There is so little content in this game.

Or well perhaps thats not the best way of putting it, there is a ton of content.

But there is very little content that feels really impactful.

Some nations get some special units, some nations get some special buildings, some nations get some special government reforms.

But a country can have 60 special events that have special triggers, and the vast vast vast majority of them do almost nothing.

I cant begin to describe how much more interested i was in trying out different nations in EU4 with the mission trees compared to EU5. Because those mission trees actually impacted how i played.

Sure mission trees were not perfect. But if EU5 is trying to replace mission trees with events, it has so far severely missed the mark.

Hello! Today we have released patch 1.2.2, which contains a great number of fixes thanks to your bug reports. Including fixing an issue that prevented the Rome tag to have access to Byzantium events.

You can find a full list of patch notes here:
https://pdxint.at/3R9mYIg

I get that some changes just won't work out the way you're envisioning, but some of these are huge swings with pretty obvious ramifications.

Cabinet traits are a neat way to give characters some flavor, and make them feel less interchangeable, but who thought 10%(!) tax inefficiency would result in anything other than a completely unusable advisor? God help you if it rolls on your head of cabinet; you're stuck with -20% until he dies unless you vassal him, which is cheese-adjacent. It feels like someone just picking a number based on vibes.

Development was too fast, and that's a problem worth addressing. But cutting pop promotions by 90% means that expanding RGOs or other rural buildings by one level takes ~10 years. Any privileges/techs that increase RGO build speed are now meaningless; there's no way build speed is your bottleneck. On the other hand, burgher workshops fill up 10x faster because they require 10% of the workforce, and you can even feasibly have enough "spare" burghers to fill up a few buildings immediately after construction. Hell, upgrading a village to a city takes a scant 3 years before modifiers. So urbanizing is relatively quick, but rural development is extremely slow. Was that intentional? Who knows?

A huge part of the fun/beauty of this game is how all of the systems fit together and create these interesting and delicate balancing acts. Making it work requires a lot of foresight, and it's strange to see the guys in charge cranking levers around all willy nilly.

It seems like the game constantly punishes the player for playing well and attempting to optimize the country:

The stuff that is supposed to create historical tension is so much and so badly designed that it's not even worth optimizing. I can play as a lobotomized monkey and do absolutely nothing in most cases and get nearly identical results as when I try-hard.

I suppose what I am trying to say is that the reward structure is inverted. Court and Country fires because you did exactly what the Age of Absolutism rewards - you centralized too much, and your nation is crippled for 20 years. You get more colonies - endless revolts, even when all colonies are happy. You get more pops - they all die anyway because of disease, despite spamming pop growth bonuses.

The decisions that are supposed to be difficult but lead to great rewards don't lead to any reward. The meta they have created rewards passive players. Every active optimization route triggers punishment, and that is the opposite of what a grand strategy game should feel like.

I was willing to live with the punishments from before 1.2, but the new disease mechanic is so incredibly broken that I think that they actually had an intern design and come up with it.

Feel free to downvote into oblivion as I am sure many will disagree, but I had to get this out.

All of the information regarding culture, culture groups, and languages are buried across a variety of different map overlays, diplomacy interactions and just vague and unclear game mechanics that make engaging with those mechanics an overall unpleasant experience.

I think the Vassal meta was a simple solution for players to just reduce what the player has to interact with via cultures to a very simple loop - Make small vassals everywhere and just have them enforce culture & religion until you can annex them as a core.

Now much more care needs to be put into how you create subjects, where you create them, farming your subjects off to other subjects, and gaming the system to eek out as much positive % conversion rates, such as making your primary culture consider the ones you want to convert an enemy, and making the cultures you want to convert look at you positively. The player can fully waste their cabinet action for years trying to convert culture and the game will never give you any indication of this without you watching it & all of it's contributing factors.

I dunno. I agree that there needed to be some design adjustments to stop how easy it was to snowball, but between the vassal & culture changes in this patch, and with complacency from the previous major patch, I find myself more and more frustrated with and turned off from the direction the development team wants to take EU5 in.

Was playing Genoa, looking to make some vassals. Fought Aragon, won, took the Mallorca province. After the war, released historic vassal: Kingdom of Mallorca. To my surprise, a few days later they were just completely independent. No warning, no event, no notification. Tried the same thing with Sicily and Cypress, same results

I am still not sure if this is intended or a bug. But either way, it is certainly new after the 1.2 update. It also completely ruined my strategy because I suddenly can't make effective vassals like I want.

Edit to add: theres an interesting discussion to be had about whether releasing a subject just to use their cores should be a valid strategy or not (I mostly think it IS valid, but I can see the other side of the argument too). But either way... If like my capital city alone (Genoa) has a greater population than an entire other country (Mallorca, Cypress, etc), there is absolutely no reason I shouldn't be allowed to vassalize that country in some way

That’s really my main issue with the update.

I did two France runs up to 1800 (modern borders only).

In the first one, I built absolutely no buildings improving population growth, food production/capacity, or disease resistance.
Result in 1800: 21M population.

In the second run, I heavily invested in anything related to food production, irrigation, hospitals, sanitation, etc...
Result in 1800: 21.8M population, and honestly, most of that difference came from getting only two bubonic plague outbreaks instead of the usual three or four.

That feels extremely underwhelming and completely removes the sense of reward for specializing your country.

Historically, France proper reached around 28-30 million people by the late 18th century. And that was despite the devastation of the Hundred Years’ War, the French Wars of Religion, repeated plague waves, localized famines, and periods of demographic stagnation due to societal reasons.

In my campaigns, none of those situations happened at the same scale. Realistically, France should probably end up slightly above its historical population under those conditions, not FAR below it.

And from a purely material perspective, preindustrial France absolutely had the agricultural capacity to sustain well over 30 million people thanks to:

• its enormous size
• highly fertile soils
• favorable climate
• dense river network

The same thing applies to Japan which i have also played a lot. I have not really tested for other region but it seems that there is a bit of a problem regarding population growth and diseases and how the player can manipulate its country to focuse on this matter.

My PC is by no means a beast but it's a fair, mid-tier PC. CK3 runs amazingly, and so does CP2077 on medium settings. EU5 however becomes unplayable after the 1450s. The ticks get so slow, and each monthly tick causes a 5 second pause. This causes the game to grind to a halt and you just end up restarting. I suspect more people are having the same issues, and if Paradox can't come up with a plan to address it people are going to drop it, as it's demotivating to play when three fourths of the game is inaccessible.

https://preview.redd.it/jtjpz842iw0h1.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fdf9dc078a575f930db3572012d60835dbf6da24

https://preview.redd.it/4fg0y2v2iw0h1.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a2b3bac3ce4c384f93089ef1c84a882c92a91096

Holy cow the AI does not mess around in war anymore.

On a tactical and somewhat strategical aspect they are still awful.

But on a long term aspect they have become absolute war machine.

They have every decision to increase levy and regular army size. Recruit a lot of regulars and mercenaries. Keep cash around and take loans just for wars.

In my Byzantium game I had a army of 10k regulars and was steam rolling Italy. I was always below 45 antagonism thanks to Byz special war goal.

Milano did the parliament war goal tricks on me. They got an instant war goal on me and instantly declared war on me. I did not see that coming at all since AI usually never declared war on someone below 45 antagonism.

They have Naples and the pope as allies. The pope has like 50k levies with 700k pops and 25k regulars. Naples and Milano have even more troops.

I just lost the war so badly I had to give up a lot of land. It's crazy this never happened before. Usually when you start to have enough regulars you can steam roll any AI even a much bigger than you. Because they don't invest enough in military. Now it's the opposite.

Also the stack wipe and infinite mercenary did not get patched today. I hope they patch it cause I don't want to check every month if the AI suddenly spawn 200k mercenary out of nowhere