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gradenko_2000 posted:Okay. I managed to figure out Victoria 3 over the weekend (thanks in no small part to this thread) so I think I'll have another crack at EU4 Vanilla. EU4 is much more traditional and broad rather than deep game. As in there's no value in the game that you can't affect directly or affect the value which it depends upon. This may sound like a condemnation and for many people this makes the game too "casual", but there's a lot to be said for its width and thickness. There are many mechanics unique to specific religions or cultures or countries, the mechanics are usually easy to grasp but you won't ever feel fully in control because of the number of actors, and they mostly interact through trade offs between main resources, the infamous monarch points often labeled as mana. The UI might be an issue cause it's not so friendly as CK3 or Victoria 3 where you have a suggestions widget, cascading tooltips, automatic switching between map modes and shortcuts between screens. E.g. in many cases when the game shows you list of provinces (for religious conversion or potential rebelions) you have no quick way to jump to said provinces. Mods like MEIOU and Taxes that people mention here have this problem very much intensified. Famous mod Anbennar is relatively good about it even though it's harder to grasp than vanilla too.
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Mar 20, 2024 10:17
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Poil posted:Won't moving the start and end dates 100 years earlier just mean people stop playing in the 1600s instead of the 1700s? This depends a lot on the pacing. To be honest, EU4 felt already too long for me, I'd prefer it to be denser, especially now that Tinto focused on bringing more flavor and special events and missions to countries. I enjoy playing late game EU4 due to how evolved and transformed the wolrd becomes, but still it feels like the same systems can't handle Medieval armies and dynastic policies at the same time as Napoleonic warfare and Great Power games.
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Mar 23, 2024 13:43
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Dr Kool-AIDS posted:I'm pretty excited about this project. 4 definitely started out a bit too similar to 3, and it doesn't seem like they're going to have that problem this time. That doesn't mean it'll necessarily be good, but it should at least be interesting. They pushed themselves into the corner with 11+ years of support, you can't make EU but better again. But then I also thought it was true for CK2 and CK3 is not really a revolution the way EU3 or Victoria 3 or HoI4 were. Go figure.
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Mar 23, 2024 14:43
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fuf posted:Here's my dumb wish: stop making all the numbers like +0.10 and -0.05. gimme some nice big numbers that are easy to read. Hight time for gamedesigners to start using ‱ symbol. You can get +100‱ and feel good about it. But really when I have an issue with numbers it's because of the sheer number of modifiers. No single bonus feels important after early game cause you have so many ideas, estate modifiers, permanent bonuses from missions, dozen government reforms and so on. Sadly EU4 went through a period where every expansion was obliged to add a new important value onto the systems.
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Mar 23, 2024 23:04
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Common Sense: +0.05 to numbers Initially Common sense added a lot more numbers but they were retroactively moved into the base game. Still it makes sense to use patch version, not DLC specifically when evaluating the number of numbers. I am sad to say I am left unsatisfied with your analysis. Demon_Corsair posted:This is what I struggle with in almost every paradox game. Dozens of different stats and modifiers and only a handful that are really impactful. To me they all feel impactful but with the sheer amount of important modifiers most feel inconsequential. They did some good job with making modifiers availability different. E.g. prestige bonuses are everywhere but getting max absolutism or core cost reduction is still rare and precious. What I mean is I no longer get the idea of what is my country good at. There was a time when you got the idea from the ideas, maybe a government type. But now there are also numerous government reforms, permanent modifiers from missions, all that stuff. If you open the page of various bonuses your country has modifiers for everything. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Mar 24, 2024 |
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Mar 24, 2024 09:58
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In the top right of trade screen you have "accept all trades" option, and underneath there's "Block surplus". I recommend ticking both unless you have a plan and you'll be fine. You can also control automatic trade for every province.
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Mar 24, 2024 15:56
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Demon_Corsair posted:It is something I’ve noticed with ck and Vicky. They release in a polished but empty feeling state. And the dlc cycle is longer then it used to be, so even now ck3 doesn’t feel super fleshed out yet. A lot depends on presentation and player expectation here. I remember listening to a podcast with a review of EU4 and people wondered what could they possibly do with DLC, the game is so full and varied. At the time it was compared to CK2 where DLCs gradually added playable Muslims, Republics, and later Indians and Nomads. A lot of tricks add to the feeling of uniqueness in these games. EU4 has the most of these I think. Even on the country selection screen you can usually see some unique ideas also known as explanation to how this particular people genetically earned their +5% to discipline. When you launch the game you get a screen talking about the environment and government and religion of the country. Imperator or Victoria 3 countries are often quite distinct, but you must get into the ledger to realize you are playing a tribe that has unique access to a lot of horses and an easy path to a formable country with some nice bonus on the way, Imperator required a lot of time to even add heritages - and it still feels like most of the map has generic heritages. With Victoria 3 it's especially funny cause some of the uniqueness of the country you can only see from outside with unique AI agendas.
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Apr 1, 2024 08:39
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YF-23 posted:But yeah, national ideas, along with inheriting a lot of EU3's country-specific missions and reworking EU2's historical events into the dynamic historical event system meant that release EU4 had some regional flair already. I wouldn't call it fleshed out really, if anything my memory of release EU4 was the opposite, everyone feeling like it was a bit bland, but I can see how someone would look at EU4 from CK2 and be surprised. Those reviewers where experienced people who played other Paradox series, not entitled fans. IIRC they noted that many more countries need national ideas but it's not something you sell in an expansion. Also EU4 did a good job to specifically replicate some of the later additions in EU3 lifecycle to pacify returning players. The last EU3 expansion added a lot of flavor to Asia and EU4 added even more by making Japan bigger and more diverse and adding new decisions here and there. People complained but when do people ever not complain. Really I'm bitter about complaints about lack of flavour cause it's so unmeasurable and uncountable. How much flavor must there be, is 5Mb of localized unique events enough?
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Apr 1, 2024 13:51
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Xerophyte posted:Idea groups can do more interesting and flavorful things, but since they're all upside there's a tendency in EU4 to let you both have your cake and eat it. The sliders are far drier but I miss the forced dilemmas in some ways. I remember how at some point I've learned enough of EU3 to understand the mechanics enough to never be scared of anything anymore. The illusion broke and it wasn't interesting to play anymore, as most choices become either straightforward with one option being a trap, or irrelevant. I never got to this point with EU4, even if I created global empires. It does sometimes feel pointless in the end game as the game is "won" and I know whatever goals I set will just require a whole lot of waiting and carpet sieging. But the game never feels solved. I like EU4 approach to bonuses. But indeed, a malus here and there would be nice, nowadays most of the penalties come in form of negative events for idea groups. And there are so many modifiers that only extreme ones feel relevant. I can certainly appreciate the idea of EU4 screen that shows you the country's "build". It sounds like EU5 is going for something like that, Johan publicly acknowledges there was too much modifier stacking in EU4 later on.
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Apr 1, 2024 15:24
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Farecoal posted:Please don't criticize the smol bean publicly traded corporation Said corporation did and still does a lot of awful stuff with their DLC policy, failure to market good games and writing off games and development studios, sometimes before release. But somehow the dominant criticism is sidetrack into discussion of game design decision or that sequels to their games aren't simultaneously exactly the same as previous games and revolutionary.
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Apr 1, 2024 18:53
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First of all note that playing tall is a self-imposed challenge. In vast majority of situations it's more "optimal" to expand - which might mean a lot of things, including vassalization and colonization and trade control. I understand you enjoy the idea of a tall empire though A good time to develop a second province is when an institution drops. Developing allows you to spawn the new institution and adopt it early. In terms of development you can develop everything. With infrastructure upgrades you can build several "manufactures" which means that it's not necessary to specialize provinces, you can get both money and manpower from a province. It might be a good idea to spend more diplomatic/production MP on provinces with costly trade goods. You know if you're doing well if you're having town. With many DLC updated nations mission rewards are very strong and if you follow them you're golden. Without DLCs or with simpler nations you just try to not be in a situation when someone can easily eat you. Generally it's enough to befriend some local powers for that.
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Apr 6, 2024 09:33
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CommonShore posted:maybe? idk it's a good achievement to work for. Get powerful in italy and start loving around in North Africa and make allies and fight the mamluks is a good campaign. I actually did that (and Arabian coffee in the same run) and I don't recommend this to anyone, especially to people who try to get into the game. A lot of achievements ask you to do nonsensical things, but this one requires you to shoot yourself in the foot by making it so that you have more Egyptian development than Italian (or whatever is the specific culture).
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Apr 6, 2024 16:20
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THE BAR posted:The first colony will still develop, but at a slower pace, and the upkeep increases exponentially Be aware it's not just a figure of speech, it really does mean exponentially. Every colony above the number of colonists costs more and more. If you have 1 colonist but 3 colonies you pay 16 gold, which will cripple an early game economy.
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Apr 8, 2024 08:21
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:Yeah I'm very unsold on the idea of minutely adjustable sliders for taxation. I just don't see what that would add over a handful of buttons for each taxation class like what Vicky 3 does. that level of fine control may add the illusion of additional depth, but it's not really going to give you more meaningful options, and it'll just waste your time as you fiddle with the sliders to find the perfect balance. Hard agree. We'll see of course but currently I don't recall any EU4 slider that I would ever use more than 2 positions for. In case of army maintenance it's max and close to 0 but so that random wandering rebel wouldn't annihilate my armies. In every other Paradox games I get meaningful choices about paying my army extra to get something out of them, but in EU4 it's literally a switch between feeling safe and not feeling safe. Every other slider is "am I really short for money now or not". Paradox gets metrics from these games, have they ever observed a player to move, say, missionary maintenance slider to any position between min and max?
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Apr 10, 2024 16:40
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CommonShore posted:I often put "root out corruption" at 1/3, and often I use middle-tier army maint when I'm short on cash but I expect some rebellions. Corruption is another one that a sensible position somewhere in the middle that would stop corruption from growing, and I never put it lower. I guess you make the case for sliders cause you seem to be 3 positions on that slider.
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Apr 10, 2024 17:00
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:
In the earlier version population played a role but it was never balanced. In the late game all the provinces get 999999 population and it looks silly, so it was removed from all the formulas but was left on the UI. You can also remember that in earlier versions of EU3 province screen had a 3d view of the city with all the buildings. But later they reworked building system and removed this screen.
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Apr 10, 2024 17:04
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Hellioning posted:The only thing I use the sliders for is setting the 'remove corruption' slider so I'm not gaining corruption and no further. I do not like sliders this much. But moving a slider pixel by pixel till you hit this point is true hardcore experience.
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Apr 10, 2024 19:28
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:
Another thing I like about Imperator/Victoria3 buttons is that you can get non-linear dependencies and different values for different positions. E.g. in Imperator underpaying soldiers dramatically lowers they morale by 25% and increases population happiness by 5%, overpaying by the same amount increases they morale merely by 10% and decreases population happiness by the same 5%. This is a more interesting choice and dependency than the one you can do with sliders. I guess you can make a slider with non-linear dependency but it will look very strange. That's an emotionally charged choices in Imperator, you know what I mean? ilitarist fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Apr 11, 2024 |
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Apr 11, 2024 07:10
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Mandoric posted:In my opinion, and eh my opinion I'm one person, that... Doesn't look strange? You're deciding whether you want 100% of the morale penalty and 100% of the pop happiness bonus or 100% of the morale bonus and 100% of the pop happiness penalty, so other somewheres along that continuum don't confuse, yes? My point is nonlinear dependency feels more, for a lack of a better word, immersive. There's an optimal value and beyond that you get diminishing returns, there's a minimal value beyond which you can't go. EU4 already has something like that in sliders, as in while army maintenance looks like it goes from 0 to 100 it really goes from 50 to 100 and you can't pay your troops less than 50% but at this point they're useless. There's no interesting choice there, at war you always go to 100, and I guess there's some choice for how much you fear possible rebels at the moment of peace, whether you go to 50 or 60% mantainance. Imperator/Victoria 3 choice of paying troops extra for diminishing returns is an actual interesting choice. You probably never go to low mantainance during the war, but you have to wonder if this war is worthy of paying your troops 25% more for mere 10% of increase of morale. It would be hard to do the same with sliders, unless you have notched slider with clear different areas. I guess they had something like that with EU3 national policies slider, but this one was very descrete and you couldn't affect it directly, you never made a decision on where on the slider you want to land, only if you're going to move it one step in any direction.
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Apr 11, 2024 08:07
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Mandoric posted:You can just as easily have that with a slider, though, even without the notches! Middle is neither bonus and neither malus, left is all the morale malus and all the happiness bonus, right is all the happiness malus and all the morale bonus. EU4's lack of diminishing returns Slider with diminishing return would be very awkward to use. As in you move it 10 pixels to the right and pay 10% more but then you get only 5% more morale. But if you move it 5 pixels instead you get what, 3% more morale? And moving it 20 pixels gives you 7% morale so unless we deal with decimals there's probably optimal position somewhere at 16 pixels that gives you 7% boost and 16% maintance increase. Or do you change the maintanance value only when the value you want to increase changes? Maybe there are ways to solve this but you can probably see it's all unintuitive. I can imagine a set of areas for slider (most likely 2, like in EU3 policies or in EU4 for various indirectly affected sliders e.g. Mysticism/Legalism) and it might work in case of army maintanance, I guess, though I can hardly imagine a lot of uses between "pay sensible amount" and "pay all the money to squeeze some additional performance" positions on that slider. I can also see a big general slider for spending/treasury working, with a notched position for 0. What we say though were sliders for taxing the estates, and there I understand you have these clear positions where if you raise taxes further the estate becomes disloyal. There I can totally see a set of buttons working well. Tax them as much as it's expected (this position will give you optimal loyalty/income), tax them more or less (this will give you optimal loyalty OR income without sacrificing the other too much), don't tax them at all (maximum loyalty), tax them as much as you can (maximum income). Of course without playing the game I don't know how it works, but if it requires constant fiddling with the sliders I probably won't like it. If it's set and forget till the situation changes then I expect you'll seek one of the positions I mentioned, and people around the world will spend thousands of man-hours looking for a pefrect pixel position.
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Apr 11, 2024 09:43
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I just wish they'd come out of beta with these patches because it creates some awkwardness.
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Apr 17, 2024 18:11
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I've tried many vanilla+ mods for Paradox games and they often left me unsatisfied. Invictus is the best one I saw. I can complain a little about the quality and consistence of art, this is the only thing that will let you know it's not an official product. It mostly does small balance fixes and adds a lot of regional content. A lot of it is very reaching and based on fantasies I think, but it does feel like historical Anbennar, if you know what I mean. Imperator missions system works wonderfully for this kind of guided gameplay. You can try playing as basically any country you know anything about and you'll get some decent writing and unique gameplay objectives and style. Terra Indomita, on the other hand, is your usual kitchensink mod. The creators never said no to any idea. It's not just map expansion but a mechanical expansion too, like it has skill trees for characters a la CK3. It's too much for me.
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Apr 17, 2024 19:30
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Torrannor posted:Do we have numbers for this? Are there many more EU players than CK and Stellaris and Victoria and HoI players? At the moment on Steam more people play EU4 than Crusader King's 3 or Stellaris and of course Victoria 3. There aren't any recent expansions or patches so it's not a fluke. Many more people play HoI4 though. Also note that CK3 and Stellaris have console versions, and all of these games are available on platforms beyond Steam. I think they're all available on gamepass, or at least were available at some point. Years ago Paradox were willing to rework a lot of HoI4 after they showed alpha version to people, even back then they knew they can't make any mistakes with their biggest games.
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Apr 21, 2024 13:07
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I think the only names on Imperator map that are still there on the map are Egypt and Armenia. Unlike, say, EU4, where most modern countries are one step from being formed by somebody if not already there. The density and detail of Imperator doesn't really work for most people. Total War games approach of making just a few playable factions with every one having some charged identity works better for a setting like this. I like how Fields of Glory Empires handles this: it is a much more abstracted than I:R and most of the map is filled with passive "independents", including even parts of Greece (Olympia is a free real estate), which sounds primitive but this also means that every single country present on the map has a unique description, traits, something.
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Apr 21, 2024 18:46
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JonBolds posted:I was at this preview event and this is pretty much how it went. Oh hey, it's you. I remember this story from Three Moves Ahead episode, I think. soviet elsa posted:Macedonia erasure. It really is a problem even for TW where the lost of playable factions is limited and each one gets special treatment with VA, art and gameplay. People don't want to play as Pontus. Lately they switched to character-focused factions but it limits the scope a lot and I'm not sure how well it works outside of adaptations of character-focused novels like Three Kingdoms and Troy.
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Apr 22, 2024 08:02
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