Game gets too easy after 1st 100 years.

[Artyom87]

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.

in all fairness the AI is more retarded in EU4

cmon...
-AI accepting to carry you through wars basically (like allying france as an OPM)
-AI not declaring peace until 100% warscore or fully occupied
-AI having 1k stacks everywhere
-AI suffering massive amounts of attrition from bit army of stationed troops in a siege or even peacetime
-AI expanding too slow (in civ you can up the settings and they expand faster)
-AI honouring alliances when obviously they'd get fully occupied and basically probed
-AI going into debt over silly wars which should be easily won without taking loans (like Poland/lithuania+half of europe would hire mercs and send all they have to siege the OPM theyre at war with, so half of EU would go into debt over war with one province)

I mean cmon the list is endless

 

[Freudia]

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".

I feel like you enjoy starting out as privileged nations who are nearly impossible to mess up with. France and Spain are extremely easy and have the game already made for them from day 1, Brandenburg is easy once you get past your first two wars or so (even earlier if you can alliance remotely well), and Netherlands' hardest part is actually forming the damn thing. The only nation that is remotely scary from start to finish is Austria, and that's if you sit on your hands and only focus on maintaining the empire's integrity instead of adding more power to yourself, and this is putting aside the fact that Austria might be the most overpowered nation in the game right now due to fast revokes.

I don't like it when people pick consistently easy starts and then go 'the game's too easy'. Why should the game be difficult for nations who start with some of the best starts in the game? You make the game difficult for them and you make it nearly impossible or extremely obnoxious for anyone who isn't a tier 1 power, and I'm fairly sure that's an even worse scenario.

 

[ahyangyi]

-AI accepting to carry you through wars basically (like allying france as an OPM)
-AI suffering massive amounts of attrition from bit army of stationed troops in a siege or even peacetime
-AI expanding too slow
-AI going into debt over silly wars which should be easily won without taking loans (like Poland/lithuania+half of europe would hire mercs and send all they have to siege the OPM theyre at war with, so half of EU would go into debt over war with one province)

I agree with these.

-AI not declaring peace until 100% warscore or fully occupied
-AI having 1k stacks everywhere

These are apparently bugs and EU4 is still under development.

-AI honouring alliances when obviously they'd get fully occupied and basically probed

It's supposed to be a trade off. One option is immediately -prestige and -trust and losing an ally, the other is getting occupied and lots of WE. The former is usually better, but I won't fault someone occasionally choosing the latter.
The point is, it's not as an "obvious" choice as you claim...

- (in civ you can up the settings and they expand faster)

So can you in EU4. You can do more if you just mod in a few numbers.
Claiming that "upping" the settings somehow fixes the AI is laughable.

 

[Freudia]

It's supposed to be a trade off. One option is immediately -prestige and -trust and losing an ally, the other is getting occupied and lots of WE. The former is usually better, but I won't fault someone occasionally choosing the latter.
The point is, it's not as an "obvious" choice as you claim...

It's not a very good tradeoff when it results in the extra nation that joined to get annexed. This happens far more often against me than I'd like to admit. I sometimes wish nations would look at the overall threat of the enemy alliance before joining. "If I join, will we still be hopelessly outclassed?"

 

[Path]

It's not a very good tradeoff when it results in the extra nation that joined to get annexed. This happens far more often against me than I'd like to admit. I sometimes wish nations would look at the overall threat of the enemy alliance before joining. "If I join, will we still be hopelessly outclassed?"

This gets somewhat absurd when tags you peace out separately join the same or another war against you shortly after (such as Mysore in my latest game, where I was waging three wars in India at the same time). Really, AI, if you lost horribly to me while you had an army, what makes you think you'll win without one?

 

[Morricane]

Play with AI bonuses on. Avoid 'gamey' exploits 'ex. Feeding vassels'

This.
Don't even complain about stomping the AI when you don't even set it to hard (which actually is reflected by AI bonus, not hard difficulty)

 

[unmerged(205148)]

I feel like you enjoy starting out as privileged nations who are nearly impossible to mess up with. France and Spain are extremely easy and have the game already made for them from day 1, Brandenburg is easy once you get past your first two wars or so (even earlier if you can alliance remotely well), and Netherlands' hardest part is actually forming the damn thing.

The poster in question sounded like he meant that he liked the historical flavour of playing the big guys, not them being so easy to play. Although "pick and underdog and make it powerful" has its own alternate-history charm.

 

[Sbrubbles]

I think if the AI knew how to properly do trade (building trade ships over the force limit, setting merchants correctly), a lot of the "way too much money" problem would be solved.

 

[richelieu1628]

I feel like you enjoy starting out as privileged nations who are nearly impossible to mess up with. France and Spain are extremely easy and have the game already made for them from day 1, Brandenburg is easy once you get past your first two wars or so (even earlier if you can alliance remotely well), and Netherlands' hardest part is actually forming the damn thing. The only nation that is remotely scary from start to finish is Austria, and that's if you sit on your hands and only focus on maintaining the empire's integrity instead of adding more power to yourself, and this is putting aside the fact that Austria might be the most overpowered nation in the game right now due to fast revokes.

I don't like it when people pick consistently easy starts and then go 'the game's too easy'. Why should the game be difficult for nations who start with some of the best starts in the game? You make the game difficult for them and you make it nearly impossible or extremely obnoxious for anyone who isn't a tier 1 power, and I'm fairly sure that's an even worse scenario.

You are making my point for me by conflating several issues that are in fact separate. There is no reason that making big countries interesting should make small countries impossible, because obviously interesting =/= hard and boring =/= easy. Also, the levers that make big-country games more interesting aren't the same that make small-country games more difficult. In fact, quite the opposite. If big countries were busier with themselves, they wouldn't eat their neighbours quite so fast.

But besides all that you're simply not reading what I said. I said I wish the game weren't so easy if you play a big country, and I reject the argument that you could just choose a smaller, harder, ROTW country to play. I play EU4 because I want to play big European countries - that's what makes the period interesting to me. I've you've been playing EU since EU1 or EU2 then inevitably you know the mechanics well enough to play well. But an EU4 experience that is premised on skilled players only being able to play OPMs to stay engaged beyond 1600 kind of defeats the point.

 

[Freudia]

You are making my point for me by conflating several issues that are in fact separate. There is no reason that making big countries interesting should make small countries impossible, because obviously interesting =/= hard and boring =/= easy. Also, the levers that make big-country games more interesting aren't the same that make small-country games more difficult. In fact, quite the opposite. If big countries were busier with themselves, they wouldn't eat their neighbours quite so fast.

The issue with making big nations hard is that the game has the same mechanics regardless of game size now (this used to not be the case, as in an earlier build you could spawn a coalition just for looking at something (ie take exactly one province with no other AE) if you were big enough), so any change you make that makes big nations hard to play will undoubtedly make minor powers or small states incredibly hard to play for no reason other than they exist at that size. Rebels already do this - if a nation gets a revolt, guess who gets hit harder? The big nation or the small one?

I would hate to see the game devolve into "major powers only because everything else is suicide" just because you want big powers to be harder and interesting. Any internal management changes you make will likely adversely affect minors (as rebels have shown, they consistently have adversely affected minors so far, with the exception of non-random rebel spawning times), and any expansion changes that're made for the sake of making expansion harder will make minor states borderline unviable.

But besides all that you're simply not reading what I said. I said I wish the game weren't so easy if you play a big country, and I reject the argument that you could just choose a smaller, harder, ROTW country to play. I play EU4 because I want to play big European countries - that's what makes the period interesting to me. I've you've been playing EU since EU1 or EU2 then inevitably you know the mechanics well enough to play well. But an EU4 experience that is premised on skilled players only being able to play OPMs to stay engaged beyond 1600 kind of defeats the point.

No, I'm reading what you're saying. I just think it's a poor way to approach the game. It's not a historical simulator; it's an alternate history/build an empire simulator/strategy game. I think it's fair that you want to play big Europeans (you're allowed to do what you find fun, and there's nothing wrong with that), but I think it's not fair to go "the game isn't fun when I play a large European, so let's change the entire game around them so that they're fun with little regard to consequence for the myriad of other starts in the game". I know that over 50% of the player starts are tier 1 powers (I think England alone is 50% actually), but it's still not fair to those who play other starts.

Anyways: How do you make big nations interesting to play without killing the playability of minor states? Answer that and I'm willing to accept your argument. For me, I like playing the small powers, the underdogs, and fight the good fight and claw my way to power and prestige, so your position is directly opposite of mine.

For me, I just think making the AI blob even half as well as the player does would be enough, but that likely does not address the problem at hand.

 

[richelieu1628]

Anyways: How do you make big nations interesting to play without killing the playability of minor states? Answer that and I'm willing to accept your argument. For me, I like playing the small powers, the underdogs, and fight the good fight and claw my way to power and prestige, so your position is directly opposite of mine.

For me, I just think making the AI blob even half as well as the player does would be enough, but that likely does not address the problem at hand.

I think that's a fair point - I appreciate that my preference is just that (even though obviously I like my preference a lot better. I like it best, in fact). And apart from what I think makes sense, it obviously makes business sense for Paradox to have a game that's all-singing, all-dancing. So in consequence it's not ok to make the game great for one subset if that means killing it for another subset.

I have some ideas of what one might do to rein in big countries and give them things to do, but they're not very well developed - hopefully in time people will come up with more. I think you could play around more with agressive expansion, with great power alliances, with coalitions, and with the new disaster system.

For me, there should be something in the game mechanics that should make it harder for somebody to become bigger than the numbers 2-4 in that continent taken together. A Napoleon-failsafe so that ginormous empires are under dire threat to collapse under their own weight, or get taken down by an alliance of your peers. I suppose the coalition system is aimed at that, but right now hits small countries way harder than large ones, when it should be the opposite.

PS: I don't actually play the big countries all that much. Every now and then I try again and get bored fast. I just wish I could play them more, for the reasons stated above.

 

[Freudia]

I think that's a fair point - I appreciate that my preference is just that (even though obviously I like my preference a lot better. I like it best, in fact). And apart from what I think makes sense, it obviously makes business sense for Paradox to have a game that's all-singing, all-dancing. So in consequence it's not ok to make the game great for one subset if that means killing it for another subset.

To be really honest, Paradox probably could just make the game cater just to those who like playing large tier 1 starts. They're the majority, after all; people like myself are mostly just a vocal minority. I just think it'd be kind of dumb to have well over 300 nations in the game and 99% of them existing only to be fodder for the resident superpower. Paradox thinks so too, as we've been increasingly making RotW more interesting to play with the past few patches (1.7 getting rid of the monarch point penalty just for being at a lower tech speed, and 1.8 redesigning the map to make RotW around the same detail as Europe). With that said, I would not be able to fault Paradox if they randomly decided the game was designed to only play the twelve or so strongest nations in the game, Brandenburg, and Netherlands.

I have some ideas of what one might do to rein in big countries and give them things to do, but they're not very well developed - hopefully in time people will come up with more. I think you could play around more with agressive expansion, with great power alliances, with coalitions, and with the new disaster system.

I've said in the past that espionage should be about pulling strings behind other nations' backs and not about fog of war removal or supporting rebels. Making something like that come into play and actually making it engaging would be interesting for both large and small powers. It would be really fun to do things like frame a rival against another rival ("You insulted me, my mother, and you sacked this town! How dare you!") and watch them go to war over something that you did behind them, for example.

For me, there should be something in the game mechanics that should make it harder for somebody to become bigger than the numbers 2-4 in that continent taken together. A Napoleon-failsafe so that ginormous empires are under dire threat to collapse under their own weight, or get taken down by an alliance of your peers. I suppose the coalition system is aimed at that, but right now hits small countries way harder than large ones, when it should be the opposite.

This exposes the entire problem with coalitions, though. I think nations banding together to stop the number 1 power from getting even more powerful is fair and should happen, but it currently doesn't. I get significantly less coalitions as Burgundy than I would as some silly minor power in the same area (Provence, for example). They're not only retroactive instead of proactive, but they don't even treat nations equally.

PS: I don't actually play the big countries all that much. Every now and then I try again and get bored fast. I just wish I could play them more, for the reasons stated above.

I primarily play small starts, but I have played the likes of Burgundy and Poland before. I actually found Burgundy pretty fun, but that's because you can repeatedly gank France exceptionally early and not die and that's always fun to me. Liked Poland before Elective Monarchy became a thing.

 

[Pilot00]

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.

How so? By having most of the actions that cost the base resource of the game (Monarch points) cost nothing for the AI?By giving it less AE and OE than the player? And so on and so on.

Both have horrible AI designs. Both are forced to make the AI cheat both directly (by choosing the bonus to the AI) and indirectly (stealth buffs).

I agree with these.


These are apparently bugs and EU4 is still under development.

And here I thought it was released in the market a couple years ago

So, the general consensus seems to be: Throw half of the game out of the window and play as dumb as the AI in order to have a challenge. Gentlemen sorry, but that doesn't look like good design to me.

The game just tries to raise invisible walls to stop the player, walls that fail. The problem with both CiV and EUIV is that the devs dont want to admit that they made design errors and as a result the same problems will plague those 2 till the end of time.

BTW OP: If you are looking a challenge dont play the Byzantines: Either I am good and I dont know it (I doubt it) or it aint difficult at all.

 

[yerm]

Coalitions are fundamentally stupid in this game. A coalition needs to stop being a measure of relationship/opinion and be about power. The #1 power should always face a coalition if they want to expand; meanwhile, you could make a good argument for a nation not being even allowed to join a coalition against a nation that is a certain amount weaker than themselves, for example Siena manages to flip a war and take Tuscany and as a result gets a coalition with Aragon and Venice, despite being only about Milan's total strength.

 

[domcoates]

to throw my own two cents into the bucket - I think EU IV is what you make of it; however, removing France early game makes life way more interesting

 

[ahyangyi]

And here I thought it was released in the market a couple years ago

If EU4 is no longer actively updated, I'd agree with you.

Pointing at a new bug introduced at some random patch and treat it as if it's a design flaw is what I won't agree.

 

[indika_tates]

I don't think the problem is the game start, or the late game. It's just abusing the AI as we all do. Abusing allies is the way to go with a OPM. Can be it fixed? Of course.

The AI can be improved too much with these little improvements:
- First, changing how alliances works. A minor OPM shouldn't be able to use big powers as "attack dogs" as you said before. Defensive attitude is a valid fix. For example, France or Austria shouldn't be involved in a war of Liege vs Aachen, or Wurzburg vs Saxony. Big powers must have his priorities and shouldn't be distracted with warmonger OPM useless alliances.
- Reduced attrition on land because the AI don't care about it. I hate seeing how Austria for example, get massive attrition during peacetime because it's stacking a big army nowhere on winter. I think is not too hard to implement a system where the AI detects it's suffering from attrition it divides the army to the adjacent provinces. Also, having armies placed on adjacent provinces help both on siege and defending their troops.
- Naval AI management. Merge all the fleets in a larger one during wartime and assign escorts to trade fleets. That way countries like GB will be far stronger. Also, allowing AI to transport 2x/3x quantity of troops in each transport should help, or maybe giving it free transport ships because naval oriented countries are horrible and weaker. The best example is GB. It's not matter of powerful ideas, is just a horrible AI management of it.
- Not abandoning sieges when trying to help and adjacent army. An easy exploit we use to give massive attrition to the AI. Leaving the enough troops to continue the siege as we do when we press "d".
- Siege improvement. A system where it sieges at the same time 4-5 adjacent provinces where each army can give support to the adjacent one (with the previous suggestion of not abandoning a siege). If it managed to wipe off all of the entire enemy army, carpet sieging is the way to go. Stacking a huge army on a single province when the enemy don't have a single unit of infantry, definitively not.
- Not giving free CB through embargos. Ceylon embargoing Portugal & Castille is not a good idea for them.

I think if the devs fix the suggestions I said the game will be a lot of harder and more challenging.

 

[yerm]

I don't think the problem is the game start, or the late game. It's just abusing the AI as we all do. Abusing allies is the way to go with a OPM. Can be it fixed? Of course.

The AI can be improved too much with these little improvements:
- First, changing how alliances works. A minor OPM shouldn't be able to use big powers as "attack dogs" as you said before. Defensive attitude is a valid fix. For example, France or Austria shouldn't be involved in a war of Liege vs Aachen, or Wurzburg vs Saxony. Big powers must have his priorities and shouldn't be distracted with warmonger OPM useless alliances.
- Reduced attrition on land because the AI don't care about it. I hate seeing how Austria for example, get massive attrition during peacetime because it's stacking a big army nowhere on winter. I think is not too hard to implement a system where the AI detects it's suffering from attrition it divides the army to the adjacent provinces. Also, having armies placed on adjacent provinces help both on siege and defending their troops.
- Naval AI management. Merge all the fleets in a larger one during wartime and assign escorts to trade fleets. That way countries like GB will be far stronger. Also, allowing AI to transport 2x/3x quantity of troops in each transport should help, or maybe giving it free transport ships because naval oriented countries are horrible and weaker. The best example is GB. It's not matter of powerful ideas, is just a horrible AI management of it.
- Not abandoning sieges when trying to help and adjacent army. An easy exploit we use to give massive attrition to the AI. Leaving the enough troops to continue the siege as we do when we press "d".
- Siege improvement. A system where it sieges at the same time 4-5 adjacent provinces where each army can give support to the adjacent one (with the previous suggestion of not abandoning a siege).
- Not giving free CB through embargos. Ceylon embargoing Portugal & Castille is not a good idea for them.

I think if the devs fix the suggestions I said the game will be a lot of harder and more challenging.

Don't get me wrong, this is a good list and I hope these improvements make it.

That said, I think the problem here IS the late game - the ai simply does not exhibit any "stop the winner" tendencies whatsoever. These were historically paramount philosophies that the great powers held to constantly; many of the great wars in the latter period of the game (War of the Spanish Succession for a good example) were fought primarily for the very purpose of curbing any one nation's rise to relative power over all others. The game allows a great power to snowball into superpower status relatively unchecked, while severely punishing nations who rise too rapidly instead, even if said nation is relatively weak compared to their neighbors even after aggressively annexing significant territory. A mechanic that caused the ai to limit support and eventually team up against any power that was becoming significantly more powerful than its neighbors would greatly improve the game. It removes both the outrageous coalitions against pathetically weak nations, and the horrible tendency to simply allow a player (or certain ai nations) to just grow far more powerful than their peers without them caring.

If someone were growing really strong and pulling away in multiplayer, the other players would attempt to stop it. When someone was at risk of overshadowing all others in Europe, the great powers organized to contain it. In single player? So long as you manage your relationship penalties, you are no more at risk of someone stopping your growth as the expanding largest power in the game than you are as a one province minor eating a few neighbors, and in fact, are probably MORE likely to get a coalition as the latter since everyone you take is close to each other, consolidating your AE.

 

[Hirron]

Here's a small bit on why your trade income, and indeed any country with end trade will have rediculous income that requires no risk, gives large amounts of reward and allows for the dominance of any node in proximity to an end node.

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?818397-The-problem-with-endnode-trade/page4


Overall spheres of influence, combined with reforming trade would make it so empires would actually have to fight to gain money, and have to fight each other. In the present once a country is powerful it will be able to bowl over small countries to blob and take the trade of small countries the second a node is discovered.

 

[indika_tates]

Don't get me wrong, this is a good list and I hope these improvements make it. That said, I think the problem here IS the late game ...

Is another thing I thought about it so many times. When a big power snowballs, there is no way to stop it. So I thought a way to fix it. The "threaten" factor. For example, the classical example of France and all the minors around them. There should be new types of "alliances" not exactly as we are used to. If there are 10 minors around France that have a threaten attitude towards them, that minors should be able to form a "confederation", a defensive pact between them against the big bad guy, I mean the possibility to fight a major power on a single front without depending on aggresive expansion.

So if France want to take Liege, Bar, or Aachen they have to fight against all of the dutch minors, the burgundian ones and the emperor in the same time. Is a logical behaviour. If I am a threatened OPM, and my neighbours all also threatened by the same power we should be able to fight united against them. And, it happened a lot of times through our European history. Duchies and Italian minors fighting against France with the help of Castille & Aragon. The "Catholic League" to defend Rome against France. And they were no allies, just they had common interests again a major foe.

So, it should work like Religious League. If I am the emperor, or Castille and I don't want France to expand his power towards east I should be able to help the minors in their confederation to fight against them without wasting "diplomatic relation slots". It should replace the AE system. Minors which existence is seriously threatened by a major power should have mechanisms to fight it involving in it other major powers interested on not having one of them snowballing.