Uh, nope... you're just refusing to admit a self-evident truth. Changing the rules of the game changes the game, regardless of whether those rules come into play, because the knowledge of those rules affects strategy. All your "point" does is discount the existence of strategy in EU4.
Coalitions are annoying, but it's not the coalition feature itself but rather perhaps the AE orgy that has been going on since 1.2. It makes the game too restrictive. Same reason why I don't like Victoria 2, the map is full of options but then you just hit a wall when GPs sphere all your enemies and no one ever joins wars on your side. Then you watch the paint dry until 1880s when the game starts opening up again. Then soon after it's 1935 and game over.
This is the argument you made that is demonstrably false, I explicitly pointed out why it is false. If you would like me to write it out in proof notation I can but I do not see that being terribly important to you, and is unrelated to the tangents you continually bring up in an attempt to establish credibility.
Please, do write out a proof, because I'm not sure how you can be so self-assured in your completely bankrupt line of thinking. You haven't provided any evidence to demonstrate that my argument has false, you have simply repeated a claim that contradicts my argument without substantiating that claim. The only thing you pointed out is that you can utilize tautologies.
Rules that don't happen to come into play still exist because they can alter the viability/optimality of the rest of the strategic decisions available to the player. Coalitions can exist as rules, and I can do everything possible to avoid them while achieving my goals such that they never come into play, but the fact that they don't come into play doesn't mean they're not affecting my gameplay. I approach the game differently than I would if they didn't exist because I have to actively make changes to my play style to avoid them. You're asking a lot of players who approach this game as an affair of optimization (that doesn't include me, but still) to give up their play style and play sub-optimally to avoid WC if you make it significantly easier.
We're not talking about objects, we're talking about game theory. You're acting like what you're suggesting is a completely new feature, when it's really a re-balance of many existing features, and as such it affects all players.
You generally have to put such things in context before you can expect others to understand your point.
This is a non sequitur. The fact that you can reduce non-warfare aspects of EU to tedium by writing about them in a certain way doesn't say anything about the "true nature" of the game. Certainly I could write the same kind of excerpt about the not-so-exceptional narrative that warfare in EU4 produces if I wanted to do so, complete with references to the "destination mini-game" (as I call it, when you game an enemy army into combat by switching your destinations without actually moving between provinces) and the combat phase dice rolls. None of those mechanics produce terribly exciting narrative in and of themselves; it's all about the imaginative stuff you project upon the game's (all things considered) bare-bones systems, and that holds true for both war and peace.
Uh... no? You have no real control of the composition of your army beyond infantry/cavalry/artillery, and the battle system essentially has zero interactivity; all that matters are discipline and morale coefficients along with a bit of randomness. Oh, and who could forget the dreadful arbitrary (read: narrative-destroying) limits of the warscore system. Let's be honest here, the combat system isn't half as deep as you present it to be, and warfare is hardly the AI's strong point. You obviously just have a personal predisposition toward enjoying warfare more than the rest of the game, which is fine but others might not share your view, and that doesn't make warfare the best part of the game.
Now, please explain how making WC easier constitutes adding a feature, and doesn't entail re-balancing the game's existing features.
So what we're really talking about here is adding meta-game options (not game features) then. Well, that's a different thing entirely, and I'm all for more options for customizing what the game's rules will be before the game starts. However, I maintain that adding features to the game itself necessarily changes all the strategic characteristics of the game.
Well the cute example is making vassals and personal unions count as "Conquered." No mechanics or numbers changed except for the addition of several new possible options if you are attempting a WC, any non-WC goal or strategy works exactly as it did before this change.
