Paradox Studio Thread

What are your expectations for the EU5 release?

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LovisXVI said:
Disagree heavily. 1337 was a far more interesting start date because it was a period when things all around the world were on the precipice and the start of the transition to the Early Modern period. In 1444, most of the circumstances by then had begun to become inevitable due to inertia, the Ottomans WERE going to conquer the Byzantines and take over the Balkans, France WON the Hundred Years' War, the Ming HAD won and would be stable for centuries to come, the Timurid Empire WAS imminently collapsing, the Delhi Sultanate WAS dead in the water, the Aztecs HAD conquered the valley of Mexico, Poland HAD won the conflict it had with the Teutons and WOULD unite with the Lithuanians, the Haspburgs WERE going to take over Hungary. The Germans HAD lost the Ghibellines and Guelphs wars. The only iconic states of that era that don't feel inevitable are the "Inca Empire", Mamluks, and Mughals, because it was still the piddly Kingdom of Qosqo, still very healthy and powerful militarily, and a circumstance of an adventurous prince, respectively.
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I liked EU5 pushing the start date back but, imo, I think 1337 is still too early. CK2 had the problem with the Charlemagne start date where nothing ever really wound up resembling what the world should have looked like because Paradox games invariably hit a wall in their ability to simulate historical events because numbers can't really account for human agency. 1337 is the same; it's before all the decisive events of the century kicked off, and so Paradox doesn't just have to represent what it was like to go through them, but to have them launch to begin with. EU5 tries to get around with all these different situational mechanics but the more they compound and the more railroading is added the more transparent the inability of the game to meaningfully simulate these things is made. To your point, in 1444 France had already virtually won the HYW, but in EU5 the HYW never becomes a HYW because the game has trouble meaningfully simulating the wars ups and downs of actual war or making its characters feel human. I personally would have gone with 1356; you would have that desired equilibrium represented from the get-go (the English actually have the upper hand on the continent, the Red Turban rebellion is well underway, the Byzantines, Turks and Serbs are all in equilibrium, etc.) and it would bypass needing to try and fail to simulate the initial Black Death and its consequences.
 
Been playing CK2 recently. I've been on a Protestant run, mending the schism as Iconoclast, then making Waldenesianism the default faith. Gave up control of the Basileia Rhomaion and moved to Britain. Everything's great, except the English (which I created by giving control of England to the Normans) conquered the rest of the region ~200 years ago and started wiping out the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish cultures. For historical accuracy I've tried to revive those cultures and place them in charge of the counties and duchies of Scotland/Wales/Ireland. When I moved, there were only 1-2 men of each culture remaining, so I've had to be fairly aggressive in landing them and generating courtiers of the desired culture. Unfortunately, if left to their own devices, the AI keeps marrying 38 year old chaste women, and dying out within a generation. To prevent this I've been timing my land redistribution to the time my daughters come of age, and marrying them off to all my vassals of non-English cultures. However, those daughters keep joining some underground Iconoclast society, and when their husbands find out, they immediately burn them at the stake. The last one was pregnant at the time with his child. What the FUCK.

It pisses me off that A) there's no way I can destroy this society, and B) my vassals can just murder their wives and princesses with zero political consequences. That should not be OK. I could understand divorce/annulment (not like we have a pope), but you should not just be able to publicly execute the daughter of your liege lord in one of the most painful ways possible just because she has slightly heterodox private religious beliefs on the nature of priesthood and property rights. In theory we don't even have religious authorities to justify or sanction this, so you're literally just deciding on a whim to kill the daughter of the man who raised you from being a random illiterate knight without family or title. Insane. And I can't do anything about this without incurring tyranny.

In general I don't think AI characters should be imprisoning or killing their spouses for any reason. The game doesn't have the ability to either simulate or think through what should actually happen if you do this, but unless you're a low-rank ruler married to a random peasant, the political consequences of killing your wife would have been enormous. Wives are generally from noble families with power and money and armies and alliances. The wives Henry VIII killed were what the game would consider "lowborn," and there was massive fallout from just that.

Next time, lesson learned: no enabling underground cults in the game rules. I wish Paradox had play-tested M&M more before releasing it.

I even went as far as joining the society to be able to see other members. My favorite daughter, who I'm running a eugenics program with, is of course part of the society. I don't have full cognatic, so I can't land her, and I'm terrified of landing her husband (which I'd like to do because the game boosts the fertility of landed characters, and this daughter is a lesbian) because I think he'll kill her. I'm not sure what to do.
 
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Cooked Rabbit said:
For historical accuracy I've tried to revive those cultures and place them in charge of the counties and duchies of Scotland/Wales/Ireland. When I moved, there were only 1-2 men of each culture remaining,
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Unfortunately with small cultures you basically have to plan to keep them alive from the get-go. In a Venice run one of the first things I did was to invite the few Coptic and Assyrian courtiers the game generates on start to marry them into either extra daughters or other courtiers to ensure that when I conquered Egypt and Syria in there would actually be a healthy dynasty ready to prop up in counties and duchies.
 
Alternative start dates are a questionable decision, especially for EUV. The only paradox game that does alternative start-dates well is CK2, but even that has its problems. Vic2, Hoi4, EU4, and CK3 all have alt start dates but they're ignored by both players and the developers. Why does EUV need an alternative start date now when the initial start date still needs work?

It's telling that total conversion mods don't bother with alt start dates. The only instance I can remember is TNO, but that horrible idea never got off the ground for a reason.

Johann has repeated the mistakes of CK3 and Vic3 and should probably just script the AI to behave a certain way at this point.
 
If I were to rebalance the way integration and coring works in EU5, I would do the following:
  • Integration now gives the same max control as cores do currently
  • Bonuses from integration now scale instead of only being applied at 100% integration
  • Passive integration speed is faster and is dependent on the location's religion, culture, satisfaction, and control
    • This should make mechanics like religious tolerance more important
    • It would take a few years at best and a few decades at worst
  • The integration cabinet action now provides a multiplier to the passive integration speed instead of giving a flat bonus
  • Cores now also provide bonuses to development, cultural tradition, and influence (next to not having an assimilation speed nerf by default)
  • Coring is no longer instantaneous; it builds up over time like integration would in this rework
    • Bonuses are still only applied when a location is fully cored
    • It would take a few decades at best and a century at worst
  • More cabinet actions are now limited to core locations (like how the develop province one currently is)
  • Spiritualist values now increase assimilation speed, while humanist values now decrease it
  • Humanism now increases cultures capacity, while spiritualist values now decrease it
    • Liberalism's bonus to cultures capacity is replaced with a different buff
  • The pop satisfaction gained from accepted culture status is increased
I think this could fix several problems:
  • The problem of multiethnic empires being unviable.
    • Being tolerant and humanist should make expanding into regions with different religions and cultures easier
    • If you're more focused on playing tall or playing in a region like Germany, where almost everyone is Catholic (before the reformation) and German, then being spiritualist and discriminatory would be more optimal.
  • The problem of expansion being tied to cabinet slots
    • You are no longer required to spam vassals to integrate and core faster
    • Vassals still wouldn't be useless, as they would have higher average control and still could integrate their locations faster than you if you didn't choose to become humanists
Thoughts?
 
The Wise Shaman said:
  • Integration now gives the same max control as cores do currently
  • Bonuses from integration now scale instead of only being applied at 100% integration
  • Passive integration speed is faster and is dependent on the location's religion, culture, satisfaction, and control
    • This should make mechanics like religious tolerance more important
    • It would take a few years at best and a few decades at worst
  • The integration cabinet action now provides a multiplier to the passive integration speed instead of giving a flat bonus
  • Cores now also provide bonuses to development, cultural tradition, and influence (next to not having an assimilation speed nerf by default)
  • Coring is no longer instantaneous; it builds up over time like integration would in this rework
    • Bonuses are still only applied when a location is fully cored
    • It would take a few decades at best and a century at worst
  • More cabinet actions are now limited to core locations (like how the develop province one currently is)
  • Spiritualist values now increase assimilation speed, while humanist values now decrease it
  • Humanism now increases cultures capacity, while spiritualist values now decrease it
    • Liberalism's bonus to cultures capacity is replaced with a different buff
  • The pop satisfaction gained from accepted culture status is increased
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This just seems like insane overbuffing for integration, which is never actually bad and gets even better from like age 3 onwards when you get more cabinet member slots and integration speed techs. You're also just rolling a bunch of stuff together that is already covered by other values or mechanics. The tradeoff between spiritualist vs. humanist is pop assimilation vs. conversion speed, so making spiritualist a super value that does both while humanist gets a bit of culture capacity would just make spiritualist the best choice nearly always. Getting land cored and increasing control is one of the few things that isn't completely effortless in this game, so making integration just give more free control is making the game easier and more boring. Your suggestion for cores giving development is already covered by prosperity. In addition, cultural tradition is a completely useless value, and cultural influence is already easy enough to get that getting one more source of it is negligible.
 
The new steam workshop page is actually the most unnecessary and garbage update they could've made, next to CS2. It's no longer beta and I don't see where I can opt out of it, it's such a lagfest eyesore.
 
The Kiel Canal has finally been added to Victoria 3.
kiel canal screenshot.png
Can we expect the Danube–Main Canal and the Nicaragua Canal next?
 
Open Face said:
[coring ramblings]
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I think they should get rid of the core system entirely. Control and prosperity are a completely adequate replacement for that. Coring was an abstraction but control is a reality dictated by where your capital and how much government buildings and crown power. There's no need to keep the abstraction anymore, it's just a left over from EU4.
 
Fig Kommandant said:
I think they should get rid of the core system entirely. Control and prosperity are a completely adequate replacement for that. Coring was an abstraction but control is a reality dictated by where your capital and how much government buildings and crown power. There's no need to keep the abstraction anymore, it's just a left over from EU4.
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I think some abstraction is necessary, because human society itself has a level of abstraction. I think the cultural homeland from Vicky 3, or at least building off the idea of it, would be better served than than cores.

That said there does need to be a way to track what can be rightfully called the 'core' territory of a state, or at least a history of ownership. If I want to force the return of land back to a reduced or conquered state in a peace deal I should be easily able to.
 
Computer God Autism said:
I think the cultural homeland from Vicky 3, or at least building off the idea of it, would be better served than than cores.
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I think a cultural homeland makes sense in a post Enlightenment world, but EU5 is at a quasi medieval world and it wasn't uncommon for a nascent state to conquer wildly and resettle to newly acquired land, like Russia moving and founding Saint-Petersburg or the Mongols and Jurchen moving their capital to China. A history of ownership would be more than enough to be able to claim a CB.
Coring is binary (sort of) and it is also in competition with the control, prosperity and cultural integration as a metric for province integration so it feels very inorganic compared to those.
 
Fig Kommandant said:
I think they should get rid of the core system entirely. Control and prosperity are a completely adequate replacement for that. Coring was an abstraction but control is a reality dictated by where your capital and how much government buildings and crown power. There's no need to keep the abstraction anymore, it's just a left over from EU4.
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Fig Kommandant said:
I think a cultural homeland makes sense in a post Enlightenment world, but EU5 is at a quasi medieval world and it wasn't uncommon for a nascent state to conquer wildly and resettle to newly acquired land, like Russia moving and founding Saint-Petersburg or the Mongols and Jurchen moving their capital to China. A history of ownership would be more than enough to be able to claim a CB.
Coring is binary (sort of) and it is also in competition with the control, prosperity and cultural integration as a metric for province integration so it feels very inorganic compared to those.
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Coring is just another step towards the goal of the player to get the most out of their provinces, and I think it's important from a gameplay perspective to make that an involved process. Removing or significantly streamlining any one of them (integrating, coring, converting, etc.) would, I think, make the game less interesting.


https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/tinto-talks-110-27th-of-may-2026.1925159/
Production buildings were one of the most-discussed balance issues post-launch: building was almost always profitable, which removed the decision-making that should exist around investment. Default Profit margins have been dramatically reduced across the board. Guilds now target 20% profit, workshops 25%, manufactories 30%, and mills 35%, down from values that were in some cases two to four times higher. Building is now a genuine investment decision: you need the right inputs available and priced well for it to pay off. Over 200 production method input amounts were recalibrated to hit these targets precisely. The practical upside is that efficiency modifiers now feel meaningful: a 5% production efficiency bonus represents a substantial share of your total margin rather than a rounding error on an already-fat profit.
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A new dev diary for EU5 came out, and, in my opinion, this is the most consequential proposed change from it. I think making it take longer for a country's economy to reach escape velocity is a good thing, and I like the direction Paradox is taking the game for the most part.
 
Fig Kommandant said:
I think a cultural homeland makes sense in a post Enlightenment world, but EU5 is at a quasi medieval world and it wasn't uncommon for a nascent state to conquer wildly and resettle to newly acquired land, like Russia moving and founding Saint-Petersburg or the Mongols and Jurchen moving their capital to China.
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Sure, but like I said it can be built on; just make the idea of a cultural homeland or the like modular. Yeah, the Turks have a cultural homeland in Anatolia now, if they get Constantinople that can extend into Thrace - or if they lose Anatolia, get pushed back into its highlands.

As it stands right now it's still way to easy for states to wipe out regional identities and dialects, let alone distinct cultures and ethnicities. Before 1.2 the most common outcome of Greece was a cultural genocide in Frankokratia.
 
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