Like CK2 when most of your vassals declare war on you. Be hilarious seeing someone's enormous vassal nearly as big as its master after being fed provinces, suddenly declare independence because of all the turmoil caused by its master. Then joined by its other vassals. Can you imagine all the whining in these forums if that happened. Bring it on.
Vassal feeding too easy?
- Thread starter Demusch
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Like CK2 when most of your vassals declare war on you. Be hilarious seeing someone's enormous vassal nearly as big as its master after being fed provinces, suddenly declare independence because of all the turmoil caused by its master. Then joined by its other vassals. Can you imagine all the whining in these forums if that happened. Bring it on.
People won't be content until you are having fun the way they play. Honestly the correct approach after all this nonsense is to actually remove achievements. Making achievements real has been the driving force of all these ridiculous changes to game play mechanics. Thus achievements should simply be scrapped.
I believe you're confusing the issue somewhat by setting an end goal that involves walking over inferior opposition in an optimized fashion.
When your end goal is not walking over inferior opposition in an optimized fashion, a player who invests in military ideas and policies will walk all over such a setup, especially because junk vassals like Timurids will feed war score. I don't see how such a setup holds up to 3-4 military ideas with innovative + 2-3 full combat widths.
This is the same patch where one bad war against a human can cost you everything you own that isn't primary culture via WE camping. Such a strategy has potential rewards in terms of land grab, but it has risk too, including devoting 2 full idea groups to ideas that do absolutely nothing to boost the quality of your military or navy.
I don't see where the issue is for the late-game to have some fast pacing in uncontested SP. 1.8 handles the pacing best out of any patch I've seen so far. If the game is effectively over (IE you can walk over everything w/o trying), what is the difference between a big land grab with massed autonomy and riding out a #1 score in SP? Nothing, unless you want the achievement.
Exactly. Plus, it's more like three idea groups, cause when you start annexing vassals that'll floor your dip pool for a decade or two, you'd best have a zero-dip-cost CB consistently available in the meanwhile. Course, and as you say, a zero-dip show-superiority cb can turn vassals into a liability.
I'm not gonna say there aren't issues with the current transfer-occupation mechanic, mostly to do with sabotaging allies. But vassal feeding too easy? Too easy for what? Consolidating a game you've already won? Who cares? If anyone here really cares about game balance, one would think the proper question is not about vassal feeding, but rather how easy it is to snowball in single player. But no, everyone here seems more interested in putting up arbitrary magical walls to curb map painting once the game's already won.
Vassal feeding makes snowballing easier by reducing the limiting effect of admin points, LA, unrest and OE. So it seems like a very good thing to analyze. What's more proper in your opinion?
MP is for all intents and purposes a different game, however. In SP you're better off not picking military ideas at all as a major European tag (Sweden in my example), or at most one for convenience (forced march is what it is). In MP you have to stack military ideas or die. Obviously you'd never do this in MP (or rather, you couldn't, since you'd be killed off quickly enough), but that's not really the point. There are plenty of strategies that only pertain to SP, so however well this feature works in MP is of little relevance.
While I agree that it doesn't much matter how trivial it makes the endgame (until Paradox finally introduces a mechanic to punish endless epansion nothing really will), it affects a lot more than that. Before you're strong enough to ignore AE outright, vassals form a protective buffer that prevents the forming of coalitions--the hordes are especially well suited to this becuase of their unique CB, which allows you to feed them virtually all of central Asia while never needing to face a serious threat. As for potential abuses of the system, the most glaring one is quite effective in MP too--more so than in SP, really.
I'd prefer it if vassals only willingly accepted claims, assuming that vassals are fixed to fabricate claims properly (at the moment the inconsistency here is terrible--while they will happily fabricate claims on your rivals, anything else seems to be a matter of pure luck). Allies in wars should never under any circumstances accept land that they do not want. So if you have a Korean vassal feeding them their fabricated claims on nearby Japanese and Chinese provinces would be fine, but not feeding them half of the Chinese coastline in a single war because you can.
While I agree that it doesn't much matter how trivial it makes the endgame (until Paradox finally introduces a mechanic to punish endless epansion nothing really will), it affects a lot more than that. Before you're strong enough to ignore AE outright, vassals form a protective buffer that prevents the forming of coalitions--the hordes are especially well suited to this becuase of their unique CB, which allows you to feed them virtually all of central Asia while never needing to face a serious threat. As for potential abuses of the system, the most glaring one is quite effective in MP too--more so than in SP, really.
I'd prefer it if vassals only willingly accepted claims, assuming that vassals are fixed to fabricate claims properly (at the moment the inconsistency here is terrible--while they will happily fabricate claims on your rivals, anything else seems to be a matter of pure luck). Allies in wars should never under any circumstances accept land that they do not want. So if you have a Korean vassal feeding them their fabricated claims on nearby Japanese and Chinese provinces would be fine, but not feeding them half of the Chinese coastline in a single war because you can.
If I pick one military NI in SP as a Euro superpower (which I almost never play, but still), especially with the strategy you highlight, it's aristocratic. That way you can annex an extra vassal simultaneously and slap an extra general on your armies as you conquer multiple areas at once.
As for relevance, it is important. When you're comparing the relative strength of choices, the most relevant way to determine something's strength is to look how it holds up in a competitive environment. Absent that environment, why do we care if something is particularly effective in certain contexts? You can 1-tag the world as Ottomans w/o it still for example, so what's so bad about also being able to do it, through different means that require more investment, as other nations?
Nothing, especially when in a competitive environment you don't even consider it as a realistic possibility.
They do not, unless you deliberately avoid a port. You could be strong enough to ignore AE outright in every patch iteration of this game without exception. The only thing that has changed over time is how badly AE creates an artificial wall through unified truces limiting war score gains, a fake barrier I don't mind seeing gone in 1.8 because the pacing of the late game, should you care to play it out, is so much better.
Feeding vassals is fine. They're your subjects and you are strengthening them. In a competitive environment, this carries risk as they can be engineered to no longer be your subject, and then you're screwed.
I agree with your assertion with allies. The turbo revoke thing is ridiculous, but the occupation transfer --> give ally crap it can't core incentive is high even without that, and it creates scenarios where you can actively screw a nation over as its ally in a big way, giving it massed overextension it can't core or imploding it through huge OE on purpose. Considering that right now you can even do this to other players (in theory anyway), it's something that should be fixed up.
EU IV is an SP game with MP functionality, not the other way around. Arguing that a feature is sound because it's somewhat balanced in MP doesn't magically make it so in SP (where it actually matters to most players--while I enjoy MP myself I don't fool myself into believing that most players play MP) -- you won't achieve a WC in MP (most of the time you'll have difficulty building a large empire as it is without significant backing from other players) so most strategies and idea groups aimed towards building large empires are automatically out as they're not viable in an MP environment.
As for being competitive, EU IV is not and will never be as it lacks the most important quality of a competitive game--predictability. If anything it's on the opposite side of the spectrum considering how much comes down to dumb luck. This makes for entertaining and often surprising games, but not competitive. Add to that that MP is plagued by houserules, turning every session into a scrubfest. Artifical rules are the signature mark of scrubs, and EU IV MP is full of them.
Of course you can't prevent every single tag from forming or joining a coalition, but it's rarely in your interest to do so. Outside of central Asia, few tags care if you go wild feeding your horde vassal the other hordes, and those tags can't reach you if you your vassals correctly. Similarly, the HRE mainly consists of landlocked tags, allowing for feeding of vassals surrounding them, cutting off all but a few tags that you can keep for CB purposes (you don't want to end up having to no-CB DoW tags because you insulated them to much, after all). Most places in the world can be treated in a similar manner, especially now that coalitions are utterly impotent.
So you accept that vassal feeding is far too easy in the absence of competent players to exploit it, yet you believe it's working fine? Out of curiosity, how many times have you lost control of your vassals in SP due to your own incompetence, e.g., not because of some random undocumented patch change?
But the turbo revoke isn't viable in your competitive environment--any competent players would shut down such a strategy before it could take off--so it should be acceptable then? As you said, "You can 1-tag the world as Ottomans w/o it still for example, so what's so bad about also being able to do it, through different means that require more investment, as other nations? Nothing, especially when in a competitive environment you don't even consider it as a realistic possibility." This is something many tags can do, although Austria has an easier time doing so. Of course, I'd be glad to see it go.
Being able to make allies implode is even cheesier than vassal feeding, and in MP it's even more powerful. Then again, MP is practically a different game, as it not only plays differently but comes with all sorts of weird artifical rules.
It arguably makes snowballing faster, once you've passed a certain threshold. Vassal feeding does not in any substantial way make conquering rivals any easier. In fact, the opposite will tend to be true, given the investment in non-military idea groups required to turn vassal feeding into an efficient long-term strategy. Your post speaks exactly to my point: this forum is obsessed with speed rather than difficulty, with curbing map painting rather than adding challenge. And that's a fine preference to have; I just wish people here would own it rather than pretending that by standing against the evils (ooooo evils!) of map painting in games that are already won, they stand in support of game balance.
No. Game balance is about fostering a competitive environment. EU4, in single player, once vassal feeding antics become relevant, is not a competitive environment. It's a steam-achievement farm. You start as a large or small nation. Some starts require luck. But if you know the mechanics of the game reasonably well, and if you get past the crucial starting stage intact, it's only a matter of time before you reach effectively-unkillable status, vassal feeding or not.
During that crucial starting stage, in fact, taking full advantage of vassal feeding is likely to be counter-productive, given the current coalition mechanics. You wanna know the most substantially overpowered mechanic in the game? Alliances. "Oooh, i'm starting as this tiny OPM ... However will I cope? <shifty eyes, allies France>"
This is a game in SP that lacks express goals. There is no win condition. WC is one of any number of things you can attempt, and a potentially draining one at that depending on which nation you pick. It is not some fundamental end-goal any more than any other goal the player sets.
You highlight this strategy as particularly good for WC. Okay, but WC isn't the point of the game. Why did you pick that achievement? Because it highlights the strength of this tactic. You didn't pick Sunset Invasion, African Power, Venetian Sea, Shahanshah, or re-Reconquista. You didn't pick no trail of tears or luck of the Irish. You picked WC as if it's obvious that's the goal.
But what if it isn't? Even if you're just going for score, snagging early income stuff and beating down other top contenders will get you to 1st/1st/1st early and it isn't hard to stay there depending on who you are...