CKII is released.

Didn't some dev state that the CKII DLC cycle would end after a "few" more expansions?

Because it looks like there might be more on the way (Johan):

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-planned-dlcs-are-left.1004233/#post-22520392

I was planning to wait it out until they are finally done before jumping back in. Which is not going to work if they keep on going.

 

Yeah, I find this ridiculous. I imagine the total cost for the players who have been supporting the game since day one already tops 300 bucks. And the game feels and plays unfinished after every new expansion, with performance problems across the board due to the old 32 bit engine.

They should just wrap this up this year and move on to ck3

 

Problem with CK3 is that it would be bare bones again.

 

Nothing a DLC or two (or ten, or twenty) won't fix I'm sure. All over again. Just as soon as they milk CK2 dry.

 

I have no interest in CK3 to be honest, I imagine they will cuck and dumb down the game to hell and back.

I always played CK2 heavily modded and at this point I will just wait out until the game is actually wrapped up before playing it again. Last time I found I spent more time modding the game than actually playing it.

 

Didn't EUIV pretty much incorporate every feature from EUIII? I think they're aware of that.

 

Oh, no. EUIV lost important features of EUIII (and previous EU games) as far as I know. I never was big on EUIII, it was too ugly for me. They introduced those silly monarch points, and have kept adding various types of "points" to no end, as if adding a points-based resource will fix everything in a game. They removed population and added the nothing-meaning "base tax" resource.

 

Population was a pretty half-baked thing in EU3 tho, it was a number you'd just watch go up as fast as the grass grows (or practically not at all if the province started with 1000 population) and all it really did was just scale production. Base tax was already in EU3, base production is essentially what population was (as population had no effect on taxation, only production; taxation was determined solely by base tax + modifiers from ideas, events, decisions, and/or buildings).

 

Obviously it wasn't well implemented in EU3, but removing a feature rather than fixing it is bad. Plenty of things that were completely screwed up in EU3 were fixed in mods.

That said most of what was lost from EU3->EU4 was good mechanics being dropped in favor of worse mechanics (e.g. the trade system, tech system, monthly/yearly split income system), not a loss of features. EU3 was pretty feature-bare.

 

The societies are pretty bald so far, I stand by my observation that the Germanic portraits are the best part of this DLC, followed by quality of life things like not micromanagey council member jobs.

 

The thing I most dislike in EUIV is the monthly "salary" income. It's probably easy on bad players, but it reduces uncertainty in a bad way + it's unhistorical. Taxes were usually collected once a year.

 

Eh, can't say EU IV lost much in that transition. You keep saying points but I just keep going back to sliders. Sure there were some things lost in translation/altered but all in all, when EU IV released it did quite good job at bringing most key things along from EU III while introducing it's own things to separate the two games from each others.

 

I liked the sliders, they gave me the feeling that my country is gradually evolving in a direction. Sure, they weren't perfect, and it was an abstract gamey rule "once in ten years you can change something about the core values of your country" but I still felt more connected to the sliders than to the MP.

 

I think you are approaching this form the immershun point of view. That is an unwise path that leads people into thinking population was an important feature of EU3.

 

Tech system IMO got better, since now it had more active planning involved and it was not linked to the tax sliders and inflation. Monthly/Yearly split in taxation was also just unnecessary busywork for no real benefit in contrast to a more intuitive and simpler book-keeping. As for trade system, the only thing that was really lost mechanically is the creation of new trade centers, BUT the new system's trade route mechanic makes for a much better and overall interesting system where there's more than local production involved. Also it no longer has send merchant busywork either. Sure it'd be nice for the trade centers and trade routes (or at least trade center locations per trade center zone and the end node zones) be more fluid and mutable.

Problem tho is that the argument of historicity cannot overtake game design in importance. I mean, being able to tax directly into currency is unhistorical, being able to directly control trade is unhistorical, armies not having lots of attrition from disease is unhistorical, being able to see next to your provinces and armies is unhistorical, being able to ship tens of thousands across the globe is unhistorical, being able to check statistical information of other countries is unhistorical, instant purely bilateral peace negotiations are unhistorical, having control over technological progress is unhistorical, standing armies as sole global standard are unhistorical, instant communications and reactivity are unhistorical, ping pong is unhistorical, not having Juche-jumbo-size proportion of military spending is unhistorical, not being neck-deep in loans is unhistorical, etc, etc. If we went with historical accuracy the player should have fog of war limited to the national leader's current physical location, most of the game would deal with indirect messages and reports, managing your delegating of all sorts of tasks and trying to keep up with the results of those delegated tasks and their delegated tasks results and effectiveness, lack any sort of direct control over population, revolt risk, production, trade, taxation, diplomacy, etc. It would be an interesting game, maybe, but it wouldn't be what you'd expect from a grand strategy game spanning centuries.

Bottom line is that in a game, the question of historical accuracy should be "does this add anything of value to THIS type of game."

 

Active planning? What? In EU3 you had to plan and invest over years, in EU4 you click a button.

It added a penalty for messing up your finances and incentivized keeping a some money in the bank to deal with things. In EU4 there's essentially no reason not to spend money as soon as you get it. You could even say that EU4 created more busywork, since in EU4 you want to buy a building or something every time you get 100 ducats in the bank, meaning you need to be watching your money counter every month, while in EU3 you could simply spent your surplus at the end of the year.

New trade system is pure crap. Money only flows one direction and it forces you to blob across entire continents to actually make profits. In EU3 and real life countries like Portugal and Netherlands controlled substantial amounts of trade while having only 1 or 2 ports in Asia. In EU4 this is impossible, they need to control most of India/Arabia/East Africa in order to profit. Apparently EU4 thinks that if you send trade through an area without owning the area all your trade ships get boarded and looted due to magical province power. Also merchants were completely automated, what are you talking about busywork?

 

Technically you can do the same strategic province taking in EU4 as well, but IMO that runs into a problem across the whole series which is that there is never reason NOT to blob across entire continents if you have the opportunity. In EU3 you'd still get the real trade income from blobbing the trade center (and preferably destroying any ones you didn't want nearby). I'm not really happy with the trade system in either game, since there's no refinement of goods or any kind of Triangle Trade mechanic for moving about various goods in exchange for other goods. It sort of ties in with how I think the best way to handle the military aspect would be some kind of mobilization system instead of standing armies that you build with gold, with things like muskets (of all sorts) and cannons being trade goods that you acquire precisely so you can equip your mobilized peons, it'd be a much better system than having a tech system handle units in war (in fact, the tech aspect really should be some kind of national idea or institution esque thing for tactical innovations). Sort of like how armies work in that recent Nobunaga's Ambition (also adding that whole looting and burning thing would also be very apt given how that was von Wallenstein's solution to logistics during the Wars of Religion). A mobilization and goods based military model would probably be around the same level of "do want" list of features to me as indepth negotiation processes in style of Treaty of Westphalia and Tordesillas.

(Also IIRC the merchant sending automation happened only in Divine Wind)

In regards to taxation, I'd say the only thing the yearly/monthly model did was make early game more tiresome because your accounting was done on a yearly scale instead of a monthly economy. Ultimately in case of both games the same principle in saving money is first and foremost for large-scale investments, event crisis fund, and hiring extra mercenaries.

 

I don't want to turn the thread to an argument about EUIV. Vaarna_Aarne , I've read your argument quite a few times, posted by a multitude of different people in various threads. You are not discovering anything new here. If we had true history-based gameplay, the player would have to be surrounded by so much uncertainty and deliberately false information, that the real fun from a game would be watching your "replay" (if there was such a feature), with all the "fog" lifted from all the internal workings, and being able to see the things you only suspected or expected while playing.

Still, ultimately everyone draws the line beyond which gamey mechanics break his immersion and fun somewhere. And funnily enough, for most self-proclaimed gamists, ridiculing players who seek "immurshun", the line really invovles shiny graphics, and is not really connected with game mechanics. Not saying you are one of them.

 

MEIOU and Taxes 2.0 will fix it, performance permitting.

 

Different pay and feature structure, though. I'm actually interested to see if they got the Sims route with the sequels -- the Sims frequently takes all those expensive DLC/expansions and tosses 'em right out the window when starting a new iteration.

 

So anyway, we should get back to hailing Satan.

 

May all the Caliph's armies die in the siege of Quetta.

 

So, has anyone played somewhat extensively with the new DLC? I'm aware that it seems to be mostly lulzy but does it add anything worthwhile to the game? I quite liked the Reaper's Due.

 

I think the best stuff (crypto-religion, UI changes, optimisations) are free with the patch. The actual societies are completely under cooked, so just wait for more patches/mods if that's what interests you.

 

I really hope (but don't expect) that with CK3/EU5, they'd actually really rework core mechanics and try to produce a very different experience. They've gotten as far as they can go with the current setup. I could excuse a more bare-bones release if they did that.