Wouldn't something explainable be something more predictable, defeating the purpose of a "bolt from the blue"?I should be more assiduous in twitter checking
I see your point about periods of instability, but I think we can all agree that having a slightly more fleshed out reason for the stability hit would be better. For example, the bailiff event - where you get -1 stability, or -33 legitimacy. That I disagree with it in principle (see this) it does emulate the sort of thing that would have created unrest in history. Whereas, a comet being sighted could have multiple implications, rather than the immediate assumption of "everything's going to go to shit" that the game implies people make. Which I hope 1.4 will address.
So, comets are pieces of shit that piss everyone off. Something more explainable would be great.
Just how many comets are there in space?
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There are just enough comets in space to give you a stab hit when you least desire it.
Well i would rather think of it like this: It's just silly rumors of a comet. Not an actual comet. People in the era seemed to believe alot in silly rumors, and the less stability the more confusion, and with confusion and no natural scientist you have more silly rumors. However the rumors can be as bad as the real thing.
Sounds like the best idea would be to make a list of about a dozen different reasons for stability to drop (which must all be something the player can't directly affect):
Comet sighted!
Birth of a two-headed cow!
Rumours that the king's new mistress is foreign!
Poor harvest!
Corrupt tax collector!
Prophet preaching heretical new religion!
Ambitious nobles spreading evil rumours about the king!
Rumours of a coming influx of foreigners stealing our jobs and our women!
etc
etc etc
Then replace the current 'comet' event with an event that picks one of the reasons from this list. It still gives -1 stability and happens with the same overall frequency, but the event description is more varied instead of being comets all the time.
Comet sighted!
Birth of a two-headed cow!
Rumours that the king's new mistress is foreign!
Poor harvest!
Corrupt tax collector!
Prophet preaching heretical new religion!
Ambitious nobles spreading evil rumours about the king!
Rumours of a coming influx of foreigners stealing our jobs and our women!
etc
etc etc
Then replace the current 'comet' event with an event that picks one of the reasons from this list. It still gives -1 stability and happens with the same overall frequency, but the event description is more varied instead of being comets all the time.
I agree. The whole point is that you're not doing anything wrong, it's just pointless panic amongst the populace causing you hassle as a ruler.
IIRC there was a poll about removing the comet event before EU4 was released. People chose to keep it.
And this is why you can't trust the masses.
Oh yes, without a doubt. In fact, I predict many more choices to come from our most glorious space rocks. We will drown in optionsYes! Paradox will surely add an important strategic choice for the two options.
Oh yes, without a doubt. In fact, I predict many more choices to come from our most glorious space rocks. We will drown in options
"How is this my fault?" -1 stab
"But our country is doing so well!" -1 stab
"Just how many of those things are there?" -1 stab
"Get those astronomers out of our country!" -1 stab
"Don't they have comets in [lucky nation]?!" -1 stab
There's nothing wrong with an event that lowers stability, but it shouldn't be a random game mechanism to penalize the player for no good reason!
I hate comets with a passion because they're just stupid! Everything you do has consequences and many decisions could trigger stability lowering events, not just successions. A royal marriage with a foreign princess could do it (think how unpopular Marie Antoinette was -- you might say her marriage proved a serious diplomatic setback for the French Monarchy!)
An unsuccessful war, an enemy invades your country, all kinds of things could and should lower stability.
But they should be tied to in-game events triggered by player decisions and actions, not random occurrences!
It doesn't have to be just the stupid lazy design of comets! (And no, 2 really specially bright comets in a century is extremely rare. Remember Hale Bop and what a spectacular show it was supposed to be and what a damp fizzle it turned out to be? You couldn't see it at all without knowing where to look and having binoculars. More often than not a comet is dim and hardly something peasants are going to be concerned about. It's only rare and spectacularly bright comets that could cause comment).
Oh, and the answer to the question "how many comets are there?" is it depends.
There are untold trillions floating about in the Oort Cloud beyond the orbit of Neptune. Occasionally gravitational perturbations will send some of them rocketing inward towards the inner solar system.
Some of these will be in the plane of the ecliptic rather than highly eccentric oblique orbits, and some of those will be in near Earth crossing orbits, which may make the brightest of them noteworthy spectacles in the night sky.
The rest you can't see unless you have a telescope. The most spectacular recent comet was probably the Shoemaker-Levy 9 Comet that hit Jupiter, leaving an impact scar the size of Earth. If it had hit the earth we would have been wiped out like the dinosaurs. But you needed the Hubble Space Telescope to see it.
There are untold trillions floating about in the Oort Cloud beyond the orbit of Neptune. Occasionally gravitational perturbations will send some of them rocketing inward towards the inner solar system.
Some of these will be in the plane of the ecliptic rather than highly eccentric oblique orbits, and some of those will be in near Earth crossing orbits, which may make the brightest of them noteworthy spectacles in the night sky.
The rest you can't see unless you have a telescope. The most spectacular recent comet was probably the Shoemaker-Levy 9 Comet that hit Jupiter, leaving an impact scar the size of Earth. If it had hit the earth we would have been wiped out like the dinosaurs. But you needed the Hubble Space Telescope to see it.
They aren't penalizing you without good reason. Comets are an abstract stand in for the various events and actions in a nation that a ruler has no control over, and decrease the stability of the state, weather that be idiotic politicians/nobles who scheme for their own advancement or a devastating hail storm that ruins the crops. It's just that, instead of making a myriad events to represent each one of these individually, they get lumped together under comets. 0 Stab is what you should be at most of the time. Going above or below that is the exception. Furthermore, it is harder to gain or maintain order than it is to lose order, that's the nature of entropy, and why you are more likely to receive events that lower stability than raise it, especially at high levels of stability. Making this non random allows the player, who is much better than the AI at abstract thinking, to game the system and have perpetual stability, unlike any nation in history. And make no mistake, this game is in part a history simulator, not a "I overpower all of my foes and never lose or have bad things happen to me" game.
In EUIII, the Death & Taxes mod added a few more options. As I recall, the choices included "Paradox hates me!" [-1 stab] and "I was just about to flipping westernize!" [-1 stab].
I'm sure that was their thinking "it would make the game too easy" but it's nonsense!
Look, it's simple: condition -stab events to things you might want to do (royal marriage for instance). There are already lots of such events (your nobles get pissed off by your modernization program, traditionalists are offended by your modern military tactics, etc.).
Just link these events to player decisions. What are you going to do? Not modernize because traditionalists won't like it and that causes unrest?
You want to improve your trade power, so you invest in diplotech, but this increase in the power of the merchant class brings them into conflict with the traditional nobles.
Also, modernizing the military means relying upon mercenaries and standing armies instead of feudal levies, which means that nobles have their military obligation converted into a tax owed to the king. That plus centralization brings the new nobility who may have obtained their patents of nobility from royal service to the crown, into conflict with the older traditional noble families.
Virtually everything you might want to do is going to cause conflicts with somebody, because what the game is modelling is change and modernization. Well, those who are already at the top don't like any changes, especially when it means they are going to lose out!
So, virtually everything you would want to do to increase the power of your state and expand the size of your country is going to cause a stability hit in real life.
This could easily be modeled in the game. Instead Paradox took the lazy way of random events.
Yes, it models some of this, but what is objectionable is that it's not tied in any way to player decisions.
Your point that it would make it too easy for the player to avoid is nonsense because the decisions that would cause stability hits are exactly those which any enlightened monarch would want/need to take and which cannot be avoided unless you are going to stagnate and become a victim of more forward thinking and aggressive neighbors.
You want the exact same result implemented with dozens of conditional events (that need to be evaluated per tag) instead of one abstraction? "Laziness" and "efficiency" can overlap heavily.
See there's a reason those things cause panic in the masses. Jungian instincts passed down to us from our distant Juramaian ancestors who were there when the dinosaurs were wiped out, tell us to fear the comets. It is only with the numbing influence of science and reason that these pragmatic self-preservational fears are replaced by a complacent sense of safety and contentment even while hundreds of comets swirl about our blue jewel threatening to scar its whispy face.
Yes, I want results to stem from causes, not mere randomness, because in real life stability hits didn't just "happen."
Take comets for instance. People took them as harbingers of war, famine and the end of dynasties. But, if such a "star" appeared during a time of peace, stability, plenty and dynastic stability, such a "sign of doom" is not going to get much credence among the people!
When famine, pestilence and war ravage the lands and the living begin to envy the dead then people look for signs in the heavens.
And all the real life events that caused stability hits are easily modeled and appropriate triggers installed. For instance reaching a certain level of diplotech.
If you played EUIII you already saw these "random" events were the essence of the slider system. "Narrow-minded" versus "Free thinking", or "Free Trade versus Mercantilism" were choices that led to results.
In this game, because people didn't understand the sliders they were eliminated and you just tech up blindly. And events just "happen" without apparent cause.
That's not an improvement.