Motivation problems with EU4 at mid game / end game.

[Gaizokubanou]

Yes, I could do the "feed your vassals" thing, but I think it's silly. If I can take land and feed it to vassals / release vassals so they do the coring, why did Paradox not cut out this middleman? The increased coring time is there for a reason. If I can circumvent it with vassals (which is tiresome as well), then why increase coring times in the first place? Why introduce a limit to expansion, and then a (very tiresome and gamey/silly-feeling) mechanic to circumvent it?

Having middle management is... kinda how things work when you run a big organization with any semblance of efficiency. As for game mechanics though, yes it does make coring feel redundant since vassalize-sell land-annex just bypass the coring in more efficient manner.

 

[Lakedaimon]

Having middle management is... kinda how things work when you run a big organization with any semblance of efficiency. As for game mechanics though, yes it does make coring feel redundant since vassalize-sell land-annex just bypass the coring in more efficient manner.

Yea they should deffinetly fix that, you should no longer be able to do that.

 

[Andy_Dandy]

Personnaly, I don't abandon my game because it's getting hard to blob, I abandon them because I already have the biggest army and money after 100 to 200 years.

Ditto. I'm glad for the mechanics that gives us coalition wars, overextention, rebuilding buildings in conquered provinces etc, without them it would be so easy to paint the map your colour I'd lose interest. If I wanted Total War, I'd play Total War.

NB! I do also agree it's alot to easy to blob through vassals now. It does have it's cost in using a diplomatic relation (1 of 4, or 6 if you have the diplomacy ideas), for the time it takes to integrate it, but it is over the top how it works now. It would help alot if there was a ten years gap in between each time you could annex a vassal, then at least the diplomatic relation upkeep would hurt abit more in costing you potential valuable allies or loads of diplo-points.

 

[statistics999]

Look single player is just to get to know the game. Multiplayer is THE real thing. (organised multiplayer games with more than 8 people in ) 12-16 is best. and if you cant play daily multiplayer games and u are sentenced to patethic weekly games, then just uninstall eu 4 and play Bf3 or Rome 2 total war

 

[LiberiusX]

Has anybody else problems with motivation after a few hundred years?

I think this is a characteristic, not really a problem, with every sandbox and grand strategy game I've played. Eventually you reach a point where you run out of things you want to do. Personally, I think the EU IV grand campaign is set up so that most of the challenge is in the first 100-200 years of gameplay.

At the beginning, you're scrambling to build alliances. You're trying to figure out which of your neighbors is going to be your biggest threat. You might get into a few wars you aren't prepared for. To top it all off, your economy usually sucks, and your leader is a derp. Once you kind of start making progress here, the Reformation hits and then things get complicated again. Once you get that sorted out, you start fighting over colonies, if you are lucky enough to be a large enough power to participate.

That's pretty much it though.

There's a lack of paradigm shifts in the gameplay to keep the game interesting. The Reformation lacks potency. In my games, by 1550, continental Europe is all Catholic again, with Britain and Sweden maybe Protestant or Reformed. This ends the wars of religion which shouldn't be resolved until the mid 1600s. I mean c'mon, the Thirty Years War was THE event of the 17th Century, the culmination of the events of the entire 100 years before it, and in the grand campaign I've never seen anything remotely close to it occur.

 

[Konstantinos XV]

In my games, by 1550, continental Europe is all Catholic again, with Britain and Sweden maybe Protestant or Reformed. This ends the wars of religion.

Granted, my sample is small - merely two games beyond 1600. But this was true for both of them. Force religion is just too cheap and easy. And sometimes outright ridiculous, when an Orthodox power starts painting religious map mode its color with this peace option.

 

[Arbus]

1. Grow big enough to shape the world the way you want.
2. Shape the world the way you want.

You shouldn't grow so big that you risk becoming invencible, and you should use your strenght for good deeds. Release minors of your religion and culture and nurture them, not as vassals, but as free proud nation-states with their own destiny. Watch them and protect them like mother bird, feel their pain, send them armies and let them have the fun. Then sit back and watch as your broodlings make you proud.

 

[Konstantinos XV]

1. Grow big enough to shape the world the way you want.
2. Shape the world the way you want.

You shouldn't grow so big that you risk becoming invencible, and you should use your strenght for good deeds. Release minors of your religion and culture and nurture them, not as vassals, but as free proud nation-states with their own destiny. Watch them and protect them like mother bird, feel their pain, send them armies and let them have the fun. Then sit back and watch as your broodlings make you proud.

The sweetest thing in life is to balkanize your enemies, see their cities sacked by rebels and hear the lamentation of their advisers.
However, be wary. You might create a monster!

Spoiler

The Ukrainian BAT has become the Scourge of Eastern Europe!

Really. The best way to cripple Poland-Lithuania is to release Ukraine. And here's the result. :rofl: All that repressed nation-building libido was unleashed on Lithuania with a vengeance.
I am kinda proud of Georgian broodling though. Nice and tidy.

 

[Arbus]

The sweetest thing in life is to balkanize your enemies, see their cities sacked by rebels and hear the lamentation of their advisers.
However, be wary. You might create a monster!

Spoiler

The Ukrainian BAT has become the Scourge of Eastern Europe!

Really. The best way to cripple Poland-Lithuania is to release Ukraine. And here's the result. :rofl: All that repressed nation-building libido was unleashed on Lithuania with a vengeance.
I am kinda proud of Georgian broodling though. Nice and tidy.

Beautiful :laugh: That's exactly what I meant

 

[brifbates]

If the bigger, western, powers are boring you then try playing a second/third world nation. It's an entirely different game when the next pop-up you see could be the BBB coming to rain death and devastation on your fledgling empire with triple the tech and ideas.

 

[Raen]

Usually if I'm going to win it's obvious I have by about 1550, at which point I start getting bored. I am not one to continue to make huge empires.

Often what I do is look at the map of my saved game and pick out another nation that has had an interesting development and play them instead.

 

[Wuddel]

Has anybody else problems with motivation after a few hundred years?

I think that makes the colonization Trade game so fun. You fiddle around more and focus on key regions, instead of just blobbing. Have you westernized yet?

 

[OhioAstro]

The game doesn't work well for large empires. That's unfortunate. I'd like to be able to recreate things that actually happened: forming the Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empire. Napoleon sweeping across Europe. Forming the USSR. This is a perfectly valid style of gameplay, and EU4 makes it painful and tedious. That's the issue; if I look at the size and pace where the game bogs down I'm in the realm of history, not steamrolling the European continent.

On the challenge side, alliance armies should co-ordinate better and should be a real threat.

On the mechanics side, it would help to clean up what your goals are in alliance wars and also to make what you can achieve more logical and transparent. I can conquer entire countries that contribute nothing to the warscore; I can defeat a handful of armies that count a lot. For bad boy wars I'd favor something transparent, e.g. the war score is against the territory of the entire alliance (if you want to take things), or against the military of the entire alliance (if you want to just end things by defeating their armies.) It actually harms the AI for individual nations to be forced to stay at war when they are occupied and defeated; again, there should be some mechanisms that allows them to surrender individually and rebuild - perhaps very limited conquest or cash and a longer than normal truce period.

Whether you like large nations or not the current system is glitchy. You can still conquer lots of things, but have to do "catch and release" games with vassals and personal unions. You fight wars and can't achieve the stated goals even when you've crushed all opponents; the formulae for how you win those war can be very counter-intuitive; and the wars don't actually threaten you when you've hit critical mass. Fixing these things should be in the interests of everyone regardless of play style.

 

[zerotwo]

Play a minor. Play on a higher difficulty. Play Ironman.

"I am so huge in this game it takes forever to core because my gigantic nation is so gigantic I'm a threat to everyone and surrounded by coalitions."

Well. Yeah, that's how the game is designed, you get big, you are a threat, people don't like threats, they coalition against you, you sit there long enough that someone in the coalition becomes more powerful than you then they try to break you to lessen your might.

Makes sense to me, it's what we'd do.

 

[Beagá]

This game will be on the same path as EU III - soon enough, someone will make a more difficult and plausible mod, which was what Magna Mundi was about.

The problem is simple, really - to make playing small nations actually possible, silly mechanics have to be introduced that eventually make the game too easy for majors.

 

[Chaingun]

If you want world conquest play Total War.

Youre also playing nations that are at their peak around this time period. If you want an enjoyable game right to the end, you need to start smaller.

Also colonizing/taking over India/Asia is generally pretty fun late game. Or trying to invade Russia if they become a powerhouse.

Don't know if you responded to me, but since your post was under it, you might have. If you did, you failed to comprehend the issue pretty hard. The issue is the removal of dynamics from the game by making it so slow to expand that expansion in practice isn't possible anymore (ignoring vassal feeding). It should be pretty damn difficult, sure, but beyond a certain point it detracts value from the game rather than adding it, because if it isn't a realistic option then you've just removed a game dynamic and more static gameplay ensues. As I don't own the game yet this is purely what I've gathered from the forums, but it seems to be the case.

As for starting small, it does help, until you've reached the point where you are France version 2.

Still, I guess maybe some mods can fix this for me (if the values are editable).

 

[OhioAstro]

Play a minor. Play on a higher difficulty. Play Ironman.

"I am so huge in this game it takes forever to core because my gigantic nation is so gigantic I'm a threat to everyone and surrounded by coalitions."

Well. Yeah, that's how the game is designed, you get big, you are a threat, people don't like threats, they coalition against you, you sit there long enough that someone in the coalition becomes more powerful than you then they try to break you to lessen your might.

Makes sense to me, it's what we'd do.

That's missing the point. The particular ways of limiting growth in EU4 make for a terrible game if you're running a large empire. They also don't work in limiting growth - you're just forced to silly work-arounds. Let's say that you hit a problem with the trading game, and I responded by telling you to play a conquering nation instead. You'd probably regard that as unhelpful. Ditto here.

 

[InnocentIII]

I like to grow my nation and expand. This is my kind of gameplay. I also enjoy building up my realm with buildings and making my provinces stronger and richer, but that takes the second seat to expansion.

Now I tried the Ottomans and Oman from 1444, and with both I was in the 16th/17th century when I lost the motivation to go on. With coring times increasing with size, and with coalitions forming all around me making me fight all my neighbours every 5 years, I kinda lost interest in going on. If I can't keep my playstyle after 100/200 years (because I have to fight tiresome yet not particularly difficult wars for a handful of provinces, then wait decades for them to core), sitting around doing nothing but building buildings is boring, especially when buildings do not help me get more ideas and tech, but only gold, manpower and force limits (which I don't really need), thus making it a better strategic option to not build buildings in order to conserve monarch points.

Yes, I could do the "feed your vassals" thing, but I think it's silly. If I can take land and feed it to vassals / release vassals so they do the coring, why did Paradox not cut out this middleman? The increased coring time is there for a reason. If I can circumvent it with vassals (which is tiresome as well), then why increase coring times in the first place? Why introduce a limit to expansion, and then a (very tiresome and gamey/silly-feeling) mechanic to circumvent it?

And yes, I could still fight wars while I wait for my new provinces to core, like wars to make vassals, wars to grab money, wars to break up enemies, wars to protect my trade.... but.... I dunno. Wars where I don't take any land at the end bore me. I don't feel like I'm "progressing" in any way when I do that.

Has anybody else problems with motivation after a few hundred years?

I've always had this issue. I play 200ish years and do the things I'd intended to do and move on. I usually move on because there's another country I really want to try. Let's face it, it is very tough to re-create that whole starting out and expanding feel when you're huge. For me, anything approaching WC is just work.

That said, I agree with the others, find something you want to accomplish. I'll often take a stab at converting the Holy Land (that was fun as Vijayanagar). Pick a rival and destroy them, break them up, smash their navy, destroy their MP and income. Atomize Europe. Disband the HRE. Look, it's always about what do I want to do. It's an easy question to answer early, I wouldn't blame Paradox because it's so tough to answer late.

 

[Black_Shade]

I think that makes the colonization Trade game so fun. You fiddle around more and focus on key regions, instead of just blobbing. Have you westernized yet?

I've found that if I get involved in colonizing, the majority of colonies are taken by about 1600. In my last game as Burgundy/Netherlands, the only area left uncolonized by 1620 was Indonesia, although in another 10 years I would have finished that up too. Spain and their extra colonist already do a good job of painting the map very early, if the player gets involved as well there won't be any colonies left by midgame.

 

[Damarow]

edit: Reading this on the wiki: " Larger countries core province much more slowly, as each non-overseas province you own will increase coring times by 5%. This sets a soft limit to your country size, as eventually it will take prohibitively long to core provinces. As an example, at 100 province it would take 3 * (1+100*0.05) = 18 years to core a single province. "

What if I moved my capital to Australia? Would that make me core European provinces faster? (Kinda exploity though)

:O Didn't realize that, good to know. I think moving the capital should work, but isn't tax also reduced substantially, by like 90%? I guess its manageable somehow.