My luck with cardinals is so bad it HAS to be a bug, right?

[RedKnight7]

Hi,

I am trying to play EU4. I loved EU3 a lot and understood it well years ago, but I cannot get a working grip on EU4.

I am Spain (a 1492 game). It's now 1513.

Early in the game, I got two cardinals to be Active and had two more Futures controlled and on the way. Great, huh? I was the Papal controller, since no one else controlled two. But then:

1. One of my future cardinals somehow became controlled by Portugal AND replaced one of my active cardinals INSTANTLY (same day, without even a popup, when I have it set to popup and stop). So I lost a current Active and a current Future, in one fell swoop. Wth? I didn't even think this was possible.

2. A few years later THE EXACT SAME THING HAPPENED. Portugal suddenly took my Future controlled, and it replaced my Current Active.

So I want from two Future controlled and two Active controlled, to zero future and zero Active, without any chance to do anything about losing control of either Future.

Wth? this have to be a bug??

Thanks if you can help!

 

[Nirmara]

Two cases is not statistically significant. Your just having a bad luck, that all.

Edit: The AI tend to go for younger cardinals if possible. If you don't generate a lots of papal influence, your better to go for older cardinals.

Portugal have 2 events giving them a lots of papal influence (Kongo missionaries and inquisition). Theses events can explain why Portugal can take over one of your cardinal easily. As for the active Cardinal, it's just bad luck.

 

[Mztr44]

What you describe is mostly just bad luck. If you want to control the Curia you need to put in a decent amount of effort to do so and use a minimal amount of strategy. The first thing you want to do is improve relations with the Papal State. This is the easiest way to maintain high influence gain. The second easiest is maintaining Religious unity, don't conquer if you can't convert. Thirdly, maintain high prestige, this can be a bit fickle due to events, but high prestige keeps influence rolling in as well. The strategy to use is to wait until you have enough influence to overwhelm the support on a future Cardinal. Wait until you can take control +5, then give your support. Don't begin supporting a second one until you build up a reserve of points to do the same thing again. Once you get a Cardinal or two in the Curia, you gain even more influence which makes it easier to continue getting more and eventually control the Curia. Once you control the Curia, as long as you maintain it, its almost impossible to lose without incredibly bad luck.

Make sure you check the tab every 6-8 months to ensure you aren't falling behind in influence on your future cardinals. If you are falling behind on one, stop supporting it and save up a reserve of points to make sure you maintain control of the others. With Curia control, choose a target country to Crusade against and then go to war with them. Being at war with a crusade target will let you rake in a huge amount of influence, unless another country goes to war with them as well, they wont be able to compete in the curia. Conversely, if you don't control the curia and a crusade target has been chosen, go to war with that target to gain control. As Spain, your best choices would be Algiers, Morocco, Tunisia and the Mamluks. Or if you integrated Aragon and have control of southern Italy, you might even pick the Ottomans.

 

[Rambo Panda]

If you vassalize the Papal States I believe other nations stop improving relations with them (or atleast the priority drops). Over time if you maintain +200 relations everyone else will drop to ~20 and you get a pretty significant advantage, definitely worth doing if you plan to stay Catholic.

 

[AmonVek]

If you vassalize the Papal States I believe other nations stop improving relations with them (or atleast the priority drops). Over time if you maintain +200 relations everyone else will drop to ~20 and you get a pretty significant advantage, definitely worth doing if you plan to stay Catholic.

Not to mention that during a later war you can practically excommunicate any Catholic and have their cardinals revert to you.

 

[RedKnight7]

Guys, I really appreciate you stepping in here.

I can believe someone steals my Future Controlleds. It happens all the time. It's guaranteed to happen if you stop supporting them.

And I can believe that my Active Controlleds can die. Of course they can. They have to, eventually.

But the odds that my Futures became controlled and, on that exact same day, my Actives died, seems utterly astronomical.

Are you hearing what I am saying? That the exact same day they were controlled, they advanced? AND they replaced MY Actives?

TWICE.


Let's compute some odds:

In a quick review of a few games, ages of Future cardinals is approx 39 to 65. That's a span of 26 years or ~10,000 days.

Active cardinals are 51 to 81. 30 years or ~11k days.

For simplicity, let's just say Futures and Actives can have a "shelf life" range of 10k days each.

But the actual average will only be half of that. (They don't all live the maximum lifespan; they only live the average lifespan.)

These are all very rough numbers which anyone with better data is welcome to change. It will change the final numbers a little, but not much; they'll still be astronomical.



You know what... I was about to do extended calculations along the lines that, Future cardinals only slipped my control maybe 5 times a year (5/365 = 1/73), at which point I got a popup and stop, and immediately re-controlled then. (I have popup& stop on, but don't have auto spending on.) And my Controlled Actives only die once every 5000 days (1 in 5000), plus they are 1 out of 7 Active cardinals.

So the odds that my Future guys got snatched, and my Actives died on same day, is 73 * 5000 * 7, or 1 in 2,555,000 days. Stated another way, it is expected to happen once every 7000 years of game play.

It is expected to occur once if you play to the year 8,500 A.D., on average.



But then I realized none of this applied. Why? Because I set the game to notify me when I lose a cardinal (popup and stop). And it didn't. My Future Controlled cardinal simply went straight to an Active controlled by Portugal, AND it killed my existing Active cardinal. Twice.

So that's that - there is something else going on. Something within the game mechanics I don't understand. Or a bug.

So... what is the "assassinate cardinal" mechanism? Or else it's a really bad bug.


But if you still think it's chance, walk through the numbers the way I did.

Then tell me it can happen twice, no problem.


Thanks

Mike​

 

[nouli]

You're making an assumption that cardinal death is checked daily (or can be interpreted as such). Other possiblity is that the game checks their death on longer intervals (few month or so). That can change the odds dramaticaly. But still, I would suspect that certain events can "sync" and this may cause strange behaviour.

The lack of notification is interesting though. Maybe if cardinal controller changes on the same day as their choosing the notification gets "lost".

 

[LastSalian]

Usually, if you take mission "Become Papa Controller" you got bad luck with cardinals.

 

[BigHamster]

I think game has kinda inner cycles in which events(like dead cardinals) happend and AI do some complicated actions like cardinal voting, and it happens only few times a month, I've seen few times when I take over ones cardinal and instantly it becomes active. It not a bug its rather intended way to work.

 

[delpiero1234]

Play VeF: it has a better Papacy and got rid of that silly Papacy mini game.

 

[miotas]

You could also just use the auto invest in cardinals option.

 

[RedKnight7]

You could also just use the auto invest in cardinals option.

This doesn't really apply - unless you are assuming that the odds really have to be truly astronomical.

If you're saying that auto-invest would fix it, you're saying that it MUST have happened because those 5 times a year that I briefly lost control (with instant chance to regain) really were right exactly when they snuck in. And then also, all the other bad luck happened, too.

So, you can believe it was an astronomical chance twice in a row that I could have avoided by auto investing.


But I don't.


The more I think about it, the more I think this mini-game is gorked... but they don't really care. It's just a mini-game, shrug. One where you just barely edge out others (or not) with relatively free points anyway, so who cares.

Some of you have said "maybe it's an issue of when exactly things are synced" and they don't really happen on exact days, etc. Which is certainly conceivable, of course, but... it amounts to it being gorked, laugh. If it should be obvious, easy, and understandable, but isn't, that's a definition of broken, shrug.

Let me put it another way: If I want to consider how important the mini-game is, and how much (mental) time to sink into it, and exactly how it works, and how to try to lean the odds in my favor...

how can it possibly matter if any other country can rip right up through my Futures and my Actives in one day? Twice in as many decades?


Anyway... I don't think I care any more. Because I'm realizing it doesn't really matter much. Like the designers realized.


By the way, my odds calculation was drastically off. I forgot to include the chance that the particular cardinal that just got snatched (1 out of 5) was THE one that advanced that day.

So instead of being something expected to happen once in 7,000 years of game play,

It is something expected to happen once in 35,000 years of game play.

And it happened to me twice. In ~30 years.

 

[Yominokuni]

And still, your numbers are meaningless. Random is random. If something has a 1/3 chance of occuring, it doesn't mean that in the next 3 tries, it will succeed. While you might have experienced something that due to your calculations should only happen in 35000 years of gameplay, i doubt you have enough years of gameplay to check the actual statistics .

Luck is luck, nothing more, nothing less. You had crap luck here, and that's all there is to it.

 

[RedKnight7]

And still, your numbers are meaningless. Random is random. If something has a 1/3 chance of occuring, it doesn't mean that in the next 3 tries, it will succeed. While you might have experienced something that due to your calculations should only happen in 35000 years of gameplay, i doubt you have enough years of gameplay to check the actual statistics .

Luck is luck, nothing more, nothing less. You had crap luck here, and that's all there is to it.

I don't agree that statistics are meaningless. Nor that the game can't possibly have a bug.

 

[Yominokuni]

Statistics aren't meaningless, but you just dont have the pool to create correct statistics. Noone here has except paradox itself. What you have is anecdotal evidence. You experienced this once, and base your statistics on that. If you play for 35000 gameyears, you might be on to something if it happens a few times more, but untill that, your numbers just dont matter to give any kind of proof of RNG bugs.

 

[Dustman]

As Sweden, I controlled curia nonstop for 75 years. When I lost it, changed to Reformed. In few cases I controlled one cardinal, in most it was two. But RNG was generous to me. Frankly, this is just luck, pure and simple.

 

[miotas]

This doesn't really apply - unless you are assuming that the odds really have to be truly astronomical.

It was mostly a reply to the previous post.

For some more relevant advice though, when something I don't understand happens in a Paradox game the first thing I do is pause and open the log to see what exactly went down. If Portugal had an event that killed your cardi and replaced him with their own then it would say so there. You could also see the exact days that these things happened, since you said you usually get a pause, but this time you didn't.