Why innovative ideas are so rare choice?
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3)Very strong late game event giving you REALLY HUGE discount(it was %25 tech discount if I rembember well wich means you can access to techs 2 year ahead wich means you can simply crush everyone around you allways)
LÉF is so not worth it. 20 years of +8 unrest and -3% conversion strength for -35% admin tech, -30% dip tech and -20% mil tech; which since it only spawns during the Age of Revs, is probably only good for one tech, unless you're really far behind.
Would Innovative be a better choice if PDOX brought back the Army Tradition bonus it used to have? For either MP or SP?
Not only do you haveta wait 50 years to annex a PU, but you also wanna forgo costs entirely and just inherit thrones. Last I checked, diplo austria > influence austria- you dont make vassals, you spend your time forcing unions and annexing the pope more than anything else.
Umm reduced advisor costs?
Generally speaking advisor costs will be your single biggest expense, especially now that they go to 5. That means you get a cost reduction on your biggest expense. Thats HUGE!
Por que ne los dos? Seriously, I get that Dip first is correct for royal marriage shenanigans, but surely Inf is your 2nd or 3rd idea group every time as Austria (depending on whether you're playing with idea group restrictions or not) - the dip rep is so important to both the HRE game and to inheriting.
Innovative is good, the problem is that Administrative(or more accurately, Adaptability) is straight-up broken good in a game that is primarily about conquest. Humanist and Religious claim the next spots because they complement blobbing so well, and Economic carves out a niche for itself in those instances where lack of funds(or run-away gold inflation) is a limiting factor. That leaves Innovative ranking above just Expansion(which is true of every idea group except Naval and probably Maritime and Espionage). It's not that Innovative is on their level, it's just that the other ADM groups either have a specific niche or dove-tail beautifully with Administrative. If you take three ADM idea groups, Innovative is probably the third choice. But if you don't take three ADM groups, then you're probably not taking Innovative at all.
The problem is that Administrative has an almost iron-clad case for being the first ADM idea, and Humanist/Religious offer such convenient salves to the problem of having lots of conquered land. The only thing I'd change about Innovative is that ridiculously worthless Resilient State idea.
The problem is that Administrative has an almost iron-clad case for being the first ADM idea, and Humanist/Religious offer such convenient salves to the problem of having lots of conquered land. The only thing I'd change about Innovative is that ridiculously worthless Resilient State idea.
The tolerance and unity bonuses by themselves are justified enough I think. They have to be high to make a tolerant approach work long-term (unless your religion has special heretic/heathen management mechanics, I suppose).
Where I think Humanist goes too far is with the -10 years of separatism. That's a blobber's charter right there: it does essentially nothing for countries that aren't expanding very fast, but gives the blobbers an instant -5 unrest on a newly-conquered province. You could change it to, say, -5 years of separatism, and reduce the base level of separatism by 5 years. That way, you don't have to panic about separatists getting a big buff, but expanding without Humanism feels a bit less painful.
The -2 global unrest is also possibly overkill, given the rest of the group: not only does it prevent revolts, it also gives a lot of protection against disasters. (I suppose this can be a disadvantage, with 'disasters' such as Court and Country, but that's another story.) Maybe change it to a more conditional bonus, such as -2 unrest in territorial cores (to fit the theme of 'light touch' governance).
Or maybe other ideagroups dont go far enough.
The reason things like Humanist or Admin or Influence look good on paper and are good in practice is the "uniqueness" or their mechanics.
Take the Trade group. It is an absolute joke compared to having just a handfull of small CNs or owning enough provinces in 3 TCs.
You can replace the effect of the entire group with mechanics that exists elsewhere in the game.
If trade wanted to compete with just playing the game it would have to give some 20 merchants and 100% trade-eff or something.
Then look at Admin.
1. There is no real replacement for RCC.
2. Because of the underlying mechanics there is no such thing as too much RCC.
You can just go and replace Admin with say Tribal Gov + Coptic but you are better of getting both.
The same applied to some of the other ideagroups.
They are not necesserarily "strong".
You can just as easily say that many of the groups just dont do enough.
They have no meaningful impact, because their bonuses are too weak, too little or too easily replaceable.
Admin isn't a good example here: it's a mess of an idea group that randomly has one overpowered idea, which is too broad to favour any specific playstyle (blobbing isn't really a playstyle, more the default behaviour of players). Influence on the other hand has a fairly consistent theme and several powerful ideas.
Trade is a really weird one to place. It certainly has its problems, but I wouldn't say it's a complete write-off:
- The +merchants are actually very useful in the base game. It's just that a couple of DLCs have been far too generous with bonus merchants, so everyone has too many of them in single player. Tone those down or add some more preconditions, and Trade could have a clear purpose again. For instance, what if you didn't get +merchants by default from TCs, and instead that was the Trade finisher? Somehow the devs need to balance this idea group so it makes sense both with and without DLCs (like how the Economic finisher is different with/without Common Sense, but both versions are valuable).
- Leaving the merchants issue to one side, the point of the idea group is to make money, and if you compare to other idea groups that directly improve your economic efficiency (as opposed to letting your conquer more etc), it's not so bad once you take into account policies, and the general potential of trade to make money compared to other income sources. Trade+Quantity has some interesting synergies as a TC-heavy power, for instance. It's just that such purely economic modifiers are probably never going to be strong enough carry an idea group on their own, because if they were, they'd just end up being another factor in the oversupply of ducats in the game. The goods economy especially suffers from being a 'rich get richer' system, i.e. blobs are not just richer in absolute terms, they generally get more goods income *per development* than lesser powers do, so bonuses to goods-based income go disproportionately to countries that are already too rich to need it.
More broadly though I think you make a good point. Some ideas are real game-changers, while others just give you a slight edge; the same with policies, which in some ways is worse because you end up with a situation where many policies are simply never worth activating. I get the impression that the devs have tried to make things 'balanced', it's just that they consistently overrate some modifiers and underrate certain others, sometimes to a dramatic extent. (This is even before we get to ideas that have a qualitative effect, such as Deus Vult.) So for instance, you get ideas and policies that give super niche bonuses like rebel support efficiency, trade range or vassal force limit contribution, and it's never at a level that would change how anyone plays; then you look elsewhere, and they're casually handing out discipline, diprep or -global unrest as if it's an equally minor bonus.
I have made noice in the past about how i think every ideagroup should confer some kind of unique ability, like a specialised CB based on the theme of the group, or like Diplomatic. Something you can base large strategic decisions on.
And if you ask me the whole policy system needs a complete overhaul.
Cutting down on the number of policies by making the usefull ones available throu more than one combination.
Making them available based on the amount if ideas unlocked instead of completing groups.
For example:
To unlock a weaker form of Deus Vult you need to unlock Religious ideas, atleast one Military idea and buy a total of 8 ideas in Religious and/or any Milgroup.
The regular full strength DV is unlocked by aditionaly unlocking Influence, Diplo or Expansion and buying a total of 15 ideas across any of those groups.
8 Ideas means you cant just fill Religious and leave a Milgroup blank to unlearn it later. You need to commit something.
It's a nice set of ideas, but as many other people have mentioned, it just cannot compete with the overall utility of other ADM idea groups.
To be honest I don't think the "unhistorical" scale of conquest in the game is caused by player mentality. The whole game is just designed this way and it goes from a very decentralized world in 1444 to a world where only a few blobs exist. You don't even need a human player to make the game "unhistorical", it's just that humans tend to be better at the game than the AI so they can achieve even more extreme results.
Many times you will see an AI power that blobs completely out of control so you are forced to counter-blob even if you do not have any ambitions to complete a WC or similar.
EU4 is simply a game where bigger is always better (and annexing weaker countries is better than attacking your big threatening rival directly). In my opinion, reducing the impact of strong idea groups would make the game more unbalanced because it would give even more relative power to the countries that already have a good starting position or great national ideas (it's possible to nerf national ideas as well but removing someone's starting position is not possible).
There are other Paradox games where WC is also possible but extremely rare and the game behaves much more like a historical simulator (Victoria 2 for example). But EU4 is just designed in a different way which supports a different playstyle. That said, blobbing in Victoria 2 is arguably easier because the game mechanics can be abused much better, but the game doesn't necessarily make you want to blob. Game design leads to a certain player mentality, not the other way around.
Yeah, with the ability to upgrade advisers past level 3 Innovative's adviser cost reduction idea and policies are even stronger than before. Upgrading a level 3 admin adviser you get from the estates is a great way to get extra admin points because the half price applies to upgrading them and their additional maintenance too. I have't tried Innovative with that mechanic yet but its probably amazing. Keeping in mind that with the trade good buffs in recent patches its easier than ever to get high level advisers earlier; Innovative might be a truly great source of monarch points in the mid-to-late game.
I hear this sometimes and I disagree. Adaptability is obviously the core of the group and is a super-powered idea. However, the group as a whole is pretty cohesive. It has merc ideas, cheaper coring, and more states - it's an idea group designed to assist you with expanding your realm through wars of conquest. It does that magnificently.
The fact that expanding your realm via wars of conquest is something that all players do to varying extents doesn't make the idea group any less coherent.
I can't imagine any reason not to take both Influence and Diplo as Austria. 2 dip rep helps a lot with inheriting PUs among other things. You frequently do have to integrate PUs if you play for them aggressively, anyway. EIther group has Innovative covered by a very wide margin for any sort of Austria game that I can imagine.
Very much agree. Normally I'm a strong advocate for efficiency over "fun" in a lot of games, but I don't get why EU4 would ever be considered to be a game like that, at least not naturally without looking at what Paradox has changed over the years.The more I read on the subject, the more I think both Administrative and Humanist idea groups could use a nerf (coring cost for Admin and religious unity, unrest reduction, tolerance for heretic and heathens for Humanist). They seem to be causing all the unrealistic blobbing for the AI and facilitating WC for players, which is something I dislike in the game. My friends don't mock me for playing a "map painting game" for nothing, I'm starting to believe these ideas are a large part of it.
I doubt this will be well received by the community, though.
PS: Maybe nerf religious ideas as well, as it would become the no-brainer pick.
Right now, it feels like being stable and having your country be (if not 100%, then at least 85-90%) under control is too easy, thus encouraging war after war after war because a larger and larger percentage of players can handle the downsides. It goes hand in hand with the general feeling that war is, even accounting for historical accuracy, an overly major part of the game, ultimately naturally encouraging WC runs as well as mad AI blobs (looking at you, current patch Bohemia). Those idea sets being too strong is part of the problem, but you could spin that around and say that the game's current condition and the low value you get from the ideas in other sets (like this one) is what pushes people away from them. If you couple that with the community's view that this is the hardest and most "prestigious" thing to accomplish (and supposedly raising a stink if Paradox dares to touch blobbing - I haven't played the game enough or been around long enough to be 100% sure on that, but it's definitely been mentioned in the thread) and everything outside of wars not being all that fleshed out, it becomes no surprise whatsoever that we're currently at this point.
At the very least, I'd like to see a few changes made to naturally encourage other objectives to players and balance things out outside of simply RPing or limiting yourself with creative house rules in any other way. Rebalancing the difficulty of certain accomplishments is critical for that, but in particular, endless conquest needs to be toned down or at least have its risk factor massively increased in a natural, gradual, non-"hey Great Power AI Burgundy, I like your expansion, my name is AI Austria and this is AI Bohemia and we're here to not just bring you down to your old size but outright kill you in a single war without even having the inheritance trigger" way (like an F1 car with an overly locked differential).
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There is simply no existential risk to playing the tall game. In fact practically 90% of the starts on normal already have the game won on day 1 because you literally cannot be annexed if you just make the available alliances. From there you have nowhere to go but up.
On VH it is different but that is because you have to keep up with an AI that does not obey your pathetic limitations like "coring cost" and "aggressive expansion". And most anti-blob crowd seem equally as horrified by AI blobs for some reason.
If you play the blob game trying to WC as fast as you reasonably can you will be riding the edge of dying to coalitions / rebels / facing constant financial pressure. And of course, the clock. Of course it also has its unique pleasures like eating and coring a 2k development Ming in less than 8 years.
Basically, blobbing requires all the internal management of playing peacefully + extra management of war and that is why it remains interesting.
On VH it is different but that is because you have to keep up with an AI that does not obey your pathetic limitations like "coring cost" and "aggressive expansion". And most anti-blob crowd seem equally as horrified by AI blobs for some reason.
If you play the blob game trying to WC as fast as you reasonably can you will be riding the edge of dying to coalitions / rebels / facing constant financial pressure. And of course, the clock. Of course it also has its unique pleasures like eating and coring a 2k development Ming in less than 8 years.
Basically, blobbing requires all the internal management of playing peacefully + extra management of war and that is why it remains interesting.
That's a big part of the problem. Outside of setting your own house rules, learning if you're still new, or going for achievements (all of which get old reasonably fast without anything else to encourage you along the way), that's the only way the game stays interesting right now, and the current state of affairs with regards to balance and the like feeds heavily into it.
Innovative really hasn't anything worth it. Playing tall? Economics to dev+policies or Admin to have more mercs. Roleplaying to blob moderately(most players play this way)? Economics/Humanist/Religious. WC? Admin + Humanist.
- War Exhaustion to "spend less admin to core" is a damn big joke. You spend 2800 admin points for that? If you are blobbing enough to make it worth, GET ADMINISTRATIVE!
- War Exhaustion to "spend less admin to core" is a damn big joke. You spend 2800 admin points for that? If you are blobbing enough to make it worth, GET ADMINISTRATIVE!