How will PC handle building decision fatigue?

[MatthewP]

One of the things that made it hard for me to get into imperator was that it had many buildings with very local and sometimes complex (at least in aggregate) effects and it wanted me to manage them across an enormous number of provinces. I invariably found myself either overwhelmed with the number of decisions and complexity of making them over and over or, more often, just abandoning any real effort to understand local dynamics and just slapping things down with minimal consideration. I contrast this to eu4, which not only has quite a few less locations, but also generally has its buildings provide pretty straightforward global effects (for example, providing more money or manpower).

I’m wondering what the plan is for making this work in project Caesar. I think a lot of the economic stuff looks quite cool. But I do worry, with what looks like again buildings with local and complex effects and an overwhelming number of places to build them, how the game will avoid running into this same problem. Maybe buildings are relatively rare? Maybe there’s a really good macro builder or other similar UI? Maybe there’s automation that can be turned on in the midgame once the player is established and before things get too overwhelming? I don’t know. But I hope it’s something the devs are actively planning around.

 

[Ispil]

That is a good point. There's some known "automation" of this insomuch that estates will build stuff, but there's still gonna be a lot of player construction. I'm not necessarily looking for it to all get automated away, but I would like maybe for the game to provide some suggestions?

 

[Hazes4ever]

Fair point. I quit playing Vic3 because I got bored of it playing just as Belgium, let alone the horror of having to micromanage the entire Spanish empire

 

[dunka2]

Well for one, there aren't any building slots, so if you build something bad, it won't matter except in that maybe you wasted some money. Still, all buildings will do something, so it's rarely a complete loss. I think this should make the 'decision paralysis' at the very least lesser than in previous games. I also think you won't actually be able to build much for a quite a while. Instead your estates will do most of the building for at least the first 200 or so years which should greatly lessen the strain on the player having to manage all that building.

It also seems like the game will lean heavily on subjects which means you won't have to manage building in those locations unless there is something very specific you want to build. You'll mostly be tasked with managing your metropole and homeland. I think Paradox have learned from Vic3 and understand that at least some automation and delegation is important.

 

[MatthewP]

Fair point. I quit playing Vic3 because I got bored of it playing just as Belgium, let alone the horror of having to micromanage the entire Spanish empire

Yeah, and while vic3 probably has somewhat more complex decisions and more buildings per location, it also has many many fewer locations. And even there the devs have taken significant steps to make decisions both more global (for example, one market per nation) and help with a very comprehensive UI and automation + delegation (much of which didn’t exist on release, hopefully PC can do better).

 

[Ispil]

There's a mission in I:R that's just "develop this region" where it suggests several buildings and the like to do in a given area. If you strip out most of the bonuses, I think the idea there is pretty sound: some way for the game to suggest "hey, here's some stuff you could do in this region to develop it" as just a regular mechanic (rather than tied to missions or anything).

Like, I'm all for complexity and the like, but I'll always appreciate the game giving me suggestions; helps with getting my bearings.

 

[LowEffortTroll]

One of the things that made it hard for me to get into imperator was that it had many buildings with very local and sometimes complex (at least in aggregate) effects and it wanted me to manage them across an enormous number of provinces.

Handling IR buildings becomes easy as soon as you realise that most of them are useless.