Make centralize state refund 100% gov progress, but none of the admin mana

[WezuLaweciarz]

Some people, including me, really liked the new reform. Centralize state, although a bit broken in the original form, offered a cool alternative solution to the gov cap problem. In every game i had in 1.33 and back, when blobbing I couldn't really state anything after early game, since conquered territories would take most of the govcap you get from tech. The new change Paradox introduced in 1.34.4, refunding 50% costs of centralizing instead of a 100%, will just make players forget about the mechanic again. Since 1.34, new government reforms and changes to govcap penalties make government progress more valuable than before. Players won't use the centralization mechanic even at halft cost, because the progress is too valuable.

What players would consider spending though, is admin mana. Every game or two I have a situation where I finished my recent admin ideas, caught up to admin tech, waiting for AE to go down while having a good ruler, and my precious admin mana starts to cap. Having that decision of using 50 admin to ease your govcap problems without spending that precious gov progress, would be an actual strategic choice you could make depending on your situation, and would be better than both the broken 100% refund, and the 50/50 split refund.

Thank you for reading my whine-post.

Sincerely,
Definitely not biased Prussia player

 

[MatthewP]

Yeah, I wouldn’t mind if they even had the reform increase admin mana cost in exchange for refunding the gov cost.

 

[supermash]

i would add that the base cost of centralize a state should not even include reform points as cost because if you don't have access to the reform to centralize the state, this ability to centralize the state is not viable without this reform as 50 points is a lot (you gain average 0.50 points per month and at max corwnland and low autonomy you gain not more than 1.20 per month in general) meaning you need 6 or 7 year to gain enough reform points to centralize once a state.

On a run with the mod extended timeline i didn't have access to the reform to centralize a state. I still did it to test how long i would need to centralize fully some state. So i was max corwnland and pretty low autonomy so i was earning average 1.10 points per month. And even with that i needed 300 years to centralize fully 14 states (i wasn't spending reform progress on anything else).

Also remember you have the mechanics to expend the administration which use reform points to increase gov capacity so these mechanics aren't compatible together.

I think the centralize state to avoid to be abused should be limited in quantity you could use it per state (i think 3 times and added one more times with the centralize the state reform) and ask a minimal amount of developpement in total or in one province to be used each times. I can think of something like this :
8 -> 20 -> 30 -> 40 dev in one province
OR
15-> 30 -> 50 -> 80 dev in total in the state.

This would also make more sense that to centralize state you need each time more developped cities to have a better administration in the area.

In exchange of the limited times we could use it and the requirement of developpement in the state. We replace the reform cost by money cost.
The money cost would depend on the number of territories inside and the total of dev (counting also in count the inflation and the time spend since the beginning) and also by the number of time the state was centralized there.

A formula of this money cost could have this form :

(Base (10) + Total in dev X 0.30 + number of territories inside the state X 10 ) X (Inflation + number of times we will centralize the state (min 1) + years X 0.01) )

So in this formula if we centralize a state of 4 territories on a state of 40 dev in total for the second times with no inflation in the year 1544 we will have :

(10 + 40 X 0.30 + 4 X 10) X (0 + 2 + 100 X 0.01)

= (10 + 12 + 40) X 3
= 62 X 3
= 186

Centralize a state would cost in this scenario 186 Gold (we would round up if not a full result).

This is just an idea. Values are just an exemple of how we could rework this system without be abused simply.

This is a cool mechanics, it would be bad to let it abandonned by players like the first version on emperor Patch.

 

[Clad777]

Centralize is a feature that should basicly never be used in its original form until you have reached the final government form and expanding administration becomes useless/too costly.
It's too costly for what it does, and should only be doable once per state.