I've never managed to keep my eyelids open in an Iberian game past about 1470.
Should we have an "historical" option at game start?
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If it gave the game mechanics and strategic choices lost in 1.1 back I would gladly agree to any possible other difficulty options you could possibly want.
The current version of hard mode seems to have most of what you want, I wouldn't be opposed to it staying as hard as it is, and an oppressively hard mode that made surviving until 1500 as the ottomans a challenge added.
Me personally, if they removed AE and coalitions entirely and I found it impossible or difficult to keep it in its current form, I would be done playing it. However, if other folks would like to play it without those, then yeah, a "sissy" mode might be good
same, the return of the cores already made me lose interest... I think having two options at start should not be too difficult... I would not call it sissy mod, just a mod to allow people for WC and/or huge empires, while with the historical mode even player nations would remain roughly historical in size
Let's not try to take the moral high ground by calling it "historical" mode. Nothing about playing a game where the player is a "nation" is remotely historical. Nations are not things that do things and take actions. They are not real-life units of decision-making. People are.
Thus a remotely historical grand strategy game would be more like Papers, Please than anything Paradox has ever made. The player is in a tent/throne room/desk and receive messages from lower level units of authority and internal and external enemies, along with varying amounts of information of varying accuracy. The player then issues orders and decisions from that tent/throne room/desk which are then carried out varying degrees of fidelity. (If it were CK2, the player might have to deal with orders and directives from higher lords.)
I would say that many people seem to like restrictions to "over-expansion", just not the ones currently in place.
And yes, I think "hardcore" (while quite an awful term in and of itself) is a more accurate descriptor for what the OP suggests (which wouldn't add much IMO).
I never understood this. If you want to play as historically accurate as you could, you could play only big nations! How much fun would be to play as any OPM, sitting the whole game at your hands and getting annexed at the end? Not that much I guess...
Fair enough, but by historical people mean that, well, there are gameplay mechanisms that simulate history properly, which isn´t the case with quite a few stuff already. Things like revolt risk that quickly disapears, how easy it is to make culture shifts in provinces, base tax issues in Siberia and New World etc etc.
While others want the game to be more lenient to nations that were too backwards to survive, like the Hordes - or want them to survive even remaining AS hordes, which is absurd.
So it´s impossible to please everyone, and therefore two, or even three modes would be ideal. Through some of the problems with EU 4 are structural and I don´t know if they will ever be fixable. The approach of using monarch points for everything, changing stuff with a click of a button (stability, culture) and magic points instead of a process, population not being modelled at all, etc etc
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I wish people would stop confounding narrative and mechanics all the time.
By "historical," people generally mean "how I think history was," and coincidentally, "how I think history was" somehow tends to overlap a lot with "the game mechanics I prefer, ceteris paribus." As someone already pointed out, an actually historical game would imply that you'd get CBs according to history, rulers according to history, etc., not that "Aggressive Expansion" would be scaled up. There are exactly two people on this forum who are capable of formulating a sound historical argument for game mechanics, and those two people are Charles Louis and to a lesser extent Jomini. Historical, to the vast majority of forum posters here, is just a word they use to justify their preferences for game mechanics.
By "historical," people generally mean "how I think history was," and coincidentally, "how I think history was" somehow tends to overlap a lot with "the game mechanics I prefer, ceteris paribus." As someone already pointed out, an actually historical game would imply that you'd get CBs according to history, rulers according to history, etc., not that "Aggressive Expansion" would be scaled up. There are exactly two people on this forum who are capable of formulating a sound historical argument for game mechanics, and those two people are Charles Louis and to a lesser extent Jomini. Historical, to the vast majority of forum posters here, is just a word they use to justify their preferences for game mechanics.
Well then we have different POVs as to what "historical" means.
Historical to me means plausibility, not having the same ruler as France had in real life in the exact same year. Through when I started playing EU 3 I was certainly in the "pure" historical line of thought.
As for who has the best argument, if you think it´s only Jomini and Charles, ok. I don´t. I think many people did good contributions. Me, brifbates, Novacat (through I did disagree with him more than once, he often has good points), and many others.
Historical to me means plausibility, not having the same ruler as France had in real life in the exact same year. Through when I started playing EU 3 I was certainly in the "pure" historical line of thought.
As for who has the best argument, if you think it´s only Jomini and Charles, ok. I don´t. I think many people did good contributions. Me, brifbates, Novacat (through I did disagree with him more than once, he often has good points), and many others.
"Historical" means exactly nothing in terms of game mechanics. History was crazy and chaotic and not rule-based in any sense we could implement as an abstract game system, which is why there's always a case to be made for the historical plausibility of any game mechanic, and the same case can be used to justify any side of any issue. World conquest plausibility? Napoleon. No world conquest? Napoleon! You can't objectively say that any proposal is or is not "implausible" by drawing on historical cases, because it depends on the subjectively chosen scope and detail of your analysis, and it depends on what you subjectively choose to use for a stopping rule. For the purpose of this forum's discussions, "historical" is in the same class of weasel words that "natural" belongs to in general use. Beyond the narrative having to fit the mechanics, there's no way to determine whether something is historically plausible or not, which is exactly why it ends up being used as "the game mechanics I prefer, ceteris paribus."
The reason I say Charles Louis and Jomini are the only posters who can formulate a sound argument from history is that they're the only posters who seem to realize this and have enough historical expertise to use history as a narrative wrapper for their suggestions, rather than letting their subjectively chosen cases dictate how the game "should" be.
But the point still remains that they use history as a basis. Maybe they use it better, but they still use it.
As to where to draw the line of what it´s plausible or not, that becomes a bit tough sometimes, and has to be abstracted - and how much, there is where divergence starts. Some people will think it´s plausible for Cherokee to kick europeans from North América, others will say it´s complete BS. Some will think you can only say something is plausible if it could happen 50% of the time or more, while other will argue that if it had 1% chance of happening, then it´s plausible and thus should be possible in game terms.
As to where to draw the line of what it´s plausible or not, that becomes a bit tough sometimes, and has to be abstracted - and how much, there is where divergence starts. Some people will think it´s plausible for Cherokee to kick europeans from North América, others will say it´s complete BS. Some will think you can only say something is plausible if it could happen 50% of the time or more, while other will argue that if it had 1% chance of happening, then it´s plausible and thus should be possible in game terms.
I might agree with a more historical vs more sandbox option, "more" since ultimately without scripting every single move you can't really make it really historical. But as for your suggestions, most of them don't have anything to do with making it more historical. The only thing that tries to divert the game in a somewhat historical straightjacket is the "historical friends" modifier but that doesn't mean much in light of the entire game... More AE? How does that make it more historical? French minors were somewhat a veritable fact until the 16th century, remember why Charles de Bourbon joined Charles V? Cause his lord and king Francois I had slighted him and subsequently his lands were confisquated. Also for all intents and purposes the Duke of Burgundy was a nominal vassal of the king of France, just like Britanny. What is more historical about coalitions?
The problem is though I get your point, the issue at hand is that all these things are in essence somewhat flawed and certainly won't make the game more historical. Coalitions in this game as it is aren't historical in their mechanics. AE isn't historical. How would you simulate the gigantic conquests of the Ottomans or of France and the Iberian monarchs in the Italian Wars? The real intricacies of history, the finer workings of dynastic policy, the more subtle reality of how state machinery operated in peace and war time, all these things aren't really properly simulated and how could they? The matter is so complex. There are no mechanics to properly form 'historical' coalitions or simulate 'historical' powerplay.
You are highligthing issues that have nothing to do with making the game 'more historical'. You are only pointing out mechanics intended to make the game more challenging, to make it EU rather than TW. By removing those you'd merely be making the game a walk in the park towards WC, obviously not the intend of the developers;
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Yes, it can hurt: having the option means that, after every patch and expansion, PI needs to take care the game is balanced with both that option and without. Thats like balancing two different games and thus a large waste of resources.
It would be nice to have some sort of 'Historical Option' that makes the AI more likely to pursue it's historical goals. Remember Morocco in EU3? Or as you may know it - Spanish North Africa. Maybe with unique CBs, for example, the Ottomans conquered Hungary at...some point in history...maybe if there was a mission for 'Conquer Hungary', it could give a CB that would allow full annexation at 100pc WS. I don't know if that's possible at all.
I think the game mechanics prevent this to a degree. I mean, Edward III invaded France with 15,000 men. If you tried to accomplish what he did in EU4 with an army of just 15,000? France had all sorts of internal problems that made the unlikely English victories possible that EU4 just can't replicate.
I think the game mechanics prevent this to a degree. I mean, Edward III invaded France with 15,000 men. If you tried to accomplish what he did in EU4 with an army of just 15,000? France had all sorts of internal problems that made the unlikely English victories possible that EU4 just can't replicate.
And no one is right or wrong. Trying to decide whether Game Mechanic A or Game Mechanic B is more "historical" is like trying to decide whether Idea A or Idea B is "heavier." Attempting to let "historical plausibility" determine game mechanics (or the other way around, for that matter) is at best an unproductive framework for discussion, and at worst pure nonsense, since weight is not an intrinsic property of ideas, and it depends entirely how you subjectively choose to translate "weight" (historical plausibility) to ideas (mechanics).
To take from Fernand Braudel - a rather famous historian - the conquest of North Africa, begun by Aragon (not Castile, disregarding Portugal here) in the early 1500's was what he called 'the historical mission of Spain', as dictated by geography, history in the broader perspective (Berbers and Iberians are in fact part of the same ethno-cultural background before the muslim advance seperated them etc etc), the spirit of the Reconquista, etc. This was moreover the case cause in 1500 there was no opponent to face the Iberians, North Africa was a instable pool of latent anarchy. Instead the king of Aragon choose not to pursue the Reconquista in this spirit, but set out on the Italian Wars, for throughout the entire 16th century (and before) Italy was a mirage attracting all its neighbours. France, Castile, Aragon, the Imperials,... they were all drawn into long and wasteful wars over this land. By 1530 the chance had passed and North Africa had rallied to the Barbary Kings. In Algiers the christians found an opponent that had rallied the countryside to it and the window of opportunity for an Iberian advance into northern Africa - which would feature in many Spanish schemes afterwards - was missed and would never return.
So that's as far ass the historical angle goes, food for though of the whims of history.
A nation's actions are primarily driven by their geopolitical reality - that is, constrained and guided by aspects such as their country's location in the world, access to resources/coasts, attitude towards neighbours, perceived regional threats. A leader or government can break out of this, but those are fundamental realities. As a silly example, it's why the US is a superpower and Canada is not. Canada's population is a tenth of the US since the climate and natural environment is not nearly so favourable as the US has, with it's major river systems and fertile land.
Some of this EUIV attempts to model. Coalitions and rivals for example, is the game's response to perceived or actual regional threats. Other geopolitical drivers, such as the desire to dominate trade routes, is modeled by the trade node system. But the AI doesn't focus on monopolizing trade goods (and it would be impossible in colonization, given the somewhat silly random resource placement). Other aspects EUIV doesn't attempt to model except very abstractly with concepts like tax value and manpower.
So it might be more "accurate" if the AI nations made decisions recognizing more clearly their geopolitical realities (assuming the game logic was changed to manage that effectively). But it doesn't sound like fun for the player's nation. I wouldn't want to play a game where Oman could only ever be a minor trading nation in the Indian Ocean, based on the reality of it's homeland and the neighbours around it.
Some of this EUIV attempts to model. Coalitions and rivals for example, is the game's response to perceived or actual regional threats. Other geopolitical drivers, such as the desire to dominate trade routes, is modeled by the trade node system. But the AI doesn't focus on monopolizing trade goods (and it would be impossible in colonization, given the somewhat silly random resource placement). Other aspects EUIV doesn't attempt to model except very abstractly with concepts like tax value and manpower.
So it might be more "accurate" if the AI nations made decisions recognizing more clearly their geopolitical realities (assuming the game logic was changed to manage that effectively). But it doesn't sound like fun for the player's nation. I wouldn't want to play a game where Oman could only ever be a minor trading nation in the Indian Ocean, based on the reality of it's homeland and the neighbours around it.