The railroading in the missions is really stupid and very limiting

  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
I absolutely despised the old mission system. Despised. My favorite example of why I felt this way was the struggle I experienced getting the Purple Phoenix conquest missions to appear in a logical order. Waiting, hoping, and refreshing missions to get something not idiotic was an unnecessary frustration.

That's not even getting to the part where missions could become ignorable after a fairly quick time. Hitting the endlessly repeating cycle of "don't spend ducats", "get prestige/legitimacy", and "conquer nearby garbage province of similar culture or same religion" was a low point of a campaign as you no longer really engage in missions. You either ignored them as they were trash or clicked on one and forgot about it.

Then there was the issue where the old mission system basically hid what missions were available to the player. Now we can see a full tree whereas before one had to go through the wiki or game files.

The current system is definitely better than the former system which was an obscured, disorganized, mess of decent missions and garbage. Well, at least it is in my book.
 
Last edited:
  • 7
  • 3Like
  • 2
Reactions:
The new EU4 mission system was a step towards HoI4's national focuses. While it is an improvement over the old system, I would really like to see another aspect of the HoI-style focuses adapted to EU4 - the choices between different paths. I think it was DDRJake who said right after the patch that introduced the new missions that they made a conscious decision not to lock off certain parts of the mission trees, but I think it might be a good idea to rethink that choice.
Right now, most mission trees basically just facilitate and reward conquest, with some more creative missions about development, economy and culture interspersed here and there. There really aren't any tradeoffs or opportunity costs when you can always grab all goodies from your mission tree, and the strategic choice is just about when to complete a given mission, not about if one mission should be pursued over another.
In a strategy game, it would be more interesting to have actual decisions - like for example different and mutually exclusive mission "branches" for Catholic and Anglican England.
I don’t know if I would block off paths, but for some missions I would give different outcomes. For example, Britain has a mission to become the Emperor of the HRE or dismantle it. Give each a significantly different reward. For the mission to go Anglican, have an alternate option of “embrace the counter-reformation” again with different rewards.
 
  • 4
  • 1Like
Reactions:
As many things in life, the thing here is to reach an equilibrium between sort of free will (player's wishes) and historic determinism (railroading missions). Like... I don't like the Austrian missions messing with Poland, or the English missions messing with France (I'd like to retreat and stay as an island). On one side, you can just avoid those missions; on the other side, avoiding them makes you feel you're not using part of the game/features, and not benefiting from mission rewards. Something like "I paid for the whole game, I'm gonna use the whole game". It's a tricky matter. Nevertheless, I believe the super Paradox team has reached a relatively good success in giving you historically related missions, that are optional after all, and that generally do not railroad you so soo sooo much towards a fatalistic fate.

The key here is the feeling the player gets from doing or not doing missions. You’re missing out on a lot by not doing them. I just feel the game is creating a bit too many railroaded incentives and some of them are just weird. Like the British HRE missions.
 
  • 1
  • 1Like
Reactions:
I absolutely despised the old mission system. Despised. My favorite example of why I felt this way was the struggle I experienced getting the Purple Phoenix conquest missions to appear in a logical order. Waiting, hoping, and refreshing missions to get something not idiotic was an unnecessary frustration.

That's not even getting to the part where missions could become ignorable after a fairly quick time. Hitting the endlessly repeating cycle of "don't spend ducats", "get prestige/legitimacy", and "conquer nearby garbage province of similar culture or same religion" was a low point of a campaign as you no longer really engage in missions. You either ignored them as they were trash or clicked on one and forgot about it.

Then there was the issue where the old mission system basically hid what missions were available to the player. Now we can see a full tree whereas before one had to go through the wiki or game files.

The current system is definitely better than the former system which was an obscured, disorganized, mess of decent missions and garbage. Well, at least it is in my book.

Absolutely. Before I bought EU IV I took a look at the steam reviews for the DLCs and the main criticism for the Purple Phoenix was that the mission system was atrocious as it's RNG nature meant that you would rarely get one of the early missions for your cores and if you skipped a mission you were locked out of the subsequent ones.

It was terrible having to rely on RNG to get the certain mission to expand on the direction that you wanted too, for the Countries that had missions which gave cores/perma-cores. And this was pretty bad for the AI because once they picked a mission they couldn't ditch it, so it could limit them (I.E Ottomans getting a mission to conquer Eastern Hungary but they can't because Hungary is too powerful). Furthermore, there would come a point were the system would become meaningless because it could one offer you any mission as you reached a point were did not met any of the requisites for the missions.
 
  • 1
  • 1
Reactions:
if you skipped a mission you were locked out of the subsequent ones.
That's not true. If you knew what you were doing it was perfectly possible to take them in whichever order the game gave you them. Though it was annoying as hell and you needed to know the mission triggers well to not accidentally ruin some of them.
Most, if not all of the Purple Phoenix ones did not require any previous ones having been done, but rather had their own triggers. Though some of the triggers required you to own areas which you'd take in previous missions. (Notw when I talk about areas here I mean geographical areas/groups of provinces, not the areas which exist now. They didn't exist back then.)

As long as you made sure to not take any of teh provinces which prevented a mission from triggering, you could take the missions in any order you wanted. I've done the Purple Phoenix ones in random order countless times. But you needed to look in the game files to be able to do this, since you literally needed ot look at the triggers and see what prevented the missions from triggering.
For instacne the Conquer Western Anatolia one would be impossible to trigger if you, when needing to take the coast of Asia Minor, took as much as one inland province. Just one inland province taken would prevent that mission from ever triggering.
Which meant that you could sit for centuries waiting with conquoring Western Anatolia due to waiting for that mission. And due to the huge amount of missions the Byzzies had then it could be forever until you got the mission you wanted. I've had games where I had Central and Eastern Anatolia conquored as well as the Levant, Egypt, including Cyrenaica (there was a mission for that too) and Italy, and then only got to take Western Anatolia just before I got the mission to take Southern Spain...

It was a ridiculous system. But not impossible to take the missions in the order they were given, as long as you made sure to consult the game files before conquering provinces in a region.
(What I usually did before a run with a country where I wasn't 100% familiar with its missions was to look in the game files and see whihc missions were available. And then check which areas I'd have to wait conquering if I wanted this or that mission. Which could be extremely annoying at times and sometimes you just deliberately decided to make a mission impossible to spawn as its rewards weren't good enouhg to offset taking the area.)

it could one offer you any mission as you reached a point were did not met any of the requisites for the missions.
Not to mention the old haters like the build 90% force limit for both army and navy, which could be death especally for the navy one late game.
 
  • 4
  • 1
Reactions:
Not to mention the old haters like the build 90% force limit for both army and navy, which could be death especally for the navy one late game.
My favourite one by far appeared to be this, which I got at 20 legitimacy:

Code:
go_legitimate (i.e. "prove legitimacy")
...
    }
    success = {
        legitimacy = 100 (!!)
    }
...
    effect = {
        add_ruler_modifier (!!) = {
            name = "legitimacy_defended"
        }
Code:
legitimacy_defended = {
    diplomatic_reputation = 1
    legitimacy = 0.5 (i.e. per year)
}

"Hey Joe, we've heard your legitimacy is trashed. Well, for the future use you'll get it replenished somewhat quicker, provided you've fully repaired it already".

o_O
 
  • 2Like
  • 1Haha
  • 1
Reactions:
Imagine if we still had EU2 events. :D
 
  • 1Like
  • 1
Reactions:
"Hey Joe, we've heard your legitimacy is trashed. Well, for the future use you'll get it replenished somewhat quicker, provided you've fully repaired it already".

Are we totaly going to ignore the DipRep you can get from that mission.
And from several others aswell? One of the strongest modifiers in the game.

Even if you argue that the old system could have used more polish the new one is railroad-city, predictable, static. Missing a single province can screw you.
It disincentivises smart use of reactive Diplomacy because what you need to do is pre-determined.

And 3 years later we are still being drip-fed new trees with half the nations in the game still not having received one.

Had they brought this system as a stand-alone DLC with every nation getting something special it would look much better.
As it stands a significant portion of the "content" sold in the last few DLC is still fallout from 1.25.


And the sad part is: Its not like it had to be that way. There are a few glimmers of what could have been even in the current versions.
The Irish and Russian minors all have a dynamic starts to their missions and Granada has a choice of what to with or against Morocco.
With a bit more creativity there would have been potential here.
 
  • 3
  • 2
Reactions:
Are we totaly going to ignore the DipRep you can get from that mission.
And from several others aswell? One of the strongest modifiers in the game.

Even if you argue that the old system could have used more polish the new one is railroad-city, predictable, static. Missing a single province can screw you.
It disincentivises smart use of reactive Diplomacy because what you need to do is pre-determined.
Firstly, I do like dynamic missions far more, it's just that certain stuff was outright weird and ill-designed and I couldn't help showing some :)

As for DipRep, you realize it literally took you ages to recover even from 49 legitimacy (the lowest eligible position) to get that +1? 'Foreign Contacts' was awarded for either having 0% OE (a mission trivial to both get and complete) or improving relations to +100 with a neighboring nation (also easy). On the other hand, getting 100 legitimacy when you're that low was either locking yourself for some 30 years (provided you were Catholic and used Papal Sanction to speed the recovery) or hoping your king to die soon, which was RNG and mocked the mission reward naming in the first place.
 
  • 2
  • 1Like
  • 1
Reactions:
which was RNG and mocked the mission reward naming in the first place.
I guess that depends on how gamey of a mindset you have.
Taking that mission just before abdicating is totaly valid in my book.
Waiting 50 years for that reward is obviously not the way to go.
I do agree that this one specificaly wasnt the best designed one. But it was reworked to only require 75 Legitimacy if you go a few patches further.
 
  • 2
  • 1
  • 1
Reactions:
The OP is wrong, the British missions are not locked behind being not-Catholic, you can also finish the mission by embracing the counter-reformation. As far as I can see its quite rare that there is not some failsafe that ensures that if you go crazy the missions still work.is

This thread is funny, people prefer the old mission system? The old mission system was awful, far too random even if you know the triggers, and although I am very much willing into looking at the wiki or even the gamefiles for some event, but that went too far. More importantly though you always need to choose one and it happened so often that you didnt get the right mission at the right time or where stuck with the wrong mission because the situation changed and you can't wait for another year so you just lose the mission ... the system was so broken that even with repairing some of the more ridiculous missions ditching it was the best they could do.

The current system is fully transparent, you know what you can ge, yes sometimes its a little bit frustrating when you get locked out for a long time out of a certain reward because you can't finish the previous mission yet. And yes in rare cases you can get locked out of for good I recently nearly got locked out of half the Manchu tree because I already took all 25 dev provinces in China without finishing the Devastate Metropolis mission (now I need to provoke my marches to revolt because I could return one province to them. That was my fault though because I totatlly forgot about that mission.
Such things are usually the result of the more creative missions, which I am happy to see a lot in the new missions for Emperor.

I don't get the complaint about the railroading either, simple go a different path and you can finish the missions later when you like. If you want to do something totally different then ignore them, you can't expect missions to be designed to all possible alternatives, if it were so than they complain its too railroaded in another direction. The missions should give some uniqueness to the nations and go down to a historic or alt-historic path which they do.

Don't get me wrong the system has its weaknesses, which is mainly that it sometimes lacks creativity, but thats usually because its just the old missions put into the new (Purple Phoenix, Ottomans), where its just conquer A and then B and then C, these missions are not exciting but they still do their job. More problematic is the large parts of ROTW where you have only the generic missions and no or very few national ones. On the other hand the generic ones are still better than the old ones except that they might get "exhausted" at one point (I am currently playing as Mali).

Yes the mission trees are a selling point for the DLCs on the other hand its also a lot of extra-content that otherwise wouldn't be there, so I don't really see the problem with that.
 
  • 4
Reactions:
More problematic is the large parts of ROTW where you have only the generic missions and no or very few national ones. On the other hand the generic ones are still better than the old ones except that they might get "exhausted" at one point (I am currently playing as Mali).

This is definitely a major issue with the mission system in all iterations, but is more apparent in the new one. Most nation's never really had missions. The favored nations did, but everything else got generic repeatable trash that was often ignored after a while.

Now we can see the lack of missions, which understandably upsets some people. Though, in my opinion having interacted with both systems playing as nation's with the generic mission, it's much better now than it was before.
 
  • 2
  • 1Like
Reactions:
I don’t know if I would block off paths, but for some missions I would give different outcomes. For example, Britain has a mission to become the Emperor of the HRE or dismantle it. Give each a significantly different reward. For the mission to go Anglican, have an alternate option of “embrace the counter-reformation” again with different rewards.

That's how it already works in at least one case: The reward for "Russian Revolution" (One of the final Russian missions) changes based on whether you crush or become the revolution. (Protip: Don't go revolutionary if you want the administrative efficiency boost. Or, at least, crush the revolution before you become the revolution)
 
  • 1
Reactions: