I'm not sure how much I want to vent about the new added tech costs to the tech paradym. I mean, I already had it out with Slargo's on this, and further more it disgust's me that they feel they need to hit us with this.
This session, I spent over half that session trying to raise stab, I took a political crisis, had a decentralization event hit, which I lost 5 stab, took several more stab hits, more then a dozen stab hits during that session. With all this, I was trying to get to infra 6, which took an additional 10 year's to do. Considering that before the patch came in, I was only 2 year's away from infra 6, now 10, was more then annoying.
The sheer added tech cost's to get to higher tech's has now gone overboard. Especially for nation's who are not in the latin tech group, it is getting simply out of hand. It was over 20k to research infra 6 before the patch, the patch raised it to over 50k. What kind of crazy increase is this?
Because of this, I ended up falling way behind in land tech. In fact I was 2 CRT's below France and Prussia during the massive continental war we had. Is it me or does this in fact hurt nation's who are not part of the latin tech group more? Look at the nation's who aren't even in the latin tech group. Both Poland and Russia are way behind as well, like the Ottoman Empire. And the Ottoman Empire at least has the income to try to compete yet I was still lagging. France and Prussia are what land 35? OE land 24 (2 CRT's behind) Poland is land 24 or 25 as well (same story as the OE) and Russia 18 land tech. ( who is in danger of becoming utterly irrelevent now)
I think Johan need's to seriously reconsider why he come's out with these patch's. These patch's are seriously unbalancing. He shouldn't be tampering with the tech paradym. Especially since there are player nation's that exist on different level's of the playing field.
I simply do not understand why EU need's to be more difficult to play when in the end, making the game easier to play should be the most important aspect. Trying to add depth and realism and more complexity to the game is only going to hurt the community as a whole. EU as a game is not built with this in mind. It's a simple game with simple game mechanic's. Yet forcing player's to consider seriously how much time and investment they need to do for their nation's is becoming more of a pain now. The saying "Keep It Simple Stupid." short for KISS comes to mind. When your creating game's for online play. A game should alway's focus on stream lining play and keeping everything simple so player's can focus on what they really want. To play the game.
Why force player's to endlessly hypertech by adding to the tech cost's? If you want to force player's to interact, making tech cost's more expensive is not the solution. Trust me when I say this, it will force player's to hypertech more. You are going to have player's who will damn well know that they need to hit certain mile stone's before they think about doing anything. Infra 5 and trade 4 being the most important early one's. Your only going to force player's to hypertech to get there more now with these new change's. Not lesson it.
I've been with this game for a very long time. My registered date of joining is way back in 2001. I've seen alot of change's and more importantly I've watched how this game evolved.
This game was all about the community, about player's feedback and about how the community changed the game we played. If any of you played Europa Universalis the first version. You would understand this. The 2 key people I consider to be the most influencial player's back then was Doomdark and Havard. Doom who scripted many of the event's that we have now in EU 2, and Havard for going to the community and getting them into the game.
Further more, in EU1, you could never change your selected nation's. They were set. They were I think only 7 nation's you could pick from. There was no Empire of Russia event back then. Much of the game was barebone's, but we all loved it. Then Doom, Havard and several other player's came out with idea's on how to improve the game. One was the IGC. A scenario that actually allowed you to change nation's during the set up. You would have to load it up and then select with 7 nation's you want to see when you load up EU. Then start EU up.
Then Havard started getting feedback for event's. More event's for EU. Since back then it really was bareboned. So the whole community chipped in and event's for many nation's started being fleshed out. When you open EU2's DP folder and look at the event's. Look at the author's of those event's. Those event's all orginated from the time of EU1.
EU2 was all the work done on EU1 but streamlined into an easy to use system. Everything that you see in EU2, was in EU1 but with alot of develpment from the community as a whole.
I believe that the current era of EU you now have a vastly different playerbase. EU1, the playerbase was smaller and in my opinion alot of respectful to the community as a whole. What you have now is a playerbase more separated by who has been here the longest, who has the ear of Johan and who can say I am more active on the board's. Yet if you look at my post count, I'm no where close to many of the poster's here, yet I have been here longer then 99% of the player's here.
I've seen how our community has changed, and more importantly how many player's have separated themselve's from the rest and are now calling themselve's the Elite and the oldtimer's of the this game. There is a definete change in this direction and having these same player's then decide that they know what is good for this game and lobbying Johan to make these change's. It's a far cry to how our community was back in the EU1 heyday.
Am I against having new patch's? No, but I would much perfer to limit the patch's to gameplay issue's and less on adding new content. I think if Paradox is serious about adding new content. They should bring out EU3 then, because EU2, was an evolution of EU1 from all the work done there. Let us have our game and stop monkeying with it. Bring out EU3 to the public so all the change's you want to see in EU2 can then be displayed in a game engine worth it. EU2's engine is old and for some of us, we'd like to keep it like we remembered it.
Duma
