If you don't find money useful, then I assume you already have three +3 advisors.
Anyway, money is not the only thing you can get for 0 AE. You can also revoke cores, return cores, release nations, cancel vassals and cancel treaties. Breaking down big countries like France or Russia in multiple small countries is quite satisfying IMHO.
People who just want to paint the world map should probably play Hearts of Iron instead.
Generally, yes being a major means I have all the +3 advisers I want; it is not uncommon for me to be running +2s or +1 for the bonuses (e.g. diplomats and statesmen can handily trump most anyone else, even with the point penalty), likewise, I can get a lot more out of various advisers - like theologians, inquisitors, and the like than the points are worth.
Military, well, if I'm western and large, I basically end up hitting ahead of time penalties and tech can get really low (HRE, ideas, and the odd event); fortifications are barely worth it in frontier, wrong religion provinces and once you get big enough and transition to heavy mercenary use manpower buildings become a lot less useful (though I try to have a few provinces with the full line and recruit all my regiments from those). Carrying extra generals is useful ... but only up to a certain point (one admiral/explorer, one conquistador, and maybe two generals). Harsh measures and rerolling generals are useful, but I often just end up with heavy surpluses that make investing in better mil advisers useless. Certainly in war adviser type trumps point gain - morale can put me over the top for automatic stack wipes (particularly with mismatches), discipline can allow me to more quickly burn down enemy manpower, recruitment speed works wonders when I'm doing a Russian war, etc.
Is money the only thing? Of course not. As I've already noted, releasing nations (e.g. Styria) and returning cores are useful. Removing cores is laughable, from a strategic standpoint you want pretty much every core in the game to last as long as possible. Why would I have France Revoke cores if I can break them by releasing nations, make them my vassals, and then feed them back their cores? All of these are usefl
if and only if the cores are there and viable. But not everyone is well supplied with useful cores as France and Austria in the early game. Denmark, for instance, has only Gotland. Muscovy has only one minor it its starting territory. Castille has just Galacia. Portugal has none and England just three provinces as two minors (excluding their French holdings which naturally go over to France and Burgundy pretty much instantly without player intervention). Even in the defunct core rich states, like France, the late game leaves piss all to hurt your rival if the AE timer isn't in a favorable position.
For instance, say I'm Austria in 1600 and I took some Italian land, now my AE within the empire is high. France gets itself into some trouble (it loses its Ottoman ally and goes to war with Spain when the Fronde breaks out). They are my biggest rival. How do I hurt France without driving all the HRE minors into coalition (as they get decent AE from France)? By 1600 virtually all the cores have expired. Taking trade power is a joke - I don't share in the main French nodes and the ones where we share (Antwerp and Genoa perhaps) are not ones where I collect (most often). If France is collecting in the colonies, I don't even hit their trade income hardly at all. Gold? Don't be daft, France has just spent all of its gold on raising mercs (like the AIs do when they face wars and rebellions). Release a nation? Can't be done. Cancel an alliance? Well let's see, if I'm not truce breaking or abusing game mechanics the odds that alliances will reform are pretty high, but more importantly why do I give a damn? If I've just declared on France and beaten them I have also beaten all their allies willing to defend them. Outside of a few esoteric cases, when I can declare on my rivals and beat them, I can also beat their allies, and mucking around there doesn't really change much.
There really is no way to actually hurt your opponents once the land they own lacks external cores - unless you spend AE. Hence why AE ends up trumping
every other strategic concern once you get big.
Homer2101:
The coalition mechanic exists to slow down player rate of expansion, and to provide more challenge for successful players.
Slow down, sure. Challenge? Don't make me laugh. Coalitions make the game easier for successful players. The AIs become completely predictable and the unified truce timer (along with a dozen other mechanisms) turn coalitions into a giant blob protection method. Given the ease with which coalitions can be avoided by big states, this "challenge" isn't.
Now I have a question about slow. Let's say you are playing the game and you make 1000 strategic decisions over the course of the game, everything else is an automatic reaction to those decisions. Why is it preferable to spread those 1000 strategic decisions over 4 hours of gameplay instead of 2?
In my estimation, we should want as much actual strategy (rather than button pushing to implement our strategies) in as little time as possible. Certainly there are a large number of ways that slow down the game that haven't worked in the past. E.g. in EUIII we had the merchant mini-game, the repetitive send diplomat to butter up/vassalize/annex game, click forever to build buildings and the like which really slowed down gameplay ... but we've, to much acclaim nerfed those systems for automation so I make the strategic decision - send the merchant & light ships here, and then I'm done. Likewise, one of the least controversial requests on the board is to have some sort of "upgrade" button that stops the player from needing to micro ships to delete, build new ones, and then reassemble their fleets. This would again, speed up the game.
What is desirable about a slow game? If we aren't increasing the strategic depth of the game when slowing it down, is this really an improvement?
