ZoC is still a mess

[macd21]

This is what every conversation about this issue ends in.

One side is simply incapable to understand that just because something works as it was designed to work, it's not neccessarily a good system.

You have it backwards, we know it isn’t a good system. But one side is incapable of understanding that just because something isn’t a good system doesn’t mean it can easily be replaced with something better.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

How do you siege forts between provinces?
Where do you build them?
What happens when you want to build a fort on a straight?

I can see why people think the current fort system is bad, but that does not mean paradox made a mistake in keeping it.
Simply because no overall better system has been invented yet, or at least none I am aware of.

Another example:
Democracy is also a really bad system, but it is still better than anything else we came up with until now, so we're stuck with it.

Paradox did make a mistake. They implemented a mechanic while it was still in beta and left it that way for two years while working on DLC. To this day, the fort system introduced in 1.12 does not work. It was not finished. Most of its defenders don't even understand it, and I suspect given my image from earlier in this thread that at least some ways I can make that a valid move actually aren't "working as intended".

Comparing this scenario to the concept of democracy is a disingenuous red herring.

The system will remain broken as long as two armies in the same location can have different move restrictions while fighting together, and as long as you can't look at a still image of the map with no units selected and tell me (with confidence) where all units can go.

If we wanted to get away from carpeting, any number of solutions involving keeping forts at the province level could have accomplished that without breaking unit movement. Any of these are objectively better than the present implementation, because in contrast to it they would work:

1. Original fort implementation around which the game was designed.
2. No ZoC at all, provinces w/o forts siege like they do now, provinces with forts slow down all hostile units on its province + adjacent provinces. It applies no matter how many forts, no overlap stacking or anything like that. You're near a hostile fort, you're always slower. If not, you're not. You can even throw some extra attrition while slowed on this one if you think these are too weak, though the ability to lift adjacent occupation and be annoying to siege is still intact here too.
3. No ZoC, but prevent moving fort --> fort. Make forts less expensive and a bit faster to siege because there will be more. Might want to boost sorties for this one.

The reason these can work so much more easily is that they don't need tons of magic exceptions with weird interactions. It doesn't matter if you put a unit on a cog...that hostile fort will slow you even after you re-arrange armies. There is no "return" province. There is no situation where armies on the same tile can't go the same places. There's no super easy interaction that lets players ignore or bypass the rules (and less commonly, the AI).

The current system is broken, anything that isn't beats it.

However, multiple attempts at improving it means they are aware so I can sit back, learn the current one, understand it (including most of its flaws) and play the game until they're finally able to come up with something better.

They have been "aware of the problem" for literally half of the game's major patch cycles now, we're kind of past the point of leeway. If it was really considered a significant enough issue, it wouldn't still be in this state.

 

[Dominion]

The current system is broken, anything that isn't beats it.

They have been "aware of the problem" for literally half of the game's major patch cycles now, we're kind of past the point of leeway. If it was really considered a significant enough issue, it wouldn't still be in this state.

Tell that to the community you're so convinced is standing behind that opinion

Last or second-to-last system in beta was okay until people started ripping it apart because "hurrdurr, there are too many level 8 forts ermagerd, muh panties are full of sand"

I would be put off even thinking about reworking it after such an experience as well.

They should just throw out a new system and flip everyone off who's trying to voice their opinion until a year has passed, then compare the amount of complaints and decide based on them which system they want to keep.

Too bad the sandbox game we love to play doesn't have a sandbox community to test patches with.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Tell that to the community you're so convinced is standing behind that opinion

Last or second-to-last system in beta was okay until people started ripping it apart because "hurrdurr, there are too many level 8 forts everywhere ermagerd, muh panties are full of sand"

I would be put off even thinking about reworking it after such an experience as well.

They should just throw out a new system and flip everyone off who's trying to voice their opinion until a year has passed, then compare the amount of complaints and decide based on them which system they want to keep.

Too bad the sandbox game we love to play doesn't have a sandbox community to test patches with.

The system in beta shared most of the problems we have today, including the ones I already mentioned here. Actually let's skip the pretense...the system is STILL in beta.

It's easy to forget how much of a time sink free level 8 forts are without adding anything, especially now that we have the revolution era bonus for most of the time level 8's exist.

I never claimed the "community is standing behind my opinion". I don't care if 70% of the community disagrees with me outright. Unless they can demonstrate coherent reasoning for how an objectively/demonstrably/demonstrated-broken system is somehow "better", that 70% is wrong.

A game without rules isn't much of a game. The fort rules are broken and most people can't discern them, and while it's not enough to destroy the entire EU 4 experience (for most people, I do know two exceptions), it undermines its credibility as a strategy game.

 

[Sauron44]

Paradox did make a mistake. They implemented a mechanic while it was still in beta and left it that way for two years while working on DLC. To this day, the fort system introduced in 1.12 does not work. It was not finished. Most of its defenders don't even understand it, and I suspect given my image from earlier in this thread that at least some ways I can make that a valid move actually aren't "working as intended".

Most of those ways will still work independent from the fort system used, because they arent introduced by it.

The problem mostly responsible for stuff getting broken is that moves only check for being legal at the start of any given move order.
And that has nothing to do with the fort system itself

The system will remain broken as long as two armies in the same location can have different move restrictions while fighting together, and as long as you can't look at a still image of the map with no units selected and tell me (with confidence) where all units can go.

We disagree here then.
I want to know where the specific unit I select can go and I want to know through where my enemies can attack me.
Both conditions get satisfied by the current fort system.


I also only started playing the game with version 1.12, so there is no other fort system I know.

And both your other suggestions have the problem, that blocking parts of your country from enemy access is really hard (3) or completly impossible (2), which is something I really like about the current system.

 

[Dominion]

It's easy to forget how much of a time sink free level 8 forts are without adding anything, especially now that we have the revolution era bonus for most of the time level 8's exist.

Other way around. We got era bonis so now level 8 forts aren't an issue anymore. I'm still convinced the only reason we got that kind of bonus in the first place was as a reaction to complaints about the beta system. And imo lvl8 forts were never the time sink people made them out to be, but that's not important now.

A game without rules isn't much of a game. The fort rules are broken and most people can't discern them, and while it's not enough to destroy the entire EU 4 experience (for most people, I do know two exceptions), it undermines its credibility as a strategy game.

Most arguments over ZoC are just people arguing over varying levels of "how bad is it really?" and not "it's perfect" vs "it's bad".
Which is why threads like this never go anywhere. Can't find a solution if everyone at least partially agrees, but gets forced to pick a side for the sake of having an argument.
You should know best, seeing how you've been in every single one I've ever seen.

Going back to the old system definitely isn't the solution though. We've talked about this before.
Pre-forts is getting romanticized. At least this system has some level of strategy despite all of its flaws.

As usual we can conclude that it's a bad system that needs to get reworked and they're aware of the issue.

Throw a few threads in the suggestions board where more team members are bound to see it. Endless threads on the main board haven't gotten a reaction out of them so far.
Since the community has maneuvered itself into a stalemate where it has been stuck for 2 years now, why not try getting a bit closer to them.
Flood the bug section with proof of dynamic ZoC (they never admitted that this was even possible), movement locked units (creating a unit inside a ZoC forces a different ZoC on them) and other stuff. Flood the suggestion board with rework ideas.

What do you think they're going to do, ban you for being right?

But this conversation, like our last one, this thread, like every thread before it, will end after a few dozen pages of everyone trying to rip out each other's throats with no progress at all.

At this point it has become nothing but an opportunity for people to get angry and learn new ways to throw around insults in the politest way possible.


You know, I know, we know.

 

[Fishman786]

IMO the current system needs to be changed like this:
- No zones of control projected outside forts, but fort provinces themselves still restrict movement. You can only leave a fortified enemy-held province to return to your own occupied territory, to advance into enemy lands further you need to either take the fort or go around it.
- Non-fortified provinces should still automatically be captured/re-captured by adjacent forts. Possibly this could extend to enemy provinces that don't have an adjacent fort of their own.
- Because this system means there would be more forts, they would need to be both cheaper to build/maintain and quicker to overcome.
- More ways to improve fortifications should be added so that you have a gameplay choice between developing your fortifications and developing your army.

These changes would preserve the current gameplay situation where you can strategically chose provinces to incorporate into a defensive line to control enemy movement, but at the same time get rid of the very confusing and un-intuitive system we have now. I am well aware that there are perfectly good explanations for the vast majority of ZoC "anomalies" that people bring up, but the fact that there are so many misconceptions and threads like this just goes to show that there's a problem. If people are routinely confusing a game feature for a bug then that feature might need a rethink.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

We disagree here then.
I want to know where the specific unit I select can go and I want to know through where my enemies can attack me.
Both conditions get satisfied by the current fort system.

You are incorrect about saying both conditions are satisfied. If you have your units selected, you do not and *can't* know what moves are potentially valid for enemy units. It's impossible, because it's contingent on knowing where they were previously plus a few extra exceptions that allow moves like my screenshot in this thread.

Right now, it is impossible to look at a picture taken of a situation in the game and discern where any unit not selected is capable of going. That's not a matter of opinion, it's objective reality given the current rules. I can trivially produce two identical pictures where the unit movements allowed are different...

Going back to the old system definitely isn't the solution though. We've talked about this before.
Pre-forts is getting romanticized. At least this system has some level of strategy despite all of its flaws.

That system had strategy too, albeit with a little less depth. I might as well point out that current forts are also being "romanticized" what with the "best option we have" type language and likening it to democracy earlier X_X.

Throw a few threads in the suggestions board where more team members are bound to see it. Endless threads on the main board haven't gotten a reaction out of them so far.
Since the community has maneuvered itself into a stalemate where it has been stuck for 2 years now, why not try getting a bit closer to them.
Flood the bug section with proof of dynamic ZoC (they never admitted that this was even possible), movement locked units (creating a unit inside a ZoC forces a different ZoC on them) and other stuff. Flood the suggestion board with rework ideas.

I am not convinced suggestions get read more than here, going by evidence/past changes. As for bug reports, no thanks. After reporting the objectively bugged offensive coalition tooltip 5 times over across years of patching without so much as a single dev/QA response/acknowledgement in bug reports, plus a few others with similar non-responses, I've concluded that bothering to report bugs is a waste of time unless it's showcasing some kind of "exploit" (quoted/used with disdain). The only evidence that would change my mind is observing a different patching trend than we've seen going for years now.

Incidentally, the can't take/core bug is from the same broken beta patch that ZoC was, and that tooltip still lies and allows opposite from what it says in both directions (the game lets you take stuff you can't immediately core, and blocks stuff you could immediately core, lying about the reason in the latter instance).

Until they start fixing some of the already reported bugs or at least acknowledging their existence it's a waste of time. Even more so if they won't admit plainly obvious things like "dynamic ZoC". I'm not sure if I'd get in trouble for "flooding" or not, but I'm not interested in that.

As for this thread, its mere title should tip off that it's a straight up rant thread. We're getting about as expected, no? We're both still here too.

At this point it has become nothing but an opportunity for people to get angry and learn new ways to throw around insults in the politest way possible.

Let me be clear: while I'll point out that some of the posts here are wrong or using incoherent reasoning in discussion, the only insults I have are for the ZoC system itself, and the systemic process that led to its implementation and retention for years.

 

[macd21]

IMO the current system needs to be changed like this:
- No zones of control projected outside forts, but fort provinces themselves still restrict movement. You can only leave a fortified enemy-held province to return to your own occupied territory, to advance into enemy lands further you need to either take the fort or go around it.
- Non-fortified provinces should still automatically be captured/re-captured by adjacent forts. Possibly this could extend to enemy provinces that don't have an adjacent fort of their own.
- Because this system means there would be more forts, they would need to be both cheaper to build/maintain and quicker to overcome.
- More ways to improve fortifications should be added so that you have a gameplay choice between developing your fortifications and developing your army.

These changes would preserve the current gameplay situation where you can strategically chose provinces to incorporate into a defensive line to control enemy movement, but at the same time get rid of the very confusing and un-intuitive system we have now. I am well aware that there are perfectly good explanations for the vast majority of ZoC "anomalies" that people bring up, but the fact that there are so many misconceptions and threads like this just goes to show that there's a problem. If people are routinely confusing a game feature for a bug then that feature might need a rethink.

Doesn’t work. There aren’t enough choke points in the game that a strategically placed fort will be effective. This means you need a chain of forts to protect your interior. But the chain is weak - take down one fort and you can push through to the interior. So you need to make forts cheap. And as you expand outward, you have to make more forts -
But do you destroy the old ones? Probably not. The end result is way too many forts, a complicated mess with forts in more provinces than not. Warfare becomes a painful chore

 

[Fishman786]

Doesn’t work. There aren’t enough choke points in the game that a strategically placed fort will be effective. This means you need a chain of forts to protect your interior. But the chain is weak - take down one fort and you can push through to the interior. So you need to make forts cheap. And as you expand outward, you have to make more forts -
But do you destroy the old ones? Probably not. The end result is way too many forts, a complicated mess with forts in more provinces than not. Warfare becomes a painful chore

A chain of forts can be broken but a broken chain isn't entirely useless as it still impedes enemy movement. And the enemy wouldn't necessarily have total free reign in the interior of the country either, it would be sensible to place secondary fortifications on major settlements or defensible locations. Fortifying borders and high-value provinces is probably the easiest strategy for the AI to use, but for human there are a lot of different approaches to fortification. Destroying old fort lines would also be a good idea if they're costing upkeep, and that could be incentivised by actually re-funding you part of the initial construction cost when you demolish a fort. You could have a situation where you take a line of border fortifications in a peace deal and then knock down all but a couple of them which you keep in place in case you get invaded. Another obstacle might be some kind of CKII-style temporary fort that has nowhere near the strength of a permanent one but which can be quickly thrown up in the path of an advancing army.

The original fort system in EU4 (and the games before) was one where there were more fortified provinces than not and the game didn't really suffer from that. The problems came from the fact that you could just walk over all these forts and carpet-siege everything at once.

 

[LegacyCWAL]

I think that the basic idea of the current system (having a few tough forts, as opposed to crappy ones in every single province) is good. I think that having a ZoC system is probably a good way to go about doing that. HOWEVER, implementation of said ZoC seems to be what's causing all these issues.

What the game does right now, is that when a unit enters a ZoC, it saves the "origin province" that was back outside said ZoC, then restricts movement based on that origin province. Things then get weird if something messes with the origin province, or if the origin province is something unexpected (like a sea zone). So Paradox had to put in a bunch of exceptions to try to avoid situations where units get stuck. After all, how many posts have there been where somebody captures a fort, and suddenly the capturing army can't move? And then the exceptions just make things even less intuitive, and when you throw bugs into the mix...ugh.

So what I wonder is if something along the lines of the following might fix it:
-When a unit moves into an enemy ZoC, instead of the game saving just one origin province, save the origin AND the entire route the unit took through ZoC.
-If a unit is inside a fort's ZoC, then it can either move onto an enemy fort, or back along its entry route.
-Make sure to update ZoCs before updating return routes when a fort falls, so that nothing gets stranded by a successful siege.

I'm sure I'm missing some things here, but I wonder if that might be a good starting point.


Edit: hopefully for clarity.

 

[Fishman786]

I think that the basic idea of the current system (having a few tough forts, as opposed to crappy ones in every single province) is good. I think that having a ZoC system is probably a good way to go about doing that. HOWEVER, implementation of said ZoC seems to be what's causing all these issues.

What the game does right now, is that when a unit enters a ZoC, it saves the "origin province" that was back outside said ZoC, then restricts movement based on that origin province. Things then get weird if something messes with the origin province, or if the origin province is something unexpected (like a sea zone). So Paradox had to put in a bunch of exceptions to try to avoid situations where units get stuck. After all, how many posts have there been where somebody captures a fort, and suddenly the capturing army can't move? And then the exceptions just make things even less intuitive, and when you throw bugs into the mix...ugh.

So what I wonder is if something along the lines of the following might fix it:
-Instead of saving just one origin province, save the entire route the unit took.
-If a unit is inside a fort's ZoC, then it can either move onto an enemy fort, or back along its entry route.

I'm sure I'm missing some things here, but I wonder if that might be a good starting point.

How would it know where the route starts? An army might have moved through hundreds of provinces through its career.

 

[LegacyCWAL]

How would it know where the route starts? An army might have moved through hundreds of provinces through its career.

Only really start saving it when it enters a ZoC. I should go back and edit a bit for clarity

 

[macd21]

A chain of forts can be broken but a broken chain isn't entirely useless as it still impedes enemy movement. And the enemy wouldn't necessarily have total free reign in the interior of the country either, it would be sensible to place secondary fortifications on major settlements or defensible locations. Fortifying borders and high-value provinces is probably the easiest strategy for the AI to use, but for human there are a lot of different approaches to fortification. Destroying old fort lines would also be a good idea if they're costing upkeep, and that could be incentivised by actually re-funding you part of the initial construction cost when you demolish a fort. You could have a situation where you take a line of border fortifications in a peace deal and then knock down all but a couple of them which you keep in place in case you get invaded. Another obstacle might be some kind of CKII-style temporary fort that has nowhere near the strength of a permanent one but which can be quickly thrown up in the path of an advancing army.

Or in other words: exactly the kind of messy, complicated nightmare that I described above that would be in no way better than the system we have now. And which the AI would certainly not be able to handle effectively.

 

[LastSalian]

Just wanna add, yes, ZoC is still a mess. TBH though, doesn't only benefit the AI, you also sometimes magically ignore ZoC.

Whomever says otherwise, hasn't played the game lately.

 

[Sauron44]

You are incorrect about saying both conditions are satisfied. If you have your units selected, you do not and *can't* know what moves are potentially valid for enemy units. It's impossible, because it's contingent on knowing where they were previously plus a few extra exceptions that allow moves like my screenshot in this thread.

Right now, it is impossible to look at a picture taken of a situation in the game and discern where any unit not selected is capable of going. That's not a matter of opinion, it's objective reality given the current rules. I can trivially produce two identical pictures where the unit movements allowed are different...

I can know what moves are valid for enemy units, because I am aware of any possible paths they could take.
Also any movement before entering a hostile ZoC is irrelevant for future movement capabilities.

And the picture argument is irrelevant because I dont play in pictures.
Still given a set fort layout that didnt change recently all possible paths are known.
The only exception would be that you dont always know if a specific stack can move ZoC -> ZoC, but I never encountered a series of events in which I assumed wrong there and that made a difference in all my hours of EU4.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

The end result is way too many forts, a complicated mess with forts in more provinces than not. Warfare becomes a painful chore

That is, of course, only if you assume they carry the same siege requirements and war score factoring as now.

War score and what affects nations being willing to continue could certainly use a facelift, with or without any alterations to forts, so it's not like that should be off the table.

I can know what moves are valid for enemy units, because I am aware of any possible paths they could take.
Also any movement before entering a hostile ZoC is irrelevant for future movement capabilities.

You are not aware and can't be aware. It's not a matter of debate on this one, it's a matter of reality.

What I'm quoting demonstrates you don't know the rules. What moves are valid for units are contingent on other moves, and yes that can include moves done before entering ZoC in some cases. One example I already posted in this thread (no way could you honestly say you'd have reasonably anticipated what I did). It's not the only one, and it doesn't include what happens if armies were to merge.

And if you didn't see this stack previously and just panned over to notice it in hostile (to it) ZoC? Not a chance.

And the picture argument is irrelevant because I dont play in pictures.

You do, however, play in frames. And you scroll the map.

Still given a set fort layout that didnt change recently all possible paths are known.

Sure, if you include "right through them all depending on what the player ordered on his troops" (yes this is possible, mostly through player pathing manipulation). And even if that order wasn't given, simply scrolling over to a hostile force in ZoC negates your ability to tell where it can go, because you don't know its origin province.

 

[Sauron44]

You assume that the rules can be broken against the player without the player noticing.
That is wrong.

There might be some obscure way of doing things I am not aware of, but that means it hasnt happened to me in over 3000 hours of EU4.
So it probably wont happen in the future.

Sure, if you include "right through them all depending on what the player ordered on his troops" (yes this is possible, mostly through player pathing manipulation). And even if that order wasn't given, simply scrolling over to a hostile force in ZoC negates your ability to tell where it can go, because you don't know its origin province.

Player pathing manipulation means using the bug that illegal moves can be made because they were legal once?
Then that wont happen also because I dont mothball border forts and the AI starts moving their armies after declaring war and not before.

To the second point:
If the army is in hostile ZoC it had to move into it, which narrows the possible return provinces down to very few. Most of which dont even make a difference in the movement capabilities.

Show me an example of the things I said not applying, else I can just assume you cant cope with someone being smarter than you and actually understanding something you think is not understandable.

 

[Lithu]

I played EU4 until 1.11 ; but I stopped at Common Sense and further. The development change locking away a part of what was in the base game displeased me, but the real big huge issue was the fort ZOCs. It never made sense that a fort blocks movement 100 miles away, but the huge convoluted mess of exceptions making impossible to be sure of what is allowed or not is a fun-killer. Yes, carpet sieging was kinda boring, I agree. But rules were clear, intuitive, transparent.

About "small countries vs big countries" : a weaker country wil always lose against a stronger one, so if you are to win it involves allies/merc/etc. That's expected For those saying we should keep ZOC because it somehow would help small countries (which I doubt), think rather how to avoid "total war". Forts shouldn't be a way for the weak to beat the strong anyway. A big power with several borders shouldn't be able to commit all its troops in a given point without serious downsides.

The huge issue is Paradox don't want to say "we fucked up" and so only ever tried to change parts of the rules by adding exceptions instead of recognizing that the whole "ZOC" paradigm is at the root of this mess and it needs to be replaced by a new paradigm.

And to those saying we can't do better ; well I guarantee you if Paradox paid TMiT to create something with more depth that the original carpet-sieging but without all the current mess (especially : where you came from should never ever count to predict movement), he would do it. Hell, I could too. And if we were employed by Paradox to fix it and shipped the fix next patch, you would tell how great it is. But we aren't employed by Paradox, and what we would do will never be in an official patch, so you'll stick to "it's the best we can have" because you dismiss out of hand the other proposals (TMiT gave some rough possibilities in one of his post above, they can be fleshed out and there are others still)

Now, to comment some posts (warning : the reminder of this post may be boring)...

huh, there always is a simple solution, if zoc is complex and doesnt work, dont use zoc, use something else

It would need Paradox admitting they fucked up. And the more time passes, the worse it is : saying "we fucked up but we fix it next patch" is really not that bad. Saying "we fucked up and refused to change paradigm for 2 years but we will now" is much harder. Most humans are not capable to say that (and me neither, probably).

It's almost like they had a different model before, and players could actually understand the rules for it...hmm...maybe I'm just getting old but I seem to remember something like that, and it being scrapped before its replacement was finished...

Wow ! You're against progress ! What a reactionary you are !

Seriously : I watched a few multiplayer streams before 1.12 ; and the wars were compelling to watch. It required skill to do, but onlookers understood what was going on, and carpet siege intervened mostly in the later parts of the war.

Of course in single player, where you design your wars to roll over the enemy, the "track down the enemy army three times back and forth before carpet sieging" was far from the best possible, but that was a bad reason to replace it with worse.

It's a rule that is documented nowhere ingame, outside of trial and error you will never understand why it works like this. Add the mess that begins once multiple ZoC overlap, and you get a maze of bullshit movement rules you can only navigate by pausing, picking your army and trying out where you can go and how the pathing is done to get there. If the ZoC rule requires half a dozen undocumented special rules to reduce unwanted abusable effects, then maybe the original rule is bad.
...
there's no logical explanation how a fort somewhere in the grass land is supposed to inhibit troop movement a hundred miles away from it. If a rule is implemented strictly for gameplay reasons, then it should improve gameplay, not make it worse.

This.

I see people make a case it's intuitive or not opaque.

Those same people utterly fail to demonstrate actual knowledge of the mechanic that is supposedly intuitive in the vast majority of cases. The example I used in this thread is egregious but not uncommon.

Obscure game rules reduce the strategic part of the game. Understanding what's going on and what you can do is essential.

"Difficulty by obfuscation" is a bad way to do things.

This is a beta mechanic and it should not have been implemented until it was finished. I do find it strange that players so frequently defend this rule set while not knowing it...

I'll probably get dislikes for saying it, and probably even more by saying I will get dislike for saying it (I hope to be wrong, but from experience... ) : there are people who will defend what's the official rule because it is the official rule, even if it is a bad rule. We find those people a lot in everyday society, they are on those forums too.

It's quite sad, because they are probably sincere when they say they don't see what's wrong. A kind of automatic blindness to what may put them in the bad graces of the authority, which may be a good reflex survival in a prehistorical tribe but is seriously annoying in modern civilization.

It was easier to defeat large nations with small ones under 1.6 rules than it is in 1.24 rules. Forts aren't the only reason, but that's the reality of it.

Most players don't remember 1.6 (myself included), so that's lost on them.

This has been a convoluted system in every iteration since it was implemented years ago and is easily one of the most consistently damaging mechanics to the game.

This.

Regardless of the actual explanation, ZOC is a terrible system and the sooner it is replaced the better. Specifically, any replacement should fit all of these criteria:

• Easy to understand, with no special undocumented rules.
• Never leaves armies trapped, unable to return from whence they came.
• The AI should have to follow the same rules as a human, with no cheating or shortcuts.

Given the horrendous mess we currently have, I don't have much faith in Paradox to be able to create a system like that. But anything would be better than what we have now. Hell, why not make fort rules moddable so players can experiment with their own systems? Then you can just pick the best of what the community comes up with, so you can focus on other important things like fixing the AI or making new content.

This too.

Yes, a small nation could get lucky and take down a larger one - but it was far more likely they’d get stack wiped and crushed. And the fact that a small nation could get lucky and take down a larger one was another strike against the old system. With ZoC taking down a superior enemy requires skill, not luck.

Forts shouldn't serve to allow the weak do defeat the strong anyway (and they don't really). Conflating these things muddy the argument.

this is what many people here don't get..

No matter IF the player's don't get the rules, and no matter IF the AI does a valid move or not when "dodging" ZoC....

Small part of the community here might actually rage and quit playing this game over counterintuitive rules.

I know I did.

I don't care if the AI follow the rules when making its weird move and if as a player I can also use weird things like merging armies at my advantage.

It's a mess, and figuring out what I can and can't do is a pain. It's not fun nor strategic.

Here's the thing: it doesn't really matter if no one can explain a particular move, because most people don't care. Most people accept that sometimes forts stop movement and sometimes they don't. No one can be bothered figuring out what the rules are, because they're too complex, and when you do know them it doesn't help that much, because there's too many variables. And yet people keep on playing the game (and buying the DLC).

And, again: Yes it would be great if they implemented a better system. But they can't, so we're stuck with this one.

They could, if they ditched the ZOC paradigm and rethought it from the ground up.

Classic business method ; establish a set of requirements and then work out something which fits it. "ZOC" shouldn't be in the requirements, it's a tool.

Of course no new method will be perfect, but given how the current one fails, doing better is 100% doable - requirements and possibilities to fulfill them have already been proposed.

This system is horrible. This is, quite simply, NOT how army movement should work in any strategy game.
This ruined the game for me when it got implemented, but I gave it another chance a few days ago, because I used to LOVE EU games, but no. It's unplayable for me.
I honestly can't understand how the hell can people enjoy a game where you almost have no control over your armies.

This.

One side is simply incapable to understand that just because something works as it was designed to work, it's not neccessarily a good system.

Or so it seems, at least.

This system could maybe make sense, if forts were positioned BETWEEN provinces, or something like that.
A fort between Paderborn and Münster should lead to situations like this, but a fort in whatever third province shouldn't.

This would make more sense than ZOCs for sure (and it's doable too, I could lay out how, though I wouldn't say if it's worth it given other less radical possibilities)

I can see why people think the current fort system is bad, but that does not mean paradox made a mistake in keeping it.
Simply because no overall better system has been invented yet, or at least none I am aware of.

Another example:
Democracy is also a really bad system, but it is still better than anything else we came up with until now, so we're stuck with it.

Not because no other better system has been invented but because no other better system has been implemented by Paradox.

There are other possibilities, they are just dismissed from the start because they are that, possibilities not yet implemented. In that way, the comparison with democracy is somehow valid, as there is no calm and rational discussion possible with the zealots defending it (but that's not specific to democracy at all, that's true of any political system for those living under it, be it monarchy, communism, fascism, non-democratic republic, etc.).

The other side is incapable of understanding that all alternatives presented so far have been worse, but the fact that we get regular updates of them trying to implement a new system is a sign of them working on it, telling us they are very aware of ZoC being suboptimal in its current form, which apparently isn't enough so why not call everyone else a stubborn idiot with too much experience in the game (however that's supposed to be an insult is fleeing me) leading to a stalemate and dozens of pages without any progress.

All there updates have kept the core ZoC paradigm. This core paradigm is flawed and the root of all the nonsense of this system and its previous iterations.

There are better alternatives proposed, but they don't fit in the ZoC paradigm nor have been implemented by Paradox in a patch so we can't say "hey, play patch X to see that this system is indeed better". We have to rely on theoretical explanation about how it would better fit various requirements, and it's easier to dismiss out of hand with "I feel it will fail this other one".

The system will remain broken as long as two armies in the same location can have different move restrictions while fighting together, and as long as you can't look at a still image of the map with no units selected and tell me (with confidence) where all units can go.

That should be unanimously approved. I don't get how anyone could truly desire rules who do not adhere to this standard, necessary to keep things clear and intiutive.

The current system is broken, anything that isn't beats it.

They have been "aware of the problem" for literally half of the game's major patch cycles now, we're kind of past the point of leeway. If it was really considered a significant enough issue, it wouldn't still be in this state.

Alas...

The system in beta shared most of the problems we have today, including the ones I already mentioned here.

They kept ZoC, it kept failing.

And both your other suggestions have the problem, that blocking parts of your country from enemy access is really hard (3) or completly impossible (2), which is something I really like about the current system.

It should be less about full blocking and more about going far from your controlled territory being dangerous (attrition if you are not next to a controlled province ?). Then, even if forts task was only to delay a lot the capture of a territory/to recapture nearby occupied province without enemy troops ; it could sorta work.

Right now, it is impossible to look at a picture taken of a situation in the game and discern where any unit not selected is capable of going. That's not a matter of opinion, it's objective reality given the current rules. I can trivially produce two identical pictures where the unit movements allowed are different...

Yes and that's absurd.

That system had strategy too, albeit with a little less depth. I might as well point out that current forts are also being "romanticized" what with the "best option we have" type language and likening it to democracy earlier X_X.

Indeed.

I am not convinced suggestions get read more than here, going by evidence/past changes..

Yeah, it's not read a lot or at least has little impact on what is done anyway.

 

[Sauron44]

Anyone thinking a fort system without movement blocking would be ok is wrong:
That would mean every war between big nations is decided by a single big battle.
With everything else being kept the same the winner would chase down the rest of the enemy army and then carpet siege.