Certainly would be nice to have but the amount of nice to have versus work required is very unbalanced
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They should focus on making you want to play from 1337 to 1837. Fixation on the the importance of the start date is baffling to me. It is not the start date that is the issue, if the game is good, you wont care about the start date, in fact, you will love it. Give them the time to work on this start date and focus entirely on it, instead of wasting time on alternative start dates that maybe 1% of people would actually use. I personally never use later start dates in any Paradox games and I know for a fact most people don't either.
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See this is the thing though - it's like me going through HOI4 as the UK deliberately losing the Battle of France because I'm trying to get to an approximately 1944-like situation, when it would be much easier if you just gave me a 1944 start.
Again, it's not something I want at launch, but if it turns out that a lot of players, like you, want to skip to the bit where colonisation is getting going, and France, the Habsburgs and the Ottomans are duking it out with huge armies in Central Europe, and the Sengoku Jidai is underway in Japan, and Henry VIII is executing a wife every other week, then I think it's something Paradox Tinto should, at some point post-release, give some consideration to.
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Someone else may have already said this, but I think there's a pretty simple reason why they won't ever do other start dates - the game is just too complex. They have had to do a ton of research just to get all the data needed to create the 1337 start date. Can you imagine trying to do that for the entire planet, for any given date? It sounds like a nightmare.
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I mostly agree. Look, as I say, it's not a priority for me. Like you, what I want at launch is a solid, well-built game with good core mechanics that keep it interesting from start to finish.
But I disagree on your last point - I think CK3 in particular has nailed how to do start dates - not just offer a bunch of random date tags, but pick 2 or 3 really good ones, suggest some good starts, and add genuine flavour, achievements, etc. to each, so players know it's co-equal with the earliest. There's no 'default' start date in CK3. And it really works! If I want to play a run inside the HRE I choose 1066 or 1178, because HRE doesn't exist in 867, and it isn't certain it will ever come about unless I create it. Same if I want to play as non-Anglo-Saxon England. It just gives players more options, and I know for a fact that both later start dates are widely used by players.
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That's completely right. I think one problem is a lot of people are imagining I want the kind of endless start date options EU4 offered. That's insane, and as you say, obviously completely impossible. If they ever do add alternative start dates (at some point long after release) I'd only ever really want 1 or 2 at most. Even then, as you say, it's a herculean task to update all the pop data, buildings, cultures, religions, etc. It would be a mammoth job. But I do think at some future point it might be worth it, and might open up a ton of new playing options.
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If they ever do add another start date, it should be mid 16th century or early 17th century, and only add it if there is significant content added for the mid and late game to make it worth anything. But I would much rather see this done as a mod
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The only way I see this happening is if a large amount of the player base falls in love with a new start date mod, and paradox sees an opportunity to get in on the action. It might feel a bit scummy though, like they're basically selling a mod as a DLC.
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Oh the eu4 model of picking any date at all sucks yeah. I don't think it's completely unreasonable to have just one additional start date though, it's not like the location sizes or trade goods or topography would change.
Personally I want a 1587 start date, exactly halfway through the game, but 1492 or 1444 or 1618 or whatever would be fine too.
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The reason players never used the later start dates in eu4 is because they are broken, and there aren't very many unique mechanics to be explored towards the end of the game anways - so that argument doesn't really apply for eu5. A later start date given the immense scope of the game would make a ton of sense. Some of us don't have excessive amounts of free time to play hours upon hours just to reach colonialism. I think that's an aspect of playing casually that sometimes gets overlooked - it's not that the game needs to be "easy", but that I can still engage with the game's mechanics even when I only have a couple hours on the weekend to play the game.
I do really hope there will be at least a mod (and hopefully later start dates will be moddable in the first place).
I do really hope there will be at least a mod (and hopefully later start dates will be moddable in the first place).
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Oh that's already been confirmed, they said that new starts dates would be easily moddable when they stated that they wouldn't ever add one themselves. The eu4 expanded timeline peeps and probably many others are already planning out what their mods will look like in eu5.
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Has anyone begun work on a 1444 mod for EU5 and if so is there a Discord and such already for this and if not is there anyone here who would be interested in working on this? I would be but I wouldn't be able to lead it or anything.
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Oh, don't get me wrong! I'd love to have another start date - like 1444 especially. I just think it's extremely unlikely, as much as some players would like it.
Why is it baffling?
I want to play a game about the Age of Exploration. It's why I've played thousands of hours of EU. It is one of extremely few game series with 16th and 17th century exploration and colonisation at its core.
I simply don't want to play yet another late medieval game. There are loads of them already.
And I don't want to have to play through 150 years of late medieval gameplay to get to the exploration and colonisation that has always been the core of EU.
If you want to play a late medieval game, that's cool. But surely its not hard to understand that not everyone wants that.
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my point is that Eu5 is a different game. Imagine people coming onto the Eu4 forum and say they should focus more on the Age of Revolution and ditch the 1444. date, just because they "like that period more".
I love the Age of Exploration too, which will be represented in the new game btw, but hyperfocusing on the start date will prove detrimental to the game if equal care is not given to every one of the Ages we will get to see ingame, from the Age of Traditions to the Age of Revolutions.
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Call me an idealist but I would like one too...but if it were to happen it would be at least ~5years into development, if not more.
I suggest adding a new 1836 scenario. In this case, players will have only 365 game days to have fun completing their game campaign or be terribly sad that they missed out on another 499 years of the same fun.
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Yes, I think an issue with the EU IV start recommended start dates is that they try to hit an important date when something big happened, but these are only viable as a short scenario that you play once or twice. Since the game fails to represent the conflicts with all the detail it would require, the other start dates are often just incredibly unbalanced scenarios that are only fun playing as the underdog for a challenge. This is the case with the League of Cambrai, Eighty years war, 1618, Seven years war and the War of American independence start dates. What I think would be more viable, is just a normal date like any other which would give you some time to chill and slowly figure out what to do before the game throws at you a big event such as the reformation. 1444 does just that in EU IV, the crusade has just ended and it is time to figure out what to do next. But for EU V 1444 would be too early into the game, I would go with just one alternate start date such as 1587, or maybe a few years later, because the late game will probably be slower so half of the game will probably fall later than 250 years in. Ideally, it should have a little more railroading than the base game for the years immediately after the start date and should be playable quite independently of the 1337 start date.