In my opinion, this does not make sense since the development team has a game that has years and years of input available to them as a starting point. So you take its strong points, cut or rework its weak points, add/improve some other mechanics and boom: you should end up with a better, cleaner game as a new starting point for an even more improved, better game.
It would be true only if the new game's code could be copy-pasted from the old game.
So if I get you correctly, a new game is supposed to have less content because code could not be copied?
For the most part - yes.
Part of the problem is that to some degree Paradox know very well how to get there, and plan for it during the game development. Mission trees, monuments/great projects and journal entries are examples of such features. They are deliberately designed fairly barebone at release to make it easy to add content to the game in the future.
Personally I'll hold on to my money and not buy the games if they do, just as I did with CK3 and Vic 3. If it is as hard to see the results of the effort from Paradox in the EU5 AI as it was for the AI in CK3, Vic 3 and Imperator, EU5 will be a terrible single player strategy game.
Ironically, editing the quote manually instead of just using the inbuilt forum quote feature when highlighting a post makes me much more suspicious of what you are to blame for in that quote.
One of the reasons that EU4’s updates are pushing more things like mission trees, and fewer new mechanics, is that the game’s base engine (Clauswitz?) is being pushed about as far as they can take it.
I would love to know how much of the budget (aka time) for a game that goes to research, feature design, proof of concepts etc, and how much that goes into actually programming features, graphical design etc. in something resembling the final state. I doubt we will ever get to know that, and it's probably not entirely clear for Paradox either since they will overlap, but I'm pretty sure porting a feature is generally significantly less labour intensive than creating the same feature from scratch. Be it the map, events or unit models with all the research that can go into it, or a basic mechanic such as moving a unit from one province to another with all the restrictions and attributes that comes with it.
I work in the computer world, and while I am not an application developer myself, I work with folks who are.
Victoria 3 feels really offended, but generally this is true. The amount of economy bussy-work in that game is staggering.
Not really. A lot of business/gameplay logic can be moved over wholesale if it's designed properly since you only need to change stuff at the boundary interfaces. That's kind of the point of them. Besides, Johan even said in the EU4 10-year retrospective that one guy coming back from paternity leave ported pretty much the entirety of EU3 onto the updated CK2 Clausewitz engine at the start of EU4 so they had a playable game from the get-go (which to me is completely amazing and awesome).
At work, we changed one of our products to a different processor when we updated it, and had 60K bytes of code from the old design basically running on the new units later that day, with only a couple of functions still in need of tweaks. The EU3 to EU4 example sounds like a better-than-average case, but not abnormal.
