Europa Universalis 2 Question

Eli · July 8, 2003, 04:54

The time speed system is completely confusing me.

In Civ you know that you have a turn after turn after turn, and it's all nice and simple. You know that you have things that will be done in X turns, and other things in Y turns, etc. So you can easily feel the flow of time.

In EU2, setting the speed above 1 month=1 minute tends to make me nervous and I keep changing is back to the lowest speed to check in detail what's going on.

So the game flows very slowly and I keep getting into plenty of wars because I think i'm ready although only a few months had passed from the previous one.

The question is... It's a bit hard to formulate... err... well, on what speeds do you play the game? How much time do you wait between wars?
There arent many infrastructure stuff to do in the game, so it always seems that i'm not doing enough.

In my current game(I just started), it takes me ~20 years to reach the second land tech. Is it normal? Is there a way to make these stuff go faster?

Grumbold · July 8, 2003, 06:13

What I do is identify all the events I really want to take action on and set those to pop up and pause. Then I can play the game fast without missing anything crucial. After all, when you are not at war or exploring new lands as you can see there isn't a huge amount to do.

If you're playing with the latest patch, war management is crucial. If you expand your diplomatic rating will suffer, so you need to wait years for that to recover if you have siezed a lot of enemy territory. Likewise if you examine your provincial unrest factors you will see war exhaustion takes time to decline after a war. Fighting is not something you can do all the time. You need to try to pick your objectives carefully. If you get a bad reputation your neighbours will be attacking you all the time in turns, often pushing your country into revolt due to extreme war exhaustion.

Remember this game is covering 400 years, and it is not intended that players max out their tech even after that time (although the best will do so.) Christian countries have the best tech rates and a lot of potential "neighbours" to get bonuses from. Others like Pagan are virtually incapable of learning anything new.

Your economy at the start of the game is pretty weak so it can't support significant tech advancement. Your domestic policy sliders are usually pretty bad too and need decades to nudge into more optimum alignment. Its generally best to try and get to infrastructure 3 and trade 3 before doing serious military research. Leave it to rich single province countries to get a head start and give you a bonus toward catching up. Its explained in much greater detail on the Paradox forums if you want to learn more.

Eli · July 8, 2003, 06:34

Quote:

Your economy at the start of the game is pretty weak

How do I make it better?

I played with the domestic sliders mainly to increase my merchant production and I have 4-5 Merchants in two CoTs... I also upgraded the Baliffs to whatever comes next in my top 5-6 taxes provinces... And built a Fine Arts thingie in my capitol. But what can be done beyond that?

I'm playing Castille BTW. It's ~1435 and I annexed Granada and took from Aragon Valencia, Rousillon(or something), Gesomething and the Balerian Islands.

Araanor · July 8, 2003, 07:40

Quote:

Originally posted by Eli
The time speed system is completely confusing me.

In EU2, setting the speed above 1 month=1 minute tends to make me nervous and I keep changing is back to the lowest speed to check in detail what's going on.

That's ok. With time you will get more used to controlling the game and reacting to events and you can easily increase the speed. I started out the same way, made for some really slow games at first. Eventually I started playing on the higher speeds and using pause, it's not far from turn-based. Getting used to pause may not be a good thing if you're aiming for multi-player, however.

Grumbold · July 8, 2003, 11:32

Innovativeness slider can make tech up to 50% cheaper or 50% more expensive.

Every step up the infrastructure techs will see your income multiplier increase, on top of giving you extra buildings which also affect income. Similarly trade tech multiplies the income while making it easier to compete against nations with lower trade tech. Exploring and conquering or colonising lucrative overseas provinces will see your income expand too.

So to get prosperous you need to spend as little as possible on troops, get yourself to maximum stability and set income 100% toward infrastructure or trade tech. Wars may get you more real estate but they won't usually speed you up the tech tree because the cost increases for every province you have to introduce it to.

To get fast tech it helps to be very small or have lots and lots of rich provinces. The only way to do the latter without getting a horrible mix of cultures is to get out and colonise the new world.

Grumbold · July 8, 2003, 11:35

P.S. Give the Paradox FAQ forum a look. The people there are really nice and can explain everything in much better detail than I can

DarkCloud · July 8, 2003, 11:53

Eli- this actually belongs in the Paradox Games section of the site. You might be able to research some more help by visiting that section and searching its contents

But the Paradox forum is probably a better bet

http://www.europa-universalis.com/forum/index.php

Main_Brain · July 8, 2003, 12:42

1min-4 months but I tend to push it up to 1 min 1 year if there is nothing important to do.

Victor Galis · July 9, 2003, 02:07

In my Bavarian games generally play on the fastest setting, hitting the pause button very often. I view it as a TBS game with variable length turns. As a major power I generally played more slowly.

Eli · July 9, 2003, 02:50

And why cant I explore new territory? It says that I need to wait until I get explorers or something.

I got 3-4 colonies from Portugal when conquering them, but cant explore anything on my own.

Main_Brain · July 9, 2003, 05:59

You cant explore Unchartered Land before you have
Land:- A Konquistadore which you get per Random Event or who appears at the Correct Time.
-Land Tech 33 I think allows All your Troops to exlore

Sea: Same with Explorer&Sea tech

BTW Why dont you take this to http://apolyton.net/forums/forumdisp...s=&forumid=124

Grumbold · July 9, 2003, 09:46

Because its lonely in the dark

None of the 'other games' sub forums get enough traffic to be worth checking every day. There's more said about Utopia and Magic than Paradox games in a typical week, even lumping them all together.