If the missions give flavor rewards like titles or maybe a small temporary boost of some kind I'm fine with them.
Its the ones that give out cores, claims and permanent modifiers that annoy me. It then isn't a fun historical option to play or a directional nudge for the player to give some purpose. It becomes the "correct way" to play, as not doing the missions means losing out of A LOT of power
I hate temporary boosts actually- those support metagame decisions, like say conquering a region giving you a +10% morale buff, you are better off saving that for the start of your next war rather than after having completed a war. I prefer permanent rewards, just not stuff that's you know, too OP.
Also- certain nations SHOULD get cores or permanent claims on certain regions. That's not something that can be handled purely dynamically. Like France should get a permanent claim to the region of France. Whoever claims the Mandate of Heaven SHOULD get a permanent claim on China.
I also don't see a scenario where a player is gonna REALLY WANT to not conquer a region they got permanent cores on, can you give me a non-hypothetical playstyle where supposedly a player is 'missing out'? Cause this sounds purely theoretical.
I don't care for rewards for missions, myself, and I think overly mechanically rewarding missions are boring as they make non-mission gameplay seem non-ideal, but I do love having mission trees as an easily accessible 'walkthrough' on the historical path you might take for a nation, while getting flavour which help to introduce the country, its religion and its culture to the unfamiliar. I don't think other mechanics give the same experience. It's a soft guidance which is a great tutorial, a guide if you don't know what direction you could take if you don't have one in mind, and a convenient way to avoid tabbing between looking up the history of a nation and the game if you want to do a historical run - at least for the basics, and if it's done well. Not every mission tree is done with that in mind, unfortunately.
Alt history is also fun, but not my usual reason for interacting with a mission tree.
That's also a big part of it- roleplay. We can't expect every player to open up a textbook to find out what a Nation did in history. Mission-trees help in teaching people what nations had done, would do, and could have done. Which helps provide a lot of structure to campaigns for tags people aren't gonna know a lot about. Like if I didn't know it was Aghanistan that formed the Mughals, why would I playing as them be prompted to go and try to expand out to form the Mughals? Open up a textbook? And if I do what they did historically, should that run be entirely identical to any other run?
In moderation mission trees can be fine. Early EU4 mission trees were fairly inoffensive and relatively ignorable (no permanent modifiers).
However, PDX has proven repeatedly that they can't maintain moderation. New EU4 mission trees (and HOI4 focus trees) are game warping monstrosities that totally negate core gameplay features. On top of that, power creep makes new trees overpowered to such a degree that they need to release DLC with new versions of the trees to keep up with the times.
And even apart from that, some trees can't be ignored. Part of the core design of the nation is tied up in doing the mission tree. Whether that be disasters, or government reforms, or unique estates. You can't ignore them if you want to take advantage of the nation's uniqueness.
That's why I consider mission trees to be poisoned fruit. As soon as they exist, devs won't be able to resist all the bad things, and to be honest, I don't consider the good things to be particularly worthwhile.
So literally your argument is 'WE MUST THROW THE BABY OUT WITH THE BATHWATER' then.
If a game is good enough of a simulation, you don't need to get bonuses for making historical decisions, you are motivated to colonise Mexico because it's beneficial to your economy, not because a mission says so and you have to complete it to progress the narrative. Both flavour and some understanding of history can be given without making the player take the historical (or any other specific) route of development.
So what you are saying is there should be nothing there to reflect what happened when Spain conquered Mexico- as what happened in Mexico would have been THE EXACT SAME if say the French, or English, or the Kongolese conquered Mexico instead. All content for invading Mexico should be generic that applies to all nations equally. No flavor.
Different people will have different answers to this, but what I don't see mentioned that much is that mission trees in EU4 make the player predestined to be the main character, and AI countries to be pawns in the player's story.
I guess even to this some people will say "But that's good! I don't want AIs to do stuff that would bother me too much" but to me that runs in the direct counter to one of the ideas that Johan mentioned in the first TTs, that EU5 should have a world that feels "lived in".
Complex mission trees by nature are going to be impossible to be done by AI, unless a very disproportionate amount of time is spent teaching it how to navigate each fancy requirement for it. For reference, outside of like claim-based missions, AI in EU4 can't really do them at all, and a bunch they are explicitly forbidden from doing even if they accidentally walk into meeting the requirements.
I, as a player, can do fancy things like getting overpowered cavalry as Poland, or form Angevins as England, but the AI cannot because of implicit or explicit blockades placed on it.
EU4 makes you the designated main character, and to me, personally, a better game is one where the player is one of several "main characters", and they have to earn that position by actually doing something special.
As a side note, this goes for a good chunk of fancy complex flavor.
AI in EU4 doesn't know how to do events, government reforms, it's literally unable to recruit special units~~
I think ideally we should strive for a situation where the player and AI at least are playing the same game. History was never told by one country just slapping its version of reality on others. Rather, it was always about different countries and entities acting and reacting to each other. Any system that disproportionately promotes the player over AI runs counter to that.
I agree with the idea that a lot of design philosophy prevents the AI from doing their mission tree- forming formidable opponents with developed land that'll be useful to conquer. This was helped somewhat by allowing players to see vassal mission trees to sort of do those parts for them (through vassal feeding or development).
But that's an argument for better mission trees, not less, which is what I find confounding. Just organize mission trees so that the (historic) content is easier for the AI to fulfill.
Non-dynamic tag-specific Mission Trees are bad game design.
Dynamic context-specific Mission Chapters are incredible for gameplay.
Imagine you're playing as an Orthodox tag and you reconquer Constantinople from the Sunni Turks. If there's a non-dynamic Mission Tree it won't be able to handle this gracefully: the game won't be able to ask the Orthodox player via missions to reclaim Constantinople because the Byzantines might never fall in the first place!
But if there is a Mission Book, with Mission Chapters the player can choose to pursue or not, then all of a sudden the developers and modders can create engaging gameplay. When Constantinople falls all Orthodox nations can unlock a MC (Mission Chapters) detailing the reconquest of Constantinople. When conquered, several new MCs might be added to the MB (Mission Book) giving the player options.
One MC can revolve around kicking the Turks out and reviving the Byzantines. Another could be creating a more tolerant metropolitan. A third could be making Constantinople your new capital. The options are limitless!
The absolute best part of implementing a MB system, in my opinion, is that it lets Paradox add in new content via DLC for every nation and not just the region the DLC focuses on. Say a DLC is centred on the Iberian experience. In EU4, the DLC would add new MTs (Mission Trees) for the nations in Iberia and only the nations in Iberia. With the new MB system outsiders conquering into Iberia, or being conquered by Iberian nations, or allying with Iberian nations, or trading with Iberian nations, or have relations of any type with Iberian nations can also get new content! And that is really darn cool!
So what you are saying is that Byzantium should get the same amount of content regarding the ownership of Constantinople as literally every other Orthodox tag.
Can you hear why I think you're an insane person?
A game with missions is created around them to some extent. More than that, the player is mostly rational, if a path of action gives them bonuses not achieved by other paths, they will generally do it. EUIV players play the game from mission to mission, quite a lot of people play every nation once just to complete the mission tree. The variety of gameplay in that case turns into an almost uniform path for any given nation. As regards mission rewards, even if a mission tree doesn't give the player rewards at all, it presents a path, allowing the player not to think about one themselves and just follow the presented narrative, it creates the right way to play.
This doesn't sound like a design problem. This sounds like a 'you're a crazy person' problem. How would tag specific mission trees be more generic than something like CK3 where content is determined solely by religion and government type?
I like mission trees, but only if they are well made and offer both historical and plausible aternate history paths.
Pure sandbox with no flavour (like Civilization or...Victoria 3 at launch) is just not that fun to me. Almost every nations feels the same. It's boring.
A good compromise would be that in EU5 we could have both EU4/Hoi4 style mission trees, as well as some additional generic/randomized dynamic missions like in EU3 (just more balanced and rewarding).
I'm open to the idea of having like a 'modular' tree- where say if I own Venice I get a 'stewardship of Venice' tree that reflects that the city has immense cultural and trade value, rather than being one of many conquests. However, I don't think that should be a replacement for say a Venetian mission tree either.
