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Historical Accuracy vs Historical Precision

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Fodoron said:
The question is to push the AI towards doing what nations did in history. If you tell the AI that they have no legitimate claim there, It won't go because it does not behave as an European government of the 18th century. In EU2 cores are just tools, not legitimate claims aproved by the International Tribunal.

When I play a nation I don't know anything about, I wait for cores to give me the clue about what I should be doing to play historically. I do not read a book before sitting to the computer. In that sense cores are also very helpful hints for the player.

I would do exactly the opposite. Put the core to get the conquest done and then remove it to avoid getting the benefits of a core national province from a far away colonial province.
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Well i don't use cores to guide me, especially for major nations. I mean clearly most people playing EU2 have some grasp of history and would almost certainly know england invaded india.

But also cores for humans tends to do more straightjacketing and pushing me rather harshly in a direction. Not quite leading me by the nose, but putting a trail of gold coins for me to follow if i do this vs that rather than let me experiment.

Actually i'd not give them cores period if were up to me, but i don't think many people would go for that idea.
 
Jinnai said:
I don't mind giving cores to them once they conquer the province, but not before. They didn't have a legitimate claim beforehand to invade india by anyone.
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That's the very kind of closemindedness I talked about in the other thread, when I spoke about game concepts.

What is a core ? It's a quality of a province for a country that :
- pushes the AI to try to conquer that province
- limits the disagreements of the country in trying to get that province, so that a human player is more interested in chasing it, be it by giving a casus belli (so, 3 less BB points and a -2 stabhit avoided)
- once conquered, limits the RR.

There's nothing about claims, rights, acceptation, or whatever, it all depends on what you want to do with it. If it can be used to depict the fact that european countries didn't care too much about the conquests of their neighbours as long as it was outside of Europe, so be it. If it helps the AI to behave historically, so be it. If you really want a country to conquer a province, but want to see it gaining some (very limited, probably only one additional revolt in thirty years - a scripted event can give that) RR, just remove the core once the province is conquered.

I see so many of you bickering about the meaning of cores, cultures, etc, trying to make them correspond to RL situations. But this cannot : it's a game, you (we) have only so many tools available (as ribbon22 recalled us), so lets use them as efficiently as needed.

Want some further destroying of your cores-theory ? What gives that the Ottomans get cores on so many provinces ? Did they have claims on them ? No, they conquered them. Period. If you want to assimilate cores to valid claims, so, please, be coherent and remove all those cores given to OE - or, on that matter, on so many other countries (Chambers of Reuinion, cores on Britanny for France, cores on Naples/Apulia/Milano, etc). :mad:
 
Well I must say that I disagree with Jinnai's positions on cores, seeing as many nations in the game get them to direct them in the correct areas. In fact, a helluvah a lot do. However if it leaves a nasty aftertaste then they should be stripped once the nation owns the provinces.
 
Hallsten said:
I agree that it'd be great if adding CB-shields would help England conquering India. However, it's still hard to justify giving them to England since there's nothing that says that England would've conquered India regardless of its earlier history, it might as well have been e.g. France or Portugal.
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Well, then you must rephrase the aim of AGCEEP.
To make ENG conquer India is the "historical outcome" we're all talking about here.

And there already are examples of such "unjustified" shields and other things.
 
Garbon said:
Well I must say that I disagree with Jinnai's positions on cores, seeing as many nations in the game get them to direct them in the correct areas. In fact, a helluvah a lot do. However if it leaves a nasty aftertaste then they should be stripped once the nation owns the provinces.
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Not necessarily if you do it right. The player will understand that a gift has been given to him by having a core that facilitated the conquest. Something along the lines:

"The conquest of XXX was prompted by desire of controlling spice trade, and was not opposed by other European powers at the time. However the native population felt it was an intolerable oppression and never really accepted the rule of foreigners, even if they had no option but to submit for the time being".

You can have an event giving it at a certain date and another one removing it after its conquest or when it does no longer make sense or after the time for that country is passed and it was not conquered.

Jinnai, you might be an expert in colonialism, but most of us are not. Not everything is as clear as the British in India. There is an awful lot of SEA nations, and as Portugal or the Dutch, I have no idea which ones are fair game. I end up confused attacking ones that could have been ceded by event or going in the wrong direction.
 
Toio said:
found it

MILNAVAL_WAR;We are paying %.3f$ for each warship.\nWe are paying %.2f$ extra for being above the support limit.\n;;;;;;;;;;2787
MILNAVAL_TRA;We are paying %.3f$ for each transport.\nWe are paying %.2f$ extra for being above the support limit.\n;;;;;;;;;;2788
MILNAVAL_GAL;We are paying %.3f$ for each galley.\nWe are paying %.2f$ extra for being above the support limit.\n;;;;;;;;;;2789

Fodoron, if I make the .3 and .2 all .1 do you think the maintenance for have a big fleet will be lowered.??
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Is it in the text.csv ? It does look so. If yes, I'm not sure it will change the game maths for maintenance, only the display or, rather, screw the display, as "%.3f$" and "%.2f$" are IMO just referals to include the exact values in the texts of the tooltips.
 
Ambassador said:
Is it in the text.csv ? It does look so. If yes, I'm not sure it will change the game maths for maintenance, only the display or, rather, screw the display, as "%.3f$" and "%.2f$" are IMO just referals to include the exact values in the texts of the tooltips.
Click to expand...


I am testing this at the moment and have changed only the .3 to a .1 for all.

it seems early on that nations ie POR and Eng have more funds to direct elsewhere. I will keep you informed if there are more bigger sized fleets being built.
 
Toio said:
I am testing this at the moment and have changed only the .3 to a .1 for all.

it seems early on that nations ie POR and Eng have more funds to direct elsewhere. I will keep you informed if there are more bigger sized fleets being built.
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Well, do you see a difference in the maintenance cost of your fleets ? It should be easy and straightforward to check, isn't it ?


If it is indeed the place to change, you made a great discovery, Toio. :)
 
Garbon said:
Oh no, I wasn't saying I was against removing the cores. What I meant was that if it bothers people for the cores to stay once granted (i.e. nasty aftertaste) then by all means, remove them once they are unnecessary.
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I know it bothers me since it gives english humans an even bigger advantage lategame if they get to have and keep them so easily.
 
Ambassador said:
Well, do you see a difference in the maintenance cost of your fleets ? It should be easy and straightforward to check, isn't it ?


If it is indeed the place to change, you made a great discovery, Toio. :)
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can you workit out,

As POR

i have 78 ships, maintenance cost 2.2

i have 13000 troops , maintenance cost 1.0
 
I don't want to veer this too far into an older part of the discussion, but since this thread inspired me to attempt to create Persia under the latest beta and latest AGCEEP, I just thought I'd report on what I've found, and what I think the problems/issues might be.

1. Persia not forming. Been done to death; as AKK I basically stayed small and teched as best I could while letting QAR do the work and avoiding the wrath of them or the OE; worked well, and come the 1470s I had inherited QAR. This is a little silly, historical or not, but it worked. It almost didn't; QAR warred on AKK twice between 1419 and 1468, not counting the ill-fated final DOW which caused AKK to inherit them. Ironically, QAR's murderous spree (taking the Caucasian states and beating up the Timurids, mainly) worked in my favor, setting up a very powerful Persia (and getting rid of AKK to boot, as I chose to become Persia outright).

2. Persia formed "historically" (albeit not for the right reasons; Tabriz converted to Sunni by event and actually fell into rebel hands as the result of a tax revolt :rofl: ), although things were a serious mess in the region. There were no other Shi'a muslim states leading to tanking relations even with high Sunni tolerance; Russia had inexplicably taken a part of south Persia and was too advanced to dislodge (more on this later), and of course everyone's favorite Indian superstar Gujarat had crossed the Indus and was encroaching on Afghanistan, with the occasional Baluchistan revolt-away. Speaking of which, a Baluchi Shi'a province owned by Gujarat once revolted... to Russia. Grumble grumble.

3. Things coasted along beautifully except for a massive Uzbek which allied with Persia and promptly annihilated the Mughal Empire (Gujarat actually annexed them); China showed up on the borders. Russia eventually pushed in on the north end against the Khanates up there (fine by me) in a rush to Siberia, but in the late 16th century the Ottoman Empire DoW'd me twice and, with a LT advantage of almost 12 techs and 2 CRTs, proceeded to instantly assault the entire Arabian portion of the empire, pushing me to the Caspian Sea/Persian Gulf border. Then I got an event telling me how Abbas I was so great and avenged himself against the Ottomans and crushed the Uzbeks. Haha, right. LT6 against 9-16 isn't avenging jack.

I've most recently stopped at 1600 on the dot, though I may keep at it to see what else I lose. I actually bribed and allied with the OE in the hope of preventing a helpless DoW and annexing spree every 5 years. It's worked, but they're not much help.

I'd submit to you the following thoughts:

1. I don't know if this is an Ottoman problem or a Persian problem, but the OE tech advantage is murderous. They beat the Mamluks, they beat the other Turkish states, they beat the Balkans, they beat Venice, they beat Austria (more of a stalemate there maybe), and with a MASSIVE tech lead. I'm not saying the OE is too strong or anything (although in this game they are rivaled in LT only by France), but supposedly the Safavid Empire provided some semblance of an eastern rival to the Ottoman Empire throughout its history, but the tech difference makes this confrontation completely one-sided; if I were the OE right now I'd DoW Persia and overrun it, annexing just about everything and setting up my rush on India. QAR would ironically probably have put up stiffer resistance. Is there any way to make up this Land Tech gap? I'm talking, quite seriously, a 2-CRT Ottoman advantage over EVERYONE in the mideast. The OE was a dominant world power, but even they supposedly had limits, and Persia was supposed to be one of them. But I couldn't even put up a fight.

2. Persia is usually the only Shi'a muslim state in the ENTIRE WORLD by the time it forms. Al-Haasa almost never lasts and if there are others, they seem to get snuffed out pretty quickly. This is like playing Hussite Bohemia; the way the game works, your relations with everybody tanks and you wind up having to mint your way to friendly relations or you have to risk going it alone, which is a certain Ottoman DoW. The (ironically enough) safest way to deal with this is to ally with the OE, which is entirely ahistorical.

3. Ahistorical performances by Persia's eastern neighbors seem to mess everything up. The Indian states, Gujarat primarily, sweep into the region and get nastily entrenched early; the Timurids are usually annihilated under the rush of the Uzbeks, Qara, and Gujarat; if they survive to form the Mughals, it's in everyone's best interest to destroy them ASAP, including Persia's. Uzbek seems to overperform until Russia arrives to demolish it; Persia has a lot of trouble fighting it, and there's hardly any reason to, as the Turkoman-culture provinces are poor and mostly Sunni. It's just a nightmare to administrate, and I suspect an AI Persia would probably leave Uzbek more or less alone as well. Again, ahistorical; Abbas I is supposed to fight them.

4. Revolts. Repeated RR events don't help, and without a human hand guiding them I fear that Persia risks being accidentally turboannexed when the tribal war events pop up during OE incursions. This is especially true if Persia doesn't eradicate Sunni provinces ASAP.

I don't know what needs to be done here, but I think everything east of the OE and west of China really needs to be reexamined; although the 1419 setup is more or less "appropriate" for a snapshot of the world at that time, very few things happen "correctly." I was using this game as an experiment, trying the best I could to make things happen semi-historically, but for all my best efforts things wound up a spectacular failure. If I did one thing right, I'd almost certainly prevent something else from happening. Even if I tried to just stick with my cores, I wound up in ahistorical situations. The "accuracy" of the setup is not really so bad, but the execution is seriously FUBAR.

Having said that, my experience is that Persia proceeds ROUGHLY historically if it is able to form, but it happens too slowly; the Ottomans don't attack in time and the Persians don't make a resurgence when they're supposed to. The good monarch and good leaders are wasted against an invincible Ottoman juggernaut that will take everything it can get from you. Assuming I even still exist to collapse in the 18th century, I imagine that won't work quite right either with no Mughals and erratic Russian behavior.

I'd put this in the Persia/mideast thread(s), but I can't seem to find them, and since it came up... well, I apologize for the diversion.
 
Thats rather tragic as all the relevant threads are on this page and the next. ;)

Anyways, don't fret. Although its not in the mod as of yet, I have a bunch of stuff (whose download is in my sig) that solves most of the pre-Persia problems you have highlighted.
 
Nakar said:
2. Persia is usually the only Shi'a muslim state in the ENTIRE WORLD by the time it forms. Al-Haasa almost never lasts and if there are others, they seem to get snuffed out pretty quickly. This is like playing Hussite Bohemia; the way the game works, your relations with everybody tanks and you wind up having to mint your way to friendly relations or you have to risk going it alone, which is a certain Ottoman DoW. The (ironically enough) safest way to deal with this is to ally with the OE, which is entirely ahistorical.
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I mean the Safavid State was hated by its neighbours. So thats pretty spot on historically.

Nakar said:
Uzbek seems to overperform until Russia arrives to demolish it; Persia has a lot of trouble fighting it, and there's hardly any reason to, as the Turkoman-culture provinces are poor and mostly Sunni. It's just a nightmare to administrate, and I suspect an AI Persia would probably leave Uzbek more or less alone as well. Again, ahistorical; Abbas I is supposed to fight them.
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Pretty spot on historically as well. Persia should only be wanting the Khorasan area provinces and occasionally Bukhara.

Ideally what'll happen is we'll get the Mughals straightened out and then we'll have the big three, Persia, Uzbeks & Mughals owning large chunks of the area with slight border shifts here and there.
 
Nakar said:
1. I don't know if this is an Ottoman problem or a Persian problem, but the OE tech advantage is murderous. They beat the Mamluks, they beat the other Turkish states, they beat the Balkans, they beat Venice, they beat Austria (more of a stalemate there maybe), and with a MASSIVE tech lead. I'm not saying the OE is too strong or anything (although in this game they are rivaled in LT only by France), but supposedly the Safavid Empire provided some semblance of an eastern rival to the Ottoman Empire throughout its history, but the tech difference makes this confrontation completely one-sided; if I were the OE right now I'd DoW Persia and overrun it, annexing just about everything and setting up my rush on India. QAR would ironically probably have put up stiffer resistance. Is there any way to make up this Land Tech gap? I'm talking, quite seriously, a 2-CRT Ottoman advantage over EVERYONE in the mideast. The OE was a dominant world power, but even they supposedly had limits, and Persia was supposed to be one of them. But I couldn't even put up a fight.
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I have also identified Land techs as a serious problem of late AGCEEP versions.

In my humble opinion this is probably caused by Austria being too strong in land technology. This comes from their provinces being too rich. The Habsburgs expanded mostly by marriage, and the Austrian armies were not that strong. In EU2 their pushed up land tech contributes to the BWB. They are agressive and superior. Then we have two countries that have to expand a lot faster than the EU2 engine allows (2 provinces/war on average): OE and Russia. They were both underperforming, and motivated regional groups have worked hard to get them to perform. But one of the changes is to pump up their land technology. In the case of the OE to match Austria, and in the case of Russia to match the OE. As a consecuence their neighbors get stomped. But there are not that many people that care about their neighbors.

The European wars were not much of a problem for the early Ottomans, but this was a consequence of several factors, with geography playing a crucial role in Hungary, as Austrians and Ottomans were far from their bases and supplies were a real problem. By comparison, Persia was the main enemy of the Ottomans. As you have noticed nobody stands a chance against them in the middle East in the current set up.

The solution is not to raise more countries technology, but to lower the technological level of those three in a concerted way, so they keep the right level comparison: The Ottos should lead early. The Austrians should tie them, and the Ottos should sink later coinciding with a rise by the Russies. Everybody would perform better regionally. The problem of quick expansion of the Ottos and Russies has to be solved by events, not by technology.

But it is very difficult to go to their regional threads to tell them to lower their military tech. They refuse and cite sources and discuss battles won, etc. This is an example of the regional thread division not working very well. A centralized decision should overrule the regional threds in this type of situations. That's probably why there is a HC in the first place. To administrate and concert the efforts.
 
Toio said:
can you workit out,

As POR

i have 78 ships, maintenance cost 2.2

i have 13000 troops , maintenance cost 1.0
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Well, I can't currently do it. But just open a game, check your maintenance costs*. Close it. Edit the file. Open the game anew, and check the maintenance costs again.

Probably even better if you first edited the save to give several hundreds ships, to avoind rounding approximations.


* both displayed (tooltip) and real : check treasury decrease after one month**.

** and I think you can even use that to check maintenance of AI countries : be sure they have nothing to build or expend their money on (essentially, remove all diplomats, colonists, merchants, etc, be sure they have sufficient money, and don't have any building to build)
 
Fodoron said:
...But it is very difficult to go to their regional threads to tell them to lower their military tech. They refuse and cite sources and discuss battles won, etc. This is an example of the regional thread division not working very well. A centralized decision should overrule the regional threds in this type of situations. That's probably why there is a HC in the first place. To administrate and concert the efforts.
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This, I think, might be the crux of the problem. Too much division of labor and discussion without much coordination and consideration of the big picture leads to lots of details that when combined into the bigger picture becomes a mess because no one is looking at the big picture, everyone is "zoomed in" on their area.

The thing is that with this "zoomed-in", isolated focus, it becomes hard to see the big picture. As the poster relates, for example the OE's tech level, when people working on it only focus on OE itself without considering the bigger picture, then we have the very problem of missing the forest from the trees.

But with this specialization and regionalization, how and where would this be discussed? It could be discussed in OE thread, Central European thread, Central Asian thread but that is the very problem in this approach. If discussed in OE thread, people there may be too focused on why OE should have the tech levels they do without considering its overall effects. If discussed in Central European thread, OE people may not even be reading it, etc, etc.

It is like architecturing a large, complex building. If everyone focuses on individual rooms and sections and designs them in isolation and then throws it all together, it will be a monstrosity. Something complex like that has to be done "top down" to have any coherence. So it is with AGCEEP. (Not saying AGCEEP is a monstrosity, but it certainly resembles more a building designed ad-hoc, each room designed in isolation than a building designed with a coherent overall architect).

Perhaps what is needed is a new (Sticky?) AGCEEP thread(s) that only discusses overall historical progression of the whole world, perhaps divided by century, while leaving the regional threads to discuss all the implementation details once we have figured out what all the big picture items are that should be accomplished. Or something akin to that. So there is AGCEEP: 1419-1519, etc.

These "temporal" threads would discuss all the "general" things that should be accomplished in the entire world and then the regional threads have a place to look to as a reference on what their fine, detailed work needs to work towards.

Possible Example:
AGCEEP: 1419-1519
Spain forms, France forms, England loses HYW

ACCEEP: 1519-1619
Persia forms, OE takes over Mamulukes, Spain colonizes New world, etc.

Then you have links to the regional threads to discuss all the implementation details.

Of course we will have disagreements over what the "big items" are. But at least with temporal threads, they can be discussed in an overall context. The temporal threads might also list big outstanding issues so that when people work in the regional threads they are doing things to correct systematic issues (or at the very least not MAKING THEM WORSE!)

What do people think of this approach to discussion (having temporal threads in addition to regional threads?)
 
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I think its deplorable. There is too much already to discuss in the regional threads. Making large overarching threads that focus on particular centuries would only add to the bureaurcracy and become cesspools of off topicness...much like how this thread has been progressing. I think you give too little credit to people who do read all of the threads. If anything, a larger problem is that too many people who post in this forum are either a) focused on fantasy things to the detriment of the historical scene or b) like to propose theoretical changes but never test them to see how they would work out.

The issue isn't regionalsim...hell I started off as a person focused solely on Granada which lead me to looking at North Africa which was tied with West Africa so I looked down there. And then there was a tenuous connection to East Africa so I went over there trying to make that work. Then stumbling upon the Central Asia scene made me want to make it compatible with the Middle East..which has most recently made me want to make some compatibility with India. I can hardly be seen a regional poster, as I'm trying to integrate all these diverse locales together. If anything my focus on micro politics first has helped in me in trying to see how to piece things together.

At the end of the day I guess I differ back to MKJ's opinion. While all this theory is well and good, its also detracting from the mod as all this time could be better spent getting things to work correctly.
 
I do not doubt that there are people, such as Gabon, who try to read each and every regional thread and follow all the discussions and then relate it to the big picture in their minds. But there are still two issues here:

One is what is the big picture exactly? So thread(s) are needed to discuss the big picture and those discussions transcend any regional threads. When "piecing" it all together, first it makes sense to list the major things that we are trying to work towards, or at least have discussions of the big items things. THEN we go from there to discuss details and implementation for those with the knowledge and skill of those details to do so.

Secondly, I think, it is asking too much for people to be reading and following dozens of different threads to be coordinating these things in their minds to an overall coherent picture. Few people have that interest or devotion to that extent. In any case, if it is being done individually, then it is still not coordinated.

Some people like to discuss the "little" things. Others prefer to discuss the "big" things. I do not see that it is possible to discuss the big things in regional threads all over the place.
 
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