New EUIV Expansion - Common Sense - Due 9 Jun 2015

[JasonPratt]

Until we fight there, it doesn't exist.  O0

[MetalDog]

I'm still munching on sour grapes because it's impossible to reduplicate Columbus's first crossing of the Atlantic. 

When basic history becomes impossible I start to lose interest and confidence in the system.

It seems silly to me that something that has been proven to work in real life, can't be accounted for in a game.  So, I understand that point of view and agree with it.  What I don't get is, the game is ruined for you because you can't cross like Columbus?  The only time the game is ever in a state of, "exactly like history,' is when you start it.  As soon as you start the clock, everything has the possibility/ability to change.  Even if you played as close to history as possible, random events will change the experience every time.  So, something small like Columbus' crossing is a game killer?  To each his own.  :)

I can definitely see the attraction of growing up.  There's a lot to be said, gameplay-wise, for keeping your attention local.  When you're aggressively expanding and colonizing, eventually you will have you have multiple fronts all over the world, and fighting a global war gets to be a bit of a drag.  You can slow the game down as much as you need to deal with it, but because of the way units disappear when you zoom out too far, you have to stop zooming out before you can see an area the size of the United States.  With that limitation, world war means you'll have to click all over the map pretty constantly to shift your view to manage the different fronts, because you could drop a bunch of United Stateses down in the world.

I understand your frustration.  It's the reason I don't play Great Britain in Hearts of Iron.  Too much stuff going on all over the world at the SAME TIME!  Having said that, it was the failure of the other colonizing/exploring powers to be better at it or overcome their competition that allowed GB hegemony over a global empire.  And I think EUIV does a GREAT job of modeling that!  The fight over the globe by the European powers to take control of trade routes and lands supplying resources.  Again, I can see why it's a PITA, but, it's the exact time period that the game covers, so, it's kind of obligatory :)

[Philippe]

The reason this severely diminishes the game in my eyes is that, in one form or another, it is supposed to be a simulation, and you use that simulation to model alternate history.  The problem is, if I don't have faith that the simulation can model reality in a reasonable way,  it's just an over-priced fantasy game dressed up in historical costumes that I've spent far too much money on  DLC's for.

Most of the time I'm willing to cut the game some slack and turn a blind eye to whether or not it's doing a good job of modelling things like what was really going on in the curia and how the Holy Roman Empire really worked.  The problem with the voyage of Columbus is that there is no way, no how, that I can bring myself to overlook the fact that the voyage of discovery is just plain impossible in the game system as it exists.  Why is it impossible ? Apparently because the designers of the game care more about applying their cool game system than they do about simulating the historical mechanics that under one limited set of circumstances will produce an outcome that we think of as historical. 

There's no if in what-if if the what is missing.

People used to complain when they noticed that for something like two decades Avalon Hill produced games that used the same Combat Results Table and pretty much the same ground movement rules, regardless of the scale or time period being simulated.  At some point along the way people who care about this kind of thing noticed that what AH was simulating in their games was not any given set of historical circumstances, but an Avalon Hill game.  I still remember when Ty Bomba threw the old rule book out the window and stopped using Zones of Control -- it didn't always work but it was a breath of fresh air to have someone ask why are we doing it this way, because that made you think about what was really supposed to be happening.

My basic problem boils down to trust.  If I can't trust Paradox to get something simple and easy like getting Columbus right, there's no way I'm going to take them seriously when they try model the forces at play in political and social evolution.  I might start asking myself why the combat mechanics are so weird and what is it exactly that they're supposed to represent, or maybe notice that the sieges go on for way too long. If I just want to push pieces around and have a fantasy that I'm conquering the world, it's a lot cheaper and easier just to play Risk.

[This rant was written without benefit of alcohol, otherwise it would have been a lot mellower].

[MetalDog]

Thank you for explaining that to me.  I can see now how something small like that would put you off the whole thing.  So what type of game matches more closely what you like?

[bboyer66]

  All I have wanted them to do for the past oh ...... 1000 years, is make the damn naval combat more realistic.

Naval battles are way to decisive, with too much "Winner take all" .   You can build a 120 ship fleet and lose it all in a single battle.   Drives me NUTZ, I tell you.

[Nefaro]

  All I have wanted them to do for the past oh ...... 1000 years, is make the damn naval combat more realistic.

Naval battles are way to decisive, with too much "Winner take all" .   You can build a 120 ship fleet and lose it all in a single battle.   Drives me NUTZ, I tell you.

Yeah, but there would be some resulting problems with that too. 

I think each battle in a province or sea zone is supposed to represent a series of battles in the area.  That seems to work okay for land battles nowadays, with the defeated force retreating a long distance back to friendly territory and (finally) being very vulnerable to effective elimination in game terms. 

It probably shouldn't work quite the same way with fleets, but I think they would have to force them to retire home to port and be locked there for awhile.  Not sure how well that would go over with players in a game situation, however.  Otherwise, we'd have the whole "bouncing armies" problem again, on the seas, requiring too much micro-management in constantly pursuing fleets.  That's something I don't miss from EU3.

[bboyer66]

  All I have wanted them to do for the past oh ...... 1000 years, is make the damn naval combat more realistic.

Naval battles are way to decisive, with too much "Winner take all" .   You can build a 120 ship fleet and lose it all in a single battle.   Drives me NUTZ, I tell you.

Yeah, but there would be some resulting problems with that too. 

I think each battle in a province or sea zone is supposed to represent a series of battles in the area.  That seems to work okay for land battles nowadays, with the defeated force retreating a long distance back to friendly territory and (finally) being very vulnerable to effective elimination in game terms. 

It probably shouldn't work quite the same way with fleets, but I think they would have to force them to retire home to port and be locked there for awhile.  Not sure how well that would go over with players in a game situation, however.  Otherwise, we'd have the whole "bouncing armies" problem again, on the seas, requiring too much micro-management in constantly pursuing fleets.  That's something I don't miss from EU3.

  Just make it so that a fleet after taking 50% casualties will at least consider retreating to an open friendly port within say 2-3 provinces.  The "bouncing navy" thing could be avoided by having higher attrition rates for battle damaged ships at sea. Actually I think the entire naval warfare aspect of the game should be improved or at least revisited. To me its easily the weakest part of a great game.

[Nefaro]

  Just make it so that a fleet after taking 50% casualties will at least consider retreating to an open friendly port within say 2-3 provinces.  The "bouncing navy" thing could be avoided by having higher attrition rates for battle damaged ships at sea. Actually I think the entire naval warfare aspect of the game should be improved or at least revisited. To me its easily the weakest part of a great game.

Yeah, the battle side of all the Pdox games have been the weakest point.