Do you have ideas how to make eu4 'taller and less blobby'?

[paulatreides0]

I see what you mean. The non-territory CBs are pretty lackluster at the moment. It's basically never worth it to fight a war over an embargo or whatever, unless you're really using it as an excuse to get some territory. The day when I use a conquest CB as a pretense to fight a trade war will be the day playing tall is a real option.

Frankly, I'd be happy if it just made not expanding more appealing. Add diminishing returns to expansion such that expanding is really good for a bit, but then after a certain size it just adds comparatively little to what you would get from building your nation up unless you conquer pretty much everything. That way building up becomes preferential unless you really want to invest a disproportionate amount into expansion.

Victoria 2 is somewhat less blobby, but is it really that less blobby? The whole "Paradox Clausewitz game" genre seems to suffer from this problem, to a greater or lesser degree. Admittedly, I am only starting playing Vic2.

It is significantly less blobby, unless you conquer China as a Western Power, in which case you are essentially untouchable. Especially if you are the US or the UK. Then you have virtually infinite manpower and virtually infinite troops. France taking over China can be even more powerful, if somewhat less invulnerable, and Greater Germany/China colossus is just painfully overpowered.

But really, that's about it. In Vicky 2 the only way to become an unstoppable super blob was really to eat up China. I guess the US could do so as well by just focusing on its navy and never letting anyone land on US soil ever, but that is a pretty unique scenario that not even the UK enjoys (at least not to such a ridiculous extent).

That's the worst idea I've ever seen here. I can't help but suspect it comes from someone who has never played/scored a WC game.

Balancing the game based on WC is itself a terrible idea. Ideally, WC should be something really difficult to do with even a very powerful nation, and even then it should be a game of you trying to beat the clock and squeeze in the last bit of conquest in the last few years of gametime. Of course, it's hard to code such an ideal and it's essentially impossible, but to say that WC should be taken into consideration at all when considering the general balance of the game is ridiculous.

Now the true way of displaying how detrimental the war actually is would be to stop thinking of your men as of "manpower". Then the whole process would balance itself, i.e. one would be perfectly fine fighting some light small-scale wars, but entering a flat-out mode surely will ruin the nation; but not because some virtual Peasant War might happen, but for the reason he lacks both working hands and brains to advance the nation. Something Victoria-like, if you so please.

And then you'd be effectively cutting out the only part of the game that has any real content in it. Warfare is the meat of the game unless PDox decides to massively overhaul their game all of a sudden, and massively cutting it down wouldn't really benefit the game all that much in anything close to its current state.

 

[gramis]

Given that forts are a hard block to territorial penetration (and that, in principle, once you've taken control of a fort you'd be able to use it as a logistics node), this has - in SP, at least, where you face opponents who actually build forts - much less impact than you think.


Ironically, this actually makes life easier for the player, in the same kind of way that raising coring costs does.

TBH taking a fort doesn't transform the whole area in friendly territory. For me it's mind boggling that it's easier to invade and hold provinces in eu games than it s in hoi games. Not to mention cross continent invasions. It should improve with time but seeing in 1500s multiple stacks of 100k + crossing europe doing battle conquering with very low impact on the armies and provinces it's just lol.

 

[LWE]

It is significantly less blobby, unless you conquer China as a Western Power, in which case you are essentially untouchable. Especially if you are the US or the UK. Then you have virtually infinite manpower and virtually infinite troops. France taking over China can be even more powerful, if somewhat less invulnerable, and Greater Germany/China colossus is just painfully overpowered.

But really, that's about it. In Vicky 2 the only way to become an unstoppable super blob was really to eat up China. I guess the US could do so as well by just focusing on its navy and never letting anyone land on US soil ever, but that is a pretty unique scenario that not even the UK enjoys (at least not to such a ridiculous extent).

But are Vicky's internal politics really that richer to compensate for it? Vicky certainly feels more flavourful, but this may be just a loose impression.

 

[itsuart]

>Do you have ideas how to make eu4 'taller and less blobby'?

I don't think it's possible to do in eu4 without it being so different, that it will be completely new game. So no, we will have to wait for EU5 DD.

 

[Ternega]

The single biggest reason we can blob so hard is that the AI is not as good at the game as us. If every gameplay agent is equally competent, blobbing is much harder than if one gameplay agent is vastly more competent than the others.

Unfortunately, the scope to make the AI more competent is limited by the development resources available at Paradox, the computing resources available on your desk, and the need to keep the game fun for players spanning a wide range of ability and intensity.

I would have to partially disagree on this one. Whilst indeed making AI smarter would help balance between player and AI it's not necessary. Paradox keep trying to keep EU4 as both a wargame and historical sim, and as such we have Ruler personalities for the AI. If you were to set all of them to always warlike, than wars between player and AI would bee far less one sided. Problem with this is historically nations didn't try to expand everywhere all the time, like players do in game, and making this change would lessen the history sim part of the game.

 

[Freudia]

But are Vicky's internal politics really that richer to compensate for it? Vicky certainly feels more flavourful, but this may be just a loose impression.

Vicky's a shorter game. That's really what lets it get by. EU4 grows tiring because of its length while Vic2 only covers 100 years, which is very little time at all.

 

[Baxil]

From my point of view the game lacks mechanichs to model a proper population system and dynastic relationships between countries and royal families. Having interactive and manageable models for just this two aspects of the game would make the peace time much more enjoyable.

About development the problem is that it is not rewarding at all. Pushing a button and sparing a bunch of monarch points for having a province to bacame magically bigger, not only is totally unrealistic but it also doesn't give you any sense of achievement. This means that development of provinces needs to be modeled by a more comprehensive and dynamic system and to be linked to other factors that could determine growth, like wealth.

One "minor" thing that I also miss is the possibility of building roads and road networks. Being possible to build roads and seeing them in the map would be very satisfying for me

 

[GeneralPetrov]

This is the core of the problem: everyone agrees that we need mechanics to encourage tall empires, yet nobody can come up with any. Unfortunately the problem isn't specific to EU4: pretty much all the other paradox strategy games (and to a certain extent, all strategy games) suffer from shallow non-war tall empire mechanics, it's more obvious and noticeable in EU4 though.

We need mechanics that not only encourage taller internal empire building, but fun taller internal empire building, and not just stuff like development which just involves clicking a single button which isn't particularly fun or engaging. I have yet to see any suggestions that would achieve this however, and I cant think of any myself either. A bit of a tragic dilemma really.

 

[grommile]

It is significantly less blobby, unless you conquer China as a Western Power, in which case you are essentially untouchable. Especially if you are the US or the UK. Then you have virtually infinite manpower and virtually infinite troops. France taking over China can be even more powerful, if somewhat less invulnerable, and Greater Germany/China colossus is just painfully overpowered.

In Vic2 SP, if you form Großdeutschland in any remotely timely manner you are functionally invulnerable, partly because of the defective design where releasing a same-culture-group OPM as your satellite when you're a culture union cancels five points of infamy.

 

[Canute VII]

Now the true way of displaying how detrimental the war actually is would be to stop thinking of your men as of "manpower". Then the whole process would balance itself, i.e. one would be perfectly fine fighting some light small-scale wars, but entering a flat-out mode surely will ruin the nation; but not because some virtual Peasant War might happen, but for the reason he lacks both working hands and brains to advance the nation. Something Victoria-like, if you so please.

And back to the population mechanic / population density ... This could be made to cater to this aspect, I believe.

 

[LWE]

And back to the population mechanic / population density ... This could be made to cater to this aspect, I believe.

But the forming consensus is that Victoria (with population mechanics as a major distinctive trait) mostly gets by due to its short timeline, although it certainly has more internal politics than EU.

 

[Mujado]

Play multiplayer? AI is just too incompetent to stop the player, it's not Paradox, it's technology.

The best way to plau EU? Achievements. They keep you focused on smaller area of map, fun challenge. I don't mean Ruyku level ones, but just Sons of Carthage, Baltic Crusader, those achievements make the game super fun.

 

[keynes2.0]

Differentiate cores into two types: De Jure cores and De Facto Cores. De Jure cores are the official lands of your people, where your fellow countrymen live and you have a nationalistic right to. De Facto cores are just any land you've cored that are not De Jure cores.

P'dox has made it impossible to mod this for a long time with the combination of overextension and an AI that breaks if it cant core. But the state mechanic might mean that modders will finally have a backdoor to address this with. Just limit all nations to 0 states and all new cores will be "colonial cores"

 

[Freudia]

P'dox has made it impossible to mod this for a long time with the combination of overextension and an AI that breaks if it cant core. But the state mechanic might mean that modders will finally have a backdoor to address this with. Just limit all nations to 0 states and all new cores will be "colonial cores"

That would turn all cores on the board into "colonial cores", including each nation's capital. That'd also make the game boring as hell for anyone that doesn't start with a ton of land already.

Edit: Never mind, I just went and re-read. Your capital region should still be a state even if you do that. That results in awkward situations where you forcibly make the game not play out authentically for some nations, like Savoy or Burgundy. Any nation along the boundaries of regions.

 

[keynes2.0]

That results in awkward situations where you forcibly make the game not play out authentically for some nations, like Savoy or Burgundy. Any nation along the boundaries of regions.

Well you could make the territory penalties very small and instead have the penalties be on colonial cores. That way Burgandy would be alright with the netherlands being a territory because the territory itself is cored and that's the important part. They just couldn't add new cores.

Alternatively you could make an argument that the netherlands shouldn't be core territory of Burgandy. After all, Burgandy had it's powerbase in French, not dutch, territory.

 

[nkibilko]

Make development cost gold instead of monarch points

 

[Ternega]

Make development cost gold instead of monarch points

This would actually be amazing.

 

[Canute VII]

This would actually be amazing.

Not sure about that since it takes something off the trade-off between developement and other stuff such as tech/coring/etc.
However, if, then I would want to see, that you can decide upon hitting the develpment button to

• either pay development in monarch points in full (as in the current system) OR
• pay half of the current cost in monarch points and the other half in gold * the new development of the province in the respective dev. category OR
• pay half of the current cost in monarch points and the other half in manpower (in hundreds) * the new development of the province in the respective dev. category

Just an example:

• you have a 1/1/1 province and want to make it a 1/2/1, now you can
  • spend 40 mp OR
  • spend 20 mp and 20 gold * 2 =40 ducats OR
  • spend 20 mp and 2.000 * 2 = 4.000 men
• you have a 6/5/4 province and want to make it a 6/6/4, now you can
  • spend 60 mp OR
  • spend 30 mp and 30 gold * 6 =180 ducats OR
  • spend 30 mp and 3.000 * 6 = 18.000 men

That way you will find that

• for very poor provinces it could be preferential to employ manpower
• for average provinces you could do with the help of gold
• for rich provinces probably mp will still be the best way to go forward

What do you think about this? Just pulled this off...

 

[SubTachyon]

This is the core of the problem: everyone agrees that we need mechanics to encourage tall empires, yet nobody can come up with any. Unfortunately the problem isn't specific to EU4: pretty much all the other paradox strategy games (and to a certain extent, all strategy games) suffer from shallow non-war tall empire mechanics, it's more obvious and noticeable in EU4 though.

We need mechanics that not only encourage taller internal empire building, but fun taller internal empire building, and not just stuff like development which just involves clicking a single button which isn't particularly fun or engaging. I have yet to see any suggestions that would achieve this however, and I cant think of any myself either. A bit of a tragic dilemma really.

I guess you're right - there is no straight forward way of just fixing this with slapping on one additional mechanic. Basically what they'd need to do is incorporate CK into EU - allowing you to spend long periods of peace time struggling over internal politics and let you go to war not with foreign powers to expand, but other lords/pretenders to keep your country together. Something that would get more difficult if you blob too much.

But then it wouldn't be eu4 anymore would it? Maybe something to think about for EU5.

Make development cost gold instead of monarch points

I think this would really help wide empires more than tall ones.

 

[nkibilko]

I think this would really help wide empires more than tall ones.

Maybe, I've never blobbed in this game though, it's hard (maybe i just dont know how to exploit the game's weaknesses?).

I just think it's really unfortunate that they added something like development, but with such poor execution. It doesn't really work they way it should (just my opinion, i know). The fact that it costs monarch points makes it a "never ever ever do unless it has an incredible benefit and you're already ahead on tech and maxed out on monarch points" type thing... I feel like most players probably don't even develop because their monarch points are so precious to them.

Developing lands shouldn't be able to make you fall behind in technology... If anything, shouldn't development be the thing that determines technology? Or at least influence it somehow?

Development should just cost gold. Development should also somehow contribute the amount of monarch points you receive... Higher development would mean a larger bonus, low development would be smaller bonuses, maybe even a penalty if low enough?

Idk, something. Development has real potential, but right now it's a questionable feature, although i probably still use it more than average. But that's mostly just to try and figure out how good or bad it is from experience.