Hello PDX,
first of all i love eu4 even though- like everyone i guess- a few changes happened i did not like, besides others i really enjoyed. i guess every player has his own ideas of how the game should improve either balancewise or to make it historically more accurate. Beside those changes/suggestions its often the little things that gave a lot of joy to the game ( PDXxmascarol, the music player options, macrobuilder, mapmodes etc). Theres one thing i would really love to see in eu4 that has just a little effect to game mechanics, but would make a huge to my (and hopefully a lot of other players) personal experience:
A little notepad. why? so if u cant play the game for lets say a week or even longer u may forget ur plans/tactics, the need to declare a war to prevent a coalition or something else.
of course u could write this down on a piece of paper but having it in the game, so u could check it before u start playing the save again would be a nice feature in my opinion. Maybe even add a little clock in it so u could set an alarm with text for a current in game date like "dow ottos now" or "stop playing u need to study" p.E poping up at a specific ingame date.
Making it look like a deed ( with a seal maybe) could make it fit in an optic way.
While that's a nice idea, you can just easily alt+tab and open the notepad. I actually had thought of this notepad feature you suggested for various Paradox grand strategy games but I was hesitant on suggesting this due to the abundance of note-taking software, free and paid, all over.
To be frank, this is unlikely to be implemented so long as such software existed, although it would be nice to not have to alt+tab constantly for that.
Alarm might be ok but the problem is changing circumstances which could make DoW unattractive. However, it would be nice to have an option to choose a specific country to let us know the truce expired with that country (I think Stellaris already does this). It might be workable, however, if truces list isn't too long and there probably should be a cap on how many countries you choose for this. That shouldn't be a problem, though, as long as truce timer remained 5 years (I think that is the default) but that could change if you use a mod that modified the truce modifier.
As for alarms about external things such as stop playing and do studying, while that might be nice, you can still do that with an external software. In fact, there is Alarms and Clocks that comes with Windows 10 where alarms you set can still pop up even while playing a game full-screen. I don't know about other platforms so I can't say what software there is available for that and if it can notify you despite playing game full-screen or not.
One thing for sure, though, I do make use of notes and wikis for the reference when playing the game. I do use web browser in Steam overlay for this reason (although it is sometimes unreliable... sometimes a tab doesn't work and I had to close it and open the page again *rolls eyes*).
