Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I am not Rob Zakney. I am T.J. Hafer,

and I guess I'm steering this ship by virtue of the fact that I strolled on up to the helm,

and at no point did anyone stop me or ask for my credentials.

With me tonight are three moves ahead regular Rowan Kaiser.

Hello.

And one of the only people I know who plays more European Universalist for than me, Sean Sands.

Hello.

You broke the big 2K this year, so congratulations.

Two thousand hours.

I'm almost up to 2100, so, you know, trucking along. I'm, I think I'm, I should check and see what I'm actually out on steam. I'm at like 11, I think, something like that.

Solid. Yeah, almost 1100 hours. So, as you might have guessed, we are talking about Europa Universalis 4, specifically the changes

that came to Europa Universalis 4 in 2017. We had two large expansions and one smaller expansion.

The Mandate of Heaven, which fleshed out a lot of stuff in East Asia, third Rome, which was kind of

focused on the Russian, Eastern European part of the world, and then Cradle of Civilization,

which spruced up West Asia and Middle East type area. I guess to start with Sean, do you feel

like there was any kind of theme to the direction EU4 went in 2017?

Well, the thing that was interesting to me is I've kind of gotten to a place where I like a lot of the new features and what they introduce, like the individual game mechanics.

But I don't feel like, like they did,

it's such a big pile of stuff at this point that putting, you know,

one cool new rock among a whole bunch of other cool rocks doesn't feel like as big

of a change as it did.

And we were talking about this a little bit before.

...