Make Regencies Stronger

[MWSampson]

Currently if you have a regency you have no wars and less mana. Which seems counter-intuitive. The regency council is chosen to be the best leaders of the country - yet they're less competent than the king which is just bred to rule. I would like to see regencies getting some love in a DLC for monarchies (hint: pls), but until then I propose a simple change

Change the -1/-1/-1 for their skills to +1/+1/+1.
I understand the reasons regencies are made weaker (there's in fighting), but from a balance perspective making something that players can't control (King Death) something universally bad seems mean.

This is only one line of code, but would make regencies a less terrible occurrence.

 

[Maq]

Historically, most regencies are remembered as times of uncertainty and corruption.

 

[Krilnik]

Yeah, or atleast introduce some special triggered modifiers if there is regency. Something like "Authoritative regent", or "Strong regent", which would give some bonuses, and "Weak regent" for other way around, it would give maluses. This should also not be totally random, but affected by certain decisions and your government type.
For example, if you had feudal monarchy, there would be more chance of some strong noble becoming the regent. This would give you maluses because that noble would use his power to make his own dynasty stronger, where in Absolute monarchy that would be less frequent, since nobles no longer have much power, because army is more nationalized. In those cases family members would become regents more frequently thus giving you better bonuses, or civil wars..

And also, regency should be able to declare wars. It happened many times through history.

 

[MWSampson]

I don't really care either way about historical relevance here, Maq. Regencies are without a doubt the worst game feature, and the fact they've treated regency war declarations as immutable since the first complaints about it in 1.1 suggests they don't mind too much. This is a suggestion that is just to tide over until they give us an interesting set of regency mechanics, like perhaps as above.

 

[Maq]

Regencies are without a doubt the worst game feature

Please don't put it in that strong way. I know many people complain about this particular feature. But others would point out other features as the 'worst' ones. Me, par example, deterministic trade scheme and flat technology development.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Please don't put it in that strong way. I know many people complain about this particular feature. But others would point out other features as the 'worst' ones. Me, par example, deterministic trade scheme and flat technology development.

While those are bad, they don't actively reduce your agency in other game mechanics or restrict your access to the most engaging gameplay element. Regency dow-block fails the history check and is pathetically terrible from a gameplay standpoint.

 

[Maq]

Regency dow-block

Did the developers ever explain why did they make it this way?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Did the developers ever explain why did they make it this way?

Of course not. For stuff like this and primitive ship nerf (where their "gameplay first focus" rule suddenly stopped applying) they use the "say nothing" strategy. It's a lot easier to just comment on the bulk majority of mechanics that can be justified and sweep the nonsense ones under the rug.

 

[Maq]

Of course not. For stuff like this and primitive ship nerf (where their "gameplay first focus" rule suddenly stopped applying) they use the "say nothing" strategy. It's a lot easier to just comment on the bulk majority of mechanics that can be justified and sweep the nonsense ones under the rug.

Well, apparently you find this feature annoying, and you're by far not alone in that. But I wonder... You know, it's hard to believe that the developers do anything to deliberately annoy their customers. It wouls be nuts. So I deduce there must be some reason behind it. But it evades me, and of course I would like to see some explanation.
And, by the way, what 'primitive ship nerf' you mean?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Well, apparently you find this feature annoying, and you're by far not alone in that. But I wonder... You know, it's hard to believe that the developers do anything to deliberately annoy their customers. It wouls be nuts. So I deduce there must be some reason behind it. But it evades me, and of course I would like to see some explanation.
And, by the way, what 'primitive ship nerf' you mean?

I think it's a matter of stubborn belief in a mechanic being enjoyable regardless of evidence. It's a tough balance as a designer, because you need some degree of confidence/arrogance to not buckle to changing important mechanics to the gameflow, but at the same time not going so far as to ignore evidence and create implementations with no basis or that run counter to your own stated intention. And on top of being capable of walking that line, you have to actually be able to program it . My suspicion is that for mechanics like this they can't really give a good explanation but don't consider it a priority.

As for the primitive ship nerf, I'm referring to the fact that starting with patch 1.10 and 1.11, new world nations can't build ships until they westernize. This was a particularly vexing change because it significantly down-paces those starts (IE you lose things to do for a while), and it came just after one of the developers claimed that posts that only use "historical basis" when convenient aren't taken seriously...creating the awkward conclusion that either this change wasn't taken seriously or that the developers legitimately believed that the ship removal was useful for gameplay reasons...despite that the tactic was never used by the AI natives and was never competitively viable in MP (casting serious doubt on a gameplay argument and thus on the change). Similar to why regencies can't declare wars, they opted to simply never talk about that one when it was brought up.

This should be a red flag to the development team. For the strong majority of mechanics in the game, they can justify them on gameplay terms in an uncontroversial fashion. When this can't be done, it should be an eyebrow raiser but most times the mechanic in question just gets lost in the shuffle/ignored. I could give more examples, but I think it's suffice to say that the regency council dow block is not alone in this regard, but it's one of the oldest, most ubiquitously encountered examples.

 

[Maq]

I think it's a matter of stubborn belief in a mechanic being enjoyable regardless of evidence. It's a tough balance as a designer, because you need some degree of confidence/arrogance to not buckle to changing important mechanics to the gameflow, but at the same time not going so far as to ignore evidence and create implementations with no basis or that run counter to your own stated intention. And on top of being capable of walking that line, you have to actually be able to program it . My suspicion is that for mechanics like this they can't really give a good explanation but don't consider it a priority.

As for the primitive ship nerf, I'm referring to the fact that starting with patch 1.10 and 1.11, new world nations can't build ships until they westernize. This was a particularly vexing change because it significantly down-paces those starts (IE you lose things to do for a while), and it came just after one of the developers claimed that posts that only use "historical basis" when convenient aren't taken seriously...creating the awkward conclusion that either this change wasn't taken seriously or that the developers legitimately believed that the ship removal was useful for gameplay reasons...despite that the tactic was never used by the AI natives and was never competitively viable in MP (casting serious doubt on a gameplay argument and thus on the change). Similar to why regencies can't declare wars, they opted to simply never talk about that one when it was brought up.

This should be a red flag to the development team. For the strong majority of mechanics in the game, they can justify them on gameplay terms in an uncontroversial fashion. When this can't be done, it should be an eyebrow raiser but most times the mechanic in question just gets lost in the shuffle/ignored. I could give more examples, but I think it's suffice to say that the regency council dow block is not alone in this regard, but it's one of the oldest, most ubiquitously encountered examples.

I quite understand that many changes are not simple to implement. But the two you have pointed out are not the case, I believe. And I do know the developers repeatedly assured that they pursue modding friendly policy.
So I suggest to make these features moddable and let modders give it a try. That would put an end to complaints, and the developers' team would gain a bonus while keeping to their opinion.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I quite understand that many changes are not simple to implement. But the two you have pointed out are not the case, I believe. And I do know the developers repeatedly assured that they pursue modding friendly policy.
So I suggest to make these features moddable and let modders give it a try. That would put an end to complaints, and the developers' team would gain a bonus while keeping to their opinion.

Modding isn't the answer to poor design choices. When you have a situation like "a well-played Aztec might be sitting with 5 reforms passed for decades before being able to do anything whatsoever", the solution is to look at why that happened, not to push making starts interesting to modders. Regency councils are moddable in that you can set all religions to being able to declare in regency (like Nahuatl is now), but that's still a slap to people wanting to use ironman or jump into MP with friends easily only to find out that they can't do anything for the next half hour because regency.