: Penalties for the "Internal Power Struggle" disaster were reduced, and the Janissary Coup estate influence increase was nerfed from 20% to 10%.
Yet, the “lag of empire” persists. Because 1.35.4 encourages the player to build a global hegemony of thousands of provinces, the game engine groans under the weight of its own success. By the Age of Revolutions, the game slows to a crawl as the AI calculates trade routes for a hundred different nations that no longer exist. The patch introduced a “Concentrate Development” cooldown to mitigate this, but the fundamental issue remains: EU4 was not designed for the scale of conquest that v1.35.4 celebrates. You feel this most acutely when scrolling across a unified Roman Empire; the frame rate drops, a silent protest from your CPU. Europa Universalis IV v1.35.4
Does this matter? For the purist, yes. For the average player logging 1000+ hours, no. 1.35.4 has pivoted from historical simulation to historical sandbox fantasy . It is the equivalent of a comic book where the hero has acquired infinite power—the fun is no longer in the struggle, but in the spectacle of the rampage. : Penalties for the "Internal Power Struggle" disaster
From a distance, the patch notes for 1.35.4 read like a litany of bug fixes and small adjustments: “Fixed AI not using its navy effectively,” “Adjusted institution spread in China,” “Nerfed the quantity of loans the AI will take.” But beneath these minor tweaks lies a seismic shift in balance philosophy. Traditionally, EU4’s difficulty came from mana scarcity and aggressive coalitions. In 1.35.4, scarcity has been replaced by abundance. By the Age of Revolutions, the game slows
