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Well speaking for myself, because the outcome of the campaign can be wildly different depending on randomness (and as I said I primarily play with other people which is incredibly dynamic) so the nations I choose are based upon national ideas, geography, or just their theme. Maybe I wanna be a version of Spain that exerts more influence in Europe and doesnt colonize.
IMO Burgundy is the most versatile country in the game bar none because even without a dynamic mission tree you can (depending upon your circumstance) either devour and become France, or remain Burgundy, or if France defeats you you can pivot to being the Netherlands, or you can devour France and still form megaNetherlands anyway, or you can choose to focus your ambitions eastwards and become Lothar (and still eat France), etc. I cannot think of any other nation that has the potential to be four different countries, all of whom have unique government forms
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I'd like to also share my opinion about the mission trees and very briefly I don't like them to be fixed/static and would really prefer them to be dynamic, very similar to the "Call Diet" feature that runs every year or every 5 years or so with multiple options.
We can have 3 mission types: general, country specific, random pop up events like calling diets.
"General mission trees" applies to all nations and having missions for early/mid/late game such as:
-Reach your force limit and get that
-Earn 50 ducats per month and get that
-Have three L3 CoT and get that, etc.
The other can be more country specific and historical but should be a few and not giving perma claims in a chain. One quick example would be for Ottomans:
-Conquer Byzantium and earn prestige, institution growth
-Siege Wien and get prestige or siege ability
-Build a navy in Indian Ocean and get ship durability
I really enjoy exploring the map, checking my neighbors and try to fight opportunistic wars. Doing the missions in order is not something I enjoy and I feel like I'm forced to follow it because the rewards are too good to pass on.
I like the randomness of this game and mission trees railroad things for us just too much that definitely impacts the player's strategy in the same way every game.
I think pop up events like calling diet's would be better but it should be programmed in a way that I shouldn't be certain that doing A will definitely result in the B event.
I also don't expect any major changes on this for EUIV because devs already decided to expand mission trees in its current form and would be very hard to turn back and change it.
I'm hoping we'll have something better for EUV and every time I make a suggestion I'm always thinking about EUV. We've been waiting for too long.
We can have 3 mission types: general, country specific, random pop up events like calling diets.
"General mission trees" applies to all nations and having missions for early/mid/late game such as:
-Reach your force limit and get that
-Earn 50 ducats per month and get that
-Have three L3 CoT and get that, etc.
The other can be more country specific and historical but should be a few and not giving perma claims in a chain. One quick example would be for Ottomans:
-Conquer Byzantium and earn prestige, institution growth
-Siege Wien and get prestige or siege ability
-Build a navy in Indian Ocean and get ship durability
I really enjoy exploring the map, checking my neighbors and try to fight opportunistic wars. Doing the missions in order is not something I enjoy and I feel like I'm forced to follow it because the rewards are too good to pass on.
I like the randomness of this game and mission trees railroad things for us just too much that definitely impacts the player's strategy in the same way every game.
I think pop up events like calling diet's would be better but it should be programmed in a way that I shouldn't be certain that doing A will definitely result in the B event.
I also don't expect any major changes on this for EUIV because devs already decided to expand mission trees in its current form and would be very hard to turn back and change it.
I'm hoping we'll have something better for EUV and every time I make a suggestion I'm always thinking about EUV. We've been waiting for too long.
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Is there any way in which you can make the AI better able to handle missions? At present the AI does nothing with them except click the ones it accidentally fulfills, which means that missions are effectively nothing but buffs for the player. Because of how powerful mission rewards are, this is hugely destabilizing for the game balance.
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Interested to hear what BB might say, but an uneducated answer I'd personally give :don't count on it.
It's effectively impossible with how MTs in EU4 are built rn, would likely be extremely hard to a point of not being feasible even if MTs & AI were remade from scratch.
The problem lays firstly with such task requiring effectively linking every possible mission requirement with an AI routine for fulfilling them. For instance "If I have an active mission that requires me to conquer X province, then begin a routine for war preparation". This would've been difficult even years ago, but now, with each new patch introducing funkier and funkier mission requirements, this becomes effectively impossible.
We now have missions that can be completed in several different ways. AI would need to be able to pick and choose one route instead of trying to go for all of them.
We have some requirements that just don't have a simple solution, like :have X of some modifier. AI would also need to be taught to figure out a good way to do that.
Secondly, it comes from AI being built as a set of tools that deals with each in game system on a largely individual basis. What I mean by that is that the AI routines for, say, managing what idea groups to pick (which is script based rn) are largely decoupled from AI systems for dealing with, say, their army compositions. Our brains can somewhat look at the game and our country as a one whole thing, AI cannot.
My point here is that you'd not only need to teach AI how to prioritize each possible mission requirement, but also how to do it in a way that doesn't conflict too much with, y know, giving a semblance of being an actual country.
In essence even if PDX spent a ton of resources on teaching AI how to do mission trees, there's a good chance that AI would end up performing significantly worse as a result.
I think the most important point though is that with how extensive mission trees are in EU4, this game would actually break apart if AI had even half of the player's ability to fulfill their mission trees.
MTs rn are made to make the player feel powerful and their gameplay unique. The actual mechanical cohesiveness of the game (as well as realism for that matter) is a non factor.
Imagine if Spain in your games legitimately started getting PUs on half of Europe, or if Poland went on a conquest spree after getting the their avada kedavra slave horses, or if Teutons AI tried to go for their holy horde... I guess there'd be some fun ridiculousness in that? But that's obv not a long term solution to anything.
Current design philosophy behind mission trees is entirely incompatible with making anyone other than the player have access to it, as well as entirely incompatible with keeping the world away from feeling like a weird incoherent mashup of history fanfics even if they did have access to it.
Current mission trees have a lot of good sides(clearly lots of people enjoy them), but I don't think you can argue that they are not ruining the .. Mechanical cohesiveness of the game, and it can't change without a reversal of Tinto's development policy, which, as we established, is also infeasible.
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Or you could just have the AI cheat and auto complete most missions at a certain date. Only free personal unions would be problematic. Claims, prestige, +trade power is not that big of a deal.
I don't like having different standards for the AI and player, but that ship has sailed half a decade ago.
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The above post is a good break down about why the AI behaves the way it does (go into the game files and search for "ai_will_do") and not to beat a dead horse but I think a better version of your question is "can you make the AI better able to pursue the dynamic rewards that currently live in mission trees" and the answer is yes, if they were parsed out of mission trees and put into a system the AI can handle, like events
When faced with an event choice, the AI has weighted factors like relative army strength that will influence its decision and that works fairly well (they wont suicide into an event triggered war if they are vastly weaker than you, for example).
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Aye. I agree with that being poor design as a general rule, but AI specific ways of completing missions, and prolly their rewards would've been a huge upgrade compared to what we have now.
But again, I'm not expecting this to happen either. PDX's primary focus has always been primarily around things that the player could directly see in his games from whatever update they were working on.
It kind of sucks but I get it. Shiny new menus and icons sell, improvements to the backend less so, because frankly most players simply don't even notice these things or don't care.
The costs/benefits ratio for actually making pure gameplay-focused improvements just isn't there, also largely because the design of some systems makes it insanely hard to actually make these improvements.
If you wish for that to change then frankly you are probably not EU4"s target audience anymore (and I don't mean it in a bad way)
Feel like it's important to note that this system is heavily underutilized. A ton of events straight up don't have any AI logic implemented for them or AI is hardcoded to always pick one options. This is partly because devs clearly don't have enough resources to deal with it properly, but also to block some of the "weird' things that player can do himself. The entire system in general is built to provide the game with more RNG and steer the world in a certain way moreso than to make AI take actions that have some sense.
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To people asking for more rng in missions path and rewards, let me recall you that when France was added with mission given potential PU on Provence purely based on dice role, everybody complaint that free PU should not be so RNG and that they will savescum until having it when clicking the button.
Thing is dopamine boost is too important for the brain, and not having the juicy reward just based on luck is not something people want to see.
More generally on the topic, the fact that PDX Devs are saying they enjoy so much the MTs with their coolish rewards when they play a country again shows exactly my opinion (and I repeated it in many other threads): EU4 is sliding from strategy game to some arcadish fantasy game. And it is not surprising me given that PDX Tinto hired lots of modders who have always modified the game to have their fun. It began with fantasy aboriginal that had the best unit pip at some point.
New MTs is just a further step in this direction. Independently of the QoL associated to them, they are dopamine fuel instead of additional strategy layer to the game. That's why "just ignore them of you don't like them" is very difficult to do. We are all humans, and even if we'd like more strategy we have our part of fun and dopamine boost to do so. It's like asking a children to not eat the chocolate on the table whereas it is well exposed there just waiting to go in their mouth.
Yes, with new MTs, EU4 is less and less a strategy game with opportunity cost everywhere but a dopamine boost deliverer that we are too weak to avoid. And permitting AI to have its OP reward will not change anything to that.
Thing is dopamine boost is too important for the brain, and not having the juicy reward just based on luck is not something people want to see.
More generally on the topic, the fact that PDX Devs are saying they enjoy so much the MTs with their coolish rewards when they play a country again shows exactly my opinion (and I repeated it in many other threads): EU4 is sliding from strategy game to some arcadish fantasy game. And it is not surprising me given that PDX Tinto hired lots of modders who have always modified the game to have their fun. It began with fantasy aboriginal that had the best unit pip at some point.
New MTs is just a further step in this direction. Independently of the QoL associated to them, they are dopamine fuel instead of additional strategy layer to the game. That's why "just ignore them of you don't like them" is very difficult to do. We are all humans, and even if we'd like more strategy we have our part of fun and dopamine boost to do so. It's like asking a children to not eat the chocolate on the table whereas it is well exposed there just waiting to go in their mouth.
Yes, with new MTs, EU4 is less and less a strategy game with opportunity cost everywhere but a dopamine boost deliverer that we are too weak to avoid. And permitting AI to have its OP reward will not change anything to that.
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It seems that many people here feel that way, because you're not the first one to mention how difficult they find it to ignore missions. Having done that myself in most of my recent games, I think a key element is to start the campaign with clear goals in mind, rather than just trying to succeed as best as possible. In particular, if you know from the start what you want your end borders to be, it's suddenly much easier to ignore any mission that would take you outside of those borders. At least, that's what's been working for me, so maybe it can help some other players.
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My biggest problem with the missions is the lack of filtering and searching features and as you mentioned the unclear rewards.
There should be filters like HoI4 focus tree filters, so you can see types of missions, types of reward etc, and if a mission reward is an event, it should at least give you an idea what the event is. You should also be able to flag a mission as a priority, which would display its requirements somewhere more clear rather than needing to find the mission in the list every time.
There should be filters like HoI4 focus tree filters, so you can see types of missions, types of reward etc, and if a mission reward is an event, it should at least give you an idea what the event is. You should also be able to flag a mission as a priority, which would display its requirements somewhere more clear rather than needing to find the mission in the list every time.
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You would think that would be all the more reason to address some of the biggest issues with existing missions rather than vehemently opposing things such as improved descriptions of the rewards as we have seen people do in this thread...
Dynamic missions would be great. Sadly Paradox threw out a dynamic mission system out to accomodate the static mission trees. Having a few predetermined mutually exclusive paths does not do a whole lot to address the idsues with mission trees being static and predetermined.
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I found it by digging the files - first you need to complete the mission "Resolve the Sabbath Issue" which only fires at 1460, then the estate privilege appears from clergy state and can be granted. Some missions like Mongols are very straightforward while others are rather non-polished, and many of the hints just come from rules, without actual explanation.
My solution with Ethiopia was to create a custom nation taking all of Ethiopian land and with the Solomonic empire government, then form Ethiopia on day one and play without all those silly problems.
Also you didn't need manpower at all - form 2 Cawa units by 4 mil points and merge them to 1 full strength Cawa unit. 200 mil = 50 Cawa infantry / 50k manpower, and keep merging and recruiting more whenever you take any loss. My empire became unstoppable when I realized this...
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Because playing the game is fun? Because there are many different ways a run can go once you unpause?
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Sure, but there are hundreds of other fun tags to play, which go many different ways.
There's also tons of tags that plays basically the same.
Some tags are more prone to different outcomes, and some tags are just favorites of people. Some tags have "themes", and some times the way tags play changes with patches that changes the meta and opens up new ways of playing.
Now I'm wondering; was your original question a serious one?
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There's also tons of tags that plays basically the same.
Some tags are more prone to different outcomes, and some tags are just favorites of people. Some tags have "themes", and some times the way tags play changes with patches that changes the meta and opens up new ways of playing.
Now I'm wondering; was your original question a serious one?
It was directly in response to "why would you ever replay that country" (that had a mission tree). So it was serious in context, but not challenging the notion of anyone replaying a nation ever.
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Good try, but you're wrong
The privilege doesn't exist if you're Jewish and the mission is resolved in a completely different way. But it doesn't matter now, I'm on a break for a week playing Sunless Sea.
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How did you even become Jewish as Ethiopia?!Good try, but you're wrong
The privilege doesn't exist if you're Jewish and the mission is resolved in a completely different way. But it doesn't matter now, I'm on a break for a week playing Sunless Sea.
