1. IMO, having some pointless event chains is actually realistic. IRL, they did not know what was going to happen, and had much less info about the state of the world than we do, playing the same position. The unexpected and seemingly unrealistic is in fact, like life.
I'm not talking "this is unpredictable, I've been blindsided by fate". I'm talking "This event does not make sense. There is no way that this is a reasonable choice to have to make". Things along the lines of being asked to split my country in two because of claims by much weaker nations, or suffer for not doing so.
2. Well, there is always the point of taste, and here there can be no arguing. In EUIII, after at most 100 years, even if I haven't achieved what I mean to do, it's always been clear that I was going to. And thus the game loses interest.
So, 100 year formations of Germany, or France from a minor, or GB? 100 years from game start is enough to be able to tell that you're going to unite the HRE as the Byzantines?
3. I agree about inherited troops, and a fortiori, ships. I'd go even further, and have them even for annexed nations. What I'd do is have a random die roll of (1d10 - x)/10. That will give the % of the unit which is effective, if less than 0, it's gone. 'x' would vary by several factors, depending on the situation and type (higher for ships and arty than for infantry; higher for inheritance than for conquest).
Surely you mean x would be lower for these situations, giving a higher result on the dice?
What is implausible in your examples is not that something historical happens without the logical preconditions, but that the logical preconditions which actually happened IRL are not in place in the game. Again, I make the distinction between AI and human player, but baring human intervention if the AI acts historically then the logical preconditions which actually happened IRL will be in place in the game when the time comes. Burgundy won't have a strong male heir or be dominant in France, the Spanish won't be in the black, Russia won't be divided between a dozen nations, England/GB won't be a republic, and the thrones of Europe won't be different - unless some human player has a finger in the pie.
Rubbish. By the time you get to the Spanish bankrupcy anyone in Europe will have done things that will have affected Spain in some way. If the human player has made even one royal marriage, then they have potentially altered the thrones of Europe. Even more so if that results in a different heir being born in a particular country.
Why is it more logical that given 250 years of history (more or less) a particular situation would apply rather than another, just because the peculiarities of history came out for the first result?
Again, if it is caused by human players its not what I'm talking about. What we see in EU3 routinely, though, is that even if a human player literally does nothing you will see e.g. North Africa & the eastern Med totally out of wack well before 1500.
Doing nothing is still different to the historical actions of a given country.
I could describe a possible mechanic, but it would be wordy. To put it as simply as possible, leverage the existing history files. At game start, the player is "activated" and no AI is. "Inactivated" AI's and all their provinces just follow the history files, including wars, alliances, rules, buildings, revolts, etc... After it becomes "activated", the AI drops the script and behaves dynamically acciording to whatever is going on around it. An AI nation gets activated upon one of a limited number of things happening to it at the hands of a nation already activated. That list certainly includes getting an ahistorical (i.e. not in the history files) war declared on it, or getting called into an ahistorical war by alliance, or becoming on either end of an ahistorical PU or inheritance - but not much else. Yes, by game end probably every nation has been "activated", but gross departure from history isn't going to happen so soon or so radically as in EU3.
Excellent. So we have (player led) England in 1399 decides to go to war with France to recover cores. In the process France gets smashed and forced to release all possible minors, and over a series of wars reduced to a single province. This of course activates France and all of those minors. Later, or in parallel to this, Burgundy, who is not yet activated faces the partition event. This, despite the fact the France is laughably unable to project power out of the single province it controls. Is it logical that France should be able to partition Burgundy this way?
What if the player is Burgundy and refuses the partition? Does this activate France and Austria? Assuming this doesn't activate Austria, does it now activate all the neighbours to the Dutch provinces who now have a different neighbour to the historical one? If so, how far does this ripple of activations go, or does the game have to now check for when the AI goes off plan, before activating all the neighbours to the activated countries?
What if I, as England, attack France and release Normandy as either a vassal or a free country? Does this activate Burgundy who are neighbours to this?
What about neighbours to a country I force a PU on? After all, they aren't now neighbouring Bavaria, but Brandenburg-Bavaria, so any aggression towards Bavaria might need to be reconsidered, but if they aren't activated and were scripted to attack they still will.
The game mechanics are never going to be complex enough to model everything anyway, so it really comes down to a game design choice. Do we want the player to mover & shaker in a world that will otherwise follows its "intended" path, or just another flounderer in a Brownian motion of flounderers collectively producing an effectively random process. I strongly prefer the former.
An incorrect choice.
Do we want the world to continue on blithely unaffected by anything the player does until he deigns to interfere in a particular region, or do we want the world to be able to be able to play out with reaction to things that happen. Several things that happened historically are to put it plainly unlikely even looking back at them.
Again, "butterfly effect" has nothing to do with it. Even in AH and time travel fiction, the author makes assumptions about this that serve the needs of his plot, and those assumptions are all over the map from story to story even by the same author. Games work the same way.
In a novel the main reason that things stay the same unless altered is to make the novel easier for the author since he knows what is happening unless something has happened to change it, and does not need to consider the "what if" of (for example) a 20 year span of time beyond what is immediately happening around his main characters. You can also find some relatively minor changes can make massive differences in AH fiction.
Consider John Adams in this list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...dents#Real_people_with_a_fictional_presidency
Now, had the US effectively surrendered and rejoined the British Empire the entire history of that region would have been different - no war of 1812, no American Civil War - but the changes wouldn't have been limited to that - no alliance between France and the US, less British troops drawn out of the Napoleonic theatre of war; iinstead of the US negotiating with Texas and Spain, it would have been the British Empire, probably resulting in either another continental war in Europe, or entirely different borders for Mexico, and Cuba remaining Spanish.
STOP! COOKIE TIME