Regarding force limit and professionalism -- the idea is that you're farming manpower with slacken recruitment. So a lower force limit means it is cheaper to maximize your yearly professionalism gain which pays for slacken recruitment.
Half of the idea groups are suboptimal
- Thread starter Kryndude
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I only take humanist when I think I will have a lot of religious diversity so it depends on the game for me, but that 10% reduction in idea cost sure is appealing! In my recent Florence game I got one entire group for 280 an idea. That was nice.
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If anything is tedious in this game it's late game map painting wars.
Garrison size is absurdly powerful late game, top-tier forts require very large armies to siege, which, combined with defensive (that you should have picked earlier) will mean that the enemy is eating attrition while waiting for the fort to take forever to siege down.
Less Attrition is always useful, as Attrition is the #1 killer on the offense.
Land Maintenance and Regiment Cost also make armies much cheaper.
Manpower recovery speed is much, much more valuable than maximum manpower.
That is on top of the immense maximum manpower and land force limit bonuses.
Quantity's rise to meta is largely fueled by the Paradox manpower nerfs. It used to be that, sometime mid-game, you would usually have so much manpower and manpower recovery that it was practically impossible to run out of manpower. Now? I had a multiplayer match in 1800 that turned into a massive war of attrition, and by the end of it both sides were out of manpower (though the two players that double teamed me ran out of manpower and troops...) and that was with me having Orthodox, 100% Patriarch authority with high religious unity (+33% local manpower in all orthodox provinces), the four military ideas I mentioned, and +20% manpower recovery in my NIs and +20% manpower from my government (yay Tsardom).
Aristocratic/Plutocratic basically make an excellent 5th pick, but I think you are limited to just 4 military NIs (Not 100% sure, but I plan on testing it in my current game). It does have a lot going for it, Leaders without upkeep, Army tradition decay, National Manpower, and Land Leader Siege, the problem is that it is already competing with four other top-tier NIs.
If it was adm or dip it would be a no brainer pick, that is for sure.
Yeah, you are limited to a maximum of 50% of current ideas from one branch, probably to avoid people going for all of the military ones and becoming an unstoppable military juggernaut
I've long thought it would be nice if espionage had the discovery era's ability to chain claims. Even then the competition from influence/diplomatic/exploration is stiff, but something like 5 diplomats running claims adjacent to claims would make me consider using it considering how many religions live off of humanism as the only viable "handling religion" choice and how much DIP that could potentially save.
Speed running is about as skillful as you can get in a single player experience, and there is no credibility to using the "exploit" umbrella as a replacement for a coherent argument.
AFAIK that only removes the restriction of picking multiple of the same group type in a row, it doesn't let you get more than 4 per category regardless unless something changed.
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Maybe espionage should give you the opportunity to steal maps *much* more effectively. Maybe then it could have its uses for nations not wanting to be set back on colonization
The problem is that military ideas buff your military a lot more than diplomatic ideas buff your diplomacy, or administrative ideas buff your internal administration. Why pick an idea group that buffs your economy by 5% when you can pick one that buffs your military by 25%?
On top of that, admin and diplomatic idea groups tend to have a lot of niche bonuses. Administrative, for example, has a ton of mercenary focuses bonuses that would be pointless to anyone not using mercenaries.