Just a question? For those that complain about it..
- do you have different nations you rotate between fighting?
- how quickly does the game do 1 year for you at max speed?
- What? People had different nations they rotated fighting with *five* year truces and still waited them out on occasion, not to mention the possibility of concurrent wars.
- Early in the game a full year at speed 5 will take about 48-50 seconds without pausing. Later on, this slows down considerably.
Take situations like Mongolia, who has just beaten Manchu after independence from Oirat + getting them as a vassal in next war. You declare on Chagatai, and after making some progress Korea declares on you (as overlord of Manchu) and brings in Ming. You win both wars, and now the only possible target for the next 10-15 years (10 in Chagatai's case) is Tibet, who is an ally and trivial to diplovassal later while providing useful trade power now.
When you extend truces really long, it often gets to the point where the only nations you can realistically attack for stretches w/o breaking truce are allies. If you've run afoul of coalitions, then they all get a magic unified truce timer of togetherness, which serves a double-annoying purpose of giving losers to coalitions enough time to actually retake what they lost, and making the player who actually beats the coalition (soundly) wait 15 years on pain of truce break to a very large number of nations. This would have been less vexing if peace deal costs scaled in a PERCEPTIBLE manner for large coalitions, but they don't...in fact all scaling was functionally removed in patch 1.6 (you shave 1% off a province against a 1000+ % war score nation from such scaling in 1.7).
If you want to make it harder to handle fighting multiple nations to expand quickly, then do please make it harder, but bear in mind that waiting is not difficulty, and rate-limiting players via a timer rather than their resources trivializes the importance of said resources to an extent.
And I still disagree that strong nations need babying in MP. In history, impressive empires got dismantled far beyond what war score allows now. From a balance standpoint, having a threat of being eliminated, even late in the game, is a benefit to MP. Otherwise, you get stale situations of giant hugboxes with barely anything changing hands.
As for the truce timer itself, I suggest the following:
- Non linear scaling (even if 100% is 15 years, 50% is not 10).
- Much faster ends to wars over a set war goal (or something similar for superiority wars).
This gives the player a legit trade between limited or total war (the current design is almost entirely skewed to total war, as the war-time investment for 1 province or 100% is a much smaller difference than from the day war is declared and until the AI is willing to peace at all). Make people think a little here, and strain their resources if they want fast expansion rather than sitting on an arbitrary timer.
It would also be nice to fix the "white peace = 15 year truce" bug that happens when white peace doesn't override the previous peace deal (very noticeable with separate peace).
