Hi everybody,
I've been a big EU fan for a long time, played the game already with EU1 version 1.06 if I remember correctly. Now with patch 1.05 I consider EU2 to be almost perfect game (aside from some bugs of course, mostly the de/centralization thing).
During the time of EU1 there was a bit similar project to the current EEP, namely Improved Grand Campaign. It was great because the default GC in EU1 was very simplistic and even stupid in many cases. So the IGC became the 'standard GC' for most gamers.
Paradox made a great decision and hired those two IGC guys to help in developing the EU2 campaign scenarios. You can really see the difference, the current GC (and other scenarios) are lightyears ahead of EU1 ones.
Having read the EEP bugs/suggestions thread (especially the latest quarreling unfriendly posts, mainly between maxpublic and Crook ) I've begun thinking about the whole EEP project seriously. Now it seems there are two kinds of people who are interested in developing (and using) the EEP. One group thinks we need a IGC for EU2 as well. The other group is more happy with the original Paradox GC, but they are still interested in the many events EEP adds to the game.
Without any offense, I would consider myself to be a part of the latter group. Why? Well, maxpublic posted some good reasons. The main problem is the difference between the ability of our rather small EEP community to test the changes to the game compared with Paradox. The company has had two years to test every aspect in the game (if you include EU1 as a prototype version of current game). They've had over 200 beta testers and countless playing hours with very different playing styles.
You can see the results with current official version of the game and grand campaign. The main scenario is not perfect - I'm not saying that. The initial setting soes not totally match with historical situation. Many things in the game happen unhistorically regardless of player influence. Some unhistorical things even tend to happen the same way from one game to another.
There is still one huge reason why the GC is so damned good - PLAY BALANCE. Paradox had to made many compromises, I know. Not every detail is right. However, I want to point out that the current balanced game state is the result of very long and extensive testing.
You may want to make the game more balanced and/or historically correct with making your own tweaks. You can do something little here and there and inspect the results. The main reason for maxpublics's concern (and mine as well) is that the current direction where EEP is going is that many quite extensive changes are applied to the campaign setting all the time. They may appear more historical and interesting for somebody but they are also seriously breaking the carefully tuned play balance accomplished by Paradox. And I can assure you that there is no way you could EVER reach the same level of play balance, just because we (the EEP community) don't have the testing resources, time and people available to Paradox.
I like history very much and I think the event engine in EU2 is wonderful. It's great there are people around who know about history of different countries enough to add interesting historical events to the game (with nice historical descriptions, of course!). The policy of Paradox was great at first, some of the first official patches for EU2 incorporated some nice fan-made events. Unfortunately, when the game was released in Europe this policy changed because it became too tedious and expensive to always translate the new events to different languages for every new patch. Although this is very sad, I can understand Paradox here completely.
At the moment, EEP offers wondeful collection of events to the game. Of course, there is a danger of breaking the play balance with events as well. Fortunately only few of the current EEP events are too major and drastic in my opinion. Perhaps it should be considered whether some of the most influential events could be tuned down a little?
So, maybe it's time to advance to the main point I had in mind. Should we have another lite-version of the EEP where people could get only the new events (both historical and fantasy) if they want? Without ANY modifications to the campaign setting? I would like to use this type of modified campaign, the EEP as it currently stands makes me use the original GC because of play balance problems. I think it wouldn't be too hard just to collect the different event files (those that are for the countries existing in the original GC) and compile a different package of EEP for us balance-stressed gamers.
Please, write your opinions in this thread. And no flaming/trolling/needless quarreling, please!
I've been a big EU fan for a long time, played the game already with EU1 version 1.06 if I remember correctly. Now with patch 1.05 I consider EU2 to be almost perfect game (aside from some bugs of course, mostly the de/centralization thing).
During the time of EU1 there was a bit similar project to the current EEP, namely Improved Grand Campaign. It was great because the default GC in EU1 was very simplistic and even stupid in many cases. So the IGC became the 'standard GC' for most gamers.
Paradox made a great decision and hired those two IGC guys to help in developing the EU2 campaign scenarios. You can really see the difference, the current GC (and other scenarios) are lightyears ahead of EU1 ones.
Having read the EEP bugs/suggestions thread (especially the latest quarreling unfriendly posts, mainly between maxpublic and Crook ) I've begun thinking about the whole EEP project seriously. Now it seems there are two kinds of people who are interested in developing (and using) the EEP. One group thinks we need a IGC for EU2 as well. The other group is more happy with the original Paradox GC, but they are still interested in the many events EEP adds to the game.
Without any offense, I would consider myself to be a part of the latter group. Why? Well, maxpublic posted some good reasons. The main problem is the difference between the ability of our rather small EEP community to test the changes to the game compared with Paradox. The company has had two years to test every aspect in the game (if you include EU1 as a prototype version of current game). They've had over 200 beta testers and countless playing hours with very different playing styles.
You can see the results with current official version of the game and grand campaign. The main scenario is not perfect - I'm not saying that. The initial setting soes not totally match with historical situation. Many things in the game happen unhistorically regardless of player influence. Some unhistorical things even tend to happen the same way from one game to another.
There is still one huge reason why the GC is so damned good - PLAY BALANCE. Paradox had to made many compromises, I know. Not every detail is right. However, I want to point out that the current balanced game state is the result of very long and extensive testing.
You may want to make the game more balanced and/or historically correct with making your own tweaks. You can do something little here and there and inspect the results. The main reason for maxpublics's concern (and mine as well) is that the current direction where EEP is going is that many quite extensive changes are applied to the campaign setting all the time. They may appear more historical and interesting for somebody but they are also seriously breaking the carefully tuned play balance accomplished by Paradox. And I can assure you that there is no way you could EVER reach the same level of play balance, just because we (the EEP community) don't have the testing resources, time and people available to Paradox.
I like history very much and I think the event engine in EU2 is wonderful. It's great there are people around who know about history of different countries enough to add interesting historical events to the game (with nice historical descriptions, of course!). The policy of Paradox was great at first, some of the first official patches for EU2 incorporated some nice fan-made events. Unfortunately, when the game was released in Europe this policy changed because it became too tedious and expensive to always translate the new events to different languages for every new patch. Although this is very sad, I can understand Paradox here completely.
At the moment, EEP offers wondeful collection of events to the game. Of course, there is a danger of breaking the play balance with events as well. Fortunately only few of the current EEP events are too major and drastic in my opinion. Perhaps it should be considered whether some of the most influential events could be tuned down a little?
So, maybe it's time to advance to the main point I had in mind. Should we have another lite-version of the EEP where people could get only the new events (both historical and fantasy) if they want? Without ANY modifications to the campaign setting? I would like to use this type of modified campaign, the EEP as it currently stands makes me use the original GC because of play balance problems. I think it wouldn't be too hard just to collect the different event files (those that are for the countries existing in the original GC) and compile a different package of EEP for us balance-stressed gamers.
Please, write your opinions in this thread. And no flaming/trolling/needless quarreling, please!
