What this forum has is two types of people. One group wants to be able to take a country and paint the world in its color. Maybe it's a small country, maybe it's a large country. The other group wants a game where they can change history within a series of constraints. These groups will always be at a cross-purpose.
I'd rather see us as one type of people, just as you can see "two types of people" suffering from ADD/ADHD, the root cause is a difficulty of the brain to adequately stimulate itself.
One type rebels against the inadequacy, and is seen as hyperactive, meaning ADHD. The other type resigns, and is seen as passive, meaning ADD.
It all comes down to how our personalities can handle the disorder.
We are one type of people, and the disorder is the game we're playing.
The game is supposed to be a historical simulation of how worldwide nations were developing between the years 1400 and 1800.
The game fails to deliver in great enough detail, accuracy or plausibility, and this is the disorder that plagues us.
It is an apt metaphor, since eu4 like ADHD/ADD is a condition denying us stimulation.
So we split into rebellious and resigned camps.
The map painters can be seen as the hyperactive ones, they expect the game to engage them, and they expect to be challenged and do a good job of playing the game. This means that they do everything in their power to win.
Since there is a massive lack of anything to do besides warfare(and also colonization, both equating making land gains), this is what that type of player focuses on.
They keep objective goals they can make gains on, and they look at the big picture. The big picture consists of making huge land gains as soon as possible and disregarding everything else that is unable to challenge them, which due to the design of the game nothing can. For this type of player, they would like to see the game accurately challenge them like it promised, but it doesn't. They will keep up conquering until they grow bored with the lack of challenge and the game's unfinished state and either move on, or restart. They can be very vocal about changes because of their high standards, and are frequently misrepresented and treated as troublemakers by the developers, as evidenced by the constant degrading of the game by erecting of barriers against winning, rather than improving the game to hold a challenge.
The passive ones are the ones that generally come to the defense of the game, and try to look past its design flaws. In contrast to the map painters, they set subjective goals and leave a lot of the lack of design content to their own imagination.
They don't try as hard and aren't as determined, and might go as far as to cede territory to enemy nations just to pretty up their borders, currently making an objective loss.
These players are the easiest to please, and they often just want the game to remain constant so that their inner view of their current game is not interrupted. They are likely to blame the more active players when things change, and are generally casual in their approach to the game. A lot of time is spent socializing and idly chatting about history and debating the various few features or lack of that the game provides that are detailed, accurate, or plausible.
Since the game fails to provide a challenge, the game was continuously patched to make it harder to collect your profits when you win, and has lately done a 180-degree turn on that method and instead just left the game easy, both sneaky backdoors to take that blatantly paints the game in a most unflattering light, that of a game that is too poor to stand on its own.
If the PI team managed to make for more interesting peace-time management, and made these a sort of natural barrier to expansion, such as improving the court mechanics and imlementing a character system like ck2, then people might start to play the same game.
When there is no gap between the game mechanics, and the expectations of what the game should be, which is universal, then we can become one.
