Tried the VeF -mod and this was indeed something that totally turned me off for it. Brandenburg/Prussia without the von Hohenzollerns? Yeah no.
And also that date leaves a looooong stretch of time before colonization and the reformation.
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Will you ever expand EU4 timeline?
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Tried the VeF -mod and this was indeed something that totally turned me off for it. Brandenburg/Prussia without the von Hohenzollerns? Yeah no.
And also that date leaves a looooong stretch of time before colonization and the reformation.
As Milan passed time slapping around everyone in Northern Italy, being pushed back during weak regencies, if it becomes a regional power when not under duress is not being overpowered.
I study history and I strongly disagree with the spirit of the sentence. I prefer - and by a whole lot - ahistorical outcomes brought by historical processes to historical outcomes brought by ahistorical processes.
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Hey I fully agree; just pointing out what was the perception at that time
EDIT: the thing with EU3 was that it consistently produced ahistorical results. So it kinda let to the thought "what happened in history that the game is not able to emulate?". "how come russia ever formed?" "why was portugal never annexed by castille?" "how come burgundy never beat france? It had much better sliders!
" etc
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I would love to know how this would change if starting a new game brought you to a random bookmark, rather than 1444 always.
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or one day later preferably. Yes, seriously, you ought to move the start date to 1453. Or even better, move it to 1477 when the burgundian inheritance happened. Moving it to 1477 would be good for several reasons. Firstly, EU4 does not model medieval states very well (no offense, but just look at the whole burgundy situation), so the less time spent in the 15th century the better. Secondly, the game's setting is in the early modern period. If Byzantium and/or Burgundy survives past the 15th century it is per definition not the early modern period anymore because the world would look so different and their absence (especially Byz) very much defines the era. Thirdly, most players are bored after 200 years. So while we're speaking dates, you might actually end the game at 1789 (sad though since your revolution mechanic is nice) and let Vic3 handle it from there. Historians do after all refer to the time of 1789-1914 as "the long 19th century" for very good reasons, so I think that should be the setting of Vic3.
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That would happen even if you started in 1453, Ottomans just sucked in EU3 regardless of the start date.
The problem is that none of the duresses that hurt Milan were present if you started in 1399 apart from them having no core on the odd province. Instead the Austrians just killed them anyway because of an anachronistic mission they always got.
Milan was the least of the issues, I was just trying to think of all the ones I could.
No EU game has historical processes, so this preference (which I'm pretty sure 90% of players with historical knowledge agree with) is moot.
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Paradox has said that some things they do are to try and make things down the line *somewhat* approximate reality 100+ years after game start (on average, anyway). Example: the cores the Ottomans have on East Anatolia, they said that they liked the end result of having them at game start. It's kind of like time travelers trying to fix a mess they've made of the timeline and eventually just going 'eh, that's close enough'
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I'd like to have a few more years to experience the Revolution and other very-late game content. I think that an end date of 1830 (or 1836, assuming that V3 will have it as a start date) would be a nice change.
I was turned down from playing Napoleon after seeing that he was 50 year-old senior when he became the emperor.
I wonder what's discouraging people from playing later dates, hmm?
Byzanz lovers are not just greeks, we are legion and we are everywhere.
I really liked the 1399. Its what I am missing most from EU III, besides sliders*. And I'aint kidding. On the map was a spirit of change, everything was possible. And in the east the dreadful horde. So it was at least a challenge to found Russia as Muscovy. Nowawadays its a cakewalk. Now the usual suspect colonize, grow big, implode, explode. And then there is this great dynamic event called The King of Burgundy dies. Which falls always to Austria if I don't intervene. But thanks to Common Sense France sucks more often now. So there is that. Meh still missing fighting hordes to get imperial authority.
Sliders were raw and a little bit undynamic. And some of them were to onesided. But still it allowed you to stir slowly the focus of your country. Less like I'm Brandenburg/Sweden, I have the best Soldiers in the World for reasons, which haven't happened yet and possibly never will. the national ideas should be scrapped althogether, but what was the topic again?
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This is an interesting point. It makes me wonder if gameplay would be better served in the next generation by cutting it off even earlier, and making a completely separate game to come between it and Vicky. I'm not sure what the best cut-off point would be; that would depend on what the actual focuses of EU5 (let's say) and the new game were determined to be. Actually, this might not be a bad idea anyway; loads of people on the board say they never even play EU4 all the way to the end because they get so big and powerful it's just not interesting anymore. Maybe they'd prefer a different game to handle the later periods?
While part of me salivates at the very idea of a specifically "Long Nineteenth Century"-focused game, I genuinely think that 1789 is a bad place to start Vic3. I don't want to have to sit through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars every time I want to start a new game. Whether Vic3 (assuming it ever exists) begins in 1836, 1821, or even November 21, 1815, I really do think it should start after the time of Napoleon.
Also, I can't tell if you were proposing that Vic3 should end in 1914 or not (implied by what you said, but not outright stated), but if so, then that leaves a huge gap between the end of Vic3 and the beginning of HoI. A gap that includes World War I, the Roaring Twenties, and the rise of Fascism and the Soviet Union and Communist China. Extending HoI to include all that would stretch its scope too far, and I don't know if people would even want a whole game just for that period. It's just as well to let Vicky handle it, I think.
(Of course, I have so little interest in a game that only focuses on WW2 that for me, the series effectively ends at Vicky anyway. I really wish East vs. West hadn't been killed. I really wanted to see what a Paradox game about the Cold War would have been like, and if I were obliged to get HoI4 just to bridge the gap, then I would. As it is, I own no HoI games and have not decided whether to buy HoI4 yet. But that's me.)
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No extensions for EU4, but I reckon future PDX grand strategies will follow the CK2 model a bit - start with a "late game" focus, so people can play those scenarios, and extend the game backwards in major DLCs only when they are sure the mechanics for those eras make sense. It must be pretty upsetting if you worked on things like the Eighty Years War in vanilla and then saw no-one playing it - people want a decent amount of time to sandbox rather than jump in to partially prebuilt castles.
Perhaps that is because your history files are not so accurate or fun after 1444.
Perhaps that is also why you spend less effort on those history files.
It's a chicken and egg problem.
IMO at least, if you made the Napoleonic Wars bookmarks as balanced and realistic as the 1444 bookmark, surely more than 0.1% of people would play them.
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How do you suggest they make the Napoleonic Wars bookmark more balanced?
A few examples:
(1) Provinces. London should not be worth 1/3 the Development of all England, for example. In fact, according to the History files, it is the only province in England that ever developed between 1444 and 1820. Doubled, in fact. Whereas all other provinces, including Lancashire the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, stays the same.
In fact according to the history files very few provinces in the world developed at all between 1444 and 1820, whereas in game you see every HRE OPM go from 15 to 75 Development. I'm not arguing which is better - I'm just saying that these make for very different games, so players are likely to prefer one over the other.
(2) Ideas. This is with all later bookmarks in general - there should be another way for players to pick Ideas. You know how many nations in the history files pick Naval Ideas? 15 out of 599. How about Defensive Ideas? 573 out of 599. Wonder why?
Every time I am tempted to play Great Britain in the Napoleonic Wars, I load, see that Naval Ideas are picked for me, I quit.
(3) Prussia/Austria not giving each other Military Access while both are fighting Revolutionary France in different wars, because of Heretic Religion and all. This is a dead horse.
(4) Not able to set/reset Rivals during war. Have fun with that one in a Europe of continuous decades of war, lol.
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CK2 (whose 1066 start is if anything more detailed than default Charlemagne start) also has this issue, in that 99+% of starts will be in the earliest date available to the player. It's something we've seen across all our games. More detailed (and fewer) later starts might see a percent or two starting there at most.
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Thank you for your response. I am aware that history files take a lot of effort to compile, but personally I enjoy a variety of game starts in EU4 between 1444 and 1492 mostly. Even made a few customary bookmarks for these.
I think the statistic about game starts is misleading in several ways:
(1) The first start could be the most picked simply because it is easiest to pick it. Less time spent deciding/scrolling down. It's Bounded Rationality.
For example, I have no problem dialing the start date up to the exact month and day of certain historical events (I later modded extra Bookmarks), but sometimes I just click a random nation in the 1444 Start to check out a new feature (such as Karma). I click a random Buddhist nation in 1444 and play it for about 5 minutes. That still counts as one game start.
(2) People could also pick the earliest start because they feel like they want to get the most out of the game.
The irony is most games never last till the end date (1820 for EU4), so they could have started later and played just as long.
(3) The game slows down much in late game in EU4, so that many players tend to quit in the 1600s or 1700s. They might worry (only partly correctly) that a later game start will mean a slower game.
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