DDRJake twitter teaser - idea groups suggestion/discussion

[lolada]

So, apparently Jake is looking for feedback on idea group changes.. finally..

Twitter link here:
https://twitter.com/DDRJake/status/1056839617603887105

Spam your suggestions.

Gonna start:

1. My first one is - skim through all the threads in forums - there's a number of threads with various good suggestions.

Conceptual:

2. I believe there are too many groups to balance well - and we can only pick so many of them - do smth about it?
3. Connecting with #2. Is it possible to open 4th group category.. besides admin/diplo/mil to throw in there hard to balance groups.. Call it "tradition" groups or smth like that - and throw in there innovative, naval, espionage etc.. so that these group don't compete with superior groups like administrative.

Current balance issues:
Admin:

Administrative - well defined role, overall good group, balance wise too strong
Economic - well defined role, good group, good balance
Humanist - well defined role, good group - too strong group.. but its good that way since you need to fix rebels
Religious - well defined role, good group, good balance

Expansion - role? expand in africa, asia? not doing good job, currently useless group,- big problem, depends heavily on exploration otherwise you cant use colonist - does not have colonist/coring range extensions - full of weak ideas; CB should be a lot stronger - you can't core far away before colonizing... impractical useless

Innovative - badly defined role, its ok-ish, usable, but weaker balance-wise to other groups - this group is all over the place, jack of all trades.. saves some monarch points, some but not that much.. administrative is better for points, economy for money.. has 2 quite useless ideas - inflation reduction and leader upkeep

Diplo:

Diplomatic - well defined role, good group, good balance
Influence - well defined role, good group, good balance
Trade - well defined role, good group, ok-ish balance - there are way too many merchants in game !!! from colonies and trade companies

Espionage - well defined role, ok-ish group, weak balance wise - there's big problem with "Rebel support efficiency" crap - remove this thing completely from group and policies are poisoned with this modifier - if the group would focus on helping player and not harming others it could be much more usable; ideas could be more concrete.. they give some benefits its all so edgy.. make this into good anti-rebel group in our own empire and it will be picked

Maritime - well defined role, ok-ish to bad group, bad balance - this could be usable, but basically needs much stronger economic impact - 10% ship cost to -33% ship cost; give trade goods bonus, trade efficiency bonus; remove sailor maintenance crap; there are plenty of ideas; if groups would combine some naval power (has now) + some money gains (missing) it could be picked since its in diplomatic branch... competing with trade which has no naval power

Exploration - well defined role, good group, balance wise - too strong - meaning it kills Expansion completely and thanks to bad AI gives player total dominance over colonization - Quest for new world - should be also in Expansion idea group .. smth needs to be done about that

Military

Offensive - well defined role, good group, good balance
Defensive - well defined role, good group, good balance - morale maybe too strong
Quality - well defined role, good group, good balance - problem with this group is that it kills Naval group completely
Quantity - well defined role, good group, good balance

Aristocratic - well defined role, ok-ish group overall, weak balance - group nice for that siege bonus - but this group lacks specialization - everyone things its for cavalry nations, but then it should buff cavalry more, those −10% Cavalry cost to -25% cost; othwerise Offensive is always better pick; Diplomat is nice touch but you have there useless absolutism and avaialble mercenaries to ruin the group

Plutocratic:
- - well defined role, ok-ish group overall, ok-ish balance - just need slight buffs, i mean 2.5% bonus to discipline.. whats that ?!? give 5% like a man... also that +10% Institution spread is useless.. give 20% and 20% discount
also to emrbacing

Naval - now this group can't be described normally - first, its mostly useless thanks to naval not being important enough. If we want naval power - we pick Quality - thats second issue. Then you overbuffed its naval bonuses to hell. Its probably used in MP because of that and its irritatinh. Honestly, I'd remove this group from the game it just has no place at all.

 

[adin85]

I Always take:
Administrative- Core Creation and more states
Humanist-Everything is perfect
Dyplomatic- Everything is great
Offensive - It must
Quantinty- It must
Quality- It must

Depends of situation:
Influence- For Vassal and PU swarm
Trade- Extra money
Economy-Extra money
Defensive- If I play some minor/ medium country.


I would like to have some changes in Religiouse, Espionage, Expansion, Maritime, Naval, Aristocratic and Innovative.

 

[RMS Oceanic]

The best sets of groups I think give you different ways to achieve similar ends, while taking both can be powerful but have a bit of overlap. Influence and Diplomatic would be the pinnacle of this balance. One encourages vassals, the other encourage alliances and more direct conquest, and it's not too much dead weight to take both. Humanist and Religious are theoretically in the same boat, but the balance isn't quite right, so the choices of conversion vs toleration aren't quite there.

With this in mind, I think Expansion and Administration could be paired up like this by giving one of them 5% Administrative Efficiency as a finisher, and giving the other the vaunted CCR. There are two ways to deal with the bottleneck of overextension: Widen the bottleneck (Admin Efficiency) and speed up the passage through the bottleneck (Core Cost Reduction). Both are useful, you could take both for even more power while maybe some of those 14 ideas you get little use out of. Sidenote, I think Administrative isn't super overpowered, because much like Religious you're normally taking it for one idea, and if you're not a heavy merc user (which I'm not getting into here) those ideas are kind of bleh. Maybe if the CCR came later in the group or was the finisher that might be perfect.

One notion I had is not directly linked to ideas, but is slightly outside it: Idea Groups are the simplest way to increase the amount of different envoys you have, but there are ways outside ideas to get more (Government Rank, Holy Sites, Trade Companies etc). Problem is, Colonists don't have such a thing, so unless you're Norway you are not colonising at all without Exploration or Expansion, and yet we saw that places like Sweden and Scotland experimented with Colonisation without going full haul on it. Perhaps when we reach, say, Tech 20, that tech level gives us an extra envoy of certain types? Admin would be Missionary, Dip would be Colonist, and Military would be Diplomat. I'm leaving Merchants aside as Global Trade gives us that. It would allow late game tags to have a little more oomph in the various tasks without having to invest in an entire idea group, to reflect how well their technology is coming along.

 

[Zarine]

Food for thought on naval/maritime : make them a tool against sea trading countries.
Maybe make the naval idea focused on sea trading. I wouldn't mind some split between land merchant and sea merchant with naval focus giving sea merchant while trade give land merchant (and indeed drop all those additional merchant from all over the place)

For maritime, maybe something to boost piracy effect from your fleet ?

Overall, the only way I can see them useful is to make them touch the economy of your opponent (if he has a sea acess).

 

[magni.]

FOR MP

How about changing it in a way that u don't have to go for defensive,economic,quality,inovative,offensive every single game, to not get a disadvantage over players that do it

 

[Afonso de Albuquerque]

I say it's time to admit that naval combat is never going to be a very relevant thing in this game, and so let's ditch Maritime and especially Naval ideas entirely. At this point they serve just for noob-traps and meme/joke runs. Recycle some of the ideas into other groups that might need some buffs (maybe merge some of them into Trade, or Exploration so that it becomes more questionable to abandon at the end of the game). And use the freed up slots for completely new Idea Groups that are actually competitive with the other ones.

 

[basun]

One big problem is that the "best" modifier for conquering, CCR, is in ONE group. Take the diplomatic/influence group. Both have dip rep and relationship slots and then competing ideas.

I would like to see that CCR is set to 15% for administrative ideas, and you get some buffs to the rest of the tree which is... decent but not good. Admin without CCR would never be picked. Give 10% CCR to some other admin group, like innovative.

Admin is too much of a no brainer now while the rest of the group is lackluster. 5 states is decent, but rest really is not that great albeit useful-

 

[Lepaso]

Religious needs to be un-nerfed, make Deus Vult the first idea again. The whole reason it was nerfed was concern over players taking it just for DV and then abandoning it without committing or something like that, right? Well, now that they have to go all the way to the end to convert territories, surely it's fine to move it back to, at the very least, one of the first 3 ideas, right?

 

[C.N.]

As I see it the biggest issue is that the type monarch points groups use affect the choice too much.

Usually people takes:
- 3 military groups
- 3 diplomatic groups
- Humanist or Religious
- 1 left over admin group, usual Administrative

Speaking about individual groups the worst problem ones are:
- Administrative - unbalanced core creation cost, also encourages merc spam which is bad for the game. This group embodies the balance problems of EU4
- Espionage - as usual in games, the espionage system is bad, and filled with annoying mechanics. That EU 4 started without an espionage system was the right decision, and adding one later was one of the bigger mistakes.
- Expansion - worthless without explorers and conquistadors, it either needs to allow those, or add an adjacent province discovery mechanic like the Siberian Frontier
- Naval - too much competition for military points, making this impossible to make balanced. To be worth taking it would have to be too overpowering in naval combat.

Thinking about it, I would suggest a total overhaul of Expansion, and throwing out the three others.

Trade - well defined role, good group, ok-ish balance - there are way too many merchants in game !!! from colonies and trade companies

The problem is that if you don't have easy access (as within two merchant's reach) to either colonies or trade companies, then trade is nearly a must. I would rather keep trade's merchants and nerf the other sources.

 

[El_Cid_]

OK - not the most constructive post of all time.. but I'd prefer they'd fix broken stuff before doing wholesale changes to stuff that works fine right now.

 

[lolada]

@El_Cid_ balance between groups is broken like forever, as well as some complete groups like naval and expansion can be considered broken at current state of the game - so this is a fix of broken things. I ofcourse do support fix of many other broken things, yes please, fix AI especially.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

@El_Cid_ balance between groups is broken like forever, as well as some complete groups like naval and expansion can be considered broken at current state of the game - so this is a fix of broken things. I ofcourse do support fix of many other broken things, yes please, fix AI especially.

The UI has been broken at least as long as the idea group balance. It's true we didn't need the game centralized further by nerfing religious relative to humanist again. It's also true that some groups are in practice dead weight. It would be nice to fix these.

Right now, the game misleads often and sometimes straight up lies to the player about what will happen. That is an every-game problem.

 

[Azieloki]

I know it'll never happen, but I'd like to see a complete overhaul of the idea groups system. I'd like it if there were significantly more idea groups to choose from and if we had also more idea group slots. Instead of three ideas unlocking a national idea, have it be the completion of an idea group. In exchange idea groups could be smaller and it would be easier to balance ideas across groups. I always find myself taking the same groups because of how limited they are and how much better some are than others. These days I near exclusively pick from Admin/Humanist/Exploration/Influence/Offensive/Defensive/Quantity. I think this could allow for better specialization and lower the opportunity cost of taking group A vs group B.

As for working with current groups, I can only echo what everyone else says. Naval, Maritime, and Expansion need to be seriously reviewed. I haven't taken any of these since they removed the cb from expansion. They're not even situationally useful.

 

[Sousuke123]

I've posted few times and i will say it again. Best approach to idea group has MEIOU&Taxes. We need groups we can specialize and certain ideas group unlocking after choosing two necessary ideas. At least in iberia pack they could add few different religious group like M&T has it.

 

[yyrkroon]

Does PDX get analytics on idea group choices from logged in games?

 

[Zentay]

I suggest that an overhaul of idea groups focus on solving a few of the most glaring problems, which in my view are:

1. Maritime ideas are bad. They would be attractive in the early game if they gave a CB for attacking nations with coastal provinces (at a distance of a few sea provinces). Then it would become a good choice for isolated nations with access to the sea.

2. Administrative ideas are too dominant. Maybe it's time to reconsider having coring cost reduction in an idea group? Have you thought about removing it and lowering coring costs to compensate? Or maybe give multiple idea groups non-stacking coring cost reductions to allow for more variety?

3. Humanist is also too dominant, but it has a lot to do with the convenience of not having to fight rebels as much (which also saves resources). There are too many rebels, and after my nation reaches a certain size, they stop being a genuine threat (with or without humanist), and become a tedious whack-a-mole game.

4. Naval ideas are bad. They need an effect that cannot be replicated by simply building more ships. Maybe blockades that hurt much more? Cannon barrages from ships?

 

[Reman]

The devs should first balance idea groups for single player instead of multiplayer. The fact that "all idea groups can be viable" in MP is not a valid excuse for the sorry state of idea group balance. In cases where SP priorities significantly differ from those of MP, the devs can include an optional, toggleable ruleset in the campaign setup for MP players.

For Expansion, I'd start with giving it +5% admin efficiency and a CB on all TC lands. Remove the silly ability to fabricate claims on TC lands.

Give Espionage -0.20 corruption as a baseline, and give it some stuff related to rebel suppression. It somewhat fits the archetype (domestic spies sabotaging dissident movements), and more importantly it gets us away from Humanist being required every single game (even if you take Religious). I'm thinking stuff like reduced unrest, reduced years of nationalism, reduced MIL cost of suppressing rebels, stuff like that.

Naval is good at what it does, but what it does doesn't matter enough. It might be prudent to give +1 to sieges, but making naval matter is more important. Reverting the strait changes (back to when ships could block straits an enemy controlled both sides of) would be a modest first step.

Has Maritime ever had a point? You could make Naval the blue-water (heavy ship) group while maritime is the galley group. As it stands it's just a weaker Naval.

 

[WJLIII3]

I say it's time to admit that naval combat is never going to be a very relevant thing in this game, and so let's ditch Maritime and especially Naval ideas entirely. At this point they serve just for noob-traps and meme/joke runs. Recycle some of the ideas into other groups that might need some buffs (maybe merge some of them into Trade, or Exploration so that it becomes more questionable to abandon at the end of the game). And use the freed up slots for completely new Idea Groups that are actually competitive with the other ones.

At least one boat idea has to exist for RP, playing England, Japan, Oceania, Etc. Maybe dissolve expansion, stick the colonist and the two best naval combat buffs from Naval into maritime, call it a day

 

[makaramus]

I love the fact creating forth idea group! it should be unlocked by diplo idea and include expansion,maritime,naval,aristocratic and plutocratic(aristoc and plutoc are here only because they are not picken as mil idea but hybrid instead)

 

[Hojsimpson]

Obviusly Naval/maritime.
Maritime gives 50% more sailors and force limit and that already makes it better than naval.

There's no way you benefit from naval more than other military idea groups.
You can integrate Naval with the other military idea groups, naval force limit in quantity, quality already has ship ideas, add piracy ideas to offensive, defensive clearly something defensive like wooden wall, aristocratic: leaders and tradition.

Then add a Mercenaries idea group, and remove the random mercenaries ideas that are spread in innovative, plutocratic, quantity and administrative.
Add a mercenary manpower pool because once they die you can keep recruiting them, they are infinite, I don't think 20 million people are willing to die for a fistful of dollars

Military idea groups are balanced (that makes it boring), while aristocratic is the weakest, you get a huge force limit if you get to mix it with influence, vassals and colonies. Military idea groups aren't really focused, there's only 2 defensive ideas in "Defensive"

Mix maritime with trade, they are too related to be separated.

Improve expansion, you can already fabricate claims because you will have a colony nearby, and you can't core without a colony nearby. Recruitment and shipbuilding time is useless. or just mix it with exploration.

I'd also think it would be interesting to mix idea groups, like one with both adm and dip ideas that cost both adm and dip.


You would get more freedom in design with loose ideas that aren't locked behind groups,