Durbal made a post in the DD and I felt there were some good points made that should be considered. However, I feel it's getting a little off topic to the DD, so I'm reposting here. I typically haven't paid much attention to past posts about NF's, so if this is a beaten horse or pet peeve for some of you, I apologize.
I gotta say I agree with these first two points. Especially point 2. I've had AI Majors mindlessly go down the NF trees without consideration to the state of the game. Then again I almost always play historical, so perhaps that is why? Which I guess doesn't give me much ground to stand on and complain.
On point #3. I disagree, I think they can be balanced. But I agree with your overall criticism about their implementation and use. It seems to be a lot of work in terms of design, graphics, interface, etc... to give majors and minors their own focus trees. I personally would rather prefer a more open system, where you can still have all these events, but there is no screen and you have no choice. Rather events are eligible or prohibited based on conditions, and there is still some variability to the time they may trigger once eligible.
But I do think the players should be able to have some control/influence over the national focus, I just think it should be more generic and feed in to a historical and RNG event system. Perhaps something like having various categories of the national efforts that you can distribute focus allocations. IE 20% industry, 10% political, 10% diplomacy, 20% research, etc... with diminishing returns for higher allocations to keep nations in ideal frameworks without min maxing / destroying the balance.
Obviously even if this were to happen, we are talking about DLC 4 or 5 to see it. But I do think I'd rather see something done differently with NF's, simply because they can gamed by players, and they seem like an awful lot of work to incorporate, as well use.
So what do you think? Leave alone? Change? What would be your ideal game mechanic / system to capture national focus if you think it should change?
I gotta say I agree with these first two points. Especially point 2. I've had AI Majors mindlessly go down the NF trees without consideration to the state of the game. Then again I almost always play historical, so perhaps that is why? Which I guess doesn't give me much ground to stand on and complain.
On point #3. I disagree, I think they can be balanced. But I agree with your overall criticism about their implementation and use. It seems to be a lot of work in terms of design, graphics, interface, etc... to give majors and minors their own focus trees. I personally would rather prefer a more open system, where you can still have all these events, but there is no screen and you have no choice. Rather events are eligible or prohibited based on conditions, and there is still some variability to the time they may trigger once eligible.
But I do think the players should be able to have some control/influence over the national focus, I just think it should be more generic and feed in to a historical and RNG event system. Perhaps something like having various categories of the national efforts that you can distribute focus allocations. IE 20% industry, 10% political, 10% diplomacy, 20% research, etc... with diminishing returns for higher allocations to keep nations in ideal frameworks without min maxing / destroying the balance.
Obviously even if this were to happen, we are talking about DLC 4 or 5 to see it. But I do think I'd rather see something done differently with NF's, simply because they can gamed by players, and they seem like an awful lot of work to incorporate, as well use.
So what do you think? Leave alone? Change? What would be your ideal game mechanic / system to capture national focus if you think it should change?
