What should be the core concepts of future EU5

[Don_Quigleone]

2) don't mass produce shallow DLC without thinking how they incorporate into existing game mechanics as a whole.

I'd prefer to have one XCOM2: War of the Chosen over 20 EU4: Leviathan, any day.

 

[subzero12479]

what the hell is trade steering supposed to represent anyway?

spices for example being more expensive in europe than in asia. considering that transporting goods around costs money and they thus far become more expensive in the process it makes sense i think.

 

[please add multithreading]

"Realistic expansion" is a horrifying can of worms to implement.

Because as soon as you start touting realism, your game has to allow the player to emulate Mehmed II or Ismail I or Babur or Selim I without getting instantly facewrecked by the game mechanics... without allowing the player to do the same thing in central Europe.

No that is not realistic cause that didnt happen in Britain and Prussia so it happened nowhere else in the world thus its not realistic.

 

[Loganplayseu4]

No that is not realistic cause that didnt happen in Britain and Prussia so it happened nowhere else in the world thus its not realistic.

... their point was that with "realistic expansion", you'd have to cover all real-life cases from the era or else risk "not being realistic", but doing so either involves giving a few countries special treatment or making a complex system. Because even if Prussia took 300 years to become Germany, the Ottomans doubled in size in one sultan's reign.

 

[Zaddy]

... their point was that with "realistic expansion", you'd have to cover all real-life cases from the era or else risk "not being realistic", but doing so either involves giving a few countries special treatment or making a complex system. Because even if Prussia took 300 years to become Germany, the Ottomans doubled in size in one sultan's reign.

I'm fairly sure they're being facetious.

 

[merilessj]

Dlc. Lots and lots of buggy $20 dlc

 

[Temudhun Khan]

Improving on the estate system would be nice, but it's only one part of a bigger picture: This game should have more interesting internal politics. At the moment, I feel like the only enjoyable part is war.
Somehow I have the opposite problem with HoI4: even though it should be the paradox game with the most exciting war mechanics, war times are always the worst parts of my campaigns.
Also, I don't necessarily have a problem with having so many mechanics rely on buttons to click, but the insantaneous effects are mostly a thing of the past. The stability bar is just there to convert your admin mana into frustration with the power of comets, for instance, and I think Imperator turned it into a way more elegant mechanic.

 

[AUG1024]

Intel and AMD endorsement。

 

[iClipse]

I'd like to see more gradual stuff on a province level. For example, religions: a province could be 70% catholic and 25% protestant and 5% Jewish. Also, make it possible to have %ownership of provinces of other countries. A good example is The Hansa who had trade outposts far outside of their territory, i.e. the City of Bergen.

I'm not a big fan of pops (too much fidgetting. Leave it for victoria and stellaris), but having some sort of 'population' tied to provinces would make sense too.

 

[grandadmiralbob]

I'd like to see more gradual stuff on a province level. For example, religions: a province could be 70% catholic and 25% protestant and 5% Jewish. Also, make it possible to have %ownership of provinces of other countries. A good example is The Hansa who had trade outposts far outside of their territory, i.e. the City of Bergen.

I'm not a big fan of pops (too much fidgetting. Leave it for victoria and stellaris), but having some sort of 'population' tied to provinces would make sense too.

Yes! Having a province just labels as "insert religion/culture" is odd. That's one of the reasons why I want EU5 and they need to let 4 die off.

 

[csward53]

You do realize what we got with Crusader Kings 3 right? A bare bones game with a pretty coat of paint and over a year wait for the first DLC. With EU5 We will be rebuying all the same DLC to add features we already have. The engines would be the same. It would just be prettier. I don't see the point. I also doubt with Victoria in the oven it's even on Paradox's radar.

 

[deathbypie]

I bet EU5 will have NFT's, though I don't know how or why.

 

[cristofolmc]

I could write lots. But i think Eu5 needs to model VICKY 3 Interest Groups (estates). For that you need pops to be behind those estates. Ni Vicky pops, IR will suffice. That way Estates can change organically unlike in EU4 where it only happens through events and the click of a button. Estates should have much more influence in the direction of the country like in Victoria 3, and hinder you and oppose you, and face the consequences if you do not listen to them. Also they should have their own purse and be able to finance their own levies and armies. Represent this period struggle between estates and the state for power.

I think pops also are great to represent the cultural make up that it was so important at this time of conquest and expansion and especially of religious differences within the same provinces. Somthing EU4 doesn't have. A province is either catholic or protestant. When in reality it was both, plus some jewish, and in some places even some muslim as well. Say what you will about IR but it had the best culture system of any PDX game which would suit this timeline just perfect. The way you could see the breakup of all the cultures and interact with all the cultures and minorities in your empire, give them or take away certain rights, it just was brilliant.

Also I think the IR levy system would be great for this game and to represent how at the start of the game most armies were levied populations. Some countries like France, Spain or Turkey would start with some standing armies just like in IR. As your country progressed and becomes wealthier z you are able to afford more standing armies and not having to rely on levying pops with the economic and technological consequences that brings, and have instead a more and more professional standing army.

Technology system is very lame and unfun. Not only depends on a horrible mana systen (no need to even say it should be scrapped), but it gives no choice to the player. You unlock all three all the time. I much prefer IR which gives you a choice. Do I want to focus my efforts more on military technology and trade and economy? Or on my navy and political/social stuff? Vicky 3 seems to go this way as well. There are three treee and you decide. I really think EU 5 needs a tech tree.

Lastly, PDX should do with all its outdated systems like its core and rebelion systens from EU3 and adapt the rebellion/civil war mechanics of the modern titles like CK3, victoria 3 and IR. Its no wonder that you cannot implement decline mechanic with such old outdated unfun annoying mechanics. A good pop-interest group system along with more fun and realistic civil war/rebelion systems should make decline mechanica much more organic, realiatic and therefore more fun and challenging to overcome, other than just an arbitrary annoyance derived from arbitrary maluses, events or outdated arbitrary systems such as cores system.

Lastly, a more obvious one: Trade. It needs to be of course more flexible and dynamic, but I think trade goods should aquire more importance. Like add actual units of trade goods that you need for certain things. Make need for trade not just based on money but actual need for certain goods. Maybe this a bit too much to ask but I thought I'd throw it there as well hehe.

Playing CK3 and seeing the development of Victoria 3 has made me realise how truly abd really old and outdated EU4 is and how much it needs shelving and start working on EU5 with modern uptodate systems and code like the other PDX titles.

 

[RaccoonCity]

Personally I would like EU5 to take a Vic3 approach, trying to be more kind of a simulator, instead of just a map painter with very abstracted mana elements (like EU4).

I honestly want EU5 to be Vic3 but adapted to its time period. So I'm talking about a deep population system, a deep economic system, and a huge nerf to braindead map painting. Instead of deep industry mechanics, we could have deep colonizing mechanics (POPs would be essential for this), and maybe more focus on religion instead of politics. About the warfare system, I'll wait to see how that turns out in Vic3, it can either be a huge disaster or a great idea.

And specially, I want EU5 to get rid of the horrible snowball effect that EU4 has, that makes me never finish any of my games. I want to see the largest empires colapse sometimes. I want internal management to be a lot harder to mantain the larger your expansion gets.

 

[saegoto]

I would like to see population mechanic (no pops) instead of development. EU3 had problem with population growth. It was too high and uncontroled. To resolve the problem every province would have population limit depends on abstract food production (which depends on province terrain, province type (city, country), climate, food trade). Buildings, technology, era would increase it. System of plagues, crop failures would control population too.

 

[grommile]

every province would have population limit depends on abstract food production

This does not work nearly as well as you'd like.

Ever since classical antiquity, the great cities of the world have been fed by some combination of trade and imperial exploitation. Local food production on the scale of EU4 provinces has in a number of cases been extremely limited.

(Conversely, many "breadbasket" regions have remained agrarian throughout history.)

 

[cristofolmc]

This does not work nearly as well as you'd like.

Ever since classical antiquity, the great cities of the world have been fed by some combination of trade and imperial exploitation. Local food production on the scale of EU4 provinces has in a number of cases been extremely limited.

(Conversely, many "breadbasket" regions have remained agrarian throughout history.)

I think the IR pop-food-pop cap model is simple enough to fit EU scope but does the trick very well indeed for such simple system. And its a hell of a lot more immersive and fun to play around than just a number you just increase clicking on a button based on some even more abstract modifiers

 

[grommile]

the IR pop-food-pop cap model

I don't have IR, so that means literally nothing to me.

 

[nyetflix]

Another idea for EU5: separate provinces into a city and countryside. This could include army presence and control, fort level, maybe a new city terrain, as well as population, tax, culture and religion. This could be a horrible or great idea, I'm really not sure yet. I'm thinking about it from the perspective of how Europeans controlled forts or cities on the coast of Africa and Asia, but not the countryside. Or also guerilla warfare. Thoughts welcome.

 

[Blindbohemian]

I really, really, really, really, really, really, really do not want to see pops in the Europa Universalis series.

Victoria III is a society sim that's interested in economy at the point in history when consumerism, resource management and mass politics became a powerful global force. Without all three of those ingredients I don't think pops are necessary or useful (and they are inescapably a huge drain); even with all three of those ingredients I don't think pops are the only or necessarily the best way to model the things Victoria is interested in.

Europa Universalis is not a society sim, is not terribly interested in the economy, and is not set amid the industrial revolution. Pops would add nothing useful to Europa Universalis that couldn't be achieved with less complexity and computational overhead in some other way.

I think it's reasonably well-accepted that each of Paradox's major grand strategy games has a central "offering" based on the historical period it represents: Crusader Kings is a grand strategy game, but more than that it's a game about feudal lineage and internecine dynastic politicking. Victoria is a grand strategy game but more than that it's a game about mass politics and industrialisation. Hearts of Iron... something something warfare. It's fairly well-accepted that by comparison Europa Universalis lacks a key central identity and is kind of just a game about painting the map.

This means two things, to my mind:

1. Europa Universalis could (probably) be improved by having a central identity for the design philosophy to be built around; from movies to architecture to cookery, things are better when there's a central pillar to bring it all together, and;
2. Europa Universalis's hypothetical core identity needs to be formulated and implemented in such a way that it doesn't ruin the game for the audience its built who like it because they can paint the map.

Europa Universalis begins with the final collapse of the Roman Empire, the unravelling of ecclesiastical absolutism in Europe, the acrimonious end of perhaps the most famous feudal conflict in the Hundred Years War and the dismantling of the über-feudal entity in Burgundy. From those beginnings in the late medieval period Europa Universalis spans the breadth of the early modern period, charting the fracturing of supranational ecclesiastical orders, the centralisation of feudal realms, the unification and calcification of rough natural borders between "culture groups" and concluding with the first total wars seeing massive armies of conscripted citizens fighting on behalf of centralised Westphalian nation-states. The shifts in the structure and organisation of political entities across the Europa Universalis period are absolutely enormous, and a lot of them (unlike the shifts in the Crusader Kings period, often driven by climate and technology) are discernible and even influence-able at the macro scale where we sit as players.

So I think the key central identity that Europa Universalis is built around should be a world that's changing underfoot even as you work to dominate it.

I think every mechanic in Europa Universalis V, so far as is reasonably practicable, should be designed so that the incentives and the ways you engage with it change over the course of the game. Things that were a good idea in the early game should be a really bad idea in the late game; things that are a great idea in the end-game might be a huge gamble in the middle, and so on.

With that in mind, I think a key mechanic that needs to underpin the above is centralisation. Europa Universalis should in large part be a game about balancing the amount of control you want to have over your lands and resources against the costs and difficulties of managing all that land and resource. And how do we make that fun? By organising the game not around pops, which represent individuals who were largely irrelevant from the beginning to the end of the time period, but around estates and subjects.

So that's what I think should be the core concept of a future EU5: it should be relentlessly focused on making the game-world and the "rules" change over time. It should achieve that primarily by making the key concern of countries, alongside warfare, be centralisation, and the player should be able to implement their strategy for centralisation (or decentralisation) and mess with their enemy's strategies, through a massively expanded system for estates and subjects.

I think on the one hand this would make Europa Universalis a vastly better "history game" in that it would actually reflect history rather than forcing you to play as an idealised Westphalian state the like of which barely existed by 1821, let alone 1444 and would satisfy the map-painter crowd by allowing them to paint maps to their hearts' content with the added ability to adjust and collect modifiers by playing with estates.

Things I would like to see redesigned around this core concept
There are four major game elements that I think need to be completely overhauled and rebuilt around the core concept of "change" and "centralisation".

1. I think internal politics need to be completely removed from EUIV (which won't be hard given they barely exist) and carefully reassessed bit by bit to ensure they interconnect, create interesting strategic choices and change over time.
2. Trade and wealth needs to be reassessed to a) ensure that it's not just an inflow of money bolted on to the side of your economy like it currently is in EUIV, b) that the wealth of your country and people rather than just your treasury is a strategic concern, and c) that the important types and sources of trade and wealth change over time.
3. Technology, "ideas" and government reforms need to be removed and completely reexamined.
4. Unit types and recruitment need to be redesigned from the ground up.

I have specific proposals for each game element, but this is a really long post already and no one actually likes reading other people's ideas for game design philosophies, so I'll leave it here.