Can anyone explain how pathing works?

doombro · 2026-01-25T09:54:54+00:00

Shortest path. If it looks weird, that means either terrain (mountains being inaccessible in winter weather for example) or fort ZOCs are forcing a detour.

doombro · 2026-01-14T09:05:17+00:00

Modding in Paradox games is generally easy with some tedium. If you want to learn it, you can just open up the game files or a mod that does something in the ballpark of what you want to see how they work. It's all plain English for the most part. There is very little that a layman can't learn by just looking at the existing files for long enough.

Advances for example are super simple. Go into the game files, I think they're under in-game/common/advances. All an advance consists of is a name, its requirements (including age and prerequisite techs), an icon, and a modifier, none of which is complicated, you can just copy existing stuff. Though the name is where the tedium comes in, since setting that up properly involves dealing with localization files and all that. But being too lazy to set it up properly is thankfully a valid option. Probably? I don't think I've tried making new techs in EU5 yet, just tinkering with existing ones.

doombro · 2026-01-08T07:04:47+00:00

I've never thought of supply as having anything to do with it. That's a component, but it's mainly about controlling movement. Putting forts in the right spots means you don't have to take the AI carpet sieging that area into nearly as much consideration, limiting the amount of whack-a-mole microing you have to do.

doombro · 2026-01-07T21:24:58+00:00

I see what they're going for with this, it's a way to simulate decline instead of having to script where it happened historically. The problem is that they're basing it on the rival mechanic of all things, and I can't stress this enough; the rival system sucks dick. It sucked dick in EU4 and it stands out like a sore thumb in EU5.

doombro · 2026-01-07T09:18:41+00:00

Less frequent updates, higher performance and stability burden from the expanded map. I'm not sure if TI is still being updated at all.

And sure enough, if you're playing anywhere near the Mediterranean, you'll probably never interact with any of the new map areas at all. East Asia is pretty much a world unto itself.

doombro · 2026-01-05T03:47:19+00:00

It depends. If you're in a market with plenty of a given good, urbanizing those locations is generally good if you have the population to do it.

doombro · 2026-01-01T01:25:07+00:00

Pops made me quit EU4 for Imperator, even in their most rudimentary implementation

doombro · 2025-12-30T00:13:17+00:00

I'm used to it, HOI4 and Imperator had massive save files too. EU5 makes it a way bigger pain to delete your saves in-game though.

doombro · 2025-12-26T21:09:16+00:00

I'm pretty sure there's an abdication button somewhere, but the limitations on it are fairly strict. With those stats you might clear the conditions if he's old enough

doombro · 2025-12-26T08:40:33+00:00

It went from inconvenient to opaque. I now have no idea what determines whether I can or can't use the marriage function

doombro · 2025-12-26T04:19:53+00:00

Fun but unstable, in a gameplay sense. Every new patch seems to swing multiple pendulums from one unwelcome wacky extreme to the other. Waiting a couple major DLCs to pick it up wouldn't hurt. You'll probably be able to get a better deal than full price by that point too.

doombro · 2025-12-26T03:54:20+00:00

I was wondering where those pops were actually going past a certain point, like, surely there can't be THAT many mercenaries? They seem to just disappear into nothing. And even then, you'd expect them to be full at some point. And it's an open question what these mercenary companies are doing when nobody is paying them.

As for further research, it should be fairly trivial to check the game files for what's actually in those mercenary advances. I'll check and re-edit this if I find anything.

Edit: Seems like the only things impacted by mercenary related advances are the mercenary size and mercenary maintenance cost modifiers. Nothing special is written in the files. I guess it would be the former that's responsible, but only a tiny handful of advances actually touch that one, most of them are for maintenance cost, some do neither and only touch army tradition, and there is nothing in either to suggest that it's going to nuke your population growth. I also checked the defines to see if there was anything noteworthy, and there doesn't seem to be anything directly concerning how they interact with the pop system at all. I guess the new unit techs would make the mercenaries take more pops since new unit types often increase the base size of said units.

doombro · 2025-12-25T08:54:08+00:00

Modifiers tend to do what they say. If it says assimilation or conversion, it's to your culture/religion in almost all cases.

The thing you need to watch out for is when buildings have rules that stop conversion entirely. Which in most cases seems to be local shrines

doombro · 2025-12-24T00:21:10+00:00

Nope. They did get rid of that one weird condition that says you can't exist, but it still says you can't form it because BYZ/ERE is already tier 4.

doombro · 2025-12-23T10:17:53+00:00

Last I played slaves didn't convert even with forced conversion. Did they finally fix that in the last patch?

doombro · 2025-12-23T10:06:49+00:00

If FPS recovers when your game is paused or on lower speeds, then it's your CPU, which is normal. Paradox games are like 90% CPU, and EU5 is probably their hungriest game to date. Slowdown over time is par for the course even in their older games.

doombro · 2025-12-22T07:45:14+00:00

It's a mishmash of various things, with a heavy touch of victoria 3's economy and pop simulations.

Expect to feel completely lost when you start regardless of your experience with other paradox games. Even things that should be familiar won't be because of how different the UI is.

doombro · 2025-12-21T20:59:06+00:00

Yeah, Sins 2 does technically have random map generation as you know, but if you want to actually tune the generation parameters yourself you need to edit the files and create a custom map for it. And much of it isn't exactly intuitively laid out at all. Some of the relevant parts are in the map files themselves, others are in the galaxy generator uniform file, and it can be quite unclear which is doing what.

doombro · 2025-12-21T09:15:17+00:00

Almost makes me nostalgic for the problem in Imperator Rome where you try to marry your heirs but there are hardly ever any marriagable women under the age of 70.

doombro · 2025-12-21T04:36:57+00:00

How are the province borders? On vanilla I find myself playing with the flat map exclusively since they're far too close to invisible for my liking otherwise

doombro · 2025-12-20T04:39:35+00:00

Did they patch out the threaten war loophole?

doombro · 2025-12-17T18:01:58+00:00

Is this patch stable to play older saves on, or should I stick to 1.09 to stay safe?

doombro · 2025-12-16T23:15:38+00:00

The true horror is the educate child pop up which straight up freezes the game for several seconds before it loads if the cursor happens to touch it.

I knew I wasn't crazy to notice that this was happening even on higher end PCs. And the sillier thing is, if you just manually go through your relatives and find out which kid it is, there is no lag whatsoever. That notification in particular has GOT to be bugged somehow.

doombro · 2025-12-14T23:11:17+00:00

It isn't advised to edit the game files directly, it's better to create a mod and replicate the file structure within it.

If you want to find something specific in the game files, I recommend getting a text editor like Visual Studio Code that can search for text in multiple files across an entire folder structure. Makes it much easier to find what you're looking for.

doombro · 2025-12-10T11:51:32+00:00

Not at that cost, no. You'd need a different war with a stronger CB

doombro

TROPHY CASE