Why does late game suck? 

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“And Alexander wept, for he saw there was about 1000 more worlds to conquer but his CPU could handle about 10”

It Sucks, Because you have Become to Strong and the Most Difficult thing is Not Falling Asleep.

The reason late game sucks is because there's no entropy. By the end of the game, especially in EU4, most of the land has been gobbled up by huge blobs with colossal militaries - the kind that would require an impossibly efficient hive-mind bureaucracy to run and keep stable. Rebellions are a joke, and internal instability doesn't scale up with the size of the empire, even if it conquered multitudes of other peoples to get there. There are other issues such as late-game lag and micro which make it annoying, but I think the biggest issue with lategame in most of the Paradox titles is that there are no mechanics that inherently counter snowballing.

“And Alexander wept, for he saw there was no more worlds left to conquer.”

For all 5 people that care, Imperator is actually fun up to the end-date, mainly cause without try-hardism even for Rome it's a challenge to reach max historical borders or WC, and with anything weaker it's a never ending cycle of build-up, line-go-up and assimilation and you actually have to put effort in keeping your country together to limit just blobbing everywhere

Problem with every Strategy late game: -Game is too slow -Player is too powerful -AI spams units -Everyone is allied with everyone causing 1 minor war to escalate into total war (WW1 RP) -There is nothing more to do (Focus tree, research etc) -There is nothing more to build

"HoI4 is not intended to be played past endgame" >Looks at Turkey's focus tree "I'm not sure, buddy"

I got a modest 1.5k hours in Stellaris and the biggest issue with the game I have is there are a ton of super fun A.I personalities that you will NEVER see. What you gotta do is make a bunch of custom empires following the wiki to get them to spawn with specific personalities. Fanatical Befrienders and Metalheads are wild but you've probably never seen them spawn naturally. A bunch of AI personalities require not just specific ethics but the founder species to have specific traits. So whenever I play Stellaris I have a bunch of custom empires forced spawn so I see variety every game. It also means unless I'm also playing a megacorp only two max will spawn in the galaxy. For reference Metalheads are so aggressive they usually die, they don't care about being stronger they will just attack. A devouring swarm has 3x aggressiveness while Metalheads have that at 10x. What I want most in Stellaris is a shattered galaxy option where galaxy is broken into chunks connected by hyperlanes but not to other chunks. Only way to reach the other chunks of galaxy being wormholes, gateways, jump drives, and the catapult.

Stellaris would be at its best late game if it didnt slow down so much. World killers, megastructures, the endgame crisis, and late game diplomacy like galactic custodian etc is actually really cool. War in heaven is a game killer tho because usually most of the map joins a single federation.

At least with PDX, no one plays it, so PDX don't pay attention so no one plays it and so on

The biggest problem with Hoi4 late game is that it's generally way too easy. You stabilize the frontline gain air superiority logistic bomb their trucks and trains and just right click past Moscow or something. It just takes about 6 months preparation to unstuck a frontline.

remain calm all province tierlist endures lemon cake will suffer i finally was early again there is much to be done

A huge issue with HOI4 (this is the paradox game Ive played the most) late game is that by 1945, even in mods, 99% of the time you're either so powerful nobody can touch you or you're neck deep into a war that you've been fighting since 1941 or earlier and it's slowly draining the life out of you, the games way of saying "fuck off and touch grass".

Real paradox game moment: "I only have a bit of experience in this game" 500 hours lol

by the late game, the AI just shows that they're really bad at the game. In EU4/Imperator, once you've done your missions (they're always overloaded with buffs for the players) the AI just doesn't know what to do with their army/manpower even if they outnumber or outdevelop you. In CK, it's ridiculous how easy the late game is because you're blobbing even when you're actively not trying to because of how your vassals can sometimes just inherit land outside your realm even at the highest crown authority. Not to mention all the super soldiers you can come up with your retinue/knights. The Victoria games are the only ones that have somewhat interesting late games, especially Vic 2, because 1) the game ends arguably early when it's just about to be boring and you're about to cruise on gas attack tank/plane and battleship stacks and 2) there's guaranteed world-altering Great Wars to mix things up that sorta compares how well you've been doing against other nations and puts a nice ending to how you've been slowly building your nation internally.

The two big once: It's slow to compute, and there is no army automation.

Crusader Kings has some other advantages over the other paradox games. The game allows for lots of kinds of expansion and map painting that don't involve directly conquering other places through systems like conversion, placing relatives on distant thrones, or the merchant republic trade post mechanics. It also gives you the opportunity to wildly shake up how you're playing even very late in the game. It also shares something like the 'crisis' system from Stellaris, what with the Mongols in the late game (and the more controversial Aztec Invasion slightly earlier if you play with it). In one of the most memorable campaigns I played I spent the first 3/4s playing as a ventian trading family, slowly building up the family palace and crushing the other merchant republics in the mediterranean while playing a careful diplomatic game with the islamic world, then I joined a crusade late in the game with a small force, did way better than expected and almost accidentally ended up becoming king of jerusalem. Suddenly I was playing with all the standard feudal mechanics and had a totally different set of priorities. It was great, and not really possible with any other pdx game.

CK2 has the best endgame because the game is so random that literally anything can happen. No two play throughs are exactly the same in CK2.

Victoria 2 modded fixed it by having the dismantle and making sure the late game was often still challenging, but not painful - as well as trying to diplomat your way into great wars. Even then, some don't pay

yeah, the micromanagement while having 1 million troops deployed and waging three simultaneous wars is tedious. Like you've said, you'll will, you're too strong too lose, but chasing their 200k doomstack isn't fun and waiting for 30 lv 8 to be sieged down while the RNG gods won't give you anything beyond a 2 star siege general is just sucky. Also, the attrition while standing around because no province even provides a half full with stack so you basically gotta slice them in 4 and then slap them back together again and then detach all siege units / artillery or take insane amounts of attrition AND then watch that like a hawk in case doomstack just wipes your artillery only stack. It's so tedious and not rewarding because taking 3 provinces with 30 dev each is neat I guess but I already have 15000 dev so going to war with Spain, France and Austria for 3 lousy provinces is just exhausting. Especially with the goddamn AE in Europe which is just insane and then forces you to fight even bigger slower wars just for tiny gains.

In a more general game design sense it’s because the developers have less knowledge of what resources a player will have and it becomes harder to build a “puzzle” that feels rewarding to solve. I can create a box with a lock on it and ask you to solve a math problem to get the solution, and that’s fine, but if the reward is worth it and you have other tools (say, a hammer or a laser cutter), the math problem simply won’t be solved. To put this in terms of paradox (and eu4), the developers only know what countries exist in 1444. They can’t script big wars, they can’t force the league war to actually be 30 years, and there’s no real way to have a fun gameplay mechanic involving incompetent rulers that so often ruined nations in this timeframe. Any lategame challenge that has any difficulty can be known and planned for (think, revolutions or the commonwealth noble revolt) and it makes these challenges significantly less challenging. There can’t really be generic challenges because something like +10 global unrest is going to function a lot differently depending on your size and strength and it’s going to feel unrewarding to play through. I definitely think there are solutions, limiting player expansion to a reasonable level so that they don’t reach a state where they can plan for everything is one of them and I hope eu5 slows down the rate of expansion in the early game to both match history and make the game more engaging

Lategame Mount & Blade Warband is brutal slogfest of conquering every single siegable place on the entire MAP

it propably also matters how curated an experience can be. having events like the 100 years war at the start of eu 4 is possible, as the devs can control for most of the parameters at the start of the game. if you put that in 100 years later it is very possible that some countries are global empires or don`t even exist anymore. so the later the events are happening the more generic they have to be, as the devs don`t know the situation in which they happen.

22:00 This is why VIcky 3 war is so hands off, trying new ways of handling the aspect of gameplay without making it into a micro fest like every other paradox title. And I can respect their effort, even if the system itself might not be that great to many, at least they are trying and looking for an alternative.

I like how the end-game strategy in CK2 is to breed the Kwisatz Haderach

I've always liked vic2's endgame, as time is really strict/punishing in that game, so you reach it often, and there's a lot of barriers to conquering, so while you *could* wc, it's not common for you to pull away entirely for the entire part of the game. Only civ5 can pull a high quality end like that in my experience.

HOI4 late game i think can be summed up by; nukes main use is for destroying stacks of aircraft all at once

I’ve played Paradox games since 2017, at some periods more strongly than others, but the only game I’ve ever actually finished is Victoria 2 (several times actually). I remember following the Victoria 3 dev diaries early on they were like “there are more ticks so it’s about the same length as the other games” and I was like “why would you ruin the best part about Victoria 2?”. I wish there was a game that was just like 1648-1821 because I do love the 18th century but getting there in EU4 takes forever and whatever country you will have played by then will be unbeatable anyway.

CK2 is challenging at all times cause it takes one bad RNG roll to just fall apart and I love it

CK:s RP elements also adds to the games longevity. When I get bored with developing my empire and dynasty I can just start a love affair with the pope, turn my family tree into a bush or start worshipping Satan.

What always kills my late games is the tediousness and the sheer micro involved if you're doing a WC. I've had three or four runs recently where a WC was doable and one where it would have been absurdly easy, but remembering all the clicking, the speed 2 or 1'ing, and the holding down s while constantly selecting my armies to get ready to lag while carpet sieging 100 provinces'ing really disincentivizes me, especially since I already have the achievement for that and a one faith. The point where I quit is usually when coalitions auto-disband. The game knows that it's over, I know that it's over. The only thing saving them is just the sheer boredom of shift-clicking the army consolidate button while I lose 100k men sieging the fourth level 8 fort for a five province minor and it doesn't matter since I have over 3 million because I spammed soldiers houses.

I’d say because the problem is trying to make entropy fun. Most people don’t like seeing what they’ve built up crumble overnight. It’s a hard thing to balance.

Loved the video! Absolutely not relevant, but your mention of the Abbasids doing literally everything reminds me that once upon a time I saw the Abbasids get taken over by a Chinese Adventurer, become the Shun Empire (with a hideous bright pink map colour) and then promptly detonate a decade or so later. CK2 was a different breed of game, man.

I love starting new Stellaris games, but it gets tiring so damn quickly. I always set midgame start date as early as possible.

Vic II has one of the best late games, colonization, crises, great wars, new ideologies all make the late game feel much more unique than the early game

Wow you got BLESSED by the algorithm. Was lange währt wird endlich gut. It's an idiom meaning that something you did for a while will eventually pay off. Congrats!

Stellaris feels like it just has a general pacing problem baked into the concept, the game can't fully accomodate the epic space opera feeling it wants to create. It wants to be a game about the first emergence of spaceborne civilization, where there's a mad scramble to discover and colonize the galaxy, but it also wants to be a game about vast warfare between galaxy spanning empires. But it can't do both of those things, maintain the epic space opera feeling and be played at a scale/timeframe that's actually fun/functional at the same time, one of those aspects needs to be sacrificed.

The problem I have with stellaris is that by the time I finish my ring world, I don't need a ring world anymore

This is a pretty common problem with 4X Strategic games, and we can find it anywhere from total war to stellaris to civilication. One game I do think handles this very well is Total war: Shogun 2 that has a defined end goal and when you get close to it the entire map turns against you. It really helps with the pacing of the game, which is where 4x games often strugle

I think for Hearts of Iron IV it's because the game typically revolves around a massive scale war, and the first part of the game is more or less building up your country, researching tech, establishing yourself diplomatically, maybe establishing more to your empire, bully smaller countries without problem and choosing your path (ie communist, monarchist etc) , it's always very chill yet slow at the beginning because massive scale wars aren't happening. You may have a micro-minigame to keep your eye on (ie Stalin's paranoia) but early game is always slow while you and the AI make their choices. Mid game is when the massive war breaks out, WW2 (or 1, or 3 if playing Great War or Millennium Dawn), countries have chosen focuses to go to war and their alliances for this save, and now you may find yourself in that war, maybe you started it as a major, maybe you're a minor who wants to build their empire. Either way, the war is now on, they're occurring left right and center, you enter the war and spend the next few hours at war, the action has started to pick up intensely, and you don't have as much of time to really focus on building alliances or whatever, the war is now the foremost part of the game. Late game is when the war's over. Maybe you won, maybe you lost. But the war is over. Germany/UK/USA/USSR (take your pick) and their allies are now defeated, and even though tensions are still sky high, there's a strange sense of peace, the defeated are usually split and puppeted between the victors, and by the time it's over, most countries focus trees are completely done, there is nothing to do really do anymore, except research or maybe try and integrate your winnings from war. Given that most games in HOI4 do last a good few hours, I also feel like there's a feeling of "thank god that's over", once you're done too.

“End your game at a reasonable time” *Me who played from 1912 to 2001 with the Great War mod* “No”

Speaking out of recent experience with late game, Stellaris returning after a long break to check out Cosmogenesis. After reaching the last stage I thought it would soon end, it's been 3 irl days since then, and it's still not over, purely because of the lag. Over the course of the death war with the rest of the galaxy my empire has ballooned to unsustainable proportions with over 15000 pops living in it. Can't purge them fast enough, and the Horizon Needle is only packing up like 3-4 planets a year. My solution to the late game Stellaris even if it's just "bigger number wins" is precisely that, big Death Wars against the entire galaxy against you because it's fun to fight them, but unfortunately it always ends the same way, game slowing down where you just can't actually finish it. The lag from everything you take becomes unsustainable, and it's purely a game engine problem. It just doesn't matter how good your computer is, you'll always experience this lag, because Clausewitz Engine wasn't built for the current iteration of Stellaris. It was built for a much simpler game where you FTL directly into the enemy capital and win the war after a handful of battles. Stellaris as a game is just unfixable and I would much rather prefer if they made Stellaris 2 at this stage.

It's simple really. None of these late games have lemon cakes as a trade good.

Victoria 2 got it right. The late game adds content that will actually massively affect the game such as new ideologies, scramble for africa, technologies such as gas, tanks etc and great wars. The early game actually feels like a build up period which you get to use in the late game via the great war mechanic

One of the great things about Victoria 2 is the game is meant to be played to WW1. Its like the early game build up of hoi without the forced tedium. If you play with certain mods the ai is actually capable and the end game will be really fun.

I would say that all strategy games suffer from the fact that microing doesn't scale up. It's fun to micro a few planets in Stellaris, but later you are still microing planets, you just hava way too many of them. In EU4 you are microing provinces, even though you have the best tools available in any game to do that, you are still microing provinces even when you own half the planet. The amount of microing shouldn't go up as the game progresses, you should have to micro different things than in early game.

Crusader kings 2 near end game is like history got spat on wall and someone tried to rearrange it

15:21 lmao thats certainly a unique version of the man v. Bear thing

Late game stellaris is fun if you play with gigastructures and have a NASA computer like I do.

Any game with a mission tree, or technology tree will have a bad late game. To get around this we first need much better artificial intelligence.

A mod that I enjoy for hoi4, "Kaiserreich", has various small improvements to make the late game less tedious. There are soft-capped unit counts that are generated from the amount of factories you have, for example. It's a bit funny, but the more I revisit the mod, the more I've come to this conclusion: The late game is very unfun with no limits. Either becauase the AI will keep building into the sky, or you can get lazy and complacent, and just toss manpower into the grinder until you get your win. Unit limits force you to blend together a unique mixture of specialization and diversification. There's still some "unlimited" aspects like equipment production, and honestly, maybe there should be some type of limit to that too. If "I were to build my own hoi4", I'd ensure that there are at least soft limits to just mindlessly fielding armies.

CK2 is also good in that as the game goes on the world becomes more populated creating lag until the black death when it gets reset

Ottomans only having 300k? They get to 600k really quickly whenever I play. I actually get to the year 1700 a lot, and never have a "breeze" beating a 800k army France. Perhaps I am simply really bad at the game. On a side note, I would actually really like some CK2 videos. (Not just because I suck)

Personally, in Stellaris, I hide in my territory and let the end game crisis delete half the empires and then destroy the crisis so I can get back to my spreadsheet simulator with better performance.

In my personal experience (having only played HOI4 and Stellaris mind you) its because it always comes down too "Im not strong enough, dont have enough resources and have to just sit my ass down and wait for the right moment to strike during the games LAGGIEST period" OR "Literally no one can kill me and i cant be fucking bothered to waste my life on a world conquest that feels more like a chore than fun gameplay"

In EU4 the coalition mechanism only works up to a point, where you're so strong you scare off coalitions. Then nothing will be strong enough to stop you, while being invulnerable (oh no the enemy holds all my lands on that continent... still 10% of my empire, I can still launch massive counterattacks at their heartlands and steamroll them).

"And Alexander wept, for his campaign had too much late-game lag to conquer."

I agree that Micro is what kills Eu4 late game. Its so frustrating fighting wars with 250k+ on both sides and you see a random army behind your lines sieging you provinces and destroying the prosperity you spend so long building up, then you gotta go send a stack to attack them, they run somewhere random and then come back and do it again

1. Lag 2. You are too OP

I think that a little ice age in eu4 that actually has an impact on economies and armies, rather than just a price change for two goods, would be something that could shake up the midgame. It could even have a larger effect on bigger nations in other to pose a challenge to states who have blobbed early game.

I just enjoy late game stellaris bc I like being able to roll things and I generally take the game slower at the start bc I’m usually just relaxing. I get into the rp of it even when I’m playing alone so that gets me through the early slog

Late game eu4 (only one I really play besides maybe Stellaris but Stellaris is imo actually good) is actually fun if you have a goal. Once you have that goal the fun decreases

A big thing for all of these I feel is common is performance. In HOI4 it’s 1942 onward, in EU4 it’s the Protestant war, but there’s a certain point where they start really chugging… I didn’t realize how big performance was a factor in how long I played saves after I sunk a bunch of money into my pc

It seems like EU5 will fix this problem. Its going to be much more balanced and fun than EU4 because of the pop system

Damn that tannu tuvan WC was slightly faster than mine (1960s for mine)

games are fun as long as you don't know how well you'll do. i come from the sid meier's civ franchise and it's the same problem there as in eu4/hoi4/vic3: about 20% into a game, you get a feeling for if you're gonna "win" or not. 30% into a game, you know for sure if you'll win or not. i had a suggestion to add a game mode where you add a dynamic ai buff like the "lucky nation", but you scale it massively based on distance and how well the player is doing. so, to use a simple example: if you play as austria and conquer 3k development in europe by 1550, a random country in east asia, e.g. korea, will get ridiculous buffs which will enable them to get 3k dev in east asia, and a random country in africa like kongo will also get 3k dev, and so on. so as you've conquered europe, you know have a massive enemy in asia and a massive enemy in africa. and in north america and south america. i mean you can't artificially add 3k dev to africa, but my point is that maybe the kongo troops get like 150% discipline to make up for a bad economy. it doesn't have to be development only. it can be land attrition, higher tech, more gold, more manpower. a bunch of stuff. the point is that in this game mode the game would adapt to your own skill as the game progresses. it's not that the ai gets 100% bonus on all stats from the start, because then you still have the problem of knowing that you've won when you've played 50% of the playthrough. it's that the game adapts to how well you're doing. obviously you'd have to tweak it a lot, and i know a bunch of changes i'd propose for civ5 and civ6 and i don't really know exactly how it could be best implemented in paradox games yet, but i really think it's a game mode that can't be too difficult to implement and that could add a lot of replayability. play as byzantium and crush the ottomans by 1480? the dynamic ai buff notices and suddenly timurids gets buffs and is able to form persia by the time you've reached the middle east. conquer persia? india is united with +1 enemy attrition. conquer india? qing has united china. as i said, i come originally from civ5 and civ6, and the amount of games where i've had a strong inkling by turn 40 that i would win, that i knew for certain that i would win by turn 80, and still have the game go on to like turn 500... well, it's only been like 3 times and those times have all been to confirm that the game does indeed get boring once you know that you've won. idk exactly how to implement any of this in paradox as i've played sid meier for like 10 years and only paradox for 1 year, but for sure a dynamic ai mode would be something i would want to play provided it was planned and executed by guys who knew the game well and knew what type of buffs are fun to play against edit: as a side note: of all games listed i feel like vic3 is the biggest offender. does anyone else agree? it starts in 1836 and i literally don't know why i should play beyond 1855. every. and yet the time period covers the Great War. why on earth is there not a massive mega war in the late late game? it is the perfect game to have a super fun late game.

genuinely love to see you do well. nice video

i get this problem in every Civ ever too, only the early game is ever interesting. The late game just feels like clicking through the results of my earlier decisions

5:39 Sounds like Civ games on Deity difficulty lmao

Eu4 endgame is like taking candy from a baby. You feel good and cool while doing it. But you feel its way to easy.

Improving your capital tech in Ck2 is important because universities can contribute a lot for that tech to be spred out to other counties not just the first one which is why I really like to build cities more than everything in my building slots

I liked the Mongol/Timurids invasions in Medieval 2. That was a nice challenge in the end game but also something you could choose to ignore if your country wasn't right next to them.

I watched a redhawk video and my wife asked. "Is that the cake?" I knew immediately she was talking about you, so according to her you sound like redhawk, congrats I guess

I somewhat like Paradox endgames as they are enjoyable. In the total war franchise, I lose interest in the endgame quickly as it is you, the dominant faction, mopping up the corners of the map. Edit: the Paradox game aren’t enjoyable, more in playable with somewhat of a variation between each game.

My fondest military memory in Stellaris was back in the day, the far off ally to my hostile neighbour unlocked stargate travel and dumped a fleet in the middle of my empire. My own were deep in the enemy territory and my borders fortified. My response was to tell my three biggest shipyards to work overtime building Harrower star destroyers (battleships). I caught the entire enemy fleet between two and one star destroyers, and the obscene health, armour and shielding of my ships meant that they crippled the enemy fleet of corvettes and destroyers, sending them into a panic. You can't do that anymore, as for unknown reasons they committed the worst crime in sci fi naval battle depictions. They increased the scale, substantially. You no longer see individual ships deploy starfighters and fire weapons, you see non-distinct blobs shooting messy special effects at each other.

This video is going viral! NIce to see new, small creators. Liked and subbed :)

There are some games where the late game is the most exciting part (as in RPGs like witcher 3 or kingdom come deliverence, or turnbased game like TW:Attila)

every time i stopped playing eu4 was because my armies got too large and micro intensive. at some point i tried to emulate giving ai control of my armies by going into obs and basically playing coop with the ai, it atleast kept me playing for a few more years.

What always bugs me about Stelaris is that it *tries* to give you all sorts of soft power and none-military options, but dominant strategy is to play like an apocalypse prepper so you don’t die when the 2-300K Unbidden fleet appears next to your home system.

The one point I'd add to hoi4 is a lot of the achievements paradox is now adding require near to a world conquest as a small country which almost always takes you deep into the late game even when played aggressively.

Oh my goodness. Please paradox introduce the ai army feature for EU4😮😮😮

Everyone has too much stuff, but you are more powerful anyway and it just become a slog

late game hoi iv turns into 1984's eternal war

The solution to late game (Eu4) being boring is just to not reach it by accidentally getting all of Europe in a coalition 20 years in and having to start again

It does not. I love late game.

I think the single Alliance mechanic (which Vic2 and Vic3 have), which is then removed in the late game is one of my favourite lategame features. It makes choosing alliances in the early game very strategic, and then makes giant wars possible in the late game with all of your fancy toys your big economy has built. It also makes backstabbing / changing alliances a real thing.

One good thing about stellaris end game is you can move it or scale it. You can make the game much faster.

They should just add really good content only available in the late game. People will play if there is a reason.

"Literally unplayable states" This is Victoria 2 in a nutshell. By 1910 even the beefiest PCs struggle to keep going, 1 in-game day takes like 30 seconds. Not even going to mention ENDLESS VIRTUALLY ETERNAL rebellions

Even on a minuscule scale, like Polytopia, the problem still exists

HoI4 players: "Late-game 1945 sucks because the enemy just pops out stupid unit counts." Imperial Japan: "First time?"

Some other commenters have pointed it out already, but I think Vicky 2 endgame is amazing compared to other Paradox games (coming from someone who played Stellaris, Crusader Kings, HOI4, Imperator, Vic and EU4, albeit not in equal amounts.) The expansion opportunities are often so limited in that game, due to limited CBs and war opportunities, plus of course the highly restrictive peace deals (I don't find infamy to be that bad of a mechanic. Similar to AE. Perhaps even what AE should have been... Considering Vic 2 is "the age of the balance in Europe," it makes sense that countries would literally die to preserve balance) you don't really become too powerful to have fun. ESPECIALLY if you didn't play a Great Power, you're not going to be rolling over anyone, any time soon. Another thing that Stellaris and HOI4 suffer from is weird combat in the late game. It's just a grindfest where you throw everything you have while mainting air superiority, especially in MP (or in the case of stellaris spamming whatever is the meta at the time and deathstacking around), while Victoria 2 doesn't really change the combat too much over time. The economy and technology don't break or become useless either (seriously, who cares about "Advanced Rockets" and stuff in HOI4? Wunderwaffe?), because they're either highly important upgrades for unlocking some huge boost to your nation, giving you a bunch of prestige or giving flat bonuses. There's pretty much no niche techs, unlike HOI4, where you just spam gun, spam tank, spam a few plane, grind for doctrine, 7-2s and whatever. The point is, Victoria 2 is the perfect game. That is all.

The answer are broken-up timelines, like EU4 actually tried to do at the very beginning, but proved impossible to program in one game scenario. Which means, maybe 3 to 5 separate games? Renaissance to Reformation? 30 Years War to Napoleon? - that kind of thing. Don't try to pile the whole buffet on to one plate. When it comes to EU4, I stop deliberately blobbing at around 1700, annex all vassals, make allies, and allow myself to be called into wars. Adds randomness and eliminates the idea of needlessly blobbing, fighting 500K Ottomans to get 2 lousy Central Asian provinces, etc. Not great, but better than nothing.

The end game lag + micro management

wow congratulations on the 200k views!! it was about time for your convoluted and unnecessarly long and tedious explanations to get the recognition they deserve! Keep up the good work

Ive also given some thought to the late game issue, the only game that has ever gotten close to solving it for me was Total War Three kingdoms, but im afraid its solution is exclusive to its setting. In that game the AI tries to form alliances that are proportional to the size of your empire. So at the start of the game there are lets say, 10 factions, once you conquer one of them, the remaining ones will form alliances to match the current size of the threat you pose to them. In this math your allies are also taken into the equation. So by the endgame you have basically 2 giant alliances fighting for the control of China. It works both thematically and in gameplay.

I love the playmaker shade 😂😂😂

I enjoy playing smaller nations in HoI4, and the problem with late game is when you grow into a real power and deal with everyone who is an actual threat you have that one annoying country across the ocean or the pond and you never had naval production before defeating everyone else, so now you are stuck in a waiting game while you are making bathtubs so you can actually land on them and finish this. Thats the boring part.

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