I'm probably going to use this to make a video, so here it is in text form even if I don't.
A lot of people have been messaging me, asking me about the EU5 timeline. You can see it here (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqJiGYdOhtI). Having played the game for about 400 hours now, I dismissed this as not being very relevant, but a lot of people have been dooming over it, people have been saying, "this is a clear sign we're getting another terrible paradox release." Some youtubers have made a response to the drama, and I figured I'd also make a response to it.
Here's what we're going to talk about: What EU5 even is as a video game, what you spend the majority of your time doing, and why the this drama doesn't seem to be impacting the vast majority of content creators who continue to believe the game is good.
The first problem I'm going to immediately run in to is asking myself, "what don't you guys know?" I've been playing EU5 on and off for over a month now, I think, and I have over 300 hours in to the game. I'm trying to play it less so I can actually make make videos and stream, and so I don't wear it out by the time it launches so that I can stream it daily. What that means, though, is that I know so much about the game that it's hard for me to describe a lot of things in ways that I don't miss obvious details.
For example, I said in a previous video that, "Germany doesn't have much content." What I meant to say is, "Other than the Dutch, Swiss, Austria, Bohemia, Saxony, Brandenburg, and the Hansa, the generic Germans don't have much content through cultural advancements." I assumed people knew about the nations with unique content, and I assumed we all knew there were lots of Situations unique to the German region, and that we all knew I was talking purely about cultural Advancements. Wording things properly, especially on the internet, is particularly difficult for me. Wording things properly when people get angry and want to take things more serious than you intend it to be is even more difficult, for all people.
I'm going to first explain the EU5 gameplay loop, and then I'm going to explain the AI issues, but don't think that this means I'm dismissing the AI issues and saying they're totally fine. If you read till the end of this post you'll also see why I don't think the AI issues will last till launch, and even if they did why they'd be easily fixable.
So lets start with the basics, what is EU5 even about? I would describe my time in EU5 as working on a fixed up version of Imperator: Rome's territory management, using an economy more similar to Victoria 3, and having the EU4 systems as the base flavor of it all. You'll see lots of similarities when you start playing the game. There's still CBs, there's still armies walking around the map that you control, there's still discipline, there's still improve relations modifiers, etc. A lot of these modifiers have been touched up to be slightly different, or more balanced, or be changed in some way. It feels like EU4:2 in that regard. People who are older might remember when games would have a sequel, and they'd use that sequel to revisit older mechanics.
The main gameplay element, at least for me, is building up your territories. That means setting up cities, setting up towns, setting up rural areas. Building RGOs (those are the basic resources) on your locations. Locations also have secondary resources they can produce, such as all areas with woods being able to place down lumber mills to also produce lumber. (A lumber RGO though will, to my knowledge, not have any resource upkeep, and then will be cheaper. Lumber RGOs also allow you to place down a sawmill and get 10% more lumber.)
You set up Scriptoriums to produce books, and having books allows you to set up libraries, libraries in turn have an upkeep on books, which let you produce more scriptoriums. The efficiency of a building depends on the cost of it's input goods, and how much it can sell the output goods for. Since Libraries then upkeep books, this makes books more efficient to produce. Scriptoriums take paper, so your paper buildings now become more efficient. There are various ways to produce paper, so all the input goods you need to produce paper become more efficient. The gameplay pattern, to me, revolves around these sorts of things.
After your country has it's goods needs taken care of, and you have enough basic resources, you might reach a point where it's difficult to find anything efficient to build. This is solved either through spamming down marketplaces (which do have a goods upkeep) to give you more trade capacity, or through some age 2 buildings with upkeep. These can be armories for manpower, universities for more literacy and pop promotion speed, or theatres. You build buildings which need goods, and then in turn those goods become worth producing, and you just keep expanding your country and becoming more and more powerful.
There's also the ever growing need for food. As you promote more and more pops to clerics and burghers, they will no longer be peasants producing food. They will eat more food, and produce no food. The need for strong food producing rural locations then starts arising. You want a location with a strong food good (wheat or livestock) on a location with access to a fresh water source (a river or fresh water lake.) Those allow you to build irrigation, which slightly increase pop capacity, but importantly give you a food output modifier to the location. Then if all the food RGOs are built, and irrigation is built, you can also produce farming villages. Farming villages produce livestock (flat food) and give a food output modifier as well. The difference between a well built food location and one that you merely slapped down food RGOs on can be 6 to 1.
Of course you might not have enough population in a territory to man all the food RGOs, the farming villages, and the irrigation. You'll have to use one of your valuable cabinet positions to push migration in to that location then to fill out enough people. Or you could make the choice to leave it as is, and use your cabinet positions to do something you find more valuable. This is where the choices on how you actually play out the game start to come in.
This is, of course, keeping in mind Parliament. Every 5 years you can use Parliament to get access to a CB (so you don't have to use a no CB war.) That takes 50% support from Parliament away though, when you get a Parliament CB. You need 50% approval from Parliament to pass a Parliament action you're trying to take. If you fail a Parliament action (less than 50% support) you lose 7 stability. It's your choice if you always want to use Parliament to generate a CB, but you can also use your support to get a free law change, or just sit on Parliament to let it pass.
Passing parliament issues ranges from not very impactful, to long term massive benefits. They can give permanent increases to the effective RGO size of a location by 1, or set up a new town for free, or permanently push yourself further centralized, or get more development. They can also be something simple like just some stability. Parliaments will always have a modifier you get while it's active, such as reduced cost of setting up new food RGOs, and an effect if it passes, such as permanently increasing the size of a few food RGO locations.
These are the choices you have to make when playing your country.
I said all this because absolutely nothing of what I just said has anything to do with how much the AI expands, or doesn't expand. I've gotten lost in developing my country more than a few times, I keep delaying using my Parliament for a CB thinking to myself, "oh I just need 5 more years to build a few things then I'll go to war." I use 5 more years, and 5 more years, and I just want to spend my money on a few more roads to get my iron producing territories closer in proximity to the capital. Then because my iron is cheaper I can get more cheap Armories down. With access to tons of surplus manpower I can now increase the size of my army, since the Armory is using many goods to maintain itself, and my buildings became far more efficient, and I could expand my buildings, growing my economy.
5 years goes by, and another 5 years, and you don't notice you've been building your country for 20 years to go to war. This is why almost all content creators with access to the game haven't really even complained or noticed the AI issue. The gameplay loop of EU5, completely works and has been enjoyed by literally everyone I've talked to. Unlike EU4 the gameplay loop during peace is not something you want to escape because you get so bored of it.
Many of you will say this doesn't matter if the AI doesn't know how to play the game. The question I have to ask you guys is if any of those timelapses you watched showed roads? Or tax base growth? Or anything at all other than merely borders showing that the AI knew how to play the game?
The AI will build roads, it will build RGOs, it will build it's economy, it will build and expand standing armies. It understands how the play the game. It has some hiccups here and there, such as not expanding it's marketplaces as much as you'd hope, but it will over time increase it's tax base, it's road network, and it's army size. That was actually what was most surprising to me, I expected another game where the AI barely understood how to play it's own game, and this AI seemed to actually build up.
What is causing the AI's lack of expansion then? A few issues, really. Less issues than you'd imagine. The Ottomans didn't expand at first because you couldn't core wrong religion land. This meant that their actual power barely grew with their territory, as only having the +5% control of incorporated land instead of the +20% of cored land meant the harsh Anatolian topography rendered their territorial gains meaningless pretty often.
Another issue has been alliance blocks. The AI doesn't seem to ever want to break alliances, and alliances use far too little diplomatic relations. As I just mentioned, the AI will slowly increase in power over time, and when the AI can have 7 alliances, (yes actually, they can have that many) it will be almost impossible to push in to 8 different AIs. In many timelapses you saw the Ottomans reach in to the Balkans then stop. Why was that? Because Serbia, Bulgaria, Kyiv, Muscovy, Poland, Wallachia, and Hungary had all allied each other. There's not much the Turks can do against almost 100k defenders (well, they did in history, but this is still just a video game for now.)
A third issue is actually really silly: The AI on that build was unfortunately incapable of using the mid-late game CBs. Not something that sounds good to say out loud, of course, and people will say "this close to release? What a disaster!" I don't really think it's that big a deal though, as it was caught, it was fixed, and as I explain above it didn't actually impact people's gameplay loop nearly as much as you'd think.
As a last thought before I try to end this post, I don't think many of you will be reaching 1500 to notice these issues, even if the patch went live as-was. This game takes a long time to learn, and I don't think I even hit 1400 for 100 hours of my own time. I kept restarting, and I kept learning new things, and I kept wanting to try new countries with new content. Every time I learned something new I thought "oh that's so much better than what I did" and I felt like restarting my run again.
The AI will keep up with you, and it will probably beat you for a good 50 hours, before 100 hours it will definitely keep up with you. Many of you are expecting to go in to EU5 with the same mentality you did EU4, playing the smallest most irrelevant nation and conquering your entire continent within 50 years. That's simply not how EU5 is going to play. I recommend all of you play at least a mid sized country on your first run, and really take time to try to learn the game.
Now with all that rambling said I am going to be done. You can all leave a comment with your thoughts if you'd like.
