1661

I’m curious about that as well and I’m with you, I need to see it in action before I know if I like it or not. They did mention they peak at different times, so if early Native units are very strong while late ones are very weak, fair enough.

Overall, I’m fine with European armies winning battles, but I’ve never liked how lopsided the victories were. Part of that problem is that reinforcement is abstracted, so as China or a Native American, you can’t really wear them down through battle attrition. This leads to situations where 10,000 European troops can wipe out North America single-handedly, which I find a little silly. Maybe the unit pip rebalance will mitigate that a bit, but… yea, I’m really going to have to wait and see how it plays out.

1662

I don’t like the changes to cascading alliances. The new system sounds even more confusing by a large margin. The old system wasn’t too hard to understand and led to some degree of risk in war if you weren’t sure of various factors. Like attacking the nation of Gotland when it’s allied with Sweden who is allied with Russia is a bad idea. With the changes it seems like doing the same thing will be trivial. I just think it’ll give the player too much control and make the game too easy. I’ve grown much better at EU4 and the AI rarely calls war on me anymore unless it’s a giant coalition. With these changes I fear I’ll never be in an unexpected war again. I like the uncertainty and being punished when I attack someone with a large cascading alliance. It made defensive alliances stronger than attacking ones. Now attacking should be much stronger in general. Of course I could be wrong but that’s how I feel it’ll play out.

Oh, and they also nerfed hordes again. They can no longer buy units in other cores and have 25% max autonomy. I probably will never bother playing one again unless it’s Timurids or a Manchu tribe. Even Crimea is just soo damn painful even with the Ottomans to protect you. Reforming a horde is such a random pain on top of the reform process itself and with all that pain you only end up Muslim tech/units. You basically waste 50-100 years on average a game reforming a horde unless you get supremely lucky.

The unit pip changes sound odd because I thought they were in a very good place. I wonder if horde pips were changed or if they gained more units. The change to base tax, not provinces generating AE might be good or bad, hard to say. Both Moscovy and Ottomans need to conquer a lot of base tax to get rolling so I fear it might hurt the AI a lot if lucky nations isn’t on. Right now Moscovy and Ottomans really need lucky nations on as AI. The main AI cheat in the game right now is AI virtually getting no AE especially if lucky nation. It’d be fun to be able to call a coalition war on France sometime!

The humiliate on rival CB sounds fun but a little weird if rivals aren’t tweaked. I often end up with very silly rivals for long periods of time and I typically don’t change them either. I hope they’ve put some work into rivals because it’s still not where it should be. I generally only want rivals I can put privateers on easily as that’s the only consistent way to “farm” power projection. I hope PP is tweaked as well.

I think with the map changes I might finally enjoy colonization more. Before it was far too easy to secure an area by spamming colonists to lock up the coast lines. Now there will be so many provinces it seems impossible. This will lead to all colonial powers fighting over various areas if they want to as many will have foot holds. I’d rather struggle and fight (you know play the game) than just spam colonists.

I’m still more curious about things we don’t know like changes in AI…

EDIT: Based on comments on the forum it seems like HRE Emperor will automatically always be co-belligerent if you attack the HRE confusing the system even further.

1663

I disliked cascading alliances because it wasn’t a random variable adding risk, it was just an (largely) opaque system that was hard to judge. Sure, in the case of Gotland or some other OPM, it was usually pretty clear someone else would take over as warleader. But what about nation with 4-5 good provinces that is allied to France and Russia? Are they strong enough to be warleader? Does it go to France? Russia? There’s really no way to tell, so it just felt like shooting blindly in the dark.

I’d much rather have a concrete system with understandable rules. Sure, you can attack a smaller nation, but it sounds like you can’t just run up Warscore on them and you’re not going to be getting as much for the war effort. To me that sounds like an interesting decision to make and opposed to blind guessing.

1664

The other factor is that, while we are all experience players, anyone approaching the game is going to be utterly baffled. We may be able to mitigate and work around the system because after hundreds of hours we kinda know how it works. It is still pretty opaque though.

Further it leads to all kinds of crazy manipulations, the kind the AI simply can not do. How often is there discussion on the Paradox forum about how to get a war with France/ Russia/ etc. isolated so that you can declare war on Savoy without drawing half of Europe. A savvy player may manipulate 2 or 3 separate wars to get the one country they are really targeting isolated. It’s a strategy, but one that really works against the core principles of the game. Changing it can be a nice way to help some of the smaller countries be more dynamic in AI hands too. Right now once the blobs reach a certain critical mass then the smaller minors quickly lose any power in AI hands.

1665

I just fear it’s going to make attacking too easy to manage as a player. Before especially with smaller nations there was some risk attacking them, now there won’t be. I can understand your guys point however but for me it seems too easy to control and manage wars. Wars shouldn’t be an exact choice, I appreciate them being risky and unknown myself. I like the weird shit that can happen cause of cascading alliances as both players and AI fuck up with it. Now I figure it’ll be as easy as opening the ledger and counting numbers to see if you win or not.

1666

Here’s DDRJake getting surprised by cascading alliances:

http://youtu.be/-avfrvS-ymk?t=8m23s - Watch a couple minutes (it jumps 3 times and triggers a coalition too?). Funny who ends up war leader, haha.

I’ll honestly miss them dearly. I loved getting surprised when I missed a detail or miscalculated. Thing is if you are extremely careful you’ll almost never get surprised by a cascading alliance now but it’s hard to maintain such patience when investigating starting a war. I like a challenge I guess when they cascade and surprise you.

1667

I always thought they should have gone for something simple like: If the war leader changes, you get a chance to white-peace out of the war.
Cascading alliances were a prime reason why I haven’t played EU4 in months.

rezaf

1668

I remember you taking a pretty strong dislike to it. When I saw the cascading alliance change, I was wondering if you were still following the thread. :)

1669

I don’t get why EU4 can’t have more options at start up. Cascading alliances seems like one of those things players probably feel strongly about. Lucky nations is similar. I’d love to be able to tweak various things each game without resorting to modding. I have spent too much time playing EU4 however so the challenge factor is much lower for me now. My last Novgorod game I ended up with over 2000k manpower (first time I’ve done that) and I even pulled back at the end and stopped building the last 50 years. My force limit was around 1600. I only even built half of my FL and I had giant coalitions which never dared to attack me.

Coalition was bigger at various times but it was real annoying.

Hmo5gid.jpg1920×1200

For the first 300 years or so I was constantly propping up my friend Byzantium before he finally could stand up to the bullies of Milan, France, Portugal and Aragon. Sadly Prussia was my creation as I allied them early and fed them provinces but eventually they broke alliance with me but I couldn’t bring myself to attack them much. What’s funny is I didn’t get any colonization ideas and GB and NL colonized Siberia, then I just took it all in 3 wars. I was running all my fleets and armies at full maintenance and still ended the game with ~248k surplus of cash! Insanity.

1670

Can I see that map in non coalition mode? I’m really curious about that Byzantium. That’s something I’ll have to try, see how big I can grow Byzantium as another power. Sounds like a fun challenge :D

1671

Heh, I might well try it again at some point. Though it’s hard to keep track of all the things they tweaked and changed and tweaked again and whatever.
I think it’s great how much support - both in terms of DLC and in terms of patches - Paradox affords their games, but sometimes I feel they almost tweak too much and too often.
Ah well, at least by the time I play the game again, I can just approach the game freshly, because most of the things I used to dislike (any maybe sometimes the things I liked) might work totally different than I remember.
All things considered, I may go back to CK2 first, though. I haven’t played with India, much less with Charlemagne…

rezaf

1672

One thing that I think is cool is that they’ve started to “save” off each version of the game in Steam, so if you preferred the game at a particular patch level you can continue playing on it by going to Properties | BETAs via the Steam library. It doesn’t help people who want to play Ironman, but I think it’s kinda cool to have the ability to see snapshots of the game’s progress as it goes from expansion to expansion.

I do know what you mean about having a hard time keeping up with changes. I play the hell out of EU4 so I haven’t had any issues keeping up, but with CK2… man, I’ve barely played that since vanilla (I played a quick game when the merchant expansion came out, but that’s it). I’ve been tempted to fire it up again but I think I’m going to be completely lost… not that that’s a bad thing, in my book. It doesn’t require for me to be in the mood to re-learn a game, though.

1673

The full 1.8 patch notes have been posted.

I’m still reading through it, but this change was new to me:

  • You no longer get river-crossing penalties if you have higher manuever than the defender
  • Combat damage from dice rolls and modifiers is now a linear curve

Dice rolls being linear could have a pretty large impact on how combat is resolved, I would think. Previously, a roll of 9 vs a 0-2 could be absolutely devastating.

This one also removed a pretty big annoyance of mine:

Mercenary pool is now swapping out mercenaries that are obsolete quicker, not waiting until its 2 generations behind

Yay, I might be able to use them more reliably, now!

1674

CraigM: I’ll try to post some screens tonight.

That’s a lot of changes. I hope they AI can cope with it all. Be interesting to see what the combat changes do.

  • Selling a core province to a colony now makes it a core of that colony
  • No longer possible to block warleader from negotiating for you (They can still only negotiate for occupied territory however)
  • Power projection added on FULL annexation too
  • Rivals now properly updates (including enemies in list of possible rivals) when a rival is removed
  • Losing a rival due to growing too strong compared to them now gives a temporary boost to power projection to make up for the loss from Long Term Rival
  • Can now rival hordes even if tech group speed difference is more than 50%
  • Only Christians can now form Personal Unions
  • Non-Christian religions can now form royal marriages with other non-Christian religions, even if they are of different religion
  • Privateers can no longer be sent to trade nodes that has nations you have a truce with (where you lost the war) if they have a trade power of 20 % or larger
  • Speed of annexing/integrating is no longer +1 month per basetax, but progress towards total cost of 10*BT (down from 15, and modified by ) Each month the progress tick is 1, +1 if same religion, +1 if same culture group, and +/-X diplomatic reputation
  • Scaled diplomatic reputation to be 1/5th of before in values, impact is similar
  • Hostile core creation now also adds to the cost of diplo-annexing
  • Annexing or integrating another nation diplomatically is no longer a penalty to legitimacy or republican tradition, but instead -3 diplomatic reputation for 10 years
  • Diplovassalizing a country will now release that country’s subjects
    #AI
  • Major optimization/improvements to military access AI
  • Now more aggressive towards weak countries holding their cores
  • Much more aggressive against countries that are at war with its allies
  • Will no longer have a penalty to joining wars that have been going on for over 60 days
  • Will now only give claims and cores in war to human
  • Major improvements to naval invasion AI
  • Will no longer lift sieges so that warleader can take over
  • Will now transfer control of provinces they don’t want for themselves to warleader
    #LOL
  • Servers now allow up to 256 players to join through steam (if anyone got good enough pc for that)

Few that caught my attention. Most look great on paper, a few could be annoying and some will depend exactly how it works. Hyped to try it soon.

EDIT: Byzantium -

Gfqgm6B.jpg1920×1200

1675

Initial AoW impressions -

Rebels are quite strong but you can prepare now. They will spawn more than your total force limit early game for sure! The advantage is you know when they are spawning and you can fight them piecemeal with your full army. I’m playing England and getting Lollard uprising every few years of like 30-40k. I can deal with them because rebel troops and leaders aren’t as good as mine and they don’t spawn in a single stack.

Performance in game seems worse but it’s probably worth the trade off in what they added (maybe AI is better too?). It’s not that much worse however but as someone who usually plays on speed 5 I notice it for sure. I just have a 2600k/8gb/570 however so maybe guys with latest gen PCs won’t notice.

The game seems harder is my initial impression which is not something I mind at all. Autonomy and rebels seem like they will put the breaks on expansion fairly effectively. Mothballing is amazing as England and is making me loads of money.

1676

Fantastic! That’s what I was hoping for, and my biggest complaint with the old rebel system which has been the biggest complaint in pretty much every Paradox game to date. I don’t mind hard rebels and all, but playing whack-a-mole with massive randomly spawning armies was… not fun.

1677

I like the expansion so far. I have been playing a Manchu tribe and just united them all. I like the new rebel system, reminds me of Vic 2 system. Ming just got pounded by them though, pretender rebels at around 4x their current army size. They were ruled by a regency council though so it made sense.

Autonomy seems good as well, but raising autonomy just isn’t worth it based on the current mechanics, dropping 10 local unrest is meh. The only bug I found is that uniting Manchu changes your government but not the tech group. Wiz said this isn’t intended (on the forum) so will hopefully be hotfixed.

Cant wait to get back to it later!

1678

I think a lot of it has to do with the all of the new provinces. See this reddit post where a user created a comparison map of AoW and pre AoW.

1679

Looking at the Paradox forums it still seems this game is far from a playable state. The same has been for Crusader Kings a few patches back.

DLCs keep coming out, but I still don’t see a version that is finalized enough that I feel comfortable playing. For Crusader Kings I don’t know the current state, but the patching before the last DLC was halted long before serious bugs were fixed, so we didn’t even have the usual patter of: DLC comes out and game is broken, wait a few months for things to stabilize, then new DLC and more broken things. It only moved from broken to broken.

1680

I’m pretty sure people on this very forum have been happily playing each of these titles.