+5 cost per development needs to go.

[net.split]

But using gold is flawed from a mechanical perspective. Then it becomes turning ducats into ducats (boosting tax) or into ducats (boosting production) or into manpower (already achievable through mercenary use). That's a much less interesting decision to make, and it's even worse late-game because investing money to make money is less and less attractive as the game continues.

There are two useful questions to ask, I think. One: how do cities get large & wealthy in the first place? And two: what sort of behavior should be promoted for players looking to make large cities in the game?

There is no simple answer to the first question, unfortunately, as there are many different reasons across different times and places. Nanjing, Constantinople, Danzig, and London have pretty diverse reasons for how they got where they got at their heights, for example. Some were gradual, growing over a couple thousand years. Other cities, like St. Petersburg, Alexandria, and Agadir were literally created from nothing at the whim of a monarch (and in some cases, declined and were similarly re-created once again).

So, there can be many explanations for how a city grows to massive size. The key, then, is that the player is simply able to reasonably apply one when it happens in-game. Investing MPs unfortunately doesn't help at all in doing this.

The second question, then, is perhaps the crux of things. In the current implementation, promoted behavior is simply that you focus your nation purely on building your infrastructure. You're not spending that MP (which represents the efforts of the bureaucracy, monarch projects, private investments by the local elite, and the like) on dominating other peoples or inventing new things. Instead you're increasing agriculture, building more roads, eliminating local corruption, managing human waste & garbage more effectively (since no plagues are happening), and the like.

That's all well and good, but it isn't very interesting, and the AI is over-indulging in it in some cases.

There are a number of alternative options that have been discussed in this and other threads. I've personally discussed use of trade nodes, countryside revolts & autonomy increases, development timers & agents, disease systems to impose soft limits, and more. And people smarter & more creative than me have offered a lot of ideas of their own, too.

In short, this isn't a bad start. But I hope this isn't the end of the development of the development system. If nothing else I hope a future expansion that revamps navies and trade manages to work in some things to further improve it.

 

[taltamir]

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%

the total discount here is 145% (and it isn't the max discount you could have, btw), with the 1.12 rules (1% per dev, +5 per click) but the bug fixed, it would give 45 free upgrades before any cost, the +5 per level won't matter for those first 45 upgrades, they will all be 0 per click. The issue is not the +5 being gone, the issue is that a major bug in the system was fixed (development efficiency from tech was not working properly), without it your max would have been 85% discount, so no free development levels.
with 1.13 rules (2% per dev and no +5) it gives 22 free development levels (instead of 45). So, fixing the bug really made a huge difference (image every single province in your empire at 45 dev at no cost at all whatsoever!)
that discount stacking is still pretty damn serious though, and it take insanely high development to counter it.

Really, the biggest and best thing to do right now is to fix the stacking of percentages in this game

incidentally, lets see what the +5 gave before
a 3 dev province of 1-1-1, no land modifiers. it costs 50 mana +3% from dev = 52 to click once.
now it is a 4 dev province that costs 50 + 5 +4% = 57
the increase from 52 to 57 is 10%, that is, the first click increased cost by 10%

meanwhile, lets say you are at 100 dev, it costs base of 1070 mana per click
if you click once and get to 101 dev, it will cost 1085 for the next click, a 1.4% increase in cost.

The percent cost increase actually decreases as your development increases

Development cost % could be: 1% for first development + 2% for second development + n% for the nth development

No, this is an awful idea. increasing it is not bad, but % should not go up every click. at 20 development you would be looking at +17% per development, aka +340%, which is quite insane. maybe get a +1%/dev every 20 dev

But using gold is flawed from a mechanical perspective. Then it becomes turning ducats into ducats (boosting tax) or into ducats (boosting production) or into manpower (already achievable through mercenary use). That's a much less interesting decision to make, and it's even worse late-game because investing money to make money is less and less attractive as the game continues.

there is nothing wrong with turning ducats into ducats.
there is nothing interesting about turning mana into ducats

 

[Zak Preston]

I don't understand people that complain about development being OP:
1. AI won't abuse it as much as players anyway.
2. AIs spend their precious MP on provinces you would take. They pay 30-70MP per development and you annex from them, paying 5-10 MP per development... you... you, dirty cheaters and abusers.

 

[yerm]

Buildings are turning ducats into ducats.

Just saying.

 

[cerapa]

Buildings are turning ducats into ducats.

Just saying.

And so are ships and everything else.

The problem is that it is a simple chain. With buildings for example, you need to worry about building slots. With light ships you have to choose your trade nodes, worry about forcelimits, etc. If you could buy development with gold it would just be gold->base tax->more gold->more base tax->repeat, where you only action is pressing a button, no thought or prioritization required.

 

[yerm]

What if development cost gold and monarch points. MP cost scaled by 2% per total development but no terrain penalty. Gold cost scaled by +# per increased development and multiplied by the terrain modifier and 1% per total development.

Your main bottleneck is MPs because they're the games bottleneck. Your upward bottleneck becomes gold if you go tall enough in one place, because it's scaling harder.

Meanwhile, development is not JUST gold. A temple is just gold. A cathedral is just gold and conversion. A base tax point is gold AND it's an increase to your size for rank, your FLs, building slots... not exactly JUST gold to get gold.

 

[net.split]

I'm okay including ducats but in an interesting fashion, not just another attached cost. I have often suggested adding a timer, then allowing ducat investments to make it faster. One or both of those could scale with total development.

Simple investment of ducats to get ducats is uninteresting because it is just a simple optimization problem. You calculate when you have made your ROI and see if that's soon enough to bother with. Temples are more interesting because the building slot is by far the most important factor; the ducats are only relevant in the first 50-100 years (depending on your start).

 

[FrigidSoul]

I don't understand people that complain about development being OP:
1. AI won't abuse it as much as players anyway.
2. AIs spend their precious MP on provinces you would take. They may pay 30-70MP per development and you annex from them, paying 5-10 MP per development... you... you, dirty cheaters and abusers.

Problem with item 2 is that the material value of provinces diminishes in importance as the game's timeline wears on, much as the value of buildings diminishes. If it's 1789 and I'm conquering a 100 development province, chances are I'm conquering it to clean up my borders and/or in pursuit of an achievement or campaign goal, not because I care about the 100 development. In that instance, the extra development is pure annoyance, vastly increasing cost but providing almost zero practical benefit.

The AI will tend to abuse sub-optimal mechanics far more than players, perhaps not in any particular instance, but as a collective group. Take Espionage as an example. In order to make Espionage (as it's currently designed) attractive to players, you'd have to raise it beyond the point where a handful of otherwise irrelevant AI countries could potentially ruin a player's entire game with it. It turns into a trolling tool for the AI as a collective long before it becomes attractive to an individual player.

(In fact, there was a brief period maybe a year or so ago when you'd regularly get spammed with sabotage relations by distant opms if you played into the 18th century.)

Or if you prefer, look at it in MMO terms: in MMOs, it's common to assign player classes big-time abilities on extra-long cooldowns, like say a massive defense buff that you can only use 1 minute out of every 30. For players, that sort of thing can enrich gameplay; it presents them with a compelling decision. But if you give that same ability to every trash mob in a dungeon, suddenly the decision is removed, because the individual AI agent doesn't care about what it'll be doing for the 29 minutes after the fight's over; it'll either be dead or the player will be. So in practice, the buff becomes permanent for the AI relative to the player unless it's explicitly coded only to use the buff in niche circumstances. (That is, coded to use the buff sub-optimally in relation to its own skewed interests.)

The key is to make the AI competitive, not to turn an uncompetitive AI into a nuisance.

On the first page of this thread, I theorized that the costs of development had more to do with reining in the AI than they had to do with presenting the player with a compelling choice. That theory now appears to be true in practice, even if the developers intended otherwise. Perhaps the best solution is directly to curb the AI's inclination to develop.

 

[taltamir]

Problem with item 2 is that the material value of provinces diminishes in importance as the game's timeline wears on, much as the value of buildings diminishes. If it's 1789 and I'm conquering a 100 development province, chances are I'm conquering it to clean up my borders and/or in pursuit of an achievement or campaign goal, not because I care about the 100 development. In that instance, the extra development is pure annoyance, vastly increasing cost but providing almost zero practical benefit.

With development, their value increases as the game goes on.
even if you have a lot of development, a 100 dev province is a significant boon.
the cost is still significant less for conquest than it is for tall
only about a dozen or so out of 3003 in the world are actually going to be 100+ dev
if you don't care about expanding then why play the game? I mean, you could just turtle until the end time if that is how you roll, its not just about acquiring achievements, its about increasing your power and conquering

 

[jaredstanko]

the issue isnt how the player can abuse it, the issue is how the AI handles it. need i remind you that development has only been around since 1.12. reykjavik has never been 123 development. only 1 basetax(3 dev) until a week ago. for balance and common senses sake there DO need to be limits on development!

 

[Risa]

Quote from the other thread:

I had suggested adding ducat cost to development (in addition to current MP cost), and here is detail:
Each click to development (dev) has base cost of 50*max(1, 2^(dev/10 -1)) ducats. This cost can then be modified by building cost modifier.

Two-part cost is necessary. MP cost places limit for larger nations, while gold cost places limit for OPMs. Exponential gold cost makes sure that OPMs can't afford development too high and larger nations distribute their development across the land.

 

[taltamir]

the issue isnt how the player can abuse it, the issue is how the AI handles it. need i remind you that development has only been around since 1.12. reykjavik has never been 123 development. only 1 basetax(3 dev) until a week ago. for balance and common senses sake there DO need to be limits on development!

and that is fine, there should be limits, but they need to be GOOD limits. the +5 was a bad limit
fixing the discounts would be a great limiter

 

[bzflater]

Eh, as a thread about this I just made apparently went unnoticed, I'll just quote myself:

I think that development cost should have a modifier based on what percentage of your country's development a province constitutes. E.g., if you're an OPM, your only province would have a +100% development cost modifier. If your development is 200 and you want a develop a province with 30 development, it'll have a +15% development cost modifier. This should also come with a rebalance of the base cost - it could be reduced to, say, 32, as 50 could be too much with this system.
Another thing that could be added is an "undeveloped capital" modifier that would apply to the capital and trade capital (stacking with each other if in one province) when their development is less than, say, 5% of the country's development.
It would scale a lot, being equal to 5% at 5% just to negate the aforementioned modifier and greatly increasing to maybe around 20% at 1% and maybe even more below.
This would make capitals of large empires develop a lot while somewhat limiting small countries to avoid things like 150 development OPM Corfu.

 

[Badpojken]

Eh, as a thread about this I just made apparently went unnoticed, I'll just quote myself:

I generally like this idea but it would not really work for historicaly rich but small nations, thinking for ex Venice or Netherlands... It could work if it took colonial/over seas holdings into consideration since it was those that enabled the development, still leaves Venice as a problem though as that development was mainly through trade

 

[Maria Theresa]

Well, you got what you wanted. Every european OPM has 35 development by 1570s now.

 

[hashinshin]

Well, you got what you wanted. Every european OPM has 35 development by 1570s now.

Yes when people asked for viable development what we were REALLY asking for was OPMs to get to 35 development. Our devious scheme has been realized!

 

[taltamir]

Well, you got what you wanted. Every european OPM has 35 development by 1570s now.

The entire point from the devs point of view was to make tall viable, not to be hyper realistic (if they wanted to do that, they would get rid of mana entirely)
Those OPM getting some much needed development so they don't utterly suck is indeed as intended. now, if they could make some changes to high end scaling to prevent hyper development while leaving low end development as is (or even better, making the sub 10 development cheaper!) then this would be peachy

 

[wickermoon]

I dunno...make development just a bit more expensive by raising the base only a bit and lower the coring and annexation costs per development and the relatively high development level isn't much of a problem anymore.

 

[Metz]

Provinces should no doubtedly auto develop as time progresses. No one stays behind on purpose so battles and sieging should lower development of a provinces.

We should bring back magistrates and place them on provinces and raise or lower a budget to make them more or less efficient at developing automatically. This way we can either directly improve through points or spend money through magistrates. Wealthy nations grow quicker after all.

 

[wickermoon]

Provinces should no doubtedly auto develop as time progresses. No one stays behind on purpose so battles and sieging should lower development of a provinces.

We should bring back magistrates and place them on provinces and raise or lower a budget to make them more or less efficient at developing automatically. This way we can either directly improve through points or spend money through magistrates. Wealthy nations grow quicker after all.

This sounds like a bad idea. Having both automatic and manual development will just augment the situation. And "wealthy nations" is a phrase I cannot hear anymore. When do you discern a nation wealthy? Prussia? France? Venice? Frankfurt? England? Vijayanagara? All of them? So almost every nation grows quicker after all...the most annoying thing about development is that the wider you are, the more engaging it becomes, becaues there's more stuff to do. Mecklenburg, if it doesn't expand, is Yawnsville compared to any expanding nation. And apparently the AI got into that mindset as well, because nations are blobbing like crazy since 1.12, but that's not the point. The point is, that the development system is supposed to be engaging, so you don't always have to play for war - the success of which is debatable - but the current level is apparently just too much, if every nation always develops so quickly. Sliders will not help.