And yet another point of view.
I like the EU2 events. I liked them a lot. They were fun to read and it could be interesting to make your plans based on anticipated events. (And monarchs and leaders) I found the EEP, AGC, and later AGCEEP projects interesting and contributed in some small part a few years ago.
However, I never, ever, tried to pretend to myself or anybody else that they were truly "historical" or "made sense" as some of you claim when you lament their lot. They did neither. At best they taught me something about the history of this world, in which I live - they were never, ever, relevant to the game world in which I was playing, no matter how many event triggers were added in later projects to "guide you into doing the thing you should be doing to be historically plausible". Ultimately, EU2 "historical" events were, in game terms, ahistorical nonsense, a forced fit of "make this trend happen again, because it is the trend that
should be happening, based on a singleton observation. Our history is rife with happenings that would be deemed "unlikely, not an acceptable historical outcome" if it weren't for one fact - that they actually happened.
Trying to guide an alternate history to broadly follow one particular set of unlikely happenings each game, while interesting, isn't a very good fit, and neither is the other typical EU2 modder's project "the player do what he wants so long as the AI does the 'historically right thing'".
Thus the design decision to write the new game engine (and it is rewritten from scratch, it isn't an "EU2 with features disabled" as some of you seem to believe when talking about "enabling X for modders again, why do you remove our freedom") based on the alternate model "get a historical starting position - and let the world develop from there with each nation trying to do its best in the situation it is placed" is - at least to my mind - much more historical than EU2 ever was, it is truly about
creating history, not recreating it.
As for feeling more bland... The thing that made e.g France feel like France (to me) in EU2 was not getting a boatload of events that were either irrelevant to my position or an attempt to make me perform certain specific actions - it was having the French flag, being located in... France... Having the same natural enemies that France did due to conflicts of interest... or their successors, should somebody else prove triumphant.
I'll still miss some of the event texts, though, simply because it was more fun to
read the often wacky descriptions of "historical" events and it would occasionally cause me to go look up the incidents described, something that the more generic approach is unlikely to - but overall that's a small sacrifice for something that ends up a better game with more competitive opponents, opponents that aren't hamstrung by myriads of competing directives trying to make them perform "historically".... It also means that I get events no matter which a nation I play.
