Help us improve Europa Universalis!

[RichardShru]

I've always felt that the argument between min-maxing and roleplaying is weird. A game's mechanics, in theory, should create optimal play through their immersive use in the world. For example, would anyone say that Min-Maxing Dishonored by having perfect runs is a non-rp application of the game's mechanics?

I'm typing that here because it didn't really occur to me until after I finished the survey. Personally, the easiest thing they could change that I really miss are the old espionage mechanics. The idea that you can't lift fog of war anymore until essentially the endgame always felt like a wasted use of a mechanic, especially considering it all used to be available upfront from the start, and was later locked behind an idea group (less ideal by comparison, but at least attainable).

Also rebels are incredibly weak unless a country is on its last legs. So supporting them really only makes sense as a casus belli, which is also unlikely to be used because there's better cb's, AND you need to invest pretty heavily in rebel support efficiency to make it likely for one to even pop off in the first place.

They managed to do intrigue well in the CK series, its just unfortunate that it feels like it was effectively almost removed from EU4 by comparison through gating behind tech.

 

[DragonTW]

What were the results?

CK3

I don't think they published the numbers from the survey.

Upon seeing they are doing this kind of survey just like they did with CK2, my thought is that EU5 is on its way. CK2, despite a good, full last DLC (Holy Fury), still had room for more improvement and flavour in some neglected areas that remained as such and I personally wasn't too enthusiastic with the announcement of CK3 (which perhaps will be a better game some years from now, or perhaps not...). EU4 of course has lots of room for improvement, and by "improvement" I mean fixing bugs and try to reduce the "feature-bloat" that has been pestering the game more or less since Mandate of Heaven. But the game is in such a poor state right now (EU4 didn't have its "Holy Fury moment" that we awaited so much, after all, with Emperor being what we may call a flop) that I, this time, wouldn't be surprised if they dropped it after a couple free patches with small content just to bid farewell and maybe try some stuff to future implementation in EU5.

 

[Metz]

I'm going to put a few points that I think should be changed:
A) Less numerical modifiers. Fewer numerical modifiers that have greater consequences.
B) Change Colonialism substantially, create more of a difference between simply claiming a province and developing it.
C) Shift more economic decisions to the state level, this would allow the economy system to be deeper.
D) Totally change Trade, right now trade mostly just puts a twist on map painting. Instead it should be more about "acquiring" goods from far off places and selling them. It could have much less numbers involved, but if the core logic that goes into it is right, it would be much more interesting. Also, right now the gains from monopolisation are disproportionately large. It's better to monopolise trade nodes where you have presence then to trade in places you have no presence, I think it should be the other way around, and would make gameplay more interesting.

This should be possible in the future now that natives can claim "grazing" provinces. Europeans should claim whole states in exchange for prestige (which they gain from discovering these lands in the first place). However, claiming these states shouldn't make these provinces uncolonizable by others.

 

[durbal]

Whatever else you do, make sure to get rid of metagame rewards like mission trees. They are anti-strategy by either rewarding you for something you planned to do anyway or punishing you (relatively speaking) for not doing something you consider to be a bad idea.

And they make playing as something without such content feel like you're missing out.

Let's not even mention the balance nightmare they create.

 

[Chazb5046]

Oh golly please don’t make another map painter Psyched for EU5 (if it’s good)

 

[Spartakus]

Filled it in. As a feedback, it's hard to say which game is best at a certain thing without playing those games. For example I heard that Victoria is good at population management, but I haven't played it, so I can't confirm. EU4 doesn't have pops in the first place, so can't really answer that.
Your answers to these questions might be a bit skewed because of that.

Same. The only game I have played that has any population management is Stellaris and pop management in Stellaris is terrible.

 

[Ololorium]

I think the survey questions "In which Paradox game is system X (warfare, economy, population etc.) is better?" can be read in two ways: which Paradox game has a working system that's good and which Paradox game has a great idea behind the system, but implements it poorly. The example might be the economy and trade in Victoria: the idea of simulating actual supply and demand instead of having a system which simply modifies the amount of "gold" you get per month is great, but the implementation not so much, both from gameplay perspective (it's too chaotic and out of control, especially if you are playing as a small country, there's nothing you can do to guarantee access to some good you need, no way to set tariffs on a particular good(s) or issue an embargo against a particular rival country etc.) and the historical perspective (instant trade on a global market in the XIXth century, no representation of the service sector workers except for the clergy, bureaucracy and military, static pop types which make no sense sometimes, like the clergy being the ones producing literacy and science even in the second half of the game etc.). In the endgame there's a permanent overproduction crisis you can do nothing about (except simply subsidising all the factories) and it makes the game barely playable (one can argue that it's kind of historical, because of the Great Depression, but because in the game work for poor people always means they must "produce" something and they can't be put to work on building parks and highways, for example, there's no fun way of handling it). So I can't say Victoria does the economy better than any other game (I'm not even sure I want Victoria 3 if the system is copypasted there). Still, I answered this way because I hope the developers take the idea behind the system and tweak it to apply to EU.

 

[Tue_p3]

Wishlist: diplomatic unions, naval only trade wars, diplomatic win conditions, economic win conditions. More focus on age mechanic. Guilds versus free trade conflicts

 

[AngelRay]

I personally chose for those:
paint the map/create my own story/change history.

 

[Ekcrbe]

I thought about not replying at first, because I don't have an extensive number of hours in any other game, so my comparisons may come from a place of weakness, but I did have one point I wanted to make, so I answered. I'm copying that here in case anyone else finds it compelling.

—

EU4 has always been my primary Paradox game of choice, but my main conceptual critique of its style is this: There are many actions which have clear and rigid cutoffs between success and failure or acceptance and rejection—sending diplomatic requests, rebel progress vis-à-vis positive vs. negative unrest, peace deals, etc. I think this style of presentation can lead to an oversaturation of information in places, and turn otherwise exciting events into joyless mini-min-maxing quests. I didn't particularly enjoy a moment in a recent game that I spent finagling with legitimacy, diplomatic reputation, opinion, and trust via great power influence to get another country to +1 reasons to accept vassalization. It felt gamey, and the opposite of the promise of a title like EU4, which is to be deep and immersive. It also, in my mind, contributes to EU4's tendency to encourage perfectionism—I feel far more pressure not to permit any bad outcomes in this game than I do in other Paradox titles, largely because I know all the information is available to optimize my situation.

I think EU4 could learn a lot from its sister Paradox titles in how to introduce more degrees of uncertainty, rather than simple, absolute yes/no outcomes. We already see this at play in areas like the combat system, where a core feature is the fact that battles and sieges have random die rolls that influence results. If we removed this aspect, warfare would become a totally lifeless system where outcomes are entirely calculable before the fact, and the key to certain victory is simply committing enough time to forethought to ensure one adequately outnumbers the enemy. But this is essentially the ethos taken in so many other areas of the game. By way of comparison, I especially like the way CK3 presents events with probabilistic outcomes and interactions where the probabilities are not even stated, but only "dependent on [one's] personality."

From an immersion standpoint, even as the disembodied demi-ruler that the EU4 player inhabits, it feels cheap that the reaction of every other ruler to every possible move by the player is known with exact certainty at any moment. Handing the player an immense cheat code book, as the situation arguably amounts to, detracts from the ability of the game to offer immersion and instead engenders a sort of railroad engineer simulator aspect—the job incomprehensible from the outside, but inevitable and programmatic for the expert. Nearly any problem can be solved with a four-function calculator and some time browsing the wiki for all the possible modifiers, and this availability presents a moral hazard for players like me who would prefer to be a bit more "along for the ride" in a role-playing capacity but don't like playing sub-optimally either.

I understand this perspective is not universal among the players, and so my proposed solution would have to set togglable with a game rule, but I would deeply appreciate the ability to turn on a "fog of diplomacy" mode where many of the threshold-dependent interactions are replaced with probabilistic outcomes depending on the relative strength of the competing factors, or the input information is at least obscured in some way. I still enjoy the game as it is, but this change would bring me back the sense of awe and wonder that I felt when I first dove into Paradox games, when consequences felt surprising and profound and I hadn't yet touched the bottom.

 

[AlphaMikeOmega]

More internal mechanics would be great. Unmitigated blobbing should be difficult (hence it not happening in real history).

 

[EarlKonrad]

I have no idea what type of game is tall or wide, or what is min/max and relaxed. Please, next time rephrase what are you exactly asking for.

The one thing that bothers me the most is the bottom right corner, tab called "history of a nation" I wrote a lot about it*, with many bugs, error that appear, what causes them, etc. so I hope it will either get fixed, or completely removed from the game, as it's current exist serves no purpose at all.

* In the last page of the survey, where was the place to add something from myself.

Unpopular opinion: Tall and Wide are two meaningless terms that have no clear definition and can't have as the comunity can't agree what are the boundaries of each and how (God forbid if this could happen) do they interact. They are, unfortunately, terms thrown around to try and convey vague ideas with Tall being not expanding much and doing internal stuff and Wide the opposite.

One thing that I absolutely don't understand is how Johan, a very good game designer by the way, has adopted the terms coined by the communite (mana, wide, tall, etc.) without making an effort to clearly define them so that in turn the community can have a better and easier discussion about the things that they pertain. This surrey had quite a few head-scratcher moments with the Tall-Wide being one of them.

 

[EarlKonrad]

Filled it in. As a feedback, it's hard to say which game is best at a certain thing without playing those games. For example I heard that Victoria is good at population management, but I haven't played it, so I can't confirm. EU4 doesn't have pops in the first place, so can't really answer that.
Your answers to these questions might be a bit skewed because of that.

Its as if whoever made the survey,or had the idea for it, presumed that the surveyed would have played or play all Paradox games. Shocking to see that there wasn't an option to say that you had no idea which game did so and so better considering that on the first page there wasn't and option to say that you had never played so and so Paradox game.

And it also made no sense to include all of those games in all categories. For example, as you mentioned, why would someone say that EU 4 has the best pop management aside from EU 4 being the only game that they play amongst Paradox games or because they love the game to death? The game has no pop at all so why even include it on the list?

 

[Vohen]

Unpopular opinion: Tall and Wide are two meaningless terms that have no clear definition and can't have as the comunity can't agree what are the boundaries of each and how (God forbid if this could happen) do they interact. They are, unfortunately, terms thrown around to try and convey vague ideas with Tall being not expanding much and doing internal stuff and Wide the opposite.

One thing that I absolutely don't understand is how Johan, a very good game designer by the way, has adopted the terms coined by the communite (mana, wide, tall, etc.) without making an effort to clearly define them so that in turn the community can have a better and easier discussion about the things that they pertain. This surrey had quite a few head-scratcher moments with the Tall-Wide being one of them.

They are poorly defined indeed, but more in the sense that they are more of a sliding scale than a binary concept.
But the ideas they try to convey are pretty clear, defining preferred playstyles, as you yourself said.
So I'd argue they are far from meaningless.

 

[John the John]

my thought is that EU5 is on its way.

Well that would be really disappointing. I was hoping Victoria III would come first.

 

[CPU Taro]

I agree, but there is definitely a subset of players that focuses on squeezing every applicable bonus out of the game for any particular action.

I once saw a guy on these forums say Paradox had "ruined" EU4 for him by adding too many sources of development cost reduction, for example. He was upset at the number of places he had to remember to click to minimize his development costs, and the feeling that he'd played sub-optimally when he forget to take advantage of any development cost reduction.

Can't help but find that pretty pedantic. Minmaxing always involves added tedium, streamlining it doesn't make any sense. If you want a challenge turn the difficulty up, use mods. I don't think that they should expect the base game to orientate itself around draining every last % out. I mean, I thought the whole point of minmaxing was some constructed sense of pride that you've mastered a system, that you know it inside and out. What's the appeal of it being simplistic? If you want the feeling of minmaxing while not actually being any good at the game then, idk, there's always console commands.

 

[CthulhuTactical]

I don't think this poll will influence anything, it's just nice posturing

 

[Atreides]

Diplomacy, Colonizing, Naval and institutions are the weakest aspects of Eu4.

Instiutions are far to easy to spread and de facto you never see a meaningful tech difference between Europe and the Rotw

THIS! Institutions as an overall concept just don't work very well for what they are supposed to represent. Technical disparity in 1700 just doesn't exist.

 

[Atreides]

Well that would be really disappointing. I was hoping Victoria III would come first.

Wiz has been leading some sort of project for two years at this point. Chris King was brought in to do something for two+ years prior to Wiz's change of position.

Wiz is either working on Victoria III, Stelarris II, or something else.

The lack of a Paradox Con for 2020 though means that whatever normal teasers we would get for upcoming Paradox content is unlikely to happen this year.

 

[WindingArc]

Can't help but find that pretty pedantic. Minmaxing always involves added tedium, streamlining it doesn't make any sense. If you want a challenge turn the difficulty up, use mods. I don't think that they should expect the base game to orientate itself around draining every last % out. I mean, I thought the whole point of minmaxing was some constructed sense of pride that you've mastered a system, that you know it inside and out. What's the appeal of it being simplistic? If you want the feeling of minmaxing while not actually being any good at the game then, idk, there's always console commands.

I agree with your opinion. I wasn't being pedantic; I was trying to shed some light on how the minmaxing players think. It might be possible to please them by having fewer opportunities for minmaxing - more "perfect" games - and devoting resources to roleplay aspects of gameplay instead.

Whether or not you think it's pedantic, it's still worth considering because there are people who buy and play EU4 precisely for the "tedium" you identified. It doesn't seem likely that Paradox will deliberately disappoint a significant segment of its players for the sake of a purer experience for another segment.