I did say 5 years ago so 2017-2018 is the relevant year. If im reading this right its 10000ish-11000ish for that time, so its still up.
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Europa Universalis IV - Steam Charts
An ongoing analysis of Steam's player numbers, seeing what's been played the most.
The high high in june 2020 was release of Emperor, the low low a few months later was lower than almost everything the three years prior.
The plateau since that is a bit higher than it was 2017-2020.
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Grand strategy game, hence the idea that there should be strategy and deep thinking involved.
Yea lets just forget the British conquest of almost half of India. Or the Dutch conquering a ton of Indonesia between 1740 and 1810.
If anything the battle of Plassey showcased how one of the weakest european militaries managed to beat an Indian polity on its own soil completely outnumbered.
Yea...no...asian states were already starting to lag behind european states militarily since the 1750s
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Chasing that wider audience has been their primary goal since EU4 and especially since they've become a publicly traded company.
And...it worked...big time, to the point that EU4 is now one of the most successful IPs at Paradox (besides HOI4).
To the point that every other IP at Paradox has gone about copying almost everything about it (from the design principles, to the easy to understand mechanics, the UI layout, the powercreep etc. etc.)
Some of this copy and pasting worked (HOI4) some of it didn't (Imperator) but, no matter what, every other game and IP will still continue down this road because, it is proven to work.
To say otherwise, is to be ignorant to the process that has taken place at Paradox in the last decade...
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It really happened with CK2. Thats when they exploded as a studio and CK2 was the first game that attracted a whole new audience (not so much stragety niche players, but people who were into character narrative storytelling - basically even Sims players could play CK2).
The really unique thing with EU4 was the mana system, and when they tried to copy that one, well, that was Rome. It didnt work that well.
I think its CK2 character focus narrative that is now the undelying design principle. You can see it in refinement of EU4 national ideas which grew into mission trees and then into HOI4 trees. The real oddball here is Stellaris, i think.
I never said they wont continue down this path, i just dont like what EU is becoming. A click fest of power up buttons that you press every 30 years to get more mana or timed bonus.
Was that the DLC that was completely broken on realse? I stopped playing around 2019. or so, im not sure. If so it would explain the low low.Europa Universalis IV - Steam Charts
An ongoing analysis of Steam's player numbers, seeing what's been played the most.steamcharts.com
View attachment 850713
The high high in june 2020 was release of Emperor, the low low a few months later was lower than almost everything the three years prior.
The plateau since that is a bit higher than it was 2017-2020.
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Looking back at the numbers, CK2 had about 2,000 players at launch and 5,000 daily until 2016 while EU4 had 15,000 players at launch with daily players increasing from 8,000 to 17,000 until 2016.
EU4 was far and away the more influential and financially beneficial game for Paradox at the time.
However, CK2 was their first breakout success because:
1) It was the first Paradox game to be sold on steam, thereby exposing it to a bigger audience
2) It was the first Paradox game to adopt the new DLC system which resulted in greater revenue
But I challenge you to do something, do you think that there are more systems that were inspired from CK2 rather than EU4? If so, go ahead and list them, I'll be happy to see what you provide...
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Yeah but keep in mind that EU has always been #1 Paradox flagship brand (in fact wasnt EU1 the first game Johan(peace be upon him) ever made?). CK started as a side project (similar to Stellaris) and with CK2 it took off and went into stratosphere (now i would even argue that CK is right there up with EU and HoI equally in the top 3 Paradox IPs). It was also the first game with new Paradox design philosophy of releasing a relatively polished and functional product, as opposed to time before that, where basically no Paradox game was playable on release and in some cases took multiple expansions before it was anywhere near a fleshed out and fully playable game. I dont have the numbers but im almost certain that CK2 didnt have 2000 players by the time EU4 launched, it was a MAJOR commercial success as a product for Paradox.
Since CK2 release, yes ABSOLUTELY, there were WAY more designs inspired by CK2 than EU4.
Sssentially the only one major EU4 core design that ever took off and went on to other projects, was monarch points or mana system.
CK2 was a monumental shift IMO in how Paradox makes games. Before CK2 Paradox put almost entire focus (at least in the Clausewitz engine era, i didnt play EU1 and EU2, i came here with Hoi2 and EU3) on basically creating map painting games with some script driven narrative sprinkled here and there. With and after CK2 it changed completely. CK2 was the first new era game that was almost entirely driven by scripted content (events). If you simply removed all events from EU3 or EU4 you would lose flavor (and a little bit of functionality since EU4 has triggered events which are requred for some systems to work properly) but the game would simply keep running just fine when it comes to all major systems. If you removed events from CK2 it would basically not work at all since game is designed to be played from perspective of a character, not a nation, and without scripted events you would have no traits and i think you might not even get heirs to spawn, characters wouldnt die etc, game would simply be broken.
This sort of narrative driven content then actually migrated from CK2 to other games - including early development cycle EU4. What is mission system in EU4 that we now? Its basically scripted narrative system taken directly from CK2 and transformed from character scope to country scope. What is national focus tree in HoI4? Same thing. In fact the only exception to this general rule of most Paradox games getting CKized is Stellaris, because deep down Stellaris is more like EU4 rather than CK2, in fact possible even more so, as events in Stellaris are purely flavor and change almost nothing mechanics wise.
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LOL no.
Beside CK2 and CK evolved significantly over time. Which is why CK3 feels and genuinely is more archaic and incoherent than CK2.
I recall CK2 used to be much more sandbox than what Paradox releases theses days. It was fascinating to play in isolated part of the map and watch the HRE alternated between times of peaceful prosperity and times of interreign like civil war all on its own and without any scripts. Likewise for Byzance.
I do agree there was a shift back to Dev crafted narrative in recent years. Most significant with Hearts of Iron 4 emphasis on Nation Focus trees and the replication of this framework to others titles. For example it is noticeable for the upcoming Scandinavia expansion with missions trees offering little to nothing in terms of actual gameplay content but producing a situation which places the devs as narrators as if it was some narrative rpg game a la Suzerain. Though a poor one imo. Likewise the missions in Imperator which basically decided all you were supposed to do with devs written narrative and mixed it with scripted bonuses, buildings and all sort of stuff that essentially destroy the sandbox.
At worse we have HoI 4 which went as far as to introduce off the map factories. In essence running fully against the principle of a sandbox strategy game.
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This one sure didn’t play EU3. The old pissed fans are already here mate.
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You are sort of right I guess.
Going for complete, 100% historicity, is of course impossible to create in a game, anywhere actually. It is on the other hand not the goal either. You can create a game that attempts to mimic history as well as you can. EUIV does not focus on the internal affairs to any particular extent. For instance a peasant rebellion taking over a county does somehow not at all affect the neighboring county.
Stability, which is the primary way of understanding how the well the internal affairs are doing, is a number that you can increase by clicking a button. It can litterally go from people going out on the streets, nobles are up in arms and separatists are plotting to "ah, what were we so riled up about", in just one in-game day.
The economy too is ridiculously over-simplified. Yeah, we are not playing Anno 1444 or some other management intensive game. But the lack of a deeper economy is part of the reason why large nations never really collapse. Most of the major realms that collapsed or were drastically weakened in the period of EUIV did so because their economy couldn't handle the strain. This is very poorly shown in EUIV and for that matter most of PDX games. The only exception is Stellaris, but Stellaris' economy is incredible insular, and you don't really need any foreign empires to trade with at all.
Obviously, what I wrote above would not make EUIV any more historical than it is today. However, it would make the simulation a little bit more realistic.
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This is a strawman.
No one is arguing for absolute accuracy in the game.
A game is a set of rules with graphics. I play the game for the rules. You play the game for the rules. All the game is, is rules.
History proceeds and has proceeded by a set of discernible interrelated processes interacting with each other in largely consistent ways. Loosely-controlled territories tend toward independence; mutually antagonistic groups tend to conflict; centralised power tends to alienate peripheral groups; wealth tends to attract wealth.
People are advocating for the rules of the game to incorporate the discernible rules of history, so that the incentives on the players and the outcome of the game are historically plausible. So that we can tell a story of what happened in a given game and events follow sensibly from one another, as if we’re playing through an actual alternate history instead of an insensible chaos of game mechanics. We would like New Granada to form as an autonomous body from Spanish colonisation because it’s easier and more effective to let distant regions govern themselves, not because the game arbitrarily decides that New World colonies are magically different from Old World territories. We would like the Dutch to revolt from foreign rule because being controlled by a distant power of a different faith, using their resources to do things they don’t agree with makes people upset, not because the game decided that the Dutch just revolt. We would like Prussia to have fantastic troops because one way to balance the asymmetry between huge military powers and tiny poverty-stricken swamp-states is to drill the hell out of your troops until one of your men can take ten of theirs, not because the game just decides Prussians are space marines. If Poland colonised Madagascar, or Naples ruled over Denmark, or a tiny Brittany was sandwiched between warring powers, we would want to see similar (or other plausible) outcomes. Because that’s how history works.
No one is asking for rigid accuracy. People are asking for plausibility. Arguing against accuracy is strawmanning.
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@Blindbohemian Amen. I stand 100% by the principles you expose. I’m tired of that straw man as well. Especially, straw men bring nothing to the discussion since they amount to deaf dialogues.
Edit : corrected hangmen to straw men. You all understood.
Edit : corrected hangmen to straw men. You all understood.
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They can remove hard difficulty like in CK3. And move everything to global modifiers like in CK3.
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Reading people on the forums speculating on when EU5 will be released has always struck me as rather strange; it's almost like Paradox sock puppets building up hype.
Why do people even want a new Europa Universalis game? 4 seems just fine to me, and Paradox seems content with releasing more content for it (poor as it may sometimes be).
Why do people even want a new Europa Universalis game? 4 seems just fine to me, and Paradox seems content with releasing more content for it (poor as it may sometimes be).
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