EU4 is a great game. I have have had a lot of fun playing EU2 and EU3, and I expect to have even more fun playing EU4. Except today my game was patched, and the patch seemed to take half the fun away, by introducing a new rule:
If you colonize more than four provinces in any one region, you will irreversibly loose control of those colonies to the AI.
I am in the middle of what I believe is a rather typical Portugal game, more or less ignoring Europe and concentrating on colonizing. My plan was to spend some one or two hundred years on aggressively colonizing the Caribbean and the East Indies, then spend another century or two constructing all sorts of value-enhancing architecture, with the ultimate goal of becoming so stinking rich that I can afford to militarily beat any coalition that inevitably will be formed against me, or the Ottoman blob, or both, thus becoming MASTER OF THE WORLD in the process.
So far I have had a successful phase one, I control Central America and the Caribbean in the West, and Indonesia and the Philippines in the East, and I have ports in Africa, Arabia and Ceylon. Around 1600, as planned, I reached stage two: The building phase. This was last night.
Today, after the patch, it seems I have to change plans. Because I no longer have control of the Caribbeans.
I still own the East Indies though, so I can still do some building there. But America is totally closed to me. Last night I looked forward to a lot of fun, building plantations and stuff in the colonies. Today it seems I will get only half the fun I expected.
This is rather disappointing.
I play EU mainly because of the scope of the game. Today's patch virtually cut half of that scope away. And there seems to be no way to get it back.
Unless I start a new game and apply some crazy house rule, like never making more than four colonies in any region. But this is rather silly, the game already has plenty of nicely balanced penalties for those that expand too much and too fast, there is no obvious need for a special hard cap on colonies. But there seems to be no way to avoid it, either you restrict yourself to four colonies per region, or you irreversibly loose control of that region. Irreversibly, because unlike a regular vassal, colonial subjects cannot be annexed. Ever.
This is actually even worse than the four cities rule from Civ5. In that game you could ignore the rule and just expand beyond four cities; that is, you pay the penalty and still play the full game with full control over everything. In the case of EU4, if you ignore the four-colonies rule, you will loose control of your colonies for the rest of the game. How fun is that?
I am told in-game that I might want to switch tag and play one of the new colonial nations. And yes, I might want to do that. At some other time, perhaps, but right now the idea was to optimize Portugal's colonial assets on a global scale. That was possible last night without switching tags.
But then again, maybe it could be done that way, global management through local interfaces. I could play a game as Portugal and give Cuba a lot of gold, then switch to Cuba and spend the gold on buildings, then back to Portugal to give some gold to Mexico, and so on. Except this is very, very risky business. Because what will the AI be doing in Lisbon, when I am busy optimizing Havana? My experience with tag-shifting from HoI3 suggests that the AI will most probably do something very stupid in my absence.
So even if I buy the DLC this is not the optimal solution. The optimal solution is an option, that allow players to avoid the four-colonies rule, by turning off the whole Colonial Subject mechanics.
Don't get me wrong, I find those mechanics very interesting, and I will certainly buy the DLC to try them out. But the colonial mechanics in the original base game (those that are still in place in the rest of the world) is also very interesting. I suspect that the future will bring more DLCs with more Colonial Nations, so that eventually the four colonies rule will apply to the whole world. In my opinion, this will make it a lot more fun to play minor overseas nations, but it will take most of the fun away from playing a European colonial nation.
If for some reason it is totally impossible for Paradox to implement a player option of not being subject to the four colonies rule, I would be willing to pay for a "Classic colonial mechanics" DLC, if it gives me something that plays like the version of EU4 that I played last night.
tldr: This wall of text argues that the Colonial Subjects mechanics add a lot of fun to certain minor nations, but has a side effect, "the four colonies rule", that takes the fun out of a standard European colonial game. To rectify this situation it is proposed to either make the new mechanics optional, or, if this is impossible, to make the old mechanics optional, perhaps as a DLC. The old mechanics are not impossible, I know, they worked on my computer last night. So basically PI could sell me version 1.3 once more:rofl:.
If you colonize more than four provinces in any one region, you will irreversibly loose control of those colonies to the AI.
I am in the middle of what I believe is a rather typical Portugal game, more or less ignoring Europe and concentrating on colonizing. My plan was to spend some one or two hundred years on aggressively colonizing the Caribbean and the East Indies, then spend another century or two constructing all sorts of value-enhancing architecture, with the ultimate goal of becoming so stinking rich that I can afford to militarily beat any coalition that inevitably will be formed against me, or the Ottoman blob, or both, thus becoming MASTER OF THE WORLD in the process.
So far I have had a successful phase one, I control Central America and the Caribbean in the West, and Indonesia and the Philippines in the East, and I have ports in Africa, Arabia and Ceylon. Around 1600, as planned, I reached stage two: The building phase. This was last night.
Today, after the patch, it seems I have to change plans. Because I no longer have control of the Caribbeans.
I still own the East Indies though, so I can still do some building there. But America is totally closed to me. Last night I looked forward to a lot of fun, building plantations and stuff in the colonies. Today it seems I will get only half the fun I expected.
This is rather disappointing.
I play EU mainly because of the scope of the game. Today's patch virtually cut half of that scope away. And there seems to be no way to get it back.
Unless I start a new game and apply some crazy house rule, like never making more than four colonies in any region. But this is rather silly, the game already has plenty of nicely balanced penalties for those that expand too much and too fast, there is no obvious need for a special hard cap on colonies. But there seems to be no way to avoid it, either you restrict yourself to four colonies per region, or you irreversibly loose control of that region. Irreversibly, because unlike a regular vassal, colonial subjects cannot be annexed. Ever.
This is actually even worse than the four cities rule from Civ5. In that game you could ignore the rule and just expand beyond four cities; that is, you pay the penalty and still play the full game with full control over everything. In the case of EU4, if you ignore the four-colonies rule, you will loose control of your colonies for the rest of the game. How fun is that?
I am told in-game that I might want to switch tag and play one of the new colonial nations. And yes, I might want to do that. At some other time, perhaps, but right now the idea was to optimize Portugal's colonial assets on a global scale. That was possible last night without switching tags.
But then again, maybe it could be done that way, global management through local interfaces. I could play a game as Portugal and give Cuba a lot of gold, then switch to Cuba and spend the gold on buildings, then back to Portugal to give some gold to Mexico, and so on. Except this is very, very risky business. Because what will the AI be doing in Lisbon, when I am busy optimizing Havana? My experience with tag-shifting from HoI3 suggests that the AI will most probably do something very stupid in my absence.
So even if I buy the DLC this is not the optimal solution. The optimal solution is an option, that allow players to avoid the four-colonies rule, by turning off the whole Colonial Subject mechanics.
Don't get me wrong, I find those mechanics very interesting, and I will certainly buy the DLC to try them out. But the colonial mechanics in the original base game (those that are still in place in the rest of the world) is also very interesting. I suspect that the future will bring more DLCs with more Colonial Nations, so that eventually the four colonies rule will apply to the whole world. In my opinion, this will make it a lot more fun to play minor overseas nations, but it will take most of the fun away from playing a European colonial nation.
If for some reason it is totally impossible for Paradox to implement a player option of not being subject to the four colonies rule, I would be willing to pay for a "Classic colonial mechanics" DLC, if it gives me something that plays like the version of EU4 that I played last night.
tldr: This wall of text argues that the Colonial Subjects mechanics add a lot of fun to certain minor nations, but has a side effect, "the four colonies rule", that takes the fun out of a standard European colonial game. To rectify this situation it is proposed to either make the new mechanics optional, or, if this is impossible, to make the old mechanics optional, perhaps as a DLC. The old mechanics are not impossible, I know, they worked on my computer last night. So basically PI could sell me version 1.3 once more:rofl:.
