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Editorial Cassidy's Europa Universalis III Retrospective: On the expansions and some of the modifications

Trash

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Tags: Europa Universalis III; Paradox Interactive



Our resident megalomaniac and Let's Play enthousiastic Cassidy sat down to write up a detailed analysis of all the ins and outs of Europa Universalis III's expansions and some of its most popular modifications. It took us some time to decypher his hushed mutterings but we're glad to be able to finally share his wisdom and insight into the fine art of mappainting. Come check out the full article of Cassidy's Europa Universalis III Retrospective: On the expansions and some of the modifications
 

TripJack

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Cassidy bro post something here so I can shower you in lovefists

Played a ton of unmodded EU3, one of these days I'll check out MM or Mare Apertum...
 

ironyuri

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I thought Cassidy was a BR not a :potato:, my mind is being blown right now.
 

oscar

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For some reason I really enjoy alternate history mods in Paradox games.
 

Hellraiser

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For some reason I really enjoy alternate history mods in Paradox games.

Probably because the outcome isn't as obvious as it is in vanilla (worst turk/russian always blobbing etc.), also you can balance the countries more to make it more challenging without people complaining on the forums much about it being unrealistic.
 

marooned

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Very cool reviews. Will definitely check the mods out, if only to grab some of their most useful clay. The coring system in MM sounds interesting.

Now a HoI2 (3?) review?

Or better yet an LP. :M
 

Luzur

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Good review, Cassidy, through I disagree with it on some aspects:

Cassidy said:
Battle results are based on dice rolls over the basic equation "bigger army = WIN" and usually sending your whole army at once for one big battle between two large stacks of units is the most common way to do it. Sure, there are equations like generals and terrain and even scorched earth was added in one of the expansions, but these elements rarely change that uninspiring formula.

You forgot to add the influence of sliders, national ideas and tech. Yeah EU3 combat ins't good yet, they don't distinguish between militia and normal troops, for example, and the numbers of troops that most big powers can wield around are totally irrealistic for most of the game, for example, pre-French Revolution, the biggest army the French got was something like 175.000 soldiers, and the King had to go to every big city to ask for help, whereas in the game a unified France can easily yield around 200.000 soldiers by 1500. Also, no ramsoning of captured nobles (like you can do in CK2), which was still a excellent way of financing warfare for quite a good time in the age of EU3, especially if the noble was a king or duke.

I really disagree with the randomness of battles. There is some, certainly, but the main challenge is to weaken the randomness and make sure odds for yourself.

Diplomacy and espionage remains a letdown compared to pretty much all other main Paradox franchises. Colonization involves spending some gold from the treasury to send a colonist to a province close enough to the nearest friendly province with a port according to naval technology and praying for the typical 40 to 60% chance of success to happen.

I thought EU3 diplomacy was quite good with Divine Wind, actually. Mainly because I can finaly properly call my allies after declaring war, choose allies and select the clay I want to take through the map instead of the old, bad interface.
What is the Paradox game with best diplomacy, then? Victoria had a lot of versatility (defensive alliances, colonial wars, giving and exchanging provinces and money and research, etc). HOI always had boring TOTAL WAR diplomacy where the war only ends when everyone is dead and grinded to paste and you can't do much more than ally/puppetize/WAR/control miltary.

Espionage does need to be better, true. I do like it a lot for rebellion-inciting, through, its a excellent way to weaken a enemy that is already going through a unstable period and has some clay I want.

Yeah, colonization is a pretty bad and bland system. MMU takes it better, but still lacks a lot. The problem is that the system is very simplistic - You colonize until you get a thousand dudes, then a city forms and then all the local natives not only stop bothering you, but they willingly join your glorious city and instantly convert to your culture-religion. All those Jesuits sent to convert the natives to catholicism never existed, aparently, and as soon as a city had thousand people, natives stopped attacking it, forever. Lulz.

There's also the fact colonization suffers from metagaming. Essentially, every player goes as soon as possible for caribbean islands and/or Brazil and Mexico because he knows where all of it is. I think MMU came closest to resolving it, but it still needs SERIOUS fixing. I remember there was a MMU game where my naval advisor giving me naval tech boost died early, which resulted in me and the whole world lagging in naval tech, and when I got ahead again I had something like fifty years of America and India only to me until the Spanish and the Dutch started showing up, but by then most of South America was already mine.

Speaking of technology, in another downside, Europa Universalis III has no complex tech tree but a very simplistic and highly abstracted system where all you need to do is move sliders towards land, naval, production, trade and government tech research. All these research subjects show the result of you gaining a level in them beforehand.


Would a tech tree really make sense in the game's period? Bear in mind that scientific research as we know it didn't exist during the game's timeframe. Technological advancement was more or less a bunch of natural philosophers finding out about cool new stuff and reporting it to the king, or new technological advancements being slowly found out by many scattered people. There is naval technology, through, in THAT governments certainly helped (Portugal's Enfante is a good example of this, and it appears in-game).

It features only three major daimyos, rather than the dozens of different clans of the Age of the Warring Clans which were already featured in the Magna Mundi Platinum 2 mod long before this expansion's release.

Besides that, it brought minor changes to China and some interface changes. I don't really have much to say about it

You forgot a lot of other changes. For example, changes to trading like trade center share, Horde System (which some like and others dislike. I like it), more provinces, but yeah it could've been better.

It’s a rushed port of the same mod from In Nomine to Divine Wind and is plagued by instability and other problems.
Actually MMU is for HTTT, not for DW. Ubik was already too involved in making the game to make a port to DW. Someone did make a MMU-DW version recently, I even played it a bit.

the infamous "FRAMED!" random event that gives a devastating 10 points of infamy to the player faction.

Why do people hate the FRAMED event? It was virtually the only way to make Infamy scary. Essentially, it made going high infamy risky instead of "If I just a bit, I can skirt 0.1 points lower than the Infamy limit and continue magically immaculate so I can conquer much if I am good at math." That sucked. The FRAMED! event added extra incertainity and edge to the game and could be dealt with properly. EUIV will discard infamy, thankfully, if the Coalitions system is made properly, then blobbing won't make a nation unstoppable anymore.

Then there is the fact that some AI-controlled countries like England/UK and Ottoman Empire gain ridiculously absurd cheats almost to the point of cheese
True, but interestingly enough some majors were much more unstable in MMU, namely China which in games often turned into Warring States Part Deux.

Some things you could've added:

- Until someone made the Malaya mod, Southeast Asia was Fantasy Land. Today almost every other mod features the Malaya mod (I think someone is doing a african mod too).

- Lacked reviews of some other mods. Death and Taxes and Miscmods are the ones I'm thinking about.

- Parts of the map were very strange. Say, Brazil getting giantic provinces and being only colonizable near the coast and the Amazon-Pantanal-Cerrado being magically non-colonizable wasteland provinces while Kwanzania getting itty-bitty nice hundreds of provinces. The hell? That makes no sense. Also, Africa and Southeast Asia, so much wrong there.

All in all, a good retrospective, but lacks many important points.
 

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