We've all seen the thread, and I don't want to drudge up the arguments here. Suffice it to say I fall somewhere in the middle of that debate—I think that coring is an unreasonable ADM sink but also that Wiz & Co. are right to raise the overall resource cost of coring to its current level (more thoughts here).
The issue I see in this debate is that it presents a spectrum with a false dichotomy: that either the cost of coring is too high and we're artificially held back from conquering more land in a game without much else to do, or the cost of coring is too low and it's too easy for a single-player human to roll up all of Europe by 1821, making artificial roadblocks necessary. The first side isn't fair to the dev team because the avalanche of changes between 1.8 and 1.12 have given us more to do outside of Wide Conquest than ever before (i.e. under Wiz, EUIV is very clearly moving away from the "Risk on steroids" model), but the other side also isn't fair because it stops map painters from having fun for no other reason than "world conquest should be harder than it is" (there are actual quotes I could find here, but I'd rather spend at least some more time actually playing the game today
).
I think the only way to reconcile both camps is reworking coring altogether; by making it something more than a sponge of your precious ADM. I'm far from the first person to recommend alternatives to coring, but this is the take that's been rattling around my head the past hour:
1. As it always has been, you can core an uncored province by paying a lump sum of ADM. This happens instantly (no coring time), but it's prohibitively expensive to core provinces immediately: the base cost is 25 ADM * development value (in 1.12, it's only 10 * development value). So Paris in 1444 would cost 700 ADM to core if you were to press "Make core" immediately (other modifiers aside).
2. Coring happens automatically over time, but at a snail's pace. 1444 Paris would start at 0/700 ADM (a completion bar represents this), and at the beginning of every year its progress advances by 20 points. So with no ADM investment (and no modifiers being applied in the meanwhile), 1444 Paris would become fully cored in 35 years, in 1479.
3. However, the more uncored provinces you own, the slower each one is auto-cored—there are diminishing returns on conquering more provinces. The formula that jumped to mind, for number of uncored provinces n, is [20 * ((2 ^ n) - 1) / (2 ^ (n - 1)) + n - 1] points split between all uncored provinces yearly. That's 20 points per province for 1 province, 15.5 points per province for 2 provinces, 12.33 points per province for 3 provinces, limiting all the way down to 1 point per province for a very large number of provinces. If you conquered both 1444 Paris and 1444 Rome, both requiring 700 ADM to core, each one would tick 15.5 points upward each year, taking 46 years to auto-core both instead of 35 years if you had only conquered one. If you simultaneously conquered every province in the world in 1444, you wouldn't be able to auto-core Paris and Rome by the end of the game.
4. You can press "Make core" core at any time to pay off the rest of the ADM cost in one lump sum. If you conquered just Paris in 1444, by 1474 it would be at 600/700 ADM toward being fully cored and you could spend just 100 ADM to fully core it on the spot.
5. Overextension is less harsh than it currently is. Since coring provinces takes more resources in this system (usually time, but sometimes ADM if you want to burn it), the drawbacks of having uncored provinces (e.g. rebels, poor religious unity) for a longer time takes the place of the brick wall at 100% overextension. 100% OE could mark the start of nasty events, but only at very high MTTHs that decrease slowly as OE rises above 100%.
Bonus! This system also allows for MIL to be used to help core big provinces. For any uncored province, you can spend 50 MIL to send a military official to the province and speed up the remainder of the auto-coring process by 25% (i.e. a permanent +25% modifier to yearly points). This can be done multiple times, but it naturally comes with diminishing returns. If you conquer only 1444 Paris and spend 50 MIL immediately, you'll get 25 points a year toward auto-coring instead of 20 points a year, and it will take 28 years instead of 35 years to auto-core it. But if you spend 100 MIL, you'll get 30 points a year toward auto-coring, and it will take 23.33 years to auto-core it. If you spent 700 ADM to core Paris using "Make core," it would be cored immediately, but if you spent 700 MIL to core Paris, it would still take 7.78 years.
All of the numbers need to be tweaked (especially considering how development scales to the late game, which I don't have a grasp on for obvious reasons), but there's the idea
The issue I see in this debate is that it presents a spectrum with a false dichotomy: that either the cost of coring is too high and we're artificially held back from conquering more land in a game without much else to do, or the cost of coring is too low and it's too easy for a single-player human to roll up all of Europe by 1821, making artificial roadblocks necessary. The first side isn't fair to the dev team because the avalanche of changes between 1.8 and 1.12 have given us more to do outside of Wide Conquest than ever before (i.e. under Wiz, EUIV is very clearly moving away from the "Risk on steroids" model), but the other side also isn't fair because it stops map painters from having fun for no other reason than "world conquest should be harder than it is" (there are actual quotes I could find here, but I'd rather spend at least some more time actually playing the game today
).I think the only way to reconcile both camps is reworking coring altogether; by making it something more than a sponge of your precious ADM. I'm far from the first person to recommend alternatives to coring, but this is the take that's been rattling around my head the past hour:
1. As it always has been, you can core an uncored province by paying a lump sum of ADM. This happens instantly (no coring time), but it's prohibitively expensive to core provinces immediately: the base cost is 25 ADM * development value (in 1.12, it's only 10 * development value). So Paris in 1444 would cost 700 ADM to core if you were to press "Make core" immediately (other modifiers aside).
2. Coring happens automatically over time, but at a snail's pace. 1444 Paris would start at 0/700 ADM (a completion bar represents this), and at the beginning of every year its progress advances by 20 points. So with no ADM investment (and no modifiers being applied in the meanwhile), 1444 Paris would become fully cored in 35 years, in 1479.
3. However, the more uncored provinces you own, the slower each one is auto-cored—there are diminishing returns on conquering more provinces. The formula that jumped to mind, for number of uncored provinces n, is [20 * ((2 ^ n) - 1) / (2 ^ (n - 1)) + n - 1] points split between all uncored provinces yearly. That's 20 points per province for 1 province, 15.5 points per province for 2 provinces, 12.33 points per province for 3 provinces, limiting all the way down to 1 point per province for a very large number of provinces. If you conquered both 1444 Paris and 1444 Rome, both requiring 700 ADM to core, each one would tick 15.5 points upward each year, taking 46 years to auto-core both instead of 35 years if you had only conquered one. If you simultaneously conquered every province in the world in 1444, you wouldn't be able to auto-core Paris and Rome by the end of the game.
4. You can press "Make core" core at any time to pay off the rest of the ADM cost in one lump sum. If you conquered just Paris in 1444, by 1474 it would be at 600/700 ADM toward being fully cored and you could spend just 100 ADM to fully core it on the spot.
5. Overextension is less harsh than it currently is. Since coring provinces takes more resources in this system (usually time, but sometimes ADM if you want to burn it), the drawbacks of having uncored provinces (e.g. rebels, poor religious unity) for a longer time takes the place of the brick wall at 100% overextension. 100% OE could mark the start of nasty events, but only at very high MTTHs that decrease slowly as OE rises above 100%.
Bonus! This system also allows for MIL to be used to help core big provinces. For any uncored province, you can spend 50 MIL to send a military official to the province and speed up the remainder of the auto-coring process by 25% (i.e. a permanent +25% modifier to yearly points). This can be done multiple times, but it naturally comes with diminishing returns. If you conquer only 1444 Paris and spend 50 MIL immediately, you'll get 25 points a year toward auto-coring instead of 20 points a year, and it will take 28 years instead of 35 years to auto-core it. But if you spend 100 MIL, you'll get 30 points a year toward auto-coring, and it will take 23.33 years to auto-core it. If you spent 700 ADM to core Paris using "Make core," it would be cored immediately, but if you spent 700 MIL to core Paris, it would still take 7.78 years.
All of the numbers need to be tweaked (especially considering how development scales to the late game, which I don't have a grasp on for obvious reasons), but there's the idea
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