Anyway, back to the railroading argument, this complaint was exactly why Paradox gave up on the idea of being a historical game and instead created games with a historical theme.
You can play Spain in EU2 and complain about the Netherlands revolting even though you kept the populace there extremely happy, about getting bancrupcy events from the new world even though you kept your inflation in check, about the treaty of tordesillias firing even though you conquered most of Portugal and them not having a single colony and so on and so forth, sure, that stuff sucks.
But to me, it's 1000 times better than having Algeria conquering the Balkans and becoming a major colonial power in the new world, along with Cologne and Novgorod, Tirol owning most of Italy and having somehow gotten Ireland and North England, some sub-saharan tribe westernizing and conquering most of china, Turkey trying to get to their historical strength, but being stopped in their tracks by a coalition of Austria, The Hanseatic League, Burgundy, the Illkhanate, the Aztecs and Norway, working better than the NATO would centuries later - none of which even sharing a common border with the Turks ... all on a world map that looks drastically different from the real world (border-wise), with only some recognizeable names, completely fictional leaders and monarchs .... you get the point.
Actually, I vastly prefer the weird ahistorical outcomes from the new Paradox games. In my games of CK2 with all expansions, usually things happen relatively believably, but in some games you just get some weird shit that makes things more interesting. It's boring to have the exact same results every time you play a new game. It's much more interesting when anything can happen - and if we're honest, during history things often only happened the way they did because circumstances were exactly one way, and not another. So if you change a few variables, things might turn out very differently. Yes, Byzantium surviving past 1453 is a possibility. Prussia never becoming a major power is a possibility. Scandinavia never getting Christianized is a possibility. Etc.
And the simulationist approach means that even if the results are weird and wonky, at least they're systemically believable. And they make the games more interesting because you never know how the world will end up in the end.
This tbh, who wants to see the exact same thing happen every time? lol
I get what you guys are saying, and Paradox agrees with your POV and completely embraced it, obviously. You already won.
That said, you're also missing the point. No game of EU2 was exactly like history, there were always variations, sometimes massive. Many (but not all, not by a long shot!) of those were caused by player action, though.
You could play a small minor for 200 years slowly fighting your way up the food chain, and when you were ready to compete with some bigger boys in 16xx, chances were the political landscape still looked at least somewhat familiar.
It was never identical to history, but close enough. The what if you played was like: What if (as you cited it) Byzantium survived to the 1600s while everything else in the world developed roughly as written in the history books.
The newer PDox approach completely loses any ties to history in no time, you cannot, I dunno, keep Burgundy alive to eventually try and stop Napoleon, you cannot play up to the War of the Roses and try to bring about a different result, you cannot try to form a german nation early and have it stand up against Austria or whatever - none of the historical events ever happen in modern EU games, no historical figures ever appear.
The game might just as well be set on a completely random map with random geography - such as you would play a Civ game on a random map.
In time, Paradox try to make up for this by adding tons and tons of systems, some region specific or religion specific and so on - but you still never end up in a scenario remotely comparable to real history.
Like I said, your side of the argument won, so there no longer is an argument, but I just cannot fathom the accusation that staying within the realm of historical plausibility equals to "the exact same thing happening every time".
That said, I also loved the older Civ games, where you are definately NOT replaying history in any shape or form. That can be a great experience. But I feel EU still WANTS to be this game tied in history, to a degree, yet it all falls apart for me, personally.
OTOH, I do like CK2, but it's something else entirely. I repeat, your side has won long ago, I just wish Paradox had at least kept their script engine versatile enough to make a historical game akin to the EU2 of old - nobody forced them to throw out the triggers enabling you to make it so - but they did. They burnt their bridges and nothing like AGC could even be created for EU4. I'm just a bit sad about that part, because some of the systems in the newer games are great and I'd love to have an otherwise more traditional EU experience with those systems in play. But alas, some things are not to be.
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