It's time to drop Province Warscore Cost

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Just being able to vassalize released nations on peace deal would make that option a lot more useful.

Actually, I was thinking of that as a way of encourage the destruction of big countries without the player directly taking control of the land, be it by himself or by vassals. Being able to release a vassal country would be interesting too, though.

@Manwe_Sulimo Reading your comment made me realize that, while I wanted that discount on releasing countries, I cannot think of many examples (maybe the decline of the Ottoman Empire) in which it's what historically happened. Historically, it seems the tendancy was to "blobbing" along geographical lines, and the HRE managed to stay more or less a collection of small principalities.

Now about Charles V and the Habsburg, their grip was weakened by coalitions, unrest due to religion and distance. Two of those are represented in-game. I guess what is lacking is then a malus on control based on the distance of the province and a way to represent how difficult it is to rule an separated empire.

How does WS translates in that? It doesn't. Never did Fredrick II told himself that he couldn't take more than Silesia because God didn't want him to. He told himself that Silesia was more than enough to expand Prussia and that his goals were reached. Administratively, he had a whole province to add to his country and diplomatically, he had only a CB on that region. Taking Praha, for example, would have made him much more ennemies. Moreover, taking more would have imposed to him a prolonged military campaign with uncertain rewards.

I guess what I want is for the game to encourage us to have the same kind of reasoning instead of limiting us "artifically". The limit should come from the game mechanics we interact with (AE and OE), not from a number we have no idea where it comes from.

Ideally, with much more diplomacic tools, you could have things like reactions from neutral countries and allies, saying they won't let you take X provinces even before you took them in the peace treaty. You could learn that if you lose a few more troops in a war a country could attack you, thus discouraging you of pressing further. Those would be far better blockers on expansion than warscore.
 
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The only reason I'd like to see province warscore cost gone/reduced is that it would be fun to see tons of threads from people wondering "Why did my country explode after I took so much land?" due to 400% over extension.
 
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The only reason I'd like to see province warscore cost gone/reduced is that it would be fun to see tons of threads from people wondering "Why did my country explode after I took so much land?" due to 400% over extension.

Or threads about how the OE cap is too low/too harsh, which is close to the argument made here.

To me, it seems it is, at least if you look at the usual historical examples.

I'm curious : can you think of historical examples where a country would have reached "overextension" cap and that could justify this mechanic on an historical ground?
 
Or threads about how the OE cap is too low/too harsh, which is close to the argument made here.

To me, it seems it is, at least if you look at the usual historical examples.

I'm curious : can you think of historical examples where a country would have reached "overextension" cap and that could justify this mechanic on an historical ground?
The problem is that it doesn't take into account other details that would've made holding that land difficult or impossible, or internal political drama. In this game, it has to be difficult to take everything at once. Otherwise, players will gobble up the world in a heartbeat.
 
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Actually, I was thinking of that as a way of encourage the destruction of big countries without the player directly taking control of the land, be it by himself or by vassals. Being able to release a vassal country would be interesting too, though.

@Manwe_Sulimo Reading your comment made me realize that, while I wanted that discount on releasing countries, I cannot think of many examples (maybe the decline of the Ottoman Empire) in which it's what historically happened. Historically, it seems the tendancy was to "blobbing" along geographical lines, and the HRE managed to stay more or less a collection of small principalities.

Now about Charles V and the Habsburg, their grip was weakened by coalitions, unrest due to religion and distance. Two of those are represented in-game. I guess what is lacking is then a malus on control based on the distance of the province and a way to represent how difficult it is to rule an separated empire.

How does WS translates in that? It doesn't. Never did Fredrick II told himself that he couldn't take more than Silesia because God didn't want him to. He told himself that Silesia was more than enough to expand Prussia and that his goals were reached. Administratively, he had a whole province to add to his country and diplomatically, he had only a CB on that region. Taking Praha, for example, would have made him much more ennemies. Moreover, taking more would have imposed to him a prolonged military campaign with uncertain rewards.

I guess what I want is for the game to encourage us to have the same kind of reasoning instead of limiting us "artifically". The limit should come from the game mechanics we interact with (AE and OE), not from a number we have no idea where it comes from.

Ideally, with much more diplomacic tools, you could have things like reactions from neutral countries and allies, saying they won't let you take X provinces even before you took them in the peace treaty. You could learn that if you lose a few more troops in a war a country could attack you, thus discouraging you of pressing further. Those would be far better blockers on expansion than warscore.
jank ae up when taking provinces you dont have claims to is nice, but would be best for a mod otherwise world conquest people would complain about options being limited due to having to form another tag for its missions
 
A while ago I proposed a modifier based on similar culture and religion. This could be applied to OE or WS or both. It would be easier to take more lands from a country in the same cultural group and of the same religion than to take lands from a very different culture and land.

Except colonizers and steppe hordes took huge parts of continents in single annexations, while German on German wars where exchanging control over a 50 people village. The Italian wars where even worse, since they often didn't even want to take any land at all.
 
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Except colonizers and steppe hordes took huge parts of continents in single annexations, while German on German wars where exchanging control over a 50 people village. The Italian wars where even worse, since they often didn't even want to take any land at all.

It could be argued that Germans on Germans or French on Spanish wars were that way because of the threat of AE, of foreign intervention and the fact that those wars were limited by claims. WS, as it is the subject of this thread, still doesn't appear to me to be a good limiting factor.

Undoubtedly, once the conquest is made, it should be easier to administer people of similar culture or religion, if only because the administrations were similar. But to get there a lot of angry people must be dealt with. So again, diplomacy should be what prevents a player from unifying Germany in 1500.

@Battlex has an interesting idea : just increasing AE for unjustified demands. Such a "game mode" could frustrate players, and would probably require a revision of the imperialism CB (if not it's abandon), but it would ensure that rapid conquests would be met with resistance by the AI. Currently, claims are almost useless except to actually declare a war.
 
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jank ae up when taking provinces you dont have claims to is nice, but would be best for a mod otherwise world conquest people would complain about options being limited due to having to form another tag for its missions
No? I would (once again) complain that the mechanic of fabricating claims is not (and has never been) fun.
 
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It could be argued that Germans on Germans or French on Spanish wars were that way because of the threat of AE, of foreign intervention and the fact that those wars were limited by claims. WS, as it is the subject of this thread, still doesn't appear to me to be a good limiting factor.

Undoubtedly, once the conquest is made, it should be easier to administer people of similar culture or religion, if only because the administrations were similar. But to get there a lot of angry people must be dealt with. So again, diplomacy should be what prevents a player from unifying Germany in 1500.

@Battlex has an interesting idea : just increasing AE for unjustified demands. Such a "game mode" could frustrate players, and would probably require a revision of the imperialism CB (if not it's abandon), but it would ensure that rapid conquests would be met with resistance by the AI. Currently, claims are almost useless except to actually declare a war.
It would also mean that the conquest of India would be alot more hard and go more slowly, as after the initial charter, you have to vassalise nearby for it to be easy. Also like God damn paradox, bring protectorates back.
No? I would (once again) complain that the mechanic of fabricating claims is not (and has never been) fun.
Well it's not meant to be fun? I do wish border friction events spawned more often, with royal marriages decreasing the mtth, especially now it gives a casus beli to all bordering provinces not just one
 
Well it's not meant to be fun?
Did you really just write that?

I do wish border friction events spawned more often, with royal marriages decreasing the mtth, especially now it gives a casus beli to all bordering provinces not just one
The border friction cb always gives justified demands on all bordering provinces. If it doenst thats either a bug or a stealth change.
 
No? I would (once again) complain that the mechanic of fabricating claims is not (and has never been) fun.

There might be a way to improve this mechanic, then.

Claims on regions
Maybe for a slightly higher cost than a normal claim one could go search in the history of a province and see if an old contiguous country that is now mostly inside the player's country owned it. From then it would be possible to have claims inside a country further than on the border. In some instances, you could claim whole regions. A system in which you could claim for many claims simultaneously would also certainly be good.

Permanent claims
Permanent claims should probably be downgraded or else, more than flavour, they would become the only way to conquer vast swathes of ahistorical lands.

That could take care of the limited nature of claims at the moment.

QoL for claims and provinces of interest
Maybe also claims could be built automatically from the province of interests screen. I mean you would still create a spy network, but you would be able to set priorities to your spies a bit like you can with your diplomats, and so claims would be automatically created and you wouldn't have to select a province from time to time. The spies would use the list you gave them. The manual action would still be available and you could also set them no priority or give them the task of doing the other harmful actions on the other country. Since the spies would use the province of interests selected provinces, they would cycle through the countries so it wouldn't be necessary to set them to one country after the other.

Refresh claims
Additionnally, spies could be set to refresh claims, so that they don't expire at the end of the period.

All of that could make creating claims less clunky and troubelsome while keeping the player's agency.


This is seemingly pretty far from the main subject, but since it was suggested to make claims more important in order to make AE more of a threat after having removed the WS cap, I guess it's okay.

The result would (hopefully) be that players, at least before AE is less a number to keep in check, would *finally* content themselves with taking provinces on which they have a claim. Going beyond that would be possible, but not for more than a few provinces, else they start a coalition against them.

Now we would "only" need a way for big conquests to still be possible without the world falling on you. I'm thinking specifically about the Ottomans conquests or the Moscovite ones...
 
Going beyond that would be possible, but not for more than a few provinces, else they start a coalition against them.
So you want conquest everywhere to be like it is in the HRE, basically? :)
 
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It could be argued that Germans on Germans or French on Spanish wars were that way because of the threat of AE, of foreign intervention and the fact that those wars were limited by claims. WS, as it is the subject of this thread, still doesn't appear to me to be a good limiting factor.

Undoubtedly, once the conquest is made, it should be easier to administer people of similar culture or religion, if only because the administrations were similar. But to get there a lot of angry people must be dealt with. So again, diplomacy should be what prevents a player from unifying Germany in 1500.

@Battlex has an interesting idea : just increasing AE for unjustified demands. Such a "game mode" could frustrate players, and would probably require a revision of the imperialism CB (if not it's abandon), but it would ensure that rapid conquests would be met with resistance by the AI. Currently, claims are almost useless except to actually declare a war.

Yes, it would be nice if the problems with taking large amounts of land could be handled diplomatically. But that kind of thing is far, far too complex to implement in a game in a manner that would make for fun gameplay (or anything remotely resembling a realistic outcome), so we're stuck with a system like warscore instead.
 
There might be a way to improve this mechanic, then.
Look, anything less than several claims a year PER DIPLOMAT is pointless under such systems.

would *finally* content themselves with taking provinces on which they have a claim
The number of provinces i take with a claim can be counted on one hand over an entire campaign.
I go Religious first or second every time because playing the game without a universal CB is NOT FUN.

Having to fabricate claims everytime you want to go to war against some random OPM ontop of paying ooooddles of Dip for taking land is
not how i want to play the game.

at least before AE is less a number to keep in check
Sorry i cant hear you over the cries of the nations lamenting that they cant join the coaliton because of a truce despite having 400 AE against me.
 
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@grommile I want conquest to resemble more closely what it was historically. I'm trying to find a way to achieve that so in the beginning of the game expansion is hard and slow and you have to place your chess pieces correctly in order to be the top dog in a balance of powers game.

Then when coalitions become less important, the goal would be to accelerate the end game by removing WS cap, like the OP wants to do (or at least how I interpret his initial proposal).

There is still the issue that usually borders were moving in a quicker way in eastern Europe and eslewhere in the world. The claim trick, however, may be able to explain that some of those movements didn't result in coalition wars forever.

@Mike1984 For a long time I longed for upgrades in the diplomatic game. Maybe, as you say, the AI wouldn't be up to it, though. Vicky 2 had an interesting system in which a war started by pressing a claim and then during the war the player could add claims, increasing his AE (infamy) while doing so. This could give the chance to the AI to react to an escalation in the war goals and thus prevent complete dominance after one war against a great power. Could such a system help the AI in EUIV?

@Vulkandrache
Look, anything less than several claims a year PER DIPLOMAT is pointless under such systems.
Yes, there aren't enough claims generated in the game currently. My post insisted on the tediousness, but the speed could also be updated. However, the goal wouldn't be to be able to claim the Commonwealth in one single war. Quite the contrary. To return to an example I used earlier, ideally Brandenburg could claim Silesia without having the whole of Europe against it afterwards, but not much more.

The number of provinces i take with a claim can be counted on one hand over an entire campaign.
I go Religious first or second every time because playing the game without a universal CB is NOT FUN.

Having to fabricate claims everytime you want to go to war against some random OPM ontop of paying ooooddles of Dip for taking land is
not how i want to play the game.
My idea, with which you can certainly disagree, is that the game would be funnier if, at the start, you had more of a diplomatic game of check and balance, and later the "end game" were shorter. Thus I want to make the beginning more about limited wars despite a theoretically inlimited WS and then the end game, after the tipping point of "no coalition" is crossed, quicker.

The proposals I put forward are going in that direction. I suppose the religious CB could be reworked to only allow for CBs on bordering provinces, or else it would be too powerful. However I'm talking about redoing or overhauling profundly the CB system, so the opinion you have of it now isn't that relevant.

However, now that I think of it, it would probably be a good time to create a way for CBs to encompass geographical features. That would have the possibility to reduce bordergore and to encourage using natural borders.

Sorry i cant hear you over the cries of the nations lamenting that they cant join the coaliton because of a truce despite having 400 AE against me.

Then simply make it so that even countries with truces can join coalitions. ;)

edit : I hope @TheProf doesn't feel like I completely hijacked his thread with my strange proposals.
 
There might be a way to improve this mechanic, then.

Claims on regions
Maybe for a slightly higher cost than a normal claim one could go search in the history of a province and see if an old contiguous country that is now mostly inside the player's country owned it. From then it would be possible to have claims inside a country further than on the border. In some instances, you could claim whole regions. A system in which you could claim for many claims simultaneously would also certainly be good.

Permanent claims
Permanent claims should probably be downgraded or else, more than flavour, they would become the only way to conquer vast swathes of ahistorical lands.

That could take care of the limited nature of claims at the moment.

QoL for claims and provinces of interest
Maybe also claims could be built automatically from the province of interests screen. I mean you would still create a spy network, but you would be able to set priorities to your spies a bit like you can with your diplomats, and so claims would be automatically created and you wouldn't have to select a province from time to time. The spies would use the list you gave them. The manual action would still be available and you could also set them no priority or give them the task of doing the other harmful actions on the other country. Since the spies would use the province of interests selected provinces, they would cycle through the countries so it wouldn't be necessary to set them to one country after the other.

Refresh claims
Additionnally, spies could be set to refresh claims, so that they don't expire at the end of the period.

All of that could make creating claims less clunky and troubelsome while keeping the player's agency.


This is seemingly pretty far from the main subject, but since it was suggested to make claims more important in order to make AE more of a threat after having removed the WS cap, I guess it's okay.

The result would (hopefully) be that players, at least before AE is less a number to keep in check, would *finally* content themselves with taking provinces on which they have a claim. Going beyond that would be possible, but not for more than a few provinces, else they start a coalition against them.

Now we would "only" need a way for big conquests to still be possible without the world falling on you. I'm thinking specifically about the Ottomans conquests or the Moscovite ones...

So, basically, what you've done is take a system which handles small-scale conquests reasonably well but fails for the larger-scale ones, and replace it with a system that does exactly the same thing but is more annoying to use....

The whole idea of fabricating claims is nonsense anyway. The number of times where a country just produced a document out of nowhere that said "this land is rightfully ours" and got any response other than laughter can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Any system that relies on widespread claim fabrication will be both ahistorical and unfun at the same time.

As you said, the real limitations on expansion were diplomatic or internal. But it was not a matter of a country saying "we just found a piece of paper of dubious validity that says we own this land", it was a whole bunch of different arguments. Russia used protection of the Orthodox Christians against the Ottomans, for instance, whilst the partition of Poland was just the three countries who cared enough to prevent it mutually agreeing to divide it between themselves and no one else caring enough to try to fight them over it.

The problem, fundamentally, is that real world behaviour relies on incomplete information, lack of long-term thinking and limited range of action. The Ottomans could conquer the Mamluks because no-one with the power to prevent it paid any attention. And the Russians could conquer large parts of Northern and Central Asia because none of the countries there ever thought "hey, we're going to be next on the menu if we don't stop them now". Those things are all really, really hard to work into a game, especially when you take the human element into consideration. For instance, in a competitive multiplayer game, any human player close to a human Ottomans is inevitably going to try to stop them at game start, just because they know the threat they will pose later.
 
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So, basically, what you've done is take a system which handles small-scale conquests reasonably well but fails for the larger-scale ones, and replace it with a system that does exactly the same thing but is more annoying to use....

I wouldn't share your analysis. I don't think a CB-based conquest system would be that more tedious, especially with the QoL feature I outlined, but your examples are interesting. The "protect your brethren" justification, that is already present in events, could be turned into a CB. It would seem that the French conquest of Alsace was justified by the protection of autonomist princes who were then integrated into France.

Also, Frederick II used a dubious CB as you say as he claimed Silesia was the price for his acceptance of Maria Theresia on the Habsburg throne. To my knowledge, France claimed that the Netherlands were hers because the dukes of Flanders of old paid alliegance to France.

Outside of the partition of Poland, I'm not so sure wars were so devoid of CBs at the time.
 
I wouldn't share your analysis. I don't think a CB-based conquest system would be that more tedious, especially with the QoL feature I outlined, but your examples are interesting. The "protect your brethren" justification, that is already present in events, could be turned into a CB. It would seem that the French conquest of Alsace was justified by the protection of autonomist princes who were then integrated into France.

Also, Frederick II used a dubious CB as you say as he claimed Silesia was the price for his acceptance of Maria Theresia on the Habsburg throne. To my knowledge, France claimed that the Netherlands were hers because the dukes of Flanders of old paid alliegance to France.

Outside of the partition of Poland, I'm not so sure wars were so devoid of CBs at the time.

It's not that they were devoid of CBs, but rather that it's very difficult to design a system that reflects the breadth of real life CBs. Also, whilst wars needed a CB (as they do in-game), it doesn't follow that all conquests from wars did. I don't think Sweden really had much of a legitimate claim to the land it took in the Thirty Years War, for instance, but nor was there massive international outrage at them taking what would be a significant amount of development by EU standards.

The truth is that the concept of "Aggressive Expansion" itself isn't very historical. About the only country it really applies well to is Prussia, in that they might have had issues if they'd expanded more quickly and less peacefully. Revolutionary France was a target of a coalition before it even started to expand, whilst the Hapsburgs mostly expanded peacefully but still faced significant opposition.

The real limiting factor for expansion, at least in Europe, was the balance of power. The great powers of Europe weren't willing to allow anything that made another power much stronger than the rest, or that disturbed the status quo too much. Outside of Europe, the limitations were mostly internal stability and geography.
 
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@Mike1984 Thank you for clarifying your thoughts. So in your mind, the concept of Agressive expansion, which I mostly left alone to focus on warscore, overextension and then claims, poses a problem itself. Your post makes me see that.

It could be tweaked by giving passive AE to big players, in the sense that France, Austria, Spain and others would have more trouble growing without generating AE, but I'm not sure such an implementation would be interesting.

Also, as you say, it wouldn't be historical, as Russia expanded without problems historically. I wouldn't say that for France, though. During Louis XIV reign, it clearly faced coalitions.