Sometimes I build, sometimes I don't. Generally an eastern or other RoTW won't unless they want to westernize early. I see no problem in that, as it's easier to expand when you are not in Europe. Westerners have the option to because they can get ahead of time, and can get chocked full of AE everywhere leading to 20 years of waiting. Or another option for them is they just want to fall behind to gain income. Normally I wait for a 5% neighbor bonus, but if I fall behind for an extra 5% neighbor bonus I'm netting 30 more MP a tech. The gold also can help you take bigger risks, expand your navy & army, and hire better or more advisers. It's basically allowing you to spend MP for another benefit besides tech. If it didn't cost any MP it would be a brain dead decision, and would generally lead to a bland build everything for the hell of it system.
Are buildings generally ok? Do they cost too many monarch points?
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Here's an idea that's been floating around in my head for a few days. It probably belongs in a separate thread, but I guess I can test the waters here.
It's a pity that provinces almost never grow in base tax; a growing population and the corresponding increase in productivity is a very natural process and at the heart of most 4X games.
I think it would be nice if there were more random events that increase base tax in owned provinces, with MTTH per province modified by:
- stability (quite a large effect, maybe *2 for each stab increase, so +3 means 64 times faster growth than -3?). This would make stab > +1 worth having.
- number of improvements in the province (maybe +5%, additively, per improvement, thus giving +130% for a full set of 26 improvements, or even slightly more with uniques)
- possibly other influences (prestige? Dip Rep? WarEx? Distance to capital? Edit: probably should have a malus for less-than-full manpower reserve)
All colonies should always have base tax 1 after turning into a regular province. I.e., you don't get high-base-tax provinces from colonies by beating other colonizers to the punch for the most profitable privinces, but by nursing them with improvements and high stab.
It's a pity that provinces almost never grow in base tax; a growing population and the corresponding increase in productivity is a very natural process and at the heart of most 4X games.
I think it would be nice if there were more random events that increase base tax in owned provinces, with MTTH per province modified by:
- stability (quite a large effect, maybe *2 for each stab increase, so +3 means 64 times faster growth than -3?). This would make stab > +1 worth having.
- number of improvements in the province (maybe +5%, additively, per improvement, thus giving +130% for a full set of 26 improvements, or even slightly more with uniques)
- possibly other influences (prestige? Dip Rep? WarEx? Distance to capital? Edit: probably should have a malus for less-than-full manpower reserve)
All colonies should always have base tax 1 after turning into a regular province. I.e., you don't get high-base-tax provinces from colonies by beating other colonizers to the punch for the most profitable privinces, but by nursing them with improvements and high stab.
I agree with those saying there shouldn't be a cost in mp for buildings. As someone said in another thread, it makes no sense to be less efficient in maritim technology because of building ports. You can apply this reasonning to all buildings, maybe even the special ones.
What makes sense is losing mp points because you would recruit an admirar, which would thus not be a thinker in a naval school but would nevertheless, given battles, improve the naval tradition of your country. Same thing with generals. Ideas could also be seen as practical thinking, but I'm not sure how.
I never loved much the mp system. I can try to work with it, but it linked with building constructions makes it present everywhere.
What makes sense is losing mp points because you would recruit an admirar, which would thus not be a thinker in a naval school but would nevertheless, given battles, improve the naval tradition of your country. Same thing with generals. Ideas could also be seen as practical thinking, but I'm not sure how.
I never loved much the mp system. I can try to work with it, but it linked with building constructions makes it present everywhere.
Why buildings are bad, in a nutshell:
1. If you're in a low tech group, you generally cannot afford them, at all, because of the MP cost. Lower tech group = anything Muslim tech or lower. You're barely on par with tech and you are scrounging to fill critical idea groups. Add in stability costs, peace treaties and military leaders, and buildings are the bottom of the barrel. So basically 60% of the countries in the world are best served by spending monarch points on other things.
2. If you're poor, you cannot afford the cash cost to build them. The base ones are too expensive (tiers 1-2) and they also come too late (especially tier 2). So another 10% of the countries in the world cannot build them. If you're poor and in a lower tech group, don't ever think about buildings. You need troops and provinces, NOW!
3. If you're rich and big, you can expand mindlessly and it's better that spamming buildings. You can handle the rebels which you usually have from conquering new provinces and the benefits provided by these new provinces are stronger than what buildings offer. Conquering is also more fun
4. If you're rich and small - this is one of the few scenarios where buildings can help. Maybe there's no room to grow due to powerful neighbors. Maybe you don't have a lot of time to fight more wars due to time spent focusing on your trade fleets or on your colonies. Maybe you want to role play. But how many countries are in this situation? 10%? Perhaps less?
IMO:
Make lower level buildings cost fewer ducats. Make the ducat cost increase at a higher rate. Also don't have a flat fee of 10MP per building, scale it per level.
Tier 1: 10 ducats, 1 MP.
Tier 2: 20 ducats, 2 MP.
Tier 3: 60 ducats, 5 MP.
Tier 4: 120 ducats, 5 MP.
Tier 5: 240 ducats, 5 MP.
Tier 6: 320 ducats, 8 MP.
Tier 7: 640 ducats, 12 MP.
Also increase the benefits, especially for the higher level buildings. Make them influence non-monetary and non-manpower aspects. Just like the Counting House (but stronger - 100% Counting Houses should reduce inflation by 0.30% per year). Have Diplomatic buildings which reduce war exhaustion (-0.05 per year at 100% coverage), have Military buildings which increase Army Tradition (+1 army tradition at 100% coverage), etc.
They're situational to lower tech groups, but not unaffordable. As Tabarestan I needed FL more than anything else so I built temples even despite being behind in ADM tech (I'm at something like 8/8/16 with 3 military groups, just trying to scrape to the achievement with the Ottoman + Golden Horde (that ate Crimea) + Timurid alliance lol). Even as a horde-all-game in previous patches I'd still toss in high-value manufactories and I'd still build up to treasury + military buildings in a few home provinces (shaving maintenance on cannons) and longer-term foreign cores. Obviously if you westernize you can front-load buildings and then offset some of the expense via neighbor bonuses too. For example I had a TON of buildings including a temple in nearly every NA province as Aztec in my Sunset Invasion run, and despite going republic and never re-electing I finished 32/32/32 with 56 ideas. Entire Caribbean aside from the few provinces I didn't own had maxed trade buildings, I had 8ish full military line buildings, every gold province had max production line, and yet with constant 1 1 4 or 4 1 1 I still got everything in.
Buildings are situational. From a balance perspective, they're okay IMO, and it's the monarch point model itself that is iffy and not how buildings fit into the picture.
I always build the unique buildings. Always worth the investment. Otherwise I build trade buildings in trade specialized provinces (CoT mostly). The vast majority of my buildings are simply a way to spend the monarch points I'm drowning in. Closer my tech group is to western, the more buildings I'll have because there's only so much you can drop on ideas and tech. Means I tend to have a lot of armories and the rest since expanding covers admin and diplo through cores and vassals pretty well.
To sum up the discussion so far:
A) If you want to blob, then building buildings is waste of resources.
B) If you don't want to blob, then building buildings help you to improve your realm.
It seems that many people find option A more preferable, while minority enjoys staying small and improving the lands, which they already have, instead of constantly conquering new lands.
A) If you want to blob, then building buildings is waste of resources.
B) If you don't want to blob, then building buildings help you to improve your realm.
It seems that many people find option A more preferable, while minority enjoys staying small and improving the lands, which they already have, instead of constantly conquering new lands.
Granted, had I realized earlier in this game the power of vassal feeding transfer occupation, I could have blobbed a bit more, but doesn't this count as blobbing?
I built a ton of buildings in this game. Heavy market presence in Malacca node, temples in SEA, Indies, and India as well as China, lots and lots of armories (almost every province aside from steppes which I took very late), max trade buildings in important centers, maxed military line + treasuries in 4 provinces on home culture island, every unique building. That's a lot of buildings for a nation that had to pay in to westernize also.
End tech was 32/32/32 though I didn't get every idea.
Granted, had I realized earlier in this game the power of vassal feeding transfer occupation, I could have blobbed a bit more, but doesn't this count as blobbing?
I built a ton of buildings in this game. Heavy market presence in Malacca node, temples in SEA, Indies, and India as well as China, lots and lots of armories (almost every province aside from steppes which I took very late), max trade buildings in important centers, maxed military line + treasuries in 4 provinces on home culture island, every unique building. That's a lot of buildings for a nation that had to pay in to westernize also.
End tech was 32/32/32 though I didn't get every idea.
Sure, but did you build them, or your vassels? No one said you wouldn't have enough money, since money scales with size. If you gifted all the money to vassels, that could explain it.
Otherwise, having markets, temples, and armories in just China (like you claim you built) would be crazy high. India as well??? I mean, that would be some 200 provenience, that you build 3 buildings each, or 6000 points.... There's no way the benefit is worth 6k Monarch points, or some 15 ideas.
I built them, not my vassals lol. All of China, most of India, and all of SEA was cored directly aside from a few vassals early on because you don't have coring range at DIP 2, so I needed a vassal to extend same-continent range.
I was truce-locked at times, even with some spreading of claims. I built far more military buildings than most other types because I had a bigger surplus of that.
Other than the idea from ADM 29, I was maxed on ideas. I could have just expanded more had I opened more fronts, probably Ottos + Africa, but I didn't vassal feed like I should have with that.
To be honest you probably dominated one of the best trade nodes in the game, Malacca, from early on. When did you get 3/3/3 advisors? I'm willing to bet that it happened at most 150 years into the game.
Play a game with a landlocked Central Asian nation and compare the incomes - things will be much bleaker.
Less money = a lot fewer buildings.
Well yeah. It does depend on the landlocked nation though, since some of them can spank their way into richer nodes inside 100 years without flinching. IIRC I was at +3/+3/+3 in the mid-late 1500's. I finished westernization around 1520ish IIRC, which helped, but I really should have snagged a few vassals to split the Ming gains sooner before doing that, and picked up a horde to do some coring for me later.
Even Chagatai could probably make a run on India though (Mughals stuff) or Oirat nailing Ming and influence-feeding vassals early on. The pink Chinese tech guy with generic ideas near Timmy would have it hard, but buildings are the least of your worries in a position like that.
I may have an idea. What if buildings cost a base amount of ducats, but you could decrease this cost each time (by a slider, for example) by spending monarch points? For example, if a building base cost is 75 ducats, you could decrease this sum by spending up to 25 mp. At 25 mps spent, the building would cost 50 ducats instead of 75. This would mean you spend 1 mp for each ducats you want to remove from the cost.. It could of course be scaled another way, but I think you understand the idea.
The trade-off would no longer be "to have buildings or technology", but "having buildings cheaper and faster or having techs/ideas/leaders/etc." As in Oblio post, rich backward countries wouldn't use this mechanic, but they would at least have buildings. Rich and modern countries could however use this to burn their excess of mp while having cheaper buildings. Poor and backward countries would still have a hard time, however, and as I understand it, it is meant to be like that.
IMHO, it would be a huge improvement. What do you think of that?
The trade-off would no longer be "to have buildings or technology", but "having buildings cheaper and faster or having techs/ideas/leaders/etc." As in Oblio post, rich backward countries wouldn't use this mechanic, but they would at least have buildings. Rich and modern countries could however use this to burn their excess of mp while having cheaper buildings. Poor and backward countries would still have a hard time, however, and as I understand it, it is meant to be like that.
IMHO, it would be a huge improvement. What do you think of that?
It makes the advantage of being large overwhelmingly greater than it already is.
I actually really hate the building cost idea in Quantity.
If buildings cost 10 monarch points, and the idea saves you 2, and the idea COSTS 400 monarch points just to acquire, then you have to build 200 buildings just to make back your investment on the idea. You then gain 2 monarch points per building afterward, so if you build another 200 buildings (we're at a total of 400 now), then you get just enough monarch points to get one more idea (and actually get some other permanent, typical idea type benefit). So you really need 400 buildings before the investment even starts to make sense, and even then you've forever lost an idea slot that could have given you some other bonus instead. That's a ton of buildings!
In order to get any serious bonus from this, you really have to get that idea super early. That's actually not too bad of a proposition, since Quantity is pretty good overall for small countries. But in that case, paying the ducats is a pretty hefty challenge; if you don't have a wealthy starting position, you have to expand very smartly to get it.
This is the same issue I have with the money-making buildings. If you spend 50 ducats on a temple to get a return of 1 ducat per year (actual return varies greatly but let's just go with that), it's fifty years in-game before you even make back the money you spent on the temple. That's money that could have paid for other things instead, like bribes or troops to boost your power immediately (and improve your ability to get more territory). It also means that past a certain point in the game (when there aren't enough years left to matter), there's no reason to build those buildings at all, even if the monarch point cost was free. Even though that's the part of the game where you can actually afford these buildings! I can think of very few scenarios where I'd build anything at all after 1750, and I wouldn't build much after 1700. Even 1650 is questionable for a lot of things. Forts are still solid enough and worth the investment, but I probably don't need any more recruitment provinces, and money-making buildings are largely out of the question by that point. And a quarter of the game is still remaining!
Honestly I wouldn't mind seeing the entire building system scrapped and replaced with a much more solid and interesting development / management / economic system.
If buildings cost 10 monarch points, and the idea saves you 2, and the idea COSTS 400 monarch points just to acquire, then you have to build 200 buildings just to make back your investment on the idea. You then gain 2 monarch points per building afterward, so if you build another 200 buildings (we're at a total of 400 now), then you get just enough monarch points to get one more idea (and actually get some other permanent, typical idea type benefit). So you really need 400 buildings before the investment even starts to make sense, and even then you've forever lost an idea slot that could have given you some other bonus instead. That's a ton of buildings!
In order to get any serious bonus from this, you really have to get that idea super early. That's actually not too bad of a proposition, since Quantity is pretty good overall for small countries. But in that case, paying the ducats is a pretty hefty challenge; if you don't have a wealthy starting position, you have to expand very smartly to get it.
This is the same issue I have with the money-making buildings. If you spend 50 ducats on a temple to get a return of 1 ducat per year (actual return varies greatly but let's just go with that), it's fifty years in-game before you even make back the money you spent on the temple. That's money that could have paid for other things instead, like bribes or troops to boost your power immediately (and improve your ability to get more territory). It also means that past a certain point in the game (when there aren't enough years left to matter), there's no reason to build those buildings at all, even if the monarch point cost was free. Even though that's the part of the game where you can actually afford these buildings! I can think of very few scenarios where I'd build anything at all after 1750, and I wouldn't build much after 1700. Even 1650 is questionable for a lot of things. Forts are still solid enough and worth the investment, but I probably don't need any more recruitment provinces, and money-making buildings are largely out of the question by that point. And a quarter of the game is still remaining!
Honestly I wouldn't mind seeing the entire building system scrapped and replaced with a much more solid and interesting development / management / economic system.
Why? Little countries already spend much less mps to build buildings than large ones. I think I forgot to stress something in my previous post : a little country could use the mps it didn't use in coring, converting culture, stability, etc. to construct buildings while a large one would have to do all of that but would then have to spend more money to build its buildings.
If this is properly scaled, this idea could be used to equilibrate things, not destabilize them.
But still, I think it is normal that a bigger country would, ceteris paribus, be stronger than a smaller one.
Yes, but the game already overemphasizes large nation power by underemphasizing the difficulty of holding them together in the name of gameplay. That's fine, but there's no reason to make snowballing even faster. Large nations have money in droves and would just dump it into buildings to create an ever-growing gold engine in short order. If you made the low-to-no MP cost option too expensive, then we'd be right back to square 1 functionally, if not you wind up with fast runaways.
It's a little less obvious than that, because this does allow a small degree of redistributing *types* of monarch point, IE spending a MIL idea to build non-MIL buildings. There's also the question of ahead-of-years versus not and investment trade off, so a strict "pay back" analysis kind of sucks here (it sucks in general in EU IV though). There's a reason payback is a junk method in finance and that reason applies to these kinds of evaluations in Europa also.
The amusing thing is that if you applied the same kind of logic to say Innovative, which is lauded pretty heavily in that other thread about it, the 400 ADM buy in for the -5% tech cost would take until your 14th tech to "pay off", but this is an admin investment rather than MIL so it's more punishing. In fact, most idea groups have some woofer ideas thrown in that aren't worth 400 monarch points if you have better alternatives, but ahead-of-years and limited expansion avenues suggest that the 2% tech cost saving and marginal utility from these guys are still worth taking if you can't use points on anything else, since points are not storable.
All that said, if you're building across a few types you can easily reach 200+ buildings so it's not the worst idea out there.
To be fair quantity is an early game idea. There's no point in taking it when you are already blobbed out. If you don't like the investment stop there, but if you think the 50% force limit is worth it spend 800 more.
As for temples they are probably your best overall building starting out. For every 4 tax that is made you get another force limit for troops. I could care less that I'm making my money back in 50 years, as I'm going to have a bigger army and a little more income. I really don't go all out all the time building temples, but when I build four I'm happy about it.
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The problem lies not with building, nor the monarch points system. It's just that is too easy to make money, at the point of being ridiculous. Historically nations always struggled with finances, but here a medium-to-big empire could literally pave the roads with gold. As many buildings give economic bonuses, they become useless. The solution is simple: all three forms of income must be cut severely, perhaps in a factor scaling with empire size - collecting taxes from half of europe cannot be as efficient as collecting from the city of Venice alone. We need some sort of administrative efficiency variable wich gives dimishing returns on further gains, or an autonomy low cap. An empire could theoretically go on conquering to secure its borders, but after so much the cost of governing exceeds the financial benefits.
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Buildings would be the perfect money sink. If the 2nd tier cost twice as much, and the third tier triple, and the fourth tier quadruple, you're looking at spending literal thousands on a couple top-tier buildings. Having them cost mp is a horrible crutch that means 2 empires will want to build in close to similar amounts, even if one has 5 times the territory of the other. That's bad design. If a huge trade empire wants to spend thousands increasing their naval forcelimits by a dozen, good; it should cost them that trade money instead of dip points. Having a massive overabundance of wealth should be an incentive to paint your land in construction projects.
The other problem is perhaps that buildings are kinda bland and half of them are just focused around making even more money (via bt, production or trade), which makes it basically you spend mps to make more money, when there's already too much money going around. Less money from buildings and more utility instead, or at least indirect money (buildings that reduce culture penalties, give you trade resource control bonuses instead of just the resource, -LA, etc.) would help too. In the end, the limiting factor for most building projects - monarch points - really does need to move to something else. I would even live with a silly architect unit that works like missionaries/colonists/etc and constructs things that way if it meant using points on at least most of them went away!
The other problem is perhaps that buildings are kinda bland and half of them are just focused around making even more money (via bt, production or trade), which makes it basically you spend mps to make more money, when there's already too much money going around. Less money from buildings and more utility instead, or at least indirect money (buildings that reduce culture penalties, give you trade resource control bonuses instead of just the resource, -LA, etc.) would help too. In the end, the limiting factor for most building projects - monarch points - really does need to move to something else. I would even live with a silly architect unit that works like missionaries/colonists/etc and constructs things that way if it meant using points on at least most of them went away!