Things that DEFINITELY need to be re-invented in a new way EU IV:
1. The cumbersome user interface whose central philosophy up to now is:
- "The map is not there to show you anything important" (besides the names of provinces and the location of armies)
- "To get any relevant information about your country, you must click on stuff or position your mouse over something"
Take a leaf from how Civ3 and later Civ games designed their user interfaces. Indicate the relevant stuff ON THE MAP, not in a UI panel that requires clicking on the province or unit. (F.ex.: active province modifiers; relative tax income; core / non-core status; fortress size; buildings; success chance of active missionaries; time until colonist arrival; unit composition of army or navy; whether they have a leader and what his name is.) You can put A LOT of info on the map without overloading it. Simple red/green bars like the ones used for unit morale could show current missionary chances, color codes or unit icons could show what an army consists of, and small icons next to a unit could show its leader.
2. Naval warfare, in fact the whole concept of naval movement in Europa Universalis, needs a TOTAL overhaul. Navies are NOT like armies that you order around the map! Navies should be something to which you give a command, and then you see how they try to execute it. That would let you model the following, fairly important but up to now badly modeled things much better:
- unfavorable winds that slow or speed up a navy's passage, or even blow them totally off course
- storms that can disorganize, damage, break up or even destroy a fleet
- navies that fail to make contact when they pass each other in the same sea zone
- importance of fleet commander's attitude (cautionary or aggressive)
3. The concept of province ownership: In all EU games so far, province ownership is an all-or-nothing affair. You either own a province, and thereby get to manage its manpower, tax income, military fortresses, revolt risk and provincial decisions; or you don't in which case you get to manage nothing of that. But that's a terrible model for things like:
- the European influence in India (where the Europeans owned only small outposts but wielded enormous influence over the native powers in the 18th century)
- the warfare and colonization in North America (where the French did *NOT* own any land, in the Europa-Universalis-way, outside of Canada, yet they controlled trade and owned fortresses all across the continent and fought a large scale war of sieges and maneuver against the British)
Stuff like "spheres of influence" or "mil access rights" are only crutches that very badly model any of this stuff. You can never have a real French and Indian war in a Europa Universalis game, because as soon as a Euro nation puts a foot on the continent, it conquers and colonizes everything and that means you are actually competing over full fledged settlements with cities and hundred of thousands of Frenchmen... not native-populated provinces in which the French only own forts!
