Distant Overseas Penalty Idea!

[Melian Erios]

Okay, none of us really like distant overseas and I just had a thought, what about if instead of it having a floor of either 0% or 75% it scaled with your colonial range?

A calculation can be done relatively easily (I will give the equation and work through some examples) and it has several benefits.

So one equation that could be used is:

D = Distance of province

C = Colonial Range

So the minimum autonomy would be calculated by:

((D-C)/C) * 100 = Min Autonomy

Eg 1. Province is distance of 300, you have colonial range of 200 therefore ((300-200)/200) * 100 = (100/200) * 100 = (1/2) * 100 = 50%

This makes sense as, as can be seen relatively obviously in the example, the colony is 50% further away than it "should be".

Eg 2. Province has distance of 950, you have colonial range of 500 therefore ((950-500)/500) * 100 = 90%

Yes, I do believe it should be acceptable to have minimum autonomies higher than 75% as it is only realistic that there would be some colonies particularly difficult to govern.

The only real problem comes when you have a colony that is more than twice the distance of your colonial range (so D > 2C) where you would end up with an autonomy of greater than 100%, I believe this could easily be fixed just so that in such cases the minimum autonomy will always be 100%.

Eg 3. Distance is 600, Colonial Range is 200 therefore ((600-200)/200) * 100 = 200%, since autonomy cannot be greater than 100% it is instead set to 100%.

I do not know how the coding works in the game but I know that this could be done with a simple IF statement in other programs and I can't imagine it to be too difficult in Clausewitz (or at least I hope not).

The only thing we really need to keep in mind is that the distance away and colonial range would have to be that measured from a province that is connected to your capital and has a sea border or even just from the capital itself as otherwise there would be very few cases in which the minimum autonomy would not be 0%.

(Note: I still support the idea that any province that has a land connection to your capital should have 0% minimum autonomy regardless of circumstances)

The reasons why I think that this would be a good idea are as follows:

- Gives more reason to advance in diplo tech which is currently lacking somewhat

- More realistic from a historical standpoint, as tech progressed it would've become easier to govern stuff further away

- It stands to make the game more enjoyable and believable

- It may stop complaints about distant overseas penalties

- Nations that partake in late game colonialism will actually stand to benefit as they may have done historically by colonisation of south-east Asia

What do you all think of this?

 

[gdj]

I like the idea, especially because the flat 75% is a real annoyance when you play a nation that expands around the mediterranean. I mean really, Crete has no autonomy, but Alexandria is distant overseas?

I would suggest though, that distant overseas should also scale in some way with your naval power. A nation with a huge trade fleet can more easily mantain/colonize distant areas than a nation with limited naval capabilities. Whether this is to be tied to forcelimits, number of ports or naval tradition is debatable though.