The single thing I hate the most about EU4

[Freudia]

Actually, the forums have plenty of complaints about giant armies walking across Siberia, and there's zero reason not to have travel time for generals since the mechanic already exists for diplomats/merchants. Are you going to implement those fixes now?

The only way this idea can even remotely be supported is if you get rid of max leader caps, or at least very greatly raise the cap. Part of the reason we have teleporting generals is because we have arbitrarily low softcaps on amount of generals we can have.

While we're at it, can we separate admirals/explorers from generals/conquistadors, for the purpose of the cap? It's somewhat of a lame disadvantage when playing a colonial nation or a general purpose naval power.

 

[josh127]

I don't follow the "realism cuts both ways argument". Rebels were already larger than historic just like armies before any changes were made. How is it an adjusted, but still realistic situation that rebels pop out stronger than the armies of the great powers in areas such as Siberia? It seems like everytime Paradox explains this the answer is that it was too easy to put down a rebel stack so they were made harder. Well, it might have been easy to put down a rebel stack, but rebels show up in hordes. Just looking at the screenshot there's 70K units in 5 stacks, ALL of which have a general.

1) Where's the limit on military leaders for these rebels who "needed" to be stronger?
2) Where's the manpower pull that can get drained for these rebels that "needed" to be stronger?

People are whining about an adjusted realism here? Really? No, people are tired of the game's dominant faction being rebels. I want to fight Ottomans and Iberians, France and the HRE. I don't play the game to fight rebels. Yes, they play a role, but they did that before the updates in 1.6. Now their role is to make me shut the game off, because they're boring and unrewarding.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I don't follow the "realism cuts both ways argument". Rebels were already larger than historic just like armies before any changes were made. How is it an adjusted, but still realistic situation that rebels pop out stronger than the armies of the great powers in areas such as Siberia? It seems like everytime Paradox explains this the answer is that it was too easy to put down a rebel stack so they were made harder. Well, it might have been easy to put down a rebel stack, but rebels show up in hordes. Just looking at the screenshot there's 70K units in 5 stacks, ALL of which have a general.

His argument is that unrealistic rebels are necessary to challenge unrealistic army sizes and supplies. Nevermind that in some regions of the world, rebels ignoring attrition (due to reinforce and no war exhaustion) is enormously more problematic than in others, or that the scaling threat of rebels in minors vs majors is piss poor to the point that you still have loads of instances where a nation with low overextension can't possibly defeat the rebels outright (where is the gameplay balance argument on this one Wiz?), or that the rebels can, with well under 100% overextension (IE a reasonable amount of land from a single war), easily outstrip the numbers of the player's top 2 competitors combined.

The game is designed in such a way that there is virtually no way to avoid spam accepting (soon to be impossible) or fighting numbers that surpass that of revolutionary France with micro tedium, many of which show up in long-conquered provinces belonging to an empire with high stability. Want to go to war again sooner? Have even more of them!

You know, for "balance". AoW province autonomy and rebel rules scare the hell out of me for this reason alone more than any other. How long is someone going to play before they get a Bengali patriot uprising larger than their or Bengal's FL flipping the land right back because they can't attack a -2 jungle/river army with a shock 3 general that's larger than their FL? 1 day? Maybe I'm being too dramatic and it's all under control.

But if it is, it would be the first patch since I got the game where that is true, and UI lies and other issues from previous patches persist. Sorry if I'm not holding my breath on this one.

People are whining about an adjusted realism here? Really? No, people are tired of the game's dominant faction being rebels. I want to fight Ottomans and Iberians, France and the HRE. I don't play the game to fight rebels. Yes, they play a role, but they did that before the updates in 1.6. Now their role is to make me shut the game off, because they're boring and unrewarding.

It's not an exaggeration either. In my Mongolia LP I'd get over 500 regiments of rebels per 10 years. The only nations even close to that were me and France, and France had less than that. In my Kathiawar run with a late game adm efficiency push I got over 1000 regiments of rebels. I could have broken truce on Europe 4 times over and not had to fight as many regiments.

 

[PeterCorless]

The main beef I have is when the rebels you are fighting rival or exceed the armies of the enemies you are fighting. I rock a country that had an army of 20k troops. Then, suddenly, 35k rebels pop up out of nowhere. Uhm... Okay. How?

 

[josh127]

His argument is that unrealistic rebels are necessary to challenge unrealistic army sizes and supplies. Nevermind that in some regions of the world, rebels ignoring attrition (due to reinforce and no war exhaustion) is enormously more problematic than in others, or that the scaling threat of rebels in minors vs majors is piss poor to the point that you still have loads of instances where a nation with low overextension can't possibly defeat the rebels outright (where is the gameplay balance argument on this one Wiz?), or that the rebels can, with well under 100% overextension (IE a reasonable amount of land from a single war), easily outstrip the numbers of the player's top 2 competitors combined.

Can I build tanks too? That would be an unrealistic way to balance against an unrealistic France. In other words, unrealistic to a factor of 100 does not balance unrealistic to a factor of 10, therefore a blanket statement about things being unrealistic says absolutely nothing.

The game is designed in such a way that there is virtually no way to avoid spam accepting (soon to be impossible) or fighting numbers that surpass that of revolutionary France with micro tedium, many of which show up in long-conquered provinces belonging to an empire with high stability. Want to go to war again sooner? Have even more of them!

Yes, I'm tired of playing the game at -100 prestige. Guess what, it lowers the quality of my empire and makes it spawn even more rebels. While Paradox has worked to avoid an upward snowball effect of power, the downward snowball is in full force.

It's not an exaggeration either. In my Mongolia LP I'd get over 500 regiments of rebels per 10 years. The only nations even close to that were me and France, and France had less than that. In my Kathiawar run with a late game adm efficiency push I got over 1000 regiments of rebels. I could have broken truce on Europe 4 times over and not had to fight as many regiments.

It doesn't take a late game admin efficiency run to do it either. Having the negatives (low stab, low legitimacy, low RT, low prestige) create a downward spiral because they'll trigger "random" events that you'll get time and time again. Could I avoid this by playing France and only growing to historic borders? Probably. Would that be a fun game to play? Not in EU4, but maybe sometime they can work on a game focused on it that would keep that interesting.

The main beef I have is when the rebels you are fighting rival or exceed the armies of the enemies you are fighting. I rock a country that had an army of 20k troops. Then, suddenly, 35k rebels pop up out of nowhere. Uhm... Okay. How?

Not to mention that 35K is 2 stacks of rebels and both got a general better than you.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Can I build tanks too? That would be an unrealistic way to balance against an unrealistic France. In other words, unrealistic to a factor of 100 does not balance unrealistic to a factor of 10, therefore a blanket statement about things being unrealistic says absolutely nothing.

I'm well aware of people hiding behind a can of "realism argument". It a rather common can, similar to spam. I just wanted to make what he was saying clear so that you can properly attack the argument .

I guess I would hate the mechanic less if there were a FUNCTIONAL automation process for it. With user micro, 1/4 of an empire's forces can generally take care of the issue. With that pathetic excuse for a rebel hunt we have now, even 1/2 your armies on rebel hunt still allow occupations and jackals events on occasion while units go nowhere at all, chasing rebels that are gone. As such, a disproportionate amount of late game micro work, pausing, and clicking is spent wading through perfectly beatable rebellions that are still pretty trivial, but with no in-game way to route your armies to handling them independently. Cue adding hours of drudgery to playthroughs.

Along with the implausible and poorly balanced rebel sizes, their tedium is a top complaint. It might be the bigger complaint of the two, because while you can do things to game the rebel spawn sizes, there's nothing you can do with a UI that can't handle anything but manual control against them to reduce tedium.

And now the stakes on a broken mechanic with high tedium are raised. Unless the details of the mechanic have changed considerably, we're in for a bad experience. Maybe they have though. I've learned not to expect that though. Prove me wrong, I want to be wrong this time.

 

[BarrosRodrigues]

You know, for "balance". AoW province autonomy and rebel rules scare the hell out of me for this reason alone more than any other. How long is someone going to play before they get a Bengali patriot uprising larger than their or Bengal's FL flipping the land right back because they can't attack a -2 jungle/river army with a shock 3 general that's larger than their FL? 1 day? Maybe I'm being too dramatic and it's all under control.

This. I also "fear" that especially after seeing some values in the developer’s video. The rebellions must be plausible and after a full scale rebellion is squashed the provinces that supported it should not be able to rebel for at least another 15-20 years because all able bodied men were killed in the fight.

 

[include]

I can't play with Bulgaria

 

[Stategem161803]

I should probably note that my main complaint was the tedium. In that game (yes it was a Novgorod start), I was very rich and had plenty of manpower. I could have dealt with the rebels.

The problem is that I like to role play. Meaning that I don't always play just to see how much I can conquer. I wanted to play a game as Novgorod and see how hard it would be to survive and prosper (not very hard as it turns out). It also means that I didn't feel like rushing colonization.

Imagine my horror when I get to Eastern Siberia and see it Portuguese Green. At that point, I considered ending the game right there. It was going to be very not fun to take Siberia from the Portuguese. It was also going to be very expensive. Why do it then? Because I'm Russia and I want Russia to look like Russia. So I figured, well, I might as well give it a shot.

It took a fairly large-scale war against several major powers just to take all of Eastern Siberia in 1 war. It ended up being about 70% ish OE (I already deleted the save).

I believe I was at +1 stability and in fairly decent shape to hold off the rebels. Then, in the span of about 2 months I get -3 stability from events. I have a thing about spending ADM on stability as a Republic. Ok, I've dealt with worse. I can just gut it out for a few years and I can get back to having fun.

The thing that really got me was that I set several provinces to core and rebels kept occupying them even after I accepted demands and killed their stacks several times (very weak forts in Siberia). It started to feel like it was never going to end.


Edit: The overall point being, say whatever you want about balance, but the current rebel mechanics, especially as they pertain to annoying areas to patrol such as Siberia or East Africa, are not fun.

 

[josh127]

I'm well aware of people hiding behind a can of "realism argument". It a rather common can, similar to spam. I just wanted to make what he was saying clear so that you can properly attack the argument .

It's probably a moot point anyway. I'm sure the argument was purposefully simplified so that it didn't fill an entire page trying to explain the design to a bunch of... community members. I just get frustrated when I see it, because it downplays one of the biggest entertainment killers in the game as if it's a non-issue. Of course it's an issue though. Otherwise they wouldn't be changing it now.

I guess I would hate the mechanic less if there were a FUNCTIONAL automation process for it. With user micro, 1/4 of an empire's forces can generally take care of the issue. With that pathetic excuse for a rebel hunt we have now, even 1/2 your armies on rebel hunt still allow occupations and jackals events on occasion while units go nowhere at all, chasing rebels that are gone. As such, a disproportionate amount of late game micro work, pausing, and clicking is spent wading through perfectly beatable rebellions that are still pretty trivial, but with no in-game way to route your armies to handling them independently. Cue adding hours of drudgery to playthroughs.

Along with the implausible and poorly balanced rebel sizes, their tedium is a top complaint. It might be the bigger complaint of the two, because while you can do things to game the rebel spawn sizes, there's nothing you can do with a UI that can't handle anything but manual control against them to reduce tedium.

And now the stakes on a broken mechanic with high tedium are raised. Unless the details of the mechanic have changed considerably, we're in for a bad experience. Maybe they have though. I've learned not to expect that though. Prove me wrong, I want to be wrong this time.

Heh, rebel hunting? Last time I used that was 1.5. If I did a lot of bad things I might have to shut it off though. Nowadays I have to stop and consider how to approach every rebel stack (or if I want to).

Have the rebel mechanics shown up in a livestream? I did not see them, but I haven't been able to keep up with all of them (and for some reason twitch doesn't seem to post them right away anymore).

 

[Dakilla TM]

Besides certain nations getting nerfed, I really dislike the rebel mechanics in this game.

I remember when 1.6 came out, and that stupid and unnecessary "nationalism" modifier was added. I started up a game from 1.5, a PLC blob that stretched from Germany to Persia. As soon as I started the game, my empire collapsed. Rebels that were content yesterday are now turned into demi-gods with 21st century weaponry, beating my professional armies like nothing. I tried my best to finish the "wack a mole" simulator but it was a hopeless cause. Even accepted cultured provinces were spawning doomstacks by the second. And this is with +3 stability and no overextention or any other modifier.

From that day on I basically do not trust PDox with their fixes to the game. They leave alone or amplify the current issues, and then go on and mess up things that are fine the way they are.

Some other things I hate about EU4:

1. The hordes being nerfed to oblivion. In each successive patch they get weaker and weaker. I had to mod them myself to make em playable again.

2. Nepal being nerfed to the ground. WHO THE HELL CRIED ABOUT THIS? This was back when ROTW had crappy units too, so I'm still baffled on why dumb Paradox nerfed a poor 2 provinces minor that rarely ever blobs.

3. Eastern Religions still being pushovers. There's no distinction from Buddhism or Confucianism. Hinduism is now much better, and Shinto is Shia without the piety bar. I've pushed for reforms on these two religions forever and still not a thing has been changed. I had to mod them myself so they won't suck.

4. New Formables. Kurland was a nice addition, but its NIs are so weak that I'd rather keep my Divine NIs when switching. Oh and in case you haven't noticed, MAKE YUAN A FORMABLE NATION! Yes there's Mongolia, but that's the "Northern Yuan", which got kicked out of China. I even made a thread with all the flavor events and NIs and how it would work and everything. There's plenty of support for it too. But it's Paradox so they probably won't listen.


Enough ranting for today. If you read all that then I applaud you!

 

[jdrou]

Stuff like this has to be fixed, extremely unrealistic. An offshoot of having no province populations anymore.....

How? Population only affected rebels in EU3 insofar as it affected province manpower (i.e. not much). Not to mention EU3 never had "province populations" at all, only city populations.

 

[AndrewT]

How? Population only affected rebels in EU3 insofar as it affected province manpower (i.e. not much). Not to mention EU3 never had "province populations" at all, only city populations.

And, we had exactly the same complaints then: "how can a province with 2,000 people produce 10,000 rebels?". It's probably one of the reasons they removed population figures.

 

[itsuart]

In one of my late games Poland "luckily" inherited Lithuania. Only to become patchwork of Lithuania, Polotsk and Ukraine in a next year. Poland got lucky indeed.
Strong rebels is still just a nuisance for huge nations, but bane for small and medium ones.
OPM Horde will never overcome succession crisis unless newest spawned rebels stack have inept general and/or RNG gods cursed them with low battle rolls.
Otherwise it's a perpetual rebellion.

And Timmies just never break apart from internal strife. PLC does and Timmies don't.

 

[Neoton]

I can't play with Bulgaria

Alas, Kebap removed it from the map for 500 years
Anyway, the thing which bothers me them most are coalitions. If you take a province in the HRE as Utrecht you get a coalition of 2-3 nations, if you take 2 provinces you get like 5-6 nations. So that's the HRE and I agree that it should be hard to expand, no problems so far. But why don't coalitions form against France when it annexes Savoy in a single war and gets -90AE with most of the members? If you, as a player, reach 40-50AE the game gives you hell, yet there are no consequences for the AI when it does the same...

 

[Jorlem]

yea, and in real life, it would probably take you 4-8 months to even find out about the rebellion in Bermuda, and you wouldnt be able to just be like, lel, lets load up 30k troops on these transport ships and ship out tomorrow

i dont like big rebel stacks, but they need to be there and realistic for the challenge especially rebellion wise, a lot of successful rebellions were small, they were just far enough away that the logisitcs/power projection of the empire couldnt defeat them without upsetting the balance in europe (ie, if im conquering india as a euro power, i can move 100% of my army and navy there to crush everything, when in real life, any move like that would give my enemies time to burn every village and town, kill every man, rape every woman, kill every rape baby 9 months later, and then go get tea/wine/brats before my troops in india even hear about whats going on) lots of shit isnt realistic, if you are having rebel problems its because you mismanaged your empire, blame yourself, lots of things are balanced for gameplay, you just suck at it

That's why I've suggested that the game be made able to tell where troops are to some degree in the ledger, not just the total troop count. If it broke it up by region, or even continent, the AI could tell if an area isn't properly garrisoned, or if you've shipped your entire army overseas and left your homeland defenseless.

 

[ChildeR]

And, we had exactly the same complaints then: "how can a province with 2,000 people produce 10,000 rebels?". It's probably one of the reasons they removed population figures.

Should've done it with colonies as well.

 

[Bragi]

For myself, what grieves me most are these random events: Peasants are unhappy -> option 1: rebels spawn (yay), option 2: lower tax or however these events are designed.

The problem for me is here, even you are a stable country whitout OE, at peace fo years and stuff, all of a sudden you have to face ridicoulous masses of rebels, while you didn't have any chance to circumvent that!
Did something "wrong", bad governcance? Yeah, punish me, no problem! But even I did it all the best possible way, the game makes me believe that the state of my nation is desolate and throws some BS events at me. So, why?

There are no internal mechanics there to represent "governement" etc., so technically I cannot inluence stuff like wellfare, taxes for my citizens, social spending, political improvements etc etc.
As a substitute, I constantly get bad events to proof that I am a evil ruler and my people or whoever is suffering. Yay.

 

[Neoton]

"We need a shakeup!"

 

[-MoRiDin-]

Provinces, occupied or otherwise, spawning rebel armies larger than the manpower and some times even population of the province.... I HATE THAT!