I want to recognize Johan's effort to pull all the aggro for his team.
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EU4, No Mapchanges and Whys.
- Thread starter Johan
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I want to recognize Johan's effort to pull all the aggro for his team.
Ireland started with 5 provinces.
Now it has 13.
You think seven provinces would have made a noticeable difference?
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Even a small update that doesn't touch the map is very likely to break a savegame, so you shouldn't transfer savegames between major versions of the game.
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Considering this post: EU4 - Development Diary 24th of August 2021 most played nations are european, like England > Great Britain and Castille > Spain. In Emperor european nations improved, in Leaviathan North America nations updated. Does in next expansion any hope for colonial nations missions since Africa nations are going to improve?
One of the things I like about Europa Universallis is the feeling of evolving my nation like Pokemon or Dragon Ball because I can have something concrete that I am progressing. When I am playing as Portugal, for example, I feel if I become a colonial nation I am going to downgrade by lack of content, so I miss for colonial nations missions.
One of the things I like about Europa Universallis is the feeling of evolving my nation like Pokemon or Dragon Ball because I can have something concrete that I am progressing. When I am playing as Portugal, for example, I feel if I become a colonial nation I am going to downgrade by lack of content, so I miss for colonial nations missions.
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@Johan Thanks for the Clarification. If possible, please take a look at Morocco. The patch for Golden Century did a disservice to Geography by adding provinces that do not contain their capitals.
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"We have plans to add content and flavor to at least three more major regions of the world" - Scandinavia / Baltic area next PLEASE!
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Eight*
You know, eight here, five there, six somewhere else and you start to pay for provinces in FPS
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I've long been of the opinion that there has for too long been a 1 way "ratchet" of adding provinces, such that there are in too many regions simply too many provinces. Indeed, it may be just my own nostalgia speaking, but I think the far more limited number of provinces in Europa Universalis 2 created better gameplay then the abundant number of provinces in EU4. Indeed, as an Irishman, I don't see how having 13 provinces in Ireland improved gameplay compared to 5 in previous versions, other then the first 10 years when you're conquering your neighbours.
More provinces do not improve a region. People who advocate for more provinces fail to appreciate the following:
1. It makes the game more tedious, each additional province adds more tedious decisions to the game with dozens of boring per province decisions you have to make making the game progressively dull as the game goes on. In general, better game design involves fewer but more consequential game decisions.
2. It makes the game run slower, for little meaningful improvement in game play, especially when provinces are added to regions where relatively little interesting action happens (looking at you North America!).
3. It makes the game harder to balance, especially when combined with development. Strictly speaking, 2 provinces with 5 development each is superior to 1 with 10 development, as you can develop those extra provinces. Likewise many bonuses are added as a lump sum per province (like manufactories). The power of region becomes the number of provinces being in that region, whereas the point of the old base tax/production income system (before development) was that the power of a region was largely unrelated to the arbitrarily decided number of provinces in a region.
4. It makes army maneuvers much more tedious, as it's much easier for the AI to avoid your armies. Wars often consist of endless tedious chasing armies around, such that the main reason to build forts is not to defend your territory but just to make it easier to pin enemy armies. In older iterations of EU, you never had to chase armies around like this. EU4 is not HoI4, and with battles largely abstracted there's far less benefit from having large number of provinces on the map.
Instead of blindly adding provinces to regions, Paradox devs could do the following:
A) Make impassable terrain setups more interesting. The addition of impassable terrain to the alps made Northern Italy much more interesting to play in then the addition of provinces. Addition of impassable jungles and mountain ranges, and likewise controllable choke points, would make the map much more interesting to maneuver around.
B) Add special landmarks or monuments. Dalaskogen with it's large bronze mine is much more interesting then adding more generic provinces in the area. More such special properties in certain provinces would make the map more interesting and alive.
C) Introduce more special mechanics around other geographical features, say deserts, oases, forests and rivers.
D) Make map terrain more "visible". 95% of the time the game is played on political map mode, so you rarely see where geographical features or terrain are, or whether there's increased attrition in winter weather. This has been a problem since EU3 (EU2 did not have this problem, as it was relatively easy to tell where your territory was and where the rivers and mountains were all on the default map mode). To make the map more interesting, this kind of information should be foregrounded.
For a future hypothetical EU5 Paradox should take a page from Victoria 3 and make province count less important to the value of a region. Instead, put more of the economic info on the state level, and have instead have relatively hard quantities associated with the state determine how valuable it is (EG: quantity of potential arable land, presence of natural harbors, mineral deposits, population size, climate etc.).
In this way provinces can be added where it would make gameplay more "interesting" and not as a means to buff/debuff a given region. Indeed, perhaps in the future there may be ways to make Europa Universalis without any provinces at all.
More provinces do not improve a region. People who advocate for more provinces fail to appreciate the following:
1. It makes the game more tedious, each additional province adds more tedious decisions to the game with dozens of boring per province decisions you have to make making the game progressively dull as the game goes on. In general, better game design involves fewer but more consequential game decisions.
2. It makes the game run slower, for little meaningful improvement in game play, especially when provinces are added to regions where relatively little interesting action happens (looking at you North America!).
3. It makes the game harder to balance, especially when combined with development. Strictly speaking, 2 provinces with 5 development each is superior to 1 with 10 development, as you can develop those extra provinces. Likewise many bonuses are added as a lump sum per province (like manufactories). The power of region becomes the number of provinces being in that region, whereas the point of the old base tax/production income system (before development) was that the power of a region was largely unrelated to the arbitrarily decided number of provinces in a region.
4. It makes army maneuvers much more tedious, as it's much easier for the AI to avoid your armies. Wars often consist of endless tedious chasing armies around, such that the main reason to build forts is not to defend your territory but just to make it easier to pin enemy armies. In older iterations of EU, you never had to chase armies around like this. EU4 is not HoI4, and with battles largely abstracted there's far less benefit from having large number of provinces on the map.
Instead of blindly adding provinces to regions, Paradox devs could do the following:
A) Make impassable terrain setups more interesting. The addition of impassable terrain to the alps made Northern Italy much more interesting to play in then the addition of provinces. Addition of impassable jungles and mountain ranges, and likewise controllable choke points, would make the map much more interesting to maneuver around.
B) Add special landmarks or monuments. Dalaskogen with it's large bronze mine is much more interesting then adding more generic provinces in the area. More such special properties in certain provinces would make the map more interesting and alive.
C) Introduce more special mechanics around other geographical features, say deserts, oases, forests and rivers.
D) Make map terrain more "visible". 95% of the time the game is played on political map mode, so you rarely see where geographical features or terrain are, or whether there's increased attrition in winter weather. This has been a problem since EU3 (EU2 did not have this problem, as it was relatively easy to tell where your territory was and where the rivers and mountains were all on the default map mode). To make the map more interesting, this kind of information should be foregrounded.
For a future hypothetical EU5 Paradox should take a page from Victoria 3 and make province count less important to the value of a region. Instead, put more of the economic info on the state level, and have instead have relatively hard quantities associated with the state determine how valuable it is (EG: quantity of potential arable land, presence of natural harbors, mineral deposits, population size, climate etc.).
In this way provinces can be added where it would make gameplay more "interesting" and not as a means to buff/debuff a given region. Indeed, perhaps in the future there may be ways to make Europa Universalis without any provinces at all.
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Tbh changes to AI are nice, it's something that most people wanted a long time ago, it's weird that Tinto is not talking with people from the modding community like Xorme for example have enormous knowledge when it comes to AI or someone like Spirit would do great as well, it might be rude but these people play the game while most of the devs when it comes to gameplay are far behind. There is a lot of people in the community that provide solutions and ideas but unfortunately most of the time they are completely ignored.
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No, Ireland has 13 now. 8 new ones since release, but 13 in total.
1) Desmond
2) Cork
3) Ormond
4) Limerick
5) Connacht
6) Sligo
7) Midlands/Offaly
8) Kildare
9) Leinster
10) Pale
11) Donegal
12) Tyrone
13) Ulster
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The thing is, a nation can only be the size of one province. If a nation controlled land which is smaller than a province, one either has to add a new province, represent the nation via a tag that embodies multiple nations, or not have that nation playable at all.
Similarly, province can only have one trade good and one terrain type. As a result, a province that spans across different terrain types and historically produced various goods has to choose just one of them to represent, even if the rest of them would be just as important to represent for the purposes of internal development, economy and warfare.
Also, due to the rule that there can't areas the size of 1 or 2 provinces, provinces have to be lumped to areas the size of 3-5 provinces. And since the AI wants to conquer land in the areas and regions it holds land in, it might be necessary to add more provinces to reshape the area layout, in order to guide the AI to a more historically-accurate path.
Furthermore, new provinces might be needed to allow for historically-accurate borders to be replicated. While sometimes simply reshaping provinces would do the trick, there are cases where nations had important border-changes at a scale that are smaller than a pre-existing province, but are necessary to represent lest nations be left with province borders that don't match any time period.
Finally, it has been brought up many times that Europe's development is higher than it should be for the time-period, in order to make the European nations stronger than they otherwise would be, so they can actually replicate their historical overseas conquests. Thus, it leads to situations like large kingdoms in RoTW having less development than a much smaller European nation: and while the situation has improved over the years, the bias is still standing. This being said, buffing the development of various regions might not always be an ideal option, since it'd lead to a province that represent a large swathe of land to have a higher development than historically-important cities. Thus, more provinces might be needed to more accurately map out a region's historical strength.
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These are arguments for changing how provinces relate to game mechanics, and not necessarily for adding more provinces to the game. For example, in terms of trade goods, if the game transitioned away from 1 trade good per province, and instead for economic purposes modeled trade goods at the state level and had different industries of different sizes in different states, this would make this aspect of the economy more interesting, more accurate AND less micro intensive. As for terrains, some degree of simplification is always going to be necessary for the sake of gameplay. For the sake of military, due to the nature of warfare in this period tending to be battles between single large armies (and not as in hoi4 battles along wide fronts), having wide numbers of provinces for maneuvers doesn't provide much in the way of meaningful improvement to gameplay, especially compared to adding chokepoints and other interesting terrain quirks.
Furthermore, its likely that the AI is much more strained by navigating loads of provinces much more than humans are, and a game with fewer provinces would strain the AI much less.
As for not being able to depict certain countries due to lack of small provinces, I think we have to accept that in a game built around empire building we're not going to depict every bishopric and city state in the Holy Roman Empire, and that some simplifications are going to be necessary, as you can't really make a good game or simulation that includes both Russia and Ulm working to the same rule sets.
I don't think we should totally give up on having such microstates, but we could look to other paradox titles for other ways to depict such entities, for example baronies in ck3.
A future EU5 could dramatically increase the depth with which provinces and subnational entities are depicted, but it is simply not possible to have both large numbers of provinces and deep province based mechanics at the same time. That's why Victoria 2 and 3 moved almost all of the important decisions in the game to the state level, so for the purposes of the "economy" victoria 2, for example, had less provinces in it than even EU2 did. But with less "provinces" much deeper mechanics were possible. Victoria 3 is set to go even further by even scrapping rgos (which in Victoria 2 were at the provincial level, while in V3 like every industry it will be at the state level).
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I agree, lets go back to unified manchu and Tuscany in 1444
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Not every town and city of the hre need be represented, just key ones, like imperial free cities, and key non electoral bisphorics, like magdeburg and munster.
Just like how we need some NA natives but not the 500 million leviathan added as well as balkanising the majors
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I don't like this Dev diary.
I don't like the decisions you have taken. It sounds like the team is afraid of introducing new bugs to the game. I would like to know what you will change not what you will not.
Last patch was a bit of a disaster but now it is stable. It is understandable, a new team has been created.
There is a lot of things to be improved on the game without touching the map. But the map can also be improved. Limiting yourselfs is not the way to go.
I don't like the decisions you have taken. It sounds like the team is afraid of introducing new bugs to the game. I would like to know what you will change not what you will not.
Last patch was a bit of a disaster but now it is stable. It is understandable, a new team has been created.
There is a lot of things to be improved on the game without touching the map. But the map can also be improved. Limiting yourselfs is not the way to go.
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While simplification is necessary lest we turn EU4 into Voltaire's Nightmare: Global Edition, I would argue that the current state of the map still leaves a lot to be desired. And while you gave HRE as a example, I would argue that HRE is actually in a really good spot as it stands (although those who are more knowledgeable about the history of the individual principalities of HRE probably will argue against that). In fact, I would argue that for the most part, Europe is in a pretty satisfying spot, as its province-density allows representing several quite small nations, which nonetheless were historically impactful. I do emphasize most part, since especially in Russia and Caucasus, the province-sizes prevent the accurate representation of several states that existed during the game's time-period, like the Mari principalities, various Khanty and Mansi principalities in Yugra, Skewbald Horde, and the various North Caucasian states. Of course, I only give those specific examples because those are my pet peeves and I am familiar with those areas' history: I'm certain that people are able find several examples of province borders which don't work with history.
That being said, it's not Europe which I think suffers the most from provinces being too large to represent countries, it's the rest of the world. In fact, one could argue that Europe's detailed provinces are a part of why the map is far from ideal: with the map projection of the game favouring Europe and the province-sizes in the rest of the world being much larger than those in Europe, several historical and even quite impactful nations can't be represented even if they're just as large or larger than nations featured in Europe, due to the map simply not having space for them. This in turn leads to abstractions that make the rest of the world feel much less accurate than Europe, especially since various nations can't focus on gameplay where they interact with smaller nations that existed in real life, but in-game have been abstracted away due to their size.
There's one more aspect of provinces I didn't mention, and that is cultures. There are many examples in-game where the larger in-game provinces don't match the historical cultural borders, and thus prevents the creation of national borders that match the historical borders of various ethnic groups, or how historically significant minority cultures are abstracted away due to them being too small to have a province minority in the currently-existing provinces: and while in some cases adding new provinces can amend that issue, there are plenty of cases where historical cultures are simply not present at all if they don't form a majority or a plurality of the population anywhere.
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I don't think every historical entity needs to be represented as a state in game. Following that line of thinking there's really no end to how granular you can go. Furthermore, if you look at the history of these tiny states, most were dependencies of larger states, and whether they count as "independent" is questionable, let alone whether they were able to levy armies of thousands of people to campaign in distant lands (raising defensive militia don't count!).
Furthermore, the way the games mechanics work, most of these small states disappear in the first 20 years of gameplay, and thus have almost no meaningful impact on the game as a whole. Including them just adds a speedbump.
That doesn't mean that such entities shouldn't be included at all, but rather that they need to be included in a different form then a standard state, for example as a sub provincial entity like a barony in ck3. Putting everything in the same bucket just clutters the game up and bogs it down.
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disapointing but okay.
Dont really get people who harass people over decisions like this. You can disagree with a change/direction without calling for witchhunts.
Dont really get people who harass people over decisions like this. You can disagree with a change/direction without calling for witchhunts.
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