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[metime00]

Even Crusader Kings 2? Barring of course playing a Muslim dynasty with their different mechanics, I know those are different.

[Digital Hellhound]

At least in the beginning, certainly. Even Christians differ with their starting situations, expansion opportunities, etc. - and of course random events and luck are gonna make some variation in any run. You should try steppe rulers, if you have Old Gods - I had an awesome run as the Duchy of Azov in the Crimean, while it was still Tengri (now Jewish, grr). Continued to be fun after I ended up Miaphysite, though. They're in a dream position to welcome the Mongol invasions, too.

[Rakonas]

Even Crusader Kings 2? Barring of course playing a Muslim dynasty with their different mechanics, I know those are different.

Here's just a few completely worthwhile different playthroughs in CK2
-Starting as a major empire
-Marriage game in the HRE
-Independent count
-Muslim
-Republic
-Zoroastrian
-Norse Viking
-Heretic
Similarly, in EU3 the game is pretty much completely different playing as a non-western country, an OPM in Europe, a mercantile power, a colonial power, a land power, a naval power, republic, etc. Balancing and focusing your country's abilities serves as a compelling dynamic to try to solve various problems, both unavoidable ones and ones of your own ambition. Basically why people log 1000s of hours on these games in a nutshell.

[WealthyRadish]

I finished the first part of a mod I'm making for M&T, which overhauls the East Asian religions (Buddhism gets its own group, Taoic gets Confucianism/Taoism/Shenism, Japan gets its own group, some other tweaking). Still need to write a bunch of vital events and decisions, and fully test it, but all the new religions are now functioning like normal ones.

It was a lot more challenging than modding vanilla. Dei Gratia has such enormous amounts of text, it's actually insane. Any suggestions for new events/whatever you guys would like to see while I'm at it?

[metime00]

So I finally finished my massive 120 hour HRE converter game, and so I decided I'd play a short game to ease myself out of EU4 to go back to school. I thought I'd play the US since I got the US-centric DLC. But I've played the revolutionary war twice and it seems incredibly strange how they set it up. There's next to no british troops in the US at all, and I can just steamroll and capture every British territory in the US area, but it doesn't have cores on any of the territories, and annexing them all would take ungodly amounts of diplomatic power. So at the end of the revolution I've completely annihilated the british holdings in North America, but I'm left having to go to war with them again, repeated wars, to take what was traditionally the US's. And in the timeframe provided it would be impossible to get the US to the size and makeup it was in real life by that point. It's been really bothering me.

Am I missing something or has anyone else tried to play the US in the revolution starting scenario and found it disappointing? Is it likely that such a situation might be remedied by the upcoming expansion (of course any claims either way would probably be baseless). I hope that with the colonies acting like vassals it would be more in line with the mechanics to have a true revolution that would allow a player to mirror the actual US situation and holdings at the various points in the short time given to it before 1821. It pains me to have to be so thoroughly disappointed with this, when the rest of the game is so fantastic....

[Catastrophic lolcats]

the US dlc was horribly rushed and was originally meant to be a preorder reward. EU4 is definitely meant to be played from the earlier dates rather than historical war scenarios as the EU series is very bad at modelling them.

[Karlito]

Yeah, the later bookmarks are often set up terribly. I don't bother with them at all.

[snelg]

Their previous games mostly weren't that good with the later bookmarks either. Not that I've used them much since the campaign max length gets shorter, I hate it when the game ends on its own because then I'm still having fun with it (or I would already have quit). A problem I have mostly had with Victoria and sometimes Hearts of Iron. Maybe because they're a little shorter. I guess those are the main reasons I haven't grabbed that dlc. And judging by that description by metime00 I'm pretty glad I didn't.

[metime00]

Although the problems with the US are not related to the dlc, they're just not fixed by it. I think with the colonial system being similar to a vassal system the whole revolutionary war and US scenario will get alot better. I'm imagining that this is similar to how vanilla CK2 had no factions, and so revolts were these wimpy disorganized things, much like revolts in EU4, and the only way to be able to control the US during the revolution is for it to be a sovereign state. The DLC itself I think is pretty good for flavor, but it, like playing the US at all, will probably only be interesting through further expansion.

It sucks but from what it sounds like it's been a problem for a while with the Paradox games. I'll return to you in a week's time, USA!

[Wiles]

The DLC is out on Steam and the 1.4 patch notes are here: http://www.eu4wiki.com/Patch_1.4

I'm debating whether or not to pick it up - I'm thinking I might get more enjoyment out of EU4 if a wait for a couple more DLCs come out. The base game got a little stale for me after a full playthrough.

[Bluerobin]

I got the DLC and started a game as the Fox tribe (single province native new to the expansion). It's... way, way, way better than playing as a native before. I've heard not-so-great things about westernizing, though. They added a bunch of native-only tech and buildings and apparently when you convert your government you lose all of it, so you end up with a military that's about 1/3 too big to support and no buildings increasing your income or diplomatic relations. I know some of the content is in the patch and some is expansion only, but I'm not sure which is which since I didn't try it with the patch before the expansion.

One thing I DID see floating around is that it's possible to play 1.3 if you have save games you want to finish before you move on to 1.4.

You can now play with the previous version of Eu4 (v1.3.2) by right-clicking the game in the Games Library and selecting Properties and then the BETAS tab, the select the 1.3.2 version in the dropdown.
This can be handy if you want to finish an old save using the old rules or just want to compare features to before. Just be aware that this version is unsupported, your ironman saves will not be ironman and you can't play MP with people using another version.

[MoLAoS]

If I were within arms reach of a Paradox dev right now I would punch them in the face and not feel at all bad about it. I saw this event I hadn't seen before to kill my heir, and he had a 0 in admin so it was worth it. Then they fucked me taking 100 ducats and like 25 prestige and legitimacy because apparently I killed him and was discovered. Okay, I ate that, no biggy. THEN they fucking hit me for like 2 stab, another 100 ducats, and more prestige, or I could suicide, thus getting a shitty regency and losing sweden and norway due to taking massive prestige hits from the event. And since it was Ironman I couldn't savescum. I was just about to end a war against the Teuts for Dazing and Ost and Memel and Chelmno plus a separate peace for the Livs for Kurland and Samogotia or something. Due to shitty Ironman save spam it had taken me two hours to get to this point. I had even had to take down the Hungarian armies due to Tuets allying them, but luckily I had Bohemia, Poland, and Lithuania on my side. All because of a fucking event chain I couldn't possibly have known the MASSIVE consequences of without looking in the damn game files. And if I hadn't suicided I'm sure the bullshit events over something that wasn't really a big deal would have kept on rolling in. And the heir I got in his place wasn't really any better with 0 dip points. Given some stuff that happened in other games that was much more fair but still annoying I am probably going to permanently give up on Ironman. The event chain is basically a big fuck you. Once you go beyond the original decision all the choices in both followup events are game ending in Ironman, especially as Denmark who really can't afford to drop its personal Union in the first 5 years of the game.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

Dicking around with native americans in the CoP DLC. They're rather overpowered. I was playing as Caddo which is a OPM tribe and I just bounced around the map for a few years before colonising around 5 provinces and roflstomping the Aztecs. Expansion is then super fast with +1 colonist from natives tech and +2 from exploration if you take it as the first national idea. 
I was deliberately trying to play a very slow game since I was trying to see what happens if you get a nation with colonial underlings into a personal union and integrating them as someone who has their capital in the new world. No such luck apart from the PU with England (who had no colonial nations)

Spoiler: image (click to show/hide)

Thoughts on the DLC:
The patch has really limited AE and vassal feeding. While I thought AE and coalitions needed to be toned down a little it's pretty much nonexistent now. You cna go on a murderous rampage in the HRE and nobody will bat an eye. I personally find this rather boring since there's really nothing stopping snowballing now. 

Not a fan of the change to vassal feeding either. Now vassals will almost never buy a province even if it's their culture and religion. My fondest memory of EU4 so far was punching India into little vassal states as Poland separating them by culture and slowly consuming them. I don't really see why it was removed, the AI was already restricted to buying their own culture and most places in the world are decently cultural heterogeneous. With the oversea integration malus it was fairly close time wise to conquering and coring. I would have just made vassal states more prone to revolt, harder to integrate or maybe an admin cost on top of the legitimacy cost.

As for protectorates I'm rather disappointed with them as well. What should be a really interesting mechanic seems to be nothing else but a fancy guarantee. Getting +50% trade is nice and the guarantee +25% tech increase for the protectorate is nice but it still feels lacking especially when compared to good ol' vassalising.
It would have been nice if they acted more like a colonial nation where you could impact their development by paying leader points. The ability to slowly Christianise, advance their tech standing and finally for a large commitment be able to diplo-annex them. I guess we'll see something like this in the likely Indian expansion.
It also makes the Eastern tech group much better than the Western tech group for the ability to vassalise Chinese and Indian tech groups. If you want to be the master of India then playing Poland or Russia seems to be the way to do it.

The random world generator is a mess. It's just simply awful. The best features out of the DLC have been the native play which is fun although possibly a bit too powerful and the colonial nations which really do add some interesting dynamics. Sadly the AI is still rather bad at colonising AI and I've noticed the AI is really bad at choosing areas where a colonial nation could form.

Westernisation is much better than before. It's less punishing and random than before but it does seem to weigh much more heavily on having a good leader.

All in all it's been a rather odd expansion. A lot of stuff I'm not too happy with plus some stuff I do like. I don't really see myself playing much for now, even playing up to 1718 as Caddo was a boring chore. I guess I just found vassal feeding more interesting than the war core war cycle.

[EnigmaticHat]

Have they nerfed coalitions yet?

[Tarran]

According to the threads in the Paradox forums, they don't appear to have nerfed them. Instead, they made it so AI nations almost never form them. But I can't say for sure--I'm waiting for MEIOU and Taxes, and perhaps a vanilla patch before playing again.