+5 cost per development needs to go.

[Naeven]

obviously they were aware of the issue with losing those bonuses but felt it wasn't so critical that it should delay the patch / expansion.

Some of those bonuses are already in our static_modifiers file The game however doesn't read them properly. I assume it's just a bug (and I have reported it as such).

gov_rank_1 = {
}

gov_rank_2 = {
    diplomats = 1
}

gov_rank_3 = {
    diplomats = 1
    free_leader_pool = 1
}

 

[Guardian54]

Some of those bonuses are already in our static_modifiers file The game however doesn't read them properly. I assume it's just a bug (and I have reported it as such).

gov_rank_1 = {
}

gov_rank_2 = {
    diplomats = 1
}

gov_rank_3 = {
    diplomats = 1
    free_leader_pool = 1
}

I don't see my Ming starting off with 1 extra diplomat and 1 extra leader...

OH, sorry, just read it doesn't read them right. Now, if they'd fixed this one-tag Ming WC would get ridiculously easy... heheheh.

 

[JoeSteel]

I'm glad someone mentioned this, even though you can build tall now, it is still nigh impossible to be an OPM superpower. Tried this after expansion launch as Cyprus, and still got wrecked even with a base tax, production, and manpower of 16.

 

[Beagá]

I'm glad someone mentioned this, even though you can build tall now, it is still nigh impossible to be an OPM superpower. Tried this after expansion launch as Cyprus, and still got wrecked even with a base tax, production, and manpower of 16.

That wasn´t the goal of thr system.

You could already go tall before. It´s just that it was a bit... meh. it´s more about making tall a choice you use sometimes. Not every country can do war every five years.

 

[Nitrousoxide]

So I'm trying to do some math here on how low you can get the cost the cost of development with the 5 mp increase gone, so correct me if I'm wrong.

First, four basic things:
1: Base is 50 mp modified by ides, traditions, buildings etc.
2: There is a sanity check and the max reduction in the cost is -90%
3: The cost for increasing development goes up by 1% for each level of development.
4: MP cost reductions are addative, so the base 50 MP with the increased cost of 20% on a 20 development province which also has a university will net out at a 0% increase/decrease.

So with all the max reductions in place for a non-custom nation:
-50% Development effeciency
-20% Full Economy Focus
-20% University present in the province
-10% Country traditions/Idea/Ambitions
-10% Capital Province
-10% Imperial Free City
-10% Trading in Tropical Wood
-5% Protestant Aspect
-5% Important Center of Trade
-5% Call for Reichsreform

You could get a reduction for natives in a colony but that's not going to be in the HRE so it's incompatable with the some of the other stuff in here and Reichsreform + Imperial Free city is probably a greater bonus.

Total reduction is -145% but it caps at -90%

at -90% your cost to increase development is only 5 monarch points. Cheaper than either conquering land or diplo vassalizing (although late game it annexing can be slightly cheaper especially if ottomans)

Your One province free city capital would have to hit 55 development before your cost to increase development would increase above 5 MP per improvment. At 145 development you would finally hit the base costs again of 50 MP per increase.

It wouldn't be at all unfeasible to to reach 500 development on one province this way. The marginal MP cost to go from 499 development to 500 development would only be 177.5.

I'm guessing they would have to increase the per development cost from where it's at.

 

[joe9594]

The development efficiency stack multiplicative with the other bonuses so it is actually a lot less important than you are putting it as.

Well it is less important initially. Once you get high it is more significant.

Still the point is valid. If you go to 500 development, the cost will still only be like 125 with development efficiency. (although the earlier costs will be higher than you anticipated).

The problem is an essential contradiction between being able to core all the worlds land and being able to develop efficiently. Even if your points are only sufficient to core/integrate half the worlds development and even if developing is only a tenth as efficient as coring every nation could stilll end up with like 1 20th of the inital worlds development by just developing. And that is kind of stupid in the pre industrial era.

 

[zdlugasz]

I'm glad someone mentioned this, even though you can build tall now, it is still nigh impossible to be an OPM superpower. Tried this after expansion launch as Cyprus, and still got wrecked even with a base tax, production, and manpower of 16.

An that is correct. Do you imagine you are building cloning facilities, underground industrial or maybe even orbital farm and industrial complexes? I hope not, and if you are not, how in the name of all that is holy do you imagine Cyprus competing against fully fleshed Ottomans, Russia of Spanish Empire?

 

[artemis667]

That wasn´t the goal of thr system.

You could already go tall before. It´s just that it was a bit... meh. it´s more about making tall a choice you use sometimes. Not every country can do war every five years.

Also tall shouldn't mean developing one province as high as possible and expecting to dominate a region. I think it means focusing more on a core of provinces and growing powerful as a mid-size nation through development and investment, rather than always needing to blob to be powerful. That may be a question of interpretation though.

I love the development idea in principle. I would have implemented a lot of things differently, though - and maybe my ideas would be different to those of other players.

For example, right now playing Norway, as some have pointed out, it's optimal to invest your points in the various islands north of Scotland, before looking at Akerhus. That's nonsensical from a historical plausibility perspective. Those islands would never have supported cities. It should be feasible to develop one or two points maybe in each location, but not several.

Even with the changes Wiz has already announced, it's still going to encourage very ahistorical outcomes. And this bothers me as much as the high cost issues. However, they're working on it and so long as a little attention is paid toward historical plausability, not just gameplay, I'll be content... for me the appeal of EU4 is as much in it's role as an alternative history simulator as it is a competitive game, and I like the mechanics to reflect that wherever possible.

 

[Atlanteax]

So I'm trying to do some math here on how low you can get the cost the cost of development with the 5 mp increase gone, so correct me if I'm wrong.

First, four basic things:
1: Base is 50 mp modified by ides, traditions, buildings etc.
2: There is a sanity check and the max reduction in the cost is -90%
3: The cost for increasing development goes up by 1% for each level of development.
4: MP cost reductions are addative, so the base 50 MP with the increased cost of 20% on a 20 development province which also has a university will net out at a 0% increase/decrease.

So with all the max reductions in place for a non-custom nation:
-50% Development effeciency
-20% Full Economy Focus
-20% University present in the province
-10% Country traditions/Idea/Ambitions
-10% Capital Province
-10% Imperial Free City
-10% Trading in Tropical Wood
-5% Protestant Aspect
-5% Important Center of Trade
-5% Call for Reichsreform

You could get a reduction for natives in a colony but that's not going to be in the HRE so it's incompatable with the some of the other stuff in here and Reichsreform + Imperial Free city is probably a greater bonus.

Total reduction is -145% but it caps at -90%

at -90% your cost to increase development is only 5 monarch points. Cheaper than either conquering land or diplo vassalizing (although late game it annexing can be slightly cheaper especially if ottomans)

Your One province free city capital would have to hit 55 development before your cost to increase development would increase above 5 MP per improvment. At 145 development you would finally hit the base costs again of 50 MP per increase.

It wouldn't be at all unfeasible to to reach 500 development on one province this way. The marginal MP cost to go from 499 development to 500 development would only be 177.5.

I'm guessing they would have to increase the per development cost from where it's at.

I am wondering if we need to remove Development Efficiency or Nerf it to -25%, and the stacking multiplier per level of development increased to 5% ... max reduction should be somewhere around 50% IMO.

In the meantime, we should also consider increasing the base development cost from 50 to 75 or 100.

Presently the pace of increased development is excessive for Western tech... with +1 advisors and waiting until you have the +5% neighbor bonus for tech, I find myself constantly 'burning MP' on developing provinces ... and the manner where HRE minors are going absurdly 'tall' is disconcerting.

EU2 was 'railroading'; EU3 was 'full sandbox' ... EU4 was to strike a balance in between ... the generosity of province development seems to be solidly at the EU3 extreme.

 

[durvas]

If they're going to remove the increase, then they really need to put a cap on coring cost. The HRE was already stupid.

 

[Nitrousoxide]

There is a cap, it's 999 admin.

 

[net.split]

Conquering the world is ahistorical. Developing a province to such heights prior to the industrial revolution is also ahistorical.

Why should we "fix" only one of these because it's ahistorical? If you can conquer the entire world (a pretty ridiculous premise) then why not be able to build a supermassive province or two at a similar cost?

As long as the AI doesn't develop to ridiculous extremes then this isn't really a problem. Even after removing the incremental +5 a developing player is a very focused and specific sort of player.

A method to "ding" overdeveloped provinces might be suitable though. There could be a "soft" limit on development based on tech levels; you can go past it but you start to risk outbreak of disease. If that fires it would devastate your provinces.

Actually that would have a lot of synergy with natives and address the issue of Americas development rather nicely (Americas could start with more development but almost certainly suffer disease due to low tech). Needs a lot more brainstorming to refine into a usable idea though. I still like the unrest solution in a general sense, but it doesn't help deal with free cities going nuts.

 

[artemis667]

Historically implausible world conquest nevertheless adds something to the game, because it's the ultimate goal for an EU4 player in the single player version, if you have that degree of ambition.

Historically implausible development to the level that the current mechanics, including the suggested changes, can enable, is critically immersion-breaking, and not required for gameplay. There are better ways to do it while still enabling tall empires (even better than presently able in 1.12). That's why you continue to tweak the machanic, and you don't "fix" world conquest.

 

[net.split]

"Historically implausible world conquest is good because I like it"

"Historically implausible development is bad because I don't like it"

I hope you can offer something more convincing :\

 

[Zak Preston]

"Historically implausible world conquest is good because I like it"

"Historically implausible development is bad because I don't like it"

I hope you can offer something more convincing :\

World Conquest is impossible unless you are an immortal god, ruling your nation for centuries.

 

[Nitrousoxide]

But you are an immortal god in EU4.

 

[Zak Preston]

But you are an immortal god in EU4.

That's the point

 

[artemis667]

"Historically implausible world conquest is good because I like it"

"Historically implausible development is bad because I don't like it"

I hope you can offer something more convincing :\

Well, I hope you have better arguments than trying to read something I didn't say into what I actually did say. The fact of the matter is that I don't like world conquest. I've never done it, and don't intend to, and I've never seen the AI do it either. But it's feasible to be in the game as a system of mechanics. It doesn't break immersion, should it be pursued by a nation with enough focus.

However It's not feasible for mechanics to allow you to cram the economic power of any two of Paris, London, or Istanbul, plus more, onto any province in the game that might be small and/or inhospitable, let alone have a dozen or more HRE nations doing this. And it's far more likely to see that occurring, than it is to world conquest. That's why practically unlimited single-province development is a problem, while world conquest isn't.

There's plenty of scope for tweaking the development mechanic to make it useful and effective while preventing those extreme single-province cases, via soft-caps, extension penalties, or whatever. Most people would agree that would be a good outcome.

 

[net.split]

Again, all you're doing is just making assertions without backing them up. "This is feasible. This is not." Why? You aren't defending your claims.

Conquering and ruling over literally the entirety of Planet Earth with the technology (including communications and logistics) of the 1820s is absolutely impossible.

What level of development should be considered "impossible?" That's tough to answer. What is a production unit? What does a ducat represent? These are extremely abstract game mechanics.

Manpower is less so, so let's focus on that. At 100 military development (and no buildings) you have a base of 25,000 manpower from a province. Assuming you're able to make 10% of the population into soldiers, that would be a minimum of 250,000 people. Quadruple that with tech and buildings and whatnot, and say you can't extract more than 5% of a province's population, and you're still talking about a population of around 2 million across all the cities of a province. That's pretty nice, but London was close to 750,000 in 1760 while Beijing had hit 1.3 million by 1821. We're not that far out of range.

Maybe the particular province you choose to develop that high is a silly choice, but player conquests tend to be equally as silly (whether it's a resurgent Byzantium, a Ragusa that conquers the Balkans and Italy, or Ryukyu conquering anything).

The most important thing is what the AI does with this. If the AI builds 300-dev provinces all over the world then yeah that's not going to work. If the player does it... who cares? The player could have spent the same monarch points on an equally silly conquest-fest.

 

[zdlugasz]

Again, all you're doing is just making assertions without backing them up. "This is feasible. This is not." Why? You aren't defending your claims.

Conquering and ruling over literally the entirety of Planet Earth with the technology (including communications and logistics) of the 1820s is absolutely impossible.

What level of development should be considered "impossible?" That's tough to answer. What is a production unit? What does a ducat represent? These are extremely abstract game mechanics.

...
The most important thing is what the AI does with this. If the AI builds 300-dev provinces all over the world then yeah that's not going to work. If the player does it... who cares? The player could have spent the same monarch points on an equally silly conquest-fest.

However recent (and recently proposed) changes may lead to super-tall OPM in HRE made by AI, which would be impossible. And to compound this problem, the current game mechanics does not allow to LOSE development. WC may fail due to the rebels or coalitions. Development does not degenerate.
(and HRE prime example: 30YW (or its equivalent) should cause that third to half of HRE should lose over half (up to 2/3) of its development.
This is another reason why WC, while possible, does not bother me (and AI wont do it). Super-developed HRE has high chance to happen, and nothing will revert it.

(Re: WC: Mongols were quite close to achieve it with 13th century technology)

Edit: Commonwealth lost third of population and a lot of infrastructure in mid of 17th century. I could give more examples of devastating natural disasters or wars. In game there is no check on "wild AI" development, not at all.