Greeting from the future: Europa 5130

[MatRopert]

As you all know, the game is supposed to end on January 1821. Of course we allow you to continue if you wish but there's no more content and it is basically an unsupported use case.
I'm sure some of you may have tried to push a bit forward to see what would happen. But what if we let it run for waaaay to long?
Welcome to Europa 5130!

Every night we let the AI play a couple games and check back the results in the morning. That helps us catch crashes, out-of-sync, and of course weird behaviours of all sorts.
Since July is kind of an off month here in Sweden, we decided to let one of the machine continue playing after 1821. It's a been a full week now...

In 5130, a small set of superpowers have been fighting for domination for millennia now without a clear winner emerging.
The biggest player is Spain, followed by the US, Vijayanagar, [NAME HIDDEN UNTIL NEXT WEEK], Revolutionary Austria, Paraguay, Portugal, Ethiopia and of course Japan, still alive and well all alone on its archipelago.

The first thing we can see is that the AI is seemingly terrible at World Conquest. After all if they couldn't pull it off in 4 millennia, what are the odds they'd be able to do it in 400 years?
Of course another way to look at it would be that our game is sufficiently balanced that, given equivalent player skill (all AIs work the same), no nation manages to take over the entire world.

So what does the AI actually do with all that time and resources? Well obviously, it develops:

The colors do not make it obvious due to the absurd difference in values so let's take another look at the ledger:

Having no technology or ideas to buy for millennia, the AI did spend a bit in development, Spain being the leader with 600 dev. Do not ask me why someone would develop Eirksfjord, a province with +50% dev cost, to 106. It probably makes sense in the future.

Of course that amount of resources allows our superpowers to field mighty armies:

Only Revolutionary Austria seems to still be able to make use of cavalry, the others having apparently forgotten how to ride horses (or bred them to extinction, this is the future after all).
But hey, who needs horses when you can hire hundreds of thousands of mercenaries, right? In the future, everyone is super rich but blows most of his GDP on soldiers of fortune.

Will any of the powers be able to make use of those massive armies to break the status-quo? So far history says no. Looking at the history of Spain for example, it seems like each monarch is able to grab a dozen provinces at best during his reign, to be lost by the next one.
There might be signs of a slow grinding of Revolutionary Austria by allies Spain and [NAME HIDDEN UNTIL NEXT WEEK] but it would take centuries (or worse) at this pace.
Then again no one's in a hurry, that game is still running as I type this article...

One last freebie before leaving: the Emperor of China still exists in the form of Korchin, a Reformed two province junior partner of Vijayanagar.
Taking ideas from the West, they decided to opt for a Parliament reform and are now titled... Parliament of Heaven! Those guys take the concept of "Celestial Bureaucracy" *very* seriously.

Oh and by the way, happy 4th of July!

 

[MatRopert]

Two more small details that didn't quite fit in the original summary:

First, the Mamluks survived by grabbing islands left and right:

Second, Korea converted to Christianity and is now the Papal controller, with no less that 7 Cardinals on their peninsula.

Japan still rejects the kirishitans himself but keeps Korea as a Tributary, shielding all those cardinals from Spain's grasp.
The American nation on the other hand still follow Catholicism without any cardinal to represent them.

 

[MatRopert]

Huh, how is Korea able to get cardinal without the capital in europe?

I guess now you know why we say continuing after 1821 is not supported

 

[KaiserJohan]

USA! USA!

Alternatively, go Prussian Spanish Western Europe!

 

[MatRopert]

I guess now you know why we say continuing after 1821 is not supported

After a more thorough check, there's a possibility.
Cardinals can only spawn in provinces that wouldn't be considered overseas for the Papal State. So theoretically if the Pope got exiled to Asia (due to Spain conquering Italy for example), they could have spawned cardinals there before getting killed by someone.

 

[MatRopert]

It's probably broken, but some of the restrictions are lifted if the Papal States no longer exist. Combination of the long game and that rule I guess.

That is also a possibility. All provinces are eligible if the Papal State is dead because Catholicism doesn't have a holy city anymore.

 

[KaiserJohan]

Nothing beats vacation in winter - going from -30 degrees celsius to +30 degrees is lovely

 

[MatRopert]

Do foreign persons get less holiday in Sweden? Since Jake is still here, and Bratyn aswell. Also Meneth last year.

We don't, it's just that we don't have that cultural(?) inclination to take a month off in July when there are 11 others in the year when we also can

A prime reason to have a look at the code and fix it. Working in July should make you the employee of the decade or something.

If it happened in a regular game we'd certainly take a look at it, but here we talk about investigating 4000 years of history in a game supposed to stop after 400.

As for the requested religious map mode, there you go:

Together with political map for future comparisons:

 

[MatRopert]

Is the name of the "unknown" nation Rajputana?

Maybe? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[MatRopert]

Greetings again! The day is now January 1st, 5671 and it's Tuesday (I tried to look up what day it is but the calculation app I found had a hard limit at year 3999 so I just decided instead).

500 years even more into the future and the news are dire indeed.
Both the Revolution and the Celestial Empire have met their ends at the hands of Spain, Vijayanagar and our new super secret tag.
On the other hand most of Spain cardinals have been forced to step down due to the conquest of Spanish China, leaving them with only one cardinals to vote against Korea's 7.
Papal elections have become little more that a technical formality this days.

The US - Paraguay alliance is still strong but without any opportunities or allies outside their continent the Americas are starting to fade away from the world stage.
Austria's only ally is Japan but since it abandoned the Revolution is now guaranteed by the very same neighbours that ate them in the past.
It looks like the next centuries are going to be a never-ending struggle between two super blocks, Vijayanagar and Ethiopia against Spain and The Masked Tag with a possible help from Portugal.

See you again in the 6th Millennium!

Vijayanagar has to be running humanist, right? Even w/o religious no way that stuff isn't converted after 1000 years.

I kind of dislike how AIs with positive tolerance won't convert provinces. Cost : benefit usually favors actually converting, unless TTF is weak and heathen tolerance is at +3. The AI doesn't have to worry about its sanity in terms of # inputs. It should prioritize intolerance first though.

Funny you ask, VIJ is actually running full Religious. The problem simply is that they can only convert their 51 States, not their 81 Territories, and the AI is not trained to "cycle" them in order to convert everything.

 

[MatRopert]

Kind of delusional thinking there,considering the AI brought up a +50% development province into the hundreds. It just seems like it has little to not grip on efficient development.

I actually took some time to investigate why the AI burning so many mana in development of Greenland but here's the plot twist: it didn't:

See this little dude cutting wood? That's Lope López de Haro. He's been diligently doing it for thousands of years and improved his nice settlement by one every 20 years or so.
Everyone else in town thinks he's little weird but no one has the heart to tell him that maybe his time would be better used somewhere else...

Or maybe he and his friends Odón and Felipe took a bet on who'll improve his settlement better and none wants to look like a quitter...

 

[Alfray Stryke]

We don't, it's just that we don't have that cultural(?) inclination to take a month off in July when there are 11 others in the year when we also can

If it happened in a regular game we'd certainly take a look at it, but here we talk about investigating 4000 years of history in a game supposed to stop after 400.

As for the requested religious map mode, there you go:
View attachment 386258

Together with political map for future comparisons:
View attachment 386259

Can we have a list of what governments the various countries have?

 

[Groogy]

So does thisean that improving land with colonist is equally good on fertile mild land as on frozen hostile greenland?

As interesting as counter-intuitive

No it isn't, they had just hit the lowest cap on the percentage.

 

[Groogy]

WAD

 

[MatRopert]

No more updates?

The game is still running, but the owner of the machine running it is on holiday. Expect a fast-forward of a couple centuries when she comes back.

 

[MatRopert]

@MatRopert Can you show us screenshots of the other superpower nations? Regarding corruption, rulers and stability.

Still from 5671 (last save I got from here), here you go:

Since there's no corruption in ledgers, here's a manual list for the great powers:

1. Spain: 100
2. Vijayanagar: 19.10
3. USA: 0.49
4. Rajputana: 2.47
5. Paraguay: 1.60
6. Ethiopia: 1.72
7. Austria: 3.59
8. Portugal: 1.78

Of those, only Spain and Vijayanagar have a growing corruption that they could still reverse by moving the slider around the 100% area, something the AI isn't trained to do at the moment.

 

[MatRopert]

Can we have a list of what governments the various countries have?

Here's the government map mode:

 

[MatRopert]

The reason behind Spain's corruption and Vijay not converting every province are explained in @DDRJake's last dev diary: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-development-diary-24th-of-july-2018.1111835/

 

[Groogy]

You have a continue button you can press.

 

[MatRopert]

July vacations may have impaired our ability to access the saves but the game was still running and now we're back in year 7187!

Spain and Rajputana finally decided they had no need for a buffer state between so they stopped guaranteeing Austria who had to abandon its possessions in Russia.
Vijayanagar seized that opportunity to claim their territory in Manchuria and Eastern Siberia and annexed Korea while it was at it.
Ethopia launched a grand campagin to unite Africa and has made some decent progress, having mostly kicked Portugal out and even took some provinces from mighty Spain.
On the other side of the world, the USA - Paraguay alliance have concluded that if they're so far in future, they must be playing Stellaris and so took the role of the Sleeping Fallen Empire.

True to the legend of katanas being overpowered and making everyone afraid of invading its archipelago, Japan is still fiercely independent, having repulsed a recent assault from Vijayanagar with its serious military advantage:

They still had to conced the world's best general title to Portugal who is clearly not to be messed with:

On the economic side, the world keeps getting more productive and richer by the century without showing any sign of resource shortage on the horizon.
Japan even manages to have the richest trade region in terms of local riches:

Still signs of overpopulation are starting to show in some provinces of Nippon...

Looking at the small guys, you'd be thrilled to know that even if the Mamluks had to concede come possessions in the Mediterranean they are still holding firm in the Pacific.
Maybe filling a bit homesick some time, they decided to breed camels on Wake Island...

Back in Europe, Greece managed to become free and claimed Crete as its capital.
Allied with both Spain and Rajputana, they are now planning an offensive to conquer Cyprus which is presently owned by Ethiopia.

And finally for those who wondered, of course in the 7th millenia the Habsburgs are still sitting on the throne of Austria!