If you end up enjoying EU4, your backlog problems are just going to be beginning.
The new mission system is part of the patch right? Any thoughts on it? Sounds cool.
Yes!
So I’ve been playing France, on a few aborted campaigns. The first go at BBB derailed when I, after swallowing the English and Brittany provinces, used my East Frisian vassals claim on Oldenburg to take land from neighboring ports. So I could fabricate claims on my rival Denmark, see (plan was expand through Denmark and into Norway. The claims were to justify war, only wanted low development Norwegian land). Problem is as soon as I ended the war with Austria and Aragon, taking the Mediterranean isles and Calabria, I got unlawful territory. Which spawned a coalition, which declared war within two months and had Burgundy and about half a dozen German minors.
Restart!
Next I botched an early war when Castile joined with England. Nope!
Third go was going well, but I got excommunicated the first month. Thanks Provence for rivaling Papal States. I note you didn’t get excommunicated… but I took parts of Aragon, all continental English land, and Brittany. Then burgundy declared excommunicated ruler war while my manpower was under 10k. I would have fought through, but then the patch hit. I’d only put a day into the campaign so went ‘eh’ and restarted again, when I saw the new provinces added to the region.
Started, have new mission system, and rolled into 1453. Took all Normandy land, took all Brittany, took Rousillion, Balearics, Sardinia, and two Calabrian provinces. Vassal East Frisia. Scotland was Britany’s ally, but managed to declare war while they had loans so they did not join. Want to keep them friendly while I feed them north England. Even participated in Castile’s war against Grenada, Morocco, and the Ottomans. Got nothing, but lots of prestige and an ally who owes me. And just fired Iberian Wedding. So good thing I took Calabria while I could!
So far best go yet. The new mission system is neat, and is so far an upgrade. The lack of ‘farmable’ generics might hurt, but in early game having clear long term options is nice.
Still the ‘enemy of my enemy’ were some of my favorite. Recurring administrative power? Yes please.
EU4 is either a game you’re going to get like 4 hours out of and hate, or 400+. Not a lot of middle ground on it in my experience. Speaking as a 400+ hours fan here, but it has bounced off plenty of my friends hard.
At 33%-50% off, i added all the DLC for EU4 to my Steam cart. It would $140 with those discounts. Boggle?
I get the sticker shock, but it’s had a full development team expanding the game for the 4.5 years since release. It’s a lot of content, but you don’t need it all to play the game. Base game and Art of War and Common Sense is like $27 on the sale, which is all you need and a steal at that price. Especially since you get about 70% of the rest of the improvements for free with the updates.
Speaking of improvements, have you looked at the new mission system @KevinC? Curious what your overall thoughts are on it.
Thinking on it I think that, for larger nations like France and the Ottomans, it’s a nice upgrade. Because this allows you to choose what mission to do, and able to do multiple at once.
For smaller and weaker nations, like OPMs and small neighbors of hungry majors, this is not a huge help, since those repeatable generic missions could be a godsend when more ambitious goals were impossible.
I’m getting slammed right now at work and the backlog is killing me. I have a Stellaris campaign I’m trying to finish, have the HOI4 expansion I haven’t even had a chance to load up yet, and now the EU4 expansion today! Worst time possible for all these updates to come out, since we’re gearing up to release a new product at work right now.
Crossing my fingers that things slow down here a bit in the next couple weeks and I can get some serious game time in!
EDIT: Not that I have to tell you about not having time for a game of EU4, hah! I don’t have kids and I should be over the hump in a couple weeks, so I can’t complain too much. :)
Ok so things were clicking along. Doing good through 1458 and I decide Burgundy looks weak. I got the mission to take their Picardy lands, now might be a good time for that, you know?
Well, no. I take one little province that is considered HRE land from them, and now half the damned HRR joins a coalition on me. Really guys? I know it’s all small states, and Austria and England. But don’t you think this is a bit of an overreaction?
Tally is 210k(!) infantry vs my sides 86k.
Yikes
One of the most important things I learned in EU4 was to always hover my mouse over the ‘aggressive expansion’ bit of the peace negotiation window when taking land, to see which nations could join a coalition against me.
Oh I usually watch it closely too. I even watched it closely here, but the Big Blue Blob achievement requires some very aggressive play. And most of those nations were barely negative relations, and at about 51 AE, so I thought I would stand a chance. I needed only about 6 months before AE bleed and improve relations would cut the number to more manageable levels.
I was wrong. I had three months. Oops. We’ll see, I might be able to take them, considering I got military tech 5, and most of them are at 4.
So far while I like the long-term planning that the new mission system affords, I don’t really understand why the mission system mechanic was replaced with what are really just tree-based decisions. I also miss the opportune randomness that the old mission system provided.
This is what they said in the DD:
I think the bolded part is probably one of the most important reasons they decided to make the change.
The bolded component makes sense, Kevin. Just adding a slew of new decisions wouldn’t really meet that objective.
So for whatever reason, my version of EU has not updated past v1.23.1. Does anyone know how to trigger the update in Steam?
Can’t you right click on the game in steam, click on properties and then local files and verify integrity of game files and force it to update?
Thanks for the suggestion. I actually tried that already, but it doesn’t appear to have resulted in any update. Just reports “All files successfully validated” and the version number remains as is.
Did you shut down the Steam client and restart it. Sometimes that gets Steam in gear.
Yeah, kicking Steam in the nuts seems to be the go-to solution. It hasn’t prompted any magic this time, though.
I’m thinking a download got aborted at some point due to a power outage/unexpected reboot, and that fouled up the normal procedure. The weird thing is I’m two versions back now.
I’m kind of dumbfounded there isn’t a “check for updates/patches” option right up front and center.
