Total and complete disagreement. Because of move=attack and provinces being atomic entitites, EU3 was a ca. 2000 Total War game and remains so without mods that either add a ton of provinces (MEIOU) or write overwhelming amounts of events to make conquest really hard (MM).
EU should not be a total war game.
Sez you.
I would have to respectfully disagree with your statement. I found EU3 an excellent game without any mods whatsoever..
Again, some vague fear of micromanagement and a nebulous appeal to "more depth". Those aren't good arguments.
Which is why they were presented as concerns and I beg to differ: They weren't vague.
If you have to click N times per province to perform some sort of management (building buildings being the obvious one), having twice the number of provinces in the game will, all else being equal, tend to make me click twice as much if what I have to directly administrate is twice as much.
I don't mind that
so long as I am giving meaningful choices for most of those clicks, but when as is so often the case in strategy games the choices aren't meaningful in the first place (e.g. I build these buildings because I build them in every province and I am not facing severe resource constraints because the games are sensibly designed to be playable by average players, who prefer not to face much of a challenge, and I do not face time or order constraints, because it is practically always better to build them in a specific order),
I do.
Every Paradox game until now features
trivial decisions with province improvements resulting in micromanagement of the provinces that scales by number of provinces without providing interesting choices. Some have been worse than others (IC production in the first HoI, railroads in Victoria 1 and 2 come to mind) but it is a constant feature of the games and I have absolutely no reason to expect CK2 to be different in that respect.
For the record, though, I'd point out that your "EU should not be a total war game" (something you seem to associate with "low" number of provinces) and by infererence CK too, does not make a good argument either.
Pray, what depth? The province is simply a square on a board the way Paradox has it, and adding more micromanagement per province will do NOTHING if 25% of them change hands in year one of the game, and the map becomes the playground of 7-9 disjointed blobs halfway through the campaign.
If 25% of provinces change hands in year one of the game, the design has almost certainly failed to live up to its intentions.
If the map becomes the playground of 7-9 disjointed blobs halfway through the campaign, likewise.
If the map becomes the playground of 7-9 mostly continuous and contiguous blobs whose provinces still belong to different members in the feudal order, that would be fine with me - it was an age of beginning blobbification and I have absolutely no objections to blob forming. I would
prefer this to not happen every time in single-player, but I would not consider it bad if it did. You might reasonably have another opinion on this issue.
The only way to prevent that happening without adding more strategic depth with more provinces is to have events that prevent you from playing generically.
You fail to provide any argument to support this statement of exclusitivity.
Moreover, and this is another point entirely, you
fail to argue why players should be prevented from playing in what you consider a 'generic' way.
You might not like playing that way, but that is, by itself, not a good argument for preventing other players from playing that way. It
is an argument for providing game mechanics that support
you in playing the way you like but that is not the same as cutting off the options to play in other ways.
Provide an actual example of tactical and strategic depth.
Tactics is hard given the limitations of the real-time engine developed for N-player multiplayer, I will admit.
The real question here is whether Paradox intends to keep the province-army tie or go to a regiment model used in the Clausewitz games. If they do keep the CK model, and there are excellent reasons to, there's only so much that can be done. If they go over to the Clausewitz regiment model (or a variant of it more suited to the age, perhaps), there is room for meaningful player decisions - but admittedly it is scant. Most of the decisions regarding that model are strategic in nature and based on army composition rather than tactical, though army movement speed is of tactical value.
As for strategic depth, I would like the game to focus more on dynastic relations and diplomacy between nobles.
That is an area that always felt lacking to me in the original. Allow me to accomplish as much (under the right circumstances) with the pen as with the sword, and cut down on the micromanagement required (marriage subgame anybody? It needs to be there and it is an important thing for your important characters, but endless proposals and counterproposals as seen in CK1 was - at least to me - not fun). Spend a major effort on designing a "Feudal interface", if you will, with focus on showing pertinent information rather than drowning the player in endless lists of characters. (Much easier said than done, I know, but that's why I would wish for it in the first place).
There is so
much that can be done with the dynastic and feudal systems to add not just convenience but also depth and which wasn't done in CK1 because what we got was a game internally developed under terrible stress with way too little actual development time to save what little could be saved after the Snowball fiasco, and Deus Vult was to a large degree an excercise in repairing a funny game that could have been so much more if it had been scheduled for internal development in the first place.
THAT is where, if I were to decide things (which I am not
), effort would be put. A total redesign of many core game mechanics, which will have many of the same design goals as the original, but will be carried out by a team working on a sensible time schedule.
...and I'd, as always, love if even a rudimentary logistics system was implemented. There are good reasons not to - many people either dislike or are poor at dealing with logistics, it can be a pain in the arse to write an AI for it, and it does take development time up that could possibly be spent better - but it is something I wish for every time I see yet another Paradox game pre-WWII with armies living off the land wherever they are, even deep within enemy territory with their retreat cut off.
I know it is at least half wishful thinking, but just think of how utterly gorgeous it would be if Paradox developed a game where you might actually need to lay the groundwork before launching a campaign to succeed with the campaign? (In singleplayer, that is - in multiplayer you
do need to lay the groundswork, but in MP it is the diplomatic agreements directly between players and outside the game mechanics that constitute that groundwork
)
More provinces? Nah.
I have one - more squares on the board. That's depth. You have nothing concrete that I can see.
No, it is not depth. It is width. You don't make the model any deeper to deal with, you don't give the player new challenges to meet or new problems to consider, and you don't make the player's decision-making any more difficult. You merely change the scale of things.
A change of scale
can increase depth by opening up for strategic options that are not available at smaller scales, but it is in no way guaranteed to do so.
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