Actually no, you might want to read beyond the first paragraph. But anyway, I'm out, sorry for trying to give some input.
The CK2 To EU3 Converter Project
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Actually no, you might want to read beyond the first paragraph. But anyway, I'm out, sorry for trying to give some input.
But if you go away, we won't be able to argue it out! D:
I re-read paragraph two, and comprehend your concern about tech gain due to tax/province ratio. This is something I hadn't thought of, to be fair. I'm trying to dig up information on Investments.
Broadly speaking, the cost of research is determined by the number of provinces you have. The rate of investment is determined by your income (including, primarily, base tax). So, broadly speaking, the less provinces you have then the easier it is to research tech. The more income you have, the faster you will research. Therefore, adding a stack of CK2 provinces together may give an unfair advantage in research over and above any bonuses that are already in play, say, for being a small country.
I'm not convinced that this, alone, is a good enough reason to scale back income on these provinces, but you have pointed out a bit of trickiness that requires a bit more thought.
EDIT: So, the problem is thus:
1) In CK2, many provinces are more powerful and wealthy than one province.
2) Therefore, when converting many-to-one to EU3, the power and wealth of the component provinces need to be converted such that the EU3 province has the same power and wealth as the component CK2 provinces (at least relatively speaking).
3) However, this would result in a higher rate of research than would be implied by the component CK2 provinces. A dilemma.
Nation size and tech cost cannot be decoupled. National income and investment rate cannot be decoupled.
There are some mitigating factors that may make this less of an issue.
1) These factors may be insignificant next to the other factors that determine the research rate, which include Tech Group (very important), neighbor bonus, and early penalty.
2) The neighbor bonus means that other nations will get research bonuses if this is the case.
3) The early penalty means that if the super-nation is for ahead of it's time on a point of research, the cost (and therefore the rate) will be slashed (20% per whole year ahead of the times you are!).
4) Since we're redistributing EU3s old world base taxes, then these values will not be especially mad to begin with.
So, given this information, I'm not convinced it's a huge issue. Though this will continue to bug me, EU3 mechanics are already such that out-of-control research has it's checks and balances.
I re-read paragraph two, and comprehend your concern about tech gain due to tax/province ratio. This is something I hadn't thought of, to be fair. I'm trying to dig up information on Investments.
Broadly speaking, the cost of research is determined by the number of provinces you have. The rate of investment is determined by your income (including, primarily, base tax). So, broadly speaking, the less provinces you have then the easier it is to research tech. The more income you have, the faster you will research. Therefore, adding a stack of CK2 provinces together may give an unfair advantage in research over and above any bonuses that are already in play, say, for being a small country.
I'm not convinced that this, alone, is a good enough reason to scale back income on these provinces, but you have pointed out a bit of trickiness that requires a bit more thought.
EDIT: So, the problem is thus:
1) In CK2, many provinces are more powerful and wealthy than one province.
2) Therefore, when converting many-to-one to EU3, the power and wealth of the component provinces need to be converted such that the EU3 province has the same power and wealth as the component CK2 provinces (at least relatively speaking).
3) However, this would result in a higher rate of research than would be implied by the component CK2 provinces. A dilemma.
Nation size and tech cost cannot be decoupled. National income and investment rate cannot be decoupled.
There are some mitigating factors that may make this less of an issue.
1) These factors may be insignificant next to the other factors that determine the research rate, which include Tech Group (very important), neighbor bonus, and early penalty.
2) The neighbor bonus means that other nations will get research bonuses if this is the case.
3) The early penalty means that if the super-nation is for ahead of it's time on a point of research, the cost (and therefore the rate) will be slashed (20% per whole year ahead of the times you are!).
4) Since we're redistributing EU3s old world base taxes, then these values will not be especially mad to begin with.
So, given this information, I'm not convinced it's a huge issue. Though this will continue to bug me, EU3 mechanics are already such that out-of-control research has it's checks and balances.
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Don't worry, I couldn't resist completing your little list there.
- Sliders: Slider movement speed (tied to number of provinces) is tied to province numbers, which allows you to move to full Free Trade (Trade = Main Income = Technology) sooner if you have more condensed provinces.
- Stability: Stability costs scale linearly with the number of provinces, allowing countries with more condensed provinces to invest more into technology on average.
- Mutual reinforcement: 2.5 (Trade, Production and the Government Trade and Production ideas) of the technology classes increase your income which will in turn increase your tech speed. The other 2.5 (Naval, Land, Government land and Naval ideas) increase your war capacity, which reinforces differentials indirectly since beating up enemies and taking their land tends to make them rack up inflation and destroys their income base. Certain technology thresholds (e. g. Land 13, 18 etc.) basically mean that whoever reaches them first has won a major war.
- Colonization: The winners of the race to trade tech 7 are able to take out the American Indians and to conquer the rest of the world at the reduced holy war rate, greatly determining the further development of the game.
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Let me see if I understand the concerns here:
With a pure redistribution of base tax, base tax might become fairly uniform, with the same regions (the middle-east) repeatedly ending up with richer provinces.
For the first, is that because holdings tend to be maxed-out at the end of EU3 (I don't even know if that's true, but it's a concern)?
For the second, I'm not entirely sure I follow the reasoning. Is it because more CK2 provinces get combined into the same EU3 province? I could see some difficulties there.
With a laddered base tax, small changes in CK2 status have the potential to get multiplied into large differences in EU3 status. And a random factor means that EU3 player position might result not just from CK2 skill (or luck), but from the non-deterministic vagaries of the converter. Which in multi-player games could lead to cries of unfairness (valid ones, IMO).
Am I understanding everything correctly?
With a pure redistribution of base tax, base tax might become fairly uniform, with the same regions (the middle-east) repeatedly ending up with richer provinces.
For the first, is that because holdings tend to be maxed-out at the end of EU3 (I don't even know if that's true, but it's a concern)?
For the second, I'm not entirely sure I follow the reasoning. Is it because more CK2 provinces get combined into the same EU3 province? I could see some difficulties there.
With a laddered base tax, small changes in CK2 status have the potential to get multiplied into large differences in EU3 status. And a random factor means that EU3 player position might result not just from CK2 skill (or luck), but from the non-deterministic vagaries of the converter. Which in multi-player games could lead to cries of unfairness (valid ones, IMO).
Am I understanding everything correctly?
I assume you mean CK2 here? Anyway, I think the main problem is that certain EU3 provinces will be composed of a lot of CK2 provinces, making them very predictably the richtest ones. And since the largest provinces tend to be the poorest ones in EU vanilla I assume that it may result in a habitual inversion of the EU3 starting positions. Balance-wise the problem is that having base tax distributed over several provinces or concentrated into one makes a big difference in terms of tech speed, stability costs and frequency of slider movements (which are a function of country size and government).
Drop the uniformity issue though - it is actually of no concern, I am just so used to thinking province-wise that I keep forgetting about the CK2 several-holdings-per-province oddity.
As the one who did the mappings, I can tell you that most EU3 provinces will be composed of multiple CK2 provinces.
Of course, some of them are worse than others.
I did mean CK2 there, I was rather sleepy this morning as I wrote that.
If the CK2 holdings do end up all maxed out by the end of the game, the number of CK2 provinces in each EU3 province will be a major factor, but so will the number of holdings in each CK2 province. I've gone and added code that logs how many CK2 baronies comprise each EU3 province, so next release you'll have some data to analyze.
If the CK2 holdings do end up all maxed out by the end of the game, the number of CK2 provinces in each EU3 province will be a major factor, but so will the number of holdings in each CK2 province. I've gone and added code that logs how many CK2 baronies comprise each EU3 province, so next release you'll have some data to analyze.
will there be an option to choose to only use base EU3 taxes if you choose to? Since how all provinces in ck2 will have the same buildings at the end regardless since there is no option to destroy buildings when you attack someone? which seems lame to me. Mongols burnt entire cities to the ground and many in central asia didn't recover until far into eu3 timeline... but I do digress. I'm glad to see this coming along!! I wish I had time to help though =-(
Time is a problem for most of us. As for using historical base tax, it'd certainly be easy to add it as an option. I'd just be rather unsatisfied if we can't come up with something much better. But if all our ideas run into the issues we fear, I'll make sure to include that option.
Mmm... data.
Btw. I didn't find anything about trade goods, are you guys planning to just keep them as they are?
Yeah, we'll have to use the EU3 defaults, since trade goods aren't represented in CK2. Also, CoTs is going to be an interesting problem to solve. I think EU3 has 9 CoTs in the old world. Does it make sense to leave them where they are, or do we want to redistribute them? For example, we could distribute 9 CoTs to the top 9 most wealthy provinces, or to the capitals of the top 9 most wealthy nations, or to the wealthiest provinces of the top 9 most wealthy nations, and so on.
For reference, the default locations are:
Antwerp
Lubeck
Isle-de-france
Andalucia
Lisboa
Liguria
Alexandria
Novogorod
Venezia
For fun, I opened up a converted game and started adding my own CoTs to the world to see how they behave dynamically. Provinces already prefer trading through CoTs based on effective distance, and coastal provinces will tend to prefer coastal CoTs. I wish our provinces had trade goods! I'd love to watch these fresh CoTs get filled out!
I'd also like to point out that I'm nearing the end of my Ireland game (just passed 1400), and while provinces are very well developed they are (probably) not going to be maxed on improvements by the end of the game. My game may be an exception (and certainly a better player than me could max out Irish infrastructure), but it looks to me that there might be enough diversity (especially among the AI) that I wouldn't worry about every province being treated the same by the conversion rules.
EDIT: Actually, something very interesting happens. I let the game run for a while, and CoTs are being created. To double check this, I delete the CoTs I added manually, and try again. Sure enough, CoTs get created every month! CoTs are created and automatically given a merchant from the country that owns the province the CoT is created in! I know this is not because the country has bought a CoT, since they have no money and this happened in one of my provinces (I took no action).
CoTs kept sub-dividing again and again until there were about 15 or so all over the old world. I wonder what the game rules are for spontaneously generating a CoT? I wonder if this will still occur when trade goods, base taxes, and populations are included? Maybe it has something to do with trade range: if a nation is out of range of all CoTs, then one is created for them? Does anybody have information on this?
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Yeh, CoTs are auto-created in EU3 if there aren't enough.
How about this: You use the formula I proposed to avoid huge base taxes in EU3, but instead of "losing" the rest of the base tax the amount of "surplus tax" determines the trade good quality.
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EU3 will auto-spawn new CoT's based on two rules in defines.txt: EDEF_COT_PROVS_PER_CENTER sets the number of provinces per trade center before a new one is spawned, and EDEF_CREATE_COT_THRESHOLD sets the minimum trade value in a new COT before a new one is spawned (I believe PROVS_PER_CENTER can be exceeded as long as the COT_THRESHOLD is not reached, so very poor areas may have more than the maximum number of provinces per COT). I believe the engine is capped at 1 new auto-spawned COT per month, also, though I haven't tested it.
Regardless, the converter should take a stab at placing COTs if possible, but should err on the side of not enough, and we shouldn't worry too much about the specific results, since EU3 does tend to correct it.
Regarding COTs, I seem to recall a CK2 dev mentioning a mechanic they had to leave out but want to introduce in a patch is trading repbulics. Mayhaps by the time we get to COTs, there will be some nice mechanics to use.
It's kind of the same situation with cores. The new de jure rules for duchies in 1.05 open up a lot of good possibilities (I think, I haven't looked in a 1.05 save yet to see what the data looks like).
It's kind of the same situation with cores. The new de jure rules for duchies in 1.05 open up a lot of good possibilities (I think, I haven't looked in a 1.05 save yet to see what the data looks like).
Hmm, maybe, but wouldn't that distribute that value out over the world (or the region) rather than concentrating it in that province? In other words, wouldn't the province still be less powerful than the CK2 provinces were?
What about giving these provinces first dibs on a CoT?
Well then, we can place 9 or 10 (and leave the ROTW CoTs as is), and we'll be pretty close to a good number (that is to say, the default EU3 number).
EDIT:
That would be great, if they tell the truth.
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Well, my point is that it's pretty inconsequent to try to convert to try to convert base tax as fairly as possible while just sticking to the vanilla trade goods since trade goods define a province's value in game far more. I really think that assuming that CK2 tax bonus = EU3 tax base + trade good both fixes the potential problems of overly high base tax provinces and makes the conversion stick closer to the actual value of the CK2 provinces. A CoT could be actually be modeled like a limited premium trade good in that regard, so that it wouldn't just be handed out for free but would instead be justified by the CK2 tax bonuses.
Well, investments are also determined by trade income, so haven't we just shifted the problem rather than solving it if we do it that way?
Actually no, since production income (not trade income which you get from placing merchants in CoTs) starts off at a low efficiency so it only becomes powerful later in game.