EU3 - ready for play yet?

[Berkut]

Is the latest incarnation stable enough for MP yet?

[DGuller]

I'm afraid the design is still not stable enough.  There is still some major rejiggering happening with every beta patch.  It sucks when our game has to be abandoned midway through because the new patch came out.

[Razgovory]

Don't think so.  Each patch breaks something new.  Looks like the latest increased naval maintenance to the point it bankrupts the AI.  I ran a hands off game the other day and found that by 1530 nobody had colonized anything.  Spain formed (and ate Portugal) and took colonial ventures but not Quest for the New World.

In another game one of the Japanese Daimyos converted to Catholicism and became a Republican Dictatorship.  Curiously some of the Japanese provinces were Hindu.  I have no idea why.

[KRonn]

What a hassle...I just got this game a few weeks ago, playing it for the first time.     Oh well, these first few games are learning games anyway, as I guess I'm waiting for the next patch. 

[Viking]

1 - cascading alliances and AI alliance building means that every war is against ALL neighbors.
2 - horde idiocy means that all 70k golden horde troops are attritting at 7% inside player territory
3 - i don't care how powerful defensive slider settings are, AI blitz sieging means that 1 AI regiment takes a level 2 fort faster than my 15 regiments take a level 1 fort.
4 - if my 5 maneuver general can't catch a leaderless regiment which doesn't start moving until the 5 man general has used half his move then the game is broken, not my gameplay (note that gripe 3 means that by the time I actually catch that regiment in the invisible map caché maneuver well I have lost the bulk of my small country to 1 regiment siege stacks)(note 2 chasing the other 1 regiment siege stacks is just as pointless)
5 - I have yet to see a non-vassal ally join in any offensive war and rarely see them join in defensive wars

Starting out as a small or medium sized country in DW is all but impossible in medium difficulty or above if you have a large neighbor. Playing as muscovy with very low ai aggressiveness at very easy difficulty still sees my 10 province muscovy ending up at war with half of europe because the golden horde's 50k army wipes mine out and novgorod decides to declare war. Novgorod is allied to denmark which has scandinavia in PU, TO and Lithuania guarantee pskov, which is allied to novgorod. Poland guarantees lithuania and is allied to austria and hungary. Austria is in the empire. Bohemia is emperor. Then algiers declares war for shits and giggles, I still don't have a port.

I don't advise SP, it just makes me want to rip my hair out.

Cascading alliances basically means that player controlled countries must grow massive quickly or the will be killed.
Horde rules need serious play testing and rebalancing (I've added a -1.00 colonist for all countries without QFNW, that seems to fix the most aggregious steamrolling)
The AI movement bit from victoria just means that there is more ping-pong, or rather pre-ping-pong where you just can't catch an enemy army. The solution to this is exactly the same as the solution to
ping pong, herding. If you don't herd, you will have to chase until the AI regiment reaches the local movement well. It's very very annoying since the chasing requires micro management which allows the AI to spread out 1 regiment deep and blitz siege all "off camera areas"

SP just pisses me off right now. I'm going back to HTTT 4.1b

[DGuller]

I don't see how 4 is an issue at all, I never had any problems with it. 

The distances between neighboring provinces are different.  If province A borders province B and C, it's logical that A-B might be longer than A-C.  If you're heading into A from B, why shouldn't the enemy be able to leave A for C at the last possible moment and avoid you? 

The reason it's not an issue is because AI literally does wait for the last possible moment, planning its move so that you'll miss him by a day.  That just means that it won't take long before you catch him; he doesn't need to hit the "well", he just needs to break the cycle of having provinces with ever shorter distances to go to.

[Ancient Demon]

I think the horde changes were a mistake. The only countries they might make sense for are the North American natives, but they weren't included.

At this point it might be better to just wait for Magna Mundi.

[DGuller]

Has anyone played the game with the latest patch?  How does auto-rebel whacking work?  Rebels are a bane of my existence whenever I colonize large tracts of America.

[Ideologue]

The last Divine Wind game I played had Sokoto force converting England to animism.  That's an inspired kind of stupid.

[DGuller]

How is that possible?    Aren't there limits to force conversions?  You can force-convert someone from Catholic to Protestant, but not to Sunni, for example.

[Ideologue]

How is that possible?    Aren't there limits to force conversions?  You can force-convert someone from Catholic to Protestant, but not to Sunni, for example.

Well, I inferred it: England wound up animist, and had been fighting a war with Sokoto.  It might've happened some other way, I suppose, but I don't know how.

I wound up reloading from an earlier save because as a seagoing Austria-Netherlands, I wanted my opponent in top shape.

Oh, looking at the SS I took, it might've been Songhai instead of Sokoto.  Iirc, those lime green provinces on Ireland's west coast are Ottoman and Muslim, but that's the regular EU kind of stupid.

[Viking]

I don't see how 4 is an issue at all, I never had any problems with it. 

The distances between neighboring provinces are different.  If province A borders province B and C, it's logical that A-B might be longer than A-C.  If you're heading into A from B, why shouldn't the enemy be able to leave A for C at the last possible moment and avoid you? 

The reason it's not an issue is because AI literally does wait for the last possible moment, planning its move so that you'll miss him by a day.  That just means that it won't take long before you catch him; he doesn't need to hit the "well", he just needs to break the cycle of having provinces with ever shorter distances to go to.

What I mean by the maneuver well is.. the chased regiment moves not along it's supply lines, but rather in a direction where movement is shorter than the province you come from. This continues until it reaches a province where the direction you are attacking from has the shortest movement time. That is the well, there is only one opening in or out of that province.

[Viking]

Has anyone played the game with the latest patch?  How does auto-rebel whacking work?  Rebels are a bane of my existence whenever I colonize large tracts of America.

rebel whacking is a good thing, but it is not as useful as it could be. It is not very useful to contiguous empires. The rebel hunter stays within your borders but roams freely. Best used for limited sized areas like large islands. Make your rebel whacker as big as the lowest supply limit in the contiguous area and only use one rebel hunter.

[Viking]

note regarding rebel hunters, they do not count retreating rebels as rebels. So with large countries with two rebels, each on either side of the country just results in the rebel hunter forcing one to retreat and then marches all the way across the country to force the other rebel to retreat before marching all the way back.

Basically they act just like AI armies.

[Josquius]

Don't think so.  Each patch breaks something new.  Looks like the latest increased naval maintenance to the point it bankrupts the AI.  I ran a hands off game the other day and found that by 1530 nobody had colonized anything.  Spain formed (and ate Portugal) and took colonial ventures but not Quest for the New World.

In another game one of the Japanese Daimyos converted to Catholicism and became a Republican Dictatorship.  Curiously some of the Japanese provinces were Hindu.  I have no idea why.

I played a Japan game a few months back and there does seem to be an awful lot of contact and wars between the Asian nations.
IIRC Shinto and Hinduism are counted as being in the same religious group (along with some others I can't remember...buddhism?) so have a habit of getting particularly involved with each other.