However, when you are at peace — you stay at speed 4-5 most of your time
Instead of acting as a player moving visual models, you act as a machine operator who controls and adjusts values during a production process.
Obviously, to make a player more involved in the process during peacetime, a developer would need to create some visual models to actively move and watch thismovement.
FOR COMPARISON, what makes CIV5 (this is the most recent example, but applies to all the series) so applying for a peaceful gameplay:
(1) Until complete world discovery, you almost always at every turn move your troops to open map of the World——manually or automatically, but you watch this movement.
(2) You manually guide your settlers to build cities, planning their movement and best position to have the most number of luxury resources——again “visual model movement” aspect of the game
(3) You guide the army of your workers to build infrastructure——more “visual model movement” aspect of the game
(4) Same with missionaries, inquisitors, and other great people, whom you use for dominating with your religion——even more “visual model movement” aspect of the game
[...]
So, most likely, EU4 also needs some active gameplay mechanics with visual response (player-controlled models that are moving in peacetime) instead of even more once-a-year-click numbers.
Maybe, Paradox will understand this and avoid falling into the same trap of numerical values.
Not much of an advanced player here, and new to the forums, but I thought I'd weigh in.
The dev diary on the revamp to espionage fired up my imagination. I want to see how it plays out in actual gameplay, but if the reception's at least reasonably positive I think it could be expanded into a lot of different areas of gameplay. Basically, it has me envisioning CK2's five agents and the missions they can be sent on, both internally and externally - that was a system of administration I really enjoyed, even if I was abysmal at every other aspect of that game. Long story short, I'd like to see at least the Magistrate/Administrator/Governor agents reintroduced, but instead of just spending them like resources they get their own missions that cause effects on the country or region level (especially important with the upcoming State system).
Deploy them within your own country to stabilize high-revolt areas, make development cheaper, buy bonuses for yourself or your provinces, and things like that. Deploy them in other countries to destabilize enemies, bolster allies, or diplomatically work over countries that you aren't so invested in yet. I think that "Network Power" function has a lot of potential for all of these things, and with the introduction of opportunity cost and physical models like YuriiH was talking about it can make the peacetime game at least feel a lot more interactive.
Furthermore, making it clear that they come with random bonus events (and failure events) like their CK2 parallels can add another level of strategic thinking, similar to the argument that Religious ideas are great for all of the free +stab events or that certain Merchant Republic and Celestial Empire factions are best in certain circumstances for their events as well as their actual effects.
Here are a few examples of the types of networks and events that could be added - note these are all pretty much brainstorms at this point, without much thought put into balance or how they conflict with Estates except where it's way too obvious even to me.
Diplomat: Foreign Country: Diplomacy
Passively boosts relations over time and speeds up negative modifier decay as long as the diplomat is present. Strengthens Spy Network at, say, 10% the rate of Diplomatic Network, letting you occasionally use Spy's powers too. Can cash in Diplomatic Network strength and money or monarch points for an immediate relations boost, an alliance, trust and favors (if already allied), trade, loan and subsidy treaties, and maybe even some other potential features like defense pacts, tech sharing, and mercenary recruitment. It also could allow you to buy or demand a claimed or cored province with or without the Threaten War option.
Diplomat: Foreign Country: Spy
As advertised in the dev diary, maybe expanded in the range of effects you can demand based on how it works out in practice - but it also strengthens the Diplomatic Network power at a small rate, and comes with a different set of events that may or may not be what you want to have happen.
Diplomat: Subject Country
Again, passively boosts relation and strengthens spy network (since allied, this boosts the Spy Defense of the friendly country). Can exchange network strength and money or points as applicable for relations, liberty desire reduction, or diploannexation progress. Diploannexation might even be adjusted to a stepwise thing - pay 100% network strength plus appropriate diplo power to annex all adjacent provinces - though I think just pumping monarch points into periodic progress towards the target is simpler and easier to handle.
Missionary: Own Country: Capital
Builds Religious Network strength and provides a small passive prestige or prestige decay bonus while the missionary is active. Full network strength boosts TTF, and can be exchanged for the standard religious bonuses - stability, missionary strength (more on that in a few lines), tolerance of other faiths, immediate prestige, and maybe even a discount to building costs or free temples and cathedrals. I'd also consider Monastery or Religious School province buffs (your choice of tiny tech or idea cost reduction, province goods produced, fort defence, extra tax, something like that, at the expense of money, upkeep, autonomy, and/or monarch points) but I think those would overlap too much with Estates.
Missionary: Own Country: Wrong-Religion Province
Builds Missionary Network strength and Administrator Network strength at 10% the rate in the province and all adjacent provinces (network is basically tied to the active missionary rather than the location), or alternately to a selection of provinces near it Army Template style,
or to some preset region/state/area/other geographical factor (network tied to the location after all). This is where Missionary Strength still matters - it accelerates the rate at which this sort of network gains power. 100% network strength can be exchanged to insta-convert a province of your choice, while there is a moderate chance to convert other provinces by event. There should also be other things to spend the power on, keeping the provinces wrong-religion longer in exchange for temporary bonuses to not just productivity but maybe tech or tolerance (as in, not the same things Estates would give you in the same provinces).
Missionary: Foreign Country
Builds Missionary Network and Spy Network strength in the target country, network can be spent to convert random individual provinces, to encourage (but not force) an AI monarch to convert (maybe a relations boost, cash deposit, or other diplomatic offer to encourage human players to consider it too), or - more positively - to build missions and provide fairly direct support to a friend (or buffer zone between you and a rival, or a potential vassal...). These can give them tech discounts, manpower (or maybe Condottieri, if my hunch about that little tease is right), development cost reduction, and/or fort defense, at the cost of being able to convert those provinces more easily in the future and building Missionary Network in that country more quickly too, or even exchanging network strength and diplo power for a free claim. Events can boost or cripple diplomacy with the targeted country even if you're trying to be nice to them, so use this network with caution!
Administrator: Own Country: Province
Boosts Administrative Network and Religious Network (the capital-specific one). Like with "active" missionaries, this network would either affect every province adjacent to the target, selected nearby provinces, or some geographic area - I'd prefer the smaller focus, but it may not be possible or practical to balance. The passive effect is reduced development cost scaling with network strength (say, Strength/3% discount, capping at 33% off at a full-strength network). Can be spent to buy development for money and network strength instead of MP, or to provide varying durations of trade power, tax or production efficiency, goods produced, or massive dev cost discounts in single provinces. Larger projects providing less straightforward province bonuses that last much longer - for instance, a replacement for the old Road Network building, boosting move speed through the provinces - would also be possible. Events can provide similar bonuses in affected provinces, or cause revolts and income or autonomy penalties, maybe even loss of stability from corruption and haphazard enforcement.
Administrator: Allied Country
Counts vassals and other client states - essentially, this builds a network around their capital that can be cashed in to give a friend similar boosts to development and economy, or even to build them a building if you've got the cash and high network power to spare. Events happen to them instead of to you, though, and negative events come with a relations penalty or a corresponding event that gives
you a diplo-rep hit, so it can backfire.
Administrator: Hostile Country
Builds Spy Network strength, of all things, with a different set of events mostly related to tech theft and occasional little bits of sabotage - temporary reductions to goods produced, strengthened Siege Ability against the target specifically (if possible) or reduced Fort Defense in an unlucky province otherwise, a few ducats of bribes and gifts sent home to your treasury every so often, and similar small but potentially vital acts of sabotage.
I'm not certain how I'd want to change Colonists or Merchants, or if they even need to be changed to go with this system, but I think I would appreciate a trade game that involved a bit more dynamism in building and maintaining your foreign contacts and trade routes rather than placing fire-and-forget merchants until the flow of profit shifts dramatically enough to warrant a change.
Honestly, as the El Dorado exploration expansions have shown, even having some extra random events for flavor can go a long way towards breaking up the flow of peacetime gameplay; if I had the ability to pick what sort of events I wanted to deal with in other fields and stack modifiers to make them happen more often, I think peace would be a lot more interesting.
Note that this doesn't address the viability of tall or wide gameplay, and it's not really meant to. There are lots of other suggestions for constraints or bonuses to play around with that, this is much more an attempt to take a (soon-to-be) existing system and generalize it into something fun. If it turns out that the Spy Networks are a painful slog to deal with on the giving or receiving end...well, some of these might still be viable parallels anyway, but I really will need to see how it turns out in live gameplay before I can really advocate this idea. For now, it's just an idea for something more to do beyond pressing buttons for profit when not at war.
