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[pedrito]

I don't get the whole argument. Paradox doesn't try to analyze the reasons behind the Europeans having better tech and showing up with vastly superior armies and navies in other parts of the world.

Point is, they did.

The only issues I have currently with EUIV are:

- Western tech takes off waaaay too early. By 1500, western nations have an important tech lead over everyone else, and this is just inaccurate from a historic point of view. They did eventually, but not this early. This has two solutions, which will be done eventually by the great modding community: having other nations start at a higher tech level, or having the malus kick in for non-westerners at a later date.

- Even when a non-westerner keeps up in tech somehow, they are still doomed because for the same military tech level they have worse units. This makes no sense at all, and it's like a double idiot proof mechanic to make absolutely sure that Europe will never be overrun by foreigners.

These things aside, EUIV is great.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

Don't forget to add that the AI suffers no navy attrition so they're able to easily drop doom stacks on the on those poor uncivilised natives who need the guiding hand of Jesus.

The only crashes I get are when I fuck with stuff in the console. The Windows7 version is crazily stable. Although honestly, if you hit own 199191 when you meant to get just 191, how hard is it to have a bounds check that just cancels that command...

I can assure you I didn't fuck with the console since it was Ironman. I also found EUIV to be pleasantly stable outside of that one (albeit annoying) situation. There's a couple of bugs but they're far from game breaking. One of my favourites includes ships getting repaired in a foreign ports will be treated as a "navy in exile".

[MoLAoS]

Ugh. After only 80 years of my Ireland game I am getting bored. I can only have 3 colonists with all relevant ideas. WTF is that.

I just sit around waiting for my 3 colonies at a time to fill and there isn't much else to do. I conquered or vassalized much of India at least.

I guess I just need to start spawning tones of armies and flooding India and the New World with them and colonial conquest and overseas expansion everyone.

I haven't be able to really do that previously because I had a bunch of events like Peasant's war that made overextension a problem. Early on I was overextending my ass off to conquer Great Britain.

[Rakonas]

Personally I think it's sort of arbitrarily harsh. I can see that high of a penalty for New World or Asian countries -- but -3 for EE or Muslim seems excessive. It's not like they're *that* far removed from European tech. Heck, the Muslims had even better advances, and EE was about equal with Western Europe, a couple hundred years before.. I'm pretty sure they could adapt without falling into anarchy.

During that time period, they became horribly xenophobic, and lost a lot of trade flowing their their area, losing their pluralism and what pluralism they had, they feared and rejected it.

When the Middle East was the leading force in math, and science it was also the leading force in pluralism in terms of scientific progress, political and cultural.   

Even during these years of intense rivalry and fighting for Europe, there was a lot of shared knowledge and a lot of pluralism. Lots of trade of trade, and lots of travel and traveling got faster and safer.

Westernization, is just an abstracted measures that promote the better exchange of ideas and their implementation, either purposefully or incidentally.


Uh.... like a random example. War Manuals were pretty major thing for EU during this period. Warmasters would print these manuals, that showed the construction and use of siege weapons, and best practices for fielding infantry, and it served much of an advertisement for their skills, so they can get hired as higher ranking officers in armies afield as it propagating knowledge.

Whereas with the middle east, they for practical purposes, banned books. Especially foreign books.

But in the Ottomans, Mathematics, Astronomy, etc. all reached their height during the early period of EU4. The point is, the reasons for falling technologically backward were COMPLEX. A simple "Yes you can do well/No fuck you" is the problem.

I don't get the whole argument. Paradox doesn't try to analyze the reasons behind the Europeans having better tech and showing up with vastly superior armies and navies in other parts of the world.

Point is, they did.

When you create a game about plausbile alternate history you have to consider shit like that in order to make it actually plausible. There's more to a game like this than giving arbitrary advantages to nations that succeeded historically. A game like this should have a great degree of stuff encouraging historical outcomes in a non-arbitrary way. Otherwise if anything ahistorical happens (which is guaranteed) things make less and less sense.
I would rather all tech groups have the same (statwise) units for any given tech level to demonstrate technological equivalency, since that's already the case in every other matter. Then Sub-saharans and Native Americans would have straight up maluses, while all countries would struggle with a more fluid system of technological maluses, which would also come with stability benefits and such. The Innovative v. Narrowminded slider was great in that regards, as you could see tangible benefits for stifling innovation, which is the reason why non-europeans turned out the way they did.
Quite frankly, there's no reason why China or Japan or Persia or India couldn't have embraced technological innovations without becoming "western" during the early portion of this time period. In Victoria 2 westernization makes perfect sense in that regard, but in 1444 nobody would have said that the entire world would become Europe.

Ugh. After only 80 years of my Ireland game I am getting bored. I can only have 3 colonists with all relevant ideas. WTF is that.

I just sit around waiting for my 3 colonies at a time to fill and there isn't much else to do. I conquered or vassalized much of India at least.

I guess I just need to start spawning tones of armies and flooding India and the New World with them and colonial conquest and overseas expansion everyone.

I haven't be able to really do that previously because I had a bunch of events like Peasant's war that made overextension a problem. Early on I was overextending my ass off to conquer Great Britain.

You can recall colonists and send them to more provinces, your colonies will just grow slower.

[Tobel]

I spent most of my evening playing Portugal. Within ten years, I was lucky enough to become the leader of a personal union with Castille. That basically pacified them for 50+ years while I waited on the timer to assimilate them. That entire time went to exploring. It is actually fun, even if you sort of know where the Americas are from personal experience. I made the mistake of rushing for Inca territory where I beheld three gold provinces. I annexed them all but was too far away from any core province to core them myself (I had Panama, but since the port is on the north side there is no connection to South America). I spent about 15 years trying to quell rebellions with my 160% overextension and -2 stability stats. It didn't end well. Fun note - rebels can break your entire country, which basically means everyone gets their demands.

I wound up rerolling to a much earlier time, although I hate doing that. Another interesting note - you get 1 prestige and 1 naval tradition for every area of the map you uncover.

[MoLAoS]

Personally I think it's sort of arbitrarily harsh. I can see that high of a penalty for New World or Asian countries -- but -3 for EE or Muslim seems excessive. It's not like they're *that* far removed from European tech. Heck, the Muslims had even better advances, and EE was about equal with Western Europe, a couple hundred years before.. I'm pretty sure they could adapt without falling into anarchy.

During that time period, they became horribly xenophobic, and lost a lot of trade flowing their their area, losing their pluralism and what pluralism they had, they feared and rejected it.

When the Middle East was the leading force in math, and science it was also the leading force in pluralism in terms of scientific progress, political and cultural.   

Even during these years of intense rivalry and fighting for Europe, there was a lot of shared knowledge and a lot of pluralism. Lots of trade of trade, and lots of travel and traveling got faster and safer.

Westernization, is just an abstracted measures that promote the better exchange of ideas and their implementation, either purposefully or incidentally.


Uh.... like a random example. War Manuals were pretty major thing for EU during this period. Warmasters would print these manuals, that showed the construction and use of siege weapons, and best practices for fielding infantry, and it served much of an advertisement for their skills, so they can get hired as higher ranking officers in armies afield as it propagating knowledge.

Whereas with the middle east, they for practical purposes, banned books. Especially foreign books.

But in the Ottomans, Mathematics, Astronomy, etc. all reached their height during the early period of EU4. The point is, the reasons for falling technologically backward were COMPLEX. A simple "Yes you can do well/No fuck you" is the problem.

I don't get the whole argument. Paradox doesn't try to analyze the reasons behind the Europeans having better tech and showing up with vastly superior armies and navies in other parts of the world.

Point is, they did.

When you create a game about plausbile alternate history you have to consider shit like that in order to make it actually plausible. There's more to a game like this than giving arbitrary advantages to nations that succeeded historically. A game like this should have a great degree of stuff encouraging historical outcomes in a non-arbitrary way. Otherwise if anything ahistorical happens (which is guaranteed) things make less and less sense.
I would rather all tech groups have the same (statwise) units for any given tech level to demonstrate technological equivalency, since that's already the case in every other matter. Then Sub-saharans and Native Americans would have straight up maluses, while all countries would struggle with a more fluid system of technological maluses, which would also come with stability benefits and such. The Innovative v. Narrowminded slider was great in that regards, as you could see tangible benefits for stifling innovation, which is the reason why non-europeans turned out the way they did.
Quite frankly, there's no reason why China or Japan or Persia or India couldn't have embraced technological innovations without becoming "western" during the early portion of this time period. In Victoria 2 westernization makes perfect sense in that regard, but in 1444 nobody would have said that the entire world would become Europe.

Ugh. After only 80 years of my Ireland game I am getting bored. I can only have 3 colonists with all relevant ideas. WTF is that.

I just sit around waiting for my 3 colonies at a time to fill and there isn't much else to do. I conquered or vassalized much of India at least.

I guess I just need to start spawning tones of armies and flooding India and the New World with them and colonial conquest and overseas expansion everyone.

I haven't be able to really do that previously because I had a bunch of events like Peasant's war that made overextension a problem. Early on I was overextending my ass off to conquer Great Britain.

You can recall colonists and send them to more provinces, your colonies will just grow slower.

That's true I guess. If you are willing 10 years or so accounting for native attacks you can just get up to like 300-400 pop and then shift colonists elsewhere. You still need a ton of troops since low native/low aggression provinces are pretty rare.

[MoLAoS]

God dammit how do I get rid of this peasant war bullshit... I can't even find a flag to erase and I have gotten an event that says "end of the peasant war" like a zillion times but it won't go away.

Nvm. I finally got rid of it. Lol on the timing. God that event was a huge pain.

[cerapa]

Lolwut.

With the help of a coalitation of a couple of nobodies(me included) and France, I(by which I mean France) kicked the crap out of Spain, cause they were stealing my trade money. The Frenchies did short work of the Spanish armies. Peace terms were 50% of their trade power. And the independance of Castile.

EDIT: Who I now have an alliance with. Holy shit, this is beyond perfect.

[Eagle_eye]

It's a little silly that you can force unions to release their primary member-country.

[Karlito]

Didn't EU3 remove the cores of the original country through some events? Maybe that was just in the mods I played.

[Vorbicon]

Coalitions are such ridiculous bullshit. Playing as England, I have the North American and Caribbean trade locked up. A few of the native tribes are still kicking around, like the Shawnee and the Huron, but they're not a threat so I leave them be for the time being. I start colonizing and expanding around Africa to get to India and China. Skip ahead a little further and I decide I need to secure my trade being pushed through Zanzibar more, so I declare war on Swahili to take a few provinces and force them to give me some of their trade power. Only to find out that they've entered a Coalition... with the goddamn Shawnee. An isolated tribe on the other side of the planet. Cue me playing a one man game of ping-pong with my camera, swinging back and forth from NA to Africa to organize the battles. Eventually won, but Christ was it annoying in it's stupidity.

[MoLAoS]

I hate how coalitions are just massive global pile ons. Its not like they can really do anything anyways, just occupy a couple lands I don't worry about and maybe spark some rebellion or w/e. Just another boring micro-management mop up that serves no gameplay purpose. How the hell are a bunch of Indian nations in a coalition with post france french minors when neither of them have gotten around the cape? And fucking only me and portugal are in the new world but those same indian and french states and in coalitions with native americans.

The tiniest little war against an indian minor is a fucking global conflict. Although I suppose that might be my massive aggressive expansion score acting up.

[Chaoswizkid]

So one of the most tedious, laborious waste of time I have ever endured is now all for nothing.

Have you played The Road to War start for Hearts of Iron 3? EU IV is far more eventful than that, I'm pretty sure. =P

Don't forget to add that the AI suffers no navy attrition so they're able to easily drop doom stacks on the on those poor uncivilised natives who need the guiding hand of Jesus.

... I didn't suffer navy attrition in any of my games. I don't mean boats, I mean soldiers on the boats. I thought they removed it or something. They didn't?

So, England.... you wanted the Orkney Islands?
Ok, that's cool, I'll just be taking the rest of Britain then!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Silly England, Orkney is for ME.

I hate how coalitions are just massive global pile ons. Its not like they can really do anything anyways, just occupy a couple lands I don't worry about and maybe spark some rebellion or w/e. Just another boring micro-management mop up that serves no gameplay purpose. How the hell are a bunch of Indian nations in a coalition with post france french minors when neither of them have gotten around the cape? And fucking only me and portugal are in the new world but those same indian and french states and in coalitions with native americans.

The tiniest little war against an indian minor is a fucking global conflict. Although I suppose that might be my massive aggressive expansion score acting up.

You do know that discoveries spread to other countries eventually? Sure it'd be some BS if you just showed up and they were in coalitions, but if it's been a while then those French Minors or those Indians have map visibility. You can check by saving and playing as one of the other countries.

Also, the coalition thing is definitely the massive aggressive expansion. People will drop out of coalitions if you don't have much AE. I'm playing a Hansa game currently and had a coalition against me when I vassalized Lubeck, but that went away after a bit. Munster (the German one with the u umlaut) has a coalition against it that I'm a part of, and the other coalition members only joined after they force-annexed some neighbors. Members are dropping out now that Munster has lost a couple wars. I'm considering dropping out as well, they're much less of a threat to me. Denmark is scaring me but I can't do much about that, there's no coalition against it.

[Vel]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Personally I think it's sort of arbitrarily harsh. I can see that high of a penalty for New World or Asian countries -- but -3 for EE or Muslim seems excessive. It's not like they're *that* far removed from European tech. Heck, the Muslims had even better advances, and EE was about equal with Western Europe, a couple hundred years before.. I'm pretty sure they could adapt without falling into anarchy.

During that time period, they became horribly xenophobic, and lost a lot of trade flowing their their area, losing their pluralism and what pluralism they had, they feared and rejected it.

When the Middle East was the leading force in math, and science it was also the leading force in pluralism in terms of scientific progress, political and cultural.   

Even during these years of intense rivalry and fighting for Europe, there was a lot of shared knowledge and a lot of pluralism. Lots of trade of trade, and lots of travel and traveling got faster and safer.

Westernization, is just an abstracted measures that promote the better exchange of ideas and their implementation, either purposefully or incidentally.


Uh.... like a random example. War Manuals were pretty major thing for EU during this period. Warmasters would print these manuals, that showed the construction and use of siege weapons, and best practices for fielding infantry, and it served much of an advertisement for their skills, so they can get hired as higher ranking officers in armies afield as it propagating knowledge.

Whereas with the middle east, they for practical purposes, banned books. Especially foreign books.

Spoilersnip. That's something interesting I hadn't thought of. Thanks! I'll have to read a bit more about that kind of stuff.

[Karlito]

Just successfully smashed the Ottomans with a large coalition. Even out numbered three to one they still won the majority of battles, what with their 115% discipline, better technology, and morale out the wizoo thanks to piety and prestige, plus poor tactics on the part of my AI allies, but we managed to wear them down eventually. It cost me 133 DIP power to make them return a bunch of Hungarian cores though. It'd be nice if my fellow coalition members could have shared in some of that cost; it's kind of a disincentive to be the one to start a war against an agressive power.