"EU IV is much improved from EUIII, so I wouldn't rule it out until you tried it, Fasces."
I've played 6 hours of EUIV (player a bit as the Portugese before getting bored, then played as Byzantium and destroyed the Ottoman empire. From now on I will only be playing it for the continuation of my CKII games, which was what I did for EUIII, used mods to convert my CKII save files over and continued my game.) and 43 hours of EUIII on steam. I'm talking from experience.
While I agree that EUIV improves on a lot of what I didn't like about EUIII, most of the problems I had with EUIII are still present in the game:
Colonization is too easy (for a game that centrers around the colonial era, you'd think that colonization would be a mechanic they would focus on) Africa Indonesia are colonized way to early in the game.
Colonization is too profitable (With exception to North America, Peru and India, it is estimated the Europeans lost money in the long run on their colonial investments)
How good your leader is plays too important of a role, especially for technological development.
Non-western nations are overly penalized, even when it wasn't historical (I'm looking at the Ottomans).
I'm not sure about the process of westernization in EUIV, but the way westernization worked in EUIII was retarded
The importance of trade on technological development being completely absent.
Wars are too easy, and how warscore works is utterly retarded. I like Vicky 2 and CKII better because you don't need to occupy every single territory in your opponents empire to get reasonable offers for peace. War is too frequent (mostly due to peace time boredom which is more present in this game then in their other games) to easy and gains are too modest. If they made peace more interesting, and wars took longer/were harder, they wouldn't need to make it impossible to expand rapidly.
Late game starts on EUIV aren't historical: How the hell can they justify both Russia and England having level 27 technology when Russia was historically decades behind England at the time. England was starting their industrial revolution while Russia would remain agrarian for most of the entire 19th century.
For a series that is suppose to pride itself on historical realism, the lack of historical realism regarding the key components of the era, makes me fail to comprehend why this series is so popular and critically acclaimed.
I still love paradox, and they're still my favourite developer. But Europa Universalis remains far behind their other key grand strategy series for me to fully enjoy the game.
"Also, any Paradox game can kick the shit out of Civ in terms of depth and realism."
Paradox does kick the shit out of Firaxis, however Civilization is more moddable then any paradox game.
Not including mods, CKII, HOI2 and Vicky 2 are the best strategy games out there (in my opinion). But I haven't seen a mod that comes even close to the depth department that we see in C2C.
The two closest mods I know of in the depth department are RoM and AND (A New Dawn), they pail in comparison to C2C, but they are also Civ 4 mods.
You were questioning my opinions because you wrongfully assumed that I hadn't played EUIV. Now I'm going to question your opinions.
Until you've played as much C2C as I have played EUIV, you are being as blind and irrational as you thought my oppinions of EUIV are.
And if you have played C2C (which is really unlikely given the way your talking about Civilization), please list the mods of any paradox game that comes close to the scale of C2C, and I will tell you why you're wrong.
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