Anti-blobbing mechanics

[AnonHobo]

I never understood the point of the current anti-blobbing mechanics.

Ridiculous coring time leads to Sitzkrieg
Massive Coalitions that you beat down for a little reward, is extremely frustrating.
Random OE stability events, legitimacy events and such make no sense.

What also doesn't make sense are empires that field 300,000 , 400,000 troops with unlimited manpower.

There should be an exponential curve on the cost of troops after you break a certain number.

Manpower drains should be signficant if you are moving a stack of 40,000 troops through ANY territory.. few nations of the time ever fielded armies of that size.

I don't have the perfect solution and I know it's probably not tenable based on the current game mechanics, but really the way to best limit expansion is to make troops (even after you blob) expensive--and hence valuable... (troop maintainence perhaps should be calculated based upon distance from accepted culture provinces subtracted by a % on whether or not the cultural area you are in is "in rebellion"). Then have pretender type rebellions based occur based on how far your armies are away. There should be some type of timing mechanism. For example, based on religion and/or culture group--if you have more than 5 non accepted culture groups, then maybe there should be a pretender chance or independence movement. Once crushed, put in a 5-10 recovery period.


If you are the size of the Mongol Empire, or the Roman Empire, or the British Empire--there are constant rebellions at all times and your troops (and ships) are precious... you will be forced to use them sparingly or allow independence.

I actually really like the idea of rebelling vassals who think they can be independent and/or have grudges against you. As you grow larger, and if you get creamed in a war, your vassals should desert you.

While it's quite a bit of micromanaging, the punishment for blobbing shouldn't be that you can't do it--but rather if you can't micromanage it, then your empire should split apart. Not hard coded means to make it impossible to blob and then absolutely impossible to manage (ie, OE + AE + coalitions).

Just a few thoughts.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Personally I find this mechanic to work exactly as it should and it feels pretty realistic. The events are based on your actions (or choices more or less) and so they are not actually so random, in my opinion. They key seem to be to choose the right ideas, such as Diplomatic, Aristocratic and Administration.

Not every country will be able to conquer and not feel the internal pressure of keeping that multicultural population from popping. It will take effort and planning, not just military prowess.

 

[Lakedaimon]

I agree that coalition wars shouldn't get special rewards, they should be something to avoid, not something to strive for, ever. The should be a war for the mere survival of your realm in it's current form, with very limited gains to be had.

Tweaks to AE and which nations join coalitions and when etc. of course are very welcome.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I agree that coalition wars shouldn't get special rewards, they should be something to avoid, not something to strive for, ever. The should be a war for the mere survival of your realm in it's current form, with very limited gains to be had.

Tweaks to AE and which nations join coalitions and when etc. of course are very welcome.

No special rewards. For the purposes of peace deals and the war, one coalition = one nation. Scale all costs based on that, just like you scale the accumulation of war score based on it. It's still impossible to separate-peace gib the world, but joining one has risk, too.

 

[Lakedaimon]

No special rewards. For the purposes of peace deals and the war, one coalition = one nation. Scale all costs based on that, just like you scale the accumulation of war score based on it. It's still impossible to separate-peace gib the world, but joining one has risk, too.

Yea something like that could be interesting.

 

[roman566]

Personally I find this mechanic to work exactly as it should and it feels pretty realistic. The events are based on your actions (or choices more or less) and so they are not actually so random, in my opinion. They key seem to be to choose the right ideas, such as Diplomatic, Aristocratic and Administration.

Not every country will be able to conquer and not feel the internal pressure of keeping that multicultural population from popping. It will take effort and planning, not just military prowess.

Realistic? That's a good one, know any other ones?
OE is the most unrealistic thing in this game, how do you explain peasants in Iberia revolting after Spain conquers three or four random provinces in India? WE? Spain can steamroll Indian nations with little to no looses, peasants would rather feel happy that their nations is so powerful that it wins wars with little to no friendly looses.
Add AE which causes most illogical alliances to form for no good reason other than 'let's make player's life hell'.
Protectorates aka 'sorry, we are to dumb to be vassalized'.
Coring - pay some magical points and all those guys living there will consider you their true ruler.

Realism like hell.

 

[grommile]

There should be an exponential curve on the cost of troops after you break a certain number.

That number is called your Land Force Limit. Every regiment in your army costs additional maintenance proportional to the amount by which you exceed it. The resulting quadratic curve would actually work perfectly well if the late game didn't absolutely vomit money into your treasury.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Realistic? That's a good one, know any other ones?
OE is the most unrealistic thing in this game, how do you explain peasants in Iberia revolting after Spain conquers three or four random provinces in India? WE? Spain can steamroll Indian nations with little to no looses, peasants would rather feel happy that their nations is so powerful that it wins wars with little to no friendly looses.
Add AE which causes most illogical alliances to form for no good reason other than 'let's make player's life hell'.
Protectorates aka 'sorry, we are to dumb to be vassalized'.
Coring - pay some magical points and all those guys living there will consider you their true ruler.

Realism like hell.

It is an abstraction and sort of "simulate" what can happen. You can role-play it however you like. The peasants can be overtaxed, being drafted into the army against their will, too little time by the regent is spent close to home so they take the opportunity to rice up, take your pick.

The points are not random magical points. They are political power (skill) and your ability to administrate/organize your land and surrounding as the ruling body of that nation. The points just simulate the abstraction of your rulers or governments limits on effecting things in the world. A core province is just the fact that you have a proper administration set up in the area for collecting taxes and judicial practices and police forces to enforce your rule. Nationality as we have it today did hardly exist in the EU time frame.

The end result and simulation of events seem pretty realistic in my opinion and there are many real world events that you can draw on for most situation and events that occur in the game.

 

[Lakedaimon]

Nice explanation Jorgen, you kind of hit the jackpot there. Couldn't agree more.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

It is an abstraction and sort of "simulate" what can happen. You can role-play it however you like. The peasants can be overtaxed, being drafted into the army against their will, too little time by the regent is spent close to home so they take the opportunity to rice up, take your pick.

The points are not random magical points. They are political power (skill) and your ability to administrate/organize your land and surrounding as the ruling body of that nation. The points just simulate the abstraction of your rulers or governments limits on effecting things in the world. A core province is just the fact that you have a proper administration set up in the area for collecting taxes and judicial practices and police forces to enforce your rule. Nationality as we have it today did hardly exist in the EU time frame.

The end result and simulation of events seem pretty realistic in my opinion and there are many real world events that you can draw on for most situation and events that occur in the game.

Nothing screams realism like nations joining into wars where they can't reach the target and magic barriers that block annexation with 0 units. That's some really strong realism right there.

 

[AnonHobo]

Nothing screams realism like nations joining into wars where they can't reach the target and magic barriers that block annexation with 0 units. That's some really strong realism right there.

I just think Armies are too plentiful and manpower too easily replaced. Nations rose and fell on single battles during the time period.

I think it would be interesting that instead of OE or AE as limiters that it's a function of ability to use your armies wisely--because they are precious.

I personally haven't found a problem in this game that can't be solved with throwing endless mercs at it; that's all.

But, as someone said before, one can just roleplay.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

The combat mechanic of the game are probably it's least realistic component, but as long as the end result are similar to history I can live with that.

In reality armies would move slower, be more effected by winter conditions and supply and decease would be a much more major concern. A general would not be able to divide his army and multi-siege everywhere, this is highly unrealistic. Siege was a serious business and a general never know when an enemy army would show up, be it an allied army to the enemy army or mercenary army (or a mix). Many sieges also simply failed if not finished before winter arrived. Cities on the coast could be impossible to take if they could be supplied from the sea and so forth. Sieges in Eu never fail unless there is a relief army arriving, that is not how it worked in reality.

Personally I have reconciled with the fact that I'm not going to get anything that resembles reality in this department and will have to work with what I got. Perhaps the next iteration of EU will be more accurate, but it is a fun game nevertheless in my opinion.

Nothing screams realism like nations joining into wars where they can't reach the target and magic barriers that block annexation with 0 units. That's some really strong realism right there.

I don't think that anyone said that the game don't have it's issues. Often many of them get fixed or tweaked after a while. It is not that easy to write a good AI and there are bound to be problems along the way. I would see this as a minor issue though, even if it would be nice to have it tweaked.

 

[SuperSFX]

I vaguely understand the concept of coring, although its current implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Overall though, I have to agree with grommile. Why should 102% overextension from taking say a couple of new world provinces as Spain result in nationalist sentiments? Why the heck would anyone in your nation care?
"Oh yeah, now that those Cherokee are demanding freedom all the way across the Atlantic, now is the perfect time to rebel in Aragon!" Its just silly. The worst part of it all is that there's no progression to it. Below 100% OE, you're fine. Over 100%, rebels everywhere for the next 10 years! Even more over 100? Just means more frequent events but it really isn't much different. The mean time to happen on nationalist sentiment needs to have some serious scaling. My favorite is when I'm sitting at 120% OE and I get 3 nationalist sentiment popups in one month... I mean come on, at this point I might as well have just taken as much as the warscore would allow.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

As I said before, you need to find a role-playing explanation for your uprisings. In your case the neglect of expanding the infrastructure at home, taxing the people for seemingly endless pointless wars etc... they can all be reasons for uprising. It can be local aristocrats that see an opportunity to act with much of the kings army tied up elsewhere and so on.

Now what you are complaining about is the arbitrary number of 100, as long as you stay below 100 you generally don't get these so called random events. If you go even further you get even nastier events. So, what you would like is perhaps that the events would scale better.

In history all great empires have fallen, most fall within a very short time period after their expansion. Most of this is due to internal problems when the ruling body just run out of steam (see monarch points) to solve all the problems. One tiny problem in one place can quite seemingly effect something completely different in another place in a way that was never suspected, there is nothing strange about such events unfolding in our own real history.

The way I see it you need to invest heavily in the right ideas and stockpile enough monarch points to deal with all the shit you will face when you overextend your empire, especially in remote areas of the world. Your people do generally not feel very nationalistic towards you, in this time period people were very close to their immediate environment, therefore small kingdoms were common since they were more stable. Large empires were almost never stable, not even within their core provinces.

Please take a closer look at a few points in history and you will see the intricacies of politics and how events often set of chain reactions over vast distances of the world. Or how sometimes seemingly insignificant actions can lead to devastating results. Pick up a thick history book and read a few chapters and you will see that the game do a pretty good imitation of it, even if certain thresholds are arbitrary I give you that.