Mechanics that feel out of place.

[Peace Weaver]

One of the things that always breaks the spell for me when I start playing EU4 again in earnest is coming face to face with mechanics that feel out of place or unconsidered.

To be clear, my issue with these is not what they do or what they represent, but how they are implemented and what the user experience with them is like. There are definitely many more of these in the game, but these are the ones that stand out for me the most in recent play throughs:

Trading Companies:
Why must you hunt for a tiny button in each individual province to convert to a trading post rather than convert an entire region?
Why is it so unclear which provinces belong to trading companies?
Why is it so easy to accidentally erase a trading company (along with all the investments)?
Why are the investments a mixture of region-wide and area-wide bonuses?
Why are they built instantly when no other building is?
Why can you build all the investments in a region, except the highest tier investment?
Why must you look at the region screen to make investments, especially when not necessarily every province in a region belongs to the trading company?
Why is to so unclear what the actually pros and cons of a trading company is?

Raiding:
Why do you have to manually raid, when naval missions exist?
Why do only a hand full of very specific nations do this?
Why are you able to just get free money and sailors with so little consequences?
Why are naval batteries the only way of preventing raiding?
Why are the requirements for raiding so strangely specific and also completely arbitrary?

(these are rhetorical questions, I'm not really looking for answers, I'm just trying to express the experience of interacting with these mechanics)

I hope that as the devs turn their focus on fine tuning what is already in the game rather than implementing new features they do a second pass on all these of mechanics that can feel so out of place and unconsidered. Honestly, it sometimes feels like I am playing with a bunch of mods in the sense that there is a hodge podge of features that dont feel completely integrated with each other or part of a cohesive design.

 

[st360]

Trade policies (too forgettable, and nothing other mechanics don't already do). The 10 different "trade conflict" "trade war" "trade dispute" casus bellies.

 

[iClipse]

Regarding Trade Companies:

Using the trade mapmode you can click on a trade node and click to add all trade companies in that node to the trade company. If there is a company icon with a '-' next to it, everything is already added, so no need to go through each province individually.

It sucks it you want to convert these provinces to your religion first though.

 

[blackbirdgriffi]

I can't answer all but a couple of those are already in :

Trading Companies:
Why must you hunt for a tiny button in each individual province to convert to a trading post rather than convert an entire region?

Go into the trade map, you can add all provinces of the trade node into the map, If you want to convert and are lazy (like me) just state ==> convert all in the trade node ==> unstate ==> add all of the trade node, tbh it's really easy to ignore if you don't need to convert stuff.

Why is it so unclear which provinces belong to trading companies?

It's clear and very simple 1 trade node = 1 Trade company = 1 potential merchant

Why is it so easy to accidentally erase a trading company (along with all the investments)?

Why should It be complicated or unclear?

Why are the investments a mixture of region-wide and area-wide bonuses?

I think it's balance but this is less of a clear cut answer

Why are they built instantly when no other building is?

No idea

Why can you build all the investments in a region, except the highest tier investment?

Cause there is a one for each leve which goes ==> Province ==> Region ==> Trade node

Why must you look at the region screen to make investments, especially when not necessarily every province in a region belongs to the trading company?

Cough Macro-builder cough

Why is to so unclear what the actually pros and cons of a trading company is?

Bis repetitas

Raiding:
Why do you have to manually raid, when naval missions exist?
Why do only a hand full of very specific nations do this?
Why are you able to just get free money and sailors with so little consequences?
Why are naval batteries the only way of preventing raiding?
Why are the requirements for raiding so strangely specific and also completely arbitrary?

While I disagree with most of your complaints about TC (even though having mechanics hidden in UI is not a great solution) I completly agree about raiding, it's a bad mechanic which I almost always ignore (except when playing the knights where I'm quite glad to be able to built my war chest), for a better (yet quite shallow in it's own way when you look at historical raids) mechanic you could see the raiding of CKII

(these are rhetorical questions, I'm not really looking for answers, I'm just trying to express the experience of interacting with these mechanics)

Oh
Well I'll still leave my answer, I hope they might help someone other than you then sorry should have been more thorought in my reading

I hope that as the devs turn their focus on fine tuning what is already in the game rather than implementing new features they do a second pass on all these of mechanics that can feel so out of place and unconsidered. Honestly, it sometimes feels like I am playing with a bunch of mods in the sense that there is a hodge podge of features that dont feel completely integrated with each other or part of a cohesive design.

Most definitely, this game is old and therefore you can see how some don't mix too well, hence the rising opinion (be it correct or not) that the game needs to rest while EU5 takes over.

 

[MatthewP]

Many of these are wrong, but I think this points to the real issue: a lot of features in EU4 are not really documented in the game. You have to dig around the wiki a bunch to figure out how most things work. This is a genuine problem, but unfortunately it’s so pervasive that it probably won’t be fixed until EU5.