Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Dec 2, 2015

  Features are nice, but let's face it, €20 is overpriced.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 2, 2015

  I like it, it has added a shit ton of features that I welcome. This expansion does feel like some change for the better, however, it's not worth 20 USD. It's a great DLC, maybe even the second best for EU4, but at best it's worth 15 USD. Only buy at twenty if you really want to support Paradox.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 2, 2015

  The new features are nice, but this expansion is buggy and unbalanced. Decided to try my hand at Byzantium again in ironman mode, because I'm a sadist or something, and watched a 32k stack of Poland and Lithuania troops completely wiped by a 17k Ottoman army. And by wiped, I mean completely gone from the map in 1461. No retreat, no "pass go and collect 200 manpower," no nothing, just... gone. I know the Ottomans start out with some nice bonuses and as a lucky nation, but jesus, to map wipe that much stronger of an army is ridiculous. Oh, and I'll also note that this was right after the Ottoman stack had just completely wiped my 12k at full moral and upkeep. Literally a 3 sec battle between my troops (wiped), when the Poland-Lithuania force hit right after (wiped); I stuck around long enough to watch my other allies, a released-from-Venice Albania and Wallachia get their stacks completely wiped, well before the main Ottoman army was even involved, before I bailed. This is unacceptable. What started out as a 19k Ottomon stack just completely map wiped 58k troops. Again, gone, no retreat or reinforcing. I think the entire process on 3 speed was over in 20 seconds. For the record, I'll note that each of the countries involved in this war were at military tech 4. Incredibly unbalanced. Paradox needs to go back to the drawing board and fix this. I haven't tried another game yet, but stuff like this is increasingly going to take the fun out of playing any nation other than a great power; which sucks because I like to play as very small nations and work my way up. A few other notes about the DLC: [list] [*] With the new estate system, and the disasters, and newer events from previous expansions, increasingly the random events are becoming total game-killers, especially if you're a small country. Most everything is a bad event now, or at least a "pick 'a' and be screwed or pick 'b' and be screwed, just in a different way." I seem to recall more good events happening in previous builds, which made the game fun, because you weren't always getting porked at random and losing control. Now I just feel like I'm campaigning in-between random events were everything I've built can come crashing down all on the whim of some randomly triggered popup. It's like the game just wants me to sit there and horde monarch points just-in-case a whole bunch of terrible events happen in quick succession. It really takes the conquest and "painting the world" aspect of the game - and thus the fun, and arguably the point of the game - away. [*] Estate system is kind of cool and introduces something for peace-time, but it looks to me to take a lot of micromanaging for benefits that seem 'meh' at best. [*] I'll have to play around with it more, but the new diplomatic system seems like a waste of time and/or isn't even working properly. I toyed around with it trying to select different nations I was either attempting to befriend or otherwise selecting enemies to backwardly gain allies. Didn't seem to matter. None of the options ever changed the other countries opinions of me or increased my relations. Every core diplomatic action still revolved around my increasing relations the old-fashioned way. Setting it and leaving it for years seemed to have no effect, nor did setting it for just a few months. [*] I haven't played a horde nation in the DLC yet, but their mechanics from afar seem to be improved. I saw the Golden Horde raze Crimea to two provinces within 15 years. [*] I seem to be encountering some fort and troop movement bugs, including blockade issues when there isn't a blockade. [*] Game seems to load and run somewhat smoother though, so kudos. [/list] This game is great and I'm sure this expansion in time will be a fine add-on, but for $20, I feel like I got ripped off. I may return it on Steam and wait for a sale.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 3, 2015

  Well its not worth those 20 euros if u ask me , with so many dlcs so far game price grow up from 20 to 90-100 euros , game is awesome but price is too big if we consider that there will be more dlcs game will be super expensive . And some logical stuff like straits were removed , dont get why , if i block it withj my ships it should be blocked and no1 should be able to pass it . Get in on sale :D it should be soon on one . Realistic price should be 10-12 not more .
• gamedeal user

  Dec 3, 2015

  I absolutely adore EU4 (1200+ play hours, and fully expect 1200 more before I even think of retiring this game) and have played it since release, buying each expansion (including Cossacks) on the day it was released. For the previous six expansions I've been anywhere from excstatic at the additions/very satisfied with the pricing down to pleased with the additions/ambivalent about the pricing. I was initially shocked at the $20 USD price tag because from the developer diaries/patch notes it didn't sound like that large of an expansion (Art of War was the same price and had a great deal more content), but I love Paradox and I love this game, so I dropped the money anyway. This is the first expansion that has left me upset, not with the content (it's fine, I mean it adds layers of depth to a game that I already love for its layers of depth) but with the price. This is ABSOLUTELY NOT a $20 expansion. Even at $15 I would say they are pushing it, but based on past DLC this would be a fair $12. If you're a fan of this game, yes, pick this up at some point, but not until it goes on sale. Edit: Wiz (the head developer of EU4 at Paradox) did address pricing concerns regarding Cossacks in a new developer diary. While I'm very pleased at their quick response time and explaining their pricing formula, his argument was that in fact the features in the expansion were larger than we realized and that (in typical/lovable Wiz fashion) dismissed complaints as stemming from not being familiar with the game development process. He listed how the EU4 team categorized features ranging from major to minor as a deterimination of price, and the disconnect with customers clearly stems from the team overinflating the value of certain piece of content (the additional espionage options being one example). While I'm still looking forward to future EU4 DLC, I hope the team takes this as a lesson for pricing in the future.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 5, 2015

  Updated review, 4th of January 2016: Having now had time to test the other features a bit more, some more thoughts, going by the feature list given for this expansion on EU4 wiki's page ( www.eu4wiki.com/The_Cossacks ). 1-2. Diplomatic options: Telling other nations how you view them. Hard to determine whether the AI actually gives a rat's ass about these, but the option is there. At the very least you can use it to lessen the alliance request bombardment from countries that you don't want to ally with. 3. Tengri: Get different bonuses depending on what secondary religion your nation has. Seemed pretty interesting, but haven't had time to touch it yet. 4. Horde unity & razing. Tested this with Timurids. Interesting mechanic in the sense that it emulates a loose coalition of tribes pretty well. The larger you grow, the more you start hoping you can get rid of it since at the cap point you lose 3 points of unity per YEAR from development alone. Tribes-estate also demand ludicrous amounts of provinces (33% of your development), making it a bit of challenge to keep them from taking over. If they do, they penalize you with horrible tech stagnation on top of your already stagnated tech. The penalty can only be removed by taking a decision that gives you 3 stability hit and requires minimum of 1 stability. In essence Horde mechanic is a limiter you need to get rid off before it breaks your run: in case of Timurids, the easiest way seems to be forming Murghal. 5. Reverting culture change: Haven't really ever used culture change much, so this is neglible feature to me. 6. Native policies: Very nice new feature. Choose how you want to deal with natives - co-existence, trade or subjugation. In my Castile test game I opted for peaceful co-existence and I believe I didn't have a single "tribal uprising" during the entire run. It does mean slightly slower rate of colonization - if you don't get the positive tribal events - but it does mean you can just send colonists with shipping protection over for the more aggressive parts of the new world. 7. Improved espionage: Didn't try the espionage changes. On paper it sounds nice, but Espionage has always felt too expensive way to do anything at all. I would guess a trade-focused nation could have the excess gold for it while not necessarily having the military backbone to make it worthless to bother with? 8. New diplomatic feedback: I like the trust & favors in the sense that it makes alliances something you actually have to work for. The problem of course is that you can no longer ally the big blops near you and have them do all the work for you as a minor power, since getting favor requires either time or actually giving a meaningful amount of help to your allies in their wars. Of course, if you don't have favour you an promise provinces instead to your allies if they join the war... IF they are next to your enemy and are actually willing to take any provinces, which might not be the case. 9. Estates: My earlier opinion on these stands. While it is possible to have problems with them, it would seem to require either Very Bad Luck or failure on the player's part for them to be anything but a nice bonus. On Castile, I never plummeted below 30 loaylty OR above 80 influence on any of the estates. On Timurids I made a series of bad decisions (refused to change heir to equal-but-not-named-by-me one, then tried to recoup the loss by accepting a shitty option in another event) that lead to Tribes taking over, but even that would've been manageable had I had better luck with reaching my goal of founding Murghals in proper time-frame. Initial review, 4th of December 2015: First of all, there are plenty of negative reviews right now, most of which I can't really agree with. 1. Overpriced for the amount of changes. This one is perhaps the hardest one for me to judge either way. On one hand, I feel Paradox DOES overprice the DLCs a bit... But on the other hand every expansion does give me more than my money's worth in hours played. I definitely disagree with people complaining how this DLC offer "very little new". Hell, the Random New World generation alone is a huge thing. 2. Rebels. I've seen so much bitching and whining about rebels, with people using examples of situations I'd have hard time FORCING to happen as signs of how "bad" this expansion is. Between myriad tools of avoiding rebels in the first place and the option to accept their demands if things get too hairy, I see a lot of ineptitude and inability to accept setbacks rather than real problems with the expansion. A lot of this also has to do with the fact that rebels in last patch might as well not have existed with how weak they were. 3. Estates. Another of the big new features in Cossacks that people are complaining about. In my games thus far, I've yet to have problem with them. Instead, I've been happily surprised with both new events with real choices and many old no-brainer events turning into actual choices. Like with rebels, most of the complaints I've seen sound like lacking judgement in-game more than anything else. People complain how the estates are nothing but trouble, all the while I see big passive bonuses for the price paying a smallest bit of attention to them and not purposefully annoying them. Hell, you even get to choose whether or not you want to give the estates a boost by giving them more land to govern, with the caveat that if you can't keep them in check / happy, you'll have more trouble reigning them in. You can also just more or less ignore them, only checking what's up when a warning pops up saying some faction is growing too powerful / has too little land / what have you. Unless you go out of your way to screw them over, it's really hard to turn them against you from what I've seen thus far. 4. Favours.This is an interesting new system where you actually have to work with your allies before getting use out of them. This means that you need to commit into alliances to get more use out of them. Favor is gained passively by being allies (1 / year) as well as actively by helping them in their wars. The amount of favour you get from wars depends on how much you contributed to the war and can swing between ~2 (don't really take part in war) and ~30 (do majority of the heavy lifting) from what I've seen. You can spend favour to call allies into offensive war (10 favour) or increase their trust towards you. Instead of using favour you can also promise land to your ally - a promise they will remember when peace treaty is being signed. This does mean that smaller nations will have harder time getting offensive help from their big allies... But it also makes more sense than all the games where I've abused the power of a big ally to feed myself without really fighting in my own wars to become a major power. It's also worth noting that you can tell your allies that you consider the alliance a defensive one - in which case they stop calling you to their wars - at the cost of no longer gaining favour passively. The only real issue I've had thus far is that the Random New World seems to be causing random crashes, something I hope Paradox will patch ASAP. That is sadly something I was prepared for when I bought the DLC right away rather than waiting for a week or two for them to iron out the issues that are usual with new expansions in most games.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 5, 2015

  I love this game, and I still play it all the time. But for $20, I just can't recommend this DLC. The estates feature is neat, the diplomatic feedback is neat, and the Tengri religion is neat. But that's it. It's all just neat. It hardly feels like my game has changed - I got bored of an Oirat playthrough by 1600. Horde mechanics are fun, but after a while, the lose their touch. I honestly had more fun with the revamped Random New World generator than the paid features of the DLC. If you've grown bored of EUIV through sheer playtime and everything feels old-hat, and are hoping the Cossacks will inject fresh life into the game, it doesn't. The features are fun, absolutely, but they don't feel new, they don't feel like the game has been expanded significantly. If the game has grown stale for you, this isn't a fix, certainly not for the cost. Paradox explained their pricing, and I understand their reasoning. I still disagree - it just doesn't feel like $20 dollars worth of content. Of course I'm not familiar with game development, but I'm familiar with games. EUIV is an amazing game, one of my favorites, yet this DLC just doesn't merit the price. That's really my only complaint - it's fun, I enjoyed it, but it wasn't so fun that I wouldn't have rather waited on a sale. Wait for it to go on sale, if you can grab this for $10, do it.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 5, 2015

  This is the first review that i've ever written. I have nearly 1600 hours on EU 4 (and about the same on EU 3!), but this DLC is almost a complete disapointment (I've bought all of them- including music and unit packs). Estates are more annoying than interesting and the new "Favor" system in Diplomacy is excruciating. By far my biggest disapointment is in the nerfing of the colonization system. Why make changes no one asked for? It used to be fun and exciting to send out a couple of conquistatadores and discover gold or pick up some extra Monarchy points- but now nearly all the events are bad, and according to the Developer Diary, events overall have been lessened. Why? It was one of the most fun aspects of the game. The lack of returns on colonialism makes playing as any of the colonizing nations very unattractive. Paradox is very good at responding to what their customers want, so I hope enough people raise this issue that they will make a change.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 6, 2015

  (TL;DR at the bottom) I have over 2,000 hours in EU4. I play it almost daily since release, I am majorly obsessed and I read changelogs like it's my favourite novel. I always buy the EU4 DLC because that's just how I am, however I am bitterly disappointed with this release. And this is going to be harsh, forgive me Johan. Basically, I feel like this was a rip off considering the quality and size of the features. After waiting enviously for the release of this DLC as I always do with all EU4 DLC, this just felt very poor. Perhaps the best feature of this expansion would be the Random New World, but that isn't even technically a part of this expansion, but rather a fix for the first expansion of EU4, Conquest of Paradise. This is really disappointing. I'll go through the features below and my thoughts on each one, and beside it I will list the 'value' that Paradox assigned each feature, this value being what they use to justify the price of this DLC, and how much you paid (USD) for the feature according to Paradox roughly. (src: [url=https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/eu4-dev-diary-december-3rd-2015.894626/]Paradox Forums EU4 Dev Diary December 3rd[/url]) The last paragraph in my blurbs on each feature discusses the value of the feature. Link to expanded feature review offsite due to review character limit: [url=http://freetexthost.com/euxq3zwkpw]Link.[/url] [h1]Conclusion/TL;DR[/h1] So, after a break down of the worth of each feature packaged in this DLC, the Cossacks, we can come to a conclusion on how much I think it was actually worth. For note: I judged what should be a mega, major, medium and minor feature on what Paradox judged as those within the Common Sense expansion, which arguably was higher quality than this expansion and was cheaper, despite still being a fairly sub-par expansion. [list] [*]1 Semi-Major Feature (Diplomatic Feedback) - 4.5 points - $1.95 [*]1 Medium Feature (Horde Unity + incl. Raze) - 3 points - $1.30 [*]6 Minor Features (Tengri, Build Directly to Army, Improved Espionage, New Subject Interactions, Native Policies, Construct in Subjects) - 9 points - $5.85 [*]10 Worthless/Should be Free Features (Estates, Advanced Change Culture, Name Your Heir, Victory Cards, Concede Colonial Area, Distribute Spoils, Threaten War, Forced Migration, Declare Colonial War, Raze??) - 0 points - $0.00[/list] [h1]Therefore, in total I value this DLC pack at: [b]$9.10[/b][/h1] I came to this figure using Paradox's own point scoring system, and what I consider to be value for money with each feature, taking into account the usefulness, the application of the feature and how much it adds to the game. Overall, pathetic honestly. This is the second DLC that Paradox has released that has been incredibly sub-par, which is very saddening as I hold PDX with very, very, VERY high esteem. I think they're one of the best development studios ever, and I love their PR and their friendly approach to the community. However, criticism is due when criticism is due. The price was too high, and no Paradox, I don't consider 'time' to be a reasonable excuse to increasing the cost of an item. It could have taken your team ten years to implement advanced culture changes. It'd still be useless. The time you spend working on free content and on paid content should be inconsequential to the price as we do not pay you to work long, we pay you to provide us with good features. It annoys me if a studio thinks time is a reasonable excuse to increase the price of an item, despite its quality. The Cossacks is an expansion pack that was not only over priced for what it contained, but also a slap in the face to me as a dedicated Europa Universalis IV fan, and a dedicated Paradox fan. Please, please, PLEASE Paradox don't let this slip of recently poor DLC lead to a continuous repeat. Cossacks, Horse Lords and Common Sense have been hard misses, but I know the team has the skill to produce good DLC, it just isn't coming out in the end result. I don't know if it's a time issue, or an application issue, but I plead to address it. But this review has been honest and I've given credit where credit is due, and criticism where criticism is due. This is of course my opinion, and everyone is free to disagree. But I felt compelled to share as I felt this DLC was very much on the wrong track, and it's a direction that makes me scared for future EU4 DLCs.
• Thane Krios

  Dec 11, 2015

  After reading the other reviews from expierenced players, I'm afraid mine won't be any different. Yet I think it needs to be said. I've played this game for more than 1400 hours... This feels like the Sunset Invasion from CK2. Which means that it's so incredibly annoying and out of place, that I'm never turning it on again, because it simply adds nothing of value. And with a too high asking price. The Estates quickly become nothing but a nuisance when playing. Something you would rather not have. Worst EU4 DLC. EVER.