New Concentrate Dev is now Mostly Useless

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I said this when the change was announced; it's going to be taken from being crazy OP to completely irrelevant. It's just a side effect of a mechanic being introduced that really had no business being in the game at all, from the beginning. That said, I prefer it now. I hated that it was almost always suboptimal to not create some ghoulish hellscape where all land existed solely to feed a megacity that could be a Great Power in its own right if released with a single province.

They could have at least opened it up to modding. Why hide the code that creates the mechanic from modders in the first place? And then saying they now somehow use magic "AI" to calculate development concentration. To talk of AI across this generation of PDX games is ridiculous and the claim that it is now being used for a stupid gimmcik mechanic is even more bonkers (as if the entire gaming industry could reach open ai at this point).

Just give it to modders and stop with the pretentious bs claims PDX for the love of god.
 
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They could have at least opened it up to modding. Why hide the code that creates the mechanic from modders in the first place? And then saying they now somehow use magic "AI" to calculate development concentration. To talk of AI across this generation of PDX games is ridiculous and the claim that it is now being used for a stupid gimmcik mechanic is even more bonkers (as if the entire gaming industry could reach open ai at this point).

Just give it to modders and stop with the pretentious bs claims PDX for the love of god.
I don't think the code is "hidden", it just isn't moddable. You can't just take a parts of the game and decide they will be moddable. Pretty sure if they could, they'd make just about everything moddable.

Like, to change this wouldn't be a case of modding, you'd need to hack the game itself.
 
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We all know 1.31 concentrate gave results to crazy capitals, and there was a lot of controversy on whether that was "good" or not (I didn't mind, but I do understand the sentiments of people expecting realism/their notion of balance, so I won't argue about that part). Now it turns out that on 1.32 with the new changes, you cannot concentrate dev if it does not raise the development of your capital by at least one.
View attachment 772213
(Cicigar is 3/3/1, which under 1.31 rules would make it 2/2/1 post concentrate)
So what does that mean? Well, due to horrendous dev cost scaling, it means that once your capital is at a reasonable dev, you can barely use concentrate dev, and the only way to use it past the first few decades is to move your capital. I guess what I had in mind with new concentrate is that it lets you burn dev even if it won't raise your capital's development, which I suppose can cause it to be a trap button for some players, so I do understand this block.
Perhaps a good compromise would be to introduce some sort of "concentrate development progress bar" that lets you deal with these cases when the state you are concentrating is not wealthy enough? Or maybe concentrate should pick another stated province to send development off to?

My screenshot is certainly exaggerating the problem (it's already 1446 and I can't use it :p ) due to Oirat's capital being mountain and me conquering much more aggressively than a typical run, but I think more ordinary playthroughs will still easily hit this problem pretty quickly, say within 1500. I suppose mil tech reducing points razed, which I'm assuming will impact how concentrating works would make it worse and worse.

So, the question is... should concentrate essentially be unclickable after the early game unless you move capitals around? I obviously have my own agenda here, since the ability to burn uncored dev (I don't care about capital dev) helps WCs a lot, but even when considering more "normal" playstyles, I feel like this phenomenon is not very good, which is why I'm making this post.
Good
 
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While I agree that this practice is not okay, it confuses me that you seem to believe it's new to the last two patches, as opposed to something we have observed on and off since game release.

As early as art of war, we were sold the ability to transfer occupation of provinces to subjects. But this only happened after they removed the ability to sell provinces to subjects for 0 gold. Selling something very strong in DLC then nerfing it later is also something that dates back to early in EU 4 development cycle.

None of that makes me happy about effectively patching concentrate development out of the game, but I don't see how this is particularly different (in design philosophy) from having the ability to take land in trade wars removed, for example.
Yeah, I know, but I sort of really (!) felt it this time, because the concept as such thoroughly appealed to me. Also, when I think back at the monumental announcement trailers ... just bugged me a lot more this time than it did before ... probably getting too old and cranky.
 
I think it should be reworked again.

At it current state it's only usefull for very limited time.

Would be nice to for example change the monarch points from concecrate/pillage to diffrent provinces or even choose a State and dev would be distribiuted to the provinces in it.
 
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I think it should be reworked again.

At it current state it's only usefull for very limited time.

Would be nice to for example change the monarch points from concecrate/pillage to diffrent provinces or even choose a State and dev would be distribiuted to the provinces in it.
It'd be cool if we got something like Crown Focus from EU3, but as the dev target for concentrate/pillage. Concentrated dev could be distributed to the state in which the "crown focus" target was as a whole, with "pillage capital" sending dev to the specific province. That way, you could slowly build up a wealthy heartland with provincial capitals that have that little extra to top it off.
 
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It'd be cool if we got something like Crown Focus from EU3, but as the dev target for concentrate/pillage. Concentrated dev could be distributed to the state in which the "crown focus" target was as a whole, with "pillage capital" sending dev to the specific province. That way, you could slowly build up a wealthy heartland with provincial capitals that have that little extra to top it off.
This! Could we have anyone from PDX to actually read it? This + progress bar is the best solution of this problem.
 
Perhaps a good compromise would be to introduce some sort of "concentrate development progress bar" that lets you deal with these cases when the state you are concentrating is not wealthy enough?
This particular idea would cause a lot of problems with implementation. What if the province gets razed or pillaged? Does the partial progress then magically turn into new development thanks to the lower threshold?
 
This particular idea would cause a lot of problems with implementation. What if the province gets razed or pillaged? Does the partial progress then magically turn into new development thanks to the lower threshold?

And why not? I don't think it would be unbalancing (I don't see any obvious way to cheese it, since the progress bar would be moving towards a gain of 1 dev at a time); from an "in-game" perspective, either the looters focused on the newer things or the work in progress made it easy to replace what they damaged.
 
People should rebel against this
To rebel against it I would have had to (a) have bought the previous DLC and (b) thought the feature was actually good.
 
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