The Ledger is too powerful and weakens the whole point of Espionage

[sckallst]

You want to introduce constant alt-tabing, or delete eu4wiki? Apart from buildings (which arent' that important knowledge) every other info is there.

Yes, you can get all the info from sources outside the game. But you could make the game more interesting by just not listing it freely within the game itself and letting players decide how they want to play. If a player wants to go outside the game to get that info, god bless. If a "full intel" game or a "limited intel" game is an option for players it's a better game than just giving it all away IMO. It adds depth to the game for those that want it.

 

[yerm]

There's a difference between listing base attributes and current ones. Things like provincial revolt risk are hidden unless you are close enough, yet you can directly interact with it using support rebels. Meanwhile, troop counts and manpower are known to the specifics.

 

[FrigidSoul]

Yes, you can get all the info from sources outside the game. But you could make the game more interesting by just not listing it freely within the game itself and letting players decide how they want to play. If a player wants to go outside the game to get that info, god bless. If a "full intel" game or a "limited intel" game is an option for players it's a better game than just giving it all away IMO. It adds depth to the game for those that want it.

The option you're looking for is already there: don't open the ledger.

 

[balmung60]

There's a difference between listing base attributes and current ones. Things like provincial revolt risk are hidden unless you are close enough, yet you can directly interact with it using support rebels. Meanwhile, troop counts and manpower are known to the specifics.

Actually, the unrest is freely known. It's only the sources that are hidden.

 

[sckallst]

The option you're looking for is already there: don't open the ledger.

Focusing on the ledger misses the point. I already don't use the ledger. The game can be made better by improving FoW in all respects.

 

[Freudia]

Decision-making with perfect information is trivial compared to decision-making under uncertainty. The latter is a heck of a lot more entertaining for many people than the former. Not only is the ledger very powerful, so is much of the info that is freely gathered on most screens.

Why should you have an exact census of opposing militaries? Why indeed should you have an exact census of every attribute of foreign provinces? Why should their tech levels be freely known? Or their missions? Can you know all these things? Sure you can. Should it be 100% free? No, it shouldn't. Almost every decision in this game is about weighing costs. Information may be among the most important resources players have and it's 100% free.

To be fair, you probably shouldn't know all of these things, but it's not like if all this information was hidden it would suddenly enrich the game. A lot of this information can be deduced, and the only hard ones would be military forces (this involves lots of math in order to determine things like force limits) and attributes of foreign provinces (I assume this is in regard to revolt risk and the like, which would require a lot of values that wouldn't be seen outside of the provincial revolt risk tooltip, like tolerance of true faith).

The military forces aspect can be partially circumvented regardless just by keeping an eye on your target and waiting for them to get involved in a messy war with lots of battles. The AI is very bad at coping with attrition and manpower losses during such a war.

Of course, I assume this is why you mentioned this:

IMO, the quality and quantity information available to players about everything not in their own nation should be a function of how much interaction that player has with the rest of the world. It's not just about the Espionage idea group. It's about the entire structure of the game and it could be made much richer in this regard.

Which only introduces uncertainly in regards to major powers; minors/OPMs are pretty easy to determine forcelimits and standing armies on even without vision, and their manpower pool is irrelevant because they will be unable to rebuild a standing army worth mentioning during the war once their army gets wiped.

All you'd really be doing is adding uncertainty to the game for the sake of adding uncertainty, and it'd honestly just be kind of frustrating in the long run. I don't want to do a lot of math to determine the forcelimit range (accounting for autonomy and things like colonial nations or vassal subject forcelimit bonuses) on a major power like England, and such math is not only time consuming (for SP) but also unfeasible for MP games.

Basically, this information is 100% free because it'd be a massive pain in the ass if it wasn't, and because running all the math isn't feasible in multiplayer games.

IMO, players should have a baseline intel value that is modified by a host of factors that may be global or specific to a given target nation. The baseline itself can grow some over time with Diplo tech level, but real growth comes with investment in Diplo Idea groups

I would need to see a more fleshed out idea to form a meaningful opinion, but it doesn't sound terrible so far.

 

[clockworkBabbag]

Hello everyone!

After a few hours of EU4, I have come to the conclusion that the ledger is too powerful. With that tool the player knows pretty much anything about anyone but more particularly the player knows exactly the army size of its enemies before going to war. I have almost developed a pavlovian reflex by checking pages 24 and 25 before going to war. Does not make much sense in term of gameplay nor it makes a lot of sense in the historic period.

At the same time we have an espionage idea group that feels quite underwhelming to a few people. I believe there is an opportunity there by making the espionage group a bit more powerful in term of intelligence gathering and review the ledger.

I suggest something of the sort :
- Remove ledger pages 24-25 in Ironman Mode.
- Instead give a sense of the other nations army strengths and manpower reserve. Possibly, a red/amber/green enemy manpower indicator if they are at 80%, 40 to 80 or below 40.
- Rework Infiltrate administration to after a period of time, one year for instance, you get more detailed information of another country armies.

Is espionage a pitiful idea group? Yes.

Is the way to change it by getting rid of a source of information in a strategy game? No, because then you run into the exact opposite problem: you make Espionage a required idea group for every human player. This is just as bad an issue as Espionage being such a poor choice that you should almost never take it.

Strategy games require you to make decisions, and decisions require information. But unless the premise of your game is that you have imperfect information (which is not the case with EU4), then you fail at making a good strategy game when you don't give the players enough information to make good decisions.

The ability to check your opponents strength before declaring war has existed in at least several other Paradox titles. It's obviously a feature that Paradox wants in there, and it's obviously not the point of the game to hide that information from people.

 

[Camtheman]

The AI checks your army size (amongst other things) before declaring war. Why should this be invisible to the player?

Do they really? I wonder what the ratio has to be for them to declare on you.

Now I know why when I have 600k men late game why they never declare lmao. Do they check your vassals or allies? Probably not considering I got a coalition of a bunch of HRE minors to attack me while I was allied to France (with Burgundian lands) Austria (with the rest) and Kalmar.

They got wrecked llmao.

 

[Zander]

Which only introduces uncertainly in regards to major powers; minors/OPMs are pretty easy to determine forcelimits and standing armies on even without vision, and their manpower pool is irrelevant because they will be unable to rebuild a standing army worth mentioning during the war once their army gets wiped.

All you'd really be doing is adding uncertainty to the game for the sake of adding uncertainty, and it'd honestly just be kind of frustrating in the long run. I don't want to do a lot of math to determine the forcelimit range (accounting for autonomy and things like colonial nations or vassal subject forcelimit bonuses) on a major power like England, and such math is not only time consuming (for SP) but also unfeasible for MP games.

Basically, this information is 100% free because it'd be a massive pain in the ass if it wasn't, and because running all the math isn't feasible in multiplayer games.

I guess I'm surprised to hear someone take that position. Personally, I don't check the ledger in my own games not because of a moral opinion on it, but because it's rarely necessary. Why do you need to know the exact force limit, army count and manpower of each nation? How would removing or approximating that information make this game vastly less enjoyable for you?

In most cases of course one already has a good sense of rough power level based on size, tech and recent wars. But on those occasions in SP where I attack someone and find out they had an additional 20k I didn't know about, it rates as "unexpectedly challenging" rather than "massive pain in the ass".

 

[Freudia]

I guess I'm surprised to hear someone take that position. Personally, I don't check the ledger in my own games not because of a moral opinion on it, but because it's rarely necessary. Why do you need to know the exact force limit, army count and manpower of each nation? How would removing or approximating that information make this game vastly less enjoyable for you?

I don't need to know the exact values of these things, but knowing them helps improve strategy building in a strategy game. These values are not even 100% accurate as the AI will go out of its way to build way over its forcelimits if money permits and circumstances demand it; it is not uncommon for the AI to mass build mercs/units as a response to being declared upon. Like I said, though; you don't even need to have these numbers given to you, as a lot of it can be inferred (partaking in a war with lots of battles) or calculated/guessed/inferred (army size, force limits) within a reasonable degree of accuracy. Having concrete numbers helps improve strategy building, though. At least, that's how I see it.

But on those occasions in SP where I attack someone and find out they had an additional 20k I didn't know about, it rates as "unexpectedly challenging" rather than "massive pain in the ass".

It sort of depends on where they got that 20k from. Generally, 20k extra units that belongs to the nation I'm attacking is accounted for, but the AI is seemingly magical at getting allies with nations it was just at war with, and fighting those nations in conjunction is where things cross into "massive pain in the ass" territory, especially if the new nations in the war have nothing to gain. This is more common than you would think.

 

[unmerged(809555)]

I totally agree. I feel like I'm cheating every time I use the ledger, yet it feels like a necessary evil. Maybe the ledger should be stricken from Iron Man mode...

 

[Finnway]

This is actually true. It would make more sense if the Ledger only showed nations' diplomatic, military, and economic scores and you needed to perform spy operations to see more specific stats. They could even make it so that different idea groups will unlock more information relevant to that idea groups type. i.e. specializing in mercantile or navy ideas would reveal more information about your opponent's navy, etc. They could also make it so that the numbers in the ledger could be wrong by anywhere from 0% to 10% and espionage ideas could reduce the margin of error to 5%.

Then again, forcing you to use spies to learn this information would add a lot of additional micromanagement and wouldn't necessarily make the game more fun to play.

 

[kneville01]

When I first discovered how useful the ledger was, I used it extensively for about one game. Then I decided it wasn't as much fun as playing under "realistic uncertainty". I no longer use it, except for the score page if I care about my rank in a particular game. I would appreciate a richer system, in which information is earned through either Ideas or assigning diplomats to "gather intelligence" missions.

 

[clockworkBabbag]

...Why do you need to know the exact force limit, army count and manpower of each nation? How would removing or approximating that information make this game vastly less enjoyable for you?

In most cases of course one already has a good sense of rough power level based on size, tech and recent wars.

So... manpower you shouldn't be allowed to know, but tech level is fine? Idea groups is totally fine?

Is being able to see the BT of a province even if it's in FOW too much information? The buildings?

Where, exactly, are you drawing the line here between what's too much information/unrealistic knowledge, and why?

EU4 is not a strategy game based on uncertain information - at least definitely not in single-player. It's a strategy game about making good decisions based on as much information as you can process.

 

[Sandmpenguin]

But the ledger is not only useful for sussing out the military strength of your next conquest, it also allows you to see how events are unfolding in the rest of the world. In a game where a lot of the fun is seeing how each game plays out differently removing one of the main utilities for doing so would be a bad idea in my opinion

In fact I would love if paradox's CK2 team would overhaul their ledger system to more closely emulate EU4.

 

[Rudolph]

No, do not turn this into a game where you need a calculator sitting next to you and minutes worth of adding up in order to decide whether it's a good idea or not to declare war. I can understand the argument that exact information is odd, but the solution is not to remove it all together. A better compromise as suggested by someone earlier in the thread, is to instead give estimates rather than exact information. This could then be built on to the Espionage tree, with the ability to appear stronger than you truly are, ability to get exact information about another country or similar mechanics. It is important to avoid making it OP, the last thing the idea's need are more streamlining as to which one to chose, but rather add more nuances.

Personally I like it just the way it is, that way if you screw up it's you and only on you to blame. If it's hated so much, just don't hit L during game play and bring out your calculator.

 

[zdlugasz]

I agree with the first part here, its like people wanting ironman with mods, and I too am okay with that.

However, how can you say "ledger is overpowered" when it's a cheat. That's like saying "console commands are overpowered."

Wat?

Some of ledger information is cheat and should be obscured, but not all. It was mentioned by someone:
-most of income can be calculated by hand checking each province tax, production and each node
(all modifiers are visible as well although modifiers could be hidden and revealed by "spies" IMO)
-you can see ideas and provinces so naval and army limit are not cheat - although current values of course should not be visible without penetration of country

btw. I liked HoI2 system - you can know all about your allies and puppets and you can send spies to your enemies giving you less and less vague data on them
(and that could include obscuring information about enemy ideas, traditions and policies - but I guess that people would hate to lose that information on or before battlefield)

 

[bbqftw]

After a few hours of EU4

I don't want to be rude but that's hardly enough experience to get a measured judgment of core game mechanics

 

[dirtInfestor2]

The thing is that even if you remove (some parts of) the ledger, still noone would pick up espionage. (atleast i would not since it seems completely pointless to me) - i can try to guess their army strength aswell by just looking how much land they got.

 

[Andrei Cuza]

Funnily enough, shouldn't Ironman mode have lock the ledger?

I don't see why. The ledger only becomes useful IMO if you have the resources to take advantage of the information it provides.

Besides I don't understand why it's considered cheating in the first place. I remember clearly in EuIII and rarely in IV when the AI just decides to jump at your throat for not having a decent army up or enough manpower.

Furthermore, I don't find it that unbelievable that you could have knowledge of other countries military capabilities or other political/diplomatic info. It would be pretty impossible to hide your army as France or other "big players". And with the amount of political meddling that was going on in those days (even today) it doesn't seem that OP.

Frankly I didn't use the ledger in EuIII because I didn't recognize it's value. Now that I do in EuIV it feels like I was ignoring certain important aspects of the game.

But... to each his own