Bureaucracy budget slider

[Incompetent]

Put a slider in the budget panel to control how much you invest in administrators. The job of your administrators is to reduce local autonomy - if you don't give them any money, you don't get any ticking LA reduction. (No money is needed to maintain the status quo, so there's no risk of an LA death spiral.) The cost is based on how many non-overseas provinces you have that are above their LA floor, and effectiveness of ticking LA reduction scales inversely with distance from the capital. So for a small state taking a couple of provinces, the cost is minor. But if you suddenly blob out and create a huge empire where everywhere has a lot of LA, you need to either pay a lot of money to turn it into useful territory, or be really good at beating rebels so that manual LA reduction is a practical choice. If you choose to pay, you need to decide how fast to do it.

To balance this out, the base (i.e. full-cost) LA reduction rates can be made significantly higher, especially in the early game, so every kind of government has a baseline LA reduction ability (not counting the 'at peace' modifier). Also, overextension can be rebalanced: the unrest effects should be less severe than now, but overextension hampers your ability to reduce LA. Instead of being an acute 'coring crisis', the challenges of expanding too quickly should be more long-term, concerning the difficulty of integrating your newly-acquired lands and making a profit from them.

 

[Fluffy_Fishy]

I think that bureaucracy should be a thing but it should be more important than just LA reduction, there should be other affects that actually make it fairly important and it should maybe work with some kind of corruption mechanic too, I don't think LA is actually much of a concern to people.

 

[BrokenSky]

Autonomy should be a part of Imperial Administration, just not the whole thing. It's a step i the right direction though...

 

[Incompetent]

I think that bureaucracy should be a thing but it should be more important than just LA reduction, there should be other affects that actually make it fairly important and it should maybe work with some kind of corruption mechanic too, I don't think LA is actually much of a concern to people.

LA is a huge concern if you can't reduce it. The only reason players ignore LA at the moment is that they know it will automatically go away, with no further effort on their part.

You could have a corruption mechanic, but I think in terms of game mechanics, LA can already do the job. At the grand strategy level, what is the difference between corruption (taxes are illegally siphoned off by local officials) and high local autonomy (local taxes are legitimately siphoned off by the local sanjak-bey)? The end result either way is less money/power for the central government.

*Increasing* LA/corruption due to a poorly funded administration would be realistic, but I don't suggest it as it would feel too punitive for the player, and the AI would fall into a death spiral very easily.

 

[Fluffy_Fishy]

Something might come out of the upcoming estates mechanic to make it more important, currently I quite like LA as it is, don't fix what isn't broken. The bureaucratic slider still interests me hugely, just not quite for the reasons you stated