Europa Universalis 4

Working on True Heir of Timur for about the tenth time. Like Big Blue Blob, it is so opposite to my playstyle, I am not sure if I will ever finish it. Three Mountains as Shogun was much easier.

I would definitely recommend playing an HRE game, it’s a lot of fun, and very different. Not sure it works as a WC play, but maybe don’t play it as a WC game?

Well, it’s not a game where you’re supposed to do WC. If you’re goal-oriented in your approach to games I think targeting particular achievements would be a better way to go?

My first WC and one faith was with HRE. I ended up releasing as many European tags as possible and fed them non-TC land. I didn’t do any reform shenanigans and took enough land early on to border enough princes to shut down the reformation. Just pay attention to timing of truces so you don’t end up with 300 OE because you needed to fight another war to prevent a coalition and couldn’t feed your vassals.

I started a game as Naples and got Castille and Hungary to back my independence from the terrible tyrants in Aragon. I’m not sure how to get the lands next to me from the Papal State, though. I assume everyone and their aunts will dislike me if I do that.

Well, the big thing is the Pope will hate you. You’ll likely be excommunicated. And good luck using any of the papal mechanics, there is a hefty penalty to cardinal chance that basically means your papal favor will go down, and there is almost literally zero you can do.

So the bug risk is it makes the penalties for attacking you far lower. And the Defender of the faith will get a huge malus. It is, however, survivable. And mostly only applies if you take Rome directly.

Always interesting to see how things can go off the rails with AI countries. Late 1600s in my Ethiopia game and questioning if I can beat the Ottomans to get Constantinople for the achievement. I contained them in Iraq and the Caucasus thinking Europe would put up a fight. I have had 2 white peaces with them and one small land grab for Antioch.

So far Commonwealth didn’t form, Muscovy got eaten by Tver and Perm, Spain and Portugal didn’t colonize, France is slowly dying to Burgundy and Timmy formed Mughals with all vassals intact. With the poorly implemented changes to religious conversion, I didn’t expect a strong HRE, but Ottomans just ripped through all of eastern Europe without much of a fight. My only hope is to finish colonizing Indonesia and building a stronger base in India to fund a bigger army as my European allies are worthless.

So, what have they been up to? A lot, it turns out (dev diary), especially on a naval revamp, but also some land combat additions and a lot more government reforms (mostly for the revolutionary governments, but theocracies get a lot of fun stuff).
Autonomy changes once again, now with a soft cap on development instead of max states - final numbers will decide how well it works. Not yet found is a buff to republics, but it’s been acknowledged as lacking.

Gotta grab a coffee/tea before reading that one, the dev diary is huge.

Have you ever felt like EU4 was too expensive and you didn’t know what (gameplay) DLC to buy? Well, unless $17 is still too much, go to Humble and buy the lot.
Which also raises the question, since this happened with CK2 in the end as well, is EU4 done after the next expansion? Probably.

Do I need everything? The $1 tier looks like it comes with a ton of content…

It does but it might be worth having Rights of Man and Common Sense (which are in the middle tier) if you want to see the full range of mechanics on offer. More recent players can tell me if I’m wrong but I think the top tier stuff is more towards the optional side of the equation.

That’s been my expectation once they started talking about how big the expansion was going to be, then how they were going to push it back until next (this) year. It had the feel of a grand finale. Looking forward to it!

I thought they were spending engineering time to put things right so they could keep going, but then DDRJake quit and, yeah, I think they’re done.

I’m looking at my list of DLC in Steam, looking at the Humble Bundles and trying to see which ones I am missing and if it is worth it and then I remember, once again, why I abhor this model of business. At least in Steam, the company Paradox forced me to use with these games, tells me which once I already own and doesn’t require a side by side comparison to figure it out.

EU: 2000

EU2: 2002

EU3: 2007

EU4: 2013

EU5: 2021??

At the very least - some kind of “20 years of EU” this year would be nice to see.

So Johan is working on finishing eu4 now and has left the imperator team?

It’s nice that he could be there for both the start and the end of development on eu4. Thanks for making such a great game!

Yeah, he handed the reins over to Arheo (formerly designer on the same project) to wrap up EU4.

I have duplicates to give away.

From Giveaway thread!

I have the following duplicates from the recent EUIV Humble sale:

Base Game
Art of War expansion
American Dream DLC
Rights of Man Collection (expansion + DLC)
Common Sense expansion
El Dorado expansion
Rule Britannia Immersion Pack

PM me if interested.

Nowadays Common Sense is not that important. Development is moved to the patch. There are still important features like National Focus (also available in Res Publica included in $1 tier) and Government Ranks (which is really shifty deal on behalf of Paradox, it moved some bonuses available to everyone previously behind a paywall). There’s also flavour for Protestantism, Buddhism and Constitutional governments, but it’s not like the game lacks content without it. Subject interaction might be the most important feature here.

Rights of men makes monarchies - the most common government type - much more pleasant to play cause regencies are often replaced by consort rule. Other than that it adds ruler/general traits which are nice to have but aren’t that important.

So I’d say with $1 tier you get some of the most important features like National Focus from Res Publica (compensates for ruler randomness, basically an essential part of game balance), and Trade Companies and stuff from Wealth of Nations (basically a completely different way to approach annexation of colonies for Europe). I do think they chose the right expansions for the first tier, the only other one I couldn’t play without would be Mandate of Heaven cause its diplomatic macrobuilder I can’t do without, I earn for it in other Paradox games. It was so good that Total War Three Kingdoms stole it.