Doesn't Development end... very unrealistic?
- Thread starter Krajzen
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That money makes money is something that's been a fundamental thing of economics for a good while
. While I agree there are issues with the AI and money, wouldn't a better solution be to:- Help the AI manage money better - I suspect the addition of forts hasn't helped the AI's money management skills, although their tenacity and willingness to accumulate some pretty heady debts is also a big 'un;
- Just like it is for MPs, have diminishing marginal returns for higher levels of development. So lower levels are cheaper and OPMs can comfortably afford them as long as they're not doing silly things with their budget.
Also - if manpower is the currency, don't forget that MP means more manpower, so you haven't gotten away from the 'monarch points means more of the resource which means more monarch points' issue, you've just shuffled it along the MP order from admin and diplo to military.
As for loans, I don't see that as an issue at all. IRL it's common practice to borrow money to develop, and then pay the money back with the increased cashflow from the development to more than cover the interest. The AI would have to be able to handle it, of course, and there'd need to be some kind of mechanism to ensure someone couldn't take out 20 loans, develop to the high heavens, go bankrupt and keep all the development, but loans shouldn't be too much of a hurdle.
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The problem is not that clicking Develop is too cheap (it's actually way too expensive for the litte 0.0000001% bonuses it offers, both in terms of direct cost of developing as well as increased annex/core/etc costs) or even that clicking Develop should cost a different currency (I don't have an opinion on that). This is an AI bug. If a country has a province up to 70 development at the currect cost levels, it's got to be ridiculously behind in tech. There's a problem with how the AI balances the value of spending MP on Develop vs other things.
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Strange that we are not seeing this level of development from natives in America since they have even fewer things to spend MP on. Even at 250% tech cost they seem to prefer saving up for those over spending it on development and holding out on tech until they can slingshot using reforms.
Of course, they dont die while they build it. But "buildings" are already integrated with ducat costs.
Imagine the increase in development as permanent use of citizen. The higher production from DIP development dont come out from nowhere, you need people to build manufactories, roads, infrastructure and those who work in these development.
I dont see a problem in the rationale of snowballing, cause it happens everywhere in the real world. If you conquer lot of provinces, you have more money and manpower to conquer even more. But who is complaining about this problem? Nearly none.
Till yet, tiny or small nations benefit from the development system the most, and big nations have nearly zero benefit from development.
(I calculated somewhere a comparison with 5 nations with 5 provinces and 1 with 25 provinces, where the minor nations could afford double or tripple the development than the major nation.)
But instead of this, we should create an option for peaceful play, even you are medium or big sized. Smaller nations are still a winner in this race, cause theres a minimum of manpower, but bigger nations benefit through their size also, but dont be able to snowball too strong cause manpower isnt that much gained as trade income or production is.
To compensate this, manpower should be improved by technology as well and have reduced values in national ideas and idea groups.
@Kamiran - I agree with the general gist of you points, but the thing I'm not entirely comfortable with is the idea that manpower is permanently 'lost' to development. In almost all construction projects, the vast majority of the manpower required is in the building, not the use afterwords, and to have the manpower disappear as part of the production function feels wrong. Given that money would be a more plausible approach (with available manpower being an enabling ratio, rather than the resource spent), why not take that approach? I mean, manpower would work fine in a pure gameplay sense, but it would be another step away from plausible historic mechanics, and would likely result in more implausible (from a historical game mechanic perspective) outcomes. It's better than pure MPs, but has lots of potential difficulties.
For a start, what if a peaceful nation that's been spending it's manpower on development suddenly gets attacked? Even though it might not have been to war in 100 years, it only has 10% of its available manpower pool on hand (but lots of well developed provinces), and gets rolled. This is neither plausible nor necessarily particularly good for gameplay. No need to wait for your opponent to have a bad war to run down their manpower, just wait for them to be at peace and build up a few provinces. That's just off the top of my head, I'm sure there's other ways that using manpower as a currency could skew gameplay.
Don't get me wrong, this is just my 2 cents, I'm hardly the authority on the matter, and it's always good brainstorming.
That was the point I was making, in response to a comment that using money snowballs (the point I was making was that using mil MPs also snowballs, so it's not a strong argument against using money - I quoted the point I was responding to in my post, apologies if I wasn't clear).
For a start, what if a peaceful nation that's been spending it's manpower on development suddenly gets attacked? Even though it might not have been to war in 100 years, it only has 10% of its available manpower pool on hand (but lots of well developed provinces
), and gets rolled. This is neither plausible nor necessarily particularly good for gameplay. No need to wait for your opponent to have a bad war to run down their manpower, just wait for them to be at peace and build up a few provinces. That's just off the top of my head, I'm sure there's other ways that using manpower as a currency could skew gameplay.Don't get me wrong, this is just my 2 cents, I'm hardly the authority on the matter, and it's always good brainstorming
.That was the point I was making, in response to a comment that using money snowballs (the point I was making was that using mil MPs also snowballs, so it's not a strong argument against using money - I quoted the point I was responding to in my post, apologies if I wasn't clear)
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As I've said elsewhere.
I think the problem is that nothing was added that makes the AI covet the new mega provinces. If you (or more usually the AI) wanna be an OPM and build some mega city you should expect your neighbors to come in and try to conquer your ridiculously rich province.
Seems like they added a feature without changing that aspect of AI behavior towards the feature.
Just need to add a scaling -X (covets your rich city) malus for neighbors of provinces over 25-30 development.
I think the problem is that nothing was added that makes the AI covet the new mega provinces. If you (or more usually the AI) wanna be an OPM and build some mega city you should expect your neighbors to come in and try to conquer your ridiculously rich province.
Seems like they added a feature without changing that aspect of AI behavior towards the feature.
Just need to add a scaling -X (covets your rich city) malus for neighbors of provinces over 25-30 development.
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Good point. Or maybe (gasp shock horror) a diminishing core-cost curve for high development. Berber Traditions' evil contrarian twin.
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For a start, what if a peaceful nation that's been spending it's manpower on development suddenly gets attacked? Even though it might not have been to war in 100 years, it only has 10% of its available manpower pool on hand (but lots of well developed provinces
What happens if you declare war, deplete your manpower pool and a neighbor declare war on you too?
What if you spend all your money for food, household etc. and then your dog/cat get ill and you have to pay the bill for medication?
Same situation.
I have no experience in MOD making but it should be a simple task to switch the payment for development with manpower and then play some 2-10 province nation on lvl 5 speed to test it peacefully.
I have no clue how the AI calculate the importance of development over technology, coring or ideas, but its an easy task to use this simply string:
if manpower pool >= 85% ---> use development
As player you can chose to play risky or mainly with mercanary to save your manpower for development, but the AI would be playing safe with this feature.
For a start, what if a peaceful nation that's been spending it's manpower on development suddenly gets attacked? Even though it might not have been to war in 100 years, it only has 10% of its available manpower pool on hand (but lots of well developed provinces
No, no. You see this is actually why it's good. Because development becomes a choice and not a 'i'm about to run out of space for mana' sink.
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And this is the point where we can see how twisted and idiocy can an overdeveloped POP "replacement" mechanic can become.
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Its because they migrate. If you look you'll see random provinces with extra development all over the new world.
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The manpower idea seems very interesting. However, I feel like all these ideas should be compared to the numbers in historical starts. What I mean is that games starting in 1444 should end with a province development spread more than 50% that of the equivalent historical starts.
yep thats what i hate small nations get rly high development and its not realistic seeing albania 5 times as high as paris ...
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Aye, but having low manpower because you've been sending all your military-service age people off to die makes sense. Having no manpower because you've been building lots of whatever development represents (I personally think buildings and development should be merged - they're kind of two sides of the same coin) doesn't make any sense at all. Moving the game further away from plausible gameplay mechanics is likely to lead to more odd gameplay outcomes, I'd say.
I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad idea, but as I'm personally one who prefers plausibility with my gameplay, it's just not one that I personally can go for.
I mean we have three abstract resources where:
- You either invest in improving manpower, getting better tech/guns or infiltrating rebellions and making them slow down...
- You either make a province a part of your empire, improve your tax or improve your philosophical thought
- You either invest in bringing vassals into your empire, improve your production or enforce your military demands
Okay, but artillery is a great example here. You would never have 1000 men required for one battalion of troops. Heck... what would they all do? The number is clearly strongly abstracted and the representation is presumably the cost of industry and infrastructure required to build that battalion. That's how I justify these weirdities to myself.
But justifications might be:
- You're improving your tax by improving your bureaucratic process and hiring more tax-collectors. During war you can't dismiss your tax collectors. Sure you don't need 3000 tax collectors, but maybe part of that is the training, recruitment, etc.
- You're improving production by improving mines and any associated production materials. Mines need to be kept structurally sound when they're not in use.
- You're improving manpower by creating better recruitment techniques and during wartime you can't stop your men signing up, that's stupid! So you can't dismiss your recruiters.
Again, it's worth noting that most resources are heavily abstracted. You're right that this might not make 100% gameplay sense. But we are talking about a game where a lot of choices are contrived. The manpower could be renamed "human capital" after all.
It's worth saying that I do believe that you should move to development not being immediate and requiring investment. Would it make more sense to you if you thought of it as losing 100 men a month for 30 months while developing? Slowly dripping in the men to a province to improve it? Because that's in a way what I feel these one-off-costs represent. Like with tech you pay 600 in one go, but presumably the abstraction is that your scientists have been researching for months before finally completing their research.
- You either invest in improving manpower, getting better tech/guns or infiltrating rebellions and making them slow down...
- You either make a province a part of your empire, improve your tax or improve your philosophical thought
- You either invest in bringing vassals into your empire, improve your production or enforce your military demands
Okay, but artillery is a great example here. You would never have 1000 men required for one battalion of troops. Heck... what would they all do? The number is clearly strongly abstracted and the representation is presumably the cost of industry and infrastructure required to build that battalion. That's how I justify these weirdities to myself.
But justifications might be:
- You're improving your tax by improving your bureaucratic process and hiring more tax-collectors. During war you can't dismiss your tax collectors. Sure you don't need 3000 tax collectors, but maybe part of that is the training, recruitment, etc.
- You're improving production by improving mines and any associated production materials. Mines need to be kept structurally sound when they're not in use.
- You're improving manpower by creating better recruitment techniques and during wartime you can't stop your men signing up, that's stupid! So you can't dismiss your recruiters.
Again, it's worth noting that most resources are heavily abstracted. You're right that this might not make 100% gameplay sense. But we are talking about a game where a lot of choices are contrived. The manpower could be renamed "human capital" after all.
It's worth saying that I do believe that you should move to development not being immediate and requiring investment. Would it make more sense to you if you thought of it as losing 100 men a month for 30 months while developing? Slowly dripping in the men to a province to improve it? Because that's in a way what I feel these one-off-costs represent. Like with tech you pay 600 in one go, but presumably the abstraction is that your scientists have been researching for months before finally completing their research.
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I'm not suggesting there aren't already some rather stretched abstractions in the game - I was just arguing that further stretching the link between the game and its historical base would be something I personally wouldn't like to see. Personally, I'd prefer the game to either have a strong tie to historic mechanics, or be strongly designed around abstract 'balanced' gameplay issues, rather than have these two elements fight against each other. At the end of the day, using manpower as a currency to provide more realistic development is almost an oxymoron (in that it's not realistic by design) - and if we're not worried about realism, then why not have crazy tall OPMs?
Valiant attempts, but I've studied too much economics, production and history for any of them to be within an alternative dimensions distance of plausibility to me. Tax collecting has always been a low manpower job, as has recruitment, training and mine maintenance. Plus, manpower is only a proportion of your realms total adult population of 'fighting age' - if the fighters are suddenly doing everyone else's jobs, are the usual workers suddenly all on holiday?
Only if they were building a development that was made of skulls and processed human-meat
. Any development product that consumes 100 men a month (that doesn't involve a situation like a colliseum where slaves are fed to lions for the entertainment of other workers ) needs to seriously look at its OH&S! I do agree that construction should be something that happens over time though. If it were me, I'd combined development and buildings, make them build like buildings, but provide both 'development point' and building-like benefits (as appropriate for the building in question), and cost both MP (but not as much as it did pre-1.12) and money for them. You get some limit to wide empires being able to develop as efficiently as tall ones (but it's nowhere near as crazily skewed one way or the other at the moment), you have scalable costs for development in the money, but it's still possible for small nations to get in on the act.I thought the units in EU4 were regiments, rather than battalions (although I agree that the numbers are skewed, and that there is far too much artillery relative to other types of units, particularly for the period). That said, it's less important as to the size of the actual units - they're just broken down into 'thousand person' blocks to make it easier for players to follow things. It's less about how big the units are, and more how much artillery is expected to be part of a sensibly balanced army.
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Holidays? Good questions. Manpower pool of 300.000? What are all these people doing?
Compare it to victoria 2, where your manpower pool, even you dont use it, have to be paid. In EU IV, no influence. No matter if you have 99% or 2% manpower, it have no influence to your economy.
There could be a solution to this. What if you need manpower and have to use them over time in a province to develop. Say, 4000 over a time of 5 years to develop a province from 10 to 11. For every higher development you need 100 more manpower. And for every development level in the province you get 1% less back. 4000 - (1% * 10) = 3600.
Technology in lategame will reduce the time and the necessary manpower for this task.
There would be a soft cap for OPM, cause at lvl 70, you need 10000 (4000+ 60*100) manpower, close to the limit of a OPM. Also the time based component would limit the maximum development a province can get. With 5 years development time (without any reductions from technology), the maximum additionally development would be 75.
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A good point - I think the issue highlights EU's lack of economic model, or link between population and the economy. I'm guessing that 'in theory' manpower is the available pool of fighting-age people (and I'm guessing mainly men, given the time period). If, like Vicky, you burned your population on war, you lost production and tax income, that'd go a long way to simulating it better (I wonder if this is possible to mod in? They do have events in vanilla that hint at this kind of thing, but are pretty soft on it.)
Thinking this through, I'd go one step further than this - you don't need manpower to develop, but once you've fallen below a certain proportion of manpower (say, 80 per cent) you start to get a reduction in tax and production income. I'm still not comfortable with the model of 'spending' people on building things - the number of people available to work should dictate the amount of work possible as a rate, rather than as an absolute currency - but appreciate we've got different opinions here. In the context of your idea, what you're suggesting is a good thing
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