But they do invalidate the other balance changes for the reasons I explained. The reasoning was "you should have to carefully consider...", but you have to be less careful than ever. Now the solution is obvious due to this one weird trick. Agree to disagree. There should be game options where you can turn the cancer up to 11 on yourself if you love the corruption so much and the rest of us don't have to suffer through it. I already impose VH on myself. It's my choice, is it okay with you?
We had 5 dev diarys already and not one mentioned fixing the current problems of the game
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You know, Twoflower, until I read that line, I was interested in reading an opinion that, while different from my own, seemed as well informed as your opinions have in the past.
But if you really think the religious changes, as implemented, improve the game, I suspect we are no longer playing the same game. Or that you haven't really played much under the current patch. Which, unfortunately, makes me inclined to discount some of your other thoughts.
I'm not talking about the conceptual change to make conversions more difficult/expensive for players. I could see some justification for that. I'm talking about the practical change that the AI simply can't handle: making religious conversions by AI nations rare to non-existent; making vassal conversions absolutely non-existent; guaranteeing a fairly static religious map with pagan provinces scattered across Africa and Asia, late game.
And that's not even considering the stunningly ahistorical, yet apparently conscious, decision that makes New World colonization a farce. Instead of the strenuous historical efforts by all colonizing nations to spread the "true faith" to the benighted heathers, we see them happily accepting pre-Columbian religions across the board, and promoting scattered Sunni colonies.
This may represent someone's fantasy regarding how American colonization could have or should have occurred. But it bears no resemblance to what actually occurred ANYWHERE in North or South America during the games timeframe. Indeed, the desire to convert natives was one of the major motivations for, and justification of, such colonization. Even Paradox's advertising has echoed these themes.
Oh, I am afraid I was being imprecise.
By religion changes I meant the increased conversion cost.
I absolutely agree that the AI's inability/unwillingness to convert since the change is a problem. Religious (and cultural) conversion by the AI was a little too common previously. The current situation is not ideal, and yes, something should be done about this. What I would like to see is for the increased conversion costs to remain and for the AI to be taught to deal with this sensibly and competently, not for the increased conversion costs to be rolled back.
As for Sunni colonies: expel minorities is a feature that looked somewhat good on paper, but that sometimes has absurdly ahistorical consequences in the game. The Sunni colonies, English-cultured Ireland and Castilian-cultured Sicily and Catalonia are silly, yet very common occurences as a result of expel minorities. Something should be changed about it. But that is a different topic altogether
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I don't get what these issues are.
Corruption places a limit in fantasy growth, outside historic proportions.
Religion conversion is a matter of altering some defines. You can either decrease the cost to convert, increase the percentage of income the AI spends on conversions or do both...
I would say that most of the community that sees the corruption change as a positive perceive the mechanic as something that punishes power-gamey super blobs, but the fact is that power-gamey super blobs were already using subjects and TCs, Administrative is a necessary idea group anyway, and it's not hard to squeeze in espionage near the end if you need it. I just did a WC where I never had more than 2 corruption.
So people who see it as a way to slow down blobbing and support it for that reason are supporting it based on its design purpose rather than its actual effect on the game.
What it actually does to the game is arbitrarily tax the poorest or most difficult regions of the game. Starting in Asia or Africa and trying to an achievement requiring owning a huge chunk of land is now doubly expensive from the combination of uni-directional trade steering and rooting out corruption.
This, in turn, makes it even easier for the Europeans to blob out of control, since any big threat in Asia will be arbitrarily double-taxed by corruption and bad trade.
So the reason it's bad design is that it fails at what it intended and merely reinforces already dominant strategies.
I don't see these as gameplay issues, more balance decision choices made by devs, I assume, to help regulate the difficulty of achievement challenges. They are moddable with relative ease, and it should not be difficult for the original poster to find existing mods that make the changes that they desire.
Even in unmodded ironman gameplay, there are options to mitigate the effects of the mechanics that seem to so upset the original poster. Those options have opportunity costs, by design. Opportunity costs introduce the factor of strategic choice, which some people appreciate, but clearly not everybody.
Even in unmodded ironman gameplay, there are options to mitigate the effects of the mechanics that seem to so upset the original poster. Those options have opportunity costs, by design. Opportunity costs introduce the factor of strategic choice, which some people appreciate, but clearly not everybody.
Oh yeah I agree with you, when you're a seasoned player you will find the money, and even if you don't find it you will create money out of conquest, and even if it's too expensive you will know how to deal with the consequences and bide your time. Of course, the AI doesn't, and that has been absolutely destroying the game, but other have made that (main) point.
The (side) point I wanted to make is that by tying religion cost you will ask the player who wants to convert this province to:
- not raise autonomy (goes against the tooltip explanation and loading screen hint)
- statify it to lower the autonomy floor (and that somehow reduces the cost even if you don't core)
- apply edict
- if you have a province with 0% autonomy do not assign the clergy or the cost will increase despite the tooltip claiming otherwise
- though luck on you if AI increased autonomy
all these things are not logical => Therefore I'm convinced there is poor design at work here. Individually, these things could be fixed, but to be honest is it really worth it? What does the formula (dev)^{1+autonomy} mean? Is it tied to the number of people that do not pay taxes? No, it's not. I'd like to see the full computation, then we'd get a number that makes sense and that one we can fix to have a adequate design.
I wholeheartedly agree. I just finished a 3rd way faith (Mzab starter), no money/corruption issues (I didn't even need to spam the muslim button on cooldown) once my capital was in europe.
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Overall, having done a WC post corruption changes, it's not necessarily a game breaker. I do think corruption needs a rework though---primarily diplomatic reputation related. You should be concerned if your neighbors/allies view you as corrupt. Let's be honest, you're a human player, you're going to betray them anyway. Perhaps you gain bonus diplomatic rep with other corrupt nations and vice versa?
Or the simple solution might be if you're taking provinces that you don't have a CB for they cause a flat corruption penalty. None of this too many territories 0.8% ongoing mess. Every province you don't have a valid reason for taking causes 0.05 corruption/dev as a one-time hit. That may make + spy network construction a little more valuable.
Or the simple solution might be if you're taking provinces that you don't have a CB for they cause a flat corruption penalty. None of this too many territories 0.8% ongoing mess. Every province you don't have a valid reason for taking causes 0.05 corruption/dev as a one-time hit. That may make + spy network construction a little more valuable.
I'm totally waiting for flat corruption per province taken in a peace deal. Wouldn't surprise me at this point.
My problems with the changes in 1.26-1.28 in a nutshell: Strong things got buffed, weak things got nerfed.
Worst offender: Trade Companies. In 1.25, the best move is almost always to get some of them as your economic power base - be it by going towards India as a European or African or by moving your cap out of Asia if you start there. 1.26 then introduced penalties that are more or less countered by TCs.
Convertion is considerably slower now? Just conquer TC land, you don't need to convert it since both negative Tolerance and Religious Unity impact are ignored. And after a temporary pullback in 1.27, 1.28 pushed further into 1.26's direction by making convertion even slower (through the effective removal of your vassals' missionaries), more expensive, and more annoying (since you can't increase autonomy anymore and half-stating is more or less obligatory in the early- to midgame).
You want to conquer the piss-poor steppe lands in order to make you name nice and big, but you can't afford to pay down the ensuing corruption? Conquer India!
You're approaching your state limit, so you're worried that future conquests will have massively reduced pay-off? Nah, just conquer India!
The Ottomans are once again crushing it and you just can't keep up with their income and forcelimit? You guessed it: Conquer India!
You're going for the African Power achievement? First of all (well, after unifying your home region), you should snipe the cape from the Europeans, monopolize Zanzibar and... Conquer! God! Damn! India!
I'm sorry, but I just cannot see how it is more engaging or demands more thought from the player when the answer to 95% of the questions that EU4 poses is "go for TC land" (the remaining 5% are solved by no-CBing into Ireland). To quote the Dharma manual (which I think I've done before, but it's too good to pass up):
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And honestly, the way Humanist was nerfed also fits in the nutshell from the first paragraph. I even think it's sensible that Humanist got weakened, but hitting the Tolerance ideas is probably the worst way to do it. Unless I'm very mistaken, it's completely irelevant for some of the strongest religions (or tag/religion combinations) since they can still reach +3 Heathen tolerance - Tengri (w/ yellow shamanism and Hindu or Mahayana as syncretic faith) and Indian Sultanates (+4 heathen tolerance when at 100 Legitimacy, which is sufficient) just laugh at these silly balance efforts.
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Finally: What's so great about the corruption mechanics, anyways? It's just a money sink with a fancy name, unless you get to the point where you can't pay it down anymore. It either trends towards 100% or to 0%, it's not something you play with, it's just something that you pay down. You could just replace the corruption caused by OE by an equivalent monthly gold cost and have practically the same effect on gameplay.
Worst offender: Trade Companies. In 1.25, the best move is almost always to get some of them as your economic power base - be it by going towards India as a European or African or by moving your cap out of Asia if you start there. 1.26 then introduced penalties that are more or less countered by TCs.
Convertion is considerably slower now? Just conquer TC land, you don't need to convert it since both negative Tolerance and Religious Unity impact are ignored. And after a temporary pullback in 1.27, 1.28 pushed further into 1.26's direction by making convertion even slower (through the effective removal of your vassals' missionaries), more expensive, and more annoying (since you can't increase autonomy anymore and half-stating is more or less obligatory in the early- to midgame).
You want to conquer the piss-poor steppe lands in order to make you name nice and big, but you can't afford to pay down the ensuing corruption? Conquer India!
You're approaching your state limit, so you're worried that future conquests will have massively reduced pay-off? Nah, just conquer India!
The Ottomans are once again crushing it and you just can't keep up with their income and forcelimit? You guessed it: Conquer India!
You're going for the African Power achievement? First of all (well, after unifying your home region), you should snipe the cape from the Europeans, monopolize Zanzibar and... Conquer! God! Damn! India!
I'm sorry, but I just cannot see how it is more engaging or demands more thought from the player when the answer to 95% of the questions that EU4 poses is "go for TC land" (the remaining 5% are solved by no-CBing into Ireland). To quote the Dharma manual (which I think I've done before, but it's too good to pass up):
In the current state of the game, this is pure mockery - even ignoring the factually wrong (TC provinces do, in fact, provide manpower) and misleading (TC land not counting as states is a big advantage) parts - but I'd be very happy if the devs would come up with a rework of the whole system that makes it an actual decision whether or not to press the TC button, be it by resticting the amount of TC land one can have, by heavily nerfing Trade Companies, or (preferably) both.
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And honestly, the way Humanist was nerfed also fits in the nutshell from the first paragraph. I even think it's sensible that Humanist got weakened, but hitting the Tolerance ideas is probably the worst way to do it. Unless I'm very mistaken, it's completely irelevant for some of the strongest religions (or tag/religion combinations) since they can still reach +3 Heathen tolerance - Tengri (w/ yellow shamanism and Hindu or Mahayana as syncretic faith) and Indian Sultanates (+4 heathen tolerance when at 100 Legitimacy, which is sufficient) just laugh at these silly balance efforts.
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Finally: What's so great about the corruption mechanics, anyways? It's just a money sink with a fancy name, unless you get to the point where you can't pay it down anymore. It either trends towards 100% or to 0%, it's not something you play with, it's just something that you pay down. You could just replace the corruption caused by OE by an equivalent monthly gold cost and have practically the same effect on gameplay.
And then what should we, the players, do in a game that has nothing to offer besides "blobbing"? Incentivize players to not blob is like saying that only map starring is allowed unless there are interesting ways to deal (work around) with the mechanics that incentivize the player to not blob (like the OE and AE). Everything introduced in 1.26 is 100% uninteresting apart from the policies rework (the tab and a handfull of them) and the gov reforms and even then they decided to link reforms with LA to incentivize players to sit on their asses if they want the reforms ASAP; nothing can beat an OPM at that...fun! Regardless of not agreeing with your opinion I want to say thank you for the compliments on the other post.
So you are a small and backward tribe, and you were not able to convert your population.
Where's the issue?
People been complaining that religious conversion was too easy for years.
It gets made harder.
People complain it's too hard.
It is not harder just very stupid and intellectually insulting if you ask me. People around here seem to confuse difficulty with tedium, in like the higher the tedium levels the more difficult the game is; IMO these changes only make the game more difficult from a RL perspective as it keeps testing my patience instead of stimulating my brain to keep me interested.
The corruption mechanic is not based on any real life history, it is just made up out of thin air. Administration, logistics and diplomacy were the limiting factors, not corruption. And then it doesn't even do its job it was designed for. It just massively railroads the game and discriminates certain regions over others and certain states over others. It decreases the fun in the game in a big way as many options are taken away to stay active and ponder on what to do next, just speed 5 and a drink is best advised. They even took away any means to curve this forced (upon us) game redesign with end-tags and limited capital movement.
It is looking like a disaster but nothing will change. They had plenty of time to do something and not even a word about it. On top of that we get the conversion changes, the complete idiocy of the AI and some push button DLC's.
It is looking like a disaster but nothing will change. They had plenty of time to do something and not even a word about it. On top of that we get the conversion changes, the complete idiocy of the AI and some push button DLC's.
I think it should be better if they add unrest or autonomy penalty instead of corruption.This will give some things to do outside of war.When i see Imperator,it sounds very better than EU4 for the things to do outside of war.I hope they will develop this in the future.The corruption mechanic is not based on any real life history, it is just made up out of thin air. Administration, logistics and diplomacy were the limiting factors, not corruption. And then it doesn't even do its job it was designed for. It just massively railroads the game and discriminates certain regions over others and certain states over others. It decreases the fun in the game in a big way as many options are taken away to stay active and ponder on what to do next, just speed 5 and a drink is best advised. They even took away any means to curve this forced (upon us) game redesign with end-tags and limited capital movement.
It is looking like a disaster but nothing will change. They had plenty of time to do something and not even a word about it. On top of that we get the conversion changes, the complete idiocy of the AI and some push button DLC's.
Cordially.
How about instead of tantruming you learn a strategy to deal with it? Considering you have over 10k hours you should be able to do that much, yes?
As someone who has much less hours in the game, I really hate it when people like you claim to be speaking for people like me. I do not get bored in the slightest playing EU IV, and the issues I have with the game are not the false "issue" of religious conversions costing money, but more practical matters such as the infinite amount of mercs as you get past 1650 or the inevitable stratification of alliances after 1650. EU IV has a major issue of the mid-late to late game being extremely insufferable. I could care less about religion, half the Great Powers are in two alliances and they don't give a crap about casualties because mercs are the meta.
Yeah, you can think of many other and better ways to punish over-extension. Don't know about rebels though (we already have enough) but increased autonomy with distance most certainly would be a better and easy solution.
Generally,i stop my games before 1600 because once you are big,you don't really have penalties,the corruption change is fastidious but it doesn't really give big penalties.I hope in the later patches,they will considerably improve the estates and the internal politics.
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Let's debunk this. There has never to this day been a reasonable debate over corruption changes. The supposed "support" for the new changes comes entirely from people who are upset that the person is attacking the game developers, and/or from people who admittedly never encounter it. You may be upset at the open hostility many players have let loose over this issue, but understand the main reason why these players might be so angry: they're being told something is fine from people who have an entirely uninformed opinion.
Every game that in this and neighboring genres has to answer the question of how will expansion be penalized. The two theoretical extreme positions to the answer are:
Double the land, double the strength
Additional land is never worth it
Now for obvious reasons either of these extremes is bad. In the first situation you quickly snowball out of control, and the game becomes trivial after a war or two. On the other hand, additional land never being worth it kills the motivation to expand, which is the main motivation behind the game. Even small indie studios understand this and pick some kind of middleground option usually incurring temporary penalties, such that the land acquisition isn't worth it in the short-term, and acquiring too much of these short-term penalties can stall your country entirely.
EU4 5 years after release has suddenly gone with the 2nd option. There's a number of states/territories "X" that once you exceed it you receive an unnegotiable penalty that makes the addition of all territory after X bad. The cost you pay to buy down the corruption is always more than the profit from the territory. This isn't because of some strategic "you took land you weren't supposed too lulz". It happens with any land after you have X states. This is quite possibly the most embarrassingly bad gameplay decision PDX as a company has ever made, on any game. It's a completely asinine answer to a question that many companies, PDX included, have already found better solutions to for the past 20 years. It's the equivalent to DDRJake making a dev diary claiming to have reinvented the wheel and the new shape is square.
Yes there are "loopholes" such that the above reasoning isn't absolute. Currently that loophole is to either rush TC land or vassal storm. The two strategies that were already the most OP in the game now become mandatory. It's also worth noting there is actually an upper bound # of territories "Y" where additional land suddenly, mysteriously, no longer has an additional corruption penalty. This completely undermines whatever the supposed reasoning behind the corruption penalty was to begin with. It also means there is a number of territories, "Z" such that finally you've made a long-term profit on states acquired after X. The difficulty is ofc getting to this Z value. Right now the way to afford it is TCs. You haven't added "strategic decision making" in expansion routes, it's been railroaded to one single choice. New capital restrictions make the difference between Europeans and non-Europeans quite huge and yet based on a technicality. It also leads to fully bizarre issues where most Asians/Africans should prioritize an exodus ASAP, do some kind of trickery, or sit there and not do anything for 50 years until they can colonize Australia.