The case for expanding Albania and Epirus (and a suggestion on Greek Culture)
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I've spent a lot of time thinking of puns for an Epirus achievement.
"Despotate Times, Desperate Measures"
As Epirus, call a crusade? I'm not sure what requirements would be appropriate for this.
"Taco Tocco"
Have a colonial nation in the Mexico region.
"Tocco the Talk, Walk the Walk"
Have the Ottomans as a vassal.
Any thoughts?
"Despotate Times, Desperate Measures"
As Epirus, call a crusade? I'm not sure what requirements would be appropriate for this.
"Taco Tocco"
Have a colonial nation in the Mexico region.
"Tocco the Talk, Walk the Walk"
Have the Ottomans as a vassal.
Any thoughts?
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In 1444 it surly can, as they were just that, a vassal.
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That first pun is probably the best, though I imagine there are multiple things that can be done for it (revolution, WE, etc.).
I'm pretty sure Alexander's Empire covered all of what's Silistria in game. You are referring to the old Macedonian Empire, right?
Edit: Sorry, I misunderstood what you were saying. Though a Silistria split would be nice - wasn't there an independent Bulgarian polity centered around it?
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I'm a bit confused. I think Silistria has always been one province in game.
Troling much?
Macedonia was split...
No, I know Macedonia was split, I just misread the post and thought he was talking about something else. My bad.
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Hey you guys, I made a little mod which includes most of the changes that have been suggested in this thread: Expanded Greece & Albania. Hopefully this can show Paradox how easy it would be to make these changes, if an amateur modder such as myself was able to do it in a single day.
It also means that instead of debating what theoretically might happen if we made these changes, we can run the game with the mod to see what actually does happen. In the test runs I did, Epirus was mostly conquered by Byzantium to get its cores back, then either Venice or the Ottomans conquered Byzantium. Albania gets left alone for longer than vanilla, but still eventually falls to one of its powerful neighbours.
It also means that instead of debating what theoretically might happen if we made these changes, we can run the game with the mod to see what actually does happen. In the test runs I did, Epirus was mostly conquered by Byzantium to get its cores back, then either Venice or the Ottomans conquered Byzantium. Albania gets left alone for longer than vanilla, but still eventually falls to one of its powerful neighbours.
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Great job (and as I thought it would go)! Though, I will say that Pontic Greeks were not quite present as a majority (or even strong minority) in most of Pontus by 1444 (most of the Pontic Greeks had fled to Trebizond due to persecution from the Beyliks, meaning that Turkish was indeed dominate in the geographical area, though an argument can be made that Trebizond is underdeveloped as a result).
Also, it might be a good idea to make the area changes once 1.16 comes out due to the states mechanic, but I digress.
You seem to think your case of 'Let's not add any more provinces or nations ever because the AI is not as efficient as a human' is a reasonable position to begin with.
Well, I'm all for splitting Silistria, provided it ends up looking neater and allows for a better-looking Romanian coast.
In addition to my desire for an Ionian Islands province (probably called Cephalonia, after the largest of the islands there), maybe Lemnos could be added as well? The Aegean Islands currently attached to Edirne were under Genoese possession at the time, consisting of primarily of Thasos and Lemnos, which entered Genoese control in 1414. Formal ownership of the islands appears to have been offered to the Genoese in exchange for aid during the Conquest of Constantinople, and was demanded as Aragon's price for aid, if I understand correctly. In 1453 it formally fell into the hands of the Genoese family that ruled Lesbos, the Gattilusi, until it was taken from them by the Ottomans in 1457.
It is not a super important province, but it might allow a Genoese player to flex a little more muscle there. It would have to be connected to Edirne by a strait, to reflect the general ease the Turks had in taking it. Anyway, it's just a thought.
In addition to my desire for an Ionian Islands province (probably called Cephalonia, after the largest of the islands there), maybe Lemnos could be added as well? The Aegean Islands currently attached to Edirne were under Genoese possession at the time, consisting of primarily of Thasos and Lemnos, which entered Genoese control in 1414. Formal ownership of the islands appears to have been offered to the Genoese in exchange for aid during the Conquest of Constantinople, and was demanded as Aragon's price for aid, if I understand correctly. In 1453 it formally fell into the hands of the Genoese family that ruled Lesbos, the Gattilusi, until it was taken from them by the Ottomans in 1457.
It is not a super important province, but it might allow a Genoese player to flex a little more muscle there. It would have to be connected to Edirne by a strait, to reflect the general ease the Turks had in taking it. Anyway, it's just a thought.
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Well, I suppose you could summarize my position in a less accurate and more offensive way, but I am impressed that was a pretty nice strawman you have there.
In like manner, your "argument" basically comes down to: this makes 1444 borders prettier, and everyone who worries about gameplay or UI can just deal with it.
Frankly, the fact that you cannot engage honestly and fairly with criticism is a pretty good sign of how weak your idea is. If you can only attack strawman, that is a pretty good case for ignoring the whole proposal as a vanity project.
My argument is pretty simple:
Which AIs are the most important for maintaining historical strategy in a historical strategy title? The Western Colonizers, the OE, Russia, Austria, Timirids, China, Poland, Persia, Mughals, and Sweden in roughly that order. These are the states that defined strategies in this period (if you build a formal interaction network, these are the most central states in it). Shockingly, map changes that muck with these driver nations have major implications for far more states than changes to OPMs.
Okay, so those guys are important, does the proposed change increase or decrease the the ability of those AIs to provide the historical threat they did to each other and neighbors? In this case it pretty clearly decreases it.
Still this is not enough to be decisive. Instead we turn now to balancing. How much of interest do we gain from the map change vs how much is the cost of the distortion. Okay we have a prettier 1444 map. We have another tag to play. And we have some more provinces that can allow you to remake certain 18th century maneuverings, albeit with provinces that are over 50 times larger than historical territory exchange. And we have one more soon-to-die minor for cheese like March Swarming the OE as Byz.
So how much are each of these worth? Aesthetics are pretty low, but given that we have an abominably bad base map (Africa and South America being nowhere near real world relative latitudes), I am guessing that few people care that much about the map looking perfect. Another tag. Hmm let's see by the numbers only a fraction of a percent of people already play the OPMs in the area. How different will this one be? Well let's see you have OPM next to the OE ... oh wait, sorry too many of those. Well it would be the OPM that has Catholic rulers over an Eastern Orthodox populace ... hrm that's harsh. Well it would be a splinter state that could lay claim to the mantle of the Eastern Roman Empire ... dang it. Oh its an independent OPM on the Adriatic coast ... yeah somewhere in here is something unique. Chances are, most people will not play this any more than more than they currently play places like Corfu, Naxos, or Trebizond. And I think we would all agree that a new playable tag is the biggest benefit of the change. Is having more Byz cheese options important to you? It is not to me.
Okay so what is the harm, as noted it degrades the OE performance by a year or two. This means that if you are playing AQ, QQ, Georgia, Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia, Poland, Theodoro, the Mamelukes, The Knights, or Venice your opponent loses one of their most valuable years on bad return expansion. This in turn has ripple effects onward - Hungary, Austria, Russia, Persia, The Mughals, Arabia ... Off the cuff I would guess that something like 30% of the games currently playing would have some degree of effect.
Okay so for those people who really, really want to play the new tag let's say that this the single best game they ever play of EUIV ... say it was worth 4 times as much as an average game. How many are likely to play it? Let's say that is the average of the Theodoro, Trebizond, and Hormuz achievements, or maybe around .2% of players will ever play it. So net utility would be something like 4 * 0.002; or around 0.008 overall. This is an exceedingly generous calculation as far more people play the majors multiple times and I would be shocked if Ironman play cohort is not hideously skewed towards people making OPM runs just for achievements.
Now let's consider that 30% of games that will have a bit weaker OE resulting from the change. Suppose that decreases the fun of the game by 1%, particularly as the OE is one of the most common foes for much of the world this is likely an undershoot (a more realistic estimate would be something like 5% for average players and maybe 15% for elite level players). This means we are looking at .3 * .01 = .03.
Now even if we added in a nice advantage to Venice and Byz games (which are going to be just a percent or two of all plays), this is not going to change the basic problem - we are making a lot of games less fun at the price of making a tiny fraction of games more by a sizeable number. Bastiat called this the fallacy of that which is seen and that which is not seen. It is obvious when you make a new OPM what is happening to the people playing the OPM, it is not obvious what happens to every other game.
But even that is not the whole story. The fact is, for those people who truly want to build an Epirate state ... you already can. We sunk huge amounts of dev time into custom nations. Here is a perfect use for it. We can have the best of both worlds - the option to create an Epirate state if you really want to play it and not dragging down the OE.
And that is all I am looking for - consistent design philosophy. If we are going to nuke Byzantine cores, attrition mechanics, straight crossings, etc. in order to make the OE not underperform then we should not gimp the AI just for a tag we can already use the nation builder on.
But I am sure this will receive plenty of downvotes with few engaging directly with my actual arguments. Perhaps you can surprise me with a substantiative rebuttal rather than simply rhetoric.
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I'll bite.
1. I don't think that the impact on the OE will be significant enough to count. You're talking about one extra fort it has to besiege. The historical strength of the Ottoman empire, and the in-game strength of the Ottoman Empire, does not come down to one or two province changes - which if Paradox implement in their usual way will make the OE stronger after they take them anyway (as it's likely to be an albeit slight development buff).
What will significantly change historical outcomes is the strength of the majors around the Ottomans they are likely to come into conflict with. Those wars have a far, far larger impact on geopolitics and as such it's not the absolute strength of the Ottomans but their relative strength when compared to other majors (Hungary, Pol-Lit, Austria, Timmies, Mamluks), some of which perform ahistorically well a lot of the time (particularly Pol-Lit) and others of which underperform (Hungary often falls into this position).
You say the addition of three new provinces would decrease historical Ottoman strength but ignore the fact the impact would be minimal and other things have a far larger impact.
For the record, I think the Byzantines should be given permanent claims or cores as per game rules and that when they are annexed an event should eventually remove those cores.
2. I don't think the map being pretty is a great objective, but its historicity is. Epirus existed as a polity at the start date. As such, ideally it should be included in the game. The whole start date is geared around allowing Byzantium to exist and it had a pretty similar historical footprint from 1444 onwards to Epirus (none, but that's beside the point).
3. Your argument hinges somewhat on the idea that these changes would or should be made in isolation. I don't think this would/should be the case, and in fact the Ottomans could probably use a bit of a buff, since they already underperform. I would have thought the best way to buff a nation is to make it stronger to begin with, not to ahistorically nerf or underrepresent what was happening around it. We have Karaman, Candar, Ramazan and Dulkadir, all similar nations in similar positions to each other. That doesn't make them undeserving of recognition in the game, even if removing them would buff the Ottomans. I'd argue that would actually be detrimental to having a consistent design philosophy - a term that's surely more relevant to what kind of and size of nation should be included than which individual nation needs to be buffed or nerfed.
The game aims to begin with a historical starting point and achieve a historical outcome. Those are both worthy of and in need of improvement. They're not mutually exclusive.
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Rather than cores or permanent claims, I think Missions might be the solution. There's already one to recover the Balkans, and another for Asia Minor. We could add "Reclaim the Aegean!" and a "Drive out the Venetians!" as missions, which would supply the claims needed for an expanding Byzantine Empire, without having to add cores back to the islands, while allowing little historical tidbits. I love the historical mission descriptions.
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The single biggest determinant of the "strength of the majors around the Ottomans" is the tech level at which the major clash occurs. Early game the OE has a 50% infantry pip advantage and a 40% cav pip advantage at game start. This starts dropping around tech 5 and is mostly gone entirely by tech 12. If the OE manages to severely weaken Poland and Hungary before they lose this pip advantage they come far closer to reaching historic threat levels. Burning 12 months on killing off yet another OPM with a coastal siege makes it that much more likely that the OE will be fighting without a pip advantage.
Please do not lie. I explicitly ran my calcs with a "minor" number. 1% is far more conservative than warranted. As far as those "other things", sorry but all of those are directly impacted by pip balances (this being the second most important determinant of AI-AI wars after net manpower). 12 months of good pip balance is far from minor.
Sure, but the Devs have explicitly said otherwise. Map concerns are explicitly secondary to gameplay balance according to the devs.
[QUOTE2. I don't think the map being pretty is a great objective, but its historicity is. Epirus existed as a polity at the start date. As such, ideally it should be included in the game. The whole start date is geared around allowing Byzantium to exist and it had a pretty similar historical footprint from 1444 onwards to Epirus (none, but that's beside the point).[/QUOTE]
Don't be abusrd Byz had at least a PU over Morea which handily defeated the Toccos (not to mention the whole fact that Byz granted the freaking title to the Toccos that you are contesting). Arta, today, has a population in the 50,000s. Constantinople had that population centuries ago. Constantinople was important enough as cities go to give it its own province, Arta simply was not.
Well, I suppose even we wanted to be even more sure to have poor performance we could do multiple things at once on a large intentional scale. Kludging like this is directly responsible for some of the worst features in the current build of EUIV.
All of the nations listed did more than surrender their territory, often without a fight. The facts are that the Tocco's had already lost their primary seat and had a very poor grasp on Arta (not even controlling all of its hinterlands). This would be single weakest city based province on the mainland.
Oh please. Sicily is ahistorically represented as integral to Aragonese territory. This is BS by historical standards. Alfonso ruled both Sicily and Naples as a joint kingdom and did not divide the Kingdom of Sicily until 1458. Either it should be part of Naples (renamed Sicily) or both it and Naples should be integral Aragonese territory. Sicily exhibited far more aspects of actually being a functional state than Epirus at this point. And of course we have the other PUs of the Crown of Aragon did far more than Epirus - the County of Barcelona, the Kingdom of Sardinia, and the Kingdom of Barcelona all were extant states that were united only by personal union.
Of course there were many other states in this period. Afterall we nuked the French vassals precisely for gameplay reasons. Those feudal administrations remained long into the game period and certainly were not united in 1444. Even Transylvania arguably did more things of a separate state than Epirus at this point.
Full historical accuracy is not possible in a simulation (otherwise we would not have overextension or monarch points), boundaries were often delineated down to the yard and every remotely useful island had the potential to become its own province. Tradeoffs happen all the time, we have an ahistorically unified de jure Aragon because the simulation cannot make the PU that was the Crown of Aragon work historically. We made blatant decisions to unify France, but break up Burgundy.
Past history of EUIV suggests that indeed these goals can be mutually exclusive and will be so in this case. With current parameters, OPMs delay growth. They require a siege, often a separate war, and that is pure poison for the OE. The gain in making the 1444 map look a bit more historical is massively offset by the large number of deviations that will occur before 1500.
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Perhaps one could do something with the Ionian isles specifically Lefkada, Kefallonia and Zakynthos who are of a somewhat moderate size and where of import to the Venetians perhaps merging them into a province of Called the Ionian isles or each independent with straits connecting them (wouldn't be the strangest straits)
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