Tinto Talks #1 - February 28th 2024

[KarlosGeek]

I'm very glad to see this new approach to making games alongside the community for input and feedback. It's truly a great idea and benefitial for both sides - the developers at Paradox will release better games that are far more likely to be sucessful, thanks to community feedback reaching much earlier, during the early development phase when nothing's set in stone, and the community/customers eventually get a great game made possible with their help. I'll be sure to be participating in these "Tinto Talks" whenever they come up, to share my feedback in this mysterious Project: Caesar (totally not EU5 guys, trust me).

As for the vision of the game, I'll say that it's a great vision and the game will be sucessful if it manages to stick to it and not stray from it for simplicity's sake. Remember, a good game requires good work, so take as long as you need with this so it's not a half-baked mess like Imperator. As for the game that best represents this pillars, I present Europa Universalis IV.

Europa Universalis IV has been, at least for me, Paradox's most replayable and immersive game of all time. Each nation and continent is filled with unique content: missions, events, leaders, religions, mechanics. Playing as France or as the Mamluks is far different, even if you swapped their territory around. Each government has unique mechanics, each religion has different bonuses, each nation has unique and interesting missions which are quite believable. The Mandate of Heaven, the Shogunate, the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Caliphate, need I say more? Of course EU4 has received a decade's worth of updates, but it is clearly the best when it comes to replayability.

What EU4 fails to do, according to this vision and on my personal opinion, is in making its world seem believable. Mana, monarch points, development, trade winds, colonisation, are all this I wish were done away with, or made far better than currently are. The monarch powers are extremely abstract, knowing your heir is an awful 0/1/0 at birth will never not be immersion breaking for me. Development is just as abstract, can you tell the difference between production 4 and 5? From taxation 6 to 7? It's just a number and a bonus to me, it doesn't actually mean anything. And god damn trade winds - all trade goes to the English Channel, Genoa and Venice no matter how powerful your nation is. It's so painfully obvious that it was made with the focus on europe's exploitation of the americas and the indian trade routes around africa and the silk road. Trade is so, so abstract in EU4 I couldn't tell you how it works, it just does.

I know it must be tiring to hear this but, POP system beats development any day of the week. You don't even need to go as deep as the Victoria titles, even Stellaris' POPs are done well enough. Having 25 pops in your capital world and 5 in your colonies means something that is very intuitive - the capital has tons of workers and makes a lot of resources, while the colony is still small but has untapped potential if you give it time to grow into that potential.

And trade is done so very well in the Victoria titles. Having demand and prices fluctutate and change over the game, being able to directly affect it by increasing their production and having ways to measure how well your population is doing through their resource needs being fulfilled is what trade should be about. It should be about the exchange of goods and services between nations, not an abstract pool where regional money goes to and a direction it can flow out of.

Anyhow, best wishes to the development of Project Caesar! I hope my feedback can help improve the game in ways it wouldn't be possible otherwise.

 

[Mauer]

I'm assuming this is EU5 we're talking about, based on previous comments, EU4s age, and the fact that it's PDS Tinto.

Believable world, immersive and replayable?

First and foremost make it so that, even starting as a minor nation, I don't become an unstoppable juggernaut 50-100 years into the game and can win every single war, every single election, every single game mechanic. I know it's hard to balance this when you don't want to make the game so hard that they can't even get into it or they feel punished instead of rewarded for their choices (and when a large segment of the playerbase simply likes to play to steamroll everything, every time, every game they play.)

• Get rid of total wars.
• Introduce fun and immersive ways to curb snowballing without making it feel like a punishment, leave a lot to chance (just like in real history) without making it frustrating.
• Get rid of instabuying. No nation should go from complete instability and chaos to full stability and order simply because it had some administrative capacity stored somewhere, same with development, etc. I'm not opposed to the monarch power mechanic, just the way it's used for 99% of things (diploannexation and policies being the only exceptions, I think.)
• Make more unique mechanics for different nations, this is the worst offender in the newer PDS titles where you can do anything anywhere and every game ends up feeling the same.

Maybe it's because I've been playing the Anbennar mod almost exclusively the past year or two, but it's eye-openning the amount of replayability that can be had in a PDS game if developers decide to have fun with it, the more unique nations with their own entire mechanics are like a whole new game and many have more or less successful anti-blobbing measures, but even that struggles with snowballing and the limitations of the base game.

 

[LeandroB]

VICTORIA 4 CONFIRMED!

 

[mad orc]

First step to immersion
Stop Indians from conquering Tibet after crossing the Himalayas
Seriously this annoys me in every paradox game. Yes even HOI4

 

[gustavjaune]

I'm going to answer the question you asked in a very naive and honest way, because you're the game designer and that's what you asked for.

Believable World
I like the fact that helldivers don't show damage numbers. If I were on the planet, I wouldnt know how much damage i've inflicted, so that makes it immersive and believable to me.

Setting Immersion
In Minecraft, I have a ton of sidequests I can go for, or I can choose to do my own thing, that is immersive.

Replayability
Axis and Allies / The war of the ring are replayable because factions are imbalanced at game start.

 

[Lord_Baltimore]

Please, no creepy 3D portraits

 

[TheBlahJ]

Please, no creepy 3D portraits

I think CK3 did them really well unlike Vic 3, so if they went with that style I wouldn't be opposed to 3D portraits

 

[Panagean]

Lots of people have mentioned independent AI actors in one form or another (e.g. other countries, characters in CK3, V2 pops to some degree, etc.) and I'd echo that sentiment: lots of independent actors are what make PDX games unique to me, and qualitatively different from the experience of sitting around with some friends playing a complex boardgame. More please!

A brief steer on that, though, in terms of believability. There is a complicated discussion to be had about how you balance believable player challenge (a believable world isn't one the AI lets the player totally dominate) versus believable AI agent behaviour (it shouldn't be that an AI nation can stop roleplaying and exploit the game mechanics in the same way a player can do) - I don't know fundamentally how you square that circle. But what I would say is that "conceivability" is more important than (total) "legibility" for me in terms of keeping AI behaviour believable. Like, in CK3, I know everyone (and in V2, every nation) is a venal git to some degree - I don't need to see the exact mathematics to know that they had a +69 modifier to stabbing me in the back to make it believable. I don't need every part of the calculation meaning that the USSR will join forces with other communist powers to think it's a reasonable outcome. Narrative wrapping, mechanics, and their aesthetics communicating a den-of-rats motely cast, a loveless imperialist struggle or a factional war-of-ideologies make all that obvious to the player without ex-machina calculations or labels even when it is actually subtly going wrong - the outcomes feel conceivable even if sometimes they aren't, because they slot well into our internal narrative of the game. V3 has tried to correct its weak AI behaviour by making its strategies obvious to the player, and will introduce UI elements to make this clearer (e.g. a "protective" attitude means they will always intervene in a defensive play), and I think this is the wrong approach because it breaks that belief-immersion to justify nonsensical behaviour through extrinsic numbers and information (why - and who? - actually knows this piece of information about the AI? What does that information mean in intrinsic terms?) rather than what is effectively player-focused "storytelling".

This is actually I imagine a bigger issue in creating a game about the early modern period (and a huge span of four centuries of it) than either earlier or later, because people know less about the period than they probably think they do (truth is often stranger than fiction), and may therefore carry the wrong preconceptions of AI-agent behaviour into that intrinsic narrative. It's not totally unreasonable to think of medieaval politics as a big drunken brawl, or the 20th century as an increasingly factional ideological struggle, but what expectations should the bloke on the Clapham omnibus have about early modern states and their subcomponents? I really don't know.

 

[stormblind]

Believable World


Setting Immersion


Replayability


Which games do YOU think represent these pillars well?

It's an interesting question.

- Stellaris does the setting immersion part of it well; but runs into the issue of the performance completely taking the player out of the game.
- Imperator was killed before it left the cradle; but i think that one may have been one of the best examples of the 3 pillars being executed; but it was shrouded in an awful launch and limited support. This means part of it are left extremely barren and empty, with minimal differentiation.
- HoI4 I find doesn't have good setting immersion or a very believable world. Either you do historical and it plays out identically each time which does limit replayability. Or, you do non-historical, and it destroys the believable world part of things.
- CK3 does a reasonable job at it, but it just has these huge parts of the game that feel empty. That emptiness, for me, kills the setting immersion and replayability. In many ways, there simply isn't enough differentiation between the parts of the world.
- Victoria 3... i don't know precisely what it is, but there's this emptiness to the game. And the extremely slow, niche, and narrow DLC's don't help. Akin to CK3, this game does a somewhat decent job at covering the pillars. But there is 100% just not enough of it.
- EU4 The grand daddy. My favourite Paradox game. The world is not precisely a believable world. The setting can end up extremely non-immersive. But the replayability is king. The reason the world isn't believable is the same reason the games good: The player has SO MANY routes to take the game, especially with the new-ish forking mission trees. The reason the setting can't be entirely immersive is due to the raw gears and levers the players have access too allowing things like the UK to go Totemist and worship the kings as actual gods. But, that raw flexibility, mechanical control handed to the players, and all of that is why its such a good game.

Now, if you want the answer to the above?
CK2 This is the game that, by far, answers the question above. Compared to many of the others, performance is a dream which helps player immersion. There's more limitations of how things progress, which adds to the believability and immersion due to things following a logical course more often than not. The world is enormous, with many parts of it wildly differentiated with mechanics compared to each other (and with varying degree of quality), making the replayability massive.

There is a reason that the true rise of Paradox as a company started when CK2 went mainstream. It meets every pillar above, and sets a golden standard outside of MAYBE replayability.

 

[KarlReich]

For me, immersion in games akin to Eu4, Ck2-3, Imperator and Hoi4 are all related in the sense that the choices I feel compelled to make are congruent with reality, as in they make sense to me (my logic might be alien though.)

For example, in Crusader Kings 2 I feel compelled to ever expand my realm to pit more vassals against eachother, gaining newfound favor and allies in recently elevated houses as older embittered houses grow more powerful as they consolidate their holdings. Perhaps I will have to instigate an incident to cut them down a peg, but I need allies to back me up should it go wrong. When I reach a certain size however, the behemoth cannot grow fast enough for the new conquests to rival the old holdings, so I cut down, I focus on consolidating my riches, maybe the council managed to regain power in a particularly taxing war, they must be cut down to size.

For Crusader Kings 3, I often found myself at a loss at what I felt compelled to do. Expanding didnt have that same punch to it, the dynamics werent there. The religious conflicts didnt really motivate me, there was little that felt RIGHT, other than conquest for conquest sake. This might have changed however in recent patches, I have not touched the game in a while so maybe with a fresh look Id have a more positive reception in this regard. One thing I certainly missed was a more intricate system of building up what I own, I really adored scaling up my demesne in Crusader Kings 2 and the options in building castles and towns.

For Eu4, the relationships between nations are more official, and the approach I have there is more about long lasting alliances, buffer states and vassalage with long term planning ahead. While Ck2 felt more like a seat-of-my-pants turmoil of rulership, Eu4 makes me feel like a monolithic nation pushing forward with an agenda. A good thing, in my opinion. As the Timurids, I do not want to occupy or deal with vast steppes, so I create a vassal state to occupy the near Steppes and dissuade any other horde from messing with my nation. Buffer states between my vassal and other contenders like Russia will be allied or supported however I can. My aims are to conquer India and the Middle East, so I should venture forth and support a state in the Horn of Africa with my limited Navy to have a strong contender against the Ottomans or Mamluks, whichever comes out on top. The Horn only needs a push, so a small force will be all the difference it needs, and it will snowball from there.

Hoi4 and Imperator are games I do not engage with as much, so I wont use those as examples.

Hopefully this very unstructured ranty post explains how I feel about how these games should be: If I put myself in the shoes of the "main character" of the game, I should feel like the options afforded to me overlaps with what I would feel makes sense. The presentation of the game is almost inconsequential to me (within reason ofcourse, there should be graphical representations to ground you to the world ), portraits for Ck2/3 barely are a factor in my mind as I play, its all about the situations I find myself in.

 

[FrancisM89]

Prefacing with EU4 is my most played game ever (2,158 hours) and it's arguably my favourite all time game.

Where I find things to be immersion breaking are where they deviate away from history in the sense that everything seems a bit too simplistic. I can save up some dev points and make any province in the world the most devved. For example in my Mzab run I had the province of Mzab > 30 dev, which is pretty insane given the real life geography which should be limiting something like that. Furthermore, if I want Renaissance in Mzab, just randomly turn it into a super city overnight and bingo. Speaking of dev it doesn't get reduced, so in real life cities would become the victim of the Malthusian Trap e.g. due to famine. Prior to the games start you have the decline of places like Baghdad, and Constantinople - when the Ottomans finally conquered all they could muster was several thousand able men defending it, including monks - compared to how it was prior to the fourth crusade. Wars usually have no impact on the dev of the province. The 30 Years War decimated parts of the HRE with something like 50% population decline in certain provinces - in EU4 it's all fine and dandy, go down and siege Konstantiniyye and everything's gravy, even though the Ottomans have basically ravaged your lands.

Same can be extended out into stability, nobody has confidence in anyone, -3 stability, everything's on fire - few clicks later I'm the most stable nation in the land.

Alliances feel too attached, as Mazandaran I'm getting an alliance with the Ottomans and essentially manipulating them into making me a world power. Beat up the Timurids, take their land, expand into areas of interests e.g. AQ/ Georgia and they're happy to be in a war with me whilst I take their lands and limit barriers to Ottoman expansion until I'm bigger than them and boom - throw that 100 Trust in the bin, I'm the big dog now. I think there should be a lot more fluidity in alliance needs based on the geopolitical objectives of various nations at the time. In my current save with Lubeck, AI Ottomans have allied with AI AQ, AQ have expanded as far as Adana completely cutting off the Ottomans from expansion into the Middle East.

Coring is the same, I'm Norway, at war with Venice for example, nab me a Naxos and within a couple of years it's now a core part of my empire even though the previous closest part of my nation is Oslo. Feels like culture should be playing a bigger part in coring time, and it should be something that happens over a generation or two.

Colonisation, the rapid pace of it is pretty nuts, as is the practically unconditional success of trying to colonise somewhere.

Rulers is another one, seeing the stats of Little Baby Odin when he's 1 years old is nuts. Imo they should be hidden for a baby, and then fluid when they develop. I can have a 1-1-1 leader as Navarra, conquer half of Iberia with them, core the lands, kill seperatism, ally with France, grow the country massively in prestige, and theoretically 1-1-1 king is one of the worst monarchs in the world. Similarly I can have a 6-6-6 ruler with France, lose half my land to England, plumit stability, prestige and legitimacy, and they're still theoretically one of the best monarchs of all time. There's never really any challenge to their throne, nor is there any basic family tree to see paths of succession when you have a 70 year old king with a 50 year old heir. I feel this is an area that can be really expanded upon - big fan of Stellaris' recent leader/ council rework, and whilst this is massively different I wonder if some inspiration can be taken from that. With Republics it annoys me that a ruler is always 4-1-1, and then then just by lasting a few years they turn into an incredible leader.

tl;dr I don't think the mana system for growth, colonisation and leader mechanics are that believable or immersive.

 

[seergius]

What I want from EU5:

- no mana
- less abstracted / more complex and dynamic economy (not necessarily pops) // the CK3 dev feels much worse than EU4 dev
- Great powers acting more "player like" while following their personality traits
- automatic hegemony classification -> when there is a hegemon the AI change their behavior to try and contain it (maybe if you are hegemon AE no longer goes down)
- if you have no possible rivals -> internal stability is more difficult
- also less abstracted stability

At the same time we also have to acknowledge that even with all the complaints we have about EU4 we still have a lot of fun playing it.

So I don't know if getting what I think I want will actually make for a better game.

I mean just look at imperator, it did a lot of things the community asked for but it ended up being less fun.

 

[PhilzuNeide]

Regarding Believability and Replayability: Scrap country specific missions, ideas, focus trees etc. This only serve to railroad certain nations while taking away player freedom. Combine this with the current DLC policy and you have regions in vanilla Paradox games that are simply less fun to play in because they didn’t yet get “their update”.

Ideally the game’s basic mechanics combined with a carefully researched and detailed map should be enough to have easily distinguishable starts. This requires the mechanics to be flexible enough to let the player feel the difference of the different starting positions while at the same time allowing different play styles of near equal value.

 

[Cassilda]

Assuming it's EUV or that it follows the same patterns as EU or CK: please make logistics count on long distances. Sometimes belligerents just bring troops into lands that were known only marginally for long campaigns like they're fighting in their own geopolitical backyard.
And please give a less bit of bite to technological advantages. In EUIV it fells that if you get behind of a couple of tech levels, your nation is almost doomed in battle, while in real word it wasn't that clean cut.

Also assuming it's EUV: sometimes mission trees seems that force a player to run a race against time to complete it. And while I think that some people just like the challenges, in my personal opinion missions should be a bit more generic and revolve around geopolitical ambitions rather than being very very specific.

 

[Stuckenschmidt]

Believable World

That would be nice, but I believe it when I see it. I am tired of games, where you start as OPM and conquer the world within 100 years. Sure, an exaggeration, but you get the point. If this is just another map-painter, then I will happily pass.

 

[Octopuses69]

To add on to my previous post, I would like countries to play very different from eachother, and to actually be able to utilize their different playstyle without sacrificing optimal play.

For example, in my Switzerland game, I had all these cool fort bonuses but in none of the wars AI tried to even siege any of my forts. There was no satisfaction in it. And then eventually I grew so big those forts didn't even matter.

As Ragusa, Genoa or Venice I want to be able to create huge trade empire without it being optimal to just blob. However, especially Venice and Ragusa for example have exact same gameplay. Control Venice node and all the nodes that feed into it. Venice just has faster start.

 

[BrokenSky]

Believable World

You should be able to play the game and feel like you are in a world that makes sense, and feels rich and realistic. While not making the gaming less accessible, features should be believable and plausible, and avoid abstraction unless necessary.

Setting Immersion

Our games thrive on player imagination and “what if” scenarios. We ensure both a high degree of faithfulness to the setting which will give a “special feel” to the game. We will strive to give this game the most in-depth feeling of flavor possible.

Replayability

There should be many ways to play different starts and reasons to replay them. Different mechanics in different parts of the world create a unique experience depending on what you choose to play. With a deep and complex game, there should be so many choices and paths that the player should feel they can always come back to get a new story with the same start.

Yeah, sounds ambitious right?

Which games do YOU think represent these pillars well?

I appreciate that this is probably not an opinion held by the majority, but I feel like (*some* of) CK2's supernatural events and EUIV's chance to find El Dorado or the genuine Fountain of Youth enhance believability and immersion (when they represent something similar to views actually widely held at the time).

If people at the time did something because they believed something about the world which turned out to be false, it feels more realistic if I, the player, am encouraged to do the same things they did for the same reasons, rather than act in a very ahistorical way because I, from the 21st Century, know the endeavor will fail. Likewise, the way EUIV shows you where there will be future coal in 1444 does the opposite, encouraging me to develop random provinces because they will become valuable when technologies I know about become available.

Ideally, of course, we don't want certainty the other way either. This which were unknown gambles should, ideally, be unknown gambles to us too. EUIV's Random New World is a good example - will colonialism west be a valuable endeavor or a waste of effort which could be spend setting up trade routes in Africa - or breaking the Ottoman stranglehold on trade with the East Directly? Or in CK - will funding alchemists searching for a universal panacea or the means to turn base metals into noble ones bring health and fortune? Or just end up turning gold into a smaller pile of gold?

One other thing which works well is when the world feels like it's alive in the background. EUIV or Imperator Rome do pretty good jobs of this - when I play in America or East Asia, discovering what shenanigans have happened in Europe often feels like finally getting to peer into the fog to see what giant looms ahead. Contrast CK3, where it often feels like the AI doesn't really do anything and I'm the only kid in the sandbox.

 

[DominusNovus]

every week will have more details

Unless you’ve got a neuralizer from MiB, you can’t really provide fewer details.

 

[Metroidkirby]

First of all, i'd like to thank Johan and everyone at Paradox (then Tinto) for creating EUIV. It's a game I really like, and which I played almost 8000 hours on. Only Civilization 4 is above in number of hours (well I don't really know it for sure as I don't know how many hours I played on it). Those two games are by far my favorite strategy games.

About Paradox's GSG, my point is that Stellaris is currently the most balanced game. Is it the best Paradox GSG? Hard to tell. Stellaris is really great thanks to all the parameters you can set for a game. You want to face a Galactic British Empire, a Space USSR, or a faction based on some famous cultural product? You can. Is it a believable world? Hell no, but that's what 'setting immersion' is all about. What about replayability? Hard to tell, I have the feeling that each game is the same. You start with neighbours of opposing civics. You beat them, then you beat some other IA, then the Khan, then fallen empires, and then the final crisis. Sometimes you're alone, sometimes with a federation, sometimes with subjects, and that's all. Or you're roleplaying as something pacifist, but you can't because IA wants to kill you, so you either defeat them again and again and again, or you eat them and you're back on the same playthrough.

On the other hand, the least balanced Paradox GSG, according to me, is HOI IV. Is it the worse? Probably. In HOI IV, the player have to follow a peculiar focus tree, in a way that is not specifically told. Yes, I'm still angry about beiing hard-locked as Bulgaria, and there is still no fixes on this. Is the starting world of HOI IV believable? Yes, it's probably the most believable of all Paradox GSG. Regarding "setting immersion", settings are theoric, as the IA can't follow a path designed by the player. Exemple: Oh no, X country did'nt took this focus, so Y country change its plans... I wanted Y to keep its plan while X is doing other stuff ! If you let me input settings, at least try to follow them ! On the Replayability of HOI IV, it's a mixed bag of "a lot" and "not at all". If you want to experience what the devs have implemented, there is some replayability. On the other hand, if you want to create peculiar scenari, the game can't follow and you have every country creating its own faction and following its own focus tree rather than doing a world war between three ideologies. That's the part of the game that should be changed to be great.

I'm not a big fan of the CK series. I mostly played CK2, so I'm talking about this game and not CK3. I think the world isn't that believable because of how wonky stuff can be. Last time, I played as Sicily, then the Germanic Emperor convert to sunnism. It was nice to create kingdoms with my dynasty all over Europe thanks to the crusades, but this isn't believable. Was it bad? No. This game have a lot of replayability thanks to all its wonkyness (not sure that's a word, is it?). Regarding the settings, they're kind of not wonky-enough. I mean with what happened in the game, settings like "expanding life expectancy to 200 years old" or "reduce fertility to 1 child by union" would have been interesting to create even more wonkyness. When you're doing something, you need to go all the way in. Some of you would answer that the game is already wonkyful (please excuse my lack of vocabulary)

With this said on those three games, I would conclude that "settings" are a lot for the "replayability" of the game.

Now's the time to speak about EUIV. It's kind of my Proust's Madeleine. I really like this game. But there are things to say. I wont speak about "culture groups", "trade nodes" or "mana points". I will speak about the abandoned child of EUIV : Random Setup. It's been a few years since the game went to this "expand mission trees everywhere" to create artificial replayability. The sheer looser of this is the random setup. Countries don't have mission trees, so IA won't get claims everywhere and are a lot less aggresive than in a 'normal' or 'historical' game. Also custom countries don't have access to tag-restricted government reforms. This is the real problem regarding replayability in EUIV. I talked a lot about "settings" and not really about " setting immersion", why? Probably because in EUIV, they're not really related. The "immersion" in EUIV is the existence of tag related missions, events, mechanisms, government reforms, special units... and so on. It's historically accurate (mostly), but is it really 'immersive'? it's not answering what the player is doing in a world that would be realistic. A lot of things could be better both replayability and believability wise, with replacing tag related conditions by multiple conditions. For exemple, a condition of 'main cultural group' and a condition of 'government rank' could do the trick. That way a breakaway Orléans that annex most of France and jump to kingdom rank could get french events and other things currently behind a tag criteria. But this won't fix the lack of mission trees which is railroading the IA on a path of no-replayability. And if tha IA is always doing the same thing, then even with another tag, it's the same experience with a slight variation. Exactly like in Stellaris. Does the game need to be wonky like CK2 for improving replayability? I think the game should let the player choose wonky settings for players that need them for more replayability. Random new world and custom nations are already great, but they're only beginner level in wonkyness. What the Stellaris team is doing on the galaxy setup is also a step in the good direction.

Another thing about EUIV, on immersion and believability this time. In reality, coalitions aren't formed because a country took one too many province. Coalitions are formed when a country seems menacing : The Constance League formed to protect itself from Charles the bold, the Augsburg League formed because Louis XIV wanted to continue its expansion Eastward , the Protestant Union formed to protect protestant german states from the Emperor, the Catholic League formed to protect catholicism as the only religion in the HRE, the First Coalition formed to protect monarchies in Europe, and so on. Coalition should be formed before its too late. When the Behemoth is here it's too late. If the game has special mechanism for the Thirty years war and for the Revolutionary target, they really feel like a carpet to hide the dust and aren't immersive (especialy in the last patches where the 'revolutionary target' is the ottomans, that's breaking to rebels every four years). Also, a lot of historical coalitions can't be formed ingame because of in-game rivalries. Tiny neighbour countries should seek to ally themselves rather than helping a monstruous behemoth by rivaling each others. Imperator Rome was really great on this matter (and I get the feeling that it's really important to say what was great in this game).

 

[RaccoonCity]

I think this is obviously EU5. Either that or its a new game that takes places inside EU4's timeframe 1444-1821. I will call it EU5 anyway.

It's hard to give feedback without knowing anything. But for now I like the pillars described by Johan.

I'm just gonna say for the moment that the game must have POPs, maybe not as detailed as Vic3, but at least something like Imperator Rome's simplified POPs. I really hate EU4's abstraction for province development. I would like EU5 to have a closer approach to being a simulator than just a map painter like EU4 is. With more focus on trade, economy and internal management of our nation. More options for tall gameplay. I specially want to see a dynamic evolution of things and not just having to click on buttons to see changes in the world. I also think that mechanics really need to model the decline of empires and fight snowballing at any cost. The 1st world power should be able to fall apart, both for a player or for the AI.

And one last thing, more from a technical point of view. The game will obviously have buffs and debuffs like every PDX title. Well, I think it is key to keep the game balanced through all the stages of its development, DLCs, patches and so on, that these buffs and debuffs are mainly percentages instead of plain modifiers. So more +x% and -x% and less +x.00 and -x.00.

We have faith in you, all mighty @Johan