tl;dr: Change one-click, single-time reward buttons like reduce inflation, reduce war exhaustion, or slacken professionalism into war taxes-like buttons enabling progressive modifiers for their respective category.
EU4 currently features several buttons that allow you to instantaneously exchange one resource for another. We have a button for reducing War Exhaustion or Inflation, one for boosting mercantilism and one for spending Army Professionalism in exchange for manpower. While in some cases the low value of the reward in itself does a good job of balancing such buttons, as it is the case with the “Promote Mercantilism” button which offers relatively little for very valuable 100 diplo points, this isn’t the case with some other buttons, especially with “slackening standards”. There are 2 fundamental issues with those buttons on a design level:
There’s a relatively simple solution to the above. All, or only the most problematic of those buttons could be replaced into a checkbox similar to new wartaxes, wherein instead of the player being able to instantaneously exchange a resource for something like manpower, instead the gain could be a modifier, like +40% manpower recovery or -0.2 monthly war exhaustion, in exchange for a monthly drain of the resource(for example, 0.5% army professionalism per month for slackens and 5 diplomatic power per month for reducing WE). Those buttons would encourage players to think ahead(by ie. enabling the checkboxes if they feel like they are going to need them) and help to reduce the unrealism of what you currently can get for using the buttons several times in a row.
EU4 currently features several buttons that allow you to instantaneously exchange one resource for another. We have a button for reducing War Exhaustion or Inflation, one for boosting mercantilism and one for spending Army Professionalism in exchange for manpower. While in some cases the low value of the reward in itself does a good job of balancing such buttons, as it is the case with the “Promote Mercantilism” button which offers relatively little for very valuable 100 diplo points, this isn’t the case with some other buttons, especially with “slackening standards”. There are 2 fundamental issues with those buttons on a design level:
- They are just silly. It makes little sense for a single button to be an equivalent of years of ‘natural game dynamics’. Slacken standards gives you 2 years worth of manpower. If done several times in a row they can be equal to up to 40 years of manpower, all gained momentarily. That kind of instantaneous growth is just silly, cheesy and unrealistic.
- Too often they become a “get out of jail” card that the player didn’t actually earn. AP slackens are the worst offender here, as the resource you use for it - professionalism - is gained literally from doing nothing(events, drilling). The low cost of being able to use a slacken would suggest an insignificant reward, yet the opposite is true.
There’s a relatively simple solution to the above. All, or only the most problematic of those buttons could be replaced into a checkbox similar to new wartaxes, wherein instead of the player being able to instantaneously exchange a resource for something like manpower, instead the gain could be a modifier, like +40% manpower recovery or -0.2 monthly war exhaustion, in exchange for a monthly drain of the resource(for example, 0.5% army professionalism per month for slackens and 5 diplomatic power per month for reducing WE). Those buttons would encourage players to think ahead(by ie. enabling the checkboxes if they feel like they are going to need them) and help to reduce the unrealism of what you currently can get for using the buttons several times in a row.
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