Bret Devereaux

LOL at the commenter complaining on my EU4 post that I'm just a woke-scold making everything 'problematic' in an essay where I literally stop to say, "EU4 history is the story of states. Now this isn’t an invalid way of teaching history, to be clear!"

I have thousands of hours in the game and couldn't have agreed more with your analysis of it - don't let the bastards get you down! I'd also be happy to talk with you about the game from the perspective of a history grad student who has played the game since its release :-)

Yeah, I've played al of Paradox's games (except March of the Eagles, oddly) since HoI2 and EU3. Clearly I must hate them and think they are bad! That's absolutely why I am doing an EU4 Vijayanagar-into-Bharat game in parallel to writing these posts.

Aha! A man of culture who doesn't mind switching from a beautiful bright yellow to a less-than-stellar green Curious and respectable! I'm finishing up what I hope will be my first world conquest as Burgundy->Lotharingia, with a very healthy Leonese march based in Venezuela

Any Burgundy game that doesn't include a tag switch to NET is heresy.

Ah, but you see, even after 8000 hours in the game, I don't particularly care for (or understand!) min-maxing the trade system. I simply control 99% of the English channel and route everything there and hope for the best. Still managed to pull off economic hegemon no less!

I actually really like the trade game. My Vijayanagar, I'm almost to forming India, but my largest income source is trade. Honestly, I wish trading-centric strategies were viable for more countries. The trade map is a real limiter; I'll get into that next week, actually.

I enjoy it too, though I prefer conquering and developing/building manufactories, and likely find it limiting for the same reasons you do - though mostly for me it's that the end nodes are too historically deterministic. Bravo for figuring out trade in India tho, I never have!