Imperator is a good game in spite of Johan though.
The game got better once Arheo took the reins.
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Who is Johan?
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Imperator is a good game in spite of Johan though.
The game got better once Arheo took the reins.
My takeaway from all these comments is that Johan probably is a guy a lot of folk would want on their team. That doesn't change the fact the he has a pretty bad record when put in a senior leadership roles the last five years. Imperator and Leviathan were full blown disasters. No matter how good a guy is in a certain role, at some point, leadership must be held responsible. A change of position may get the best of both worlds for Paradox. Oh well. Not my problem! Thanks for the context guys.
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Really shouldn't be forgotten that Johans work in creating Cicero 1.2 introducing pops and the removal of "mana" really helped to lay the foundations for 2.0. 1.2 was a breath of fresh air at the time.
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Sure, but let's not ignore the fact that this was a rearguard action after the initial blunder of basically porting EU4 mechanics into Imperator.
One of the biggest criticisms of Imperator prior to 2.0 was that it had zero uniqueness. I find it hard to present Cicero as an accolade when it was clearly the rectification of a major blunder.
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Still a good patch regardless. I wouldn't knock it and as the rectification of a major blunder well executed. Shame it wasn't the 1.0 of the game.
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My understanding from the dev diaries that he wrote is that Johan was responsible for introducing mana in EUIV (and subsequently, I understand, Imperator).
If that is the case then yes, the weakest and most pernicious elements of EUIV design philosophy are because of Johan.
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When EUIV launched 8 years ago mana wasn't the worst decision in the world. It helped make the game accessible to new players.
The problem with it is the way it was presented and how the game became simply a game of waiting for points to press a button.
The Monarch Stats had been effecting things since EU1. It was other choices they made for gameplay reasons (primarily because of their office MP) that killed Historical Plausibility that attracted many of the older players.
I think Johan had a good run....but time catches up with everyone and he was probably promoted above his ability to lead.
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That's fair. I amended my statement above to be a bit less forceful.
It's not that mana itself was the worst introduction in the world (although I think at the time it was the single thing that made vanilla EUIV a substantially worse game than EU3), it's that the concept of mana enabled the further introduction of all kinds of new mana-ish things (Cossack government points, Russian government points, this points, that points, the other points) that have progressively made EUIV worse and worse (wait for bar to fill, button light up, click) even as other things (map improvements, more tags, autonomy, new forts, new mercenaries... maybe estates) have made the game better.
That central game philosophy is down to Johan, and I think it's the thing that makes EUIV bad. I would even tie monuments and other recently-reviled features into the same terrible central decision. There's very little "magic" in EU3, but EUIV is full of it... and it all started with monarch mana.
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@Blindbohemian Well, there is still mana in Imperator. It’s just less visible and more organically linked to the game. Political influence is mana, the points to have military traditions too, though for that one it has a definite use.
As for EUIV, I think Johan wanted, by introducing mana, an accessible tool to be able to « balance » things and to prevent money to be the one value allowing the snowballing of power.
In that regard, it worked. I remember mana was too present when EUIV released. You needed mana to build buildings, and this thankfully was later removed. Many people, me included, complained that it made little sense to use the same value for ideas and technologies, making it so that a country learning to be more offensive would be less technologically advanced.
I eventually grew out of that particular criticism, because all in all there is enough mana for that.
So with insight I wouldn’t assign mana as the root of all evil. The root of all evil for me is precisely what makes EUIV soo entertaining to many : national ideas. This is the moment when the devs ceased to strive for a simulation of the polities existing in the world and introduced arbitrary bonuses to countries. Those bonuses then continued into special mechanics, mission trees and now monuments.
The urge to put more bonuses in the game is what made it unrecognizable. The calls to buff or nerf one country or another lead to something more and more impossible to balance, as Johan recognized concerning the missions. Forming tags is now a major part of the game, while it should only be a name.
There would have been ways to make the countries more unique without resorting to cheap expedients. It would have been to increase the depth of the game, attacking the roots of why a country was allegedly more powerful than another in a field or another. Government forms is a strive towards that.
But you lack ways to directly impact the destiny of your country otherwise. You are stuck with determinism called flavor.
As for me, I’m back to my position when EUIV started : I won’t buy anything more and I might even stay forever with patch 1.30.4, waiting for them to either do a massive overhaul removing all the cr** there is in the game or for EUV, if it’s any better and not bloated by the wrong features.
As for EUIV, I think Johan wanted, by introducing mana, an accessible tool to be able to « balance » things and to prevent money to be the one value allowing the snowballing of power.
In that regard, it worked. I remember mana was too present when EUIV released. You needed mana to build buildings, and this thankfully was later removed. Many people, me included, complained that it made little sense to use the same value for ideas and technologies, making it so that a country learning to be more offensive would be less technologically advanced.
I eventually grew out of that particular criticism, because all in all there is enough mana for that.
So with insight I wouldn’t assign mana as the root of all evil. The root of all evil for me is precisely what makes EUIV soo entertaining to many : national ideas. This is the moment when the devs ceased to strive for a simulation of the polities existing in the world and introduced arbitrary bonuses to countries. Those bonuses then continued into special mechanics, mission trees and now monuments.
The urge to put more bonuses in the game is what made it unrecognizable. The calls to buff or nerf one country or another lead to something more and more impossible to balance, as Johan recognized concerning the missions. Forming tags is now a major part of the game, while it should only be a name.
There would have been ways to make the countries more unique without resorting to cheap expedients. It would have been to increase the depth of the game, attacking the roots of why a country was allegedly more powerful than another in a field or another. Government forms is a strive towards that.
But you lack ways to directly impact the destiny of your country otherwise. You are stuck with determinism called flavor.
As for me, I’m back to my position when EUIV started : I won’t buy anything more and I might even stay forever with patch 1.30.4, waiting for them to either do a massive overhaul removing all the cr** there is in the game or for EUV, if it’s any better and not bloated by the wrong features.
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For fucks sake have some boundaries. He doesn't work for you. You don't elect him. Why the hell would you even think it's appropriate to comment on something like this. You're talking about someone's entire career. Criticize a game all you want, but leave people alone
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Hmm. That's a useful insight. I can see how that was a goal with mana, but I don't think it worked (or at least worked substantially less well than money did in EU3). In fact I think it made things worse: enormous countries spending the same 100ADM to increase stability as OPM Mecklenburg is "balanced" only in the narrowest sense. In EU3 a giant Germany would spend years and many ducats regaining stability while tiny Mecklenburg would stabilise almost overnight. That was balance.
Similarly, sprawling empires earned tons of ducats but their ability to snowball was limited by each new province increasing the cost of technology. Tiny Mecklenburg, if it focused on land tech and had a decent income, would probably pull ahead of a vast France or Poland. A poverty-stricken OPM would fall behind. That was balance. Small, prosperous Portugal and small, poor Navarre teching at roughly the same rate because they cost roughly the same number of mana is only balanced in a narrow and meaningless sense. It seems to me that mana, in fact, wildly unbalanced what was an extraordinarily well-balanced (basic mechanic in a) game.
But that's the problem: the only way to ultimately "balance" the competing opportunity costs associated with mana is to generate so much mana that it becomes an effectively non-scarce resource. "There is enough mana for all that" is essentially a rephrasing of "you don't have to worry about allocating mana".
That's interesting. I thought that national ideas were a fantastic concept, because originally I believe they didn't change when you formed new countries. They were a way to ensure that an Italy formed by Venice or Genoa would be naval-and-commerce-focused, while an Italy formed by Florence or Milan would be great at technology and prestige; a Prussian Germany would be militaristic and highly disciplined, but a Germany formed by Lubeck would be rolling in money. Integrating that "national character" with small bonuses into countries seemed to me to be an amazing way of adding a little uniqueness that EU3 lacked.
I thought that NIs especially had potential if they were iterated upon such that the way you played affected what your future ideas would be. Lubeck would start with powerful commercial traditions, and then hidden variables would track how you played (lots of light ships and ports? Pushing inland? Using lots of mercenaries? Taking lots of loans?) so that your final bonus (called "national ambition" in early iterations) would be an emergent feature of your nation's apparent ambitions. That was EU3 thinking: what you do in the game should affect outcomes... I worked on a mod to that effect. But the game-y arcade-y philosophy that I think is typified by mana won out, and we got the exact opposite.
Instead, and where they went wrong (as you observed) was in letting you shuffle through national ideas (the first ones are called national traditions, wtf? How does changing them make any sense?) by switching tags. Mission trees were just an even more egregious attack on the basic coherence and integrity of the game. I think all of this comes back to the basic principles of mana, though. Once you've ingrained mana into the game you've put "balance" in terms of "all nations are equally capable on the basis of magic mana" ahead of "balance" in the sense of "nations are differentiated by historically plausible factors". What you've done is, essentially, build an arcade anyway and historical plausibility is being left in the dust. Why not let people flip through idea groups and chase ever-more-powerful modifiers, in that case?
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@Blindbohemian Thanks for your thoughtful answer in a thread that might not be all that appropriate for such a topic .
I think we fundamentally agree, and your explanation of balancing around money in EUIII makes perfect sense. I have long thought that vassal feeding was a travesty because each country has a unique mana pool, and what you say when you talk about stability goes exactly that way.
In the end, maybe "mana" could be salvaged by being used only to enact "ideas" and to do special actions. What would you think about such an idea? Because as of now, I don't imagine all special actions costing mana to go away. I would like that if stability raise, war exhaustion reduction, legitimacy increase, mercantilism gain and so on would take time, as in Imperator currently, but I think mana still has its use in that regards instead of everything costing money.
About National ideas, that's how I saw it for a long time as well. Bonuses spawning from what you actually did would have been a good way to implement something resembling national ideas. However, the naysayer will still say that then every country is the same. That's not taking into account the possibility that, instead of spending countless hours of development into adding meaningless modifiers, they could have brought what differenciated the countries, like a rural-urban ratio, expanding the bonuses you get from the goods (so that playing in Spain isn't the same than playing in Germany), having cultures and religion having relationship with the state past being rebels, having the fabric of your country defined by your relationship with the factions and estates...
Granted, they did some of that. They reworked the estates in Emperor. That was one of the best thing they did in my opinion. And they added government forms, but some governments are still inexplicably (in game terms) restricted to other countries. Development, as strange as it may sound, can still be a basis to differentiate regions if we go away from the construct Paris in a night to learn the renaissance mindset.
The reason I'm still around and I still love that game is that I still see potential in it. But from patch to patch, my confidence that something good will happen has waned. I want my good historically plausible game. EUIV is the closest I have.
.I think we fundamentally agree, and your explanation of balancing around money in EUIII makes perfect sense. I have long thought that vassal feeding was a travesty because each country has a unique mana pool, and what you say when you talk about stability goes exactly that way.
In the end, maybe "mana" could be salvaged by being used only to enact "ideas" and to do special actions. What would you think about such an idea? Because as of now, I don't imagine all special actions costing mana to go away. I would like that if stability raise, war exhaustion reduction, legitimacy increase, mercantilism gain and so on would take time, as in Imperator currently, but I think mana still has its use in that regards instead of everything costing money.
About National ideas, that's how I saw it for a long time as well. Bonuses spawning from what you actually did would have been a good way to implement something resembling national ideas. However, the naysayer will still say that then every country is the same. That's not taking into account the possibility that, instead of spending countless hours of development into adding meaningless modifiers, they could have brought what differenciated the countries, like a rural-urban ratio, expanding the bonuses you get from the goods (so that playing in Spain isn't the same than playing in Germany), having cultures and religion having relationship with the state past being rebels, having the fabric of your country defined by your relationship with the factions and estates...
Granted, they did some of that. They reworked the estates in Emperor. That was one of the best thing they did in my opinion. And they added government forms, but some governments are still inexplicably (in game terms) restricted to other countries. Development, as strange as it may sound, can still be a basis to differentiate regions if we go away from the construct Paris in a night to learn the renaissance mindset.
The reason I'm still around and I still love that game is that I still see potential in it. But from patch to patch, my confidence that something good will happen has waned. I want my good historically plausible game. EUIV is the closest I have.
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As I like the Historically Plausible SP play. I might actually head back to EU III for at least a little while.
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@Blindbohemian and @Arizal : I've read your conversation and would be interested to hear your opinion on the MEIOU and Taxes mod? I wholeheardly agree on most of what you both said (and in fact, I think that your ideas are indeed going in the same direction) and I also think, that the design philosophy of M&T is pretty close of what you want.
For me, EU4 found salvation in the M&T mod. I basically only play it, precisly for the reasons you both described above.
For me, EU4 found salvation in the M&T mod. I basically only play it, precisly for the reasons you both described above.
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I think the entire vassalage mechanic in EUIV is a travesty—I wrote a long post on it just last week. It's one of the four top things I would expect to see changed in order for EUV to have any real value proposition.
Maybe. I don't really have an answer because I'm not sure I can imagine it—I guess what you're suggesting is that stability (for example) becomes a bar that fills up over time, at a rate based on your monarch's ADM skill? I could get behind that, I suppose. My question is just... why? Surely regaining stability is better represented by investing money, influenced by other gameplay factors (do you have strong alliances on your borders or vicious enemies that slow down stability gain as an abstraction of cross-border banditry? Do you have a large standing army doing policework in peacetime? Do you have high autonomy?). I have just never been able to see what mana adds that can't be done better without it.
Tying it to ideas... I don't know. I think the EUIV ideas system is less-good than the EU3 ideas system, and I hope that EUV will have a completely new iteration.
On the mana note, there was an old mod called Mundus Non Sufficit that played with government forms having different base monarch skills. Despotic monarchies had a base skill of zero, because when the monarch's power is absolute only the competence of the monarch worked; parliamentary constitutional monarchies had a base of (let's say) 3, because even with a crappy monarch the system built around the monarch was capable of cushioning his impact and running the country alone. I can imagine that would scale right up to fully decentralised bureaucratic states having a base of 5 or 6, so that the ruler's skill almost doesn't matter. Maybe in combination with your idea that could work?
I just really hate mana.
Yeah. That's what I'd like to see. Features that interrelate and build upon one another to make a better and more complex whole. That's what I felt like we got in EU3, in it's fifteen-year-old way (my god has it been fifteen years? Longer?). And then in EUIV we got this magical arcade of nonsense, which I feel strongly ties back to magic mana points...
I do it from time to time. It's hard: EU3 is seriously ugly, the UI is clunky, the map is miniscule and the tags are not varied... But I stand by the assertion that it genuinely is a better and healthier game.
I couldn't give you an opinion as I haven't really played it. I strongly dislike mods built on convoluted event-driven systems, because they just don't feel to me like they work. I like the sound of its core principles, but I just can't bring myself to soldier though playing it. Sorry
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The fact is, no one knows which individuals are responsible for the release as it was. The QA team isn't stupid. They caught most of the stuff that ended up in the release. Beta testers would have found many of the things months ago. There's either a disconnect on reaching the correct people (because how hard is it to change a number) or someone higher up in a management type position determined a different set of priorities (likely in my opinion). The developers don't want the product released in a broken state guys. They have the power to fix the stuff relatively quickly if only they are either allowed to do so, or are aware of said problems.
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Having been here awhile, I can guess people bashing Johan don't really understand what goes on inside Paradox. I've seen this guy release patches on his own time back with EU2 and more than once. I've seen the effort he puts into these games back as a beta tester in EU3. It's a disappointing release, I get that, but don't jump to conclusions and launch baseless attacks against what is probably - based on my interactions - one of Paradox's best resources.
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