Europa Universalis IV - Page 14

On August 17 2013 02:10 Sub40APM wrote:

because you do nothing for the first 50 or so years and then you exploit the game to succeed. the fact that you *can* do it doesnt mean its fun to do it while playing, only afterwards when you sit back and enjoy your accomplishment. fundamentally the game is balanced, and its features focused, on the european states and the ottomans.

On August 17 2013 03:25 Monsen wrote:


" If you find the easy nations too easy, don't play easy nations."

Your reply: "Only because you can win with hard nations doesn't mean it's fun. The game is balanced around the easy nations."

I'm having a hard time seeing how that makes any sense whatsoever. (Not to mention that I sincerely doubt the validity of that statement. There might be more specialized missions for some powers, but part of the charm of all paradox games has always been that you could play any "nation" in the game.)

1. If you're not having fun with an easy nation, your best bet would be not playing as an easy nation, no?
2. If a nation is popular/game balanced around it/whatever because it's a major power- well guess what "major" means- it means big. Guess for who fights are easier. (Hint: it's the big guys.)

On August 17 2013 03:34 Sub40APM wrote:

Easy does not equal fun. Just like hard does not equal fun. Challenging doesnt always equal fun either. It could be challenging to play EU IV with only your keyboard but it wouldnt be fun. It would be challenging to play SC2 only with your mouse, that would also not be fun.

More specifically to your second point, that shouldnt be the case at all. The way that paradox handled big states in CK2 was to make them in a certain way much more difficult to manage than a medium sized country (being the king of England, for example, was in certain ways much more limiting than being the Duke of a 3-4 province sized state within England), now they are two different games with different mechanics but I'd like to see more of that where a state is too big it naturally is too difficult to control -- akin to the overextension thing but with more event driven variety maybe.

On August 17 2013 04:06 Monsen wrote:


I still think you're beside the point. Yes, there's no foolproof recipe for "fun". But how is that relevant? Certain games address certain player types who tend to share a similar taste aka "what's fun for them". However I was replying to a very specific complaint, namely "when you blob the game stops being fun". So that narrows the concept of "fun" in question down to precisely one.

I can't really address your CK2 argument because I hated that game with a passion. If I wanted to micromanage the relations of virtual characters I'd get a gender change and play the Sims.
EU has it's own mechanisms to make managing big nations challenging and while those do not always apply to all nations, particularly the major powers, they're not meant to. I'm pretty sure that some nations are just meant to be easy to play. The "but I like one of the easy nations for some reason and would like it to be hard" argument seems just silly to me.

On August 17 2013 02:58 Sub40APM wrote:

Burgundy because it has all the features of the game within its borders (good trade node, religious conflict, part of the HRE but not a voting member) and is close to UK/France/Austria/Spain for conflicts but isnt so small that you just sit around gathering money and waiting for a random opportune moment to steal a province from someone.

On August 17 2013 02:45 Invoker wrote:
I've played other Paradox games before but this will be my first time in the EU series. And I really don't like playing with major powers tho I would like to have a nice and challenging experience. What country would you recommend to someone like me?

On August 17 2013 04:47 Monsen wrote:
You really need to focus on what you're replying to.

So let me spell things out for you for the last time:

My first paragraph deals with your statement that neither hard, easy, challenging is guaranteed fun. And since I was talking about a very specific type of fun, namely the afore mentioned "(no) fun when blobbing" your argument of "x,y,z does not guarantee fun" is not relevant to the point at all.

While your personal preference certainly has merit in a "what is fun/no fun" in EU discussion, that was not the point I was talking about. Please read more closely in the future.

On the topic of major powers and the effort Paradox put into them- well, Blizzard spent a lot of time crafting their single player campaigns, but a avid and experienced gamer will not find them very challenging and neither should the game be balanced around those.
I think it's the same concept here. The major powers are meant to be relatively easy and fun especially for beginners and casual players. And since that's always the majority, it makes sense for Paradox to focus on them. Experienced players will just have to look elsewhere for challenges.

(Judging from your CK2 example, and I'm just guessing here, it might well be that the "major powers" in CK2 are just not as obvious/ aka "big" as in EU. But that hardly changes things as there are still "easy" and "hard" nations/fractions to play, just like with EU. But as I said, just a guess.)

On August 17 2013 06:03 Sub40APM wrote:
Its not relevant? My point is that big countries arent fun. Your suggestion to making the game more 'fun' is to play a minor state/not complain about playing too easy. And my response was that all that does is delay your blobing by 150-200 years (and the first 50 are really you doing nothing at all) and that artificially heightening the challenge of the game does not automatically make it more fun either.

There is always a balance between making a game accessible to a total new player and to someone who has played it for all four iterations but with the strength of their current engine, with their event system and with a reasonably decent combat ai its still disappointing that at the end of the day almost none of the 'classic' EU countries are enjoyable to play -- especially when in CK2 they actually made it reasonably challenging to play as a major state by introducing dynamic rebellions/treasons/betrayals that i would have liked to see pop up for the big states too.

On August 16 2013 20:36 Monsen wrote:
I've never understood the "too easy when blob" complaint. For one, you can always pick an even harder to play nation or set crazy goals. Check the old EU3 thread for cool ideas, we had quite some amazing stories there (some people even made aars with storylines and screenshots, might be in a different thread though, can't recall), but just on top of my head you can try becoming papal controller (with eventual invasion of Europe) as one of the american tribes, unite the HRE as Ethiopia or form Spain with The Knights. Byzantine games were always tricky and fun too, same as the smaller Hordes.

Also for me a big part of the enjoyment has been watching the developments in the rest of the world, the Norway story above is a good example of the surprising turns the game can take.

On August 17 2013 14:12 Simberto wrote:


I think you were talking about our Succession Games, which were an incredible amount of fun. Sadly i haven't got EU4 yet, but maybe someone wants to do something similar for that game.

TL Succession Game 1 (Sicily)

TL Succession Game 2(Alsace)

On August 17 2013 16:01 Leporello wrote:
Playing as England with this new trade system is so much fun, although it makes England's navy even more OP than ever.

I started by conquering Normandy and went eastwards taking the Dutch coast as well. Moved my capital to Holland so I could collect from the Antwerpen trade node, while pushing all the trade from the surrounding nodes (Lubeck, France, Seville) with my dominating navy. So much money, almost more than I can spend. $57 trade value in Antwerpen, while somewhere in the 1560's. I'm wondering if I should even bother colonizing, as I'm going to be intercepting all that overseas trade anyways, as long as my Navy controls the Seville node. Yeah, it's not challenging anymore, but I'm still enjoying it. I might take a crack at Burgundy, but I really hate how they're one-foot-in the HRE, one-foot-out. Very annoying.