Well, some of you might consider these improvements but in my mind they're definitely bugs. I think of the EEP as adding events to the Paradox game for more 'flavor', not changing the game in a fundamental manner. So anything that skews the game from the Paradox model is a bug.
I've run a number of 'hands off' games with 1.1 untouched, and then modified the events to correct the worst of the errors. My changelog for the events now stands at 49k, which tells you that I've had to really muck with the events to avoid ahistorical results. No doubt YMMV.
Here are the worst of the lot, in my opinion, and the changes I made to prevent them from messing up the game:
- unneeded minor nations in places virtually no one cares about. They add nothing to playability and are, in any event, usually eliminated anyway. I removed them all as unnecessary clutter. If these minor nations are to be considered for 1.2 I hope that a) they're submitted for consensus review to see if people really want to waste a tag on them, and b) they're added to a third choice ('history plus new minor nations'?) so that they aren't installed by default.
- on a similar note the two most requested nations - Italia and Germany - aren't added in the fantasy section, but we have Khwarizm, Khorasan, Ahmadnagar, and Bikaner in the historical section? Did I miss the raging demand for these nations? I've seen the Italia and Germany discussions time and time again, but never any heated debates over why Ahmadnager just *has* to be included in the EEP. Color me puzzled.
- the Moscow COT. I was under the impression that the consensus was not to add it to the game. What a surprise to find that it somehow made it into the events file! I removed it, of course.
- the Indonesian nations are out of control. Their events are too favorable and they now colonize everything under the sun. By the time Portugal or Spain gets to the islands they tend to be taken. The same now goes for India as well, by Oman.
Even worse, these nations have a tendency to eliminate all the natives, so there's no chance for European colonization to incorporate the natives as subjects. Historical or not this really fu**s up the Paradox version of the game. The fix: I eliminated or changed most of the Indonesian events and made the nations non-colonizers, as they are in the Paradox game. I haven't quite figured out why the hell Oman takes India yet, but this *does not* happen in my Paradox install on my other computer so it has to be the EEP.
- The English events make it incredibly easy for a player to annex France as a core country and from that point on the game is over. Play balance is thrown right out the window. While the AI usually fails to pull this off, I've had little difficulty doing this as a human. These events kill game balance and should be removed, or at least moved to the fantasy section (or perhaps the 'easy world conquest for beginners' section).
- the Dai Viet events all hinge upon specific wars and actions which are incredibly unlikely to occur in the game. They are indeed historical but in the game this history almost never plays out. I'd suggest making them more 'generic' so that they're more plausible, or adding very specific triggers. This is also true of a couple of other nations in SE Asia. E.g., it makes little sense to have an event talking about how your capital was trashed and you had to move it when in the game you just conquered the nation who was supposed to be the cause of that event.
- in a number of events for some nations, mostly in India and Asia, it seems as if the authors were quite fond of adding random domestic modifiers of land +1 or offensive +1 even though there's no historical justification whatsoever for such a change in the event. This seems to be an instance of 'author bias' for particular nations and I removed all of them.
- Muscovy/Russia seems to be truly screwed by the new events, perhaps because of the high serfdom/aristocracy values. Russian expansion tends to be crippled. I removed *all* of the new random events and this seemed to help the situation somewhat. Heavily modifying the Russian events helped the situation even more. I'm still getting a reduced Russian expansion and will have to look into this.
- moving the COT to Danzig without removing Prussia from the Polish hit list just makes Poland more powerful. Prussia is still eliminated just as easily as it was before. The fix: remove Prussia from the Polish attack list and Prussia seems to have a 50/50 of surviving past 1600.
- the game almost invariably creates a COT in Anglia within the first ten years. The good news: while the Danzig COT definitely seems to help Poland, the Anglia COT doesn't affect England at all. You'd think it would but England hasn't done any better in any of my test games. But then, I've also run tests where I've eliminated Ille de France and the Dutch COT and this hasn't affected either France or Holland, so who knows....
- for reasons beyond my ken Austria is consistently crippled in all of my test games, and in one completely destroyed before 1525. Hungary also regularly gets whacked, as does Burgundy. I have no idea why, but this doesn't happen in my Paradox install.
And in general I've noticed a shift in the balance of power. Russia does worse, but so does Lithuania. Poland does better (the Danzig COT), often much better. Austria never becomes a European power of any real importance and often gets the crap kicked out of it by Venice and Saxony (!). The minor German nations form up mini-empires more often, at least those that aren't conquered by the Polish, because Austria and France don't try to maintain the status quo. Sweden is still ridiculously over the top. Denmark's expansion often ends in defeat by the Polish. The Mameluks go crazy, as do those looney colonizing folks from Oman. Persia is dead in the water every single time, although in the Paradox game they often do well. Delhi, too suffers the same fate, again in contradiction to the Paradox game. The Indonesian nations colonize beyond all historical reason, and conquer each other too - I once showed up as the Spanish around 1600 and found that Atjeh and Malacca had eliminated everyone else and picked up all but a couple of islands as colonies. They had even conquered SE Asia!
This over a half-dozen games, hardly a representative sample. I present it here as problems I've consistently run into and how I've fixed them, for those who might be getting similar results. This is also encouragement to go back over the added events and nations and do a review to see what might be causing these problems, and then submitting them to the community to see if they should be kept or not.
These are just a few of the changes. In total I've eliminated or changed more than 75% of the EEP events and will take the axe to even more over the next week. What this tells me is that Paradox did *alot* of testing with their events, evidently discovering that even small changes can have drastic long-term effects on the game. The Project might employ the same methodology with consensus approval/disapproval in order to avoid similar unintended changes.
Unless, of course, the majority *likes* these changes. In which case ignore my notes entirely as they certainly don't apply.
Max
I've run a number of 'hands off' games with 1.1 untouched, and then modified the events to correct the worst of the errors. My changelog for the events now stands at 49k, which tells you that I've had to really muck with the events to avoid ahistorical results. No doubt YMMV.
Here are the worst of the lot, in my opinion, and the changes I made to prevent them from messing up the game:
- unneeded minor nations in places virtually no one cares about. They add nothing to playability and are, in any event, usually eliminated anyway. I removed them all as unnecessary clutter. If these minor nations are to be considered for 1.2 I hope that a) they're submitted for consensus review to see if people really want to waste a tag on them, and b) they're added to a third choice ('history plus new minor nations'?) so that they aren't installed by default.
- on a similar note the two most requested nations - Italia and Germany - aren't added in the fantasy section, but we have Khwarizm, Khorasan, Ahmadnagar, and Bikaner in the historical section? Did I miss the raging demand for these nations? I've seen the Italia and Germany discussions time and time again, but never any heated debates over why Ahmadnager just *has* to be included in the EEP. Color me puzzled.
- the Moscow COT. I was under the impression that the consensus was not to add it to the game. What a surprise to find that it somehow made it into the events file! I removed it, of course.
- the Indonesian nations are out of control. Their events are too favorable and they now colonize everything under the sun. By the time Portugal or Spain gets to the islands they tend to be taken. The same now goes for India as well, by Oman.
Even worse, these nations have a tendency to eliminate all the natives, so there's no chance for European colonization to incorporate the natives as subjects. Historical or not this really fu**s up the Paradox version of the game. The fix: I eliminated or changed most of the Indonesian events and made the nations non-colonizers, as they are in the Paradox game. I haven't quite figured out why the hell Oman takes India yet, but this *does not* happen in my Paradox install on my other computer so it has to be the EEP.
- The English events make it incredibly easy for a player to annex France as a core country and from that point on the game is over. Play balance is thrown right out the window. While the AI usually fails to pull this off, I've had little difficulty doing this as a human. These events kill game balance and should be removed, or at least moved to the fantasy section (or perhaps the 'easy world conquest for beginners' section).
- the Dai Viet events all hinge upon specific wars and actions which are incredibly unlikely to occur in the game. They are indeed historical but in the game this history almost never plays out. I'd suggest making them more 'generic' so that they're more plausible, or adding very specific triggers. This is also true of a couple of other nations in SE Asia. E.g., it makes little sense to have an event talking about how your capital was trashed and you had to move it when in the game you just conquered the nation who was supposed to be the cause of that event.
- in a number of events for some nations, mostly in India and Asia, it seems as if the authors were quite fond of adding random domestic modifiers of land +1 or offensive +1 even though there's no historical justification whatsoever for such a change in the event. This seems to be an instance of 'author bias' for particular nations and I removed all of them.
- Muscovy/Russia seems to be truly screwed by the new events, perhaps because of the high serfdom/aristocracy values. Russian expansion tends to be crippled. I removed *all* of the new random events and this seemed to help the situation somewhat. Heavily modifying the Russian events helped the situation even more. I'm still getting a reduced Russian expansion and will have to look into this.
- moving the COT to Danzig without removing Prussia from the Polish hit list just makes Poland more powerful. Prussia is still eliminated just as easily as it was before. The fix: remove Prussia from the Polish attack list and Prussia seems to have a 50/50 of surviving past 1600.
- the game almost invariably creates a COT in Anglia within the first ten years. The good news: while the Danzig COT definitely seems to help Poland, the Anglia COT doesn't affect England at all. You'd think it would but England hasn't done any better in any of my test games. But then, I've also run tests where I've eliminated Ille de France and the Dutch COT and this hasn't affected either France or Holland, so who knows....
- for reasons beyond my ken Austria is consistently crippled in all of my test games, and in one completely destroyed before 1525. Hungary also regularly gets whacked, as does Burgundy. I have no idea why, but this doesn't happen in my Paradox install.
And in general I've noticed a shift in the balance of power. Russia does worse, but so does Lithuania. Poland does better (the Danzig COT), often much better. Austria never becomes a European power of any real importance and often gets the crap kicked out of it by Venice and Saxony (!). The minor German nations form up mini-empires more often, at least those that aren't conquered by the Polish, because Austria and France don't try to maintain the status quo. Sweden is still ridiculously over the top. Denmark's expansion often ends in defeat by the Polish. The Mameluks go crazy, as do those looney colonizing folks from Oman. Persia is dead in the water every single time, although in the Paradox game they often do well. Delhi, too suffers the same fate, again in contradiction to the Paradox game. The Indonesian nations colonize beyond all historical reason, and conquer each other too - I once showed up as the Spanish around 1600 and found that Atjeh and Malacca had eliminated everyone else and picked up all but a couple of islands as colonies. They had even conquered SE Asia!
This over a half-dozen games, hardly a representative sample. I present it here as problems I've consistently run into and how I've fixed them, for those who might be getting similar results. This is also encouragement to go back over the added events and nations and do a review to see what might be causing these problems, and then submitting them to the community to see if they should be kept or not.
These are just a few of the changes. In total I've eliminated or changed more than 75% of the EEP events and will take the axe to even more over the next week. What this tells me is that Paradox did *alot* of testing with their events, evidently discovering that even small changes can have drastic long-term effects on the game. The Project might employ the same methodology with consensus approval/disapproval in order to avoid similar unintended changes.
Unless, of course, the majority *likes* these changes. In which case ignore my notes entirely as they certainly don't apply.
Max
