The type of railroading I am hoping for

[Linbot#6018]

- AIs desire provinces that they historically desired in real life (one of main reasons why Persia, Netherlands and Mughals rarely form in EU4 is because tags in the region have a tendency to make alliances with tags that hold provinces that are necessary to make the formation, with this game rule AIs would actively desire provinces that are necessary to make formable nations happen, what is the exact thing that players already do).

This isn't even a railroading thing this should just be a normal game mechanic. For Europe I don't think the solution is necessarily adding desire for provinces, it should be to add mechanics that encourage natural regions like the Netherlands, Iberia, Scandinavia etc. to form personal unions with each other. For Persia, China, India etc., if there's a state that has an "ambition" or something to unite the region they should desire the provinces in that region yeah. This would generally just make the game better. Though maybe the Mughals uniting India could be considered to have more to do with how it is a plain with few natural defenses.

 

[Galadredid]

Railroading in what way? Saying 'the United States area is will be scripted to being the first colony in the New World to declare independence' is the kind of aggravating sort of scripting that's best to avoid. Instead, the game should be able to simulate reasons that a new world colony might be able to declare independence (a largely settled area that has the kind of local prosperity and the idea that it can defend itself on the own, colonists being unhappy with any policies that the crown is passing, and how many Enlightenment-style liberal 'administrative techs' have spread to them).

The Napoleonic Wars as such is really hard to simulate, but it wouldn't be done with saying 'welp, this is a 6/6/6 general who spawns with doomstacks' but instead, first setting it up so that there are pro-war parties in the world's first major revolutionary liberal republic who want to create sister republics, defeat the nation's historic rival and/or annex similarly-cultured pops during the rise of nationalism. Then also factor in some kind of revolutionary factional system where you have the military forces potentially coming out on top - so maybe you can see something similar happen, but also a lot of other plausible possibilities.

 

[Blindbohemian]

Actually Spain has missions which give it lots of claims on Mexico. There are of course less scripted reasons it could get the "wants your provinces" modifier, but this is why it seems like Spain always has it. If you take missions away (and e.g. special tag powers and tag-specific idea group scripting) you'll see a less historical new world most of the time.

I apologise, I wasn’t aware of that. I have not played with missions since about two weeks after Rule Britannia came out.

 

[Basileus2]

I expect this game will use Imperator style mission trees. In I:R, there were a few types of mission trees. Ones built specifically for countries, but also other ones that would dynamically appear based on your circumstances - growing the wealth / population of your empire, or your foreign policy (e.g. various paths to breaking free if you're a vassal), culture group type mission trees, government reform or conquest type missions. It was great.

If Johan and co could build on this strong foundation and have more types of dynamic mission trees as well as building in the country / culture specific ones I think not-EU5's re-playability, content and plausible nation development 'guardrails' will be the best in all of PDX history.

 

[Kovax]

The best way to have specific historical events (Hundred Years War, Napoleon, American Independence, etc.) happen for the players that want them is to have alternative start dates shortly before those events. Trying to railroad a "semi-sandbox" game for several hundred years and expecting something close to our own timeline to emerge is asking for the highly improbable at best.

I much prefer having things flow more naturally from the situation on hand, taking different courses in each game, rather than having some unexplainable outside force magically reshape the world to something more like what happened historically, no matter how unbelievable it is under the in-game circumstances. Anything acting to railroad things historically needs to be somewhat realistic, and the more subtle the intervention the better.

 

[TitaniumMan91]

Taking the historical event choice is only going to make sense if the rest of the game has played out historically. A game where, no matter what, Austria gets Hungary as a PU even if Austria is an irrelevant nobody is bad game design. I want historical-ish things to happen, but unless you yourself play historically, you're going to alter the game state and then you have a static world you can predict who is incapable of really challenging you because you already know what's going to happen. It works in a HoI game, because the whole thing is ~10 year long, but still goes off the rails the moment the player starts changing history.