Hello,
i love the new levies feature, but i believe it will worsen game balance significantly. Since game release late game in I:R was similar to a ww1 scenario with infinite manpower/gold and 1million+ armies (in my opinion this is caused by pop growth and "few to nonexistent pop death" + all the tech boosts), 2.0 as of now is magnifying this problem because of levies. The two biggest gold sinks army maintenance and inventions are almost gone. So gold will as abundant as sand in the desert.
For example at game start base on the pictures shown in the dev diary, rome can muster a 45k levy, from an initial 400pops. However in my last game i had this many roman pops:
That means i can raise approx. 1.600.000 levies only from my roman pops(not considering possible levy boosts), and i already have another ~1.000.000 standing army with 500k manpower in the pool, with a ridiculous gold income, this is in 60BC btw. Historically i should have 40-100k armies during this period, never on the millions.
You might say that there is a cost to raising the levies and that balances it, but actually NO. The gold is almost exclusively generated by slaves via tax & commerce income (trade goods surpluses), and slaves aren't levied, so the penalties for raising the levies are practically non existent, specially in mid-late game when gold/mnpwr are infinite and you have so many surpluses.
For example, in the pictures from the latest Dev diary you see that raising the levies will cost -2.74 gold, however since there is no standing armies anymore the initial gold income for rome is 4.17 per tick, so even when levies are raised you would still make a lot of gold.
To make matters worse, because we no longer need to carpet siege there is almost no pop death, before the only way to kill pops was through occupation, now you only need to occupy capital/forts.
As for suggestions i will be vague since there are many ways to do it and devs are the ones who would know better than i do what is possible:
1- Eliminate manpower completely and spend pops for recruitment, also pop death always when levies partially/completely die (not only when stackwiped).
2- Reduce slaves tax income and increase freemen/citizien/nobles tax income, also for getting surpluses you need other pops as well, not just slaves, because it comes a point when commerce income>>>tax income. This way the cost of raising the levies is actually very significant as it should be.
3-Add a food production penalty when raising levies so provinces tend to starve reflecting the fact that the farmers goes to war. Also increase food consumption across the board. We need more starvation for "pop growth control" and making food resources the most important resources as it should be.
4-Add disease mechanics?
5-Hard/soft caps in army size & command. (like in hoi4)
6-Rework civil wars & slave revolts & make them more common for more death?
7-Add gold sinks.
I know many people hate the idea of lower pop growth and RNG since it interferes with the easy map painting aspirations of many. But you can please both sides by modifying the difficulties to make harder difficulties have more RNG and bigger penalties as they should to have a challenging and historical game.
I really hope you put a high priority on balancing the game as well and not just adding new features. I only mention things about 2.0, but a lot of things from previous version needs balancing as well, like loyalty, since i can basically have free standing armies & navies by just assigning low loyalty generals and then bribe+make friends.
Please take your time with 2.0 even it takes a lot, i am willing to wait.
That's all Discuss!
i love the new levies feature, but i believe it will worsen game balance significantly. Since game release late game in I:R was similar to a ww1 scenario with infinite manpower/gold and 1million+ armies (in my opinion this is caused by pop growth and "few to nonexistent pop death" + all the tech boosts), 2.0 as of now is magnifying this problem because of levies. The two biggest gold sinks army maintenance and inventions are almost gone. So gold will as abundant as sand in the desert.
For example at game start base on the pictures shown in the dev diary, rome can muster a 45k levy, from an initial 400pops. However in my last game i had this many roman pops:
That means i can raise approx. 1.600.000 levies only from my roman pops(not considering possible levy boosts), and i already have another ~1.000.000 standing army with 500k manpower in the pool, with a ridiculous gold income, this is in 60BC btw. Historically i should have 40-100k armies during this period, never on the millions.
You might say that there is a cost to raising the levies and that balances it, but actually NO. The gold is almost exclusively generated by slaves via tax & commerce income (trade goods surpluses), and slaves aren't levied, so the penalties for raising the levies are practically non existent, specially in mid-late game when gold/mnpwr are infinite and you have so many surpluses.
For example, in the pictures from the latest Dev diary you see that raising the levies will cost -2.74 gold, however since there is no standing armies anymore the initial gold income for rome is 4.17 per tick, so even when levies are raised you would still make a lot of gold.
To make matters worse, because we no longer need to carpet siege there is almost no pop death, before the only way to kill pops was through occupation, now you only need to occupy capital/forts.
As for suggestions i will be vague since there are many ways to do it and devs are the ones who would know better than i do what is possible:
1- Eliminate manpower completely and spend pops for recruitment, also pop death always when levies partially/completely die (not only when stackwiped).
2- Reduce slaves tax income and increase freemen/citizien/nobles tax income, also for getting surpluses you need other pops as well, not just slaves, because it comes a point when commerce income>>>tax income. This way the cost of raising the levies is actually very significant as it should be.
3-Add a food production penalty when raising levies so provinces tend to starve reflecting the fact that the farmers goes to war. Also increase food consumption across the board. We need more starvation for "pop growth control" and making food resources the most important resources as it should be.
4-Add disease mechanics?
5-Hard/soft caps in army size & command. (like in hoi4)
6-Rework civil wars & slave revolts & make them more common for more death?
7-Add gold sinks.
I know many people hate the idea of lower pop growth and RNG since it interferes with the easy map painting aspirations of many. But you can please both sides by modifying the difficulties to make harder difficulties have more RNG and bigger penalties as they should to have a challenging and historical game.
I really hope you put a high priority on balancing the game as well and not just adding new features. I only mention things about 2.0, but a lot of things from previous version needs balancing as well, like loyalty, since i can basically have free standing armies & navies by just assigning low loyalty generals and then bribe+make friends.
Please take your time with 2.0 even it takes a lot, i am willing to wait.
That's all Discuss!
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