I actually liked the EU3 sliders...

[Siegfriedfr]

If anything the problem is that all ADM trees are good, while many trees are useless in the other categories, making the strain on admin points even bigger.

 

[Vishaing]

@net.split: The thing is that those trade-offs you name aren't actually trade-offs in EUIV, They're Speed Bumps. Picking Idea Group A only prevents you from picking Idea Group B Right Now but in the future you can easily pick Idea Group B, and there will be no penalties or consequences to having both at the same time, you just wind up with all the bonuses, whereas with the old model you didn't. There are sort of trade-offs in that you only have a limited number of Idea Group Slots, but that's extremely arbitrary and again, its really just a delaying tactic. You get enough slots that you can easily pick up enough ideas to do everything.

That's honestly one of the biggest problems I have with EUIV; 99% of the balancing is not about actually restraining countries to represent their limitations, or providing meaningful strategic choice with both long term and short term consequences, its all just about slowing things down.

Take Over-Extension. Over-Extension only ever serves as a speed bump telling you to slow down. At no point does it actually restrain a blob, in fact if anything it restrains small countries far more since large countries are better able to utilize Defence in Depth against threats, even threats that come from Internal Rebels. Even if that failing didn't exist, once you've spent enough Mana and Waited a few months the Over-Extension magically goes away and you're fully free to conquer yet more provinces.

You can say that its better to have just bonuses, I disagree. Choices should have Consequences, they have to, in order to actually ground those choices. Some of those Consequences will be good, some will be bad. I think having pure bonuses dulls that realization immensely.

If you invest in the quality of your soldiers, that should improve Discipline and Morale (provided the training works). However it should also mean you have to spend more Money and Time on training your soldiers than a nation who did not focus on quality would. Those are the things you should have to take into account when ruling a country. It might mean, especially if you have to maintain a large force to police a long border with several hostile states, that investing in quality may not be a viable option, or only viable with extreme difficulty, especially if your country, while large, is economically under-developed and riddled with issues of local autonomy.

Like Austria, for instance.

Austria is generally my favourite country to play as, and its always disappointing that this game never represents any of the long term problems that Austria had to deal with. The chief example of this is Autonomy. Austria always struggled with Local Autonomy inside the various Crown Lands, primarily due to the cultural divides in the nation. In game none of this ever happens. By the end of the game Austria will have ruled their territories enough that any Local Autonomy will have magically disappeared just by existing and will never resurface except maybe in The Netherlands.

Their Technological Advancement was hampered by ruling largely poor agriculture based lands ruled by an entrenched nobility that relied on an economy based on illiterate serfs. The lack of a literate population made the establishment of the sort of educational systems common in smaller more developed countries difficult while also making it difficult to establish a modern bureaucracy without relying on the landed Aristocracy whose goal was to maintain the existing situation. In game there's nothing preventing me from choosing Innovative and being able to tech up just as fast if not faster than everyone around me.

Austria had major trouble building a disciplined fighting force, partly because they drew their soldiers from an exceptionally diverse lot, and again because of the general illiteracy of their population. Attempts to improve discipline and standardize the army often faltered, partly because doing so would have just been extremely expensive given the size of an army Austria was pretty much required to Maintain. In game I choose Quality and there's never any problems. I never even need to worry about having a smaller Army than my neighbours because I'm the Goddamn Emperor and thus I get a massive bonus to Manpower which is already high just on account of me being big.

Not only are the games stances towards these subjects unrealistic, they're also Boring. I play Austria because I want to actually have to deal with the internal and external issues they faced. The entire reason for playing a historical game like this is because the history interests me and I want to try my hand at the historical troubles that others had to deal with.

I want to struggle against and ultimately overcome them, and in game I can't, because they do not exist.

 

[bzflater]

Why do people keep saying there are no trade-offs? You do not need discrete penalties for trade-offs to exist. That is thinking too simply.

If I buy an idea set, I have locked myself out of choosing any other idea set until the next tech unlock (or abandoning the set at high cost). There is also a limit of how many idea sets you can have in total. This is a trade-off.

If I buy an idea, I'm spending Monarch Points to unlock that idea. Those points could have been spent on any number of other things, such as developing provinces, unlocking tech, expanding, or various ways of reducing unrest / promoting stability. This is a trade-off.


The focus on penalties doesn't even make any sense. To reduce this down to a simpler example, imagine a game where there's two values: Value A and Value B. Let's look at two designs for how you can interact with these.

In our first design, we set Value A and Value B to default at 50. Then we give you two choices: boost A by 25 and reduce B by 25, or boost B by 25 and reduce A by 25. If you pick the first option, you'll have Value A at 75 and Value B at 25. If you choose the second option, you'll have Value A at 25 and Value B at 75.

Now let's look at an alternative design. We set Value A and Value B to default at 25. Then we give you two choices: boost A by 50 or boost B by 50. If you pick the first option, you'll have Value A at 75 and Value B at 25. If you choose the second option, you'll have Value A at 25 and Value B at 75.

You will see that the numeric outcomes are identical. All we have actually done is frame how we present the choice to the player. Some people are clamoring for the first design as though it's somehow superior, but we can see that it's actually the same as the second design in results, and the second design is better for psychology (it's more rewarding as a player to choose a bonus). Nothing about the second option makes the game easier.

Of course this is a bit of a simplification; there is a bit of nuance lost if you never permit any penalties, which I'm sure penalty-defenders are already itching to hit Reply and educate me about. Paradox is aware of this, but they've moved those kinds of choices to things like events or tweaks to Local Autonomy. This works because you're not spending in-game currency to make these selections, so you don't have to worry about the psychology issues with players "buying" a penalty.

You will notice that pretty much nothing that you spend Monarch Points on comes with a penalty attached. This is intentional, and it's good design. This does not make things "easier." It means where before they might have used a penalty to balance things, they will instead simply adjust the baseline to compensate or otherwise get a bit creative with the overall design.


This isn't to say that the idea system is perfect. It has some obvious balance issues as-is (in terms of size and arrangement of bonuses as opposed to any structural flaws), and of course there are plenty of potential ways to improve things. I'd personally enjoy fewer idea groups but turn each group into a tree so you have more choice in how you fill it out (and getting a group to 100% isn't a foregone conclusion; it could even be impossible, so you instead get the final bonus when you unlock an end / leaf node).

But most of the criticisms leveled against the system are either unfounded or somewhat misfiring. If everyone's picking the same groups in multiplayer, that's because some groups are just too powerful (or because specific playstyles are too powerful and those idea groups are required to engage in them). It doesn't mean reverting to a slider system is the solution; it means revamping problem ideas.

Still. It bothers me that you can just take quality, quantity, offensive and defensive at the same time and have an unstoppable army that is perfect at everything and anything you could ever need. That is bad design IMO.
Direct penalties are not necessary, but something should be done to incentivise specialisation instead of being great at everything.

 

[balmung60]

Still. It bothers me that you can just take quality, quantity, offensive and defensive at the same time and have an unstoppable army that is perfect at everything and anything you could ever need. That is bad design IMO.
Direct penalties are not necessary, but something should be done to incentivise specialisation instead of being great at everything.

Hmm... here's an idea: once you have at least three idea groups, the more unbalanced your idea group choices, the higher the cost of each idea, so that a nation that only takes ADM and MIL ideas to the exclusion of DIP ideas is spending far more MPs than a nation that uses all three categories. It might not be the kind of incentive you were thinking of, but it would be some incentive.

We could also do something like make nations that have either 0% investment in any idea category after 3 or four idea groups or less than 20% after six idea groups take penalties to the category they're neglecting, like all ADM and MIL results in a loss of diplo-rep, higher liberty desire in subjects, and more expensive vassal annexation, while ignoring ADM ideas gets you lower taxes and more expensive cores, and neglecting MIL ideas could lose you CA or hurt your manpower, with harsher penalties the more unbalanced you are.

Though depending on how you look at it, your example is already specialization - specifically, such a nation has specialized heavily in its land forces and left little room for colonization, economics, the navy, diplomacy, or much of anything else.

All this said, I'm perfectly fine with the current implementation.

 

[bzflater]

Hmm... here's an idea: once you have at least three idea groups, the more unbalanced your idea group choices, the higher the cost of each idea, so that a nation that only takes ADM and MIL ideas to the exclusion of DIP ideas is spending far more MPs than a nation that uses all three categories. It might not be the kind of incentive you were thinking of, but it would be some incentive.

We could also do something like make nations that have either 0% investment in any idea category after 3 idea groups or less than 20% after six idea groups take penalties to the category they're neglecting, like all ADM and MIL results in a loss of diplo-rep, higher liberty desire in subjects, and more expensive vassal annexation, while ignoring ADM ideas gets you lower taxes and more expensive cores, and neglecting MIL ideas could lose you CA or hurt your manpower.

Though depending on how you look at it, your example is already specialization - specifically, such a nation has specialized heavily in its land forces and left little room for colonization, economics, the navy, diplomacy, or much of anything else.

The problem is that in MP, everyone takes those four ideas with the rare exceptions of Portugal and England who, in some cases (but not always) can drop one of them in favour of naval while taking the other three.
Those four ideas, as well as Economic and Religious (for the policies) are pretty much mandatory in MP. The pretty much only competitively viable way to play includes taking 6 same idea groups in every game as every nation. I consider that terrible game design.

 

[net.split]

Did you read the post in detail? Slider shifts are tied to events. These are indeed strategic decisions because these events would fire as a reflection of your actions. Waging lots of wars? War-related social and military matter events pop up that can affect you towards the future. Playing a pacifist? The game would be able to tell due to your lack of war declarations in X years and fire an event to either egg you on or reestablish your pacifist tendencies. It's a strategic decision because the consequences of your actions are felt later, not right away. You're altering society, of course you're going to suffer some form of instability. How do you think the Aragonese and Portuguese reacted to the Hapsburg's centralizing tendencies and attempts to curtail the local Cortes? Did the Prussians spawn a monster of an army out of thin air, or was it a process that took several consecutive Electors?

As for it being a random card draw....that's essentially how history played out. Leaders looking at the now, looking at the future, and being pragmatic about the choices given to them in response to internal and external factors, political, military, and mercantile. You act as though I'm suggesting the return of surprise Russian 'Times of Troubles' events for shits and giggles instead of advocating for events revolving around internal factionalisms that alter society over time that build on your past choices. There are no objective good choices without downsides. States did not go from strength to strength and good thing happening to good thing happening; that's just not how things worked out, and it's poorly reflected in EU's lack of internal matters. Honestly, your second paragraph is devolving into fearmongering.

I'm not seeing how my proposal would prevent an unorthodox colonization strategy if the player so chooses either. But doing such a thing takes monarch points, lots of monarch points. A massive investment. Or in other words, a gradual process. Just like this system. And your last paragraph makes no sense. How is adjusting tech costs(arbitrarily, mind you, because who's to say the Spanish end up declining? The only way your 'simple' solution would solve anything would be to arbitrarily slap on tech penalties late in the game for the Iberians) going to solve anything? I figured it went without saying that sliders -> events -> modifiers that help non-Euros out without requiring an arbitrary westernization. A strong martial tradition with an open society is one route, off the top of my head, is one possible way for a non-European to be at parity by the end of the game. It'd be a far more organic system than having to tie monarch points to everything, while introducing even more ways to burn monarch points ingame. And I'm not even advocating a complete overhaul of EUIV here, unless you skimmed most of my post. This is the kind of system that would have to be implemented in another game.

This is a weird response as you seem to be writing it as you're reading through my post, but I'll do my best to address what you're saying here. The problem is precisely that you're tying slider shifts to events for numerous reasons. I touched on most of them in my previous post, but I don't think I did a good job of explaining, so I'll list it out here:

1. Triggers for events are hidden from the player.
The only way you can know what triggers various events in the game is to either accumulate a massive amount of experience or go read wikis & manuals offline and try to memorize it (or take the Guide-Dang-It approach of keeping the references open while playing in another window or device). This increases the barrier of entry and significantly blurs optimal strategies as it isn't obvious why certain things are or aren't happening.

2. MTTH are hidden from the player.
Even if you learn the triggers, you still have to memorize the Mean Time To Happen values to interpret them in a way where you can make good strategic decisions to invoke them. Without looking up this information you can't properly judge the risk & reward of any action you take.

3. Even with the above, events are still random.
Even if you do everything "right" to go for the events you want, you can't guarantee you get them. And you can do "wrong" things and not suffer for it with a bit of luck. All of this happens in the background, invisible to the player until an event actually fires. For newcomers and even those with moderate experience, it makes the game seem temperamental and obtuse. Completing objectives, whether ones you set for yourself or predetermined achievements, become more at the mercy of RNGesus than your ability to make good decisions.

These problems can be tolerated if the benefit to having the events outweighs the shortcomings or if the shortcomings can be designed around. However, if there are alternatives that don't have these shortcomings, that would be a superior option.

Consider as examples the new rebellion and disaster systems. Rebels used to spawn randomly depending on revolt risk in a given province. This was frustrating to deal with as a player, so we instead got a new system where we can see revolt progress building and take active steps to do something about it. That's permitting strategic decision-making and using real trade-offs. The mechanic is much more fleshed-out, it's visible and easy to understand for a newcomer, yet it still has an element of randomness within so that it isn't trivial to optimize around. That is good game design.

Your system is adequate for a simulation that plays itself, but it's absolutely terrible for gameplay. It invokes a series of cardinal game design sins, and it apparently does so out of laziness; all you need is to take those core ideas and meld them into a visible, tweakable system that the player can observe and interact with. That's not very easy to do, but Event-like systems are super easy as they don't require mechanics at all.

I understand you're not suggesting this system would go into EU4, but I'm so wholly opposed to the concept appearing even in future games that I felt a desire to comment on it despite Wiz's assurance that sliders would never come back. They absolutely should never come back, most especially in the form you've described.

@net.split: The thing is that those trade-offs you name aren't actually trade-offs in EUIV, They're Speed Bumps. Picking Idea Group A only prevents you from picking Idea Group B Right Now but in the future you can easily pick Idea Group B, and there will be no penalties or consequences to having both at the same time, you just wind up with all the bonuses, whereas with the old model you didn't. There are sort of trade-offs in that you only have a limited number of Idea Group Slots, but that's extremely arbitrary and again, its really just a delaying tactic. You get enough slots that you can easily pick up enough ideas to do everything.

<snip for unrelated>

You can say that its better to have just bonuses, I disagree. Choices should have Consequences, they have to, in order to actually ground those choices. Some of those Consequences will be good, some will be bad. I think having pure bonuses dulls that realization immensely.

If you invest in the quality of your soldiers, that should improve Discipline and Morale (provided the training works). However it should also mean you have to spend more Money and Time on training your soldiers than a nation who did not focus on quality would. Those are the things you should have to take into account when ruling a country. It might mean, especially if you have to maintain a large force to police a long border with several hostile states, that investing in quality may not be a viable option, or only viable with extreme difficulty, especially if your country, while large, is economically under-developed and riddled with issues of local autonomy.

<snip for unrelated>

A "speed bump" is an absolutely massive trade-off in a game like EU4. If you take the Exploration idea group just one idea set later than your neighbors, you risk losing out on colonizing the best land within early reach and all but guarantee that your colonial nations will be smaller and weaker than the set of colonial nations possessed by your enemies. Taking one military group over another can have similar impacts, determining what you're able to take or defend during that period. This is a game with a time limit, and it's all about getting your nation to that tipping point where you can impose your will on the world. The first four idea groups you choose are by far the most critical in anything other than an extreme challenge game (total WC) or multiplayer (less concerned with this since the vast majority only play single-player).

Your supposed consequences do, of course, exist already in the game. I showed mathematically how that concept works already in the post you responded to (I notice a lack of a rebuttal to any of that in favor of just pretending it wasn't there). Further, for your specific example, if you've chosen to invest in ideas that boost unit strength in place of investing in ideas that boost your economy or make them cheaper than you have indeed made the precise trade-off you're claiming doesn't exist. In fact, if we took your recommendations and put them into the game, choosing an idea that boosts discipline in favor of more expensive troops now becomes double-dipping; you are losing out on economic bonuses / cheaper troops / other ways of boosting money and taking a hit to your expenses at the same time. That is poor design, and that's one of the reasons Paradox has avoided putting such things into ideas.

Still. It bothers me that you can just take quality, quantity, offensive and defensive at the same time and have an unstoppable army that is perfect at everything and anything you could ever need. That is bad design IMO.
Direct penalties are not necessary, but something should be done to incentivise specialisation instead of being great at everything.

In an earlier patch there was a specific restriction put on stacking idea groups within the same category. Has that been removed? I thought it was a pretty good addition.

Regardless this is mainly a problem because having the "perfect army" is too effective in EU4 as a general strategy. Tweaking idea benefits could be a short-term solution to this, but a long-term solution would be more comprehensive, making the other elements of gameplay more critical to success and giving nations other ways to deal with each other. The total uselessness of the Espionage group is an easy example of this problem in action.

 

[bzflater]

This is a weird response as you seem to be writing it as you're reading through my post, but I'll do my best to address what you're saying here. The problem is precisely that you're tying slider shifts to events for numerous reasons. I touched on most of them in my previous post, but I don't think I did a good job of explaining, so I'll list it out here:

1. Triggers for events are hidden from the player.
The only way you can know what triggers various events in the game is to either accumulate a massive amount of experience or go read wikis & manuals offline and try to memorize it (or take the Guide-Dang-It approach of keeping the references open while playing in another window or device). This increases the barrier of entry and significantly blurs optimal strategies as it isn't obvious why certain things are or aren't happening.

2. MTTH are hidden from the player.
Even if you learn the triggers, you still have to memorize the Mean Time To Happen values to interpret them in a way where you can make good strategic decisions to invoke them. Without looking up this information you can't properly judge the risk & reward of any action you take.

3. Even with the above, events are still random.
Even if you do everything "right" to go for the events you want, you can't guarantee you get them. And you can do "wrong" things and not suffer for it with a bit of luck. All of this happens in the background, invisible to the player until an event actually fires. For newcomers and even those with moderate experience, it makes the game seem temperamental and obtuse. Completing objectives, whether ones you set for yourself or predetermined achievements, become more at the mercy of RNGesus than your ability to make good decisions.

These problems can be tolerated if the benefit to having the events outweighs the shortcomings or if the shortcomings can be designed around. However, if there are alternatives that don't have these shortcomings, that would be a superior option.

Consider as examples the new rebellion and disaster systems. Rebels used to spawn randomly depending on revolt risk in a given province. This was frustrating to deal with as a player, so we instead got a new system where we can see revolt progress building and take active steps to do something about it. That's permitting strategic decision-making and using real trade-offs. The mechanic is much more fleshed-out, it's visible and easy to understand for a newcomer, yet it still has an element of randomness within so that it isn't trivial to optimize around. That is good game design.

Your system is adequate for a simulation that plays itself, but it's absolutely terrible for gameplay. It invokes a series of cardinal game design sins, and it apparently does so out of laziness; all you need is to take those core ideas and meld them into a visible, tweakable system that the player can observe and interact with. That's not very easy to do, but Event-like systems are super easy as they don't require mechanics at all.

I understand you're not suggesting this system would go into EU4, but I'm so wholly opposed to the concept appearing even in future games that I felt a desire to comment on it despite Wiz's assurance that sliders would never come back. They absolutely should never come back, most especially in the form you've described.


A "speed bump" is an absolutely massive trade-off in a game like EU4. If you take the Exploration idea group just one idea set later than your neighbors, you risk losing out on colonizing the best land within early reach and all but guarantee that your colonial nations will be smaller and weaker than the set of colonial nations possessed by your enemies. Taking one military group over another can have similar impacts, determining what you're able to take or defend during that period. This is a game with a time limit, and it's all about getting your nation to that tipping point where you can impose your will on the world. The first four idea groups you choose are by far the most critical in anything other than an extreme challenge game (total WC) or multiplayer (less concerned with this since the vast majority only play single-player).

Your supposed consequences do, of course, exist already in the game. I showed mathematically how that concept works already in the post you responded to (I notice a lack of a rebuttal to any of that in favor of just pretending it wasn't there). Further, for your specific example, if you've chosen to invest in ideas that boost unit strength in place of investing in ideas that boost your economy or make them cheaper than you have indeed made the precise trade-off you're claiming doesn't exist. In fact, if we took your recommendations and put them into the game, choosing an idea that boosts discipline in favor of more expensive troops now becomes double-dipping; you are losing out on economic bonuses / cheaper troops / other ways of boosting money and taking a hit to your expenses at the same time. That is poor design, and that's one of the reasons Paradox has avoided putting such things into ideas.


In an earlier patch there was a specific restriction put on stacking idea groups within the same category. Has that been removed? I thought it was a pretty good addition.

Regardless this is mainly a problem because having the "perfect army" is too effective in EU4 as a general strategy. Tweaking idea benefits could be a short-term solution to this, but a long-term solution would be more comprehensive, making the other elements of gameplay more critical to success and giving nations other ways to deal with each other. The total uselessness of the Espionage group is an easy example of this problem in action.

A possible solution that I'd like would be dividing all idea groups into mutually exclusive pairs where you can only choose one of the two. No maluses would be even needed and it would be a real trade-off on its own that would prevent the scenario I described above from appearing.

 

[sterrius]

While i don´t actually like or dislike sliders they added a very good mechanic. "Trade offs"

Would be nice like some people said for ideas to give a Bonus and a Nerf at same time.

Every idea bonus can have those (Except the last bonus for completing the ideas). Would make games much more interesting and taking ideas like quantity AND quality could make one kind of nulify each other. (it would still be possible and you would still end with positive bonus in the end of the road, but it would be more valuable and make more sense to just choose 1).

trade offs are nice in games like EU IV because EU is all about choices and consequences. You choose something and face it.


And every idea out there can easily have some small and anoying nerfs for every bonus you got. The nerf can´t be too strong to make people choose to not continue the tree, but enough to not make that decision so automatic and without consequences).

I would think those penalitys like that portion of society that is always against anything you do and pushing against your idea.

 

[bzflater]

A possible solution that I'd like would be dividing all idea groups into mutually exclusive pairs where you can only choose one of the two. No maluses would be even needed and it would be a real trade-off on its own that would prevent the scenario I described above from appearing.

Or, instead of a hard lock, taking one idea group from a pair could greatly increase the mana cost of the other.

 

[Zylathas]

I think that having some more trade offs would be nice. Does not have to be done by sliders persé, but like suggested expand the idea system where every idea has a counter idea and you can pick one of the two.

 

[balmung60]

A possible solution that I'd like would be dividing all idea groups into mutually exclusive pairs where you can only choose one of the two. No maluses would be even needed and it would be a real trade-off on its own that would prevent the scenario I described above from appearing.

Okay, so what pairs? Offensive/Defensive, even though I'm sure someone can name a country that had great forts and great generals. Quality/Quantity, even though that prevents France and Prussia from doing things they actually did by mobilizing abnormally large percentages of their societies into highly skilled militaries. And what else? Religious/Humanist maybe? Those don't even synergize very well and players rarely take both, so that doesn't change much. Plutocratic/Aristocratic? While possible, the number of hoops required to get both doesn't exactly make it a popular pairing.

The problem is that in MP, everyone takes those four ideas with the rare exceptions of Portugal and England who, in some cases (but not always) can drop one of them in favour of naval while taking the other three.
Those four ideas, as well as Economic and Religious (for the policies) are pretty much mandatory in MP. The pretty much only competitively viable way to play includes taking 6 same idea groups in every game as every nation. I consider that terrible game design.

If you think that taking major DIP and/or ADM related penalties from the previous ideas I was kicking around is worth the perfect army, then I don't think anything short of a hard cap of 34% on idea groups (no more than 3 from each category) will keep people from taking those four military idea groups, though pretty much any change would just be a band-aid for the overwhelming importance of land power in the current game.

 

[bzflater]

Okay, so what pairs? Offensive/Defensive, even though I'm sure someone can name a country that had great forts and great generals. Quality/Quantity, even though that prevents France and Prussia from doing things they actually did by mobilizing abnormally large percentages of their societies into highly skilled militaries. And what else? Religious/Humanist maybe? Those don't even synergize very well and players rarely take both, so that doesn't change much. Plutocratic/Aristocratic? While possible, the number of hoops required to get both doesn't exactly make it a popular pairing.



If you think that taking major DIP and/or ADM related penalties from the previous ideas I was kicking around is worth the perfect army, then I don't think anything short of a hard cap of 34% on idea groups (no more than 3 from each category) will keep people from taking those four military idea groups, though pretty much any change would just be a band-aid for the overwhelming importance of land power in the current game.

That would obviously require a massive rework of idea groups so that every group has a pair. Current ideas as is can't be paired.

 

[balmung60]

I don't think that it's necessary to massively rework idea groups, solely so that false dichotomies can be enforced upon the game.

 

[Ratlegion]

This would be accurate if the lack of sliders was a problem rather than the exact opposite.

I understand that you've kinda already leapt off the mountain and won't go back, but is there any way you could elaborate on why you feel monarch points are better than the slider system, or at least what problem you feel the monarch points are solving that the sliders created?

 

[bzflater]

I don't think that it's necessary to massively rework idea groups, solely so that false dichotomies can be enforced upon the game.

Not necessarily enforced. I already suggested a minor idea about this where choosing an idea out of a pair wouldn't hard lock the other one, but would rather massively increase its mana cost.

 

[balmung60]

Well, that might give more value to "cheaper idea" ideas, but I still don't think that such a thing really requires reorganzing all ideas into distinct pairs. Do spying or diplomacy really NEED an opposite?

 

[Searry]

I personally never liked them and I'm glad they are gone forever!

 

[frivolity]

I really don't understand why people are suddenly nostalgic about EU3 sliders of all things. The same complaints being lodged against picking idea groups in EU4 also applied to EU3 sliders; so-called "trade-offs" were illusory because one option was almost always better than the other. For me it was always quality over quantity, innovative over narrowminded, free-subjects over serfdom...etc. Centralization vs decentralization wasn't even a real option. Either sliders abstract way too many things at once, or you would need something like 20 sliders to replicate the combinations of choices you get in EU4. Neither would be good design.

 

[Pellucid]

The lack of any trade-offs whatsoever in the ideas is a problem, though it doesn't matter whether it'd be implemented via sliders or otherwise.
Many possible idea group combinations don't really make sense in fluff terms and the lack of negative modifiers makes them kinda bland IMO.
This also has an anti-fun effect on MP games: most people take the same combination of idea groups with very little variation in every game on every country without any significant specialisation except for maybe picking up exploration if you want colonies.

But there are trade-offs. You pay an opportunity cost every single time you select a new group and every single time you select an idea. With the sliders, there was almost no reason not to max them out in one direction or the other, and the "trade off" penalty was often something the player didn't care about.

 

[WSnova]

There is always a cost associated with choosing an idea. Don´t know why the need for making direct penalties.

Quality and quantity are not mutally exclusive

If the problem is people choose the same ideas all the time, its a probelam with the ideas not being balanced.