I would just like to point out that in numerous instances which can affect outcome/choices made, the UI still plainly lies to our face every time we play.
The UI has lied to our faces in ways properly documented for more than 6 years in some cases.
You can still get blocked by hostile forts that never existed. You can still get broken by rebels that cannot break you. You can still have cobelligerent nations not be cobelligerent. You can still be banned from taking provinces you can core instantly on the basis that you can't core them...yet are sometimes allowed to take provinces you cannot core. You can still have small stacks arriving at the same time as other stacks get wiped before the other stacks participate. You can still have a battle and not have a battle.
Not an inclusive list, of course. A canteen of water? One of those recent "canteens" broke about a patch later (shift click gold demands in peace deals). I would love things like auto religious converter. Or a functional grant province screen based on best practices somewhere in the neighborhood of the past two decades. Or even to have the old, superior building UI back.
But let's not let the warped priorities in Pdox games warp our own perceptions.
EU 4 and HOI 4 are games where the basic controls still don't work. The UI lies to us about what will happen when we pick something or give an input. Repeatedly and reliably. Selling QoL features that I would bet money won't perform at the level of strong player micro before fixing the controls is callous. Ultimately, QoL features do the same job that functional controls do: reduce player time doing rote inputs/doing actions that don't require much thought to progress the game.
Yet we already have to babysit bad UI for:
- Grant province
- Give province to client state
- Converting province religions
- Constructing buildings
- Removing buildings (which is just awful to do, yet strongly incentivized when conquering land because they made the AI deliberately select bad buildings!)
- Basic unit movement/changing path when clicking on same target province
- Naval movement due to randomly re-adding on-arrival attrition because reasons
Just to give a few examples. Some of these are still paid features gated on DLC. I am not the least bit surprised people are complaining when Pdox is trying to sell QoL in a game rife with bad design + outright bugs when it comes to existing QoL.
There is a pretty clear line between "attempting to make the controls better" vs "allowing player to do things that were previously not available". Even if the carpet siege UI is perfect (it won't be), it will at best match what elite players are doing with stack splitting/sieging right now.
That's not to say the new stuff is all bad, far from it. 1.30 and 1.31 have a lot of positives for EU 4. But yeah, messing with this kind of QoL thing and selling it while the game still can't honestly tell you whether a battle is going to happen or not is going to rub some people the wrong way for reasons that should be obvious.
variety.com
