France 1.8

[ThuderLizard2]

I crushed France as Burgundy in my 1.8 game but noticed that Poland is really powerful. They formed Commonwealth and are keeping Moscovy at bay until 1600. Aragon is doing better than pre 1.8 as well.

 

[Deuterium Dawn]

That's my observation, too. France isn't weak by any means, but I see it outperform in a few game, underperform in a few games, but still maintain a strong enough presence that it fills its historical role. HAB/HRE is more consistently the outperformer in that part of the world.

Yeah. The first few observer games I ran, it looked like the were comparable to 1.7 (i.e., significantly underperforming, but retaining enough strength to fill their historical role, somewhat. Unfortunately, that doesn't appear to be the case. The underperformance is more pronounced and they're becoming a bit of the "sick man", just centuries too early, having never approached their zenith. The good news is that they don't really need to buff them. Just undo some of the nerfs from this and prior patches.

Ottos do not need a buff. They've got more provinces(slightly), nearly triple the ships they started with last patch, and are still surrounded by people mostly too weak to challenge them. The braindead ai failing to do this does not mean they need a buff. And as far as I can recall, the only nerf the ottos have received is changing that ridiculous +300% manpower recovery speed against non-sunnis to a constant +20%, which was definitely called for.

 

[Lord Finnish]

In my Byzantium run I saw France get slammed by Spain three times, each time they were only saved by my armies coming to help them.


French AI seems rather poor at fighting two-front wars.

 

[Deuterium Dawn]

In my Byzantium run I saw France get slammed by Spain three times, each time they were only saved by my armies coming to help them.


French AI seems rather poor at fighting two-front wars.

Strange, typically what happens is the French will smash them individually before they link up. Haven't seen France lose any wars I haven't been directly involved in yet.

 

[Andy578]

Only played 1 game so far (as england) but at first France seemed to dominate but around 1550 they ended up at war with Austria + a ton of minors and another war with Spain then I jumped in to get a few cores back. France lost and never recovered, they are still fairly strong but no longer a serious threat

As for England the starting economy is now pretty much insane and I had saved up almost 3000 before 1500 then once colonies started popping up money was never again an issue