So the EU4 system is better because if the EU4 system was not the EU4 system it would be something interesting?
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Yeah, I do agree but it's rough to compare both game because one is trying to be a cool risk like game about power -fantasy and has never aimed to be a simulation which IR is trying to do.
IMHO, if you really want to make a fair comparison between the two games you have to compare MEIOU and TAXES (which is a mod where it's designers gigau and co have decided to turn it into a simulation game) and even then it's unfair because it's MOD vs Game which has it's limitation in terms of comparrison, yet both teams have similar intents which is turning an "arcady" game into a simulation game.
But I really feel like complaining that EU4 is bad because it's arcady is just kind of a weird complain. For me the real appeal and the reason why EU4 is a fun game is because the game is pretty consistent with it's arcadiness and beeing silly (I mean they just added aborigines tags in australia which are supposed to compete with major european world power how could you consider the game to be a simulation of history? which once again isn't a problem because it's consistent throughout the game and we love it for that reason, or at least I do).
The real problem plaguing I:R is the fact thatthere was a shift with Arheo (which I thoughrouly support I'm more of a simulation guy), meaning that until all mechanics have been "turned/replaced/overhaul" there will still be an inherent clash in the game between the arcady feel of EU4 type stuff from launch VS the new simulation that the current team are adding into the game. And even yet there are still big design decisions IMHO about mechanics that have been tweaked to become more simulation like (stability/War exhaustion for exemple), and wether those should be scrapped and to what level such aspects of state management should be abstracted and what would be the benefis of less abstraction in building an immersive and historically accurate feeling of civilisation/state building (Althought beeing a big history nerd those go together for me).
For me the future of I:R will show Paradox to which levels are fans will to support a simulation type of game that will most likely inform their initial approach to the design of V3.
IMHO, if you really want to make a fair comparison between the two games you have to compare MEIOU and TAXES (which is a mod where it's designers gigau and co have decided to turn it into a simulation game) and even then it's unfair because it's MOD vs Game which has it's limitation in terms of comparrison, yet both teams have similar intents which is turning an "arcady" game into a simulation game.
But I really feel like complaining that EU4 is bad because it's arcady is just kind of a weird complain. For me the real appeal and the reason why EU4 is a fun game is because the game is pretty consistent with it's arcadiness and beeing silly (I mean they just added aborigines tags in australia which are supposed to compete with major european world power how could you consider the game to be a simulation of history? which once again isn't a problem because it's consistent throughout the game and we love it for that reason, or at least I do).
The real problem plaguing I:R is the fact thatthere was a shift with Arheo (which I thoughrouly support I'm more of a simulation guy), meaning that until all mechanics have been "turned/replaced/overhaul" there will still be an inherent clash in the game between the arcady feel of EU4 type stuff from launch VS the new simulation that the current team are adding into the game. And even yet there are still big design decisions IMHO about mechanics that have been tweaked to become more simulation like (stability/War exhaustion for exemple), and wether those should be scrapped and to what level such aspects of state management should be abstracted and what would be the benefis of less abstraction in building an immersive and historically accurate feeling of civilisation/state building (Althought beeing a big history nerd those go together for me).
For me the future of I:R will show Paradox to which levels are fans will to support a simulation type of game that will most likely inform their initial approach to the design of V3.
I think it is better as a base, the idea of a Graph with nodes and trade streams that you can interact with is better than Individual one city to another manually created trade route in my opinion
I feel like you pretend to not understand what I mean just to contradict me
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You are right, I know EUIV much better. And it took a while till I was able to appreciate it for what it is coming from CK2. Maybe after a few patches and content drops I can say the same for I:R. In this moment EUIV is the superior game for me. Your opinion may vary, which is totally fine.
I follow the development of I:R very closely and like the direction where it's going. I am happy that so many people have fun with it now. A year ago the situation was much different.
It's time for EUV, that's what I think of EUIV.
Stop milking the fan-base and make a new game, they've piled so many mechanics, modifiers and systems on top of countess other mechanics, modifiers and systems, they don't know where they are with it, or how to fix it, and it's just creaks like hell, it's like one of those poor donkeys you see on the charity adverts trying to carry too many bricks up the dusty old cart track...
Put it out to pasture and give us something new, it's really old and tired now. I've had 3,000 hours out of it, but I can't get past the loading screen any more without groaning....
No mas!
Stop milking the fan-base and make a new game, they've piled so many mechanics, modifiers and systems on top of countess other mechanics, modifiers and systems, they don't know where they are with it, or how to fix it, and it's just creaks like hell, it's like one of those poor donkeys you see on the charity adverts trying to carry too many bricks up the dusty old cart track...
Put it out to pasture and give us something new, it's really old and tired now. I've had 3,000 hours out of it, but I can't get past the loading screen any more without groaning....
No mas!
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This may be unpopular in this forum but I still hold the same opinion I had at release of I:R that EU4 will always have more replayability than I:R, doesn't matter how many patches I:R gets. This is because it is easier for players to identify with tags in EU4 than in I:R so they have a lot more playthroughs available. Sure, a player may be from one European country but most players will still be interested in building a British empire as England, proclaiming revolutionary France, colonizing America as Spain, forming Prussia or dealing with reformation as Austria, uniting Italy as Florence or building a trade empire as Venice, stopping the Otto as Byzantium or forming the Mughal empire etc etc, i could go on for ages. While in I:R unless you're an expert in ancient history most people only recognize Rome, Carthage, Athens, Sparta, and the Diadochi. That severely limits the replayability.
In EU4 I sometimes even pause mid-game and spend time just scrolling around looking at the map, seeing how the AI is doing, did Russia form?, did Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth collapse, what did Austria do with its Burgundian inheritance, what did the colonizers do etc. I never do this in I:R (well, only to check up on Rome unless I'm playing close to them), I just don't care how Reudignia or Pellene or Coniscia are doing, I've never heard of them anyway.
In EU4 I sometimes even pause mid-game and spend time just scrolling around looking at the map, seeing how the AI is doing, did Russia form?, did Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth collapse, what did Austria do with its Burgundian inheritance, what did the colonizers do etc. I never do this in I:R (well, only to check up on Rome unless I'm playing close to them), I just don't care how Reudignia or Pellene or Coniscia are doing, I've never heard of them anyway.
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Even the Diadochi are a bit of a stretch unless you're interested in the period. I honestly wasn't very invested in the Hellenistic period, and my general knowledge of the period before I:R really sparked my interest was basically "Alexander's Empire fell apart and Rome eventually stopped by to pick up the pieces". Now that I've gotten really invested in the period, the Diadochi and the surrounding states, I'm WAY more invested in how the carcass of Alexander's Empire is doing than Rome and Carthage - every game. "Yeah yeah, Rome is big but HOW IS MY BOY ARMENIA DOING AGAINST SELEUKEOS? Is that SCUMBAG TRAITOR CASSANDER dead yet?!" etc.
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well, the Diadochi include such tags as Egypt and Macedon which presumably most people can recognize.
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Which is all the more funny since Rome wasn't much of a thing yet and Athens and Sparta weren't a thing anymore.
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Well, Byzantium wasn't much of a thing anymore at the start of EU4 and yet it's one of the most played tags in that game.
You recognize the names, but not necessarily that Egypt was Hellenic, or the context in which Macedon existed at the time. I mean, here we all know RTW bungled it with their Bronze Age Egyptians, but I had friends who genuinely believed Egypt in the Roman age were ruled by bona-fide Egyptians, and had no idea Cleopatra, The, was from a Greek dynasty.
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That's true but such lack of knowledge can also be extended to european who roughly know what happend to their country during EU4 era, but know very little about others countries history/formation/dismantlement during said era, making it pretty similiar to the situation in I:R where most people know about Rome during this era but not much else.
Edit 1: Especially with the scope of the game (EU4) where most people don't know what was going on on other continents except if their country was a colonial country.
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You have a point but I'd argue that while most Europeans will admit they don't know much about neighbouring country X's history in the 16th century, many would think they somewhat know what Athens or Rome were in the late 4th century BC because we haven't really been taught (or shown) how much the Ancient World changed in the matter of a few centuries.
These “nations” are often perceived as some more or less immutable entities (Athens = democracy, etc.) even though they've considerably evolved internally and their power relative to their neighbours changed a lot. And other entities who haven't been put on the front scene by the educational system and the entertainment industry will be too quickly judged as irrelevant.
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Oh yeah definitly, most of my friends don't understand my maniacal laughter when I see spartans in 300 judging the Persians for their slavery practice because you know the greek are the good democratic guys and the persians are the decadent slavers empire.
On another stand, this might apply only to me but I find that seeing a map that is weird and different from your expectation can teach you stuff,
For exemple I first learned about the seljuks when playing in CK2 and asking myself : "dude!!, tf is seljuk? Why does it has all of iran/syria?, wait isn't iran shiia?" and stuff like that.
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... I think a lot of players begin to engage with paradox games partially because they "like" history, in one way or another... But few are really that learned or experts at any aspect of history - let alone semi-experts at several aspects.
Some may engage without that much in-depth interest in history to begin with but looking for that GRAND strategy experience that other sub-genres of strategy are rarely able to offer with as much granularity.
I like to think that we all come away learning a lot about history and the processes through which it can "be forged" in gamified alternate-history scenarios.
Regarding EU4, I think particularly the trade and diplomacy systems are very satisfying to game, one way or another, providing incremental payoff.
Arguably, they are (still) more satisfying to game than the best systems of Imperator (pops, cultures and their various dynamics).
... in any case, they critically more familiar for EU4 players - and perceived as fundamentally important.
If you're with me that far, do you agree that diplomacy and trade ARE more fundamentally important than the strengths of IR? in a civ-builder type game?
I'm somewhat on the fence about this myself:
I think IR's best mechanics are in reach of being as good drivers of gameplay progress as those in EU4:
for example, If the pop/city mechanics had another layer to it - a more pronounced payoff for good management, and some more explicit mechanic than pop-capacity and food, to regulate population-density -- "Squalor" for example.
Regardless, improving trade and diplomacy systems iskind of "common sense" IMO.
Some may engage without that much in-depth interest in history to begin with but looking for that GRAND strategy experience that other sub-genres of strategy are rarely able to offer with as much granularity.
I like to think that we all come away learning a lot about history and the processes through which it can "be forged" in gamified alternate-history scenarios.
Regarding EU4, I think particularly the trade and diplomacy systems are very satisfying to game, one way or another, providing incremental payoff.
Arguably, they are (still) more satisfying to game than the best systems of Imperator (pops, cultures and their various dynamics).
... in any case, they critically more familiar for EU4 players - and perceived as fundamentally important.
If you're with me that far, do you agree that diplomacy and trade ARE more fundamentally important than the strengths of IR? in a civ-builder type game?
I'm somewhat on the fence about this myself:
I think IR's best mechanics are in reach of being as good drivers of gameplay progress as those in EU4:
for example, If the pop/city mechanics had another layer to it - a more pronounced payoff for good management, and some more explicit mechanic than pop-capacity and food, to regulate population-density -- "Squalor" for example.
Regardless, improving trade and diplomacy systems iskind of "common sense" IMO.
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I agree, and playing EUIV certainly made me more interested by what happened elsewhere in the world (being an American (in the real sense, someone living in the Americas), but most of the time I did so because I was interested by what those people became.
There are a lot of people in Imperator who became nothing, as in they just disappeared from history without a trace. You can link the Romans with the latin world, think about some people who historically disappeared but were important (like Cathage), others who survived (Jews, armenians) or link some countries to characters, like Pyrhuss and Epirus, and you can loosely link some peoples, like for example the Boiis to Bohemia.
However, looking at the stories of imperator unfolding, I have a smaller investment than while I look at EUIV, simply because of the temporal distance. It becomes a bit akin to Stellaris, where the people being shown have no real link with what I know of the world (except the humans).
Maybe if I play more the world will become more familial to me and I'll like the idea of making all those nations thrive, but at the onset, I felt like the only peoples I wanted to play were Makedon or Athens, Carthage being too big and peripheral and Rome being too obvious.
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Probably a mistake to assume that the EU period is inherently more relatable. Maybe to Europeans with a bit of historical interest and similar people from regions not covered by Imperator, but people uninterested in history are likely just as disinterested in both periods. Not to mention being able to play 'your' nation or faction isn't the only historical draw. All that said I am most definitely biased, I find the Hellenistic period significantly more interesting than the Modern.
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if someone's uniterested in history, why are they playing a historical GSG? just go play Stellaris or Civilization or something.
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It just does not mean you are aware about the history of most countries in the time period. Don't tell me the common knowlege about EU IV is higher than about the time period in imperator Rome. When i like the period i know the tags. When i dont, i know about EU IV also not much. I just compare the tags with modern nations.