the game is unplayable.
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Pretty ironic coming from "peaceful Pueblo who tech all the way to ADM 4 at a 150% cost penalty rather than conquering a border to reform", "Japan gets bashed by Russia", and "I'm irrelevant as England".
I don't normally like to attack skill rather than arguments, but since you're pointing fingers...
Of course, the OP's story sounds very fishy, unless said coalition members were players wanting to screw him over.
Claims he quit game after 7 years.
5 years in takes a province from Bohemia + vassalize Silesia.
2 years later Bohemia joins an offensive war against him.
Claims all are AI.
5 years in takes a province from Bohemia + vassalize Silesia.
2 years later Bohemia joins an offensive war against him.
Claims all are AI.
lol do you store everything I write in a folder and pull it out to bash me when I say something you don't like? It's amusing... and Pueblo who do you conquer a border with when no one was in NA until 30 years ago and when they came they did not border any native tribe until 5 years ago? It's like you're playing a totally different game...
I actually remember things.
Yes, we are playing a "different game". You're stuck in la-la land thinking you need to border these tribes to conquer them. Even as Pueblo, you can have most of the Eastern US tribes gone before 1550. Then again, maybe declaring no-CB war is an "exploit" in your book, no idea.
Rather than ADM 4, you put those points into native ideas, annexing vassals, culture converting, and coring. Being at ADM 1 or 5 doesn't matter when you instantly reform to tech 10 when you do finally border a European. The difference between the two empires, however, is that one has a force limit of 60+ and the other has a force limit under 20 after reforming. One of them "doesn't want a border with France", the other can afford enough heavy ships to sink the entire French (or even Spanish/Portuguese) navy without batting an eye.
well for one I had no idea reforming would format tech to level 10... I'm learning as I play I don't have to do my best every game this is not a race or something where you win money, relax lol
Reforming sets your tech in each category to the tech level of the western nation -2. If England is 12/11/13, your tech will be 10/9/11 after reforming.
I get that, but OP is learning too, and you hit him with a
Considering this game's UI is absolutely terrible for learning the game and essentially forces trial and error gameplay into a strategy game, frustration is both natural and expected. For example, you and I know that big AE leads to coalitions. However, if someone just fires up the game, runs the tutorial briefly, then hops into the game to replicate a historical conquest, he'll see "you get 40 aggressive expansion for this". That means nothing without context of everything that AE can do, and the game does *not* provide that via in-game interface, anywhere. It doesn't tell you which aspects of combat are more important (tactics > pips > discipline/morale), so people lose battles and have no idea why. It sure as heck doesn't explain how coalitions work, and you know nothing about separate peace limitations until you see it.
To a rookie just looking to replicate historical conquests on an average difficulty level, the game is both obscure and vexingly punishing when it comes to doing what actual countries did, and in more than one case goes against logic.
Then you could sand to be a lot less condescending when encountering a fellow player who's trying to learn the game and encounters some frustration.
but starting a thread "this game is unplayable"? sounds chilidsh and attention seeking, sorry. You fail, you start again, you fail again, you'll likely do well...
I'm all against bashing new players for lack of skill in any game, but if they're somehow claiming a game is unplayable because they suck at it then they shouldn't expect to be taken seriously.
Besides, the OP is not trying to learn the game, he's done with EU4, he's just here to vent and to demand the game is 'fixed' to his specifications.
As the first person to drop a l2p on this thread I have to concur with this and raise you the wildly exaggerated (or just plain inaccurate, take your pick) OP...
That is a cookie cutter definition of trial and error gameplay, and is fake difficulty. While "literally" unplayable is an exaggeration (unless you're trying to play MP on Linux or Mac, where it's literally true), saying that in frustration is not a surprising outcome.
What is mass amounts of fake difficulty doing in a strategy title?
I continue to demand that it at least makes it possible to determine rules of gameplay (distinct from AI actions and events) without fake difficulty :/.
Stick to the thread topic, folks. And don't post unauthorised links.
Some OT posts deleted. No infractions issued. Yet.
Some OT posts deleted. No infractions issued. Yet.
Out of interest, would you care to name some strategy games that don't involve any trial and error gameplay?
Because what you label as "fake difficulty" seems to me to be something most games treat as real difficulty.
Can I name strategy games that have none? It's hard to work with absolutes. Can I name strategy games that don't routinely hide important gameplay rules? Yes, in fact out of the ones I've played it's hard to think of others that are even close to EU IV in terms of trial and error gameplay wrt game rules.
Anyway, fake difficulty *can* make a game seem unplayable, because you wind up with too many mechanics that seem incomprehensible to new players. That PI turns the hidden gameplay rules into a moving target (and will change them without indicating such in the patch notes) makes it tough even on veterans in this regard. I had to really push just to get anybody to acknowledge the massive change to war score cost vs large countries, let alone whether that was WAD. Ditto with how stabhits work in peace deals...1.7 made that completely different and I actually had people arguing with me about it not being changed when it clearly was, until I posted a screenshot showing it.
Could that seem "unplayble" to a person who hasn't invested 1000+ hours into the game? Yes, it could. For as much as I've seen people claim the game is "dumbed down for casual players", the reality is that this game is very much not accessible to casual players.
The OP just obviously failed in diplomacy. It's the best part of MP, so I'd suggest SP if you're struggling.
Name some (strategy) games that don't routinely hide important gameplay rules then.
As for "fake difficulty" making the game incomprehensible to new players....normal difficulty does that, a game just has to be complicated.
Normal difficulty is very different from fake difficulty. Working out an optimized solution to a complex environment is real difficulty. Denial of information that is known through experience or looking at the code making it impossible to find that solution w/o trial and error is fake.
Civ IV, Civ V, HOMM 2, 3, 5, both Starcrafts and all 3 Warcraft RTS do not hide gameplay rules this way most of the time. They are largely irrelevant here though, except that they refute the notion that trial and error gameplay is unavoidable in a strategy title. EU IV is in sore need of something on the level of the wiki built into the game, if it can't handle the rules via UI. At this point, even moderately experienced players can't tell you their combat width offhand, which makes sense when the game won't tell you your combat width outside of battle, only that techs are adding to it. I could string examples incessantly, but the relevant ones here in this thread are the AE --> coalition and diplomacy mechanics.
"France will join your war against your target on your side. France is DotF, and will protect your target". Did you know that you can actually get France to do either? Most on the forum tell you that DotF takes precedent as it's a defensive CTA, but in my Sunset Invasion game I brought France in on its fellow Catholic, England as a Protestant nation by altering my target to be an English CN (which is senseless, as it was also Catholic).
What AE causes coalitions? No info. How exactly do coalitions work? No info. You do a basic historic action, get hit with a wildly ahistoric response to it, and were given no reason to believe that would happen ahead of time. This has been going on since release, with slaps to the player face like Venice getting league of Cambrai, the DHE text saying Venice survived with separate peace deals, then noticing that coalitions block separate peace deals.
Well, I don't know about the rest but at least CiV hides the gameplay consequences from the player regarding equivalent scenarios as described i OP. But eventually you learn how you can go about forward settling safely, how many workers you in fact can steal freely and what it means when the friendly neighbour all of a sudden don't want to pay premium for a luxury.
BUT the l2p and such comments are of course condescending and should not be used, neither should the "the game is unplayable" threads which are pointless when there are plenty of people out there who clearly are playing and having fun (since the game is not "unfun").
BUT the l2p and such comments are of course condescending and should not be used, neither should the "the game is unplayable" threads which are pointless when there are plenty of people out there who clearly are playing and having fun (since the game is not "unfun").
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Well, the game does become unplayable in the literal sense if you try to do cross-platform MP as of 1.6 though. You have a few minutes (maybe) or the first peace deal made until the game N_67 de-syncs, whichever comes first. So while the OP is using it regarding his scenario is incorrect, the game actually is unplayable in something it actively advertises it allows. They also still advertise hotjoin, which doesn't work on any platform, though doesn't strictly make the game unplayable.
STRICTLY speaking, AI activity isn't really fake difficulty, as the design-stated goal is for it to act as a competing player. Some of the things it can do as a result, however, fall clearly in that category. To mirror the civ V example, them getting pissy and declaring war is a player interaction --> they are allowed to declare at any time. The stuff we see in EU IV is more akin to workers having a 10% chance to disappear if ending their turn on a plains tile, but nobody mentioning that and having it change patch to patch which terrain does it.
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