Europe VS the world

[Beagá]

I'm not speaking about an edge, Yabba. I'm talking about 7000 Mauricians, 3000 knights and 2000 artillery vaporizing Far Eastern armies double or triple their size, in 1530. This is 1850, not 1530.

Well the keyword here are revolts and administrative penalties, so that such silly conquests are both hard to mantain and not very profitable until decent sea tech is acquired and dominance is well established.

In other words it´s not only about how easy it is to conquer, but also WHY conquer and how to mantain the conquest. There are good reasons why Portugal couldn´t advance in India as much as the british could, later - analyzing those differences is pretty interesting and critical in defining how to balance conquest in Asia.

 

[WeissRaben]

The main impact is not on America, Yabba. Military-wise, America works like a charm: to beat the European you need a combination of shrewdness, attrition and massive numbers. Good! That should be it. America has OTHER problems (which is that it is as fun as the above mentioned paint drying), but not that one. Good.

The problem is everything else. It is that, by 1530, either you pull an Isandlwana or you get vaporized, as an ASIAN nation. Japan was almost on pair until 1600, military speaking, but leaving some thousands Tercio or Maurician (I used 12000) is enough to cancel them. Only infamy slowed down that conquest.

 

[Colombo]

Yabba: Colombo only pointed out, that discussion about European Union and decline of Europe in near future with flamebaits is highly inapropriate.

 

[Colombo]

The main impact is not on America, Yabba. Military-wise, America works like a charm: to beat the European you need a combination of shrewdness, attrition and massive numbers.

It depends what do you want to simulate. I would be mutch happier by simulating the diplomacy that make the difference in most of colonial places with net of alliances etc.

Still, withouth lowering of reinforcements for europeans invasion and with autoannex, it would be still boring for natives as for europeans.

 

[unmerged(463662)]

Yabba: Colombo only pointed out, that discussion about European Union and decline of Europe in near future with flamebaits is highly inapropriate.

I mentioned it purely to help those who are tied up in knots over European dominance in recent history to get some perspective. Nations rise and fall. Lots of people, even on these forums, seem to believe that the white man will have to shoulder his guilt for a long time to come, and it shows up in their posts. It is simply not true.

You seem to use highly inappropriate to mean borderline censored. I suppose that means that any reference to the decline of any nation is forbidden, and I suppose that that also extends to references about other countries rise.

And why people are offended at a perceived slight against an illiberal, anti-democratic embryonic state is beyond me. Especially when its relative decline is a well documented fact. But... what the hey.

With regards to EU4, game-balance is key, and considering that many people's games never get terribly far out of Europe, focusing on Europe now helps ensure half a decade of expansions.

I'm sure that the developers know what they're doing, though a well thought out plan that buffs Asia without breaking Europe in the critical first half of the game might be well received.

 

[Colombo]

OMG, not again. It is totally OT. Thats the only reason.

 

[Red_warning]

The following two quotes are by Sid Meier on designing Civ1:





This thread is all about game balance when Europe interacts with the rest of the world. My point has always been, and I either commented in this thread a few hundred comments ago or an identical thread, is that Europe and its interactions with itself are the most vital aspects of the game that needs to be balanced.

If those proponents for slower tech growth in this thread are heard and their desires implemented, will that actually make EU4 the best that it can be, or will it make the game dull?

There seem to be several kinds of people in this thread:
1. Those that believe that the Native Americans were only a generation behind Europe in tech, and should be represented as such.

Some of the above are suffering from "western guilt", my first post was aimed at them. The West's dominance won't last forever, and is to a degree an interesting anomaly.

2. Those that believe that the EU series is and must be the most true and faithful model of human history during that time. These people care less about playability, and more about accuracy.

3. Those that care more about how changes will impact the game. These people are obviously the opposite of 2.

This is a game that must sell well if we are to get all the future expansions the effort will deserve.

Contrary to what some people believe, I have never left the topic, and have been attacked 3 times.

My question remains: are you discussing what will make the most playable, historical computer game, or what will make the most accurate simulation?

Elwood and Colombo have both pointed out that they believe that this discussion is deadly serious, and cannot take any interruptions, especially from those who take a different viewpoint to them.

So there is a further question: Given that this thread is at about 500 comments, is someone writing a report based on the findings and conclusions reached for submission to Johan & co?

If not, why is everyone so serious?

Your introduction is quite clumsy, so you should not be surprised by the kind of reactions you get. This is a forum, we can't read your thoughts, you actually have to convey them in a way so that you don't get misunderstood.

 

[Dafool]

This thread is all about game balance when Europe interacts with the rest of the world. My point has always been, and I either commented in this thread a few hundred comments ago or an identical thread, is that Europe and its interactions with itself are the most vital aspects of the game that needs to be balanced.

The problem is that this is a two way street. You can't accurately simulate Europe's interactions with something if you're not willing to accurately simulate the thing with which they're interacting. The excuse of "It is Europa Universalis" becomes immediately irrelevant if you admit that Europe has to interact with non-European parts of the world. Things like Castillian North Africa, England conquering the Inca and Aztecs by 1500, or Portuguese Siberia are caused by the game's lack of focus on the rest of the world. People don't just desire these changes because they want Nation X to receive more attention. Many just want to see Nation X to be able to play it's role in world history.

There seem to be several kinds of people in this thread:
1. Those that believe that the Native Americans were only a generation behind Europe in tech, and should be represented as such.

Some of the above are suffering from "western guilt", my first post was aimed at them. The West's dominance won't last forever, and is to a degree an interesting anomaly.

Did Joe create another account just to annoy everyone? Seriously, people don't discuss the Native Americans in depth because of "Western guilt". When a serious discussion comes about them, someone always says one of two things. Rather "You're a revisionist with crazy ideas about these stone age civilizations!" or "You're an apologist for the Native Americans who were conquered by the superior Europeans!" I'm neither. I have an interest in this topic. I read books about it, studied it, and research it. Early work on Native Americans tended to be focused on the "Noble Savage" myth or the "Brutal Subhuman" myth. Neither has any basis in reality. Sadly, too many people enter these conversations with one of these two images in mind and then think they know what they're talking about.

2. Those that believe that the EU series is and must be the most true and faithful model of human history during that time. These people care less about playability, and more about accuracy.

Many people want a mix of playability and accuracy. One is completely pointless without the other.

3. Those that care more about how changes will impact the game. These people are obviously the opposite of 2.

Any change will impact the game. The why is as important as the how.

Elwood and Colombo have both pointed out that they believe that this discussion is deadly serious, and cannot take any interruptions, especially from those who take a different viewpoint to them.

I came back to see how this discussion was going and I see that you and a few others have been discussing the future of Europe for nearly two pages. I'm surprised that a mod hasn't issued infractions by this point. Seriously, stay on topic or leave.

 

[Beagá]

Well my POV is that expansion should be limited by revolts and difficulty of reinforcing troops the farther they are. I think a large part of the problem is how easy it is to mantain troops and reinforce them in totally hostile territory.

I´d suggest troop reinforcement to be linked with distance and sea tech. That France might be able to beat China or India in 1600 is a bit silly - but to a large extent, part of the reason it would be impossible is the logistics aspect, not only the fact that firearms technology wasn´t THAT advanced.

 

[Emre Yigit]

It would be very nice to see reinforcement scaled by distance!

 

[Lemont Elwood]

It has everything to do with how forumites perceive the implementation of new world et al nations in an Europa Universalis game. The person who threw the angsty guilt-ridden lefty stereotype at me was wrong in his target, but spot-on with regards to the flavour of some of the earlier discussions. As I said:



Some of us feel so guilty about Europe's success that it blinds us to the actual events.



Serious discussion? Serious? Seriously?

What papers are going to be published based on these discussions? What policy influenced? What lives changed?

If this forum were a physical location where would it be? Parliament? A town hall? A classroom? Or judging by your attitude a dilapadated room in the back of some run-down near abandoned pub.

And considering that your opinions are even more extreme than mine:



I wonder what the purpose of your serious discussion is to achieve? Control the Muslims perhaps, I don't know.

Europe really was at the top of its game for quite a while. Let's not try and make allowances for other countries who no matter who noble ttheir civilization might have been, were not.

As the Chinese say, you really are chopping wood outside Master Ban's door.

REALISTICALLY, America and Africa shouldn't be able to advance technology except at the slowest rates, while Asia and Islamic societies should be almost as fast and advanced as Europeans until near the tail end of the game (by which point so much time has passed and so much has diverged that there's no reason they couldn't have maintained their previous progress).

The current system is that you can only Westernize when neighboring a Western country. That sounds fun and realistic both. So what's the problem? The real issue, then, is the faulty representation of American societies. Americans need to be devastated by the great plague (give the Americas high base tax and Manpower, but have it more or less wiped out through events), but at the same time Europeans need to be far more limited as to how many troops they can ship, attrition on them (those troops should drop like flies in the tropics), and some sort of guerilla warfare (probably more attrition).

As for my comment in that other thread, that was in reference to an idea for a game set in THAT time period. How to represent it. You're just babbling on...

 

[icedt729]

The current system is that you can only Westernize when neighboring a Western country. That sounds fun and realistic both. So what's the problem?

Just to point something out- sharing land borders as a requisite for westernization is not realistic at all. Maybe sharing a land border should speed the process up a little bit, but there's nothing you can get from the West over land that can't get there by sea. Also, consider how ridiculous this scenario is: Orissa has ongoing diplomatic relations with Britain, France, Portugal and the Netherlands and has westernization-oriented sliders and a capable ruler. They don't have access to the necessary knowledge to westernize. Now say Britain conquers a single province in Bengal that is adjacent to Orissa. Those Bengalis, conquered by the English just a few short days ago, are now endless fonts of western knowledge shedding the light of civilization on all neighboring regions. Does this make any sense?

EDIT: Just for clarity, this is a hypothetical. I'm not using Orissa as a historical example.

 

[Pwyll]

I would be happy if they got rid of intercontinental reinforcement entirely.

 

[unmerged(415869)]

Well I can understand he or she gets the impression you're a left wing self-hating white male; IMHO Europe was great (even greater for Europeans maybe?) with a (small?) negative side of that coin. Still the offers Europeans nations made, makes them just like their other countries, which were put in such a position.

Surely the African slaves didn't mind being kidnapped and shipped to be worked to death thousands of kilometres from home. Not being self-hating white males they understood the necessities of progress.

The mode of operation, which made Europe a dominant power was based on commoditization and unsustainable exploitation of both the natural environment and humans.

Madeira is a very good early small scale example - in fifty years since the introduction of sugar crop it went from overtaking Cyprus (the previous leader in sugar production) several times in terms of production to a total breakdown caused by environment degradation.
The atrocities witnessed in Europe during WW2 were commonplace in 19th century Africa, the most known (or rather least unknown) example were the proceeding of Belgian Leopold II in Kongo (probably due to "Heart of Darkness") but was in no way exclusive.
The introduction of cash crops led to famines everywhere. India exported a lot of cereal to England while thousands died of starvation in the sub-continent. Contrary to what one might expect, the availability of railway transportation only made things worse, leading to "enterprenous" individuals withdrawing and stockpiling even more food to increase profits. Public officials who organized any kind of effective help were lambasted back in England for wasting money on "useless" and "idle" population. The rational thing to do was let them die, since - in the opinion of the day - the Indian population was growing to fast anyway.
The same thing happened all over again in Ireland during Great Famine. Census data put Ireland population at 8 million before the famine - it still still lower today after 1,5 century.

What I'm trying to point out is:

1. Anybody who thinks the negative side was small is either ignorant or a right-wing stuck-up racist white supremacist,

2. Those kind of occurrences are not accidents or mishaps; in fact the unsustainability of the whole endeavour was one of the most important reasons for European expansionism. It also helps to explain why both Spain and Portugal declined despite their initial advantage.

 

[Fawr]

REALISTICALLY, America and Africa shouldn't be able to advance technology except at the slowest rates, while Asia and Islamic societies should be almost as fast and advanced as Europeans until near the tail end of the game (by which point so much time has passed and so much has diverged that there's no reason they couldn't have maintained their previous progress).

Why do you think that its realistic that Asia and Islamic societies should keep up with Europe until the end of the game?

Most economic historians believe the Europe was more wealthy since the start of the game, and its average wealth was growing much faster than Asia. Lots of "technology" in EU4 is about increases in wealth.

Then consider Naval tech. While China may have had an initial advantage they certainly didn't advance during the game's time period. There are reasons why Europeans sailed around Africa rather than the other way around, and most of it links back to Naval technology. Also consider that once the Portugese reached Asia they took on a lot of trade between Asian countries and not just the Asia to European trade routes. To me that indicates that at that point the Portugese had a significant naval/trade advantage over all the Asian countries. When Portugal lost its advantage it wasn't taken over by local Asian countries but instead was taken over by Holland and England.

When you look at the land tech differencial the Portugese were able to take whatever strong points they wanted. However they could only take and hold so many due to the small number of Portugese people in Asia. So they focused on the wealthiest ones (Malacca/Oman/Goa) and those which were easiest to defend (Indonesian Islands or Ceylon).

And I'm sure Mr. Murray has a perfectly flawlessly Objective and not at all Subjective mathematically sound way of determining what a "Significant Event" or "Significant Figure" is...

I understand he looks at the amount of space dedicated to their work in reference works.

That would create a small bias towards older sources, and towards literate societies, but I don't think either would significantly alter the outcome.

 

[unmerged(415869)]

Why do you think that its realistic that Asia and Islamic societies should keep up with Europe until the end of the game?

Most economic historians believe the Europe was more wealthy since the start of the game, and its average wealth was growing much faster than Asia. Lots of "technology" in EU4 is about increases in wealth.

As, I think, Joe posted in the other thread, this only proves that most economic historians have hardly any clue.
Comparing GDP in pre-modern societies is totally worthless, even more so if you are comparing entities operating under different modes of societal organization. Europe was at the spearhead of capitalist transformation, which in large part involves monetization of previously un-monetized concepts and increase in asset liquidity.
The GDP is essentially a sum of bills paid in a given time period. A society which moves from serfdom towards contractual labor will obviously have an inflated GDP compared to one that doesn't.
If half of the former serfs are going to starve to death due to permanent labour deficits, while the other half contracts to harvest more effective cash crops the GDP per person will surely increase. But is the resulting society better off at that point?

This isn't even taking into account the obvious problems with GDP present even now. You can't do any serous research based on GDP alone, you at least need a calibrating factor like PPP.

So we have bunch of people in a heated debate to estimate a magic mambo-jumbo number, who don't even notice it's not an useful measure of anything.

For me the case of Opium Wars is more telling than this. Until then China was basically a self-sufficent closed economy.
Before the British intervention it exported cash crops (e.g. tea) and sophisticated technological products (e.g. chinaware) to Europe mostly in exchange for raw materials (silver).

Yes, by 1850 the Europeans were already able to overcome the Chinese militarily, which is telling.

However I think that a more useful distinction to be made is between e.g. the New World or Indian subcontinent, which were by then fully dependant parts of world economy, versus the Chinese who were coerced into dependence much later.

I understand he looks at the amount of space dedicated to their work in reference works.

That would create a small bias towards older sources, and towards literate societies, but I don't think either would significantly alter the outcome.

Thank you for proving what Vishaing suggested: what he measures is who made the inventions and which personas were most important to people in European cultural circle.
The results aren't surprising, but tell us nothing otherwise.

This is exactly the same problem as when comparing modern scientific output by number of Nobel prizes. It has an extreme pro-western bias, while e.g China and even Russia produce a lot that is simply not accessible outside of their language zone and therefore goes unnoticed.

EDIT: Another example of the same is the accelerating rate of invention BS from the Kurzweil-Singularity crowd.

 

[Colombo]

There are reasons why Europeans sailed around Africa rather than the other way around

Yeah, continents are slow.

 

[Pippin123]

Concerning the issue of reigning in Force Projection, would it be possible to somehow integrate the Supply system of March of the Eagles ? Or are the game engines too different ?
Or at least tying the "in supply" status with controling a port and having a sufficient navy?

 

[unmerged(612669)]

Well as I said before, if you're primarily talking about metallurgical factors, then yes the Andes were Bronze Age and Mesoamerica is somewhere in between Neolithic and Bronze Age. However, when we're looking at actual societal and technological factors beyond metal, that system simply fails.



Simply untrue. What the Spanish did was entirely normal. Mesoamerican politics followed a very particular pattern: An alliance rises up and subjugates its neighbors. When the time is right, several of the subjugated states will form an alliance, rise up against their overlords, and then begin the process anew. Many often think Cortes roused the locals against their brutal Aztec overlords. This is somewhat of a myth though. Cortes merely found a very profitable niche, that of the powerful ally looking to subvert the dominant alliance.



From what you've said and what I've looked into, it looks as if steel production within the Roman Empire was minimal and the process not well understood. Only though peripheral areas and imports did they seem able to attain and use it on any notable scale.

1. Well metallurgy is the basis of the original ages system (it is only named after the mythic ages).

2. Everything I have read indicates that the Tlaxcalla who proved the most important in the alliance against the Aztecs were losing hopelessly; and it took the Spanish arrival to get them to fight offensively instead of an inevitably lost defensive war.

3. During the empire there really wasn't anyone left to import anything from; if you mean during the republic then equipment was provided by the individual soldier who was required to equip himself. The Empire did not rely on unconquered portions of Germany, India or China for steel. If you meant to say Italy itself had little steel industry then you may be right; but Italy was just one small part of the Roman World as a whole during the empire, Romans didn't import steel from the Picts either. The Roman Steel found in Lorica Segmentata swords etc by the researchers of Iron For Eagles was produced domestically within the empire. Steel was invented before the Romans rise to power so wasn't a Roman invention but neither was the Gladius which they definitely used.

There seem to be several kinds of people in this thread:
1. Those that believe that the Native Americans were only a generation behind Europe in tech, and should be represented as such.

Yes I read a lot of history that isn't in my field (classics) out of western guilt; western guilt from someone who wouldn't dream of bringing actual politics to a Swedish board like this out of fear of being banned yesterday.

Some European Nations achieved great things in this time period and really did set the world ablaze, other factions in the EU timeframe held temporary dominance, Poland was an empire without equal in Europe before the Cossacks started the process of destroying it internally and it's form of monarchy prevented it from expanding or well doing very much. Sweden fought a war too many against Peter the Great and was reduced to a joke which Russia easily trounced next war (I apologize to everyone especially the mods but Russia really did kick Sweden out of the nations that could be termed important in this period it even took over the Baltic). Spain dominated before it's reliance on goldmines destroyed it internally etc. Empires shouldn't be indestructable (including yours) and the West shouldn't have absolute domination.

 

[Lemont Elwood]

AMERICAS
Does anybody else think it would be good for America to be full of "fake" nations (real tribes, but not present in EU)? Historically speaking, they've found the ruins of a huge civilization along the Mississippi, which was hit hard by the plague before the white man arrived. After the first Conquistador/Colonist landing there would be a major event chain in which the plague spreads, and in provinces that get hit too hard, civilization collapses and it reverts to uncolonized.

That way, a Native American player has plenty of room to expand, but most of the "excess" nations will die off in the end by the plague.

Either that, or allow Native Americans to colonize in their home territory.

AFRICA
I don't know enough about African tribes to tell where states belong and where they don't, but as a general rule Africa could use touching up. When it comes to their relations with Europeans, simply represent the fact that white men drop like flies in Africa... no colonization beyond the coast, no expeditions, etcetera. The Africans receive no such limitations, and are able to colonize the interior.

ASIANS
Asia ought to start out fairly tech-advanced and with high base tax, but for various reasons be limited so that they slowly fall behind. Take China for example... the Ming Dynasty had high "base tax" but low "tax efficiency". Technological innovation in the Orient was hampered by isolationism, while in the South it was hampered by too much internal division. China ought to be a juggernaught.