Development Diary - 16th of August 2006

[unmerged(2833)]

I'd say the multi-culti of Poland was a strength, rather... their big problem was that their king was too weak, the parliament too naive, the government inefficient and so on; in other words, blame the proto-democracy-huggers!

(and the partition plans, which did come about in an attempt to keep Russia away from Europe's sick man / the Ottoman Empire during Potemkin's and Catherine's visionary episode - we could really have ended up with a "partitioning of the Ottoman Empire" instead)

Since we're already talking about Johan list...

- They had no natural borders.
- Several religions.
- Several different cultures inside borders.
- Stronger enemies all around them.
- Lacking efficient government.
- No natural allies versus their enemies.
- Weak kings.

I actually think he listed practically every important factor that contributed, in one way or another, to downfall of PLC (ah, and to remember those discussions before EU I, when Sapura argued that Poland should be a major...)

Of course, this is just short list, and just a basis for explanation. For example, the judicary branch of government was quite good, it was the executive that lacked enough power. Cultures, religions can be dangerous, but not necessairly. The became problematic when PLC became intolerant under Vasas.

Or the stronger enemies, actually, enemies, apart from the Ottoman Empire were potentially weaker - Russia was weaker, Sweden was weaker, even Habsburgs (Austrians) were, with only Ottoman and German Empires having more potential (and lateron, indeed, Russian one). The point is, the potential power of PLC stayed just this, a potential power.

And so on.

On a side note (as if it wasn't somewhat off topic already), i wonder how will PLC union be actually represented, with all that conditional events.

 

[unmerged(2833)]

Didn't China, Russia, The Roman Empire, The Greek Empire, the USA and, hey, Belgium -among others- start out pretty much the same way?

I've always disliked this kind of historic thinking - you cannot diminish the potential for succes for a nation to these kind of... trivial factors. For each nation that, for example, fell because of its lack of natural borders, dozens more created their own natural borders, or survived dispite a lack of them. For each nation that collapsed because of multiple ethnic groups, dozens more managed to merge their ethnic conciousness into one coherent group and survive dispite petty cultural differences - heck, some nations even prospered because of it. For each nation that had weak kings, a dozen more managed to tighten royal control or devised ways to balance them out. For each nation that was gobbled up by stronger neighbours, a dozen more overcame them, balanced them out against eachother or survived no matter what.
It would probably be more usefull to go back to the very core of things: population density, ground fertility and natural resources. In this light:

Why did Poland fail?

1) Very low population density, which made serfdom more appealing and, hence, gave more power to people who were born in a wealthy family - which resulted in the static, crooked and decentralised government Poland had.

b) Quite low ground fertility, which meant that an acre of Polish land could support less people than an acre of, say, Flemish land (see point 1.)

£) Is a cool symbol

- Lack of natural resources, which coupled with the other factors made them even more vurnerable in the early modern age.

If anything, the succes and potential of a nation usually starts out with how fertile the ground in their core area is. The factors you have summed up tend to be more a result from this.

I don't really think those are trivial factors. The examples you list are not similar, as they lack significant number of those factors. Not to mention i don't really think that the trend was that weaker nations defeated stronger, on the contrary, we saw constant consolidation of European powers in this era.

As for your reasons of fall of Poland, these are simply not true. Neither low density, nor poor soil, nor lack of resources.

 

[unmerged(6777)]

It also didn't help that CK took a dynastic view as opposed to a nationalist view (and had a very weak AI that had trouble understanding this).

The dynastical view was appropriate for much of it (not everywhere...but that's the fault it didn't have the power to deal with multiple models). The problem there is the AI, not the dynastical system itself.

Oh yes...dynastic view was definitely appropriate for that title. This usually led to realms that would become highly fractured on the map and often not be directly linked or tied. That would be challenging for even a super-powerful AI, let alone the weakish one that was in CK. All other Paradox games have had more of a nationalistic view (again, appropriate for the time periods covered by those titles) which is quite a bit easier for the AI to contend with because those realms/countries are quite often largely contiguous.

Also, the post I was replying to had mentioned relations (lack of diplomatic options) as being an issue in CK. Because of its dynastic model, there were far more "entities" in CK with whom you (and the AI) would need to react -- almost to a point where each individual province was its own entity. All other PI titles rarely have more than a hundred or two, and in most cases a player will only actively interact with a small precentage of them at one time. Hence my "dynastic vs nationalistic" comment.

No regional or global flags?

 

[unmerged(11427)]

Not really.

Like previous Paradox game event scripting, it's simply a matter of learning what's available and how it's used. Think of it as a bit like learning a new language that has a lot of similarities to a language you already know. All you need to do is learn the new grammar (code syntax) and some new vocabulary (commands) and you'll find it quite easy.

If you could make a nice event effects.txt (more detailed than in CK), it would be awesome.

 

[Bodders]

In short: so many butterflies, why should there be events tied around specific people being around at specific times?

Because sometimes that's what caused the event?

Now, I'm not going to try to argue the 'great man' history which has been largely discredited where everything was controlled by kings and leaders but I do think they had some influence.

For example, why should there ever be a Mughal empire without Babur? Will it be the same when you get to India with no Mughals? Well, it wouldn't feel particularly right to me (I acknowledge problems EU2 had in this area already). Now, I suppose they could have an event tied to a king with a high 'marshall' (or whatever the 'CK like' equivalent stat is) in an Islamic state to start the Mughal Empire. Alternatively, maybe a large Islamic state in India begins it but I will miss the tiger.

Trying to tie all historical events in to conditions in the country at the time and that 'great leaders' don't matter is suitably trendy and revisionist but it's not always true. As I mentioned before - the 'Act of Supremacy' in England. The subsequent attempts to reconcile religious differences/whether the monarchy is absolute or not by the Tudors and then the weakness of the Stuarts is one of the contributory factors of the English Civil War. Why should there be one without these factors? Yet, to go through the whole campaign without an ECW would feel wrong. In that case, England wouldn't have had so many colonists... leading to a dramatically different North America etc.

Frankly, I don't buy the hype - supercomputers can't model a 'butterfly effect' world so I don't see how a little game on your PC can. By necessity, there'll have to be a lot fewer specific events because you'll only be able to narrow down identifiable causes you can model in a few major cases. Flavour about Austrian/Spanish war of succession whenever you get a succession war will be OK I guess but won't mean much to me in the fifteenth century.

You can simply do much more with many events if you accept the simplicity of tieing an event to a country and a date. On the other hand, Johann did just say they didn't have any events with just those triggers. Maybe ones exist with those triggers plus 'countrysize' or similar - with that you could get more flavour in to the game without having to worry too much about the complex underlying issues.

 

[unmerged(5822)]

Alternatively, maybe a large Islamic state in India begins it but I will miss the tiger.

You are free to begin at a date when he was around. Nobody is stopping you.

If you want to play out historical scenarios, you can play those historical scenarios (i.e. start at a good date and play until that time in history is over).

Yet, to go through the whole campaign without an ECW would feel wrong.

Yet, to go through the whole campaign and get the ECW after England is reduced to a 1-province minor would feel even more wrong.

I've said it before and I say it again: a game that is about changing history should not punish players for being successful by having less/no special events for them to experience, nor should it ignore their actions (unbelievable causalities make for an unbelievable/non-immersive experience).

You can simply do much more with many events if you accept the simplicity of tieing an event to a country and a date.

Yeah. One can play the same history, that somebody else wrote according to their own ideas of what was historically possible, over and over and over again. Not my idea of fun; I want to write my own history as I go along, not re-enact someone else's imagination.

 

[Arilou]

I've said it before and I say it again: a game that is about changing history should not punish players for being successful by having less/no special events for them to experience, nor should it ignore their actions (unbelievable causalities make for an unbelievable/non-immersive experience).

But aren't you reducing the choice of those who prefer to play it historical? (and I'm not entirely certain how leaders work btw. At the screenshot it seemed like their names will at least be historical but their abilities will be mostly random according to your naval/land tradition)

IE: Should you not, if you want to, be able to play as a nation and follow the historical course? Why is that less legitimate than alternative outcomes?

 

[Kasperus]

Since we're already talking about Johan list...

- They had no natural borders.
- Several religions.
- Several different cultures inside borders.
- Stronger enemies all around them.
- Lacking efficient government.
- No natural allies versus their enemies.
- Weak kings.

A certain generalization needs to be made here while seeing all these arguments. Are these arguments to be used with regard to the specific collapse of Poland by the end of the 18th century or do we evaluate the causes for the collapse of empires overthe whole history? If the last is the case, which seems to be where this discussion leads to, one should first realize that all empires in history of mankind have eventually collapsed, in one way or another (or are likely to do so eventually). One can try to search for a lot of causes that contributed to it in a very general sense, but the reality is that at a given point such general causes were not the actual reason such an empire collapsed - that was often much more specific. And so the case of Poland is clearly that it disappeared from the map because of its position in the international system - simply put because Russia, Austria and Prussia were at that moment stronger, more or less allied and saw no reason to keep it alive. At that moment natural borders, cultural and religious diversity, government or monarchs effectiveness, poor soil or whatever else did not make ANY difference and would not have saved Poland by then. In fact Austria, Russia and even Prussia shared more or less of such characteristics - all of these did also eventually collapsed, for quite specific reasons in the end. If we can always apply similar arguments for a nation to consider it doomed, isn't the obvious conclusion that ANY empire is in the end doomed anyway? But then, what is the point of searching for causes in the first place?

I hope the developers will keep certain amount of relativism in mind before they make such characterestics unreasonably deterministic.

 

[Bodders]

You are free to begin at a date when he was around. Nobody is stopping you.

If you want to play out historical scenarios, you can play those historical scenarios (i.e. start at a good date and play until that time in history is over).

I don't buy it. I don't believe you can start at any point in history and get the 'historical' situation and events relevant then - it would just be too complex to do.

If I start with Babur then I can create the Mughals under him but if I start any earlier then it won't be possible in the same way? How much earlier? If I start at the beginning of his life, maybe I should always be able to. Then again, if he does better at the beginning perhaps he's not 'diverted' to Delhi.

If I start in the mid 1630s then the English Civil War should be a sure thing - there's nothing that can forestall that course now. In fact, how far back would this not be pre-ordained? Some kind of confrontation had been made inevitable by the Tudors as I said - so certainly with James I it's still pretty much inevitable. Probably even with Elizabeth I.

I simply don't buy that you can have an event which follows this pattern - inevitability starting near to the event/in the midst of it. Probably won't happen otherwise. Without date triggers as the primary driver.

Yet, to go through the whole campaign and get the ECW after England is reduced to a 1-province minor would feel even more wrong.

I don't deny that - you may notice my comment that a good compromise would be date/country/landsize triggers

Yeah. One can play the same history, that somebody else wrote according to their own ideas of what was historically possible, over and over and over again. Not my idea of fun; I want to write my own history as I go along, not re-enact someone else's imagination.

I'm not trying to argue against this. I know you're one of the most active CK followers and thus I'm sure you'll be happy with the result.

For us at the other end of the spectrum, I am merely sceptical that a dynamic engine can do much except paint very broad brush-strokes on an abstract canvass. Much closer to a CK2, with nations instead of dynasties, than to EU2.

 

[unmerged(5822)]

But aren't you reducing the choice of those who prefer to play it historical? (and I'm not entirely certain how leaders work btw. At the screenshot it seemed like their names will at least be historical but their abilities will be mostly random according to your naval/land tradition)

IE: Should you not, if you want to, be able to play as a nation and follow the historical course? Why is that less legitimate than alternative outcomes?

Nobody is stopping you from trying to re-enact your favoured country's history.

If you want 100% faithfulness to history, you might as well ask for a hands-off mode where the game advances according to the history files (the ones that are used for the "start any date" feature).

 

[unmerged(5822)]

I don't deny that - you may notice my comment that a good compromise would be date/country/landsize triggers

There's more to history than date, country and landsize though. To get reasonable triggers for specific events, most games would be without most of the historical events and there is just no way that alternative-history events could possibly cover up enough of the possibilities.

I'm not trying to argue against this. I know you're one of the most active CK followers and thus I'm sure you'll be happy with the result.

"Follower"? :blink: You make it sound like we're some sort of sect...
(besides, I'm mostly inactive now)

For us at the other end of the spectrum,

I don't consider myself that far towards the "anything goes" extreme. That you've only seen me argue against determinism doesn't mean that I am 100% anti-determinism, just that I'm trying to "balance" the debate towards my perceived "optimal mixture". If this forum was full of extreme "anything goes"-ers, I'd probably argue for more determinism than they would like (and I would consequently be labelled as a "determinism extremist", no doubt).

 

[unmerged(9145)]

Hmm, I have a feeling that all those new commands are going to make it even harder to break into coding...us code-illiterates will just have to enjoy what the rest of you create, I suppose.

You didn't have to be a coder to make events in EU 2, or anything remotely close to a coder. That was a good thing in terms of simplicity, but a bad thing in that those of us who had actual coding skills had zip to work with (the engine couldn't even count properly; I had to use an ugly event hack to simulate this in my German unification scenario). I'm certainly cheering on the addition of further functions, the more the better.

And remember: if you want to do something simple you can always ignore the stuff you don't understand or don't need. It isn't like C or Perl or Python, where you have to have some basic understanding of the language as a whole to do anything useful. With events all you really need to know is what you really need to know, if you take my meaning.

Max

 

[Ciçatrix]

Wow!
Great stuff, I can't wait.

 

[Eldin]

Because sometimes that's what caused the event?

[...]

You can simply do much more with many events if you accept the simplicity of tieing an event to a country and a date. On the other hand, Johann did just say they didn't have any events with just those triggers. Maybe ones exist with those triggers plus 'countrysize' or similar - with that you could get more flavour in to the game without having to worry too much about the complex underlying issues.

A point I wholeheartedly agree with, although I think the conclusion is rather mild. The interesting thing of historic events is not their effect, which improves historical performances, but their descriptions, which provide a humanly interesting background. And deviation from the historical path will, with current computer capacity, make a nation feel generic in no time and basically destroy the charm of EU.

It will become in essence a CK-like game, but on another level - that of the state. I myself don't mind it that much because I enjoy CK, but I think that many of the people calling for dynamic events now will not enjoy it as much as I think they will. I've stated it before, but dynamic events can by definition not be historical. Personally I think even an alternate historical feel is improbable and it will become, like Civilization and to a lesser extent CK, a totally historically braindead slugfest. Interesting to play perhaps, but not anything like EU.

Of course, the high moddability of the game will make sure this doesn't matter much at all because people will be modding all the events of AGCEEP back in in no time. Then we'll be getting two games for our money

 

[Johan]

Interesting to play perhaps, but not anything like EU.

And EU had exactly how many hardcoded historical events?

6

Eu2 had alot more, but the original EU had less historical events than Crusader Kings.

 

[TeeWee]

Frankly, I don't buy the hype - supercomputers can't model a 'butterfly effect' world so I don't see how a little game on your PC can. By necessity, there'll have to be a lot fewer specific events because you'll only be able to narrow down identifiable causes you can model in a few major cases. Flavour about Austrian/Spanish war of succession whenever you get a succession war will be OK I guess but won't mean much to me in the fifteenth century.

You can simply do much more with many events if you accept the simplicity of tieing an event to a country and a date. On the other hand, Johann did just say they didn't have any events with just those triggers. Maybe ones exist with those triggers plus 'countrysize' or similar - with that you could get more flavour in to the game without having to worry too much about the complex underlying issues.

Actually, I don't think we disagree very much. A game with purely generic events is less fun than a game which specifically refers to historical events. Perhaps having both contextual generic events and contextual specific/historical events will solve this.

An example of the first type (generic) would be an event which fires for every country if three major powers are involved in a succession war.

An example of the second type (specific/historical) would be the same event as the first, but with additional country/date specific triggers for the participants (France, Austria, Spain as the main participants, with lots of side events for lesser stakeholders).

This way, you still have events which makes sense even if the details are different (Maybe a Poland-Burgundy-Spain succession war instead of a Austria-France-Spain war) and the events won't fire when the conditions aren't properly met (say, both Austria and Spain are very small, France and rest of Europe might not even care). And if the specific historical triggers are met (big Spain, Austria and France) the event with all the right historical details will fire.

In short, I think it's not about modelling butterfly effect, but about modelling the context in a believable way. If the contextual condition is fulfilled, the event should trigger (be it generic or specific/historical). I have confidence in Paradox that it may succeed in this.

 

[Joohoo]

And EU had exactly how many hardcoded historical events?

6

Eu2 had alot more, but the original EU had less historical events than Crusader Kings.

Only 6??!!

 

[Arilou]

Nobody is stopping you from trying to re-enact your favoured country's history.

If you want 100% faithfulness to history, you might as well ask for a hands-off mode where the game advances according to the history files (the ones that are used for the "start any date" feature).

But what if what I want is something in-between, like in EU2?

There's more to history than date, country and landsize though. To get reasonable triggers for specific events, most games would be without most of the historical events and there is just no way that alternative-history events could possibly cover up enough of the possibilities.

Then it comes down to AI scripting: To find out why the historical decisions were made, and try to make circumstances follow closely enough that these decisions *will* be made.

I'll be curious to see how the Paradox team works it out.

"Follower"? :blink: You make it sound like we're some sort of sect...
(besides, I'm mostly inactive now)

You are CK *is* a sect. Personally I'm an Eu2-er true and thorough: It was the game that made me start playing Paradox games, and the one that had by far the optimal mixture of determinism vs. randomness. Yes, a lot of events could be scripted better, but the fact is, that in the 17th century I want to see a strong Sweden, an Austria inheriting it's historical territories, a consolidated France, a colonial Spain, an unruly England, a troublesome Russia, a grand Ottoman Empire.... (unless of course I've already killed one or many of those ) to be sure, even EU2 rarely managed to achieve that. But if that *doesen't* happen then it's not really the 17th century, and I might as well play Civ 4, no? And no, starting at that date *is not a solution* as a part of the charm is watching those entities develop (and possibly throwing a spanner in their machinery....)

Whether it is done by AI scripting or deterministic events is pretty much moot. If it can be achieved by simply setting "background" effects and letitng the AI do it's thing then GREAT! But if not I'll be *frumple*.

I don't consider myself that far towards the "anything goes" extreme. That you've only seen me argue against determinism doesn't mean that I am 100% anti-determinism, just that I'm trying to "balance" the debate towards my perceived "optimal mixture". If this forum was full of extreme "anything goes"-ers, I'd probably argue for more determinism than they would like (and I would consequently be labelled as a "determinism extremist", no doubt).

To me it is a matter of *outcome* exactly how Paradox produces the outcome is pretty much irrelevant: Johan says he'll produce a historical feel and I suppose I'll have to take him on his word.

 

[Bodders]

Of course, the high moddability of the game will make sure this doesn't matter much at all because people will be modding all the events of AGCEEP back in in no time. Then we'll be getting two games for our money

Yep, I agree with your other points too - just said stronger than I did

I've snipped down to this one just because I hope this is the case. However, there's been no attempt to try to make any sort of historical flavour for CK because even if you set up some events to try to do so, the dynamic engine then takes it off in a completely new direction.

I hope we can still mod in events within the context of the EU3 dynamic engine. Again, I shall remain sceptical until we see though!

 

[Registered]

Only 6??!!

But bear in mind that only a few countries were supposed to be playable. The fall of the Ming for instance was simulated not by a historical event but by a torrent of "wave of obscuratism" events coming seemingly out of nowhere.