Because they are
boring for the vast majority of players who have voiced an opinion. Is a coalition war more dangerous than any other war? No, it is the same exact thing as a regular war, except all the risk and reward has been ripped out. People like challenges - that is things that require them to think, plan, and execute strategies filled with non-trivial decisions. Coalitions trivialize decisions. Sweden just got nuked by a peasants war and Russia declaring on it. I could overrun the whole place with just 15K men ... but the AE from taking anything would spark a pan-Baltic coalition - so meh, it is a strategically foregone conclusion to wait out the timer.
(And I am not necessarily reffering to you, since apparently you have some ideas that make coalitions even harder. Haven't had time to read the entire thread) It is the ONLY thing holding me back from conquering most of Europe.
Lol, no. In 1.4 a pitifully few people "conquered the world", and virtually all of those were done via early containment of the colonizers, slow conquest & vassal feeding of Europe followed by a quick protectoration spree at the end. Direct conquest is limited by OExt/coring times/AMP gain. Vassalization conquest is limited by diplomatic relations and diplomat numbers. Rebel conquest is of limited utility but might give you the functional equivalent of another vassal. There are multiple control mechanisms and
they are all timers; we don't need another timer, particularly when we could buff the coalitions and make them
actual challenges without too much work.
Coalitions are the only thing that actually makes the AI work together. Without them, it is too easy to expand in whatever direction is easiest at any given time, say if a neighbour is severely weakened by another war, rebels or week alliances.
Nobody, nowhere is arguing for coalitions to disappear, and very few are even pulling for 1.4. What most people actually want are coalitions that are more effective against blobs. Right now, coalitions are a danger to minors, not an issue for a blob, and just a speed bump for world conquest. What we need is for coalitions to be based on
actual threat and not just rate of expansion. Ideally, we'd have a well integrated multiple level coalition system that begins by slowly turning the diplomatic game against the player, then makes the AIs more likely to ally, and then starts buffing them, and then starts really piling it on.
If the coalitions didn't ensure some kind of backup to the weak AIs, human players would conquer new land from day one, and for the rest of the game.
Umm, that's what I do now. Say I take an OE opening. I take all my cores. I go beat up Spain & Portugal (take the islands to stall colonization, take Andalucia to get Grenada as a vassal), then go beat up the Orthodox. Then take two provinces from the QQ so I have access to the Persian Gulf (for most everyone else it is better to go via Egypt, but the Ottos can abuse some events there, so this actually ends up being better). Then explore to India & China. Boom now I can cycle between: Iberian Christians, Muslims (particularly the Hordes so I can get into range of the Orthodox Russians), Eastern religions, and maybe through in the odd Sub-saharan conquest. Of course I take religious ideas, maybe convert to Orthodox & take over the HRE, and of course vassal feed places like Persia, Ukraine, Burgundy, Novgorod, Byzantium, etc. But I can play the Ottos,
right now without ever stopping conquest. If the goal is to protect weak AIs, the coalition system is utterly ineffective against competent players.
Instead of waiting for AE to drop, you'd just have to sit around and wait for manpower to replenish or loans to be paid off.
Nah, once you reach blob size and play smart about a few things (like virtually never take a global +1 RR), you can trash everyone but Europe with nothing but Mercs. Yeah they are more expensive, but they don't cut into the manpower pools and you can pay for them pretty easily once you are big (also some of the idea sets that work well for explosive expansion work well for merc abuse). If you have a colonial monopoly, you can make out like a bandit - collecting in the New World is pretty good and if you control Africa + New World, you can rack up a lot of nice bonuses.
Since we ARE able to expand from a 1 or 2 province minor to the strongest nation in the entire world, even without being attacked by a coalition, I fail to spot the problem.
Oh come on, if we could expand to the strongest nation in the world just but RMing every Christian on the planet (tanking your DMP) and then inheriting France + Austria would you still nothing is wrong? I mean if any war declaration was an auto-game over, but as long as you married well you could inherit Europe, would the game still be fun and balanced? Of course not. But that is where we are right now with coalitions. If you want to expand big, your only option is some BS ahistorical theater cycling and highly repetitive play that is mostly devoid of strategy.
The problem with coalitions right now is that they remove strategy from what is supposed to be a "grand strategy" game. Should I do X? Nope it raises AE in a non-optimal fashion. What about Y? See X. Slightly less egregiously, they make virtually every historical war of note, completely immersion breaking in game. Want to fight the Thirteen Years war and take 4 provinces? Great, everyone nearby will go into coalition against Poland. Want to take pretty much all of the Balkans and Greece in 10 years while consolidating Anatolia as the Ottomans to follow history? Great you get an ahistorical bireligious coalition that is better suited to 50 or 100 years later. Want fight the Italian wars (with you places like Milan, Genoa, Verona, and Romanga changing hands)? Nope auto-coalition for a hundred years. Want to do the Prussian expansion of the 18th century? Nope. Pan-HRE coalition nukes you.
I agree that improvements could be made, but as I've said before, the same is true for every other aspect of the game.
Nobody disagrees that there are other problems, this one just happens to make the game less intuitive and fun for other players, saps the late game of any risk/reward, and massively constrains the number of viable playstyles while eliminating strategic skill as a consideration in game.
Do I favor making OExt a smooth curve so 104 isn't massively freaking worse than 100? You bet I do. I'd like to get rid of just about every hard cap (no matter how cleverly hidden) and replace it with a sliding scale that doesn't make a decision boil down to well X will put me just under the cap while X+1 will put me just over, better do X. But coalitions really, really suck the strategy and history out of the game that even OExt foibles can't approach. And these aren't hard fixes to do in many cases. But people don't bother to read. They just spew BS like "that's just opinion", no it is the result of me having spent a few years doing professional strategic analysis for the JCS. You may enjoy a linear, low skill, low risk game ... but it objectively has fewer strategic tradeoffs and its extant form for any model really is simpler to solve. Likewise, timers are well known in military science to decrease the impact of analytical skill on outcomes. You can argue that, hey a game where skill has less of an impact is better; but the game is still one with less impact for skill.
People never tell me, you know what, "I want a slow game where skill is equalized and strategic choices become easier", but when I point out that their preferred model does
exactly that and does so by dint of mathematical definition, they get all bent. When the math says a task is a "linear optimization" it doesn't change to a "strategic tradeoff" just because you like the end outcome (a slow paced game that conforms to your ahistorical preferences).
Your third statement ("Coalition wars -> boring gameplay") is NOT one I agree with. Coalition wars are in most respects exactly like any other war, and neither more or less boring.
A war, in which actually taking anything means that you will likely repeat the
exact same war every 5 years isn't boring? Currently with other wars if I bash France + Tuscany + Scotland + Aragon, I can force Scotland and Aragon out of the alliance, and maybe take Calais after defending the British Isles and then staging a raid on France. Next war, it is France + Tuscany + Denmark (has Norway integrated) . Now I have naval war on my hands. I peace out for some North Atlantic islands and break the Danish alliance. Next war, now I'm invading France from my Calais bridgehead and France has a new Spanish alliance so I'm doing a protracted siege campaign in the low countries. All very different risks, all very different tactics, and all very different choices (do I separate peace out Scotland early for some land, or do I hold onto them to leverage their WS to get back some cores on the continent?) Now suppose I have a France, Scotland, Tuscany coalition. Now, that's locked in stone until I give up fighting the AE and wait out the timer. Maybe more people get pulled in, but I spend most of the time just taking Scottish land and later French land with every war being: take what I need to get a timer, take the enemy capital, kill armies until I get enough WS to peace out for what I want.
Frankly, your statement appears to boil down to "I don't actively dislike coalitions; I like big wars". And fair enough that, there is (sometimes, for some people) something nice about beating down big hordes of the enemy. But not one of the suggestions I've seen would stop that. Sure, you might have to be either particularly aggressive to get the same big wars as soon, but the size of the war isn't any part of the coalition itself. Further, if you actually follow the advise given about "how to play with coalitions in 1.5", you end up with small ineffectual coalitions who don't declare on you because you've neutralized the big boys by making alliances, using your diplos, and timing your theaters of conquest properly. Coalition mechanics aren't the source of the behavior you like (though they are far from divorced from them as well).
Regardless, though, it's true that most people would change coalitions in some way (just as most people would change every major mechanic in some way). I'm up for changing them, and think TheMeInTeam's suggestions have some merit. (Though I'm genuinely disappointed by his repeated trolling in this and other threads.)
It's hard. I spent years reading history under circumstances most of you cannot imagine (several of my van Creveld books died to a mortar strike), yet people who
clearly haven't read any economic or military history keep telling me to read Sun Tzu or some "economic history". When you post a well thought out suggestion of how to make coalitions better, people don't reply with "here's what I afraid that might do, so here's a tweak that would satisfy my concerns", instead you get half a page saying "play on easy" (except that easy doesn't change the mechanism in discussion) or "play mods" (except the behavior in question is hard coded) or "you just want a win button". No matter how many times I post that coalitions need exogenous bonuses (like morale and higher taxes), people always post about me wanting an easy win.
But just because you have to fight 2/5/20 nations instead of 1 doesn't make coalition wars any more "boring" by default. Indeed, when you don't choose the war it can make it more exciting, though not necessarily in a pleasant way.
Coalitions make the choosing the war much more likely if you understand the mechanism and control it. Again, look at the thread. We have people posting about blobbing up through Italy, Greece, France, and Switzerland ... and the coalition never declared. In the same thread we have people saying "coalitions are great because you get declared on when you don't choose" and "coalitions never declare on you"; and that's the point coalitions are only challenging for a narrow window in their present form, serving mainly to keep down minors and limit the potential losses to blobs.
I don't find fighting wars boring. I don't find coalitions boring.
