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Wednesday, January 15, 2014

No coalitions minimod for EU4 1.3.2

Koty by Zbigniew Gajda from flickr (CC-NC-SA)
From what I've heard so far the new 1.4 patch is a total disaster breaking all the things, and I'm not going to upgrade anytime soon anyway since I have an ongoing campaign in 1.3.2.

Anyway, two worst things about EU4 are railroading and coalitions. To deal with railroading would require removing a ton of really stupid events like Burgundian inheritance and then some extensive rebalancing. Some balancing mod would be totally doable, but it would be a ton of work for a moving target like EU4 right now with every patch completely whacking everything and requiring another round of rebalancing tests.

For coalitions it would probably be enough if we just got separate peace option like in every other war. Unfortunately there are very few things we can mod about coalitions, and that's not on the list. So if you want a quick fix that disables coalitions entirely, check this minimod. The only thing it does is changing one line in no_coalitions/common/ai_attitudes/00_ai_attitudes.txt that makes AI want to join coalitions when outraged to no.

AI can still join coalitions in some other ways (probably special missions/events), but such coalitions never reach more that 1-2 members so they don't really matter. It works in existing campaigns - countries in coalition will quit them as soon as they are at peace.

I'm aware this is a nuclear option, and coalitions serve an useful purpose in the game, but unless modders get better control over CB system the way they had it in CK2, that seems like the best we can do. If you're interested in other possibilities, I tried to list them all in this thread. Events for burning AE by generous peace terms are probably the second best thing, but they might imbalance things differently, just like all gamey ways to burn infamy did back in EU3.

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