Centralisation feels too easy, Empires are too stable

[Liquidstuff]

Hello. One of the things that bug me in Eu4 is that it's very easy to have complete control over your country. Historically, Monarchs all over the world hard times imposing their authority.

The game shows the Ottoman Empire as one big block whereas in real life, they had to compose with rather autonomous pachas that could simply refuse to deliver taxes or conscript men for war.

In Western Europe, at the beginning of the game, the centralisation efforts of Louis the Eleventh had most of his de jure subject rise up.

So, if even such successful countries had troubles imposing their rule, I don't get how countries like Vijaynagara or Jaunpur, which are basically cities that grew big, can assert their authority for an extended period of time.

What to say about African countries. Sure, from time to time, great leaders emerge but their authority do not outlive them. What I'm trying to say isthat very few countries can achieve durable centralisation.

So, what should we do ? While autonomy was a nice addition, I think it would be really enjoyable to "conquer your own land" by asserting your central power. Countries in the game feel way to stable compared to their historical conterparts.

What made countries like France successfull during the period was it's stabilty while being able to exploit the full potentiall of it's subject. The same goes for the United Kingdom during the Victorian Era. On the other hand, "puzzle" countries like Spain were at a disavantage. Whenever Philipp the Second ask for help to the Catalans to fight against the Netherlands, their answer was : Have our money, but not our men.

 

[Horn and Ivory]

You're clearly right. But what kind of concrete suggestions/new things/changes to mechanics are you imagining?

 

[Tript]

You're clearly right. But what kind of concrete suggestions/new things/changes to mechanics are you imagining?

I always disliked the stability button. Put some admin I it and poof! Stable country.. a new mechanic can be introduced, which isn't impossible to do.

 

[Sanny]

Hello. One of the things that bug me in Eu4 is that it's very easy to have complete control over your country. Historically, Monarchs all over the world hard times imposing their authority.

The game shows the Ottoman Empire as one big block whereas in real life, they had to compose with rather autonomous pachas that could simply refuse to deliver taxes or conscript men for war.

In Western Europe, at the beginning of the game, the centralisation efforts of Louis the Eleventh had most of his de jure subject rise up.

So, if even such successful countries had troubles imposing their rule, I don't get how countries like Vijaynagara or Jaunpur, which are basically cities that grew big, can assert their authority for an extended period of time.

What to say about African countries. Sure, from time to time, great leaders emerge but their authority do not outlive them. What I'm trying to say isthat very few countries can achieve durable centralisation.

So, what should we do ? While autonomy was a nice addition, I think it would be really enjoyable to "conquer your own land" by asserting your central power. Countries in the game feel way to stable compared to their historical conterparts.

What made countries like France successfull during the period was it's stabilty while being able to exploit the full potentiall of it's subject. The same goes for the United Kingdom during the Victorian Era. On the other hand, "puzzle" countries like Spain were at a disavantage. Whenever Philipp the Second ask for help to the Catalans to fight against the Netherlands, their answer was : Have our money, but not our men.

While I agree with you, you need to remember that this is a game and not reality, you would be taking away a certain degree of fun something which EU4 has been gradually losing over time with new punishing mechanics and more challenges, of course this is all down to what you expect from a game like EU4, some players enjoy punishment and a hard challenge. But there's a point where a game stops being a game and becomes a chore.

If anything the Stability mechanics should be reworked, the boost stability button is rather unrealistic.

 

[liveandletdie14]

Agree it's something Paradox needs to do to focus on the end game as blobbing is too powerful. But it is how to do it without being annoying rebel fest and be fun and challenging

 

[humb]

There have been many suggestions for this problem over the last years. Limiting blobbing with a very elaborated Communication-Efficiency-like mechanic that introduces a minimum autonomy the farther the distance of the capital to the provice like proposed in this thread: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ansion-and-conquest-ce.1012349/#post-22663304 As far as I know, none of the devs ever replied to such suggestions, so its unlikely for such things to be implemented.
But if you want a challenge and more immersion, you can checkout the excellent MEIOU&TAXES Mod which has a lot of mechanics that make it difficult to manage a big empire, adds tons of flavour, dynamic trade-and production centers as well as tradegoods and a pop-system. The author of the thread posted went there as well and is actively developing a submod.

 

[Badesumofu]

I kind of feel like this is more CK2's area. Especially conquering your own land and taming your vassals.

 

[YuriiH]

The game revolves around "development" (in earlier versions, it was "base tax") reflecting province population to some extent.
Province development influences everything important: money, army, warscore, even the choice of HRE electors.
This leads to an issue, the more development you have, the more money and army you get, and the more warscore you are—without any major drawbacks.
Of course, autonomy and state limit create some borders, but in this case you simply need even more development to be averagely stable.

I don't think this will ever be re-designed in EU4, because it is the core of almost all EU4 systems.

P.S. That is one of the reasons why 6mln Muscovy/Russia in the wild and cold woods/steppes has in-game development on par with highly inhabited 18mln France.
Otherwise, Muscovy would be incredibly weak within the EU4 systems.

 

[Richard Karlsson]

I agree that some difficulties managing a huge empire should be introduced in the game.

As I see it, the Aggressive Expansion and Over Extension are mechanics stopping you from, or at least making it more difficult to, blobbing very fast. However, it only makes you blob slower, it doesn't necessarily stop you from blobbing. Of course, blobbing shouldn't be impossible, but in my opinion it should be more challenging to manage a huge empire than is the case at the moment.

So, there should be some difficulties/challenges introduced as a result of having a large number of provinces (not just with quickly gaining them). One way is of course to introduce a new mechanic into the game, but I'm not sure that is necessary. A lot of the mechanics that are already in the game could probably be tweaked and adjusted to have this result. Some of them are:

• Over Extension
• Local Autonomy
  
• Administrative Efficiency
• Absolutism
• Vassal States
• Government Rank

There are probably even more mechanics that I can't think of right now, that could be used for this.

This would make the last 150 years of the game much more interesting, even if you're a large empire. As it is right now, I find it less interesting once your country makes it into the Great Powers list.

 

[Andy_Dandy]

In earlier versions rebellions could actually be an issue. Not sure why they decided on making it so easy to create a stable country, even when you have alot of minority cultures.

 

[blackchoas]

This is a problem paradox has never solved, its not just EU4 large empires are too stable in literally all their games, CK2 is the worst in my opinion but it can basically be said about all their games.

I think part of the reason is that its a fun vs realism problem, its too difficult to make a system that is seriously challenging/punishing to large empires while making it still fun, since it would be easy to design a simple system that does this but then it would just feel like players are being punished for playing the game, its also a bit of a challenge to make it work with the AI, after all we are talking about an anti-blobbing system that is good enough to challenge players yet not so power that the AI can't handle it, but you also wouldn't want something like the current coalition system which the AI seems to understand perfectly well, which really just means that the AI will never conqueror enough to get coalitions and thus the system is functional a player only system

Its really not a simply check list of bars you have to pass and to be perfectly honest I think unfortunately one couldn't really know if they had made a good system until it was totally complete, which is why Paradox pretty much just dodges the issues since it could easily be a trap of spending 5 months designing a system that ends up proved about as effective and fun as coalitions

 

[Lacost]

Honestly, I don't think destabilizing huge empires takes the fun out of the game. I personally would like to actually have something to do after the 17th century. Normally I am so big at this point that I only force the achievements I'm hunting for and then drop the campaign immediately out of boredom.

The chore is not to keep my empire together but to keep playing without any reason on a gameplay perspective. Achievements, personal goals or beautiful borders are what is keeping me in the late game and not to game mechanics. After almost 1000 hours in the game I have never, ever seen a revolution and I only hit the 1821 mark a few times. For me the game could as well end after 1700.

But, if my 1600 empire would be seriously challenged by internal affairs so it isn't becoming the unstoppable juggernaut until the late game, then the timeframe of EU4 could be utilized far better.

 

[Buladelu]

The solution should lie somewhere with institutions.

Here's an idea: something like a Tradition value. Makes people content with your country, makes them believe in the future. Lowers cost of raising stability, maybe slightly lowers cost of stabilities. You get it automatically. Or, perhaps, it's a slightly reworked Splendor.

Anyway, the point is you get a severe hit to it when you adopt an institution, nullify it if it's a separate value, and if it's splendor just make it frozen for X years and remove age bonuses. Perhaps also a stability hit, national unrest penalty. Because you do work against an essentially conservative society. Institutions are well suited to model problems that numerous rulers saw when they tried to modernize their countries.

If the splendor is used than there's a clear reason to postpone modernisation for powerful countries. After all they probably have all those Splendor bonuses of the age. Only when it's clear that the new age has dawned it makes sense for them to adopt new institutions and catch up technologically, before that they rely on their splendor and special age abilities. Raising powers though probably don't have as much splendor and can just adopt those institutions - also national unrest is not as problematic for them as for the big empires.

 

[dayalu]

Something to encourage great powers from allaying. Increased stability cost ... Dynamic stability idk, lose wars and provinces and still be stable thats wired. Religion and culture should be harder to convert too.

 

[Richard Karlsson]

...maybe one can think of solutions on a province-level?

For example that every province has a "nationalism"-value indicating how convinced the population in the province are that they should belong to the country they currently are part of. There is a long list of aspects that could influence this value:

• Other countries having a core on the province (encouraging revoke core in peace deals)
  
• Distance to the capital (encouraging vassal states)
  
• Development improvements in the province done by the current country
  
• Province recently belonged to other country
• Prosperity
• Separatism
• Legitimacy
• Accepted culture
• Religion
  
• etc.

Too many provinces with low "nationalism" (or whatever it should be called) would lead to problems for the empire.

This is quite similar to the unrest value, but maybe it can be adapted to better include this aspect of unrest?

 

[stnk]

There are already two concepts in the game which should put some sense into the empires but don't work at all. Actually they are exceptionally frustrating, I bet noone, not even the devs like them:
1) overextension - the more you conquer the worse it is, including extremely annoying over 100% events, but after you core everything suddenly everything is fine. That's silly. The overextension should persist (with more fine tunned modifiers/events then the current ones). I would instead make overextension be modelled simply as a ratio between state cores and territory cores/uncored provinces. The more territory vs. states you have the more over extended you are and the less you get from your land and occasionally face something bad.

2) rebels - One of the problems I have with them is that they don't provide any gain once beaten. They're just annoying, punishing mechanic and not really dangerous to empires. So I would much more prefer CK2 faction style rebels. Say Hungarians and Czechs wants freedom on Austria - they create a faction, you should have some options to calm them down with diplomacy, and if they rebel, they should rebel in Netherlands style. The important thing is profit - once you beat them you should be able to get something from it otherwise it's again boring/frustrating. And because as a faction tag they could actually behave as normal AI armies, they would be more difficult to put down, or even they could break you completely with help of intervening rivals ( just don't over do it )

 

[Dalos]

I always disliked the stability button. Put some admin I it and poof! Stable country.. a new mechanic can be introduced, which isn't impossible to do.

I once proposed to remove this immediate effect and was told Johan is against such a thing... Maybe whole new mechanic would be better...

 

[PsychoLold]

2) rebels - One of the problems I have with them is that they don't provide any gain once beaten. They're just annoying, punishing mechanic and not really dangerous to empires. So I would much more prefer CK2 faction style rebels. Say Hungarians and Czechs wants freedom on Austria - they create a faction, you should have some options to calm them down with diplomacy, and if they rebel, they should rebel in Netherlands style. The important thing is profit - once you beat them you should be able to get something from it otherwise it's again boring/frustrating. And because as a faction tag they could actually behave as normal AI armies, they would be more difficult to put down, or even they could break you completely with help of intervening rivals ( just don't over do it )

Sorry, but this is just micromanagement again, isn't it? If you conquer a bunch of minor nations you just end up fighting a lot of small angry factions, which is just as annoying and time-consuming as fighting EU4's stupid rebels. Also, this only makes sense in Europe, where you have de-jure vassals. East Africa, SE Asia or in the steppes had vastly different administrative systems.

It is a really difficult topic, since the challenges for a conqueror during that time frame did not only lie in differences in culture and religion, but in different legal systems, administrative traditions, diseases, information transfer times and the gap between the cities and the surrounding countryside. There's a reason why the Europeans didn't fully 'core' their conquests in Africa and Asia, but just created trade companies, because they only wanted the money and not deal too much with the local populations. I don't have any idea how to model this in a video game without making it yet another tiring button click fest. If core provinces could contribute to overextension (depending on culture, distance from capital, autonomy level etc) it would just lead to more rebels, making humanism even more mandatory for a conqueror and not contributing to gameplay value. What @Liquidstuff suggests "conquer your own land" to me sounds like decrease autonomy, fight particularists, win, repeat until you have 0% autonomy.

Except for the rebels and the estates, I'm happy with how EU4 is right now. Making it more realistic would require a complete redesign from scratch to add more state-building into gameplay. We don't know if this would be fun or interesting.

Edit: Just a thought: Historically, a great challenge for all large nations in the world was the process of succession after monarch death. So maybe there could be a mechanic that raises autonomy in certain states or even create vassals after a successful monarch dies. That would certainly be more interesting than the -1 stab you receive when your king dies.

 

[Buladelu]

I once proposed to remove this immediate effect and was told Johan is against such a thing... Maybe whole new mechanic would be better...

It's less of an issue now that stability is just one of the characteristics of your government - you may have low legitimacy (or more importantly horde unity), high corruption, low power projection, low prestige, low diplomatic reputation, low institution spread. Many of those things are just lack of bonuses but it still means other countries have an edge cause they have it and you do not. Stability is a rare problem you can fix relatively easily.

 

[Liquidstuff]

There are already two concepts in the game which should put some sense into the empires but don't work at all. Actually they are exceptionally frustrating, I bet noone, not even the devs like them:
1) overextension - the more you conquer the worse it is, including extremely annoying over 100% events, but after you core everything suddenly everything is fine. That's silly. The overextension should persist (with more fine tunned modifiers/events then the current ones). I would instead make overextension be modelled simply as a ratio between state cores and territory cores/uncored provinces. The more territory vs. states you have the more over extended you are and the less you get from your land and occasionally face something bad.

2) rebels - One of the problems I have with them is that they don't provide any gain once beaten. They're just annoying, punishing mechanic and not really dangerous to empires. So I would much more prefer CK2 faction style rebels. Say Hungarians and Czechs wants freedom on Austria - they create a faction, you should have some options to calm them down with diplomacy, and if they rebel, they should rebel in Netherlands style. The important thing is profit - once you beat them you should be able to get something from it otherwise it's again boring/frustrating. And because as a faction tag they could actually behave as normal AI armies, they would be more difficult to put down, or even they could break you completely with help of intervening rivals ( just don't over do it )

THIS is what we need. Plunder the coffers of the nobles you crushed, remove the head of an heretic church in your land translatting in less agitation. Get an increase in taxes pressuring the peasant who just revolted. Unruly burgers, have their priviledges remove.