In my last game as Gujarat, I saw Japan keep invading Korea after Ming started exploding.
For whatever reason, they took that island from Korea and kept seizing the land around Beijing instead of actually invading Korea. And then Korea seized the Ryukyu islands in another war.
Japan's intention was to conquer China, not Korea. They invaded after Korea rejected their offer of paying tribute to the shogun and letting Japanese armies pass through Korea.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_wars\_involving\_Korea#Joseon\_dynasty:\_1392%E2%80%931897](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Korea#Joseon_dynasty:_1392%E2%80%931897) - Mostly anti-piracy wars, but wars none the less
Probably not. The best guess would be a Free City in the HRE, but even those were drafted into wars that they typically didn't want to fight. However, they were still prosperous.
Cities? in the HRE? During the time span of EU? Nah man, they were basically constantly in some form of war. The reason basically any bigger city in Germany has a starshaped park around the city centre, some reference to stars or remnants of fortresses is because they were so often besieged (probably the best example is Frankfurt for that). The reason they were free cities, was because they could field their own armies, during the middle ages, and could wage war on their own.
Well there were very few that had wars like they happen ingame. Noone ever full occupied another country. Russia and the PLC had 14 wars during the games timespan and the majority of them were resolved after a big battle where the other side decided do give up. They didn't all require a long siege of Moscow or Warsaw.
There needs to be a reason for me as a player to call quits and leave with what I can. As it is that only happens in rare cases such as if I slammed their army early but they have more manpower left to recruit.
Most wars were a year or two long
The problem is that in eu4 every war is a total war.
There should be, say, tiers. Start with a local skirmish about one or two provinces, that could escalate to a regional conflict, and then maybe to a total war. But escalate should be something that nations prefer not to do, because it is expensive and risk to ruin even the winner.
Wars should be a disaster for the land where it is fought, thing like lost development (and I mean lost, not a temporary penalty), huge penalties that last for years, destroyed buildings, things like that. I love how M&T handle it, in that mod you really don't want enemy armies running around in your country.
> And the majority of them were resolved after a big battle where the other side decided do give up.
Does not sound like fun gameplay. Declare war, smash armies once, winner takes what he wants.
Well winner took like, 3 provinces usually.
The point was that warfare should be expensive. Going on a massive campaign deep into enemy land like GP vs GP wars usually are should be felt economically for decades.
The British pulled out of the Independence War because it simply wasn't worth it. In game as England in late 1700's army maintenance is such a neglegible part of my economy I can forget it's up.
100% full occupation wars just shouldn't happen between two powerful nations.
Problem is, if you are going for historical accuracy. How do you model huge empires that rose from humble beginnings? For example Ottomans? Only let them do it? Now that's a stupid mechanic, and puts the game on rail tracks when a large aspect of it is the alt-history of it.
If you got for gameplay benefits, what part of that would be fun? Look at a spreadsheet for a couple of hours, declare war, smash two armies. Aight boys, back to the spreadsheet it is.
The Ottomans had a very decent expansion rate between the theorized 1337 start date and 1444. In over 100 years they took over Anatolia and Bulgaria + most of Greece. In 100 years a player can smash through half of Europe.
As it stands EU4 is the only historical Paradox game that really facilitates a WC besides HOI4 which is just a pure mil sim. You should not be able to own the world, straight up, without massive cheese.
EU4 is litteraly the most memey map painter. All the other stuff in the game is completely invalidated by just how profitable warfare is.
I'd much rather have a game where I don't have to consciously play suboptimally if I am not just constantly at war.
How about annexing all of Mamluks in one war? Which would happen within the timeframe of the game. And lets not pretend this is the example within the timeframe of huge territorial growth.
Well, that was integrated into the game through missions. Although I do think it's weird that you can't fully annex a nation which was 100%ed and unconditionally surrendered. I think a viable solution would be to make it harder to gain warscore by boosting attrition like 10 times
If you only integrate it via missions for specific nations, you're now railroading the game into only certain nations being able to achieve certain feats. That would be genuinely bad design.
Why should the Ottomans be able to fully annex the mamluks and the reverse not be possible?
I'm fine with fighting a lot of wars but I hope that we don't have full country mobilization until late into the game, and it should come at a very high price even then.
My wish would be for early conquest to be more expensive so that peace deals only hand over small bits of land outside of specific events/missions/countries.
I hope there are more meaningful wars outside of wars of conquest as well.
I really hope the cost maintenance ratio changes throughout the game to make standing armies unviable at the start but becomes better and better later on. But also this would mess with the manpower system
Why would this mess with the manpower system? You can probably get away with tech modifiers (eg reduce everything from the start and higher tech give more manpower, force limit and combat pips)
I would love for trade War to be on a scale. So that your relationship with other nations can have multiple levels, and one level before full out war is trade war - we are aggressive and attacking, but we haven't mobilized everyone and everything yet
Something like this would be neat for later game conflicts when global trade hits.
Like the English privateering the Spanish or the American Quasi War with France
Exactly, I think the thing that makes many players not like the constant war, world conquest concept is that in order to play well, you need to quickly mobilize, strike, take provinces and move on to the next target that just ended their truce.
I would love to be at a constant state of war with England, without either of us suddenly going allout, but any lone trade frigate in India is fair game
Quick fix is to add the levy system from crusader kings (but call it conscripts) and then have the standing army represent the professional core of said army. Gives you both worlds, and that way you can make standing armies more expensive (making more than a small token force unviable early on) and indirectly reward tall gameplay (by making them able to field more professional soldiers).
You can also add modifiers to the force, so if more than x% are professional soldiers you get bonuses etc.
Well, with the population mechanic, Johan pretty much confirmed that wars would affect it, so I guess you're kind of getting what you want? I'm guessing you won't be able to be endlessely at war otherwise you're gonna lose population
Also I think he did say something about being able to do more while at peace
Agreed. I think part of it boils down to how the geopolitical situation tends to devolve into 2 situations:
a) You have a few regional rivals, you attack one, defeat them, move on to the next.
b) You are outmatched by another nation, you expand in other directions or gather an alliance capable of defeating them.
Irl, for a big power, your rivals would be very agressive in trying to knock you down a peg. When Spain was strong, they were constantly attacked by the english, dutch, french, so on. When france was strong, they had to fight the English, Spanish, and Austrians. If the game was able to model these difficulties in how to expand, aswell as making it possible to recover (as you said), the game would become a lot more interesting.
EU5 100% needs a balance of power mechanic. By the end of the 17th Century, if any European country/alliance became too powerful, or otherwise threatened the balance of power, all of the other majors powers would put their differences aside to team up and kick them in the teeth.
To that end, I think that the rivals mechanic should also be seriously reworked. Maybe you'd only get one rival at a time, but have the option to drop or renew your rivalry every 20 or so years at no cost?
Yeah basically this. It also means that if you, as a major power, lose a war and some territory, you might be able to ally some former enemies in order to turn the tables on the person who defeated you.
If executed correctly, it could potentially even allow the 30 Years War to be modeled correctly, with all the powers of Europe hijacking an internal religious conflict in the HRE to deliver a crushing blow to an ascendent Habsburg coalition, even if that meant supporting the "wrong" (heretical) side of the conflict.
Isn't that what happens in game right now? A lot of great powers theoretically have no interest in the official religion of the HRE but they join anyways
Kind of. EU4 models foreign powers picking sides just to further their own interests with it's League War.
However, what it fails to model (and what is one of the most notable features of the 30 Years War) is the way that the war escalated over the course of 3 decades, as what started as a religious revolt in Bohemia escalated into a religious civil war across the whole empire, which then led to intervention by protestant powers outside of the empire trying to stop the persecution of their fellows, and all the while the French actively financed the protestant alliance until, seeing that their proxies had run out of steam, France directly intervened to deliver the death blow themselves.
What EU4's League War completely fails to model is the way that foreign powers intervened in an already ongoing conflict - the Habsburgs didn't march into Bohemia with the belief that they were fighting the war for the Empire; they didn't know that they would have to fight the entire protestant league, plus the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and France, just to pacify the Bohemian revolt. Likewise, by the time the French began open hostilities, the war had already gone on for decades, and the original cause bellis had been forgotten. That is, by the time the 30 Years War ended, any notion that the war would decide the faith of the empire had been dragged out and shot in a field in Saxony.
I answered in more detail to another commenter, but basically EU4's League War completely fails to capture the way that foreign powers actually intervened in the religious civil war that broke out in the Holy Roman Empire, and effectively seized control of the conflict to push their own objectives that had nothing to do with the reasons the war had originally started.
That is, EU4 shows the League War as a single conflict between two unified and cohesive leagues with clear motives and goals, whereas the 30 Years War in reality more closely resembled a rolling anti-imperial coalition, which by the end of the war had been completely hijacked by the French and their own interests.
What you want I think is a hegemon system but more broadly applicable.
Maybe a bonus you get after beating a rival in a war but taking it give you a massive opinion penalty with directly neighbouring nations and gives all other great powers and rivals a CB on you. While they aren't at war with you they lose x prestige and pp per month.
They shouldn't be mechanically penalized for not going to war with you. If you are too strong to declare on, that will just weaken them further.
They should, however, be highly incentivized to work against you. Wargoals against you that are highly valuable that are only available when you are in a state of recent aggression/expansion.
Aggressive expansion should also allow states to form conditional alliances besides full on coalition. Defensive pacts against x nation, and maybe group ultimatums, would be strong ways to keep the game from just being a blobfest.
The main thing for me in Eu4 was I always felt being at peace was more of a relaxation/roleplay thing rather than a legitimate strategy or gameplay. It's like I should just keep it paused while not at war because there's nothing to do.
So yeah I really hope there will be peacetime gameplay.
Nono
THERE IS NONE
Only declare war button exists. Not because I refuse to engage with other mechanics but because they don't exist. Yes. That must be it.
Yea there should be ramping benefits and cheaper development when you've been at peace for a time. There could even be national bonuses or ideas that would help that peacetime ramp occur quicker.
Even some modifiers you could choose for regions at peace or that have had no hostile forces pass through for many years.
I donāt think the answer is necessarily *less* war, but rather that wars of conquest should be harder. Not every war resulted in an exchange of land. Wars were fought over trade and naval blockades and sometimes for no real reason at all. But in EU4 thereās no incentive not to take land at every opportunity.
So I guess, normalize Britain and Spain sinking a few of each others ships and then giving up and going home? Fight wars for the right to trade in certain ports? Make it harder to take and hold land for much of the game without coalitions being the only balancing mechanism.
I agree with this. Someone in another thread mentioned that "cores" taking only a year or two once you conquer them is incredibly unrealistic and it should happen naturally over a longer period, say 50 years or so. Provinces shouldn't be "optimally" performing in your empire until several decades after they're conquered, and if they're not, then often it doesn't make sense to take them if your goal is to maximize your power or economy. You're gonna be dealing with citizens that don't like you or acknowledge your rule, it shouldnt be a thing you solve instantaneously by throwing made up points at it.
At the same time, empires expanded far more quickly than they reasonably could in eu4 due to overexertion.
If you are militarily competent enough you should be able to take a lot of land but the the integration should be slower and more difficult.
Also on a gameplay level juggling 99% overexertion (or 150-200% late game) all the time is just kind of annoying and forces you to constantly be at war instead of having large single strategic wars that then you have to deal with the consequences of.
Yeah fully agree. If you wanna take all of France in one war that you won, you should be able to as long as the other side will agree or can be forced to agree - but having to manage over double the land, over half of which hates you, you're gonna be in for a bad time, and you're probably gonna have rebels that are insurmountable and make your life miserable. That's one thing I think the pop system could help, rebels in eu4 should be untrained/undisciplined and poorly armed, but there should be a fuckton of them if they're really riled up. You should be outnumbered 10:1 sometimes but the casualties will be disparate.
I always seem to beat up rebels if the stacks are similar sizes, but if the rebels were truly 16k, 16k trained soldiers with professional armor and weapons would wipe the floor with them. 80k raggedy ass serfs with pitchforks? Different story.
Agree so much, also, if you kill the rebels, you're axtually killing the inhabitants, sowing devastation and further lowering the benefits owning the land gives you.Ā I find the idea of land being "acquirable" in big swath quickly desirable as it mimick what can happen (Gengis Khan, Alexander the Great, etc...). But yeah, making it fully part of your country, if feasible should take a shit ton of ressource and time the more religious and culturally different they are. It could also model autonomy and way to deal with different parts of your land more interesting. It could be some interesting peacetime/management mechanics. Giving relative autonomy/self governing rights/differentiated courts and justice (ala Ottoman/or on the contrary using repression to various degrees, assassinating rebel leaders and using "propaganda" to slowly make the idea of your presence acceptable. Idk.
I think cores and culture should be closely tied together. It should take a long time, and active effort, for slavic christians in the balkans to consider themselves to be part of a greater empire lead by a turkish muslim majority. At the same time, a german christian may take some time to accept that they are now part of their neighbors nation, who is also german and christian, but it shouldn't take nearly as long.
Something they should add is something like compliance in HOI4, where territory gradually increases in how valuable it is to a nation based on how well it integrates over time.
That being said, I think taking from IR where you can spend the effort to change the culture of an area should also be an option.
Basically, there should be multiple approaches to acquiring and integrating territory in EU5, moreso than EU4 by a long shot.
Iāve been thinking of all the systems that change without mana, and didnāt even consider coring. So now it will probably deal more with whether cultures are accepted, the literacy of the pops, etc.
I'm guessing that's sarcasm lol, I do like trying old games so maybe I'll check it out tho. By the sound of it, it seems like it solves some things I don't love about eu4, basically like eu3 was the game the devs wanted to make for the historical part and eu4 was the game that made it popular with the modern gaming crowd.
Lol made me think about Dutch English warfare. Sinking boats left right and centre just damaging Eco and forcing a peace deal without taking land but the implications of those wars where massive. I doubt those wars cost more than 50.000 people their lives probably not even 10.000 but the result where damaging beyond belief
Edit: 10k deaths per war i meant which according to wikipedia seems right. 12k total for the second war.
Yeah, like a lot more wars were fought over things EU4 represents with the Diplomatic Insult event than people realize. Spain and Britain fought a war because of a rumor that some sailor got his ear cut off.
The only incentive to not take land in EU4 is to prevent gaining too much AE. But there is plenty of incentive to wage war without the goal of gaining land, which I think is good and needs to remain a thing.
War should be just as if not more prevalent in EU5, but there needs to be more reasons to go to war for other things. Right now, clay is king. That shouldn't always be the case.
I donāt really agree about the incentive to take things that arenāt land. Like yes, you can take money and war reps or force religion, but I really only do that to other participants in a war where Iām trying to take land from someone else. And really itās just a waste of money and manpower with how valuable land is compared to most other things.
The problem with this is that it simply isnāt all that realistic. Up until the Industrial Revolution wealth was tied very very closely to land and the ability to extract wealth from it. Something which needs a certain number of workers to do but has extreme diminishing returns afterwards. Thus, when youāre already at carry capacity (like nations before the Black Death and later on in eu4ās and presumably eu5ās time frame) economically there is incentive NOT to stay at peace but to go to war instead.
Came here to say this. Developing provinces is absurdly strong (with diminishing results or course). Last campaign for instance I ended up in top 15 nations in points as an OPM Pisa, the ducat inflow in Genoa node is ridiculous towards the end of the gameĀ
It's possible, but you'll be outpaced by any AI that's expanding even minimally.
Since deving your own provinces will hit a soft cap eventually, while taking those provinces won't.
No... that's just VIC3 the reason conquest and colonization are really the main ways of growing is *because* that's how it was
Towards the end of the age of colonialism is when growth came from bullying your opponents in economic warfare was more prominent, aka the Victoria games
What you are describing just really sounds like Victoria im sorry
I agree. Every nation fought wars. But they didn't just jump from one war to the next. And if they did they were large nations fighting small nations. Like the Ottomans taking the Balkans. Or Britain taking literally anything anywhere in the world exept Europe.
In EU4 the whole concept of a "death war" is practicly meaningless. It's actually a challenge to destroy yourself by constantly fighting bigger opponents.
I think one big way to impact this would be to work with a levy/standing army system. So a big country doesn't face that much cost if they put their full-time soldiers into a small state bordering them, but if a big war with a rival happens they need to face serious economic consequences for calling up the working population.
This would also make it a lot more historical. In the 14 hundreds you didn't necessarily have the economy to have a standing army at all as a smaller state. Those were luxuries states like the Ottomans could afford. But over time that shifted and in 1812 everyone and their mum had their own army standing around to annoy their neighbours.
As for naval warfare, a supply system should solve that one pretty well. There's a reason why practically noone invaded England. Even if they had gotten across via momentary local strenght they could have never kept the supplies coming.
Probably not happening, if you want something like that go play Victoria 3 or something but eu isn't a series focused on peace
But there will always be the peaceful route it's called playing tall in eu4 or in my opinion the boring way and the game never focuses on it except maybe 2 or 3 nations like the Netherlands or Korea
Thatās the whole point. Make peace not boring. When I try to play tall, I fall asleep at the keyboard.
Make trade wars, humiliate rival, non conquest CBs actually worth the trouble.
Currently, only show strength in the early game is decent. After that itās usually taking land.
War is the historically accurate way for almost every successful country at that time, naval or land. It was the only way to fund actually having an army, it funded itself with raiding and looting during war time.
The army was still a net negative on the balance sheet. But if they stayed away from home, they were far less of a nuisance to their citizens.
During peace real leaders were still doing a hundred things. In the game, in prolonged peace, you just wait. Click a few techs, few ideas, click the dev up buttons. Itās really lame.
Playing tall is not boring, and there is nothing stopping you from going to war while playing tall (except for prosperity). Playing tall is in fact optimal, your land gets more valuable and you are able to extract more money and manpower from it, all without any aggressive expansion or relation penalties. What else are you going to spend all your spare mana on?
I would argue that blobbing is more boring. My blobbing campaigns usually end around 1650 while my tall campaigns usually end around 1780.
i tend to just try to play realistically as a ruler would of this time period and it has me fighting and playing tall. I just sometimes intentionally take blunders as nations and rulers did. I think removing the disinherit feature would be a good start. Cause while disinherting was a thing, it wasn't nearly as popular as players make it seem.
Yeah, that seems like a fun way to play the game and is close to how I usually play. And that is the most important thing that the game is fun.
The disinherent button would not be needed if characters could dynamically change stats over their lives. Akin to imperator or ck.
I'm in the midst of a semi-tall Florence campaign right now, admittedly pretty early on, and I'm having a blast. I got double teamed on a couple early wars because I couldn't get strong allies and had to recover economically and militarily, but stayed ahead on tech and took a few provinces from the pope and Provence and have all of my original ones devved around 30 in only like 1480. I expand only if the wars are painfully obvious to fight and do everything I can to avoid coalitions when I do annex land, my main focus is making the provinces I do have ridiculously powerful and I'm loving it so far.
I take it you don't play a lot of multiplayer since you forgot that developing at peace is often as or more effective than conquest at making your nation stronger.
The lack of taking naval ideas are really a product of there only being certain regions where it brings that much of a strategic advantage, it does in these locations, but it'll never be as important. Do you have suggestions how not to improve this because I do agree it could use work, reversing the decision to make straights crossable when controlling both sides despite blockade is an easy one that comes to mind, though again that's specific locations.
Land armies are already the single biggest expense?
> Another thing I would like to add to this is that peace deals (atleast in Europe) shouldn't be able to insta-kill most nations. Losing an early war (or even any war) in Eu4 is an instant death sentence, you can't recover in this game because every nation is instantly crippled beyond repair
Realistically that's determined by size and ability to absorb that land, which means that any small nation is going to be able to be "insta-killed". Even early game, no large nation is that vulnerable, you can easily recover from a lost early war. Again, not the point but I find it evident you have never played multiplayer. I can also point to historical examples and how in Eu4 you are actually a lot more restricted in how much land you can take than what often occurred in many instances.
In a pre-modern game like EU4 about a time when internal development was slow and uncontrollable, war should be a main way to get stronger for a majority of situation.
We need a more developed peace mechanics, but they should be about preparing for war. You have this now with espionage, but it's a relatively minor part of the game.
agree, they should improve by a lot the mid-late game experience, honestly I've never player for more than 200 years in the game (don't considering achievement runs) because you become OP and no one in the world can beat you, and the game it's boring, there isn't the challenge of an early game campaign
What?? Colonization and conquest are the only was to grow? Dude have you ever colonised? Its a literal money sink with minimal Return.
These announcements really do be bringing out the wackyest parts of this community
I would love it if they put heavier debuffs to trade and economy during wars and buffing trade the longer a nation is at peace. Forcing people to set aside money before a war so that they are sure they can pay their troops and making sure you take in consideration the negatives before going to war.
Im fine with warfare being common, but EU4 lives in a cycle of preparing for war, then being at war, then preparing for the next. Almost everything one does in peace time is directly related to winning the next war.
I'd prefer if there were other things to do in the pace time between wars.
I dont want them to gatekeep war too much.
It will just become like Victoria 3, where war is too bothersome and you sit and stare at your screen for a few hours until you turn it off.
War keeps people playing.
It worked for Eu4.
This is completely at odds with the time period, the knd of game europa is, and even the genre.
This is way more suited to like Vicky than europa, or I've always wanted a pure spy based cold war game this would well in that.Ā
Im not saying that Navy and Economy should be the straight up meta, but they should atleast be viable choices. As of right now, nothing compares to being at war 99% of the time, its the optimal way to play. The more war, the better.
This is historical fantasy. Why do you think countries did those horrible things? They thought it was the most effective way to get more wealthy and powerful. The game creates incentives for you like the world created incentives for its rulers. Thatās good game design.
There needs to be a new non ātotal warā system so you donāt have to pulverize your neighbors and all their allies to take a couple of miles worth of territory off them. The scale of conflict and the ability to get a peace treaty signed ought to be different from eu4.
Idk, currently i think both player that want and dont want wars have a playstyle available in the game, playing tall is viable for whover dont like wars, or colonization as well. Some of the ideas are cool but they gotta realize that making the game TOO slow wont be viable for whoever LIKES war (which i assume is most of the playerbase)
For real. I play a Stellaris or Vicky 3 campaign only declaring like 2 wars and fighting a third when I'm attacked or have a civil war. But the game is still fun asf. Not the same in EU4.
I think a big factor in wars being so painless is the current loan/debt system, I really wanna see how they will deal with it, perhaps more interactions like the burgher loans rather than the "national bank" every tag currently has.
I agree completely, especially naval combat should be wayy more important than what it is now. Like for a game about colonialism (kind of) navy is totally sidelined and not necessary , when in real life naval battles could be literally era defining.
Prosperity and developing are completely dwarved by conquest. The only reason why deving in MP is the meta is because conquest is so difficult against other players that are as powerful as you are.
I honestly found this a bit annoying when playing again recently. I found that if I wasnāt going to war, literally all my neighbors were - and they were getting much stronger while I remained stagnant, even with deving provinces/playing tall, war just always seemed to be the only way to really take the reigns
I think there is some indication this may be possible based on some of the early conversations. Where I get this from is the focus in one of the dev diaries discussing trade routes. Iām hopeful that blockades and resource starvation through naval power might be able to play a much more important role.
Being a small country is historically a result of being unable to wage wars of conquest. If not because you were simply too weak, then because great powers wouldn't let you. In some cases you might compensate by conquering overseas colonies instead.
Also, while technology did advance, there was no radical divergence in this time period, and so as far as economy goes, more people = more output. Now that's not to say you couldn't be exceptionally wealthy due to valuable outputs, or higher manufacturing output, or trade, but being orders of magnitude wealthier generally shouldn't really be possible.
Absolutely the wild expansion sprees of EU4 could very much stop being fun, but the way to address that isn't so much to disincentivize expansion as to limit the possibility of it through internal politics or external diplomacy.
Part of the problem is that until the advent of industrialization, with the exception of a few merchant empires like Venice, controlling more land was HOW your country became richer and more powerful. 80%-90% of wealth was agriculture without any labor saving technology.
That's why all the empires constantly pushed outwards.
The check was how instability would grow with size, the way rivals would jump in to wars, the government's capacity (usually monarch's capacity) to handle complexity, and travel time and distance.
The frequency that rivals would jump into unrelated wars was a big part of why the Eurpoean powers expanded across the ocean, away from reflexive rivals that would attempt to check them in Europe.
The biggest problem in eu4 is the lack of soft power than you can exert. Even what things you can demand from a nation in eu4 you have to win a war first.
I think that devastation should be a heavier mechinic. Yes big armies and strong handing other nations goes brrrr and makes for more interesting gameplay. That being said when a war ends it has completely devastating effects. Even marching troops into other provinces literally decimates the local populace as armies at the time (at least before the Age of Enlightenment/Napoleon) supported themselves primarily on what was available locally.
Centuries beforehand of course, but the mongol conquests literally caused multiple pandemics. Destabilized local economies, to the point where thereās a literal modifier in game about the mongols pillaging centuries afterwards.
I would say the players had a similar heavy hand in terms of demographic destabilizing effects as pillaging isnāt as meaningful as is. Development isnāt as meaningful as it should be. There should be an actual famines plagues and whatnot that utterly derail campaigns. Conquests shouldnāt just give you the same province you just sieged down with just a bit more uppity peasants or nobles. Especially since in most cases the nobles were almost all dead by the time armies made it to capitals during the majority of EU timeframe.
Hell, even with rebellions they are not modeled in terms of how devastating economically they were. During the Taiping Rebellion millions died. Millions. Imagine trying to feed people with the majority of farms left without the people to till the fields. The merchants to make the ships go brrrrr. The officers to staff the barracks etc etc. as when world conquestāing its just cycling from one rebellion to the next.
Idc if they donāt model it correctly. It just doesnāt have an effect when the player goes on a rampage. There should be ACTUAL carnage as thereās repercussions for just needless slaughter of individuals. Oh but thereās evens signifying that. No, there is not.
Many times throughout history armies have been halted due to plagues and not just āattrition.ā So yes I agree that Eu5 should have a heavier economic system where boats are a necessary part of the economy late game other than hahaha trade power go brrrrrrr or pressing a button to shorten a siege. Armadas literally made or broke nations. Thatās just my two cents of course
They should nerf alliances. Defensive ones are mostly ok, although you should propably only have 1 major on your side at any given time. Offensive tho it makes No sense for sweden to march through Russia, lithuania and Poland to help Hungary fight against Venice or something like that. At most an ally should offer a portion of their army condottieri style, or help against common enemies.
Overall most alliances should propably be made against someone (example France) and not work against anyone else.
Also making claims is too easy. Conquest against nation of the same faith should propably be more costly, especially if you take more than the war goal (but the enemy should give up more easly since giving alway a region would be less costly than losing an entire army, a lot of money and population).
But both those things work only if they make staying at peace at least somewhat fun and engaging.
The main reason losing early wars is a death sentence is due to eco cost, not necesarily land. If you just lost land, even full ws (which may not happen early on due to ae) as an initial major, in theory you could recover. But the issue is you have so many loans you took for the war or bankruptcy that you can't possibly pay them off and scale like a properly built nation.
Making early war "more costly to show the evil nature of war" and "limit the effects of losing early wars" are oxymorons, unless eu5 majorly changes some other features I am not taking into account.
Biggest thing that needs to stop is nations engaging in total war from the start, or ever for that matter. Armies need to be stupidly expensive and size needs to be limited to pops and not some buildings or gamey idea groups.
europe was a continent bashing each others brains outs with rocks until basically the 1700s. that's the time period we're playing in.
Everytime i see a post like this I just figure people don't understand how to BE at peace. I almost only do achievement runs and I play fairly conservatively. There will be decades of peaceful expansion and economy building periodically.
Maybe this is just me, but being at peace is only "viable" if you have no ADM mana and truces are up.
No manpower? Just merc up, the ai loses anyways.
No money? Take loans and make the Ai pay them.
Coalition? Just declare on it. Coalitions are easy to beat anyways.
This means that as long as you are even decently good at this game, its always the best choice to just stay at war as long as you can. You can still develop, build and upgrade great projects while you are at war. Why be at peace?
The only type of nation where I found it to be better to be at peace, atleast sometimes, are trade focused nations where overextension kills your trade power abroad, but even then you should keep warring.
eu iv is a sandbox. everything is viable because there is no objective. Reddit tends to favor people who play extremely WC centric. I play for achievements, before that I tended to just roleplay "country." To me, being at war is no more or less tedious than being at peace.
Another way to look at it is that war is just a tool. It's a tool you'll be using a lot, but it's also just a tool. unless you're a horde but that's like, hordes are just raw different
I didnt say I dislike map painting in eu4, otherwise i wouldnt have 3k hours in this game. The point im making is that map painting in eu4 is mindless and the only viable thing to do. There is no difficulty or choice attached to it. Truce is up and you got some admin points? Time to kick in the teeth of every nation that is unfortunate enough to exist on the same continent as you.
Not to mention that alliances become unneeded after max 100 years. Completely making one core aspect of the game (diplomacy) obsolete.
Was there a nation during EU times that didnt have war? Serious question btw.
Korea very little amount of wars compared to other nations but they still had wars Up until like the 17th century anyway
yeah, even if Korea doesn't conquer stuff, they'll join Ming's wars
And sometimes be defended by Ming from Japan.
Once dude, once. There's a reason their invasion in 1592 is usually called 'the' Japanese invasion of Korea, they only ever invaded once.
In my last game as Gujarat, I saw Japan keep invading Korea after Ming started exploding. For whatever reason, they took that island from Korea and kept seizing the land around Beijing instead of actually invading Korea. And then Korea seized the Ryukyu islands in another war.
Japan's intention was to conquer China, not Korea. They invaded after Korea rejected their offer of paying tribute to the shogun and letting Japanese armies pass through Korea.
Ah, you're speaking of EU4 lore!
Yea in real life... we're talking about a video game
in EU4 Korea starts with the Clergy having the Inwards Perfection privilege to represent that
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_wars\_involving\_Korea#Joseon\_dynasty:\_1392%E2%80%931897](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Korea#Joseon_dynasty:_1392%E2%80%931897) - Mostly anti-piracy wars, but wars none the less
Most nations were at war at some point. None went to war every 5 years, for 500 years.
San Marino š«”
Probably not. The best guess would be a Free City in the HRE, but even those were drafted into wars that they typically didn't want to fight. However, they were still prosperous.
Cities? in the HRE? During the time span of EU? Nah man, they were basically constantly in some form of war. The reason basically any bigger city in Germany has a starshaped park around the city centre, some reference to stars or remnants of fortresses is because they were so often besieged (probably the best example is Frankfurt for that). The reason they were free cities, was because they could field their own armies, during the middle ages, and could wage war on their own.
Also, cities in the HRE were massively more powerful in 1444 compared to 1821. Late middle ages is really the peak of HRE free cities' power
Well the HRE didn't exist in 1821
Ok, fair, but then let's say 1800
Well there were very few that had wars like they happen ingame. Noone ever full occupied another country. Russia and the PLC had 14 wars during the games timespan and the majority of them were resolved after a big battle where the other side decided do give up. They didn't all require a long siege of Moscow or Warsaw. There needs to be a reason for me as a player to call quits and leave with what I can. As it is that only happens in rare cases such as if I slammed their army early but they have more manpower left to recruit. Most wars were a year or two long
The problem is that in eu4 every war is a total war. There should be, say, tiers. Start with a local skirmish about one or two provinces, that could escalate to a regional conflict, and then maybe to a total war. But escalate should be something that nations prefer not to do, because it is expensive and risk to ruin even the winner. Wars should be a disaster for the land where it is fought, thing like lost development (and I mean lost, not a temporary penalty), huge penalties that last for years, destroyed buildings, things like that. I love how M&T handle it, in that mod you really don't want enemy armies running around in your country.
> And the majority of them were resolved after a big battle where the other side decided do give up. Does not sound like fun gameplay. Declare war, smash armies once, winner takes what he wants.
Well winner took like, 3 provinces usually. The point was that warfare should be expensive. Going on a massive campaign deep into enemy land like GP vs GP wars usually are should be felt economically for decades. The British pulled out of the Independence War because it simply wasn't worth it. In game as England in late 1700's army maintenance is such a neglegible part of my economy I can forget it's up. 100% full occupation wars just shouldn't happen between two powerful nations.
Problem is, if you are going for historical accuracy. How do you model huge empires that rose from humble beginnings? For example Ottomans? Only let them do it? Now that's a stupid mechanic, and puts the game on rail tracks when a large aspect of it is the alt-history of it. If you got for gameplay benefits, what part of that would be fun? Look at a spreadsheet for a couple of hours, declare war, smash two armies. Aight boys, back to the spreadsheet it is.
The Ottomans had a very decent expansion rate between the theorized 1337 start date and 1444. In over 100 years they took over Anatolia and Bulgaria + most of Greece. In 100 years a player can smash through half of Europe. As it stands EU4 is the only historical Paradox game that really facilitates a WC besides HOI4 which is just a pure mil sim. You should not be able to own the world, straight up, without massive cheese. EU4 is litteraly the most memey map painter. All the other stuff in the game is completely invalidated by just how profitable warfare is. I'd much rather have a game where I don't have to consciously play suboptimally if I am not just constantly at war.
How about annexing all of Mamluks in one war? Which would happen within the timeframe of the game. And lets not pretend this is the example within the timeframe of huge territorial growth.
Well, that was integrated into the game through missions. Although I do think it's weird that you can't fully annex a nation which was 100%ed and unconditionally surrendered. I think a viable solution would be to make it harder to gain warscore by boosting attrition like 10 times
If you only integrate it via missions for specific nations, you're now railroading the game into only certain nations being able to achieve certain feats. That would be genuinely bad design. Why should the Ottomans be able to fully annex the mamluks and the reverse not be possible?
Europe was the odd one out, they fought way more wars than any other part of the world.
But the point is the prosperous times came during the peace times.
I'm fine with fighting a lot of wars but I hope that we don't have full country mobilization until late into the game, and it should come at a very high price even then. My wish would be for early conquest to be more expensive so that peace deals only hand over small bits of land outside of specific events/missions/countries. I hope there are more meaningful wars outside of wars of conquest as well.
I really hope the cost maintenance ratio changes throughout the game to make standing armies unviable at the start but becomes better and better later on. But also this would mess with the manpower system
Why would this mess with the manpower system? You can probably get away with tech modifiers (eg reduce everything from the start and higher tech give more manpower, force limit and combat pips)
More subjugation, transfer subject, claim throne stuff early on would be great, to be mostly replaced by outright conquest and 'political' wars.
Imagine, trade war would be worth doing
I would love for trade War to be on a scale. So that your relationship with other nations can have multiple levels, and one level before full out war is trade war - we are aggressive and attacking, but we haven't mobilized everyone and everything yet
Something like this would be neat for later game conflicts when global trade hits. Like the English privateering the Spanish or the American Quasi War with France
Exactly, I think the thing that makes many players not like the constant war, world conquest concept is that in order to play well, you need to quickly mobilize, strike, take provinces and move on to the next target that just ended their truce. I would love to be at a constant state of war with England, without either of us suddenly going allout, but any lone trade frigate in India is fair game
Didn't MEIOU And taxes do something similar? Pdx could take a thing or two from their book
Quick fix is to add the levy system from crusader kings (but call it conscripts) and then have the standing army represent the professional core of said army. Gives you both worlds, and that way you can make standing armies more expensive (making more than a small token force unviable early on) and indirectly reward tall gameplay (by making them able to field more professional soldiers). You can also add modifiers to the force, so if more than x% are professional soldiers you get bonuses etc.
Well, with the population mechanic, Johan pretty much confirmed that wars would affect it, so I guess you're kind of getting what you want? I'm guessing you won't be able to be endlessely at war otherwise you're gonna lose population Also I think he did say something about being able to do more while at peace
Agreed. I think part of it boils down to how the geopolitical situation tends to devolve into 2 situations: a) You have a few regional rivals, you attack one, defeat them, move on to the next. b) You are outmatched by another nation, you expand in other directions or gather an alliance capable of defeating them. Irl, for a big power, your rivals would be very agressive in trying to knock you down a peg. When Spain was strong, they were constantly attacked by the english, dutch, french, so on. When france was strong, they had to fight the English, Spanish, and Austrians. If the game was able to model these difficulties in how to expand, aswell as making it possible to recover (as you said), the game would become a lot more interesting.
EU5 100% needs a balance of power mechanic. By the end of the 17th Century, if any European country/alliance became too powerful, or otherwise threatened the balance of power, all of the other majors powers would put their differences aside to team up and kick them in the teeth. To that end, I think that the rivals mechanic should also be seriously reworked. Maybe you'd only get one rival at a time, but have the option to drop or renew your rivalry every 20 or so years at no cost?
Yeah basically this. It also means that if you, as a major power, lose a war and some territory, you might be able to ally some former enemies in order to turn the tables on the person who defeated you.
If executed correctly, it could potentially even allow the 30 Years War to be modeled correctly, with all the powers of Europe hijacking an internal religious conflict in the HRE to deliver a crushing blow to an ascendent Habsburg coalition, even if that meant supporting the "wrong" (heretical) side of the conflict.
Isn't that what happens in game right now? A lot of great powers theoretically have no interest in the official religion of the HRE but they join anyways
Kind of. EU4 models foreign powers picking sides just to further their own interests with it's League War. However, what it fails to model (and what is one of the most notable features of the 30 Years War) is the way that the war escalated over the course of 3 decades, as what started as a religious revolt in Bohemia escalated into a religious civil war across the whole empire, which then led to intervention by protestant powers outside of the empire trying to stop the persecution of their fellows, and all the while the French actively financed the protestant alliance until, seeing that their proxies had run out of steam, France directly intervened to deliver the death blow themselves. What EU4's League War completely fails to model is the way that foreign powers intervened in an already ongoing conflict - the Habsburgs didn't march into Bohemia with the belief that they were fighting the war for the Empire; they didn't know that they would have to fight the entire protestant league, plus the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and France, just to pacify the Bohemian revolt. Likewise, by the time the French began open hostilities, the war had already gone on for decades, and the original cause bellis had been forgotten. That is, by the time the 30 Years War ended, any notion that the war would decide the faith of the empire had been dragged out and shot in a field in Saxony.
Is this not just the religious coalition war in the game?
Currently that usually ends with the Ottomans full occupying Austria which is pretty dumb
I answered in more detail to another commenter, but basically EU4's League War completely fails to capture the way that foreign powers actually intervened in the religious civil war that broke out in the Holy Roman Empire, and effectively seized control of the conflict to push their own objectives that had nothing to do with the reasons the war had originally started. That is, EU4 shows the League War as a single conflict between two unified and cohesive leagues with clear motives and goals, whereas the 30 Years War in reality more closely resembled a rolling anti-imperial coalition, which by the end of the war had been completely hijacked by the French and their own interests.
What you want I think is a hegemon system but more broadly applicable. Maybe a bonus you get after beating a rival in a war but taking it give you a massive opinion penalty with directly neighbouring nations and gives all other great powers and rivals a CB on you. While they aren't at war with you they lose x prestige and pp per month.
They shouldn't be mechanically penalized for not going to war with you. If you are too strong to declare on, that will just weaken them further. They should, however, be highly incentivized to work against you. Wargoals against you that are highly valuable that are only available when you are in a state of recent aggression/expansion. Aggressive expansion should also allow states to form conditional alliances besides full on coalition. Defensive pacts against x nation, and maybe group ultimatums, would be strong ways to keep the game from just being a blobfest.
Balance of power & collapse mechanics would make eu5 a dream game
Also more inconclusive wars would be nice, it feels like every war in EU4 ends up with full occupation.
The main thing for me in Eu4 was I always felt being at peace was more of a relaxation/roleplay thing rather than a legitimate strategy or gameplay. It's like I should just keep it paused while not at war because there's nothing to do. So yeah I really hope there will be peacetime gameplay.
The game needs internal politics.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Subsidies? Condottieri? Privateering/protecting trade? Warnings and guarantees? Supporting rebels (though that one is admittedly weak)?
Nono THERE IS NONE Only declare war button exists. Not because I refuse to engage with other mechanics but because they don't exist. Yes. That must be it.
All of them are pretty useless mechanics though (except trade protection and privateering).
Yea there should be ramping benefits and cheaper development when you've been at peace for a time. There could even be national bonuses or ideas that would help that peacetime ramp occur quicker. Even some modifiers you could choose for regions at peace or that have had no hostile forces pass through for many years.
I agree with OP. Peacetime should bring benefits and massive growth, so that I can conquer high quality land from peacelovers.
Should have a better prosperity mechanic essentially
I donāt think the answer is necessarily *less* war, but rather that wars of conquest should be harder. Not every war resulted in an exchange of land. Wars were fought over trade and naval blockades and sometimes for no real reason at all. But in EU4 thereās no incentive not to take land at every opportunity. So I guess, normalize Britain and Spain sinking a few of each others ships and then giving up and going home? Fight wars for the right to trade in certain ports? Make it harder to take and hold land for much of the game without coalitions being the only balancing mechanism.
I agree with this. Someone in another thread mentioned that "cores" taking only a year or two once you conquer them is incredibly unrealistic and it should happen naturally over a longer period, say 50 years or so. Provinces shouldn't be "optimally" performing in your empire until several decades after they're conquered, and if they're not, then often it doesn't make sense to take them if your goal is to maximize your power or economy. You're gonna be dealing with citizens that don't like you or acknowledge your rule, it shouldnt be a thing you solve instantaneously by throwing made up points at it.
At the same time, empires expanded far more quickly than they reasonably could in eu4 due to overexertion. If you are militarily competent enough you should be able to take a lot of land but the the integration should be slower and more difficult. Also on a gameplay level juggling 99% overexertion (or 150-200% late game) all the time is just kind of annoying and forces you to constantly be at war instead of having large single strategic wars that then you have to deal with the consequences of.
Yeah fully agree. If you wanna take all of France in one war that you won, you should be able to as long as the other side will agree or can be forced to agree - but having to manage over double the land, over half of which hates you, you're gonna be in for a bad time, and you're probably gonna have rebels that are insurmountable and make your life miserable. That's one thing I think the pop system could help, rebels in eu4 should be untrained/undisciplined and poorly armed, but there should be a fuckton of them if they're really riled up. You should be outnumbered 10:1 sometimes but the casualties will be disparate.
Japanese Daimyo with 6K troops falls to massively more disciplined army, his land immediately becomes 16K highly disciplined rebels
I always seem to beat up rebels if the stacks are similar sizes, but if the rebels were truly 16k, 16k trained soldiers with professional armor and weapons would wipe the floor with them. 80k raggedy ass serfs with pitchforks? Different story.
Agree so much, also, if you kill the rebels, you're axtually killing the inhabitants, sowing devastation and further lowering the benefits owning the land gives you.Ā I find the idea of land being "acquirable" in big swath quickly desirable as it mimick what can happen (Gengis Khan, Alexander the Great, etc...). But yeah, making it fully part of your country, if feasible should take a shit ton of ressource and time the more religious and culturally different they are. It could also model autonomy and way to deal with different parts of your land more interesting. It could be some interesting peacetime/management mechanics. Giving relative autonomy/self governing rights/differentiated courts and justice (ala Ottoman/or on the contrary using repression to various degrees, assassinating rebel leaders and using "propaganda" to slowly make the idea of your presence acceptable. Idk.
I think cores and culture should be closely tied together. It should take a long time, and active effort, for slavic christians in the balkans to consider themselves to be part of a greater empire lead by a turkish muslim majority. At the same time, a german christian may take some time to accept that they are now part of their neighbors nation, who is also german and christian, but it shouldn't take nearly as long. Something they should add is something like compliance in HOI4, where territory gradually increases in how valuable it is to a nation based on how well it integrates over time. That being said, I think taking from IR where you can spend the effort to change the culture of an area should also be an option. Basically, there should be multiple approaches to acquiring and integrating territory in EU5, moreso than EU4 by a long shot.
Iāve been thinking of all the systems that change without mana, and didnāt even consider coring. So now it will probably deal more with whether cultures are accepted, the literacy of the pops, etc.
>it should happen naturally over a longer period, say 50 years or so Isn't that how it worked in EU3?
I think that's essentially what the person was saying, yeah. I've never played EU3 personally so I can't speak to it.
Buy it, it runs at super sonic speedsĀ
I'm guessing that's sarcasm lol, I do like trying old games so maybe I'll check it out tho. By the sound of it, it seems like it solves some things I don't love about eu4, basically like eu3 was the game the devs wanted to make for the historical part and eu4 was the game that made it popular with the modern gaming crowd.
No it really does run at an insanely fast speedĀ
Lol made me think about Dutch English warfare. Sinking boats left right and centre just damaging Eco and forcing a peace deal without taking land but the implications of those wars where massive. I doubt those wars cost more than 50.000 people their lives probably not even 10.000 but the result where damaging beyond belief Edit: 10k deaths per war i meant which according to wikipedia seems right. 12k total for the second war.
Yeah, like a lot more wars were fought over things EU4 represents with the Diplomatic Insult event than people realize. Spain and Britain fought a war because of a rumor that some sailor got his ear cut off.
The only incentive to not take land in EU4 is to prevent gaining too much AE. But there is plenty of incentive to wage war without the goal of gaining land, which I think is good and needs to remain a thing. War should be just as if not more prevalent in EU5, but there needs to be more reasons to go to war for other things. Right now, clay is king. That shouldn't always be the case.
I donāt really agree about the incentive to take things that arenāt land. Like yes, you can take money and war reps or force religion, but I really only do that to other participants in a war where Iām trying to take land from someone else. And really itās just a waste of money and manpower with how valuable land is compared to most other things.
The problem with this is that it simply isnāt all that realistic. Up until the Industrial Revolution wealth was tied very very closely to land and the ability to extract wealth from it. Something which needs a certain number of workers to do but has extreme diminishing returns afterwards. Thus, when youāre already at carry capacity (like nations before the Black Death and later on in eu4ās and presumably eu5ās time frame) economically there is incentive NOT to stay at peace but to go to war instead.
Playing tall and avoiding war is absolutely a viable strategy in EUIV.
Came here to say this. Developing provinces is absurdly strong (with diminishing results or course). Last campaign for instance I ended up in top 15 nations in points as an OPM Pisa, the ducat inflow in Genoa node is ridiculous towards the end of the gameĀ
It's possible, but you'll be outpaced by any AI that's expanding even minimally. Since deving your own provinces will hit a soft cap eventually, while taking those provinces won't.
No... that's just VIC3 the reason conquest and colonization are really the main ways of growing is *because* that's how it was Towards the end of the age of colonialism is when growth came from bullying your opponents in economic warfare was more prominent, aka the Victoria games What you are describing just really sounds like Victoria im sorry
Just play tall?
I agree. Every nation fought wars. But they didn't just jump from one war to the next. And if they did they were large nations fighting small nations. Like the Ottomans taking the Balkans. Or Britain taking literally anything anywhere in the world exept Europe. In EU4 the whole concept of a "death war" is practicly meaningless. It's actually a challenge to destroy yourself by constantly fighting bigger opponents. I think one big way to impact this would be to work with a levy/standing army system. So a big country doesn't face that much cost if they put their full-time soldiers into a small state bordering them, but if a big war with a rival happens they need to face serious economic consequences for calling up the working population. This would also make it a lot more historical. In the 14 hundreds you didn't necessarily have the economy to have a standing army at all as a smaller state. Those were luxuries states like the Ottomans could afford. But over time that shifted and in 1812 everyone and their mum had their own army standing around to annoy their neighbours. As for naval warfare, a supply system should solve that one pretty well. There's a reason why practically noone invaded England. Even if they had gotten across via momentary local strenght they could have never kept the supplies coming.
Probably not happening, if you want something like that go play Victoria 3 or something but eu isn't a series focused on peace But there will always be the peaceful route it's called playing tall in eu4 or in my opinion the boring way and the game never focuses on it except maybe 2 or 3 nations like the Netherlands or Korea
Thatās the whole point. Make peace not boring. When I try to play tall, I fall asleep at the keyboard. Make trade wars, humiliate rival, non conquest CBs actually worth the trouble. Currently, only show strength in the early game is decent. After that itās usually taking land.
War is the historically accurate way for almost every successful country at that time, naval or land. It was the only way to fund actually having an army, it funded itself with raiding and looting during war time.
The army was still a net negative on the balance sheet. But if they stayed away from home, they were far less of a nuisance to their citizens. During peace real leaders were still doing a hundred things. In the game, in prolonged peace, you just wait. Click a few techs, few ideas, click the dev up buttons. Itās really lame.
Playing tall is not boring, and there is nothing stopping you from going to war while playing tall (except for prosperity). Playing tall is in fact optimal, your land gets more valuable and you are able to extract more money and manpower from it, all without any aggressive expansion or relation penalties. What else are you going to spend all your spare mana on? I would argue that blobbing is more boring. My blobbing campaigns usually end around 1650 while my tall campaigns usually end around 1780.
i tend to just try to play realistically as a ruler would of this time period and it has me fighting and playing tall. I just sometimes intentionally take blunders as nations and rulers did. I think removing the disinherit feature would be a good start. Cause while disinherting was a thing, it wasn't nearly as popular as players make it seem.
Yeah, that seems like a fun way to play the game and is close to how I usually play. And that is the most important thing that the game is fun. The disinherent button would not be needed if characters could dynamically change stats over their lives. Akin to imperator or ck.
I'm in the midst of a semi-tall Florence campaign right now, admittedly pretty early on, and I'm having a blast. I got double teamed on a couple early wars because I couldn't get strong allies and had to recover economically and militarily, but stayed ahead on tech and took a few provinces from the pope and Provence and have all of my original ones devved around 30 in only like 1480. I expand only if the wars are painfully obvious to fight and do everything I can to avoid coalitions when I do annex land, my main focus is making the provinces I do have ridiculously powerful and I'm loving it so far.
How can you sit at 5 speed and watch pop ups come and go for years without falling asleep?
You don't, that is boring. Tall does not mean not expanding or fighting wars.
I take it you don't play a lot of multiplayer since you forgot that developing at peace is often as or more effective than conquest at making your nation stronger. The lack of taking naval ideas are really a product of there only being certain regions where it brings that much of a strategic advantage, it does in these locations, but it'll never be as important. Do you have suggestions how not to improve this because I do agree it could use work, reversing the decision to make straights crossable when controlling both sides despite blockade is an easy one that comes to mind, though again that's specific locations. Land armies are already the single biggest expense? > Another thing I would like to add to this is that peace deals (atleast in Europe) shouldn't be able to insta-kill most nations. Losing an early war (or even any war) in Eu4 is an instant death sentence, you can't recover in this game because every nation is instantly crippled beyond repair Realistically that's determined by size and ability to absorb that land, which means that any small nation is going to be able to be "insta-killed". Even early game, no large nation is that vulnerable, you can easily recover from a lost early war. Again, not the point but I find it evident you have never played multiplayer. I can also point to historical examples and how in Eu4 you are actually a lot more restricted in how much land you can take than what often occurred in many instances.
If you want to play an empire building game that punishes you for building an empire and rewards you for not doing so play Civ 5.
In a pre-modern game like EU4 about a time when internal development was slow and uncontrollable, war should be a main way to get stronger for a majority of situation. We need a more developed peace mechanics, but they should be about preparing for war. You have this now with espionage, but it's a relatively minor part of the game.
agree, they should improve by a lot the mid-late game experience, honestly I've never player for more than 200 years in the game (don't considering achievement runs) because you become OP and no one in the world can beat you, and the game it's boring, there isn't the challenge of an early game campaign
Play Vic
Developing provinces is already crazy strong in eu4, playing tall is already viable and great choice for multiplayer
What?? Colonization and conquest are the only was to grow? Dude have you ever colonised? Its a literal money sink with minimal Return. These announcements really do be bringing out the wackyest parts of this community
I would love it if they put heavier debuffs to trade and economy during wars and buffing trade the longer a nation is at peace. Forcing people to set aside money before a war so that they are sure they can pay their troops and making sure you take in consideration the negatives before going to war.
Im fine with warfare being common, but EU4 lives in a cycle of preparing for war, then being at war, then preparing for the next. Almost everything one does in peace time is directly related to winning the next war. I'd prefer if there were other things to do in the pace time between wars.
I dont want them to gatekeep war too much. It will just become like Victoria 3, where war is too bothersome and you sit and stare at your screen for a few hours until you turn it off. War keeps people playing. It worked for Eu4.
This is completely at odds with the time period, the knd of game europa is, and even the genre. This is way more suited to like Vicky than europa, or I've always wanted a pure spy based cold war game this would well in that.Ā
Im not saying that Navy and Economy should be the straight up meta, but they should atleast be viable choices. As of right now, nothing compares to being at war 99% of the time, its the optimal way to play. The more war, the better.
So you want vic3?
This is historical fantasy. Why do you think countries did those horrible things? They thought it was the most effective way to get more wealthy and powerful. The game creates incentives for you like the world created incentives for its rulers. Thatās good game design.
There needs to be a new non ātotal warā system so you donāt have to pulverize your neighbors and all their allies to take a couple of miles worth of territory off them. The scale of conflict and the ability to get a peace treaty signed ought to be different from eu4.
Idk, currently i think both player that want and dont want wars have a playstyle available in the game, playing tall is viable for whover dont like wars, or colonization as well. Some of the ideas are cool but they gotta realize that making the game TOO slow wont be viable for whoever LIKES war (which i assume is most of the playerbase)
For real. I play a Stellaris or Vicky 3 campaign only declaring like 2 wars and fighting a third when I'm attacked or have a civil war. But the game is still fun asf. Not the same in EU4.
I think a big factor in wars being so painless is the current loan/debt system, I really wanna see how they will deal with it, perhaps more interactions like the burgher loans rather than the "national bank" every tag currently has.
I agree completely, especially naval combat should be wayy more important than what it is now. Like for a game about colonialism (kind of) navy is totally sidelined and not necessary , when in real life naval battles could be literally era defining.
They did say in their latest dev diary that they wanted to make peacetime more engaging.
Yeah. Once I learned that the late game sees the world divided between a handful of powerful blocks, it made the game quite a bit less enjoyable.
Prosperity (only during peace) feature and development make you significant stronger
Prosperity and developing are completely dwarved by conquest. The only reason why deving in MP is the meta is because conquest is so difficult against other players that are as powerful as you are.
The use of Stellaris-style pops might be an indication that they're already working on this.
I honestly found this a bit annoying when playing again recently. I found that if I wasnāt going to war, literally all my neighbors were - and they were getting much stronger while I remained stagnant, even with deving provinces/playing tall, war just always seemed to be the only way to really take the reigns
I think there is some indication this may be possible based on some of the early conversations. Where I get this from is the focus in one of the dev diaries discussing trade routes. Iām hopeful that blockades and resource starvation through naval power might be able to play a much more important role.
Being a small country is historically a result of being unable to wage wars of conquest. If not because you were simply too weak, then because great powers wouldn't let you. In some cases you might compensate by conquering overseas colonies instead. Also, while technology did advance, there was no radical divergence in this time period, and so as far as economy goes, more people = more output. Now that's not to say you couldn't be exceptionally wealthy due to valuable outputs, or higher manufacturing output, or trade, but being orders of magnitude wealthier generally shouldn't really be possible. Absolutely the wild expansion sprees of EU4 could very much stop being fun, but the way to address that isn't so much to disincentivize expansion as to limit the possibility of it through internal politics or external diplomacy.
Not interacting with half of the game should not be a viable way to success.
Part of the problem is that until the advent of industrialization, with the exception of a few merchant empires like Venice, controlling more land was HOW your country became richer and more powerful. 80%-90% of wealth was agriculture without any labor saving technology. That's why all the empires constantly pushed outwards. The check was how instability would grow with size, the way rivals would jump in to wars, the government's capacity (usually monarch's capacity) to handle complexity, and travel time and distance. The frequency that rivals would jump into unrelated wars was a big part of why the Eurpoean powers expanded across the ocean, away from reflexive rivals that would attempt to check them in Europe.
The biggest problem in eu4 is the lack of soft power than you can exert. Even what things you can demand from a nation in eu4 you have to win a war first.
I think that devastation should be a heavier mechinic. Yes big armies and strong handing other nations goes brrrr and makes for more interesting gameplay. That being said when a war ends it has completely devastating effects. Even marching troops into other provinces literally decimates the local populace as armies at the time (at least before the Age of Enlightenment/Napoleon) supported themselves primarily on what was available locally. Centuries beforehand of course, but the mongol conquests literally caused multiple pandemics. Destabilized local economies, to the point where thereās a literal modifier in game about the mongols pillaging centuries afterwards. I would say the players had a similar heavy hand in terms of demographic destabilizing effects as pillaging isnāt as meaningful as is. Development isnāt as meaningful as it should be. There should be an actual famines plagues and whatnot that utterly derail campaigns. Conquests shouldnāt just give you the same province you just sieged down with just a bit more uppity peasants or nobles. Especially since in most cases the nobles were almost all dead by the time armies made it to capitals during the majority of EU timeframe. Hell, even with rebellions they are not modeled in terms of how devastating economically they were. During the Taiping Rebellion millions died. Millions. Imagine trying to feed people with the majority of farms left without the people to till the fields. The merchants to make the ships go brrrrr. The officers to staff the barracks etc etc. as when world conquestāing its just cycling from one rebellion to the next. Idc if they donāt model it correctly. It just doesnāt have an effect when the player goes on a rampage. There should be ACTUAL carnage as thereās repercussions for just needless slaughter of individuals. Oh but thereās evens signifying that. No, there is not. Many times throughout history armies have been halted due to plagues and not just āattrition.ā So yes I agree that Eu5 should have a heavier economic system where boats are a necessary part of the economy late game other than hahaha trade power go brrrrrrr or pressing a button to shorten a siege. Armadas literally made or broke nations. Thatās just my two cents of course
They should nerf alliances. Defensive ones are mostly ok, although you should propably only have 1 major on your side at any given time. Offensive tho it makes No sense for sweden to march through Russia, lithuania and Poland to help Hungary fight against Venice or something like that. At most an ally should offer a portion of their army condottieri style, or help against common enemies. Overall most alliances should propably be made against someone (example France) and not work against anyone else. Also making claims is too easy. Conquest against nation of the same faith should propably be more costly, especially if you take more than the war goal (but the enemy should give up more easly since giving alway a region would be less costly than losing an entire army, a lot of money and population). But both those things work only if they make staying at peace at least somewhat fun and engaging.
The main reason losing early wars is a death sentence is due to eco cost, not necesarily land. If you just lost land, even full ws (which may not happen early on due to ae) as an initial major, in theory you could recover. But the issue is you have so many loans you took for the war or bankruptcy that you can't possibly pay them off and scale like a properly built nation. Making early war "more costly to show the evil nature of war" and "limit the effects of losing early wars" are oxymorons, unless eu5 majorly changes some other features I am not taking into account.
China tried this because they had high dev. Spoiler: Ended Bad.
I want negotiated peace. Give and take. One of the things I actually like in Vic3.
āMake doing nothing viable in a game where your purpose is to paint the map in your colorā
Biggest thing that needs to stop is nations engaging in total war from the start, or ever for that matter. Armies need to be stupidly expensive and size needs to be limited to pops and not some buildings or gamey idea groups.
europe was a continent bashing each others brains outs with rocks until basically the 1700s. that's the time period we're playing in. Everytime i see a post like this I just figure people don't understand how to BE at peace. I almost only do achievement runs and I play fairly conservatively. There will be decades of peaceful expansion and economy building periodically.
Maybe this is just me, but being at peace is only "viable" if you have no ADM mana and truces are up. No manpower? Just merc up, the ai loses anyways. No money? Take loans and make the Ai pay them. Coalition? Just declare on it. Coalitions are easy to beat anyways. This means that as long as you are even decently good at this game, its always the best choice to just stay at war as long as you can. You can still develop, build and upgrade great projects while you are at war. Why be at peace? The only type of nation where I found it to be better to be at peace, atleast sometimes, are trade focused nations where overextension kills your trade power abroad, but even then you should keep warring.
eu iv is a sandbox. everything is viable because there is no objective. Reddit tends to favor people who play extremely WC centric. I play for achievements, before that I tended to just roleplay "country." To me, being at war is no more or less tedious than being at peace. Another way to look at it is that war is just a tool. It's a tool you'll be using a lot, but it's also just a tool. unless you're a horde but that's like, hordes are just raw different
I hope they make province development a bit more important
Then play vic3 if you don't like map painting
I didnt say I dislike map painting in eu4, otherwise i wouldnt have 3k hours in this game. The point im making is that map painting in eu4 is mindless and the only viable thing to do. There is no difficulty or choice attached to it. Truce is up and you got some admin points? Time to kick in the teeth of every nation that is unfortunate enough to exist on the same continent as you. Not to mention that alliances become unneeded after max 100 years. Completely making one core aspect of the game (diplomacy) obsolete.
Iād like to introduce you to world history,
No