Havent played in a while, whats your thoughts on Leviathan?

[MordredViking]

It is difficult with so many people being away for vacations, but there are a few of us still watching these threads. Many of the issues raised above are being addressed already in the upcoming patch (no ETA). I'm still taking a very active role in forwarding all issues raised, especially on the Bug Reports forum, so if you have come across anything that needs a fix, please, please, please post it there.

Lets quickly go through the Leviathan feature list:
2. the new regency events unintentionally break personal unions and cause other issues. Broken - Think this is working as intended actually, your other allies get pissed that you're forcing a union on your allies.
3. The new colonial nation types don't apply their effects properly, some aren't applied at all, some with wrong values. Broken - Being fixed
5. Concentrate development was designed for tall play but is almost exclusively helping countries with a lot of wrong culture land, therefore wide play. Feature is not achieving intended goal - We're taking another pass at this, not sure if it will be in upcoming patch
7. expand infrastructure is useless. It is never used. Wide countries cant afford the GC cost and tall countries don't need it. Feature is dead on arrival Disagree with you here actually, having more manufactory slots is super helpful.
10. Monuments still have multiple impactful bugs lile forming a new nation preventing you from speeding up the improvements you already started as the old tag. Most issues aren't gamebreaking with this feature but still issues that should not exist nontheless. Being fixed

Now on to the imortant issues of 1.31 itself:
1. performance is unaccpetable. Especially the state notification issue (blue flag issue) completely kills the game. We're looking into this. The "Blue Flag" issue is being fixed, and if you find any other causes, please do post them.
2. Native reform gain is still way too unbalanced. AI colonisers often fail completely to colonise the east cost and i have seen multiple games where colonisers fail to get a foothold until they come from the west after colonising SEA. Being fixed.

Anything not replied to in green I have no further update on.

 

[Mindel]

It is difficult with so many people being away for vacations, but there are a few of us still watching these threads. Many of the issues raised above are being addressed already in the upcoming patch (no ETA). I'm still taking a very active role in forwarding all issues raised, especially on the Bug Reports forum, so if you have come across anything that needs a fix, please, please, please post it there.



Anything not replied to in green I have no further update on.

Add to this the fact that the currying favors mechanics completely breaks the pre-Leviathan scaling growth of favors (where they grow inversely proportional to the size of the ally). With currying, they essentially grow the same for everyone, from Ottomans to Mainz. There's a longer discussion about it here and also here.

 

[MordredViking]

Interesting, thank you. I'd missed that thread

 

[legoras]

Just Crap.

 

[Hezekiah]

7. expand infrastructure is useless. It is never used. Wide countries cant afford the GC cost and tall countries don't need it. Feature is dead on arrival

Disagree with you here actually, having more manufactory slots is super helpful.

When in EU4 is paying that much GC for a second, non-duplicate manufactory worthwhile?

 

[Victoria 3 finally]

I would say it was better then Emperor since it had the development time of 3 weeks unlike Emperors nearly 2 years and didnt recycle vanilla events and called it a new mechanic.

 

[ThePHD]

The performance is awful now. I don't know what they added to cause such a huge performance hit but they definitely need to work on fixing it whenever possible. This is by far the biggest issue with the game in my opinion. I don't really care one way or another about the update beyond that. The only other thing I might change is how powerful the natives are. Colonization feels very strange now as a result.

 

[kgmi]

There was a time when you could call your allies into any offensive wars from day one. France used to be abused by players who started with smaller countries. You could call them in over and over. I think that favors increase a little fast right now, but at least there is a way to increase the speed instead of sitting and waiting.

You can gain favors by declaring on someone in the alliance network they want land from and giving them according to their contribution. Ofc most players just want all for themselves and never give their strong AI ally some land. Which is kind of understanable considering how hard they manage to fuck up administering their nation, like Muscovy releasing novogord vassal 5 campaigns in a row in my game forcing me to deal with semi WC Ottoblob every single time.

 

[The Norman Yoke]

Leviathan makes the game ridiculously easy.. a tiny opm near ottomans can get 100 trust and call them in on anyone otto does not like.

Performance dropped lategame to a point it hiccups day by day.

Ai is worst i ever saw; i don't feel at home in this game anymore unless i use mods like xorme ai.

The latter two are not part of dlc.. but still.

Launch was terrible for favour curstion because minors got them faster off majors than majors getting them off minors, but yeah still way easier to get your major alloy into wars than previously

I would say it had the best ideas any DLC had in a long time. But the execution was horrible. My biggest issue with Leviathan is that when it gets a few more bandaid fixes it will get thrown away and it's potential will never be realised.
And maybe im just a cynic but i kind of expect them to say "well we designed a tall play DLC and it didn't sell well, so lets go back to spamming buffs for conquest", completely misunderstanding the issues of their product

There is irony in the patch that promised to buff tall play, will make it easy as a player to just wipe across the US and Canadian natives

There was a time when you could call your allies into any offensive wars from day one. France used to be abused by players who started with smaller countries. You could call them in over and over. I think that favors increase a little fast right now, but at least there is a way to increase the speed instead of sitting and waiting.

I remember buying cossacks, and being annoyed I could no longer call everyone into my first war vs Venice on 11th December, whilst Venice had all its allies and its whole trade league. But then I got slightly better at the game

 

[MordredViking]

When in EU4 is paying that much GC for a second, non-duplicate manufactory worthwhile?

Ramparts + Manufactory. Soldiers (or Sailors) Household + Manufactory

 

[Barbu]

Poorly thought out followed by even worse execution.

 

[Hezekiah]

Ramparts + Manufactory. Soldiers (or Sailors) Household + Manufactory

Paying 100 governing capacity for the second manufactory still seems too steep a price for this to be useful. For example, in a grain province, I would choose the household over the manufactory, or in a mountain fort, I might choose the ramparts over a manufactory. But having both doesn't seem like it would especially increase the value of the province, but it does dramatically increase the cost of holding on to that province.

 

[Jarvin]

In a nutshell, Leviathan has great ideas but the worst possible execution.

oh no no no no

 

[newtlord]

I posted elsewhere that "most of the egregious bugs have been fixed, leaving a bunch of pretty egregious intentional features", and I haven't seen anything to change that opinion.

 

[Jarvin]

I posted elsewhere that "most of the egregious bugs have been fixed, leaving a bunch of pretty egregious intentional features", and I haven't seen anything to change that opinion.

This is a pretty good summary

That said, here's my honest take:

I think the majority of EU4's playerbase is and has always been largely unaffected by PDX's bad design choices. New players, or simply casuals who never felt the need to try to learn the game, don't feel the deteriorating state of EU4's gameplay, because they don't understand how things are meant to be to begin with or don't care.

If you are that kind of person - you are likely going to enjoy Leviathan, as you might have any other of the recent PDX's DCLs, even if in the view of the 'more experienced' part of the community they have been detrimental to the state of the game. And to be clear, there's nothing wrong with being new, casual or not giving a shit about gameplay.

Even if you are an experienced player, Leviathan might still have some short-term fun to provide you just from the new content that it provides, regardless of its quality. The sense of novelty that new patches bring IMHO have carried the development of this game for a long time.


The game has been on a descending trajectory for a long time, with rather few exceptions(I, for example, loved the regional rework of India in 1.26, even if the rest of the patch was controversial at best, 1.30 had a cool rework of estates and nice QoL changes even if, likewise, the rest of the patch was meh to really bad), but this hasn't caused the game to 'die', as some doomsayers were predicting years ago, and that is because - contrary to what you might expect if you only read those forums or EU4-related Discords - this community is very much made up of casual players who don't notice the decrease in the game's quality(which, again, is nothing negative), so:
on average: yes, you are likely to enjoy Leviathan

 

[MatthewP]

This is a pretty good summary

That said, here's my honest take:

I think the majority of EU4's playerbase is and has always been largely unaffected by PDX's bad design choices. New players, or simply casuals who never felt the need to try to learn the game, don't feel the deteriorating state of EU4's gameplay, because they don't understand how things are meant to be to begin with or don't care.

If you are that kind of person - you are likely going to enjoy Leviathan, as you might have any other of the recent PDX's DCLs, even if in the view of the 'more experienced' part of the community they have been detrimental to the state of the game. And to be clear, there's nothing wrong with being new, casual or not giving a shit about gameplay.

Even if you are an experienced player, Leviathan might still have some short-term fun to provide you just from the new content that it provides, regardless of its quality. The sense of novelty that new patches bring IMHO have carried the development of this game for a long time.


The game has been on a descending trajectory for a long time, with rather few exceptions(I, for example, loved the regional rework of India in 1.26, even if the rest of the patch was controversial at best, 1.30 had a cool rework of estates and nice QoL changes even if, likewise, the rest of the patch was meh to really bad), but this hasn't caused the game to 'die', as some doomsayers were predicting years ago, and that is because - contrary to what you might expect if you only read those forums or EU4-related Discords - this community is very much made up of casual players who don't notice the decrease in the game's quality(which, again, is nothing negative), so:
on average: yes, you are likely to enjoy Leviathan

If casuals is meant to be read as “people who don’t do WC or competitive multiplayer,” then I agree with this. I am in this category despite having a lot of hours and caring a lot about gameplay. These ways of playing just don’t appeal to me, and as a result I don’t care about a lot of the issues that WC and multiplayer players care about. Like territory corruption I recognize was a bad mechanic, but anytime I ran into it I was about ready to quit and start a new run already.

 

[Cosmonaut15]

Maybe I’m a minority here. But my last six runs (Majapahit, Brunswick, Iroquois, Tunis, Ayutthaya, Hungary) in 1.31.4 - 1.31.5 were fun and challenging in its own way without any game-breaking bugs (still miner bugs that got reported already).

No MP play anyway as I’m exclusively SP.

The good:

1. Monument is a really nice addition. Some are OP e.g. -10% tech cost, but most of them are religion-related. So, overall I’m satisfy with them. It gives province priority and significance than ever before.

2. Allied favor rate and cooldown are fine for me. AI can still decline your call to war if they’re in debt, low on manpower, etc. A little more balance may needed but nothing is broken for me.

3. Concentrate dev were used from time-to-time especially early game to increase trade power in main node and to free-up GC in territories for more conquest. I don’t see why it’s a problem when ANY playstyle can use this feature to solve GC problem. But now we have a way to properly play tall which we didn’t have before and finally we can play more nations which is a good thing. I don’t see AI overuse it either as 60 dev Wien or Constantinople is reasonable in my view.

4. Native reform may need a bit of balance but overall is not an issue. The colonizer must have to fully commit their troops in the new world to fight the native and stall player expansion somewhere else. So, a bit more difficult to manage the WC run perhaps. But overall it’s challenging and fun for playing either the colonizer or native

5. Native dev in the province is just a number. They got spread out in the area when they settled. Not sure why people don’t like having a more developed colonial land. Just from reading the comments, I even felt that many people are not even understand how the native dev works in 1.31.

6. Mission trees are OP but understandable as it is for rewarding a player who can pull that nation off from the brink of collapse or managed to turtle a native nation and make them a superpower. Overall they’re fun to play.

7. Zoroastrian - finally.

8. AI is smarter and can get rid of their own debt already. At least Otto and Russia did in my runs.

The so-so:

Regency, new colony type, pillaging capital
I don’t feel much different of having them in my game but they are kind of making it more realistic.

The bad:

1. Performance, especially when there is a war between majors involving 200-300 units. You will know there is a WW1 somewhere when the game is suddenly lag like h…

2. Duplicate feature e.g. Expand Admin vs “another feature I forget the name already” that do the same thing but have to spend more reform progress.

3. I agreed Expand Infrastructure is used very rarely unless in a very strategically important choke point that you don’t want to expand further. Rampart + fort is only a temporary structure as we can easily expand beyond that fort later and replace it with other manufacturing we want (and build a new rampart+fort closer to the new border). I never even bother clicking that button.

4. Released three patches in a row with game-breaking bugs. Totally unacceptable.

 

[Ninking]

When in EU4 is paying that much GC for a second, non-duplicate manufactory worthwhile?

Building a coal thingy somewhere you already have a manufactory.

 

[Hezekiah]

Building a coal thingy somewhere you already have a manufactory.

I thought coal replaced the old trade good entirely.

 

[EarlKonrad]

1. Monument is a really nice addition. Some are OP e.g. -10% tech cost [...]

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