Jomini, your assumption about binning would demand being able to constantly sample a binned variable, and have that variable not change. But at any given time, those variables are acted on by multiple modifiers that do not necessarily move in the same direction. The point is that it's kind of immersion breaking to think: "oh this gift will raise relations with Ulm to 190, which will let us vassalize them". But its much more plausible to think "hmm, our relationship with Ulm is "very friendly", and with one more gift, they might be willing to become our vassal. It would demand a bit of knowledge about where the bins are, but that's really not much different than knowing what the number is. As far as I'm concerned, the "tedium" that you propose based on adding a RNG is just a strawman - I'm not proposing an RNG, and it would certainly be tedious to try to sample enough times for the central limit theorem to apply.
Oh please, you are going to have a million samples within hours of the update and you can simply tag switch to see how most of the bins in the game line up. A small amount of save & reload or custom event work will get the bins written up on the boards relatively quickly.
And frankly it is not like a lot of values are in constant flux. I want to vassalize Ulm? Okay I count out the months as I improve relations. Ding, I flip bins. I now know how far I was from the center of the bin for the conditions that existed when I started. It doesn't take that many trials to figure this out.
Would it make it harder for new players? Probably a bit, as they learn what is a reasonable war demand (and they would be getting feedback, mind you, if their demands go too far one way or the other - the only "loss" would be that it would be harder for them to precisely figure out how much they could get), but that's part of the skill of picking up the game. For "elite" gamers, it would make it harder to min-max so precisely, but it would make the game world a little less mechanical - instead of thinking "I need to wait 4 months for the 'length of war' modifier to drop by this many points, so I can demand precisely 46 warscore", they would be thinking "I need to wait a few months, and I should be able to get this". That element of uncertainty and risk are interesting, I think, otherwise, the game becomes pretty much just a matter of solving for an algorithm. But I think we're reaching a fundamental disagreement about whether hidden knowledge is good or bad, here.
None of this is correct. EU used to have honest to God random calls for relations - gifts gave variable rewards, diplovassalization was indeed
functionally random. Way back in the early internet days the community still figured out the bins and you had
completely mechanical responses to them. I mean seriously do you think algorithms cannot handle stochastic inputs? If I know that this bin has a 75% chance (+/- 12.5%) then I'm going to do the exact same thing as now.
You aren't proposing something new, you are proposing a regression to old design, something that worked out exactly as noted above. CIV IV likewise reported a lot of numbers with obfuscation, they were all cracked repeatedly by the community so that elite players could and did spreadsheet things.
I don't particularly want to get into the "gameplay vs realism" debate, particularly as I'm one of those people who thinks that gameplay can be enhanced with greater realism in many ways, but am not someone who thinks we should chuck fun out the window just to make the game more realistic. But I think the suggestions you raise about other things that are realistic and good for gameplay, and should be in the game. Just because they are not does not mean that arguments from realism are to be quickly dismissed though.
There is nothing realistic about this. During the Napoleonic wars, the British had better counts on French naval strength than the French did. Louis XIV had better data about Dutch forces than the Dutch did. Historically, your
own numbers were a crapshoot of ghost regiments, optimistic recruiting aspirations, regional pride, and many other issues.
Further, as noted in real history you could do a LOT of stuff to
negotiate bilaterally to affect change. Want to unify England and Scotland? Well if you give up this, we will line the parliament's pockets with gold. Want to flip the loyalty of Transylvania from the OE to Austria - make concessions (like on religious freedom and legal standing) to make it happen. Precision in results is just a tradeoff from not being able to sweeten the deal. France doesn't like your efforts to buy Louisana, it counters for more money and the sale of all North American claims. In the real world
everything is open to negotiation without fixed points because you can add all manner of carrots and sticks. Given that the game lacks flexibility here, why on earth should it remain rigid elsewhere? The point of negotiations in the era was that they routinely worked, rarely were serious proposals put forward and rejected - because a huge amount of back channel work had already gone down. This accurate numbers are just making the game more realistic because you cannot work bilaterally, at all, in EUIV.
As to the criticism that you can "math it out" - that's precisely the problem. Yes, without the ledger, I can go click through every French province and figure out how much forcelimit, basetax and manpower they have. But I shouldn't be able to do that! Nobody had economic or demographic data that precise - not even today, which is why we get those "country grows 50% because of GDP rebasing" new stories. But if that's too radical and bad for gameplay, I'd restrict it to just the manpower column in the ledger (current manpower, not max. manpower). There's no reasonable way you could conduct a rural census in every country in the world to know this, and the uncertainty would make strategic decisions to go to war a little less mechanical.
Oh BS. US military manpower is known within a percentage point or two thanks to this thing called the draft (which all American males must enroll in or seek a waiver from). It is trivially easy to calculate it. Actual population, the census is pretty freaking accurate and we know the Mongols were doing effective ones before game start from China to Novgorod. Rebasing GDP is just taking into account that in the technological era, prices value considerably the Nigerian example to which you allude is pretty much a one off due to the relative value of food and other things swinging hugely towards food (other stuff dropped a lot in price). None of that is a concern in this era. In this era, the vast, vast majority of the wealth stock of a country lay its land, its bullion, and in its ships. These are NOT hard to count. While technological progress did change the relative value of some land ... it wasn't hard to know terribly much who had more manpower.
I mean seriously, in what historical war was it
ever relevant that England miscounted the actual number of Frenchman (as opposed to French conscription policy)? Never. Likewise, at one point was Spanish accounting of the size of the Royal Navy ever so far off that an operation was lost or canceled based on the fact? Historically the sort of precision that annoys you was
immaterial to the policies of state.
In reality, states knew much more than the ledger. They could
ask allies what their intentions were and get honest answers. They could count ships in harbor - even without their navy sailing past. They could listen to gossip at court and in the streets and have a decent idea how the enemy would react. None of the concerns you have actually were period concerns. No wars were ever lost because Spain miscounted the "current manpower" of France. Frankly the ledger just gives us a shorthand for what was often known - some country has been locked in a long and bloody struggle and has few men of military manpower left. This was obvious if you
looked at the average village during travel. We know the OE did this in the Balkans (the raiders routinely reported such things). We know the French, English, and Spanish all had this sort of intelligence (in that English guesses about French manpower were no worse than French guesses).
Your proposal is wildly ahistorical in that introduces an information asymmetry
where none existed historically. The King of France had a decent idea how many Frenchmen he could draft because maybe he had a decade old census (riddled with lies) and some knowledge of how many men were under arms or had died recently. The English knew what French officials said was the size of French manpower (these reports
not being secret and information security being crap regardless in this era) and could also know how many Frenchmen died recently. Accurate numbers is just dealing with game as it is actually processed - the symmetry should be preserved.
So to recap:
1. This asymmetry has no basis in history.
2. By your own admission the vast majority of this can be tediously calced.
3. This hurts newbies, does nothing to stop dedicated number crunchers, and makes balancing the game harder.
4. Is a non-issue because
you could just
not open the ledger.
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