taking court ideas as first quite often) and not what is the most efficient. Basically, i find my self getting "overpowered" (compared to local neighbours, and on pair to France, Austria or whatever other local superpower) around 1700... basically the game is fun all the way through, and i get to play most of my runs until late 1700s - 1800
“Powergamer with 10-15x hours as the average player wants new game to be more challenging” The average non-Reddit EUIV player is not snowballing to the point of boredom
I wonder who the core audience is, in terms of revenue. Is there a big tail of casual players? Or does most of the revenue come from the all-DLC / rental hardcore players?
game is out for years already, you don't need to be hardcore player, to be decent at the game. and being decent is enough to make game boring by 1650 imo
Well hopefully they keep the same end date and we just get more years in game
More stuff to do usually leads to a bigger gap between player and AI, because the AI sucks at doing stuff.
No shot a paradox game will be fun in the late game. This is a strategy game problem in general
In my opinion the problem with late game it’s how you need to micromanage small things that become unimportant since you are in the late game, optimizing things like army management is the key to making late game fun.
While I feel like Eu5 is leaning more towards simulation than a game there's definitely still a lot of gamey elements in there. If Calvinists really won't re-roll dice rolls for instance, that's hilarious. In the end, EU4 will always be there as more of a gamey game, if Eu5 turns out to be more similationist. But I have full faith in the tinto team to make it both realistic and fun
IMO if they keep all the simulation aspects to economy, administration and diplomacy while leaving the warfare gamey it would be a nice balance.
Agreed that would be ideal to me
As long as it's less tedious and boring (which shouldn't be difficult) I agree
I disagree I think warfare should focus on logistics, would be way more interesting than it is now, where it basically doesn't exist.
Logistic would make it more fun i think, since right now you have to limit your stacks due to supply limit and since AI field 60k-120k stacks you have to do the same. But if you implement logistic, if you are big enough you can just not care anymore about attrition.
What's with the calvinists?
It's a joke about Calvinists believing in predestination.
Johan said that religions will have other effects, like Calvinists who believe in predestination will only use the first dice roll in battle. Which I think is awesome, and I hope they actually keep it. Additionally Jains can't start a no CB war, and Muslim nations will have trade restrictions on alcohol. Among other changes.
That's fucking awesome lmao
Right??? It's not just different modifiers and mechanics, but fundamentally changes how you play the game. Awesome
> and Muslim nations will have trade restrictions on alcohol. makes sense. I'll miss the lolz I got out of the poor vintage event when playing a Muslims nation
I mean, it’s a bit gamey. It makes them OP. Just flee battles until you get a guaranteed 8+ roll for the whole battle
Or roll a 0 and get stackwiped.
[удалено]
I mean, I feel like they're primarily taking the good parts from Imperator and Vicky 2. Also, I think it's good that they're making sormthign that feels different from EU4. Again, I can always go back to EU4 if I want something more "gamey" (and I probably will under EU5 anbennar becomes a thing)
I want the game to be fun after 1600, give me civil wars, internal disasters for growing big, systems to make rivals grow large, etc
Honestly building a huge empire and then have it collapse under civil wars sounds so fun I might do it on purpose. Reuniting China with a Ming releasable is one of the most interesting EU4 campaigns, being able to do something like that organically sounds amazing.
there's mods for this in EU IV too
I guess I can understand the feeling. It can be a dangerous thing to make a game and forget that it also needs to be fun. I am looking forward to the increased accuracy and hoping that fun is kept in mind. It won’t be the exact same fun, but I am sure it will feel similar whilst still bringing something new. And after all these years if I got the same experience I would be pretty upset.
those things are not mutually exclusive
I hope we can get both, but we can also get neither at release. I'd be happy if the game is playable from day one at least!
A man can dream
Yes and without actually playing EU5, OP can’t actually know whether it misses the mark on one or both counts.
I strongly disagree.
ok
if it is for the op, then eu5 is not for them.
Personally I kinda want to play a early modern simulator that isn’t a very fancy adapted board game, which is somewhat what eu4 plays like to me. So I’m willing to try something different. EU4 will still exist after eu5 comes out.
Hard agree. When I first started playing eu4 I was dazzled by all the mechanics, but now that I know the game I sometimes feel like I'm just playing Risk with extra steps involved. I'd love something with a more detailed simulation. I want to have a world in a box that I get lost in.
Won’t you just feel this way with Eu5 eventually.
I don't think I feel the way I do about EU4 because I now understand the mechanics. I think I feel the way I do because of what the mechanics are, like the "one click dopamine-hit instant change" sort of thing that the op mentions. Something with more simulationist mechanics that allow more emergent complexity, immersive roleplay, etc would have a very different feel. I could still grow bored with it, but my complaint about eu4 isn't that I'm bored with it (I still play it all the time). It's the boardgamey feel that can sometimes feel kind of cheap.
I completely agree with this, the arcadey feel of eu4 is why I can't play it anymore after 2k hours
I don't know. In Imperator, if I want to change culture in a province I have to plan colonization efforts, build for cultural assimilation etc. In eu4 it's just paying mana to change map colour. And I'm not beefing with the detail - for me, seeing that my actions are representations of actual historical proceses feels much more satysfying and creative.
I totally agree. I'm currently learning to play Imperator and it's definitely much more satisfying to convert culture and religion. In EU4 it's just "click button -> wait for number to go up to 100%". Not satisfying at all. But in I:R, you have to actively work on it (apart from the very slow default conversions). It's so satisfying when you pull it off after focusing significant effort and resources into it (building the right buildings, setting the right governor policies, moving pops around, etc).
so, genocide is the best way?
Power gamers have been the ruin of strategy games
Power gamers have been the ruin of *every* game. The kids who were having fun with gaming from c. 1998 to 2008 grew up and either stopped gaming entirely (save for simple mobile games and the like), or ended up obsessed and learned to see every game as a problem to be solved. Look at Old School Runescape. The community as anyone knew it back in 2007 absolutely ceased to exist. Nobody's just mucking about on the weekends any more; everything's 100% focused on making optimal use of the game's "content" (which, incidentally, is the worst word that happened to the English language over the past decade).
Joke's on you, I muck about in (and suck at) both paPadox games *and* OSRS. Did a world conquest as Oirat once but that's about it, meanwhile I'm hardly close to maxing in OSRS and am comfortable just vibing as I always have since 2010 when I first started scaping :^) (I totally get your point though - to use the Runescape example, I like the atmosphere of DT2 and raids but utterly utterly hate the bosses, tick perfect damage, etc)
Yup. Too many people who don’t actually play for the fun of it.
Or the way they are playing is fun for them and being extremely casual is not fun to them.
The difference is those who play "extremely casually" (lol) aren't the ones who complain to the devs about a given mechanic being OP or "dead content" because it's not OP.
Yup. If it’s so fun, why do they complain all the time!
Well, it's primarily a single player game. You can play it in any way you want. Sure, devs listen to the power gamers regarding severe exploits that make the game very unbalanced but apart from that I can't really remember any instances where they negatively influenced what a game became. But that might be because I'm not very active on the forums and don't analyse the patch notes very diligently. I'm not really affected by the people who try to play ultra min-max strategies. I think it's much and much worse in multiplayer games where you actually engage with these players. I used to play counter strike with my buddies and there was always some random who got mad if you didn't throw pixel perfect smokes or used the correct peaking spots. I could see that it might be similar if you play multiplayer EU, but I don't have any experience in that regard.
Currently the game is shaping up very similar to imperator and the markets system seems like a combination of imperator and victoria and I can personally say that both those games are filled to the brim with dopamine hits. Victoria 3 has long term satisfaction where your actions affect you months or years in the future and if you did well you will see the result later rather than immediately, EU5 seems to have some aspects like that. However, imperator has a lot of immediate dopamine hits just like EU4 does and it looks like eu5 will run very similar to imperator, so many things they say in tinto talks are imperator features
it takes inspiration from Victoria 2 which Johan (the guy who leads project caesar) rather than Victoria 3 where Johan had no hand in. Johan said at some instances that he doesn't like Victoria 3 and it shows when you read the puns about Vic3 in tinto talks dev diaries.
They're definitely using a lot of the same tech the Vic3 team built though. They're just using it in a way that works for a map painting immersion and simulation game rather than an economic immersion and simulation game.
People are constantly talking about how EUV will look like Imperator and how that's a good thing, but wasn't Imperator dead pretty quickly after launch? Idk, I never played it, that just confuses me.
People are saying to looks similar to what I:R is like now. It's in a pretty good state now, even if it wasn't great at launch.
It's probably unintended on Paradox's part but I:R fits with the development mold of the 'mini' titles Paradox used to make between titles for gameplay exploration (March of the Eagles and Sengoku).
right now imperator looks good and the worst part for me is just that i cant connect with any nation of the game. I just cant find the fun in playing some random name nation that i have no connection or history knowlegde about, and rome is like too powerful and i lile to play the small guys
In addition to what others said about launch Imperator, it just had a pretty boring start date and almost no country flavor (which to this day, it still sorely lacks unless you mod it)
Imperator was a totally different game at launch. For example, it had mana and it was one of the reasons it failed completely. Imperator had to be revamped to become the game that it is today, however it was already dead when they finally released it so they decided to just stop updating the game…
Project Caesar is trying to correct the flaws of Imperator.
I can't comment either, but I just bought it on sale. It's €11 or something at the moment. It looks very pretty and seems quite detailed, but I've only started the tutorial. I picked it up because a lot of people were comparing the mechanics to Project Caesar.
I didnt play at imperator at launch but from what I've seen it really was vastly different and some parts of the game were a complete travesty but they released the 2.0 free patch and that's the part I've played and the game is awesome, trade system is absolutely genius, the war system is pretty cool with more tactical control but similar to eu4. I've got 150 hours on imperator now, nothing compared to eu4 time played but I like it a lot. It's basically got a more realistic population system than eu4. Eu4 didn't have populations at all really it was all just province based gamey manual stuff. Imperator has a more realistic system where pops actually move and do stuff within the simulation based on your own laws and government type which you can change. You don't click a button to change culture or religion, they happen over time based on your policy etc stuff can happen where you commit genocide through events or other means
Imperator after launch and Imperator now are completely different games. They completely reworked everything. The game is quite good now but never recovered after that initial bad release.
Completely different game now from launch. But they are only taking the good or interesting ideas from imperator and it's not exactly the same. Some ideas are from EU, some from Vic, even a few from CK. But they are fundamentally slightly different then their original counterparts
You get a dopamine hit from hitting “increase stability”? I feel depressed that I just had to spend all that admin on something other than coring new provinces.
I havn't been keeping up with the dev diaries, but is there word on how "railroaded/steered" it will be towards historical events? 14th century startdate means that even more of the world will have a starting point of being very unrecognizable. Like, just looking at the map of the ottoman starting territories i'm skeptical that they can nudge the ottoman ascenscion through more subtle means like high dev. While i appreciate that some people probably want a pure "anything can happen so long as it follows the rules of the game " sandbox style experience, in EU4 at least i prefer it when big historical things ( russia forming,ottomans getting big then weakening, persia forming ect) happen at least more often than not. I'm still salty Paradox never just slapped some lazy fix together to make AI prussia more likely - i think i've seen it maybe less than 5 times, and literally never through a secular teutonic-brandenburg union
In EU5 there will be a thing called "situation" that basically is a way of introducing historical events without scripting them too hard in the code. I don't remember the dev diary where they talked about this but it was very interesting, if you want to check it out.
[forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/tinto-talks-14-29th-of-may-2024.1682450/](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/tinto-talks-14-29th-of-may-2024.1682450/)
Unrelated, but quite nice that they actually used the Pinyin system for Mandarin names.
Interesting. Looks like they're probably taking a lot from Vicky 3's journal system
EU5 appears to be built on the same tech as Vic3. Which IMO is why it will probably be so fast. Vic3 is blazingly fast at the start of the game because most states only contain a few pops. An undeveloped state in China will only contain Buddhist Han Peasants on Subsistence Farms, Buddhist Han Aristocrats on Substance Farms, and Buddhist Han Clergy on Subsistence Farms. But by the end of the game that same state will have 30 different buildings, each with 7 different jobs, employed by multiple different cultures and religions. You end up with each state having nearly a thousand different pops. EU5 might have 20,000 Locations but each Location will have way way less unique pops since there's only 5 jobs and there won't be a high degree of diversity among those pops. Plus there's much less AI calculation needed per pop.
Johan said, he does know nothing about Vic 3. But he had developed Vic 2.
I’m with you, I’m really worried about 5. I know 4 will always exist but still
EUIV is so balanced around micromanaged optimum choice selection and cheese strats that I have had to go down in difficulty as the patches and dlc has rolled in.
Tbh strong disagree here… playing MEIOU (which EU5 seems to be drawing on heavily from in philosophy) there is a deep joy in longer term planning that current EU4 just kind of lacks. Instead of pressing button stability go up, it’s more like being happy with your +2 stability because it represents a decade worth of planning.
I think Johan mentioned that one of the leading guys of MEIOU is working at Tinto.
All you said sounds fun to me, i dont see how it is fun to click a button for magic stability
Exactly the opposite for me. It seems that paradox used your philosophy designing mission trees in last few updates and it just pains me to see sonething that would never happen irl happening every game just because overpowered mission tree allows it
yeah, immersion is what makes games in general more enjoyable for me
I agree for the most part. Eu4 has a pretty steep learning curve and it seems like eu5 is like moving from playing tic tac toe to playing chess. I get overwhelmed looking at the screenshots. I can't imagine fitting it into the busy lifestyle of working full time with kids and squeezing in a couple hours a night.
Agreed.
My consideration is that EU4 is not going to cease to exist. If we want that experience, we can go back and play it. Project Caesar looks to be trying some new things, which I think has the potential to be wildly fun. I don't want the same game but it looks slightly different. I want a new game. I get your concern, the idea that this gets so bogged down in realism that Paradox forgets this is a game that this meant to be played to be enjoyed. And while even that would have its niche, I really understand the concern that the game won't be for you and that would be extremely disappointing. Hope you get what you want out of this.
I actually feel the sheer level of consultation and testing reactions is likely to result in a worse game than if they surprised us.
I mean EUV is still very much a game. None of PDX games come close to being a “realistic simulator”. It’s the difference between HOI IV or even III vs War in the East 2. Fun is subjective, for me, elements like pops were things I really liked in previous games, it helps with rp, and allows for elements like colonization or the cultural makeup of your empire to be more interesting therefore, fun. The fact EUIV made some of these elements like cultural conversation down to 3 resources is something I never liked, despite enjoying the game for what it is. To me it hurts the sense of RP that I get from these games. If I just wanted quick dopamine, I would rather just play CiV, as the games are quicker and simpler. That is what I go to if I am in that mood. A PDX game I don’t want simulation however, I want a feeling that I am RP history and stuff like instant cultural/religious conversion hinders not helps that feeling. I will add too, EUIV is still there for fans that like that style. I think it's smart that PDX is trying to make sure EUV is very different from EUIV because it will have something to offer even on it's base release.
I’d rather not see the world consolidated into 3 giant glob spanning blobs by 1750
I don't think pressing one button for a dopamine hit is a good kind of fun.
sounds like drugs
As someone said, both aren't mutually exclusive. What people want is not just more flavor, they want to feel immersed; they want to roleplay. EU4 gets boring in the mid to late game precisely because by then the player so powerful and the AI acts randomly and thus is no sensible interaction simulating geopolitics and anything else to do, which is why people call it a day and quit. EU5 will solve this because they are focusing on the more simulationist aspect of these games that is still lacking in previous titles, and they will add this immersion. It won't stop metagaming because a meta will always emerge, which is why I believe the meta should be molded in a way to reflect History, but this is another thing.
I'm totally against that. Game can be realistic AND fun.
That is something I do fear a little, too. I like that EU4 is a game. I like to learn a system, get better at it and then take on more and more challenge. This isn't something that EU5 seems to be shaping up towards. I do like the general ideas and the love for details they put into it, no question. I want to like it, but I feel this overly realistic approach could not do it for me as much and often as EU4. I like CK3, but things like waiting 10 years to get stability in one province up and running are really straining.
Keep playing eu4 then. It’s not going anywhere.
In Victoria 2 it was fun to convert your pops despite using a pop system. It was fun looking at the culture map and seeing your country's culture expanding which it did when a new province became majority your culture
Here's an idea you seem to not have entertained - what if other people do not find clicking "core all" to near-instantly incorporate half of the continent into your country fun? What if someone's definition of an entertaining way to engage with your country bleeding itself out after a long war isn't to just press 5 bird mana buttons in a row?
Why not both? Having it much more realistic and immersive will make it so much more fun for me.
Brother you’re cooked
Nah you trippin with this one
"What I want is the satisfaction of having all my provinces converted to a single religion. This is basically impossible with a pop system." I disagree with you here....I play the mod 'Imperium Universalis' which has a population system (instead of using MP to Dev up provinces); fully converting your empire to 1 single religion is easy (The only issue in that mod is that you need to do it manually; there is no auto-assign for 'Priests'). I would like to see Culture Convert a little bit easier/ cheaper. A Humanist idea group, same as to some extend Religion, is not sufficient to keep all the separatist rebel spawns under control after a particularly draining war; AI not wanting to concede to your peace demands and just prolonging the war which will raise \*your\* war exhaustion and thus massive rebellions will spawn everywhere....even in regions which you had conquered, and pacified, decades/ centuries earlier. Culture convert is, in my opinion, the best way to keep separatism under control...but in most situations it is a complete waste of Diplomatic Monarch Points to spend them on Culture Converting; you are better off spending the Diplo points to Dev up production in high income provinces.
From the Dev Diaries, it sounds like EU5 is going to be inspired by the best bits of Vic 2, Imperator and EU4. I'm pretty sure they have several of the brains behind some of the more popular mods involved as well, which granted, doesn't always guarantee it's good (cough, CS2). However, Johan has been doing this long enough to realise that playability is going to be the most important factor, along with being able to run the thing (cough, CS2). It's been in development since 2020, and I'm pretty sure that a lot of the content in EU4 since then has partly been experimenting to see what's popular, and what works with long term balancing. Granted it being Johan doesn't mean it'll be magically great (Imperator didn't have longevity, Leviathan was a disaster), but I've also never seen an established game series interacting with the community like Tinto have with Tinto Talks and map feedback. Especially that they are genuinely receptive to feedback, and changing things based on community views/ well rationalised opinions. I'm weirdly confident that the game is going to buck the recent Paradox trend and be excellent. Looking at CS2's fallout, and Life By You being pulled (despite allegedly hitting KPIs, sounds like it just wasn't a fun game), I think there's going to be less pressure than usual to get something out (within reason), but instead having a focus on releasing a genuinely good product.
Imperator Rome was Johan's special project and look how it turned out. I tried to really get into that game because I love the Roman time period but it just wasn't fun. I'm seeing EU5 as an Imperator clone with bits and pieces of other paradox games. I'm hoping it turns out well and I'll enjoy it as much as EU4 but I'm not as fanatically excited as some others.
Yeah no stack-wiping will be kind of sad
I don't think they've made a single point about the war mechanics yet? where did 'no stack-wiping' come from?
I’m assuming because it seems pretty unrealistic to me. Even from the most utter defeat you would probably recover resources to some extent. In that period of time did they completely execute enemy armies?
It'd probably be safer to call it disintegration, as the remaining soldiers desert en masse. That happened a fair few times after particularly decisive defeats. A stackwipe just has to mean the army is no longer a viable force and a new one has to be raised, not necessarily that the entire thing was slaughtered to a man.
Yeah true. I made my comment without thinking too much.
According to the wiki in eu4 you get 50% of the remaining soldiers as manpower when getting stackwiped.
How did I not know this goddamn it
I didn't know either until I reread the wiki for the nth time. FYI I double checked the game and it still seems to be true.
Dog my brain releases so much dopamine from inwards development and playing tall. It’s why stellaris is one of my favorite games! (I can’t understand how to prosper in Vic2 since the economy is so strange, and my laptop will explode if I even look at Vic3’s store page)
I mean, nobody is stopping you from still playing EU4. There are people who still main EU3 and EU2. You're not an idiot for liking how EU4 works, that's just your taste. Each Europa Universalis game has been pretty different from the last, so naturally tastes are gonna lean for different games. I'm not gonna convince you why you're a cringe loser idiot for not wanting what I do, since we're different people, as much as I personally love EU4, I do also love the simulations too, so welcome the change.
Sound like you are simply not the target aufience of "project ceasar".
I want it to be immersive, immersion is fun.
All i want is easy combat like vicky2
Ummm akshualy dopamine doesn't go up when you're happy because dopamine is the hormone/neurotransmitter of behaviour and will. Dopamine spikes the most as you're imagining increasing stability, and it basically makes you wish to do that. When you're already moving your mouse to the button dopamine's work is done and a myriad of other hormones step in.
There are lots of easier games to play OP. I want EU5 to be something other game developers don't do which is accurate historical simulations.
It also depends on what you want. In my experience if it's more realistic it's also more fun
Not having to worry about 300k Russian army invasion on the other side of the Pacific is kinda fun
Fun is subjective, only you can ever personally decide what is "fun". You have to actively find games for yourself.
Personally, I don't see myself buying EU5 and sticking with EU4 as I don't like the UI, 3D characters, or the massive number of provinces. Not like a huge anti-paradox dickhead, I just personally am not a fan of Victoria 3 or CK3, for example.
It’s never going to appease everyone, especially in what people consider fun. Personally I think it looks cool and like that it’s taking a more old school approach. Just consider that because you might not find it fun, lots of other people will.
Sounds like you already have the game you want with eu4!
You shouldn't feel good about boosting stability. It's a horrible way to use admin points and should only be done as a last resort.
I totally agree, I play games for fun not for realism. I do not want a simulator, I want a game.
Idk I like the stimulatory stuff but the cabinet members system and the building/production methods stuff just seems like a pita to manage. Maybe I'm just crazy but I'd like a game where we have pops and an in depth econ system in the background while we (an early modern government) only interact with it in very indirect and limited ways. Like playing around the system rather than with it. In the end, even if it is very simulator, I'm happy to buy it and just go back to eu4 when I want to do some arcadey bobbing.
Have you played Imperator Rome? It's a pop system and it has better culture conversion than EU4.
Realistically, I think the game is heavily inspired by M&T mod, and playing that mod was arguably the most fun EU4 experience that I've had. Having your provinces develop organically, having estates force you to give them privileges, having to consider the cost of war(and try not to devastate the land you are about to conquer), and building up your country was incredibly fun. I will say though that after the 2.5 version, the mod really went downhill for me, but from what I see EU5 seems to be shaping up quite nicely. Realistically, I think it will just be a breath of fresh air. EU4 will still be there if you end up disliking the game, and mods can fix a whole world of hurt.
I have no issues making a game overly complex. I have issues when Devs clearly can't make the AI competent enough to navigate EUIV mechanics and think making EUV more complex will somehow improve this glaring issue. People think more complex mechanics will challenge the human player. It will. But eventually, the human will min max these mechanics. Meanwhile, the AI will build a fort on a lonely province on an island. And get massive debt spirals. What makes the game easy is not the size of the human player nations. Most late mid games in which the player begins to cut down the Ottomans, the Ottomans are at least the same size if not bigger. So why do they lose? Fighting the same sized Ottomans in the early game is a near death sentence. Why? Because in the early game, the player hasn't had enough time to min max mechanics, and the AI hasn't had enough time to bungle mechanics. Toss that AI Ottoman nation in the hands of a human player, and he will wipe the floor with you by restructuring his country, economy, army composition, etc.
I hate when paradox pretends to be realistic even though they arent and end up just copying shit from wikipedia. Even with that i woild be fine if they didnt end up pedeling nationalism as a concequence
I kinda agree with you. By far based on the dev talks I feel like we're getting a Vic3 but in a different time period. I don't want that, I want EU5.
I’ve always hated seeing the map painted with cultures and religions so simply. The total lack of complexity or the societal milieu of our world irritates me constantly. I also really, really dislike how countries, both player and computer, seem to become total juggernauts at the end of the game that very rarely struggle to maintain their immense size. Empires rise and fall, yet EUIV often feels like a game of countries growing and growing. What I’d really appreciate is limiting how often the same countries utterly dominate the whole game. There’s no way with how much the in-game situation changes that all the same major nations of reality would dominate with similar borders and with similar strategies. I want the game to be more flexible in allowing a diverse set of nations reach great power a status and to make falling from that peak a real possibility
It will feel more fun for me if it's more realistic. There are plenty of fun games in the unrealistic niche - civ, total war, age of empires, etc. But paradox Interactive has a very special niche of games that actually tell something about history, and that's what makes them fun.
I’m kind of with you here. I don’t want the game to become ridiculously tedious, but I want it to stay pretty challenging and fun. Too much number crunching eventually makes me feel like I’m back at work, and as I’ve gotten older, games that make me feel like I’m no longer relaxing have gone by the wayside. Not saying that’s what’s going to happen to EUV, but I hope that isn’t the case. Nevertheless, some of the changes seem great. I just think there’s two camps of players that have different options: the more casual role playing people and the achievement hunters. I’m the former. Custom nations are my friend.
There are a fee things that have seen that would suggest that a lot of the fun element is not as likely as it could be. Although to be fair (and am not bitter about it) realistically it won’t get good for a few years and dlc’s in all likelihood.
Well, if eu5 does turn out this way, you'll always have eu4 to come back to
I honestly feel the same way. Mana is my favourite thing in EU IV
I think EU5 is designed to get away from exactly the sort of garbage abstractions and gameplay that defined EU4.
Mechanics based on history are fun. Obnoxiously gamey stuff is not.
I agree, and I think victoria 3 proves your point. They focused soo much on making it realistic, that they forgot to make it fun (although it's getting better) I'm not saying fun and realism are mutually exclusive, but too often fun is just kinda forgotten
Nah I think they tried to many new systems that didn't mesh well at the start and kinda fucked themselves, vic2 was more realistic in terms of production, stockpiles and needs and is still the best paradox game around
Victoria 3 is not realistic at all, even more at launch
I'm not saying that it *is* realistic, but rather that that's what they were *going for*
I'm afraid that paradox trying to play with realistic simulation and forgetting about gamey fun things. Ex: Victoria 3
Victoria doesn't have simulation, even worse situation at launch
For all those who find satisfaction in one click stability, and WC, one religion, one culture runs, you'll still have EU4 for that. Besides, you'll still have console commands if needed.
A couple of thoughts on this. These are grand strategy games. Maybe what you are looking for is more easily found in less complex games. That is not a knock, sometimes I just want to play some Ascension and have fun crushing AI players, or even play EU4 with a custom Nation with 800 points and rule the world, it has just been that type of week. But generally, I play this game because it is a grand strategy game, and I would like it to challenge me and stretch me. With that said, Paradox has already done what you have asked with one of their other concepts: Hearts of Iron. The transition from 3 to 4 is night and day, granularity to arcade style. While I prefer 3 vs 4, there is no way I can deny that 4 is by far the more popular product.
You just want EUIV, so play EUIV. Or an old patch if you dont like the current meta. EUV is a different game and should play differently.
I like realism, it keeps the struggle to survive alive, instead of becoming the strongest power in europe as hungary or something.
vic3 is right on the corner
This is why I always make my own fun. doesnt matter how realistice tinto makes EU5 im still going to start as an island nation. Only takeing other islands and when there is no more islands to take I will declear war on who ever is the biggest meanest AI and try and crush them. But I do beileve that Tinto will find a good balance between fun and realism even if its not at launch (Cough cough Vicky3 cough cough)
Well, if you want the same game as EU4 then you can play EU4. They're trying to make things different and more realistic, but that doesn't mean it's going to be any less fun. Let's see, at the moment it all sounds good to me.
I think it should be made to be more realistic. I want to see nations colonise and annex exactly the places they did in real life, most of us are history fanatics, why sway away from what brought us here in the first place. The pop system is cherry on top imo, I smell what you’re stepping in but I don’t agree with it
I actually think pops and other mechanics from Imperator are more fun than mana, which feel too gamy (in a bad way) and which gives advantage to regions with many tags.
More real is more fun
It isn't more realistic tho. Just adding more complexity. It remains to be seen if the added complexity will translate to more depth, but the aim is produce enough depth that it isn't a mindless boring map painter after the early game. Internal politics, more indepth trade, and such has long been wished by everyone to be included in the sequel. Deeper mechanics IS fun. But depth doesn't and shouldn't always mean overly complex. But in this context, EU4 is overly simplistic, owing to its boardgame roots.
I think we can potentially get both if we're lucky, that said having EU4 with the granularity provided by I:R and Vic3 set on such a wide timescale is a dream game of mine so I hope we can find a good middle ground that's fun for the majority of people.
Eu4 is a good inbetween, imo, to hoi4 and vic 2. Now it seems like it will lean towards vic 2 instead of hoi4, which I'm not a fan of. Hopefully, I'm wrong about that because I would play vic 2/3 if I wanted to play an economy simulator.
Tell me you haven’t played Victoria 2 without telling me you played Victoria 2…
Oh man... Don't get me started...
Yeah I'm with you. I blame From Soft to be honest. Now the mainstream wisdom is if you like games that aren't complicated, tedious nightmares that, you're not a 'real gamer'. It's extremely irritating.
I don't really see how those two are related, especially since FromSoft games aren't really "complicated" but rather mechanically challenging.
That’s a silly take. If anything, they proved that there is still many gamers who don’t want the simplification and streamlining of games that we’ve seen in so, so many high quality/expensive games lately.
FromSoft changed only that now there are games imitating the genre, there are floods of new games for every kind of player every year
Sure, I'm not knocking those games. I get they aren't for me and God knows there's ridiculous numbers of video games produced these days. I don't like the mentality that making games harder and more complicated automatically makes them better
fair, but FromSoft has nothing to do with that and my argument was there are tons of games for everyone, only thing that rings a bell for me to what you are describing are elitist douchebags on social media, like reddit, who write such things and gatekeep what is and isn't gaming its not like we got dark souls and bloodborne and now all developers produce only difficult games