I don't understand the attitude of this forum

[Wizzington]

In the vast majority of cases, backlash to a balance and gameplay changes is actually just complaining about change, in itself. 1.12 changed a lot of things, and it's to be expected that the complaints would be more loud than usual and that they would mainly target easily articulated topics such as the increased coring costs. You'll notice the vast majority of complaining about it has died down now that people are used to the new rules and the rhetoric being thrown around like 'it is now completely impossible to expand' didn't exactly turn out to match reality.

This has happened with every major patch, will continue to happen with every major patch, and we usually manage to find some valid feedback among all the yelling.

 

[Wizzington]

You're confusing difficulty with speed.

Imagine you're on a road trip, sightseeing from point A to point B, but once you get about 100 miles away from point B you're in your hometown with nothing unfamiliar to check out and you just get bored and finish things up.

A more difficult nation starts at a further point A. There's more to see and more to do because you have further to go.

Paradox nerfing expansion again and again and again? That's not increasing the distance of the trip, it's setting your car to go half the speed limit.

The game would not provide twice the fun if it took twice as long to play. Nerfs to conquest don't add peacetime gameplay.

So if we removed AE and made coring free and instant, the game wouldn't become easier? That's a silly and far too narrow definition of difficulty. If anything, difficulty in games is precisely about the time it takes to do things - Dark Souls is difficult because you have to spend a large amount of time learning and dying to complete its encounters.

 

[Wizzington]

Removing AE and making coring cheaper are two very different things.
AE is a real obstacle that makes sense and must be played around, I love it.
But coring as in EU4 is just a boring and tedious process that's just there to annoy the player. EU3-style coring was much, much better IMO.

Coring adds difficulty because it requires tradeoffs between expanding your territory and other things such as tech and ideas, much like for example tradeoffs in skill builds adds difficulty in an RPG. You may not like it, but that doesn't make it anymore 'fake' difficulty than AE.

 

[Wizzington]

There are lots of legitimate complaints from changes in each patch. Remember 1.6 and how ridiculous AE was? Or how the nationalism modifier was added and rebels popped up like gophers?

Yeah, I remember, and after venting, I'd usually mod the game myself the way I see fit. And it works.

Same with the recent patch, as I wasn't a fan of the high coring costs. I modded it back to previous levels and now I'm fine.


You can't just dismiss the rants as rabble and ignore it. Some changes are good, others not so much.


And to OP, everyone has different ways of playing. Some of them are more tolerant when it comes to playstyles, other not so much. Go figure, it's the internet.

There will always be people who do not get used to the new changes, but that doesn't mean the changes were bad - you will never have 100% of pplayers agree on anything. The vast, vast, vast, vast majority of players do not mod their game or go back to an old version, though. Most of them complain for a while and then adjust.

Of course, in some cases complaints are 'legitimate' insofar that more than a handful of players continue to feel that a change has made the game worse. You can usually tell because those are the complaints that persist and find agreement internally in the dev team. Nowadays, we tend to catch such changes before release because we have more testing resources.

 

[Wizzington]

No, it wouldn't be easier or harder. It would simply be faster.

Managing alliances, income, and manpower in the course of conducting wars is the challenge the game provides.

Double the length of truce timers, triple the cost of coring, quadruple the time it takes to core something - none of that makes the game harder, it just makes it take longer. Taking longer to do the exact same thing does not increase the fun involved. People would not call the game "innovative and exciting!" if you made truce timers last 100 years, they would just be bored out of their @#$#@ minds. Just like they would be if you made every minion and npc in a dark souls game have 100x the hp.

I challenge you to play a campaign with the normal rules, then play one with the same nation with instant free coring and no AE. See if you really don't find the second one easier.

Then again, you seem to have invented your own meaning for the word 'difficulty' so who knows what you'd even measure by.

 

[Wizzington]

I think that a big problem is that way too many things are tied to a resource that is random in nature. I get having some things tied to that, but it makes little sense that, for example, you have to choose between province development and technological advancement as they went hand-in-hand IRL.
It doesn't make much sense from a fluff perspective, it's random and way too many things depend on it. At least some of the uses of Monarch Points should be switched to use gold (or just a lot of time) instead, I think.

I think the criticism about resource randomness in regards to Monarch Power is to some degree fair, though I also think the randomness adds a certain emotional layer to the flow of the game - you care about your monarchs and your heirs to a much greater degree than you otherwise would. I also think that if the resource randomness *really* bothered people that much, republics would be far more popular than they currently are.

However, even if we were to 'fix' this, the way to do so would not be to make fewer things use MPs as that would pretty much destroy their core design of tradeoffs.

 

[Wizzington]

You're still confusing difficulty with speed. The game is not easier or harder if I play on speed 1 versus speed 4.

What exactly do you think 'difficulty' in an empire builder is? It's how fast you can grow powerful, and how many obstacles impede your progress. The faster you can grow powerful, the easier the game is. This is the accepted meaning of 'difficulty' in EU4 game design and what people are talking about when they say EU4 is an easy or a hard game. The fact that you have invented your own meaning for the word does not oblige anyone else to adopt that meaning.

 

[Wizzington]

They can still provide some trade-offs. I didn't really mind most of their uses before 1.12. But province development in particular bothers me a lot because technological advancement versus development shouldn't be a trade-off in the first place as the countries with the highest wealth per capita were also usually the most technologically advanced ones, therefore making that particular trade-off counter-intuitive.

Realism arguments are meaningless, sorry. You can use realism to argue against or for literally anything.

 

[Wizzington]

The only emotion I ever notice regarding my rulers is irritation when I get fed 179 months of agency denial.

Sure, but that's you personally. Take a trip around this forum or any forum talking about EU4, and watch how many words and how much emotion people put into stories about bad rulers living forever, mocking Enrique and Henry VI, making jokes about hunting accidents when someone gets a 5/5/5 heir, etc. Many players don't realize just how much they actually 'enjoy' getting occasionally screwed by the RNG.

 

[Wizzington]

Or they just try to find the humor in it. But it does make for great jokes.

I'm obviously not saying people are super happy at getting a 0/0/0 heir, but negative emotions can actually serve to draw players into games just as much as positive ones - why else would anyone play a horror game?

 

[Wizzington]

Besides, gold, on the contrary to MP, has very little uses. It's an almost useless resource in this game, which is weird to say the least.

Hyperbole doesn't do your arguments any favors. It's true that gold becomes too plentiful in the mid and endgame, but 'almost useless resource' is about as true as expansion being 100% literally impossible in 1.12.

 

[Wizzington]

That's pretty much what I meant, though. You often have way more gold than you can realistically spend if you play as an European nation. There should be more gold sinks in this game.

I understood your meaning, but spare me the ridiculous exaggerations in the future. 'Almost completely useless resource' means that you'd basically be fine if you had no gold at all, and I don't think anyone believes that.

I am looking into ways to address the excess of gold in the midgame though.

 

[Wizzington]

Length of time required to complete something is a result of increased difficulty, not the other way around.

I'd guess that a campaign as, say, Milan would be much harder with instant coring and no AE, assuming that the AI was designed to take this into account. France and the other majors would instantly blob to insane degrees, faster than you could. If you make the snowballing process faster, the bigger snowballs have an even bigger advantage.

On the other hand, slower expansion in general benefits the player more, because it plays off of our inherent advantages over the AI. We're better able to handle multiple slower-burning wars, we're better able to make detailed long-term plans about how to avoid AE, or eat up large coring costs. And because we are able to deal with blocks on expansion better than the AI, our rate of growth is always greater than the AI. So, removing blocks to expansion entirely would make the AI much more competitive.

That being said, of course removing AE and coring would be a stupid idea, and overall I'm quite happy with how the game plays right now. But I think you're reasoning is flawed.

Nah, it'd benefit the player because players are much better at adapting to such extreme systems and finding strategies to exploit them. New players might have a bit of a rougher time of it though.

 

[Wizzington]

Early game economy is fine. Mid and late game economy is better than it was, but you still get to the 'far too much money' phase eventually.

 

[Wizzington]

While technically true, electing has a ton of problems of its own relating to drop of "legitimacy" and bad events. you also need to re elect a 60 year old guy (usually) at least 3 times for him to enter the "above average" territory.

Simply because of his age this will be rare. Combine that with the fact that you can't always do it because your republican mana drops way too much and you get an average of shit monarchs way above monarchies.

If you know what you're doing, you'll get tons of monarch points from a republic. I think you're running on a lot of assumptions coming from not actually playing them.

 

[Wizzington]

Of course there are also the people that realize the game is no longer to their liking because of these changes and the path it seems to take, find something better to do with their spare time, only check the forums in a more and more infrequent manner and move on.

I'm sure those people exist, but considering our player numbers grow with each expansion, there can't be all too many of them.

 

[Wizzington]

it has quited down because its futile, ur responses only come when those u dont agree with have given up

for me the game is dead, hopefully you have enough replacements, actualy im sure youl have. and im yust a number you dont care about.

you cant say that every dlc its the same, because not 1 time did the game totaly change with a patch and dlc, you created a new game, and the old game is gone forgood. and trust me i would have spend many more euro's if the game actualy continued on its path it did for so many patches

bil

This may be true for you, and I think it's unfortunate that you don't find the game to your liking anymore, but there is nothing to suggest your experience is shared by the majority of people who complained about the changes, and quite a lot to suggest that it isn't.

What precisely is it that makes the game unplayable for you now, if I may ask?

 

[Wizzington]

Yeah like the 30+ page thread about a significant rebalance when it comes to idea groups that wasn't even put in the patch notes. No dev response, no attempt to explain until months down the road when it finally came out as "multiplayer balance", a line of reasoning that had been thoroughly debunked as ineffective and offensive.

Under the assumption that you're talking about the 50% block:
1) It was commented on when the change was made, that it was primarily about stacking MIL ideas (both in SP and MP). If it was left out of patch notes it certainly wasn't intentional to do so.
2) It wasn't purely about multiplayer balance, though that was a big aspect to it.
3) Who has proven balancing around multiplayer (note that by saying that I mean balancing the game so that it works in both SP and MP, the old 'we only balance for multiplayer' is still hogwash) to be ineffective, and by what measure? Was there a scientific paper published on EU4 balancing and nobody told me?
4) This is so laughable I hesitate to ask, but do elaborate on how our balancing methods have been proven 'offensive'. Is there a political action group picketing Paradox headquarters because balancing games with multiplayer in mind is an insult to their culture?

Honestly, you do know that just because you imagine something in your mind does not mean it automatically becomes reality... right?

 

[Wizzington]

Also, another thing that I wanted to say: while I realise that expecting any changes of this is silly as it won't ever happen in EU4, the one thing that I dislike the most in EU4 is the existence of mana in the first place. It just feels wrong and it's the reason why I stayed on EU3 and didn't want to play EU4 at all after my first game on EU4 1.0 (which I played to 1821) up until Art of War was released when I finally reluctantly made the switch.

If your biggest problem with EU4 is that it has mana then I have some great news for you: You've actually been playing Skyrim all along! You can buy a copy of EU4 with a 75% discount here.

 

[Wizzington]

Was the name of the monarch point resource changed, or is it just 'hip' to refer to it as mana if you don't like the mechanic?

It's a meme from a really, really funny steam review. The problem is that some people think the same joke is funnier each time you tell it.