finally got a chance to dive into the new DLC
anyone know a good guide / youtube about the changes? the patchnotes are always so dry I find it hard to work out what they actually mean in real terms.
The dev diaries are a bit too long and drawn out. Just need a simply summary of the changes and what they mean when actually playing. is that so hard?!
I'm not sure any guide or video would really be less effort than the dev diaries, since most I've seen basically regurgitate the dev diaries with commentary.
A lot of it is very country specific, too, so a lot of it you can skip if you know what country you might want to play. Pretty much all the countries touched are majors or regional majors.
That said, I think the biggest non-country specific changes are:
1) Tons of new estates with myriad awesome options. I'm absolutely loving this as it adds a lot of flexibility.
2) Slackening recruitment no longer gives you direct manpower and basically sucks now. It's only useful if you have a huge store of manpower and want to doomstack opponents quickly.
3) Three new idea groups: Infrastructure, Court, and Mercenary. Infrastructure seems weak, Mercenary is powerful but obviously situational, and Court seems useful if you really go hard on using as many of the new estates as possible (though probably still weak overall).
4) Additional new government reforms across many tiers as well as a brand new military reform tier for many nations (Tier 5). A lot of solid, useful options there.