u/LessCrement

I'm not doomposting, just being observant, and I'm an Inter fan.

Inter are currently the best Serie A team and technically the best team in the world to use wingbacks, we just sold our starting right wingback, and we are generally in a good place financially.

Yet, when needing a proper Inter level starter, we couldn't sign a young Italian wingback coming off a good Serie A season with Cagliari. A player who matched Inter's needs perfectly and had Inter as their preferred destination.

Inter and Palestra are a truly perfect match on paper, we were meant for each other and we were supposedly under the perfect conditions to make the signing. Yet, we couldn't even get close to matching the bids of a Premier League team who offered about twice our offered salary and 10m more to Atalanta.

This clearly marks the end of an era where at least some Italian teams were able to compete with the Premier League on the market, and hence, on the field. This league is bound to have no competitive teams in the Champions League for the rest of our lives unless this downwards trend is reversed.

Pretty new player here, I started a couple of playthroughs and by now I feel like I have a full grasp of the game and most of its mechanics. I wanted to make a list of what I think are the most glaring issues in the game's current state. Please let me know your thoughts!

1. To start, and I know this is a universally agreed on complain, the AI is terrible. And the AI being bad does tend to happen in this sort of games (I played some Civ too in the past), but honestly there's no reason why it should be THIS bad. Why is it that whenever I go check another ruler's child, the guardian that they are assigned does not match their education at all? Like they are being educated in diplomacy and the guardian has a diplomacy skill of 1 and a learning skill of 3? Surely it takes just a little bit of coding to fix that, is Paradox not doing it on purpose or cause they are chronically lazy or what?
2. We need more ways to spend prestige and piety. Way too often my character dies with thousands of each because I have no way to spend them. Some decisions require them but they will often require come gold as well and like, maybe I don't want to spend the gold on that? And even then you may not have those options depending on your playthrough. Obviously you're gonna need a bunch of prestige to unlock cultural traditions and piety to create a new faith, but you often don't plan / need to do either.
3. Some skills / lifestyle trees are noticeably better than others, and thus the respective education traits.

The diplomacy skill tree feels underwhelming, considering that there's no shortage of other sources of causus belli, opinion or prestige. I know it can be useful in some instances, but it's just less common than the other lifestyle trees being useful. It could use a buff. The diplomacy skill is useful enough as its own source of opinion, but the lifestyle tree being meh and the fact that there aren't a lot of innovations requiring high diplomacy as a culture head means that you're usually not going to be very motivated to educate your heir in diplomacy.

The learning skill is quite underwhelming, as piety and devotion level are only really relevant on some specific playthroughs and you're not gonna change crown authority law all that often. Plus very few innovations require learning from the culture head right now. The most universally useful thing about the learning skill is that it contributes to the education of the children at court, but obviously if the only use of the skill is to improve your heir's skills it still makes it a pretty stupid skill. Like, imagine investing in the learning skill instead of the useful skills just so your child can have better useful skills, you're basically skipping a generation of good skills for the fuck of it.

The martial skill is quite useful (VERY useful if you want to command your armies) and the lifestyle trees are great, plus there's lots of martial innovations to research as culture head.

The stewardship skill and trees are maybe TOO generally useful in comparison to some of the others. Gold can pretty much get you anything you want in this game, it's a universally useful resource. And there's so many stewardship innovations to research as a culture head.

Hence generally speaking it feels like you very rarely want to educate your child in diplomacy or learning. I'm literally doing a run as Galicia as we speak, they have more ways to use piety and thus learning than most other civs, and I'm trying to focus on that playstyle as much as possible but no matter how I look at it it's STILL not gonna be convenient to educate my heir in learning, let alone in diplomacy. As a culture head I feel like I must improve my martial or stewardship as much as possible.