1.4 - Units

[Katarian]

- Not possible to give move order for more than one province into TI

I was just about to pre-order on Steam. Glad I checked the forum before shelling out my money. I'll wait for a sale or big price cut before I consider buying.

Exploring for me will be spending 5 minutes clicking on each sea province in turn followed by 15 minutes of waiting for my ships to get repaired, and virtually impossible to do when also engaging in a war. I am never going to touch the random new world option it's just not something that interests me, so I know exactly where the land is and how far my explorers can travel without sinking. It was hardly exciting before when I would spend 15-30 seconds planning a route that wouldn't get my ships sunk and then 15 minutes waiting for them to repair, adding more clicks and time sitting waiting for the ships to move isn't going to make it more fun.

 

[Nutcracker]

Anyone else picked up on the big nerf to the HYW ship tactic?

Attrition on ships and lack of reinforce make it far less effective.

 

[General Baker]

- Not possible to give move order for more than one province into TI

Could you please reconsider this? It's going to be more of a hassle. Right now it's reasonably convenient if you know what your vessel can take to queue exploration with shift and focus on other things, coming back later. Being unable to do that will make exploration more of a hassle. Can this change at least be limited to only the randomized starts/new world area and not the regular world map?

Entirely agreed.

I was just about to pre-order on Steam. Glad I checked the forum before shelling out my money. I'll wait for a sale or big price cut before I consider buying.

Exploring for me will be spending 5 minutes clicking on each sea province in turn followed by 15 minutes of waiting for my ships to get repaired, and virtually impossible to do when also engaging in a war. I am never going to touch the random new world option it's just not something that interests me, so I know exactly where the land is and how far my explorers can travel without sinking. It was hardly exciting before when I would spend 15-30 seconds planning a route that wouldn't get my ships sunk and then 15 minutes waiting for them to repair, adding more clicks and time sitting waiting for the ships to move isn't going to make it more fun.

You realise this change will take effect regardless of whether you buy the DLC? Patch 1.4 is for all users.

 

[TheBloke]

Anyone else picked up on the big nerf to the HYW ship tactic?

Attrition on ships and lack of reinforce make it far less effective.

You mean for England? I can't see it making a big difference. With the prevailing England strategies you move your troops about by ship a bit, but not all that far as the distances involved are always small. Generally I have my troops waiting in Castile when they're not doing anything, and they move in and out of France in the south by land. It's only when I want to switch attack to the north that I will take them up there by ship, but that's only two or three sea provinces at a time. And if need be I could drop them on the English coast for a couple of months before to regen before taking them down for a southern assault.

It might alter the timings slightly, but its' definitely not a game changer I feel.

 

[Sensational]

You mean for England? I can't see it making a big difference. With the prevailing England strategies you move your troops about by ship a bit, but not all that far as the distances involved are always small. Generally I have my troops waiting in Castile when they're not doing anything, and they move in and out of France in the south by land. It's only when I want to switch attack to the north that I will take them up there by ship, but that's only two or three sea provinces at a time. And if need be I could drop them on the English coast for a couple of months before to regen before taking them down for a southern assault.

It might alter the timings slightly, but its' definitely not a game changer I feel.

He's probably referring to hit and runs, where you keep your troops out on the ships and hit the shore as soon as there's a smaller stack there available for destruction.

 

[Katarian]

You realise this change will take effect regardless of whether you buy the DLC? Patch 1.4 is for all users.

Crap, I had hoped that I could skip this DLC and dip into later ones. I've pretty much stopped playing EU4 waiting to see what happened with the DLC I'll doubt I'll start playing again.

 

[InnocentIII]

By the way, could we possibly get some river crossing indicators? Like the ones in CK2? I still don't understand why river crossings are a game of guess and see.

+1 It's the same in HoI3 iirc. I wonder, is river crossing a % chance and not a fixed y/n? Your troops go from A to B and sometimes it's at a crossing and sometimes it's not. It would fit in with the terrain randomness. As a "crossing the border" question, yeah, it makes no sense, but if you think of the invading army as marching across interior land as well as the province border, whether they're suffering a disadvantage is partly luck.

If it's always yes on one border and always no on another, I can't see why we don't already have a display of information the computer obviously possesses.

 

[AdmRepublic]

It probably means pirates will spawn randomly even in active sea zones. No more suppressing pirate activity across multiple zones with a single 1444 barque.

That would be nice. I wouldn't mind more pirates actually.

 

[TheBloke]

He's probably referring to hit and runs, where you keep your troops out on the ships and hit the shore as soon as there's a smaller stack there available for destruction.

Yeah. You don't need to do that all that often, though, as it's usually possible to also execute the hit and runs from nearby neutral land. And when not attacking, you can drop troops somewhere very close - like in Castile when attacking Labourd and Gascogne, and England itself when attacking Normandie and Caux.

It'll make a little difference to the specifics of how one executes a winning HYW strategy, and you'll probably end up with a little less manpower than in 1.3, but neither will be too huge. Maybe a little more micro-management overall, to ensure troops are on ships for less time.

 

[TheBloke]

Crap, I had hoped that I could skip this DLC and dip into later ones. I've pretty much stopped playing EU4 waiting to see what happened with the DLC I'll doubt I'll start playing again.

With the DLC, you can. Just not with the Patch

 

[Schmoekoeksklok]

http://www.eu4wiki.com/Force_limit#Base_tax

That link doesn't help at all. Vassals most definitely do add 50% of their tax base to their overlord for both diplomatic purposes and force limits in the current version of the game (and the number appearing on their economy screen). That the wiki doesn't mention this is mainly an issue with the updaters not being the people who actually test this stuff

So yeah, I'm not sure where this is coming from, that's already in the game.

 

[Kraxis]

Wow, seems I'm not the only one who really doesn't want the tedious micromanagement of TI. And all for the sake of a few people who can't keep their pants on with the current mechanic. Thanks a lot! This is exactly what is wrong with MP and SP being balanced together in games. Someone is always going to be screwed over. In this case, my group.
I had never expected that PI would begin to fall into the trap that Blizzard did. I can't remember how many times they managed to mess up something because another aspect was off balance. I left that behind, sad to see it enter this, my timesink of timesinks.

 

[Mann42]

That link doesn't help at all. Vassals most definitely do add 50% of their tax base to their overlord for both diplomatic purposes and force limits in the current version of the game (and the number appearing on their economy screen). That the wiki doesn't mention this is mainly an issue with the updaters not being the people who actually test this stuff

So yeah, I'm not sure where this is coming from, that's already in the game.

While I do think that vassals add to forcelimits, I don't think overseas vassals do, which is what the patch note would imply by specifying colonial vassals.

 

[unmerged(811747)]

The problem is the mechanic - the way unexplored seas are discovered. You should be able to put your ship into explorer mode.

i.e. tell your explorer to go in a certain direction (Columbus style, maybe 16 points of the compass) and the explorer should have the foresight to return to a port for repair before sinking by calculating their return path as they progress. As the explorer finds coastline, they start mapping/tracking the coastline in an attempt to get back on their original compass course.

Then you can get rid of the silly mechanic of manually moving into undiscovered sea tiles, whether it be by setting a predefined path or discovering a tile one by one...

The same could be said for conquistadors or when you are at war. You cant discover a land province by clicking an undiscovered tile - you just specify the direction and the game will snap to the province on discovery.

Less micromanagement the better.

 

[Jomini]

If we can't keep the good old shift-right click a big path into TI, can we at least get a crappy automate explorers/conquistadors button? Something like a mini-AI that will make use of Explorers and Conquistadors even when you are off managing a war in Europe. In SP you can set up the message to auto-pause, but in MP this is going to suck hard to toggle between say a Dutch explorer in Indonesia and an active war in the HRE.

So remind me again why we are getting attrition for being on naval vessels? I mean I get it is historical, but so too was continuous attrition on land even in peace time (you never had a shortage of deserters, diseases, and incarcerations in this era). All it appears to do is make the naval game yet less interesting.

 

[Fryslan0109]

Adding my +1 to the fact that one-province-TI is going to be really slow and will be very frustrating micro-management.

I always used to set long shift-right-click paths for my Explorers, sending them on a path to reveal a bunch of TI and then back to the nearest port to repair their attrition.

I already have the "New discovery" popup enabled, but it's going to be really tedious having to constantly seek out my ships to give new orders.

Please guys consider mitigating this change in the first hotfix. I am certain that starting Tuesday there are going to be a lot of threads on it

Some thoughts:

1. If it's mandatory for Randomised New World, then enable the one-province limit only when Randomised New World is enabled.
   1. Even better: enable it only in the Americas and only when Randomised New World is enabled.
2. At the least, allow it to be modded: so we can set a define or add a modifier that enables the old behaviour of being able to right-click anywhere into TI.
3. For the future: if you must have it, extend it to a game feature: technology reduces or removes the limit.
   • For example, at DipTech 12 you can explore 2 provinces, and the limit goes away completely at DipTech 15.
   • So it applies early game when player is first finding new areas, but gets better and goes completely after a while as time advances and technology increases.

Some fair suggestions. I agree with the fix that would simply restrict it to Random Map worlds and only in the New World region of those maps...

I really hope they fix this. PI's seeming obsession with plugging exploit holes is doing more to damage the game than those who use these things. I feel like I'm being punished for something I didn't do.

 

[unmerged(798670)]

The problem is the mechanic - the way unexplored seas are discovered. You should be able to put your ship into explorer mode.

i.e. tell your explorer to go in a certain direction (Columbus style, maybe 16 points of the compass) and the explorer should have the foresight to return to a port for repair before sinking by calculating their return path as they progress. As the explorer finds coastline, they start mapping/tracking the coastline in an attempt to get back on their original compass course.

Then you can get rid of the silly mechanic of manually moving into undiscovered sea tiles, whether it be by setting a predefined path or discovering a tile one by one...

The same could be said for conquistadors or when you are at war. You cant discover a land province by clicking an undiscovered tile - you just specify the direction and the game will snap to the province on discovery.

Less micromanagement the better.

Unfortunately if the AI could handle this, the AI would not be immune to naval attrition.

 

[Talq]

- Not possible to give move order for more than one province into TI

Oh lord, this is going to suck.

Please start brainstorming a better method of discovery...quickly.

Hard to justify such a statement, considering the AI doesn't even take naval attrition. Where's that advantage again ?

While the AI does not suffer attrition, it is coded for exploration not to abuse it (ergo Portugal doesn't discover the entire world in 1444). Allowing it to abuse it would be...bad (in part because because it then flows into discovery).

Why didn't you just make it affect blockade efficiency?

Because its rare you would want to use an admiral on blockade, except incidentally as part penning their main fleet in? It would still be an inferior stat, and nearly totally useless for explorers.

 

[anubisfike]

You realise this change will take effect regardless of whether you buy the DLC? Patch 1.4 is for all users.

That still doesn't mean he would want to give them more money. I certainly don't.

 

[unmerged(798670)]

While the AI does not suffer attrition, it is coded for exploration not to abuse it (ergo Portugal doesn't discover the entire world in 1444). Allowing it to abuse it would be...bad (in part because because it then flows into discovery).

The argument that the AI is both too bad that they need to make exploration a micromanagement hell and that the AI is also too good does not hold water. I doubt the AI having terra knowledge without changing its exploration priorities would actually be difficult to deal with and I don't think its theoretically possible to be worse than the added micro. This isn't a theoretical case, the players currently know the exact layout of the new world and the AI knows where it all is and the players are able to cope just fine, if anything the AI could stand to be more abusive by a good chunk to compete with a colonial human.