Motivation problems with EU4 at mid game / end game.

The cost is based on the base tax + modifiers.

The time was... erratic for me in my game as Germany. It was definitely longer... in some cases. But I had one that went in about half the time (while the province beside it was the one that took longer). Though they were primarily colonial holdings. I'm not 100% sure what was affecting the coring time.


I used to run into it, but over time I just started to enjoy consolidating and building up what I have as well. I'm always looking for the next place to nab, but sometimes I also just go in to knock a big neighbour down to size (even if I don't conquer anything more out of it).

When I get bored playing a country I change to someone else. Try playing a small nation.

stilgarpl said:

Haven't you read million posts/threads by SirMaru? He had the need to tell us every single time that he uninstalls every game after 12 minutes and only Civ 5 has the fonts he likes?

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Oh, thanks for the info, didn't know it

balmung60 said:

I modded the coring time increase because screw waiting 40 years for a province to core.

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Can you tell how to mod it? Im now on my 6th country because i cant keep going because it takes 10+ years to core a poorest irish provinces

When your aim is war, and war alone, you are bound to get bored when the game begins to reel you in. Set yourself some kind of ridiculous goal, such as getting the Ottomans into North America, and go through with it.

The game after a certain point doesn't have much more than building stuff and even that's cut down thanks to monarch points system. This game should have incorporated system from other Paradox games. It's the oldest among them and the lack of depth is now glaring after 10 years. It should have pops, characters or a deeper combat system. It started out as my favorite Paradox franchise 10 years ago and ended up being the one I like least now.

Yeah, once you conquer most of Europe and half Asia, it really gets boring. Antiblobbing features don't stop anyone, they just make the game less enjoyable until you just leave it, never finish, and start all over again as a different country. Increased coring time with the size of your country? 100% overextension after taking 4 provinces? Inability to take provinces from enemy coalition members? Same amount of monarch points no matter the size of the country? It's all bullshit ;/

When in EU3 officials requirement for buildings kicked in, I thought it was ridiculous and immediately modded it out. 500 provinces with like 20 buildings to build in each, and your number of officials doesn't increase with the size of your country (or if you manage to increase it, 6 is still max, so you have to build a few each month, instead of all at once). Now in EU4 you need 10 monarch points for every building, and again, you'll NEVER build them all, or even most of them, unless you want to get terribly behind in tech. If anything, buildings should INCREASE the speed at which you tech up (Not really, but still more so than decrease it). You have tons of money to spend on buildings, but you can't use it, cause you need to save those adm points for coring, dip points for culture changing (which you shouldn't be able to do at all imo), and mil points for... actually no, mil points are pretty useless, you only get techs and ideas with them, and no military buildings are worth having at the moment.

btw, PU's are op. In my game as Poland I PU'ed blobbed France, Spain, Austria and Russia. France, Spain and Russia kept colonizing as my bitches. After integrating them I owned more than half of the freakin world by 1700 without even trying to do WC that time. I'd prefer to be able to actually conquer faster instead of having to get my king on the throne of every significant country in the world.


It's still the best game I've ever played though. I'd just make conquering more fun and less of a pain in the ass. The most fun thing to do is split the world into 4 parts in multiplayer and then have our superpowers battle it out in a world war.

I don't know about Oman, but the Ottomans start out huge already... I don't understand why people like to play large nations. Not much challenge after you've cleared out a few large opponents. I really only like playing small nations. But to each his own.

I am still playing my very first game. It is 1743 and I nearly achieved my goal: Russia in its exact 1914 borders. That's actually feels like natural borders for my country, as coring hast starting to take forever and every war is a tiresome world war against all my neighbours in a coaltion.
My new goal for the remaining years is to make and keep White Sea the most valuable Trade Node in the world (currently having a small lead against Sevilla) by building a highly profitable land-based Silk Route all the way from China.

What my games always made more interesting were historical visions and limitations (house rules) instead of just blobbing around.

Yes it gets quite boring in the end but I am sure it will be a blast in large MP games.

I was afraid of this, even on day 1. Not that I had any complaints, but after seeing all these all hail eu4 threads on launch day I got really worried. The first impression might be good, but you have no idea, or basis to claim that the game is a masterpiece. Just like simcity, people started to realize how broken the game was after a week or so. No I'm not saying eu4 is broken, but more and more people are seeing eu4 for what it really is, and it seems they do not like it.

But to be fair I've had this falling of mid\end game with more or less every paradox game except maybe hoi2. I did however manage to finish one punjab game in victoria 2 once though. That said I spend at least over 100 hours on each game\expansion.

I played eu4 to death the first couple of days, and now I'm somewhat bored. Dunno how more I can ask from the game, but I did in fact expect to play it more before getting bored. There's just a few incredible annoying aspects about the game already mentioned.

Crispin said:

I was afraid of this, even on day 1. Not that I had any complaints, but after seeing all these all hail eu4 threads on launch day I got really worried. The first impression might be good, but you have no idea, or basis to claim that the game is a masterpiece. Just like simcity, people started to realize how broken the game was after a week or so. No I'm not saying eu4 is broken, but more and more people are seeing eu4 for what it really is, and it seems they do not like it.

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I really wouldn't call it that many. But if your sole goal is to become a huge nation, then fighting against the AI is always going to leave you wanting because you're ALWAYS going to be able to do this by about mid-game. This is the point of a sandbox, you make goals and they're solely yours. If people can't think of any other goal to make, it is no more a fault of the game than it is a fault of their imagination.

In my opinion people should focus much less on conquest and more on diplomacy, trade, colonization. It will certainly make the game more challenging and fun in the end.

In order to become big you just have to take advantage on the deficiencies of the AI, it currently are just way too easy to beat the AI in wars. Not because the tactical AI is bad but because the strategic AI is too aggressive and don't concern themselves with survival and more about expansion. A player doing the same thing can do this by exploiting the weakness in the AI and thus never become weak.

If you instead decide not to abuse this lope-hole you will face a more challenging game overall. Just take strategically important areas for trade and colonisation purposes and concentrate on keeping your technology in the top to score many points and win a cultural victory over your enemies.

I would also wait with judgement until a few patches of balancing and AI work has been done. Hopefully the AI will become less of a pushover in strategic warfare and trade.

Try unifying Islam! If you've got CK2 play your converted CK2 save! Meditate and learn to think about nothing, because thinking too much on sandboxy games make you loose all motivation. I have this problem with Skyrim, I've not completed the main storyline, and I've only gotten through 1/4 of the amount of content available in the game. The thing to do is to stop playing when you're bored and come back later, don't try and blitz the nation your playing in a couple of days. Keep at this, then new mods and patches and shizz will keep you hooked to the game as time goes on.

However I do believe that it can get poop sometimes if you dwell too much on it's flaws, i.e. SUPER AMOUNTS OF LAG at the end of each month.

Another pro-tip would be to play with friends or groups on steam who have weekly multiplayer matches, the game time is usually set to 2 and gameplay is more fulfilling when your with and against human players.

Around 1550 the game gets boring.

Captain Frye said:

Around 1550 the game gets boring.

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1550? That's only like 106 years. My games haven't even started yet in 1550. Get colonization ideas. Go get some trade nodes. Conquer India. Try to get the 'one province on every continent' achievement. What country are you playing that you can't think of anything to do after 1550?

Now 1750 and you've finished all your major goals for the game, that's boring if you just sit and wait for 1821 to roll around.

laiziras said:

Can you tell how to mod it? Im now on my 6th country because i cant keep going because it takes 10+ years to core a poorest irish provinces

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It's in defines.lua and should be CORE_TIME_SIZE_MODIFIER = 0.05 (5% longer per province you have). I changed it to 0.0001 (0.01% increase).

I'm sorry but it's simply not the case for me. Developing provinces doesn't gimp tech necessarily. I just finished (yes till 1821) a France game, where I have all 5 military ideas and I was still a full decade ahead in Military technology. With my Colonies in America having at least two levels of trade buildings, and mainland France also have full productions buildings AND military up to Barracks... (I got that far because I was sitting at 999 Military and Admin points for quite a while).

Couple screenies.

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/594761054307291132/A1B822A47CB5C94A263D4F4D7FAF7BE2790B6B70/

http://cloud-3.steampowered.com/ugc/594761054307360279/D326800F184A9C0C1395CD802BCF1532BDF1F1C2/

http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/595886760016647345/5FA638482B85B21446FD8B05D0043C589C5C3F85/

Personally, I have 1200 hours on EU3 and about 100 hours on EU4 so far. I always finish my games. Every single game is brought to 1821. Usually, I adopt short term and long term plans.

Short term, develop mainland France. Long terms, form a colonial empire by A)Colonizing North America and B)Getting access to China. Also, I wanted to test to see if it was feasible for a nation to take all of ONE idea and still be able to stay competitive in tech. Answer: It's possible. This was my first game, where I really didn't pay attention to using my diplo-points efficiently. Just wanted to see how far I could get just derping through the game and taking what I wanted.

Personally, I don't find the game boring at all. In this thread, I seem to be the exception to the rule rather than the rule, but I always play till 1821. The key for me, is testing out new play-style and mechanics. I'm currently doing an England Ironman as a colonial power. In that game, I'm doing a full Diplomacy National Idea build. Just for fun to see how it pans out. Normally, I would mix it up, but I'm currently testing how "focusing" on one type of idea might be.

For those giving up, I hope you guys one day find a renewed interest in the game.

Lessing said:

I like to grow my nation and expand. This is my kind of gameplay. I also enjoy building up my realm with buildings and making my provinces stronger and richer, but that takes the second seat to expansion.

Now I tried the Ottomans and Oman from 1444, and with both I was in the 16th/17th century when I lost the motivation to go on. With coring times increasing with size, and with coalitions forming all around me making me fight all my neighbours every 5 years, I kinda lost interest in going on. If I can't keep my playstyle after 100/200 years (because I have to fight tiresome yet not particularly difficult wars for a handful of provinces, then wait decades for them to core), sitting around doing nothing but building buildings is boring, especially when buildings do not help me get more ideas and tech, but only gold, manpower and force limits (which I don't really need), thus making it a better strategic option to not build buildings in order to conserve monarch points.

Yes, I could do the "feed your vassals" thing, but I think it's silly. If I can take land and feed it to vassals / release vassals so they do the coring, why did Paradox not cut out this middleman? The increased coring time is there for a reason. If I can circumvent it with vassals (which is tiresome as well), then why increase coring times in the first place? Why introduce a limit to expansion, and then a (very tiresome and gamey/silly-feeling) mechanic to circumvent it?

And yes, I could still fight wars while I wait for my new provinces to core, like wars to make vassals, wars to grab money, wars to break up enemies, wars to protect my trade.... but.... I dunno. Wars where I don't take any land at the end bore me. I don't feel like I'm "progressing" in any way when I do that.

Has anybody else problems with motivation after a few hundred years?

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Haha. Yeah man, that's how it is! It isn't just this game though - it's a common thing. Basically you have nothing challenging to strive for. You've taken off - you're done. It's kinda like asking the Wright brothers to fly back and forth on charter lines after they figured out how to get a plane in the air. WHY, right?

This happens in other games too. Don't freak out, it's normal. Always happens to me in Civs once I've finally caught up to techs and am now outproducing everyone with my perfect cities, there's no way not to win - all I have to do now is conquer everyone and it's tedious and there's no surprise because I know I'm going to win. Same in the Total War series.

Must start new challenge! Go! =P