seems like a pointless way to antagonize the player given its so easy to work around.
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why not just make ironman optional for achievements?
- Thread starter jamal bakr
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I guess as an incentive for people to choose Ironman. Tbh I only play for achievements and it makes my game much more satisfying being in Ironman, because i just continue even after a bad war, instead of reloading a save. In 1000 hours i never played without ironman
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Yeah, but its a local game, its not really "ironman". Its just "regular mode" and "regular mode with a more annoying save function".
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What does being local have to do with it being ironman? Ironman/hardcore modes have existed in singleplayer local games since forever.
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from the perspective of gameplay, how would earning an achievement be any different if I just could hit *save* rather than copy-paste the save file to an outside folder?
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Less effort for savescumming challenging attempts, I guess? I think the rationale was to enforce the same gameplay onto everyone going for an achievement run, since most mods break ironman compatability for achievement purposes. I don't have a horse in this race either way, as any achievement I get is largely incidental to my gameplay - I was just wondering about your local game rationale.
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Because it's so funny seeing that 80% of players don't care to achieve even the marriage achievement
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If I was the kind of person who got antagonized by it, the fact it's easy to work around would probably contribute to my antagonization.
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I personally find what kind of achievenments can disable ironman far too restrictive. Sometimes I even wish mission trees were ironman compatible just so I dont have to look at the generic missions so often since they make up the majority of achievenments.
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The OP is vastly underselling the problems with the current setup:
- It's trivially easy to circumvent through to anyone who has access to Google and 5 minutes of spare time. Ways to do so include, but are not limited to:
- Making separate save files in the save file directory
- Creating or downloading a python script that does this automatically
- EU4ConsolePatcher.exe
- Cheat Engine
- Steam Achievement Unlocker
- Some people find the mandatory autosave annoying, especially if they're playing on an HDD. It breaks the flow of the game and is largely unnecessary.
- Some new players vastly overestimate the integrity of the ironman symbol and end up feeling "betrayed" when certain Youtubers are suspected of having "cheated", which causes a bunch of drama (a particular incident happened recently).
- Game-ruining bugs are harder to fix in ironman, and can potentially ruin runs altogether.
- It hurts the modding community by forcing a choice between mods and achievements. Other games like Civ allow modded games to earn achievements and are just fine. While it's quite easy to circumvent ironman to trivialize achievements, it's quite hard to hack the game in ways that allow for mods and achievements simultaneously.
- Since mods and achievements conflict, any changes the devs make are effectively forced on players. If the devs make silly decisions in Rimworld or Civ, I can just trivially mod them out. If the devs make silly decisions in EU4, I have to live with them if I still want to get achievements, or at least use hacky workarounds like playing a modded game and fulfilling the achievement unofficially, then using one of the methods mentioned above to actually get the achievement officially. Think how obvious it is that spamming courthouses is extremely micro intensive and annoying. Think how easy the problem would be to solve by just giving courthouses +1 building slot like universities, which could be done in a single line of code. Reflect on the fact that the devs still haven't done anything to ameliorate this issue in over 18 months.
- With easy modding out, complaining LOUDLY to the devs becomes the only real recourse many players have to improve the game. This amplifies the number of complaints in terms of both quantity and severity. Sometimes the issues get fixed. Other times the devs get too many complaints and start avoiding the forums, denouncing them as "toxic" and breaking a critical link with the community thereby causing all sorts of issues.
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Why not just download all the achievement icons from EU4 wiki and you have them? Your suggestion seems like a pointless workaround just to antagonize people.
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Granted I do some save-scumming because RNGs with events; Ironman prevents me from outright editing the game/save file to do the Achievements; so it is ‘necessary’.
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Because you can't become president of the united states by just being born.
Basically, achievements are for good players who know how to play around AI, and love a challenge. By your understanding Three Mountains would be "very easy" if we have commands enabled and type in "annex all"
Basically, achievements are for good players who know how to play around AI, and love a challenge. By your understanding Three Mountains would be "very easy" if we have commands enabled and type in "annex all"
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Game became a million times more fun (almost an entirely new game to me) once I started playing in Ironman mode and going after achievements. I used to have around 500 hours or so with console and a lot of savescumming involved, and now about 1000 more with no console use and no (weird indirect methods involved) savescumming. The difference is day and night. Even a failed campaign or a lost coalition war that sets me back decades or makes me lose an achievement is way more fun than what I had before. Eventually, this is all personal taste. I would understand people who would rather save scum to "get that" achievement but I think it is best not to cheat for something if you really do want to earn it. And if you cannot get it normally (I struggle with many achievements, barely have half of them in Steam) then so be it, it is not the end of the world. Making Ironman optional for achievements would severely change their rarity etc. on Steam. I am 100% sure that many people cheat nowadays, so the ratios are already skewed, but making it so much more easier to cheat would simply destroy the whole point of going after rarer achievements.
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I always find these demands/suggestions kinda weird. As in, if you care about achievements why would you want to trivialize them? And if you don't care about them, what does it matter? Personally though I also have never really understood 100% completionism, for me achievements are a fun background thing, not a main goal in a game.
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You can reload saves in ironman, and you can choose not to reload saves without it.
Numerous EU 4 patches have allowed save manipulations, resulting in stuff like 999/999/999 type rulers with the immortal trait or similar. Even w/o third party software. Cheaters are going to cheat.
Reman listed a lot of reasons, but I will add one more. Players should be punished for their mistakes. Players should not be punished for developer mistakes.
Pdox games, and EU 4 in this particular case, have a long history of broken interactions, lying UI, achievement descriptions that don't tell the truth, and save issues breaking ironman. You don't have to go that far back to notice that several achievements were completely impossible for a little bit, because they had conditions that were failed before unpausing. Only a little further back than that, and you have that thread where a member of the community took the role of a hero and restored a bunch of corrupted ironman saves.
Even ignoring RNG, you also have issues like the game falsely saying when rebels can/can't break the country, or that a nation will/won't join the war (then it does the opposite), lying about cobelligerency, etc. It's a long list. Many of them were actually fixed recently.
And for some things, it's hard to draw the line where developer mistakes end and player mistakes begin. A fun example is the extensive (and mostly undocumented) history of changes to stabhit peace offer threshold, or just how badly forts can be abused in either direction (player losing movement options as a consequence of capturing a fort, player exile walking through ZoC, player making deliberate maintenance swapping retreat traps).
As for "playing the same settings"...well if you consider a patch where it was possible to government swap and stab boost so inexpensively that you gained ADM from the loop (aka infinite admin), a patch with negative maintenance, and a patch with no cap on admin efficiency from absolutism to all be comparable then knock yourself out. But I hold these are not the same experience, and ironman allows for all of them, even without save manipulations.
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Okay, how about a "copperman" that just makes it easier to save and load, and can earn achievements? I'm not a haxxor by any stretch of the imagination but it literally is trivial to already save/load under ironman.
also the comparison to "breaking into someone house with a lock" is completely bizarre.... its my house dude. Its like asking if I should put a lock on my own bathroom to have to pick everytime i feel like taking a dump.
also the comparison to "breaking into someone house with a lock" is completely bizarre.... its my house dude. Its like asking if I should put a lock on my own bathroom to have to pick everytime i feel like taking a dump.
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Copperman? You mean Bronzeman? Crusader Kings 2 had that feature for getting you unique features for CK3. Bronzeman is what you describe: Multiple save files but not achievement compatible.
Bronzeman for EU4 could be a smart suggestion if there is actual talks from the devs about development of EU5. Maybe giving you unique religion and flag symbols for customisation
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