+5 cost per development needs to go.

[gwachnitz]

+5 cost per increase will be removed, dev efficiency not affecting whole cost is a bug and will be fixed. To balance the lack of cost increase for repeatedly developing same province, we'll make it so you can't develop any one of the three values to be higher than the other two together (so you can't make a 40 production 1 bt 1 manpower silk province).

Hi Wiz, I generally agree on the fact that development cost is to height now, and therefor applaud the changes. But this changes make me worry about already high coring and AE costs in game (I am presuming reduced development cost will make for a more developed world )

Any thoughts on this?

Best regards

 

[Kamiran]

If you want a more balanced gameplay, then you have to change the development system to one, that is less suggestible.

Imagine all provinces will increase their development over time for free, depending on terrain, technology group, technology level and ideas modifers. The grow over time without any intervention should be easily predictable. And be also easy balanced due to this prediction.

The only way to improve this process is using diplomats in your own provinces and the bonus should be at least 200% or higher. Expanding wide empire will use their diplomats for CB/annexing and will not be able to use on development but still benefit from general passiv growing. Small countries, not permanent using all diplomats, will be able to improve valuable provinces faster in comparison to their size to big countries.

And if you really want to dump MP in your development you can buy "booster" for each MP type to improve the base grow of your tax/production/manpower for a 10 years period.

This would also fit colonization, the earlier you colonize a province the earlier it can start to grow. And colonial regions can have also different modifierst to their grow rate (caribic 200% grow rate, peru + australia 75% etc).

 

[YuriiH]

The only way to improve this process is using diplomats

Or present another service men, something like Governors / Mayors / Massons, to the game.
Because how can a diplomat be good at administration or military training?

 

[SchwarzerKaiser]

Granted, it is the latest possible start date with naturally lower development values and several modifiers active, but I have to say it does seem a little bit cheap (Accepting Refugees is an idea I created for Württemberg). And the cost won't go up that much, with my 70 MP each I was able to get it to 8/8/5 and the cost now are 20.

This might make going tall a better alternative, but I think it might have an unfortunate effect on later territorial conquests as well, despite Admin efficiency. But I'm too busy modding in order to test it thoroughly, so this is just a basic assumption.

 

[Kamiran]

Or present another service men, something like Governors / Mayors / Massons, to the game.
Because how can a diplomat be good at administration or military training?

You can also ask why is your diplomat giving rebels money? Or let a diplomat search for a reason to conquer a province.
I also thought about a new "service men". But this would be maybe too much new for one patch.
Additionally with diplomats as development booster you have to decide, shall i improve my main provinces, shall i boost relations, shall i create a CB?
Personally i would suggest your number of diplomats go up by higher government rank or technology. A lot of ideas improve tax income by 10%, core creaton -20% etc. but with one more diplomat by diplomatic or influence ideas you improve it by 50%. A very strong buff.

And as shown in post above, with all that cost reductions, you can develop simply silly in no relation to risk and cost by a war. Conquering without beeing a big blob is sometimes risky, cost adm for coring, manpower, reputation. Pressing the button as often as you can instead is quite boring and a time dependend development is much more predictable (and able to be balanced) then the system it is now.

 

[bzflater]

Granted, it is the latest possible start date with naturally lower development values and several modifiers active, but I have to say it does seem a little bit cheap (Accepting Refugees is an idea I created for Württemberg). And the cost won't go up that much, with my 70 MP each I was able to get it to 8/8/5 and the cost now are 20.

This might make going tall a better alternative, but I think it might have an unfortunate effect on later territorial conquests as well, despite Admin efficiency. But I'm too busy modding in order to test it thoroughly, so this is just a basic assumption.

With similar modifiers, coring would cost 1 ADM per point of development...

 

[SchwarzerKaiser]

With similar modifiers, coring would cost 1 ADM per point of development...

Ah, yeah, of course. I don't know what I was thinking about when I wrote the post, probably kept the changes to admin efficiency in mind while forgetting them at the same time or so. Just checked it to be sure and the province would indeed cost 21 ADM to core with 60% admin efficiancy, a claim and admin ideas.

So disregard what I said about that.

 

[jaredstanko]

It's a little bit disconcerting. In truth I doubt the AI will ever develop to those kinds of levels but based on what I saw in 1.12, I wouldn't be surprised if it occasionally exceeded 80-100 in a few places. Meanwhile, cities of the likes of Paris, Wien, London, Prague, and Istanbul will remain at less than half, because the AI is spending points elsewhere. Exactly the opposite of what could happen IRL.

Some people seem to think this sort of thing is okay, like they probably wouldn't care if Norway was converting to Sunni every game, the Aztecs conquering the HRE, and Circassia colonising Canada in 1470. Because what these mechanics will potentially create makes about as much sense as those anomalies would.

Don't get me wrong, I like development in principle, but I'm really worried about how Europe is going to look. We do need soft caps of some sort and a still smarter formula. Europe is going to look pretty ridiculous otherwise. Playing 'tall' and developing a group of provinces as opposed to wide blobbing is great as a principle, but at what cost to historical plausibility when you put no restraints on it?

run an observe mode game, they already are.

 

[taltamir]

This change destroyed my game

No it didn't, the bug fixes did
The 50% discount from tech (which has somehow become 60% in the new patch) now applies to the whole value (as it was intended) instead of only applying to the +5 per level (a bug in 1.12). fixing that bug is a massively more significant change than removing the +5 per click.

Developmetn efficiency -60%
land reform -20%
full economy focus -20%
reichsreform -5%
organized through bishops -5%
capital city -10%
university -20%
development +400%
coastal center of trade -5%

Mind you, I had land reform custom idea with 20% discount

You playing as a custom faction with a specialization in development makes a world of difference, especially with how the percentages stack.
You have stacked so many discounts on this one thing, that the result is obvious.
It is significantly easier to get free coring on conquered nations via stacking.
OR stack army boosters to the point of your armies being unstopable. The issue is with stacking giving accelerating rather than diminishing returns because percentages are added as a %p (percent points) not as a % (percent)
that is, -25% and then another -25% give a total of -50% (meaning the second discount was actually -33%) instead of -43.75%

Also, you had a good capital to begin with (not mountainous, but coastal center of trade instead). and I am going to say I suspect you developed a lot and spend little on other things (how much did you spend on annexing?), so actually, that 200 could be perfectly fine and finally a way to actually go tall (it is still less dev than you would have from conquering)

I still think the 2% per dev point needs to go away. you want to avoid mega roma then you need to fix the way % stack in this game

Step 1: Percentages should stack correctly instead of additively. (2 x 50% discounts should result in paying 25%, not free)
Step 2: Reduce the size of the discounts. (aka, -30% from tech instead of -60%, -10% from university instead of -20%, etc)

Inflating the base price is an awful solution. you could still stack the discounts for a bunch of free/near free development

 

[yerm]

Development is currently HEAVILY stacked in favor of smaller nations. Provinces divided between multiple small nations will be developed FAR higher than the same provinces owned by a single nation.

The problem is easy to identify why. Small nations get a pool of monarch points each, while the large nation gets only one monarch pool to spend on the entire provincial area. If we want to remove this whole OPMs ballooning development while large nations do not, development simply needs a bottleneck resource requirement that scales better with nation size. This isn't even counting the cost to going wide in the first place, simply BEING wide means your development is too spread even if no further points are spent on new territory.

 

[Tiax]

Here's a list of provinces getting over 100 development in my 1.13 observer game:

Spoiler

Surabaya : 102
Ecab : 105
Barrois : 108
Chios : 114
Pisa : 115
Liège : 116
Reykjavik : 122
Milan : 125
Massachusetts : 129
Nürnberg : 132
München : 135
London : 140
Roma : 144
Paris : 148
Utrecht : 149
Prague : 156
Firenze : 158
Memmingen : 163
Rhodes : 169
Avignon : 192

 

[BFTeixeira]

Here's a list of provinces getting over 100 development in my 1.13 observer game:

Spoiler

Surabaya : 102
Ecab : 105
Barrois : 108
Chios : 114
Pisa : 115
Liège : 116
Reykjavik : 122
Milan : 125
Massachusetts : 129
Nürnberg : 132
München : 135
London : 140
Roma : 144
Paris : 148
Utrecht : 149
Prague : 156
Firenze : 158
Memmingen : 163
Rhodes : 169
Avignon : 192

In what year?

 

[taltamir]

Here's a list of provinces getting over 100 development in my 1.13 observer game:

It is worth noting there are 3003 provinces in the game.
and like I said before, the big issues is that the math for stacking discounts is wrong, and the a bug was fixed that denied a massive reduction to dev costs

 

[BaZERGer]

One thing i wanted to suggest before he announced the removal of it, was that rater than having a permanent base cost increase, each time you improve the province, you could get a temporary province modifier that makes it more expensive to increase it, a modifier that can have multiple instances for increasing it multiple times.

Something to slow down concentrated development, and encourage spreading the development out, but not something that permanently adds an expensive artificial cost to it.


Another option would be having it take time to implement each development increase, which shares the slot with building and conversion activity.

 

[Tiax]

In what year?

1820

 

[Tiax]

removed - Had a dad

The cities that ended up equivalent to Constantinople are:

Spoiler

Coneticout : 49
Tunis : 49
Mogadishu : 49
Constantinople : 49
Majar : 49
Qahirah : 49
Bern : 49
Thüringen : 49

 

[net.split]

Tiax's values are much more relevant than the results of a player stacking all available bonuses, something no AI will be able to do.

Looking at that list, the number of 100+ dev provinces isn't too bad, though the content of the list is somewhat questionable.

Ultimately, the costs for the system are just a bit too simple in how they're derived. We have current development values and local terrain, and that's basically it. Those are good starting points, but there are many more factors that should go into how big you can make a province. Trade seems like one reasonable avenue to approach; if the province is in a wealthy trade node that you dominate, then presumably the city would be able to grow much larger and wealthier. So if you want a truly huge, magnificent city, you need to take steps to direct the world's goods to & through that city.

Rhodes as a OPM super-developing is complete nonsense. But a Rhodes that becomes a new Venice, building itself a little empire to dominate the Constantinople trade node and colonizes abroad to push wealth from Asia to its home city? Yeah sure, let it develop super big.

Without a more interconnected system, any set of numbers applied to development will result in nonsense of one type or another.

That said, a good intermediary solution is to cut the Development Efficiency bonus. I never considered that bonus in any previous analysis arguing against the compounding +5 because it came too late and was buggy besides. Now it works and got larger. I understand the need for it to a point -- developing late game has less return than developing early because you don't get the benefits for as long. However, that's not especially relevant in this case because you're transforming Monarch Points into other types of resources. If you were investing ducats to get ducats then yeah the formulas should change. Also later game you have more production efficiency, better buildings, etc, so you're already seeing a bigger return for each button hit.

Don't bring back the +5. Reduce or eliminate Development Efficiency, then look into something more compelling and scale-worthy than terrain for modifying development costs.

 

[taltamir]

1820

so, one year before the game end

 

[yerm]

In 100AD, when Rome was at its glorious height preparing to knock its enemies into the dirt, the population of the city of Rome was boasted as a million residents. Byzantium, a small fishing village, had no more than 30 thousand. 4 centuries later (eu4's length) this little fishing village grew so large it was boasting a million residents too under Justinian.

The idea that a city can develop from pathetic to amazing is not the absurd part. The absurdity comes when this city is an isolated minor city with no backing. Development is not boosted by having a sprawling imperial network to feed it. It's not boosted by a massive overseas empire built on funneling wealth home, or a huge banking industry and monopolies in the spice trade, or heavy immigration measures and terraforming of terrain. Not at all. Terraforming is impossible in eu4, and wealth and territory add nothing. All you need is monarchs, which means money is only good so far as they provide advisors, and size and power only good so far as they let you sit over 50 power projection.

Instead, turning your little Byzantium into a Constantinople is not due to being the capital and trade center of one of the largest empires in history. It's done by being Memmingen, a tiny Swabian farmland in the middle of Germany, or being Rhodes, an assumedly independent little island that for some reason everyone just left alone, or being Avignon, probably knocked out of Rome (which also went tall) and sat free somehow. Since Paris is big, I'll guess France was contained and never swallowed it, but being Avignon it never grew out... just up.

Notice that I say France was probably contained and that's why Paris is big. That's the boldest statement here. The fact that someone's capital makes the list of tallest cities meaning that empire probably didn't get to expand much is a rather strong, and silly, statement to have to make. I don't see Wien on that list, so my assumption is Austria probably expanded really well. Dumb logic but good logic.

 

[taltamir]

In 100AD, when Rome was at its glorious height preparing to knock its enemies into the dirt, the population of the city of Rome was boasted as a million residents. Byzantium, a small fishing village, had no more than 30 thousand. 4 centuries later (eu4's length) this little fishing village grew so large it was boasting a million residents too under Justinian.

The idea that a city can develop from pathetic to amazing is not the absurd part. The absurdity comes when this city is an isolated minor city with no backing.

This is because the idea of development using mana instead of gold is fundamentally flawed
Also, there are scaling issue with development, since going from 30k to 1m is a 33x increase. a fresh colony with 1000 people in it is 3 dev (1 in each point), so 30k should be 30x bigger than a freshly founded colony, aka 90 dev, and 33x90=2970 development. this however is not how the game represents it