Proposal for new DLC: The Means of Wealth

[Imgran]

EDITED NOTE: This thread has taken on the character of a brainstorming session with many different suggestions throughout the thread. I *HIGHLY* Recommend that any Dev who reads this takes the time to read the whole thing, there's a lot of ideas here that I in all humility think are excellent, and by no means are all of those ideas mine.


This is something I was rambling about in a thread in the main forum when I suddenly realized I had conceptualized an entire DLC/patch scheme that wouldn't (I don't think) be all that hard to implement, and would add a lot of fun and enjoyment to EUIV without really costing anhything but a bit of devtime.

Let me tell you though that that loot bar is very interesting. It's a source of extreme potential down the road for this game, if the devs see it. Because for the first time we have numbers for not just the potential wealth of the province but also the current affluence of the province. And both are already tied directly to the province's income.

The potential for a national system of taxation, economic policies, and a whole load of new content ideas just opened up with something that I strongly suspect the devs just see as a new loot mechanic. I'm guessing it may take a modder to get them to see the light, but oh what a light it is!

Imagine if you had this natural development system that we've both discussed where a full loot bar unlocked the potential for the province to develop on its own, slowly.

Now imagine this: A set of buttons in the economy window marked Emergency Tax, High Tax, Average Tax, Low Tax, Minimal Tax.

Minimal Tax and Low Tax cuts tax income by 50% and 20% respectively but lowers Unrest somewhat and gives a boost to the loot bar (which really should be called Affluence Bar) and triggers (relatively) rapid development in all provinces. Great if you can afford it, you then have the choice of going for a very lax tax policy, but short term risks are very significant since you won't be able to build as much or have as big of an army and navy. Makes for a great long game but a very very challenging short term game.

And maybe to balance the lowered unrest, Autonomy ticks up when taxes are low as the government maintains less control over the economy.

Normal taxes are the current default, usually good in most situations and generally sufficient for most players to kee their army at the force limit. No impact on unrest or autonomy.

High Tax increases your national tax modifier by something pretty significant, say 20%, but the affluence bar fills much more slowly and the MTTH between development goes up as a result and unrest increases a bit, while autonomy drops. Thus you can potentially go over force limit safely, but in the long run your provinces will be poorer than they could have been, and an oppressive tax policy carries a big penalty over a 400 year campaign -- but a tax income burst for short term gain, or if you're playing a relatively poor OPM, can make a difference to survival that may be worth it. And of course with the DLC you can keep developing a small nation with only a few provinces with monarch points to make up for anything you lose from taxation. Think of it as going Socialist.

Emergency taxes give a huge boost to national tax but the loot bar goes down and keeping emergency taxes for any length of time encourages Peasant Rebels or even the Peasant's War disaster. Meanwhile the autonomy drop is no better than High Tax. This is an emergency SOS option only, designed strictly to stave off bankruptcy, but in a pinch it could save a nation in a real financial crisis.

Put this system in place along with the current DLC model, and all the DLC does is allow you to spend MP to keep your taxes high and still develop your province, or alternatively to spur natural development to even greater hights or make a key development where you feel you need it. Still valuable, and that would put it in the area where most DLC features are for this game -- an interesting potentially strategic extra, similar to National Focus.

If the Devs did this it would also add some amazing depth and tactical choice to the peacetime game, which this game desperately, desperately, DESPERATELY needs. I really hope something like this makes it into the next patch, especially because the potential for DLC-only extras in a system like this is also extreme. Or put the entire new tax system as the centerpiece of a new DLC. I probably won't buy CS but I would buy that, and I think I'm not alone

Now beyond that core concept, which you already have enough material for a base for the core game (natural development of provinces based on Loot/Affluence bar but only access to Normal tax mode) and for DLC content (the taxation system itself, which gives very VERY interesting gameplay consequences for decisions at the outset of the campaign that can affect a whole playthrough) the option for potential decisions, rebalancing national ideas and idea groups for a new economic model, as well as the ablity to adapt to situations in a new way, such as being threatened by a superior power in a war, raising Emergency Taxes, recruiting ALL THE MERCS and turning the campaign on its head, and knowing that an enemy could do the exact same thing to you given a chance.

Not to mention a whole slew of possible new events and decisions and even a new disaster or two based on tax protests, or on a lax tax policy potentially opening your nation up to commercial explotation of one flavor or another as your nation surrenders control of its economy to the private sector. For example, a decision chain based on the South Seas Bubble triggered by high national debt, or the Tulip Crisis, would be both period and very interesting.

It would also mesh very nicely with what you were doing with the new development system in Common Sense and make that DLC more attractive in retrospect, which is only a good thing for Paradox Development Studious I think. and new DLC that synergizes with an old DLC and can increase sales of both is a good thing.

I think this suggestion has some serious legs if the developers want to take the idea on board and I'd be excited to buy a DLC based on this kind of proposal. I think the new dynamics it created could radically open the game up especially in peacetime and the fact that it opened up an entire new kind of playstyle for EUIV makes me hope the devs take this idea or one very like it very seriously. Fingers crossed.

Thoughts?

 

[Imgran]

Well at the end of the day these are details that the devs are going to have to wrestle with until they're comfortable. I think there's a danger in overcomplicating the proposal. If all they did was add natural development based on the loot bar, balanced it to their own satisfaction, and a tax system that modified it, I'd be happy enough with that

 

[Naeven]

I think there's a danger in overcomplicating the proposal. If all they did was add natural development based on the loot bar, balanced it to their own satisfaction, and a tax system that modified it, I'd be happy enough with that

Exacly A simpler and more straight forward solution was what I was going for. If it's a DLC or not - I don't care.

 

[Imgran]

I'd love to hear some feedback from the devs if this thing is something they might consider doing. Don't know if I willl but I'd be pleased if it happened.

 

[Angeleyed]

I believe that your speculation around province lootbar has indeed extreme potential, however it is just the start. Would love to see a developer opinion on the thread, since my personal knowledge of game development is primitive.

 

[Clausewitz_]

What about nations that can generate absurd amounts of money through trade? they would have no need to ever raise taxes and that would be a *tad* bit op. I like your ideas don't get me wrong.

 

[Imgran]

I saw a similar proposal in the main forum that was buried deep within a thread and I think it's worth adding to the suggestion here.

A forumite wants maximum development levels, that one assumes increase with admin tech, since that's the most logical way. That would certainly be an interesting way to prevent every province from becoming Constantinople just because taxes are low, or every wealthy nation (or anyone who can find a way to cheese gold) dropping taxes to nothing just to max out their Manpower potential.

Maybe just cap natural development as propised in this thread and allow manual directed development as the player pleases? That makes more sense to me anyway.

I think the way to handle it would be to cap it out such that provinces can grow by enough development to add 1 building slot at tech 3 and then having the development ceiling go up by one slot's worth of development for natural development at certain determined points in the Admin chain as tech levels rose. That combined with the fact that you can't raise as big of an army if taxes are nil, and the fact that low taxes make Autonomy for all non capital provinces gradually tick upward, should be enough to balance against the potential for natural development to unbalance the tendency of low tax powers to autodevelop faster.

Another thing I'd like is to have a new building chain. The new building types would be Town -> City -> Metropolis, and building them would cost oodles of money but would significantly raise the development ceiling. This would be particularly useful for colonial nations, though of course Cities would already exist where they made sense, such as Venice, Prague, Rome, Vienna, Paris, Moscow, Vijayanagar, Constantinople, Kyoto etc. but this would account for the in-period rise of new major cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, New York, Edo/Tokyo, and so on (actually Mexico City should be City at start, since Tenochtitlan was absolutely HUGE when Cortes first found it, but nevermind).

Building Cities should reduce cost for manual development and raise maximum natural development capacity, and also vastly increase the capacity of the Lootbar (meaning you can Loot a city for far more and rebuilding wealth after being fully looted takes far longer). They sould also break the bank to build and take about 20 years of build time. This would make Cities a good place for directed, points-based development, being easier to coordinate development because yeah. City. Which is perfectly realistic because that happened frequently all over the world, the cities very much were the places that got the love when it was time to build a new thing. Still are really.

Also, Capitals should always count as Metropolis regardless of whether you have the tech or even have their own even higher development ceiling, since many capitals were the center of official attention and were developed more than any other place as a result, especially in small countries, which would be nice to see mimicked by the game. That would also allow the game to emulate very highly developed cities from very low tech nations, such as Tenochtitlan, without throwing out the entire concept of a development cap which I think needs to exist to rebalance the game economy.

While we're on the subject of buildings one more thing I'd love to see is the development of buildings that could stack natural development *slightly* towards a given era.

So three buildings in a province and you can only build a maximum of one in any given province.

Guild halls stack development such that any new natural development would have a 40% chance of being a Production development, 30% base tax, 30% Manpower. Unfortunately that's the only one I have a definite period name for.

Headquarters? Recruiting Office? Military Academy? 40% Manpower, 30% Production and base Tax

Administrative Office? Bureaucratic Center? Administrative Center? 40% Base Tax, 30% Manpower and Production

 

[Mattius]

Tax slider, perhaps?

 

[Imgran]

No objection to a slider as long as it works on some spectrum of low taxes = reduced unrest, increased province alffluence over time, increased autonomy, and high taxes, increased unrest, decreased affluence over time, and reduced autonomy.

What would be interesting about this is that it might make it feasible to deal with low legitimacy or even westernization a bit more easily by dropping taxes over that period, which certainly makes sense.

 

[Wizzington]

We're never going to do a whole DLC from suggestions. Better to just suggest features (I know you did that too)

 

[tjayharvey]

Wouldn't this re-mess up looting though? The new looting change was designed to make it so there's something to be got out of every province based on its affluence, but somewhat limited to what could be taken by soldiers roving about the countryside (i.e. they aren't demolishing buildings, they're stealing loose supplies). It's designed to empty relatively quickly but also refill relatively quickly. It needs to empty quickly to reflect the easy loot being gone and to discourage players from sitting in wars just to continue to loot everything. It needs to refill quickly to make looting the area in subsequent wars reasonable - which is fairly accurate since the barns and supply stores and whatever would have to have been replenished quickly or everyone would have died or moved away.

Maybe instead you should have the new Affluence bar you described, and have it refill the loot bar (but be on a significantly bigger scale).

Example: Province X is 10 Development. It has a Loot bar of 10, and an Affluence bar of, say, 60. The province is looted bare in war, so it ends up at 0/10. It then refills from the Affluence bar at the 10% month rate, so it relatively quickly ends up back at 10/10 Loot and 50/60 Affluence. Affluence itself recovers somewhat slower (maybe only 3-4/year, though this could be based on tax rates and realm settings). That way it really takes a province getting wrecked in multiple wars before it becomes unavailable for looting. It also means the province isn't going to end up at 0 Affluence just because someone parks 20 cavalry on it for a year.

At some level though, you start modelling too much of individual economic elements in EU4, which is really not designed for that (modelling the economy is more Vic2's thing). The abstractions might have to be so broad to cover the entire time period under question (which, despite being less broad then CK2, is probably more diverse due to the events of the Renaissance and beginnings of the Industrial Revolution) that they wouldn't actually end up being very interesting.

 

[Imgran]

We're never going to do a whole DLC from suggestions. Better to just suggest features (I know you did that too)

Well I intended my proposal as a whole melange of suggestions. I do hear what you're saying Wiz, but everything I'm suggesting kind of synergizes with everything else, so it's kind of one whole thing that if it was all implemented would be enough to release a DLC.

At the very least it'd be great if the game moved in that direction conceptually, since the potential is there for added depth to the game with what seems like a relatively modest adjustment to the front end. As for the back end, of course I can't comment.

Baseline, the tax system might be very very cool and with the way the game is now balanced, I feel some form of natural development is nonoptional, it's going to wind up in the game somehow, you can't just rely on events to cover this stuff adequately in a large nation. Tying it to a loot bar and using the loot bar to gague the affluence of provinces for the purpose of internal development is just one way I see to merge the system in with the current game in a way that's relatively intuitive.

By the way, I think it would be fascinating if you did reverse that policy, if there was a way to do it without being a complete pain in the butt to work with on both ends of the equation (probably is not a way) just to see what the community came up with. I'm sure I'm not the only one with some good ideas.

 

[TheDarkMaster]

Another thing you could do with this is minority exploitation or colonial exploitation. Say by default non-accepted cultures are pretty useless to you unless you exploit them through imperialism, which brings with it a mandatory minimum of high taxes on that culture group. If you want to play the long road, you can opt to give them a lot more autonomy and try to push for federalism instead in order to get them as an accepted culture.