Europa Universalis IV

[Arakhor]

This year, apparently.

 

[Angst]

Map painting is fine but too much of it being too unreasonable is boring to me. I'm very happy when they do stuff to minimize it.

 

[Quintillus]

Quite honestly, please go over to the Plaza and do it there then. There's a reason I don't frequent their forums much.

I have to agree, this discussion has turned in a very negative and unproductive direction for anyone who likes the game, which all have said they do.

And as a developer, if someone is trying to get my attention by "screaming like a baby", all they'd get is put on my ignore list unless they were paying a good chunk of my salary. Which isn't the case with any of Paradox's million+ customers. It just isn't worth the trouble and distraction of satisfying the 0.1% who scream like a baby when most of the rest are pretty happy. Thoughtful critique = good (though you can't expect them to always agree with you); screaming like a baby = bad.

I don't agree with all the changes Paradox has made over the patches, and it is kind of bad if cross-platform multiplayer has been broken for so long, but they both have made what's still one of my favorite games, and the ability to use old versions easily if you prefer, so on the whole it's pretty much impossible to argue I haven't got my money's worth.

I just alt tab and copy the save to a different folder.

Ironman still gives you two saves: the current and the one previous month.

Cool. Might try it sometime if I'm running out of ideas. That'll be a few games yet, though.

 

[Double A]

I've done plenty of thoughtful critique, but I don't think Pdox has ever seen any of it, and if they have, they didn't care. It's really distressing when I feel like one of my favorite games keeps getting a little bit worse with every iteration and I don't have any way to influence it.

 

[Evie]

The fundamental problem with critiques, thoughtful as they may be, is (to put it bluntly), that for any potential change Paradox may ever make, there will be thoughtful critiques suggesting the change should be made, and, should the change be made, thoughtful critiques explaining why it shouldn't have.

Don't add the Central African state? The game is ignoring important countries and parts of history. Add them? The game is being slowed down to add countries that aren't going to matter. Don't add a passage through the American Rockies? You're preventing players from properly exploring a region that was explored at the time in one of the most famous exploration enterprises of the EU era. Add a passage there? You're allowing armies to move through a region they shouldn't be able to move through.

The list goes on and on and on. for any feature you can imagine, there will be fans to suggest one thing and fans to suggest the exact opposite, and all of them with thoughtful arguments rooted in what they think EU should be like. Which is why trying to build a game around fan expectations and suggestions doesn't work. Sometime fans have useful ideas worth implementing, and sometime they can find mistakes in the database or suggest changes in it that are useful), but you can't design the game around forum opinions. On top of that, the forums will always represent the opinion of people who aren't happy with the game, because by and large, those who are aren't critiquing the game on internet forums.

Not to say that Paradox's approach and public relation matters are perfect, but if politely suggesting hasn't gotten you what you want, then ranting isn't likely to improve the odds.

 

[Lohrenswald]

How to defeat France as England (quickly)?

 

[Double A]

lure their army onto a fleet by turning off maintenence in one of your forts in England proper and kill it with your bigger fleet

 

[TheMeInTeam]

The key phrase there being "I consider..." If you're going to think about actual legal action for half a second, you'd better make damn sure that you have a proper case.

Map-painting is fun, of course, but I was rather meaning it as a general term for trying to do world conquests and the like.

They advertise cross-platform MP on their main page to this day.

Cross-platform MP has de-synced inside of 1 month since Summer 2014, patch 1.5 --> 1.6. A staff member has gone on written record saying that they know cross-platform MP doesn't work, yet they released multiple patches and DLC since that point.

I would imagine that continuing to advertise something the firm demonstrates knowledge that the product doesn't deliver would meet the standards of a case.

The fundamental problem with critiques, thoughtful as they may be, is (to put it bluntly), that for any potential change Paradox may ever make, there will be thoughtful critiques suggesting the change should be made, and, should the change be made, thoughtful critiques explaining why it shouldn't have.

That's all well and good. Removing functionality then selling upgraded versions of the original functionality back as DLC is not well and good. They make changes I don't agree with sometimes, but the "remove this then sell back stronger version" pattern is dishonest business practice and convinced me to stop buying games and DLC from the company. I will not consider buying again until I see a trend of this no longer happening.

Selling monarch points after making thing cost more points, selling the ability to ignore liberty desire after adding it in "free patch", nerfing the heck out of already-DLC boosted merchant republics only to make their "trade leagues" DLC-only, removing province sales to vassal feed (after stating it WAD) but selling DLC to transfer occupation, these are not things an honest firm does.

At this point, the difference between having Cossacks and not having it, if you micro estates well, is comparable to starting in the Indian technology group until you reach tech 13 as France. The problem is, SP balance changes are made on the assumption you have all of the DLC. By owning Cossacks, Art of War, and Common Sense specifically I can play a completely different game than you can in vanilla, despite that some of the things I can do now only with DLC are things you could do in vanilla a year or more ago.

Map painting is fine but too much of it being too unreasonable is boring to me. I'm very happy when they do stuff to minimize it.

War is still where the game's design is centralized. You can tell easily by looking at where the player has to make meaningful choices in the game, and how frequently.

Too many of their "minimizing map painting" moves simply force the player to wait more without adding any meaningful decisions to the game. A good example of an expansion constraint is states/territories. A good example of mockery to the player's intelligence is corruption.

But even this kind of crap is less dicey than removing/reselling game options.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I know this post is almost a month old but holy crap, TMIT has been on this forum this whole time and I never knew? Man I'm kinda glad this isn't one of the forums I have a permanent ban on.

Before Peachrocks bought EU IV for me I had thousands of hours in Civ IV, this forum is the first time I've ever had a serious presence in the online community. With Civ VI on the horizon, my presence here does not appear to end any time soon .

Paradoxplaza is the only place I've ever been banned/set on probation/etc. I'm not a fan of the uneven moderation there, though I'm a little surprised I can still post there ^_^.

 

[salty mud]

I'm very upset with the way Paradox is taking EU IV in recent times. It's almost as if they've realised their own game mechanics don't work and they are trying every ham fisted way possible to stop people expanding in their games.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I'm very upset with the way Paradox is taking EU IV in recent times. It's almost as if they've realised their own game mechanics don't work and they are trying every ham fisted way possible to stop people expanding in their games.

At the fundamental level, I think they realized that they want the game's pacing to be more level before end-game, but can't come up with mechanics that actually slow player expansion without putting in hard-stop timers or arbitrarily throwing in resource starvers.

Even then, outside of WC most things in the game are trivial because most things they implement the AI has to use also (with the exception of forts, where the AI doesn't pay maintenance on those in 90% of cases and is basically playing a different game).

This is the kind of thing I've been messing around with lately:

Spoiler :

I have over double the income of France, who is #2. My manpower cap isn't too high because Africa sucks, but when your entire army is mercenary other than the artillery it's hard to care ^_^.

Other than one faith and 3 mountains I'm not sure I have much left to try to pick up, but it's still fun to screw around here and there, at least until they DLC it up too much more and I don't buy those. Mare Nostrum already patched merchant republics out since I won't buy it, so what's next? We'll see how long it lasts.

 

[JohannaK]

Oh, Zanzibar. You little old funnel of spice trade.

 

[Angst]

At the fundamental level, I think they realized that they want the game's pacing to be more level before end-game, but can't come up with mechanics that actually slow player expansion without putting in hard-stop timers or arbitrarily throwing in resource starvers.

Even then, outside of WC most things in the game are trivial because most things they implement the AI has to use also (with the exception of forts, where the AI doesn't pay maintenance on those in 90% of cases and is basically playing a different game).

This is the kind of thing I've been messing around with lately:

Spoiler :

I have over double the income of France, who is #2. My manpower cap isn't too high because Africa sucks, but when your entire army is mercenary other than the artillery it's hard to care ^_^.

Other than one faith and 3 mountains I'm not sure I have much left to try to pick up, but it's still fun to screw around here and there, at least until they DLC it up too much more and I don't buy those. Mare Nostrum already patched merchant republics out since I won't buy it, so what's next? We'll see how long it lasts.

Invade Europe and make Rome animist!

 

[Double A]

I've been banned from a couple places. Ah well. I don't regret flaming Johan and getting banned. He called everyone bad words the same day but did he get banned? No.

The only place I regret being banned from is Bay12. Ever since I got around to working on my own game after Paradox betrayed me with mediocre products and I burned out on Dominions 4 I've wished I could make posts about it on Bay12. Their other games forum is pretty friendly, especially since I posted a lot on existing games so I wouldn't get yelled at for excessive self promotion.

I'm mostly stuck on RPGCodex now. Reddit has barely any strategy presence outside of subs for specific games so its useless. The 4x sub is dead as a doornail and the TBS and strategygames subs have so few members and few posts.

I considered writing some posts here but it doesn't have much activity and making a quality post is so much work.

How did you get banned on Bay12? Did you ask about Goblin Fortress too much?

 

[Dell19]

I'm very upset with the way Paradox is taking EU IV in recent times. It's almost as if they've realised their own game mechanics don't work and they are trying every ham fisted way possible to stop people expanding in their games.

The tech and culture changes in the August patch seem pretty good as no more westernisation is great. If they released EUV then the impact of changes would be less of an issue.

 

[Double A]

Toady gave me a 5 day mute for arguing aggressively with someone, except I wasn't. So I was in a really bad mood that day so I was like, hey Toady, here is what it looks like to "argue aggressively" and then demonstrated. Toady was not happy. So, ban.

Edit: To be clear, I said bad words to him in a PM and insulted his forum moderation capabilities.

It's probably been long enough that if you explained and apologized he'd unban you.

 

[Quintillus]

Although I am far less critical of EU4's recent changes than TMIT (maybe because I'm still a couple patches back?), I did wonder recently whether Paradox's expansion strategy is that great. I started wondering because I saw that Euro Truck Simulator 2's main expansions each have 96-98% positive reviews - and for that matter Civ5's expansions do too - whereas EUIV has been hovering in the 50-70% range ever since Art of War.

And although I'm less negative than TMIT in it, it has to be admitted that no one expansion (except perhaps Art of War) really feels like it's really making big improvements. With Euro Truck Simulator, the new map areas are high enough quality, and the reason for them existing obvious enough, that they're very well received. With Civ5, most people probably can't imagine going back to Vanilla. With EUIV expansions... it's nice to have the new features, but would I really miss them if I turned off all the DLCs and played a game? Maybe if I wanted a Conquest of Paradise New World, but otherwise I'm not sure. I'd miss the map improvements if I went back to 1.7. Otherwise though, I'm not so sure.

On the other hand, the game has cumulatively added a lot, most of which has worked pretty well - take forts, for example. Could I play 1.11 without the new forts? Sure. Do I want to go back now? Not really. So maybe it's a picky fanbase, or poor communication, or an inherent problem of the many-smaller-expansions approach versus the fewer-larger-expansions approach. Maybe it's even a perception issue due to the patches being free and also including new content. Probably it's a combination of these things, and not necessarily being amazing expansions by themselves.

On the whole I still really like the game, even if I've diversified this year, and am glad it wasn't two expansions and done. But I do wonder how they might change things so that expansions three years after release could still get 80%+ positive reviews from the community, and ideally be even better at the same time, rather than being a fairly slim margin over 50%. Perhaps they'll figure out a way of doing this in time for Stellaris and/or HOI4's expansions.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I've been banned from a couple places. Ah well. I don't regret flaming Johan and getting banned. He called everyone bad words the same day but did he get banned? No.

Was that on my thread about the 15 year truce change that got deleted outright to cover it up? Man, that was good times. I picked up a good deal of my infamy on those forums in that one .

It has occurred to me that the following is long, and slams pdox pretty hard. I'll put it in spoilers so it doesn't clog up the page.

Spoiler :

Oh right. A disclaimer. I do enjoy EU IV, but I do not respect the actions of two of their developers. The kind of people who mock players with "historical arguments are meaningless" and then wilt when pressed on the gameplay reason to nerf primitive ships are not the kind of people who demonstrate rational competence. Claiming the 15 year truces "disincentivize total war" when they overtly incentivize it is disingenuous, but that's exactly what they said before they deleted it. Algebra to 3 year olds indeed, Johan .

I was also given a major infraction for pointing out that the patch notes have a trend of being incomplete and providing wrong information, despite being able to list to the community manager over a dozen line items over the past three patches (back then, now I could probably break 40), and despite doing so in a thread someone else started about the quality of the patch notes. Speaking of community manager, that one has ignored me outright when I asked for clarification as to why it is people "on probation" can't access bug report forums or tech support. I couldn't even determine how long my probation lasts until a different junior mod was nice enough to PM me that information.

So keep in mind that to some degree, it's developer dishonesty in that thread and a few others that contributes to the below sounding hostile. It isn't just their DLC policy that's dishonest, and it's hard to forget that so nicely.

Invade Europe and make Rome animist!

Actually, I did exactly that in my defenders of the faith co-op LP with Maddjinn, Josh127, ParadogsGamer, and CanisAlbinus. The goal was to remove all religions that could take DotF. I switched to animist as Mali.

Doing it as Kuba wouldn't be practical though. Africa is not animist now, but Fetishist, and while you can still convert Rome (easier than ever with Cossacks...of course) Fetish syncs a lot better with humanism.

And although I'm less negative than TMIT in it, it has to be admitted that no one expansion (except perhaps Art of War) really feels like it's really making big improvements.

It's not underwhelming improvements I have a problem with. Estates when used to their potential are as strong as AoW for example.

The problem is that their now longstanding tendency is to nerf player strength with patches, but sell DLC that makes players stronger than previously. Estates are an excellent example; even half-effort micro on them will let you have 1500 monarch points per category from 1444-1644. Think about the implications of that...estates grade out to more than a 15% tech cost reduction for everyone. But if you don't have the DLC, not only do you lack estates, but as of 1.12 cores cost more, and as of the patch that introduced estates you get less ticking -LA (game was re-balanced assuming you have them).

The other problem is that they don't fix problems, some of them pretty serious...

On the other hand, the game has cumulatively added a lot, most of which has worked pretty well - take forts, for example.

Case in point:

Spoiler :

Spoiler :

Spoiler :

First of all, as an amusing aside I actually ***-pulled that war and won it . But more importantly, that was introduced in the patch that changed forts. It is a confirmed issue. It still exists now, no less than five major patches later.

Forts work?

Spoiler :

No, forts do not work. Yet another relatively common example. I can't return to the province of origin because the game claims land movement blocked by a fort. The only change in status quo since I marched on their capital is that I occupied a fort. My enemy gained none in that timeframe. I am literally being penalized for occupying a fort by getting a new ZoC to trap me.

There is also a bug that resolves on reload (so more save scum in ironman) where the game pretends all retreat points are blocked by a hostile fort and you get stackwiped, but if you reload the save you instead retreat.

The game still has other crap like lying about cobelligerency or having it claim you can't take a province because you can't core it, but if you console it you can core it instantly (UI lies to the player and restricts a legal action per stated rules)...again confirmed in introduction patch beta (1.13beta), still in 1.17.

It goes on and on. De-ironman'd saves have been happening since Mare Nostrum release, still no hotfix on that one.

It's not that they're just another company. Their DLC practice puts them in the same territory as Electronic Arts. For all of Civ V's myriad faults they have not patched content out of Civ V and resold it in a new form in DLC. The UI is quite shoddy in #inputs, but it doesn't routinely provide misinformation (that was patched out in vanilla).

So maybe it's a picky fanbase, or poor communication, or an inherent problem of the many-smaller-expansions approach versus the fewer-larger-expansions approach. Maybe it's even a perception issue due to the patches being free and also including new content.

No, it is an issue of priorities set. They knowingly advertise cross-platform MP, and they know for a fact it doesn't function. Are they working to fix that? No, that was introduced in 1.6. Not 1.16, 1.6. Summer 2014. New content has consistently been prioritized over known bugs and legacy issues.

The other major problem is that the "free" patches with "some" bug fixes also modify the game in a way that's balanced on the assumption of DLC. The more nuanced you understand the game, the more you realize just how crushingly powerful something like "grant province" really is. I told a less experienced player about how they implemented liberty desire, then sold ways to ignore it, and he assumed I was talking about client states. That's a joke compared to grant province, something you can do all game and get over -100% liberty desire...as if you care about that 50% increase at 300 development with such a tool.

Most people don't look at estates and go "wow, that's thousands of monarch points per category per game, eastern tech is basically western if I buy Cossacks". But that's what estates do. That's what the horde razing mechanic does in place of having 3 estates.

That's what earns my scorn. I don't like pay to win models, and that's how the DLC progression has been. Common sense, Cossacks, and Mare Nostrum to a lesser extent (shattering merchant republic functionality quite a bit unless you buy DLC) follow that pattern. We haven't had a somewhat honest expansion release since El Dorado with its treasure fleets, new world mechanics, and ToT (though taco treaty is still bugged and you can violate your treaty against yourself sometimes, another confirmed bug that lingers).

Does scutage work yet? Not if you read the patch notes. That's a DLC paid feature that has never actually increased your income by enabling it last I bothered to check. If it was fixed, it was not in any patch note. It has yet to do what the developers claim since the day they sold it.

As someone who has played this game many hours (though apparently FlorryWorry dwarfs me with his 9k ^_^ ), it's easier to see these flaws. Some are minor, but others such as UI lies and de-ironmaning, are things that are risks to everybody or worse, things players get penalized for without even realizing.

None of the non-war stuff has the interesting choices of war. So they prevent you from doing the only thing there is in the game to do.

This is the crux of the issue when analysing actual gameplay. They have cannibalized the game's core gameplay, and replaced it with trivial heuristic stuff calling it "peace time mechanics", as if development is ever optimal absent alternative uses of the monarch points, or as if corruption actually makes you think about your approach.

Adding "waiting" is not adding to the game .

Back to more pleasant things, perhaps.

 

[JohannaK]

Paint me interested.

 

[Dell19]

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.