Greek base taxes are a joke, improve them.

[darthfanta]

You can't build manufactories for silk and dye.

This is unintended.

 

[oblio-]

I dont think people wants a complete overhaul of basetax system, at least I dont.
But what I want is to have devastation of wars on wealth represented in the long turn. This can simply be done with events tied up to high WE, sieged/occupied provinces famines etc. Also peacefull countries should be able to create more wealth than warmongering countries. Veritas et Fortitudo Mod does this with black death events. So it should not be so hard nor require a complete overhaul.

Then war score should increase faster for combat and to a higher value (perhaps 60 instead of 40), sieging/occupation should not be required for cores and claims and war exhaustion for the winner should increase much faster after 5 years. All this in order to have satisfying wars but also avoid camping (i.e. carpet sieging to destroy a nation).

 

[Freudia]

Then war score should increase faster for combat and to a higher value (perhaps 60 instead of 40), sieging/occupation should not be required for cores and claims and war exhaustion for the winner should increase much faster after 5 years. All this in order to have satisfying wars but also avoid camping (i.e. carpet sieging to destroy a nation).

War exhaustion should increase even faster for the loser than for the winner, to encourage the loser to actually get out of the war. This is something the AI is really bad at doing, which is part of why sieging down everything is done - because there's nothing else to do except sit at home or police the things you did siege.

 

[Pilot00]

Just make sure to form it with someone that gets a unique idea set. Venice and the Knights are good choices. I suppose Cyprus works too.

Trebizond too, if you live to tell the tale.

 

[Freudia]

Trebizond too, if you live to tell the tale.

Naxos as well, but throwing away your beautiful color for Greece's is a sin, so I don't recommend it.

 

[oblio-]

War exhaustion should increase even faster for the loser than for the winner, to encourage the loser to actually get out of the war. This is something the AI is really bad at doing, which is part of why sieging down everything is done - because there's nothing else to do except sit at home or police the things you did siege.

That can be fixed by changing the modifiers for the AI.

 

[slv]

I do support buffing the non-Greek Balkans and Hungary in terms of basetax and manpower, but do you have a source that actually shows European population densities in/around the year 1600? Because that map is of population density in the 21st century.

I am not sure if this map is right, but this one is supposed to be a population map for 1600

Sadly it's not detalised enough.

 

[Ultrix Prime]

Just make sure to form it with someone that gets a unique idea set. Venice and the Knights are good choices. I suppose Cyprus works too.

Actually, I'm starting to grow fond of NIs that I previously considered junk. Figuring out a way to augment them and make them useful adds a small dynamic. Georgia's NIs aren't the greatest but if you stack the manpower recover modifiers it becomes essentially the same as having infinite manpower (oops, hope DDRJake didn't see that, only he does truly "infinite" stuff )

Anyway, playing with junk NIs actually started showing me things by trying to figure out how to get value out of them. But yes, I normally always look to see what NIs I have and/or will be getting.

Another case where I avoid "good NIs" is when playing TO or another bishopric. It's true that these aren't the best, and I have yet to figure out how to put the garrison recovery buff to good use, but simply saying no to becoming Prussia and no to switching from Catholic has it's appeal. Stomping France when your strongest idea is +2 missionary strength has a certain warm fuzzy feeling for me

 

[yls3431]

Then war score should increase faster for combat and to a higher value (perhaps 60 instead of 40), sieging/occupation should not be required for cores and claims and war exhaustion for the winner should increase much faster after 5 years. All this in order to have satisfying wars but also avoid camping (i.e. carpet sieging to destroy a nation).

This is actually a very good proposal.

 

[Aldaron]

I think the very first thing we have to understand is what Base Tax really represents. Paradox has been pretty obscure in this matter, so it is pretty difficult to imagine what they wanted to do.

Once this has been said, I would just try to focus on how I see it.

I usually see people try to equate wealth with BT. I do think that this a mistake. We have to consider that there are three ways of earning money: BT, production and trade. In this case, I would say that BT has to be raw taxes over population.

I have been working for quite a lot of months in a project to update BT values for the M&T mod. I have been able to wrote down a large list of data to modify both BT and MP values, so I think I can share a little of my experience.

First of all, I have just worked with one data: the XVII Century. I have chosen this data for two simple reasons, it is a middle ground and there is a good amount of data available. Why do I need a middle ground? Well, because not only colecting data for all the timeline would be crazy (if not impossible), but we have not dynamic BT values. We would have to change it by event and it would be a real mess.

I have considered BT as urban taxes. This is a good aproach because I consider that taking taxes in urban areas, where people are more "controled" is easier than in sparsely populated and/or rural areas. Wealth of a low populated region is easily done with trade and production values. Provinces where a good amount of cities existed have those values added to each other to make the final calculus.

So I have been making calculus to convert urban values to Base Tax, and provincial values to Manpower. I do not know if my method is the best, but I'm pretty proud of it because at the very least it gives consistency since all regions follow the same rules.

If we look at the vanilla map, we'll see that regions out of Europe that were pretty rich are far poorer than those in Europe. Does it make sense? I think it doesn't. So now, after studying that data, I have come to a new map where a lot of regions out of Europe are fairly rich. Besides, with the new authonomy modifiers we can play and introduce new "corruption or tax efficiency" modifiers to rectify when needed.

Using my scale, I have to say that Greece is far poorer than what it should be. At least, it is not consistent neither among their provinces, nor among other similar provinces. This can be applied to Iberia, Italy and a lot of regions in Eastern Europe.

For example, in 1600 Greece have these values (just some examples):

Athens: 33.000 inhabitants.
Ioannina: 12.000 inhabitants.
Iraklion: 14.000 inhabitants
Kerkyra: 13.533 inhabitants.
Mystras: 30.000 inhabitants (in the case of M&T, in the same province, there are Kalamai [3.000], Nafplion [6.000], Tripolis [10.000]; for a total of 49.000 inhabitants)
Serres: 22.000 inhabitants (+8.000 in Dráma)
Thessaloniki: 50.000 inhabitants.

And so on. There are at least another 7 10.000+ inhabitant cities and another 5 4.000+ inhabitants cities. We have to consider that anything over 4.000 inhabitants was fairly big for the era.

The biggest city in the world (Beijing) had 706.000 inhabitants. Is this considered in the map? I don't think so.

I hope this post serves its purpose and throws a little of light over the issue (at least, how I see it).

 

[ChildeR]

That can be fixed by changing the modifiers for the AI.

Yes, I don't think war exhaustion is a good way to do it. AI would just be even more screwed due to waiting for the war exhaustion to hit, and the war wouldn't be over that much faster.

Perhaps a "good deal" modifier to mirror the "over warscore" one? Make the AI more likely to accept offers worth e.g. < half the war score, if the war looks like it won't go well (no + from alliance or making gains).

 

[grommile]

But what I want is to have devastation of wars on wealth represented in the long turn. This can simply be done with events tied up to high WE, sieged/occupied provinces famines etc.

Awesome. Another beatstick to crush the AI with. Just what we always needed.

 

[yls3431]

Awesome. Another beatstick to crush the AI with. Just what we always needed.

That stick, you know can work 2 ways.

 

[grommile]

That stick, you know can work 2 ways.

Your proposal makes the consequences of failure more severe. When there is already a significant performance gap between the median player and the AI, making the game-mechanical consequences of failure more severe is pretty much guaranteed to make the game further favour the human.

 

[Zak Preston]

I would say that Balkans should have more provinces, resulting in more total BT. To slow down Ottos snowball Balkans could have an event that won't allow to convert Orthodox provinces 'till 1550-1600.

I was proposing some kind of BT increase mechanics in my recent thread. Unfortunately, it seemed to have died.

 

[yls3431]

Your proposal makes the consequences of failure more severe. When there is already a significant performance gap between the median player and the AI, making the game-mechanical consequences of failure more severe is pretty much guaranteed to make the game further favour the human.

You would have been right if only consequences of failure wasnt already severe to the point of letting human players crush even France(insert any major here) with carpet sieging all of it and waiting for the rebels broke it into oblivion. And once you conquer those former juicy French lands you dont find provinces reduced to ashes but eaqually rich compared to war. Whats more funny is the most secure way with dealing any major powers is sieging the crap out of them once you beat their army.

 

[yls3431]

I would say that Balkans should have more provinces, resulting in more total BT. To slow down Ottos snowball Balkans could have an event that won't allow to convert Orthodox provinces 'till 1550-1600.

I was proposing some kind of BT increase mechanics in my recent thread. Unfortunately, it seemed to have died.

Slow it down? You sure? Many people seem to complain that they are to slow already.

 

[Enewald]

Any attempt to slap the wrist of a human player is like a kick to the face for the AI. Human mind will always find a way to exploit anything.

 

[Zak Preston]

Slow it down? You sure? Many people seem to complain that they are to slow already.

Greeks have saved their language, culture and religion through centuries of occupation. Why should they be converted in 25-30 game years in EU4?

 

[yerm]

Greeks have saved their language, culture and religion through centuries of occupation. Why should they be converted in 25-30 game years in EU4?

Because Islam is becoming the dominant religion of Sweden, and is therefore the greatest in the world??

For real though, everywhere in the game's world it is too easy to culture or religious convert. Culture conversion is just a click of a button and a loss of dip points for something that is the equivalent of localized westernization and possibly some genocide. Converting religion is similar, but even more silly, because religion is this all-or-nothing value in each province with no representation of minority faiths or local heresies. It's not exclusive to the Ottomans.