Game gets too easy after 1st 100 years.

[IIWW]

EU3 and EU2 snowball was harder because

1.You don't have "give me casus belli" (fabricate claim) button

On the other hand, stability was easy to maintain at +3, so no-cb wars wasn't so important.

2.To make something a core you have to wait 50 years. Don't remember corrrectly, but I think that integrating vassals was not giving cores as well.

There was no OE, so that wasn't that much of a problem. Also in EU2 You could just make a qucik anti-rebels pure cavalary army (actually it was in game hints) to easily deal with them.

3.In EU4 when you "snowball" you start getting 100% trade income from the whole word. In EU3/2 you can't reliably get more than 25% of the trade income even if you snowball.

Trade Propagation dwonstream is far too strong right now, hopefully they will nerf it.

4.It looks like badboy system was much better in handling the anti-snowball theme than coalitions.

Ok, that one I agree totally. But the AE was "gloabl", there was no modifiers towards certain country. You were just agrressive or not-aggressive.

 

[SweetHalcyHS]

I'm not really saying it's an argument against it, just that I'm curious people find a problem with this but then turn around and praise EU3 as some holy grail of strategy games when it has mostly the same problems.

Also this is all spoken from the mindset of someone who only reads about the game based on what others have said about it. I've zero experience in actually playing it, so maybe it actually had content outside of invading people to death.

There wasn't.

What EU3 did much better, however, was that conquest was less limited and more straightfoward, meaning that EU3 didn't really need peacetime mechanics all that much. Peacetime would be spent on planning out your conquests and dealing with rebels, while wartime was effectively executing those said plans. It was a much more action-styled game compared to EU4, which tries to be "less war-focused" through the dubious strategy of limiting warfare through multiple mechanics, but not really adding anything else to do besides warfare.

Like seriously, before DW, you could just ignore badboy once you were a certain size, and in fact it was even helpful in that it helped you avoid wasting your diplomats. And even post-DW, it didn't matter if it took 50 years to core something and you get overextension penalties because OE was flat and didn't scale, meaning all it was some more additional rebel bashing here and there.

EU3 was simple and was honest about what it was about, therefore it meant that the few decisions made were much more meaningful compared to EU4, where "decisions" are really just about how to minmax as many details as possible to be able to do what you really want and paint the map.

Or at least that's my take on it anyway.

 

[grommile]

1.You don't have "give me casus belli" (fabricate claim) button

On the other hand, in the later expansions of EU3, being Muslim or Christian automatically gave you a CB on all your heathen neighbours with a 25% badboy multiplier, and if you took certain National Ideas (or were Defender of the Faith) you got that CB against all heathens everywhere.

2.To make something a core you have to wait 50 years. Don't remember corrrectly, but I think that integrating vassals was not giving cores as well.

Indeed, integrating a vassal gave you 1BB/province, destroyed all the buildings, and left you waiting 50 years for a core.

On the other hand, you could literally sit on a hundred uncored provinces and have the only real problem arising from doing so be your horrendous stability cost.

 

[lucaluca]

I agree, and I agree with the need to make coalitions a tool of balance of power. As of now they have been rendered completely useless...

 

[Halaberiel]

AI nations just don't seem to like blobbing so they don't really get that strong (players always blob faster than them). They also don't group up to kill you or coordinate at all aside from coalitions but you can easily avoid those (or just ignore them at a certain point). In my current game for instance England was leader of the protestant league war, they had the entirety of France sieged down, large parts of Austria & the HRE in general. You know what they took in the peace deal? 3 provinces in France, that's it. A player would of taken large parts of France, released nations in Austria etc, since less superpowers is always good for other super powers even if they're not a direct threat.

 

[Artyom87]

increasing difficulty and giving AI bonus would change the game tremendously. and ofcourse historical nations set to lucky

try that and see how powerful you are, comparatively, after 100 years (you really wont be as the dutch, i can promise you that)

 

[Te. Kenzo]

Its the snowball nature of the game.

True, and if you add some anti-snowball to the game to made it more interesting, someone start to whine becouse can't do its achievements. Damn achievements.

 

[toroltao]

In 1.7 by 1650 I had conquered half of Iberia as the Aztecs. Haven't done these in 1.8 yet and they've certainly become harder, granted. But you'll certainly be at a point in 1650 that will allow you to beat any European super power, if you want to.

Aztec isn't all that hard. They start out strong and only get stronger after westernizing. Try playing as Haida.

 

[Freudia]

True, and if you add some anti-snowball to the game to made it more interesting, someone start to whine becouse can't do its achievements. Damn achievements.

The problem with adding anti-snowball isn't that you're adding anti-snowball; it's that you're adding anti-snowball without actually adding anything to compensate for it. Paradox has this weird habit in EU4 where they try to limit expansion without actually adding anything else to compensate.

I swear that if they made peace-time gameplay and internal management actually engaging instead of just waiting on timers, people would have a lot less issues about making anti-snowball a thing. This game suffers from timers far too much right now to justify expansion nerfing.

 

[unmerged(88013)]

AI bonuses / Hard helps, as does adopting non-cheese tactics such as not allying France and exploiting its war capacity to do the work for you. In truth though, the trade and production is far too rich now. Ducats have become all but worthless except for a few poor regions. The difficulty level definitely needs a bump.

The France / Major power cheese could be mitigated by:

1) Restricting alliances to countries of real strategic interest (potential vassals/marches) and / or countries with a relative war capacity. A OPM who just happens to have the same rivals shouldn't qualify. Perhaps add an additional malus for the player to make it harder to establish such unbalanced relationships.

2) Decreasing a major power's desire to take up offensive wars on the player's behalf. Defensive wars are fine, but it shouldn't be easy to get France to do your dirty work for you.

 

[richelieu1628]

I strongly agree with the OP's sentiment - even though the game in question also looks like it's been well-played. 3 points to add:

1. The odd thing about the EU3-EU4 comparison is that I find the new game mechanics way cooler and starting out games it seems way more fun now. I couldn't even imagine going back to EU3. There's a strange disconnect between a game that makes me feel more and more like a kid in a candy store in 1444, and for the most part leaves me fairly cold by 1600 at the latest. One interesting indicator for this may be - if anyone's watching Quill18 or Arumba play on youtube - when do their games become boring to you?

2. I totally get the advice from people in this thread (and 100s of others when people ask "what should I play next") who say- play an OPM; play an HRE OPM; play Aztecs; no, play an Indian OPM, etc. And fair play, obviously those would be more challenging games, but generally I don't want to - and I don't want to have to. When I think EU4 I do think of the Age of Exploration, the 30yrs War, the [French] Revolution, the balance of power and all that stuff. So I want to play France, Spain, Austria, Brandenburg, Netherlands. Obviously that doesn't have to be everyone's opinion, but I'm pretty sure that few people come to EU4 thinking "I want to conquer the world as the Apaches".

3. For me the comparison with CK2 is very interesting. If you're not too abusive about exploits and min-maxing (I tend to be too lazy for most of it anyway), then gameplay at every level of the game can be fun for a long time (at least it did for me). If you play an HRE duke and by some fluke you find yourself crowned Emperor, often you're in for one hell of a ride. In EU4, if you're playing as Austria and you inherit Spain, it's game over. And that's a big shame.

 

[IIWW]

AI bonuses / Hard helps, as does adopting non-cheese tactics such as not allying France and exploiting its war capacity to do the work for you. In truth though, the trade and production is far too rich now. Ducats have become all but worthless except for a few poor regions. The difficulty level definitely needs a bump.

The France / Major power cheese could be mitigated by:

1) Restricting alliances to countries of real strategic interest (potential vassals/marches) and / or countries with a relative war capacity. A OPM who just happens to have the same rivals shouldn't qualify. Perhaps add an additional malus for the player to make it harder to establish such unbalanced relationships.

It would help just a bit. I wouldn't have toally France, if the country I'm willing to attack didn't have Commonwealth/Austria/whatever as ally. AI is also abusing this mechanism, and for similar streght nations the player will always be stronger.

2) Decreasing a major power's desire to take up offensive wars on the player's behalf. Defensive wars are fine, but it shouldn't be easy to get France to do your dirty work for you.

Make the strong stronger, and the weak weaker. With non-chaining alliances it would mean that France can get f.e. Castille to join a war against Austrian ally, having only Austria as major power agaisnt them, but the weak nations would be all alone.

 

[iheady]

AI bonuses / Hard helps, as does adopting non-cheese tactics such as not allying France and exploiting its war capacity to do the work for you. In truth though, the trade and production is far too rich now. Ducats have become all but worthless except for a few poor regions. The difficulty level definitely needs a bump.

The France / Major power cheese could be mitigated by:

1) Restricting alliances to countries of real strategic interest (potential vassals/marches) and / or countries with a relative war capacity. A OPM who just happens to have the same rivals shouldn't qualify. Perhaps add an additional malus for the player to make it harder to establish such unbalanced relationships.

2) Decreasing a major power's desire to take up offensive wars on the player's behalf. Defensive wars are fine, but it shouldn't be easy to get France to do your dirty work for you.

But if I start as Gelre, Utrech allies with Austria and in adition Austria inherits my Dutch core provinces, sounds logical to ally France. Why would Utrech ally Austria? For the same reason Gelre allies France. France doesnt want an Austrian Empire so they help you in that region, I can pass that story, althought It is quite fantastical but well I have no problem with exploting this.
What I would like to see now in my game is Venice or Hungary or Bohemia or who knows which country with 300 Ducats income/monthly and great power due to the fact of me beating Austria and they taking adventage. Same goes for Portugal or any other nation that has had time in this said game to boom their economy and they didnt.

Of course if also a new influence/power/coalitions system was implemented as you people have suggested it would be much better, but that in my opinion requieres more work than finding a way to make AI smarter in terms of investin their Ducats

 

[smellymummy]

excuse the somewhat OT but I've seen this acronym used a lot... what is ROTW?

 

[Artyom87]

excuse the somewhat OT but I've seen this acronym used a lot... what is ROTW?

it refers to all the losers who arent US or in EU's timeline, who arent european. "Rest of the world"

 

[ThuderLizard2]

Quote Originally Posted by iheady
in my opinion requires [sic] more work than finding a way to make AI smarter in terms of investin [sic] their Ducats

AI intelligence is a limit in any game. The EUIV AI is generally pretty good but over the long run falls behind. If you want to experience a terrible AI try Civ V.

 

[ahyangyi]

AI intelligence is a limit in any game. The EUIV AI is generally pretty good but over the long run falls behind. If you want to experience a terrible AI try Civ V.

Civ V consists of a combat system its AI can't handle, and an AI that can't handle its combat system.
I wonder why they made the decision to make combat more "tactical". It's basically more abusive in SP and more tedious in MP...

 

[bbqftw]

Don't know why people say everything is too rich (okay, in fairness certain endnodes are broken) - if you have excess money you're not merc'ing / ridiculously overextending hard enough

 

[Artyom87]

Civ V consists of a combat system its AI can't handle, and an AI that can't handle its combat system.
I wonder why they made the decision to make combat more "tactical". It's basically more abusive in SP and more tedious in MP...

if the AI could actually use the combat system like the player nobody would play the game.

It would be like, the AI would declare war and/or attack your cities only if it knows it has a good chance of taking them. So basically you'd be screwned considering the AI has many buffs

Therefore the AI is perfectly fine in civ5. The AI isnt very smart, but then it gets a crapload of buffs, so all is fair. And its more realistic that way, otherwise an Intelligent AI would just sit back, not attack anything unless it knows it can take it. And it would use alot of archers

 

[ahyangyi]

if the AI could actually use the combat system like the player nobody would play the game.

It would be like, the AI would declare war and/or attack your cities only if it knows it has a good chance of taking them. So basically you'd be screwned considering the AI has many buffs

Therefore the AI is perfectly fine in civ5. The AI isnt very smart, but then it gets a crapload of buffs, so all is fair. And its more realistic that way, otherwise an Intelligent AI would just sit back, not attack anything unless it knows it can take it. And it would use alot of archers

Making a dumb AI and giving the AI lots of bonuses are two sins. They don't cancel each other. You can't say the AI is necessarily dumb because it has many buffs and it has many buffs because it's dumb. There is only one way causality between them: AI is dumb first, AI gets buff then.

EU4 at least tries to limit the extent of this.