AE is broken > coalitions are broken > game is broken
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When does this happen, seriously? I have never seen it in any of my games.
It's so great to have someone tell us we are playing a sandbox game incorrectly.
If we're "playing it wrong," then the game should only allow play that is "right." It's extremely satisfying to play a sandbox game that's actually not a sandbox game at all, but rather a game that pretends to be a sandbox game but is really just a game on rails.
"No, its just a mechanic that tells you that you are doing it wrong." This kind of attitude is the reason the game is losing players. Your quote there is beyond annoying. This game isn't intended to emulate American Marine Corps, thank the gods, where there's "the wrong way" and then there's, "my way."
Yeah, this game is hard. It's hard to not fall asleep as you stare at the screen as the end game stalemate begins. It's extremely difficult.
Another one of these, "Play it wrong or play it my way." I'm so glad we have you to tell us what's the "absolute worst" way to play this game. That's a relief.
Again, Paradox should revamp this game to where the game essentially plays itself until a trigger event where the game releases 2 or 3 choices for you to make, and unless you pick the "correct" one, the game stops immediately. Once it stops, there's a big, flashing red sign that takes up the entire screen that says, "You chose wrong. Game Over."
This happens any time you respond to a coalition as a period warmonger. Say I have a coalition of France, Spain, Austria, and Russia against me as a westernized OE. I punch out the allies by abusing scorched earth, siege attrition, and my defensive depth. If I take 100% WS from them (say base 60 AE), there is no way in heck I'm getting the coalition to disband. So I punch them out again. And again and again and again.
Trying to deal with a coalition through force of arms inevitably ends with you fighting the same war over and over again. This is why all the forum advice is on how to avoid coalitions or on how to ensure they evaporate without a fight. Aside from vassalizing minors (and that is iffy), the only way to bloody a coalition is to release nations or return cores - both of which stop being viable by 1700 most of the time; anything else just adds more fuel to the fire and makes more of the world go into the coalition.
Eventually, you reach the point where the size modifiers on AE are just insane and everyone gets pissed at you pretty much regardless (-50 for rival, -20 for diff religious group & border, -5 for claim, -15 for CB, -25 for competition, -25 enemy) and I'm not even counting border friction ... if you have even a single spy-brat spamming sab relations (-50), well diplomatic options for everyone you haven't kissed up to for years building other bonuses (alliance, war to the end, etc.). If you play efficiently, this seems to be when you own a HUGE expanse of territory, but if you are just a casual type picking up EU for the first time, you hit here pretty quickly and it isn't obvious that taking provinces just digs the whole deeper and forces a repeat war in just a few years.
1. The ability to make separate peace deal in coalition (with or without penalty) is actually what most players want here. I don't think it's Paradox's intention for coalition mechanic. Coalition is there to prevent many OPMs from getting swallow in one war at once. But I believe Paradox will have to give in at some point.
2.The ability to induce a member out of coalition. I believe this is not an intention behind coalition mechanic either. It's precisely there to prevent you from isolated your target unlike normal alliance. Paradox even make a member joining coalition war disregard truce. So I doubt this will be implement anytime soon. The problem should be solve if Paradox let players do 1. anyway.
3. Bonus for being in coalition. While this sound interesting, I don't know how this will fare in game balance term. It will require a lot more thought into it. I'm quite sure those who allow a coalition to spiral half the world span will soon find themselves fighting against coalition with 20 morale and 250% disciple or something as well. More rage thread will ensue lol.
All in all, your suggestions sound like a nice singleplayer campaign. But that is what it is. A campaign where scenario is scripted and units can pop out of thin air, not a sandbox game.
In reality, If countries gradually join a coalition like that, it will give us no challenge whatsoever. Just an EU3's rolfstomp ride.
Poland+Hungary free alliance won't be enough to stop human OE with Greece. We all know that and Paradox know that.
That is why they tune AE up in 1.2. That is why coalition form sooner in 1.2. In hope AI will gather enough strength to challenge a player. The AIs still fail apparently.
This leave us with a few choices.
1. Make coalition form even sooner and more AIs dogpile on you. Current approach. I doubt it will do us any good. Please don't do it Paradox.
2. Make AI actually challenging in warfare. Ideal approach. But I doubt AI will be near veteran players level anytime soon. Human will always find the way to exploit the shit out of AI.
3. Give AIs absurdly resource advantage, Civilization style. I know many players oppose this. But this is actually most practical approach. As there is players who struggle against 1:1 AI as it is. We need various difficulties.
Your suggestion for giving AI advantage, not game-wide, but on coalition basis is interesting really. However I can't see how it will fit in game balance. Some players seem to be annoyed enough with lucky nation alone. and how will we prevent players from exploiting this benefit.
There are a lot simpler and more effective ways to limit the annexing of OPM. You could do the old EU saw of just doubling (trebling) the AE of taking out a OPM without coalitions at all. Certainly we already have OExt which makes annexing OPM of limited utility without feeding an adjacent vassal.
My own best guess is that coalitions were meant for two things:
1. A method to bring together enough force to oppose the player without dropping into old style "BB wars".
2. A way to represent a few of the historical wars that did draw enemies together into war. E.g. Napoleon fighting against Austria, Prussia, GB, Sweden, Russia, etc.
Coalitions don't do a good job of protecting OPM, and few survived the EU period outside of the HRE (which has its own OPM protection racket) and it is just too trivially easy to time OPM crunching to have coalitions impede you at all.
Forcing members out is historical, and it gives the player a way to trade potential gains (and penalty AE) for breaking the coalition feedback loop (hurt a coalition, gain AE, gain a bigger coalition). You absolutely should have some way to shorten the duration of a coalition and some way to sacrifice current opportunities to demonstrate long term commitment. It is very hard to create player choice with static politics. Basically you are trading real gains now for intangible gains later. It still will be less efficient than theater jumping now.
Bonuses for being in a coalition after successive wars means that the more you take from a coalition, couple that with the option to force people out, you really do have a choice - take the gains, get stronger enemies (it can be fun and has a higher rate of expansion possible) or skip the gains have fewer and weaker enemies.
The truth is, if you start the human with a major you need a brilliant AI with major advantages to lose. Poland + Hungary (+ normal allies) isn't going to win against the starting OE human. What this does do, is slow the growth rate. If the human OE pushes out quickly (e.g. historical 1453-1463) it makes the wars bigger & slower (or bigger & creates more dangerous foes more quickly). By setting the stage with an intermediate level, it isn't where suddenly everyone is one giant alliance that needs 150 sieges to take minimal gains - you have a lot of people who might enter the war, but aren't locked in straight jacket coalition. Further you can spread the AI-AI love outward so when countries do join up, they aren't wasted husks of their former selves from AI-AI wars.
I would be very happy if you could use DMP to buy people out of the coalition. The size of the coalition (perhaps by base tax, perhaps by army strength, etc) should dictate the cost in DMP to break the coalition peacefully.
What I would do is this.
1- First and above all, change that crap that war leader can ask anything. It´s the root of all balance problems in this game and also why AE and coalitions have to be that BS.
Replace that with a system similar to Victoria 2 where you start with a wargoal and can only add others according to your warscore. So no more "trololol me ally with France and get 100% warscore due to them spanking U nau become catholic and give 3000 gold plox". If you only gave 10% warscore, then ask what 10% warscore could give you, and that´s it.
MAYBE the warleader could have half the aliance warscore (so for example, warscore is 100% - 25% from me, 25% from Russia and 50% from France - I would therefore have 25 + plus half of 75% = effective warscore of 25+37.5%) to use in Peace negotiations but not that 100% BS.
2- Make expansion less difficult from external factors and more from internal factors. What sttoped the Ottomans were much more internal than external factors, for example.
1- First and above all, change that crap that war leader can ask anything. It´s the root of all balance problems in this game and also why AE and coalitions have to be that BS.
Replace that with a system similar to Victoria 2 where you start with a wargoal and can only add others according to your warscore. So no more "trololol me ally with France and get 100% warscore due to them spanking U nau become catholic and give 3000 gold plox". If you only gave 10% warscore, then ask what 10% warscore could give you, and that´s it.
MAYBE the warleader could have half the aliance warscore (so for example, warscore is 100% - 25% from me, 25% from Russia and 50% from France - I would therefore have 25 + plus half of 75% = effective warscore of 25+37.5%) to use in Peace negotiations but not that 100% BS.
2- Make expansion less difficult from external factors and more from internal factors. What sttoped the Ottomans were much more internal than external factors, for example.
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Look genius. Just because its sandbox doesn't mean it doesn't have rules and mechanics. You don't see me never tech'ing up my army and then complaining that I can't beat level Red Coats with them do you? By your logic I should be on here complaining that the game is stupid because its supposed to be a sandbox game and I can't beat everyone with hordes of level 1 infantry. Boohoo.
Get a grip.
While it could have been expressed in a less pugnacious manner, this point is valid. There are many tools available for player use in the game, if you aren't using all of them and bad things happen as a result you really don't have a valid complaint. It is entirely possible to form empires larger than any that have existed in the history of the world without generating the worldwide coalitions people are on the forums complaining about, you just have to actually use all the tools provided, not just your armies.
Yep, use the "tools" of ignoring history, building your entire strategy around circumventing the AE mechanism, and then completely ignoring a major game mechanism because it is mind numbingly boring. Of course, this is only an option for those players who read the forum, have a good feel for Pdox games, or go read the game files as AE and coalitions are completely opaque as to how to manage them.
It would be one thing if you could manage the Ottoman conquests of 1453-1463 (let alone the bigger ones) in an historical manner and not hit these mechanisms, but doing this on the easiest game setting still gets you lined up smack in the middle of unfun game mechanisms.
Except eastern europe did hate/fear the Ottomans to such an extent that they worked together. Even troops from all over the HRE aided Austria in their defense against the OE. The OE just managed to kick all their asses for quite a while.
I see people yelling there shouldn't be a "wrong" way to play this game. And quite frankly there isn't, if you can beat the coalitions you can keep on attacking, it'll just go slower. Just because it's a sandbox game doesn't mean you should be able to do everything you want and get away with it. Even in GTA going too mental will cause the police to kick your ass. You play a certain way this way has consequences, if you don't want to deal with those consequences then play a different way that has different consequences. It doesn't make the game any less of a sandbox game and it doesn't make the game a worse game. The choice to do these things is still yours, you can still take so many provinces the entire world will hate you. Doesn't mean the entire world shouldn't hate you for it, just means if you don't want the entire world to hate you don't take that many provinces.
I see people yelling there shouldn't be a "wrong" way to play this game. And quite frankly there isn't, if you can beat the coalitions you can keep on attacking, it'll just go slower. Just because it's a sandbox game doesn't mean you should be able to do everything you want and get away with it. Even in GTA going too mental will cause the police to kick your ass. You play a certain way this way has consequences, if you don't want to deal with those consequences then play a different way that has different consequences. It doesn't make the game any less of a sandbox game and it doesn't make the game a worse game. The choice to do these things is still yours, you can still take so many provinces the entire world will hate you. Doesn't mean the entire world shouldn't hate you for it, just means if you don't want the entire world to hate you don't take that many provinces.
The OP expanded less aggressively than the historical Ottoman empire and has many more nations in coalition against him than just "Eastern Europe."
Except for in 1453-1463 the geopolitical situation in Europe was far far different than it is in the case of the OP's situation. You really can't expect me to believe your comparison of the the situation in OP's post to 250 years before that in real history is legit in any way, shape or form.
As the OE it is now 1809. I myself have an empire bigger than his and I have waged wars against the HRE, in the last one I took half of hungary from them and I haven't managed to let the situation get as bad as OP did.
Now I'm not saying OP did it wrong but situational circumstances DO play a MASSIVE part in this game.
To reiterate:
The historical Ottoman Empire was both larger than the OP's country, and more aggressive in the period in question (1669-1683), yet fought against a much smaller coalition. Why? Because in real life countries did not go bananas over a single country's small expansion unless it was directly contrary to their interests. Everyone fighting the Ottomans had a very specific reason for doing so, not just "They're expanding, stop them!".
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The historical Ottoman conquests in 1453-1463 net around 140 AE if we are generous about CBs used. The coalition that stopped Ottomans was led by Hunyadi at Belgrade (though they took most of Serbia) and then by his son at Breadfield both of these were mostly Hungarian/Serbian affairs and very little help came outside of those two states. There was no coalition spanning central Europe in spite of massive AE from taking apart Serbia, Bosnia, Byzantium, Trebizond, and vassalizing places like Wallachia and arguably Moldavia. In fact, concurrent with Breadfield the Hungarians were fighting the Austrians and meddling in Bohemia. When the Ottomans invaded Italy, they had signed a separate peace with Venice and nobody messed with them in spite of the problems during Beyazid II's ascension (all the Cem fun).
Later, yes, when Vienna itself was the frontline and the Turks looked much stronger you had remnants of Hungary, Austria, Poland, etc. join up, but you could expand a lot in the EU era even as the heathen Turks who everyone was worried about (i.e. I've heard it said that more books were published in the 16th century about the threat of the Turks than about all discussion of the New World combined). The coalition mechanics we see currently are much more punishing than historical conquest evidenced.
Now you may need to go above and beyond history to keep the game challenging for the player ... but you really shouldn't have to restructure a mostly historical game around avoiding the coalition mechanism just to take less than half what the real life Ottomans did in under a decade.
Fight the good fight
Post what is right
Jomini, the Lord of the Realm
Fight the good fight
With all your might
Jomini, the Lord of the Realm
Post what is right
Jomini, the Lord of the Realm
Fight the good fight
With all your might
Jomini, the Lord of the Realm
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