My primary way of playing Europa Universalis 4 is to select an achievement I want to complete, and go for it. After completing ~80 of the 320 (currently) available achievements this became hard, because I had no reliably list of the ones I want to go for.
- 25% of the achievements were already claimed, so I wanted to filter those
- I am not an excellent player, so Very Hard and Impossible achievements are off the charts for me
- Sometimes I want to join the mainstream players and have every achievements that are obtained by a lot of Steam user
- Sometimes I want to be more hipster and go for the ones only a few percentage of the users got so far
- For a long time I did not have all the DLCs, so I played a few patches behind the current meta - that also means there I achievements I cannot get
There are two main sources where one can check the achievements: the Steam page of the game and the Europa universalis 4 Wiki. Sadly, both of these pages contain only a fraction of the information I needed: the Wiki has a very good difficulty rating and shows the needed patches and DLCs, while Steam knows which achievements have you already done. So I had to use both lists to determine which achievements I want to go for.
Of course I tried to create Excel spreadsheets to maintain achievements, but it became extremaly hart to manage after a short time. Not to mention how often new DLCs come out (looking at you, Paradox Interactive) with new achievements, so the hand-maintained version was quickly abandoned.
This gave me the idea of a page where I have every information about the achievements I want to see with all functions needed to easily navigate between them:
- The difficulty of an achievement
- Wether I have earned it or not
- The DLCs and game version required
- The percentage of Steam users who already claimed that achievement
- Ordering and filtering wherever necessary in these informations
- Automatically maintained and extended with every new achievement
And this is how EU4 Achievement Checklist was born.