Unpopular opinion: some provinces should be removed

[st360]

Paradox has admitted that they went overboard with new provinces on the map and it crossed the line into heavily affecting performance. This performance cant be fixed any way except by removing provinces. The effect is not linear; even removing just a few provinces would make most of the difference.

I don't think Ireland having 13 provinces instead of 10 is worth EU 4 as a game getting permanent unfixable lag. I think if Ireland tomorrow got cut down to 10 provinces it would still be just as fun a region and the world wouldn't end.

I don't think Japan needs every household with over 4 people represented on the map.

Not every village in the game should be represented just because its in some players home country and they think its cool to see it in EU 4.

 

[MatthewP]

I agree with you about the relative value of perf versus having a few more provinces. But:

1) Removing provinces would be a big project (not as simple as just rolling back for multiple reasons).

2) It would also be very controversial, not just because people want more provinces but also because people want accurate provinces and interesting tactical setups, which are both subjective (tbh I suspect this is a big reason they stopped adding them, even if they don't want to say it).

3) Lastly, do you have any compelling evidence that removing a few provinces would make a big difference to performance? I'm pretty sure Paradox hasn't said that. They said they stopped adding them in part because of performance, but that's not the same thing. If there was a mod out there that made no changes except removing a couple hundred provinces and the game ran much smoother, I'd get behind this in spite of the difficulties. But I have pretty strong doubts.

 

[st360]

3) Lastly, do you have any compelling evidence that removing a few provinces would make a big difference to performance? I'm pretty sure Paradox hasn't said that.

It was in a reply in one of the development diaries a while back.

The developer diary stated that "EU 4 is done adding more provinces to the game, period" and this naturally caused a big disappointment on the forums with people asking their favorite regions updated with more provinces.

In the next dev diary, in the replies a developer wrote that the noticeable new lag after the Emperor DLC is mostly unfixable, and that they honestly went a bit overboard with updating the HRE region due to "going over the game engines province limit".

They also said that its not linear: after a certain number even just a few provinces more will increase lag by a lot. They where also concerned enough that they where looking into merging the maps wasteland provinces just for a 4-5 province reduction to the map.

 

[Wixelt]

Please don’t do this.

 

[MatthewP]

It was in a reply in one of the development diaries a while back.

The developer diary stated that "EU 4 is done adding more provinces to the game, period" and this naturally caused a big disappointment on the forums with people asking their favorite regions updated with more provinces.

In the next dev diary, in the replies a developer wrote that the noticeable new lag after the Emperor DLC is mostly unfixable, and that they honestly went a bit overboard with updating the HRE region due to "going over the game engines province limit".

They also said that its not linear: after a certain number even just a few provinces more will increase lag by a lot. They where also concerned enough that they where looking into merging the maps wasteland provinces just for a 4-5 province reduction to the map.

The initial reason they gave was save game compatibility. I take the pivot to performance with a grain of salt: they realized save game compat was not sufficient for most people and started emphasizing the perf impact. I’m not saying there isn’t any or even that it definitely isn’t significant. Just that I don’t think there’s compelling evidence. They said there are n^2 calculations, but that is not surprising, and it doesn’t imply that cutting 1/20th of provinces would make a huge difference. If a dev answers this and says, “yes, we’ve tested, we could cut 100 provinces and the game runs much faster,” then that will be different.

 

[st360]

The initial reason they gave was save game compatibility. I take the pivot to performance with a grain of salt: they realized save game compat was not sufficient for most people and started emphasizing the perf impact. I’m not saying there isn’t any or even that it definitely isn’t significant. Just that I don’t think there’s compelling evidence. They said there are n^2 calculations, but that is not surprising, and it doesn’t imply that cutting 1/20th of provinces would make a huge difference. If a dev answers this and says, “yes, we’ve tested, we could cut 100 provinces and the game runs much faster,” then that will be different.

The "people complain when new provinces break their save games" is a totaly insincere and transparent argument, and Im trying to put it as politeley as I can. At a minimum, new DLCs always break the game so you could add new provinces then.

Anyway, I found the quote:

Performance . Each province that is added, adds several NxN factors to a lot of calculations, and after 8 years of optimization of the game, there is simply no way to add more provinces without permanently hurting performance. Leviathan already took us past the point of no return when it comes to performance. In hindsight, we should have kept as maximum province count at <3000, and made it more even around the world, and kept adjusting borders of them.

Link: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/eu4-no-mapchanges-and-whys.1490842/

 

[Nostalgium]

On that note, there are some provinces which, while they were populated and unquestionably part of nations IRL, should be Wasteland provinces in the game for reasons of strategical layout. Like most of northern Scandinavia. There's a reason Peter didn't march on Stockholm after crushing Sweden at Poltava, and it's not because he was content ravaging Finland: Rather, it's because the logistical infrastructure neccessary to support troop movement through northern Scandinavia simply did not exist. Scandinavia should effectively be isolated from the rest of the landmass save for the straits around Denmark. I doubt it'd be inaccurate to whittle down Siberia a lot too, leaving the colonziable provinces as corridors through largely wasteland, like the Sahara corridors between Morocco/Libya and West Africa.

 

[MatthewP]

The "people complain when new provinces break their save games" is a totaly insincere and transparent argument, and Im trying to put it as politeley as I can. At a minimum, new DLCs always break the game so you could add new provinces then.

I somewhat agree with you. But you're assuming that because the initially stated reason seems to have been insincere (or more generously, only a part of the reason), that one of several reasons expressed in a follow-up must be the main one. Again, it's possible but needs evidence. I think it's also perfectly plausible that it just seemed like an easy way to simplify the scope of future changes. Software developers always want to do that when they can get away with it.

Anyway, I found the quote:



Link: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/eu4-no-mapchanges-and-whys.1490842/

I already looked it up from your earlier post, it's where I got the part about n^2 calculations. Nothing in there says removing a small number of provinces would bring dramatic performance improvements. It's quite vague, which makes sense since it's a post-hoc rationalization for a decision that was initially described as being for other reasons. Once again, if it's in fact quite clear that there would be major gains, the devs can come and correct me. But I don't think they will.

 

[durbal]

The worst part about adding new provinces is how they alter the demographic and economic realities that the game is supposed to represent -- I remember when they redid Ireland it ended up with more dev than central Italy in 1444...

 

[MatthewP]

On that note, there are some provinces which, while they were populated and unquestionably part of nations IRL, should be Wasteland provinces in the game for reasons of strategical layout. Like most of northern Scandinavia. There's a reason Peter didn't march on Stockholm after crushing Sweden at Poltava, and it's not because he was content ravaging Finland: Rather, it's because the logistical infrastructure neccessary to support troop movement through northern Scandinavia simply did not exist. Scandinavia should effectively be isolated from the rest of the landmass save for the straits around Denmark. I doubt it'd be inaccurate to whittle down Siberia a lot too, leaving the colonziable provinces as corridors through largely wasteland, like the Sahara corridors between Morocco/Libya and West Africa.

The worst part about adding new provinces is how they alter the demographic and economic realities that the game is supposed to represent -- I remember when they redid Ireland it ended up with more dev than central Italy in 1444...

These are good points and perfect examples of why removing 100-200 provinces would be a large and controversial project.

 

[necro84]

Is the problem number of provinces or number of colonized provinces? Maybe merging some provinces in colonial regions, central Africa or Siberia would help and it wouldn't require removing any tags

 

[Twoflower]

The worst part about adding new provinces is how they alter the demographic and economic realities that the game is supposed to represent -- I remember when they redid Ireland it ended up with more dev than central Italy in 1444.

I think I made a post about it back then, but I would like to reiterate because it irritates me quite a bit: Ireland is not a good example for this. I know there is a cliché of Ireland being this poor rural backwater that people had to leave in order to avoid starvation. This stereotype is based on rather unfortunate events - the potato blight, mass emigration, persecution by the English and a bloody civil war in the 1920s - in the 19th and 20th century. Things that happened after EU4's timeframe.
Ireland's population almost halved from 8,18 million in 1841 to 4,21 million in 1931. Even today, it is just over 7 million and far from its 1841 level.

In the 17th and 18th century, Ireland was in fact quite densely populated and experiencing rapid growth. It had a population of 1.4 million people in 1600 - only slightly less than the Dutch republic with 1,5 million, about as much as Sweden with 1,36 million people and more than Denmark-Norway with 1 million.
In an 1806 census, it had 5,57 million people - compared to (in 1800) 5,3 million in the USA, 3,3 in Sweden or 2,9 in the Kingdom of Sardinia.

As of 1,33 - if I am counting correctly - Ireland has a total development of 88. The 1600 territory of the Dutch Republic has a total development of 134. Considering their actual population numbers - and taking into account the fact that development does not just represent population - that does not seem out of proportion at all.

There may be places that are "over-represented" in terms of provinces and/or development. Ireland is not one of them. Please stop this memey, ill-informed argument.

And btw, I also disagree strongly with the sentiment of the thread. With recent patches, the game has become a little slower for me, and ideally that should be fixed, but not by cutting down on the number of provinces. And I personally also wish they wouldn't have ruled out adding more provinces. Historical detail and flavour is the one thing that is probably most important for my enjoyment of the game.

 

[BlazeKnight_]

As I have said before, no new provinces "because performance" is a bullcrap answer and the real reason is that PDX cannot be bothered. Anyone that actually codes and mods EU4 knows that the effects of adding a single vanilla province is very menial. There are several workshop mods that add hundreds of provinces without compromising performance. If anything, there is a stronger argument for removing tags on the map to improve performance, because tags are one of the most resource-consuming things in this game. All those Australian natives have a greater effect than adding 500 new provinces.

 

[arosenberger14]

Not sure how much I buy the performance argument, but I do think the province bloat has been negatively impacting game balance. The game's systems, especially regarding conquest, coring, and military, were designed around far smaller province counts. The difference between the EU3, or starting EU4 map and the current map is quite dramatic. Now this increase in resolution is great in terms of fidelity and complete representation of states, but comes at the cost of increased micromanagement for the player and straining the mechanics, especially military. It's probably far too late for the devs to rewind the clock and remove provinces, but moving forward I'd rather them focus on game mechanics instead of adding more provinces and tags... as they seem to be doing.

 

[Word_Smith]

I agree with you for the most part, but I don't think we're going to see any such changes in EU4. Maybe in EU5 there will be a more reasonable balance of provinces from the get-go.

 

[Destaloss]

The only real solution to all this is EU5.

 

[Retrac910]

The only real solution to all this is EU5.

I disagree. Why would eu5 be a real solution unless it does something different, in which case the discussion would be what to do differently. Even if eu5 comes with better performance (with the assumption that that is the actual problem), they may just use the increased amount of performance to add more provinces to lead to the same thing. After all, if you can model more towns and cities, why not?
Eu5 by itself isn’t a solution. (Though I also don’t necessarily agree that there is a problem.)

Also, people have been discussing why Ireland should not have a reduction in provinces, but I would also argue for Japan not to as an example. The whole fun part of playing in Japan is the civil war start, where the large number of tags adds to the experience. Sure it may not need that many OPMs, but it wouldn’t be nearly as fun without them. It’s a gameplay start that is very rare (everyone around you who can realistically threaten you is small but of the same size) that only really matches the Ireland start (with England being a much bigger threat than Ming).

 

[durbal]

I think I made a post about it back then, but I would like to reiterate because it irritates me quite a bit: Ireland is not a good example for this. I know there is a cliché of Ireland being this poor rural backwater that people had to leave in order to avoid starvation. This stereotype is based on rather unfortunate events - the potato blight, mass emigration, persecution by the English and a bloody civil war in the 1920s - in the 19th and 20th century. Things that happened after EU4's timeframe.
Ireland's population almost halved from 8,18 million in 1841 to 4,21 million in 1931. Even today, it is just over 7 million and far from its 1841 level.

In the 17th and 18th century, Ireland was in fact quite densely populated and experiencing rapid growth. It had a population of 1.4 million people in 1600 - only slightly less than the Dutch republic with 1,5 million, about as much as Sweden with 1,36 million people and more than Denmark-Norway with 1 million.
In an 1806 census, it had 5,57 million people - compared to (in 1800) 5,3 million in the USA, 3,3 in Sweden or 2,9 in the Kingdom of Sardinia.

As of 1,33 - if I am counting correctly - Ireland has a total development of 88. The 1600 territory of the Dutch Republic has a total development of 134. Considering their actual population numbers - and taking into account the fact that development does not just represent population - that does not seem out of proportion at all.

There may be places that are "over-represented" in terms of provinces and/or development. Ireland is not one of them. Please stop this memey, ill-informed argument.

And btw, I also disagree strongly with the sentiment of the thread. With recent patches, the game has become a little slower for me, and ideally that should be fixed, but not by cutting down on the number of provinces. And I personally also wish they wouldn't have ruled out adding more provinces. Historical detail and flavour is the one thing that is probably most important for my enjoyment of the game.

Ireland in 1444 compared to central Italy shouldn't even be close in any terms represented by pretty much anything someone can claim development to represent in EU4. The fact that they'd even be comparable is silly. Let's say it like the nonsense that it is -- Kildare has more dev than Perugia at game start.

 

[MatthewP]

Ireland in 1444 compared to central Italy shouldn't even be close in any terms represented by pretty much anything someone can claim development to represent in EU4. The fact that they'd even be comparable is silly. Let's say it like the nonsense that it is -- Kildare has more dev than Perugia at game start.

I think you’re right, but also wrong. It doesn’t seem like there’s any direct real world analog to the development number that would have the numbers for Ireland and central Italy at game start make sense. But that really illustrates that development does not have a direct real world analog and is a game mechanic first and a simulation mechanic only as a distant second.

 

[al.gb]

Adding tons of provinces and tags in Leviathan was a mistake. Should get rid of part of them.