Am I the only one not playing HRE politics

[ero_sk]

I have never involved in HRE politics both in EUIV and EU3. But I can't really say that HRE bothers me at all. It is there in the game, I deal with my interests and don't care about what is going on in HRE. Therefore I don't really feel a need to get rid of this feature from the game. I would rather want devs to expand on the mechanism and implement more similiar feature, e.g. Commonwealth shouldn't be played as one huge country but as combination of two nations (or even three when considering Zaporozhian Cossacks) maintained by some nice mechanism.

 

[FrigidSoul]

FWIW, I've come to enjoy the HRE game.

Is the prospect of becoming emperor a little too attractive if you're playing a country with any proximity to Europe? Yeah, probably, but as grommile pointed out, that's a hard problem to solve: becoming Emperor is the de-facto best option because the HRE renders an old-fashioned conquest of central Europe punitively impractical. In other words, there will always be an enormous upside to playing within the HRE's rules, because the adversarial alternative must always confer a substantial downside.

Granted, the second-to-last reform offers some ridiculous benefits for players prepared to leverage them well outside of central Europe, but the existence of a niche strategy doesn't constitute a problem in and of itself. If anything, the game needs more HRE-like regions and/or mechanisms for players of all stripes to explore and put to imaginative use.