Has Some of the Fun Gone Out of This Game?

[Nuklearius]

#

 

[ChildeR]

- still can't see rebel progress in occupied provinces

Just wanted to note that you can see enemies' rebel progress by sending a spy/diplomat to support rebels. Somewhat sensible that you do not gain as much information as about actually owned provinces otherwise. However, the next patch with its spy changes may change things.

 

[satyrlord]

I can't argue with your statement as I admit my post can be read that way - after all, I didn't bother to explain much.

I'll try to address the points you raised as best as I can:
1. You bested me here as I haven't coded much in the last 5 years - had to go where the pay was better. I was a tester myself when I was a student so I know it can be a tough job if the company is less than stellar for "caring" to its workers. I hope you're in a better position than I was and wish you good luck on your endeavors.

Thanks, I'm doing quite well, Romania is full of opportunities for testers right now.

2. The EU4 [and especially CK2] engine forks are old. PDS admitted in the past that while the engine itself is kept being improved, most of the time changes aren't being back-ported. BTW, many games end up not getting to market because they are simply not good enough - just like the 1st design of HoI4 was before they scraped it and started anew.

I know that the engine is also improved, they said that a few times, but the fact that is not backported to EU4 is an argument for my initial post, not against it. The game should be allowed to die with some dignity so that the resources are diverted to the future and we, modders, would really like a damn break from updates once in a while so that we can actually finish our work in reasonable time. I know I am selfish, but that's beside the point. Our mods are for you, not for us, so if we could actually finish our work, it would benefit the community of EU4, but greed is good eh? Why give the community some breathing room when they can suck our wallets dry? Growth comes with some downsides. I would have to work 8-hours a day to match their update schedule and I can't afford that because they don't allow modders to get paid in any way.

3. I'm sorry you feel that way as I try to be helpful [most of the time at least]. The "no programmer" comment is usually reserved for people who demand "make it better", but don't specify how or even realize what they demand is not possible due to one limitation or another.

I know those types and they annoy me to no end, but perhaps less presumption and more dialogue would be better to distinguish professionals from entitled little brats, eh? I guess it's only my own fault for not being clear, but it's hard to write coherent walls of texts in-between deploys.

What bothered me is that you compared two engines optimized for two different things as if to point one was better than the other when in fact they both were better than the other. With all due respect to Dice - and I was impressed with Frostbite 3 - there are still some areas where I'd chose Clausewitz over it.

That's why I specifically compared it to the Endless Legend engine (because the games have a similar scope and a similar number of variables floating around), and I can even compare it to Cryengine or UE 4.9 since people are building all sorts of crazy shit using those engines, from RTS, RPG to the kitchen sink. I really wish I could turn back time and change my career to game programming so that I can make a GSG using another engine so that I can prove you wrong, sadly I'm too old for change now. But someday, someone smarter than me will make a GSG using Unreal Engine and then we can all quietly weep in a corner.

**I think you'll agree with me that your 2nd post was much well written/presented than your 1st post.

No argument there, like I already mentioned it's hard to write coherent walls of texts in-between deploys. And I don't blame you either, - removed

 

[Casus_Belli]

I agree with the increased coring costs and the AI employing the idea of Total War every time. On AE I am not so sure. However, to combat the AI's merc' spam, I'd like to see scorched earth boosted a little.

 

[Checco]

I can only agree with the OP and many others who explained how the game went from a "messy, but still interesting EU3 game" to a complete mess.

I never thought to buy Common sense or Cossacks (I play only with the 1.11.4 downgraded version), the game became such a bugfest I do not even want to think about spending my free time with that.

1. 5. Nothing To Do But Expand and War ... but lets make that as annoying as possible
2. 6. Sometimes You Feel The Game Doesn't Play Ball

The OP perfectly highlighted the problem...the game is not fun anymore.
I just completed the "Silk Road" achievement and I'm wondering what was the point of doing it.
I spent most of the playthrough fighting against annoying features built to punish successful players (Mughals getting Lucky, went past 100% OE by mistake and lost 10 years...), which -as always- proved to be only an annoyance, instead of a mechanism making the game more challenging and fun.
When you realize that instead of "playing the game" you are "playing against the game", what is the point?

I was surprised I manage to stomach the 'shattered retreat' and 'monarch points' nonsense, something that initially discouraged me.
But ultimately the game IS playable...not EU3's level (far from it) but decent if your expectations are not sky high.
Provided you do not go past 1.11.4, that is.

I hope EU5 will return to an older formula, without the devs' habit to insert countless new 'features' who reveal to be 80% bugs, 15% AI cheese, 5% "good idea, poor implementation".
I admit I'm quite disappointed...

 

[Ilyasviel]

I can only agree with the OP and many others who explained how the game went from a "messy, but still interesting EU3 game" to a complete mess.

I never thought to buy Common sense or Cossacks (I play only with the 1.11.4 downgraded version), the game became such a bugfest I do not even want to think about spending my free time with that.

1. 5. Nothing To Do But Expand and War ... but lets make that as annoying as possible
2. 6. Sometimes You Feel The Game Doesn't Play Ball

The OP perfectly highlighted the problem...the game is not fun anymore.
I just completed the "Silk Road" achievement and I'm wondering what was the point of doing it.
I spent most of the playthrough fighting against annoying features built to punish successful players (Mughals getting Lucky, went past 100% OE by mistake and lost 10 years...), which -as always- proved to be only an annoyance, instead of a mechanism making the game more challenging and fun.
When you realize that instead of "playing the game" you are "playing against the game", what is the point?

I was surprised I manage to stomach the 'shattered retreat' and 'monarch points' nonsense, something that initially discouraged me.
But ultimately the game IS playable...not EU3's level (far from it) but decent if your expectations are not sky high.
Provided you do not go past 1.11.4, that is.

I hope EU5 will return to an older formula, without the devs' habit to insert countless new 'features' who reveal to be 80% bugs, 15% AI cheese, 5% "good idea, poor implementation".
I admit I'm quite disappointed...

As a former EU3 player, I've actually been feeling that way about EU4 since its release. Especially this "why am I playing this" feeling. When I play EU4, I always feel like it's just a gigantic waste of time, to the point of making me feel dirty. The only other game that caused this for me was Total War: Arena, but at least it's free, so I didn't waste money on it and is easier to give up on.

The true tragedy, though, is CK2. This game actually used to be great until they ruined it with shitty arbitrary updates. EU4 hasn't been disfigured to the same extant that CK2 was yet.

 

[Frederick_Will]

Honestly I wish they stopped after 1.11.4(with perhaps one final patch or 2 to polish the game) and saved a lot of these changes for a future Eu5. The estate system would of been a lot better had they fully integrated it with the game, especially with the mission system. They could of done more to make it more interactive and not just a button click every now.(making autonomy non existent feels kinda like cheat to me.)

The dev system just isn't that good imo. It has some quirks to it and it is not really worth it compared to conquering. It and the buildings replaced what the old buildings did. you now get buildings that are not as useful imo outside of the decent to good provinces.(not to mention some of the unique buildings were removed and never replaced. and the only way to get some of those bonuses back is if you have the dlc and can increase your gov rank. they also removed some unique gov in 1.12) If you do not have the dlc, you do not have a point sink when you are capped in one or more categories.(the idea cap really hurts here as well. and it has hurt me in about half of my game if not more. another bad decision that was not necessary imo) It doesn't help either that some parts of the world are balanced around you having this, and if you don't, they remain terrible.(new world)


forts are another issue. i thought when i first heard about it that it would be neat and work well. it hasn't. the rules are hit and miss and quite often lead to situations where basic logic is thrown out the window.(you want to walk 2 miles to the next province? nope, you have to walk 1000 miles around it before you can get there) Wished they just saved this and actually spent a lot of time to work out all the kinks and when it was 100% ready, release it. having the rules change constantly doesn't help people understand what is and isn't allowed or what is intended and what is not. (someone brought up a valid complaint about forts and one of the devs responded with a snarky remark. that isn't good for PR)

at this point, the best solution i have is make forts not block movement anymore but drastically slow down movement past said fort.(i find the forts to expensive anyways for what they do) have increased attrition(perhaps higher than the max 5%) when you are behind their lines to make staying and sieging back there painful. having navies be useful by providing a "supply line" to the lands they are next to would also be nice to have. having an enemy navy off shore while you are sieging would cause more attrition or slow down the siege progress.(though not having a blockade would hurt you. perhaps it would be too much) it would make having a navy somewhat more worthwhile. these are just some ideas anyway.

i have some gripes about other mechanics but i don't want to turn this into a book.

There have been quite a few other changes over the last year that i didn't feel were necessary. Some of them feel like they are intended to hurt the really good players but they are the ones that can best get around it while the common player is hurt by it.(not even counting the bugs they introduced with those) Rather than fix some of the bigger issues, they change things that are just not necessary imo. Their DLC/Patches have felt like betas with all the inbalances and bugs that come with them. You then have to wait for a major patch and hope they are fixed. With their being only one patch after a dlc before they move on to the next dlc, you can be waiting months or years for your issue to be fixed.(it doesn't help either that the devs have gone on vacation after their last 2 dlcs, making the next patch take a few weeks/month longer to be released. I don't have a problem with them going on vacation. just their timing) I do not like playing buggy games.

I would also like to see the devs get involved more with the bigger issues/topics.(without being snarky) Like why are regency councils the way they are.


While i have my gripes about eu4, i still get some enjoyment out of it. Just seems like every patch they end up doing something that makes the game more frustrating to play. They improve in some areas, side step in some places, and downgrade in others. Between these and any bugs(like lying UI), it makes the game not as fun.

 

[wildbillhdmax01]

I used to love this game, but stop playing around when that big update that split the community in half years ago. COP (Conquest of Paradise) was the last time I really ever played the game. To me it seemed every update, every expansion, just made the game worst. Didn't like the fort system, didn't like the building system, made going to war harder and harder while not making peace anymore fun. The last expansion I played was Common Sense, and it was very meh. While I did enjoy El Dorado a lot, I think COD was the best expansion before everything went down hill.

It seems every new expansion and or patch just add more bloat, nefts the game, making it slower to play and progress. A lot of times it seems like they're just changing the core game mechanics rather then adding new fully fledged features.

I can only agree with the OP and many others who explained how the game went from a "messy, but still interesting EU3 game" to a complete mess.

I never thought to buy Common sense or Cossacks (I play only with the 1.11.4 downgraded version), the game became such a bugfest I do not even want to think about spending my free time with that.

1. 5. Nothing To Do But Expand and War ... but lets make that as annoying as possible
2. 6. Sometimes You Feel The Game Doesn't Play Ball

The OP perfectly highlighted the problem...the game is not fun anymore.
I just completed the "Silk Road" achievement and I'm wondering what was the point of doing it.
I spent most of the playthrough fighting against annoying features built to punish successful players (Mughals getting Lucky, went past 100% OE by mistake and lost 10 years...), which -as always- proved to be only an annoyance, instead of a mechanism making the game more challenging and fun.
When you realize that instead of "playing the game" you are "playing against the game", what is the point?

I was surprised I manage to stomach the 'shattered retreat' and 'monarch points' nonsense, something that initially discouraged me.
But ultimately the game IS playable...not EU3's level (far from it) but decent if your expectations are not sky high.
Provided you do not go past 1.11.4, that is.

I hope EU5 will return to an older formula, without the devs' habit to insert countless new 'features' who reveal to be 80% bugs, 15% AI cheese, 5% "good idea, poor implementation".
I admit I'm quite disappointed...

I think Checco said it best, "When you realize that instead of "playing the game" you are "playing against the game", what is the point?". This is what killed the game for me. Expansion and patch after patch has done nothing but punish successful players like me, who loved this game used to know the ins and outs of it. So what did they do? Make it more annoying, and harder to be successful.

I've already heard all your guys(and gals) complains already. This is nothing new to me. I've seen it all before years ago. "War no fun anymore" "Events are all bad" "AI sucks" "Allies suck, have Multiple Personality Disorder" Been there done that. You hear the same thing every time. "You just want to paint the map" "You're just a small part of the community" "Just stop playing" It seems quite a few people listen to that one since the EU4 community is not what it once used to be (which by the way isn't good for the game). "insert insult here". After a while people just move on.

We said fine, if you're going to make war, and conquest such a bitch then we make peace time more fun and interesting? After they failed with that, I just quit. I was looking into getting back into the game but it still seems to be the same problems that I already experienced.

Remove war and expansion and this game is sorely lacking in anything to do!

And this was a major complaint that never got addressed.

 

[bbqftw]

I don't understand how they've made expansion harder.

I mean this is a game that used to have 20-year core times and practically permanent coalitions once.

 

[Freudia]

I don't understand how they've made expansion harder.

I mean this is a game that used to have 20-year core times and practically permanent coalitions once.

People are likely mis-using the term 'harder' when they mean 'take longer'. The two go hand-in-hand according to Paradox, too, despite that being fake difficulty.

 

[grandadmiralbob]

I do like the game, but it has some quirks. Freudia put it best, "fake difficulty." I love it!

 

[jrk264]

I don't understand how they've made expansion harder.

I mean this is a game that used to have 20-year core times and practically permanent coalitions once.

Ah, but you could rotate coalition halves if you were on the ball with your truce management. You could also feed vassals to expand and then annex them without spending diplo points. Sure, getting your vassal to take over the relevant sieges could be tricky, but juggling tricky stuff is fun.

In general I feel like most changes have been in the direction of removing opportunities for skilled play:

• Foreign core recruitment. Did this actually hurt anybody in SP? No. Did it provide for an interesting tradeoff for advanced players in some situations? Yes. Can't have that, it's gone.
  
  
• Forts + morale boosts for winning battles take a big chunk of the skill out of war. If you have the biggest army, bring it to the bottleneck and win, win, win. Maneuver? What's that?
  
  
• Directing your own explorer and using fleet basing to extend your exploration range? No, no, no early westernization for you. Know your role.
  
  
• Tearing apart a big country? That's just mean. Have a fifteen year truce timer for your troubles. Also, cheaper war score costs to take from larger countries lets players get too big too fast, let's hold back access to that kind of stuff until tech 17.
  
  
• Figured out how to work the dynastic system in order to pick up a personal union? Eat massive liberty desire and enjoy having the rest of the world hate your guts.

Basically, anything other than very linear play has been systematically stomped out of existence. Once you've figured out how to win wars and manage your MP efficiently there is not much left to do.

 

[zamieo]

People are conquering the world faster than ever... How could coring costs possibly be a problem if that's the case? Get Administrative ideas and you're alright. I disagree with the rest of the points as well, excluding #3 and #5 to a degree. Regarding #3, I am in total agreement with you. Not every war should be a total war. If an 3PM is attacked by a nation with 150 FL, has no allies and no chance of winning, they should perhaps be more willing to take a peace deal if you only want one province (and you've taken the fort) or something similar.

 

[Jomini]

People are conquering the world faster than ever... How could coring costs possibly be a problem if that's the case? Get Administrative ideas and you're alright. I disagree with the rest of the points as well, excluding #3 and #5 to a degree. Regarding #3, I am in total agreement with you. Not every war should be a total war. If an 3PM is attacked by a nation with 150 FL, has no allies and no chance of winning, they should perhaps be more willing to take a peace deal if you only want one province (and you've taken the fort) or something similar.

Because the records for fastest conquest all stemmed from razing and using tags that have significant coring cost reductions.


When you paired -25% from being a Horde, -25% from admin, and overseas, you could often get provinces where razing them paid their full integration costs. Even on the same continent, you could come close to making a net profit to raze & core a lot of provinces.

This follows a very tired, old pattern - Pdox uses MP as a timer to make conquest slower. Then when something lets you sidestep said timer, whatever it is, then you can have record quick global conquest because most everything else is insufficient challenge as they have nuked a lot of complex challenges out of the game.

Right now there are just a couple of stats that determine growth rate:
MP/coring & annexation time
AE/Brot
Oext/Manpower/RR

Razing completely eliminated the first, with the OE or Hordes it was trivial to get multiple fronts going to limit the second. For the third Hordes have free reinforcements so you can Merc spam and kill rebels. As an added bonus, rebel lands do not respawn as quickly and the 20% rebel ticks at high Oext are gone (which is a good thing).

If you play the game any normal way, it is slow, slow, slow. Literally any bonus that doesn't make land cheaper is dwarfed by ones that do now.

 

[indika_tates]

I stopped playing after cossacks. For me there is no fun anymore. The problem inside all the complaints is the game AI. It's the true devil of this game. All of these changes were made to balance an early expansion which made late game boring. But the problem is the AI can't defend properly against the human player neither naval or land.

The player expands too fast? Then they increased coring costs & AE. The player uses proper straits blockades? Nerf straits. The player crushes enemy fleets? Auto naval-retreat. All of these are the response to a bad designed and poorly implemented AI.

What happened if they managed to improve the AI to proper defend their borders? To properly defend straits? To create decent fleets? That is what they should did but they don't. I don't know if it's difficult or not but to be honest I don't care that's exactly what I expect from this game. If a chess engine is able to defeat every human player on the world there is no reason to improve the game AI to be a real challenge to the human player.

This is the root of all the madness of this game.

 

[JustMormegil]

What happened if they managed to improve the AI to proper defend their borders? To properly defend straits? To create decent fleets? That is what they should did but they don't. I don't know if it's difficult or not but to be honest I don't care that's exactly what I expect from this game. If a chess engine is able to defeat every human player on the world there is no reason to improve the game AI to be a real challenge to the human player.

This is the root of all the madness of this game.

The problem is that EU mechanics is a 'little' harder that chess ones... AI in game is good enough, and close to 'as good as it is possible'.

I think PDX needs to just accept fact that human players are smarter. Much smarter than AI. In any aspects of the game. Don't try to nerf players - try to make some of mechanics easier to let AI catch up a little.

And maybe its good idea to make gameplay more dynamic with available mechanics staff like more rebels, more monarch deaths, more unpredictable wars etc.
Because, really, do you feel annoying when sometimes AI goes in suicidal wars? Isn't it more fun than annoying?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

People are likely mis-using the term 'harder' when they mean 'take longer'. The two go hand-in-hand according to Paradox, too, despite that being fake difficulty.

Pretty much this. They added "mandated waiting" instead of difficulty in most cases. The only difficulty there is having sufficient patience.

I agree with the increased coring costs and the AI employing the idea of Total War every time. On AE I am not so sure. However, to combat the AI's merc' spam, I'd like to see scorched earth boosted a little.

You would have to undo all of the scorched earth nerfs to even see a tiny dent in merc spam. With infinite pool available now, more SE damage would just mean a little more WE for the AI, not much else. There is no "combating merc spam", unless you carpet siege someone or abuse fort siege races + long travel distances to your fort(s) to avoid bothering to fight at all. I'm doing more of the latter lately; slap fort on capital only and scorch it for defensiveness, then just siege-race AI and ignore fighting it in many cases. As long as they don't want to attack your army, they will instead try to siege capital, taking all that time to march over there. It somewhat changes my opinion on fort defense because the AI having 60 day siege times or more on a level 3 (later 5+ fort) while yours are half that gives you a legitimate possibility of winning major gains w/o fighting at all.

As for AE, we've talked about coalitions previously. Past implementations of it were even more broken, but the role it serves now is awkward, a sort of "crawl or sprint, no between" pace setter. You're either staying mostly below 50 AE or vaulting into 500+. The fundamental issue is the same though; it's a mechanic that protects blobs and punishes minors, when it *should* be a mechanic that causes nations to dogpile runaway nations, both from a historical (Nappy France) and gameplay (stop the runaway before it becomes completely unstoppable) perspective.

 

[OnvreOrrivle]

Just played it again. The game is really bloated beyond repair. They've added so much stuff that looks nice once in the DDs but isn't actually that fun ingame. I really don't enjoy the English Parliament and now that I think about it, I never thought the game was lacking sailors. The turning point for me was common sense. The DLC added fort mechanics that didn't work for most of the time and completely destroyed balance, and introduced the development system which is very unfun and unbalanced. I remember reading the Dev-Diary about province-development and asking myself how they balanced it for larger nations. The answer is they didn't, and it still sucks the fun out of the game. Conquering Paris was rewarding before, now it's just as much worth as Wallachia or Alsace -_-
As someone suggested already, it's really time for Paradox to stop pumping out unready DLCs and finally patch the game to a stable version so Modders can take care from thereon.
Just to give you a list of things that don't work in current version:
- liberty-desire for colonies is way too high
- Interface bugs, with icons disappearing, trade wind arrows sticking around and such
- balancing and historical events: PLC still kills everything, no Mughals, Qing or Prussia, Castille/Spain very weak (don't want them to suceed every time, but at least let them show up sometimes)
- HRE is broken right now, everyone is blobbing out of control, no imperial-authority and son on
- still can't see rebel progress in occupied provinces
- Development is still unbalanced and occurs randomly in nonsensical locations
- Some Idea sets are broken now, France doesn't always take exploration anymore, Muscovy not religious and some other nations are affected as well. (Intended by the Devs, but probably does more bad than good)
- There are still nonsense restriction in peace-deals because you "can't make that province into a core"
- Patriarch Authority is still something you NEVER want and that is useless for every orthodox nation
- Some nations are still never DOW'd by the AI even if they have cores/claims there and the targeted nation has no alliances (good examples are Tver and Anatolian minors)
...and a ton more stuff
Back in Art of War EU4 really felt like a finished complete game, now it seems like it has downgraded into a beta version again and I fear the next DLC will just create another mess of unfinished features.

based

 

[Vistariel]

I think a proper and feasible solution to coring issues would be to make coring be a function of time and development. After you conquer a territory it would take say...2 months per development. No monarch points required. That way a huge province like Paris would take close to 5 years, whereas these little backwater provinces wouldn't take more than 2.5 or so. This would adequately represent the strain of implementing new administrative infrastructure and establishing legitimacy in the eyes of the people conquered. Coring cost modifiers would then simply be a reduction in coring time. Problem solved.

 

[Merrivale]

I wonder if we are reaching the limits of the DLC policy Paradox introduced with CK2. Both that game and EUIV seem to have turned into massive houses of cards built on top of a solid foundation.

These games were all designed with interlocking systems and balance on release. Then we start tweaking. Initially a lot of the tweaks are positive, things that the devs wanted to do initially but ran out of time/money. And of course as the game is played more and more, ideas start to surface about ways it could be better. But I think Paradox needs to be honest with themselves: at a certain point you can't just keep adding new system after new system. The game becomes a mess, with overlapping systems sometimes contradicting each other (like rivals and trust). And the new systems can't be implemented as efficiently as possible because of all of the old stuff that has to be worked around. And of course each new system brings new bugs.

This game is massively bloated right now. I think it's time to put a bow on it and start fresh. And learn the lesson for HOIIV and Stellaris: at some point development needs to cease and everyone needs to move on to the next thing. If you wait too long, the end result won't be pretty and you'll be forcing players to choose between giving up on some of the bug fixes for longtime bugs that come with each patch or playing the inferior version of the game.