We are drowning in money. Please make it stop.

[iquabakaner]

For a solution to the standing armies issue:

Tie it to Centralization. With low centralization you have little to perhaps no army force limit (force limit representing your standing army). Increasing your centralization increases your army force limit, however, as you do the cost of maintaining said army goes up.

Currently there are two force limits, army and navy. I suggest a third one: A Levy Force Limit. They're similar in mechanics to the flag armies introduced for the Manchu (meaning you raise them on a state by state basis), except when they're on the march in foreign territories they take higher attrition, representing their relative lack of desire to be too far from home (desertions and so on).

I also recommend being able to go negative with centralization. If a country goes into negative attrition then if they leave their home state. This would be helpful in representing the Americans during their revolution.

Centralization can also tie with minimum autonomy, instead of the state system right now where we have either 0 or 75%.

 

[randomgamer71]

Well, the game was originally balanced so that an average player could not WC. But what's considered an average player on the forums today is miles ahead of what an average player is, and what an average player was when game was released. We all learned an enormous deal by watching vids, reading AARs and reading answers from better players. It's hard to balance that so that new players still enjoy the game.

Anyway I don't see why making WC less achievable would solve the issue you raise, or has anything to do with it being or not the final goal of the game. I've done my fair share of WC, I do that once in a while still, but that's not my final goal in most campaigns. I don't see why making WC harder would give me more fun when I don't aim for a WC.

So far, we could say WC can be boring because of the excessive minmax/micro, and that tall play is boring because of the lack of things to aim for that do not require blobbing. Making WC harder, if anything, will make it even more boring because of minmax/micro, while not helping at all with the issue of tall play lacking flavour.

I think the problem is that the game need something else to do that is not conquest and war, something interesting to do, that is.

At the moment, the only thing interesting in the game is war, everything else is an accessory, you trade to gain money to afford an army, you research to have a better army (or to gain more money for the army) and you spread your religion so you have less rebels that distract your army.

So you make wars and conquest other provinces and grow stronger, and not just because it is fun, but because if you don't grow strong someone else will and then it will attack you, and then you'll lose the game. it is literally conquest or die

But you arrive at a certain point when you are so big and strong than wars stop being interesting because they are not challenging anymore, you being so much stronger than everyone else, and because there is nothing else interesting to do you usually quit.

now, world conquests, I'm not saying they are easy, but I don't find them interesting, even in the AARs I've seen are the most boring part (and a part where I hope something go wrong for the player because at that point they look like they are bullying the other smaller nations, yeah, I know, it is silly), they seems more an exercise in micromanaging and min-maxing where you synchronize building claims and war declarations to use more efficiently the remaining time and release the right vassals and feed them province to optimize your monarch points, and so on. Challenging? certainly, but not my kind of challenge.

The game need something else interesting to do that is not war, and a way to gain power that is not conquest (there are some way at the moment but they are inefficient if confronted with war) so maybe you could do something else beside conquering everything until it lose interest (and even if you do it you could have something else to do..

 

[Sfan]

I don't know if you quoted one of my posts because that's exactly what I say since the beginning of that topic (and the numerous others), but yes, I wholeheartedly agree. Even if I add that the WC is not the only end challenge there is and that money cap is another one that removes the tedious island hopping in the pacific, sieging of level 8 forts of GB on a random island and America's large scale invasion.

 

[durbal]

I sure as hell don't drown in money in 1600 VH, neither does florry or marco, dunno what game the rest of these guys are playing

Yeah you do, you just spend it. The problem of too much money in the game isn't that players don't like big green numbers on the UI.

 

[Geodynamis]

Recently we vastly improved the AI's ability at building good buildings. This increased the money they had and, therefore all the money in the game.

So I took a good look at mid-late game finances and the biggest issue I had with it was how cheap warfare was, particularly as the game progresses. Oftentimes, Napoleonic units would be cheaper to maintain than the early gaggle of halberd men. A fairly ridiculous situation to say the least.

Unit costs have been increased the later into the game we get. Additionally the myriad of reductions to this cost (we've added many sources of maintenance cost reduction) have been reduced. The result is that large military mobilizations will prove more costly as the game progresses, and a sound economy will be required to maintain one for long. A couple other minor adjustments have been made, such as the large amount of trade and production bonuses from tech, and through observing overnights and playing, it seems to have tightened up the vast amounts of money in the mid-late game.

Of course it's something we'll continue to monitor, so I welcome any feedback on it once 1.25 lands. Thanks for your comments.

Do any of these changes hopefully curtail mercenary spam?