A flurry of patches

Europa Universalis V patch 1.0.8 is announced for tomorrow. And while some patches were smaller hotfixes, they didn't skip any version numbers, and this is the 8th patch after release 3 weeks ago. On the one side, it is good to see bugs fixed so quickly. On the other side, a bit more thought and less shooting from the hip would be welcome for balance fixes. For example patch 1.0.5 basically broke trade by increasing trade maintenance by a factor of 10, and 1.0.6 then went back to 1.0.4 levels. Patch 1.0.8 is expected to fix some problems with the balance between levies and regular armies that patch 1.0.7 introduced.

I'm still on my Mecklenburg run, my overall second game of EU5. It is an ironman run to be able to get achievements, and I plan to play until the end in 1836. But bugs and changes to the game did have some weird consequences to my game. For example there was a now fixed bug in which the HRE emperor with the "demand unlawful territory" ended up getting random provinces for himself. In my game that gave Bohemia a north sea harbor, and it is now rivaling England in the colonization of North America.

Having quit my first run after becoming emperor of the HRE without wanting to, I maybe should have made some different strategic choices as Mecklenburg. Instead, in between the player country having a tendency to expand faster than AI countries, and my decision based on history to make Mecklenburg protestant, I found myself leading the protestant side in the religious war of the HRE, won, and ended up as the emperor again. At least this time I wasn't just elected randomly.

In hindsight, I found out that in my first game with Holland, I had by chance avoided a country specific disaster, the hook and cod wars, which frequently triggers if the ruler dies in the plague and the heir is weak. In my second game, I made it to the Age of Absolutism, only to find that by choosing absolutism over liberalism I was hit by another brutal disaster, called court and country. I must say, I'm not impressed with the design of disasters in EU5. They consist of a series of punishing events, and don't feel as if you as the player can do much about them. If a good game is a series of interesting decisions, the EU5 disasters don't live up to that standard.