Economy and trade could be expanded so its more than just shifting merchants to the right places and conquering provinces with lot of trade power.
Played a game of Civiliztion after a long pause - EU4 feels shallow by comparison
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What is "bucket filling" supposed to mean? It seems rather simplistic, almost to the point of being meaningless.
Dear OP: While I agree EUIV is shallow, comparing it to Civ doesn't really make a strong argument for anything. Vicky 2 and CK2 are much better proxies to compare to EUIV. Being from the same dev and built on the same engine makes one wonder how the flagship franchise can be so weak.
"Comparing EUIV to Civ" threads belong to last year's trolls.
"Comparing EUIV to Civ" threads belong to last year's trolls.
Why? I would say that its most defining aspect is it's greatest shortcoming. Whatever people may say, EU4 is the most realistic game about its period. Civilization, by comparison, is ridiculously abstract.
So why is it so, that the less complex, more abstract game feels better?
It's just my guess, but maybe because EU is all about conflict, while Civ is more about achievement. And achievement is more positive.
The game I played had one interesting aspect of note - through the entire history of the "Spanish Empire" (founded 4000 BC) I have waged exactly one war. One. On the other hand, playing as the Aztec Empire from 1444 to 1516 (so far) I have waged 20, maybe 25 wars. War never changes, and neither does Europa Universalis.
The Spanish Empire achieved an arbitrary "victory" after being elected "World Leader" by the "UN", but it was also around 20 turns away from becoming "influential" culturally over the whole world and had 3 parts of a spaceship to Alpha Centauri ready. None of this makes any sense, if you stop just for a moment to think of it, but also none of this had anything to do with waging wars. It was all about achieving something peacefully.
The Aztec Empire did nothing but wage war. It waged war on its enemies, it waged war on its allies, it waged war on its own people. It build armies and ships and forts and collected money to build more of those. Even its trade it waged through war, by conquering more land to get "tradepower". It didn't do a single thing that would make it stand tall and proud above other nations that did not involve piling up skulls to stand atop them. To be fair, though, that's an achievement, as well.
Now, that's not to say that there isn't fun to be had in conquest, but the more I think of it, the more I become convinced that EU4 is all about Genghis-Khan-wannabes. There's no room for Plato, Einstein or Michelangelo here.
I guess the next game I play is going to be as the Jurchens. I'll conquer and conquer and conquer. And then, I'll have all the tradepower I need.
Cheers
I'm really sorry, BUB. but you can TOTALLY play a 500 year peace game. It's about what you want to do.
I have stayed peaceful as switserland for a couple centuries at a time, once i got my cores, all the way until france decided it wanted to eat some of savoy what used to be savoyard land.
To me, war is only to gain the land you need to achieve what you want, and the game is about building it up, and preparing for the eventualities that come with annexing other people's lands.
You play this game how you WANT to play it, and that is just a fact. I've actually played a portugal game without getting involved in a single offensive war throughout the 380 years :/ just don't rival anyone, no need to conquer anything, you can expand without doing so quite nicely, and you end up just as well, with maldives and empty indonesian areas before anyone else bothers to get there, and no big bad relations penalties on mainland europe because you dont have rivals, and alternate your dips around to make the colonising nations like you some...
I think i had... 3 wars in that? and all 3 were with people who wanted my carribean provinces. but without bein gin wars so much, i was having so much money and that my fleet was outsized of everyone elses P: so no one ever landed on my land in any of them.
(and id idnt even move my capital from lisboa.)
I had circumnavigated the globe by like 1480, being smart and going around africa then paying for port access,
letting them fix and keep going , paying for port access in ming and removing in kilwa, repeat until the hard pacific crossing, HOPING youc an making it to inca, and HOPING they already have ship capability ports!!! lol if not, losing a explorer (probably our last by that time, though always close to unlocking the second idea of exploration anywho by that time)and now there are elements in game of production and sell results that are completely removed from the trade systems.
ship building!but hey, it is not MY responsibility to give YOU imagination. but you can't pretend that EU4 is this bland game, when it's clearly only as imaginative as the person playing. :S
PI games aren't all that different. The only difference is that they're riddled with esoteric mechanics with a smack dab of frustrating randomness and bugs galore so that it becomes even more confusing.
i disagree... civ is literally a ticking time bomb where you have to do what you can not to be last by the end.
eu4 has never been that, for me at least.
i set my own goals, and i achieve them in various ways, through various strategies.
as korea, its fun to sell ships to ryukyu, support them in a conquest of s..shimazu? that south part of kyushu island.
fun. maybe not the goal of the game... but man it is fun to help the little guy
how deep this game is, really depends on how deep you are wanting it to be, and what you want out of it.
i disagree... civ is literally a ticking time bomb where you have to do what you can not to be last by the end.
eu4 has never been that, for me at least.
i set my own goals, and i achieve them in various ways, through various strategies.
as korea, its fun to sell ships to ryukyu, support them in a conquest of s..shimazu? that south part of kyushu island.
fun. maybe not the goal of the game... but man it is fun to help the little guy
how deep this game is, really depends on how deep you are wanting it to be, and what you want out of it.
Yes but that's generally an AI problem.
CiV has been just as buggy at times, BE was spared that because the majority of it was copypasted. PI games have buckets but they're the means to an end rather than the ends themselves, as is the case with Civ.
Maybe I'm weird, but I've played Civ since Civ2, but I've since stopped playing Civ once I started playing EU (starting with EU3 Complete), because Civ feels too simple now.
You thought EU4 was empty after playing Civ? I wonder what you'd think after playing Alpha Centauri then; and yes, I agree. EU4 is a bland, empty game where all you do is paint the map your country's color to pass the time. :wacko:
what then, is civ v? because there is so much less variance in civ v...
you dont HAVE to "win" to do everything you could want to do in EU4.
if anything, id say the only reason I could remotely attribute to thinking Civ V is better, is having less time to actually understand each game.
why do people assume the only thing you can do in EU4 is attack attack attack, wait for manpower and lower AE, then resume pattern?
That is not a gameplay issue, that is your PLAY STYLE issue.
you dont HAVE to "win" to do everything you could want to do in EU4.
if anything, id say the only reason I could remotely attribute to thinking Civ V is better, is having less time to actually understand each game.
why do people assume the only thing you can do in EU4 is attack attack attack, wait for manpower and lower AE, then resume pattern?
That is not a gameplay issue, that is your PLAY STYLE issue.
Annnnyway, back to the OP. Yes, EU4 could use more things to do during peace. If you want a game that satisfies that itch, I suggest Victoria 2. That game is all about what you do during peace, war is kind of a pain in the butt.
I honestly think it's very difficult to compare the two games, but I do have to say that I tend to enjoy Civ quite a bit more. However, one thing I will grant is that the Civ AI makes every single nation in EU4 look like it's ruled by Bismarck and Machiavelli. One of the main draws of EU4 as opposed to Civ V for me, apart from the historical flavour, is the fact that diplomacy is actually worthwhile, while it was minorly useful at best in Civ IV and a complete waste of your time (with other civs anyway) in V.
Civilization and EUIV are two different kinds of games.
Civ V is a 4X strategy game with a focus on the eXploit: there are a lot of numbers that increase each turn. eXploration is not that fun, eXpand is tactical but built on 2 numbers: production and science, and eXterminate is only one way to win a game. This makes the game more varied. And to those that says that "Peacetime in civ is 100% bucket filling": you probably suck at this game. You shouldn't try to play Civ V as you played Civ IV (which was actually shallow without mods).
EU IV is a wargame. There is "war" in it. The focus is on the war. You're always thinking about war. There are no roleplay elements like in Crusader Kings, and no real diplomacy or focus on the industrialization like in Victoria. In EU IV you can annex entire states and blob like an Abbasid Caliphate in CK2. It's like a more complexe Risk, and that's why we play it.
Civ V is a 4X strategy game with a focus on the eXploit: there are a lot of numbers that increase each turn. eXploration is not that fun, eXpand is tactical but built on 2 numbers: production and science, and eXterminate is only one way to win a game. This makes the game more varied. And to those that says that "Peacetime in civ is 100% bucket filling": you probably suck at this game. You shouldn't try to play Civ V as you played Civ IV (which was actually shallow without mods).
EU IV is a wargame. There is "war" in it. The focus is on the war. You're always thinking about war. There are no roleplay elements like in Crusader Kings, and no real diplomacy or focus on the industrialization like in Victoria. In EU IV you can annex entire states and blob like an Abbasid Caliphate in CK2. It's like a more complexe Risk, and that's why we play it.
at most you can argue that i was being too literal or using a dated form of the word, which i did not even know had changed, as that is how i learned it less than 2 years ago.
It hasn't changed. The British 'Empire', Dutch 'Empire', Spanish 'Empire', Ottoman 'Empire', et cetera et cetera ad nauseum were calling themselves as such, and referred to as such by academia ever since, for the last 5-600 years. You used an incredibly narrow and totally incorrect definition; 'at most', as you put it, and in fact 'at least' your point (that the Soviet Union was 'never ever an empire' and that Japan is the only empire in the modern world) is invalid and you are completely incorrect.
After being majorly disappointed by CIV V at release, I've started playing again after Brave New World and found it quite fun. In my opinion the reason comparing EU4 to CIV V is fruitful, is because CIV V and EU4 are both "Empire-building games", but they approach what that means from radically different directions. Both have their own advantages and disadvantages when compared to each other, however the great thing is that EU4 can learn more from CIV V, than CIV V can learn from EU4.
The reason why this is a great thing, is because it's not caused by CIV V being just overall better than EU4, but by the advantages of EU4 being primarily caused by the underlying system, while the advantages of CIV V are in large part caused by resources and polish. CIV V can't adopt any of what makes EU4 great without no longer being CIV, but EU4 can look at what CIV V does to make itself more than just acquiring the most hexes*, and still be EU.
Ways to implement cultural advancement, patronage of the arts and sciences, improvements of the technology system, to improve infrastructure and administration and just in general make the game about more than the acquisition of land.
That's why I've been trying to get Paradox to enable modders to fiddle with Merchant Republic mechanics (Family palaces, Trade posts and amount of non-landed vassals and which governments have them) in CK2. The potential it holds to improve CK2 outside of warfare (with CK2 already being game that is better at non-warfare than EU4) is immense.
*Let's by honest, in CIV V terms EU4 is a game about getting hexes, with everything you do either getting you more hexes, or making you stronger than your neighbours in order to get their hexes. There's not really any doubt that EU4 is game about map-painting that (due to no specific "Win condition") some people play without actually painting the map.
It's similar to how some people find their fun in Skyrim by playing as a village blacksmith, spending an entire "playthrough" buying resources from local merchants to craft into items they sell in order to buy food to eat and more resources to craft with. I have no problem with people thinking that's fun, I just don't personally and it doesn't mean Skyrim is a game about blacksmithing.
The reason why this is a great thing, is because it's not caused by CIV V being just overall better than EU4, but by the advantages of EU4 being primarily caused by the underlying system, while the advantages of CIV V are in large part caused by resources and polish. CIV V can't adopt any of what makes EU4 great without no longer being CIV, but EU4 can look at what CIV V does to make itself more than just acquiring the most hexes*, and still be EU.
Ways to implement cultural advancement, patronage of the arts and sciences, improvements of the technology system, to improve infrastructure and administration and just in general make the game about more than the acquisition of land.
That's why I've been trying to get Paradox to enable modders to fiddle with Merchant Republic mechanics (Family palaces, Trade posts and amount of non-landed vassals and which governments have them) in CK2. The potential it holds to improve CK2 outside of warfare (with CK2 already being game that is better at non-warfare than EU4) is immense.
*Let's by honest, in CIV V terms EU4 is a game about getting hexes, with everything you do either getting you more hexes, or making you stronger than your neighbours in order to get their hexes. There's not really any doubt that EU4 is game about map-painting that (due to no specific "Win condition") some people play without actually painting the map.
It's similar to how some people find their fun in Skyrim by playing as a village blacksmith, spending an entire "playthrough" buying resources from local merchants to craft into items they sell in order to buy food to eat and more resources to craft with. I have no problem with people thinking that's fun, I just don't personally and it doesn't mean Skyrim is a game about blacksmithing.
