Played about 10-15 years as Austria last night. Some notes...
Seems like the missions let you wage war as often as you want, as long as your manpower allows. My wars went as follows:
- Flanders declares independence right after the game starts, I take back Antwerpen and the one between Brabant and Vlaandaren; as someone pointed out in EU4 forums, pretty annoying that by breaking away with provinces >100 warscore, even when their revolution fails I can't take all my provinces back
- I get a "claims on Northern Italy" mission giving me claims on Brescia, Cremona, and one other province from Venice, take them from Venice/Milan pretty easily. I like the new "claims" system where you frequently get claims on a province but that doesn't necessarily translate into getting a core on it like it did in EU3. Still undecided how I feel about being able to just spend power to get cores super fast though, having it for 50 years in EU3 made it feel like it meant something and not something that's basically a given once you take a province.
- With my 2/5/1 king, I get quite a few "unclear maps" or whatever events (the one that asks if you want to press the issue to get a claim) for Treviso, Friuli, and Elsass, didn't have time to wage these wars though except for taking Elsass on the way back from a lowlands expedition.
- Go back to the lowlands to finish off Flanders and also take Gelre and Friesland, which I barely even noticed I had cores on lol
- Missions I actually
turned down during this timeframe: got one to put Brohemia in a PU (WTF THAT IS SO STRONK) but they were allied with Hungary and my manpower was low, also one to take France's provinces in the Spanish Netherlands region
So yeah, having a choice of 3 missions means you'll have
lots of opportunities to go for aggressive expansion if you want it. I did spend almost the entire demo having 0 manpower; patience is required if you're actually playing with the long term in mind.
The monarch power system feels like macroing in SC2, gotta keep my power low by spending it on stuff or else I'm not making the best use of my resources. I didn't pay attention for awhile and then all of a sudden I had like 900 diplo power, lol.
It did feel pretty easy. But then again I was Austria so that's probably realistic. I thought it was funny when I looked at the Flanders rebels at the start of the game like WTF THEY HAVE LIKE 27 REGIMENTS HOW DO I KILL THAT, and then I looked at my troops and was like
LOL I HAVE 60.
Anyone understand the trade system? Might try a little time as Venice. And yeah, I guess Venice was busy getting dunked by the Ottomans in 1492 so that's why their navy is nowhere to be found when you attack them? In EU3 (and I certainly hope at EU4 start) they have a much stronger naval presence.