2121

Oh wow. Wow. Thinking through the implications… that seems to be a big, big change.

It looks like they’re changing up trade so it’s more about your navy, less about territory control. At first glance I think this is an interesting change.

  • Reduced trade power from provinces.
  • Reduced trade power effect of Important Centers of Trade and Tolls.
  • Reduced maintenance of light ships.

EDIT: Keep finding other interesting nuggets.

  • You now get army tradition for each fully maintained non-obsolete fort, up to a maximum of +1. The amount you get depends on how many forts you have compared to your total development level.

Thanks for the link and the heads up, Dave!

2122
  • Reduced trade power from provinces.
  • Reduced trade power effect of Important Centers of Trade and Tolls.
  • Reduced maintenance of light ships.

Yeah, they seem to be moving back closer to the old system. They nerfed light ships pretty badly in 1.12.

2123

They did, yes. I send them on privateering missions almost exclusively right now.

2124

I don’t have a problem with that. The problem is this expansion contained elements supposed to enhance your ability to build taller. In the process they pay gated the base game’s ability to build tall as was previously possible. That is wrong and a bad decision. Instead of pay gating development it should be included in the base game. If they wanted to pay gate something add new buildings for instance to build taller only for the expansion. Don’t restrict old content and abilities because it is the easiest way to do it.

I don’t see how sales being super great makes this right as Johan seems to imply. This is something companies I don’t buy games from any longer would point at to justify their decisions.

If they make development free, I’ll be a happy customer and 99% chance I’ll buy Common Sense as well.

2125

I played multiplayer for a few hours yesterday with a friend. And by “a few hours” I mean “most of the day”. It was a blast, but it was also the longest session of the game I’ve experienced and I felt like I was getting absolutely hammered by the most lousy random events to the point that the game became not fun. I checked the in game menus and did some quick google-fu, but couldn’t find anything. Is there some way of turning off the random events? Or do I just need to learn to play?

2126

You can’t turn off the events. Dealing with the crap that gets thrown at you is just part of the gameplay. If there’s one particular event that you really dislike it’s possible to disable it with mods, but that wouldn’t really be feasible for all of them as you can imagine. :)

Events in general tend to skew negative, but there are some positive ones out there as well.

2127

Who were you playing as? There are event chains that can fire if you meet a few bad conditions (e.g. very low manpower, negative stability). I believe they are called ‘disasters’ now and you can check them in one of the tabs. From memory the probability of stability hit events increase the higher your stability is. So if you made it your mission to stay at +3 stability at all times that might help explain why you got more - stability events than you’re used to (“comets, comets everywhere!”).

Other than that, the only other explanation I can think of is confirmation bias. With such a long play session you might only be remembering back to the times bad things happened.

2128

YOU’RE A CONFIRMATION BIAS!

I certainly remember the positive events, and they were a treat. My stability was never above a +1. I just couldn’t afford it, but I did try to keep it at 0 or +1 if I could. We played two games, and one of the games I was Denmark, and the other I was Castile. But I did chronically have low manpower. We were playing very aggressively. That is probably what it was. Typically I don’t play that aggressively, but I also hadn’t played in months, so I wasn’t sure if all of the negative events were because of some update. It sounds like it probably had a lot to do with my low manpower and maybe my over extension, if your over extension effects those things.

2129

Yeah, that haven’t added additional event unpleasantness in recent updates of anything. The one big change (in Art of War I think) was to make the more drastic negative event chains like the Peasants War, religious turmoil, etc be visible via the in-game Disaster alerts instead of having to rummage through event files or read the Wiki.

2130

I think only one time did I have a looming disaster pop up. We ended the session before it fired, but it looked like it was a race between a civil war because I had a regent council (is that what they’re called? The king hadn’t come of age yet) and a Peasant’s War.

2131

I’m interested if this “- Will now refuse to be vassalised by a country that owns its cores” stand for both diplovassalization and for peace deals, or just the diplo one? If for both, then can we just sink them to stab -3 to insta-accept any deal, including the vassalization?

2132

No idea, but that’s the standout item from the change log for me, too. That change is particularly odd given the feature nation from previous expansion essentially requires you to annex/release your neighbors regularly in order to advance.

2133

YouTuber Marco Antonio completed an Ottoman world conquest by 1689 in patch 1.12. Crazy.

I love the new fort system!

Wonder what kind of cheese he abused to be able to accomplish that. This guy previously had completed world conquests as Frankfurt, so he’s like DDRJake in that he seems to be very adept at exploiting game systems. I don’t find that a very interesting way to play the game, but I find it pretty impressive how people are able to find exploitable cracks in a game’s design!

2134

I think they skew much more negative now than ever before. The events that have prestige choices seem particularly painful. I still almost always choose to lose prestige but it seems hard to climb back up before another hits.

Also I suspect the fast WC can be explained by the new fort system. It makes sieges go so fast on any non-fort provinces.

2135

I find the new siege/fort mechanics make revolts much more dangerous. I try to keep on top of unrest, but it seems if I look away, some group of peasants is springing up in some province that’s a little far from my army. And before you know it you’ve got a province that’s 100% sieged and has 10 years of separatism. And of course it happens all too often in provinces where I’ve turned off my fort to save ducats.

2136

Well he took Ottomans which is 13% more coring reduction than even custom nations can take. There is also a lot of speculation he used an exploit to enable players bonuses, 25% off coring cost. Plus admin ideas. So, 25%, 25%, 33% is 83%, or 93% for provinces where he had claims. Trick is to focus claims on the costliest provinces. Also with your capital in the right spot you can trigger distant overseas coring reduction of 50%, which stacks so that you pay 8.5% or 3.5% of total coring cost and coring time. The only real downside as Ottomans is that a custom nation could get 20% off of diploannexation. He also likely ctrl+alt+delete’d so as to maximize good heir chance. This lets you tend to get 1.5x as good kings plus the original Ottoman king is 5/5/6.

The rest of what he did is boring nasty bullshit full of soul destroying tedium where you set the game to speed 2 and pause a lot to fiddle around with stuff. Its difficult only insofar as your tolerance for tedium prevents you from /wristing while doing it.

Personally I feel enabling player bonuses in Ironman is pretty lame but not anymore lame than DDRJake getting infinite completions of Achieve Religious Unity for an extra 25 ADM and DIP per month.

2137

Looks like the EU4 team will be redoing the Randomized New World feature that was introduced with the first DLC (CoP). It will be a free update to anyone who owns CoP.

2138

Good, they should have fixed it long ago. If they actually do a good job on this they might win me back. I did buy CoP long ago and was quite disappointed with it. I never used the random world more than 2-3 times since it was unappealing.

It also gives me hope they might fix development in the free patch too. Removing stuff from the game and selling it back to us is bogus and I hope they realize that.

2139

OK, so I just discovered that Humble Bundle is dealing up to 90% off on Paradox titles (ending ~1 day) if you purchase 5+ keys. The DLC regime for these games have gotten fairly complex now. I think that picking up
[ul]
[li]EU4 Base[/li][li]EU4 DLC Pack[/li][li]EU4 Art of War[/li][li]EU4 El Dorado[/li][li]EU4 Common Sense[/li][/ul]
would grab everything of note? That runs you $17 due to the group promotion.

2140

It is hard to keep track given how much DLC there is now but many features are exclusive. I’d wager you’d also want Wealth of Nations as that has some important stuff. I still refuse to buy anything Paradox until they fix EU4 and give us back what they are re-selling in Common Sense even if it is 75%-90% off.