f13.net

Demo now available on Steam; product releases on August 13th.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/236850

Here's part of the press release straight from the Paradox Forums (http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?706528-Europa-Universalis-IV-Demo-description&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8o_I5jsrDcykA9kWSuqyT-pm433jzBjOwRDHpErpX6vMtZBW7VybZ9OCGONMVHArtDcCl2D70CtcqkHE0RWX9hE5QkRA&_hsmi=9931714):

If only I still had the time to play such a title. Loved the EU and HoI series...

It's out.  I left it downloading on steam for the night, and can't try till I'm off work.  Somebody tell me how it is.   :awesome_for_real:

I'm enjoying it. I've already dropped a number of hours into it and it has a number of changes from EU 3 that are really nice. Feels more streamlined and simple (though it still has that similar EU learning curve). A number of the big changes, like coalitions and revamped coring and peace negotiation systems are better than the previous games.

The new trade system takes a bit of getting used to, though, and has aspects to it that I'm not fond of in the least -- but its a small price to pay for a lot of the other improvements. Game makes it a bit harder to blob up as a human player (harder for the AI, too, but its an EU AI so it struggling to cope with things like rebels is not surprising), at least so far with the over-extension mechanic and how a lot of systems can slow or make others more expensive if you let things get out of control.

On the whole I'd say I like the core system changes. I vastly prefer it to CK2 and a good bit more than EU 3, but I'm not as big of a fan of the CK/Sengoku character based Paradox games as I am the EU series (and I still put around 160 hours into CK2). Number of the systems require a big change in how you approach the game and it is a bit easier to get RNG-fucked (if you get a streak of shitty rulers and advisers good luck getting your monarch points high enough to do anything). Trade locked into flowing one way annoys me, given how I don't tend to play the Western European nations that benefit from it. Trade should be able to flow primarily to my glorious empire if its strong enough! How dare everything go to Antwerp and Venice without my say-so. Oh well.. I'll conquer them eventually.

It'll be interesting to see where they go with the expansions in the future.. and there are some small features from the later EU 3 expansions I miss already.

I am very angry with Lum for pimping this on Facebook. Now I can't stop thinking about it and really want to buy it. But comes right on the cusp of my annual Fantasy Football/NHL/FIFA spending spree (Might even add Madden this year), so I am about to be poor  :heartbreak:

Played the demo as Portugal.  Not bad.  I like the Ideas and the 'quest' system but the trade system sucks.  Little choice in buildings and units.  Map is gorgeous and I did manage to colonize the New World but the gameplay doesn't feel especially 'sticky'.  Maybe because I played a rump nation and not one in the mix. 

I'm 50/50 on this one. 

Just remind yourself that:

• Paradox games usually need months of patching to be balanced and really shine.
• Even then the most "perfect" game experience will often depend on using mods - which aren't out at release.
• They release tons of minor DLCs that add to the game, but are really kind of high priced. Even right now there is: EU IV €39,99 + Call-to-Arms Pack €3,99 + Extreme Edition Upgrade Pack €7,99 + Pre-Order-Pack €6,99 + CK2-to-EU IV savegame converter €9,99 = €68,95.
  To see how bad it will get: EU III currently has 11 different DLCs totaling €40,89.

Which leads to the conclusion that the optimal decision path in this situation is:

• Forget about the game until it's winter time and perfect gaming weather.
• Buy at the next Steam Paradox or Weekend sale.  
• Get the Extreme-Ulitmate version that includes all DLC at a discounted price.  
• Take a quick look at paradox forums and see if there are any mods or total-conversions that are billed as "needed" or which seem interesting to you, install those and never worry about that again.  
• Enjoy the game!

Edit: I always wanted to start an advice column!  :grin:

Really want to buy this but I need to upgrade the gaming machine first.

Plus, Football Manager 2014 is coming out this month too.

How old is your gaming machine if it can't run a Paradox game?  :ye_gods:

4 years old, but 1Gb VRAM (recommended) requirement is 512Gb more than I have.

Upgrade the card. AMD Radeon HD 9000 series will be launched in October, which should lead to some price movement for "older" AMD and Nvidia cards.

Bought this about a week ago, really like it.

AI is much better overall over EU3 and even somewhat over CK2. Acts a lot more logically in terms of ambitions and also does a much better job of managing its armies so you can't so easily cheese it. It knows how to carpet siege with minimal forces now while leaving it's main armies together to fight yours and overall seems more aware of their existence and operates accordingly (it won't go bee-line for token siege corps or bait regiments if it sees your real army skulking around).

Works fine on my 4 year old mid-range PC. I'll post specs later when I get home.

ok AI could still use some work after being sick this weekend and playing a lot. The stuff I said mostly holds up but one thing the AI needs to be more aware of is mountain and hill terrain. It should completely avoid attacking armies in this terrain unless there's only token defenders and no chance of reinforcing. It's way too easy to draw them into fights there where the combat width is 6-12 and they have massive attack penalties. As Venice I beat Hungary + Austria + Bohemia + France + Russia minors fighting them in like that in the Austrian alps, a bunch of massive battles that took years won at 1:5 odds.

Felt dirty abusing such cheese but I justify it because that alliance cascading made no sense when I wardecced.

Be careful about wardeccing a country that is in a personal union with another.  When you look at that country it wont show them as having alliances, but it will draw in anybody allied with the other country they are in Union with.  Found that out the hard way when I declared war on a vastly reduced Poland and managed to get most of the Holy Roman empire to wardec me.   :awesome_for_real:

I'm enjoying this quite a lot.  They fixed a lot of the game play issues that have hounded the series and added more depth, while still keeping it straight forward to play.

probably something like that since they had PU with Austria and royal marriage with France (now have a Valois king after the Habsburg queen died!)

This is on sale right now for 50% off. The general consensus is that this is a decent game right?

Yep definitely decent. It's well worth the few coins it costs.

How far down did EU III eventually drop in price? I don't even remotely have time to play this, but am interested and wondering if I should pick it up while it is on sale. I can just see it being $10 on Black Friday though.

Yeah good game.

I don't think they'll drop it 75% until next year...

It was $22.49 for the deluxe version or whatever on Steam yesterday so I pulled the trigger (bought PayDay II as well...Merry Christmas to me!). Had to be in the office today so I haven't had a chance to do anything other than download it. Any tips for a soft landing when I do start to play?

Easier nations to play as tend to be nations like Portugal (get an alliance and Royal Marriage with Castille and you generally won't have to ever worry about an invasion of your European provinces even mid to late game, and it buys you time to learn the game in the early-game as there are no real threats to you -- as well as letting you dabble with conquest against the Morrocans, trade system, and colonization), or the Ottomans (large-ish country that can safely expand in a few areas for awhile with little threat.. but can be a pain later on when their units start to get out-classed when the European nations start hitting Military Tech 15 and beyond). Some say Muscovy is also a good option as a beginner, but it can run into serious trouble if some of its neighbours actually look its way instead of in-fighting, or Lithuania doesn't get revolts and the player hasn't gotten some additional land to knock out at least one of its neighbours as a threat.

If you've never really played an EU game, I'd strongly recommend the tutorials as they do a decent job of laying the basics out so you aren't completely lost when you start a game. Other than that, I'd recommend to pausing a lot and take your time to consider how your decisions can impact other areas (grabbing three advisers early on can be great in buffing up aspects of your nation and getting more monarch points, but can easily send you into bankruptcy as they can be quite expensive, especially the tier two and three advisers, as an example).

And if you run into issues.. just ask for help. Fairly sure there's a number of us here who are fairly well versed in the game. Learning curve can be a bit steep, but its probably the most accessible EU game in the franchise.

Thanks! I played III a bit, but have almost no recollection about how it works. I am fairly certain I didn't really know how it worked when I WAS playing it, tbh  :awesome_for_real: Glad it hear the tutorials are useful- I will start there.

If you have played III, paradox have put out a EU IV for EU III players guide, and a more general EU IV strategy guide.  I got them hotlinked in a paradox email, but if you search around their website or forums, you should be able to find them.

Europa Universalis IV is $9.99 for the next 15 hours at the Humble Store.

Expired.

Picked it up during this sale yesterday since it game with a steam key.  I've been thinking about picking this up for a while anyway and $10 seemed like a reasonable price point.  Haven't gotten around to trying it yet.

I picked this up last weekend and promptly played three long streaks of 10+ hours each. This game is dangerous.

It's basically EU3 with the shitty rough edges polished off. I haven't really wrapped my mind around force composition or how to properly manipulate alliances, but I generally have had decent luck allying with large nations that border large nations that border me - enemy-of-my-enemy sort of thing, I guess.

So far I have a hopeless Scotland game where Scotland owns the Spice Islands, Australia, New Zealand and the entire New World north of Panama (except Hudson Bay because fuck Quebec), but is hopelessly hamstrung by low population/forcelimits and most of the income from the Scottish colonies gets stripped away because of the overseas naval requirements.

I also have a promising Japan save where Japan owns 75% of Manchuria and all of Korea, is Westernized, has huge forcelimits and highly-developed territory, and owns a massive standing army. It'll probably gobble up all of China before game's end. The only problem is the god-damned Christians causing religious unrest. For some stupid reason, knowing about Christianity makes it harder to convert provinces, even if those provinces are non-Christian, and I haven't yet been able to convert to Christianity, nor do I know if that will even remove the -5% conversion rate modifier.

Fun game, but I definitely turned the music off after an hour or so and put on my own collection of classical. There's only like 3 songs in the game, as far as I can tell, and they get old fast.

Force composition for those who care:

The larger combat width (CW) of the two nations involved is always used, certain terrain (mountains, hills, forests) reduces this width by a percentage.  Assume you're fighting at mil tech 2, CW 20 in open terrain.  You have no cannons at this level, so you can largely ignore what goes in the rear rank of troops; they will only be used to reinforce as the front row dies.  Infantry will take the front center out to the 3 spots on each edge.  If you have at least 14 infantry and 6 cavalry, that's what will be in your front rank, cav split on the sides.  That is the minimum amount of cav that you want for an army, at least 6 for the flanks.  Depending on your tech group you will want as much cavalry as you can support while still fielding a full width army, up to the ratio limit for that group.  For westerners that's >50% cav in the force.  Bear in mind that this means 50% of the live soldiers, not 50% of the regiments, and infantry tend to die substantially more quickly.

TLDR: early game, at least 6 cav per unit, and if you're rich as much as you can get.

Once you get cannons, the second rank comes into play.  Cannons support whichever unit is in the rank in front of them, but are terrible fighters if they're forced to fill the front rank themselves.  You now want the same ratio of infantry and cavalry in the front rank AND enough cannons to fill, as nearly as possible, the entire second rank.  If you're fighting in open ground at Mil tech 7, the first time you get cannons as a westerner, you'll have CW 24 and thus ideally would want 24 cannons.  Actually being able to support that is unlikely, but having more cannons is only a liability if you run out of infantry/cavalry to fill the gaps in the front row.

TLDR: once you get cannons, as many as you can afford but less than your combined infantry and cav.

Later in the game infantry catch up to and by cost outperform cavalry in a straight fight, eventually you'll want to drop cavalry down to a minimum to occupy your flanks in most cases.

The actual ideal ratio of each unit will differ as you get later military tech, more ideas, nation specific bonuses, depending on where you're fighting, or depending on your tech group.  If you're in central asia and fighting almost exclusively on open terrain, investing more into cavalry for their greater power in a wide line makes sense.  If you're fighting in the Alps and constantly in mountains (-66% CW), focusing on cannons and infantry makes sense as neither side will outflank the other very often.  Finally, keep in mind that the infantry, and in some cases the cavalry, are going to die off quickly.  You'll need quite a few extra infantry regiments available as reinforcements so that the cannons don't end up overrun.

The way I usually end up building armies as a westerner is: infantry equal to combat width +30% (so I have some replacements), 6-10 cav, and as many cannons as I can afford.  I haven't played much with the other tech groups, so I can't speak specifically to their units.

That explains it. I've been fielding armies of 10 inf + 5 cav + 1 cannon, and combining these into a mega-army if I need to take down a doomstack (I prefer to let attrition bite into these first). It works fine for mopping up Asian nations and natives but gets wrecked when faced against anything less than 1.5:1 odds.

Heh, I was creating my armies using that exact same ratio Yoru, and getting similar results.  Woops!

Thanks for the outline Muffled, that will help a lot.

It'd be really nice if you could see your battle order on a given army without actually committing them into a battle. Just like, "show me my battle order on the current province's terrain" so you can kinda visually judge whether it's shit or not.

The terrain for battle is random. Mouse over a province on terrain map to see what % chance any likely terrain is.

Necro.

I bought this game on Steam Sale over the weekend, and all I managed to do was log on for 1 minute and not knowing what to do. So I ended up watching Quill18's Burgundy to Norway line of 20+ videos of a 10+ hour game. I don't have time for 4x games anymore. Looks fun though.

Its a lot of fun, and they've improved it even more with all the expansions.  So much good shit know if you have all the DLC's.  After many false starts, managed to Ironman my way to victory with the Hansa in a long tense play through.

Waiting for this 1.9 patch to drop in a few weeks I guess before I play a new campaign. Thinking Venice for Venetian Sea achievement. Setup some of these new marches on the side. The latest 'Art of War' DLC looks spiffy but it seems to have created some AI bugs which I don't feel like dealing with.

What sort of bugs?  Played through a whole campaign as the Hansa with art of war dlc.  Didn't notice any bugs, and it was a ton of (challenging) fun.

Seen a lot of stuff on the forums about AI not reacting well with armies during war, not organizing them well. Makes the warfare element way too easy for me. But I have played A LOT of Paradox games and know the AI logic too well so these kinds of bugs probably just bother me more than most people.

This is pretty much my go-to game in-between (and often during) my playthroughs of anything else. I'm a sucker for it. I especially tend to end up as Russia curb-stomping the world because it is just fun to paint the world green and consider how utterly more fucked it would make the modern world.

Hmm, guess I just don't "see the code" or something.  I always struggle to win battles in this game, even when I have larger armies.  The AI compared to the previous games has become god damned vicious.  Get into a fight with a much smaller army, but that prompts every army across your opponents empire to drop what ever the fuck they are doing to stream towards the fight.  And his side always just seems to hold out just long enough for the next wave of reinforcements, then the next, next, until he has a huge army that crushes yours at the very end of the day.  Also, leave any gaps in your line and the AI sends shit rampaging around insta-killing any smaller armies you left to siege provinces while you moved the main bulk of your forces inland more.

Not say they don't exist, just that the AI in this game is miles above any of the previous three games, and gives me a run for my money.  Which is probably more indicative of how shitty I am, but I still appreciate the challenge it provides me.  I loved EU2, but I got so good at that after awhile, any play-through was a walk in the park even starting as some one province nation in the middle of nowhere.  Don't see myself ever getting to that point in this game.  I had to restart about 12 Hansa campaigns on Ironman after getting totally crushed at different points in history, before I managed a winning game.

Yeah Hansa you're going to lose battles pretty reliably unless you pick like 3 military ideas that provide positive fighting modifiers, and even that probably won't give you an advantage, just will just work towards evening things up. Hansa no national military ideas & traditions, whereas nearby major nations like Sweden, France, Poland, Brandenburg/Prussia, Austria have some. Not only that but most of these are "lucky" nations so will have better generals which can make a huge difference. Ontop of that the terrain around there doesn't help you much for defending, maybe a couple of forested provinces that's it. No mountains or hills. So you're going to get clobbered in most straight up battles. So you would have to be very careful and pick your battles, attack small stacks with overwhelming force only if you know you can route it quickly and no chance of reinforcements reaching in time. Otherwise keep your army together in your best defensive position and use your assumed larger navy to hurt them with blockades while things play out. You do have a lot of money, and should be hiring a lot of mercs to give you a numerical advantage and bounce back quickly from any losses.

Yeah, I worked it out, mainly by making smart alliance decisions and declaring wars on the right nations at just the right time (major allies all tied up in other wars, or they themselves are having the shit kicked out of somebody else), and using my huuuuuuuuge amount of money to my advantage (mercs are certainly helpful).

I should add though, its not just Hansa.  I've struggled hard with any non-major countries, like Bohemia, Argon, and Teutonic Order/Prussia.  The AI is just really damn good, and they always seem to force me into fights where they are defending good ground, and I can never pull off the same.  Great challenge though, AI seems way better than previous versions.

Anyone knows how's the multiplayer works here? I know a host is needed and people can drop in and out (except the host) at any time, but since I can't foresee games being over in one sitting, is there any way to save a game and resume it later? Also, is there a timer on player actions? Anyone have any experience with the MP?

You can save games, yes. Also, when picking up a save you can swap countries if, for example, one player got stomped out of existence they aren't stuck playing a rump state or having to sit out.

There are no timers because it is real time with a speed selector (1-5, with 1 being very slow; in multiplayer the speed settings are generally on 2 or 3, but almost never higher than that due to the need for control and syncing issues). You can, of course, still pause if need be (many do for things like peace deals or when a flood of pop ups hit). The multiplayer stability is decent, but not perfect. A lot better than the stability in Crusader Kings 2, though.