It was suggested that I post this here too, so I'll just paste it:
So in my current game as the USA, playing as a constitutional republic has been made completely untenable by the sheer amount of shit I have to do to get anything through Congress. At my size (most of USA/Canada) I need about 57 seats in Congress. This is already a fucking shitstorm, because I have to hand out 57 seats which increases stability cost and war exhaustion cost by 114%. Couple that with having anything less than 100 republican tradition and you're spending 250/300adm on getting stability to 0. So half a tech's worth of admin points for 1 stability and you get some tax/production/manpower and minuscule autonomy reduction.
Now onto the actual mechanics of the parliament itself. Just look at the "Bribes" and imagine having to do about 30 of these just to get a decent chance of actually winning a debate. Tons of army/naval tradition, republican tradition, thousands of ducats, invaluable bird mana, prestige out the ass, just to get 1 base tax in a province and -5% build cost for 10 years? What's even the point when I can just spend the 50adm and forget about the 5 ducats I'm saving off my next Marketplace. Almost all of the actual rewards are outweighed by the ridiculous amount of resources you need to put in to make sure you can win the debate. And even if you paid your way to >75% chance to win, you can still lose and boom, 20 prestige gone. Advisers that cost 1 ducat/month can get you more than a lot of these bills can.
Now it's probable that Paradox designed this with smaller, denser countries in mind like England, and it probably works quite well with them. But neglecting to make it viable for large nations like the USA (whose standard government is a constitutional republic) just makes the flaws in the mechanic stand out.
I would suggest:
So in my current game as the USA, playing as a constitutional republic has been made completely untenable by the sheer amount of shit I have to do to get anything through Congress. At my size (most of USA/Canada) I need about 57 seats in Congress. This is already a fucking shitstorm, because I have to hand out 57 seats which increases stability cost and war exhaustion cost by 114%. Couple that with having anything less than 100 republican tradition and you're spending 250/300adm on getting stability to 0. So half a tech's worth of admin points for 1 stability and you get some tax/production/manpower and minuscule autonomy reduction.
Now onto the actual mechanics of the parliament itself. Just look at the "Bribes" and imagine having to do about 30 of these just to get a decent chance of actually winning a debate. Tons of army/naval tradition, republican tradition, thousands of ducats, invaluable bird mana, prestige out the ass, just to get 1 base tax in a province and -5% build cost for 10 years? What's even the point when I can just spend the 50adm and forget about the 5 ducats I'm saving off my next Marketplace. Almost all of the actual rewards are outweighed by the ridiculous amount of resources you need to put in to make sure you can win the debate. And even if you paid your way to >75% chance to win, you can still lose and boom, 20 prestige gone. Advisers that cost 1 ducat/month can get you more than a lot of these bills can.
Now it's probable that Paradox designed this with smaller, denser countries in mind like England, and it probably works quite well with them. But neglecting to make it viable for large nations like the USA (whose standard government is a constitutional republic) just makes the flaws in the mechanic stand out.
I would suggest:
- Add a province improvement mechanic alongside the bribe mechanic. Make these options more demanding than bribes, but reduce/nullify the chance that that MP will stop supporting the bill at some point. Examples: "Build a Galleon in X", "Build an Armory for X", "Increase adm/dip/mil development in X", "Convert Culture of X". This would encourage improving your provinces while not just sinking resources into the black hole that is bribery.
- Make the bribery mechanic less demanding, but more erratic. Significantly reduce the cost for bribing MPs, but add more events that cause them to flip back and forth (maybe even increase the chance of defection depending on the ratio of bribes to province improvements), so that full reliance on bribes is dangerous and potentially costly for your nation.
- Give much better rewards for passing the bills. With such a high input of resources into the debate, the rewards for passing bills should be much less mediocre. Perhaps add "tiers" of rewards based on the size of your nation. Examples: "+1 Colonist forever", "+X stability", "Add X base development to several provinces"
- Rebalance the pros/cons of a seat being assigned to a province. I'm not quite sure how best to solve this problem, but a flat +2% stability cost per province is absurd.
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