What ideas should be buffed?

[Vapiritapiri]

It seems that espionage is getting a nice lil buff, a well deserved one, now it has a good use. But what about the other ideas like naval? There's rarely ever a reason to practically take it. And what about aristocratic? I don't see it being useful for anything but commonwealth. It also has bad policies.

Maritime? Is there any point in it over trade aside from naval force limit?

 

[Blust]

Maritime and naval aren't bad, it's just that navy is useless most of the time and rarely deserve an entire idea slot. I quite like aristo too : manpower, tech cost, siege pip, I enjoy that

 

[MatthewP]

Maritime and naval aren't bad, it's just that navy is useless most of the time and rarely deserve an entire idea slot.

The thing is, this was the explanation for espionage for a long time and they fixed it by adding some effects that aren’t strictly related to the main focus. Maybe they should do the same for these groups.

 

[subzero12479]

i like maritime a lot. it gives +50% naval fl, the +100% navy tradition from protecting trade makes it quite easy to stay at 100 all the time , the thalassocracy deciision has neat buffs as well (and it conditions arent too hard to fullfil). if i play tall with the intention to steal peoples trade (like italy) i usually pick it at some point.

 

[Korsjan Rīkis]

i like maritime a lot. it gives +50% naval fl, the +100% navy tradition from protecting trade makes it quite easy to stay at 100 all the time , the thalassocracy deciision has neat buffs as well (and it conditions arent too hard to fullfil). if i play tall with the intention to steal peoples trade (like italy) i usually pick it at some point.

I agree, it was very useful in my tall Kilwa run, too. It was actually the 1st idea I picked, so I could dominate the trade in East Africa and later on in India and the East Indies.

 

[Nostalgium]

It seems that espionage is getting a nice lil buff, a well deserved one, now it has a good use. But what about the other ideas like naval? There's rarely ever a reason to practically take it. And what about aristocratic? I don't see it being useful for anything but commonwealth. It also has bad policies.

Maritime? Is there any point in it over trade aside from naval force limit?

Maritime I do sometimes take - it's more flexible than Naval, and doesn't occupy a Mil slot - and Aristocratic is a pretty good "little bit of everything"-group. You get an extra diplomat - nice - extra manpower - very nice - and a siege pip! Extremely nice! Sure, it's not Diplomacy, Quantity or Offensive, but not everything needs to be S-tier. I'd like to see Religious buffed - through policy unlocking Propagate Religion or some other way of "spawning in" religious centers, mostly - but other than that, the groups seem to be roughly where they should.

Obviously, Naval and Espionage are pretty garbage, but that has more to do with naval and espionage being tertiary concerns for the most part. The way I'd like to see these buffed, without overhauling the systems completely, is to tie them to some more interesting policies. Perhaps Espionage/Trade could unlock a trade policy that gave a passive tick, capped at 25, to your spy networks in the trade region, for example? Generally speaking, I think Policies are underutilized, and should play a bigger role, with some of them unlocking special mechanics. "Embiggen number" isn't a very inspired take on something that requires you to complete two full idea groups.

 

[PDXJon]

Maritime and naval aren't bad, it's just that navy is useless most of the time and rarely deserve an entire idea slot. I quite like aristo too : manpower, tech cost, siege pip, I enjoy that

I think naval and maritime should be merged into their corresponding land idea groups. An example would be naval’s morale buff added to defensive’ s. This would make naval warfare a bit more interesting since it ensures that countries will have certain buffs to their navies. It would also open up the possibility for new idea groups. Maybe they could add something like tactics. Of course some balancing would need to take place.

 

[Uskayaw]

Quality. Cavalry is awful unless you play Mongols.

 

[kiwimaster]

For Maritime ideas, the recent 1.33 beta changes gave it 25% ship trade power propagation among other things, but this is such a small and insignificant modifier that I'm seriously wondering whether the devs mistook ship trade power for ship trade power propagation.

More generally, I think the best way to buff Maritime and Naval ideas is not by changing its ideas (since you do need some idea groups in the game that buffs navies), but by enabling more unique decisions like thassalocracy or powerful policies that aren't entirely naval-focused, since you rarely need more naval buffs once you've taken one of those ideas. Maybe there should be a decision allowing you to use up to 5 flag ships? Or a decision that greatly reduces downstream trade steering from your home trade node so you don't feel screwed by the fact that your home trade node is not an end trade node.

Or how about a naval+innovative policy that gives you +0.5 artillery fire (which affects both ships and artillery) and -15% artillery cost? Or an admin+maritime policy that gives you -10% coring cost and -10% dev cost?

I'm just spitballing ideas here so I don't know how balanced these would be, but the point is to give players more flexibility and excitement if they were to choose naval or maritime, so that more people will actually choose them in non-WC campaigns.

 

[MachopPower69]

Most of the idea groups are decent, but most of the policies could require a buff as well, considering they are combinations.

 

[TeutonicTortoise]

Think adding +2 impact on siege would be cool for naval or marine bonuses to bump them into something like late game revolutionary guard compared to currently where they just reduce manpower needed of the whole army abit. Maritime being less mil related might be harder but maybe lean into the diplomatic reach naval power historically brought like diplomatic relations with a joint idea of envoy speed, and maybe AE impact which is always a decent bonus.

 

[coorta19]

Greatest problem with naval ideas is that navy is not that important in most cases and you can easily win most of wars without using a single ship - thanks to current system of military access which allows Ottomans/Spain to simply walk around Mediterranean Sea to siege each other territories or Commonwealth to simply walk through entire Asia to siege provinces in Siam. And not to forget weirdly working system of straits - when you control provinces on both sides of straits your troops can easily cross straits despite enemy having there his entire fleet of around 300 ships (which should obviously prevent such thing).

 

[Jespoke]

I think Maritime could still use a bit more than what is on the beta. A modifier that encourages spreading out your trade ships would be neat, though it would need to watch out not to make it optimal to send Protect Trade to every single node you can reach because that is a lot of clicking every time you start/end a war. I can't come up with a good way to word it though...

The main buff i want for Innovative ideas is not in the idea group itself: I want Innovativeness gain to be replaced with Dip points (scaling to how much you would have gained) when already at 100%, so you can actually reasonably pick the innovative event options when playing an innovative nation . It also makes the idea group more attractive further into the game.
The second thing i would like for Innovative ideas is some modifier that scales with highly developed provinces, to make it synergize more with tall play, which it thematically should imo.

 

[MatthewP]

I think innovative ideas should replace 100% innovativeness gain with 50-100% innovativeness effect. I think probably 50%, 100% would make them too good.

edit: along with making the group competitive, this would shift incentives in a good way. Currently chasing innovativeness becomes a worse strategy after getting the idea group because you’ll get to 100 so quickly. This change would make chasing innovativeness better after getting the idea group, which it should be.

 

[bokorthedust]

I think innovative ideas should replace 100% innovativeness gain with 50-100% innovativeness effect. I think probably 50%, 100% would make them too good.

edit: along with making the group competitive, this would shift incentives in a good way. Currently chasing innovativeness becomes a worse strategy after getting the idea group because you’ll get to 100 so quickly. This change would make chasing innovativeness better after getting the idea group, which it should be.

I think that even 50% would be too OP, that's 5% all power costs on everything and even without the doubled gain you'd be at 100 in less then a year. That modifier is very overpowered for the duration of a whole game, and the wider you are the more it does for you, so it'd be like concentrate dev was in its initial form, implemented for tall play and getting used for wide.

 

[Word_Smith]

Nothing should be buffed. Powercreep is too much of a problem already. If something is too strong, it should be nerfed instead imo.

 

[MatthewP]

I think that even 50% would be too OP, that's 5% all power costs on everything and even without the doubled gain you'd be at 100 in less then a year. That modifier is very overpowered for the duration of a whole game, and the wider you are the more it does for you, so it'd be like concentrate dev was in its initial form, implemented for tall play and getting used for wide.

I think you probably mean a century not a year.

Personally I don’t really think of this as a tall/wide thing, except in that there’s some tradeoff between expansion and spending power on innovativeness. But that aside, do you really think it’d be op? Would you take it ahead of admin for a wide game, influence for a vassal-centric game, or diplo/humanist/religious in the situations you’d normally take them? I have my doubts it pushes out any of the meta groups, but it at least would be sort of a possibility.

edit: I do think it would make innovative a pretty obvious pick in the late game, when all the key groups are taken. But that doesn’t seem like a bad niche, and is also probably appropriate.

edit 2: I actually think power cost is pretty balanced for tall vs wide. Wide uses it for coring and vassal annexation, tall uses it for dev. Both are quite strong, but 5% is not close to the dedicated bonuses in each of those areas.

 

[bokorthedust]

Yeah I meant a century. Maybe it wouldn't be as OP as I initially thought, but in certain cases I could see delaying either admin or influence to take it. Innovative also has advisor cost reduction, which in my opinion is another quite strong idea, especially for the early game, because it allows you to get better bang for your buck. And innovative also has a nice policy with offensive, which is usually the only military idea I take in my games. So higher level advisors coupled with the mana cost reductions (let's not forget the 10% tech cost the group also has) could bridge the gap of what you lose out on if you delay influence for example, or even admin, which outside the CCR and the GC plus the influence policy is full of merc related ideas which are trash considering you are better off relying on professionalism for manpower (with which the -5% power cost would also help in the form of cheaper generals and generally more points to sink into it).

Maybe my position also comes from that I don't outright hate Inno in its current form either (and in certain niche starts I actually take it and keep it), compared to what the community seems to generally think about them.

 

[dD_ShockTrooper]

If military access were nerfed considerably, I could see naval ideas being a good idea group. Maritime not so much because most of the modifiers in it are also irrelevant for naval play too.

 

[MachopPower69]

If military access were nerfed considerably, I could see naval ideas being a good idea group. Maritime not so much because most of the modifiers in it are also irrelevant for naval play too.

Maybe offtopic but talking about military access, there should be a warscore thing for peacing out nations you can't get military access to, like if you are at war with Ingolstadt as Switzerland and you can't get any access because the nations between you don't want to give any during your war against the three leagues, then you should be easier to peace out if it has been a year without access requirements