A simple way to fix absurd blobbing and make large empires more challenging

[Shinkuro Yukinari]

I should point out that the fastest claimed one tag doesn't pick religious or humanist ideas. But it is disbelieved because no one thinks anyone would go to that absolute hell of rebel stomping..

When you've gone past a certain point rebels are just a tax on your mental exhaustion.

Just because you would rather not play on VH and instead make everyone's experience more miserable...

This one?
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/one-tag-wc-by-1579.907924/

It would appear that he used an exploit to have infinite manpower, which, combined with the wealth of East Asia, explains it

I already talked about VH being mostly arbitrary modifiers. The difficulty is artificial

 

[bbqftw]

The claimed WC I mention is earlier.

I already talked about VH being mostly arbitrary modifiers. The difficulty is artificial

VH is not for everyone, its ok.

Its just funny you claim the game is too easy in that case.

Sucks having to deal with the an AI that doesn't self destruct and effectively outputs army sizes that a player fighting for their existence would, right. And one that mercilessly dogpiles at any opportunity, and actually expands.

 

[Shinkuro Yukinari]

VH is not for everyone, its ok.

Its just funny you claim the game is too easy in that case.

Sucks having to deal with the an AI that doesn't self destruct and effectively outputs army sizes that a player fighting for their existence would, right.

Spare me the condescending tone.
The AI is still the AI, only it mainly gets artificial buffs to cover up for its mistakes

 

[bbqftw]

Of course you have to claim it is too artificial. If you admitted the true cause is "it is too hard to be enjoyable" then it would destroy your argument.

But really, how is it too artificial? You would rather fight 2 regiment Qara with 200 dev because it self sabotaged to rebels?

 

[Vulkandrache]

Our ruler died without an heir?
*two clicks later*
No problem!

like the way Admin can be dumped into Stability so quickly and easily

You are going the wrong way around.
Bumping stab by 2 costs 200 admin. For your average country that 20 months of income.
If you really have the death of an heirless ruler then skirting at the edge of (and narrowly avoidin) a civil war for 2 years seems plausible.
In the case of the game you "pay" those 2 years instantly with points you have accumulated beforehand.
Thats the abstraction, not the fact that you click a button twice.

I myself am not the worlds biggest fan of the point system, but EU4 went with it and so the mechanics of the game need to be made to fit accordingly.

In EU4, unless you are converting a massive city like Rome, Constantinople or Beijing, you will be done within 5 years if you have some sort of bonus, like an advisor or a NI. Now imagine if you had Religious Ideas on top of that.

Only the top performing religions can even hope to convert high dev land. Your weaker religions are out of luck ESPECIALLY without religious ideas.
5 years without that is very quick, in many cases esp. with Sunni land you are more likely so see tripple digit numbers for months.

conversions are unrealistic

I only get the full benefit of the new religion if the conversion goes to completion.
There is a large increase in unrest while its going on.
I only have single digit amounts of missionaries and have to do provinces one by one. If you want to have conversions take longer you need to give more guys.
Or introduce more religious center mechanics. And give partial benefits during the conversion. But every province only has one religion. There are no partials.

The unrealism goes further than you think and it also works both ways.

This critique depends from example to example. Maybe introduce some variety in rebel stats

At the start of the game, for many countries, a single rebel stack is an existential crisis threatening your very life.
Go start a game as England, let the desaster fire and use up your whole manpower and potentialy a few loans to beat it.
Now scale that down to a 2pm with some seperatists. Same deal, different scale.

And then we also have fun things like rebels from other countries walking into your army because f you.

If you really wanted to change something and make it more "realistic", then rebels would be somewhat more numerous but would fall like flies.
Currently some rebel stacks can give you a K : D of nearly 1:1.
Realistically some 20k peasent army would be beaten by a few thousand trained soldiers with horrific loses for the peasents.

I'd disagree

Still cant follow you. If you dont need the tolerance or the RU then picking some other group is probably better.

The AI is still the AI, only it mainly gets artificial buffs to cover up for its mistakes

Have you played a longer game since 1.23?
With the new money thing there are more troops underway and the AI behavior, which is now also unlocked on normal, wars become much tougher as more nations ally if you come barreling down on their neighborhood.
I had to make a few changes to my playstyle.

 

[Shinkuro Yukinari]

Of course you have to claim it is too artificial. If you admitted the true cause is "it is too hard to be enjoyable" then it would destroy your argument

Imagine if you were fighting a boxing match. You are fighting against a poorer boxer, but he uses steroids to pump himself up
That is AI on VH

If you beat him or not, it does not matter. The victory/defeat doesn't feel appropriate. Especially defeat

You are going the wrong way around.
Bumping stab by 2 costs 200 admin. For your average country that 20 months of income.
If you really have the death of an heirless ruler then skirting at the edge of (and narrowly avoidin) a civil war for 2 years seems plausible.
In the case of the game you "pay" those 2 years instantly with points you have accumulated beforehand.
Thats the abstraction, not the fact that you click a button twice.

I myself am not the worlds biggest fan of the point system, but EU4 went with it and so the mechanics of the game need to be made to fit accordingly.

Depends on the situation, if you took religious ideas you have lower stability costs, for example.
I still advocate for the stability increase to take some time. Don't you find it silly when you get a disaster and get rid of it within the same in-game day with no reprecussions?

Only the top performing religions can even hope to convert high dev land. Your weaker religions are out of luck ESPECIALLY without religious ideas.
5 years without that is very quick, in many cases esp. with Sunni land you are more likely so see tripple digit numbers for months.

For that reason I stated the advisor, NI etc. In my Karabakh game I found that conversions with an advisor were not too slow for me

I only get the full benefit of the new religion if the conversion goes to completion.
There is a large increase in unrest while its going on.
I only have single digit amounts of missionaries and have to do provinces one by one. If you want to have conversions take longer you need to give more guys.
Or introduce more religious center mechanics. And give partial benefits during the conversion. But every province only has one religion. There are no partials.

The unrealism goes further than you think and it also works both ways.

Definitely a good point

At the start of the game, for many countries, a single rebel stack is an existential crisis threatening your very life.
Go start a game as England, let the desaster fire and use up your whole manpower and potentialy a few loans to beat it.
Now scale that down to a 2pm with some seperatists. Same deal, different scale.

And then we also have fun things like rebels from other countries walking into your army because f you.

If you really wanted to change something and make it more "realistic", then rebels would be somewhat more numerous but would fall like flies.
Currently some rebel stacks can give you a K of nearly 1:1.
Realistically some 20k peasent army would be beaten by a few thousand trained soldiers with horrific loses for the peasents.

Jan Žižka comes to mind. His armies were not of the quality of his enemies, but they were loyal, passionate, and were led by someone good at his work. Having some rebels be strong actually has historical justification. But yes, there should be paper tigers too

Still cant follow you. If you dont need the tolerance or the RU then picking some other group is probably better.

There is still the Unrest reduction, idea cost, separatism reduction and promoted culture, making your realm really hard to fall into the hands of rebels

Have you played a longer game since 1.23?
With the new money thing there are more troops underway and the AI behavior, which is now also unlocked on normal, wars become much tougher as more nations ally if you come barreling down on their neighborhood.
I had to make a few changes to my playstyle.

I'll try to observe AI behaviour much more carefully next time

 

[Vulkandrache]

I found that conversions with an advisor were not too slow for me

One province might not be too slow but 100 and things are different.
Suddenly every month each province takes longer hurts.
I do One-Faith Campaigns, i know the pain.

I still advocate for the stability increase to take some time.

You wait for the points to accumulate and then you want to wait for them to get spend?
I dont.

Don't you find it silly when you get a disaster and get rid of it within the same in-game day with no reprecussions?

What i find silly is if a desaster requires X stab do end but also increases stab-cost.
Thats stupid, thats unfun.

A desaster should be something to look forward to.
That might sound contradicting and it is but if you fail to avoid one it should still give you gameplay.
Not rebel masses, or i-piss-points-away kind of stuff.

CnC is the brilliant example for that.
Most of its events, including the initial one, give you choices. And at the end you have the potential for a bonus if you do well enough.

There is still the Unrest reduction, idea cost, separatism reduction and promoted culture, making your realm really hard to fall into the hands of rebels

The main source of rebel are war and random events.
If you expand slowly the reduced seperatism is worthless, if you expand so slow that even without religious your missionaries can keep up any sort of unrest reduction beyond TotF is unneeded.

 

[Siu-King**]

Spare me the condescending tone.

You are already being condescending and belittling other better players because apparently, you gotta protect your ego and hence, to make your argument remotely valid.

Git gud scrub.

 

[bbqftw]

You claim insane blobbing speeds are a problem. These issues are directly addressed by VH by:

A. Making war more unprofitable by increasing AI army sizes. In normal many wars are short term profitable in that you will easily make back your cash investment. This is rare in VH, as an OPM you will have to loan often. Of course you can do planned bankruptcy but that has costs of its own.

B. Making it harder to secure alliances with AIs. This tends to make wars far more expensive and dishonoring alliances more impactful since you can't just cycle through majors alliances as on normal..

C. AI now blobs competitively e.g. 1400 dev ottoman in 100 years isn't uncommon.

Also, you do realize the AI gets steroids on normal too right? Does that ruin your experience? Does that invalidate your accomplishment?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

This thread is non-functional so far for a few reasons:

1. It has not been established why blobbing is necessarily bad for the game.
2. The criteria for "absurd" was not stated or established in any coherent fashion. How much is "too much", and why, in game terms?
3. Lacking clear reasoning for a problem, there's no clear goal for what any change is attempting to accomplish specifically.
4. It is also not clear why the suggested change accomplishes any goal, though that is true in part because of #3.

Right now there's not actually a consistent framework being presented, so there's no point arguing.

It's basically an OP that says "I like sliders and I don't like some undefined degree of expansion" without reasoning. There's nothing to go on with that. No coherent framework = no argument.

Perhaps that will change.

 

[darth254]

We can do that.
Do i also get an increasing amount of missionaries to go along with the size of my country?
Im thinking a few hundred once you hit 10k development is a reasonable number.

seems excessive, but I wouldn't mind giving the player/AI more answers when more problems are introduced. maybe the issue is I played Vicky 2 first, and the rebels there are probably over the top so this feels like a breeze in comparison.

it's like...why wouldn't I want to make my country huge? Some dinky short-term issues like spending monarch points or a quick rebel spawn, but afterwards I get rid of my opposition, and I get loads of $$$ and manpower for the rest of the game with little headache.

and we do have overextension as an ok anti-blob mechanic, but it goes away so quickly (unless you're doing WC where it doesn't go away fast enough, but I mean I am not judging the game or trying to balance it solely in terms of my ability to perform a WC). Overextension doesn't linger, it's more of a temporary derp a player or AI can make.

 

[Cataphract887]

This topic makes me sad because the sliders were fun in EU3\EU2 but the arguments presented for them make them look bad by association.

I would make the case that EU4 encourages bigger blobs than ever before because its harder than ever to become powerful(and thus satisfied and stop blobbing). When I formed an Italy or Japan in EU3, I was already at superpower status and could project power at great distances, defeating any opponent. Thats much harder in EU4 IMO without massive development and also, it has become far harder to play long distance games as CBs are restricted to neighbors only for most of the game.

It also seems to me some players say big blobbing is bad simply because they have a different playstyle. They are threatened that their small and tall quality empire is outdone in every category by simply conquering vast lands. The gameplay solutions offered to fix blobbing by those who do not blob often feel vindictive and petty. (how DARE you enjoy having 3000 development...now I will make your life hell)

 

[Shinkuro Yukinari]

I was not being condescending. It takes a degree of skill and speed to do a WC and those that succeed deserve praise. Although there is a difference between an Ottoman WC and a Ryukyu WC

You wait for the points to accumulate and then you want to wait for them to get spend?
I dont.

Maybe lower stability costs alongside it? My issue is mainly with the instant effect, you can even them out by combining these two

What i find silly is if a desaster requires X stab do end but also increases stab-cost.
Thats stupid, thats unfun.

A desaster should be something to look forward to.
That might sound contradicting and it is but if you fail to avoid one it should still give you gameplay.
Not rebel masses, or i-piss-points-away kind of stuff.

I presume the idea behind stab cost increases is to make sure the players actually suffer from the disaster, rather than just dump points and poof, no more!

CnC is the brilliant example for that.
Most of its events, including the initial one, give you choices. And at the end you have the potential for a bonus if you do well enough.

Agreed, would be lovely if we could have more situations like that

 

[Karpathios]

I was thinking about starting a similar thread today, and I just want to add my 2 cents...

The problem, in my opinion, is that once you reach a critical mass, there is literally nothing that can stop you. You become Alexander, Genghis Khan, and Hitler all wrapped into one, and can conquer literally any province on the planet you wish.

This isn't a reflection of reality. Yes, it is a game, but it is also a 'simulation' of real-life in some ways. And in real life, empires reach a point where they reach the limits of their influence for one reason or another. (Really? A few guys from Ryuku can DOMINATE THE PLANET in 2 centuries?)

It should, in my opinion, be increasingly DIFFICULT to blob as you grow, not increasingly EASY.

Suggestion: really put a limit on number of STATES an empire can have, and have harsher negative modifiers on 'territories', that perhaps increase with the higher territory/state ratio

 

[Shinkuro Yukinari]

You claim insane blobbing speeds are a problem. These issues are directly addressed by VH by:

A. Making war more unprofitable by increasing AI army sizes. In normal many wars are short term profitable in that you will easily make back your cash investment. This is rare in VH, as an OPM you will have to loan often. Of course you can do planned bankruptcy but that has costs of its own.

B. Making it harder to secure alliances with AIs. This tends to make wars far more expensive and dishonoring alliances more impactful since you can't just cycle through majors alliances as on normal..

C. AI now blobs competitively e.g. 1400 dev ottoman in 100 years isn't uncommon.

Also, you do realize the AI gets steroids on normal too right? Does that ruin your experience? Does that invalidate your accomplishment?

https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Options
No modifiers on Normal
As for the alliances thing, it makes it harder by giving like -20 to the acceptance modifier. Not because the AI Hungary thinks "Hmm, should I help Byzantium that is bound to die by the Turkish hand which killed my previous king?"
Disclaimer, I love playing Byzantium, even though it is quite RNG based(less so than before, but still)

 

[Brynjar]

A. Making war more unprofitable by increasing AI army sizes. In normal many wars are short term profitable in that you will easily make back your cash investment. This is rare in VH, as an OPM you will have to loan often. Of course you can do planned bankruptcy but that has costs of its own.

I've never had as many quick profitable wars as in 1.23 on VH (Najd). Even minor countries which can be fully annexed for less than 50% WS in a matter of months are sitting on several thousands of ducats mid game.

B. Making it harder to secure alliances with AIs. This tends to make wars far more expensive and dishonoring alliances more impactful since you can't just cycle through majors alliances as on normal..

After the initial years this usually isn't much of a problem, but it will depend a lot on which country (and religion) you play. As there still no significant penalty for accepting a call to war and do nothing, it is very rare to end up in trouble because you dishonor an alliance

C. AI now blobs competitively e.g. 1400 dev ottoman in 100 years isn't uncommon.

Sure, fighting 800k+ Ottamons is more scary and may require a slightly bigger army than fighting 500k+, but in the end you can still stackwipe them (espacially late in the game), and beat them without too much trouble as they spread out too much to use their numbers efficiently.

The reduced unrest the AI gets on VH is often making things easier, as it makes it much easier to wait peacing out while you finish off wars against your allies' ally.

All in all I find VH to be fun at times, but it often just adds more tedium as there are more enemy troops to remove from the map.

 

[FrogCrusher]

I don't get your point OP. It seems that you actually want another game. It is like going in a street food restaurant and say "you have to change your business plan because street food is bad. Go to more prestigious meal.".
EU4 is a blob game, by nature. You don't like it, fine. Do other things, or use mods. Or play something else. The game will not change because you want it to change.
If PDX choose to make WC impossible in EU5, we will have no words to say about that ^^ Expect maybe petitioning

 

[Shinkuro Yukinari]

In retrospect it seems like I should have articaulated this better.

Ok, my issue with blobbing in EU4 is that you reach a point where the game just becomes you beating up countries that literally can't do anything to you together, let alone alone. Idea groups like Humanist make it almost impossible to have rebels spawning by "natural means" unless you really screw it up. There is also the "accepted cultures" system. Can't convert Beijing? For just 100 diplo they will be worshipping Horse Jesus in like 10 years!

In reality, massive empires were very difficult to keep together. Whether it be due to administrative issues, high degree of de-centralization or the simple fact that a message from Kamchatka could literally take months to reach St. Petersburg. In another thread I talked about increasing minimum autonomy the further you are from the capital. That is one way to deal with this, and it makes sense.
As for sliders, I will use EU2's system as an example:

Narrowminded lowered stability costs and provided more missionaries, but it also made techs more expensive. Basically you can still lose to a smaller empire that has superior weapons
Innovative is the opposite. A blob that has innovative just begs to get a disaster and fall apart

Serfdom made infantry cheaper and stab costs lower, but it also made their morale worse. As expected, easier to draft and keep in line, but they are less willing to fight.
Again, Free Subjects is the exact opposite!

Decentralized made War Exhaustion less of a problem at the cost of higher tech costs and lower tax income. But, Centralized realms have bad events that periodically happen to them, because subjects want autonomy. Not to mention that going over the Badboy limit in EU2 made Civil Wars imminent if you were at peace, so it is eternal war or bust.

As you can see, blobbers had upsides and downsides to their playstyle in EU2, which are reasonable. Meanwhile in EU4 you take humanist and have all upsides and no downsides. You even get Idea Cost Reduction!

I don't mind WC still being a thing, but in the late game it just becomes a tedious rutine of beating up nations that literally have no chance to beat you and your massive, incredibly efficient and surprisingly stable empire ruled from a couple of islands near Japan.

As for Tech sliders, they give tech a sense of progression, make tech a long-term investment. In EU4, techs don't feel as rewarding when investing in them, as you just dump 500 points and poof, your troops have moved on from halberds to muskets!
Plus, the old system allowed you to set priorities on which techs to research at the cost of others. For example, if I play Brandenburg in EU2, I can forsake Naval tech and put those resources on Land tech, that I actually need. In EU4, France can rule both the waves and the lands, when in reality the attempt at both caused it to lose the Seven Years War, as Britain destroyed its ships with its focus on Navy, and in the land it got defeated due to Prussia having superior troops

As for religion sliders, unless your realm is secular, which should be a late-game thing, after the Religion Wars, tolerance should be less between certain religions and/or religious branches. Catholics and Protestants for example, but not as much for Catholics and Orthodox.

This took me too much time to think up and write on my phone. I will be around for a while to clear up anything

 

[darth254]

I don't get your point OP. It seems that you actually want another game. It is like going in a street food restaurant and say "you have to change your business plan because street food is bad. Go to more prestigious meal.".
EU4 is a blob game, by nature. You don't like it, fine. Do other things, or use mods. Or play something else. The game will not change because you want it to change.
If PDX choose to make WC impossible in EU5, we will have no words to say about that ^^ Expect maybe petitioning

you do have a point that the current identity of this game is Bob Ross Universalis. I guess what I really want is Vicky 3, and they're taking their jolly good time on that. It's hard to revert back to Vicky 2 considering how much more convenient the interfaces are with the newer products (e.g. EU4's ledgers, diplomacy macro builder, military template builder/conform to template).

 

[gia257]

Damn I almost forgot this part.

>Play Prussia
>Rebel got 135% discipline

>play prussia
>dont take humanist
>threaten war
>laugh as the world burns