Can we get a rework for pirate nations?
- Thread starter Rainwors
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The mercenary contracts one could maybe be replaced with something else like galley or light ship combat ability, and 'Northern Ports' rather than trade steering could be inland trade power. The ideas aren't bad, and Pomerania is in the right place to benefit from them, I just feel that the other regional formables have better ideas. Still, you can form Pomerania more easily than some of the others so maybe that's why.
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There's a significant disconnect between the EU 4 concept of "pirate republic" when compared to literally anything in history. You'd have to squint pretty hard to compare even the closest examples.
As a pirate republic in the game expands to hundreds of development, it becomes an incredible reach to still call that a "pirate republic". Unless, of course, you just have a really cynical view of government in general (there's a joke or two I can make here, but better for off topic).
As a pirate republic in the game expands to hundreds of development, it becomes an incredible reach to still call that a "pirate republic". Unless, of course, you just have a really cynical view of government in general (there's a joke or two I can make here, but better for off topic).
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This is, why do i have a formal army, why i have traders, why i can protect trade, why there are not pirates of my own nation raiding other pirates or merchants of the nation itsel. Even if they make an anarchist agreement to respect each other why is it organized like a normal state. I feel like an horde of the sea more than a pirate.
Why people from a town into deep territory like middle nord-america/europe would participate in a nation like ship raiding (in the coast you only do coast raiding).
At least you should be able solve this problems through reforms, or missions/decisions, but you can't just start with that all of this, give at least sense to the gameplay evolution.
Maybe pirate republics should have something like the old MR mechanics - ie. SERIOUS problems if you expand beyond ~20 provinces? (Except, in addition, all inland provinces should cause serious problems for pirate republics.)
To prevent trivialisation of this mechanic via vassals: prevent pirate republics from having non-tributary subjects, and allow them to have (and force) tributaries.
You can pay in raids, or you can pay tribute, but you WILL pay!
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Pirate Republics get allies just fine. There's no alliance malus, unless the target coast was raided.
The BEST (or should I write most FUN) pirate republics are ones made from existing nations that have huge mission trees and a lot of potential.
Kilwa Pirate Republic for the Freest Man in the World achievement was a lot of fun!
Palembang Pirate Republic can form Malaya.
Cebu Pirate Republic can also form Malaya, and it's a lot of fun after taking expansion to raid Ming's coastline and then trade war and then watching PDX coding make Ming explode due to the devastation.
Kilwa Pirate Republic for the Freest Man in the World achievement was a lot of fun!
Palembang Pirate Republic can form Malaya.
Cebu Pirate Republic can also form Malaya, and it's a lot of fun after taking expansion to raid Ming's coastline and then trade war and then watching PDX coding make Ming explode due to the devastation.
It is really fun. Huge mission tree and starting between big nations.
By the way, one of the reasons why I think that nations that turned pirate should change their NI to Piratical is because of "Religious Apathy" - not only provinces that are not of your religion should not contribute to religious unity and don't give any penalties, but you also should be locked out of any interaction with religious mechanics: constant -100 to papal authority/church power/fervor/patriarch authority, at least for Christians. For muslims - I don't know, maybe constantly staying at 0 Legalism/Mysticism, for Buddhists - -100 Karma.
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If all pirates should have this religious apathy, it's probably better to put it in the tier 1 gov reform.
I mean, what priest would willingly deal with outlaws and give them blessings? Or better yet: what good is church attendance for outlaws? Except for grabbing some golden icons, knick-knacks and whatever.
What I was trying to say is, I don't know if I fully agree with the proposed mechanic (particularly for religions that don't have a large organisational structure), but if you wanted to implement a consistent mechanic for all pirates then it should probably go in the tier 1 gov reform instead of the national ideas. And this would have the added advantage of allowing pirate nations to have unique NIs, which usually makes for a more compelling playthrough.
Maybe you are right, but what national ideas for different pirate holdouts can be? What is the big principal difference between pirates of New Providence and Baltic corsairs of Rugen?
YES! Should it be like an insult CB, protect trade or something completely new. I don't know if the devs would put in work for something like that.
Unless you take that admittedly tempting "privateer's way" government reform, which blocks allying non-pirates. Sometimes it's not worth it, but +1 RT and morale is pretty nice if you're not relying on allies to carry you or sponge AE.
Another useful thing to know when playing pirate republics is that if you take a reform that gives you an estate, that implies by extension that you get the crown land mechanic and thus the reform progress multiplier if you have a high %. Since pirate republics unlock an early equivalent to "imperialism" and eventually even razing, you really want that progress!
They get +75% gov cap cost in states, so they are already somewhat more challenging than regular nations to scale up in strength, at least at first.
Doesn't fit so well with all religion options though, and makes ones with limited mechanics/better "up front" bonuses just objectively better for pirates specifically, which is odd.
Galley vs ocean focus? Maybe some HRE/Protestant stuff, since it's Germany?
The argument is stronger for pirate nations that already have custom national ideas, eg. Gotland/Cornwall/Palembang. Forcing all pirate nations to have pirate NIs means these nations would lose their custom NIs.
Doesn't stop you from expanding massively via TCs...
I guess where I'm going with this is that it would be nice to have some nations in EU4 where a wide playstyle is actively discouraged. You can definitely argue that MRs would have expanded widely if they could, so the old mechanic (massive corruption for going over province limit) was not a good fit. Tribal anarchists are extremely niche. And I'm not aware of any other tall-only nations in the current version.
I think it makes some kind of historical and gameplay sense for pirates to be strongly discouraged from going wide, at least initially. And you could lean into this with a number of further developments. (Maybe add a CB to destroy coastal batteries (ie. enable future raiding)? Maybe add an anti-pirate-hunting CB? Maybe add the ability to "go wide" as a late-tier gov reform?)
Civ 5 continues to be a blight on strategy gaming over a decade later.
Games and their mechanics create incentive structures. In game environments where entities are competing over resources, an "exclusively tall" setup is toxic. The whole point is competition and tradeoffs. There's no functional reason to avoid going both tall and wide...but when you destroy wide, you get broken incentives. The "tall" entity is then incentivized to avoid engagement with others in the game. At best, it might be forced to defend itself...but everyone needs to do that anyway because you lose when you die in the game.
??? there is no historical "sense" in a "pirate government" operating in the context of multiple provinces, period. The degree of organization required amounts to...well...a government. The kind with laws, bureaucracies, etc. Some effectively sponsored pirates, which I guess could then be called "pirate governments". But there was no ship captain on the biggest flagship ruling stuff the size of historical duchies. That's just not a thing in history, and it's not hard to reason out why it wasn't a thing.
In the context of EU 4's design, a forced-tall nation is at best a "play the same game, but less" setup. We got away from this already with merchant republics being improved. Pirate republics have fairly unique interactions right now, and are fun if the player can get past their meme nature. I don't want more nations who are penalized or blocked from taking what would otherwise be the best option in their peace deals, and instead sacrifice big costs to do crap like destroying buildings and remaining weak relative to the rest of the field.
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I kinda agree with this thought. However, you seem to be saying that pirates shouldn't own more than one province... which kinda goes against your next point saying that forced tall play is anathema...
For reference, the way I think a pirate republic might work is as a loose confederation which administers a few safe harbours. You have to abide by the rules of the harbours, or you're outlawed even from the outlaws. If the harbour is attacked then everyone who uses it should defend it (and many will actually turn up to do so). (Eg: Nassau, perhaps.) The "loose confederation" part is difficult to model properly in EU4 (except perhaps via the OPM trade league mechanism?), which is why a tight restriction on number of provinces seems like a reasonable idea.
I kinda agree that, for most EU4 nations, tall play is just wide but less. I think that's a little bit sad, but the changes that would be required to make it substantially different are wide-ranging (eg. make peacetime fun) and therefore unlikely to ever occur.
I don't think that the desire for tall play is a civ 5 thing. I think, at base, it stems from the observation that in the real world many nations were quite happy as local powers - even in the age of world empires, there were significant holdouts who were not absorbed. EU4 doesn't model this well at all.
However, pirates could IMO be reworked into a true exception - a nation that's fun to play tall. There is potentially a whole different gameplay style in there, with raiding, privateering, tributising, seizing ports to extend your raid range, defending those ports against outraged conventional nations, maybe a way to get own coast naval bonus (to protect your precious islands), maybe a way to raid 3-4 sea tiles from home (instead of only 2), maybe an automated coastal raiding mechanism, etc. You're never going to conquer the world, but you can dominate the sea.
I'm saying that "pirate republic" was never a thing historically and the historically correct thing would be to have pirates be unplayable and act more like they did in early EU 4.
However, if we do include "pirate republic" as a game mechanic for fun, I'd prefer to still play the game while controlling it. Among the things I'd advocate spending effort to improve in EU 4, pirate government isn't even on my radar.
EU diplo breaks it. You're more or less suggesting something different from any of the other playable entity options on the map. Like a "play as the barbarians in Civ" type of mini game. But EU 4 doesn't have enough special mechanics for that, so it would require designing and implementing them. Or...we could just leave a functional/unique government as is and it'll be fine.
That's what makes EU 4 though. You can design games that model internal mechanics. In the context of EU 4's level of abstraction, however, asking for "tall emphasized or exclusive" gameplay is only a little bit less ridiculous than asking for "tall gameplay" in Mario Kart, Call of Duty, or Binding of Isaac.
Like in a team deathmatch game of CoD, one guy doesn't get any utility from killing the enemy, for some reason, and instead his incentives are mostly just to hide, or maybe do a little bit of damage to someone engaged with his teammate. But he's penalized if he kills the enemy!
Granted, some people actually play like that. They predictably do poorly, though CoD doesn't share the same requests to incentivize that play style.
Expansion by conquest and internal development of empires both pre-date Civ 5 by decades. However, prior to Civ 5's toxic nonsense, I do not recall any serious discussion about doing one to the exclusion of the other as a unique play style. Maybe it happened. Firaxis probably got the idea from somewhere. But it was not widespread. Players mostly went for whatever they thought got them closer to winning. Often, that was expansion, but when the empire could be improved more internally (either because expansion was not possible or the mechanics constraining expansion made the best cost proposition temporarily shift), players did that as well.
What Civ 5 "contributed" was penalizing people for conquering other nations, and creating a set of options that let you be competitive to win the game on minimal territory, without contesting the resources available on the rest of the map. It was after that travesty that I started seeing more and more "I want to play tall" type discussions crop up. Even in games like Dominions, where "playing tall" within the game's rules makes about as much sense as "playing tall" in chess.
EU 4 doesn't even have a defined win condition in that way.
You can dominate the sea with Great Britain. Or with Luba, if you want.
Raiding, privateering, tributaries, and seizing ports for range extensions are all available to conventional nations, as is fighting outraged conventional nations. The in-practice outcome of this in EU 4 is that you will fight wars similarly, get less returns/growth for the trouble, and still function absolutely nothing like historical pirates.
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