Ming is Broken, some basic fixes are needed!

[Manic Eskimo]

tributary monarch points must be removed ming is only ahead because of this :/

That's part of the problem but it's not a problem that's exclusive to Ming. I recently got my arse kicked by Transoxania as Russia because they were ahead in mil. My tech discount was only 5% behind time and they had not embraced as many institutions. It's not that uncommon to see someone like Malacca also up there in terms of tech in the late game. Or Indian majors if they get some institution spread.

Ideally I'd want to see tech drastically made more expensive east of the ottomans and south of north Africa. But to balance it out I'd give them drastically bigger manpower and force limits.

 

[petertel123]

People keep saying that its a good thing that paradox is still making dlc for eu4, but I'm getting sick of playing a 5 year old game that still feels like a beta because paradox sucks at balancing anything.

 

[BarrosRodrigues]

It is extremely easy for a player to make Ming hit 0 mandate due to the extremely harsh mandate penalty that Ming suffers when bordering non-tributaries. If low mandate also gave unrest on top of everything else then there would be no need to fight Ming since the mandate mechanics would become a "let´s make Ming explode button" for the player.
IMO AI Ming is fine as it is unless you want to make the game even easier; you don´t need to mess with Ming´s balance for that.

 

[KimmelZhang123]

It is extremely easy for a player to make Ming hit 0 mandate due to the extremely harsh mandate penalty that Ming suffers when bordering non-tributaries. If low mandate also gave unrest on top of everything else then there would be no need to fight Ming since the mandate mechanics would become a "let´s make Ming explode button" for the player.
IMO AI Ming is fine as it is unless you want to make the game even easier; you don´t need to mess with Ming´s balance for that.

How about the AI? Without player's significant intervension, there can be only one out come.

And Ming should collaps after a major defeat, becoming the new emperror by eating Ming slowly through more than 10 wars is extremely boring game play.

 

[BarrosRodrigues]

How about the AI? Without player's significant intervension, there can be only one out come.

And Ming should collaps after a major defeat, becoming the new emperror by eating Ming slowly through more than 10 wars is extremely boring game play.

Not really if you know what you are doing/bother Ming can be eaten in ~3 wars without absolutism but even if you have to fight them more than 3 times if you, again, know what you are doing the last wars are extremely quick and just a formality. As an example in one of my recent campaigns I erased Ming from the map IIRC <20 years after the 1st war had ended; FYI that was a very slow takedown of Ming since I can do do it much, much faster. You can see what I am talking about in this video:

At last but not least on AI vs AI wars I´ve seen Ming lose provinces to rebels because of very stupid AI issues combined with long travelling times in that region of the world and ofc WE (just to name a few).

 

[Pyramid_Head]

Tech level. Date. Yes, it is top tch with +200% ahead of time penalty. And ming have it.
And yes, they have 12% discipline

 

[Naga Niome]

I can't believe how broken this is. I am playing currently as Ottomans, and they're 10/10/10 at 1522. They could be, yes, what everyone here is missing is that their Tributaries are benefiting from their technological synergy. I notice many of Ming's Tributaries are at higher tech levels than their non-Tributary neighbors.

Not only that, but from what I see, Ming ALWAYS protects it Tributaries, thus nobody can attack their goblins around them. Their Tributaries keeping feeding and feeding themselves when an opportunity appears, yet, nobody ever attacks them. That's really stupid.

I wanna make it my personal pet project to break their Mandate as Ottomans, but seeing the above screenshot, this means they're gonna at a higher Military level than me, even if I outnumber them 2:1.

 

[Mantis42]

Some ideas on fixing Ming:
1. Only nations with East Asian religions should voluntarily become tributaries (basically countries that are eligible for taking the mandate). Empire level nations should be opposed to entering it as well. No more tributaries in India and so far west.
2. Ming shouldn't automatically be called to arms to protect tributaries.
3. Usurping the Mandate should protect you from the lack of tributary drain for like a century.
4. No more recruiting in tributary lands and tributaries shouldn't put down Chinese revolts, as noted.
5. Low Mandate should affect the number of mercenaries available.
6. You could tie professionalism into the Mandate system, to simulate China's history of standing armies and the decline of the reserve system in the Ming dynasty near the end. So maybe being Chinese emperor gives you a boost to professionalism gain or something but if you let it get low you start to lose the Mandate. e: or maybe just being rich and able to drill troops is enough of a boost to begin with

Ideally there should be more choices where you have to pick between short term benefits (or problems) vs long term Mandate growth or decay.

 

[Roxas15]

I also noticed that around 1650 when ming went down most hordes already reformed their government from horde to monarchy.

 

[Sukramo]

Tech level. Date. Yes, it is top tch with +200% ahead of time penalty. And ming have it.
And yes, they have 12% discipline

Exactly this. Ming current embodies everything wrong with the tech system. He barely uses Monarch points (No coring, no rebels to supress, no need to hire many generals, no vassal integrations) AND on top of that he's getting spammed with monarch points from his tributaries. Hence he techs far before anyone else in game. Nothing to spend it on, and more income than anyone else. It needs major nerfs to how Celestrial Empire gets tribute.

Also infinite money. The only thing he dosent have unlimited quanities of is manpower, and he fixes that with infinite mercs.

 

[ywxiao]

And Ming should collaps after a major defeat, becoming the new emperror by eating Ming slowly through more than 10 wars is extremely boring game play.

This is different from having to eat through Ottomans in more than 10 wars how?

I've killed both countless times, and the only difference I can tell is killing Ottomans triggers massively annoying coalitions that I have to deal with. Killing Ming is much easier because the only ones who care are Korea and Ming breakaways which will be dead shortly.

 

[KimmelZhang123]

Not really if you know what you are doing/bother Ming can be eaten in ~3 wars without absolutism but even if you have to fight them more than 3 times if you, again, know what you are doing the last wars are extremely quick and just a formality. As an example in one of my recent campaigns I erased Ming from the map IIRC <20 years after the 1st war had ended; FYI that was a very slow takedown of Ming since I can do do it much, much faster. You can see what I am talking about in this video:

At last but not least on AI vs AI wars I´ve seen Ming lose provinces to rebels because of very stupid AI issues combined with long travelling times in that region of the world and ofc WE (just to name a few).

ask you a simple question, can AI do this?

Besides, it is really a game killer to play EU4 like it is my job or career.

This is different from having to eat through Ottomans in more than 10 wars how?

I've killed both countless times, and the only difference I can tell is killing Ottomans triggers massively annoying coalitions that I have to deal with. Killing Ming is much easier because the only ones who care are Korea and Ming breakaways which will be dead shortly.

when i play european powers, there are no need to eat the entire Ottoman empire.

When the player has take the mandate, it means the player's country is adopting the Chinese imperial system, culture, and giving the promise of bring stability. That is also why when during the Qing's conquering, large amount of Ming's nobles and army actually fliped to the Qing side.

This is different from having to eat through Ottomans in more than 10 wars how?

I've killed both countless times, and the only difference I can tell is killing Ottomans triggers massively annoying coalitions that I have to deal with. Killing Ming is much easier because the only ones who care are Korea and Ming breakaways which will be dead shortly.

Since mandate of heaven provide a special system of China conquering, why should conquering Ming be as same as conquering ottoman? If one nation's head become the newly recognized emperor, and Ming's emperor lost that position, Ming should suffer serious stability problem.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Before we do anything else, the one-sided military access in wars involving tributaries needs to be fixed. Tributaries should not be giving access by default, nor should they be allow overlord to make troops. Those are broken interactions.

 

[Incompetent]

IMO AI Ming is fine as it is unless you want to make the game even easier; you don´t need to mess with Ming´s balance for that.

There are a few threads out there that pretty much say 'Ming is overpowered, please nerf', which I agree are not well thought-out. But the OP is not doing that: they're listing specific aspects of how the EoC and tributaries work that make no sense and lead to silly situations. Ming recruiting ~500 merc regiments while his whole country is occupied, from places the enemy can't enter, is not a case of 'fair enough, Ming should offer some resistance', it's a clear case of broken mechanics.

 

[Salix]

I like to play Japan, but I don't expand outside Japan only take Korea sometimes as Vassal.
I agree to many points. My problem is that Ming doesn't negative effect on loosing wars. As Ming is super rich as it has over 350.000 ducats in most of my games, so as some already stated it is not to make bankrupt.
The Devastation is small, because he overpowers me on a long war with merchs and is huge manpower pool, even though I wiped a lot of his army out, but they keep coming. Sank his complete Navy, and blockade some parts, because his provinces have such high development and can only blockade the North.
So his provinces with high prosperity in the south west upset, that I burned down his capital(which is also an event) and the North East(down to Taiwan). But Ming is to big to take influence, even though if you burn down his most develop provinces.
And repeatly go to war to him.

So it's feels there is nothing you can do make his madate low.

In another game I'm allied with Korea and he broke lose and after that we had a lot of wars again as ming wanted him as tributary. Ming lost all of them and after truce is away they attack again. I we give other ai cores back, ming will claim it again very fast, so the only to disable Ming is to conquer itself, which i don't want.

He should get negative Mandate for loosing wars and so much manpower. Also the money thing really needs to be addressed. It can not be that I need way over 35 wars to make his money go empty.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Oh, I forgot to mention that if they haven't fixed the Ming condotierri bug, they need to fix it. This was a bad look and if it's still present it's worse:



I don't recall seeing that this was fixed in the patch notes, but I might have missed it.

 

[DàbiànLājīdàrén]

Yet again Korea annexes Manchuria.

 

[ahyangyi]

No, I don't belive Chinese are Orcs. Just wanting to see the Ming Empire collapse in a spectacular manner and his armies utterly beaten. Lord of the rings is a good visual of what I want happening to his armies.

Sigh.. that's the problem with *most* analogies between the real world and the fantasy genre. Fantasy settings have races that are fundamentally different and, especially in the case of orcs, can be inherently evil. That concept, while works greatly in their settings, is simply too close to racism when you start to draw parallels with the real world.

Anyway, I knew you didn't mean it. That post (and this one) serves as a friendly warning about the danger of this kind of analogies. I should have chosen my own wording better too.

 

[ywxiao]

ask you a simple question, can AI do this?

Besides, it is really a game killer to play EU4 like it is my job or career.



when i play european powers, there are no need to eat the entire Ottoman empire.

When the player has take the mandate, it means the player's country is adopting the Chinese imperial system, culture, and giving the promise of bring stability. That is also why when during the Qing's conquering, large amount of Ming's nobles and army actually fliped to the Qing side.



Since mandate of heaven provide a special system of China conquering, why should conquering Ming be as same as conquering ottoman? If one nation's head become the newly recognized emperor, and Ming's emperor lost that position, Ming should suffer serious stability problem.

Mandate is not something magical that you get all of or none of, some may recognize you have it, some don't. Even when Qing took over the north, most of the south still supported one Ming prince or another, they just couldn't decide which had it.

It's more like the revoke previlegia of HRE, the empire is split. Also if you had claimed the Mandate it wouldn't take you 10 wars, more like 4-5 maybe by that time.

I have been thinking of something like an area of conflict mechanism, where certain entire regions will have reduced AE and core cost, such as China unification, and the non-Christian mediterranean regions similar to how Ottomans conquered Egypt and how Britain later shattered the Ottoman empire.

 

[Gnostek]

breaking ming takes ONE long chain of wars: get 100% warscore, but don't wait for rebels since they could harm you later on. peace out for provinces bordering ming's forts and their tributaries, on which you should have a spy network of at least 20 to make a claim.
set ming fort garrisons to 0, declare on the tributary, enjoy an extremely easy war against ming. This can be repeated ad infinitum if you accept the double warscore cost. Alternatively, you can use the warscore of those wars to make Ming bleed money.
Once you have a forcelimit/manpower that is 1.5 Ming's, you can win a war against a recently defeated Ming (thanks to the forts trick) in MONTHS, and therefore, you can force them to pay 3x or 4x their yearly income in a year.

TL;DR: it is often better to empty ming forts and attack their tributaries again and again, than sitting on a fully defeated ming.

I do agree that they almost NEVER break on their own, the same could be said of the ottomans however, or france, or basically any large nation that has proper religion/culture. If I recall correctly they still get trade income even if you fully occupy them, so instead of a temporary solution (sitting on their provinces), you're better off forcing a bankruptcy: make them have less provinces and more loans.