Yeah? Explain the multiple achievements and regular displays through social media if you think it's not an intended feature
You can be salty if it suits you, but it's a feature of the game and you have nothing whatsoever to prove otherwise.
Bigger nations must have more problems!
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You can be salty if it suits you, but it's a feature of the game and you have nothing whatsoever to prove otherwise.
WC is part of the game, but shouldn't be an easy goal or something that could happen in every game. It should be something that you succeed with some luck, and with good starting nation. But this have almost nothing with the subject here (whatever new mechanics are made, people will find some holes in it to profit anyway).
The problem is how you can have (or the Bot) a huge multi-ethnic empire and still be as stable as Switzerland. It remove the challenge for the more casual play at some point and push people to color paint the map with few to none consequences.
The problem is how you can have (or the Bot) a huge multi-ethnic empire and still be as stable as Switzerland. It remove the challenge for the more casual play at some point and push people to color paint the map with few to none consequences.
If WC happens to stay possible with a lot of luck and skill its fine. But PDX should never ever not address a problem like blob stability just because WC players would complain or WC would become hard or impossible with the fix. Sadly I fear this is already the case.
In its current form the game has no meaningfull alternative to blobing.
If you add some mechanic that becomes so punishing beyond a certain size that it basicaly sets a hardlimit on how big you can grow then you also need to add several mechanics for people to do stuff with inside their realm. INTERESTING mechanics. Not pointless bussywork with buttons, or rebel spam for lulz, or random parts of your country breaking of CK2 style.
There is zero internal management stuff in the game and at this point the more meaningfull question is wether its worth adding those things in now. The game was never build for those in the first place, so hamfisting them in now is unlikely to end well.
We play the game because we like it, people like you are demanding sweeping changes be made with no reasoning beyond " i dont like the current state of the game".
If you add some mechanic that becomes so punishing beyond a certain size that it basicaly sets a hardlimit on how big you can grow then you also need to add several mechanics for people to do stuff with inside their realm. INTERESTING mechanics. Not pointless bussywork with buttons, or rebel spam for lulz, or random parts of your country breaking of CK2 style.
There is zero internal management stuff in the game and at this point the more meaningfull question is wether its worth adding those things in now. The game was never build for those in the first place, so hamfisting them in now is unlikely to end well.
Maybe you should pay attention to what the WC people are actualy saying instead of putting words in their mouths.
We play the game because we like it, people like you are demanding sweeping changes be made with no reasoning beyond " i dont like the current state of the game".
I wanted to give it a try to see if I could break it once, since some friends were goading me to try it. The performance hit is completely oppressive. I conquered some of Mesoamerica with a nation that had a force limit of 1 then quit a few years in after realizing I'd not be getting much past speed 2, ever, and was playing new world
.I think Reman or Siu did a video on it and it was enough to conclude that for all the stuff it adds, you need less ability to optimize within its constraints and the incentives are screwy. Fair enough in a mod I suppose, but not for me.
The way the mechanics are designed and interact since day 1 are inconsistent with your statement.
Claiming something the game actively purports as an achievement goal multiple times is "not a feature" does not appear to have any coherent basis. WC has certainly gotten easier over the past few years, but most people still don't manage. Of those that don't, only a fraction are capable with their current knowledge/ability.
Casual play is casual precisely because it avoids challenge that competitive players or players trying to optimize for something experience.
Well, for starters wars to defend your status quo could be a part of a game where WCs are not possible. But, even if WCs are not nerfed, I'd like to see at least some randomness, meaning that I'd like to see events that can break a WC fight beyond repair even if you play it by the actual standard of "by the books". Now it's mostly math after a point, game looses the unforeseeable part and the challenge that comes from that.
What you did not understand, do not understand, and doggedly fail to understand with every condescending post you pour in these boards, is that there's a difference between "waaaaah it's too difficult nerf it" and "why is this happening this makes no sense". Because if I want a sandbox game with a dusting of history, I play Civilization. I'm here for stuff that makes sense. Eternal internal stability doesn't.
Well, playing Tall or going with a vassal swarm are alternative to blobing, and are viable if not as much great than painting the map like Bob Ross.
And the ''hardlimit'' isn't to stop players from blobbing: it to put some historical logic behind it. No multi-ethnic empire had an easy and peaceful history form the inside. The bigger the weaker from the inside it was, explaining for example why Manchu took over Ming, how Qing failed in face of Opium and so on. Staying big should be by itself some achievement, something that isn't that easy. Not some case of your only danger from the inside is when you go at 100% overextension in pagan land...
Removal of skill variance is not skill, and claiming that removal of skill variance "adds challenge" is nonsense.
I can WC. bbqftw can WC. Marco can WC. There are clear jumps in game performance between us (I'm the least skillful). A game mechanic that makes me succeed where Marco fails by random chance is nonsense. If you play well in a strategy game, you should do well corresponding to how effectively you made your choices.
When RNG is done right, there are decisions that the player needs to make based on the RNG. An event that just breaks you w/o counterplay is a travesty, actively undermining core gameplay where choices matter.
I've probably posted > 100 times on this already, but making such an argument without requesting a total game overhaul top to bottom is *necessarily* incoherent. It's self-inconsistent and therefore irrational.
When players are asked to create and apply their standards for "what makes sense" consistently, they can't present these standards because anything they think of applies similarly to basic mechanics they accept.
Just for example: the game's versions of army composition & logistics, coalitions, player capacity to micromanage units on a 1 day reaction time, monarch points, and inflation are all utter nonsense concepts if you're trying to draw parallels with reality. Eternal stability makes every bit as much sense as these mechanics. If you want to elevate eternal stability as something special/specifically needing a change, there needs to be clear criteria for why specifically this mechanic is singled out.
Even the core premise of "one entity/decision-maker optimizing with the strength of the country as the top priority/consideration for 377 years of a country's existence" is a flagrant deviation from anything that makes historical sense. When you make a system around that premise and are forced to abstract just so the thing runs, you *can't* have everything "make sense" in historical terms.
So justify your position in game terms, set criteria for what needs to make sense, what doesn't, and why. Without that criteria, the argument isn't rational and has no more basis than "the new world should start with 2 million manpower because soda".
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Why should you need luck?
One of the most interesting things is comparing very good horde players vs. the Marcos/gnosteks and seeing the exponential divergence in outcomes. Such starts tend towards limiting rng due to razing and thus they tend to be the best indicator of pure management skill..
The ability required to WC by 1600 vs 1800 is immense, the difference between a fresh player and one capable of doing TTM imo. Yes, pulling off a TTM is just the start of your learning, isn't it great that blobbing offers such mechanical depth?
I am not saying that optimizing tall play takes no skill, but it offers quite a bit less depth.
One of the most interesting things is comparing very good horde players vs. the Marcos/gnosteks and seeing the exponential divergence in outcomes. Such starts tend towards limiting rng due to razing and thus they tend to be the best indicator of pure management skill..
The ability required to WC by 1600 vs 1800 is immense, the difference between a fresh player and one capable of doing TTM imo. Yes, pulling off a TTM is just the start of your learning, isn't it great that blobbing offers such mechanical depth?
I am not saying that optimizing tall play takes no skill, but it offers quite a bit less depth.
By casual play I am talking about non-WC game.
Because we are talking of an ''historical sandbox game'', not a Risk 2.0. World conquest in a realistic world isn't something that could happens without loads of luck, especially in Empire were the travel time from a border province to the capital could take months...
Maybe you should pay attention to the reaction PDX gets whenever they announce something which makes boundless, rapid expansion even just a tiny bit harder.
Risk is the game you're rolling just as many dice and depending on card draws.
Real history didn't have 40000 cannons rolling around. Nor did one decision maker rule the same country regardless of religion, capital location, government form, or disasters for the better part of four centuries. In terms of causality, we don't know how a historical nation that acted that way would perform. The argument is a non-starter, the argument NEEDS to be gameplay based, because this is a game first. Using "x isn't historical" as sole reasoning in a game where its core premise did not and could not have happened in history is non-sequitur.
I would be interested in some concrete examples.
What some might perceive as "harder" is usually just "more tedious".
The last thing i remember from 2 years ago was a change to AE distribution which made a peacedeal between Portugal and Castille go from "Aragon in coalition range"
to "every country from France to Poland in coalition range" for the same provinces taken.
It was quickly reverted because:
1. It was a bug since it was not metioned in the patch notes.
2. Its complete nonsense within the mechanics of the game as there is practically 0 counterplay.
3. Its nonsense with respect to the historical plausibility which oh so many are banging on about, as no country back in the day should, would and could give a shit about what two equaly sized countries do to each other on the other side of the continent.
I wish so much that people would talk more civilly on these threads. Let's not have the mods come in.
That aside, @WeissRaben is making a good argument and one which turns up frequently, though I think a lack of historical knowledge tends to make it come through badly. Huge empires in the timescale did not, by and large, collapse castastrophically due to rebels (which isn't to say that rebels weren't a problem - and there were some very successful ones, such as the Dutch). The Catalans rebelled over and over again, and never achieved independence, and after the Ming-Quing transition the borders of China were much as they were before. But there are struggles which were of tremendous importance in history which are not represented: for example, almost all states in the game's timespan had difficulty collecting a stable revenue for periods of time, and this contributed in a big way to the downfall of enormous empires - the Ming and the Spanish Empire being the most obvious. If you couldn't raise revenue, you risked your army turning on you, and your enemies coming for your blood. In EUIV your economy just grows and grows steadily as you expand. I'm not sure how you'd implement interesting tax reform mechanics, but we have interesting army professionalisation mechanics, so I'm guessing there's a way to do it. That's the kind of feature I'd like to see.
Also, for the record, I agree with @bbqftw that a lot of complainers-about-blobbing seem to spend a lot of time denigrating a skillset that's completely legitimate and has it's own deep interest. I'm very much against a 'git gud' mentality where it conflicts with 'enjoy the game in whatever way you like', but that has to go both ways.
For example when PDX "changed" the "feature" that you basically paid nothing to core provinces on other continents as long as you left a gap between the new provinces and your capital continent which people used for example to core Anatolia and beyond for basically free.
I don't recall the state/territory implementation being panned by too many WC players, and that's what replaced the overseas modifier. There are actual meaningful choices with that one too, as opposed to some of the proposed "struggle w/o counterplay if succeeding" stuff in this thread.
A few of us immediately pointed out the TC autonomy floor being 0 is nonsense too, despite that it makes WC easier.
Sure, it is still a game and many thing are unhistorical (well, the canons aren't in a ratio of 1 man for one canon. It was more 4-5 men per canon so it isn't as bad as it looks). So no, saying that ''other thing do not make senses make it stupid to want it more realisitic''. Especially that ''big empire'' have a way bigger impact on the game than the number of artillery or the decision mechanics.
But even from a game play perspective: big Empire are boring to play. At that point, the only challenge is ''how much land can I grab before the end of the game'', since your neighbour shouldn't be a menace anymore and you do not have any stability problem from the inside.
It was really stupid to fight an Italian Minor with 15k-20k FL who gets free 60k+ troops from one of your rivals, and additional 40k from another one. And this does not count his allies who also got free troops.
With initial Condotiery free and eager renting back then, VH became a game where "player" fights the whole world in every war, regardless Europe/Africa/Asia, regardless size of the target, and especially in the endgame
A good attrition and supplies model could probably make this interesting, but no
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