You have 400 years of history to play, this gives plenty of ability to make changes, especially with absolutism, so removing alt his missions a weak ai gets will not stop the player making their world
Could go sikh for even more buffs
- 1
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
I don't disagree, and diet missions are a good iteration on that. The "missions" we now get through mission trees, though, are neither an improvement nor an iteration. They're a completely different feature to the (infinite, dynamic, repeatable) previous mission system. They're also a game design disaster that's been nothing but bad for the game, and even the EU3 mission system would be superior to them.
Last edited:
- 12
- 4
Cores give less unrest, like wrong opinion malus
Cores give no oe, like ruling a tonne of non de jure vassals is likely to be overthrown
Cores allow religious conversion more easily, ike opinion buffs help conversion
Cores dont allow you to seduce your vassal because family trees dont exist in this game
Too bad that it's exactly that, which makes them sell so well in hoi, it's presumably why they're trying to emulate that in EU.
- 3
- 3
- 1
I think the way they are going with this is to make smaller countries balanced versus larger ones. Probably to appeal competitive multi-player.
Also the question to ask is are we aiming for balanced MP experience or more accurate simulation. And I am quite sure that there won't be one objectively valid answer on this.
For example I don't mind op missions, if (only if) the AI don't get silly-out-of-context in my games too often. For example if I play in malaca I don't want to have gotland as an European superpower 9/10. He can of course get lucky and succeed from time to time, but don't make it too strange.
- 3
- 1
Really? One of the design goals for missions in EU 3 was giving players an idea on what to do and make countries somewhat follow historical borders, hence all the claims on X and conquer Y missions (incidentally, almost all of the missions when EU 4 released were from EU 3). The issue with having these missions locked behind RNG gives you 3 missions and you can pick one had some issues. It was opaque and heavily incentivezed looking stuff up outside of the game, was easily missable, could be frustrating when you were trying to follow along the mission and you'd not get any TAG mission just generic stuff.
When the new mission system came along with 1.25, it resolved all of these issues; now you knew all missions that were TAG related without having to look up the wiki and you could follow the tree without having to constantly re-roll missions and wait for the one you wanted. On that end, I think the new mission tree works.
So, I don't exactly dislike it's implementation as a system but rather what is has become over the years.
- 5
- 2
- 1
Do they ? All HoI4 DLC come with Focus Trees / Mission Trees so it may give this impression but as I understood battle for the Bosphorous, the only DLC so far with just Focus Trees and no actual gameplay mechanic did not do well.
I can't help but feel like this emphasis on Focus Trees or Missions Trees comes mainly from how convenient it is from a production point of view. And to be clear I am not talking about the amount of work they require but more on the design, conception. Unlike specific new gameplay mechanics, which need to be identified, conceptualized, tested, built from scraps, Missions Trees and stuff like that under different name can be made near in definitively as long as there are some tags untouched yet.
Unfortunately, this is the main reason why I do not buy DLC anymore. Beyond the quality of said Focus/Missions Trees, it is the same stuff again and again and again. I miss the days when new DLCs introduced brand new concept or expanded the playable factions. Sword of Islam for and others early DLC for CK2 were total bangers. Death or Dishonor for HoI4, Art of War and Common Sense for EUIV were cool DLCs too.
The devs looked tired after a decade of intense post release DLC production. That is why I am closely watching Victoria 3 and waiting for EU V. It is time to turn the page and write a brand new one. With less frequents, less numerous but more meaningful DLCs.
- 7
- 3
Most of the "retrieve X provinces" missions could become cultural missions steming from the fact that you accept a culture or have it as your main culture, that you need to save your religious brethrens or that you have unclaimed cores that the country you claim to be used to have. (Of course, absurd missions like taking provinces thousand of kilometers away with which the country you have has nothing to do with should just go away entirely or become silly achievements.)
Personal unions could come from basic dynasty trees and legacy values making them more likely… or from the fact that some countries are more likely to be allied to others since they have a starting situation encouraging that.
Internal development missions could come from more complicated starting situations for each country because there would be more to do to reform each country.
With that, 90% of missions would be obsolete and we could see the global situations they depict more often in game.
For the others, some imagination could certainly save their essence.
Yes, I want this game to be a simulation game. Since when did that very word become something to be ashamed from?
Personal unions could come from basic dynasty trees and legacy values making them more likely… or from the fact that some countries are more likely to be allied to others since they have a starting situation encouraging that.
Internal development missions could come from more complicated starting situations for each country because there would be more to do to reform each country.
With that, 90% of missions would be obsolete and we could see the global situations they depict more often in game.
For the others, some imagination could certainly save their essence.
Yes, I want this game to be a simulation game. Since when did that very word become something to be ashamed from?
Last edited:
- 5
- 3
it's funny seeing people praise the "dynamic" missions from before the trees considering how much people hated them at the time. they often presented tasks to the player that made little sense or were entirely uninteresting, or just impossible. so many times you would run out of any unique ones for your country and just get the "get to 25 prestige" or "raise legitimacy" missions repeatedly. very exciting, immersive gameplay!
- 14
- 3
- 2
I honestly think the goal is to make fun mission trees rather than balance anything for multiplayer. Any player with ambitions in the Baltic would more or less be capable of immediately annihilating Gotland despite the money boost, if only because they build boats [number of coastal provinces above one] times faster than Gotland and can invade them. And ironically, giving Gotland a very powerful mission tree makes them less likely to survive in such a scenario, as their competition now has a mechanical incentive to destroy them ASAP, before they can benefit from their missions.
I do wish they'd tone back the crazy rewards you get, though. I don't mind more narrative, railroaded experiences for things like the Majapahit/Mali disasters and other scenarios (although I'd rather see them rework Disasters to in general function like little mini-mission trees replacing that function), but when missions with greater and greater regularity lets you straight up circumvent game mechanics as a reward, it starts feeling weird to interact with those mechanics normally. PU's are a good example here; they've not been made any less opaque in normal play, so it feels like this weird scenario where PU's are mostly in as a mission reward mechanic, rather than a normal game mechanic.
As a general statement, I like the thought behind mission trees (and I thought Imperator did them pretty well, for the most part), but it's presently plagued by the same level of feature creep present elsewhere in the game, and think they should be dialed back quite significantly.
- 6
I just hope EUV is early enough in its development cycle so that it can learn from Vick3's journal system. I'm not confident the journal entries aren't going to repeat the issues of mission trees and national focuses but the more inputs for EUV the better.
- 3
- 2
- 1
I'd have taken a more clear set of dynamic generated missions over TAG magic any day though. I agree that needing spoiler information to optimize it was bad, but improving that model would have been healthier for gameplay and historical realism alike (MT tied to nothing but TAG name alone are not, and objectively can't be, historical).
- 7
- 4
It was also dynamic with your gameplay, applicable to every tag (although there were tag-specific ones) and notionally inexhaustible (although as others have commented you eventually got to nothing but legitimacy, prestige, conquer X bordering province). None of those things were carried over in the new feature, and all of them were strong points of the old system. Mission trees have taken the worst aspects of EU3/4 missions and made them into something even worse.
Mission trees do not shift with gameplay: an Oldenburg which escapes to the Caribbean will go right on having missions to do German things and claim German provinces instead of getting missions to claim neighbouring provinces. They are not tag agnostic: some tags don’t have missions and so they just don’t have missions. As a consequence, the never ending cycle of developing new mission trees and obsoleting or devaluing old ones is built into the new system. They are not inexhaustible: once you’ve built to your force limit it’s done. The game will never again reward you for doing so, even if your army is stomped into the ground by coalitions (or you lose all your allies because you switched faith) and a reward and impetus for building back would make sense.
They also run counter to the central purpose of EUIV as a sandbox experience and the much-touted Paradox specialty of emergent storytelling. Mission trees tell a predetermined story the devs have decided they want to tell.
And the other thing is they don’t even tell it well. Completing missions doesn’t feel significant. It’s a single click—and a click you hold off for decades or centuries to use the modifier when it’s most useful at that. It’s got no weight, significance or departure from standard gameplay and operates as a gotta-catch-‘em-all meet-the-minimum-requirements modifier-collecting mechanism rather than a substantial and added-on challenging storytelling tool.
I agree, and this is a good argument to iterate on the dull, repetitive and poorly balanced aspects of the old system, not a good argument (indeed “the old system was bad” isn’t an argument at all) that the new crap system is any better. They have different weaknesses and I’ll be the first to say the old one had a huge amount of room for improvement, but the old one wasn’t inescapably trash that warped the rest of the game by dint of its bad design. There is no way to improve mission trees beyond making them into something that fundamentally isn’t mission trees. They add nothing to the game that couldn’t be added better in some other way (including by using the old mission system), and they are corrosive and damaging to the game’s integrity to boot.
There is literally nothing to recommend mission trees except as DLC bait. They are strictly worse than the previous system and have been nothing but bad for the game.
Last edited:
- 14
- 6
- 1
Nobody here is asking for a return to early EUIV or EUIII missions. Finding the current missions awful doesn't mean that the old design was perfect or that we would like for them to be simply removed out of the game without any replacement. I for one agree with the argument that "tag-magic" is bad for the game, bad for realism and thus bad for immersion. As long as missions will participate to that aspect of the game, I will either dislike them or hate them.
- 5
- 2
The snark in the last point doesn’t help your point. Do cores help diplomacy?
I think this is what I dislike the most in mission trees. If someone wins a tournament, the trophy is given to them, they don't go get it themselves. Triggered modifiers do it right, you fulfill the requirements and when the month ticks a popup informs you got the modifier. With mission trees you have to press the button so it feels more like you had to go after your rightful reward and there's no pressure to get it, almost like it's an afterthought.
- 3
I think that a lot of the principles behind the mission trees are decent, but they are often simply too powerful not to pursue and as such tend to railroad the game.
- 4
I know for sure cores mean you cant vassalise someone, e. G. Baluchistan can't be vassalised by timurids day 1
They might have an effect on diplomacy as theyll be vitally demanded land but you might still be able to make alliances depending on opinion stance
Theres no snark sans the last post, and you have to recognise ck3's diplomacy is pitiful compared to eu4, auto alliances via marriage and in spain being able to join wars for some money is it
Mission trees are one of the worst things the game added with it turning a free flow sandbox game into a "ignore a entire mechanic thats the only content you are getting from dlc now OR follow what WE the devs tell you to do in what order to get the rewards we added in the dlc you just bought". EU4 mission trees not allowing you to complete a mission before doing the other first is the worst offender. It turns a checklist into the aforementioned "do as we say or you wont get your OP bonuses and claims".
- 14
- 3