I know pirating is always an option, and I used to play EU4 completely pirated.
But I got some credit remaining on Steam and they’re on sale right now, so lads, which should I go for?
Background info being I only played EU4 before, and enjoyed the nation-building side more rather than the military strategy. Although I was able to do some WCs back in the day and I do like micromanaging and extending a 20hr campaign into a 100hr one.
I’m curious which countries you consider broken? I’ve played Russia, Cuba, Dai Nam, Hawaii, France, and Nejd. I found Hawaii to be the worst, simply because of its isolation. But they all seemed quite playable to me.
In the current version, nation unification mechanics are broken, making Italy and Germany games way harder than is reasonable. In addition, it’s ridiculously difficult to keep Dixie as a primary culture in the American Reconstruction.
Ah, I see. I did unify Arabia in my Nejd game in the current version. But I admittedly don’t actually know how the unification mechanics are supposed to work. I conquered my way to unification.
Italy, Germany, and Scandinavia have more involved unification mechanics. At game launch they were fine more or less but the most recent update made a change that means any unification war puts you against all nations that hold land with your primary culture homeland. So since France owns Alsace-Lorraine and Savoy, they always get pulled into these wars.
In addition, the required provinces for forming Italy was upped to the point that you can no longer form them without taking some land from Austria first.
For some reason Austria and Russia ally in like 90% of games, so any unification war from Italy or Germany will put you at war with France, Austria, and Russia. And since it’s so difficult for Italy and Germany to form, you can’t rely on your AI counterpart to help in the war (even though irl the Brothers War was Germany and Italy together against Austria with no allies).