New Tech system - Human vs AI imbalance

[Gnivom]

Hi everyone!
This is an interesting issue you're raising and we did discuss it in the office before releasing.
On the one hand, we wanted a natural and fairly historical spread of institutions in single player.
On the other, we wanted the players to be able to create unhistorical institution spread for themselves.
The solution was that we gave tools for the player to increase the spread of institutions that the AI deliberately does not use.
This was ultimately not my decision, but I hope I have managed to explain the reasoning behind it.

 

[Gnivom]

To be clear though: The AI still does some things to spread the institutions, and it does take loans to embrace them.

 

[pikaemperor]

Common Sense; not Cossacks.

Cossacks is one of the Big 3 with Estates; but it's Common Sense that development is tied to. [And development should REALLY have been made a free feature with this patch and something added to Common Sense owners in return; because Development is now integral to a core mechanic]

Agree with that, the game is quite broken without development (not only the institutions). Unless it's the player in ROTW cheesing institutions doing stuff like beelining exploration and such, they never get there as they spread too slowly outside europe.

 

[richelieu1628]

Hi everyone!
This is an interesting issue you're raising and we did discuss it in the office before releasing.
On the one hand, we wanted a natural and fairly historical spread of institutions in single player.
On the other, we wanted the players to be able to create unhistorical institution spread for themselves.
The solution was that we gave tools for the player to increase the spread of institutions that the AI deliberately does not use.
This was ultimately not my decision, but I hope I have managed to explain the reasoning behind it.

I think this is exactly the right approach. It allows players to do crazy things in the privacy of their own homes, without ever bothering anyone more interested in a more historical flow of events. I'm sure there will be tweaks necessary, but as a design choice this sounds super good.

 

[Otto of england]

I think it would best if the tech penalty ticked like it currently does, but the total penatly was modified by the percentage of your country the institution was present in. embracing an institution would no longer completely remove the penalty just increase the speed the institution spreads and providing you the institutions bonus.

Well even with the above developing to get a spawn point would still be the best strategy, it would not be as required as before.

Edit: to clarify what I mean, say 50% of your country has institution A. that means you have a penatly cap of 25%, and your penalty will now grow by .5% per year not 1%.

 

[grommile]

Given the blinding speed with which institutions propagate through your territory (particularly the highly developed provinces) once you've embraced them, that doesn't really feel like it would add much to the game.

 

[Juggernaught]

I believed that AI intentionally tried to spawn an institution when they lacked behind a certain threshold. Judging from what the developer says, they spawned those ones by coincidence or by purely wanting to develop their province and resulting in unintentional spawn.

 

[Ixal]

Worse than taking loans is the development bombing to instantly create a institution in your lands. A human player will always do it and it renders the whole slow development spread pointless as even far away in southern Africa or Asia a human player would instantly get a institution to spread there as soon as it is appears.

Yes, in single player one can elect to not do this. But in MP everyone is forced to do this and there is basically no downside to playing a nation not in Europe and institutions become a moot point.

And this is a paid feature with massive balance effect on the game.