I don't see why "arcade mode" should have negative connotations. To me it would be the same sort of thing as an always war mod. It wouldn't necessarily be easier, but it would provide an experience entirely centered around fast-paced strategy for those who want that sort of gameplay. Heck, I'm proudly one of those NOFUNALLOWED role-playing history nerds, and even I'd play a few games in arcade every now and then, just for the change of pace. We just need to realize that grand strategy gamers basically want three different games from EUIV, and it would be fairly easy to provide that for the community by creating three different modes with different expansion mechanics.
But if people would REALLY get offended by their playstyle being called "arcade", just call it Napoleon Mode or something.
Either way, there's no reason we should all get buttfrustrated at each other just because we want to play different variations on the same game. Instead of agitating to get our own preferred mechanics in a single game mode, which will just result in the devs pandering to everyone and completely pleasing no one, we should agitate to have the devs create several different game modes. To elaborate a bit more on how I see this working, we could have:
-A Historical Mode, where the ease of expansion fluctuates considerably based on the time and place, and in line with historical plausibility. So, for instance, in 1800 France or Austria can conquer and core Europe really fast (but massive coalitions will form really quickly for little AE), random international coalitions of natives don't form against GB (but attrition is much higher overseas until your tech/presence there increases), giant swathes of territory can be taken in 1700s colonial wars (but that massively increases colonial rebel chance), etc. etc. etc. It could allow for far greater fluctuations in power and a lot more risk to strong empires, but also greater opportunity for extremely skilled players (unless they're playing Ryukyu, Albania, etc., of course). This mode would generally be around 1.2 in terms of difficulty of expansion, with the historical part making certain aspects a lot easier and certain parts a lot harder.
-A Normal Mode, where expansion is somewhere between 1.13 and 1.2 in difficulty and speed. Perhaps keep the basic expansion mechanics constant in this mode for those who want a fairly consistent gameplay experience and less risk.
-An "Arcade"/Napoleon Mode, where expansion is easy for anyone who has the military and economic capabilities to carry it out. Make coring faster (or get rid of OE altogether!), make manpower replenish faster, etc., and have all these bonii apply to the AI as well, so the game presents a serious endgame challenge of massive blob wars.
I don't think any of these modes would be "easy" or "difficult", they would just offer fundamentally different experiences to players with fundamentally different desires.
Moreover, I'm not a dev and have only made a few crappy event mods in Paradox games, so maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about, but I don't think this would be enormously difficult to program. Surely if implemented it would solve the pointless divisions we've been experiencing lately.
Who's with me?
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