Europa Universalis IV Catch-All

Any guesses on total number of hours it takes to get comfortable playing EU4?

jrralls wrote:

Any guesses on total number of hours it takes to get comfortable playing EU4?

I can tell you it's higher than 7.

I was probably at the 15 hour mark before I thought I knew what I was doing and then by about the 30 hour mark I realized how clueless I was at the 15 hour mark. Then at the 60 hour mark I realized I didn’t know much at 30 hours.

I’m guessing this cycle will continue to repeat itself.

I hear you. Same sort of thing happened to me with Crusader Kings II.

It's amazing how Paradox games can make you feel like a complete newb after playing a game for 60 hours.

The good part of it is that the process is a lot of fun. I'd say after 2-3 hours I've felt like I'm enjoying myself. Spending an hour watching a good Let's Play can shorten things up a lot too.

Aggie-SWO wrote:

I was probably at the 15 hour mark before I thought I knew what I was doing and then by about the 30 hour mark I realized how clueless I was at the 15 hour mark. Then at the 60 hour mark I realized I didn’t know much at 30 hours.

I’m guessing this cycle will continue to repeat itself.

It does.

The thing is, every new country kind of plays differently, some more than others. Also, as you get more confident, the game will play differently based on what you are trying to accomplish with a given country. So, I think someone can get comfortable with the mechanics relatively quickly, especially if you watch some teaching Let's Plays (looks like Sean Sands is putting out some teaching videos - I have not watched them but assume they are good).

I think having an interest in history for the period helps somewhat, if only for the player to understand the initial conditions (Castile is fighting the Reconquista, France and England are still in the Hundred Years' War, etc.) and what happened historically. I find this gives a initial set of objectives (do whatever the country you are playing as did) and a feel for why other countries' are what they are at the start.

Even once you have the mechanics down, the game always seems to have a curveball for you though.

This is new...
IMAGE(http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb321/kergguz/20181006_094200.jpg)
IMAGE(http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb321/kergguz/20181006_094927.jpg)

Looks like Steam has some new hooks that devs can use if they want.

New mission system has really brought fresh blood to this for me.

boogle wrote:

New mission system has really brought fresh blood to this for me.

I haven't played it yet, but my brother says it's 'borrowed' from the Hearts of Iron national focus trees. If that's the case it sounds interesting, because the focus trees are what has lifted HoI above Paradox's other titles for me.

Yeah basically no more filler missions and you have a tree so you know how to get where you want to go. Really nice.

Big difference is that in EU4 you still have to do the mission to progress, in HOI4 you just have to wait 70 days or whatever.

However, being able to take missions that move you toward how you want to build out your country is pretty huge. Much prefer over old random mission system.

So I ticked over my 1000 hours of EU4 yesterday. I am not sure if I am happy about that. I wish it was more. ^_^

So top 3 rarest achievements I have.
1) Anglophile: complete the English mission tree.
2) Sweet Harmony: harmonise 7 religions as a Confucian
3) The White Elephant: as Ayutthaya, own all of Indochina and Burma as core provinces.

The top 3 most common achievements I don't.
1) In the Name of the Father: As an Orthodox country, have 100 Patriarch Authority.
2) Factionalism: Have 3 different estates in your country with at least 70% influence each.
3) Grand Duchy: Starting as a Duchy, have 1000 development without upgrading your government rank.

I only play normal im scum

DoveBrown wrote:

So I ticked over my 1000 hours of EU4 yesterday. I am not sure if I am happy about that. I wish it was more. ^_^

Here's a question for the Millennial. What are the 3 best tips you'd give to someone who is 10 hours in?

easy sunday wrote:
DoveBrown wrote:

So I ticked over my 1000 hours of EU4 yesterday. I am not sure if I am happy about that. I wish it was more. ^_^

Here's a question for the Millennial. What are the 3 best tips you'd give to someone who is 10 hours in?

I don’t have 1k hours, but I’ve played enough:

1) watch some YouTube videos, they’re really helpful about explaining the mechanics and some of the ui. There are tons of sub menus and little hidden buttons everywhere. Some are pretty important. Trade can be hard to understand. YouTubeing and explanation of it is probably for the best.

2) I liked when I started going with a big country - Spain, France, England, and Austria to name a few. These contries are really hard to ‘mess up’ anything that you can’t fix eventually. Even when you see every peasant in France taking arms against your government, it’ll all be fine after it’s over. It’ll help you also work the diplomacy a little and understand a little about annexation and PUs.

3) There’s two sides to this game to me - there’s the colonization and the conquest. England, Portugal, Spain, France, and The Netherlands (if you start late) are good ones to choose to understand these mechanics. For conquest, it’s really hard to beat Russia or the Ottomans for easy conquest. For a little more challenge, playing a northern German state can be a lot of fun and challenging - ditto for Italian states.

BlackSheep wrote:

1) watch some YouTube videos, they’re really helpful about explaining the mechanics and some of the ui. There are tons of sub menus and little hidden buttons everywhere. Some are pretty important. Trade can be hard to understand. YouTubeing and explanation of it is probably for the best.

My only question about this is which ones? Obviously, earlier videos, no matter how good, have been made obsolete by new patches, DLC, and game mechanics. Is there a EU4 YouTube "star" who's dependable no matter what? Thanks!

Natus wrote:
BlackSheep wrote:

1) watch some YouTube videos, they’re really helpful about explaining the mechanics and some of the ui. There are tons of sub menus and little hidden buttons everywhere. Some are pretty important. Trade can be hard to understand. YouTubeing and explanation of it is probably for the best.

My only question about this is which ones? Obviously, earlier videos, no matter how good, have been made obsolete by new patches, DLC, and game mechanics. Is there a EU4 YouTube "star" who's dependable no matter what? Thanks!

Elysium did a Beginner's Guide series last month on the GWJPlays Youtube channel that should fairly up to date (and the videos are each short). The episodes are nicely compartmentalized so you not having all the DLC or it not covering the changes in the most recent patch shouldn't be too big of a deal. I'm not a big video content consumer but with CK2 and then EU4 I found it was the easiest way to quickly learn the interface and what's most important

My advice would be don't worry too much about not knowing every mechanic and how to use it. I don't see any of the individual systems in EU4 as particularly complicated on there own, there are just a lot of them that interact with each other. If, for example, you don't even bother touching trade you can power through just fine if you're playing a big country.

And once you're past the basic familiarity phase if you end up suffering a setback in the game (usually by losing a war) keep playing, having to change your strategy and your goals to be less ambitious can still lead to satisfying outcomes.

easy sunday wrote:
DoveBrown wrote:

So I ticked over my 1000 hours of EU4 yesterday. I am not sure if I am happy about that. I wish it was more. ^_^

Here's a question for the Millennial. What are the 3 best tips you'd give to someone who is 10 hours in?

Don't super worry about things you don't know.
Hover tips are your friend.
Ottomans is a fun learning game.

What is the hardest achievement in this game you have personally won?

easy sunday wrote:
DoveBrown wrote:

So I ticked over my 1000 hours of EU4 yesterday. I am not sure if I am happy about that. I wish it was more. ^_^

Here's a question for the Millennial. What are the 3 best tips you'd give to someone who is 10 hours in?

I feel like I am bad person to give general newbie tips. I kept thinking about it during the day and it's that this game keeps surprising and evolving that keeps me interested. It's definitely a game where I embrace my ignorance.

I don't fully understand trade so I just put trade ships in home node until I have 80% control and it's enough. I quite often don't understand combat so I avoid offensive wars unless I have a numbers and a tech advantage. My diplomacy is mostly I ally my rivals' rivals and that's it. So much I don't understand and just muddle through.

Sean's YouTube series A Beginners Guide to EU4 on the GWJPlays YouTube channel are great.

easy sunday wrote:
DoveBrown wrote:

So I ticked over my 1000 hours of EU4 yesterday. I am not sure if I am happy about that. I wish it was more. ^_^

Here's a question for the Millennial. What are the 3 best tips you'd give to someone who is 10 hours in?

- Don't worry about it - this is just general advice. Don't understand trade? Don't worry about it. Don't understand army composition? Don't worry about it. Diplomacy? Don't worry about it. Play and you will figure stuff out. Videos help but just playing helps more.
- Doing nothing is always a good idea. Not sure what to do? Do nothing. This is not always true, like if you are in a war. But otherwise, doing nothing is always a valid strategy. This is hard to learn because most other games pander to your need to do always be doing something. In EU4 doing stuff will cost you monarch points, or manpower or gold or whatever. Doing nothing let's you build those up so when you do something it will really be something.
- Pick your rival (not the game rivals, your real one) and get a counterweight. Ally with someone on the other side of that rival. Make it so that if they come for you, someone will come for them. This will change over the course of a game but always try to have at least one counterweight with your main rival in your area.

One extra:
- Experiment, try weird stuff. Find out why the Ottomans are not great at being a colonial power (or maybe they are?). Try a commerce game, a colonial game, a blobby war machine game, a diplo-tricky game. Try to recreate history (Brandenburg -> Prussia is interesting for instance). Try to break history (making the HRE a consolidated nation is hard but fun too). The point is to play a bunch of different styles.

This is such a great post, tboon!

tboon wrote:
easy sunday wrote:
DoveBrown wrote:

So I ticked over my 1000 hours of EU4 yesterday. I am not sure if I am happy about that. I wish it was more. ^_^

Here's a question for the Millennial. What are the 3 best tips you'd give to someone who is 10 hours in?

- Experiment, try weird stuff. Find out why the Ottomans are not great at being a colonial power (or maybe they are?).

Tried it. I tried to recreate the Ottoman invasion of modern Romania. That didn't go so well. I may have to try again.

tboon wrote:

- Pick your rival (not the game rivals, your real one) and get a counterweight. Ally with someone on the other side of that rival. Make it so that if they come for you, someone will come for them. This will change over the course of a game but always try to have at least one counterweight with your main rival in your area.

To build off of this, the systems in Europa Universalis are accurate enough that you can apply lessons like this that you get from real history much more successfully than a game like Civilization. Whether you play a power that you are already interested and knowledgeable about, or become interested in the power that you are playing, reading about them, who they were fighting, what they were fighting about, and how they won or lost the fight really translates well. In a lot of cases that sort of synergy really heightens my enjoyment of the game. In my example I had read a bit of history on the dissolution and conquering of Poland, so specifically played a game with the intention of stopping that from happening.

Also, a lot of the lessons from Machiavelli's The Prince can be quite well applied to EU.

Also, try to keep in mind the things that stop or annoy you, and make sure you are doing the same things. Related to TBoon's advice: don't you hate it when you want to declare war on someone, but they are allied with someone stronger so you don't? Make sure you're doing the same thing! As a corollary, don't you love it when a neighbor you've been eyeing for awhile gets involved in a war too big for them and you jump in to kick them while they're down? Try not to open yourself up to that.

Edit: Also, try to get into the spirit of the fact that the objectives of the game are open-ended. It's not like Civ where you either won or lost. For my first couple games I didn't even have a "win" condition in mind, at least not initially. For the Poland game my win condition was really just "do better than real Poland". In later games you can try to really stretch into areas you don't understand. "I've never really been good at Trade, I'm going to play as Venice to force myself to learn it!" but early on follow the advice you've gotten already: don't sweat what you don't know and aren't good at, there are plenty of avenues of activities open to you, work with what you are comfortable or mostly comfortable with and let your skill level grow naturally.

Playing as Venice, England, Spain, Portugal or France and focusing on trade are pretty solid learning tools. The nodes all have arrows and frigates rule the waves when protecting trade. I’ve had games where I’m even Sweden, The Netherlands, or Germany (very late game) where I just got addicted to making trade work. Get those traders in nodes upriver of you and choke everyone else out with sea power...

How do you all handle the overwhelming amount of DLC and layering it in? Especially when you are starting out? I came in late to this game, and I've picked up the 2-3 most recommended DLC packs. But I'm not sure of the best way to layer them in. And I'm interested in grabbing the others, but how to layer THEM in? Best to play Vanilla for a bit, then add them in one at a time? Or just turn on everything and go? (I have the same issue with CK2, which I've played a ton, but I'm 5-6 DLCs behind on that one too.)

Just turn it all on, whatever you have. Don't worry about layering, just go.

A lot of people get hung up on the DLC, with reason: there's a lot of it. However, the basic game stays (mostly) the same, so there's not much sense in worrying too much about it. Some DLC will add a mechanics, sure, but they are (mostly) additional not fundamental (I don't think they are at least). What the DLC does do is add more stuff to do: more events, more things to tweak, more decisions.

Exceptions: The Art of War, Wealth of Nations, and Common Sense. Those do make some fundamental changes to the game. Hopefully you have those, if not it's not that big a deal, really.

The rest of the DLC falls into two camps: general goodies and flavor. General goodies tend to be the older DLC like Rights of Man (ruler traits, great powers) and Coassacks (despite the name, the highlights are generally applicable across the whole game, like condottieri, more spy stuff). Flavor DLCs add more, well, flavor for certain regions like Rule Brittania (more stuff to do in the British Isles) and Cradle of Civilization (more stuff to do in the Middle East). I suggest getting those if/when you really get into the game.

Bottom line is don't worry about it. EU4 is a great game without any DLC, with some DLC and with all the DLC (except Conquest pf Paradise, that is just garbage IMO). Just play!

My suggestion is to play the game.
Then if you like the game, buy some DLC.
Then play the game more.
Then a DLC sale hits and you buy third rome and realize that Russia is a really fun game.
Then you play the game more.

Hangdog wrote:

How do you all handle the overwhelming amount of DLC and layering it in? Especially when you are starting out? I came in late to this game, and I've picked up the 2-3 most recommended DLC packs. But I'm not sure of the best way to layer them in. And I'm interested in grabbing the others, but how to layer THEM in? Best to play Vanilla for a bit, then add them in one at a time? Or just turn on everything and go? (I have the same issue with CK2, which I've played a ton, but I'm 5-6 DLCs behind on that one too.)

To echo others, DLC is not essential. I played vanilla at the start only 2 years ago and got about 60 hours before any recommended DLC was purhcased. For the recomended, people mean more that it creates new mechanics that change the game. Within itself, the EU4 base game has plenty for you to get acquainted with. I personally feel that starting a game with all the DLC as a new comer is worse than starting without, as there's things like estates with are a whole other mechanic you just shouldn't need to worry about starting out.

So I started playing again and realized that I’ve missed out on some of the updates and dlc I had. Playing as brandenberg, I had to restart about 6 times before I decided to forget Poland, ally with Hungary, Denmark and Austria and attack Pomerania first. Worked like a charm. All the other times, they’d release, vassalize and consume Danzig, leaving me with an onerous task, but this last time, I’ve made huge gains and Poland is whittled to nothing while I ended up accidentally becoming the HRE emperor by accident and using that to consume my neighbors without threat of Austria.

Definitely a different feel to he games.

I like the new mission system, it gives the player some nice long-term guidance, but I think it makes things a bit too easy with the claims (permanent or otherwise) some missions grant. Gobbling up Scotland and Ireland as England has never been so easy. Same with getting France into a personal union.