What would YOU like to see in Europa Universalis IV?

[Chamboozer]

I never really liked the idea of generic provincial buildings being the main thing to spend money on. I'd rather see more concrete things like for instance ordering a census for a region to tax it more accurately, or the construction of a church/mosque to increase the loyalty of a religious faction.

 

[BandC]

Our history is ridiculous aswell, as a lot of things that happened were not that likely and spanned further events/ changing more outcomes. And if just 5 Countries would Overperform and 5 would underperform; it would totally change the timeline/ history. There are no ridculous alternate histories just very unlikely ones ( and this may even include our own ). I´d like any events etc. as generic as possible without targeting specific countries, so the game will not artificially be steered in a direction. The biggest problem for "plausibility" is to write a AI that is both capable of being semi-efficient and totally irrational. I guess what I am trying to say is: It is really hard to make a "plausibile" acting game without any artificially steering, biggest part of the problem is the giant timeline it´s simply too big to get something that´s remotely based on our own history without extreme steering.

I didn't say 5 countries. I said 10-20%. That's a lot of countries. If 10-20% would overperform/underperform while the rest performing historically you'd still get a lot of variation while staying mostly plausible. I guess what upsets me most is not that EU3 presents ahistorical results; it's that EU3 presents same ahistorical outcomes 9 times out of 10. So it's more of a balance / AI problem than RNG causing wild results.

Now I didn't say that writing a generic non-scripted AI that gives you plausible results is easy. Writing AI is hard. I get that. I'm a programmer.

However, it's a brand new sequel to the game and it's what "I" expect from Paradox.

 

[DrLulz]

A humble request: The return of policy sliders and national ideas. I love them when I play EU3 and miss them when I play Victoria. The ability to customize your nation contributes immensely to replayability.

Also I really hope the coalition system will be cool, and will replace BB as the check on unhistorical expansion. In general I'd like it to be harder to expand, but feel much more fullfilling. Then you'd of course need to have something more interesting to do in peacetime - like a more interesting trade system, which is already announced
.

Also for the love of God a new pirate system, that does not make reaching Naval Tech 9, the worst thing that happens to you for the entire game

 

[Chamboozer]

Please, please make it harder for an army that's besieging a fortress to defend against a relieving attack. It's so silly that an army can be fully involved in taking down a fortress, then the next day be 100% ready to fight another army. Generally, the relationship between armies and forts needs to have more of an impact on gameplay.

 

[Garak]

I didn't say 5 countries. I said 10-20%. That's a lot of countries. If 10-20% would overperform/underperform while the rest performing historically you'd still get a lot of variation while staying mostly plausible. I guess what upsets me most is not that EU3 presents ahistorical results; it's that EU3 presents same ahistorical outcomes 9 times out of 10. So it's more of a balance / AI problem than RNG causing wild results.

Now I didn't say that writing a generic non-scripted AI that gives you plausible results is easy. Writing AI is hard. I get that. I'm a programmer.

However, it's a brand new sequel to the game and it's what "I" expect from Paradox.

I think you missed what he meant. He was throwing out the 5 countries thing precisely because it's less than 10-20%. In other words, what you were suggesting wouldn't result in minor variation; it would radically change things from one game to the next. If you want less dramatic variation, you'd need smaller numbers. Anyway, EU3 goes about halfway there already with the Luck mechanic. That really does make a significant difference in most cases by causing the beneficiaries to overperform. If you don't believe me, start a game and then mod your save to grant lucky status to some really off-beat countries, like the Papal State or Oman, and watch what happens. For what you're talking about, I guess there could be an opposing mechanic causing certain countries to be "unlucky", giving them penalties so they underperform.

 

[Thanks4Nothing]

No more Comet Sighted events!

A thousand times this! Though I have a feeling the developers will be cheeky and add in an identical event with different fluff just to spite us

Umm...how about event like "there was no sighted comet for awhile...maybe something goes really not good? Maybe, our leader is bad and we need to riot!"?

 

[Chamboozer]

I'd like to see the Eastern European slave trade represented in some way, could be an interesting new use for the hordes (and more realistic than their endless territorial expansion in EUIII). It would also make controlling Kaffa and Azov more important than they are now (which is not at all).

 

[VI Imre]

A good map.

 

[Vestinus]

I didn't say 5 countries. I said 10-20%. That's a lot of countries. If 10-20% would overperform/underperform while the rest performing historically you'd still get a lot of variation while staying mostly plausible. I guess what upsets me most is not that EU3 presents ahistorical results; it's that EU3 presents same ahistorical outcomes 9 times out of 10. So it's more of a balance / AI problem than RNG causing wild results.

Now I didn't say that writing a generic non-scripted AI that gives you plausible results is easy. Writing AI is hard. I get that. I'm a programmer.

However, it's a brand new sequel to the game and it's what "I" expect from Paradox.

A De Jure system like the ck2 one (but more dynamical) can prevent from having veryvery strange situations/borders.

 

[Persiani]

Persia not Being a Theocracy. Seeing oh Persia was a monarchy with Shah's(Kings) until late 1979

 

[nijis]

Mostly, I would like to see a strong sense of the distinction between core and frontier areas of one's empire.

The core is the domain of armies, fleets, and epic battle. The frontier is the domain of far-flung squadrons and detachments, protecting tenuous settlements and trade routes. Expanding into an underpopulated area like Mongolia, or the fringes of the Sahara, should be difficult -- not because of the numbers of the enemy but the ability to bring force to bear.

I'm really excited by the announced game's emphasis on trade routes.

 

[Burning]

1. Game mechanics that prevent exponential growth/success of the player against AI. (currently, you can "win" EU3 within 50 years, and the rest of the game is just dominated by you)
   
   
2. Game mechanics that prevent exponential growth/success of the player against AI. (currently, you can "win" EU3 within 50 years, and the rest of the game is just dominated by you)
   
   
3. More importance to exploration and trade, conquest should happen along the way, but it should not be the ultimate solution to everything.
   
   
4. Dynamic culture system with migration and cultural assimilation (similar to vicky)
   
   
5. Political agendas for bloodlines (Conquer France, Unify the HRE, Convert the Pagans, ...).
   
   
6. Possibility to maintain log-term alliances and relations, combined with goals. (NOT war goals, but this should be more delicate things like... spreading the reformation)
   
   
7. A better rebellion-system like in Vicky, but combined with causes(not just: enact reform XY) and missions.
   
   
8. Game mechanics that prevent exponential growth/success of the player against AI. (currently, you can "win" EU3 within 50 years, and the rest of the game is just dominated by you)

 

[Cybvep]

Game mechanics that prevent exponential growth/success of the player against AI. (currently, you can "win" EU3 within 50 years, and the rest of the game is just dominated by you)

This. Seriously, the game needs to be a bit like Magna Mundi in that respect. I want several hundred years of "real" gameplay...

 

[Blastaz]

Expaning the mission system. Make them more dynamic, linked to geographical location and culture rather than just tag. Make them tell a national story, so you progress through them (if you want) adding a bit of narritve and historical context to your game. Mostly these stories would be cultural based and consist of uniting your area (Spain, Britain, France Russia whatever), but you could have seperate chains for trading republics or theocracies. When you reached a certain level you could upgrade to being a Great Power where your missions are about your rivalry with other Great Powers and colonisation & exploration.


following your unique country missions was always fun in EU3 but they quickly petered out into just a handful of generic ones build manufactory X in province Y which were largely pointless, creating something like Great Power missions (or alowing you to pick a national focus conquest, trade, culture, colonisation) would enable you to have random missions that were still relevant to your goals and aims.

 

[liveandletdie14]

One of the things I wouldn't mind seeing is being able to set an end date. One of the things I like about Victoria 2 is that it only lasts 130 years making it more challenging to be 1st at the end of the game. If u play over 400 years you easily become the most powerful country by the end. So just an option to set an end date would bring more challenges to the game I think.

 

[Closet Skeleton]

No numbers in the tech system. Tech should be based on actual inventions like in Vicky 2 rather than silly numbers that just give Europe tiny little advantages and should also be based on provinces like CK2. Inventions should travel and while they can be invented in multiple places at once I don't want the Vicky 2/Civilisation problem where everyone has to invent gunpowder individually when in real life only china did.

 

[Kalmar8]

Well, before the thread become too long for anybody to read it...

- more complex military system, especially including:
- - meaningful terrain and climate/seasons -- invasion out of the blue over Alps or Carpathians should be painful, wars protracted into winter should be painful too; so far I simply ignore seasons in Paradox games
- - logistics -- maintaining a single stack sent somewhere overseas should be difficult and it should simply shrink; marching through half the Europe and whole Russia to intervene somewhere in Asia should also be a bad idea; AFAIR even Ottomans in the routine Central European campains could loose half of the army due to desertion, diseases etc. before it arrived from Constantinople to its destination; besides, it should also prevent bigger countries from bullying the smaller ones so easily
- - outcome of a battle should be somehow unpredictable, or rather dependent on multiple factors so that a small army should be able to prevail over numerically superior enemy that is for example badly led or in unfavourable terrain
- I greatly support some more options in time of peace -- some reforms to pass (maybe you'll need to convince the nobles to accept them), some factions to manage, some economy to build -- I think a dificulty of playing for example Poland should be much like that: huge amount of difficult to manage internal problems.
- I would also appreciate multi-ethnic provinces -- otherwise Central and Eastern Europe lacks its complexities and is simply a bullshit; a pop system would be great, but I guess unrealistic to implement; however personally I would gladly exchange flexible but not much detailed starting point for a few well researched starting points with also well researched pops; it would also solve the absurdness of instant convertion and the process could be greatly slowed down; even pecentages or splitting the population into rural (most resilient), urban and noble (most eager to adopt the culture of the court) would be better, otherwise Ukraine is catholic in 50 years and Balkans are muslim and it's rather easy to turn them respectively Polish/Lithuanian and Turkish
- I would really like monarchs as real people with parents, siblings and children and with personal traits like in CKII and some system of principalities or provinces and with local nobles that can rise to power; anyway politics by that time was fuelled very much by personal/dynastic interests
- I would also appreciate less typos in Central Europe -- Victoria II after so much time still has "Bialystock" and "Siedlice" -- it's pain to look at that

As a sidenote: I'm just reading Wilson's "Europe's Tragedy" abouth the Thirty Years War and for example it shows very well how complex was the internal situation of Austria before the war: with personal and dynastic ambitions, religious divisions (that were not so straightforward geographically), resistance of the nobles and so on. I wish I could see more of that in the game -- not just the behemoths that conquer everything around.

 

[Bad_Haggis]

One of the things I wouldn't mind seeing is being able to set an end date. One of the things I like about Victoria 2 is that it only lasts 130 years making it more challenging to be 1st at the end of the game. If u play over 400 years you easily become the most powerful country by the end. So just an option to set an end date would bring more challenges to the game I think.

What my view of EU3 was that you spend 100-150 years building an empire, and the rest of the time holding it together while fighting everyone else.

 

[unmerged(271387)]

More dynamic situations and alternate history that makes sense(see:no trollhemia)

 

[Jaol]

Better Sub-National Entities

As in a more complex system of vassal states. In the early game these could be fuedal vassals; later, colonies and chartered companies. I'd like to be able to have, feudal Japan represented as single nation to the outside, but be internally divided into sub-states that can go to war with each other. Or the 13 colonies represented as some sort of vassal state of England that wouldn't have much in the way of foriegn policy, but might independently declare war on neighboring Indian tribes, and could eventually rebel against the motherland.

Basically something inbetween the feudal structure of CK2 and the sub-state mechanics of Vicky2.