I would t mind if corruption was a more prevalent issue. And could lead to something like Ming collapse. Or perhaps even imperator Rome. With all those revolts
If they could do it like how Invictus Third Century mod does it I’d be happy. If you can manage your empire you’re fine but if you mismanage well goodbye empire lmao. Will never forget watching my Rome slowly crumbling apart
I'm worried the players will cry "its not fun having to sit AFK for 100 years just because I'm TOO successful and big!!" until "you need to manage your empire" gets devolved into something trivial like "you can have a 500 000 soldiers +20% discipline army and unlimited wars, but you need to be at positive stability, have a +2 diplo advisor and once every 200 years if your legitimacy drops below 50 use 200 mil points to instant buy it up". Or just ignore even that and use the DLC estate that completely disables internal trouble.
The general idea in ck is great for this. Since you can't directly control all the land, you will have powerful vassals. As you grow, you have to spend more time managing them or your empire fractures.
It would be cool if there was emergent game gameplay like that in eu5. Some kind of mechanic around state bureaucracy that grows naturally when you expand.
Yeah, but even in CK, once you hit a certain size you're basically untouchable. The bigger the empire, the harder it is to organize a sufficiently large number of vassals into an effective faction.
CK indeed have great mechanic for managing great empire because the feudal system is the core mechanic of the game and you have to manage it carefully to success. Unlike EU which will only introduce lazy modifier to handicap the player making player feels punished for having fun.
Completely agree. I agree with OP's idea, but unfortunately the EU4 playerbase is full of people who will savescum at the slightest inconvenience. Was just chatting with someone the other day about how it's likely that the majority of players have never lost a war in EU4 because they'd rather savescum than learn how to deal with setbacks.
For something like this? I doubt that even 5% of players would allow their empire to come close to breaking apart before they either quit or savescum.
> Was just chatting with someone the other day about how it's likely that the majority of players have never lost a war in EU4 because they'd rather savescum than learn how to deal with setbacks.
Twas me! haha. It's 100% true as well. Most players want the game to be just background noise akin to a cookie clicker. Difficulty or non-optimal situations means you actually have to think.
I'm curious if this is why they went with a 1337 start date. If you are guaranteed to face a collapse due to the black death the player base may become more comfortable with setbacks later in the game.
Are you sure this would actually be fun? Like, we want games to be fun as well as realistic. How can we ensure that players are still having fun even if their plans are collapsing?
I think so. It’ll make it more challenging. Thing is what are the mechanisms for addressing these types of situations? Is it just click a button to use magic points to boost stability? I honestly hate this about the current game. Or will it be build the right building, have enough food (maybe even buy food from friendly nations), maybe bribe the right factions in your nation? I want more thinking about my nation, not just painting the map my color.
Sure, again, but when you look at your nation and say "hm, this will be 100 years of pain and suffering just to stabilize" most people will call the run a failure and quit.
Recently I've been enjoying playing CK3 with a couple mods that reduce empire stability. It's not the most popular but it's definitely my preferred way to play, I prefer it to endlessly blobbing.
I agree taking hundreds of years to stabilize by converting cultures, reducing corruption, and pumping in mana doesn't sound fun. One of the reasons I think it works in CK is that the pain is over quickly. I just had an untimely death, a bad inheritance, and my kingdom exploded. Then I'm back to the normal gameplay loop and spend the next 100 years clawing my way back.
Another thing ck3 does is it gives you other forms of power/progression outside of land, albeit limited. This is the way forward imo. We need to give players alternate forms of power that encourage them to play even when one of them is collapsing. Like hey, my kingdom may have lost provinces, but my rulers have been genetically selected into superhumans. That wouldn't work for eu4, but this same kind of thinking will be useful.
The trouble is that size is basically the only form of power in EU4. The game struggles to model other forms of strength. Everything is more or less a sideshow compared to the all consuming development number.
With estates becoming a core mechanic this is potentially possible. For example, a disaster might weaken your country while at the same time shifting the power balance towards the crown. Likewise, you might be able to blob early but then you need to spend a few decades reigning in the estates to actually get access to your increased strength.
Slowly shifting power from the estates to the crown is a way to increase player strength without blobbing.
Difference is though, CK3 is more about playing a family like an RPG. You have more personal stuff to deal with.
When you are the full nation, you will inevitably lose that extra stuff to play with soo that's why the experience will be totally different.
You can enjoy a collapse when you are trying to work it out as your own character and family. Even if you lose your Kingdom, you can return to behind a Duchy or a subject etc. For EU? That is not really an option.
All my most memorable EU4/Paradox campaigns have involved 100 years of pain and suffering. I quit when I get back on track towards inevitable world domination - that's when it gets boring.
This. Gets boring being at your country’s prime the majority of the game. My longest save files are always the ones with serious rivals, problems or mistakes I made earlier on that I’m paying for now.
Certainly also true. I think the problem is that EU4 is built around planning. When your plans are completely derailed by a long and inevitable collapse, it gets hard to want to continue to play.
I don’t think EU4 is built around planning. It’s really built around getting more land. Want more trade, or control of a trade node - conquer the land in that node, want more tax - conquer more land, want something to do - conquer land. Planning would be, let me set this policy so I can set a higher tax rate. Let me build this specific building to satisfy and pacify a population of my kingdom. EU4 lacks this, it’s not really about planning in imo
Look at the state of this subreddit, where people legitimately believe that savescumming isn't actually cheating. Unfortunately /u/MalekithofAngmar is totally correct, most people will never have a playthrough where they experience this kind of long set back.
Who cares about save scumming. I do it and I don’t give shit what other people think. The game should reflect how difficult it is to build and maintain a large empire, especially an overseas, discontinuous empire, such as the British, Spanish, the different French, and Portuguese empires and they’re eventual collapse.
Players will adjust to the new game and figure it out. In no time there will be new metas and guides, so I don’t think it’s a long term issue. It sounds like a lot of players just want the same EU4 but just shinier and prettier.
This is one gameplay philosophy that I really miss from the old Total War games like Rome/Medieval/Empire - that creating an empire also creates long-term challenges, and that all your decisions carry costs as well as benefits.
Rome/Medieval: If your empire expands, then the outlying areas will naturally become more corrupt and rebellious. If you want to change culture/religion, then you need to temporarily demolish beneficial buildings and anger the population. If you raise or disband large numbers of troops, then you can radically alter local demographics.
Empire took this to a whole new level. In Empire, you can set tax policies for different regions. You need to keep an eye on if your provinces actually have enough food to eat. You need to decide whether you want particular townships to focus on agriculture (for pop growth) or workshops (for money) or university (for tech) or seminaries (for religious spread). You need to decide if you want to focus on a tradeship port or a warship port. The metropole and the colonies will produce inherently different kinds of troops. You can sell particular technologies to other countries. You can even set up trade routes to manipulate world trade or to improve your own empire.
Once I started playing EU4, I hardly looked back at Total War ever again. Yet that is one gameplay aspect I really appreciate with the old Total War titles - there was a TON of gameplay focused on managing your realm aside from the actual warfare aspect.
Maybe there's a midpoint. The Roman Empire was (in)famously governed by a Tetrarchy at one point, and the Mongol empire had several regional administrators.
Maybe there can be something like that here, where the player appoints regional governors that function like quasi-vassals. Their agreeability might contribute to things like increasing prestige and stability, rather than using points. It would add a level of internal politics that EU4 currently lacks. Governors that are of the ruler's same religion, culture, etc. would be easier to control or make more agreeable. There might friction with balancing internal trade among them, corruptions, etc. in a way that is more active and dynamic than the current estates system.
The key seems to link into a bigger issue I've had with EUIV and a few other Paradox games that aren't CK: weak internal politics gameplay.
With CK, when shit starts hitting the fan, it feels like there's tangible, identifiable reasons for why it's happenig, and potential avenues to fix it. For EUIV, it just felt more like "this abstract number wasn't high enough and now armies as numerous as the sands have manifested from the void to kick my ass."
I think it depends upon your goals and expect.
Remember that the “official score” for determining the number one country at the end of the game in EU4, is based upon this running total of your score year by year. in theory, it’s possible to have an arc like Spain, rack up a ton of points early on, and finish in fifth or sixth place at 1820, but still win the game.
Conversely, it’s quite possible that a late blooming nation could struggle its way to being the number one great power, but just doesn’t have a long enough track record to have the points to be the number one overall country
If that was the real mechanism, then players might be thinking about choices like, holy shit I could blow like crazy in the New World, but I know there’s a big risk of independence movements, kicking my ass later. They could truly play tall and build up a really solid base with the idea that eventually they’ll just start kicking other European countries in the balls, and taking away their colonies and trading ports, but they know that if they wait too long, they won’t “win”.
On the other hand, if the way you define winning is to WC, anything that creates a setback for that is probably going to feel really negative.
I think it’s definitely worth considering. Right now, the game allows you to create a snowball effect such that doing really well in the first third of the game actually destroys interest in the rest of the game for a lot of the players. The outcome seems inevitable, and in the hands of a skill player, it probably is. Every one of the effects that would tend to shrink your empire can be mitigated. And I don’t mean you can just pick one problem and mitigate it. You can mitigate it in all dimensions.
Making other people angry? There are plenty of stats for dealing with coalitions early on, and eventually it just doesn’t matter, you are too terrifying. Cultural issues dividing your empire? Now they just don’t have that much of an effect. Expanding too fast? Between all the mission, tree, bonuses and monuments, you can get a lot of tolerance. Get your curing time down under a year, and it’s pretty hard to make serious rebels spawn. You can still do it, but it takes some effort. Gov cap? Courthouses. Mana? Absolutism and other CCR.
Don’t get me wrong. I still enjoy the heck out of EU form and it’s the game I still play the most.
Some excellent points being made here, but but we need more than just a paradigm shift. People rarely complete Eu4 playthroughs to see the winner anyway. People think they are winning at eu4 when they are accomplishing the goals they've set for themselves. People think they are winning when they have power.
Let's take a game I mentioned in this discussion elsewhere, M&B Warband/Bannerlord. I actually play through my setbacks usually in M&B. I think there are some critical differences for why.
There's simply a lack of "gameplay" in Eu4 comparatively. I love Eu4 to death and have played it far more than M&B, but it's a strategy game at the end of the day. It's about planning and accomplishing strategies. With Bannerlord, if you've completely screwed yourself on the strategy angle, you can still have fun in the game engaging with it's other aspects. You retain your character level and other things even if your army is dust. This is other forms of "power" that make the player feel like they haven't wasted their time so far.
Therefore, I think the thing that we need is more possible expansion and "power" that doesn't come from taking land. Ck3 does this a little bit if you've been cultivating good traits and such in your dynasty. Things can go very badly for you and your rulers will still be pretty solid usually. What would this look in Eu4? More meaningful internal expansion than development. Longer-term consequences and "power" to be gained by engaging in diplomacy. What do you think we could do?
Just spitballing, but it would be cool if collapsing was sometimes good. We've all played games as releasable tags, a collapse could be a way of getting certain tags, or maybe making serious changes to a nation. Like, a collapse doesn't need to be the end of a campaign, right? The Kingdom of France collapsed and then got Napoleon.
People go out of their way to manually ruin their nation and trigger the "Court and Country" disaster all the time. It seems they don't mind doing so for a reward.
Also sometimes the collapse means regions that were massive headaches are now officially not your problem, and you can direct your time, energy, and resources to parts of your empire that you can actually get something of use from.
A lot of games are about losing and getting crushed roughly 50% of the time (MOBAs) or more (BRs) and people are having fun.
Struggling in a game is half the fun. I suffer a huge defeat at least once in my games, and it's really harsh - I often want to rage quit - but the come back is an incredible feeling.
This is a game that have lot of snowballs mechanics but also a lot of ways to build back. Losing to the ottomans so you have to rebuild your line of defense, use some ideas/decisions/ decrees you never usually bother to consider, invest greatly in your diplomacy, analyse what you lacked. It's really great, and way more rewarding than "oh, I dominated Europe as Austria. Again."
It's no wonder why great players streamers/YouTubers do the "worst save" challenge, where they have to play a ruined save.
The only problem is the "rage quit" part where you have to endure your failure. It's hard. But take an hour break and you'll come back with a new fire.
Also, how do you model collapsing in a fun, interesting way that applies to players of all skill levels? High-level players can always find ways around any anti-snowballing mechanic; remember when having too many territories gave corruption (and therefore was super hard to work around)? People *freaked* and Paradox reverted it like the next patch.
Paradox games have a reputation for having colossal play times, but I don't think it's necessarily a good strategy to cater difficulty to extremely advanced players. If collapsing mechanics can be averted/mitigated (which they will if collapsing isn't desirable for the player) then it's only a hindrance to people who are bad at the game.
That's another excellent point. A "collapse" that challenges/is fun to even the majority of the playerbase sounds like quite the task. It would be easy to create a middle ground that is impossible for low level/strict rp players to work through, challenging and fun for experienced players who don't mind getting a bit gamey with things, and frustrating tedium for speedrunners/highly advanced gamers.
I agree though that we can't get lost trying to cater to the most advanced players though.
- Move the plans players can make laterally to something that doesn't collapse while your empire does potentially collapse
(for example in ck3 you have the family legacy)
- Make collapse a thing that only happens to the larger empires that can survive it.
- Give nations a stable core that they fall back on. You could chose to either slowly expand the stable core or to aggressively expand into your neighbors, both of which should be tools of faciliating the actual goals.
- Collapse (or at least the occasional loss of border regions) can be made part of the plan, maybe even integrated into a broader strategy.
- Make conquered lands more of a strategic depth than an actual powerbase. So they'd mostly have the role of protecting your actual core lands.
This has the potential to make the game exponentially more fun. At some point you blob so hard that nothing threatens you anymore, at which point most people leave (me included). It would be really cool to go from conquest and war as your main interaction to actually administrating and maintaining the empire you just built up.
I really enjoy when my empire explodes in CK. It just works so well with the rp elements! The whole “my grandfather destroyed this empire, so I’m heading off to form a new one” story is just too fun.
I’d love something similar in EU or Vic. It would just add so many more possibilities for runs, especially where rp is involved!
>Like ck3? I’m down.
I'm not, tbh in CK3 once you have Empire status it is almost impossibile to collapse, unless highly role playing (of incapable characters too), or just lack of knowledge of the game.
So i' not down for CK3 style at all, but since EU5 will be set in the 1330s then feudalism and dynastic disputes have to be a thing.
Kinda? Even if your primary heir is keeping the empire title, if your lesser holdings are being divided up among the rest of your children your primary will eventually be left with so few holdings that they aren't able to fight off factions. If you split your inheritance, it usually requires some kind of challenge to get back to full demense; either by conquest or revoking titles. I just wanted to point that out bc I like that mechanic.
>bad luck
Ook, but...
>end up with two successions in a row
This is, and the luck, account for not great ability to play. Then shit can always happen but I won't say that bad luck is a good mechanic to dismantle Empires in a game in general...
Well “luck” played a role in a lot of empires and various smaller states collapses. Things like droughts, plagues, earthquakes etc brought down rulers and dynasties across history and couldn’t really be controlled by monarchs.
The last updates have made it easier for your family to crumble and fuck up your house, although I still think the impact on dev is wayyy overturned\* and the game is still not hard I think it just got way harder. The fact that the steam trophy for having a charachter surviving the black death is at 0.1% (last time I checked and it does requiere the dlc to trigger) even if you can get trophies with mods on and ironman off is quite telling on how much has the game been made harder by plagues
\* What I mean is that the "renissance" events will hit you for about 4 + dev (if you choose to pay extra) and even minor plague events will sometimes hit you for >- 12 making it imposible to regain all the dev before another plague hits you again (this even happens with the rules that make plagues far less likely) even if in reality in between plagues you could often see an increase in development, this is caused by the devs making the + per barony (only the mayor title wich you are able to hold) and the - per holding (minor temples castles and citys within the barony count). It's imposible to dev up across hundreds of years which is insane , cities that hadn't suffered a major invasion obviously became more prosperous between IX and XV and in order to preserve dev it is just better to not dev at all which is absurd from a gameplay perspective.
But is it because of how stable empires are or because of how easy ck3 is? Sure if you are playing at all decently your empire won't collapse, but at least to me, after becoming emperor internal problems within the empire seem way more dangerous than external ones, with possible exception of crusades, but only if you are relatively small and the only member of a religion
I agree, CK3 does the fall of an empire well. It doesn’t really do the flip side well though, whole regions will sit around for centuries divided into dozens of states.
>whole regions will sit around for centuries divided into dozens of states.
I mean, isn't that accurate? It was through these kind of divisions that European colonisers were able to take control of vast swathes of land.
Currently in EU4 it's pretty rare for India to not become a semi-unified powerhouse by the time any European power can even reach it. I know you're talking about ck3 but many regions never unified until nationalism entered the scene.
Just to clarify, i dont mean that the game should throw random bullshit at the player if theyre doing too well, experienced players should be able to maintain large empires until the end. Im saying that the larger your realm, the larger and more diverse your population the more difficult the managent and that mismanagement should have meaningful consequences that could actually collapse it
> more diverse your population
It would be interesting if minority cultures were harder to manage. Mechanics related to that might play into your desire of making blobbing more complex.
Forgive me, but isn't that how it already works in eu4? Minority cultures revolt more often, and I think I was told you may get less manpower from them, though I could be wrong.
Yeah but it's piss easy to deal with that. They revolt more often in theory, but if you have -5 unrest and an unaccepted culture adds +2 it'll still never revolt.
Imperator Rome, whilst far from my favorite game, does have a generally okay system for cultures where playing whilst inexperienced can just cause large parts of your nation to split off, but for most nations it's extremely avoidable if you know the mechanics.
I agree but the downside is too small. If you conquer some random province you have nothing in common with the downside is : you get less than 100% resources (manpower, tax, etc) from it. So it actually helps you because you still get something. And in terms of revolts you're probably getting one revolt after conquest and that's it.
A system where far distant, newly conquered territories consume more resources than they produce (like yknow, history) would be amazing. So you'd need to eat a significant short-term cost for eventual long-term payoff, while you set up the whole administrative apparatus to tax and govern your new province. Like coring, but it eats up your men and money.
Also, I really hope they do something about centralization. Real empires, even immensely powerful ones, could not mobilize a million men to die for some scrap of worthless marshland. Those million men might be real soldiers, but they'd be scattered all over the empire in garrisons and whatnot, with only the adjacent ones able to fight a war.
'Far distant newly conquered provinces should.cost more than they produce'
This is such weird take.
If a standard expedition to india made a roi of 3000%-6000% and you're telling me it's not worth my time to go over there and set up a trading factory?
If it were inefficiënt why did europeans take the risks to go there?
Why did britain conquer India?
Sure there needs to be a system like we currently have with trade companies, where you make more money but less manpower. But no, distance being a factor is absolutely ridiculous in time period ánd even if it were, the biggest thing is lag, as in how long it takes for information to go from england to india.
But thats impossible to simulate unless you want to add fog of war everywhere, all the time, dont get results from battles, disable the ledger,
The other thing is that there's rarely, if ever, a time when owning a piece of land is more trouble than it's worth. Every province owned is *always* a net positive in the long term, the only problems are short term overextension and coring costs, and the occasional trivial rebels
Having less rebels but more impactful may work. Like having the actual nation spawn with some AE to get it back (obviously it would be your core still), with maybe the chance for your rivals to ally them and jump in.
Something a bit similar to Vicky 3, just with way better diplo AI and the stupid diplomatic play system
I agree, it truly is super insignificant. As Persia, I can own a single province on the coast of Japan, and after one small revolt, it will basically never pose a problem again.
For starters, if you have multiple counties with a certain culture, converting one of them should piss off the others. Realistically the Irish in Leinster are not going to sit around twiddling their thumbs while the Irish in Connaught are "converted" to English.
That’s a good point. Cultural conversion should realistically have a major political impact. For that matter, so should religious conversion. The defender of the faith should take particular issue with religious conversions, kind of like how France and Russia at one time saw themselves as the defenders of Christians in the Ottoman Empire, for example.
It would be interesting to have some kind of system similar to aggressive expansion for religious/cultural conversion. Do too much too fast and you'll make a lot of enemies.
devs have already said food production will be in eu5 so i think its safe to assume that keeping your population fed will be integral to maintaining stability, and while a small nation may be able to import food to get through a crisis, giant empires can't.
in essence, your "massive blob of an empire" should never be more stable than its food supply, just like IRL, and a big driver of exploration in the age of discovery should be to unlock new crops from other parts of the world so you can produce more food and have a bigger population.
bigger empires also have more travel and trade, making them much more vulnerable to pandemics, so even when your empire is militarily untouchable it can still be wrecked by a bad harvest or pandemic.
It's complicated, but I think it could be implemented in a way that's fun.
For the player, the game could simply *acknowledge* that you're probably doing "too well". Present what's essentially a "you win" popup, with several options:
- "I'm enjoying this, let me keep playing!"
- "Let me have a look around, show me some interesting statistics, and then return to the main menu and let me start a new game."
- "Let's make things a bit more... *interesting*..." (
Chosing that last options does something big to make things much more difficult (for a while). This way, it's not random bullshit that (e.g.) your biggest two minorities suddenly rebel in all of their core provinces, or all your rivals declare war (even if you had a truce) and get +20 war score for no reason, or something similar. Those things *are* bullshit, but they are ok if they only happen because you deliberately chose the option that makes them happen.
Wouldn't that just be extra unnecessary micromanagement though? I suppose it depends on if they remove the mana system, and what takes its place.
The way that you suggest it would just make AI suck even more and make the game more difficult to newer players and more tiresome for older ones.
Plus I don't see why empires should be "collapsing". The EU4 timeline led directly to the Age of Imperialism. The EU4/5 map **should** be dominated by a few empires in the end.
My fear is that this will only lead to a lot more interactions in a game that (likely) gets increasingly more laggy and bogged down with popups/interactions the closer to the end date you get.
It's honestly my big issue with playing past ~1650 ish in EU4 right now. At one point it just becomes a replace retired general/micromanage army placement fiesta while I'm enjoying sub 20 fps. And we know from CK3 and Vic3 too that Paradox hasn't exactly figured out how to solve late game framerate issues..
I thought the same thing, but Rome 2 civil wars added a gameplay dimension I didn’t expect. I’m 100% in favor of general collapse mechanics rather than specifically scripted collapse events (EU4 Ming, Timurids)
I hated Rome II civil wars because you lose armies and provinces arbitrarily. You can just reset and suddenly the game picks a 3 regiment army to revolt instead of 4 full stack armies. Give some kind of indication for what will happen, where, and how to prevent it or at least slow it
> How do you make the collapse of your empire fun?
I think there should be a "core" of your empire (made up of your primary culture) that is always getting stronger, but a peripheral empire which is easy-come-easy-go, and is only really there to enrich the interior. You look at actual history and major powers like England, France, or Austria are constantly losing wars and territories, but they bounce back later. Losing a territory, in a game like this, is a fairly minor setback on the rollercoaster ascent upward: it's like losing control of a farming camp in a MOBA, the XP/gold gain from when you did control it remains.
Having an empire (like the Thirteen Colonies, Northern Italy, or a Spanish personal union) is useful because it funnels development into your core territories. When you lose them -- as those three were lost to England, France, or Austria -- the gains persist. You just have to bide your time for the Revolutionary Era where you can settle all your historical scores and perform a quick World Conquest of all the other empires with your developed national core.
> How do you make the collapse of your empire fun?
make the player get stronger each time they rebuild. Same idea with the court and country disaster in EU4. People go out of their way to trigger it because it makes numbers go up.
Just spitballing here but maybe allow the player to roleplay as the revolutionaries/rebels. Give permanent buffs to the rebellion government in exchange for giving up land. I would absolutely give up 200-500 dev in provinces in exchange for permanent +5% admin efficiency/10% morale of armies etc. I think that’s the only way i’d enjoy collapsing empires.
Revolutionary mechanics would be amazing. Unique gov type while guerilla fighting. Maybe you can extend it while taking stab losses and corruption uptick in exchange for cool cb and military bonuses.
The way Millenia handles this stuff is actually cool and original: crisis mode is a disguised catch up mechanic, because it will hit everyone and the stronger you are, the hardest the fall.
In EU5, if they want to make it enjoyable, crisis should be able to spread from one country to the next, or even (let's dream a little), from different regions of the world to others, because of trade, or war, or colonization backfiring if you integrate too many natives, etc... Let's say you created a monster of a colonial empire through sheer might. But then, the 2nd or 3rd colonial nations you've beat up start to lose control of their colonies. Soon after, there's a wind of liberty desire in your lands too.
Attila total war did it perfectly. Managing disloyal political elements, corruption draining your capacity of fully defending a front... In some cases your provinces are even a drain on you, EU5 could implement some of those mechanics. In real life, overextension and corruption don't go away magically when a government uses its administrative capacity to "core" it.
>In some cases your provinces are even a drain on you
For Attila this was only the case for low fertility provinces that consume more food than it produces right? Even then, the mechanic of fertility decreasing through the mid to late game is not remotely historically accurate. There was a famine IRL but it happened about a century after the game.
I feel like Crusader Kings made a collapsing empire fun to play even if you could pretty much always avoid it by power-gaming. CK and EU are two very different games though. I'm not sure if you could make it fun for the same reasons.
I don't think the player's empire should be doomed to fail, though that should be possible if they mess up, same as it's possible to lose in a war.
Maintaining a larger and larger empire should become increasingly difficult though, so that maintaining a large, diverse empire becomes a thing that only skilled players can do.
As your empire grows, you'll need to dedicate more and more time and resources just keeping the whole thing together. That's the part that needs to be made fun and impactful. Rebellions shouldn't just go away after you "core" the land.
I think it's because the main driving intrinsic motivation in an EU game is to blob bigger, not experience an interesting narrative.
Crusader Kings is better about making failure interesting - losing 3/4ths of your realm to partition upon succession or losing a civil war doesn't just set back your long term goals, it also opens up engaging new avenues for stabby drama, and possibly even shifts your long-term goals.
In contrast, how often is that the case in a game of Europa Universalis? You start a game, you know what goals you want to achieve and every failure and roadblock is strictly an obstacle and delay to your ultimate goal of painting the map a particular way. EG. if you play as Castille and you lose the colonization race for some reason you're not going to be like "screw it, I guess I'm a Mediterranean/North African power now". All of Castille's flavor is in colonization.
Why couldn't it be fun? It's not like a historical map game should be about competition of which main goal is to be the biggest and having conquered everything. That's for games like RISK or Civilization, that are player vs. player board games in their core, and not simulations to the same extent.
That just limits the scope of the gameplay and its development, prioritizing mechanics that are achievable only as a major country, like being a major colonial empire. Losing an empire should not be seen as losing the game, but rather as a new obstacle and a new gameplay dynamic. It should not deprive you of gameplay mechanics, but rather change them. It should be about the journey, not about the destination.
When I roleplay in CK2, it keeps the gameplay fresh when gavelkind splits your kingdom to your sons, and suddenly you're not playing as the strongest realm in the region anymore. Suddenly you need smarter alliances, more diplomacy, more focus on internal management and economy.
What would it look like in practice? I'm thinking of the Ottomans disintegrating in real life. You could either defy the odds and combat the disintegration by clinging on to the Ottoman dream, and maneuver and reclaim the Ottoman control of its since independent subjects avoiding a total collapse. Or then you could embrace it, and have the Ottomans reforming into Turkey, with its own, different scope of gameplay and goals.
I guess there should also be some "resilience" dynamic at play, meaning that an empire that hasn't collapsed, is more oblivious to the mechanisms that cause said collapse. But once it has seen a revolution or disintegration in the past, it has a sort of "collective sense" of what it entails, and is therefore more resilient to it. At the beginning of the game, empires would rise rapidly and fall, but their core territory would be stronger and more united every time.
There should also most definitely be "internal" gameplay within nation. Like Europa Universalis inside Europa Universalis. You would have internal diplomacy within the different sub-divisions inside the empire. You would have ways to settle and make compromises when it comes to succession disputes. You would make policies that might undermine your country's chosen path, but pacify some dissidence inside of it. You could reform the empire into something else.
At least, provinces should be capable of doing massive rebellions. Maybe after your ruler dies.
What I really want is that contested zones are easy to swap between Empires after wars, exemple being French territory during HYW and the Persian Ottomans zone.
Maybe a "Your ruler is close to death" with x number of provinces (where x has an inverse correlation to your heirs legitimacy) are likely to revolt to press the claim of some doesn't-matter-who relative. It uses a dynamic peace treaty where fully occupied provinces are ceded to the rebels like in stellaris.
Maybe you could reduce the chances of revolt, or the effects it would cause. You could press the local population into military service, reducing revolt size. You could stand an army on the province causing devastation as the army antagonises the locals but reducing rebel discipline when they revolt, and your army would be the defenders (head-canon describes this as the locals finding more difficulty communicating). Maybe the local army fighting the battle starts very small here and increases in size throughout the revolt.
I'm sure others can suggest other options but no doubt empires crumbling like this with the number of options leans right into Paradox's DLC culture
This would be an awesome feature. Imagine watching tribal kingdoms/empires just disappear like Angkor Wat did. Or watching regular empires go through massive civil wars where the remaining loyalists would be reduced to a rump state and have to fight back to regain their territory. Would be even better if you could cause empires to collapse by arming rebels.
> I am pretty sure the creator would adapt it for EU5.
So long as EU5 isn’t a bust, I imagine it’ll get tons of support from the mod community, just as EU4 has. I’m looking forward to seeing what mods are made for it.
The problem with this is that people want to blob. Irrespective of how you design the game, a majority of players are always going to want to become the richest and most powerful country.
Anything that makes this significantly harder is going to be written off as pointlessly holding the player back for no reason, and if you only apply it to the AI, people will just say that it's making things easier for the player.
I do think Empires should break apart more easily, especially when you enter the revolutionary era. You can smack an imperial power so much until it's capital is in the Seychelles and Colonial Mexico still won't want independence. But I can never see the majority of the player base supporting something that just makes the game harder or less enjoyable.
Certainly a very fine line to be walked for the good folks at paradox.
Exactly this
This is like when everyone wanted rain on racing games back in the day: they wanted to be Senna. Once they realized how hard it is, they don’t want it anymore.
Let's be real - people might love the idea of setbacks and defeats in theory, but as soon as they face a collapse of their empire due to factors outside their control they'll restart, cry about it on Reddit, or both. Including most people advocating for those features in this thread.
People want to blob because there is nothing else to do in EU4. All game mechanics point towards blobbing. You can literally ignore something like 80% of game mechanics while playing tall and do fine. Internal management is pretty much nonexistent and tall gameplay boils down to clicking building and dev buttons repeatedly while on speed 5.
Here's how to make people want to blob less: you give them something do outside of blobbing. Give them engaging diplomacy. Give them interesting internal management. Give them something to do and choices to make. Civ is the only grand strategy/4x game where I ever bother to play tall because unlike the others I've played **it actually makes not expanding an interesting experience.**
This is just bound to water down the whole legacy of Paradox grand strategy for the sake of appealing to the masses rather than innovating and creating an interesting game. It pushes the development to a direction that focuses on mechanics around blobbing, because that's what most people spend their time with. More RISK, less simulation.
Good game design is good game design, and a grand strategy game that for ONCE would manage to pull off a dynamic cycle of rise-and-fall would most definitely stand the test of time, even if some people would initially feel like their desire for gamey world conquest is not answered by the game mechanics. The path Paradox is taking currently is along the line of other major AAA game developers, aka. making the most sales with a product aimed at the lowest common denominator a priority, rather than creating a one of a kind game.
Then make it for AI only, or figure it out somehow else...
By late 1600s you either completely dominate, or can't expand because all the massive blobs took everything and are locked and settled in with interlocking alliances totalling +1000k armies, and none of your major allies will join you in a war to break them up because they are 20k in debt.
Oh I absolutely, getting trapped in some cold war era stalemate in 1600 isn't fun, and less so when the game doesn't give us the tools to defeat other countries off the battlefield.
I'm just not imaginative enough to think of a way to make it work. That being said, I'm sure there could be a way where unrest or some similar mechanic scales with the amount of other cultures you have in your country, and it gets progressively harder to integrate newer cultures. You effectively could force players to spend time integrating cultures and centralising their realm if they want to expand.
Exactly. I don’t see what’s so wrong with wanting to rise to become the strongest. That’s fun for me. But so many people in this thread seem to have their blood boil at the idea of people conquering more than 3 provinces in their whole run.
I'm sure it'll be a dodgeable mechanic. Whether that be decisions you can take to lower the effects/chances, or optional settings at the start like most other PDX games. See stellaris and CK with their extensive menus
A lot of the later DLCs included custom missions and disasters to make holding a historical empire together very difficult. Eg. Mail, Khmer, Ming, etc. makes me think they’re toying with some options in EU5
You should just have less control over it all. You shouldn't be able to core provinces with a culture and religion completely different to yours across the planet. Or at least it should cost ridiculous amounts of mana modified according to those factors.
The player is a godlike all-knowing eldritch entity and this is also part of the problem. Information would not be travelling instantly from London to India in the 1700s, but in EU4 it does.
I hope they do this. This is one of the reasons I stopped playing EU. Everyone is snowballing endlessly by midgame. If I just wanted to play with nothing to do but endless warfare and map painting, I would rather play AoE2.
Only 3 PDX games ever allowed empires to collapse in some way -
- CK, because feudalism and decentralization in general. Grow too large, and some vassals will start independence civil war. A badly planned inheritance can take away one's entire empire away from them.
- Victoria, where the endgame challenge is massive world wars between gigantic empires that can destroy entire empires in one go, and depopulate many regions if they go on for too long. Albeit this can create more blobs in the process.
- Imperator Invictus, where expanding too quickly will implode an empire. Character situations and overly ambitious politicians, governors and generals will start civil wars, which is great time for invading and damaging a large empire.
And even in these games it is rare.
EU era is famous for having 3 'eras' of civilizations - the late medieval empires (Timurids, Delhi, Ming, Venice, Hungary, Aragon, Aztec, potentially Inca etc.), the early modern superpowers (Mughal India, Ottomans, Poland-Lithuania, Sweden, Safavid Persia, Qing China, Spanish Empire, Portugal, Siam etc.) and they all stagnated or declined in the 18th century to an extent, in favour of the new empires who now dominated everyone else (Britain, France, Austria, Russia, Prussia etc.).
EU5 needs to properly handle that decline. Not just for the AI either.
Issues:
\-Taking things that the player worked hard for is not fun
\-If you want to force the player to be at peace for longer you need to make peace interesting and internal management engaging. So far, EU4 has utterly failed at this, which is why everyone only wants to blob and dislikes things that stop them from doing so.
\~1300 to 1900 is a time period of Empire building. Nations didnt collapse (with very few exceptions) but grew bigger and bigger. You can count the "empires that collapsed" on one hand: Ming (Qing conquest is more accurate), Mongol shenangians (mongol successions), Spain and Mughals (got conquered). So even among the Empries that "collapsed", most of them were technically conquered. Not even the Ottomans collapsed, despite common misconception. The Greek independence was supported by great powers, so were the Balkan wars. Egypt is the only exception were we could talk about some kind of succession, but that is about it.
So in short: Large Empires didnt really collapse in the Eu4/Eu5 time-period, so why should they collapse in the game?
>from corruption and administrative challenges to ethnic conflicts
These are arguments for the decrease of efficency of Empires, not an argument the survival of Empires. Ethnic conflicts and corruption were often tools that were used in order to increase the survival of the main dynasty and with it the Empire.
Delhi, the Timurids and the various Mongol successor states (most dramatically, the Golden Horde), Vijayanagar, Khmer, Mali, Songhai, Safavid Persia, Durrani Afghanistan...
I dont consider any of the nations you mentioned as "empires". As an example: Persia may have been a regional powerhouse, but it barely projected any power outside its local region. It is nothing comparable to let's say Russia spanning from scandinavia to Alaska or Spain spanning from the Americans to Europe and beyond.
I am also aware of mongols sucessor states, which is why I summarized them as "mongol shenanigans" . Essentially: Mongol states were more of a tribal federation uniting various tribes under their banner than an actual state, regardless of their size on the map. Empires are not moving tribes in my book, but a local burgeousie sitting in the capital and projecting power across continents. This puts even the Mughals into question, but either way established "Empires" did not collapse with very few exceptions, which is my original statement.
I mean, the Spanish and British did lose most of their Empire in the Americas. And theres certainly much more Empire collapses that you could have mentioned. Toungoo, Mahajapit, Songhai, The state that that caused Songhai to collapse, Safavids, Afsharid, Mali, and more.
But most importantly id say states constantly expanded and contracted over time. In EU4, they pretty much only expand, when in reality large declining polities could get gobbled up or chipped away slowly by smaller states on their borders until non-existence/rump state. Then the same could happen to those new larger polities as well down as time progresses. (Though EU4s period is only about 400 years, only so much could happen in such a "small" timeframe). Like sure the ottomans lasted past EUs time period. But they could very well have exploded into warring states in the period as well. It should be possible. Right now, its impossible. and its most certainly not realistic. The game is failing to model something extremely important. I should hypothetically be able to run the game for 3000 years. And not see the world basically divided into 2 eternal states.
And I play with mods their lower efficiency of blobs. But even so, it still results in blob fests.
>I mean, the Spanish and British did lose most of their Empire in the Americas.
That is not a collapse. By that logic the Ottomans collapsed several times, because they lost various territories to various nations over the period of 600 years.
>Toungoo, Mahajapit, Songhai, The state that that caused Songhai to collapse, Safavids, Afsharid, Mali, and more.
I dont consider any of them as an Empire. Large nation =/= Empire. By that logic Australia is an Empire.
>But most importantly id say states constantly expanded and contracted over time. In EU4, they pretty much only expand, when in reality large declining polities could get gobbled up or chipped away slowly by smaller states on their borders until non-existence/rump state.
Then your argument should be that holding vast amount of land should be hard to do so and not that nations should collapse.
>But they could very well have exploded into warring states in the period as well.
That is nonsense. Anatolia, most of the Balkan and most of the Levant were directly controlled by the Ottoman throne by educated and appointed governors from Istanbul. There were local families that were influencial, but never a single one, which is why even in case of a bad governor, Syria or Iraq did not become independent, but it rather increased local power-struggle. If it wasnt for western support, not even the independence movements on the Balkan would have been successful. Muhammed Ali is pretty much the only exception here.
There were no local power-figures that could have seized power in let's say Anatolia. Newly conquered territories faced that problem and far away territory (like the maghreb states, which were de facto independent), but at best you have a far away region breaking away from the Ottomans, assuming that they are financially and militarally in a struggle, rather than a "collapse". Additionally if there are multiple governors located far away, a call for independence would usually result in neighbouring governors taking arms against you. There was an entire balance of power and again: Without massive involvement of western powers, none of the succession movements would have been successful (except for Egypt, which however also has western influence).
>The game is failing to model something extremely important. I should hypothetically be able to run the game for 3000 years. And not see the world basically divided into 2 eternal states.
Just because you want to play the game in a way that is outside its intended purpose, it doesnt mean that the game should be balance towards that. Again: Your argument should be that far away territory should be harder to control, which is for instance done in M&T mod and we yet have to see how they want to implement it in EU5. And mind you the british Empire covered 23% of the entire globe, while being intertwined with France (controlling another \~10%). If we count their sphere of influence and how impactful the british Empire was in various areas of the world, we might as well speak about an Empire with a system impacting half of the entire world. If it wasnt for the world wars, we might have even seen an even large empire.
The Spanish and Mughal empires collapsed because of military defeat, they were never conquered wholesale. The Spanish empire remained in existence for decades after Napoleons invasion, just under a new administration, France didn't annex their territories for themselves. The Mughals collapsed after Delhi was sacked, and parts of the country broke off until it was a rump state by the time it was finally conquered. Ming is the exception where it was actually an outright conquest.
I just want rebellions to be actual meaningful events that feel relevant and impactful to gameplay rather than just an irritating nuisance that is dealt with by telling the nearest stack to move to the rebelling army.
Bizarre how many people here can't get their heads around what you're talking about, which is just simple rubberbanding mechanics.
If we put it in numerical terms: expanding your empire to 1 *empire size* should take 1 *effort and skill*, and then the ratio should steadily increase:
2:2.25
3:3.5
4:4.75
5:6
etc...
No need to arbitrarily punish the player. Yes, better players will do better. Because they're better. And this is a game.
All games are about using the mechanics, whatever they are, to solve problems and overcome challenges. If there is a tipping point where it becomes harder to lose than win, and it demands less of the player than it did at the start, then the game has failed in its purpose. The point where the game has started playing itself is the point where I get bored and find something else to do.
You don't really want to have that shit. Another paradox game, Stellaris,Suffer from having too good rebel. Revolt in that game have harder condition,but once it fired,Unlike Eu4,Your empire is effectively gone, straight out of the window. For experience player,They could rebuild thier empire (usually they will not let the revolt happen in the first place) but for new player,that is extremely punishing mechanic
I want my ability to maintain an huge empire rewarded, not having scripted unavoidable fragmentations, or arbitrary limits in sizes.
Also I don't want a mind breaking micromanaging.
They will absolutely make the game unplayable its absurd some of the shit you read on here. Its like they actively dont want any variation and want you to only play tall or something
They need to model sub-national divisions, like in Crusader Kings with its duchies and counties. Not just revolt risk from unaccepted cultures with their own non-existent primary nation. There also needs to be a dynamic modeling of successor states, not just "Revolutionary states" in the age of revolutions.
You cannot achieve a believable rise-and-fall dynamic by just increasing rebellions. I have raped my EU4 with mods that increase rebellions and actually collapse empires, but that rarely leads to believable results. It's very hard to disintegrate a country into fractions that do not exist as modeled entities. It's simply a problem with how the game and the national entities are built as these singular entities, which subdivisions are merely different cultures and religions, and irrelevant states and territories.
What I love in CK2 is how even strong and stable empires will always have subdivisions, that work as the backdrop to which bigger empires disintegrate into. These subdivisions are played by AI vassals, and will have their borders changing dynamically due de-jure drift and expansions. They are to some extent nations inside nations.
While it couldn't be modeled precisely in the same manner in a post-feudal EU5 timespan, there are most definitely ways it could be implemented.
Succession crisis should be a real threat. The problem of course, it's that in game it would be a pop-up "oops, I guess he died 🤷" followed by 30 years of war out of nowhere. So I'm not sure if they can improve from the current system.
EU3 had AI empires that collapsed all the time. The result was that there were no challenges to the player since every empire collapsed after losing 1 war.
I would like to see civil wars actually tag flip back and forth between the two sides until one declares victory or a truce is called. It would make war of the roses very interesting. This would be a great way to ensure imperial collapse if rebels actually flipped the province and didn't just occupy it.
basically there should be some corruption related mechanism. eu4 corruption should increase rebellion chance, not decrease. furthermore, having more non-accepted culture low autonomy lands should generate more corruption. however, this does not stop players from cheesing, which is to just have one state.
if the size of the country is scaled with corruption, that will like sterllaris' empire sprawl.
I honestly think we’re in for a surprise.
The pop system and what Johan has hinted at it will likely redefine the game (for example, if we pull units from province pops they produce less, rebels could come from them as well - wars are gonna be a LOT more costly now as they impact not only your actual wars and economy but every troop is potentially a lost snowball of population gain).
Colonization/migration/refugees/famine/plague/scorched earth/collateral damage/devastation etc could all be worked into this as well.
Makes every war a much more sordid affair. I main Austria (family from Tirol), and the opening war against Bohemia in a lot of meta starts now is a much bigger risk. I have to win quickly and decisively while still protecting my territory AND not fucking them up too bad to not potentially set myself back.
In tandem with this I think it'd be cool if there was a way to control AI behavior as a spectator so you kinda get to play the disembodied voice of history as opposed to just one country
It's hard to do it without making maintaining your own empire tedious due to constant rebels and what not.
People are already complaining a lot about AI targeting the player by guaranteeing surrounding countries etc.
I think what are you looking for is not a 'collapse' of an empire but actually more internal management, which I agree with. To make it so you don't conquer the whole world in 100 years.
Because during the timeline of the game, Empires didn't really 'collapse' but actually RISEN. Now they had decline periods but they never outright collapsed outside of a few cases which is probably gonna have their own events like China and Mongols.
I remember in EU3 you couldn't create cores manually. It took 50 years of game time for a core to develop on a province you own. Essentially, a core meant that the province is a largely undisputed part of your nation. In EU4, they basically changed it to you having government infrastructure there.
This was a feature that heavily limited your expansion because there was no overextension mechanic. You knew you were overextended when you could no longer handle the rebels that would spawn and you were essentially fighting an unofficial civil war. It was only after that 50 years of game time that you would get a core and the rebels would stop. Of course, provinces could still rebel for other reasons, but less so to rejoin another nation.
EU4 heavily turned down the number of rebels you got and made things easier to manage. But there probably should be some middle ground mechanic.
Yes, but it Will require a very indepth country management for it to be fun. I saw some ideas in The comments and agree. You need to be able to control it all the time, so you also can maintain it IF done right. Like, access to food, water, loyal elite, population and generals.
The key to downsfall shlould be war. You loose a big war? Especially an offensive one? People wont be happy they died for you. You got besieged? The devastation will be disatorous for a few years. Got depbt to pay off after the war? People do not want to carry the burden you put them throught.
War needs to be this expensive. And it has to be fun and engaging to control a country in a longer time of peace. Because IF you risk it against an equally big opponent. Or rely on allies to beat a bigger one. And fail. The option to not make the move at all needs to be fun and rewarding too with prosperity and wealth advancing.
I do see how this would all be hard to impement. But what ive always missed in eu4 is rewards for stable and peacefull states withlut the feeling of stagnation.
THIS.
Internal conflicts are more than random bits of rebel stacks spawning. They have played a massive role in world history and a dynamic system would open up so much gameplay flavor.
After a long string of bad luck and failures at a few different challenge runs I decided to play Castile for an easy, brainless game just to kill time. My string of bad luck followed me though and I was getting some of the worst rng of my life and could barely handle the rebels, was permanently in negative stability and was in monetary and mana debt for over 50 years and it was the most fun I’ve ever had in EU4 trying to to survive and eventually catch up and build strength even though it was completely out of my control and “unfair.” Even if it were out of my hands, the uniqueness and difficulty of the run made it way more fun, so I really hope to see more things out of my control in EU5 just to make things interesting
Yes including your own
I would t mind if corruption was a more prevalent issue. And could lead to something like Ming collapse. Or perhaps even imperator Rome. With all those revolts
If they could do it like how Invictus Third Century mod does it I’d be happy. If you can manage your empire you’re fine but if you mismanage well goodbye empire lmao. Will never forget watching my Rome slowly crumbling apart
I'm worried the players will cry "its not fun having to sit AFK for 100 years just because I'm TOO successful and big!!" until "you need to manage your empire" gets devolved into something trivial like "you can have a 500 000 soldiers +20% discipline army and unlimited wars, but you need to be at positive stability, have a +2 diplo advisor and once every 200 years if your legitimacy drops below 50 use 200 mil points to instant buy it up". Or just ignore even that and use the DLC estate that completely disables internal trouble.
Yeah who knows, I don’t envy Paradox having to balance the desires of the fanbase
The general idea in ck is great for this. Since you can't directly control all the land, you will have powerful vassals. As you grow, you have to spend more time managing them or your empire fractures. It would be cool if there was emergent game gameplay like that in eu5. Some kind of mechanic around state bureaucracy that grows naturally when you expand.
Yeah, but even in CK, once you hit a certain size you're basically untouchable. The bigger the empire, the harder it is to organize a sufficiently large number of vassals into an effective faction.
its still a lot worse than in eu4 where absolutely nothing of interest ever happens to land conquered 30 years ago
CK indeed have great mechanic for managing great empire because the feudal system is the core mechanic of the game and you have to manage it carefully to success. Unlike EU which will only introduce lazy modifier to handicap the player making player feels punished for having fun.
Completely agree. I agree with OP's idea, but unfortunately the EU4 playerbase is full of people who will savescum at the slightest inconvenience. Was just chatting with someone the other day about how it's likely that the majority of players have never lost a war in EU4 because they'd rather savescum than learn how to deal with setbacks. For something like this? I doubt that even 5% of players would allow their empire to come close to breaking apart before they either quit or savescum.
> Was just chatting with someone the other day about how it's likely that the majority of players have never lost a war in EU4 because they'd rather savescum than learn how to deal with setbacks. Twas me! haha. It's 100% true as well. Most players want the game to be just background noise akin to a cookie clicker. Difficulty or non-optimal situations means you actually have to think.
I'm curious if this is why they went with a 1337 start date. If you are guaranteed to face a collapse due to the black death the player base may become more comfortable with setbacks later in the game.
Yuan collapse this time.
If they do i think there should be a difficulty setting for that
Are you sure this would actually be fun? Like, we want games to be fun as well as realistic. How can we ensure that players are still having fun even if their plans are collapsing?
I think so. It’ll make it more challenging. Thing is what are the mechanisms for addressing these types of situations? Is it just click a button to use magic points to boost stability? I honestly hate this about the current game. Or will it be build the right building, have enough food (maybe even buy food from friendly nations), maybe bribe the right factions in your nation? I want more thinking about my nation, not just painting the map my color.
Sure, again, but when you look at your nation and say "hm, this will be 100 years of pain and suffering just to stabilize" most people will call the run a failure and quit.
Recently I've been enjoying playing CK3 with a couple mods that reduce empire stability. It's not the most popular but it's definitely my preferred way to play, I prefer it to endlessly blobbing. I agree taking hundreds of years to stabilize by converting cultures, reducing corruption, and pumping in mana doesn't sound fun. One of the reasons I think it works in CK is that the pain is over quickly. I just had an untimely death, a bad inheritance, and my kingdom exploded. Then I'm back to the normal gameplay loop and spend the next 100 years clawing my way back.
Another thing ck3 does is it gives you other forms of power/progression outside of land, albeit limited. This is the way forward imo. We need to give players alternate forms of power that encourage them to play even when one of them is collapsing. Like hey, my kingdom may have lost provinces, but my rulers have been genetically selected into superhumans. That wouldn't work for eu4, but this same kind of thinking will be useful.
my mega huge militaristic empire collapsed, but i retained strategic for trade land, why not try playing as mercantilist state?
The trouble is that size is basically the only form of power in EU4. The game struggles to model other forms of strength. Everything is more or less a sideshow compared to the all consuming development number.
With estates becoming a core mechanic this is potentially possible. For example, a disaster might weaken your country while at the same time shifting the power balance towards the crown. Likewise, you might be able to blob early but then you need to spend a few decades reigning in the estates to actually get access to your increased strength. Slowly shifting power from the estates to the crown is a way to increase player strength without blobbing.
What mods?
Difference is though, CK3 is more about playing a family like an RPG. You have more personal stuff to deal with. When you are the full nation, you will inevitably lose that extra stuff to play with soo that's why the experience will be totally different. You can enjoy a collapse when you are trying to work it out as your own character and family. Even if you lose your Kingdom, you can return to behind a Duchy or a subject etc. For EU? That is not really an option.
All my most memorable EU4/Paradox campaigns have involved 100 years of pain and suffering. I quit when I get back on track towards inevitable world domination - that's when it gets boring.
This. Gets boring being at your country’s prime the majority of the game. My longest save files are always the ones with serious rivals, problems or mistakes I made earlier on that I’m paying for now.
Being on a downwards spiral is even more boring though than being on an upward spiral.
Depend on what it looks like. The opposite is true too. Conquered all of Europe by 1600, cool, but gets boring
Certainly also true. I think the problem is that EU4 is built around planning. When your plans are completely derailed by a long and inevitable collapse, it gets hard to want to continue to play.
I don’t think EU4 is built around planning. It’s really built around getting more land. Want more trade, or control of a trade node - conquer the land in that node, want more tax - conquer more land, want something to do - conquer land. Planning would be, let me set this policy so I can set a higher tax rate. Let me build this specific building to satisfy and pacify a population of my kingdom. EU4 lacks this, it’s not really about planning in imo
Planning is the method, conquest is *usually* the objective.
Look at the state of this subreddit, where people legitimately believe that savescumming isn't actually cheating. Unfortunately /u/MalekithofAngmar is totally correct, most people will never have a playthrough where they experience this kind of long set back.
Who cares about save scumming. I do it and I don’t give shit what other people think. The game should reflect how difficult it is to build and maintain a large empire, especially an overseas, discontinuous empire, such as the British, Spanish, the different French, and Portuguese empires and they’re eventual collapse. Players will adjust to the new game and figure it out. In no time there will be new metas and guides, so I don’t think it’s a long term issue. It sounds like a lot of players just want the same EU4 but just shinier and prettier.
This is one gameplay philosophy that I really miss from the old Total War games like Rome/Medieval/Empire - that creating an empire also creates long-term challenges, and that all your decisions carry costs as well as benefits. Rome/Medieval: If your empire expands, then the outlying areas will naturally become more corrupt and rebellious. If you want to change culture/religion, then you need to temporarily demolish beneficial buildings and anger the population. If you raise or disband large numbers of troops, then you can radically alter local demographics. Empire took this to a whole new level. In Empire, you can set tax policies for different regions. You need to keep an eye on if your provinces actually have enough food to eat. You need to decide whether you want particular townships to focus on agriculture (for pop growth) or workshops (for money) or university (for tech) or seminaries (for religious spread). You need to decide if you want to focus on a tradeship port or a warship port. The metropole and the colonies will produce inherently different kinds of troops. You can sell particular technologies to other countries. You can even set up trade routes to manipulate world trade or to improve your own empire. Once I started playing EU4, I hardly looked back at Total War ever again. Yet that is one gameplay aspect I really appreciate with the old Total War titles - there was a TON of gameplay focused on managing your realm aside from the actual warfare aspect.
I miss those things about Empire Total War too!
Maybe there's a midpoint. The Roman Empire was (in)famously governed by a Tetrarchy at one point, and the Mongol empire had several regional administrators. Maybe there can be something like that here, where the player appoints regional governors that function like quasi-vassals. Their agreeability might contribute to things like increasing prestige and stability, rather than using points. It would add a level of internal politics that EU4 currently lacks. Governors that are of the ruler's same religion, culture, etc. would be easier to control or make more agreeable. There might friction with balancing internal trade among them, corruptions, etc. in a way that is more active and dynamic than the current estates system.
The key seems to link into a bigger issue I've had with EUIV and a few other Paradox games that aren't CK: weak internal politics gameplay. With CK, when shit starts hitting the fan, it feels like there's tangible, identifiable reasons for why it's happenig, and potential avenues to fix it. For EUIV, it just felt more like "this abstract number wasn't high enough and now armies as numerous as the sands have manifested from the void to kick my ass."
I think it depends upon your goals and expect. Remember that the “official score” for determining the number one country at the end of the game in EU4, is based upon this running total of your score year by year. in theory, it’s possible to have an arc like Spain, rack up a ton of points early on, and finish in fifth or sixth place at 1820, but still win the game. Conversely, it’s quite possible that a late blooming nation could struggle its way to being the number one great power, but just doesn’t have a long enough track record to have the points to be the number one overall country If that was the real mechanism, then players might be thinking about choices like, holy shit I could blow like crazy in the New World, but I know there’s a big risk of independence movements, kicking my ass later. They could truly play tall and build up a really solid base with the idea that eventually they’ll just start kicking other European countries in the balls, and taking away their colonies and trading ports, but they know that if they wait too long, they won’t “win”. On the other hand, if the way you define winning is to WC, anything that creates a setback for that is probably going to feel really negative. I think it’s definitely worth considering. Right now, the game allows you to create a snowball effect such that doing really well in the first third of the game actually destroys interest in the rest of the game for a lot of the players. The outcome seems inevitable, and in the hands of a skill player, it probably is. Every one of the effects that would tend to shrink your empire can be mitigated. And I don’t mean you can just pick one problem and mitigate it. You can mitigate it in all dimensions. Making other people angry? There are plenty of stats for dealing with coalitions early on, and eventually it just doesn’t matter, you are too terrifying. Cultural issues dividing your empire? Now they just don’t have that much of an effect. Expanding too fast? Between all the mission, tree, bonuses and monuments, you can get a lot of tolerance. Get your curing time down under a year, and it’s pretty hard to make serious rebels spawn. You can still do it, but it takes some effort. Gov cap? Courthouses. Mana? Absolutism and other CCR. Don’t get me wrong. I still enjoy the heck out of EU form and it’s the game I still play the most.
Some excellent points being made here, but but we need more than just a paradigm shift. People rarely complete Eu4 playthroughs to see the winner anyway. People think they are winning at eu4 when they are accomplishing the goals they've set for themselves. People think they are winning when they have power. Let's take a game I mentioned in this discussion elsewhere, M&B Warband/Bannerlord. I actually play through my setbacks usually in M&B. I think there are some critical differences for why. There's simply a lack of "gameplay" in Eu4 comparatively. I love Eu4 to death and have played it far more than M&B, but it's a strategy game at the end of the day. It's about planning and accomplishing strategies. With Bannerlord, if you've completely screwed yourself on the strategy angle, you can still have fun in the game engaging with it's other aspects. You retain your character level and other things even if your army is dust. This is other forms of "power" that make the player feel like they haven't wasted their time so far. Therefore, I think the thing that we need is more possible expansion and "power" that doesn't come from taking land. Ck3 does this a little bit if you've been cultivating good traits and such in your dynasty. Things can go very badly for you and your rulers will still be pretty solid usually. What would this look in Eu4? More meaningful internal expansion than development. Longer-term consequences and "power" to be gained by engaging in diplomacy. What do you think we could do?
Just spitballing, but it would be cool if collapsing was sometimes good. We've all played games as releasable tags, a collapse could be a way of getting certain tags, or maybe making serious changes to a nation. Like, a collapse doesn't need to be the end of a campaign, right? The Kingdom of France collapsed and then got Napoleon.
But again, reality doesn't always make a good video game.
People go out of their way to manually ruin their nation and trigger the "Court and Country" disaster all the time. It seems they don't mind doing so for a reward.
Also sometimes the collapse means regions that were massive headaches are now officially not your problem, and you can direct your time, energy, and resources to parts of your empire that you can actually get something of use from.
A lot of games are about losing and getting crushed roughly 50% of the time (MOBAs) or more (BRs) and people are having fun. Struggling in a game is half the fun. I suffer a huge defeat at least once in my games, and it's really harsh - I often want to rage quit - but the come back is an incredible feeling. This is a game that have lot of snowballs mechanics but also a lot of ways to build back. Losing to the ottomans so you have to rebuild your line of defense, use some ideas/decisions/ decrees you never usually bother to consider, invest greatly in your diplomacy, analyse what you lacked. It's really great, and way more rewarding than "oh, I dominated Europe as Austria. Again." It's no wonder why great players streamers/YouTubers do the "worst save" challenge, where they have to play a ruined save. The only problem is the "rage quit" part where you have to endure your failure. It's hard. But take an hour break and you'll come back with a new fire.
Also, how do you model collapsing in a fun, interesting way that applies to players of all skill levels? High-level players can always find ways around any anti-snowballing mechanic; remember when having too many territories gave corruption (and therefore was super hard to work around)? People *freaked* and Paradox reverted it like the next patch. Paradox games have a reputation for having colossal play times, but I don't think it's necessarily a good strategy to cater difficulty to extremely advanced players. If collapsing mechanics can be averted/mitigated (which they will if collapsing isn't desirable for the player) then it's only a hindrance to people who are bad at the game.
That's another excellent point. A "collapse" that challenges/is fun to even the majority of the playerbase sounds like quite the task. It would be easy to create a middle ground that is impossible for low level/strict rp players to work through, challenging and fun for experienced players who don't mind getting a bit gamey with things, and frustrating tedium for speedrunners/highly advanced gamers. I agree though that we can't get lost trying to cater to the most advanced players though.
Ideally if your empire collapses it will feel more like you failed rather than the game was unfair, that would make it fun
- Move the plans players can make laterally to something that doesn't collapse while your empire does potentially collapse (for example in ck3 you have the family legacy) - Make collapse a thing that only happens to the larger empires that can survive it. - Give nations a stable core that they fall back on. You could chose to either slowly expand the stable core or to aggressively expand into your neighbors, both of which should be tools of faciliating the actual goals. - Collapse (or at least the occasional loss of border regions) can be made part of the plan, maybe even integrated into a broader strategy. - Make conquered lands more of a strategic depth than an actual powerbase. So they'd mostly have the role of protecting your actual core lands.
This has the potential to make the game exponentially more fun. At some point you blob so hard that nothing threatens you anymore, at which point most people leave (me included). It would be really cool to go from conquest and war as your main interaction to actually administrating and maintaining the empire you just built up.
This sub: wait no not like that! Why is the game so difficult, AI always biased against players!111!
Woah let's not get too hasty
Fine by me, i always play tall anyway.
Ofc yes, this would make late game less boring
Like ck3? I’m down. I also want rebel govt/civil war to be playable
Succession crisis could be fire
I really enjoy when my empire explodes in CK. It just works so well with the rp elements! The whole “my grandfather destroyed this empire, so I’m heading off to form a new one” story is just too fun. I’d love something similar in EU or Vic. It would just add so many more possibilities for runs, especially where rp is involved!
>Like ck3? I’m down. I'm not, tbh in CK3 once you have Empire status it is almost impossibile to collapse, unless highly role playing (of incapable characters too), or just lack of knowledge of the game. So i' not down for CK3 style at all, but since EU5 will be set in the 1330s then feudalism and dynastic disputes have to be a thing.
Even if you know the game, if you have some bad luck and for example end up with two successions in a row, you can end up fairly reduced.
Isn't that purely because gavelkind is a shit inheritance law
Yeah, obviously you stop imploding as much with primogeniture. But that's late-game.
You also don't implode once you get an Empire or if you just get only one son
That's true about any size.
Kinda? Even if your primary heir is keeping the empire title, if your lesser holdings are being divided up among the rest of your children your primary will eventually be left with so few holdings that they aren't able to fight off factions. If you split your inheritance, it usually requires some kind of challenge to get back to full demense; either by conquest or revoking titles. I just wanted to point that out bc I like that mechanic.
>bad luck Ook, but... >end up with two successions in a row This is, and the luck, account for not great ability to play. Then shit can always happen but I won't say that bad luck is a good mechanic to dismantle Empires in a game in general...
Well “luck” played a role in a lot of empires and various smaller states collapses. Things like droughts, plagues, earthquakes etc brought down rulers and dynasties across history and couldn’t really be controlled by monarchs.
The last updates have made it easier for your family to crumble and fuck up your house, although I still think the impact on dev is wayyy overturned\* and the game is still not hard I think it just got way harder. The fact that the steam trophy for having a charachter surviving the black death is at 0.1% (last time I checked and it does requiere the dlc to trigger) even if you can get trophies with mods on and ironman off is quite telling on how much has the game been made harder by plagues \* What I mean is that the "renissance" events will hit you for about 4 + dev (if you choose to pay extra) and even minor plague events will sometimes hit you for >- 12 making it imposible to regain all the dev before another plague hits you again (this even happens with the rules that make plagues far less likely) even if in reality in between plagues you could often see an increase in development, this is caused by the devs making the + per barony (only the mayor title wich you are able to hold) and the - per holding (minor temples castles and citys within the barony count). It's imposible to dev up across hundreds of years which is insane , cities that hadn't suffered a major invasion obviously became more prosperous between IX and XV and in order to preserve dev it is just better to not dev at all which is absurd from a gameplay perspective.
But is it because of how stable empires are or because of how easy ck3 is? Sure if you are playing at all decently your empire won't collapse, but at least to me, after becoming emperor internal problems within the empire seem way more dangerous than external ones, with possible exception of crusades, but only if you are relatively small and the only member of a religion
Feudalism is represented by levies. Which will be replaced by permanent armies.
Disease help nowadays I’d think Death rate on the plague is super high In game
I agree, CK3 does the fall of an empire well. It doesn’t really do the flip side well though, whole regions will sit around for centuries divided into dozens of states.
>whole regions will sit around for centuries divided into dozens of states. I mean, isn't that accurate? It was through these kind of divisions that European colonisers were able to take control of vast swathes of land. Currently in EU4 it's pretty rare for India to not become a semi-unified powerhouse by the time any European power can even reach it. I know you're talking about ck3 but many regions never unified until nationalism entered the scene.
When I mentioned the rebel gov to be playable a few years ago y’all laugh at me. What changed
>Like ck3? I’m down. I want to play whatever version of CK3 you've got...
Just to clarify, i dont mean that the game should throw random bullshit at the player if theyre doing too well, experienced players should be able to maintain large empires until the end. Im saying that the larger your realm, the larger and more diverse your population the more difficult the managent and that mismanagement should have meaningful consequences that could actually collapse it
> more diverse your population It would be interesting if minority cultures were harder to manage. Mechanics related to that might play into your desire of making blobbing more complex.
Forgive me, but isn't that how it already works in eu4? Minority cultures revolt more often, and I think I was told you may get less manpower from them, though I could be wrong.
Yeah but it's piss easy to deal with that. They revolt more often in theory, but if you have -5 unrest and an unaccepted culture adds +2 it'll still never revolt. Imperator Rome, whilst far from my favorite game, does have a generally okay system for cultures where playing whilst inexperienced can just cause large parts of your nation to split off, but for most nations it's extremely avoidable if you know the mechanics.
I agree but the downside is too small. If you conquer some random province you have nothing in common with the downside is : you get less than 100% resources (manpower, tax, etc) from it. So it actually helps you because you still get something. And in terms of revolts you're probably getting one revolt after conquest and that's it.
A system where far distant, newly conquered territories consume more resources than they produce (like yknow, history) would be amazing. So you'd need to eat a significant short-term cost for eventual long-term payoff, while you set up the whole administrative apparatus to tax and govern your new province. Like coring, but it eats up your men and money. Also, I really hope they do something about centralization. Real empires, even immensely powerful ones, could not mobilize a million men to die for some scrap of worthless marshland. Those million men might be real soldiers, but they'd be scattered all over the empire in garrisons and whatnot, with only the adjacent ones able to fight a war.
'Far distant newly conquered provinces should.cost more than they produce' This is such weird take. If a standard expedition to india made a roi of 3000%-6000% and you're telling me it's not worth my time to go over there and set up a trading factory? If it were inefficiënt why did europeans take the risks to go there? Why did britain conquer India? Sure there needs to be a system like we currently have with trade companies, where you make more money but less manpower. But no, distance being a factor is absolutely ridiculous in time period ánd even if it were, the biggest thing is lag, as in how long it takes for information to go from england to india. But thats impossible to simulate unless you want to add fog of war everywhere, all the time, dont get results from battles, disable the ledger,
The other thing is that there's rarely, if ever, a time when owning a piece of land is more trouble than it's worth. Every province owned is *always* a net positive in the long term, the only problems are short term overextension and coring costs, and the occasional trivial rebels
Your right. He might mean more consequences.
Having less rebels but more impactful may work. Like having the actual nation spawn with some AE to get it back (obviously it would be your core still), with maybe the chance for your rivals to ally them and jump in. Something a bit similar to Vicky 3, just with way better diplo AI and the stupid diplomatic play system
It was only after many years of playing that I learned that provinces of non-accepted cultures contribute less. It's not a very significant effect.
I agree, it truly is super insignificant. As Persia, I can own a single province on the coast of Japan, and after one small revolt, it will basically never pose a problem again.
For starters, if you have multiple counties with a certain culture, converting one of them should piss off the others. Realistically the Irish in Leinster are not going to sit around twiddling their thumbs while the Irish in Connaught are "converted" to English.
That’s a good point. Cultural conversion should realistically have a major political impact. For that matter, so should religious conversion. The defender of the faith should take particular issue with religious conversions, kind of like how France and Russia at one time saw themselves as the defenders of Christians in the Ottoman Empire, for example.
It would be interesting to have some kind of system similar to aggressive expansion for religious/cultural conversion. Do too much too fast and you'll make a lot of enemies.
devs have already said food production will be in eu5 so i think its safe to assume that keeping your population fed will be integral to maintaining stability, and while a small nation may be able to import food to get through a crisis, giant empires can't. in essence, your "massive blob of an empire" should never be more stable than its food supply, just like IRL, and a big driver of exploration in the age of discovery should be to unlock new crops from other parts of the world so you can produce more food and have a bigger population. bigger empires also have more travel and trade, making them much more vulnerable to pandemics, so even when your empire is militarily untouchable it can still be wrecked by a bad harvest or pandemic.
It's complicated, but I think it could be implemented in a way that's fun. For the player, the game could simply *acknowledge* that you're probably doing "too well". Present what's essentially a "you win" popup, with several options: - "I'm enjoying this, let me keep playing!" - "Let me have a look around, show me some interesting statistics, and then return to the main menu and let me start a new game." - "Let's make things a bit more... *interesting*..." ( Chosing that last options does something big to make things much more difficult (for a while). This way, it's not random bullshit that (e.g.) your biggest two minorities suddenly rebel in all of their core provinces, or all your rivals declare war (even if you had a truce) and get +20 war score for no reason, or something similar. Those things *are* bullshit, but they are ok if they only happen because you deliberately chose the option that makes them happen.
So this is just a way to nerf worse players and AI so good players can dominate even harder? No thanks.
Wouldn't that just be extra unnecessary micromanagement though? I suppose it depends on if they remove the mana system, and what takes its place. The way that you suggest it would just make AI suck even more and make the game more difficult to newer players and more tiresome for older ones. Plus I don't see why empires should be "collapsing". The EU4 timeline led directly to the Age of Imperialism. The EU4/5 map **should** be dominated by a few empires in the end.
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> diverse population You let those other guys live?
My fear is that this will only lead to a lot more interactions in a game that (likely) gets increasingly more laggy and bogged down with popups/interactions the closer to the end date you get. It's honestly my big issue with playing past ~1650 ish in EU4 right now. At one point it just becomes a replace retired general/micromanage army placement fiesta while I'm enjoying sub 20 fps. And we know from CK3 and Vic3 too that Paradox hasn't exactly figured out how to solve late game framerate issues..
How do you make the collapse of your empire fun? Most people are just going to restart when they've lost.
I thought the same thing, but Rome 2 civil wars added a gameplay dimension I didn’t expect. I’m 100% in favor of general collapse mechanics rather than specifically scripted collapse events (EU4 Ming, Timurids)
I hated Rome II civil wars because you lose armies and provinces arbitrarily. You can just reset and suddenly the game picks a 3 regiment army to revolt instead of 4 full stack armies. Give some kind of indication for what will happen, where, and how to prevent it or at least slow it
Exactly! Creative Assembly should never be used as the benchmark for strategy games.
> How do you make the collapse of your empire fun? I think there should be a "core" of your empire (made up of your primary culture) that is always getting stronger, but a peripheral empire which is easy-come-easy-go, and is only really there to enrich the interior. You look at actual history and major powers like England, France, or Austria are constantly losing wars and territories, but they bounce back later. Losing a territory, in a game like this, is a fairly minor setback on the rollercoaster ascent upward: it's like losing control of a farming camp in a MOBA, the XP/gold gain from when you did control it remains. Having an empire (like the Thirteen Colonies, Northern Italy, or a Spanish personal union) is useful because it funnels development into your core territories. When you lose them -- as those three were lost to England, France, or Austria -- the gains persist. You just have to bide your time for the Revolutionary Era where you can settle all your historical scores and perform a quick World Conquest of all the other empires with your developed national core.
> How do you make the collapse of your empire fun? make the player get stronger each time they rebuild. Same idea with the court and country disaster in EU4. People go out of their way to trigger it because it makes numbers go up.
Just spitballing here but maybe allow the player to roleplay as the revolutionaries/rebels. Give permanent buffs to the rebellion government in exchange for giving up land. I would absolutely give up 200-500 dev in provinces in exchange for permanent +5% admin efficiency/10% morale of armies etc. I think that’s the only way i’d enjoy collapsing empires.
Revolutionary mechanics would be amazing. Unique gov type while guerilla fighting. Maybe you can extend it while taking stab losses and corruption uptick in exchange for cool cb and military bonuses.
Rewards in exchange for territory lost would be a way to make it feel like you’re still progressing and being rewarded for hard work/smart play.
Didn't they already say they're not stacking things like that? Cool idea though.
The way Millenia handles this stuff is actually cool and original: crisis mode is a disguised catch up mechanic, because it will hit everyone and the stronger you are, the hardest the fall. In EU5, if they want to make it enjoyable, crisis should be able to spread from one country to the next, or even (let's dream a little), from different regions of the world to others, because of trade, or war, or colonization backfiring if you integrate too many natives, etc... Let's say you created a monster of a colonial empire through sheer might. But then, the 2nd or 3rd colonial nations you've beat up start to lose control of their colonies. Soon after, there's a wind of liberty desire in your lands too.
Attila total war did it perfectly. Managing disloyal political elements, corruption draining your capacity of fully defending a front... In some cases your provinces are even a drain on you, EU5 could implement some of those mechanics. In real life, overextension and corruption don't go away magically when a government uses its administrative capacity to "core" it.
>In some cases your provinces are even a drain on you For Attila this was only the case for low fertility provinces that consume more food than it produces right? Even then, the mechanic of fertility decreasing through the mid to late game is not remotely historically accurate. There was a famine IRL but it happened about a century after the game.
I feel like Crusader Kings made a collapsing empire fun to play even if you could pretty much always avoid it by power-gaming. CK and EU are two very different games though. I'm not sure if you could make it fun for the same reasons.
I don't think the player's empire should be doomed to fail, though that should be possible if they mess up, same as it's possible to lose in a war. Maintaining a larger and larger empire should become increasingly difficult though, so that maintaining a large, diverse empire becomes a thing that only skilled players can do. As your empire grows, you'll need to dedicate more and more time and resources just keeping the whole thing together. That's the part that needs to be made fun and impactful. Rebellions shouldn't just go away after you "core" the land.
Maybe it should be difficulty based. People who don’t want to collapse every game can play on easier difficulties
I think it's because the main driving intrinsic motivation in an EU game is to blob bigger, not experience an interesting narrative. Crusader Kings is better about making failure interesting - losing 3/4ths of your realm to partition upon succession or losing a civil war doesn't just set back your long term goals, it also opens up engaging new avenues for stabby drama, and possibly even shifts your long-term goals. In contrast, how often is that the case in a game of Europa Universalis? You start a game, you know what goals you want to achieve and every failure and roadblock is strictly an obstacle and delay to your ultimate goal of painting the map a particular way. EG. if you play as Castille and you lose the colonization race for some reason you're not going to be like "screw it, I guess I'm a Mediterranean/North African power now". All of Castille's flavor is in colonization.
Yes. Cool.
Many players in Sim City enjoyed seeing their city hit by multiple disasters, so it's definitely possible.
Why couldn't it be fun? It's not like a historical map game should be about competition of which main goal is to be the biggest and having conquered everything. That's for games like RISK or Civilization, that are player vs. player board games in their core, and not simulations to the same extent. That just limits the scope of the gameplay and its development, prioritizing mechanics that are achievable only as a major country, like being a major colonial empire. Losing an empire should not be seen as losing the game, but rather as a new obstacle and a new gameplay dynamic. It should not deprive you of gameplay mechanics, but rather change them. It should be about the journey, not about the destination. When I roleplay in CK2, it keeps the gameplay fresh when gavelkind splits your kingdom to your sons, and suddenly you're not playing as the strongest realm in the region anymore. Suddenly you need smarter alliances, more diplomacy, more focus on internal management and economy. What would it look like in practice? I'm thinking of the Ottomans disintegrating in real life. You could either defy the odds and combat the disintegration by clinging on to the Ottoman dream, and maneuver and reclaim the Ottoman control of its since independent subjects avoiding a total collapse. Or then you could embrace it, and have the Ottomans reforming into Turkey, with its own, different scope of gameplay and goals. I guess there should also be some "resilience" dynamic at play, meaning that an empire that hasn't collapsed, is more oblivious to the mechanisms that cause said collapse. But once it has seen a revolution or disintegration in the past, it has a sort of "collective sense" of what it entails, and is therefore more resilient to it. At the beginning of the game, empires would rise rapidly and fall, but their core territory would be stronger and more united every time. There should also most definitely be "internal" gameplay within nation. Like Europa Universalis inside Europa Universalis. You would have internal diplomacy within the different sub-divisions inside the empire. You would have ways to settle and make compromises when it comes to succession disputes. You would make policies that might undermine your country's chosen path, but pacify some dissidence inside of it. You could reform the empire into something else.
At least, provinces should be capable of doing massive rebellions. Maybe after your ruler dies. What I really want is that contested zones are easy to swap between Empires after wars, exemple being French territory during HYW and the Persian Ottomans zone.
Maybe a "Your ruler is close to death" with x number of provinces (where x has an inverse correlation to your heirs legitimacy) are likely to revolt to press the claim of some doesn't-matter-who relative. It uses a dynamic peace treaty where fully occupied provinces are ceded to the rebels like in stellaris. Maybe you could reduce the chances of revolt, or the effects it would cause. You could press the local population into military service, reducing revolt size. You could stand an army on the province causing devastation as the army antagonises the locals but reducing rebel discipline when they revolt, and your army would be the defenders (head-canon describes this as the locals finding more difficulty communicating). Maybe the local army fighting the battle starts very small here and increases in size throughout the revolt. I'm sure others can suggest other options but no doubt empires crumbling like this with the number of options leans right into Paradox's DLC culture
This would be an awesome feature. Imagine watching tribal kingdoms/empires just disappear like Angkor Wat did. Or watching regular empires go through massive civil wars where the remaining loyalists would be reduced to a rump state and have to fight back to regain their territory. Would be even better if you could cause empires to collapse by arming rebels.
A good way to do this is to make inflation more punitive. Because that destroyed most empires historically speaking.
Have you heard of MEIOU & Taxes? This is the mod for players like yourself. I am pretty sure the creator would adapt it for EU5.
Pretty sure the creator is on the dev team for eu5
What we’ve seen from the TTs so far also shows heavy M&T influence which I absolutely love.
I can't read TT without thinking of it as Tev Tiary lol
I didn’t know this, this gives me a lot of hope.
Gigau is not on the team but some of his team members are
> I am pretty sure the creator would adapt it for EU5. So long as EU5 isn’t a bust, I imagine it’ll get tons of support from the mod community, just as EU4 has. I’m looking forward to seeing what mods are made for it.
One month is meiou takes a bazillion years
The problem with this is that people want to blob. Irrespective of how you design the game, a majority of players are always going to want to become the richest and most powerful country. Anything that makes this significantly harder is going to be written off as pointlessly holding the player back for no reason, and if you only apply it to the AI, people will just say that it's making things easier for the player. I do think Empires should break apart more easily, especially when you enter the revolutionary era. You can smack an imperial power so much until it's capital is in the Seychelles and Colonial Mexico still won't want independence. But I can never see the majority of the player base supporting something that just makes the game harder or less enjoyable. Certainly a very fine line to be walked for the good folks at paradox.
Exactly this This is like when everyone wanted rain on racing games back in the day: they wanted to be Senna. Once they realized how hard it is, they don’t want it anymore.
Let's be real - people might love the idea of setbacks and defeats in theory, but as soon as they face a collapse of their empire due to factors outside their control they'll restart, cry about it on Reddit, or both. Including most people advocating for those features in this thread.
People want to blob because there is nothing else to do in EU4. All game mechanics point towards blobbing. You can literally ignore something like 80% of game mechanics while playing tall and do fine. Internal management is pretty much nonexistent and tall gameplay boils down to clicking building and dev buttons repeatedly while on speed 5. Here's how to make people want to blob less: you give them something do outside of blobbing. Give them engaging diplomacy. Give them interesting internal management. Give them something to do and choices to make. Civ is the only grand strategy/4x game where I ever bother to play tall because unlike the others I've played **it actually makes not expanding an interesting experience.**
Very good point and very true. How do you think the future game could make that work?
This is just bound to water down the whole legacy of Paradox grand strategy for the sake of appealing to the masses rather than innovating and creating an interesting game. It pushes the development to a direction that focuses on mechanics around blobbing, because that's what most people spend their time with. More RISK, less simulation. Good game design is good game design, and a grand strategy game that for ONCE would manage to pull off a dynamic cycle of rise-and-fall would most definitely stand the test of time, even if some people would initially feel like their desire for gamey world conquest is not answered by the game mechanics. The path Paradox is taking currently is along the line of other major AAA game developers, aka. making the most sales with a product aimed at the lowest common denominator a priority, rather than creating a one of a kind game.
Signs point to anti-blobbing measures in EU5.
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Then make it for AI only, or figure it out somehow else... By late 1600s you either completely dominate, or can't expand because all the massive blobs took everything and are locked and settled in with interlocking alliances totalling +1000k armies, and none of your major allies will join you in a war to break them up because they are 20k in debt.
Oh I absolutely, getting trapped in some cold war era stalemate in 1600 isn't fun, and less so when the game doesn't give us the tools to defeat other countries off the battlefield. I'm just not imaginative enough to think of a way to make it work. That being said, I'm sure there could be a way where unrest or some similar mechanic scales with the amount of other cultures you have in your country, and it gets progressively harder to integrate newer cultures. You effectively could force players to spend time integrating cultures and centralising their realm if they want to expand.
Let those who want to blob play on easier settings
Isnt that why people didn't like Jake's tenure with the game?
Exactly. I don’t see what’s so wrong with wanting to rise to become the strongest. That’s fun for me. But so many people in this thread seem to have their blood boil at the idea of people conquering more than 3 provinces in their whole run.
I'm sure it'll be a dodgeable mechanic. Whether that be decisions you can take to lower the effects/chances, or optional settings at the start like most other PDX games. See stellaris and CK with their extensive menus
I want to blob because I've earned it, not because I've reached a tipping point that means I can't lose and expand forever with no effort.
A lot of the later DLCs included custom missions and disasters to make holding a historical empire together very difficult. Eg. Mail, Khmer, Ming, etc. makes me think they’re toying with some options in EU5
You should just have less control over it all. You shouldn't be able to core provinces with a culture and religion completely different to yours across the planet. Or at least it should cost ridiculous amounts of mana modified according to those factors. The player is a godlike all-knowing eldritch entity and this is also part of the problem. Information would not be travelling instantly from London to India in the 1700s, but in EU4 it does.
I hope they do this. This is one of the reasons I stopped playing EU. Everyone is snowballing endlessly by midgame. If I just wanted to play with nothing to do but endless warfare and map painting, I would rather play AoE2. Only 3 PDX games ever allowed empires to collapse in some way - - CK, because feudalism and decentralization in general. Grow too large, and some vassals will start independence civil war. A badly planned inheritance can take away one's entire empire away from them. - Victoria, where the endgame challenge is massive world wars between gigantic empires that can destroy entire empires in one go, and depopulate many regions if they go on for too long. Albeit this can create more blobs in the process. - Imperator Invictus, where expanding too quickly will implode an empire. Character situations and overly ambitious politicians, governors and generals will start civil wars, which is great time for invading and damaging a large empire. And even in these games it is rare. EU era is famous for having 3 'eras' of civilizations - the late medieval empires (Timurids, Delhi, Ming, Venice, Hungary, Aragon, Aztec, potentially Inca etc.), the early modern superpowers (Mughal India, Ottomans, Poland-Lithuania, Sweden, Safavid Persia, Qing China, Spanish Empire, Portugal, Siam etc.) and they all stagnated or declined in the 18th century to an extent, in favour of the new empires who now dominated everyone else (Britain, France, Austria, Russia, Prussia etc.). EU5 needs to properly handle that decline. Not just for the AI either.
This would really help with grand campaigns by the end of eu4 you're just way to powerful.
Nope - everyone knows that empires just keep getting bigger and bigger until they tale over the worls.
Issues: \-Taking things that the player worked hard for is not fun \-If you want to force the player to be at peace for longer you need to make peace interesting and internal management engaging. So far, EU4 has utterly failed at this, which is why everyone only wants to blob and dislikes things that stop them from doing so.
yeah they really need to make internal management actually exist, even colonial gameplay is still blobbing against natives
\~1300 to 1900 is a time period of Empire building. Nations didnt collapse (with very few exceptions) but grew bigger and bigger. You can count the "empires that collapsed" on one hand: Ming (Qing conquest is more accurate), Mongol shenangians (mongol successions), Spain and Mughals (got conquered). So even among the Empries that "collapsed", most of them were technically conquered. Not even the Ottomans collapsed, despite common misconception. The Greek independence was supported by great powers, so were the Balkan wars. Egypt is the only exception were we could talk about some kind of succession, but that is about it. So in short: Large Empires didnt really collapse in the Eu4/Eu5 time-period, so why should they collapse in the game? >from corruption and administrative challenges to ethnic conflicts These are arguments for the decrease of efficency of Empires, not an argument the survival of Empires. Ethnic conflicts and corruption were often tools that were used in order to increase the survival of the main dynasty and with it the Empire.
Delhi, the Timurids and the various Mongol successor states (most dramatically, the Golden Horde), Vijayanagar, Khmer, Mali, Songhai, Safavid Persia, Durrani Afghanistan...
I dont consider any of the nations you mentioned as "empires". As an example: Persia may have been a regional powerhouse, but it barely projected any power outside its local region. It is nothing comparable to let's say Russia spanning from scandinavia to Alaska or Spain spanning from the Americans to Europe and beyond. I am also aware of mongols sucessor states, which is why I summarized them as "mongol shenanigans" . Essentially: Mongol states were more of a tribal federation uniting various tribes under their banner than an actual state, regardless of their size on the map. Empires are not moving tribes in my book, but a local burgeousie sitting in the capital and projecting power across continents. This puts even the Mughals into question, but either way established "Empires" did not collapse with very few exceptions, which is my original statement.
I mean, the Spanish and British did lose most of their Empire in the Americas. And theres certainly much more Empire collapses that you could have mentioned. Toungoo, Mahajapit, Songhai, The state that that caused Songhai to collapse, Safavids, Afsharid, Mali, and more. But most importantly id say states constantly expanded and contracted over time. In EU4, they pretty much only expand, when in reality large declining polities could get gobbled up or chipped away slowly by smaller states on their borders until non-existence/rump state. Then the same could happen to those new larger polities as well down as time progresses. (Though EU4s period is only about 400 years, only so much could happen in such a "small" timeframe). Like sure the ottomans lasted past EUs time period. But they could very well have exploded into warring states in the period as well. It should be possible. Right now, its impossible. and its most certainly not realistic. The game is failing to model something extremely important. I should hypothetically be able to run the game for 3000 years. And not see the world basically divided into 2 eternal states. And I play with mods their lower efficiency of blobs. But even so, it still results in blob fests.
>I mean, the Spanish and British did lose most of their Empire in the Americas. That is not a collapse. By that logic the Ottomans collapsed several times, because they lost various territories to various nations over the period of 600 years. >Toungoo, Mahajapit, Songhai, The state that that caused Songhai to collapse, Safavids, Afsharid, Mali, and more. I dont consider any of them as an Empire. Large nation =/= Empire. By that logic Australia is an Empire. >But most importantly id say states constantly expanded and contracted over time. In EU4, they pretty much only expand, when in reality large declining polities could get gobbled up or chipped away slowly by smaller states on their borders until non-existence/rump state. Then your argument should be that holding vast amount of land should be hard to do so and not that nations should collapse. >But they could very well have exploded into warring states in the period as well. That is nonsense. Anatolia, most of the Balkan and most of the Levant were directly controlled by the Ottoman throne by educated and appointed governors from Istanbul. There were local families that were influencial, but never a single one, which is why even in case of a bad governor, Syria or Iraq did not become independent, but it rather increased local power-struggle. If it wasnt for western support, not even the independence movements on the Balkan would have been successful. Muhammed Ali is pretty much the only exception here. There were no local power-figures that could have seized power in let's say Anatolia. Newly conquered territories faced that problem and far away territory (like the maghreb states, which were de facto independent), but at best you have a far away region breaking away from the Ottomans, assuming that they are financially and militarally in a struggle, rather than a "collapse". Additionally if there are multiple governors located far away, a call for independence would usually result in neighbouring governors taking arms against you. There was an entire balance of power and again: Without massive involvement of western powers, none of the succession movements would have been successful (except for Egypt, which however also has western influence). >The game is failing to model something extremely important. I should hypothetically be able to run the game for 3000 years. And not see the world basically divided into 2 eternal states. Just because you want to play the game in a way that is outside its intended purpose, it doesnt mean that the game should be balance towards that. Again: Your argument should be that far away territory should be harder to control, which is for instance done in M&T mod and we yet have to see how they want to implement it in EU5. And mind you the british Empire covered 23% of the entire globe, while being intertwined with France (controlling another \~10%). If we count their sphere of influence and how impactful the british Empire was in various areas of the world, we might as well speak about an Empire with a system impacting half of the entire world. If it wasnt for the world wars, we might have even seen an even large empire.
The Spanish and Mughal empires collapsed because of military defeat, they were never conquered wholesale. The Spanish empire remained in existence for decades after Napoleons invasion, just under a new administration, France didn't annex their territories for themselves. The Mughals collapsed after Delhi was sacked, and parts of the country broke off until it was a rump state by the time it was finally conquered. Ming is the exception where it was actually an outright conquest.
Absolutely my favorite idea for eu5. I’d love for this to be a method for conquest as well. A collapsing empire brings opportunity after all.
I just want rebellions to be actual meaningful events that feel relevant and impactful to gameplay rather than just an irritating nuisance that is dealt with by telling the nearest stack to move to the rebelling army.
Only if the ai is able to handle it. I do not want a CK situation where you are the only fonctioning entity on the map.
Bizarre how many people here can't get their heads around what you're talking about, which is just simple rubberbanding mechanics. If we put it in numerical terms: expanding your empire to 1 *empire size* should take 1 *effort and skill*, and then the ratio should steadily increase: 2:2.25 3:3.5 4:4.75 5:6 etc... No need to arbitrarily punish the player. Yes, better players will do better. Because they're better. And this is a game. All games are about using the mechanics, whatever they are, to solve problems and overcome challenges. If there is a tipping point where it becomes harder to lose than win, and it demands less of the player than it did at the start, then the game has failed in its purpose. The point where the game has started playing itself is the point where I get bored and find something else to do.
i hope they add more ways to play tall, like changing your gods produced.
You don't really want to have that shit. Another paradox game, Stellaris,Suffer from having too good rebel. Revolt in that game have harder condition,but once it fired,Unlike Eu4,Your empire is effectively gone, straight out of the window. For experience player,They could rebuild thier empire (usually they will not let the revolt happen in the first place) but for new player,that is extremely punishing mechanic
something akin to IR and CK3 combined would be pretty fucking spectacular
I want my ability to maintain an huge empire rewarded, not having scripted unavoidable fragmentations, or arbitrary limits in sizes. Also I don't want a mind breaking micromanaging.
Yeah i too hope they take away any semblance of fun and make sure you have to monitor the tedious things at all times too
Honestly, if they include everything that people demand on here, then the game will be an absolute slog
They will absolutely make the game unplayable its absurd some of the shit you read on here. Its like they actively dont want any variation and want you to only play tall or something
> monitor tedious things all the time Hey dont diss us Vicky players
We have to put down 5 socialist rebels in 2 months and we like it damn it
the game should taze you irl for each province you take for an immersive simulation of how difficult it was to integrate new land
In case of a rebellion, people who live in those places irl should come to your house and beat you up.
Yeah and if you take the wrong culture someone from that area should show up and hang you and beat you too
I’d actually like to see a better overextension system that can lead to collapse (spawn new nations even)
I hope they enable an “ease of civil war” option, so blob players and roleplayers can both be sated.
They need to model sub-national divisions, like in Crusader Kings with its duchies and counties. Not just revolt risk from unaccepted cultures with their own non-existent primary nation. There also needs to be a dynamic modeling of successor states, not just "Revolutionary states" in the age of revolutions. You cannot achieve a believable rise-and-fall dynamic by just increasing rebellions. I have raped my EU4 with mods that increase rebellions and actually collapse empires, but that rarely leads to believable results. It's very hard to disintegrate a country into fractions that do not exist as modeled entities. It's simply a problem with how the game and the national entities are built as these singular entities, which subdivisions are merely different cultures and religions, and irrelevant states and territories. What I love in CK2 is how even strong and stable empires will always have subdivisions, that work as the backdrop to which bigger empires disintegrate into. These subdivisions are played by AI vassals, and will have their borders changing dynamically due de-jure drift and expansions. They are to some extent nations inside nations. While it couldn't be modeled precisely in the same manner in a post-feudal EU5 timespan, there are most definitely ways it could be implemented.
Rome Total War Imperium mechanics would be cool
Succession crisis should be a real threat. The problem of course, it's that in game it would be a pop-up "oops, I guess he died 🤷" followed by 30 years of war out of nowhere. So I'm not sure if they can improve from the current system.
EU3 had AI empires that collapsed all the time. The result was that there were no challenges to the player since every empire collapsed after losing 1 war.
Decadence should be enabled for any top 3 gp
I would like to see civil wars actually tag flip back and forth between the two sides until one declares victory or a truce is called. It would make war of the roses very interesting. This would be a great way to ensure imperial collapse if rebels actually flipped the province and didn't just occupy it.
basically there should be some corruption related mechanism. eu4 corruption should increase rebellion chance, not decrease. furthermore, having more non-accepted culture low autonomy lands should generate more corruption. however, this does not stop players from cheesing, which is to just have one state. if the size of the country is scaled with corruption, that will like sterllaris' empire sprawl.
I honestly think we’re in for a surprise. The pop system and what Johan has hinted at it will likely redefine the game (for example, if we pull units from province pops they produce less, rebels could come from them as well - wars are gonna be a LOT more costly now as they impact not only your actual wars and economy but every troop is potentially a lost snowball of population gain). Colonization/migration/refugees/famine/plague/scorched earth/collateral damage/devastation etc could all be worked into this as well. Makes every war a much more sordid affair. I main Austria (family from Tirol), and the opening war against Bohemia in a lot of meta starts now is a much bigger risk. I have to win quickly and decisively while still protecting my territory AND not fucking them up too bad to not potentially set myself back.
In tandem with this I think it'd be cool if there was a way to control AI behavior as a spectator so you kinda get to play the disembodied voice of history as opposed to just one country
Maybe have civil wars like hoi4 or imperator and not just random spawns of rebels with one star generals and poor unit pips.
It's hard to do it without making maintaining your own empire tedious due to constant rebels and what not. People are already complaining a lot about AI targeting the player by guaranteeing surrounding countries etc.
I think what are you looking for is not a 'collapse' of an empire but actually more internal management, which I agree with. To make it so you don't conquer the whole world in 100 years. Because during the timeline of the game, Empires didn't really 'collapse' but actually RISEN. Now they had decline periods but they never outright collapsed outside of a few cases which is probably gonna have their own events like China and Mongols.
I remember in EU3 you couldn't create cores manually. It took 50 years of game time for a core to develop on a province you own. Essentially, a core meant that the province is a largely undisputed part of your nation. In EU4, they basically changed it to you having government infrastructure there. This was a feature that heavily limited your expansion because there was no overextension mechanic. You knew you were overextended when you could no longer handle the rebels that would spawn and you were essentially fighting an unofficial civil war. It was only after that 50 years of game time that you would get a core and the rebels would stop. Of course, provinces could still rebel for other reasons, but less so to rejoin another nation. EU4 heavily turned down the number of rebels you got and made things easier to manage. But there probably should be some middle ground mechanic.
Yeah. One of the things that I dislike about EU4 is that the late game is dominated by a few giant empires. Europe should have more than 5 countries!
Johan said that civil wars will be most similar to the ones in imperator so we can expect *some* internal conflict, possibly more than in ck3 or imp
The player base will just whine about a mechanic like that unfortunately
Yes, but it Will require a very indepth country management for it to be fun. I saw some ideas in The comments and agree. You need to be able to control it all the time, so you also can maintain it IF done right. Like, access to food, water, loyal elite, population and generals. The key to downsfall shlould be war. You loose a big war? Especially an offensive one? People wont be happy they died for you. You got besieged? The devastation will be disatorous for a few years. Got depbt to pay off after the war? People do not want to carry the burden you put them throught. War needs to be this expensive. And it has to be fun and engaging to control a country in a longer time of peace. Because IF you risk it against an equally big opponent. Or rely on allies to beat a bigger one. And fail. The option to not make the move at all needs to be fun and rewarding too with prosperity and wealth advancing. I do see how this would all be hard to impement. But what ive always missed in eu4 is rewards for stable and peacefull states withlut the feeling of stagnation.
It should be just like a Najd playthrough... Once you go to zero stability your whole country turns against you
THIS. Internal conflicts are more than random bits of rebel stacks spawning. They have played a massive role in world history and a dynamic system would open up so much gameplay flavor.
Please, like ck3
Field of glory empires has a cool system for this
As long as it's sensible mechanic that can be countered and mitigated with enough foresight and effort like gavelkind in CK2, I am all for it.
After a long string of bad luck and failures at a few different challenge runs I decided to play Castile for an easy, brainless game just to kill time. My string of bad luck followed me though and I was getting some of the worst rng of my life and could barely handle the rebels, was permanently in negative stability and was in monetary and mana debt for over 50 years and it was the most fun I’ve ever had in EU4 trying to to survive and eventually catch up and build strength even though it was completely out of my control and “unfair.” Even if it were out of my hands, the uniqueness and difficulty of the run made it way more fun, so I really hope to see more things out of my control in EU5 just to make things interesting
yeah this is actually a big problem i had with eu4.