Half of the idea groups are suboptimal

[TheMeInTeam]

In MP-games I always take offensive, defensive, quantity and quality which only leaves room for four ideas anyway making the use of a diplo idea instead of an admin one useless in that respect.

In MP for DIP groups you're likely picking exploration, maybe trade, or nothing. In that case the ADM groups you'd select are Economic, Innovative, and Religious. These all have strong policies with the military groups you're choosing, each significantly stronger than expansion.

Which accounts for 7 of your 8 possible groups, or all 8 if you pick exploration. If you don't, expansion probably isn't helping you in the mid 1700's. The winner is likely decided, and colonies aren't going to be the difference maker if it hasn't been.

Like I said, they are good as a balance between trade and colonization for African countries like the Mamelucks.

Like I said, they are not. They are inferior to exploration in that role and lock you out of better policies/money making options in the ADM groups.

Sure optimal in it self is objective, after you have defined what you are optimising. As EU4 is a game I would prefer the idea groups to be optimised for fun. Fun is very subjective, and not defined as reaching a goal in the shortest possible time, even if that is how you personally have the most fun playing.

That's not making an actual argument though. For the idea group choices to be meaningful, there should be at least some plausible in-game scenarios where picking a given group is more attractive than alternative groups. By "plausible", I mean a situation you can realistically expect to see at least 1/10 games if picking a random nation. There are a handful of groups that are basically "never picks" outside of screwing around/strict roleplay.

I must disagree that the idea groups should all be balanced around WC or near-WC blobfests.

Expansion, maritime, and naval are still inferior even in crowded MP, which prevents anything even approaching WC. That's why the trash tier, they're nearly always bad. You're not seeing groups like economic, innovative, or quality getting called out with similar frequency because there are reasonable situations to pick these over alternatives.

It's not just about WC. WC is one goal towards which you can optimize. The trash groups fail to be worth considering for WC. But they also fail in general.

Trade especially allows you to siphon income from your neighbors and rivals, empowering you and weakening them.

The ducat value from that is small. The more attractive part of trade is something like economic/trade/quantity/quality where you have 20% more goods produced and 40% trade efficiency from the idea group + policies. If going the MP military route religious adds another 10% goods produced. If you already control a decent amount of land, generating nearly 1/3 a manufactory per province out of thin air and pushing the % multiplier from what you're collecting up can be attractive if further expansion is difficult or you need to bankroll a big alliance/major wars. This idea group combination already has a discipline policy (economic/quality), and with religious can add 15% morale.

Doesn't professionalism make aristocratic pretty competitive?

No, but guaranteed siege pip and an extra diplomat is pretty handy in SP once you have the most important expansion stuff. It's also the lone group that gives a RU policy with humanist rather than religious so can keep a trash religion from screwing absolutism.

 

[bly08]

If difficulty is the goal, then don't use any ideas and then we can all be in awe of these "skills".

EU4 is a game of choices, making the right choice requires understanding cost/benefit. I don't agree that players who make optimal choices should be punished to appease players who don't. This would be terrible design philosophy regardless of sales numbers. The people who want to punish blobbing further are usually the ones who do not understand core mechanics. In this case I don't think their opinion should be taken seriously yet Paradox often does.

 

[bbqftw]

The problem with trade ideas in particular is that trade in general strongly rewards trade node monopolization especially of sequential nodes.

Which means that ideas based around competing in trade nodes (any trade power booster) are serious ass tier because you are better off massacring your competition, and once that happens your trade power bonuses are actually irrelevant

Also doesn't help that the values in trade are tuned laughably low compared to burgher or TC trade power mods.

Value of trade competition idea might be elevated in MP but in early you are competing against people rushing econ quality policy so...

 

[TheMeInTeam]

^ trade is more about generating more money out of thin air with stuff you already have than legit competition in nodes. It's similar to the idea of boosting tariff efficiency. In SP you're better off taking the land directly, but if you can't the extra money might be worth more than a 3rd admin group in MP I suspect.

I haven't taken trade in ages so I don't know how it interacts with trade companies. I'd rather take exploration or conquest-oriented stuff and gain access to TCs faster in SP.

 

[Northernwwater]

EU4 is a game of choices, making the right choice requires understanding cost/benefit. I don't agree that players who make optimal choices should be punished to appease players who don't. This would be terrible design philosophy regardless of sales numbers. The people who want to punish blobbing further are usually the ones who do not understand core mechanics. In this case I don't think their opinion should be taken seriously yet Paradox often does.

I don't agree that players who are bored following their current set of WC scripts should cause the game to homoginized for the rest of the players so the WC route can have a new script.

Let's be honest, WC is not about a deep understanding of the mechanics of the game. It's been said plainly that economy oriented idea groups are not needed so no deep understanding of trade or production is needed. Just take the province you need and the money will follow. All you need to know in WC is war, core and how to manage the clock and AE.

OTH, An understanding of game mechanics is needed in all early games. In a WC it quickly becomes an exercise in tedium where your brute force carries the day. Like I said the only enemy you have is the clock.

My goal is to make the game interesting from 1444 to 1821. You can't tell me the last 100 years of a WC is any fun. I think there should be much, much more disruptive disasters late game for large empires. I'd love to see the Ottoman's disintegrate once they have the east china sea or something.

 

[makaramus]

economic ideas are good if you are a nation with very strong men but bad early game (its really cool idea group if you are sweden as example)
trade ideas are amazing if you are trading in mediterrian or persia
maritime and naval is bad I agree but maritime is good if you are a nation with extra merchants to dominate naval trade.
espionage is only good with manchu I suppose thanks to corruption reduce + subject loyality.
expansion is good if you are colonizing siberia while you are not russia . (with hordes or novgorod or sweden conquered muscovy or commonwealth) since exploration wasting many ideas for nothing.its better than exploration at that region (still deserves some love)


also I belive espionage is only bad because we are lazy :/ it can be used as core cost reduce + siege bonus in games with ease. but it requires so much micro management .

also as a bonus: as venice you can become spy immune with espionage ideas

 

[Northernwwater]

That's not making an actual argument though. For the idea group choices to be meaningful, there should be at least some plausible in-game scenarios where picking a given group is more attractive than alternative groups. By "plausible", I mean a situation you can realistically expect to see at least 1/10 games if picking a random nation. There are a handful of groups that are basically "never picks" outside of screwing around/strict roleplay.

You define "more attractive" and "meaningful". Topped off by simply dismissing any other choice with "screwing around/strict roleplay". You build a sort of anti-strawman. You make up your own situation. Then proclaim it's the only one that matters.

 

[bly08]

I don't agree that players who are bored following their current set of WC scripts should cause the game to homoginized for the rest of the players so the WC route can have a new script.

Let's be honest, WC is not about a deep understanding of the mechanics of the game. It's been said plainly that economy oriented idea groups are not needed so no deep understanding of trade or production is needed. Just take the province you need and the money will follow. All you need to know in WC is war, core and how to manage the clock and AE.

OTH, An understanding of game mechanics is needed in all early games. In a WC it quickly becomes an exercise in tedium where your brute force carries the day. Like I said the only enemy you have is the clock.

My goal is to make the game interesting from 1444 to 1821. You can't tell me the last 100 years of a WC is any fun. I think there should be much, much more disruptive disasters late game for large empires. I'd love to see the Ottoman's disintegrate once they have the east china sea or something.

Pulling off a WC as any nation requires a greater understanding of mechanics than 99% of the goals/achievements in this game. I don't think there's much room for disagreement here.

For economic idea groups, it's actually the exact opposite of your understanding which I always find amusing. The players who've taken the time to analyze cost/benefit can see that those idea groups are less optimal than their alternatives, which means they understand the economic model better than players who are fooled into thinking otherwise.

You're right that the last 100 years of a WC are not interesting or fun, and is the main reason I try to WC as quickly as possible.

 

[Northernwwater]

You're right that the last 100 years of a WC are not interesting or fun, and is the main reason I try to WC as quickly as possible.

100 years is still 100 years no matter what year it starts.

 

[Cataphract887]

I don't agree that players who are bored following their current set of WC scripts should cause the game to homoginized for the rest of the players so the WC route can have a new script.

My goal is to make the game interesting from 1444 to 1821.

Ive been arguing for idea groups like trade and the bottom three to be buffed and made interesting, with the possibility of crafting powerful strategies around using them. So how in the world does buffing trade homogenize the game exactly?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

You define "more attractive" and "meaningful". Topped off by simply dismissing any other choice with "screwing around/strict roleplay". You build a sort of anti-strawman. You make up your own situation. Then proclaim it's the only one that matters.

While not mentioning it every post "meaningful" choices requires that the choices are not false; IE the player's choice of idea groups both 1) matters and 2) the correct choice is different depending on situation. You can safely never pick expansion for all but the most edge-cases of goals.

"More attractive" should be even more obvious. "More attractive" = "gives more benefit towards your goal".

You still haven't actually addressed my point. The method to demonstrate I'm mistaken is simple: show more common scenarios than "almost never" or "role play" where the benefits of picking these trash groups outweigh the benefits of selecting alternative groups. The complete no-show of such examples over 5 pages is evidence in favor of my argument, but it could be refuted, if you can demonstrate that these groups actually do confer the most benefit among options in more practical scenarios than we believe.

 

[Less2]

I think you're forgetting that probably the best idea in trade is +20% global trade power, which is the first idea. That extra cash is often enough to afford you either the extra troops you need to win your battles, or to afford advisors in the more important monarch point categories.

+20% trade power is fairly awful and gets more awful the better your position is. The goal for maximal trade income is to monopolize (good) nodes, and for most nations this is the ideal way to expand for the first 50 to 100 years. +20% trade power is most powerful at 50% trade power in a node, which is pretty much the worst possible position: spread out amongst lots of trade nodes and only having a small footprint in each (which is also what the +merchants from trade ideas ties in to). The only instance that makes it look good is sucking trade from colonial nations, but even then its something of a pittance compared to the CN itself.

 

[Northernwwater]

While not mentioning it every post "meaningful" choices requires that the choices are not false; IE the player's choice of idea groups both 1) matters and 2) the correct choice is different depending on situation. You can safely never pick expansion for all but the most edge-cases of goals.

"matters", "correct choice" and "situation"

"More attractive" should be even more obvious. "More attractive" = "gives more benefit towards your goal".

goal

You still haven't actually addressed my point. The method to demonstrate I'm mistaken is simple: show more common scenarios than "almost never" or "role play" where the benefits of picking these trash groups outweigh the benefits of selecting alternative groups. The complete no-show of such examples over 5 pages is evidence in favor of my argument, but it could be refuted, if you can demonstrate that these groups actually do confer the most benefit among options in more practical scenarios than we believe.

You have not actually demonstrated anything either. You've made points on why a set of idea groups is best in the context of optimizing total development, which I actually accept. There are a set of optimal idea groups if your goal is to maximize developement.

Role play is a meaningless word in these discussions usually used to artificially make small some argument. The meaningful words to use in an optimization context are the constraints on and characteristics desired to be optimized.

 

[Brynjar]

If the "optimal" choice is always rushing to get as many trade companies as possible, it's probably not the ideas that are in a bad need of a fix, but rather the trade companies. I think there are very few who disagrees that there are some idea groups which could use some improvements, but optimising them all for WC is not a viable solution in my opinion. Then you may as well give just give them all +improved relations, -AE, RCC etc.

 

[Robert de Bruce]

You still haven't actually addressed my point. The method to demonstrate I'm mistaken is simple: show more common scenarios than "almost never" or "role play" where the benefits of picking these trash groups outweigh the benefits of selecting alternative groups. The complete no-show of such examples over 5 pages is evidence in favor of my argument, but it could be refuted, if you can demonstrate that these groups actually do confer the most benefit among options in more practical scenarios than we believe.

I think I can bring up one example for expansion ideas. Far east asian starts, especially Ming, Korea, Japan. While none of these nations have decent struggles with aggressive expansion and also the usual vassal feeding isn't that viable, fast colonization promise several things: spawning Colonialism before europeans, meaning not only spawn reward and fast embracement without developing, but also setting Europeans back in tech, especially if none manages it fast to get a colonial nation. Colonization opens more expansion options and opens up in the end the opportunity to get a european province and move capital there for trade companies. Ofcourse, this might be done with exploration alone, but expansion speed up things significantly, especially in the early race for colonialism spawn. I have no other options, when I want a CN in Alaska, than to speed things up with expansion ideas. Ok, I can go over colony limit, but this doesn't mean I finish 5 colonies needed for CN earlier´, colonial growth without colonist is too low, especially in start. I can't no-CB my way there, since I have to explore first and there aren't really nations I can usefully no-CB to increase my colo range. So before I can start with american colonies, I need to finish asian ones first. And meanwhile it would be better I work also in the other direction to secure Cape and block Europeans in Africa. Ok, second point could be done with no-CB and going over colony limit, too, but beside from Ming, the nations there can't afford this too easy.
In comparison, for what do I need Influence ideas early, when I play as Korea? Do I really need Admin or even Humanist in the first 3 picks, when I play Japan, no matter if Ashikaga or Daimyo start? You may argue, conquest of India will go better with Admin and Co., but there's smaller use of it when you don't have a european capital, so delaying admin etc. a bit, doesn't hurt this much.

 

[Dewra]

I think I can bring up one example for expansion ideas. Far east asian starts, especially Ming, Korea, Japan. While none of these nations have decent struggles with aggressive expansion and also the usual vassal feeding isn't that viable, fast colonization promise several things: spawning Colonialism before europeans... SNIP

Spawning Colonialism doesn't require a single colony, unless they changed it in 1.23 or 1.24.
Requirements are
- exploration 2
- discovered the new world (Alaska counts)
- capital not on an island
Did it with Ryukyu with just three exploration ideas and a capital in Java.

Also there are a lot of nice options for No-CB on the way to Alaska: Ainu, Yeren, the Siberian Tribes.
You can't increase colonial range with an extra colonist, you can go to multiple directions though.
If you are going to Africa, No-CB somebody in India is a lot faster or even carving through Tibet or China.

The rest of the argument if I understand it correctly is that you don't need anything else but you'd like an extra colonist?
Great take the expansion get the first idea. Drop it when you actually need a proper idea group.
Doesn't mean the idea group is fine because extra colonist is nice and sometimes you don't need anything else.

 

[Cataphract887]

If the "optimal" choice is always rushing to get as many trade companies as possible, it's probably not the ideas that are in a bad need of a fix, but rather the trade companies. I think there are very few who disagrees that there are some idea groups which could use some improvements, but optimising them all for WC is not a viable solution in my opinion. Then you may as well give just give them all +improved relations, -AE, RCC etc.

Espionage, Naval and Maritime have been worthless since they were first available.

Constant strawmanning that improving the idea groups means optimizing them for WC is getting on my nerves.

 

[bradles0]

economic and trade both let you buy level 5 advisors faster, and refund their points fairly quickly because of that.

 

[KlinkerFyren]

Yeah, certain idea groups are certainly not created equally. I think idea groups need a rework in general.
Espionage, I mean whats even the point now that the abilities they use to unlock are now tied to tech.

 

[Brynjar]

Espionage, Naval and Maritime have been worthless since they were first available.

Constant strawmanning that improving the idea groups means optimizing them for WC is getting on my nerves.

I've never said they are useful, nor that they shouldn't be improved, and I wouldn't mind adding expansion to your list of groups that needs some work. Many of the posts in this thread, including the op, seem to be of the opinion that ideas can only be optimal (or good) for WC/extreme blobbing, otherwise they are worthless. Among these are economic and trade, arguing for this view by stating that quickly establishing a bunch of trade companies is much better.