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lwarmonger

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Jan 28, 2005
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A question to those beta-testers out there. I was curious if there were any blobs that form in every game due to pre-determined factors (ie France as the Big Blue Blob of early EU III builds due too their manpower and wealth or Britain as the Big Red Blob with Indian and Chinese pops fueling their expansion), or any ahistorical outcomes that consistently occur (the Mongols making it to the English Channel without breaking a sweat or not making it past the Volga depending on the build, or Egypt getting crushed every time under wave after wave of Crusading states)?

Or does it tend to produce varied and plausable outcomes? I don't object to a Muslim southern France, as long as it doesn't happen every time. I don't object to Egypt getting crushed by a swarm of crusaders, as long as it doesn't happen every time. I don't object to a Saxon England, so long as the Normans and/or Danes win sometimes. I was just curious what kind of outcomes we can expect.
 
I think someone who'd played it said that (with the version at the time) most places showed a tendency to blob to form their de jure kingdoms, and maybe a bit beyond. But civil wars also seem fairly common, so said blobs don't like more than a few decades at most.

Also from what I've seen a LOT of the development at this point is about balancing (the game seems stable and without game-breaking bugs based on the LPs). Balancing the AI, and the likelihoods for these sort of outcomes. So as an example, in 1066 pre-invasion William the Bastard starts out with a (pun intended) boatload of cash so he can ship his army off to England, and Harald Hardrada/Norway starts out with some extra soldiers (raised, I guess) so he has a big enough army to have a chance of winning England. If neither had these advantages, they probably wouldn't have a very good chance at beating the Saxons - although with William the Bastard, this creates some gamey options for the King of France, like imprisoning+banishing William, so you get all his money and keep his lands, so this is probably being looked into somewhat.
 
The game gets updated frequently so it's not really possible to play a statistically significant amount of games under the same version to judge this. But, I've seen a lot of randomness. I've seen the Saxons, the Normans, Norwegians, Danish and French take England. I have seen the Russian Pagans kick Rurikovich butt but I have also seen an orthodox Rus form. I have seen a big Scandinavian union but I have also seen a pagan Sweden. The Muslims have conquered into France but I have also seen the reconquista happen.

The game is sufficiently random but if you play a lot of games I think you will see patterns, but I think that's inherent in a game where some characters are stronger than the others.
 
The game gets updated frequently so it's not really possible to play a statistically significant amount of games under the same version to judge this.

This.

I might get one decent game in with each patch, if I am lucky. And those of us who are playing updating preview copies, we don't get a changelog or readme with each update, so we might not even know what's been changed. I got an update today to 0.81, but I have no idea what changed, other than I saw a new loading screen. Was that the only change? I dunno. I might play for 100 years and not notice a difference, but that might just mean some events were rescripted or some history files were changed.