It was time. I’m not playing it (screw Paradox) but this was that one series I followed closely. Or like my nephew called it, “boring map game uncle plays”.

Things mentioned:

• New and larger map: pathfinding will be a mess.
• Longer time scale: flashy but surprisingly irrelevant in the big picture. Okay, if still ending in 1821 then it’s +25% gameplay time, but people typically drop their games before the end anyway. I also hope they dropped that “start in any date” feature, it was a nice idea but in practice it was awful, non-canonical starting dates were not managed so they ended a mess.
• Population based system: Imperator like, perhaps? I actually like the idea.
• Thousand of historical events: see… the problem with those is that they always assume some country will pop up, as if countries were “fated” to exist. When they don’t, it’s always replacement goldfish country (e.g. Castile vs. Spain). They tend to react poorly to the main historical force in the game, the player.
• Detailed production and trade: okay, this sounds cool.
• Design a nation [SIC - country] to suit your situation: EU3 sliders comeback?
• Deep military and diplomatic systems: should I expect the associated bugs? Such as your vassals not being able to declare on each other, but their colonies do, even if they’re all from the same overlord?

Things I wish I saw mentioned:

• complete fort revamp, without introducing path-dependent outcomes. For example in EU4 if you an army reached a fortified province A from province B, it could only go back through B, so you had to memorise it. And this interacted really poor with the fact that armies can be merged and split, the outcome was always a mess. Plus naval transport.
• I hope they address that fucking mess where tags represented ambiguously states and stateless societies at the same time, native people could be “abstracted” as a province attribute or a tag,
• An actually interesting colonisation system, that is neither “click on province, send colonist, ???, profit” nor “it’s the same you do in Eurasia, just blob over nearby small tags”. (Relevant to note how natives-as-tags fucked up colonisation - because the old colonisation system assumed huge tagless areas.)
• getting rid of magical boundaries. In EU4 they were everywhere, e.g. you’d had to cheese the game to change your capital from Anatolia to Persia because they were across the magic “Europe vs. Asia” border, but you could change it from Anatolia to Ireland just fine. Or colonial regions goddammit how I hated those, always assuming colonial governments should control areas that loosely correspond with XXI century governments. (Although I always had fun breaking this system. For more merchants and aesthetic borders.)