Also back then you stability was always taking a hit so being at +1 stability all the time was very difficult. There were many threads of people complaining about not being able to be at 1 stability the whole game.
I know because I used to exploit the heck out of low stability. heh heh.
OH at -2 stability and I just got an event for another minus stability..... time to break a truce! or break a royal marraige. heh.
England used to be the worst! I once played an MP game as England and I was at -2 or -3 stability almost the whole time. Only ever upped it to declare war.
And this is relevant why?
Your MP are no less lost to you when you take a negative stab hit, when you get an event that is a straight -50 Adm, or when someone takes your province. Should we ban taking provinces in multiplayer because you lose all the development you invested?
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I disagree about the AI needing even more economic boosts for warfare.
They already get alot of boosts. Heck, a tactic in Multiplayer games when you take out a ton of loans is to 'disconnect' and let the AI run your country for a few years to pay everything off.
]When your country is wrecked the AI seem to do a great job and recovering faster than a human player due to their bonus's.
....when your country is prosperous though, the AI tends to squander that wealth.
So why would you ever keep playing with such folks?
If the AI is already squandering what it has, how will giving it relatively
less make it stronger?
Making the AI go bankrupt is actually very difficult. You have to wait until they have ALOT of loans and then sit on them for a long time. All while you got call for peace ticking up your own war exhaustion. ....And then you peace out for 100% and got a 15 year truce for them to recover.
I find its just better to take a province or two, make them annul treaties with their allies, and maybe make them release a nation if they are that big.
When they are a fairly big nation and they have lots of loans - making them release some high income provinces is a real hit. Because now they have a smaller tax base to pay off those loans which were based on a higher income.
So obviously, you've been doing it wrong. First you can force them to take loans. Leave them some provinces open and the AI will build replacement troops even as WE creeps upwards. You crush the new troops, they take out more loans, build more troops, etc. As WE creeps upwards, provinces become less lucrative and rebels pop up. You let these start taking over the place. Other AIs will often begin to declare. You normally want to leave them a safe port to hide their fleet in, they pay to upkeep it, even while it is bottled up doing nothing. Parking a single merc on a fort can lead to them having to pay upkeep there. Do routinely loot every province till the bar empties.
Once the AI is overrun with rebels and vulture AIs it is imperative to peace out for little or no gains. 0% WS is extremely powerful. This does a few things - first it keeps the truce timer low, second it stops the AI from getting the free WE exhaustion from losing a 100% peace (completely wipes out all WE), third it doesn't risk coalitions, and fourth I think it keeps the AI out of some logic loops that make it peace out against other AIs sooner.
AI nations pretty much never recover from this sort of treatment. Taking a province, meh as you note the AI can recover quite well from that and you get to slog through a bunch of forts again soon.
So when can I do this? When I have outgrown the AI. Making things more expensive will make this sort of abuse far cheaper. And it is not like this doesn't happen already. France regularly implodes the worst not when it gets handily crushed by England & friends, but when it gets into a sequence of rolling wars (before England peaces out, Burgundy declares, then Provence & Milan, then maybe Brittany & Castille). This can result in all manner of fun rebels breaking the place and taking the AI under. Once the rebels start, it is all but over for the AI. Anything that makes the AI spend more money on war makes this sort of positive feedback loop (war makes AI poor, poor AI makes for juicy target for vulture AIs, which makes AI poorer) much more likely.
From a historical perspective, the amount of peace time needed in the game is drastically too high. They don't call it the 80 Years War for nothing nor the Thirty or Hundred. Historically wars brought countries low because they waged them
all of the time. There has been something on the order of 200-300 years of peace in
all of recorded human history. Take Great Britain. From 1700 to 1800 there were a grand total of 22 years of
peace (between the 4th Anglo-Abenaki War and the War of Austrian Succession, between the second Carnatic War and the Seven Years War, and between the First Anglo-Mysore war and the First Anglo-Maratha War). States should be able to wage war far closer to continuously.
Now this is bad for gameplay because historical wars were limited affairs. You went, sieged some place, maybe fought a big battle, and then you went to the peace table because fighting long wars was ruinous to both sides. Fighting at EUIV intensity for historical durations is far, far beyond the ability of any state at the time, but this is largely because fighting to the total exhaustion (something not really seen until the late Victorian era too much, and certainly not by any major power) was utterly foreign in real life.
So to recap, you acknowledge that the AI is already too poor with the current cost of war to be threatening. So you want to make war more expensive so it will be even less like period history and more like WWI. This so you can feel better about slowly outgrowing an AI that has been nerfed into easy mode. Gotcha.
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