Which expansions are required to enjoy game as Japan?

[Taweret]

I play mostly CK2 when it comes to Europe but i want to start playing this, because of rest of the world, especially asian part. So what functions from other dlcs are necessary to fully enjoy a game as Japan?
obviously Mandate of Heaven and then?

[tonypa]

Why would you want Mandate of Heaven?

First of, who you want to play as, Daimyo or Shogun (Ashikaga)? If you want to play as Daimyo, form Japan and then conquer more lands in Asia, then Shogun actions have no benefit for you. MoH makes conquering Ming and northern Manchu tribes more difficult. As Ashikaga, I find the Shogun actions not terribly useful either since Shogun actions of these cost 20 Legitimacy for 10 year modifier and Daimyo interactions require Daimyo to have Liberty Desire below 50% and they are almost always quaranteed to go over 50% after few years.

Historical Ages and Golden Era is not something you would really benefit from either.


If you really want some DLC, I would say El Dorado if you want to colonize. Mare Nostrum for Timeline (no effect on the gameplay but cool to look at). Rights of Man for Personalities and Leader Traits. But none of these is required.

[Taweret]

If MoH expand Japanese religion then is enough reason for me to get it.
does Art of War affect me that much? (i guess it should.. it's "the art of war")

[tonypa]

Originally posted by Ojama King:

does Art of War affect me that much? (i guess it should.. it's "the art of war")

The best feature of AoW is Religious War, but it only matters for HRE.

[Taweret]

also why people says that "common sense" is required if you want to play "outside of Europe"?

[Pozz]

Originally posted by Ojama King:

also why people says that "common sense" is required if you want to play "outside of Europe"?

Increasing development was part of common sense, people mistakingly felt you had to buy institutions with manual development to be able to cope outside Europe.

It was made a base feature not long ago

[tonypa]

Most institutions spawn in Europe and then spread slowly from one province to next all over the world. Normally Japan is last country to get the institutions, while growing huge penalties on advancing tech (basically waste big junks of monarch points). Now the manual development of province (which was part of Common Snese and is now in base game) gives you 2 bonuses:
- your province gets better
- you also advance toward spawning your first missing institution in that province

So, instead of waiting for several centuries for institution to reach you, you will start to develop one single province until institution pops there and then spreads to rest of your country. Oh, and you also get very rich province while doing that, so win-win.

[kaiyl_kariashi]

And turns you into Europe. Making it pointless to play there.


Not to mention manual development itself being a retarded mechanic that is literal magic that has no place in this game, period, let alone being forced on everyone where as previously you could least turn it off by avoiding the dlc it was part of.



technilogical stagnation is historical. And dealing with that is a natural part of the regions you're playing in. If you want to change it, you go over and get the ideas by focusing on an expansionist/exploratory bent (or learn how to thrive in spite of the penalties if you plan to stay at home and keep to a more historical path).

Aka, you learn to play something that isn't Europe.

You don't cast magic spells to pull those ideas out of your ass, while turning a desolate province into a city center that rivals the greatest cities on earth with zero logical reason for it to exist or not immediately collapse under it's own weight due having zero support structure for such a place to exist.



Paradox allowing people to develop for institutions was the single worst idea they've ever had (only rivaled by manual development itself (in execution, the general idea isn't completely awful) and the native council debacle that took years to fix).

It killed the Institution system. And it wasn't even in response to protests. They killed it on arrival.

Unless you already despised Manual Development and had stopped using it (or never bought the dlc at all), the path of least resistance was to cheat and skip the mechanic.

Why be better, when you can cheat.

You are not playing with Institutions if you foster them via development. You are skipping an important core mechanic of the game. That is now functionally dead as of 1.28.

Even people in EUROPE foster institutions. It's completely retarded. they might as well just remove tech penalties entirely, because they already functionally did. Why even pretend that they exist anymore.

[Taweret]

oh i get it, so they make game easier and less "realistic" but wasn't it what most of people asked for anyway?

[Henri IV]

It's not the game to play your asian fantasies. for starters asia is one big china and all other countries are her tributaries, so you'll have to fight an enourmous china everytime you go to war. Second. Colonization as japan means you can only colonize indonesia and australia, as you're to far away from anything else. And lastly Asia has not been granted much love from paradox, and there are WAY less provinces and mechanics than europe. I'd say pick up Nobunaga's ambition if you want to play grand strategy in japan

[Corn Dog 7]

Originally posted by lord of china:

It's not the game to play your asian fantasies. for starters asia is one big china and all other countries are her tributaries, so you'll have to fight an enourmous china everytime you go to war. Second. Colonization as japan means you can only colonize indonesia and australia, as you're to far away from anything else. And lastly Asia has not been granted much love from paradox, and there are WAY less provinces and mechanics than europe. I'd say pick up Nobunaga's ambition if you want to play grand strategy in japan

You've obviously never played as Japan.

[Taweret]

NOBUNAGA'S AMBITION: Sphere of Influence this one? how about Romance of the three kingdoms 13?
i actually never thought about it because of koei pricing and dlc spam that even tops paradox but maybe these aren't really necessary to enjoy game as well.
the first game that actually got me into ck2 was sengoku, i only before played the civ games, occasionally, so obviously i am amateour who never played these no graphic WW paradox games, although i heard about them from gaming magazines.
i dont really want to dominate world i like the option to interact with the rest of the world though, while sengoku was nice for the time i played it, it feel empty compared to ck2. while eu4 don't focus on human interaction it has superior map in comparsion to these games.

[tonypa]

Originally posted by Ojama King:

oh i get it, so they make game easier and less "realistic" but wasn't it what most of people asked for anyway?

Yes. And no.

The question really is about how many is "most".

Someone will always complain. Players complained for years that playing any country outside of western Europe was frustrating and pointless. You spend long time to nurture and build up your nation, it has good economy, you can stand against your neighbours, have allies. Then the europeans show up and they are using machine guns while you still have bows. It is not fun.

So developers have tried to fix that multiple times.

But there are many types of players - some want more historically accurate game. They want to roleplay with historic figures and want countries to stay within historic size. These players do not mind if one country is very difficult to survive and gets usually destroyed because that what happened in real life too.

Others want to be able to pick any country in the world and have equal chance to prosper and expand. For example many who only play multiplayer prefer this system. Every country should be somewhat balanced and none should be hugely stronger or weaker. These players keep complaining about Ottos or France (there are probably thousand threads about Ottos being too strong in this forum), and yes, developers have nerfed Ottos many times already.

Then there are players who simply want to conquer the world as fast as possible. Or get every available achievement. These players enjoy every glitch and bug and exploit and oppose any change that makes blobbing slower.

[kaiyl_kariashi]

I don't mind having alternative experiences being in dlcs, that's fine, that's the whole point of the ala carte model so you can buy the changes you want.

But there is no official option for people who want a historically plausible history anymore.

And the Frustrating part is, they do take steps in that direction almost every patch, but then do something like adding manual development that takes it 20 steps back.

It's the same deal as CoP. It turns natives into Gods with zero effort required and completely removes any challenging in playing as them, and turns them into an ahistorical fantasy land when playing against them. And while I absolutely despise that DLC personally, I have the freedom to choose not to use it, and someone who does want it can.

But not that's not an option anymore. While I am somewhat glad that Manual Development was finally removed from Common Sense so I can actually use the dlc again (I actually like pretty much everything else the dlc did), there's no real escape from it anymore.

And the only saving grace of the whole mess is that being baseline gives them more freedom to change/mess with/remove it when they finally do a new provincial system.


-----------------------------------------

Hell paradox could fix a lot of complaints across the board, just by adding a game-features menu like CK2 got so people could customize the experience a little bit.

That way I could get rid of the fantasy non-sense that ruins the game for me, and people that don't want that annoying historical accuracy stuff interfering with their fantasy to disable it as well.

And could do so in a way that allows achievements to be accessed.

Within reason of course.

for example.

Removing the state limit should disable achievements as it makes the game really easy and there's no way to do that without mods.

removing the corruption from territories however shouldn't, since there are options avialable to do that already, and thus the mechanic isn't really that important and shouldn't affect achievement status.

turning off manual development on the other hand makes the game MUCH more challenging not just in the aspect of not being able to cheat on institutions anymore but also having to development via development events exclusively, as well as restoring the provincial economy modifiers that make economy management far more complex.

And any dlc exclusive systems should always available to pick and choose without compromising achievements. (like turning off the COP or ED versions of native reform while keeping the other features the expansion adds)

[Taweret]

Originally posted by tonypa:

Someone will always complain.

i know what you mean, i am moba player and there was this blizzard moba hots, people complained about x thing it got changed then they complained again and it was rollbacked.
the vocal majority could be actually the smallest % of serious playerbase... but their opinions influence especially new players who want to try out the game.
also there will be always people who prefer vanilla feature over the expansion one.
i think the best way would be give the game different gameplay modes like:
historical mode and fun mode in this case.

[tonypa]

Originally posted by Ojama King:

i think the best way would be give the game different gameplay modes like:
historical mode and fun mode in this case.

Non-ironman mode with lots of mods counts as fun mode :)