Why the balance change for missionaries? [Megathread]
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If the only fun you get from EU4 is blobbing might I suggest another game? MS Paint.
If you really need to WC or One Faith and nothing else then there's always 1.25.
If you really need to WC or One Faith and nothing else then there's always 1.25.
Good change, good reasoning, good post.
Most people want to be challenged.
Either by doing WC (an then doing faster WC) or by one faith (or both) or whatever.
The thing is, if you actually want to reach the end of the game by 1821. After you achieved your first plans (like for instance, become the biggest trade power in the Baltic as Denmark or Sweden), there's nothing much to do besides expanding, or, for that matter, to achieve certain objectives you have to keep expanding a lot.
So it comes that to keep being challenged in this game, the only thing that is left is expansion.
We have to admit that most of the blobbing mechanics don't actually work or work poorly. Coalitions are easily avoidable, and later game admin efficiency makes it even easier and cheaper to expand after a war when nationalism is actually becoming a thing and thus should make it harder to expand beyond your actual culture.
Majority of the people here will admit that peace time in EU4 is boring, you are most of the time preparing for another war while at peace.
I don't have any tips on how make peace time more interesting, but it's THE problem of EU4 right now.
Either by doing WC (an then doing faster WC) or by one faith (or both) or whatever.
The thing is, if you actually want to reach the end of the game by 1821. After you achieved your first plans (like for instance, become the biggest trade power in the Baltic as Denmark or Sweden), there's nothing much to do besides expanding, or, for that matter, to achieve certain objectives you have to keep expanding a lot.
So it comes that to keep being challenged in this game, the only thing that is left is expansion.
We have to admit that most of the blobbing mechanics don't actually work or work poorly. Coalitions are easily avoidable, and later game admin efficiency makes it even easier and cheaper to expand after a war when nationalism is actually becoming a thing and thus should make it harder to expand beyond your actual culture.
Majority of the people here will admit that peace time in EU4 is boring, you are most of the time preparing for another war while at peace.
I don't have any tips on how make peace time more interesting, but it's THE problem of EU4 right now.
While I'm fine with the stated motivation for this change, I hate the actual implementation.
1) It doesn't actually stop converting everything if one is keen on doing that. It just makes the process massively more fiddly and micro. In general "you can still blob, just with many many more clicks and a tiny efficiency penalty" isn't really the solution to blobbing.
2) As basically everyone has noted, the already-stronger Humanist and Trade Company avenues are left unaffected by this change.
3) Converting culture was almost never efficient anyway. So that change just punishes roleplayers.
It really feels like this changes punishes people who want to change everything to their religion and culture (for roleplay or just for funsies). But it specifically doesn't impact the people who are "painting the map" just by conquering everything efficiently, since they're already using means that will take zero hit from losing culture conversion and very little hit from losing religious conversion.
1) It doesn't actually stop converting everything if one is keen on doing that. It just makes the process massively more fiddly and micro. In general "you can still blob, just with many many more clicks and a tiny efficiency penalty" isn't really the solution to blobbing.
2) As basically everyone has noted, the already-stronger Humanist and Trade Company avenues are left unaffected by this change.
3) Converting culture was almost never efficient anyway. So that change just punishes roleplayers.
It really feels like this changes punishes people who want to change everything to their religion and culture (for roleplay or just for funsies). But it specifically doesn't impact the people who are "painting the map" just by conquering everything efficiently, since they're already using means that will take zero hit from losing culture conversion and very little hit from losing religious conversion.
yeah, nah, not buying that crock of bullshit. Conquest still is the best, it's just now even more railroaded to Humanist and TC. If what you said was true, you'd actually put some effort into making tall/trade/colonies a more engaging and fun experience, on par with conquest, rather than pretending to nerf the only functional thing about the game, and let's be real here, this isn't a nerf, it only results in money loss, which is laughable, and needless micromanagement to anyone insane enough to actually try converting everything.
Agree, the problem is not the changes but that to much is left unchanged. The people that use humanist is going to play on as nothing have changed and so are the people who already stockpile huge amount of money, they would likely not care about corruption tax anyway.
With humanist you basically can ignore religion completely and so it is going to be after the change. Religious is currently hard to justify as the only good thing I can say about it is the CB and I very much doubt a CB is worth the points you spend on the idea group. Otherwise it feels like a complete inferior pick compared to humanist.
If you truly want to nerf expansion, make large polyreligious and polycultural empires unstable and hard to maintain instead of pick humanist, no problems forever.
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Please remove any achievements that require conquest of vast swath of land, rather add achievements like 100 devs ulm or simply survive as ternate without Any conquest of foreign lands. tell me how fun that is
This will only screw the ai, not the player. The elements to make a harder late game are there: inflation, corruption, stability, coalitions... but Paradox decided to make a casual version of them, not realizing players like a challenge. In former EU games losing stability was a big hit, here it is only something to throw admin points at, and you even have more ways to stop rebels, like harsh treatment. I appreciate the intention of anti-blobbing measures, but you should look at the mechanics in the former games in the series to draw some inspiration.
I can understand this but please, at the very least buff Religious. Blobbers will just go Humanist as it kind of was the only choice between both idea sets already. Let them give two missionaries, let them convert territories (or areas instead of provinces), whatever. Right now it's a no-brainer.
It seems the idea is that it should be humanist or not humanist instead of humanist or religious or non of them.
Basically it feels like religious should not be a good choice for anything other than roleplaying.
Monreligious are not going to pick religious because they do not really gain anything from it.
Polyreligious are not going to pick religious because they simply pick humanist and forget about religion.
Motivation aside, the conversion changes look like targeted nerfs for One Faith and One Culture rather than general blobbing. Most religions aren't strong enough to convert anyway and conversion isn't necessary with Humanist. The corruption penalty only nerfs end game WCs or WCs that progress too quickly, any form of blobbing that does not end up with half of the world won't be affected. Every time these explanations are given I can only assume that either 1. there are other, unmentioned reasons, in which case either explain or don't pretend otherwise, or 2. the changes are what they seem - an extremely small percentage of runs are penalized without affecting the rest. So in essence, I can't tell if I'm being bamboozled or if the changes are as ill-advised as they seem. Or maybe One Faiths/One Cultures are the target after all, in which case job well done.
And TC and admin are buffed... It was like they looked at a list of stuff that needed nerfed and mistook it for a list that needed buffed.
I couldn't put it any better...
I'll admit, I never play EU4 for challenge, I just roleplay a country. My goal in game are always weird ones like "make xxx great again" or "experience every country specific event". I don't want EU4 to become some esport level competitive game.
I agreed your other points, this change doesn't make blobbing a secondary choice and the peace time still have nothing to do.
All it really would take is to make wrong religion penalty only go way at like +3 tolerance instead of 0 which would make humanist still good but it would not remove province religion as a game mechanic all by itself. That way conversion would be better than humanist but hard to do on a large scale and thus humanist would still be useful but not as overpowered at what it is doing right now.
Admin core cost reduction should be nerfed to around 15 to 5% in my opinion as currently it save to much monarch points by itself. That would nerf blobing a bit.
You're not refuting my point.
I didn't touch on it earlier, but I absolutely agree that anything that significantly adds to "# of unnecessary extra inputs to accomplish the same thing" is degenerate and damaging to the game.
This game has so many extra clicks already. Core all? Nah, click on all 50 of those. Convert religions? Not only can you not automate this, every time you pick a province you get confirmation and have to smash enter, too. No way to simply toggle provinces for future conversion, sort by region, filter etc.
Despite being a DLC feature, grant province is still AWFUL from QoL perspective, you don't even get to stay in the same screen so if you feed 200+ provinces to vassals have another several thousand clicks added to your game because reasons. Full annexation? Nah man, we couldn't get rid of the bug that made that cost DIP when it shouldn't so we just removed that forever apparently, go pixel hunt to make sure you have everything.
This on top of the fact that the UI provably lies to the player outright, has been reported as such, and has remained that way in spite of this in multiple different ways for years.
So yeah, a DD mechanic that makes an already physically tedious process more so is a major downside.
Given the continued non-importance assigned to fixing blatant UI lies that can impact the outcome of the game while bending backwards to nerf esoteric exploits the idea that design makes any serious effort toward end user experience when adding/changing the game is not credible. It's a strong statement, but when the game lies about the existence of a fort, lies about who will be cobelligerent, lies about whether or not you can core the province, lies about whether target nation will join the war (and breaks rules to allow it) it's a statement supported by evidence.
Some of these are simple text edits so the UI reflects what the game does. Some of them are more complex. The fact that even the former remain in the game for > 3 years speaks volumes though and it certainly colors confidence in a mechanical change that at least at face value appears to require more physical inputs to do the same thing...
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BUT I DO LOVE IT!!!
(Well to be fair: let's see how it works out given all the other changes like trade company investments....)
I just don't fully understand why you had to exempt trade companies from the territory/state-penalty. It's not that Great Britain didn't strip its TC of monopoly power in the 1850s and assumed direct control over India. Sure, this is outside EUIVs timeline, but so are the formation of Germany and serveral other feats of history. Apart from historic reasons, I also believe that TCs would be profitable even if we had as many areas in them to actually breach the territory/state-limit.
I guess you want to have TCs on par with colonial nations, since the latter won't count against the soft territory limit. Unfortunately, that just leads to both being overpowered. I hope in future you'll find a better solution for them, whatever that might be.... E.g. it's pretty unfair that a vassal next door takes one diplomatic relations slot while we can have several colonial nations on the other side of the sea that don't - and even give free merchants and trade power on top of gold income from treasure fleets. Ideally there would be some special downsides to CNs and TCs, like e.g. a special disaster that gives more liberty desire to CNs and more corruption to TCs and ties both together so we need to juggle their needs and demands. Well, something.
This is kind of getting repetitive if one follows this forum....which brings me to the next point:
Who cares?
Don't get me wrong, you have valid points sometimes and I really don't want to start a shit war here. But this game is not really made for the atwixes and marco antonios. I would also assume, that whatever nerf pdx implements is not really relevant to them, given that reportedly they use to finish WCs in the late 17th century or earlier... (can you confirm?).
If this is more historical, please explain the conversion of the Philippines to Catholicism. Since its in Asia, it wouldn't be a colony in game.
Skill equalization is bad on a fundamental level in gaming as long as you hold one assumption:
That player choice(s) mattering is a good thing.
Your country's position is the only outcome measure this game has, the means of determining who did well vs poorly. By implementing a mechanic that pushes nations towards a similar position regardless of how well someone plays, the game is necessarily squeezing out the importance of decisions along the way. If it wasn't, the outcomes wouldn't actually be equalized.
As I've not played the new mechanics, there might be details that actually don't reduce outcome variance, or maybe even increase it (but then the outcome is inconsistent with Jake's rationale for introducing the mechanic, not that such stopped them from implementing 15 year truces or removing ships from the new world disingenuously in EU 4's past).
As a player, I want my choices to matter. It's what differentiates the game from a movie or some other medium. While making them matter less doesn't stop them from mattering completely, it's still a decline in a very important facet of the game.
"The archipelago was Spain's outpost in the orient and Manila became the capital of the entire Spanish East Indies. The colony was administered through the Viceroyalty of New Spain (now Mexico) until 1821 when Mexico achieved independence from Spain. After 1821, the colony was governed directly from Spain."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Philippines_(1521–1898)