Europa Universalis IV

[Sonereal]

The problem is, even just keeping track of family trees had a sizeable amount of information for the game to keep track of. That means cutting something else in return, for a feature that's essentially about realism/simulation rather than about game design.

You'd have to make families an important part of the whole game design (rather than an abstraction) to make family trees useful, and at that point, you're looking at eating into Crusader Kings' central schtick, which is unlikely to happen.

I'm all for a little more dynastic stuff, but I don't think we're likely to see it, and I can see reasons why not.

I'm not very sure about that. Making something like this

can't really take that much time relative to other things being done, and it almost looks like an afterthought. I don't think anyone's asking for character-specific traits or that jazz, but tracking family relations, who those family members are married to, ages, and children might not be that tall of an order.

 

[Dell19]

Its not just one screen though as they would need to keep track of relationships of characters between nations and potentially royal marriages need to be reworked so that there is a royal marriage option and a powerful nobility option.

Also in EU3 they presumably hold the bare minimum of details on the current ruling family so this would need to be expanded to display who is actually married, who has childen, what they look like and add events so that can die, marry have childen etc.

 

[mechaerik]

Also in EU3 they presumably hold the bare minimum of details on the current ruling family so this would need to be expanded to display who is actually married, who has childen, what they look like and add events so that can die, marry have childen etc.

I don't think they necessarily need to track appearance. Death events also wouldn't have to be a huge change from the regular king/heir/adviser dead events already present in EU3.

 

[Sonereal]

Its not just one screen though as they would need to keep track of relationships of characters between nations and potentially royal marriages need to be reworked so that there is a royal marriage option and a powerful nobility option.

It isn't as if they would need to start from scratch. The tree system already exists in CK2. Unlike CK2, there wouldn't be character links either, because characters wouldn't have pages.

Also in EU3 they presumably hold the bare minimum of details on the current ruling family so this would need to be expanded to display who is actually married, who has childen, what they look like and add events so that can die, marry have childen etc.

Tracking who already is married and who already has children shouldn't be too difficult. The CK2 family tree does it well enough. You wouldn't need to track what anybody looks like, or character traits whatsoever (besides possible inbreds). Events where children die shouldn't be an issue either, because there are already events like that for heirs. Just make it so that event can pop for any of the children.

It wouldn't be a one-week sort of deal probably, but it isn't the insurmountably difficult either.

 

[cybrxkhan]

They don't need to do a full-blown CKII-style character madness sort of thing. Heck, they could just keep track of how many male and female dynasty members you have (or close relatives or whatever) and work your way from there.

 

[Dell19]

It wouldn't be a one-week sort of deal probably, but it isn't the insurmountably difficult either.

Sure it would be reasonably straight forward like most development however it might end up adding an extra month's* worth of development when you take into account testing and bug fixing.

Also as they are doing a simplified family tree they might ultimately have to start from scratch as they would probably want to differentiate it from CK's in terms of design and also it needs to hook into the rest of the EU code rather than CK's. I appreciate that bits of it could still be copied.

* This is an amount pulled out of the air as I don't build games.

 

[Heretic_Cata]

Having never played any CK games, i hope whatever you guys want never gets added. My reaction reading what everyone said about families/dynasties was either "Wow, this is useless" or "Wow, this needlessly complicates things just for the sake of complicating things."

 

[Sonereal]

Having never played any CK games, i hope whatever you guys want never gets added. My reaction reading what everyone said about families/dynasties was either "Wow, this is useless" or "Wow, this needlessly complicates things just for the sake of complicating things."

I know right? How dare people make suggestions that would at least put the game in the same region as "historical accuracy" or even "mechanical sense".

 

[Evie]

I'm not very sure about that. Making something like this

can't really take that much time relative to other things being done, and it almost looks like an afterthought. I don't think anyone's asking for character-specific traits or that jazz, but tracking family relations, who those family members are married to, ages, and children might not be that tall of an order.

Even without character-specific traits, what you would need:

1)To keep track of ALL children of all rulers in the game, as opposed to one child at a time (the heir). That right there multiply by a lot the amount of information the game need to keep track of. All the more so if you try to keep track of multiple generations at once (so you know who the king's brothers, king's grand-children, king's great-grand-children are.

2)To *generate* this data. In order for this family tree to be useful you need kids being borns, and marriages happening. That means the game need events (either as actual in-game events or as a hidden routine within the game) that keep marrying off those characters, and generating kids for them, and killing them off. That's a lot of background operations for the computer to constantly be running on a cast of thousands.

If you try to keep track of entire family trees as far back as European dynasties tried to track their family trees, it's far, far, far worse.

...and we haven't even *looked* at adding the higher nobility yet, just the ruling families of in-game states. To say nothing of the rest of the world where they might not even follow the same system of dynastic laws (or were you planning to introduce those too?)...

The interface is the EASY part of doing this. The work for the actual game engine to keep track of this information - the relation between thousands upon thousands of characters - is where the problem is.

When the vast majority of those characters exist solely for the purpose of providing a realistic family tree (as opposed to being game-relevant characters), then you have a serious game design problem.

But to make them game-relevant characters you need to throw even more design at them (ie, giving them stats, abilities, roles to fill). Which in turn means focusing the game even more on those family trees and characters, at the expense of other features that will need abstracted.

And then what you have isn't Europa Universalis anymore; it's Crusader Kings : 1444-1800. Which might be what some fans want, but it very clearly isn't what Paradox want.

And rightly so. Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis should be completely different games, not the same game in two separate time periods.

 

[uat2d]

Having never played any CK games, i hope whatever you guys want never gets added. My reaction reading what everyone said about families/dynasties was either "Wow, this is useless" or "Wow, this needlessly complicates things just for the sake of complicating things."

You're in for some grief

While I do agree with you in that dynasties in EU3 would needlessly complicate things, you do should try CK2, it's actually quite great

 

[Heretic_Cata]

I know right? How dare people make suggestions that would at least put the game in the same region as "historical accuracy" or even "mechanical sense".

I never associate those two things with EU ... or any computer game for that matter.

You're in for some grief

While I do agree with you in that dynasties in EU3 would needlessly complicate things, you do should try CK2, it's actually quite great

I will try it at some point as it seems intresting, but it seems to move the entire focus of the "EU" game on other things.
Also you guys can take your royal families/marriages/trees/dynasties and shove them - REPUBLIC 4LIFE YO !

 

[uat2d]

Also you guys can take your royal families/marriages/trees/dynasties and shove them - REPUBLIC 4LIFE YO !

There are also republics in CK2

 

[Evie]

Provided you have the right DLC, and even then only a handful of republics are playable...

 

[SouthernKing]

Just pre-ordered it.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Originally posted by Owen
Right now EU3 is a rather drab boring affair where the only time you don't expand rapidly and easily with little internal (or even external troubles) is because you're purposefully not doing so for "historical realism".

This is basically EU3's greatest flaw, combined with the "boring peace" syndrome, since war is the only really interesting thing in the game. Surprisingly, the supposedly less realistic/historical Civ suffers from this much less.

I liked the concept of "Cultural Tradition" in HTTT, since it was actually a reward for peace. Pity it was so easy to keep it high anyway, EU3 always needed some tweaking in its modifiers.

Even treating all countries starting in 1444 as nation-states, but adding in something internal and interesting would be better then what we have now.

 

[Kyriakos]

I am not sure if that is utterly fair though. Playing as the Byzantine Empire i actually got more bored after i had way too many provinces in Europe, Asia and Africa. It is not realistic to make good use of many of them by that time and i ended up just developing the European and Asian part of the Empire. The system of economics based on distance from your capital and regional capital effectively means that too much expansion will not really lead to benefit, at least not internal benefit (it will at least allow you to not worry about antagonists in your immediate regions).

The BB system is very basic too. Surely some sort of detriment to pure warmongering must be kept, but the BB system was too generic and did not take into account even who was the side starting the war- in fact it would reward you for starting a war if you had the correct CB, but penalise you if some country you had a CB on would declare on you first...

 

[Peck of Arabia]

I was always disappointed in how rare it was that a dynasty or a monarch would be overthrown, that was my big complaint. Since Kyriakos posted above me, I'll take, for example, the Byzantines; they were famous (infamous?) for their intrigues and Palace coups- yet in the last game I played as them I had the same dynasty peacefully pass from father to son for 200 years. That's just not right!

Pretenders are pathetic, they can only overthrow the government if the player shepherds them to do so and looks the other way while they siege the capital (assuming they don't spawn somewhere in the wilderness miles from the capital making even this impossible) and in only spawning a single army, the assumption is that the entirety of the rest of the country is with the current king, it all looks a little pitiable. Why not have whole provinces and existing armies declare for a pretender, for instance, making it constant threat, rather than, a slight concern until you get 5 province, as it is at the moment?

I wouldn't suggest a dynasty system a la CK 2 as I think you could make peacetime country management interesting without having "characters", perhaps instead adding a "faction" element so that pretenders wouldn't be so random and so lonely when they appeared. We already have legitimacy and stability, why not have them influence, along with some other variables, a "pretender-o-meter". This could be coupled with rebellions that really sting, perhaps having them as states-within-states rather than rogue single armies and as I mentioned before, stealing territories and armies away from you, the government. After all as it stands nationalist, and religious rebels, like pretenders, are all just single armies that are easily crushable.

There's few consequences for being a centralised, absolutist, persecutory, war-monger, and if you do mismanage a country so badly rather than feeling like the country you're governing is falling apart (something that, for all it's faults and accompanying misery, is quite exciting) you're left ping-ponging or playing whack-a-mole with single rebel armies which, unless you construct your own narrative around, is quite dull.

As a result, the excitement has to come from, mostly, from declaring war and expanding territory to sizes that Early Modern governments would find, frankly, ungovernable just for the sake of something to do.


EDIT: I understand EU IV has revamped the rebel system somewhat, but, as I read it, it still sounded pretty similar to EUIII

 

[Kyriakos]

I really like your idea of a faction-based rebel system. As you mentioned some nations such as the Byzantine Empire could really use this. There could be some major factions (eg Komnenoi, Palaiologoi etc) who remain alive unless the player tries to purge them (with purging them leading to a rise in rebel activity and possibility of civil war).

It would be interesting, but i am not sure how practical it would be, given that for most of the countries in the EU period there does not seem to be much information as to major dynasty dynamics.

I also agree that whole regions should take part in any such revolt. Iirc in EUIII mods there was the chance that a loyal army could just turn rebel (or am i remembering it wrongly?)

 

[uat2d]

I don't think that would be too much fun, it must be something comprehensible like CK2

 

[sophie]

I really like your idea of a faction-based rebel system. As you mentioned some nations such as the Byzantine Empire could really use this. There could be some major factions (eg Komnenoi, Palaiologoi etc) who remain alive unless the player tries to purge them (with purging them leading to a rise in rebel activity and possibility of civil war).

It would be interesting, but i am not sure how practical it would be, given that for most of the countries in the EU period there does not seem to be much information as to major dynasty dynamics.

I also agree that whole regions should take part in any such revolt. Iirc in EUIII mods there was the chance that a loyal army could just turn rebel (or am i remembering it wrongly?)

Depends on what you mean by "most countries". We know an exceptional deal - perhaps more than we know about Byzantine politics - about English, French, and Spanish politics, for example. And Italian politics at this time was nothing but factional/dynastic disputes.