Anyone else thinks the game is too easy?

[ramrom]

Too easy to play with most nations. Build alliances with strong countries and have them help you grow. I think alliances and favour mechanics is overpowered and needs a rework. It shouldn't be that easy to get powerful allies and invite them to wars.

[Pool Toaster]

There are plenty of hard nations try playing as a small orthodox nation especially like Trebizond or Theodoro my guess is you will suffer the Ottoman wrath and even if that is to easy for you play on a harder difficulty

[cyundt]

Try doing From Frankfurt to the Andes achievement in Iron man.

[Kapika96]

Relying on allies is not the best strategy FYI.

[Azunai]

I kinda agree that the game became easier when they added the "Curry favors" option. Before that, it took much longer to get enough favor to get big allies to help win the crucial early game wars.

[Invisible]

No

[LSD]

Originally posted by Kapika96:

Relying on allies is not the best strategy FYI.

Not the best, but undoubtedly the easiest. The AI just farts out alliances, and it's ridiculously easy to get a big AI nation to win all your wars for you.

[Marquoz]

Originally posted by Azunai:

I kinda agree that the game became easier when they added the "Curry favors" option. Before that, it took much longer to get enough favor to get big allies to help win the crucial early game wars.

Favors weren't in the game at all at launch. They were added years later. During those years, allies would join your offensive wars immediately. You could literally form a big alliance web in the first few days of the game and launch a giant war the next month.

When the favor system was introduced, thousands and thousands of posts were made complaining that it made the game too hard and too slow. The currying favors mechanic is a compromise between how the game was for its initial years and how it was after the introduction of favors.

[Bomber Rex]

I strongly disagree. The game has a huge learning curve especially if this is your first paradox game. People often joke you finish the tutorial after 1000 hours of game play.

The only thing I think is too easy is maintaining large empires. EU4 does well to simulate the rise of empires but not the fall of empires when they are big. They have mechanics for emperors of china and ottomans but for every other nation it gets boring once big.

But if they add mechanics for this then people will complain they can't do (or too difficult to do) world conquests.

[Bomber Rex]

Originally posted by Marquoz:

Originally posted by Azunai:

I kinda agree that the game became easier when they added the "Curry favors" option. Before that, it took much longer to get enough favor to get big allies to help win the crucial early game wars.

Favors weren't in the game at all at launch. They were added years later. During those years, allies would join your offensive wars immediately. You could literally form a big alliance web in the first few days of the game and launch a giant war the next month.

When the favor system was introduced, thousands and thousands of posts were made complaining that it made the game too hard and too slow. The currying favors mechanic is a compromise between how the game was for its initial years and how it was after the introduction of favors.

I don't have the DLC for currying favours (leviathan i think). I think the game is quite playable without this mechanic. This mechanic im not sure if it has been tweaked but it does make the game much easier just like place your relative on throne of allied nation. I remember that used to be so broken at launch.

It seems to be the trend with new dlc for paradox to add stuff that benefits the player but the AI has no idea how to use. Its bad IMO but it makes them money so.....

[bri]

Originally posted by Bomber Rex:

It seems to be the trend with new dlc for paradox to add stuff that benefits the player but the AI has no idea how to use. Its bad IMO but it makes them money so.....

This has definitely been a significant problem at times in the game's history. Of course it then leads to all kinds of crying when the ai finally catches up on some of the DLCs like the whining about "infinite manpower" and so forth.

[Chad]

Originally posted by Marquoz:

Originally posted by Azunai:

I kinda agree that the game became easier when they added the "Curry favors" option. Before that, it took much longer to get enough favor to get big allies to help win the crucial early game wars.

Favors weren't in the game at all at launch. They were added years later. During those years, allies would join your offensive wars immediately. You could literally form a big alliance web in the first few days of the game and launch a giant war the next month.

When the favor system was introduced, thousands and thousands of posts were made complaining that it made the game too hard and too slow. The currying favors mechanic is a compromise between how the game was for its initial years and how it was after the introduction of favors.

I also remember in the very early iterations the biggest nation in your alliance chain would automatically become the war leader, similar to Vic2. You basically could only hope your big alliance brother would give whatever you wanted which made big wars a bit random, but not necessarily harder. Same as Vic2 you didn't want Britain to become your leader lol

Originally posted by Bomber Rex:

The only thing I think is too easy is maintaining large empires. EU4 does well to simulate the rise of empires but not the fall of empires when they are big. They have mechanics for emperors of china and ottomans but for every other nation it gets boring once big.

Personally I feel similar. Additionaly for me going for World conquest is the most boring part of the game once you are able to beat the strongest nation in the game it beomes mindless busywork. I am just not sure how you could make maintaining a big empire fun though and there was no shortage from neither mods nor Paradox themselves trying. You can go the root of triggered modifiers so the bigger your empire the more unstable but that just results into endless rebel stacks which is just annoying and not interesting. Others tried to do something with cultures ( like you need a ceratin % of primary culture) but that just becomes religious unity 2.0. Governing capcity also ties into it but all you do is just try to stay under your limit, nothing engageing there. Mings Distare for the player also just boils down to "get over it as quickly as possible"

The one thing I could think about is having certain periods if strife in the sense of unavoidalbe disasters (which paradox will never do since they don't want to force someone into a disaster) I feel it works with the HRE and Protestantism. Make one where a country has a certain development it has to rework it's administrations. Muslim/tribal countries could face heavy resistance for adopting the printing press (the ottomans tried adopting it but failed historically) Make a disaster for the burgers once your nation reaches a certain amount of trade income or after global trade is discovered where they try to renegotiate their place in society (republics get an exception) The age of enlightenism starts questioning monarchies and legitimacy becomes more impactful and a certain value will try to launch a coup/ revolutianry republic. (And the value itself should decrease maybe add a -3-5% per year depending on stability treasury balance if nation is at war etc) Nationalism should try to trigger events similar to the netherlands for their individual culture groups if they aren't excepted

Again Paradox will never do something like that though since it would distract/hinder someone from world conquests and the community would become quite vocal about that

[Marquoz]

Originally posted by Chad:

Again Paradox will never do something like that though since it would distract/hinder someone from world conquests and the community would become quite vocal about that

Agreed, but I wish they would. If I were in charge, I would

1) Rip out all the WC and near-WC achievements
2) Make it literally impossible to complete a WC, and alter the game as needed to prevent them anytime someone found a way to do it. Maybe a very skilled player could control a quarter to a third of the world by the very end of the game's time frame if they really worked at it, but that would be the absolute upper limit.

[ramrom]

I rarely use the curry favour mechanic but it doesn't take too long to build favours either. Also from a defensive point of view the way alliances can keep a superpower from attacking you is overpowered too.

[Malvastor]

Originally posted by ramrom:

I rarely use the curry favour mechanic but it doesn't take too long to build favours either. Also from a defensive point of view the way alliances can keep a superpower from attacking you is overpowered too.

Another thing that's a consequence of the AI not having the skills of a player. They're just not as good at building their own alliance to beat your defensive one, or at attacking strategically to avoid fighting the whole alliance.

[Spivo]

After 500+ hours in the game, I finally tried Ironman Mode.

Never going back... damn I've save scummed to many times, and now I've had to give up provinces to escape a very badly managed war, and seen my 5/5/6 monarch die at the age of 17, only to go through 15+ years of regency where I was locked out of declaring wars.

Still only playing at Normal, but my game got a lot more interesting :)