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Dawkins

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Jan 31, 2003
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I've always felt Badboy/infamy is a poor mechanic for regulating excessive player expansion. This is probably too late for EU4, but I'll post it in advance for EU5 :).

Problems of the badbody mechanic include:

Inability to perform historical actions
For example, the Ottomans conquering the Mameluks in 2 years. If you tried this, you would have every nation in Europe declare war on you.

On the flip side, a war like the Spanish Succession might never happen, because inheritance produces less badboy than conquering, despite the fact that they both create the same outcome (eg. a massively overpowered France)

Unrealistic, immersion breaking gameplay
For example "I don't want to split up my enemy France into smaller states, because it will cost more badboy to conquer" or "I'll wait 50 years before invading France because by that stage everyone will have forgotten I have conquered all of Spain".

Badboy fails to prevent the player from becoming too powerful
Because a good player will just expand consistently, keeping their badbody down till they are so dominant nobody can challenge them. This would not be allowed to happen in real life!

It creates unrealistic effects across religions
For example, as Morocco I am less worried about Castile conquering Algeria than I would be if Tunisia did it, because their badboy would be much lower.

A system I'd prefer to see
Rather than judging other nations by their individual actions, I think it would be more realistic and interesting if nations judged each other based on their perceived threat. Perceived threat would involve factors like proximity, relative nation size, religious differences. Nations which considered others a serious threat, would dedicate their foreign policy to forming alliances with others who share the feeling of being threatened. These alliances would then choose the opportune moment to strike against their threat

This would make the game feel far more natural and the balancing of expansion would be far more interesting, rather than just a game of playing the numbers. It would also make it harder for the player to take over the world, because in doing so they would find they must fight constant alliances of countries who realize 'we will be next'.
 
In EU4 you don't have to worry about being a bad boy!

They will use the opinion system from CK2, and I expect that instead of receiving 4 infamy for taking a province, you will have different opinion hits from different countries for different reasons. For example, taking a muslim province will give you a opinion hit from muslim countries, but might give you a opinion boost from catholic countries, except from your rival neighbour that are worried about your expanions. At least that is how I hope that the system will work.
 
Perceived threat actually already exists, there's an interesting console command showing some of the inner workings of the AI (wants to conquer, fears, threats), I'm fairly confident the AI already uses that to choose alliances, isolate and target other nations.
 
In EU4 you don't have to worry about being a bad boy!

They will use the opinion system from CK2, and I expect that instead of receiving 4 infamy for taking a province, you will have different opinion hits from different countries for different reasons. For example, taking a muslim province will give you a opinion hit from muslim countries, but might give you a opinion boost from catholic countries, except from your rival neighbour that are worried about your expanions. At least that is how I hope that the system will work.

I hope this is true, but I don't see anything in the pinned post about removing badboy. The way the relationship value is calculated will be changed, but that was always separate from the badboy mechanic.
 
As things stand at the moment we intend to remove badboy from the game. We of course reserve the right to put it back in if we need to.
 
As things stand at the moment we intend to remove badboy from the game. We of course reserve the right to put it back in if we need to.

Just to make it clear: you're not repleacing it with a goodgirl system, right? One that rewards nice nations instead of penalising mean ones.
 
Just to make it clear: you're not repleacing it with a goodgirl system, right? One that rewards nice nations instead of penalising mean ones.

No we are working on a more naunced system that makes AI countries aware of expansion by other nations, and what they should do about it.
 
I tentatively agree with Ralph. Maybe there could be some kind of carrot-and-stick approach?

EDIT: Just saw King's post and now I'm really excited.
 
Ah, cool. Will the AI be able to think more strategically, like sense threat by overexpansion in the longer term?

I don't want to be drawn too much on that. We have a goal that will make the AI more aware of expansion, but I'd rahter not over promise.
 
I don't want to be drawn too much on that. We have a goal that will make the AI more aware of expansion, but I'd rahter not over promise.

Fair enough. I like the sound of it though, I've always thought that one thing the EU3 AI was blind on was longer-term expansion. For the game to be fun BB had to decay reasonably quickly, but it meant you could take over half of Europe without the AI really noticing the trend. Reasonably realistic I suppose, when you think about it, that's what Russia did
 
I don't want to be drawn too much on that. We have a goal that will make the AI more aware of expansion, but I'd rahter not over promise.

Great! I know these things are much easier said than done so I wish you all the best of luck in designing a system that works.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I think a system which periodically appraises threat levels would be more robust than specifically targeting expansion. This way, Brittany taking a province from France would not make England see Brittany as a bigger threat than France just because it is "expanding" whereas France is contracting.
 
I don't want to be drawn too much on that. We have a goal that will make the AI more aware of expansion, but I'd rahter not over promise.

Without giving away any of the developer diary coloured details, is the team's thinking on this influenced by Napoleon's conquests in Europe? The local AIs see an aggressive neighbour, so they get moody and try to stop the beast, perhaps?

Anything other than the traditional BB system is fine with me, honestly. In EU3, you could take Mecca in a holy war and gain the same amount of infamy for it with Christians as you do with Muslims! It was a really silly system because the concept of a single infamy stat implies that every country on earth views your actions the exact same way, which obviously shouldn't be the case.
 
Without giving away any of the developer diary coloured details, is the team's thinking on this influenced by Napoleon's conquests in Europe? The local AIs see an aggressive neighbour, so they get moody and try to stop the beast, perhaps?

Anything other than the traditional BB system is fine with me, honestly. In EU3, you could take Mecca in a holy war and gain the same amount of infamy for it with Christians as you do with Muslims! It was a really silly system because the concept of a single infamy stat implies that every country on earth views your actions the exact same way, which obviously shouldn't be the case.

This! Even your allies in the same war saw it the same way as your enemies.
 
Just to make it clear: you're not repleacing it with a goodgirl system, right? One that rewards nice nations instead of penalising mean ones.

That's wrong. If we're to get rewards, we want them to come from badgirl.
 
Without giving away any of the developer diary coloured details, is the team's thinking on this influenced by Napoleon's conquests in Europe? The local AIs see an aggressive neighbour, so they get moody and try to stop the beast, perhaps?

Anything other than the traditional BB system is fine with me, honestly. In EU3, you could take Mecca in a holy war and gain the same amount of infamy for it with Christians as you do with Muslims! It was a really silly system because the concept of a single infamy stat implies that every country on earth views your actions the exact same way, which obviously shouldn't be the case.

What we are looking at in broad terms is relations between countries. We can then change the relation effects depending on the province and the country. So taking a province will have a different effect on different countries.