Europa Universalis IV

Looks like this has potential, but I'm going to have to wait for mods due to the monarch power works. Also, dat Grand Campaign wrong start-up that Paradox still insists is the right story, even through it ins't.

 

I feel that monarch power is kinda semi-realistic, as in history the monarchs really did shape their empire. And in the times of weak ones the empires would crumble.
That said, there are way to offset monarch power by getting high lv advisers so it dosent seem that bad

 

Attrition in Africa needs to be much higher, perhaps by tying certain regions to technology. . It should not be possible for 7k Portuguese troops to sit in Rio de Oro without any attritition while a colony is built.

I feel like a lot of the slowness can be fixed with tweaking the graphics in defines.lua

Nevertheless, I really like what they've done and haven't seen anything that's irreparable yet.

 

I like how monarch power does not scale to size so big empires are greatly penalized and risk falling behind. In general I love all the decisions you have to make when spending monarch power. My issue however is with gold - there seems to be little ways to spend gold, especially without monarch power.

 

Tried to play cracked demo with unlimited time, had memory leaks and crashes so I could never go past 30 years. Never change, Paradox.

 

Ummm... seems silly to blame Paradox for you being unable to play a cracked demo. I haven't had a single problem with it uncracked.

 

Me neither, those problems only showed up after a few hours of playing. Classic Paradox.

 

Seriously, you're fucking retarded if you blame paradox because you're having trouble playing a cracked version. Will that happen in the full release? Maybe, but stop bitching until it does.

 

Played a new game, this time as Oyo. Took over most of west africa and drove out the muslim filth, got bum-raped by europeans with superior tech. (new) thoughts:

- I agree, Fabricating Claims is ridiculously overpowered. What I didn't realize before was that it both lowers the monarch point cost to take the province in war and lowers the point cost to core, but ALSO REMOVES NATIONALISM ALMOST COMPLETELY HOLY FUCK. As anyone knows from the EU3 patch that nerfed manpower, taking lots of land and then seeing 30k manpower go up in smoke after 10k rebels spawn twice a year is a big risk. Fabricated claims make that almost completely irrelevant and remove possibly the biggest barrier to taking all the land you want. Claims also last too long (you can get 2 claims, start a third -> war, get third claim during war, take 3, then get another 2 after truce is up) and are basically free to make (even if caught, 2 aggressive expansion on it's own will quickly degenerate to nothing, and if it's repeated wars against a single target you probably don't give a shit because they are so weak now). Plus diplomats simply aren't used for much else. You need 1 available to do the instant actions, maybe 1 to raise some relations, everyone else can fabricate their hearts out. So yeah. Needs nerfing.

-I like the trade mechanics, but it seems that it favours large nations far too much. Part of the appeal of trade in EU3 was that it was income relatively independent of nation size, but now the mercantilism effect of owning lots of land seems to give too much trade control. And especially, having a high naval limit to spam light ships seems way too powerful. Not a huge fan of that.

-Ideas definitely don't replace teching hard. At least not in the early game. I wish paradox would lighten the Military Tactics progression a bit, like they did with the latest V2 expansion. As it is Europeans are still ridiculous rape machines that even endless hordes of units can't put a dent in, even with some maxed military ideas behind them. Also supply limits should really have more than a +25% boost in your home territory, yes?

-Westernization seems completely broken. At least, in terms of gameplay (historically of course westernization shouldn't exist at all with the exception of possibly Japan). The new restriction is that one of your core provinces must border a (western) european nation's core province. This is really god damned hard because you have to rely on the AI to core their colonies, which seems really rare since there are some sort of penalties/restrictions to coring distant overseas territory. The other option of course is for me to start attacking Europe with my 7 military tech, which ain't gonna happen. So yeah, not a fan, and I see no reason why the restriction is in place. Also, you can't westernize in any way other than directly to western nations. If you are India you can't upgrade your tech group to muslim, you gotta wait for the Western Europeans to come, take a colony, make it a core, then you westernize completely all in one go.

 

Well if light ships are still as cheap as they were smaller nations can compete with bigger. Especially when focusing on naval forcelimits.

 

They are cheap, but a nation with 4x as much coastline will have 4x as high a naval limit all else being equal. And a large country can make all light ships and still win naval battles. A small country needs to make a good amount of large ships, otherwise they won't be able to win naval battles. Same with regards to transports, a large nation doesn't need 4x as many transports because there are supply limits in play, so they can again dedicate a greater % of their already greater naval forcelimit to light ships. Overall, naval contribution should actually scale with nation size even stronger than taxation or production, which scale linearly. This is in direct opposition to EU3, where taxation was (almost) constant with nation size, being purely dependent on ideas/tech/advisors.

 

Man, increasing the time it takes to change religion and cores by 5 times Paradox's amount sure does wonders. Also getting caught claiming cores a tad more painful.

 

Overall seems like people complain about things that will get modded in the first two days. Yes, vanilla may be too easy due to claiming and coring/culture changing being so cheap but first mod coming out will increase the cost. And vanilla EU3 was easy anyway. Hopefully there are no deeper issues.

 

Damn, tempted to pre-order this.

 

Wait for the Byzantium - Phoenix Rising DLC first.

 

Pre-ordering gives some pre-order DLC, like the CK2 savegame converter, which is p. awesome.

 

But it would be given for free as preorder bonus.

But problem there, that even in that time period very few monarchs had actually an absolute power, and it was gained by combination of their abilities with right circumstances. In most cases they were limited by various groups of interest and sometimes there was a person who was much more powerful than a king. So it isn't realistic playing as country and not have an ability to do something with your monarch aside making him a general with hope, that he will die in some battle. And in game files there is at least one ruler, who was classified by game as a very bad ruler, but in fact didn't rule anything at all. And period of his "ruling" even claimed to be moderately successful.

 

First of all, nothing short of a real SECOND COMING(TM) being Steam-exclusive, and even that by quite a stretch, would ever convince me to use that piece of shit called Steamworks, and this game is definitively very far from that.

Not that doing such was ever much of a problem for experienced players, but if Paradox thought they could push the "5%" like me that wants DRM-free games into bending to their retarded decision and still buying it Steam only for the sake of such a wondrously easy map painting faggotry, fuck them. I hope this goes on STEAM SALES very, very soon and make them regret it.

So Hansa small countries will need ridiculous bonuses to have their strengths properly represented, nice. And AI as dumb as always, if it is even possible to conquer most of West Africa with Oyo.

To conclude my point of view, from reading the impressions of the demo here: inferior to Europa Universalis III with Mare Apertum mod, as I predicted, and with some probably hardcoded new game mechanics being questionable at best.

Therefore, unless they change their mind and sell DRM-free copies, not going to buy it, ever.

 

You apparently cannot into Steam sales, because Steam sales don't cause regret. They cause joy for all involved!

 

Paradox Games can't really ever reach the same volume of sales of an indie hipster platformer. They aren't that mass marketable. Which means them being sold too soon for a lower price will cut down their total revenue. But apparently Paradox thinks otherwise. I'd rather not lose even more hope in humanity by assuming the majority of Steam users will impulse buy any game on sales without even reading what the game is about.

 

Can someone smarter than me clarify how does pre-ordering from the Paradox Web Shop work, do they email you the key when it is available or what? Also, haven't received any keys for Crusader Kings 2, wonder if that will come too when the actual game is released.

:superfastedit: Also really excited about the game even if I'll barely have the time to play this... All I ask is EU 3 made better and I'll spend hundreds of hours on this.

 

http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/7/4554042/paradox-interactive-history

Impulse buying without looking at it or not, but multiple massive sales on CK2 and they still haven't saturated the market to the point they can't sell it any more.

 

Paradox games may be niche but the market in growing and they have a strong following so I don't see how being Steam exclusive would alter that. I bet that large majority of their sales come from Steam anyway.

 

95% sales are Steam sales from the numbers they gave.

 

Seems to be true: for quite a time now majority of posts on their forum are idiotic, while membership doubled since 2011.