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

[Brynjar]

Although I agree that the game needs more interesting game play past 1650 or so, I'm not sure that adding more micromanagement (which I feel sliders would), or making large realms more unstable, is the right way to go for EU4. It would at least require a large rebel revamp (which is needed anyway according to many players).

If I understand you correctly, your suggestion would also mean abolishing the monarch point system in its current form. Even if the sliders are already in the game files, I would think that such a change would require a huge overhaul of the entire game (events, coring mechanics, development etc.) If this is the case the, I still think such a change would be best left for an eventual EU5.

All in all, I kind of like your ideas, but think they may be better used for future EU games.

This took me too much time to think up and write on my phone

Ouch, writing forum posts from a phone is terribly inconvenient.

 

[bbqftw]

There are AI steroids on normal. Lucky, elevated AT gain, some matters relating to trust influence on diplo actions etc.

Anyways - so you realize that playing tall actually accelerates the pace at which you can trivially beat up most of your neighbors and giant blobs.

That is why playing tall is so boring, most the time you just make the right alliances and can actually pick military groups and you can't be killed. No ticking threat of coalition, your borders are compact, etc etc. The only things that make it interesting are racing the clock or putting in even more insane handicaps like no alliances.

A typical blob build is going to take 4-5 idea groups that grant no military bonuses, going to eat horrendous corruption penalties, has barely any edge room for building valuable infrastructure like manufactories etc. Yes you will have more dev, you will also have more enemies (this is actually relevant on VH)

I am reminded of a tall VH swiss game where I only allied opms and because of econ quality offensive build with << 1k dev was able to trivially stackwipe ottoman whereas my typical blobfest with triple-quadruple that dev would have a harder time vs ottoman.

 

[Piotrzeci]

Slider technology and MEIOU type Stability would be a great idea. I approve for them.

 

[Amadeu of Savoy]

Good thread, OP. Something needs to be done to address late game blobbing by either making large empires very rebellious (empire dictatorship with internal wars all the time) or rigid and backwards (bureaucratic/communications mess with little control from central authority).

The craziest the solutions, the better.

 

[bbqftw]

It sounds like meiou is a much better fit for your capabilities

 

[tip001]

The validity of WC around 1444-1821.

1) Its well known through history that empires are stretched when growing over a certain size. Think of communication lag times, are you going to give more or less autonomy to far regions, or is warring for new land financially viable? We all know there are boundaries on how big an empire can be without it falling apart.
There is a reason why colonizers installed governors or even petty kings over seas. If you are over seas or far away you need to be self sufficient for the greater part.

2) Besides above you had a string of coalitions raised against you preventing you to take take whatever.
This was real life. Without these politics and physical difficulties it would have been easy for any "superior" nation (you can point at many during the period) to dominate the world at any time.

Back to 2017

Now back to the game, EU4. Without the opportunity to do a WC half the game immersion will fall apart as we really want to rule These are the facts of modern games. Forget about tall, nice try. With no WC opportunity half the player base will be gone If you want to make a political game, which EU4 isnt, you have to start from scratch.

 

[bly08]

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!

Are you saying this because all of your games accidentally turn into WCs and you find that too unrealistic or are you just assuming that it's easy to form and manage 10k dev empires?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Arguments based *solely* realism in the context of EU4 aren't coherent and shouldn't be assigned any more credibility than arguments based solely on cheese-dipped gummy bears.

To be self-consistent, they're stuck asking for a different game entirely. WC isn't actually any less realistic than war score or the super abstracted logistics. Force marching 300,000 soldiers at game pace across Siberia pre-railroad or from Kongo to Kilwa in a straight line and winding up still having 300,000 battle-ready soldiers is roughly as "realistic" as WC. It didn't happen, and there's no clear way to create a scenario whereby it could have.

You can't have it both ways. If you hand-wave the troop example as "some things have to be abstracted", it removes the "WC isn't realistic" argument. Using both is irrational.

Whenever I ask for standards of realism applied consistently to an argument regarding realism, those standards almost never even appear (I've never seen an attempt that didn't effectively axe core game mechanics). They won't this time, either, because self-consistent standards will dictate a new game outright if going that route.

 

[Shinkuro Yukinari]

Alright, I got my strawberry tea and cookies so let's type for another half an hour!

Although I agree that the game needs more interesting game play past 1650 or so, I'm not sure that adding more micromanagement (which I feel sliders would), or making large realms more unstable, is the right way to go for EU4. It would at least require a large rebel revamp (which is needed anyway according to many players).

If I understand you correctly, your suggestion would also mean abolishing the monarch point system in its current form. Even if the sliders are already in the game files, I would think that such a change would require a huge overhaul of the entire game (events, coring mechanics, development etc.) If this is the case the, I still think such a change would be best left for an eventual EU5.

All in all, I kind of like your ideas, but think they may be better used for future EU games.

It will definitely take time and effort to implement all of this, but not as much as you think. Sliders are already present, so engine-level tinkering should be miniscule. Monarch points will still be there, rolling generals and squeezing points out of estates too. The main overhaul will be the tech system, where you allocate points of respective category from your "point budget" each month. Excess goes in stockpile. As for stability, I propose a small up-front investment and then tiny investments over time to represent hiring people to fix things and keeping them around long enough.

There are AI steroids on normal. Lucky, elevated AT gain, some matters relating to trust influence on diplo actions etc.

Anyways - so you realize that playing tall actually accelerates the pace at which you can trivially beat up most of your neighbors and giant blobs.

That is why playing tall is so boring, most the time you just make the right alliances and can actually pick military groups and you can't be killed. No ticking threat of coalition, your borders are compact, etc etc. The only things that make it interesting are racing the clock or putting in even more insane handicaps like no alliances.

A typical blob build is going to take 4-5 idea groups that grant no military bonuses, going to eat horrendous corruption penalties, has barely any edge room for building valuable infrastructure like manufactories etc. Yes you will have more dev, you will also have more enemies (this is actually relevant on VH)

I am reminded of a tall VH swiss game where I only allied opms and because of econ quality offensive build with << 1k dev was able to trivially stackwipe ottoman whereas my typical blobfest with triple-quadruple that dev would have a harder time vs ottoman.

Lucky nations are mainly there to ensure that historical powerhouses are powerhouses(don't get why I must use it in Ironman tho)

Biggest reason why playing tall is boring is because the game really lacks peace-time mechanics. CK2 has Court intrigues and Vicky 2 did its part brilliantly, to contrast.

You still take like 4 military ideas, which brings me to my next point!
IDEA GROUP EXCLUSIVITY!
Humanist ! Religious
Offensive ! Defensive
Quality ! Quantity

Just this one decision will bring so much variety to idea groups and keep military powerhouses in check(Stacking military ideas as Prussia, Shimazu or Oda is just retarded)

As for conquest vs building, if you get Humanist, rebels are almost not an issue, and if they are you can probably get rid of them without much problems. When I play the Ottomans, for example, I find myself often being ahead of time on Mil. Tech, so I obviously go for Mil Ideas, although Professionalism changes things up a bit.

Also, you get tons of cash from peace treaties often and you get their land that might have manufactories. If you are a military powerhouse you probably don't spend as much money on troops since they are so strong that they don't need to be reinforced much.

Arguments based *solely* realism in the context of EU4 aren't coherent and shouldn't be assigned any more credibility than arguments based solely on cheese-dipped gummy bears.

To be self-consistent, they're stuck asking for a different game entirely. WC isn't actually any less realistic than war score or the super abstracted logistics. Force marching 300,000 soldiers at game pace across Siberia pre-railroad or from Kongo to Kilwa in a straight line and winding up still having 300,000 battle-ready soldiers is roughly as "realistic" as WC. It didn't happen, and there's no clear way to create a scenario whereby it could have.

You can't have it both ways. If you hand-wave the troop example as "some things have to be abstracted", it removes the "WC isn't realistic" argument. Using both is irrational.

Whenever I ask for standards of realism applied consistently to an argument regarding realism, those standards almost never even appear (I've never seen an attempt that didn't effectively axe core game mechanics). They won't this time, either, because self-consistent standards will dictate a new game outright if going that route.

Now this is an interesting critique!
I agree that the game abstracts a lot, but some situations abstract the game so much that it feels too unrealistic. Like dumping Admin into Stability. You often do it because of a random Comet so you dump 100 Admin you have spare just so you are not at -1 Stability.

Well, that is my tea done!

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I agree that the game abstracts a lot, but some situations abstract the game so much that it feels too unrealistic.

How it "feels" doesn't align with what the game does. There are numerous routinely accepted abstractions that meet the exact same standard of realism (IE none). Take how coalitions function, for instance. Despite being based on Napoleonic times, they actively disallow separate peace (something Napoleon did). What's worse, they allow for ahistorical outcomes like Sweden marching into North Italy to punish an Italian nation with 2/3 its development for expanding, as if that would actually be in their political interest historically.

But that's not why coalitions were implemented, and they rarely get called out on the basis of being ahistorical (in fact people try to justify them with history despite 0 examples of one functioning this way!). They were implemented as an additional consideration of constraint for expansion, and they do serve that purpose until the player reaches runaway status.

Speaking of which, I don't have any interest in the history arguments precisely because they're inconsistent. You can, however, make a gameplay case along these lines:

1. Very large nations have virtually no counterplay.
2. Despite that very large nations have virtually no counterplay, the game will continue for a very large percentage of the full timeline. This creates a classic game issue of "the game is over too long before it ends".

For example an elite player hits 3k development by 1600, then is nearly 10k by 1700. There might still be several decades until full WC is achieved, but functionally the game was out of reach 150 years ago based on how the AI plays right now.

a) You can solve this in a few ways, but they'd each be pretty game-altering. One that was only partially implemented is diminishing marginal utility of size...in fact thanks to the silly trade company buff it's debatable whether this even happened despite max states being decreased. Think along the lines of 1000 dev being 10x stronger than 100 dev, but 5000 dev barely being 2x stronger than 1000 for example. Depending on how it's handled (major contingency!), this could make diplomatic choices in the end game remain meaningful (IE screwing up can actually cause you to lose).

b) Everyone just dogpiles the runaway and if the runaway still beats them, game over. Runaway wins. Threshold for this must be chosen very carefully.

c) Completely different game with more internal consideration and constraint, which seems to be what you want. In the context of EU 4 mechanics it wouldn't interact well, but for example you don't see nearly the WC spam in Victoria because the mechanics are different. Just keep in mind that for this to work you really do need a top-to-bottom change, it's not something you can just patch into an active title and have it work well. Heck, they tried that with the tributary system over half a year ago and that STILL has broken interactions despite being comparatively orders of magnitude more minor! Same with forts.

 

[bly08]

a) You can solve this in a few ways, but they'd each be pretty game-altering. One that was only partially implemented is diminishing marginal utility of size...in fact thanks to the silly trade company buff it's debatable whether this even happened despite max states being decreased. Think along the lines of 1000 dev being 10x stronger than 100 dev, but 5000 dev barely being 2x stronger than 1000 for example. Depending on how it's handled (major contingency!), this could make diplomatic choices in the end game remain meaningful (IE screwing up can actually cause you to lose).

This is pretty much the case now though not to that extent. 3k dev of TC provinces will generate most of the income during a WC up until the very end. The 3k dev will be worth as much as 7k dev of 75% autonomy wrong culture territories elsewhere.

 

[Shinkuro Yukinari]

@TheMeInTeam
Look at Victoria 2 for example. It still has some degree of abstraction, for example pops representing the entire family, the lack of service-related jobs and the doomstack mechanic still being a thing(plus late game wars are utter BS), but is overall praised for its realism. One of the most realistic simulators of its kind out there! There is a reason why people are passionate about our lass Vicky
Pushing for more realism allows for a more immersive and, may I say, educational experience. If you want to properly experience ruling a country, Victoria 2 is a great game to do so.
If EU4 pushes for realism, there might be some complaints here and there, but in the long term people will come to love the game even more, and WC players will be even more respected than now

 

[bly08]

Realism is a vague goal and would make blobbing both easier and harder. I hope people can just be happy with their own playstyles in a sandbox game instead of trying to propose endless restrictions for WCs that are already extremely tedious to do. No one's ever suggested that a tall Lucca shouldn't be able to make 10x more income than France or that developing provinces should be capped.

 

[Vokasak]

The reason you couldn't blob in the older EUs wasn't because of their sliders. It's because you had to wait 50 god damn years for provinces to core passively. While that does a great job slowing down blobbing, I invite you to intentionally not core any of your conquests for 50 years and see how much fun you have

 

[Viktor Vaughn]

yeah TS it sounds like you really need to play MEIOU and Taxes lol.

Personally I would prefer a more realistic design that made larger empires much more difficult to manage. But I can't get that in the current game, and M&T doesn't run well on my laptop, so I just find ways to enjoy EU4 in my own style.

 

[Shinkuro Yukinari]

The reason you couldn't blob in the older EUs wasn't because of their sliders. It's because you had to wait 50 god damn years for provinces to core passively. While that does a great job slowing down blobbing, I invite you to intentionally not core any of your conquests for 50 years and see how much fun you have

Among other things, like techs, culture penalties, conversions being a lot harder etc.

 

[Lemont Elwood]

I don't see how this would specifically disadvantage large nations, but yes,I would much rather have sliders than idea groups.

 

[bradles0]

...Also the magical Raise Autonomy button and suppression of rebels via military points...

the magical raise autonomy button is when you give in partially to the nationalists, and let them rule themselves under you instead of you ruling them. Think of it like holding local elections, or giving the local duke more power.

Suppression of rebels via military points is when you send a corps of troops to the province to hunt down and imprison or execute dissidents.

 

[Shinkuro Yukinari]

the magical raise autonomy button is when you give in partially to the nationalists, and let them rule themselves under you instead of you ruling them. Think of it like holding local elections, or giving the local duke more power.

Suppression of rebels via military points is when you send a corps of troops to the province to hunt down and imprison or execute dissidents.

Interesting way to think of it... Still they are too effective. I suppose separatist rebels would much rather prefer freedom than autonomy

 

[TheMeInTeam]

^ raising autonomy in the 2nd half of the game is almost strictly poor play, FWIW. You won't see it in strong SP play and I doubt very much you'd see it often in MP.