1.4 General Gameplay Observations

[Zenicetus]

What i will be interested to know about (cos I'm sure some of you have got further with 1.4) is what starts to happen mid/late game when in 1.3 and earlier versions, erstwhile allies would starting hating you for no clear reason accessible to the player.

Yeah, I'm curious about that too, because it goes to the heart of whether a long campaign is enjoyable or not. I think it was established that in previous TW games, there's a "player hate" variable tied to how much of the map you control. It kicks in during the later game if you're doing well, on top of all other relations variables. I'm hoping that if this operates the same way in ETW, it operates separately in each theater, instead of on a whole-world basis. In other words, if you stay small in your homeland but expand in the colonies, you'll only trigger aggression from the factions where you're actually in territorial conflict in the colonies. It would be more realistic for one thing, and a better game instead of just universal aggression from all factions.

Right now I'm still early in a UP campaign where my goal is to hold just two or three core provinces in Europe, and do all my real economic/military expansion in the Americas and India. I don't want to expand in Europe, but I may have to, if I can't juggle diplomacy and threats in the homeland (and I just got attacked by Westphalia for no reason, so it's not encouraging). So we'll see how it goes...

Edit: P.S. I'm playing at Normal/Hard difficult to give diplomacy a chance. If it works at all, it will work at Normal campaign difficulty. It probably shouldn't work at H or VH, for players who like constant warfare and being forced to steamroller the map everywhere.