Should there be an option to disable magistrates?

Well, the three best arguments for magistrates are probably:

-To make there be some strategy behind taking land, rather than just "more land = stronger" caveman style play like in TW and such.

-Conscription centre and Naval base spam is dumb enough without having infinite magistrates.

-Too much economy micromanagement.

In addition, the high cost of military maintenance means you can't just nerf income across the board to solve development spam in giant blobs.

Pewt said:

-Conscription centre and Naval base spam is dumb enough without having infinite magistrates.

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I would say the level 5/6 trade building spam is even dumber but I don't really do MP.

I do agree that something is needed to throttle mega-blobbing being every bit as efficient as staying small. The magistrate system works well enough IMO although I wouldn't mind a few tweaks such as allowing you to burn manpower reserves (and $$$ of course) to expand forts or possibly adding a very small (.01/province > 30?) modifier for extremely large nations. It was a bit ridiculous in prior expansions that 1 year after hitting a tech I could have 200+ constables/temples/whatevers up and running across my empire.

I've never liked the fact you need magistrates to upgrade buildings although it does work fine as it is. Ideally always felt the cap should be population related and would add a sort of maintenence penelty for vast empires above a certain number of buildings + distance from the capital. Holding a big empire toghether should be harder than creating an empire if history is to be believed. Not sure if that would be welcomed by people who play the game though...

brifbates said:

I would say the level 5/6 trade building spam is even dumber but I don't really do MP.

I do agree that something is needed to throttle mega-blobbing being every bit as efficient as staying small. The magistrate system works well enough IMO although I wouldn't mind a few tweaks such as allowing you to burn manpower reserves (and $$$ of course) to expand forts or possibly adding a very small (.01/province > 30?) modifier for extremely large nations. It was a bit ridiculous in prior expansions that 1 year after hitting a tech I could have 200+ constables/temples/whatevers up and running across my empire.

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Level 5/6 trade spam isn't really that dumb, for a few reasons.

1. By the time you have enough buildings for its effect to truly end the game, you already won from sheer size and province value years ago.
   
2. After a certain point, more income doesn't really do anything for you. The ~26 naval FL or ~20,000 MP and ~8 forcelimit provided by the line of land or naval buildings on a single province cannot really be replicated by t6 trade building spam.

gameofthrones said:

I've never liked the fact you need magistrates to upgrade buildings although it does work fine as it is. Ideally always felt the cap should be population related and would add a sort of maintenence penelty for vast empires above a certain number of buildings + distance from the capital. Holding a big empire toghether should be harder than creating an empire if history is to be believed. Not sure if that would be welcomed by people who play the game though...

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This.
Current magistrate system is just not logical.

I think part of the problem is that the magistrate pulls multiple duties. He builds buildings, he goes to provinces to perform decisions made by the immortal god-emperor and he is sacrificed and turned into art work that magically inspires better advisors for his country.

It works as an abstraction, in much the same way that no-one really believes you can store up merchants; or that you can hold a maximum of 5 diplomats at your court, who then proceed to die when used.

Imagine all the fine tuning that would be needed to make an economy solution to the blobbing problem. Then imagine Paradox trying to solve it that way. In 6.0 they would have forgotten to update the economy, in 6.1 everybody would go bankrupt every year, in 6.2 everybody would have a million ducats in 1400 and then they wouldn't release any more patches.

Frederic III said:

I think you found a very interesting point about magistrates, DeadLindwyrm. The multitask magistrates make them look like they were only something to fill in a hole. They don't simply do one task, but many, and it is frustrating that the same guys can be used to buy a paint and to build a road network. And I claim that money was the perfect abstraction for those tasks in the old game. If only they were like in HoI "leadership", it would make a little more sense, but for me, all of the little guys on the top should be considered like "magistrates", if you mean by that "public servants".

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Here, here! (or is it "hear, hear!") Paradox likes sliders, so something like the HoI system would be kinda cool.

Its easy to turn off magistrates and hordes by modding Buildings.txt and changing the government types of the hordes.

To me that removes two of the three biggest fun-killers of the latest expansion. The third issue being Cta alliance cascades which I thoroughly loathe and that have sadly been hardcoded into the game.

Anyhow, mod it away.

DreadLindwyrm said:

I think part of the problem is that the magistrate pulls multiple duties. He builds buildings, he goes to provinces to perform decisions made by the immortal god-emperor and he is sacrificed and turned into art work that magically inspires better advisors for his country.

It works as an abstraction, in much the same way that no-one really believes you can store up merchants; or that you can hold a maximum of 5 diplomats at your court, who then proceed to die when used.

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This is the key point here and why people don't like magistrates.

For the buildings, it seems far more logical to suggest that certain buildings require a minimum population base before they can be built whilst others can be built anywhere because they are an extension of military power and so centrally funded.

For the province based decisions, why not simply have a clock on those (like the clock on the national focus, for example) to limit the number of decisions you can make in any particular period of time.

And for the cultural role, again there could be a clock to slow you down here but otherwise things should cost money rather than magistrates.

> It's not that I don't like the concept of cascading wars, it's because I don't like the fact that diplomacy seems to be absent of it.

A.I. is still completely stupid in choosing its war target, goals, and CB. A rather extreme example would be Castile being "Very Likely" to accept A Call to Arms to a dirt poor country it has military access to and I watched on the ledger how its stability turned from +2 to -3. What a dumbass.

Magistrate system is excellent. Balances the game and forces us to make hard choices. EU3 is better then ever after DW.

I'll premise that I like it, but I can't force others to like it. This said, Frederic, modding is not cheating: this side of the game wasn't there before, I don't like it, I mod it out. On the other hand, it COULD be an option, along with the "no inflation" one. But then, what would you use magistrates for? Painting spam, I believe, isn't meant to be done - give a money price to that decision, and you will find that you have more magistrates to build things.

I would think a change in the magistrate system could make it more intersting. Lower the overal number of magistrates a little but in return lower the cost of building low lvls buidlings if you got high tech.

F.eks. Lets take forts as an example. If the highest available fort is lvl 1 it would take 1 magistrate to build, just as it does today. If you are able to build lvl 2 forts, a lvl one fort would only cost 0.9 magistrate, while the lvl 2 would cost one. If you're highest lvl available fort was lvl 3. A lvl 1 fort might cost 0.75 or 0.7, lvl 2 would cost 0.9 and lvl 3 1. That what it would be easier to develop provinces a little bit late in the game, while not disturbing the game balance much, becouse you get less magistrates overall + it can now be a strategic decision on WHEN to build and also WHAT to build.

Lets say you want to build trade buildings up high, and you will get acess to a new building in about 5 years wich will reduce the number of magistrates you will need for lower lvls buildings.Will you then spend the magistrates on other buildings to cash in on the number of magistrates needed for trade buildings 5 years from now, or do you still build them at once at a higher magistrates cost, but also getting the bonus for them straight away instead of postponing it by 5 years?


I also think that is realistic. What takes a lot of great minds to develop and improve and build with a brand new technology will be considersed easy and could requireed almost unskilled workers many years later. LVl 1 forts might simply be a wall, while a lvl 6 would be maybee inner and outter walls, with big towers, boiling oil, rolling logs, killing pits, mote etc. By the time you can build a castle like that, a simple one layer wall should be something a lot of people could do. Meaning people able to build a lvl 6 fort and a new technology would be scarace and only a few would be around, but there woudl be plenty of haldway educated people able to build a lvl 1 fort, and so only costing 0.3-0.5 magistrates instead of 1.


Edit: And if you don't mind to cheat you can just mod the game by going into the buildings and set magistrates to 0 below every building and they won't cost a magistrate. Though 0.5 etc doesn't work though, the game reads it's as 0. you can also mod the buildings to not be destroyed on conquest even if you don't have a core on the. Changing those 2 things here is an example of what it would look like. Temples does not required a magistrate to build and is not destroyed on conquest.

# Government
temple = {
cost = 50¨
officials = 0
time = 12
modifier = {
stability_cost = -4 #reduces stability cost by 4$
}
destroy_on_conquest = no
category = 1

For those suggesting that population should be considered, I think two major points are being overlooked. One, remember that urban populations were relatively small in this period. 10K people in a city made it fairly notable. Considering that all cities start out at 1K minimum, you should theoretically be able to build most of the buildings in those 1K population cities. This pretty much defeats the purpose of considering population in the first place. Second, remember that EU3 barely handles populations at all. It's not hard to turn a 3K population province into a bustling metropolis in about 100 years. That should be more or less impossible.

In any case, Magistrates are in the game mainly as an abstract limit on your administrative capabilities. Instead of just dumping money into everything, you now have to take things a little more slowly and you have to plan a little more in advance. To be honest it makes more sense than the old method where you could just save up for a particular tech level, research it, then spam buildings from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Maybe magistrates should decrease the cost and time to build provincial improvements?

Like, if you have a magistrate available, building cost and building time will be the same as they are now. If you want to build an improvement without a magistrate, it could be 5 times more expensive and take take twice as long to construct. These are just examples--the penalties could be higher or lower.

That will encourage people to build when they have magistrates available, but also make it possible to build when you are swimming in gold and willing to wait longer for stuff to be built.