I don't care. Much talk for a small feature while there is IMO much more important to discuss about.
How do you feel about Canals?
- Thread starter Olaus Petrus
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In this game, you can actually conquer the world. You can colonize all of africas coastal areas by 1600. Aztec indians can conquer Rome and evict the pope, or you can make sure the pope is in fact an african.
We are far into the realm of alternate history already, with the present accepted and well-known game.
Canals gives something nice to aim for in the last 50 years of the game if you want to play that long, and it probably adds a cool dimension to multiplayer games, so I dont see a problem.
We are far into the realm of alternate history already, with the present accepted and well-known game.
Canals gives something nice to aim for in the last 50 years of the game if you want to play that long, and it probably adds a cool dimension to multiplayer games, so I dont see a problem.
I also fear that these Vicky -style additions encourage to ahistorical gaming. While there are those players who don't give a damn about historical plausibility, I prefer the game to be loyal to it's time period, otherwise there wouldn't have been much point for me to buy EUIV at all, because I already had other Paradox strategy games. I bought EUIV to experience early modern strategy, not industrial era game.
However otherwise, besides these ahistorical canals, great building projects sound like a nice idea, if you could build buildings like Versailles, Basilica di San Pietro or Taj Mahal which took decades to finish and belong to this time period.
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Canals existed at the time and these canals were completely possible with the technology. They'd have taken longer but hey, if the Pyramids and other wonders of the world prove anything, Manpower is more valuable for MANY of these types of projects than technology is. Perhaps make it cost Manpower over time as well.
Panama is an excreble, ahistoric bit of BS on par with the current BS of a northern settlement route through the Rockies before the 1830s. Suez and Kiel would be viable but exceedingly expensive in time period.
Panama required moving 268 million cubic yards of dirt (much of being dredged off the river bottoms by the largest steam dredges the world have every seen until then). That is over 60 Great Pyramids. Given that the original took a decade, you are looking at a 600 year construction time frame just to move the dirt. Of course you have the other problems - like how Panamanian dirt collapses a lot when you cut into it and needing somehow build 85 ft high locks with only the crappiest early steam engines to move water - that dwarf that 600 year project lifespan.
Then we get into the logistics. Desert are nice places with low incidence of disease. A camp of thousands of workers is much less likely to be overrun by disease. Merely feeding the Gizan workforce in Panama is a logistical stretch. Keeping them healthy enough to do heavy labor continuously is much higher.
I mean it took decades almost a hundred years after game end using cutting edge technology. Panama is utterly rubbish to include.
Panama required moving 268 million cubic yards of dirt (much of being dredged off the river bottoms by the largest steam dredges the world have every seen until then). That is over 60 Great Pyramids. Given that the original took a decade, you are looking at a 600 year construction time frame just to move the dirt. Of course you have the other problems - like how Panamanian dirt collapses a lot when you cut into it and needing somehow build 85 ft high locks with only the crappiest early steam engines to move water - that dwarf that 600 year project lifespan.
Then we get into the logistics. Desert are nice places with low incidence of disease. A camp of thousands of workers is much less likely to be overrun by disease. Merely feeding the Gizan workforce in Panama is a logistical stretch. Keeping them healthy enough to do heavy labor continuously is much higher.
I mean it took decades almost a hundred years after game end using cutting edge technology. Panama is utterly rubbish to include.
Besides the Suez Canal having been attempted and working in a fashion THOUSANDS of years before, while logistically being a nightmare, I don't see why Panama would be utterly rubbish. That's like saying "hey, england winning the hundred years war is absolutely RUBBISH. Logistically, it just wasn't even possible at the time. The french forces were absolutely better in every way and we should not have this ahistoric garbage in our games. OR HOW ABOUT BYZANTIUM BEING ABLE TO SURVIVE? I might as well start just eat my own feet this is so ahistorical." It would have been a logistical nightmare, but if you owned half of the lives on the entire planet because you had an empire spanning the planet, you could easily make it happen. With that much land for crops, with enough boats to ship men and materials, with enough men digging and building while they go, nightmare yes but impossible? Only if you can't imagine something ahistorical happening in a game where 90% of stuff is ahistorical.
They sound pretty neat. I mean, the game is ahistorical the second you unpause it from your start date. Just because the AI (tries) to lean historically, doesn't mean it ever actually works out that way on average.
As I said in the dev diary thread: I just don't understand the point. I don't really care that much about them being a-historical, but they just seem to have no real purpose. Pay 20k gold to get...slightly more income. Suez would be slightly useful for the Ottomans, but why not just build a second navy/army for a fraction of the cost?
If you actually care so much about historical plausibility then why did you buy Kamchatka Portugalis? These canals are so expensive you have to be cheesing your way to the top to possibly afford them; meanwhile, AI Europe colonizes Africa by 1600 and unilaterally decimates every non-Western nation and this forum barely lifts a finger in protest. Apparently history is only implausible when things start getting weird on the Continent.
Now you are just putting words into my mouth. I have never claimed that it's a good thing if Iberian AI nations somehow manage to colonize Kamchatka. Besides IIRC there was a thread recently where people complained about Spanish who colonized Siberia. Personally I have always supported suggestions which make expansion more realistic and prevent formation of AI or human controlled blobs.
And I think that some level of realism should be kept, because otherwise it's very difficult to roleplay and you end up ignoring the theme and start playing the game based purely on mechanics. When I want to do that I play something very abstract, like chess, instead of Paradox games. In any case I fear that with the ahistorical building projects we soon end up into situation where new DLCs add great building projects like Burj Khalifa and ISS to EUIV.
Well, for a start the Panama canal needs to have lock capable of raising ships up 85 ft each way, that is a huge amount of pressure and anything pre-19th century is going to burst from the pressure or be immovable - the original doors were insanely advanced for the early 20th century - they managed to be buoyant and have low enough friction to move with 25 horse power motors (of course 25 hp is an absolute monster for EU era steam engines). Good luck making something strong enough and light enough with pre-Bessemer steel. Of course once you have the monster locks, then you need to have some way of providing breaking for the ships as riding up the locks provides a lot of yaw which is far worse in wooden vessels. Historically that meant steam engines with high horse power, high tensile strength steel rails, and connections that can take huge tensile forces - none of which is remotely feasible before the price of steel drops by an order of magnitude or two thanks to technology. Lest we forget, these hundreds of thousands of gallons of water are going to have to go somewhere when you lower the locks ... and without low erosion concrete you will likely either wash out the base of the locks, or collapse the cut in again. You could try for more, smaller locks ... but then you run into problems with transit rates, construction costs, and water course management. Locks are the kiss of death in this era, making a canal through which a Man-of-War can pass is just not doable (take a look at the C&O canal on the Potomac - it was considered challenging when it was made and it couldn't even transit a sloop). Suez was vastly easier precisely because it needed no locks.
Then you have the problem of "how in hell to we dredge the river approaches"? You will need to move several cubic yards of muck off the river bottoms, historically you dammed the rivers to do this ... but then that floods your work site and you have the hills collapse into the canal cut. You might try using an early steam engine (something like Fulton's) and argue for a completely ahistoric steam sledge a few decades before it would be possible to manufacture, that would only be 10,000 times less efficient than what it actually took; wind or muscle power, of course, is completely out of the question. And this is not a one time effort, the approaches have to be continuously dredged as new dirt (often the stuff you've just dredged) will silt back onto the river bottom - this is what perennially killed the earlier Suez projects - when you cut between two landmasses there is an awful lot of tidal, gravitational, and weather energy that is going to go into sealing the cut back up. You need to continuously keep working to keep the approaches from reverting to their natural shallow state.
But surely you can just throw more manpower at the problem? Sorry, but no. Even using the most efficient shipping in 1800 is going to present a huge challenge to supply the rations, tools (which are going to be breaking 10x faster as the steel is nowhere near as hard, oh and remember they will also cost over 10x as much), and other supplies. The tonnage needed is something like the entire British merchant marine in 1800. Of course, this will be happening before the sanitation revolution and long before germ theory. So you are going to be suffering workforce attrition pretty much like a major siege, then of course there is the whole yellow fever bit. So we figure the American effort killed a small army (literally), so extrapolating back period disease figures and higher occupational fatality rates ... well good luck fielding an army, ever again. Remember, in the EU era the mortality rate to disease tends to be proportional to the square of the encampment size so more manpower is hard capped by diminishing returns thanks to epidemics.
And of course, there is the other big problem - cement. The early cements are utter rubbish for making the Panama canal (and doing it with brick or stone is going to run back into a millenia length building schedule). Prior to Portland cement, anything dealing with all the water from the canal is going to die rather quickly and set rather slowly - neither of which make the canal possible. Of course getting to Portland cement requires industrial rollers, which in turn require both industrial power and industrial steel.
The fact is the Industrial Revolution was a revolution precisely because in multiple different ways industry made orders of magnitude leaps in performance and output. Panama was attempted at the tail end of the 19th century for a reason and even then it took decades. Given the non-linear response of reduced efficiency on project length, even minor losses in construction rate mean centuries long construction times.
Truth is, no matter how many men you throw at the problem, you aren't going to change the tensile strength of the steel then available, nor are you going to appreciably increase the quantity of steel being produced. Without that steel, you don't get workable locks or a workable lake for transit. Being a world spanning despot doesn't let you rewrite the laws of physics.
On flat land with no locks? Sure the technology to cut and maintain the canals is marginally viable (it will be a LOT of work to keep the thing from silting over). Needing to deal with a 300 ft rise and use an elevated lake? Not going to happen. I'm fine with ahistorical stuff happening - Byz surviving needs the OE to have a protracted civil war (which happened both before and after the OE killed them) that results in diminishment of the OE to its enemies (Serbia, Wallachia, Bulgaria, Karamon, etc.), the OE's splintering into rival factions, and an inspired leadership that can slowly regrow out of Greece. That is easily 10K times as easy to see happening as making the Panama canal.
Why is it everytime a "historical" game takes a centimeter with ahistorical stuff, people take a mile and start going, "WELL NOW THEY'LL DO THIS!"
Love em, true to be honest I know they're controversial.
I'm hoping Paradox expands massively on the notion of 'great works and monuments' in coming DLCs.
I'm hoping Paradox expands massively on the notion of 'great works and monuments' in coming DLCs.
Suez and especially Kiel are fine, and while Panama is a bit out there, I think it could be an interesting change to gameplay. Besides, its not like the AI will ever get it, so it won't really change much of anything.
Because there are already enough fantasy games and many people who play these games enjoy the historical atmosphere of the setting.
This is where you go wrong. Throwing enough people, which would have included "earth scientists" and things, would have produced the materials needed. Innovation wasn't done just for fun back then and having it happen JUST when it happened in history just to please a few people is absurd. There's no reason a germ theory of disease couldn't have happened easier, or that if England owned half of europe instead of just the isles they'd have more of a fleet than the historical british merchant marine fleet. beep boop.
In this case they could make it so you have to have innovative tech as well, just to show the country was willing to actually do the scientific research necessary to make these things possible. Maybe have a few national decisions you need to acquire first.
Given I haven't seen quite that many people who play these games strictly historically, I don't see how an entirely optional ahistoric option is going to bother people that much. The cost and the tech for these things means the odds that anyone but the player will do them, is pretty slim.
'Panama is clearly controversial'
CONTROVERSIAL?! IT'S...
Since I'm quoting this from a dev diary, I think it's in my best interest to not express my anger any further -.-
CONTROVERSIAL?! IT'S...
Since I'm quoting this from a dev diary, I think it's in my best interest to not express my anger any further -.-