They actually last for 10 years, as of one of the 1.7 patches. I don't have the exact build number, but I do remember them specifically changing this recently.
15 year truces seem a bit long
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They actually last for 10 years, as of one of the 1.7 patches. I don't have the exact build number, but I do remember them specifically changing this recently.
Excuse me if someone already mentioned this, but shouldn't the length of the truce be determined during the peace negotiations?
I.e. A country loosing a devastating war could give up a bit more for a longer truce to try to rebuild their nation, while a country loosing only a small amount could go for a short truce in order to loose a little less?
Edit: I guess what I'm saying is truce time should be tied to peace negotiations and warscore, like all other peace options.
I.e. A country loosing a devastating war could give up a bit more for a longer truce to try to rebuild their nation, while a country loosing only a small amount could go for a short truce in order to loose a little less?
Edit: I guess what I'm saying is truce time should be tied to peace negotiations and warscore, like all other peace options.
The problem is that a country losing by just a small amount isn't willing to get out of the war unless rebel explosions or being invaded in a separate war. The AI is very stubborn when it comes to wanting out of wars.
I believe he means that truce length would be part of the peace options, as a counter-weight to your demands. So with 100% warscore I can demand X with a 5 year truce, but I can demand Y with a 15 year truce.
That's pretty much what I meant. I'm not sure if that would be the best way to work it, maybe it's unbalanced. But if we look at real world applications the nature of a truce was very much flexible depending on the participants.
This already occurs, but with a floor higher than 5 years (unless you're 100% sieging someone just to white peace them, in which case...).
But yes, I'm fairly sure at this point he meant negotiable truce timers, which doesn't really address the problem but does give slightly more control over it.
In which case you've discovered the new meta?
You can 100% WS someone taking their army and manpower to 0 along with their WE to 20.
If you white peace, they don't lose any of that WE (100% WS peace deal will wipe all WE) and you only have a 5 year truce.
Even if every other neighbor doesn't jump them, they're unlikely to recover. Add in nationalist rebels splitting away and (as TMIT has shown in numerous screenshots) there is no easier way to break up the kind of blob that the scaled truce timers were introduced to protect.
Which is why 15 year truces don't help nations recover. If they don't implode to rebels, they get dogpiled by every other nation that has a CB on them. Guaranteed. 15 year truces do literally nothing except annoy the player, from what I've experienced and generally read.
They also help protect lucky AI nations from other AI nations.
They can also be used by the player to do DOW with low manpower (no fear of being dogpiled while at low manpower when your other neighbors all have 15 year truces).
I'll be damned, you are asking a constructive question and feedback? Let's try nice mode as opposed to not saying anything one more time then
. Why the manpower change then? Please do not play the realism card or something, there's too much counter evidence. The fact is there's practically nothing to do outside of war, everything else is a simple click and done with minimal to no thought involved. War is the meat of the game whether people like to admit it or not.
As for truces they simply cannot be ignored until your position is overwhelming because truces and coalitions snowball. Breaking a truce once gives you AE and therefore more nations join the coalition and more nations you have truces with even if you win the war and constantly truce breaking is a drain on monarch points and unless you've got innovative and/or defender of the faith (which not everyone is eligible for), the WE is going to add up too.
I think another factor is that truce timers and coalitions make mini goals harder to reach for inconsistent and 'gamey' reasons which results in players attempting to get around these gamey reasons in ways that shouldn't work (e.g declaring war on the ally of somebody who is in a coalition against you for the purposes of avoiding their coalition).
Something that makes many games addictive (this one included) is mini goals but when you do things like prolonged truce times and coalitions which change the rules of how much a player can be rewarded for the same effort it both makes those addictive mini goals harder to achieve for silly game mechanic reasons as well as causing a lot of frustration which is what you see here when people moan about coalitions, truce timers and multiple war leader changes calling in ALL their allies creating world war 1 over something completely ridiculous whereas something much bigger such as a succession war over France (though don't get me started on stupid PUs with large nations... just don't) could get ignored by most of the world.
But you can still break truces, or your other mean neighbor can attack you anyway.
Longer truces don't even do what you want them to do.
It kind of is, but it's very gamey and can't be negotiated separately. It breaks hard on specific % changes.
So don't fight a war so long you totally exhaust your manpower. If you do that, it's your own fault when they wardec again in 5 years and your nation is still exhausted. Actually, this should be thought of as a feature. The way to lose EU4 is to unwisely waste your resources. Strategy games need to have strategy - being able to fully recover between wars from totally exhausted is a scrub rule.
If AI being unwilling to peace out earlier is a problem for some players leading to exhausted manpower, even when those players offer the AI good deals, fix the peacemaking AI, don't hobble the rest of us with timers.
Johan is complaining about scenarios in which your manpower is completely wiped out by another player in multiplayer and then you don't even have time to get it all back before the player can attack you again.
Sadly the solution does not even fix the problem he's concerned with.
Ok - that makes sense. So was the reason for the change that defeated nations were not able to get on their feet again and were essentially being "bludgeoned" over and over by victorious nations? Or was it decided that a 15 year truce just made more sense generally with the amount of time it took to recover from a war?
If they completely wipe your manpower and have enough strength to win in the next war, and you can't line up some allies to defend you, congratulations, you lost the game. Why drag it out? Why give you a respite to save you? Losing is not a reason to change mechanics.
(And if its MP, if you can't convince some other players to ally you and defend you, chances are they're going to take turns ripping provinces from your corpse. How in the world can a longer truce timer save you from sequential declarations that should inevitably follow the gutting of a major power.)
Alternately, hint: buy some mercs. If you're also out of gold, really, you lost already.
I'll be damned, you are asking a constructive question and feedback? Let's try nice mode as opposed to not saying anything one more time then
Why the manpower change then? Please do not play the realism card or something, there's too much counter evidence. The fact is there's practically nothing to do outside of war, everything else is a simple click and done with minimal to no thought involved. War is the meat of the game whether people like to admit it or not.
As for truces they simply cannot be ignored until your position is overwhelming because truces and coalitions snowball. Breaking a truce once gives you AE and therefore more nations join the coalition and more nations you have truces with even if you win the war and constantly truce breaking is a drain on monarch points and unless you've got innovative and/or defender of the faith (which not everyone is eligible for), the WE is going to add up too.
I think another factor is that truce timers and coalitions make mini goals harder to reach for inconsistent and 'gamey' reasons which results in players attempting to get around these gamey reasons in ways that shouldn't work (e.g declaring war on the ally of somebody who is in a coalition against you for the purposes of avoiding their coalition).
Something that makes many games addictive (this one included) is mini goals but when you do things like prolonged truce times and coalitions which change the rules of how much a player can be rewarded for the same effort it both makes those addictive mini goals harder to achieve for silly game mechanic reasons as well as causing a lot of frustration which is what you see here when people moan about coalitions, truce timers and multiple war leader changes calling in ALL their allies creating world war 1 over something completely ridiculous whereas something much bigger such as a succession war over France (though don't get me started on stupid PUs with large nations... just don't) could get ignored by most of the world.
I have a different question for Balor:
Why are you scared of making manpower a resource? Why of money? When nations take longer to recover than truces allow, that puts pressure on all nations, large and small. Rather than being covered for your mistakes, you *have* to use diplomacy or a new strategy to get out. Not 15 years later at full strength, but fast. Regardless of SP, MP, pushing the strain away from arbitrary timers and onto player resource management forces the player to think about how he spends resources, trying to squeeze every last drop of expansion possible. If you bottleneck him on the timer, he instead just waits for it to end, fully replenished (or dead, if he was small).
One thing I mentioned earlier is the unified truces of coalitions. Yes, that slows down the player, but it cuts both ways. Coalitions can't engage in a unified offensive war against the player through truces; you're not forced to honor offensive coalition CTA during a truce. Because of this, the player also gets a shield; a 15 year window to ignore what is presumably one of the few credible threats left.
A variable truce length is not a bad idea, but crashing the game's pacing isn't the right direction to go IMO. While resources themselves are on a timer, their depletion and acquisition can be managed in a dynamic way. The solution to players stopping playing after 1650 is not to stretch that same amount of gameplay over an additional 150 years without adding more important decision points. The solution is to do something that curbs the runaway-superpower abilities of the biggest nations. You have the right idea with a nation the size of Ming at the start; it's obviously too strong if it just starts that way freely. You saw that in previous games. Why, rather than arbitrary timers, do you not pressure large nations similarly, with autonomy or some other mechanic that makes owning a pan-Asian empire give much less than 800 force limit? You have historical basis for doing that, and it would prevent a blobbing player from making all future wars an easy walkover without an arbitrary timer, and create a better trade scorewise on other investments.
You bring up some great points here. Essentially this is why I asked for clarification from Balor - because if the idea is to make manpower, cash, WE, etc a strategic set of resources that you need to manage carefully, you're actually covering folks making reckless decisions if the idea is to "give people time" to recover.
However if the reason these changes were made is to cover the weaker party from getting repeatedly trounced without being able to come back, then I could see it. For example if Ottomans or France are fighting small neighbors and it takes all of their manpower to fight back against the big boys, I could see this being added as "protection"
It's a nonsense defense though. These places survived historically because they got other strong countries to agree that it would be a terrible thing if, eg, France, just walked over and annexed them. They shouldn't get an arbitrarium shield, they should be forced to assemble a defense of friendly nations, or get stomped.