Proposal for a mechanic to replace warscore (and hopefully solve bordergore)

[MatthewP]

It seems like control is the game system that’s supposed to model the anti-border gore sentiment though. It’s the concept that it’s very hard to control regions when they are tenuously connected to your core and basically impossible when they’re fully disconnected with hostile (or even neutral) powers in between. Along with having different cultures/religions/etc. being harder to control.

Why does it need to be harder to seize these territories in the first place? I honestly see either the realism or gameplay argument for this when control is already a thing that seems to embody the concept a lot better.

Obviously the AI should be taught not to make terrible choices that will lead to it owning a lot of land with negative value. But I don’t see why a game mechanical block is needed.

 

[Ispil]

Given that control seems to also impact the ability for someone to take a territory in a war (i.e. lower cost with lower control), theoretically as long as wars can be "cheap and quick" for a given more limited wargoal (or at least, that's the feeling I've gotten from a few things so far), you wouldn't really be able to hold such a stretched-out chunk of territory anyway. The war could be over before your army even arrives, and it won't be nearly as cheap or quick for you to reacquire.

 

[Linbot#6018]

It seems like control is the game system that’s supposed to model the anti-border gore sentiment though. It’s the concept that it’s very hard to control regions when they are tenuously connected to your core and basically impossible when they’re fully disconnected with hostile (or even neutral) powers in between. Along with having different cultures/religions/etc. being harder to control.

Why does it need to be harder to seize these territories in the first place? I honestly see either the realism or gameplay argument for this when control is already a thing that seems to embody the concept a lot better.

Obviously the AI should be taught not to make terrible choices that will lead to it owning a lot of land with negative value. But I don’t see why a game mechanical block is needed.

These are good points to be fair, but bordergore isn't just about that, as I have attempted to describe. Like there's nothing about the control mechanic that would obviously disincentivise you to partition Egypt (and I'm pretty sure the game should do that somehow because Egypt was historically never partitioned since ancient times. There has to be some reason for this). And it doesn't represent the resilience of traditional political units in Europe, unless you want to argue that that sort of thing should just be accounted for via control as well, which might not even be a bad idea.

Like for example this is bordergore. The game should prevent this from happening or being a sustainable situation. It's not really because of the exclave, that happens all the time in the HRE, but you shouldn't usually be partitioning Bohemia like this in most games.

 

[MatthewP]

These are good points to be fair, but bordergore isn't just about that, as I have attempted to describe. Like there's nothing about the control mechanic that would obviously disincentivise you to partition Egypt (and I'm pretty sure the game should do that somehow because Egypt was historically never partitioned since ancient times. There has to be some reason for this). And it doesn't represent the resilience of traditional political units in Europe, unless you want to argue that that sort of thing should just be accounted for via control as well, which might not even be a bad idea.

View attachment 1119633

Like for example this is bordergore. The game should prevent this from happening or being a sustainable situation. It's not really because of the exclave, that happens all the time in the HRE, but you shouldn't usually be partitioning Bohemia like this in most games.

Is moving a border a bit really that unusual an outcome of a war in the period though? I get the exclave being weird, but if that’s fixed and it’s just the idea that Austria might win a limited victory against Bohemia and end up claiming some border counties…idk, that doesn’t seem like something that needs a fix to me.

I do see your point about Egypt. I think some places had a high level of sort of cohesiveness - China would be another example. It would be cool to model this. But I would rather see it done in an organic way that somehow models the loyalty shift that occurs when someone new takes over the accepted power centers rather than just picking regions to go together.

I guess control might do this in a perfect world - there are supposed to be regional “control centers”, and presumably if you took one then the rest of the region’s control would quickly drop, reducing its ability to resist and also its war score.

 

[alexkowal123]

Would you care to provide any examples of this? It wouldn't happen to all be feudal states in western europe, which aren't really the same kind of thing as normal national borders at all?

Yes, I'll admit that a lot of the specifications I list to do with taking individual provinces are really mostly intended to apply to Europe. Because Europe has a lot of traditional political units that tended to change hands as whole pieces, and even when they were split apart, there was pressure to reunify them. The example I always go to for this is the empire of Matthias Corvinus. You can see that the territories he took exactly corresponded to Lusatia, Silesia, Moravia, Lower Austria, and Styria. And furthermore, after he died, the Bohemian lands he conquered basically automatically returned to Bohemia, because Matthias was only able to rule them by being a King of Bohemia. He couldn't integrate them into Hungary. But in the game there are no issues with this at all, if you repeat Matthias' conquests in the game, it just gets annexed into Hungary and Bohemia won't ever get it back unless they defeat Hungary in a war. You can just take random provinces from Bohemia and core them into Hungary. I am not exaggerating when I say that I think that any game that doesn't at least have some way of representing what is going on here is guaranteed to be bad, because it is inevitably going to produce nonsensical borders in Europe.

Even outside Europe, it seems to me that islamic empires often tended to just annex particular cities along with their hinterlands, and they weren't really drawing specific lines.

But like in general, I think we all agree that something has to be done to prevent stuff like this from happening. This for example isn't even based on regional elites enforcing traditional borders or anything, this just needs to stop happening. We should be thinking of ways to make it stop happening. That's what my post is about, even if I'm sort of struggling to talk about my points coherently.

View attachment 1119498

For another example, see the Russo-Turkish wars, where the Russian gains north of the Black Sea were always bordered by rivers, or for a few wars they just conquered Azov, an individual fortress. You could argue that this is because this region was basically just steppe, and in that case this should mean that in low-dev regions, borders are very usually based on either fortresses or natural borders like this. I think this needs to be represented in the game somehow. And maybe saying that you can only take in-game provinces in wars in certain contexts is the best way to do that.

View attachment 1119503

And like, perhaps you could make the argument that all of this should really be based on, like military defensibility or something (which kind of intersects with my argument that if you have no cooperation from local elites, your border would have to be determined purely by what you can control with forts). Like maybe we should try to think about making the war system function so that if you lose a battle in Egypt or Iraq, it's really easy for the winner to capture the rest of the area and difficult for the loser to keep control of it. But I'm not sure. I just know that this problem has to be solved somehow, or it will get even worse in Project Caesar than it is in eu4, because we have more locations that can be annexed individually in wars.

Tbh I was just thinking of the HRE. There’s lots of modern border gore with exclaves

 

[Rafg]

I really like most of the ideas in this thread, however I see a few counterpoints to OP's suggestions:

1. Making most peace deals status quo reflecting the reality of military occupation is not as good as it sounds like: whilst that sounds like a good idea and is pretty accurate with regards to 16th-18th century european warfare, it also reminds me of how Stellaris worked a few years ago when you needed influence to create claims on systems, then you DAW, wait for war exhaustion to tick and enforce demands. It was a terrible system preventing you from playing wide for arbitrary reasons. It is a great case study of why war exhaustion shouldn't be the main driver for war score (or equivalent) and your conquest should be limited by other factors than authority mana and gov cap/admin efficiency/empire sprawl etc.
2. Bordergore will already be limited by the new control mechanic: as Johan said, a province where you have low control will cost less war score for the enemy to take. Bar tech and raising a standing army to sit on the province, that makes exclave all but impossible to hold because you'll probably have close to 0 control in the location. There is also no incentive to conquer/hold exclaves because at 0 control you won't get any money or manpower
3. Borders following historical/geographical borders coud be solved by... Crusader Kings mechanics: I'm only half-joking here, hear me out. In CK bordergore organically solves itself through CBs and opinion penalties related to the de jure titles system. Some of the historical examples you've provided (like the unity of Egypt, the kingdom of Bohemia) could be solved by a titles system. Not CK's titles system obviously, but since the game aims to model the transition from feodal societies to nation states, wouldn't it be cool to have a titles system which matters a lot in the first centuries of the game and then less and less as time passes?
4. The suggested changes will make the game more boring: unlike the other guy who said he'd spent 500 of 520 hours in EU4's observation mode, I think most people actually want to be a decisive force in the game and rewrite borders a bit as they like. With your suggested changes, the process simulating the Ottoman expansion in Europe for the player would be: 1. CB, 2. DAW, 3. Win battles, 4. Occupy the province, 5. Click button to annex the province, 6. Build a fort in the province/send settler, 7. Sign peace treaty. To compare with the process in EU4: 1. CB, 2. DAW, 3. Win battles, 4. Occupy the province, 5. Peace treaty, 6. Spend a shit ton of admin to core the province; this is exactly the same thing bar removing admin points and adding an extra step (build a fort/send a missionary). The extra step doesn't add anything in terms of gameplay, it just makes the process much more tedious and boring. Another of OP's suggestion is to have a discount for creating a subject rather than taking for yourself (like the Ottoman conquest of Egypt): the only difference that makes in terms of gameplay is to have less power for the player, more power for the AI, without changing who really controls the land. That will never be a good option given how infuriating the AI is. This suggestion will recreate the same situation as in EU4 where the only point of vassals is to temporarily exchange money and manpower for admin points, but with having to have additional vassals.

 

[Arizal]

When I'm looking at French borders under Louis XIV, you can't convince me that borders ought to be perfectly "beautiful"

 

[Antonin Vuillemin]

When I'm looking at French borders under Louis XIV, you can't convince me that borders ought to be perfectly "beautiful" View attachment 1119937

Still very far from the bordergore we are talking about...

 

[William the Merry]

Would you care to provide any examples of this? It wouldn't happen to all be feudal states in western europe, which aren't really the same kind of thing as normal national borders at all?

But the game takes place in a feudal period

Yes, I'll admit that a lot of the specifications I list to do with taking individual provinces are really mostly intended to apply to Europe. Because Europe has a lot of traditional political units that tended to change hands as whole pieces, and even when they were split apart, there was pressure to reunify them. The example I always go to for this is the empire of Matthias Corvinus. You can see that the territories he took exactly corresponded to Lusatia, Silesia, Moravia, Lower Austria, and Styria. And furthermore, after he died, the Bohemian lands he conquered basically automatically returned to Bohemia, because Matthias was only able to rule them by being a King of Bohemia. He couldn't integrate them into Hungary. But in the game there are no issues with this at all, if you repeat Matthias' conquests in the game, it just gets annexed into Hungary and Bohemia won't ever get it back unless they defeat Hungary in a war. You can just take random provinces from Bohemia and core them into Hungary. I am not exaggerating when I say that I think that any game that doesn't at least have some way of representing what is going on here is guaranteed to be bad, because it is inevitably going to produce nonsensical borders in Europe.

Because Matthias Corvinus had no legitimate sons, with his successors not having neither the miliatry or political skills Matthias had

Even outside Europe, it seems to me that islamic empires often tended to just annex particular cities along with their hinterlands, and they weren't really drawing specific lines.

Because islamic states have a longer history of being hegemons rather than various decentralised polities

But like in general, I think we all agree that something has to be done to prevent stuff like this from happening. This for example isn't even based on regional elites enforcing traditional borders or anything, this just needs to stop happening. We should be thinking of ways to make it stop happening. That's what my post is about, even if I'm sort of struggling to talk about my points coherently.

View attachment 1119498

Rome would have some odd borders in the early empire too

For another example, see the Russo-Turkish wars, where the Russian gains north of the Black Sea were always bordered by rivers, or for a few wars they just conquered Azov, an individual fortress. You could argue that this is because this region was basically just steppe, and in that case this should mean that in low-dev regions, borders are very usually based on either fortresses or natural borders like this. I think this needs to be represented in the game somehow. And maybe saying that you can only take in-game provinces in wars in certain contexts is the best way to do that.

Low dev + fort would be enough WS to annex the steppe after occupying it, without a new system

View attachment 1119503

And like, perhaps you could make the argument that all of this should really be based on, like military defensibility or something (which kind of intersects with my argument that if you have no cooperation from local elites, your border would have to be determined purely by what you can control with forts). Like maybe we should try to think about making the war system function so that if you lose a battle in Egypt or Iraq, it's really easy for the winner to capture the rest of the area and difficult for the loser to keep control of it. But I'm not sure. I just know that this problem has to be solved somehow, or it will get even worse in Project Caesar than it is in eu4, because we have more locations that can be annexed individually in wars.

But Iraq and Egypt have taken more than one battle to take before, especially with more forts built. The borders of iraq and egypt to take after one war can vary. Should basra be auto annexed by this battle? What of Mosul and Khuzestan