Now, who's pulling a straw man now...
Do you or do you not prefer the current system to one which is more dynamic and less linear? If you prefer a less linear game, then please,
finally, post actual replies to the points raised and not just some more BS about how people asking for say commensurate risk/reward with coalitions will ruin the game.
To me, it seems that your fundamental dissatisfaction lies in your unrealistic expectation from a video game. This is a video game, which can play only with a few sets of data, which cannot be but gross, crude, oversimplified abstraction of the real world. Again, it's not my intention to be offending, but you're taking the game too seriously. No matter how many events and historical details, ultimately a video game is just a video game.
Oh don't be moronic. Of course I get the game runs with just a few sets of data, but consider what it would take to do some of our suggestions.
1. Allow for a coalition peace to tamp down the coalition. Well, this would require some balancing (should this be a 60% Warscore cost for 25 AE reduction or 70% WS for 20 AE), but it is literally something like 20 lines of code to implement and likely no harder for an AI than figuring out when to vassalize and when to take territory directly.
2. Calculate the peace terms of coalitions as one giant country. This requires tracking precisely no new data and is really just some modifiers - something like "if coalition == yes, then warscore_cost := warscore_cost/coalition_size". Again you might need to buff the AI a bit to understand these things in a strategic sense - but all it involves is the AI doing the
exact same thing that it currently does to evaluate peace options with large states (e.g. late game Russia).
3. Allow AE to be decreased by something other than waiting time. Again you might have to balance - well if I spend diplomat-time, how much AE/month should I burn or if I can just bribe down AE how much gold/AE point is balanced ... but there is no new information carried around here.
These are all computationally light exercises and they are
vastly less impactful on AI behavior than things like the new great power modifier and orders of magnitude lighter on the touch than the oscillations on AE between 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5. All of these move the game in the right direction - something that is easier for the AI to manage, something that has deeper strategy, and something that better balances risk & reward.
There were many, many more wars that did not result in massive land swaps than the ones that did and I never expected AIs to be upredictably human. Maybe that's what I'll expect in 20 years, but not now. AIs can't but follow a predefined set of rules with given data, and the long timespan of the game doesn't make it easier to impose a uniform set of rules suitable for all periods. Do you think the entire game needs to be re-written to better simulate Napoleonic wars, and it's a good idea to impose the same rules on late medieval Europe of 1444 or somewhere completely different like North America or India? As long as you play with the AIs, it becomes "predictable" because that's what the AIs fundamentally are. If that makes the game too easy, then you've effectively "beaten" the game.
I think Pdox, rather than fiddling around with a new trade dynamic or random new world generation would have served the game better by reworking the peace system. The peace system is a hangover from the board game days. Ideally, they'd just nuke the percentage concept and then we could have something like feedback costs so reward scales strictly with some root of the risk (e.g. reward = risk ^ (3/4)).
In the interim, taking the very simple step of allowing coalition peaces to take
more than four provinces would go a long way.
With your long narrative about your wife's playing Poland - I absolutely agree that the game does not provide enough information. I want there to be in-game reference (similar to Civilopedia, for example) which details every major game concept with regular updates with every patch, so people don't need to come to forums and search wikis after "WTF-moments" like that.
Yet the coalition mechanics are designed backwards. They start with some mechanic (coalitions mean no separate peaces and form from AE/relations) and kludge it until they
maybe get close to the desired effect (rampant expansion makes nations feel threatened so they band together to stay alive and maintain the challenge of the game). A better shot is to first model the mechanic on the desired behavior (hey what is actually threatening in game - taking out two OPMs on the other side of the HRE via conquest, or Austria diplo-annexing everything until I have no borders but with Austria) and then balance it to be effective.
To take the Poland example, suppose Pdox included a simple "reduce coalition" peace option. My wife gets the coalition, she beats them. Hey, what's this (mouse over: -25 AE with all coalition members, coalitions grow stronger the more land you take, reducing AE will make the coalition dissolve sooner). Boom, we have a new player friendly mechanism that can be balanced. If we need to change the balance, well make the WS higher or the AE reduction less. This also increases strategic depth: coalition avoidance vs strategic AE reduction wars. And it makes the AI less predictable to the human - is this anti-AI coalition going to be stable, pretty much for forever, or will it dissolve and come after me sooner?
I think it boils down to "I want a better game than this" vs "What do you expect from a freaking video game" attitudes.
And you would be wrong. The big difference is that you suffer from a heavy status quo bias - what is right now is as good as it can get. I and others see the real flaws in the current setup and
actual ways to moderate them. Rather than engage with us about hey what would need to be changed to make these suggestions
mutually viable, you just attack strawmen and then pretend that everything here is an unalayzable question of aesthetics. My guess is, if Pdox actually implements Themeinteam's suggestions you will love them, particularly if they are well tested and balanced before they make it into a patch. But rather than work on a way to make things
work, you want to be
right.
I think I'll pull myself out of this debate; our expectations on the game differ too much for us to come to a consensus. That aside, if there is a strategy game that actually meets your expectations in the AI behavior, please make a recommendation because I'd be interested.
The basic problem here is that you agree, my vision is better than the current status quo, but you doubt that any of our suggestions could make the game better. Okay, then buck up and see about what you can do towards mutually acceptable solutions. Yeah, I won't get my ideal game, but moving away from magical clock timers towards more engaging coalitions is a step in the right direction. As silly as 1.4 was with no-coalitions, moving to a linear "AE trumps everything" is a step backward (though arguably a needed one that might let us, finally hit something like "coalition wars aren't boring" or "AE is a scaling concern that doesn't trump everything").
Fleet:
Except the OP's argument is not about there being no point in beating a coalition but rather that they get hated and have large coalitions formed against them for expanding (aggressively and rapidly) as a minor power. They are annoyed because this means that they have to be more careful about their conquests and that this in general, slows the overall pace of expansion for minor powers. From what I seen, most of the people against the current coalition mechanics listed this as their main complaint. Most people are annoyed at the increased tendency of coalitions being formed rather than the fact that they can't get anything substantial even if they do beat a coalition as you tend to be vocal about.
Your logic ignores the fact that right now, once you get coalitions; they are
boring. Yeah a very good case can be made that Austria shouldn't end up in a coalition against a new TPM over one detected fabricate claim and one annexed province, but another big part is that "being careful" just means you have a prescribed gameplan. Grinding, by definition, is "the process of engaging in repetitive tasks during video games", and that is exactly what coalitions force you to do - the exact same rote of fabricate a claim, take a province or two, core it, wait out the AE, go do something in another theater. So you want to expand as a land locked HRE OPM? Welcome to the Grind. You need to space your minimal conquests. You need to repeat this cycle decade after decade.
Of course people hate the mere sight of coalitions right now. Coalitions only exist in a place where they mean risk/reward is dead, strategy is linear, and grinding is assured. Try making coalition wars
interesting and perhaps even having a way out of coalition/AE hell that isn't "sit on your ass for a few years" and suddenly people might be so upset with a coalition merely forming. Oh hey a coalition formed, should I wait it out, should I fight a war to disband it, should I buy them off with diplomatic action ... that's a helluvalot more engaging than: coalition formed, time to crank the speed and wait them out.
