1.4 - World Conquest & Achievements

[tapewormlondon]

Who would have thought that people were interested in actually balancing the game, as opposed to treating the matter like a team sport?

No you misunderstand me, im not mocking anyone saying its too much.

I believe that the player base is fairly split on this issue - hence all the childish arguing over "Pdox defence lawyers" and "Noobs that cant play". once one group decide it is balanced, another will think it OP or too little. We will see if that turns out to be correct.

 

[zodium]

No you misunderstand me, im not mocking anyone saying its too much.

I believe that the player base is fairly split on this issue - hence all the childish arguing over "Pdox defence lawyers" and "Noobs that cant play". once one group decide it is balanced, another will think it OP or too little. We will see if that turns out to be correct.

Ah. Well, I obviously agree with that. There's probably a group of people who do treat it like a team sport, at any rate, but I've come to think that it's a bit like the economy: most people agree something isn't working, but it's hard to put a finger on exactly where the tumor is, and it's harder still to work out what to do without making matters worse. Are coalitions too easy right now? Too hard? It's a bit of both, really, which makes it tricky to deal with. Discussions either get stuck in the high abstracts (1.1 vs 1.2 was prototypical of this) or quagmired in lots of low level details (historical arguments are prototypical of this).

 

[AKronblad]

When is 1.4 scheduled for release?

From a modding perspective, please include the following:

1. A trigger for when a ruler is the first of his/her dynasty.
2. Possibility to set heir's age in define_heir (was bugged in 1.3). Also for definer_ruler obviously.
3. AND OF COURSE, making it possible to run the game in DEBUG mode in order to get more extensive error reports.

Many thanks!

 

[grisamentum]

and 100% religious unity => a hell of a lot of missionary activity.

Much less missionary activity than is required now. I'll just sell all my non-Sunni provinces to vassals.

 

[grisamentum]

- Jihad now 'only' requires owning 500 cities, and having 100% religious unity.

Do those 500 cities have to be in Asia, Europe, and Africa? Or would cities in North and South America count, too?

 

[lucaluca]

may it could be made an option before starting the game?

 

[unmerged(755241)]

Cool, I like this!

 

[InnocentIII]

yeah, while it was the design we wanted, we realise that those who grow that big want to paint the map, and AE scaling just makes it impossible.

Yay! As someone who doesn't really paint the map himself (too much work), I still applaud the expansion of expansion.

 

[unmerged(798670)]

- World Conqueror & Three Mountains: You need to have the entire world under your control.. All countries should either be conquered or a subject of you. Subjects = Vassal, Colony, Lesser Union or Protectorate.
- Jihad now 'only' requires owning 500 cities, and having 100% religious unity.

Is this stating that every county on earth must be colonized by someone now for a WC?

 

[Novacat]

PMSL. I do love these boards. People clamor for coalitions to be nerfed, they get nerfed, then more people clamor that its too much.

Be interesting to see if its a popular change, just to see how split the community is on AE and coallitions.

The problem is that coalitions were not nerfed, AE was nerfed. AE was fine and never needed nerfing.

 

[blaidd]

Is this stating that every county on earth must be colonized by someone now for a WC?

No. It's just saying that you can have vassals and PUs, you don't have to be the only tag on the map. You just have to control every existing nation in some way.

 

[anomalacaris]

The problem is that coalitions were not nerfed, AE was nerfed. AE was fine and never needed nerfing.

But coalition do come from AE though. This change just encourage you to wait coalitions down, which should be much easier since the rate of decay of AE stay the same. (unless you use DDRJake's trick) Also, from the AE formula where everything is additive, this would mean countries that are far away indeed won't get much AE unlike now, so you can easily rotate between different parts of world much easier.
So although Coalitions are not nerfed directly, it would make things much easier to manage for sure.

 

[srd5090]

yeah, while it was the design we wanted, we realise that those who grow that big want to paint the map, and AE scaling just makes it impossible.

That's the most beautiful thing I've read on this forum in a long time. All the fighting that came from the 1.2 changes... I think this helps bring things back into a more open, fun game.

 

[TheBloke]

Really good decision guys, thanks.

Of course the AE changes will greatly de-emphasise the role of coalitions. Nonetheless, I do hope that there is still work being done to them, so as to make them more of a scaling risk/reward soft-cap, than the present hard-cap "anchor on expansion."

I would personally like to see coalitions get harder and harder to beat, e.g. due to scaling military bonuses once the coalitions reach a certain size. I made some simple suggestions in this thread.

Now that coalitions can be more easily avoided, I think it's even more important to make the more challenging. To summarise my suggestions from my thread I linked: I think coalitions should get Crusade-like bonuses, which start applying after a certain number of coalition joinees (e.g. 3 or 5), and boost the members' morale, discipline, manpower, manpower recovery, and maybe other things too.

At the same time I proposed a removal of separate peace. I can see that this is now less important if coalitions feature much less prominently. Nonetheless I do think they should continue to provide an ongoing risk/reward balance. So I am in favour of increasing the risk - making them much harder to beat - but also increasing the reward when you do beat them. Hence separate peace, or perhaps sometimes separate peace, like only if you get 100% WS against an individual coalition member can you separate peace them. Or even, you can never offer a separate peace to a coalition member, but they are able to negotiate with you, once they're 100% beaten, because they'd really like to get out at that point.

I also think that they should be brought into line with other diplomatic features, in that they should have some associated cost to members. Such as requiring use of a DipRel. And/or that members of a coalition should need some minimum relations towards each other (perhaps as low as 0.) to prevent odd collections of nations in a single coalition (or add multiple coalition types, e.g. religious-based.)

Anyway, really pleased with the changes and thanks for again proving that you do listen to community feedback!

 

[AgentPaper]

What if, to replace the AE increase from larger countries, larger countries instead affected the transmission of AE, so that countries further away tend to care more? So for example, if you're playing as Muscovy early on, and take Kiev, that could give -30 AE to lithuania and -5 to poland, whereas if you took that same province in the same situation, but later on when you control ten times as many provinces, you would still get -30 AE with lithuania, but -20 AE with poland, and -5 AE all the way to france.

This would make it so you could still manage your AE by expanding not too quickly, but it would still mean that large countries tend to get larger coalitions against them if they get aggressive.

Besides that, I still feel like there needs to be some change to coalition wars themselves. I recently suggested a 400% cap on coalition provinces, as if they were one big country for peace deal purposes, and that seems like a great way to allow people who can beat coalitions down to still be able to expand reasonably, without actually making coalitions weaker.

 

[Xia]

Doubt this solves the biggest issue with AE which is the impossibility to ever actually drain it fully (well, apparently excluding the vassal release exploit) but meh anything is better than the current permanent coalition members from 1500s onwards.

 

[Nobak]

The problem is that coalitions were not nerfed, AE was nerfed. AE was fine and never needed nerfing.

I disagree to some extent. I think the upper limit to the size factor was too high, and when you reached that point no action was a good move anymore.
One thing they might have done rather than removing it entirely is a mix of lowering the upper limit, and mitigating AE gain based on the size of other nations.
I always found it silly that OPM Friesland would get less scared of neighbor Gelre quadrupling in size by adding 3 provinces, than a fully-united France would be scared of neighbor Castile taking 5 Aragon provinces or something.

 

[Helios Ra]

and 100% religious unity => a hell of a lot of missionary activity.

Is there still a problem with random provinces being converted to Shiite, particularly very wealthy provinces that become impossible to convert?

 

[mcmanusaur]

yeah, while it was the design we wanted, we realise that those who grow that big want to paint the map, and AE scaling just makes it impossible.

I'm actually ambivalent toward this change, as I prefer a game balance where expansion gets progressively more difficult (and thus there is a sort of equilibrium around the size of a nation state), but oh well. Obviously quite a lot of players want to go for the WC's, and I can understand wanting to oblige them all.

Personally I think what was needed were changes to the nature of how warscore, AE, coalitions, and over-extension work, rather than tiny balance tweaks like this, but (again) oh well. The main problem with AE was that it led to coalitions that contributed nothing beyond bringing things to a grinding halt and thus frustration, because neither side of a coalition war has the war goals to achieve their respective objectives. This in turn would require somewhat of a re-design of warscore (which is desirable for many other reasons), but I suppose the easy way is just tweaking the scaling of AE. Still, I don't see the advantage of the current systems other than that they're "easier" to implement.

 

[hauptman]

AE was only a minor nuisance to me in my WC attempt, as I did it as Imperial Emperor in charge of 70+ vassals, and hadnt grown very much myself. I suppose it would make things easier for another nation doing outright conquest. But making things easier isn't what most of us want. The scaling was a good idea, it did make larger nations more likely to find a balance, and stop growing through conquest. I'm a little worried that now AI france will use the new change to become even more BBB.