There’s a reason its my only 1000+ hour game ever
What is the one thing you fellow EUIV fanatics have felt is missing from the game?
I dare say most of you will agree it is the lack of Gotland as a selectable nation with a full mission tree and events.
The long wait is over!
At this point in EU4s life with hundreds of dollars of dlc is the $5/month sub as good a deal as it sounds? Any drawbacks?
I’m also in the EU4 forever gang.
I do wish fleet management was easier. Once your big with colonies all.over the map, then things become tedious to me when fighting another major power. The AI doesn’t have difficulty multi-tasking through various naval battles and naval invasions. I wish there was a more competent method of managing large, late game wars.
Plenty of UI things in the game highlight how the game mechanics are not great. A lot of fleet stuff is like that. There’s a dedicated button for trade fleets to go home in case of a war. Devs know that’s what the trade fleets should do (in most of serious wars at least), but damn you if you forget to do it. There’s fleet automation for blockading so Devs know that splitting your fleets for blockading is boring. But the mechanic stays and there’s a bandwidth on top of it.
Yep - I actually really enjoy fleet management in the early/mid game - but it has caused me to stop playing more then one game in the late eras.
‘Oh, you want to upgrade all your light ships? Well pull all the trade fleets back to port and manually upgrade them one at a time, then set them back on their missions’
Navy has consistently been butt in the Europa Universalis series and it’s a damn shame given how important it was in the era. Maybe they should take a page out of Victoria 3’s book and abstract it more in EU5. Your navy might have admirals and a number of ships, but no more moving actual units around, just give them general orders and objectives.
There aren’t many DLCs considered “required” per se. Someone more knowledgeable can chime in on which ones introduced new features.
I’d recommend getting the base game on sale and a couple of the DLCs that folks recommend.
In DevDiaries they announce that they will make Naval ideas actually useful by adding a bonus to make Naval Barrage free. That’s huge.
In general, I think for devs naval stuff is as tricky as realistic attrition. It’s not like they can’t do it, it’s just the balance will go south and make the game unfun. If you make access to the sea as profitable as it should be and blockade as devastating as it should be then the game will have hard counters so to say. Just like adding realistic attrition might allow the player to destroy their army with one command and will turn the conquest of the New World into a nightmare.
Makes sense, thanks. I’d already grabbed CK3 and finally gotten into it enough that I’m sold. I considered waiting for EU4 to go on sale again but went on and grabbed it for the price of a couple of coffees. Even if I won’t get into it for a while.
Are you saying it’s impossible to model real-world dynamics in the game’s model?
I think he’s saying truly real world dynamics are not fun for the average player in a power colonialist simulator.
Presumably there are real-world decisions to be made even given those real-world constraints, right? And those decisions are very likely to be interesting.
Regarding the blockade part, it seems like boats should be much more powerful than they are in the game, but the sea is barely modeled outside of a minimal number of zones, giving the player little to do.
In terms of army attrition, the real-time nature of the game could be the issue (you’re distracted elsewhere while your army is whittled down), but perhaps the game could predict the attrition for you, allowing you to make the decision ahead of time.
They’ve made attrition more manageable in Imperator and later CK3, where your armies are able to carry supply with them before attrition really starts to kill you. For CK3 it seems that armies just carry supply, but in the case of Imperator you have supply wagons and the like that determine how much food you can take with you into enemy territory.
If EU4 did something similar I think it could mitigate the impact of the player being distracted for a bit. Accounting for supply needs would be part of pre-war planning and preparation and would allow you to focus elsewhere here and there without half your army melting away.
I would like that - stack management is a huge annoyance as well, as you break apart your doom stack to avoid attrition - then you end up micro-managing both stacks during a war.
Has no one made a mod to fix that?
I thought there’s a button to upgrade the whole fleet but it’s been a couple years so maybe I’m misremembering.
There is a button to upgrade the whole fleet - but you have 10 trade fleets, you have to pull them all back to port, upgrade each fleet, then reconfigure their missions again. It is a huge PITA (for me), and if you have a mixed ship fleet then you might have to do that a couple of times. It would be great to have a button that says ‘upgrade when return to port’ or something like that
Oh, I get you! Manually upgrade each fleet at a time, not each ship at a time. I agree, a “upgrade when next in port” command would be great.
I’ll usually play a full campaign then put it down for a while, so the subscription would be great to be able to use all the DLC for a month. An alternative is the periodic bundles that come along, usually on Humble, that let you buy all of the DLC except the most very recent for like $30.
I find the DLC for EU4 tends to be more integrated to the entire game than Stellaris or CK, so I would find it annoying to play without it. But I don’t actually know what’s in the last few. The last time a played a full game was before Emperor was released.