EU4 needs dynamic difficulty like Stellaris has.

[Pellucid]

In Stellaris you can set the difficulty to scale as the game progresses, so that in the early game the AI has very small bonuses but in the late game very large ones. This game would arguably benefit FAR MORE from such a system due to the fact that some starts are very difficult and some very easy, but it all ends up easy as you enter the late game. I'd love to be able to play as Trebizond or the like starting on even footing with the AI, but have the AI scale into the late game so I'll continue to have a challenge even after I fend off the Ottomans. This doesn't seem like it would be too hard to code, so I wonder if there's a reason this idea hasn't been moved over to other Paradox games.

 

[iClipse]

I agree. It could move together with the ages. Especially when absolutism is introduced in the mid/lategame it's then that the player comes out leagues ahead and the extra challenge would be welcome.

I like playing on Hard/Very Hard, but it's neigh impossible when starting as a small nation.

 

[Victoria 3 finally]

How would you make this happen without it getting silly. Should the France who you beat as a OPM with your allies now be able to steamroll you after owning half the world just cause you didnt annex them before lategame. Should the unit bloat be increased even further where every major just has 1 million active troops to fight you at all times. Do the Ottomans just get free morale and unit pips for free.

 

[iClipse]

How would you make this happen without it getting silly. Should the France who you beat as a OPM with your allies now be able to steamroll you after owning half the world just cause you didnt annex them before lategame. Should the unit bloat be increased even further where every major just has 1 million active troops to fight you at all times. Do the Ottomans just get free morale and unit pips for free.

There are many ways to go at it. Just for example: start the game on normal. From age of reformation onward, the AI now is playing on difficult (same as we have now), and from age of absolutism, the AI plays with the bonusses from very hard.

But you can make it scale any way you want.

 

[MojaveDreams]

One of the Ai mods added bonuses to ai through the ages so every age is gets harder.

 

[EarlKonrad]

No, it doesn't. Giving bonus to the AI doesn't make the game harder or more challenging, no. What it does is widen the gap between optimal and suboptimal play. The AI is as easy to beat on Very Hard as on Normal, the only real difference is that they can field more troops. More troops does not, I repeat, equates to a more challenging game.

if you want EU 4 to me a more challenging game you should instead champion for the AI to be a more competent opponent, not a bad opponent twhose armies are stronger/larger because the AI is incompetent and can't compete even against a reasonably competent human player.

 

[Pellucid]

No, it doesn't. Giving bonus to the AI doesn't make the game harder or more challenging, no. What it does is widen the gap between optimal and suboptimal play. The AI is as easy to beat on Very Hard as on Normal, the only real difference is that they can field more troops. More troops does not, I repeat, equates to a more challenging game.

if you want EU 4 to me a more challenging game you should instead champion for the AI to be a more competent opponent, not a bad opponent twhose armies are stronger/larger because the AI is incompetent and can't compete even against a reasonably competent human player.

Coding a truly better AI is a months or sometimes years-long undertaking requiring thousands of hours. Meanwhile they could probably code dynamic difficulty in less than a day.

 

[_Bachus_]

Giving bonus to the AI doesn't make the game harder or more challenging, no.

I don't agree with this. What about giving maluses to player? Giving +50% idea costs for the player makes game harder for sure. Or reducing mana you get by 1 for every category. Yes I can understand somewhere here you need to play more optimal and think about every mana point but that's the part of the difficulty also. There are plenty of mechanics AI don't use. Estates, goverment modifiers, TC etc. Modifiers from them are only for player. A player has more bonuses than AI even on Very Hard. I don't see how you can say that giving bonuses to AI that Player already has, has no impact on difficulty. If AIs don't get those modifiers that player gets you for sure would say that makes the game easier. It works also other way around. Modifiers and bonuses have huge impact on the difficulty. Yes the way you can play the game is being narrowed, I agree here, but this is the difficulty. There is no more: Whatever you do or choose you make it regardless.

The point why this was not implemented (maluses to player or stoping player having more bonuses) is that it would make game failable if you don't know what you're doing and it's narrowing the way you can play the game. I understand why PDX wants to avoid this approach as a base game . Not everyone seeks more challenging version of this game.

 

[EarlKonrad]

I don't agree with this. What about giving maluses to player? Giving +50% idea costs for the player makes game harder for sure. Or reducing mana you get by 1 for every category.

Again, this isn't difficulty. When you handicap the player you incentivize them to go after what is meta and/or ways of bypassing the handicap. Handicap, or AI buffs, encourage the players to meta game the game.

In your example if ideas were 50% more expensive what a good player should do is go after a select few idea groups over, and over, and over again because the cost-benefit isn't really there. You would also see a lot of idea groups never be finished for the simple fact that you'd need to conserve your resources for other stuff. Similarly getting -1 MP in each category would make it so that players would spend less on what isn't optimal and same the points for what they really need.

See how you aren't Incentivizing new strategies but rather decreasing the number of possibilities that a player have at their dispose? This isn't increasing difficulty, no, it is forcing optimal play on the player.

A series that suffers a lot more than EU 4 in this is Total War where there are so many game rules that buff the AI and handicap the player on higher difficulties (AI getting buffs for melee combat on their units, player's armies getting disproportionately more expensive the more troops you have) which all converge into making the majority of all factions roosters useless, push all armies to be composed of the exact same types of units, and forces players to only play what is optimally (unless the player is exceptionally competent).

 

[ThePettyQueen]

Again, this isn't difficulty. When you handicap the player you incentivize them to go after what is meta and/or ways of bypassing the handicap. Handicap, or AI buffs, encourage the players to meta game the game.

In your example if ideas were 50% more expensive what a good player should do is go after a select few idea groups over, and over, and over again because the cost-benefit isn't really there. You would also see a lot of idea groups never be finished for the simple fact that you'd need to conserve your resources for other stuff. Similarly getting -1 MP in each category would make it so that players would spend less on what isn't optimal and same the points for what they really need.

See how you aren't Incentivizing new strategies but rather decreasing the number of possibilities that a player have at their dispose? This isn't increasing difficulty, no, it is forcing optimal play on the player.

A series that suffers a lot more than EU 4 in this is Total War where there are so many game rules that buff the AI and handicap the player on higher difficulties (AI getting buffs for melee combat on their units, player's armies getting disproportionately more expensive the more troops you have) which all converge into making the majority of all factions roosters useless, push all armies to be composed of the exact same types of units, and forces players to only play what is optimally (unless the player is exceptionally competent).

It isn't forcing anything on the player if it's a settings option.

 

[MojaveDreams]

I would love a good ai but that's for the next game. I'll be demanding decent AI for eu5 or I'll probs skip.

 

[MatthewP]

Again, this isn't difficulty. When you handicap the player you incentivize them to go after what is meta and/or ways of bypassing the handicap. Handicap, or AI buffs, encourage the players to meta game the game.

In your example if ideas were 50% more expensive what a good player should do is go after a select few idea groups over, and over, and over again because the cost-benefit isn't really there. You would also see a lot of idea groups never be finished for the simple fact that you'd need to conserve your resources for other stuff. Similarly getting -1 MP in each category would make it so that players would spend less on what isn't optimal and same the points for what they really need.

See how you aren't Incentivizing new strategies but rather decreasing the number of possibilities that a player have at their dispose? This isn't increasing difficulty, no, it is forcing optimal play on the player.

A series that suffers a lot more than EU 4 in this is Total War where there are so many game rules that buff the AI and handicap the player on higher difficulties (AI getting buffs for melee combat on their units, player's armies getting disproportionately more expensive the more troops you have) which all converge into making the majority of all factions roosters useless, push all armies to be composed of the exact same types of units, and forces players to only play what is optimally (unless the player is exceptionally competent).

“this change forces a player to play closer to optimally to be successful” is a terrific definition of increased difficulty. I don’t understand how you can say bonuses do this but aren’t making the game harder.

I absolutely do understand how the game could become harder but worse, or that you might want it to be harder in a different way. Personally I like very hard (it is definitely harder) and would enjoy scaling difficulty, but it’s obviously not for everyone, and I doubt I would have kept playing EU4 when I picked it up if it was the default.

 

[FrogCrusher]

I think we need to well balance difficulty and tediousness. What is the point of having a 8 years war in 1750 with 1M on each side to take 5 provinces to Ottos?

 

[MatthewP]

I think we need to well balance difficulty and tediousness. What is the point of having a 8 years war in 1750 with 1M on each side to take 5 provinces to Ottos?

Well, it could be quite fun, if it’s a genuinely tough and inconclusive war where you finally fight to a marginal victory. I think that’s one of the places where the game really shines. But not if it’s like “you finally totally crushed the ottomans after 8 years and the game won’t let you take anything significant in the peace because there’s a 250% WS penalty.” That seems like a bad kind of difficulty.

 

[Victoria 3 finally]

I think we need to well balance difficulty and tediousness. What is the point of having a 8 years war in 1750 with 1M on each side to take 5 provinces to Ottos?

Ask England France Russia the same thing in 1919.

 

[_Bachus_]

See how you aren't Incentivizing new strategies but rather decreasing the number of possibilities that a player have at their dispose? This isn't increasing difficulty, no, it is forcing optimal play on the player.

But you can't eliminate the fact that some strategies are better than the others. If all are the same then there is no difference between them. And if they are different in terms of what they do and when they're useful then you always are in this situation when one is better than the other in given situation than the other. It seems to me like you want to outlaw gravity not the difficulty. I understand what you getting at though. That the game doesn't present many situations where different strategies are more optimal meaning there is little variety. But this is the game thing more than difficulty per say.

 

[Victoria 3 finally]

But you can't eliminate the fact that some strategies are better than the others. If all are the same then there is no difference between them. And if they are different in terms of what they do and when they're useful then you always are in this situation when one is better than the other in given situation than the other. It seems to me like you want to outlaw gravity not the difficulty. I understand what you getting at though. That the game doesn't present many situations where different strategies are more optimal meaning there is little variety. But this is the game thing more than difficulty per say.

You cant eliminate that fact but saying one strategy being better makes all other strategys unviable is stupid and arguing in bad faith. It is always more viable to never colonize yourself and just annex the colonizers to get their colonys for free. With your definition this means players CANNOT colonize and have a succesfull game at the same time. Heck the best strategy has always been to just play Hordes since if you know how to play you can conquer the world before 1600 and in extreme cases 1500. Now every single nation wich isnt a horde is unplayable to you cause why bother playing Russia when I can conquer Russia before it even fights its first war. So lets just balance the entire game around hordes with massive modifiers wich make expansion tedious and basically stonewall horde players from conquering. This change will make expansion as other nations near impossible since they now need to deal with those modifiers without enjoying the benefits of being hordes but same difference between now and before right?

 

[_Bachus_]

You cant eliminate that fact but saying one strategy being better makes all other strategys unviable is stupid and arguing in bad faith. It is always more viable to never colonize yourself and just annex the colonizers to get their colonys for free. With your definition this means players CANNOT colonize and have a succesfull game at the same time. Heck the best strategy has always been to just play Hordes since if you know how to play you can conquer the world before 1600 and in extreme cases 1500. Now every single nation wich isnt a horde is unplayable to you cause why bother playing Russia when I can conquer Russia before it even fights its first war. So lets just balance the entire game around hordes with massive modifiers wich make expansion tedious and basically stonewall horde players from conquering. This change will make expansion as other nations near impossible since they now need to deal with those modifiers without enjoying the benefits of being hordes but same difference between now and before right?

I think you confused the person you were responding to.

 

[Beagá]

Heck the best strategy has always been to just play Hordes since if you know how to play you can conquer the world before 1600 and in extreme cases 1500. Now every single nation wich isnt a horde is unplayable to you cause why bother playing Russia when I can conquer Russia before it even fights its first war. So lets just balance the entire game around hordes with massive modifiers wich make expansion tedious and basically stonewall horde players from conquering. This change will make expansion as other nations near impossible since they now need to deal with those modifiers without enjoying the benefits of being hordes but same difference between now and before right?

Wait what? How the hell you do WC with a horde before 1600?

 

[EarlKonrad]

Wait what? How the hell you do WC with a horde before 1600?

Expanding like mad? It isn't that hard. Iirc the WR for WC with a Horde doesn't even reach 1500.