So just a graphic interface for what can already be done with notepad? That doesn't seem too bad. It also isn't the implication from being able to move provinces and countries which was what you initially suggested...
Such modding takes hours to
prepare to play a video game. Streamlining the system means people who aren't modders can make their own mods, and simple things could be changed without writing a mountain of code. No need for a game converter; do it yourself! Such simplified modding is so "old school"; even Age of Empires had a basic game editor. By that I mean, its pretty much expected. The real point, though, is that it would make the game more fun to mess with. If you try to setup scenarios, wars, and alliances by just using tag swapping, you'll spend hours, just to see that it doesn't work out.
The only problem is that if each nation has 5 people to keep track of, then it has ~1500 people to keep track of. If each nation has 10, then we're looking at ~3000 and so on. If you have personal relationships for what ever reason then you go from 1500x1500 things to keep track of to 3000x3000. Each doubling of the number of people to keep track of quadruples that portion of the load on the game.
CKII has barons, counts, dukes, kings, and emperors, all with families and courtiers. EUIII represents a significantly smaller amount of nations altogether, and many of these are not monarchies. I'm assuming EU4 will be similar. Representing monarchs and their immediate families should be no problem. Besides that, modders for CKII have made working maps of all of Europe, Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
I'm not sure what to say here - surely if you just made cosmetic changes it'd be "send flag X to Y = conquest!" just in a silly hat. If you make substantive or rules changes then it stops being one united game and breaks into being more than one.
Yes. It would look nicer. All the things you can see with your eyes can be represented numerically. Personally, I'd rather have eyes than a graph. Hmm, not sure about changing mechanics. However, the timeline does cover several time periods where people drastically changed the way they fought, traveled, experienced art, etc. It would make sense if things felt or behaved differently over time.
Sure, let's have them spend time doing 4 or 5 different outfits per tech group rather than putting that time to good use with a good set of graphics for elsewhere in the game. Would you want to tie the artwork and music to a given year (bad if tech is advancing much faster or much slower than history), or to given milestone technologies (people will complain that they're getting 18th century organ music in the late 16th because "that wasn't around then"). I'll admit it's no better, and in some ways worse than a consistent set of music and "timeless" art, but the more precise you try to make something cosmetic, the more people will complain when it's slightly wrong, rather than being generically reasonable for the period as a whole.
Why would culture always change with technology that doesn't necessarily relate to it? Most games have a lot more than 20 sprites, and they're usually highly detailed. I think the art team would survive.
I may have misunderstood you, I thought you meant having the tribes under your control rising up in wars against each other - otherwise known as yet more revolts - and being even more disruptive in your attempts to progress your tech and sliders, or even westernise (however this is done...).
So, what you need is the event that triggers the CB to also slap the targetted nation with a province penalty of some sort. The likelyhood of the event could be tied into your centralisation, or to a decision "allow/disallow raids".
Physically represented factions physically attacking another nation or faction. Not modifiers. Rebels, maybe, but rebels with personality who you can interact with. Rebels 2.0!
The events in CKII fundamentally come down to pressing a button, then pressing a couple more - not exactly enthralling when you're on your 8th or 9th time through a given triggered event tree, and mechanical after the 20th. In EUIII as it stands, all the decisions are optional, and some of them make it more likely that certain event chains will happen. If you look at the CKII events they are very much targetted around you playing "King X of Y", rather than playing "the Kingdom of Y", the approach taken in EUIII.
It gives you the ability to choose and add your own personality to your nation, rather than the personality being assigned to you. Especially if the effects of the event had lasting side effects, changed something about your nation.
Fundamentally, anything in a computer game like this is going to boil down to clicking a button, moving a slider or moving a flag/little man around the map, since that's how the interface works. The EU series is more about international than domestic politics, and trying to add the internal complexities of CKII, which uses the same amount of resources to handle a smaller area, will mean that something has to give somewhere. Either the requirements to run the game go up (due to the extra resources required), or some features of EU have to be left out (to allow you to keep the game in roughly the same resource requirements).
Well, considering that the game runs pretty well on a single core processor, maybe adding more complexity.. people with mac books will need to upgrade? Besides, the graphical improvements are going to bump the requirements up passed single-core compatibility.
Did you play EU:Rome? you could in that game and it was a nightmare to micromanage every province could have about 3 or 4 routes and people got unhappy if not all your provinces did. Rather than any province creating a route you should need a BIG port/CoT equivalent to create a route to or from.
Yeah, that was really poorly implemented.
I think the coastal defenses idea would serve to counter-balance the power of navies, it was annoying when you're playing lithuania and england DOWs you, not accepting peace because its blockading your port(s)
