Europa Universalis IV announced

[crazy canuck]

In my Portugal game Burgundy survived and owns the eastern half of France. 

That happened in my first game.  In my current game as Portugal Austria inherited and the France proceeded to march all over them, and Spain, and England etc etc etc.  I hope the religious wars happen soon so France gets crippled a bit.

Of course none of that has really affected me - other than driving up WE now and then as I try to defend Spain.  I am well on my way to creating my trading empire with valuable trade goods being produced in Brazil with the assistance of the slave labour being imported from my colonies in Africa.   Next stop - domination of trade and colonies in the Indian Ocean.  The rest of Europe can fight over the rest of the New World, I have the bits I want.

[The Minsky Moment]

It does seem to be a rather strong attempt at design for effect.  The goal is clearly to get players to avoid fighting total wars in the Renaissance period, but I'm not sure if it is too strong a swing in that direction versus gameplay. 

The problem with the EU series has always been the ability to raise ahistorically large armies pre-17th century.  In reality no country in Europe had a standing army of significant size before the 1600s and most had none at all.  When Charles VII invaded Italy with 25,000 men, it was considered at the time to be an unusually large force, and probably half of it consisted of mercenaries of some form or another.  A more strictly historical design would have all countries start with garrisons only, an ability to call out a small temporary muster, and otherwise relying on soldiers for hire, with only those countries with a Standing Army idea (France only at the begginning) having the ability to keep in being a small permanent army of say 5-10K men.   That would probably cause a revolt in the customer base.  The alternative of using stricter manpower limits to force greater reliance on mercenaries (or to cut down ambitious campaigns) is a decent second best solution.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

It does seem to be a rather strong attempt at design for effect.  The goal is clearly to get players to avoid fighting total wars in the Renaissance period, but I'm not sure if it is too strong a swing in that direction versus gameplay. 

The problem with the EU series has always been the ability to raise ahistorically large armies pre-17th century.  In reality no country in Europe had a standing army of significant size before the 1600s and most had none at all.  When Charles VII invaded Italy with 25,000 men, it was considered at the time to be an unusually large force, and probably half of it consisted of mercenaries of some form or another.  A more strictly historical design would have all countries start with garrisons only, an ability to call out a small temporary muster, and otherwise relying on soldiers for hire, with only those countries with a Standing Army idea (France only at the begginning) having the ability to keep in being a small permanent army of say 5-10K men.   That would probably cause a revolt in the customer base.  The alternative of using stricter manpower limits to force greater reliance on mercenaries (or to cut down ambitious campaigns) is a decent second best solution.

I wonder if that would be moddable. Would bring the early warfare into line with what CK2 offers (more or less), evolving into classic EU-gameplay.

[crazy canuck]

When Charles VII invaded Italy with 25,000 men, it was considered at the time to be an unusually large force, and probably half of it consisted of mercenaries of some form or another.

Yeah, so large in fact that he didnt have to fight a battle of an signficance and was eventually forced to leave for reasons unrelated to the battlefield.

[The Minsky Moment]

Would bring the early warfare into line with what CK2 offers (more or less), evolving into classic EU-gameplay.

That would be ideal. 
In EU3 it was commonplace to see France muster huge armies to fight the HYW.  In reality in the latter stages of the HYW even the largest battles and sieges usually only involved a few thousand men per side.

EDIT: I meant Charles VIII above of course. Didn't notice the error until CC quoted it.

[Viking]

The inheritance of Burgundy clusterfuck is back.  I was quite surprised as I was playing my first game as Austria.  It's a little ridiculous, my territory doubled in size overnight for reasons that have nothing to do with me.  I understand the desire to have some historical events, but I think accidents of history like the Burgundian succession don't need to be in the game.

In my second game as england... (I now know how trade works!). Burgundy told Austria to get stufffed and found itself coalitioned by virtually everybody. Fortunately for burgundy Brabant started the war drawing in all the coalitionists, eventually burgundy was crushed but brabant only took breda. But before the peace she found herself dogpiled by OPMs and was losing badly. I had been drawn into the first war since I was guaranteeing Burgundy (if only to get periodical wars to keep my cores on the provinces I lost in france). I quickly sent my only really army 14k into germany and started knocking off the OPMs. Outside of the Rhine valley Germany was consolidating into 5-10 province size countries. Burgundy loved me to bits for this and we allied and married. Burgundy found herself then in a regency and I claimed the throne and attacked. She was out of manpower and men, I was merely out of manpower. I then got sucked into a franco-castillian war where my out of date army got nearly wiped out by the french hunter killer stack. I then PUed Burgundy. Then after the french wars in italy and spain had bled them dry I attacked, castille and brittany had joined my coalition and I took everything back. I also gave burgundy shitloads of overexpansion to keep them busy coring provinces for the time when I annex.

Bleed france properly and she goes down hard. The AI watches your war capacity like a hawk and strikes when you are weakest. Once things start going bad they keep going bad. The worst bit about losing a war isn't the territory or concessions, but rather the massacre that happens at home where everybody revolts and ultimately when you are a 0 manpower the only thing you can do is concede before they enforce. To be honest -100% income is better than losing the province, but those -25 and -50 prestige hits really do hurt.

[The Brain]

EDIT: I meant Charles VIII above of course. Didn't notice the error until CC quoted it.

Too late. I judge you moran.

[PRC]

I'm playing as Portugal and i've selected the mission "Conquer Tangiers" which i've done, but the mission hasn't finalized awarding me the admin points and prestige.  The alliance with Castille mission ended successfully immediately after the alliance was formed.  Are the conquer missions something that doesn't fire immediately, perhaps needing a core or reduced revolt risk? 

[crazy canuck]

I'm playing as Portugal and i've selected the mission "Conquer Tangiers" which i've done, but the mission hasn't finalized awarding me the admin points and prestige.  The alliance with Castille mission ended successfully immediately after the alliance was formed.  Are the conquer missions something that doesn't fire immediately, perhaps needing a core or reduced revolt risk?

You also need to core it to complete the mission.  Iirc it is in the mission description.  Which sucks because you are going to need over 450 admin to do it due to the Berber coring penality.

@ Viking - well done.

[PRC]

I'm playing as Portugal and i've selected the mission "Conquer Tangiers" which i've done, but the mission hasn't finalized awarding me the admin points and prestige.  The alliance with Castille mission ended successfully immediately after the alliance was formed.  Are the conquer missions something that doesn't fire immediately, perhaps needing a core or reduced revolt risk?

You also need to core it to complete the mission.  Iirc it is in the mission description.  Which sucks because you are going to need over 450 admin to do it due to the Berber coring penality.

@ Viking - well done.

Arg, yah, it's expensive to core.  Casablanca on the other hand would only cost 110 admin power to core at this time.  Thanks for the info! 

Loving the game by the way.

[alfred russel]

A more strictly historical design would have all countries start with garrisons only, an ability to call out a small temporary muster, and otherwise relying on soldiers for hire, with only those countries with a Standing Army idea (France only at the begginning) having the ability to keep in being a small permanent army of say 5-10K men.   That would probably cause a revolt in the customer base.  The alternative of using stricter manpower limits to force greater reliance on mercenaries (or to cut down ambitious campaigns) is a decent second best solution.

I agree. That the armies are too big doesn't make a huge difference (that effects everyone), but the fact your army is equally deployable for long international campaigns and for domestic defense is a major problem.

[Anatron]

Just you know,american indians are completly playable.I just westernized Iroquoises in 1640 and made an alliance with Castille and Great britain.Now i can start to grow to a big indian empire.

[Tamas]

 

My Ironman Portugal was going nice, but an über Algiers, with the same ahead-of-time military tech as mine, declared Jihad on me, caught my Seville patrol fleet with pants down, and now is eating up my North West African holdings.

I seriously love this game.

[PRC]

My Ironman Portugal was going nice, but an über Algiers, with the same ahead-of-time military tech as mine, declared Jihad on me, caught my Seville patrol fleet with pants down, and now is eating up my North West African holdings.

I seriously love this game.

Ironman is a great mode, I play classic ironman in XCom exclusively, but for EUIV i've always been such a save & reloader that i'm afraid of getting to deep into it.  Also afraid of making mistakes because of mis-clicks.

[Viking]

BTW, as to how important it is to know what you are doing with trade. With two merchants and "owning" the chesapeak, bordeaux, london and antwerp nodes (y'know physically by owning all the land at their centers). I maxed out my income by redirecting from chesapeak to london and collecting at antwerp. Re-directing at antwerp reduced my trade income from 32 to 17. There was no point in re-directing from bordeaux since both downstream nodes were controlled by me. Redirecting in chesapeak really helped since norway was redirecting to the north sea from there (which was heavily re-directed to lubeck) and the indians still owned most of the land.

Before going gangbusters on the irish.. their merchants were actively redirecting trade from bordeaux and north sea to london for their own benefit.  I'm not actually sure that wiping them out was actually a good idea. Though, I suspect that when I have 200 light ships running around I'll be in a situation where I wouldn't even notice 8 irish merchants supported by 12 light ships.

BTW, I've adopted a strict naval policy.

A) Have as many heavy ships as the next two powers combined (historical)
B) Never build a stack of land units that I can't march onto my transport fleet (historical)

The AI collects their fleets so finding and blockading the enemy fleet works, plus butchering light ships when parked on a trade node is just priceless.