1-Stop using customers as QA, 2-dev clashes as balancing reference and 3-missions as power-creeping

[RobbieAB]

The challenge on WC is to generate enough resources within a time limit to be able to conquer all the world. From my experience it is the opposite of boring as you have to be continuously fighting wars, pushing your country to the limit and squeezing every last bit of MP that you can get. The micro does get tedious but WC are also the most action packed games that you can get.

Continuously fighting? Tedious? You might call it action packed, but for me, given there is no risk of me actually losing the wars, it really is just a long boring slugfest. I have respect for those who have the patience for it, but it simply isn't me.

At this point it isn't even about AI, and honestly, if the devs were completely hostile to WC there are some very simple and effective ways to spoil it. The most obvious being simply make the AI capitulate automatically once outmatched by a large enough margin such that the groundwork for WC is done (so around 1650-1700?) which for me would be the interesting part.

 

[Ivashanko]

The Word "Blobbing" and its meaning is somewhat up for debate when is a nation considered a blob...

And most players have never gotten close to a WC or one faith. and they say that the game is to Easy and call for more Anti-blob mechanics? thats just BS imo.
The Challenge after 1600 its not the AI and his weird unit comp its the End Date 1821.

It is up for debate, but I object in the strongest possible terms to anyone who tries to re-define blobbing as meaning 'going for a WC'.

If we use any definition for 'blobbing' other than the silly 'blobbing=going for a WC' your last point is somewhat irrelevant and misunderstands why most anti-blobbing players are against blobbing. It isn't to constrain WC players. It is because sub-WC conquests are usually too easy when compared to what many anti-blobbers want. Honestly, I do not think there is a middle ground here: if WC is possible, more minor conquests* must be too easy relative to how they were in real life/how difficult anti-blobbers want them to be. If more minor conquests become as difficult as many anti-blobbers want, WC becomes impossible.

I have to stress that I don't actually think Paradox should cater to anti-WC players. They should cater to what their marketing researchers says is the largest player group. There are mods for those of us who are more historically minded.

*By 'conquest' I mean conquering and then holding an area.

 

[erneiz_hyde]

Honestly, I do not think there is a middle ground here: if WC is possible, more minor conquests* must be too easy. If more minor conquests become as difficult as many anti-blobbers want, WC becomes impossible.

This display of hubris is what I hates the most from anti-blobbing crowd.

 

[Ivashanko]

This display of hubris is what I hates the most from anti-blobbing crowd.

I changed my post to clarify that I'm not talking about 'ease of conquest' in regards to what most players want, but rather in regards to what anti-blobbers seem to want.*

I guess I don't understand what makes this a hot take. If achieving historical conquests were as hard as many anti-blobbers seem to think it should be, then WC is impossible. On the other hand, if WC is possible, then getting a nation's historical borders cannot be as difficult as many anti-blobbers seem to want it to be. Minus crazy exploits that one side uses and the other doesn't, how could it possibly be otherwise?

*On the off chance that you're arguing that WC is possible regardless of game rules I'll point you in the direction of EU3's Magna Mundi. I've asked forumites here, on Reddit, and a few other places, and as far as I can tell that mod has never been WCed. It's a silly argument for a lot of reasons -it is trivially easy to construct mods that make WC impossible- but I've seen it made a few times.

 

[Dasmani]

I have Nothing against "Roll-play" players. However when someone Says that WC or a One faith is not "Hard" or a "Challenge" and uses this "aim a Roll-player" excuse is just dumb. The Admin Efficiency got reduced this patch. and every single update they Add more provinces and new mechanics that are not implemented around a WC in mind. WC gets Harder with every patch saying its Easy or a Steamroll makes me think "This guy is either Marco or a Liar"

I ran a WC as the Ottomans the day the patch launched and did an Unlikely-Candidate/Third-Way/Dar-al-Islam/One-Faith as Mzab in 1.30.2. Wars are easy now because the AI can't use mercs and wastes all their manpower marching through Siberia to siege my Georgian march's level 7 mountain fort with 60k troops in December. All the mechanics introduced to nerf or slow down blobbing have proven to be nothing more than a forced choice that allows you to ignore the negatives entirely. Corruption from territories meant moving your capital to Europe and conquering TC's first so you could spend a tonne of money rooting out corruption, governing capacity just means conquering TC land to support spending a tonne of money on courthouses and state buildings. They give you an "off" button for any inconvenience and you just pay to click it when it comes up.

The only way to make administering an ever larger empire increasingly difficult in a way that is strategically meaningful is to have the depth of choices increase organically as the game goes on. I think the game could use something similar to the character systems from CK2 or Imperator, which is a reason I think that Imperator might have been a tech demo for a new EU5.

 

[mc10]

Some enjoy WC, some prefer a more RP focused game, others enjoy the process up to snowballing, and so on. People enjoy different things, but that's not why we're here. Most of us wouldn't even be on this forum if the game functioned at an acceptable level for what we want to do. Been over 2 months now and core mechanics are still broken (hordes don't get ducats for razing, debt/CTA).

 

[BadOrc]

I ran a WC as the Ottomans the day the patch launched and did an Unlikely-Candidate/Third-Way/Dar-al-Islam/One-Faith as Mzab in 1.30.2. Wars are easy now because the AI can't use mercs and wastes all their manpower marching through Siberia to siege my Georgian march's level 7 mountain fort with 60k troops in December. All the mechanics introduced to nerf or slow down blobbing have proven to be nothing more than a forced choice that allows you to ignore the negatives entirely. Corruption from territories meant moving your capital to Europe and conquering TC's first so you could spend a tonne of money rooting out corruption, governing capacity just means conquering TC land to support spending a tonne of money on courthouses and state buildings. They give you an "off" button for any inconvenience and you just pay to click it when it comes up.

The only way to make administering an ever larger empire increasingly difficult in a way that is strategically meaningful is to have the depth of choices increase organically as the game goes on. I think the game could use something similar to the character systems from CK2 or Imperator, which is a reason I think that Imperator might have been a tech demo for a new EU5.

The AI is/was never the hard part in a WC its always been the Game mechanics them self. Overexstantion AE corruption Regency council Rebels these are so called”speedbumps” The wars was not HARD in 1.29 The AI spamming 1k merc stacks in every province and takeing on a massive debt and then run of to Siberia was something that happend pre 1.30 and to compare 1.30 to any other patch is just silly 1.30 Broke the Game in so many ways that it is hard to know what is WAD and what is not.

 

[Dasmani]

Overexstantion AE corruption Regency council Rebels these are so called”speedbumps”

Overextension: just stay below 100
AE: Ignore it, nations can't join a coalition while under a truce
Corruption: Ignore it, trade companies didn't count as territories for the calculation
Regency: Since queen regencies were implemented, it's actually pretty rare to have a bad regency
Rebels: Take humanist + Offensive, then ignore them

The problem is that they've always added tiny speed bumps while also giving the player a way to completely ignore them. And that's really the only challenge there's been to a WC: knowing which button to press to make the speed bumps go away. I think that's where 1.30 fails most egregiously; they simultaneously made the bottlenecks for conquest extremely obvious (manpower and governing capacity) while tying the solution to both problems to a single strategy (trade companies) in a way that's far more obvious than corruption or AE or OE or separatism.

 

[BadOrc]

Overextension: just stay below 100
AE: Ignore it, nations can't join a coalition while under a truce
Corruption: Ignore it, trade companies didn't count as territories for the calculation
Regency: Since queen regencies were implemented, it's actually pretty rare to have a bad regency
Rebels: Take humanist + Offensive, then ignore them

You make it sound like a walk in a park. Doing a WC is not just pick Hum+Off and Click i Winn Policy. Just stay under 100 overextenstion..? yeah right haveing up to 10 wars at the same time and playing as a Horde never back fires? Regarding corruption the only way to by pass it was to snake you way to India or Asia ”so you could affored to ignore it. How ever you just spent the first 200 years playing the game to make the corruption go”away” so did you ignore it or adapt your hole game play around it?

 

[Lightwell]

I suspect that what many anti-WC players dislike WC because, if it is achievable, sub-world conquests can't be as difficult to pull off as they should be. Conquering what nations historically conquered is often barely an inconvenience, and that feels wrong to the RP and historically minded among us.

I'm dead set against WC myself- heck, I'd prefer a game where conquering a continent was effectively impossible to achieve- but I recognise that I'm not like the average EU4 player. I encourage all players who are (like myself) anti-WC to get mods that suit their playstyle better.

Solid point. WC players kinda drag the rest of us along with them. It's silly. They should just make a separate mode for something like that.

 

[grommile]

Solid point. WC players kinda drag the rest of us along with them. It's silly. They should just make a separate mode for something like that.

The modders can probably do a better job of producing something for the "even small conquests should be hard" crowd than the devs can, honestly.

Because the modders don't have to care about commercial viability, marketing promises, what features people have paid good money to have, etc.

 

[Ksaweri]

I usually buy the latest DLC for EU then wait until its in a playable state (from the forum feedback from players) to give it a try.

This is the longest I think I've had to wait, and seems the biggest slip in standards yet.

We seem to live in an age where we no longer have to make excuses for our outrageous behaviour, and Paradox seems to have wholeheartedly embraced this by not fixing the bugs whilst at the same time antagonising us by showing that development diary.

 

[firezatswill9]

I usually buy the latest DLC for EU then wait until its in a playable state (from the forum feedback from players) to give it a try.

This is the longest I think I've had to wait, and seems the biggest slip in standards yet.

We seem to live in an age where we no longer have to make excuses for our outrageous behaviour, and Paradox seems to have wholeheartedly embraced this by not fixing the bugs whilst at the same time antagonising us by showing that development diary.

It is rather disheartening to see how the slow slipping of quality standards suddenly changes to a rapid decline over the past 3 or so years. Dating back to RB, if memory serves, since that was when the "too much money" crowd won their fight and the AI got worse as a result.

 

[Lightwell]

"too much money" crowd won their fight and the AI got worse as a result.

What do you mean? I think I missed that episode.

 

[Vulkandrache]

1.24 was the one Patch the AI had somewhat competent building behavior, which resultet in it preseting something of an adequate challenge for the first time in years.
But since the only thing some people saw was that they ended every game at the money cap there was much uproar over nothing,
which resultet in most of those changes being reverted in 1.25.

What they did not see was that its better to have the player cap their money with the AI being affluent,
rather than having the player having a few 10k gold and the AI being bankrupt all the time.

This has never been adressed and with the things introduced (which the AI was never taught how to use) over the last 2 years, has gotten even worse.
Culminating in the borderline or outright broken money management by the AI highlighted in the other thread.

 

[Beagá]

Sad truth.

 

[EarlKonrad]

What do you mean? I think I missed that episode.

1.25 & 1.25 nerfed a lot of money related stuff. For example, 1.24 reduced the money bonus from tech from 5% to 2%, 1.25 reduced most maintenance cost reduction from 10% to 5%, increased the land maintenance cost via tech level, etc.

Patch 1.25 - Europa Universalis 4 Wiki

eu4.paradoxwikis.com

 

[firezatswill9]

1.24 was the one Patch the AI had somewhat competent building behavior, which resultet in it preseting something of an adequate challenge for the first time in years.
But since the only thing some people saw was that they ended every game at the money cap there was much uproar over nothing,
which resultet in most of those changes being reverted in 1.25.

What they did not see was that its better to have the player cap their money with the AI being affluent,
rather than having the player having a few 10k gold and the AI being bankrupt all the time.

This has never been adressed and with the things introduced (which the AI was never taught how to use) over the last 2 years, has gotten even worse.
Culminating in the borderline or outright broken money management by the AI highlighted in the other thread.

Hit the nail on the head with your explanation. We used to have AI that would build manufatories in smart locations, not do their infamous dock spam, and be somewhat competent as a result, since they could field large armies and fight more wars. But now, and correct me if I'm wrong, we reverted back and the dev's have shot down the idea of reverting back to that because "why does it even matter when the land will end up in the player's hands?"

I don't know, maybe so it's not as easy to get said lands? Maybe that's why better AI would be a boon for a game? To make strategy and decisions actually matter?

 

[Lightwell]

Hit the nail on the head with your explanation. We used to have AI that would build manufatories in smart locations, not do their infamous dock spam, and be somewhat competent as a result, since they could field large armies and fight more wars. But now, and correct me if I'm wrong, we reverted back and the dev's have shot down the idea of reverting back to that because "why does it even matter when the land will end up in the player's hands?"

I don't know, maybe so it's not as easy to get said lands? Maybe that's why better AI would be a boon for a game? To make strategy and decisions actually matter?

Honestly, the main obstacle in many of these games is just the AI's stubborn refusal to accept a peace deal within a reasonable amount of time, even when he has no income and your soldiers are throwing parties in the king's bedroom.

 

[erneiz_hyde]

Solid point. WC players kinda drag the rest of us along with them. It's silly. They should just make a separate mode for something like that.

Make no mistake, we have our current dumb AI precisely because the devs have been hearing the complaints of the anti-blobbing crowds. The devs have ALWAYS been listening to the anti-blobbing crowd and ignored the blobbing crowd. This is why blobbing strategies are almost always immediately nerfed while age old bugs that have been around since forever never gets fixed. The mantra "no fun allowed" comes from here as well.