France had great diplomacy from a player perspective. For the viewer it was underwhelming. We viewers love the Game of Thrones backstab diplomacy, always going for the win and more important not letting your allies win because you helped him to win. I'd say France wouldnt have been able to win against Poland/Prussia/Sweden without you and the other allies being loyal and honest with your deals. Unfortunately this did also ensure that you had very little chance of winning, despite playing extremely well. Your navy was the most impressive I have ever seen! But I know that you devs/players think for the long run, as nobody would ever trust you again in the next dev clash if you would betray France and rob him of his chances to win.
EU4 Dev Clash #11 - Baltic Elephants - Tuesdays 15:00 CET
- Thread starter Groogy
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France had great diplomacy from a player perspective. For the viewer it was underwhelming. We viewers love the Game of Thrones backstab diplomacy, always going for the win and more important not letting your allies win because you helped him to win. I'd say France wouldnt have been able to win against Poland/Prussia/Sweden without you and the other allies being loyal and honest with your deals. Unfortunately this did also ensure that you had very little chance of winning, despite playing extremely well. Your navy was the most impressive I have ever seen! But I know that you devs/players think for the long run, as nobody would ever trust you again in the next dev clash if you would betray France and rob him of his chances to win.
Usually yes, doesnt mean that there's no incentive to a split.
Isnt about surprising, is about the fact that most naval battles take place in proximity of something that's relevant land wise, which often means chokes or harbors enabling/forcing rotation.
Stop strawmanning please. My argument isnt mentioning anything remotely related to "it's fine if you're just a better player". What I'm saying is that in most naval engagements one of the two sides will draw benefit from splitting up the battle compared to doomstacking.
There doesnt need to be a drastic difference. One side will typically have more good admirals than the other (even if both have naval ideas/good naval trad), and for that side its advantageous to force split battles compared to doomstacking.
Player A has more naval morale than Player B. Player A will win every doomstack battle, given current mechanics.
Player B therefore has the incentive to do something about this. Player B decides to stack-cycle to even out the odds.
Player A sees Player B floating around with multiple heavy stacks and isn't an idiot. Player A retreats until they can also safely create multiple stacks of heavies.
Player A wins every stack-cycle battle against Player B, given current mechanics.
Nothing changes. Advocating split battles only ever makes sense if you know your opponent isn't able to match your micro (because they don't know how or aren't fast enough). Show me a case where "for [one] side its [sic] advantageous to force split battles". It doesn't matter if you're hiding your fleet in port and sending them in one stack at a time: they'll just do the same from the next sea zone and you're back at square one. And again, show me a side that has consistently better admirals and consistently worse morale. Your argument makes sense in theory, but is completely unfeasible in practice against a competent human opponent. ("Oh shit, they out-morale me. But I'm sure I'll have better admirals than them because... reasons?")
Maybe, maybe you pull this off once. Nobody in your multiplayer group does this, and you pull a surprise. What did you win? Forcing everyone to do extra micro for zero gain at the end of the day.
While I understand it`s annoying to get backstabbed, I really appriciate every player who tries to make the dev clash interesting from a viewers perspective. That last roflstomp of the prussian/polish/swedish alliance I just fast forward. It`s a pity when the endgame goes like this, there sure has been some memorable dev clash endings before. There still is time though, someone please unsheath your dagger (pretty please)
Only the Dutch would be able to achieve this. As the saying is “God created the world but the Dutch created the Netherlands”.On a second note, draining the sea completely might be the better option
The point is that usually one or the other will get a more desirable outcome from stack cycling than doomstacking, and hence use that strategy. To put it in your terms: Either player A wins more reliably/with a greater casulty difference if they stack cycle, so they stack cycle over doomstacking OR player B has a great chance of edging out a win/loses less ships from stack cycling, and hence does that over doomstacking. Using stack-cycling produces another outcome than doomstacking, the result of the doomstacking won't be superior for both parties.
Glad you brought this up, as this is one of the scenarios. When your stacks have the ability to repair inside the harbor before being cycled in again this favors stack cycling for that player.
You don't need to have worse morale, you just need to have more top tier admirals and relatively similar morale, which is a common occurance late.
I guess this is why you're so hellbent on refuting this, you just want to justify you not doing extra micro. No one is forcing you to do this, and if your group plays fine without stack cycling keep doing so.
But for what gain? At this point 3 ages worth of score had already been accumulated, and there was no chance of snatching first place anyway. Even if we utterly crushed France at that point he'd still be in the top 8 for score for this age, and so would beat me in total accumulated score. So, I would betray my only ally to get him 2nd instead of 1st, and then I would have no ally at all to help me get 3rd.
Paradoxically, the new scoring system which was implemented to break up long-standing alliances has thus only served to make people -less- willing to backstab their allies, as there is virtually no gain anymore after the first 2 ages if you lacked the score in those to remain competitive...
What incentive do you think would have been sufficient to make you click the dismiss alliance button when the victory cards spawned? For sake of argument, if there were a malus for being allied to a nation you hold VCs on (or being allied to a nation that had eaten VCs off you) of -3 diplo rep and +50% coring cost, would you? What do you think would incentivise you to go further still and set rivalry status? For clarity, I'm just talking about the game mechanics, and not the verbal agreements/bargains.
Strictly game mechanics I would do it in a heartbeat - alliances formed through game mechanics without verbal or written agreement is worth nothing to me. You need to communicate to have any semblance of trust.
As @Meneth once put it: You'd gain war. Glorious war.
But that aside, I think it's clear that the current scoring system needs some degree of inflation for the later ages to avoid the kind of situation you (and KJ) are in - incredible powerful, but with virtually zero chance to win first place. Giving more score for the later ages would not only make the lategame more interesting, but I'd also consider it more fair. Getting first place as Burgundy in the Age of Discovery is a smaller achievement than first place as
In my opinion, should you decide to give this format another go, the Ages of Reformation/Absolutism/Revolution should give +33%/+67%/+100% more points than the AoD - so basically 10/13/17/20 points for first place, 5/7/8/10 for 4th place, 1/1/2/2 for 8th and so on. If my quick calculations are correct, this would put France at 25, Persia at 23, and Delhi, Hindustan and Dithmarschen at 20 points. All these players would have been guaranteed to win the clash by winning the AoRev (1st place gives +6 compared to 2nd) and even Bratyn (at 16 points) would still have had a reasonable shot at winning the whole shebang.
Still, I enjoyed this round very much, and more than the previous ones.
While it's true that no region of the world was putting on a show every week - in my perception, there was hardly any session where there wasn't anything amazing and/or funny going on somewhere. While I think that Groogy made a great debut as commentator, I have to say that he and (even more so) Jake seemed rather... distracted? I know that DDRBlind has been a meme for quite a while now, but I found it rather jarring this round that Jake was often so busy not telling the viewers about some cool new feature that it took several minutes for him to notice that the whole world was on (blue) fire. If I may make a request, it'll be less teasing and more game-at-hand.
Oh, and if I can also make a request to the players: No more Exodus-to-America strategies, please.
Honestly, I found this to be KJ's weakest clash to date. Not that he would have been playing badly, but having the Atlantic ocean (or Pacific, in case of the Ming) between the two combattants really takes away a lot of the drama, especially since KJ was usually rather outgunned on land (at least against the human opponents). So basically, as long as he was able to use his naval advantage to keep the enemy from amassing their full force, it would be a stalemate, and if the wooden wall would crumble, it was a bit of a foregone conclusion because, well, Revolutionary France is a thing. So, Comrade, while your incredible Smugness still provided fine entertainment, I find that it can only realize its full potential if you're in the thick of the fray.
Moving to America was an act of desperation. The alternative would be slowly getting squeezed in between Marketing Sea and Burgundy/Dutch and share the fate of Hamburg and then be relocated to some backwards piece of the world like Theodoro or Kilwa
Hopefully we get more spread out spawns next time!
Hopefully we get more spread out spawns next time!
Considering my entire campaign was based on just 'relaxing' with colonies and naval stuff, any 'glorious war' would just be my armies getting crushed in a heartbeat
Probably going to be the last time I play like this, but it was an experiment and mostly came from the chance of being able to let out my Inner Dutchness 
Moving to America was an act of desperation. The alternative would be slowly getting squeezed in between Marketing Sea and Burgundy/Dutch and share the fate of Hamburg and then be relocated to some backwards piece of the world like Theodoro or Kilwa
Hopefully we get more spread out spawns next time!
and not such a spread of starting powers, trying to contest with pommerania, sweden, brandenburg, burgundy or scotland as a OPM such as hamburg/ditmarchen is a big task.
I tried to grow but was slapped down by a coalition of pretty much everyone in northern europe so
At least I have retaken my ancestral homelands by now
and not such a spread of starting powers, trying to contest with pommerania, sweden, brandenburg, burgundy or scotland as a OPM such as hamburg/ditmarchen is a big task.
I tried to grow but was slapped down by a coalition of pretty much everyone in northern europe so
At least I have retaken my ancestral homelands by now
Exactly. With Sweden/Norway/Pomerania/Prussia alliance to our east and Burgundy/Dutch alliance to our west, Hamburg/Dithmarchen is simply dead on arrival.
and not such a spread of starting powers, trying to contest with pommerania, sweden, brandenburg, burgundy or scotland as a OPM such as hamburg/ditmarchen is a big task.
I tried to grow but was slapped down by a coalition of pretty much everyone in northern europe so
At least I have retaken my ancestral homelands by now
Did you not choose Hamburg?
my request was lubeck but was denied it due to they not wanting to give me something powerful in the region.Did you not choose Hamburg?
I settled on their counter offer of hamburg,
First time commenter, but long time watcher and reader of these Dev Clash threads - I'm a bit shy about this but imho this format is so close to perfect in my view that I thought I should give my 2 cents )
)The agree button is not good enough for this comment. I think this new format is absolutely brilliant for making the early game more interesting, and this seemed to be the case with probably the most entertaining dev clash I've seen (and I've seen them since Fritaly) in terms of unstable alliance systems. Of course, perma alliances like France/Netherlands and Marketing Sea are unfortunately a near inevitability, but I would urge people who disagree with my judgement to fondly remember all the diplomatic twists and turns in Italy, India and the Middle east. For the record, suffering at the hands of this unstable situation and then manipulating it to come back from the brink to (nearly) the top is why I voted for Neondt for fan favourite. This was probably futile but hopefully you'll get a trophy so it won't matter
. Anyway, please don't scrap the new system! Just bear in mind that the game itself weights score gain through the ages and must have been programmed to for a reason, and this weighting was entirely nullified by the new system. Shame it was forgotten this time by the looks of things but no reason weighting shouldn't be added next time! To be fair, I think you, Millens in Portugal, and Sidestep in Scotland could maybe have pulled something off against Burgundy and Holland if you had been allowed to migrate more to Ireland. And the issue with Marketing sea for you and Katz would not have been so great if so many large powers so close together had not all been working together in the same department and consequently been inevitably predisposed to create a hugbox which was ridiculously OP in the early game. Regardless, as I see it its not a problem with the game format so much as with the diplomatic situation in game, which people were placed in which countries (for the record, I think the asymmetric start positions did a pretty good job of balancing things), or perhaps, with no offence meant, your diplomatic abilities. Given that you are such a good player in other respects (let it not be said I'm unduly harsh ) that you can usually outblob everyone and win by brute force I wouldn't blame you for not particularly needing to hone your diplomatic game (not that I would want you to - your smack-talking is brilliant from the perspective of us as fans!), but I think it bit you this session because blobbing wasn't possible in Europe. Maybe see if you can extract some pearls of wisdom from Wiz?
) that you can usually outblob everyone and win by brute force I wouldn't blame you for not particularly needing to hone your diplomatic game (not that I would want you to - your smack-talking is brilliant from the perspective of us as fans!), but I think it bit you this session because blobbing wasn't possible in Europe. Maybe see if you can extract some pearls of wisdom from Wiz? Lastly, I think this session has proved how difficult revolutionary is to revoke when it's in the hands of a relatively secure leader who is strong enough not to mind being marked for death and hence able to simply soak up the oft forgotten score bonus. As such I think the warscore cost for end the revolution should maybe be ever so slightly reduced (even if just 1 or 2%) to make stabhitting for it a easier than requiring **total** occupation/annihilation of all armies of all human participants who can't/won't be separately peaced. Bear in mind that historically the revolution was eventually crushed.
All in all - great clash, look forward to the final session and next clash!
edits: grammar errors, being less harsh on KJ - I didn't mean to be!
All in all - great clash, look forward to the final session and next clash!
edits: grammar errors, being less harsh on KJ - I didn't mean to be!
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Coming up next devclash: Poland can into space!
(Honestly just want to see KJ as Wallachia/Romania smacktalking about impaling everybody)
(Honestly just want to see KJ as Wallachia/Romania smacktalking about impaling everybody
)