Okay... after 12 pages of comments, and over 200 years of gameplay as a non-European power under my belt, I am ready to weigh in.
1) It does utterly suck that the MPs are used as the currency for EVERYTHING. It creates insane trade offs. "Congratulations. You have quest for the New World. But you still haven't ever gotten any further than the earliest ship tech." Or, "Congratulations! You have made cores of your conquered provinces. However, now your nation is a backwards hellhole compared to your neighbors." I don't mean simple "hard choices." I mean -- "that makes no sense" types of choices.
yeah because Russia which conquered so much territory during its history was a world tech leader in everything. Oh wait... And look at the Ottomans they were once more advanced then Europe and all their conquests made them more advance through the ages.. oh wait..
Sorry but your navy is more advance when you take quest for the new world. Your advancement is in navigation and cartography. But that's so counter intuitive I mean because you can navigate better surely your ships are better designed and have more cannons right? So lets look at Spain and England with the Spanish armada.
The outcome seemed to vindicate the English strategy and resulted in a revolution in naval battle tactics with the promotion of gunnery, which until then had played a supporting role to the tasks of ramming and boarding. Most military historians hold that the battle of Gravelines reflected a lasting shift in the balance of naval power in favour of the English, in part because of the gap in naval technology and armament it confirmed between the two nations,[28] which continued into the next century. In the words of Geoffrey Parker, by 1588 'the capital ships of the Elizabethan navy constituted the most powerful battlefleet afloat anywhere in the world.'[29] The English navy yards were leaders in technical innovation, and the captains devised new tactics. Geoffrey Parker argues that the full-rigged ship was one of the greatest technological advances of the century and permanently transformed naval warfare. In 1573 English shipwrights introduced designs, first demonstrated in the "Dreadnaught," that allowed the ships to sail faster and maneuver better and permitted heavier guns.[30] Whereas before warships had tried to grapple with each other so that soldiers could board the enemy ship, now they more often stood off and fired broadsides that could sink the enemy vessel. Superior English ships and seamanship had foiled the invasion. The English also took advantage of Spain's over-complex strategy which required coordination between the invasion fleet and the Spanish army on shore. But the poor design of the Spanish cannon meant they were much slower in reloading in a close-range battle, allowing the English to take control. Spain still had numerically larger fleets, but England was catching up.[31]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Armada
So in real life we have a nation that was the first to discover the new world so invested in exploration far sooner than England yet were technologically behind England when England was just starting its age of exploration. Seems to me the system is WORKING AS INTENTED. We have a clear historical example of of this oh so anti-intuitive system working like history did. Seems to me all this QQ is people wanting the game to be EU3.5.
Well done paradox in making a mechanic that works so well with history.
2) The easiest way to get up in technology is to do nothing. Take no national ideas. Never expand. Build no buildings. Just sit and spin, watching your clock as the techs roll in. Yay?
If that is what you want to do then go right ahead. But my goal in the game is not to just have the highest tech. While this might be the easiest it isn't the only way. I don't have a problem keeping up in tech but then I am more then willing to NOT spend my points on a NI just because the bloody light bulb icon shows up.
3) I was able to actually "keep up with the Joneses" in military tech as Ceylon. It's the 1650s, and I have a Military Tech of 20. The best in the world is 21. However, my ADM is 9 and my DIP is 10. How did I do it? I took ABSOLUTELY NO MILITARY IDEAS. That's right. I ignored my military, and ended up with one of the best armies in the world. THAT MAKES NO SENSE. I had just a +1 Mil advisor for the most recent years of the game (once my economy was big enough to support keeping one). Oh, and most of all, I "save scummed" to get heirs that were at least 3-3-3s. Then I had plenty of points to tech up.
Yeah your military was not as good as you think it was because you had no Military ideas. The effectiveness of your military is not solely determined by your tech level. NIs give significant bonuses to how effective an army is. Tech is not the only benchmark.
Also...
"Hello everyone I cheated to get monarchs I approved of and because I cheated, I was able to keep up in tech. Ergo the system is broken because I was able to cheat my way to success." lol. Sorry but maybe if you didn't cheat you'd have found yourself in oh I don't know a more historical situation? But No I just has to be a flaw to the system not the fact that I am playing the game NOT as intended that is the issue.
4) There should be some sort of way to "invest in the state." Colleges or universities. Trade schools or central bureaucracies. Military schools. Some way to get incremental adds to your tech leveling.
Err there is its called the UNIVERSITY gives you -5% to all tech costs. There are building that all make you more effective in the area they target. Fine Arts academies makes stability cheaper which is more admin points which means you get access to new NIs groups faster, which means you can invest in NIs that improve tech costs.
Simply because you can't directly generate more monarch points doesn't mean there is zero ways to invest in infrastructure to make your techs cheaper.
5) Separate technology investments from infrastructure developments. It makes no sense that if you are building barracks that you will produce lower technology soldiers. IT MAKES NO SENSE. Or that if you build shipyards, you will produce worse ships. Or that if you build counting houses to collect money you will have less skill in collecting money. I understand that they want players to make trade offs, but the sort of trade off I was thinking was: should I invest in military, diplomacy or administration, and, if I choose military, then I should develop slower in the other two. Or something like that. But right now, if I choose diplomatic national ideas, what do I end up worst at? Diplomatic tech. IT MAKES NO SENSE.
And it make zero Sense that just because you build barracks you create an advance army. Russia has had one of the largest armies in the world and it wasn't known to be the most technologically advanced. History has plenty of examples of nations focusing on a narrow field being better in this field but in the broad view of things they fall behind. Russia's huge army yet not very advanced & Spain advance in exploration but crappy at ship technology. Seems that it is players complete lack of history that makes them think the system is broken when it seems to be working EXACTLY as intended.
6) In a way, what I'd prefer is some sort of pie chart/percentage system, where you could put money into these different buckets:
• Administrative Tech
• Administrative Ideas
• Diplomatic Tech
• Diplomatic Ideas
• Military Tech
• Military Ideas
Of course, if you have yet to select an idea in one of the types, then you could freely set that set of ideas to 0% for now. And those percentages need to add up to 100%. Then, on top of that, your leader and your advisors could give incremental benefits, like +X% per skill level. So your pie could be more than 100% at the end of the day.
That way, even if your leader was a "0" in diplomacy, if you put some emphasis on your diplomatic slice of your pie, you would still be developing the nation in a manner that makes sense according to its traditional narrative. It makes no sense, even if King George was an idiot, that England would suddenly stop improving its fleet.
Players keep trying to fix a system that isn't broken
You get +3 and an advisor so even if you have a crap monarch with o in diplomacy you can advance your nation. Its just means you have to give up on other things.
You see, what rubs me the worst is that I spent all this time in the game unlocking the two diplo ideas, Expansion and Exploration, and what am I worst at? That's right. My navy sucks. THAT MAKES NO SENSE.
I am sure the Spanish raged at how unfair it was that the English who were not great explorers and didn't have an expanding empire crushed defeated them at sea in almost every engagement. IT MAKE NO SENSE! oh wait...
