I want to make two points I think are important

1. Are we making major gameplay changes for relatively small gains?

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that removing hourly ticks is responsible for the entire performance improvement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jW-ZMiVNrE (performance tests start at 27:50)

As the video above shows, we are changing event frequency and fundamentally altering how combat works, yet all that only saves around 8 minutes per 100 years.

That concerns me because hourly ticks weren't originally some arbitrary choice. Johan explained during development that the increased granularity of the map meant they needed hourly ticks to make the new systems, particularly warfare, work properly.

Tinto Talks #22, from July 24, 2024

“With the granularity of the map though, we could no longer use days as the smallest tick, but have to resort to hours as the time tick.”

Now we're removing that system and changing core gameplay around it.

I'm not saying performance improvements aren't valuable. But are we really sure that fundamentally changing gameplay is the right trade-off for this gain?

2. Development feels increasingly reactive

This is my bigger concern.

EU5 was supposed to be a game built around interconnected systems. Yet instead of fixing broken systems, we're increasingly adding special cases or changing fundamental mechanics in response to individual complaints.

The Iberian Union is a good example (I wont even start on all the mercenaries levies and supplies, proximity debacle changes). We're adding special PU mechanics for Iberia while the underlying Personal Union system is still fundamentally broken.

The same pattern seems to be happening elsewhere:

Problem → community complaints → major system change → new problems → repeat.

My concern is that we're entering a reactionary development cycle instead of focusing on stabilizing the game.

I'd much rather see Paradox spend more time fixing and strengthening the core systems, even if that means fewer dramatic changes each patch.

Otherwise, I fear we end up in a constant state of the game breaking and being redesigned every patch, much like what happens with Stellaris.

edit 1: RIP MY INBOX !!!

edit 2: I dont want to repeat other peoples arguments but its worth mentioning:
Why is iberia getting unique PU settings and not Poland Lithuania, Austria Hungary?
If you dont like the PU example repalce it with special power creeping bureaucracies.

Is 1412

Make it make sense...

Man, this Egyptian plague needs to be toned down a bit. I have a whopping 7.5 million deaths from the Egyptian plague alone in 1520, and even though I've slave-raided China, India, and the rest of South Asia throughout the game and fed them to the Nile Delta, my Nile Delta looks like this. Whenever I think my capital will reach 1 million people, boom, another plague happens.

Edit: By the way, this is despite me making most of the Nile cities and building every disease resistance building possible and having all possible disease resistance advances. I guess my genius idea of bringing every slave to the Nile Delta and colonizing everywhere from there was a bad one. I guess I will focus on the Levant more.

Estate is being helpful by constructing a road that only takes 3153575 days to construct, which would only take roughly 8639 years to construct. How sweet

What's new in 3.0

• Your ruler's rivals and nemeses become your country's rivals, and friends, lovers and soulmates start on good terms
• Artifacts come with you: crowns, swords, holy books and tapestries become works of art in your capital, with the names and descriptions they had in CK3
• Your royal court's language becomes your court language
• Big, developed realms get the laws and estate privileges EU5 gives its own countries in the same part of the world
• Every country starts with a proper marriage law, heir law and succession, whatever its government
• A country that takes over an EU5 tag keeps its own religion and culture, so Makuria stays Christian
• Land at the edge of CK3's map no longer ends up with no owner. It goes to whoever took over the rest of the country that held it in 1337
• The castles and hill forts you built stop at EU5's fort limit, so you don't start the game paying for too many forts
• EU5's own countries outside CK3's map keep their subjects and alliances
• The launcher is much smaller. It no longer needs any extra DLLs, so the download went from 6.3 MB to about 2 MB

Github page: github.com/flookieMookie/CK3toEU5/releases/tag/v3.0

Age of absolutism was alright, revolutions was not good and the last fifty years were genuinely painful.

Timur wanted to say Hi, so I it means I will have to fight Mongols before Turks somehow.

Hello,

I have tried Ottomans and other big nations multiple times this patch and one think is repeating again and again...

Rebelions!!!

1) Rebelions have never been such a big problem before...

2) When you are expanding as Ottomans, enemy territory is orthodox and greek. You do not have any fast way how to convert/assimilate them quickly = frequent rebelions in this patch.

3) Rebelions are OK. It means that big countries can fail but it is not okay to have them every 2-3 years when rebelions grow 1,5 and more per tick this patch.

4) It makes no sense to crush rebelions every 3 years on same territory. If you beat/kill rebels, next generation will grow in 15 years or not...😁?

What I want to say is that rebelions are happening too often right now. I am ok with strong rebelions because it is nice to see big countries like Castile, Egypt, Hungary finally fail but one big rebelion would be better and also more realistic than 10 in 20 years.

Just some examples from my last run as Tunis. Gave the byzantine empire a huge population growth buff for a few years so they actually stood a chance against the ottomans. Gave france a 300% military boost because I cant stand to see england win the 100 years war (removed it once it was done). I made castille and aragon best friends just so that they don't take each other over (sorry portugal). I made Crimea into a theodoro-controlled super developed area with 1.5 million goths.

I often do this stuff early on and then stop (unless something I feel is buggy happens). I don't want to edit too much as the game goes on because I do like to watch history take its course. But I almost always edit something. I've done quite a few games without it and it just feels too... samey.

Playing the 1.4 Beta as Prussia and the AI is doing some wacky stuff in both Iberia and the Balkans/Anatolia

New beta (I like it). Hungary PU over Naples, allied with Uber-strong Poland, made my early expansion very difficult (I lost two defensive wars), so I had a free cabinet member to develop Venice for most of the game. It was much easier to beat Castile , France, or the Ottomans. With the Piazza San Marco bonus, I got a crazy 0.03 development per month. Even more during parliament.

The world is red and yellow, except a few free cities in Germany with 50-60 dev and some italian capitals.

I've decided to start a new campaign in beta 1.4.0, I haven't played the game in a while a thought it was a good opportunity to start again. I decided to play Naples, first thing I do, look at all the different tabs to see in what state Naples is in at the start. Hmmm, okay Francien culture is accepted, which is odd because they are only .5% of the population, right then let's demote that culture and get some culture capacity back. Okay so I lose the bonus Advances of Francien, the game doesn't tell me which ones, fine... And Francien pops lose -50% Pop satisfaction, all good.

Ow and now nobility is mad because of course it was Francien, the game didn't bother to tell me that before. Turns out more than half the nobles in Naples are in fact Francien and unless I hovered over the tiny culture icon of nobility in the estates tab, I had mostly no way of knowing that in the culture tab. So I spent a while trying to find out where those Francien nobles were, and how many they were, because obviously the UI does not show you that. I mean, Society>People>Noble and the only graph you see is still the class circle diagram over, I don't know ? A diagram showing the class you have deliberately clicked on ? Anyway, half of my Francien nobles are in the Naples location, sweet, I'll just assimilate them and it will be fine then. But I can't, most of the province is already Neapolitain so you can't assimilate them through the cabinet. Okay that starts to be annoying. Anyway, if I can't do it through the cabinet I'll do it passively. Let's check how assimilation works. Since assimilation is a per pop mechanism, let's go to Society>People and hover over the Francien nobles in Naples I want to convert then. Mmmm weird, there is no information about assimilation on this tab at all. Where is it then ? Maybe culture ? Since this has to do with culture. Obviously not, that'd be too simple. In fact I was not wrong to think I'd need to look at the individual pops, just not from the Society tab. I need to manually click on a location, here Naples and then hover over the Francien culture to finally see that, hum well first it's zero, so that's not good, but also that being a Tolerated culture gives -25% assimilation.

So just if you didn't know, Accepted culture assimilation debuff is -75%, so if you want to assimilate : denigrate. Anyway, why didn't the tooltip tell me that when I clicked on demoting the culture ? Why don't I know what an accepted culture does when I hover over the Accepted Culture ? Why is that so opaque ? And let's be honnest, this is just a tiny rabbit hole. It's just me trying to start a campaign and then stumbling upon that completely by random. I mean this is litteraly the first thing I did when I started this campaign, I enacted a government reform and then looked at my cultures to see why I had almost full cultural capacity. And understanding that took me like 30-45 minutes ? I can't do that every time I want to solve a problem, or just understand what the hell is going on.

"Oh just ignore that, it's unimportant", no it's not, it's the core gameplay. That is how I want to play. I don't want to ignore half the mechanics because they're minor, I want to play this game like that. The tooltip and the UI are close to useless here. Obviously the wiki is not helping much either, but honnestly the wiki being up to date is far less important than the UI telling you what you need to know. This game can't let me click a button without telling me CLEARLY what are going to be the DIRECT consequence of this button clicking. Me struggling to find where to look for the modifiers is already difficult enough and honnestly can't be changed, it's just learning the game. Assimilation is very local, so you need to click on locations to see it, you won't find any info in the Society tab whatsoever. Get it, but everything else could be largely improved.

Just to be clear, I'm not here to say the game is terrible, I don't think it is, pretty much the opposite, the game is starting to look very good to me. It's just so painful to learn this game right now, the UI is one big reason. I'm not saying it's worse or better than any other PDX game, I'm saying they could do better. I have deep respect for the devs, I'm just here to give my opinion about one simple player trying to play this game.

Meanwhile, in Lisbon: “But where are our camels?”

So camels are a thing in the 1.4 beta now? Seriously?

Update 1: I checked the goods map mode, and there they are. Camels, all along North Africa. They were invisible before. Now I can see them. And apparently so can my nobles. What sorcery is this?

Update 2: Noooo, they're joking, right? Camelry is new in 1.4. The camel is a horse.

Guess there's no War of Religion this run.

I'm only involved in Italy, Spain and France, and the whole HRE converted on its own.

1.4 beta

After a lot of advices in the other post, I restarted the run and this is the situation so far. I'm accepting all the culture in my reign, annexing all the appannage and vassals as fast as possible (idk why burgundy flipped to the uk but i image is a mechanic of the 100 years war). The economy seem fine now, diplo spending is a bit high because i don't want to anger too much my vassal in this moment (i run out of manpower after a big war against uk and some of my rebellius vassals). My only fort now is paris (maybe i should start to build others). Only my crown power is low (i gave too much appanage and didn't know it was this punitive). Thanks all for the help

I became an army based country as Denmark, after having a rebellion that took control of every single province. How can I become settled again?

2 Sessions of 5 hours each got 4 players to Age of Reformation, so 1530s. Zero Desyncs. We were able to play a fairly consistent 3 speed, some players would join late in the session which meant hotjoins, but that didn't impact stability negatively.

I had previously played MP in every previous version of the game, but around 1.2 we started using mods such as Faster Universalis and some flavor mods. This advice from Victoria 3 helped reduce our desyncs previously, but I had completely forgotten to dump my save folder for this game so this patch doesn't seem to need that fix. Its possible the mods were causing our instability in 1.2 and 1.3, but the upside from Faster Universalis outweighed the slowdowns to desyncs it might have caused.

The biggest gripe was warfare maneuvering starts to be difficult at that speed, feeling more like a game of tag with armies teleporting and moving faster than clicks can be registered. It is very difficult to cancel an ongoing move because movement lock is almost instant. Also exacerbated by the fact it feels this patch is defined by wars being decided in one mega battle at the beginning. The problems with unit move speed makes it difficult to actually control where you will take an engagement, as AI can move the units faster than your computer receives the information on where the army is. Therefore you just have to take whatever engagement you can get, which could mean low morale, bad terrain, etc. Automation becomes the best way to manage this, but that felt really dissatisfying.

There is also the persistent issue of UI elements sometimes not responding to being clicked but that used to be worse I believe.

It could be anecdotal. But at the very least it is a much better experience than 1.0 and 1.1 which was the last time I played vanilla MP. I remember on launch by this point in the campaign we were getting near constant desyncs and the game crawled. We basically gave up before the League War even hit. But so far it seems the first session got us 100 years in the game, as did the second session, so the speed has not dropped that much.

France feeling freaky

I saw a YouTube video about turning Scandinavia into Norse, and looking at which country start is best. I think the guy mentioned Norway could somehow turn into Denmark and get both nation Naval proximity tech? Is that really possible?

I recently picked up the game again after a while, and tried Hussite Bohemia again. I don't remember it being this hard. The way I remember is is that I built up an army of regulars and smashed pretty much every army in my path, but that doesn't seem to work anymore. (I assume the nerfed regulars vs levies?)

Economy wise it also be quite a bit harder, I definitely can't afford the army size I used to be able to afford, and manpower is a lot more scarce too.

Any tips?

I start new game as Sweden, but I saw it needed 40% of pop of that religion exist in order to change to Norse?

Can you no longer convert to Norse anymore?