Europa Universalis IV

Well, they did pay for the game so they certainly have a right to voice their opinion on it. And a series of patches and DLCs are changing the game in ways many fans don't like.

I suppose you could argue you could just roll back patches. However, it is surely indicative of poor business practice where you have to roll back patches to return to a version of the game you enjoy more. Patches should be about fixing bugs, not altering major game mechanics and then selling extras as DLC.
 
I'm fine with people voicing their opinion, but after several years nothing is really going to change.

Even if the next DLC was flawless I feel like certain people would still throw a fit.
 
However, it is surely indicative of poor business practice where you have to roll back patches to return to a version of the game you enjoy more.

Personal taste is never indicative of poor business practice. The fact that you can at all rather suggests the reverse.
 
Perhaps I worded it badly. It is indicative of poor business practice to have to revert to previous patches to access different features of the game because the developers either removed or significantly changed them so they could sell an "upgraded" version in a DLC.
 
That's a different issue, yes.
 
Well, they did pay for the game so they certainly have a right to voice their opinion on it. And a series of patches and DLCs are changing the game in ways many fans don't like.

I suppose you could argue you could just roll back patches. However, it is surely indicative of poor business practice where you have to roll back patches to return to a version of the game you enjoy more. Patches should be about fixing bugs, not altering major game mechanics and then selling extras as DLC.

At least it isn't like WoW.
 
It's interesting how TMIT mentioned how the core players are the ones most upset with the DLC model. Something I've noticed, and I'm sure others have too, is the point when companies like EA, Ubi, and CA stopped caring about their base to go after less devoted but more numerous demographics is typically considered the point of their decline in quality of product, service, and sometimes even employee treatment.
Development was terrible. Ugh. Yet you need it for buildings. So you can't even do buildings without the DLC.

And yeah estates are OP. I used to exploit it to pull 200 ADM and MIL in the first ~10 years so I could CRUSH people due to the tech advantage. Even with a custom 6/6/6 setup with tier 3 advisors and national focus etc you take a while to build up 200MP. A year with 15 points which is hard to get early. Plus you take that on top of a custom setup and the AI is fudged, especially if it has tech time penalties and you don't. However a good use even against Western nations is to take down great powers like france or austria or the ottomans in a super early war.

Honestly though even if Paradox mechanics were optimal they are just boring as fudge. Since I started working on my own strategy game my goal has been to make all non combat systems as interesting as combat. Something like the HRE in my project is infinitely more enjoyable for me due to political and espionage options. And magic of course. Non-combat magic was only a dream before I took control of my life and decided that no one was ever going to realistically make the game I wanted to play. Even Dominions 3/4 mostly focuses on combat magic and maybe a simplistic crafting system.

I don't think I could ever go back to commercial strategy games even compared to the state of the game right now where its still in a sort of pre-alpha phase. Plus programming itself is just super fun.
Your game actually sounds pretty close to my own pipe dreams (which'll never happen cause I'd rather do other things with my life). You have a link with more info?
I'm extremely puzzled why if someone dislikes the game so much they feel the need to continue posting about that game every couple of months for several years now. Let it go and move on.
Because when passion turns to hatred, it doesn't lose any of its intensity.
 
I'm pretty sure that if Paradox would only turn the direction of the game towards what I, and many others want...

The next DLC isn't going to be flawless and even if it was flawless for some flawless is subjective. So you never have to confront that prediction because its never going to happen.

Well done for pointing out that all this belly-aching is essentially useless after all.
 
Complaining on a different forum is not political activism: it's just boring.
 
How should I handle light ships and protecting trade missions?

Like, as England I can get a lot of them, so should I like spread them out evenly or focus on one or two areas or what? Like is it best to just maximise everything in the english channel or?
 
How should I handle light ships and protecting trade missions?

Like, as England I can get a lot of them, so should I like spread them out evenly or focus on one or two areas or what? Like is it best to just maximise everything in the english channel or?

Each ship both adds more total power to the node and increases your ratio. The more total power, the less each ship contributes, so you will get to a point where the maintenance on an additional ship > extra share of ducats in the node.

Unless you want to just straight calculate trade power ratios in each node, just do some trial and error to get a feel. TBH, however, I rarely run a lot of trade ships especially after trade conflict CB got nerfed so you can't take land. They're at risk during war, have significant up front costs, and while at war with other naval nations to protect them you forego income.

England wants to beat down competition in the channel, then probably put ships in other nodes to pull value or conquer those too (but conquering deep in the HRE is a pain early and you'd probably prefer to take emperor). So for early game maybe something like conquer trade centers in channel, conquer north sea, trade ships pull from Lubeck.
 
I have played EU4 from time to time since it was released, but always on the Vanilla version : it's a Paradox game, so I knew it would take a while to fix the bugs after a DLC, and they released DLC so fast there wasn't ever a long enough cooldown time between each one that I would be safe to upgrade the game. And after a while I just didn't checked nor bothered to see the update and happily played with my hopelessly outdated 1.0something.

But I wanted to do a "history of mankind" marathon (CK2-EU4-Stellaris), so I started CK2, and needed to update EU4 to use the exported save...

And holy cow, I don't recognize EU4 at all now. I haven't any idea about what half the new things do and how they work, but it certainly feel cramped and bloated here. I usually like Paradox game complexity, but there it seems more like a lot of unrelated mechanisms thrown together without a unifying vision - I guess I see where the criticisms about the randomness of the DLC come from.

I might get a grip on it and start liking it, and it might just be the fear of the unknown, but for now I admit I'd prefer to just go back to my good old version - or EU3, from a time before magic kings with instant cast spells and mana, but I couldn't find a good converter from CK2 to EU3, the only ones available didn't work.
 
But I wanted to do a "history of mankind" marathon (CK2-EU4-Stellaris), so I started CK2, and needed to update EU4 to use the exported save...

There's an EU4 --> Stellaris converter??? Please tell.

I wonder if there's a Vicky2 --> Stellaris converter, too, or for that matter if the Vicky2 converter is updated to work with 1.12+ yet (or was it 1.14+ that it needed updated for? Perhaps both). Although TBH I've never finished a Vicky2 game, so EU4 --> Stellaris would probably be just as well.

It's been over a month since I played EU4... although as much as I played it last year, I was due for a break. Probably going to give it awhile longer, finish up the games-in-progress, and then jump into Stellaris. Have to say it's been nice to try some other games for awhile, turns out EU4 isn't the only good game out there.
 
The history of mankind must start with Rome, then CK2, EU4, V2, HoI4, THEN Stellaris. Methinks.
 
There's an EU4 --> Stellaris converter??? Please tell.
No there is not, but honestly you absolutely don't need it. After all, the only things that would carry through are the name of the empire and its symbol, what would a converter actually do (except maybe copy-paste the flag) ?
The history of mankind must start with Rome, then CK2, EU4, V2, HoI4, THEN Stellaris. Methinks.
I don't have Rome (the reviews about it were not very engaging) and if you kept the Roman Empire intact, the whole ultra-feudal CK2 would feel pretty weird anyway.
Also, yes in theory I should continue with V2 and HoI3/HoI4. But the idea is to reach Stellaris starting point (unified Earth), and I think I can probably manage it by the end of EU4. I guess if it's still far from this goal I'll continue on V2, though I've never played it yet and learning it just for finishing a WC might not be the best bang for bucks ^^

Anyway, I tried to learn a bit the new mechanics, but they are really too clunky and gamey and just F-ing annoying overall, so I went back to 1.14 and disabled Cossack to have a somewhat playable game. EU4 really has become a horrible mess, a pile of disjointed mechanisms without unifying vision and just trying to trip the player up at every corner and prevent him to do anything actually fun, and the last DLC for CK2 are also very subpar.

Maybe that's the reason Stellaris was so barebone at release : they can now apply their feature bloat habits so it ends up just right after ten DLC :p
 
What do people regard as the last "good" version of the game? Which patch is best to roll back to?

Regards
I'm not sure there is an actual consensus. Plenty of grognards actually like all the features, plenty of hardcore agree with the systematic hamstringing of big empires to prevent blobbing (and TBH I can see their point even if I don't find it fun).

The consensus is that Art of War is the best DLC. Beyond that, it's pretty much up to individual opinion.
MY opinion is that I can stomach the changes up to just before Cossacks. After that it's just too irritating and annoying - I despise the estates, the states/territories, corruption and so on.
I just went to 1.14 because before that my export would break, but I actually disabled the Cossack DLC itself.
 
I'm currently running 1.15.1, but that's because I had a game in progress before the patch.
 
I generally stay on the latest version as I like adapting my playstyle to each set of changes.
 
Top Bottom