The game is starting to feel more like "use the mission tree"

[iClipse]

But that’s not depth, it’s just a paint job designed to make it look like there’s depth when there isn’t.

Having to play a specific country in order to play colonial, trade, land warfare, whatever is precisely the problem with mission trees.

You asked what makes Holland different from Brabant without mission trees. Well, not much. That’s a failing of EUIV design so far, not a win for mission trees. The trees just paint over that failing by making it seem like the experience of each country is radically different. It isn’t, you just get told to click on different provinces.

Depth is when mechanics interact to create interesting emergent behaviour. Mission trees aren’t depth. Culture isn’t depth. Unifications aren’t depth. Flipping culture and unifying a country to get a different mission tree is depth, but it’s A) about the best EUIV offers (and is that good enough?) and B) not the kind of depth I and @Arizal want from EUIV or that EUIV offers, which is the experience of early modern empire building. Rather, it’s a purely mechanical depth from contorting game mechanics we might instead call “complexity”.

A deep game would mean Holland and Brabant are different because Holland has crappy infertile territory and depends on the sea and naval units, so its nobility are poor and weak and its burghers are wealthy and strong. Out of that would flow a more powerful navy, a strong commercial class who compete for power over the government with the traditional aristocracy, and perhaps an army based on commoners with expensive weapons rather than noble cavalry. Brabant would be different because Brabant is different. If Brabant found itself in a similar position, Brabant should play in much the same way—there’s no magical Brabantness in the world that means if Brabant was reduced to scratching a living in swampy coastal badlands its nobility would stay powerful.

That would require the building of complex interacting mechanics: terrain types dictate goods produced; goods produced dictate the power of estates; estates influence government forms and the makeup of armies; makeup of armies recursively affects estates; all of them affects the relations of religious and cultural groups, which impact stability and diplomatic relations and stability and the makeup of armies and how autonomous different areas are. Each step of the above introduces new and interesting interactions between mechanics based on our understanding of history. That is historical depth.

Each step of the above would also make room for you to mess around with more things and twiddle more levers than culture-religion-government reform-tag, which is about all you can adjust at the moment. So not only would the game have more depth for me, it would have more depth for you, too.
But mission trees militate against that improved depth, because they’re a one-size-fits-nobody single solution: why make an interesting mechanic whereby pretenders split off bits of the realm and try to conquer it back when you can just make Gotland a special magic mission where that happens? Sure, that gives Gotland a special thing to click but it means every other country where there’s a pretender misses out AND it means that we can’t see what weird and interesting outcomes might be produced by dynamically applying that mechanic to different situations all over the game world.

This isn’t even some wild out-there suggestion. EUIV used to have development toward implementing and refining new local and global mechanics that made the world more dynamic for everyone. Then things like mission trees and tributtons came on the scene and the community accepted them as good enough to pay for.

Mission trees are a bad solution for everybody who plays EUIV. The only people who think they’re good just haven’t considered opportunity cost.

So, in short you're asking for a game that EU4 never was and never will be.

It's this weird state where EU4 is too complex for 90% of the player base, but then the other 10% plays it so much they consider the game too easy and there's never the inbetween that scratches that itch. Can you really say the game is too easy after you've played 3000 hours of it?

I honestly suggest you play mods to enhance your gameplay. Take Anbennar for example, it has way more mechanics and stuff in the game than base EU4 will ever be able to offer. Or as the poster above: M&T

 

[Aloraand]

So, in short you're asking for a game that EU4 never was and never will be.

It's this weird state where EU4 is too complex for 90% of the player base, but then the other 10% plays it so much they consider the game too easy and there's never the inbetween that scratches that itch. Can you really say the game is too easy after you've played 3000 hours of it?

I honestly suggest you play mods to enhance your gameplay. Take Anbennar for example, it has way more mechanics and stuff in the game than base EU4 will ever be able to offer. Or as the poster above: M&T

Not sure about the person you were replying to, but I still somewhat enjoy the base game more than m&t/anbenar due to performance/not being into fantasy, while still having the same attitude towards mission trees as them.

I think that everyone realises that mission trees are here to stay, and that reworking fundamental systems is not realistic. But the evident power creep in the missions should still be complained about, as somewhat inherent feature of making static trees that need to be increasingly interesting, to merit excitement, hence purchase. As opposed to attempts at emergent historic gameplay , which would often introduce organic challenges as well as rewards.

But since some players complain for instance about the Mali start, which for me didn't really go far enough with difficulty, I understand that spending money to make your playthrough more difficult might not be popular. Hence we see stuff like already too strong plc getting even more buffs instead of a bunch of nasty disasters that they would historically deserve.

 

[Mertier]

For me mission trees are more 'tutorial' (= if you don't know what you want/can do, look at there) than mandatory 'game-flow'. If mission tree isn't pointing to the direction I like to go/develop, I ignore it and go with my own.

Have I understood something wrong? This is sincere question.

The problem with mission trees is they are inherently railroady and lazy and they take up valuable development time from other additions that would make the game more fun. With mission trees any random event -by events i dont mean the pop up events in game, i mean things that would happen in a game, for example Qing conquering china or a country joining the hre or the burgundian inheritance and such, further examples i will give with qing conquering china - would only happen for a country that would have the corresponding missions for it -for example qing getting cores on china- to happen as opposed to it being a dynamic feature and as such being able to happen to any country that would fulfill the necessary requirements -even for custom nations!- and maybe the a similar event on the other side of the globe -large empire being conquered by a small nation- would happen in the circumstances that would fullfill the requirements. i rushed writing this and there are probably a couple of grammer errors here and there but i hope i got my message across clear enough and maybe there are some things that could be improved since this was just a 10 minute rambling and maybe implementing features like this perfectly is impossible but we still shouldnt stray from trying to make it so

 

[annulen]

Disclaimer: I haven't read the whole thread as it's too long. Sorry if some of these topics were already discussed.

Here is my (highly subjective) vision of how mission trees should work in EU4.

1. Mission trees in general are valuable kind of content for this type of game. Not every player can come up with interesting goals for their game, and having "external" source of goals is helpful (despite being an opposite to "write your own history" on the surface).
2. Mission trees should not duplicate goals which come naturally from game mechanics. For example, it's highly profitable for Ottomans to expand into Alexandria and Aleppo trade nodes, and there is little need to motivate this conquest by giving lots of permanent claims. However, such claims would be nice to have e.g. for Maghreb areas because it's not possible to pull trade to Constantinople from there.
3. Exception from previous rule can be made for generic missions. While "High Income -> Build Buildings -> Build Manufactories" chain is pretty much obvious course of actions for experienced player, it gives a nice boost to economy, and also can be used to boost economy of subjects.
4. It's fine that mission trees are "static" (in a sense "not dependent on RNG") because this allows making long term plans which are inherent part of strategy game.
5. There should be NO TAG-SPECIFIC MISSION TREES, period. We already have a lot of flavor for tags: unique national ideas, events, starting rulers, etc. In a spirit of "history is written by victors", there should be no prescriptions who is victor and in which areas. Also, as it was already mentioned, this approach doesn't scale - we have hundreds of tags in game and it's not physically possible to make equally interesting trees for all of them.
6. Instead of tag-specific missions we should have conditional mission trees that depend on region, culture, religion, government reforms, owned important provinces, region where capital is located, maybe mix of these conditions. We already have a certain amount such trees, however I think it should go much further. All fantastic mission chains that are presented to us in dev diaries should be possible to do if your country has presence in certain region and satisfies all necessary conditions. Edit: for example, you should not have to be Riga to sell indulgences, but satisfy certain set of conditions.
7. To avoid "guide dang it" effect, it should be possible to preview what mission trees will become available if you do certain change to your country. Obviously, there is no need to have preview for all possible combinations, so it should be limited to individual changes, e.g. if you move capital here you get tree A, and if you convert religion you get tree B. If you do that, you may be able preview more trees which would become available if you change government type or something else. Yes, it would require having much more sophisticated UI for missions than existing graph with clickable images and scrollbar.

 

[Arizal]

@iClipse I disagree. There was a time when EU seemed to go in the direction of more general mechanics. When they added autonomy, government reforms, estates, I had some hope that they would overhaul or add more mechanics like that, not less. @Blindbohemian has it right when he says local strenght distribution and practices should play a much bigger role and affect the makeup of your country.

@annulen Conditional Missions look really though to make, but are closer to what I advocate for than you may think. Why not having "long term agendas", which would correspond to what various parts of your country would wish you to do? They could then counsel you to do X or Y in order to get to the final goal. Want to conquer the Netherlands as Brabant? Make allies and build to force limit!

In turn, those objectives would not feel like they are detached from the game, as mission trees currently do. Identifiable people (or group of people) would advocate for them and would enquire on the advancement and/or results of their doleances.

That way, the supposedly "tutorial", as well as the "where to go now" part of mission trees would be preserved in a far more open environment.

 

[annulen]

@annulen Conditional Missions look really though to make, but are closer to what I advocate for than you may think. Why not having "long term agendas", which would correspond to what various parts of your country would wish you to do?

Could you please give me a link to specific post where you explain this feature, if it exists? BTW, if your "long term agendas" are related to estate agendas, I'm strongly against that.

Playing Manchu now, only one estate so there's no possibility to reject shitty agenda, if tribes want to develop some mountain province you'll have to do that, also their influence is very high and can get dangerously close to 100% at times. As a result, I just try to avoid diets now.

 

[Arizal]

Could you please give me a link to specific post where you explain this feature, if it exists? BTW, if your "long term agendas" are related to estate agendas, I'm strongly against that

I‘m not sure I follow you. “Conditional missions” is the term you yourself employed. I merely tried to integrate the idea into a feature of the game I liked.

It’s not necessarily estates. It could just as easily be religious or cultural groups.

Instead of tag-specific missions we should have conditional mission trees […]

However you call them, missions or agendas, they are still of similar nature : objectives giving rewards when you fulfill certain triggers.

What I mean by “long term agenda” is a more broad objective which would be dependent of sub-objectives that could structure the game.

If the agenda mechanic isn’t good enough for tribes, I maybe it should be expanded. I was talking in general and about the need for missions to be tied to gameplay elements.

 

[annulen]

I‘m not sure I follow you. “Conditional missions” is the term you yourself employed. I merely tried to integrate the idea into a feature of the game I liked.

Sorry, I was talking about "long term agenda" feature.

However you call them, missions or agendas, they are still of similar nature. What I mean by “long term agenda” is a more broad objective which would be dépendant of sub-objectives that could structure the game.

If the agenda mechanic isn’t good enough for tribes, I maybe it should be expanded. I was talking in general and about the need for missions to be tied to gameplay elements.

So it's not tied to estate agendas, that's fine with me.

Actually, there is a big difference between "new-style" missions and estate agendas: missions don't depend on RNG, and player can actually choose them (though it's reduced to choice of starting tag, which is pretty stupid, still there is a choice). Estate agendas are random and fall on your head from outside with no possibility to control them. “Conditional missions” that I suggested are like existing missions but with more choices for player.

 

[Arizal]

@annulen As I said, I think we are more in agreement than you give me credit for. I lacked clarity, but what I envisioned was more like consulting the state’s interest groups to have a vast array of possible general goals. It could even be, ignoring the engine’s possible limitations, crafting one’s goal.

Then you would have the aforementioned “interest groups”, whether estates or minorities (or majorities), giving you “advices” (that’s short term goals, missions if you like), bringing you closer to your final objective.

Once you attained your final objective, I’m not against the idea that you would get a reward of kind by the groups you helped, but to be honest I feel like the accomplishment of the goal should be enough in itself.

 

[cristofolmc]

They are almost replacing national ideas seeing how massively overpowered the bonuses have become.

But it makes them more fun to play and change things up than getting plain boring modifiers i have to admit imo

 

[Pavía]

This thread has come to the attention of the dev team, so let me say a couple of things.

Mission trees are not a mandatory feature of the game, as some people have already pointed out. What they do is expand the gameplay experience of EU4, which by this time, almost 9 years after it was released, is already difficult to achieve.

And it's difficult not because of a lack of creativity or fresh ideas in the team, but because there is a legacy that had to be assumed when Paradox Tinto was put in charge of the development of the game, in 2020. The problems experienced after the release of Leviathan were a consequence of that legacy, and since then, we've spoken out loud on what we're doing: fixing as much as possible the state of the existing game systems while developing new content.

On the first objective, I think the changelogs of the last updates speak for themselves on our work. Regarding the second, it's true that the main way of developing new content is being in the form of missions, but not that we're avoiding adding more depth to the game. In the last mission trees, we've been experimenting and developing less railroaded paths for them, giving more agency to the player to develop and create its own gameplay, based on both branching missions, but also on variable triggers and rewards. And what we're also doing is implementing new content to the existing game mechanics, instead of introducing new ones that would compromise again the state of the game. Also because the game at this point is already quite dense and complicated to learn for newcomers, something that veteran players with thousands of hours into the game are not always aware of.

What are the changes to the base game we've been working on? I'll talk a bit more about them in a DD in a couple of weeks. But we've already shown a lot of new government reforms, not only giving modifiers but also affecting other game mechanics; new naval doctrines; changes in the combat system; next week we'll show improvements to the AI... And all of them coming for free in the next update.

So, it's fair to criticize the mission system if you don't like it. But, at the same time, we think some of the critics poured into the game development are unfair, on the other hand.

And, also, let me note that comments like these:

Mission trees are added by Paradox's 'content designers' which are about the lowest on the totem pole in their studios. I doubt many have any programming background at all -- they're basically just paid modders. Meanwhile Paradox also seems to be skimping on programmers because after all, why hire programmers to make noteworthy changes and improvements to the game when you can just use interns, fresh history grads, and people who are willing to work for peanuts to work in the gaming industry to churn out endless DLC 'content' like mission trees?

It’s sad, but my opinion of the work of « content designers » is really low indeed.

Are completely out of place in this forum, regarding the new code of conduct. As I said in another thread, devs deem respect, and more if you want us to continue interacting directly with the community, one of the things that we're proud of in Paradox.

PD: In our CD Team there are no interns, the only historian here is me and I held a Ph.D. (so I know a couple of things about historical research and History), and we also have some programmers. So I suppose ignorance is bold.

 

[noblehunter]

Thank you for responding to this thread despite the less than decorous comments.

I appreciate the continued work to integrate mission trees into the core simulation and to increase player agency. Not because I'm going to play EU4 much any more (due to the legacy issues) but because mission-like mechanics are probably going to remain a feature of your games and the more you know about how to make them, the better they will be in EU5

 

[Arizal]

Thanks for the attention from the devs. It’s surely appreciated.

I still think that mission trees, despite not being mandatory, warp the game experience, as they give optimal ways to play given countries. No amount of work on them, in their current state and use, will be enough to make them a purely dynamic part of the game.

I acknowledge that work has been done on other parts of the game. I especially look forward for the new government reforms and the greater amount of estate privileges.

Edit : I also want to say, regarding my short opinion of content designer work, that I didn’t attack them personally. I just don’t like the direction they are throwing their effort at.

 

[durbal]

Part of the problem with mission trees is that they show a development focus away from what people would like to see. In this regard, criticism of development focus and practices is inextricable from criticism of the features themselves -- that is, the problems with mission trees are a product of development focus and staffing changes. Would you disagree with the statement that Paradox has greatly increased its number of 'content designers' as a percentage of dev team members since, say 2018? And what have we been receiving as DLC and updates since then? And even if that weren't the case, it's no doubt to me that it's what the playerbase sees -- and if they're wrong in their perception it might be a good idea to explore why.

In any other game forum you will see people criticizing the dev team for slow updates, bugs, bad design decisions, etc. Being critical of dev teams and development practices is not the same as being disrespectful to the developers. If this isn't the forum to discuss the dev team and design decisions, then why are there posts from developers introducing themselves and dev diaries posted here?

I don't want to start an argument about forum rules or anything else here, but I think calling out individual posters and acting like they're demonizing the developers individually and calling those posters' statements 'ignorant' is more personal than anyone else has been in this thread. And even then, it may be a valid criticism of me and my posts so I don't really mind. I just hope it's not an attempt to gather sympathy or something since this thread has been about the game and development directions, not individuals and it's probably best to keep it that way. If we ever meet in person I'll be glad to talk and have a beer --and if the topic of mission trees comes up I'll be very critical even before taking a sip.

 

[annulen]

Regarding the second, it's true that the main way of developing new content is being in the form of missions, but not that we're avoiding adding more depth to the game. In the last mission trees, we've been experimenting and developing less railroaded paths for them, giving more agency to the player to develop and create its own gameplay, based on both branching missions, but also on variable triggers and rewards

While having more variability in mission trees is certainly nice, railroad with branches and switches is still a railroad. There's still a kind of "storyline" attached to certain countries. While there is a category of gamers that expect game to have a pre-defined plot (which isn't necessarily linear!), I believe most of these people prefer playing games of different genres.

I believe if "advanced" mission trees were bound not to special tags but were available to any country which have chosen certain path of development (as I've thoroughly explained in my comment here), there would be much less railroading and more of "write your own history". There is no doubt that implementing my suggestion fully requires tremendous amount of work, but it should be possible to start small. Minimal implementation of "conditional missions" should be possible without changing missions UI and with very little (if any) changes to missions themselves.

 

[Susan1972]

This thread has come to the attention of the dev team, so let me say a couple of things...

If you and the other devs are unhappy with negative feedback, maybe you should consider your situation. You work for a company which relies on the "sunk cost fallacy" (aka spending good money after bad) to get it's customers to spend up to 1/3 of the game itself for DLC which heavily hints that it will fix issues that have been around since the game's release but never does. You work for a company which uses "sponsored" YouTubers to create heavily edited videos purporting to be live playthroughs (seriously, look at any YouTuber's vid and watch the dates closely) to sell the game. A company that leans hard on unpaid fans to provide tech support and additional content and tries to pass off unintuitive, arbitrary rules and needless complexity as depth and challenge.

 

[annulen]

You work for a company which relies on the "sunk cost fallacy" (aka spending good money after bad) to get it's customers to spend up to 1/3 of the game itself for DLC which heavily hints that it will fix issues that have been around since the game's release but never does

Largest share of modern gaming market is taken by online games with microtransactions. That is what I call "sunk cost fallacy". By comparison, what Paradox is doing is completely fair, you pay for gameplay and content, not some in-game items. And all DLCs are completely optional and standalone, you don't have to buy stuff which is not interesting to you personally. At the same time, all players of base game are regularly getting some new free content and improvements.

You work for a company which uses "sponsored" YouTubers to create heavily edited videos purporting to be live playthroughs (seriously, look at any YouTuber's vid and watch the dates closely) to sell the game

Sorry but it sounds like unfounded insinuations. I cannot speak for the whole world, but at least in Russian community there are no content creators who had received any sponsorship (or any other assistance) from Paradox (and one person even faced hostile treatment from Paradox PR team because of his political views, completely unrelated to game).

A company that leans hard on unpaid fans to provide tech support and additional content

That's just because there are fans which are able and willing to provide such support. Not every game in the world enjoys having this kind of community.

and tries to pass off unintuitive, arbitrary rules and needless complexity as depth and challenge

Seriously?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I honestly suggest you play mods to enhance your gameplay. Take Anbennar for example, it has way more mechanics and stuff in the game than base EU4 will ever be able to offer.

Anbennar magnifies vanilla issues with MTs. It's to the point where players often criticize selecting nations in interesting positions/species/terrain combos when they don't have mission trees, because those nations "have no content". MTs themselves become increasingly complex over time, and sometimes depend on the state of AI-controlled nations rather than what player has agency over. Or you don't read the fine print of a tree 4 missions away from current one and permanently lock yourself out of a significant part of the tree because it has requirements you can no longer do after picking something.

It's a shame, they fell into the same design trap. The added species interactions, mechanical variety of regions, and shuffling of religious bonuses are interesting elements (even if most religions over-incentivize humanist because the mod hates giving you enough missionaries to functionally convert things and then pretends that purging can possibly cover the difference. Jadd excepted).

On the first objective, I think the changelogs of the last updates speak for themselves on our work.

For sure. I saw things patched that had been bugged for ~7+ years and had long since figured would never be fixed. I'm not a fan of mission trees, but generally the game has improved since 2020, substantially. I will feel that way more strongly after the experimentation with combat settles down too.

It's always interesting to try to pin down to what degree criticism/praise/apathy/etc is reasonable for a given game state or message. There have been times in EU 4's patch cycle where the developers ignored confirmed bugs that were reliably detrimental to gameplay (including simply displaying wrong information in UI which could be text-edited) and instead fast-tracked "anti-exploit" implementation into the game that bugged it further.

A good example of that was not liking how players raised autonomy with 0 authority as Inti...so the devs at that time made it impossible to raise autonomy if you don't have authority...and this continued to be the case after fully reforming (which removes authority as a mechanic). In essence, they ignored multiple confirmed bugs of variable difficulty to fix in order to fast-track an "anti-exploit" change on a weak nation/religion combo and in doing so introduced yet another bug...which was subsequently ignored for years. When a particular team does things like that enough times, it will frustrate the player base.

HOI is another can of worms, because HOI as a game/patch priority sequence definitely does not respect player time. The reactions to stuff there are probably more toxic, on average. And while it's not constructive to be toxic generally, it's also not hard to see why that is...devs genuinely prioritize those focuses over things like functional basic controls (I was recently pinged in a thread where a dev asked what was wrong with the battleplanner, which is strikingly out-of-touch with player experience...but at least it WAS asked, after ~6 years).

Focus trees are therefore a highly negative comp that comes to mind when thinking of mission trees, though fortunately EU 4 mission trees don't share some of the limitations focuses have. Missions can be ignored or put off. Even so, when missions bypass baseline gameplay rules for any reason, it's worth considering the failure modes presented by focuses. It is close to impossible for human beings to foresee every possible interaction when you start to create lots of special exceptions through focuses/missions. A mission that gives a subject outside of conditions where it's normally possible can screw another country playing normally, similarly to how land stealing in HOI can occasionally screw a player. EU 4 Crimean succession is a good example of how this goes wrong; that event can fire and shank a run by happening mid-war, in a way that's unique/completely impossible elsewhere, requiring spoiler information to anticipate/play around it. The more of those you have, the worse it is for the game state...those interactions are neither historically nor mechanically sound because they break the internal consistency of the game world.

In terms of control, EU 4 does not have the HOI problem where you issue a command/order/pick an option, then the game refuses/does something else/lies to you about what will happen. However, there is definitely tremendous space for improving EU 4 UI. Building management (particularly deleting them), religious conversion, and giving provinces to subjects immediately come to mind as things that take many times the number of inputs they could take, in principle. I nevertheless appreciate the non-trivial effort that's gone into it since 2020...the pre-war screen has received a truly massive improvement I didn't think I'd ever see, and the accompanying insta-accepts from AI blocks the issue where UI says one thing then does another that was sometimes observed.

That's just because there are fans which are able and willing to provide such support. Not every game in the world enjoys having this kind of community.

Communities are a function of some combination of type of game (thus players attracted), state of the game, dev/company interaction with players, age of game, and more. Some of these things are within company control, others are not (at least not w/o making an entirely different game/genre).

 

[Me_]

This thread has come to the attention of the dev team, so let me say a couple of things.

Mission trees are not a mandatory feature of the game, as some people have already pointed out. What they do is expand the gameplay experience of EU4, which by this time, almost 9 years after it was released, is already difficult to achieve.

I feel that this is not a fair argument.

Technically technically armies are not a mandatory feature of the game. One can never use them and hope for the best.

I like the more interesting and engaging missions, but when there are crippling disaster that some nations start with, you can no longer honesty claim that they are not mandatory without it sounding absurd. Add tothat how powerful many of the mission rewards are - if e.g. a mission gives claim on half of Africa can you honesty say that a reasonable player can ignore it?

The great thing is the fact that they are becoming more dynamiczny, but the bad thing is that the opportunity cost of ignoring them Goes up and up with every new tree added.

The missions are great at giving different tags different character, but in some way they are supplanting the other ways of giving nations character.

 

[Susan1972]

Largest share of modern gaming market is taken by online games with microtransactions. That is what I call "sunk cost fallacy". By comparison, what Paradox is doing is completely fair, you pay for gameplay and content, not some in-game items. And all DLCs are completely optional and standalone, you don't have to buy stuff which is not interesting to you personally. At the same time, all players of base game are regularly getting some new free content and improvements.

You kind of do have to because you're left with a wholly different meta to work with. And, again, there are always hints that this DLC or that will fix ongoing problems but add stuff which no one was really shouting for, which usually require a few patches just to fix.

Sorry but it sounds like unfounded insinuations. I cannot speak for the whole world, but at least in Russian community there are no content creators who had received any sponsorship (or any other assistance) from Paradox (and one person even faced hostile treatment from Paradox PR team because of his political views, completely unrelated to game).

I know what I know. I know I see the dates jump and soft cuts in games allegedly being recorded "live".

That's just because there are fans which are able and willing to provide such support. Not every game in the world enjoys having this kind of community.

Why do you think Imperator was released as empty it was? PDX was counting on some modder making a killer app-level mod (see Old World Blues for HOI4) that would justify buying IR.

Seriously?

Yes. EU4 would be a bloatware mobile game without the Morton's Forks and scripted maluses.