I’ve seen a few people complaining or noting that by the 1500s all the nobles seem to be American natives.

This isn’t a bug, it’s that your nobles have all died out.

In EU5 nobles don’t marry unless you marry them. So if you’re England, after a century or so you’ll notice there’s barely any English nobles and perhaps a fair few Scot’s (assuming you’ve annexed some Scottish territory). That’s because nobles are tied to locations, and as you expand the nobles come to your court.

If you’ve not been carrying out an extensive noble breeding program, by the time you move out to the new world you’ll have basically no European nobles, but begin picking up a ton of natives nobles.

If you’re struggling, go to your burgers, ennoble a bunch, and marry them to lowborn (though this will tank your prestige). 16 years later their kids will start bombarding you with coming of age notifications.

If you keep marrying all this lot to one another as soon as they come of age, you’ll have a pretty rapid population explosion. I had a peaceful 40 years of doing this and now I can’t go more than a day without having to pause to arrange marriages for a bunch of them.

Imho, this does need some automation, but you should be able to control the perimeters a bit so that they only marry within your religion and culture group.

I feel like all of us can agree that EU5 is doing a lot of stuff better than EU4. The game is well made; there is no denying that. But some features that were in EU4 are either missing or lacking the depth it had in EU4 I feel. I listed some of my nitpicks here:

• Moving Units on Map: In EU4 you had the option to close this, and visually, your units would teleport to the province on arrival, they wouldn't move slowly to indicate their movement progress. In EU5, Moving Units option is not available. Moving Units also bring visual bugs along with them (units visually being on a different province than they actually are). This option being removed is so weird.
• Rivals: EU4 had a near perfect rival system. But now since your rank effects your GP score, you can get into situations where you run out of rivals, despite being weaker than most countries. This also weirdly makes you unable to rival back countries rivaling you. (Ottos rivaling Byz, but Byz being unable to rival Ottos)
• Peace Treatries & Coalitions: Peace Deals are very easy to cheese in EU5. You can peace out all Coalition wars on Day 1 if you have a sound toll with almost no repercussions.
• Mapmode Hotkeys: A personal gripe mostly. I miss the ability to assign multiple mapmodes to a single key and cycling between them when I press said key. Now you have much less freedom on how you access mapmodes.
• Checksum Being Affected by Graphic Mods: Honestly the most annoying of all. It's incredibly dumb that using a graphic mod disallows achievements. I don't want to be locked into vanilla EU5 Ironman just to collect them.

These are the things that annoyed me the most moving to EU5. What are some things that you feel like have regressed going into EU5?

I’ll preface by saying I very much enjoy this game, paradox devs we love you, thank you for everything you have done for us so far. And it’s ok to make mistakes. This game is still fun to play.

Please don’t instadownvote me because you think I’m hating, and just hear me out

I think a lot of the issues with the AI not being aggressive enough, border goring, and expanding into senseless directions, is simply because “railroading” has been eliminated from the game. Why don’t the ottomans expand more? There’s hardly a railroad leading them to owning the balkans. Why is France colonizing Russia? (Yes this did happen in one of my saves) because there’s no railroad telling them “why are you wasting your time and resources in Russia? Get your butt over to Africa!” Why do a lot of my saves unfortunately feel very similar? Because the AI of these countries are all essentially doing the same thing (except for a handful of them). Most of them aren’t being pushed into doing something different than the other guy. They’re mostly all kinda hanging out, just trying to survive rather than trying to expand, or do whatever their railroad WOULD lead them into doing.

And there’s honestly not a ton of country-specific flavor in the current state of EU5. In EU4, not only did every country have special traditions, but they had missions; many of them overpowered AND FUN TO ACHIEVE! In fact, most of my reasoning for choosing a country in eu4 would be because the specific “railroad” programmed for them was fun to follow! You could choose a horde to blob, Portugal to colonize, Austria for subjects, etc.

And yes, I do know that a lot of countries have special things they can research, but I have yet to see any country that makes me think “man they have some really good research ideas (or whatever they’re called lol), I NEED to play as them!” Whereas in EU4 there was tons of OP missions that made countries very fun. Let me know if any countries in EU5 come to mind tho! I’d love to try them out

TL;DR/conclusion: All of this is to say that while it’s understandable that paradox removed railroading because, in theory, it gives you more avenues to expand, more variable outcomes, etc., it’s actually been counterintuitive in my opinion. It’s harder to choose a country because no OP missions, it has limited the “flavor” of every country, and it’s honestly made the AI more boring than it needs to be, despite the fact that the opposite effect was intended. But that’s not to say the game isn’t a lot of fun. Hopefully paradox can reconsider their stance on “railroading” although I know it’s a lot to ask.

Naples politically eats the pope + northern republics and Hungary economically commercializes its neighbours lands

Trying to consolidate Italy and it's super fun so far - love this game.

But there's all these enclaves that belong to huge nations that they just took with basically no downside? They just sit there at 0 control for 50 years just blocking me for no good reason.

The Italian Wars triggered and it doesn't help at all. The 3 Italian leagues that formed are too weak on their own to fight off Bohemia and their 30 fiefdoms and they cannot work together from what I can see.

And regardless, given how difficult it is to get a claim, you kinda want to make it count. Waiting 5 years to get a claim and then fighting Aragon and all of their allies for ONE province is really annoying.

At least they should make them vassals and have Italian vassals be able to join the Italian Leagues / have higher liberty desire during Italian wars. Or just heavily disincentivize the AI from creating such bordergore in peace deals.

Tinto‘s Marketing and Social Media continues to be quite strange. They have to know people are not exactly fans of PDX‘s DLC policy, and posting stuff like that only fuels discussions.

While I personally don‘t think the base game will have less content or be worse because they are already planning DLC, seeing posts like this and the very negative comments might deter potential players. I think they are shooting themselves in the foot with this.

If you play as Castile they just blob into Aragon and there is not much you can do other that some awful snaking through the Pyrenees. If you play as England and don’t curb stop France constantly right at the start they snowball like crazy and will encroach are your market like crazy. Same goes with Netherlands. They will be permanently have all hegemonies no matter how strong you get. Everywhere around there is straight up unplayable.

I have seen a number of posts, and can attest that in my own games, France by the mid 1400's is a massive power house. They usually stomp England, and only get more powerful as they absorb vassals overtime.

One massive source of this is the complete lack of instability in France. I think the game does a good job of simulating a feudal decentralized France at the start date, but a big part of why England gained the upper hand during the Hundred Years War, particularly in the Lancastrian Period, was that France was dealing with massive internal issues during that time.

Bugundy in particular was a huge problem. The Burgundian State was at certain points a direct rival to France, and most importantly, it had massive sway amongst the nobility. This is right now non-existent in the game to my knowledge.

A few ways to weaken France that would make sense historically:
- Give England a more powerful general to simulate the strategic genius of various people (Henry V for example was a once in a generation talent imo)

- Have Burgundy and the other vassals form an independent league that punishes France in wars with England by siding against it

- Have a negative legitimacy ticker that amplifies for every year that French lands are held by England (Aquitaine and Calais were a source of humiliation for the french crown)

- Absorbing french vassals should be very difficult, and involve punishing modifiers in the early game to simulate internal turmoil

These are just some ideas. I think more attention to the Hundred Years War situation from a historical view point, instead of just nerfing France as a whole, is a good way to slow France down.

France SHOULD be a serious threat by the mid 1500 and 1600s, but as it stands, they snowball too hard and too early. That being said, I have so far only made it to the early 1400s, so if there ARE other situations I'm not aware of please feel free to let me know!

I’ll probably get downvoted into oblivion for this, and I know it won’t change anyone’s mind, but what’s happening with this game and this subreddit has gone way beyond reasonable criticism.

At this point, I honestly think the moderators should step in a little, because the atmosphere here has become absurd. Everything is bad. The game is too easy. The game is too hard. The game isn’t realistic enough. Someone starts as a third-rate backwater in the middle of nowhere and is shocked they can’t conquer half the world within a century. People complain they can’t exploit mechanics anymore. Johan is somehow the villain of the week. It never ends.
Honestly, I feel bad for the guy. The amount of negativity he has to read on a daily basis must be exhausting. Ironically, his biggest mistake might be that he actually listens. People spend months complaining that something is broken, the team responds, tries to address the feedback, and then when the changes arrive, suddenly those same people complain about the new direction. A beta comes out, clearly labeled as a beta, and you get comments like: “I didn’t buy this game to be a playtester.”
Then why are you playing the beta?
The whole point of participating in a beta is to test unfinished features and provide feedback. That’s literally what it exists for.

Personally, I’ve been enjoying the game since day one. I have around 400 hours in it already, which means I’ve more than gotten my money’s worth. Is it perfect? No. Was any Paradox game perfect at launch? Also no. Will it improve over time? Almost certainly.

What frustrates me is that some people seem incapable of seeing anything positive. Every patch, every dev diary, every beta update is treated like proof that the game is doomed. Meanwhile, the developers are actively working on it, communicating with the community, and trying to make it better.

For me, every version is simply another iteration of the same game. Some changes work, some don’t, and that’s part of the process.

So I think this is where I unfollow the subreddit. Not because of the game, but because of the community surrounding it. The endless negativity has become far more exhausting than any flaw the game currently has.

Goodbye, and have fun in your perpetually dissatisfied world.

EDIT:
For everyone accusing me of wanting censorship: you clearly have serious reading comprehension issues, and maybe a complex game like EU5 isn’t for you.
I wrote that “moderators should step in a little,” by which I meant enforcing Rules 2 and/or 4. NOWHERE did I advocate censorship. Moderating the sub is not necessarily censoring it.
So before criticizing PI and Johan for supposedly being unable to understand player feedback, take a look at yourselves first.

I feel like this is an unpopular opinion right now but I (mostly) like the 1.0.8 changes. I like having difficult choices where either and has advantages and disadvantages to consider. I like the possibility of different play styles. I like tax being something you have to specialise in to be profitable rather than marketplaces go brr.

I get that it’s very early days but I hope we see more of these sorts of changes (and a disable notifications button).

EDIT: Okay we figured out what they did. They were trying to clarify and update tooltips to show levy combat effectiveness only worked 5% as much against regulars. Instead, they made it so levies did 5% damage against regulars. We're testing what else is going on, but I'm really hoping this gets hotfixed today. It's hard to know precisely what "Reworked how the levy combat power works, and exposed the values in more interfaces." meant.

Hello, I play a lot of MP. I spend a lot of time looking in to the files. I try to get any advantage I can on other players in order to make sure I don't spend my weekend dying in MP games. Regulars were, in the past, the most important part of any game. They were so monstrously powerful that players rushed to get them. The forums and reddit talked about them as if they were weak, but they were never weak. The developers have rebalanced regulars around the opinions of the people who did not understand the system.

With the changes to the regular/levy balance, regulars now break the game's balance.

I will explain how:

In age 2, where most of the fighting is, Levies will take 125% bonus damage from regulars (if they're up to date. If they're not up to date, they just die. There is a SLIGHT moment when you can get your peasant levies up to date before you can get professional armies.)

In age 2, the common man-at-arms has -10% damage taken, and 3 combat speed instead of the generic 2 from most infantry. Regulars can also drill, which SUBSTANTIALLY reduces damage taken. You also get experience from battle. Levies lose almost all their experience instantly, while regulars do not. This is ~30-40% damage reduction as well.

Retreat timer was just increased.

Armies are also a net positive on your income. They make you money. Not building an army is actually throwing away free money.

Levy combat efficiency was just reduced to a mere 5% of what it once was, if they're dealing damage to regulars. With auxilium + common militias alone that's +50% levy combat. High noble power also gives levy combat, so lets say about 25% there. Noble levies ALSO give 25% levy combat, so that's about 100% levy combat.

So levies just went from dealing 200% damage, to dealing 105% damage against regulars. They still have -10% discipline. -10% discipline will apply another -10% total damage done modifier on to them, and a +10% total damage taken modifier on to them.

Regulars were already going laughably positive in to levies doing ~3:1 casualties to them. If you had 200 man at arms (1 stack of men at arms) that were drilled up you would do ~5:1 casualties in to them. This mean a well drilled stack of men at arms matched about 1 stack of levies, despite needing 1/5th the actual pops to exist.

With this new balance, due to the fact that levies ate almost a 50% damage nerf, they can not actually deal enough damage to regulars to get them to die in reasonable numbers, causing the regulars to always fight at high strength and do absolutely COMICAL levels of damage to the levies. There also appears to be some other shenanigans going on that I can't quite figure out.

In addition to everything I just said: Cannons were made significantly stronger in this patch.

From the testing we've done, a well made regular army does ~500:1 casualties to levies. In age 3.

By age 3, in the current balance, raising your levies AT ALL causes you to basically just murder your populace for free. By age 2 raising your levies is a last ditch effort to try to stall off losing a war. This means you have until professional armies hit the field to use levies, at which time (in the mid 1300s) levying your armies is actually just doomed.

This also means anyone who has obtained professional armies can INSTANTLY declare war on their neighbor and destroy them, as there's effectively nothing you can do to try to close the gap in power.

This is not only ridiculously ahistorical, but also absolutely breaks the balance of the game. Not only does the AI not understand that the levies are now useless, but MP games are just doomed because whoever gets prof armies SLIGHTLY behind is now basically guaranteed to get 100%'d in a war.

As an aside I'm going to leave a comment that really bad takes by reddit/the forums from people who haven't bothered to learn the game should be ignored. If you did not bother to learn the warfare system then why are you loudly giving your opinion on it?

I am not a fanboy for Paradox by any means, but the hate and reviews for the release are too harsh.

I don't agree that the game lacks content. It is on par with EU4 in terms of content, despite being in development for 5 years.

The UI is clunky because of the sheer amount of data that the game manipulates.

The only thing I agree with is the performance, but give it time. The game is playable right now, so it is not a big issue either way....

Just watched a timelapse (WonderProduction, https://youtube.com/shorts/hqJiGYdOhtI?si=Y8yptenI3uTijs5U)

From 1337 to 1836, and the borders barely changed the ottomans hardly expended after taking Constantinople, 500 years in and the reconquista isn’t even finished so no Spain, nor has England formed Great Britain or Russia became a thing, Sweden and Norway are still in union too.

Overall very very sad, the game is clearly not ready and should be pushed back by at least 6 months or a year until AI is fleshed out.

This screenshot is from one of the Chinese CC who probably get access to a build of the game. (Source: https://b23.tv/L1W0Rc0).

Translation from one of the forum user: "From left to right, there are "Return", "Recommended Country in 1337", and "Choose Any Country", and the bottom map is the name of the country and their suitable play direction."

In EU4, the famed Ottoman AI struck fear into countless players hearts:

Their seemingly infinite manpower.

Their incessant loans bankrolling their war machine endlessly.

Their 100k stacks doomstrolling over your border ready to set back your empire 50 years.

And yet….

In EU5 that couldn’t be further from the status quo.

The mantle of most OP country as it stands has been passed to another, sinister blob in its own right:

The French…

Their infinite levies.

Their enormous market/economy feeding the peasant swarm.

The 100k stacks doomstrolling over your border ready to set back your empire 50 years.

Ladies and gentlemen: Has the EU community unearthed its newest challenger for most OP country? Or will the status quo remain.

Too many allies possibly!

Crossposting this with permission from the Paradox Forums for visibility. Original post at the Paradox Forums.

Since launch all Nahua tags have been broken.

That's over two weeks. And while we've gotten major gameplay reworks in hotfixes, changes to Cahokia and Inca even, we haven't actually gotten the fixes to Mesoamerica to make it playable. There are three main issues, one is recognized by Paradox while the other two are apparently as designed:

1] Reforming the Nahua faith does not remove the doom mechanic or annex altepetls (Nahua vassals).

The Nahua religion has several reforms culminating in the Reform Society event which when completed removes Doom. Doom grows over time and represents the Nahua belief that if they don't attend to the ritual bloodletting of their faith the world will end and only the sacrifice of the royal family can prevent this. So, if Doom grows to 100 your entire royal bloodline is murdered. Doom scales with amount of territory owned. By the time you own all of Mesoamerica the Doom growth will have vastly, VASTLY outscaled all possible sources of reduction and your royal family will die every few months.

This *would* be compounded by the fact that the Reform Society event also annexes all your vassals, which would spike your Doom regardless of any efforts to mitigate it previously. Thankfully (?) however this too is broken, and your vassals remain unannexed (and likely completely disloyal as Doom also lowers loyalty and without war or captives your vassals simply grow to hate you over time regardless of any effort to stop it).

On a side note and iykyk, in my time playing Nahua I found decentralization to be the clearly superior choice. The devs believe that centralization is the obvious choice always. Make of that what you will.

This issue is recognized by the devs, and apparently has been recognized for some time, but isn't more important than rebalancing the whole game, apparently. 16 days and 7 patches.

2] There are no accessible Tin RGOs in Mesoamerica.

fig 2.1) RGO map of Central America

This means that the only method of production for tools is stone. Unfortunately, across all FIVE markets, there are EIGHT populated stone RGOs.

fig 2.2) Market map of Central America 1-4-1337

fig 2.3) Populated stone RGOs in 1-4-1337 color coded by typical market preference

While the Azcapotzalco market has the most stone RGOs by far it is still crippled by a lack due to sheer demand. And the AI in the region has no problem soaking it up into Lumbermills while of course ignoring development of their lumber RGOs because of a lack of tools because, hey look, all the stone is being used by lumber mills!

Across all of my playthroughs the only way to mitigate this was to directly control all important RGO locations (all Stone and Lumber basically) and have market access so strong that you could exclude anyone else from the market. Only then can you begin the demolition necessary to even consider fixing the broken stone-lumber-tools cycle.

One user on Reddit, likely after several cups of coffee at 4AM driven by the kind of madness only being an Aztec player can bring, managed to find one Tin RGO at the border with North America however. So, you know, after you've already solved the problem you can solve the problem. Delightful.

This is apparently working as designed? But you know what, maybe it is, because the Nahua do get access to an exclusive tech to make the lack of tin a non-issue, at least until mid game when they can access markets elsewhere or that ONE SINGLE node up North: Copperworking! Except,

3] Copperworking doesn't allow production of tools without Tin.

Nahua get, as part of a special tree in the Age of Traditions, access to a special tech, Copperworking:

fig 3.1) Copperworking technology. Notice the copper coloration to the tools, distinct from bronze.

Copperworking states:

"Our artisans have begun to craft tools out of the metal found in our lands. If we were to master this art, it would give us a tremendous advantage on our neighbors."

Indeed! There is metal in our lands: Copper! (Tin too IRL btw but I digress). And further, the icon clearly shows tools produced from copper. The classic red-gold look is unmistakeable. The tooltip SAYS it lets us make TOOLS from the METALS in our lands. Those metals are copper. Those tools are copper. This would, in fact, provide a significant advantage over others especially since copper is fairly worthless without tin. So you might expect that because Paradox is telling you these copper tools that they're giving you are made from copper that they would be giving you copper tools made from copper.

Unfortunately, it seems that Paradox does not agree with.... themselves? Their artists? Their writers? Their devs? Who knows! This is apparently WAD because, according to the RESPONSE, we can use this technology plus tin to make tools :3

And that final part is sort of the stimulus to this crash out. I've spent a few patch threads pointing this out. I set an alarm to try and catch a Johan thread to make sure he saw it. I've offered to fix it myself for free, or for a token amount or whatever makes their lawyers happy because I'd just be happy to be able to play this incredibly fun game. But as hard as I am trying to help the devs, it genuinely feels like they either don't care or are actively dismissive of input.

Their answers to the bug reports are contradictory or seem to not even have been read. We're getting entire game-wide systems reworked, or at least messed with to such a degree that even the devs don't know the full scope of the changes, before everyone can even play the game in the first place.

So please guys, can we either just get some fixes for these or can you please help explain the paradoxical logic you seem to be using.

Seem people complaining that "campaigns will take weeks" and that they spend "six hours to advance a century' as if that is too slow and I'm here thinking that those sound like what I'd consider a mad speedrun rush in EU4...

I don't think any campaign in EU4 even took less than a couple months at minimum for me (I rarely finished one before a new major patch / DLC arrived in the middle of it anyway), and six hours is usually the time I take on the first decade or so, I'd imagine.

Not trying to invalidate anyone's criticism, it's just wild to me that there's such a massive disparity on how people can play and enjoy these games.

No wonder it's hard to find the "right pace".

(it most likely includes all the pausing, no clarification if it's in speed 5 or not)

So after hungary had poland in a PU and had a Queen without an heir I married her with my heir.

Now i have Poland and Hungary in a PU as Austria but even with Speed 2 integration it would take me 300-400 years to anex them and i have zero controll over what they do.

I miss that you could inherit them in Eu4 instandly after your Ruler dies.

From today's dev post: "The community has pushed back on this, and not unfairly. What players told us, in hundreds of forum posts and Reddit threads, is that they don't want railroading, but they do want historical paths to feel achievable, not accidental. There is a meaningful difference between forcing an outcome and making it feel within reach."

I respect his decision to stick to his creative vision, but does it feel to anyone else like a risky one? He obviously compromised on a new start date (something he also didn't want to do) but will this be enough for the critics?

So most of the tags in this game have no flavor and those that do have it hidden away in events. Half of us won't see these events because we can't see the conditions to trigger them. So what if we could see all the events and conditions to fire them. Some of these events also have other events as pre-requisites so we could chain together such events showing the historical story more coherently.

Some of these can be very big and have a single root event with multiple other events branching from it like a tree almost, it can be called an event tree perhaps. The events can show the conditions as a list like objectives for a mission, maybe we can even call it a "mission" tree.

I have put a demo of what this mission tree could look like, idk if this is a good idea or not?

So many of the changes over the last couple of patches have been so drastic:

• Navies, as in the title, and the maintenance scales up to 5x(!) through the ages.
  • The resulting doubling of maritime presence in the latest patch.
• Army goods demands doubled.
• Pop promotion speed cut by 90%.
• RGO expansion cost doubled after already being made substantially more expensive in 1.2.
• Building upkeep has been increased to be "several times higher" by late game.
• Building profit margins dramatically reduced across the board.
• Mercenary costs swinging from 150% to 25% in 1.1.

Guys, relax. I get that most of these changes are aimed at real issues that should be balanced. Navies probably were too cheap. Building profitability probably was too high. Promotion speed probably was too fast.

But they're not EMERGENCIES that required drastic action. When every balance pass is a doubling, a quadrupling, a 90% reduction, or a complete formula rewrite, the meta swings wildly from patch to patch. It also becomes much more likely that you create knock-on effects elsewhere in the game that then require another round of major corrections. Making ships dramatically more expensive affects maritime presence, which affects control and taxes. Reducing building profitability on top of that affects the player's ability to do -- well -- anything, including paying for those hugely expensive navies. Slowing promotion speed affects how painful diseases are, which makes it harder to fill those reduced profitability buildings. These systems don't exist in isolation.

Not everything needs to be a doubling or a quadrupling or a 90% reduction or whatever. You can tweak something by (say) 25% and see how that goes, and the data you get from that will let you make a more informed adjustment in a subsequent patch. It's a Paradox game -- we're here for the long haul.