1.4 - World Conquest & Achievements

[mcmanusaur]

The fact that [rebels] happen to be represented by military units and not an event textbox is mostly incidental to their function in the game.

This is a very important point for us to understand. And personally I think both rebel mechanics and random events should be re-considered.

 

[Jomini]

Bleakie: In general, I have long supported the creation of rebel states rather than the current "magic red numbers", doing that for big rebellions and abstracting away all the micro of rebel fighting (the loss of manpower and gold). This makes it much easier to balance the game as your tactical skill at fighting rebels becomes the same as fighting other countries (because you can use all your skills - and not just tactical military efficiency).

That being said, rebellions still are really poor as balancing forces. Suppose I have a restored Roman empire that controls most of the Mediterranean coast. Rebels pop up in say Syria. Even if I have to embark the army in Valencia, it doesn't take long for my army to make it to Syria and then to crush the place (unless the AI states get to intervene). Once you blob to a sufficient size, there are very few possible rebel groups that really represent a challenge. Syrian nationalists? It will be over in under a year. Catholic zealots? Well maybe if they get Italy + Southern France + Eastern Iberia ... but that makes it pretty hard if you have a smallish state where the majority of the country is wrong religion (and how on earth do you do something like France or GB in the reformation)? Do we really want rebellions that typically split the AI in half and not expect other AIs to jump on them? So maybe we give the Catholic zealots only a fraction of the provinces they might get scaling with revolt risk. Then again, once you are past a certain size blobs can beat down the rebel states with ease.

Remember, like with the Russia/Austria example above, you really only need a flatish number of men as your external army expenditures. Absent coalition balancing, you just need an army big enough to take down the biggest external threat - everything above that goes to rebel suppression. So say I'm a 100 province blob and I use half my army to beat down the external foes I have. I double in size to 200 provinces. Do I need 50% of my army? No, at most I need 25% now and more likely I need 20% or something (as I've removed resources from external threats and made them into resource providers for me). As I continue to grow, a lower and lower percentage of my military resources need to go to maintaining my expansion rate and it is fairly flat to maintain my relative expansion rate (true snowballing). So anything less than a huge percentage of the Empire - which is extremely unlikely to be any coherent set of rebels outside of pretenders - going up in arms is going to just be a quick war, maybe followed by sieging, and then back to the grind. Now you can make these rebellions more frequent, but we again get into the tedium business. At what point should I get a major rebellion every year? At what point should I get a major rebellion every month? This then gets back to the tipping point quality where if I can completely beat one rebel power before the other makes gains I don't have feedback, but once they start making major gains I have mass negative feedback as they start dipping into my gold and manpower. Likewise, rebellions during peace are massively easier than rebellions during war (if only because you can always optimally path and not worry about foreign troops killing your siege stacks). Something that will stop an aggressive diplo-expander will crush a warmonger; something a warmonger fears won't hold a candle to someone at peace.

Think about it this way, certain players (somewhat defined by skill), certain playstyles, and certain countries can handle near perpetual war much more easily than others. This will always be the case. If you use a mechanism that only allows war as its only out, then those favored at war will be favored by game mechanisms.

Death by a thousand cuts sounds good for player balance, but it doesn't really work out. There is too much variability to balance things properly given how feedback works. What needs to happen is for the anti-blob mechanism to force players to either slow down or lose wars. Once the player faces no risk of losing whatever he does, all the internal balance in the world doesn't change anything. We may as well embrace that at the end of WC run it becomes a World vs You grudge match and winning is the crescendo of the game. I mean say you make it possible to take up to half any country regardless of size, but for every province above 5 you take, that country gets a huge buff to tax, manpower, morale, and discipline. You might be able to pull off an early WC, but honestly you'd already effectively won anyways. We really should avoid tedium just to make it so fewer people can claim they've done "X". Make the game challenging - where doing something is all about balancing costs and benefits - but not tedium (where you do the same rote routine to eventually get something easily).

 

[bleakie]

The rebel system needs a fundamental redesign to not be a chore. What you propose is a great narrative, but in practice what's going to happen if this is used as the game's snowball inhibitor is that either you design your strategy around negating it (exactly as with coalitions now, since they presumably spring from the same expansionist well), or it's trivial to deal with on an ad-hoc basis. There are still a lot of things that need to be addressed here:

How do the rebel states interact with you and the world? Do they start with an opportunity to make allies? Do they have your tech and ideas? Do you get their income? If yes, how are they supposed to maintain a credible army against you? If not, how are you supposed to maintain an army against the external enemies whose provinces you took to incur the rebellion in the first place, while fighting the rebellion?

There would certainly be some kind of optimum point for how much to take balanced against rebellion risk, but that point would be difficult to find and get a feel for. It would end up being even worse for casual players, as now they wouldn't have to balance just "my forces vs. enemy forces," but "my forces weighed by chance of rebellion vs. enemy forces weighed by chance of rebellion."

I can continue to fill my proposal with more details, but I think that most of the details have clear answers with respect to how it can be done right. For instance, financial support can be provided for rebels of other countries like the current version, and other additional features are optional. When a revolt happens, countries supporting them can choose to just convert the funds to war subsidies, or form an alliance and join the war. Nationalist and patriot rebels have their own ideas and same tech, while the other rebels have same ideas and same tech. Player should not get income from revolting provinces, and they should rely on the resources of their core provinces to fight the war, as rebellion is a result of serious mismanagement or over-extension under my proposed system, and should be punished to some degree.

It is not that difficult to balance between the army and the garrison under my proposal, as you can easily recognize how much military capability remains when you install new garrisons to newly conquered provinces, and decide if you have any residual capability to expand further. The even better thing is that there is no fixed optimal point, as the optimal point is determined by how much military capability that the player is able to part with, which is in turn determined by player skill. As all strategy games are about optimizing available resources, having an optimal point determined by player skill is about the best that I can think of.

And as a final note, I have to state that the my proposed rebel system is made more robust by providing a linear/sub-linear relationship with positive base value (instead of inverse relationships like missionary strength or having negative base values like the current rebel system) between the resources available and the resources used for dealing with rebels (both being manpower, money and force limit). This kind of relationship is more easily balanced, as changes of the parameters will not be magnified. (EDIT: This paragraph does not make sense to myself anymore. It is ultimately an exponential system, no matter what the intermediate stages are)

That's why I think the solution to this is going to come from two things:

One, recognizing that the late game (~50+ provinces) phase represents a fundamentally different game dynamic than the early game (1-49 provinces). I maintain that, except for lack of transparency around the key mechanics, the early game is well-balanced for expansionist strategies. It can use fine-tuning in terms of both balance and user QOL, but it's essentially healthy. The late game is different because the balance of power changes as the countries snowball, so that as the game progresses, we see a kind of power law dynamic where more and more base tax is consolidated by fewer countries. Unlike the early game, where the strategic space is huge and volatile (many constantly changing options), the game becomes very streamlined once you're the top power: without going into a long analysis, suffice it to say that managing AE so as to avoid coalitions is always the dominant strategy (the only thing you need to worry about).

Two, recognizing that while AE is the proximate cause of the late game problems, the ultimate cause is the peace offer system. For the reasons Jomini pointed out here and elsewhere, the dynamic pricing and cap system doesn't work once wars get larges enough, even though it works fine in the early game. Past a certain war size, the peace system simply needs to work entirely differently from how it works in the late game, because the wars are fundamentally different. Whether by no separate peace, scaling military bonuses, coalition disbanding, AE reduction demands, or some variation/combination thereof, a long-term solution requires a fundamental change to how peace is made in late game wars.

Hence, if we are going to propose the redesign of any core systems, it makes the most sense to redesign the peace offer mechanic. Redesigning a core mechanic is both resource-demanding and very difficult, however, so nixing the province count modifier is a sound solution for now.

I fully agree that the current AE fix is a beneficial change and a reasonable short-term solution to the question of the ultimate snowball inhibitor, which I have stated before. I proceed to claim that no diplomatic limit can serve as a proper snowball inhibitor for late game blobbing, and thus made the proposal about recasting the rebel mechanics, which I think can fill that role naturally.

The current rebel system matches your description of the early game/late game divide. It works reasonably well when you are small, but becomes a chore when you grow large. That's one of the reasons why recasting the rebel system is a very important piece to the puzzle of making late game more enjoyable.

While I agree that the peace offer system is the root of the current problem, I am afraid that the burden of the role of snowball inhibitor will alter people's expectation of what constitutes a good mechanic for a new peace offer system. For me, it is perfectly reasonable for a player to demand 25% of all the lands of a grand coalition after a complete victory (if the player can hold it), but this is impossible if you are expecting the peace offer system to limit expansion to a certain extent. Some strict rules will have to be imposed to guarantee a limitation to expansion, which will inevitably make working around those strict rules the dominant feature of a late game scenario. That's why I want to propose something that may have the capability to take the role, so that diplomacy can relegate to its proper role to help countries align against a common threat, instead of creating overly complex rules to check expansion.

 

[bleakie]

That being said, rebellions still are really poor as balancing forces. Suppose I have a restored Roman empire that controls most of the Mediterranean coast. Rebels pop up in say Syria. Even if I have to embark the army in Valencia, it doesn't take long for my army to make it to Syria and then to crush the place (unless the AI states get to intervene). Once you blob to a sufficient size, there are very few possible rebel groups that really represent a challenge. Syrian nationalists? It will be over in under a year. Catholic zealots? Well maybe if they get Italy + Southern France + Eastern Iberia ... but that makes it pretty hard if you have a smallish state where the majority of the country is wrong religion (and how on earth do you do something like France or GB in the reformation)? Do we really want rebellions that typically split the AI in half and not expect other AIs to jump on them? So maybe we give the Catholic zealots only a fraction of the provinces they might get scaling with revolt risk. Then again, once you are past a certain size blobs can beat down the rebel states with ease.

Under my proposal, there are potentially powerful rebel groups (revolutionaries, nobles, pretenders) that can literally rip a large country apart. They can be stimulated by using events to increase the resource drain of every province by a fixed amount. This can present a credible potential danger when a player tries to push things to the limit. Large countries will be less able to counter this kind of events, as their general level of development is lower. Under my proposal, large countries should be better at putting down nationalists, patriots and religious minorities, but more prone to country-wide rebels.

Remember, like with the Russia/Austria example above, you really only need a flatish number of men as your external army expenditures. Absent coalition balancing, you just need an army big enough to take down the biggest external threat - everything above that goes to rebel suppression. So say I'm a 100 province blob and I use half my army to beat down the external foes I have. I double in size to 200 provinces. Do I need 50% of my army? No, at most I need 25% now and more likely I need 20% or something (as I've removed resources from external threats and made them into resource providers for me). As I continue to grow, a lower and lower percentage of my military resources need to go to maintaining my expansion rate and it is fairly flat to maintain my relative expansion rate (true snowballing). So anything less than a huge percentage of the Empire - which is extremely unlikely to be any coherent set of rebels outside of pretenders - going up in arms is going to just be a quick war, maybe followed by sieging, and then back to the grind. Now you can make these rebellions more frequent, but we again get into the tedium business. At what point should I get a major rebellion every year? At what point should I get a major rebellion every month? This then gets back to the tipping point quality where if I can completely beat one rebel power before the other makes gains I don't have feedback, but once they start making major gains I have mass negative feedback as they start dipping into my gold and manpower. Likewise, rebellions during peace are massively easier than rebellions during war (if only because you can always optimally path and not worry about foreign troops killing your siege stacks). Something that will stop an aggressive diplo-expander will crush a warmonger; something a warmonger fears won't hold a candle to someone at peace.

I think it is a consensus that the absolute rate of expansion should increase for large countries, while the relative rate should decrease. A purely linear model holds the absolute rate constant, while a purely exponential model holds the relative rate constant. To make a proper model, it should be something in between.
The current game model is a buffed linear model, while the rebel faction model I am suggesting is a nerfed exponential model.

Then how is it nerfed?

1. First of all, the difference in culture/religion. By widening the gap between the resource drain of same culture and different culture provinces, small countries can be given a chance to expand in their own culture more easily. The penalty of accepted cultures should be present, but much smaller than non-accepted cultures. This effect will only wane after the country size approaches 200 provinces, when every new province is in a different culture group, and it becomes virtually impossible to have accepted cultures anymore.
   
2. The fact that large countries are poorer in a per-province or per-base tax sense. This is a natural slowing factor for the relative expansion rate.
   
3. Culture conversion can help smaller countries pacify a province faster. Large countries can also do this, but this is under a linear model, and the relative benefit for large countries is smaller.
   
4. If the above factors are not enough, then it is possible to add a "decadence" factor, which multiplies the resource drain for rebel suppression according the the number of provinces. Of course this need to be properly balanced, and the factor should not exceed 1.5 regardless of circumstances. It is also possible to have a factor smaller than 1 for small countries.

You have mentioned that countries tend to use a higher proportion of its military resources to rebel suppression. This may be true, but there it is not as serious as you what you are describing. I think a different hidden premise is missing between your depiction of the mechanism and mine. I have assumed that the resource drain for rebel suppression of newly conquered provinces should be higher than provinces that are long subjugated. The most important point is to make newly conquered provinces a net drain of resources rather than instantly amplifying the power of the conqueror (and the drain should be substantial for wrong culture provinces). This way, it would be difficult for an already large country to double its size in a few decades.

Combining the above, it should be possible to control the rate of expansion until the country controls half of the world, when the country will make a final push to annex every remaining country.

Think about it this way, certain players (somewhat defined by skill), certain playstyles, and certain countries can handle near perpetual war much more easily than others. This will always be the case. If you use a mechanism that only allows war as its only out, then those favored at war will be favored by game mechanisms.

Death by a thousand cuts sounds good for player balance, but it doesn't really work out. There is too much variability to balance things properly given how feedback works. What needs to happen is for the anti-blob mechanism to force players to either slow down or lose wars. Once the player faces no risk of losing whatever he does, all the internal balance in the world doesn't change anything. We may as well embrace that at the end of WC run it becomes a World vs You grudge match and winning is the crescendo of the game. I mean say you make it possible to take up to half any country regardless of size, but for every province above 5 you take, that country gets a huge buff to tax, manpower, morale, and discipline. You might be able to pull off an early WC, but honestly you'd already effectively won anyways. We really should avoid tedium just to make it so fewer people can claim they've done "X". Make the game challenging - where doing something is all about balancing costs and benefits - but not tedium (where you do the same rote routine to eventually get something easily).

The mechanism is based on military resources, but war is not the only way out. Under my proposed system, PU and vassals still gives you an easier time to pacify the newly acquired provinces, and infrastructure generates resources that you can use to pacify new provinces. Endless war may be the end-game scenario, but there are still lots of things to do even when the country has grown to 200-500 provinces.

Earlier in this post, I used the term "buffed linear model" to describe the current game. On the up side, it means easier balancing, and a strictly controlled pace of expansion, but on the down side, it means the tedium that you have denounced. As you have said, once a country has grown to a certain size, there is nothing that can make the player lose. If you force the player to continue to play according to a constant pace that you have defined, it would inevitably result in tedium. In my opinion, the game has little to offer to the player once this stage has been reached. When this eventually happens, I think the best way is to loosen the grip, and let the player continue all along to the final goal (world conquest). Of course we need to delay the coming of this point, and I have listed the measures that can be taken to serve this purpose. There is certainly rooms for improvement, but a nerfed exponential model is better than a buffed linear model in terms of getting rid of the late-game tedium.

 

[Fryslan0109]

Perhaps have a scaled AE reduction for small nations, say under ~15 provinces?

This actually seems very reasonable. But at the same time, it doesn't seem unreasonable that a bunch of opm HRE provinces should form a coalition if one of their opm colleagues gets uppity and seizes 3 or 4 provinces. With the suggested reductions, they might look outside the HRE for threats rather than the growing one inside the realm.


I like the changes overall though - I might actually attempt a WC game despite never having done so in a P'dox game ever.

 

[unmerged(780209)]

I guess it's a lot easier to implement this than to allow for multiple coalitions against the same target, and have those coalitions be restricted through relations, religion, distance etc. I don't mind that the ottomans and the timurids are joining up against me, but it's a bit weird that on the exact same day both ming and denmark also decide to declare war on me.

But yeah, the people worrying about AE are typically the ones who want to conquer as much as possible anyway, when you're doing a peaceful playthrough, or just want to form a nation from an OPM, you'll hardly run into AE issues anyway

Two points about this:

1. The REALLY weird stuff is when nations that haven't discovered each other yet (like say, the Creek and Brunei) join a coalition and go to war with you on the same day, when they actually have no idea that the other nation even exists, and have no diplomatic contact with them at all!

This leads to hilarity: Ex. You attack Ayatthaya and then their ally, coalition member Brunei declares war dragging the Creek into it.

2. AE issues come to all. I ran into them despite not ever trying for a WC, simply because I had no idea what I was doing and didn't understand vassal feeding or release nation to avoid the AE penalty.

It's only experienced players who understand the mechanic who can avoid it. It sneaks up on noobies who then look up and say: "What's this coalition??? How did that happen?"

Making the mechanic more transparent and easier to deal with is probably a necessity for keeping the frustration level down for more casual players -- who after all probably make up a majority of the players for this game.

Not everybody peruses the forum for tips from experts on how to deal with AE successfully!

 

[unmerged(780209)]

To respond to Bleakie's point about rebellions taking a lesser and lesser amount of your resources to suppress as you grow larger -- well, that logical isn't it?

A huge empire with vast resources is less likely to suffer rebellions and will be a lot more efficient in dealing with them than a smaller power. The British Empire was historically shocked if any rebels at all spawned and made progress against them.

Look at their responses to the Sepoy Mutiny and the Boer War. They basically annihilated their enemies as a punishment, because they thought it was so outrageous that they suffered rebellions at all. And they had plenty of resources to do this with. It wasn't that much of a strain.

 

[Viperswhip]

To respond to Bleakie's point about rebellions taking a lesser and lesser amount of your resources to suppress as you grow larger -- well, that logical isn't it?

A huge empire with vast resources is less likely to suffer rebellions and will be a lot more efficient in dealing with them than a smaller power. The British Empire was historically shocked if any rebels at all spawned and made progress against them.

Look at their responses to the Sepoy Mutiny and the Boer War. They basically annihilated their enemies as a punishment, because they thought it was so outrageous that they suffered rebellions at all. And they had plenty of resources to do this with. It wasn't that much of a strain.

Yes, well, that was a better example than say in Rome though. We are in the pre industrial era in EU4, and with lack of easy communication rebellions could grow a lot larger before being responded to. And then there were such things as the French Revolution. So, you can't point to one instance.

England was even surprised by a couple of rebellions post World War 2...of course that was a few of the Caribbean territories rebelling against being released into the wild, so kind of the opposite of what was expected.

 

[thefourthestate]

Yes, well, that was a better example than say in Rome though. We are in the pre industrial era in EU4, and with lack of easy communication rebellions could grow a lot larger before being responded to. And then there were such things as the French Revolution. So, you can't point to one instance.

England was even surprised by a couple of rebellions post World War 2...of course that was a few of the Caribbean territories rebelling against being released into the wild, so kind of the opposite of what was expected.

The CK and EU periods are characterised by rebellions that in a paradox game mechanics sense were utterly doomed.

 

[Hiram_Maxim]

Paradox can we please have this as an achievement in a future patch:

"Accurate" Sino-Portuguese Relations: As Portugal, have Ming as a vassal.

 

[TyrannisUmbra]

To be honest, I think what might be a better fix for AE is instead of removing the size penalty entirely, maybe make it scale based on your size compared to the size of the other countries, as well as based on relative power/basetax, and distance.

What I mean by this:
If you are Saxony, and you go on a conquering spree, 3 province Hesse should be very worried about about your growth, but France shouldn't care much about the now 10-province Saxony. Though, now Saxony is rivaling Bohemia's size and power, so they're starting to get concerned.

At the same time, Britain has made a foothold in India. All of the Indian nations are becoming extremely worried about this new strong neighbor. But at the same time, even though Vijayanagar is slightly bigger than Britain, Britain doesn't care much about it eating all the little Indian states because it knows that despite its size, compared to Britain's power Vijayanagar is nothing more than a kitten.

 

[Strangedane]

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.

Wow.

While I do not agree with the specifics of the change, this might be the greatest thing I've read on a game forum for quite a number of years.

Thank you for listening.
Thank you for caring.

 

[Great One]

- You will no longer get increase AE from actions just because you are a bigger country.
- All impact on AE from war & peace now scale, there are no fixed values there anymore.

- 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.

With the New World game mechanic where you can assume a colony/protectorate and play to beat your colonial master, how will this affect the 3 Mountains achievement. Is it a viable strategy to reach the New World as the Ryukyu player, form a Colony/Protectorate, fight a war for independence, and then retake the Ryukyu as part of world conquest?

I guess the deciding factor would be if the achievement is flagged as possible when you start the game as Ryukyu or if you have to actively be the Ryukyu player when the game is finished.

 

[UnluckyKat]

With the New World game mechanic where you can assume a colony/protectorate and play to beat your colonial master, how will this affect the 3 Mountains achievement. Is it a viable strategy to reach the New World as the Ryukyu player, form a Colony/Protectorate, fight a war for independence, and then retake the Ryukyu as part of world conquest?

I guess the deciding factor would be if the achievement is flagged as possible when you start the game as Ryukyu or if you have to actively be the Ryukyu player when the game is finished.

achievement_the_three_mountains = {
id = 49

possible = {
ironman = yes
start_date = 1444.11.11
tag = RYU
}

happened = {
NOT = {
any_country = {
NOT = { tag = RYU }
exists = yes
}
}
}
}

Right now the game checks if any other country other than Ryukyu exists so I assume in 1.4 it will check if any other country other than Ryukyu is a subject nation