Corruption hate - why??

[TheMeInTeam]

I'm OK with corruption discouraging technology imbalances. It's always lame to see an African nation almost keeping up in military technology but intentionally ignoring the other technologies in favor of expansion, then getting a western neighbor to magically catch up. That might be the best way to expand rapidly, but it's also lame.

I'm less sure about religious unity. It seems that getting higher levels of tolerance through Humanist ideas, decisions, and so on should be a valid strategy. All of that still helps with unrest, but now you absolutely must convert everything to avoid corruption. That's kind of weird.

Lame is the way the tech group disparity and monarch points railroads exist in the first place.

Worst of all is that as such a nation you can never focus MIL or even focus DIP or ADM and still wind up with a disparity. In an extreme case I was MIL 6 and ADM 3 despite having cored < 100 development directly, due to bad ADM rulers, without a single day of military focus.

Being penalized for that is awkward to the point of absurdity. It's a strict nerf basically due to how disparity in rulers for ROTW translates to larger tech gaps.

The corruption is solely off your religious unity so high tolerance would be fine as highly tolerated religions don't decrease your religious unity.

This is correct, no corruption from RU in this one:





However, the way it works right now makes animism, totemism, Confucian, Shinto, Judaism, Zoroastrian, Sikh into false choice religions. They have no out; they can't convert fast enough with religious nor tolerate enough with humanist. These were already trash can religions in 1.15, so the idea that they needed to be nerfed won't hold.

You can avoid the issue by going Sunni (yet again), but that's not making the game more interesting.

Tengri and Fetish can escape the fate with humanist, Hindu can also to a lesser extent (definitely with even +1 heathen tolerance in NI or a +unity idea like Vijay's).

 

[Xinkc]

I just don't understand what Paradox is trying to achieve with this mechanic. It doesn't make the game harder, it doesn't make it more fun... what does it do?

It adds another punishment (only lack of corruption or very low corruption allows for the positive events which now rarely occur in the current patch) on top other other features/mechanics that already punished one either implicitly or explicitly. The goal of this was to, obviously, nerf the things it dissuades and, as Johan said in another thread, nerf the ROTW.

 

[rho]

One thing I never seem to see people mentioning is that getting a certain level of corruption is OK. You don't have to keep your corruption at 0, just as you don't need to keep inflation at zero or debt at zero. Ignoring corruption means that you get to be more powerful now (relatively to countries who are not ignoring it) but that you will have to pay for it in the future. Sometimes this is worth it. Sometimes this is not worth it.

I played a campaign as Adal in which I went up to about 10% corruption. This isn't a super high amount, but it's definitely enough that you start feeling it. However, ignoring corruption for a while meant that I was able to grow, able to defeat my neighbours, and able to improve my economy. Once I was at the point where I wasn't dirt poor and wasn't under existential threat from bigger, more powerful neighbours, then I could move my focus and start bringing corruption back down.

I totally get that this sort of play-style isn't for everyone, but for me it made for some interesting gameplay choices and an interesting overal arc to the campaign's narrative.

 

[Edmon]

I wrote this for another thread but it really belongs here as well:

If you blob hard enough, your autonomy never goes down because you are never at peace.
If you blob hard enough, you are riding 5 to 10 war exhaustion all the time because you are never at peace.
If you blob hard enough, you have revolts going on pretty much ceaselessly because of seperatism.
If you blob hard enough, you have coalitions due to all the AE your piling on so quickly.
If you blob hard enough, you never have any admin for technology or ideas even though you might like them.
If you blob hard enough, you never have any man power to use because it does not regenerate fast enough.
If you blob hard enough, your money is a wide razors edge you are riding to victory due to poor autonomy and OE preventing trade.
If you blob hard enough, alliances are not formed before you need to be breaking them and moving on.
If you blob hard enough, your religious unity with plummet as you expand out of your natural zone, even when Sunni.
If you blob hard enough, diplomatic vassalisations are a pipe dream.

If you blob hard enough and you cant take it, "separatist rebels" the disaster is just waiting to put an end to your empire. Pushing the limits of what you can get away with taking without self destruction is nail biting and interesting. Encountering the big blue blob and it posing a real and serious risk to your survival is interesting.

Now you can't blob hard enough, all these challenges are eliminated while you wait for corruption to allow you to continue.

Guess what. Managing one thing (by waiting) is a million times less interesting than managing all those dynamic things I just mentioned. Quelle surprise.

 

[Ratanka]

Try playing Qara Qoyunlu, or the Bahmanis. Hell, try play the Ottomans.

jaeh and ?
i played now ottomans and i played korea and with both i had like ... never over 2 corruptio n... its kindergarden ... sry but especially as ottomans u have SO much money i can spend 15 ducats to pay it down no problem ...
just go down 1 advisor or have 1 army less no problem at all its cakewalk

 

[bbqftw]

Lame is the way the tech group disparity and monarch points railroads exist in the first place.

Worst of all is that as such a nation you can never focus MIL or even focus DIP or ADM and still wind up with a disparity. In an extreme case I was MIL 6 and ADM 3 despite having cored < 100 development directly, due to bad ADM rulers, without a single day of military focus.

Being penalized for that is awkward to the point of absurdity. It's a strict nerf basically due to how disparity in rulers for ROTW translates to larger tech gaps.



This is correct, no corruption from RU in this one:





However, the way it works right now makes animism, totemism, Confucian, Shinto, Judaism, Zoroastrian, Sikh into false choice religions. They have no out; they can't convert fast enough with religious nor tolerate enough with humanist. These were already trash can religions in 1.15, so the idea that they needed to be nerfed won't hold.

You can avoid the issue by going Sunni (yet again), but that's not making the game more interesting.

Tengri and Fetish can escape the fate with humanist, Hindu can also to a lesser extent (definitely with even +1 heathen tolerance in NI or a +unity idea like Vijay's).

Hey man you can form Mughals, you've totally got choices.

 

[I'm gaming]

Perfectly agree with OP. Expanding with managing corruption is very easy if we don't play ROTW OPM, which is supposed to be very difficult.

Corruption is scaled from 0 to 100, so we can accept it 10~20 and reduce it later. But I haven't even gotten it more than 2 while I made ROTW small state to great power at 1.16.1, and now it's 1.16.2.... Maybe it should be scaled from 0 to 10.

 

[HaniNachmias]

Mainly because it forces my hand when it comes to decide where to put the points, tech or ideas.

 

[BarrosRodrigues]

I wrote this for another thread but it really belongs here as well:

If you blob hard enough, your autonomy never goes down because you are never at peace.
If you blob hard enough, you are riding 5 to 10 war exhaustion all the time because you are never at peace.
If you blob hard enough, you have revolts going on pretty much ceaselessly because of seperatism.
If you blob hard enough, you have coalitions due to all the AE your piling on so quickly.
If you blob hard enough, you never have any admin for technology or ideas even though you might like them.
If you blob hard enough, you never have any man power to use because it does not regenerate fast enough.
If you blob hard enough, your money is a wide razors edge you are riding to victory due to poor autonomy and OE preventing trade.
If you blob hard enough, alliances are not formed before you need to be breaking them and moving on.
If you blob hard enough, your religious unity with plummet as you expand out of your natural zone, even when Sunni.
If you blob hard enough, diplomatic vassalisations are a pipe dream.

If you blob hard enough and you cant take it, "separatist rebels" the disaster is just waiting to put an end to your empire. Pushing the limits of what you can get away with taking without self destruction is nail biting and interesting. Encountering the big blue blob and it posing a real and serious risk to your survival is interesting.

Now you can't blob hard enough, all these challenges are eliminated while you wait for corruption to allow you to continue.

Guess what. Managing one thing (by waiting) is a million times less interesting than managing all those dynamic things I just mentioned. Quelle surprise.

You have a point in some things you say but others are probably because you are expanding carelessly, in another words poor gameplay. I can expand very fast without suffering many if not most of what you are suggesting but we do need to know when to (for example) feed a vassal or who to attack and when. Corruption as seen in 1.16.2 still railroads gameplay, still hurts ROTW the most and may force us to wait a bit but it is nothing compared to what it was before; with that said what I find hugely annoying are the f****** events that unless you play a "perfect" game from PDS POV (perfect RU, tech balance and no OE) you´ll be hit with a shitton of those at an alarming rate which will definitely slow you down if you start very small/poor. Like I said before using vassals to core and convert is the cheapest way to expand now. Whenever everything else is equal always conquer the provinces with the lowest manpower ratio if you want to maximize income by minimizing the effects of corruption on the economy.

 

[Edmon]

You have a point in some things you say but others are probably because you are expanding carelessly, in another words poor gameplay. I can expand very fast without suffering many if not most of what you are suggesting.

We have different ideas of what very fast is.

This is what I mean by very fast:

 

[Dayledose]

The "simple solution" would be to simply cap how much AI can spend on fighting corruption, isn't it?

Honestly the "simple solution" would be to remove the mechanic and utilize the features it overlaps with that the AI already understands and deals with. The reality though is that Johan and crew won't remove it, because if you take away corruption, you finally have to admit you can't really stop people from Blobbing hard. Corruption only does one thing, slow the game down; That's it, it won't stop people from doing WC's , it won't stop them from expanding. Hell if Edmon really wanted I'm sure he could probably go hard within the new mechanic and give the Devs a big "Screw your mechanic" WC that was done with a ROTW OPM that only took 50 years longer than it would have with 1.15.1 and if not him some other player that has more patience than I.

Really though as I said in my post earlier, I'm just tired of people trying to make this game something it's not, it's a game of conquest. I mean sure you "can" have fun doing things other than conquest, but really everything in the game is shallow and unrewarding except conquest. You want deep country management and diplomacy, go play CK2. You want less abstract but still on a "global" scale, Vic2. You want to conquer, rule a nation and play one of any number ( how many are there now?) nations in various different parts of the globe? Well EU4 should be for you, but it's becoming less and less that type of game.

 

[I'm gaming]

We have different ideas of what very fast is.

This is what I mean by very fast:

5/3/16.. Basically what developers don't want to see and what couldn't be done at real world.

And I thinkt that what he said about 'very fast' is exactly same with what you said.

 

[Dayledose]

5/3/16.. Basically what developers don't want to see and what couldn't be done at real world.

Okay so what happens if he does basically the same thing only it takes him 100 years more? did corruption work at that point? It's still what the Devs don't want to see nor what could happen in the "Real World" of a video game.

 

[BarrosRodrigues]

We have different ideas of what very fast is.

This is what I mean by very fast:

Lol, you do have an attitude but I will endulge you, when I said "very fast" I meant this:

After Saara756 trashed my previous 1624 (world domination only), 1632 and 1598 WCs with his 1582 record I had to try one last time; I started in 1.14 as Jianzhou (before 1.15 was released) and formed Manchu to be able to use the "Unify China" CB.

I recorded the whole thing and I am going to dump it all to my YouTube account if you want to check how it was done. It won´t have commentary and as usual it will be very boring so watch it only if you really don´t have anything better to do. I will post a link to the series here within the day.

YouTube:

That can lead to this or better if I had my competitive hat on :

I decided to unlock the "One faith" achievement as an animist Manchu, here is the result:

You can see how I did it in my twitch channel. This is the last recording:
https://www.twitch.tv/marcoan7onio_/v/58549854

 

[I'm gaming]

Okay so what happens if he does basically the same thing only it takes him 100 years more? did corruption work at that point? It's still what the Devs don't want to see nor what could happen in the "Real World" of a video game.

'5/3/16' meat his technology levels.

And the reason why we can't see it in real world is that countries in real world don't want to have that kind of unbalance of technology- level 3 dip and 16 mil means that mil is faster than dip approximately 169 years. Well, the country in real world can have that unbalance, but it doesn't. We can have that unbalance in the game, with heavy penalty for corruption- so we don't. That's all.

 

[Edmon]

@BarrosRodrigues

Fair enough, you understand the game enough to play it very fast.

If you can avoid all the punishments of very fast play then fair enough to you, it makes you a better player than me. However that said, all of your screenshots are of 1.15 Hordes. They are unstoppably broken and their ability to alchemise mana means that you can buy your way out of any problem you might have. Not saying that it still is not difficult in its own way to get the time of conquest down to those kind of world breaking levels and I definitely respect that. However, between their CB, pure cav armies and razing, they aren't exactly difficult to do well with.

Playing very fast with a non-horde is going to be that much more of a struggle, because you will fall behind on tech, stab, money, etc very heavily without extreme careful management as you very well know.

TL,DR = Fair point, well made, but stop posting 1.15 hordes to make this point.

 

[Dayledose]

Lol, you do have an attitude but I will endulge you, when I said "very fast" I meant this:



That can lead to this or better if I had my competitive hat on :

Well now those are some pictures I can appreciate even if I can't accomplish it myself at this point.

 

[Noel84]

Lol, you do have an attitude but I will endulge you, when I said "very fast" I meant this:



That can lead to this or better if I had my competitive hat on :

*bows*

 

[Dayledose]

'5/3/16' meat his technology levels.

And the reason why we can't see in real world is that countries in real world don't want to see that kind of unbalance of technology- level 3 dip and 16 mil means that mil is faster than dip approximately 169 years. Well, the country in real world can have that unbalance, but it doesn't. We can have that unbalance in the game, with heavy penalty for corruption- so we don't. That's all.

Right but my question asked was : If he does it again ,but it just takes longer, did the mechanic work?

 

[Musthavename]

For me, the hate for corruption is that I find it serves no purpose as a game mechanic to punish the player for things they already get punished for. The entire design to me is ill-thought out and just plain bad.

Looking at it this way, there are three things that cause corruption, and they already have negative effects before counting corruption:
- Overextension already has penalties associated with it, that are pretty severe. Not to mention, provinces you've conquered in order to amass overextension will also have separatism.
- Religious Unity already has penalties associated with it. Plus, any province you have that's wrong religion that you have negative tolerance for will also have penalties.
- Imbalanced tech is the only one that you're not really being punished for, but at the same time you're missing out on all the benefits you'd get if you pushed that tech up. Not advancing admin? Then enjoy less idea groups, less government types, less buildings, less income from production and not having access to administrative efficiency. Not advancing diplo? Then enjoy less buildings, income from trade, worse ships and particularly not having access to advanced casus belli.

In all honesty, the only real things I can see corruption actually addressing are a late game money sink, and the fact that diplomatic tech is easily sacrificable. The money sink one I don't ever entirely buy as worst case scenario, just use the income to breach your forcelimits. The diplo tech one can be solved either by making diplomatic tech more important to keep up with, or by coming up with a more specialised penalty.

For example, let's say to combat inbalanced tech, a nation has a concept of their current tech level defined by their highest tech level. If any of their other techs are more than a specific number of techs behind, they start getting penalties to that area, which increases the further they are behind. Admin for example could reduce tax/production, increase unrest and increase coring costs. Diplo could reduce trade efficiency/power, increase warscore costs and increase annexation costs. [I'll ignore military as being behind in military is its own deathwish]. This would then specifically punish the approach of players not using points for anything other than land grabs by making it harder and harder to grab more land. To top it off, the impact of these penalties and/or the number of techs you'd need to be behind would be lessened for those in non-western tech groups.