The game is too long to offer a challenging experience to a good player all the way until the end

[P.Quirinius]

I've seen there are already multiple threads about the game being too long, but my take is different, I believe. The issue is the game takes 500 years which is a lot longer than Imperator Rome in a time period when rapid and often relatively stable conquests of large areas were quite possible even in places distant from homeland like Spanish conquering much of America in the 16th century while simultaneously getting control of a lot of Italy and Portugal, the British conquering/colonising most of Canada, Australia, South Africa and even all of India in the last century of the game, large rapid conquests in Asia like Timur, although these might be less stable. Even Western Europe did allow for relatively rapid expansion early on with the expansion of the Burgundian state. If the game is to allow historical scenarios it needs to enable such rapid expansion and players will be able to learn how to do it. Now if you allow the player who has learned the game mechanics well to expand like this or even faster (assuming historical Spain and others weren't doing their absolute best) for about 250 years, there is no way they will not build a huge empire that will not face any serious challenges, if they start as a strong nation, and the game will only get easier from there. The game could be made more challenging by making rebellions a bigger issue, but an experienced player will learn how to deal with them efficiently. Some expansion opportunities like personal union integration could probably be made slower. But the point is that a strong nation that would be doing their absolute best (like an experienced player would) would have snowballed way out of control long before the end of the game.

I am not saying that the game is unplayable in the later half because of this. Many people only play about first 150 years of most EU IV games, but I played quite a few until the end date and enjoyed them. Making the game challenging until the end for the very good players would require to make it hyperrealistic in a way, either be making it super complicated, but I wonder how the AI and less experienced players would handle that, or massively increasing the RNG factors, but I doubt many people want this. I think the best solution to this would be to add another start date about half way into the game. I have followed much of Tinto maps so I think I have an idea how much work it could take to make another start date, that is real lot. But I think another start date would almost amount to a new game for quite a few people, who would only rarely reach the content in the second half of the game otherwise.

 

[McEwanMaster]

Not to be facetious, but the statement that you made your title can describe many of the games in existence, particularly the ones built around a sandbox-like experience that naturally give the player the bulk of the gameplay latitude.

Apply this to PGSGs, Total War, Civilization, mamy city builders, 4x games, even survival games like Conan Exiles or Minecraft. The difficulty curve is almost always high in the beginning until a certain point somewhere in the middle when players have gathered enough resources and built up their strategy enough that they gain an unstoppable stride. The way many of these titles address this change in difficulty is to shift the focus of the gameplay to create different phases that make each game stage feel different, from survival to creativity. EUV is certainly set up to be challenging in the beginning, but at least in theory the existing gameplay systems are enough to allow a mid- or late-game shift to a creativity paradigm along many types of play, whether conquest or gardening or economy.

I don't know if this strategy will apply well to EUV or if Tinto has another one in mind, but I hope whatever comes to pass turns out well. We haven't seen any late-gameplay whatsoever, so while we hear these fears, any particular judgements are premature.

 

[Axelzzz]

If I understand correctly this is about making the game challenging enough to be able to play the entire timeline of the game?

A game is always going to be a limited sandbox and for someone min-maxing everything they will always out-game the system especially once they learn it. This is where it differs historically as in the game you don't have the complexity of being human living in a body with emotions which would massively hinder real-life rulers from making optimal decisions. The rulers who do this will have become greats, but they all die and get followed up by their children etc who have a completely different set of human complexities that end up with them fucking up their kingdom/nation/empire. Now compare that with a person playing a much simplified game compared to real life, and the person will still be playing from the exact same once a ruler of the nation you play dies and the next one takes over, whereas historically this often fucked things up.

The reason most people play only about the first 150 years of the game is that they'll have achieved their goals already which gets them to a point of being unstoppable, and that is where the fun of the game ends. It's the earlier part of the game where people have a vision that they want to realize and are facing challenges along the way is what in my experience and perception makes the game most interesting.

As for possible solutions to this issue, where the goal is to make the game more challenging for a longer period of time0:
- There could be a feature, likely as a mod, that introduces something of a 'shattered world'/'bring chaos' button, perhaps culture based, where nations are broken up and the world is plunged into chaos which brings a whole new set of threats and opportunities. This could be a button you can press whenever a save game feels like it's getting stale or losing it's challenge, or even a randomised feature. I'm not going to go into the specifics of how to make this work, but this is just one idea and could be worked into a bunch of different versions/shapes.

- Another idea is to simply switch nations within the same save game where you pick a smaller nation to build up which has a completely new set of goals, which essentially starts in a completely different world from base game start that varies depending on the save game.

Essentially, what you're asking is really hard to implement into the base game itself, that's just the limit of simplified games and the mismatch with reality, and it's best something you implement yourself by either creating new challenges for yourself - which rather than starting a new save game you do by switching nation in the same save game, or through some sort of fantasy-mechanic mod that mid-game reintroduces chaos, challenges, and new opportunities into the world to refresh it.

You could also use the console commands to just mess with the world; either to create a different base game start, for example to weaken a strong nation you want to play so it gets some more runway and challenge before getting unstoppable, or completely mess with the nations layout to start in a completely different world. You could also do it mid-game to sort of weaken the situation of your own nation, although this can be quite hard to do by shattering the nation you've just painstakingly built, hence a mod feature can make that aspect a bit easier.

 

[ingenieux]

Now if you allow the player who has learned the game mechanics well to expand like this or even faster

You can't prevent this kind of people to do that without unfun limitations. (like : a maximum number of provinces you can conquer per year)

I think the best solution to this would be to add another start date about half way into the game. I have followed much of Tinto maps so I think I have an idea how much work it could take to make another start date, that is real lot. But I think another start date would almost amount to a new game for quite a few people, who would only rarely reach the content in the second half of the game otherwise.

Agree.

 

[Lord_Telchar]

I think the best solution to this would be to add another start date about half way into the game. I have followed much of Tinto maps so I think I have an idea how much work it could take to make another start date, that is real lot. But I think another start date would almost amount to a new game for quite a few people, who would only rarely reach the content in the second half of the game otherwise.

This idea has always received mostly negative reactions by the community when it was raised in the past, but I'm curious whether by seeing more of the game people are changing their minds on this.
I've previously made the point that it's very unlikely that most players will play through more than maybe the first half of the game's time frame, the 500 years seems simply too long for the game's mechanics to consistently remain challenging.
Perhaps we'll get at least a DLC adding a second start date at some point after the game's release. It would be a real shame for EUV's late game to end up like in EUIV. It's not that the developers never made content for that, but they realised that most players never reached that time in most of their playthroughs.

 

[InvisibleBison]

So what if the game isn't challenging throughout its entire timespan? Not everyone plays games to be challenged, and not every game has to go all the way to 1836. People who want challenge will simply stop playing when they are no longer challenged, the way they always have in every Paradox game.

 

[Lykus Cerebros]

This idea has always received mostly negative reactions by the community when it was raised in the past, but I'm curious whether by seeing more of the game people are changing their minds on this.

Just for myself I haven't changed my opinion yet. For me the more fixed maps (in EU4) in the later parts make the game less interesting. I know EU4 often suffered from the same big nations coming out on top, but that was already the case if I would have started later.

There were also much less nations to pick from (mostly a European problem). So it felt like less variety and less opportunity to expand before taking on the big guys.

Of course a factor was also the sheer amount of content you would miss out (only relevant after a couple of DLCs).

So far nothing i have seen has really changed my opinion. I won't expand as quick as most reviewers because I have less time to sink into the game and really dont care for metagaming as much. I think we haven't really seen the later events yet so am hopeful there will be additional mechanics to explore.

 

[A Pink Duck]

But I think another start date would almost amount to a new game for quite a few people, who would only rarely reach the content in the second half of the game otherwise.

It would also appeal to people like me for whom the current start date is an anti-feature that I have absolutely no interest in.

 

[GDQuirm]

I think the best solution to this would be to add another start date about half way into the game.

There has been a lot of argument over this with regards to how much work this is, but I think it would be a good idea to mention what the devs actually said about this:

Whether it's fun or not, whether it makes sense or not, and whether or not it's feasible, the idea is completely moot if people don't actually play it.

They've been very open about the fact the US is by far their biggest consumerbase, and despite that, the single least-played DLC content they've ever produced was the US DLC. And they've also been very clear that the main reason all that dev work wasn't engaged with was that despite adding in a new start date specifically for the content, nobody actually used the start date that allowed you to play it.

I am skeptical of the suggestions people have put forward to "encourage people to play other start dates". It's possible they might work, but it seems very likely to me that if the devs put in a monumental amount of work into creating other start dates, and then put even more work in to try and encourage people to play those start dates, that a vanishingly small portion of the community will play them, arrive on the forums to compliment the work of the devs and to claim that this is great and that they think this has improved the game immensely, and that the entire process will have been a huge net loss for the devs in time that could've been spent working on parts of the game the other 99% of the community will actually play.

To an extent, this aplies to the late game in EU. But about 10% of players have the achievement for actually finishing the campaign, and just going by the roughly 30-odd people I occasionally play MP with, I would venture to say that about half of them have finished a campaign, and none of them have even looked at other start dates. Only one has even expressed interest in other start dates, and that one expressed it in terms of "Would be cool to have a mod that started in 1100", which was easily satisfied by downloading a mod built around that.

I think features that are targeted to such a small portion of the playerbase should probably be left to modders

 

[Monty is staring at me]

So what if the game isn't challenging throughout its entire timespan? Not everyone plays games to be challenged, and not every game has to go all the way to 1836. People who want challenge will simply stop playing when they are no longer challenged, the way they always have in every Paradox game.

Because this is not a RP game like Crusader Kings.

Why else are you playing EU? There is no story. There are no cutscenes. It is daunting to get into, with a lot of different mechanics. What fun is to do all that and have the game be too easy?

In a sandbox game, there really shouldn't be a "winning" condition, and I think it would be quite awesome if you could never "win" EU5, not even if you had a thousand years, just because it's never possible to become powerful enough that no internal or external threat is dangerous to you anymore.

 

[Patron Pes]

Each age must bring new challenges and opportunities.
Also i exagerate here, but to be short lets say almost no vassal integration in Europe till the reformation or discovery age, almost no culture conversion till absolutism age and then the real mappainting speedrun will start in the later game only

 

[pheonix_cruz]

I share the same concerns for the game. I want to experience the late game (age of absolutism) content without feeling that I have already won and the gameplay has just become tedious. I would like to see a halfway start date, but I don't agree that's the best solution nor do I think the devs will focus on that anytime soon given the stat of how few people used other start dates. Here are some suggestions for how I think this could be addressed:
1. Difficulty. As many other people suggested, one of the easiest ways to address this is to simply have multiple harder difficulty options that apply bonuses to the ai or maluses to the player.
2. Ai Tweaking: Similar to difficulty, but instead of changing modifiers, have different modes for the ai. I would love to see a "try hard" mode for that ai that uses more meta gameplay and plays more like another player in general. This would obviously tend to have less historical outcomes in general, but I'm okay with that for a non-default mode experience. Xorme AI mod for EU4 is a great example. I'm not a coding expert, but maybe they could even use machine learning to develop ai modes that are more competent.
3. Disasters/Rebellions: As OP suggested, making disasters and/or rebellions more frequent and more punishing would not only be a good way to slow the player down, but if done correctly, could also be a good way to continue to make the game challenging once the player has become hegemonic. I'm already liking the disaster content shown so far and hope for more to come. As for rebellions, I think they need to become a larger part of the game. It seems they are already stronger/more of a hinderance than eu4, but I want to see rebellions expanded upon. The concept of rebellion could be represented much more by the civil war mechanics mentioned in previous TT, rather than just simple rebels like in EU4. A civil war could even have multiple factions spawning at once to break away from or take over the state. These factions could collaborate as allies or be independent and have their own simultaneous wars. I think the inclusion of multiple factions would represent history better, and they would also make the rebellion a larger threat as these rebels would consider their combined power when chooses when to start a civil war. This seems like a fun and natural way to have consequences for expansion.
4. Slowing Overall: General slowing of geographic expansion and economic development. No need to go into all the ways to do that, mostly just adjusting various values. There are plenty of threads and comments about stopping both economic and geographic snowballing.
5. Ages: A mode with some sort of age reset like Civ 7? This one is very speculative, but could be interesting.

 

[McEwanMaster]

Each age must bring new challenges and opportunities.

This is definitely the setup Tinto is aiming at, and I hope it goes well! My dream is for an experience that gradually traces the historical evolution of the nation state, socio-economic systems, and technology, I won't be too disappointed if the earlier versions of EUV give us a more cleanly delineated experience around each of the Ages. I'm optimistic about progress.

 

[InvisibleBison]

Because this is not a RP game like Crusader Kings.

Why else are you playing EU? There is no story. There are no cutscenes. It is daunting to get into, with a lot of different mechanics. What fun is to do all that and have the game be too easy?

I'm playing EU4 to tell the story of my nation and to see how the world develops. It doesn't have to be challenging for me to do that. The question isn't whether or not I can conquer a given stretch of land. Of course I can, though it may take a while. The question is whether or not it makes sense for me to do so. You say it's not a roleplaying game; that's not wrong, but it doesn't stop me from roleplaying, from acting as if my nation was subject to realistic constraints that the game isn't sophisticated to model. None of that depends on the game being challenging, either. In fact, a lack of challenge arguably enables it. If the game was always a struggle to survive, I'd have to make the most efficient decisions at all time, regardless of how well they fit the story of my nation, regardless of whether it made sense for a king with the sort of personality my ruler has or a society with the sort of nature my society has to make those decisions. regardless of whether it is at all realistic for a nation to make that decision. I'm not against the game having the possibility for challenge - difficulty settings are a wonderful feature - but challenge is far from the only reason people play games.

 

[Lord_Telchar]

There has been a lot of argument over this with regards to how much work this is, but I think it would be a good idea to mention what the devs actually said about this:
View attachment 1332579

Whether it's fun or not, whether it makes sense or not, and whether or not it's feasible, the idea is completely moot if people don't actually play it.

They've been very open about the fact the US is by far their biggest consumerbase, and despite that, the single least-played DLC content they've ever produced was the US DLC. And they've also been very clear that the main reason all that dev work wasn't engaged with was that despite adding in a new start date specifically for the content, nobody actually used the start date that allowed you to play it.

I am skeptical of the suggestions people have put forward to "encourage people to play other start dates". It's possible they might work, but it seems very likely to me that if the devs put in a monumental amount of work into creating other start dates, and then put even more work in to try and encourage people to play those start dates, that a vanishingly small portion of the community will play them, arrive on the forums to compliment the work of the devs and to claim that this is great and that they think this has improved the game immensely, and that the entire process will have been a huge net loss for the devs in time that could've been spent working on parts of the game the other 99% of the community will actually play.

To an extent, this aplies to the late game in EU. But about 10% of players have the achievement for actually finishing the campaign, and just going by the roughly 30-odd people I occasionally play MP with, I would venture to say that about half of them have finished a campaign, and none of them have even looked at other start dates. Only one has even expressed interest in other start dates, and that one expressed it in terms of "Would be cool to have a mod that started in 1100", which was easily satisfied by downloading a mod built around that.

I think features that are targeted to such a small portion of the playerbase should probably be left to modders

I'm not convinced by the argument that players don't use the later start dates based on EUIV. Sure they probably don't in EUIV, but that's because they are broken, and you're missing out on all the content from the early game. A better analogy would be CK3, do people don't use later start dates there?

Either way, there's a problem here: people don't use later start dates, so there's no need for one, but also people don't play for 500 years because they've "won" far before that.
What I've argued before is a exponentially rising difficulty, as the player grows, maintaining that growth should get progressively harder - for example maintaining two personal unions should be much more difficult than just double, and so on. But to balance that is not easy either.

 

[MalcolmZeta]

The problem is thst you are immortal being that leads a nation and can redo any choice with quick save scumming or in next playthrough. With 1000 hours you can master the game. Imagine If you could rule an actual country without worrying about your death, you could replay it many many times, and you would start seeing patterns, you would know what would happen before it happens. It means that no game can be made "realist" enough to be challenging for master tier player cause reality is not as challenging either if you had the same powers in it as you have in this game. I'm tired of seeing people waiting Paradox to come up with some sort of a miracle where their game is as challenging and interesting to new players as it is for 10000+h players. It's just impossible to do.

 

[Monty is staring at me]

I'm playing EU4 to tell the story of my nation and to see how the world develops. It doesn't have to be challenging for me to do that. The question isn't whether or not I can conquer a given stretch of land. Of course I can, though it may take a while. The question is whether or not it makes sense for me to do so. You say it's not a roleplaying game; that's not wrong, but it doesn't stop me from roleplaying, from acting as if my nation was subject to realistic constraints that the game isn't sophisticated to model. None of that depends on the game being challenging, either. In fact, a lack of challenge arguably enables it. If the game was always a struggle to survive, I'd have to make the most efficient decisions at all time, regardless of how well they fit the story of my nation, regardless of whether it made sense for a king with the sort of personality my ruler has or a society with the sort of nature my society has to make those decisions. regardless of whether it is at all realistic for a nation to make that decision. I'm not against the game having the possibility for challenge - difficulty settings are a wonderful feature - but challenge is far from the only reason people play games.

Then, maybe, you can play at Very Easy difficulty?

I don't know what to tell you, but I feel like struggle, strife and challenges are part of "national stories", and that most players think EU4 is "unrewarding" when there is no challenge in the game, and that it's a chore when you know you can achieve any goal easily.

And when your back is against the wall, "efficient" choices don't mean optimal ones. It actually forces you to make compromises, weaken your long term position by appeasing estates with bad privileges, leveraging debt, making a lot of short-sighted choices.

You apparently want a gardening sim. Okay, I think most players here actually want an immersive experience of what it meant to lead a nation in this very difficult period in human history, which means that they also want to face the same challenges as those leaders did. The problem is, it's much more straightforward to make a game easy rather than making it properly balanced and challenging. And I want to be able to have a challenging game till 1837, which is something EU4 fails at miserably.

Yes, difficulty settings are a wonderful thing. Set your game to Very Easy and garden away.

 

[Moppy771]

I've seen there are already multiple threads about the game being too long, but my take is different, I believe. The issue is the game takes 500 years which is a lot longer than Imperator Rome in a time period when rapid and often relatively stable conquests of large areas were quite possible even in places distant from homeland like Spanish conquering much of America in the 16th century while simultaneously getting control of a lot of Italy and Portugal, the British conquering/colonising most of Canada, Australia, South Africa and even all of India in the last century of the game, large rapid conquests in Asia like Timur, although these might be less stable. Even Western Europe did allow for relatively rapid expansion early on with the expansion of the Burgundian state. If the game is to allow historical scenarios it needs to enable such rapid expansion and players will be able to learn how to do it. Now if you allow the player who has learned the game mechanics well to expand like this or even faster (assuming historical Spain and others weren't doing their absolute best) for about 250 years, there is no way they will not build a huge empire that will not face any serious challenges, if they start as a strong nation, and the game will only get easier from there. The game could be made more challenging by making rebellions a bigger issue, but an experienced player will learn how to deal with them efficiently. Some expansion opportunities like personal union integration could probably be made slower. But the point is that a strong nation that would be doing their absolute best (like an experienced player would) would have snowballed way out of control long before the end of the game.

I am not saying that the game is unplayable in the later half because of this. Many people only play about first 150 years of most EU IV games, but I played quite a few until the end date and enjoyed them. Making the game challenging until the end for the very good players would require to make it hyperrealistic in a way, either be making it super complicated, but I wonder how the AI and less experienced players would handle that, or massively increasing the RNG factors, but I doubt many people want this. I think the best solution to this would be to add another start date about half way into the game. I have followed much of Tinto maps so I think I have an idea how much work it could take to make another start date, that is real lot. But I think another start date would almost amount to a new game for quite a few people, who would only rarely reach the content in the second half of the game otherwise.

All human vs AI strategy games become easy for the human player once a certain threshold is reached admittedly. The threshold where human adaptability, foresight and planning outpaces AI's simple reactive reasoning.

Me personally, I just play multiplayer (with house rules about PvP warfare) if I want late-game to have competent rival powers that keep my snowballing in check. Why? Because it is impossible to make the game both extremely hard for the player but somehow have the AI not totally crash in on itself within such an environment without essentially giving it cheats, which I always see as unfair, despite having the ultimate cheat - a brain and pattern recognition.

 

[Lord_Telchar]

Then, maybe, you can play at Very Easy difficulty?

I don't know what to tell you, but I feel like struggle, strife and challenges are part of "national stories", and that most players think EU4 is "unrewarding" when there is no challenge in the game, and that it's a chore when you know you can achieve any goal easily.

And when your back is against the wall, "efficient" choices don't mean optimal ones. It actually forces you to make compromises, weaken your long term position by appeasing estates with bad privileges, leveraging debt, making a lot of short-sighted choices.

You apparently want a gardening sim. Okay, I think most players here actually want an immersive experience of what it meant to lead a nation in this very difficult period in human history, which means that they also want to face the same challenges as those leaders did. The problem is, it's much more straightforward to make a game easy rather than making it properly balanced and challenging. And I want to be able to have a challenging game till 1837, which is something EU4 fails at miserably.

Yes, difficulty settings are a wonderful thing. Set your game to Very Easy and garden away.

There's a way to satisfy both: just maintaining what the player already has, and growing the economy doesn't have to be too hard, the challenging bit should be conquering and building an empire.
EUIV had the issue where just playing tall not only lacked a lot of gameplay, but was also harder than just conquering more, because quite quickly all your neighbours would outscale you. Conquering more land in EUIV is pretty much a requirement to play the game, and in EUV that hopefully won't be the case.
So there's a good option for both types of players here, where you can just slowly grow your country over centuries with roleplay, or can do something very challenging and start building an empire.

 

[Monty is staring at me]

There's a way to satisfy both: just maintaining what the player already has, and growing the economy doesn't have to be too hard, the challenging bit should be conquering and building an empire.
EUIV had the issue where just playing tall not only lacked a lot of gameplay, but was also harder than just conquering more, because quite quickly all your neighbours would outscale you. Conquering more land in EUIV is pretty much a requirement to play the game, and in EUV that hopefully won't be the case.
So there's a good option for both types of players here, where you can just slowly grow your country over centuries with roleplay, or can do something very challenging and start building an empire.

I would like to feel genuinely threatened by AI.

I think playing tall should be viable, but if another country is able to conquer half of Europe, no amount of "building tall" as England will save you (my desired solution for this would be that it would be impossible to control half of Europe, simply because you wouldn't be able to manage the separatism and because the AI would stop you, ideally; unfortunately, it doesn't seem like EU5 is going that direction).

I think variety of experiences can be provided by different starting countries. There are countries that are going to be very difficult to invade - most obviously Japan, Spain, Great Britain. Other countries should have the experience of being attacked a lot - particularly in mainland Europe, India, West and Central Asia, etc.