EU4 - Art of War- Dev Diary 8 - Sorties, Terrain and the Maghreb

[TheMeInTeam]

What am I missing? Why do you think it's a buff to big countries?

Because of defensive depth. When you have 40 provinces of 2000-3000 regiments, you have that much more potential to sortie, and you're that much harder to siege at all. I'm not sure the AI can handle it but we'll see.

From a game design standpoint, it can make a lot of sense; it turns out to be the case that a critical aspect of good game design is knowing what to leave out / remove.

Yes. And practical limitations too. Not re-calcing trade supply/demand will probably cover some of the new tags.

 

[Umega]

Landlocked M'zab will be Ibadi, which gives 10% naval morale, lol. I still think that naval morale boost for Ibadi merely exists for Oman.
Will the rumored new Revolution mechanics be touched upon in the next DD?

 

[PhroX]

Do you even know what "improve" means? I'll give you a clue: not "ax".

It means to make better. The terrain system and the pricing system have been made better, ergo they have been improved.

 

[caintheconfused]

Wow. All provinces are going to essentially have one terrain for combat?

So everyone's going to park at hills and mountains and create a buffer you have to somehow break through to get on with the war.

That just sounds wonderful. /s

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Wow. All provinces are going to essentially have one terrain for combat?

So everyone's going to park at hills and mountains and create a buffer you have to somehow break through to get on with the war.

That just sounds wonderful. /s

When was the last time you defended in alps or Tibet etc and not drawn mountains? The percentages were convoluted anyway. I bet the difference is marginal here.

 

[spinoza013]

Wow. All provinces are going to essentially have one terrain for combat?

So everyone's going to park at hills and mountains and create a buffer you have to somehow break through to get on with the war.

That just sounds wonderful. /s

They have to add Favourable terrain/unfavourable terrain bonus/malus with Leader Maneuver score otherwise, like you suggest, it'll be just tragic.

 

[pgroves]

They have to add Favourable terrain/unfavourable terrain bonus/malus with Leader Maneuver score otherwise, like you suggest, it'll be just tragic.

Agreed

 

[unmerged(2833)]

Wow. The fixed terrain was in previous iterations of EU, and it was much better than the EU 4 system. It actually made for planning maneuvers and had players have much control over the process of the war, whereas EU 4 system meant you couldnt count on anything reliably enough to bother with consistent maneuvers. (granted, it was the best in EU 2 where attrition was much more important and there were uniform travel times between most provinces, but even in EU 3 it was better)

It was way superior. I am only surprised to see old players complaining (The Archduke? Really? )

 

[r-amarcord]

Making terrain fixed is VERY stupid thing. :sad:
Multi-terrain system is an important element of the EU4.
:excl:You should increase the type of terrain if you decide to introduce "one terrain - one prov".

 

[ABookshelf]

Because of defensive depth. When you have 40 provinces of 2000-3000 regiments, you have that much more potential to sortie, and you're that much harder to siege at all. I'm not sure the AI can handle it but we'll see..

You can't actually take the sorties out and fight with them bro its not like large countries get a free 80,000 troops just for being large rofl. Its a buff for anybody big or small who builds high level forts which sounds fair to me.

 

[oblio-]

You can't actually take the sorties out and fight with them bro its not like large countries get a free 80,000 troops just for being large rofl. Its a buff for anybody big or small who builds high level forts which sounds fair to me.

He isn't talking about using the sorties to make a standing army.
He's talking about an OPM or other minor carpet sieging a big country to prevent it from producing troops. You can't do that anymore, and your paltry 10k troops will never stop France that is willing to take loans until going into bankruptcy to merc up and give the 2-3 star generals troops to squash your measly forces.

TheMeInTeam - there's another factor - if you force even a lucky nation to mass-sortie, they will destroy their military points. Fight 1-2 white peace wars to bring them into the military stone age, then destroy them with your lazors.

 

[ChildeR]

Because of defensive depth. When you have 40 provinces of 2000-3000 regiments, you have that much more potential to sortie, and you're that much harder to siege at all. I'm not sure the AI can handle it but we'll see.

OTOH, if they do that, they take a proportionally larger hit in monarch points. Seems to me that for an OPM 10 points gives e.g. 20% more army for a single battle, while for a 40 province nation the difference is too small to mention. Compare to policies where 1 point per month gives the same percentage bonus (to whatever) for both.

 

[WeissRaben]

Wow. The fixed terrain was in previous iterations of EU, and it was much better than the EU 4 system. It actually made for planning maneuvers and had players have much control over the process of the war, whereas EU 4 system meant you couldnt count on anything reliably enough to bother with consistent maneuvers. (granted, it was the best in EU 2 where attrition was much more important and there were uniform travel times between most provinces, but even in EU 3 it was better)

It was way superior. I am only surprised to see old players complaining (The Archduke? Really? )

You might have skipped EU3, where the system was not of single terrain.

 

[ABookshelf]

He isn't talking about using the sorties to make a standing army.

Dunno dude, when you bring up "40 provinces of 2000-3000 regiments" as a big bonus for big countries I'm not sure what else you could be talking about. The idea that a minor country is even capable of carpet-sieging a nation like France or Ottomans (Really you're mad that Serbia can't carpet siege the Turks? ROFL) is absolutely ridiculous so I don't think he's complaining about that either. Everyone should be relieved that that can't happen anymore.

 

[Pro]

I don't think the price system is dumbing down; in almost 300 hours of playing EU4 I never once gave the supply and demand of trade goods a single thought. Unless you were doing a WC anything you could do to affect the price would have an almost unnoticable effect.

 

[Te. Kenzo]

Landlocked M'zab will be Ibadi, which gives 10% naval morale, lol. I still think that naval morale boost for Ibadi merely exists for Oman.
Will the rumored new Revolution mechanics be touched upon in the next DD?

Useful if you want to become and Ibadi berber pirate.

 

[oblio-]

Dunno dude, when you bring up "40 provinces of 2000-3000 regiments" as a big bonus for big countries I'm not sure what else you could be talking about. The idea that a minor country is even capable of carpet-sieging a nation like France or Ottomans (Really you're mad that Serbia can't carpet siege the Turks? ROFL) is absolutely ridiculous so I don't think he's complaining about that either. Everyone should be relieved that that can't happen anymore.

I can't be completely sure what he's thinking, but I've seen him carpet siege a 20+ province Muscovy with Golden Horde in order to destroy them quickly.
It might sound silly, but you need to do silly things to overcome silly things like lucky nations getting awesome generals at the start.

I don't think the price system is dumbing down; in almost 300 hours of playing EU4 I never once gave the supply and demand of trade goods a single thought. Unless you were doing a WC anything you could do to affect the price would have an almost unnoticable effect.

And during a WC you did not care at all.

For me, if the provinces would have been producing rockets or rabbits, the outcome would have been the same. I never, ever, planned around trade goods. I gave them a look at the start, noticed that they were completely irrelevant (except for gold) and completely ignored trade goods in ~800 hours of EU4, including 1 WC.

For them to be relevant they would somehow have to be tied in to buildings and other aspects such as these, and all these should be tied together in a dynamic and interactive system. Something that I could control a bit in intervals shorter than 50 years (the shortest time it takes to control a trade good, I'd reckon) and that would require my attention every few months.

 

[208]

New Price Mechanic
Another new thing in the free patch accompanying Art of War is an overhaul of the trade goods price mechanics. The old, confusing and unwieldy system of supply and demand is now gone, replaced with a system of fixed prices that are influenced by important events. For example, the base price of slaves may be fairly low, but when the Europeans start colonizing the New World in earnest, the ‘Triangle Trade’ event will fire and greatly increase the value of the slave trade... at least until the abolitionists get going a few centuries later.

When you say "a system of fixed prices", does that mean there's no direct way to influence trade good values anymore and they only change through events? If so, that's a little disappointing (not that the pricing factors couldn't use an overhaul, but removing them entirely was unexpected), but I suppose it was a big win in terms of optimization to simply ditch all those per-province calculations entirely and the gameplay benefits of "spending" those CPU cycles elsewhere outweigh that minor loss of dynamic pricing.

 

[Kljunas]

Landlocked M'zab will be Ibadi, which gives 10% naval morale, lol. I still think that naval morale boost for Ibadi merely exists for Oman.
Will the rumored new Revolution mechanics be touched upon in the next DD?

Yeah naval morale should be in Oman's NI's instead, it's a pretty weird bonus to have for a religion.

 

[ABookshelf]

I can't be completely sure what he's thinking, but I've seen him carpet siege a 20+ province Muscovy with Golden Horde in order to destroy them quickly.
It might sound silly, but you need to do silly things to overcome silly things like lucky nations getting awesome generals at the start.

Then they should address the "silliness" of the lucky mechanic, not let players do even sillier things like carpet siege majors with minors to compensate.