You seem to imply either that no content should have been added after the release version because it was not in the release version, or that various early versions of EU4 satisfied all of my (and/or others') complaints about historical balance, which they did not.
My intention was to imply that "historical balance" (whatever that means in EU 4 context) does not require special mechanics to achieve. Special mechanics might nevertheless be interesting or worth adding, but them being a requirement for "balance" isn't a thing.
The thread started with criticism of the federations mechanics; (implicitly) the "Rapid Collapse of Society" triggered modifier; and colonial culture conversion. Those overlap heavily with the fairly detailed list I gave, which is what you've made multiple replies about.
"Rapid collapse of society" (and its relatively weak impact) is an event (not a special mechanic) that precedes most or all of the special mechanics. The only thing preventing colonial culture conversion is similarly unrelated (bad interaction with AI religious conversion behavior with certain NIs/tolerance values, and not converting blocks culture conversion --> note that this also results in non-conversions in India or by player subjects literally anywhere in the world sometimes).
Federations are bugged and that bug should be fixed, but we don't disagree on that.
In context, you impugned my ability (or anyone's) to coherently model historically plausible probabilities of EU4 events. Yet, in the sentence immediately preceding that, you cited "improbable outcomes" in history as evidence of the futility of making such assessments of historical probability.
Haha, I didn't realize this was what you were getting at. Okay:
- It is virtually impossible to model probabilities with a sample size of 1, thus the notion of "historically plausible frequency" is both ridiculous on its face *and* self-inconsistently defined by players using it in the context of this thread.
- It is nevertheless possible to claim "improbable events occurred", because this claim does not require us to assign an estimated probability to any one event. It instead merely requires us to consider that there were a tremendous number of events in the period in question. That, by itself, makes at least some very improbable outcomes extremely likely to occur. Despite that we still don't have good ability to estimate just how unlikely one particular event was.
I didn't. I framed both of my answers as a matter of average outcomes. For natives, it was an average per tag; for France, it was an average over time spent with expansionist designs on and superior power to the HRE.
What makes you think this framing is more useful than other framing? People in these threads generally don't like the concept of "natives succeeding too often". However, these is no apparent standard for that, even now.
If you want to use that multi-tag framing, we can instead use the fact that the HRE tends to always exist at end of game, despite that there are "hundreds of tags that could dismantle it". Now we can use "average per tag" for that interaction too! Is it useful? About as useful as using "average per tag" in NA...
Native tribes had a much more consistent experience: they were eradicated or pushed inland in virtually all cases of sustained contact with Europeans, typically starting only a few decades after Europeans first colonized nearby land. Those losses were rarely if ever reversed. To my knowledge, natives never formed giant federations over huge tracts of fully settled land as they do in EU4.
Again, EU 4 has a tremendous number of things that nations "never did", even when taken as a group, that the game does routinely. Nation orders, coalitions, forced 5 year minimum truces, war score cap, join war limitations, and financial management are all examples of things that either didn't happen in history or were completely impossible in history.
Yet year after year, thread after thread, these mechanics garner a tiny % of the attention that "natives doing better than I think they should do in the context of a game where many nations wildly over or under perform relative to history in every single game" seems to get. I wonder why.
This is a game where you can't possibly execute the Italian wars, no matter what you do. It's a game that forces coalitions in a form that did not exist a single time in history, and directly contradicts the closest historical examples it allegedly models. Even the mere existence EU 4 "BANK" is more ridiculous than any amount of marginal success natives have over historical capability. BANK is straight up wizardry.
This is not an environment where "historically plausible frequency" comes off as a criticism genuinely applied to only one instance. Yet in threads we observe it laser focus on this instance over and over and over and over and over again.
You don't need to improve or change every part of the game equally or all at once for your ideas to be worthy or coherent. (I happen to dislike most of the wilder, less plausible outcomes that EU4 makes somewhat likely, and I've often suggested ways to make EU4 less ahistorical.)
You do, however, need to avoid a stated set of preferences that looks like this:
A > B > C > A.
Because if you do not avoid this supposed set of preferences, they are not coherent.
This thread is not "I want EU 4 to be a completely different game, so rework these 20+ core mechanics". If we were *honestly* discussing historical plausibility as the basis for making changes to the game, that's what this thread would look like. Not the umpteenth thread complaining about natives (still one of the weakest positions on the board) somehow being "too strong" to be "plausible" again. With implied standards for plausible used that can't possibly track to the game anywhere else. Again.
but it makes more sense than your apparent positions that historical models must always apply globally and that historical plausibility is synonymous with a close adherence to actual historical events.
I'm actually making a stronger, harsher claim. I do not claim that "historical plausibility is synonymous with adherence to events".
I am outright claiming that the typical posts that claim natives are "implausibly strong" can be reliably inferred as an incoherent game preference, because no coherent *possible* set of preferences for "historical plausibility" would predict a thread that singles out native performance in particular, period.
Any standard that merits making the natives weaker on that basis *necessarily* implies gutting the game mechanics overall,
a total game rework. My experience is that most players do not realize that's the case. That no, you really can't use "the natives are too strong because reasons" when those reasons imply things like "change how development works from the ground up", "eliminate idea groups", "rework systems like OE and AE", and "rework wars from the ground up".
Maybe you really do want a completely different game. It's not realistic to transform EU 4 that way, but it might be a genuine preference where the game experience models historical causal interactions more closely to how they worked in reality. That's totally legit. But color me dubious, when this just happens to be in a native thread in particular for the 20th+ time, and these things aren't so much as mentioned alongside it.
refers to a model of history and not to the precise course history took.
The game rules ARE that model, and they are necessarily nowhere close to the causal interactions dictated by history. Can't be. You advance years in minutes, make decisions that optimize for the nation against incentives that would typically exist for the ruler (!!!), field standing professional armies in 1444, ship 75% of those professional troops across oceans safely and without consequence, and have mechanics that outright block an independent state from negotiating peace regardless of its wishes or the state of the nation, all while expending "mana" as a resource transferable between naval technology, making demands at a peace table, and consolidating loosely held territory.
That *IS* the model, and it's mighty suspicious that natives being "too strong", but still weaker than every other position on the board by a wide margin, is *particularly* out of place in that model.
