Also, ironically, despite the game being called "Europa Universalis", it is the least eurocentric of all Paradox grand-strategy games (excluding Stellaris).
@@Michal-je1hxHope EU5 only has Europe. And maybe change the name for something more napoleonic, like marching. Also add some german heraldry like an eagle. Something like Eagle's March. Could even restrict the timeline to the 18th century. That would be a perfect game.
The previous titles were very much eurocentric, hence the name. In the first game you could literally only play as European countries, and in 2 and 3 (and early patches of 4) non-European countries were playable but hardly worth playing because they weren't fleshed out at all and had to deal with the incredibly frustrating mechanic of westernization or they'd be steamrolled by the European powers. EU4 is leagies ahead of those games, the name has Europe just because of the legacy
Ah yes, truly a global center of trade in 1444, TIBET. Also isnt trade value meant to represent goods flowing, not cash, hence it becomes more expensive downstream, i mean yh trade is like horribly inaccurate with the people producing goods getting 0 shekels , but i thought the worst part of trade was the rhine not flowing along the rhile river, instead hopping into france and New York not being a center of trade. China already has 2 very good trade nodes in Beijing and Yumen if you conquer past mongolia to make no1 transfer from Yumen. A thing we'll definitely deal with in EU 5 that you could do and which I think would be very cool is redo the dev based on population, if you take europe's dev as the baseline ming should have like i think it was 8K starting dev, but that would quickly rise to 10k, and india iirc in total should start with like 12k dev
I think that the problems with eu4 euro centrism is that eu4 doesnt have good colonial mechanics and also doesnt have good economy mechanics. I dont understand what is money from production efficiency supposed to be and trade is largely a very static and "brick" kind of mechanic. All that really matters is controlling the nodes directly behind you and in front of you and you can be good on trade. Trade goods dont even matter that much because while yes i can go to india or africa and get spices and ivory and diamonds, simply devving up my farmlands and cloth is good enough. Colonialism is also a very boring mechanic. Press button and get province in 5 years isnt that exciting and trade companies might aswell be named trade mode where you assign provinces to trade mode so they get more trade. I hope eu5 can have some more incentive to think outside the box and expand in other places and also a nice diplomacy system to compliment it. The 1600s was a truly crazy time period especially in asia because of the arrival of pesky europeans and the game doesnt really depict it at all. Spanish-japanese invasion of cambodia? Portuguese fighting dutchmen in indonesia ? English defending indians from french privateers? A greek catholic from corfu called constance phaulkon becoming the top advisor to the king of thailand and almost grabbing power to make the country a french protectorate?? Why cant we have this stuff.
In the Steam workshop there used to be a mod called "trade flow reversed"... doing exactly what it says. A little easier on the map because it didn't make a point to add and remove the trade flow to bias China's nodes, but in a round about way having the same effect. There was also a variant called "trade flow half reversed", that kept the original flow of trade in the Americas and Australia, because a lot of people complained that nobody was colonising or spawning the Colonialism institution. For some reason the game AI (at least at the time the mod was made) only colonised downstream. This had the effect of turning the Girin / Manchuria region into the world's premier end node. Venice and Genoa were start nodes, but the English Channel did have an opportunity to get trade flowing into it once the age of exploration gets underway.
For the memes you might as well make Ming start with printing press. It is a chinese invention after all. The reason it blew up in Europe is movable type, for which chinese characters are quite ill suited.
I do wish that there is a way to balance the game so that China (and consequently the rest of East Asia) have major advantages in the early game that diminish in favor of Europe as time goes on; a system that realistically depicts the shift of the center of the world away from China and towards Europe. I really wish trade nodes were dynamic in EU4, because that would add a lot to that.
Well the center of the world was China and India, either way both nations are basically heavily nerfed at the start of the game. The nomads used to be super strong in early game but that's been nerfed too.
There was - that's what the old tech group system did before they replaced it with development and institutions. I think in retrospect the changes were a massive overcorrection that did a lot to destroy the games loose historical simulation.
@@jansatamme6521 No, China should start the game with a few mil techs ahead, enough to build artillery reg from the start of the game. Moreover, it only takes like 200 years for France to have similar dev to Ming, didn't happen IRL. Both Ming and Indian states had armies in the hundreds of thousands, they don't have that in game.
On the colonialism institution spawning, if you allow having colonies in Australia as a requirement (which is not there in the base game), it should allow SE Asian nations to potentially spawn it
I think that the biggest advantage that europeans have in EU4 nowadays is province density. It allows a much smaller area in Europe to have a much higher development
Trade ports-centers in every province?????? It's interesting how strong it will buff the trade especially for poor areas like Africa, New world, tataria and Australia
Eu5 should have this but every nation so that if you somehow make south african space marines technocracy. Then south africa would get renesance or smth
I think the game would benefit massively from dynamic trade spheres. Like, i can see and agree with why land is grouped together into "nodes" and most of said nodes make sense, but i think the flow should depend on which node has more total power, snd msybe even dome railroading. Like, at start I think there should be 6-7 nodes that are "end" nodes, but sre not fixed, they are just that by virtue of having the strongest sovereign trade powers and/or richer thsn surrounding nodes. Like: Lubeck Venice Genoa Beijing Great Lakes Mexico Lima Should be starting "end" nodes, the 3 American ones could easily decay once colonizers arrive and begin pulling trade away, Lubeck could easily be overtaken by the channel once the dutch and English take off, same with genoa and sevilla whencthe new world silver begins to flow in, and bejing could become unable to pull trsde fromcabrosd because of ming isolationism and lose it's end node status wheb malaya takes off.
For the time period of 1444-1823 it very much makes sense for Europe to be the center of the game and for them to have advantages like this. This obviously does not mean that other nations should be an afterthought, but it is a game that wants to simulate the foundations for the European empires that dominated the world for over a hundred years. As a side, I think the game is far too balanced in its current state. Everyone apart from migratory tribes seem to have no problem catching up in tech, only being like 2 or 3 behind.
I think you underestimate the power of 2-3 mil techs. 3 mil techs are an insane amount and make you easily defeat armies 50% to 100% your size depending on the specific tech level. If you wanted to make it more Euro favoured, the best way would probably be to let the later institution spread like the first few
Also the probably best way to realistically balance all of this is to have strong and big techs like 16 increase the army upkeep similar to how it works for navies. That way the trade has a bigger impact on actual army power and not every nation can just build to its force limit
Imo there should be trade nodes with 2-way flow, china and japan should be able to take transfer money from malacca/moluccas back to china/japan rather than needing to go for like philippines->polynesia->nippon
Honestly giving one country that hasn’t done a lot of trade companying 3 endnodes is kind of unhealthy for their trade setup regardless of what they do. Probably has something to do with the fact that China is HUGE but actually isn’t that big in terms of number of provinces and number of trade nodes when compared to Europe which has a lot of detail. A big culprit is that Canton and Beijing are separated by only one node. Both are very valuable and important to trade in China, but really only one can be an end node - think about how in spite of being next to each other, Venice and Genoa only really share trade through Tunis, and even the the English Channel is an utterly insane node not just for its ability to draw directly from the Americas and Africa but also because it’s near other very valuable nodes that can only ever fall towards it. In this trade setup, Hangzhou, another extremely big node, has to make a decision between two end nodes, and loses a lot of power as a result. Personally I’d make Canton the only endnode if we want it to just be China Universalis, with the other two possible endnodes saved for other parts of the world - maybe India deserves one, or perhaps Alexandria’s importance should be nodded to, or maybe we should keep the power of the English Channel but shift around the trade immediately around it to ensure that ultimately Canton is big. good video tho, you do way too much work for dumb things like this lol
That is all true if I wanted a more 'realistic' experience but in fairness this was more created as a glorified China Stronk shitpost, so while true again, I think for the purpose of this setup it does its job.
@@LemonCake101 Well in that u succeeded lol. I do have one note for u though You should’ve given every trade route an anchor point in Nanjing, the southern capital. It doesn’t actually accomplish anything but all trade flows through China.
The European expansions would not have happened if the Ottoblobs never existed so blame the Ottoman empire for starting European kingdoms to go colonial and form empires. It's a sad byproduct.
I feel like making Malacca or Coromandel the third end node would have been more believable. Making Lhasa an end node felt very arbitrary, whereas Malacca and Coromandel have historically been trading hubs comparable to Genoa or Venice in Europe.
so uh I got inspired from your video and tried my hand at making my own more semi-serious version of a noneurocentric trade node network if you see this, I'm posting in case my other comment got deleted/removed by youtube's automoderation thing for having a link to the reddit post I made on it on the EU4 wiki about it (lemon can delete this comment and mark the other one as not spam if wanted)
yeah I expected as much thank you though! here's a cut version of the link that should still work, probably /r/eu4/comments/1ffkkhy/asia_universalis_a_europhobic_trade_node_overhaul
To be pedantic for the sake of being a bit educational, it won't be GULAG specifically, as GULAG refers to soviet labour capms as it is and abbreviation from something that can be translated as "Main labour camp directorate" - the name of the body that was running said labour camps.
I understand why a comparison between this (or any other mod you make) and vanilla is not actually useful, but a sample game that runs to ~1600s would still be interesting to see. I'd be interested to see how nations that have institution spawning monuments fare, for example.
Can you make it so that all trade only flows in one direction and has no end or start node just loops back on itself? Would it hit infinity super fast or would peoples trade power keep it under control?
Very much looking forward to EUV/Project Ceasar pushing back the start date and taking mechanical steps to deabstract and elaborate on mechanics. With the setup time (and impending black plague), I'm starting to think the player will be able to make a "Europe" powerhouse out of anywhere in the world, China being an obvious example.
This one in particular was bad because it picked up all the mouse movements… I might just record the voice separately to any in game things so the mic has no mouse movements to pick up :(
Make a video of trade where it can only flow one path from start node to end node to amplify trade steering massively. I don’t care which order, I’m only curious about how trade value will increase.
11:15 - the buff to printing press for protestant branches (in-game protestant, reformed, and anglican) actually does make sense. One of the core differences between catholicism and protestantism was the fact that in catholicism only the priests were allowed to read the Bible, and only the church's interpretation of the Bible could be considered true (+ the priests were one of the few groups who even knew how to read and write), meanwhile, protestants believed that only what is directly said in the Bible is true, and that everyone should read it themselves and be able to interpret it. That belief was the main reason why the printing press was considered so important back then, why it developed the fastest in regions with large protestant communities (Germany, the Netherlands, England, Switzerland, Scandinavia) and also why many letters not present in German that were used in other languages (for example the letters þ and ð in English) were removed around the XVI century - the demand for more books, especially for Bibles, was rising so quickly, that the printing press was just necessary to be able to meet that demand, and since the technology was the most popular in Germany, most printers were using German fonts. Other than that, really cool video
