EU4 - Development Diary - 2nd of April 2019

[Xeiki]

Estate overhaul should focus on one thing: Local Autonomy.

Right now, local autonomy means that you get a -X% modifier on province production, manpower and tax - and nothing else. It just slows you down a little bit while you wait for it to decay. Now, I propose to tally change this system along with estates. The most important change: Local autonomy always INCREASES by default. Think about it. If left to their own devices, local buisinessmen, clergy and the nobles will expand their power. Thus, over time, they gain more and more control over their holdings. Estates will amplify this effect, and must have the option to spread to other provinces. Nobles expanding their power, the Clergy supporting each other, Merchants trying to control the centers of trade. The more local autonomy, the more this effect gets amplified, as the Estates can put more money into their own treasury. When you conquer a new province, local autonomy will be set to a low but non-zero value, lets say, 10%, reflecting that the player recently placed loyal servants there, and directly controls the province, which will grow more autonomous with time, instead of the current system, were a newly conquere province is highly autonomous, which makes no sense at all, since the conquest will have removed the old power structures.

Now, this system would run with constant modifiers, not single click actions (even though those are not removed, but I will come to that later). The player would need to actively spend money and expand the bureaucracy to try to slowly push back against the nobles. While in the early game, tax collection would be in the hands of the clergy and local nobles, the player could try to install tax collectors who are directly responsible to the government. This will of course bloat the bureaucracy (increasing corruption gain and cost), but yield more direct benefits to the player. At the same time, estates will be unhappy if the player directly collects the taxes, which limits their options to cheat - so they will withhold more manpower/tax/production from the player where they have high autonomy. So the player must counteract this by granting certain benefits to the estates to please them. This could be done by a kind of minigame or event chain, negotiating terms with the estates.

Another thing that happens with high powered estates would directly affect what actions the player can take. A few examples:
The Clergy is very powerfull in your country. It thus controls the religion of provinces. The Clergy will actively try to enforce their religion, and will resists attempts by the player to change the state religion. This will add a scaling modifier to conversion time/cost, making conversions almost impossible or very costly with high enough clerical power in a province. In provinces not controlled by the Clergy, this modifier will be lower, but if the clergy is strong enough, random events could hinder the player, for example by sending counter missionaries to a province not controlled by the clergy, which, if prosecuted by the player, will lower the clerical opinion, and increase the chance of negative effects, etc. If a new religion emerges, lets say, protestantism, a new estate is created, which you can chose to support, which will slowly turn your country protestant. Similarily, if you conquer territory of different religion, that religion will get an estate as well, which will be hostile to you unless some compromise is reached.

The powerful nobles will try to hinder you expanding your army. This will affect you mostly in the early game, and could be handled similarily to Imperator: Rome, with the Nobles providing you armies, but, if the Nobles hate you, you will not be able to send those armies anywhere, and if angered enough, they will turn against you and try to dethrone you. Now, if you expand the player army, each regiment over a certain number will worry the nobles, as the relative strength of King and Nobles will shift more in favour of the King. Thus, the Nobles will increase their efforts to build a large Army, while simultaneously trying to withhold manpower from you. You will have to find a balance between maintaining your own army and relying on nobles. Another possibility is that, when you declare war and your nobles are unhappy, there is a random chance that some local nobility will NOT join the fight, with some regiments becoming uncontrollable, or not fighting the enemy unless in their home province. Conversely, with high powered but loyal nobility, they would actively try to expand their territory, petitioning you to attack a neighbouring country, producing claims, plotting, insulting other countries, with a penalty to relations if you refuse to meet their demands, or demanding compensation in other form.

The Burghers will try to monopolize commerce - withholding money from you if you anger them too much. The more you regulate trade, the less likely they are to build marketplaces, invest in centers of trade, or build ships to protect their trade. They are also generally anti-war, but seek colonial expansion, thus they need the ability to colonize provinces on their own. They will also try to steer trade to their local provinces, further decreasing player power. Powerful Burghers could also form trading companies on their own. This would be perfect to simulate the East India Company for example, which, for a time, had the largest army and navy on the planet. They could conquer provinces on their own in trade company regions, establish protectorates etc.

One other thing: While estates will gain provinces autonatically, it will still be possible to remove provinces from an estate (for a cost in loyalty) or grant them provinces to appease them. This can be tied in the the negotiations mentioned above: The nobles will agree to send you X% more manpower for Y years in exchange for X new provinces granted to them.

Now, all this is sounds pretty punishing to the player - and it is. But it should be. It is an active, organic countermeasure to mindless blobbing. It will be pretty easy to reign in the estates of a small country - after all, you don't need much bureaucracy to replace the local one. But the bigger your country, the more powerfull the estates become, hindering the player. The cost of fighting the estates will grow rapidly, as distance to the capital increases. As the game progresses, the player will have to chance to curtail the power of the estates step by step - through constant expenses for player buraucracy as well as certain descisions and events, for example a descision to pass a law regarding the size that private armies can have, etc. This would be similar to HRE reforms. Absolutism growth would be dynamic, just representing the fraction of player power vs. estate power. Conversely, the player can chose to keep strong estates, which will then do things on their own but limiting the freedom of the player to do what he wants. For example, the player could choose to keep a strong Burgher estate around, which will greatly increase the trade power of your nation, and while you get smaller and smaller fractions of the money made, it will still be a net increase, giving you money to spend elsewhere, but without the ability to control trade directly, and hindering your ability to wage war because the merchants will not support you in a war of aggression if they see no benefit in it. Similarily, the clergy estate could be left very powerful, ensuring that your religious unity stays high and no foreign religion can grab hold of your provinces, but hindering your technological advances because the clergy controls which ideas you can pursue, or something like that. The nobility could continue to provide you with armies, but you will have no control over army composition and size, and you are left at the mercy of the nobles to support you in war.

This is of course a major overhaul, and would work best with a kind of pop system, but the main points are this:
-Make estates dynamic instead of completely player controlled - provinces can be assigned to an estate automatically if the estate is powerful enough.
-Make local autonomy actually mean autonomy for the locals. Give estates the ability to take actions on their own (colonizing, pushing for war, etc)
-Make Absolutism dynamic, representing the value of player power vs. estate power.
-Make local autonomy grow with time UNLESS fought with state spending, and make it so that the required money increases exponentially with size and estate power, and that a bigger bureaucracy means more corruption.
-Give the player the ability to pursue estate reforms that will permanently affect autonomy growth/estate power
-Balance all this so that the struggle for the player shifts from "I need to expand" to "I need to keep my realm together" - until the player manages to break the estates in the late game and unleash the raw and unbridled power of absolute ruler.

 

[Vohen]

Good day and welcome to today's EU4 dev diary. Now that the 1st of April is over, I can return to being online. A day of having hopes dashed when awesome stuff is announced, only for it to be a hoax is too much for my heart to take.

Last week we had a fun dev diary where we talked about our current thoughts on the Mercenary system. To re-iterate, that dev diary was, much like this one, not a promise of things to come, but more an airing of current design thoughts and a way to involve the community (if you're reading this, that's you!). As we could see, there was a lot of followup discussion from forumgoers and has given us much to ponder on during our current development period of bug crushing and tech debting.

Today we'll have a similar expunging of EU4 thoughts, and for our subject matter, we'll pick a mechanic which has been through a small journey of its own, and may well have some distance to go yet: Estates

Again, what is mentioned here are not changes that are currently in the game, nor are they promises of things to come, but more to share our thought process and ideas we have, potentially for the upcoming expansion and update.

The Estate system joined the roster of EU4 mechanics back when The Cossacks Expansion was released. It added internal factors to balance within your realm such that patronizing your various estates heavily could grant wonderful bonuses, while letting them run away with power could put your nation in jeopardy with said Estates seizing direct control. EU4 is very much a game about direct action: so your primary interactions with said estates come from Estate Actions such as granting monopoly charters to the Burgers, or calling a Diet for your Nobility.


View attachment 467894

EUIV is a game very much about building empires, and while the external elements of this: outward diplomacy, warfare and expansion are generally strong, the internal aspects had been somewhat lacking in comparison. Estates were designed to bring meaningful choices within your realm, to match those outwith.

The reception of Estates at the time was a mixed bag, and has continued to be ever since. While the system did indeed bring internal mechanics to the game, they came with their own baggage, which we see ourselves, and have heard from various comments and feedback, much of which on these forums.

Common issues have included:

• The system is only available for The Cossacks Expansion owners, creating a large rift between playing with and without the expansion, as well as a belief that the mechanic won't be expanded upon since
• Managing province allocation is a lot of scutter and brings on click fatigue
• The above issue only compounds itself as your nation expands, creating more busywork as the game goes on
• The steps involved in expansion are needlessly bloated at every conquest, by needing to be at the Estates' beck and call
• The actions are not as involved as they could be: you call a Diet for your Nobility, but where is the Diet? What came from it?
• Estate types and their flavour is limited.

Some of these have been tackled in the three+ years since Estates were added to the game. Dharma saw the system becoming part of the base game, opening it up for further changes, while Estates no longer made minimum demands for land, reducing the bothering necessity of adding new land to the estates lest you suffer their wrath. We also added to the variety of Estates, bringing in special types for the subcontinent of India.

Ultimately though, the system retains some issues which leave us wanting to take a big swing at improving it. Like Mercenaries last week, I'm talking in broad-sweeping statements about what we want to do with the feature, so again, take this as airing out our thoughts rather than our rock-solid mandate of what we plan to do with Estates.

Firstly, the busywork element of Estates should be removed, or at the very least reduced. our Grand Strategy games are about creating , without sounding too pretentious, intellectually stimulating experiences, and the current methods of interacting with your Estates are not up to par with this.

Additionally, the actions done through the estates should be more impactful. I've said it quite a few times before, but I'll say it again, when a Diet is called, perhaps there should be...a Diet? Impactful is an easy word to throw around with various different meanings being drawn from it, but in Estates' cases, the existing interactions often make little change worth noting outside of their influence and loyalty, which has limited meaningful effect on your nation until hitting crisis point where they can seize control of your nation through disaster.

On another note, making the Estate UI more accessible would be a boon. Currently, much of the hands-on actions are somewhat buried as menus within menu

With Estates being made a basegame feature in EU4, we believe this came with an unspoken promise to continue to work on and improve the feature. It is certainly on our radar for something we would like to do this year, but as I continue to believe people are getting sick of hearing, we continue to spend our time on ironing out tech debt and gearing up for development of this year's Update and European Expansion. The question I leave to you as we conclude today's dev diary: What are your experiences with the Estates system, what do you most enjoy and what are you left most wanting from it?

I have said before that Estates are probably the mechanic with the most untapped potential in the entire game, and was very much glad to receive a response then, and even more so now, that you guys do have plans to work on it.

To me, there are two things that should be worked on regarding estates:
First, which was already commented on, make them feel alive, like proactive, dynamic parts of your empire.
Right now they do feel rather "dead", as they are completely reactive to player input and static outside of a few flavor events.
Second but not less important, make them interact with the rest of your nation, and maybe even with one another.
Case in point, stability: as the factions that represent the internal components of your nation, they should heavily impact stability (which in turn would be a major trigger for most disasters), be it positively if they do like you or negatively if they don't.
Also, have other factors internal to your nation impact their influence and loyalty to the player, for example, the nobility should like more of a king with high legitimacy than an illegitimate one.

Then there are more specific things, like how parliaments should work with factions that should also have a dynamic of their own, and how factions should be in every republic and heavily impact elections.

I am looking forward to see what will come out of this rework, the potential is definitely there!

 

[FleetingRain]

Guess I'll take the chance and shamelessly plug my suggestion for Estates/Absolutism. The devs already know about it, but maybe many others don't.

our Grand Strategy games are about creating , without sounding too pretentious, intellectually stimulating experiences

Tributtons.

 

[Xetfield]

Burghers should be connected with mercantilism, the more mercantilistic is the nation, the happier they are. The clergy will feel the same about religious unity and the aristocracy should love high military traditions/frequent wars.

 

[Lavilledieu]

Estates in the past had been something I could manage in the early game, when I'm small, and could make quite some use of. The minimum requirement made me not forget about them, and that way I retained a nice level of influence and thus a small bonus. Recently, you no longer have that, so you forget about adding provinces to keep influence high enough.
The usual benefits for me were the monarch points (though the diplo ones were harder to get) and the clergy bonuses (I like theocracies more). Too high influence had been an almost non-issue for me, except as Catholic theocracy; a few times I was borderline Clergy coup. Now, high influence can be almost ignored because the event influence modifiers are not balanced for the new system. IMO, the recent changes solved nearly nothing, it just made things ignorable. The menus in a menu thing is certainly one of the major reasons why you can so easily forget about them. But unless a very major (not like the one we had) redesign of the estates is done, I don't think they are the way to regulate internal gameplay.

I'm still surprised that estates are not dynamic; if I were to design them, I would've designed them almost as the voting preferences in vicky 2 (also including a non-estate option). Accumulation of small changes, local variables,... affecting who is more present where. I may be wrong, but estates were not always "assigned"; they grew dynamically. This could become easy to manage to small, low dev countries, but becomes more impactful in high-dev provinces or more difficult to manage in large empires (potentially creating risky revolts etc).

 

[Celtic Cross]

Please change the way estates spawn at the start of the game. They currently appear on random provinces, many of which where a player would never choose to put them (nobility on trade centers and things like that).

 

[Blitz229]

Im not sure if you are aware of how the the mecanics of estate levies and esate priveleges work in M&T, but a breif summary is that during war you can demand support from nobles in the form of troops that belong to the nobles, and/or buffs. this could add an interesting layer to warfare, expecially early game when the estates have more relative power, and thus would have a larger inmpact on the war. This could represent the feudal system that still lingered in europe from the ages of CKII, and the shift away from this levy system to standing armies could be better shown in game as the nobles lose more power to the centrilized state (the player). Esate privaleges in M&T are randomally demanded and estates start with a couple. They give mostly negative modifiers to the player, on a national or per provence basis (under a particular esate) giving you an insentive to shrink their power, and revoke the privleges. The estates will of course resist this centilizarion and revoking of their privleges, but the more you limit them the less malices they create and the more centrilized you can make your nation. This will give a good imitation of the histporical centeralization and shrinking power of the nobles, church, and merchant class in a nation and particularly in the government of a nation during this time period. Just like the absolutism and centralization that occured historically, the most centrilized and absolutist nations dominated during most of the mid-game, up until the "age of revolutions". These estate privleges and the players revoking of said privleges add another layer to the players struggle to unite their realm and centralize their power, on top of just having a number of absolutism "points".

 

[Lord Hoosier]

I love the Dharma estates for Indian countries.

 

[Tyr86]

You can sum up the current estate system with just a few sentences. Aside from some of the special unit centric estates, they are essentially click me every X year for a bonus.

I would like to see the estate system function as a power struggle. Each estate is a bar within a bar graph. Think Sunni religion. This would also have the benefit of, perhaps, a much cleaner interface. A few buttons below each estate and the hover tooltip OR a giant box at the top listing all benefits(and negative impacts)

Estates should offer bonuses, but maybe with an extra tier. Having a dominant clergy in your country might mean +1 missionaries, +2% missionary strength, and +1 admin points but at the cost of a weak burghers--but not necessarily if RNG and good estate management takes place. Burghers could even get as bad as you losing a merchant and a dip point. These are meaningful decisions but also allow us the flexibility to shift our country to make up for bad RNG or to rush an idea group.

Do away with loyalty and keep only influence(or name it power). Influence over a country implies happiness right? Unless....you're a corrupt ruler.

So how would the interactions work? Well for one, I like the idea of adding monarch points more slowly. The +150 button is great but I want to feel the impact of the clergy(similar to power projection). I hate when I fall below 50 power projection and I should hate when the clergy falls below 60 influence if that is my goal. At 85 influence the clergy should give a meaningful bonus of a monarch point or two.

Secondly, I want access to estate clicks every single month of the year. I know I know, holy cow so many clicks. No, not really. Why can't I ask the burghers for more money every single month? Sure they might hate me but I want my money now. I'm king. Bad things can and should happen but let me deal with those. I'm king. I should be able to steal from my nobles and make them hate me. I should be able to throw money at all of these estates but maybe it causes corruption? Maybe corruption at greater than 10% makes my bribes essentially a coin flip but a coin flip I won't know until much later(to prevent save scumming)? who is to say the clergy won't just pocket my money and do what they want if I am super corrupt?

Maybe an added benefit of influence within these groups is I can always hire the type of advisor I want. I might not like the cost but I want options. I have a loyal clergy but it takes me 2 years to find an inquisitor through firing? Seems silly.

So before I make a super long post let me give examples below:

Bars(maybe sliders too but I haven't thought this through). Power struggle. A progression with an estate to an end goal of high influence would be ideal. Let me court the hell out of the nobility(maybe even with a diplomat??!?!?) so that they love me and give me things.

Function:
Influence will tick down/up by .10/month to a base of 50
Estate clicks available each month---let us rob, bribe, corrupt our estates at will BUT suffer the consequences. This should be as tedious of a system as the player makes it. Create a mess and expect to deal with it. Leave it be and hey maybe some ok benefits but nothing extra special

EXAMPLES---just freethinking here...obviously not balanced. Perhaps influence should be tweaked to make 85 percent difficult for more than 1 estate. Pick your poison. For example, if the clergy is at 85 influence, the burghers and nobility get -0.05 monthly influence(dominant clergy). 60 should be realistic for all but 85 for 1, maybe 2 for a short period of time. 2 at 85 would cause each of their influence to decrease by 0.05 and the 3rd to decrease by 0.10...a good chance the third will be angry soon.

Province bonuses: 40+ influence. At less than 40 they simply invert:
Clergy +1% missionary strength and +10% tax
Burghers: -10% development +20% goods produced modifier
Nobility: -30% fort maint, +25% local manpower
Perhaps this makes forts more desirable and makes the nobility the go to for them.

States that consist of the same estate have reduced edict costs. Edicts might need some more flavor.

Clergy

• 85 INF +2 admin points/mo, +2 missionary strength, +1 missionary. +1 TOTF, +0.50 yearly corruption, defender of the faith click
• 60 INF +1 admin points/mo, +1 missionary strength, +1 TOTF, +0.10 yearly corruption
• 50 INF +1 TOTF
• 40 INF -1 TOTF, increased missionary maint
• 10 INF -1 TOTF, increased missionary maint, -1 Admin points/mo

Clicks:

• Assigning provinces adds influence relative to dev of province and reduces influence of other estates
  
• bribe the clergy(+corruption + influence)
• rob the clergy( - -influence + corruption)
• Defenders of the <insert faith> 5 infantry with +10% morale vs other religions(war leader) and -10% morale(war leader) vs the same religion(on a click timer--10 years?!?) Defenders of the faith cannot be dismissed once summoned and become rebel zealots if the religion is changed. We are coming Ottomans (or maybe them for us). This might also make the reformation more chaotic. In addition, when not at war, if defenders of the faith are suppressing rebels in a province that province gains +1% missionary strength.
  
• random events based on influence(biased RNG relative to influence level)

Nobility

• 85 INF +2 mil point/mo, general click, +20% manpower recovery speed, +0.50 yearly corruption, -10% AE, noble dispute CB, raise noble manpower click, +0.50 yearly power projection
  
• 60 INF +1 mil point/mo, , general click, +10% manpower recovery speed, +0.10 yearly corruption, raise noble manpower click, +0.50 power projection
  
• 50 INF +10% manpower recovery speed
  
• 40 INF -10% national tax modifier, -10% manpower recovery speed, -0.50 power projection
  
• 10 INF -1 mil point/mo, -15% national tax modifier, -20% manpower recovery speed, -1.00 power projection

Clicks:

• Assigning provinces adds influence relative to dev of province and reduces influence of other estates
• bribe the nobles(+corruption + influence),
• rob the nobles( - -influence + corruption),
• hire a noble general (quality is based on 20% of current tradition+30 capped at 100 obviously, perhaps on a timer).
• random events based on influence(biased RNG relative to influence level),
  
• raise noble manpower click---, raise manpower based on the dev of noble provinces(this reduces their influence)
• Alternate Noble click --Summon 2 Noble Elite cav units--call them Arumbles and make their maintenance modifier -60%.
• noble dispute CB---declare war on another country that has a province within a state that has nobility. Nobility want the entire state...not just part of it. The greedy people they are. The influence loss to remove the nobility from a province will likely be much more severe than the clergy or burghers. Influence might experience a minor decrease(0.01) for all states that are not completely owned by the nobility. Example) You have 3 states, 2 states are owned entirely by the burghers and clergy and 1 state, consisting of 3 provinces, has 1 province owned by the nobility. The influence penalty would be -0.02. This could create a snowball effect for the nobility or an angry estate. Kind of a cool mechanic.

Burghers

• 85 INF +2 dip point/mo, +1 merchant, +0.50 yearly corruption, -1.00 yearly separatism, -0.10 monthly autonomy change, +10% trade efficiency, promote prosperity click, promote culture click
  
• 60 INF +1 dip point/mo, , +0.10 yearly corruption, -0.05 monthly autonomy, +10% trade efficiency, promote prosperity click
  
• 50 INF -0.05 monthly autonomy
  
• 40 INF - +0.05 monthly autonomy, +1 national unrest
  
• 10 INF -1 dip point/mo, -1 merchant, +0.10 monthly autonomy, +2 national unrest

Clicks:

• Assigning provinces adds influence relative to dev of province and reduces influence of other estates
  
• bribe the burghers(+corruption + influence)
• rob the burghers( - -influence + corruption)
  
• promote prosperity click(10 year CD)--essentially a mini golden age of sorts(1 year = +15% national tax modifier/goods produced, -10% army morale, -1 national unrest, -10% dev cost, unable to declare wars, -20% stability cost modifier, -20% rebel progress). This costs influence and the cost increases with the size of the country.
  
• random events based on influence(biased RNG relative to influence level)
• promote culture(20 year click)--promote a culture to accepted if the follow conditions apply:
  • 10% of total dev
  • No separatism/unrest/devastation in culture provinces--national unrest must also be negative
    
  • Prosperity present( MOH exclusive maybe prosperity should be for everyone?!?)
  • not at war
  • costs 50% of the normal dip cost to culture convert these provinces
• Assigning the burgher estate to a gold mine has the normal autonomy modifiers but also halves the inflation or some other positive variant. This might help some of the smaller countries thrive on gold and be more competitive?

Just a random thought at the end. I like the implementation of special troops and would love for this feature to be enhanced for more nations. I think the defender of the faith thing could be implemented for the entire game. Every country has a religion and people who defend it.

EDIT: Some additional thoughts.

I tried my best to make the clicks/bonuses meaningful and not too heavy on ducat generation. This was intentional. +10 national tax modifier/production/trade are great. Let's save those modifiers for advisors/buildings/traits as much as we can. Yes, you can click and rob the clergy, that is instant money. Other's have posted that the "hidden" autonomy money of a province that goes to an estate could slowly build. If you haven't raided it before and your estates are overflowing with cash maybe they choose to reward you with ducats(RNG) for giving them influence. Or maybe you just steal it from them at the cost of corruption. At least this would make the estates feel alive.

I also tried to create 3-6 distinct avenues to play. A Burghers-heavy game with the right country has me thinking a little about how much I really need humanist. A clergy-heavy game with religious ideas would make converting pretty easy but do I really need it? The nobility estate might be best suited for someone who wants to blob. I'm still not super happy with the bonuses there though. I like the CB but I'm not sure if that is enough to justify siding with them over the other 2. Raise noble manpower seems like a meh click. I added an OR click for laughs.

 

[Sulphuric_Glue]

This has popped up in a few mods and I think it'd be a good addition to the game - estates based on accepted culture groups. This would add more to the system of managing cultures than simply accepting or not accepting certain cultures, which is not how it went down irl.
For accepted cultures, their estates could demand certain things in return for reduced unrest - e.g. they want you to develop their provinces and construct new buildings in their provinces, and they prefer higher autonomy.

I also think you should introduce a new layer of how much a culture is accepted, having fully accepted, neutral and then cultures you actively want to remove. These cultures would get a big unrest increase in their provinces but should also be the only ones you can convert culture in.

 

[Rashie]

Influence % of nobility should be connected to the level of absolutism you have. It being a completely separate mechanic from estates doesn't make much sense.
Ideally you should need to fight your estates trying to de-claw their power and overall influence as a part of centralising your country, rather than just intentionally upsetting them by revoking a bit of land, accepting their demands for more provincial autonomy, and then just scrolling through your province list right after getting more absolutism for every click of reduced autonomy, maxing it out in the early 17th century nearly instantly.

 

[mechanical_Critter]

But it should be. It is an active, organic countermeasure to mindless blobbing.

Define "mindless blobbing".

It's amazing that all you come up with suffers from 2 congenital issues. The first one is that of course a good player will be able to subvert easily the control mechanics you mentioned (like giving burgers the power to conquer TC lands? How do you even think it would work…). At the end of the day, "mindless" good player will still "mindlessly" conquer territory The second one is a gross misrepresentation of the devs desires towards the game (you really think more micromanagement is coherent with Jake's expressed desire to reduce "click fatigue"?).

Tbh I feel like you'd need some more experience in the game (including some "mindless" games) to have better ideas. Theorycrafting isn't enough.

 

[purplephoton]

Unpopular opinion: I personally think that estates are good enough the way they are. All issues with them are fairly minor (such as too many clicks, but that's something to take care of during peacetime I guess) and attempting to "fix" anything could just as easily make things worse (much like professionalism made the mercspam meta even worse by adding +15% mercs at low professionalism). Any changes to the system should purely be for expanding the system and not for fixing issues.
People say that the estates are too much bother to do anything with because their bonuses are so irrelevant, but I beg to differ. 20% manpower recovery, 20% tax, and 20% trade efficiency are all sizeable bonuses, the dev cost from loyal burghers is absolutely amazing for playing tall (helps you get down from 8/dev to 4/dev, single-handedly doubling your efficiency!), the stab cost is situationally useful, and the land maintenance is nice. The ability to ignore autonomy is also quite huge; I was once given a savegame and managed to increase a country's income and manpower by about 50% simply by giving high-autonomy land to estates (50% strength increase is about 30-40 years of progress btw!).
Also, imo estates should be a far smaller priority than mercenaries, because revamping estates is unlikely to change the meta.

 

[kettch]

As a mediocre casual player, currently I experience estates as 'that thing I remember from time to time to check if I can grab some bonuses'. Apart from the much quoted missing 'feeling' there are two main points I would like to mention:
1. Due to the fixed 20-year cooldown and (save for influence threshold) fixed interactions estates feel very static. Sure, there is some occasional choice in which bonuses to use and which to forgo to stay below 100 influence, but even those are usually very obvious and not even faintly do the potential of the mechancis justice.
2. Estates are, all in all, pretty isolated from other mechanics and even your country in general. The only touching points are province allocation (which I consider to probably be the only 'decent' part of estates right now), disasters (which you generally want to and can avoid) and events (which are nice for flavor but feel completely random and get repetitive pretty fast)

To improve on those points, estates should be changed to something tzhat is much more involved with other parts of the game and that one can actually incorporate into their strategy, instead of some bonuses that you just get from time to time.
Some ideas off the top of my head what could be done to move into that direction (in no particular order):
1. additional / different estate interactions, attainable e.g. through ideas, policies, government reforms or special event chains.
2. Varying (preferably shorter) cooldowns
2a. Or even permanent modifiers, perhaps containing some buffs to certain areas and tradeoffs for others toggleable through interaction with some cooldown much like policies, but maybe only affecting estate land and also having an impact on estate loyalty scaling with controlled land (like having great bonuses on some provinces vs having less bonuses but on many provinces instead)
3. Different modifiers to estate land based on, say, institutions present in the province
4. dynamic (additional) bonuses (in type) of interactions depending on things like:
- having a regency council
- having a male / female ruler
- government form
- having marriage / alliance / good relations with another country of same / different faith / religous school / dynasty
- being a duchy / kingdom / empire
- being subject of another country
- being shogun / emporer of china / the holy roman empire
- having attained certain age objectives
- not having overextension
- having no / high corruption
- having aristocratic vs plutocratic ideas available
5. dynamic bonuses (in value) of interactions not just depending on estate loyalty but many other factors like:
- legitimacy / rep. trad. / whatever other equivalents there are
- ratio of income from trade vs tax
- ratio of core vs non-core territory
- ratio of main culture group development
- number/size/ratio vs home territory of vassals / tributaries / colonial nations / trade companies
- ratio of true believers vs heretic vs heathen territory
- ratio of army vs navy
- ratio of military spendings vs ecenomic base
- ratio of military vs light ships
- ratio of each shiptype vs naval limit
- trade power in home node / collecting / transferring nodes
To name just a few each.

Some actual examples for clarification:
- The number of troops raised by the 'raise additional levies' could be modified by your legitimacy
- Having ties with heretics or heathens could negatively impact certain interactions of religious estates
- Having a trade-heavy empire could lessen negative impacts on burghers interactions, but increase influence more.
- Accordingly, a tax-heavy empire could have similar effects on clergy.
- The esp / trade policy could give your burghers este (or equivalent) an interaction to modify your tradepower in nodes based on the state of your spy networks in other present powers for some time, with the downside of higher reveal chance or faster spy network decay and a small hit to relations.
- 'draft ships for war' interaction could be unlocked through naval ideas and have a similar interaction 'draft trading ships' for light ships unlocked by maritime ideas. Number of ships gained could depend on naval forcelimit and inverse ratio of shiptype vs naval forcelimit (-> you get more for having lots of naval forcelimit but less for already having 60% of naval forcelimit filled with that type of ship)

 

[Bearjuden]

Okay, so I touched on this a bit in my suggestions from last week, but here I can give it a bigger spotlight. I think Estates are a criminally underused aspect of the game. It's one of the primary tools I would use to separate this game from where it is (a generically mindless conquest game, a la Civ) from the truly ambitious and special games (Paradox at its best, CK2 and Vic2). Some of this I posted in one of my original threads on this forum a while ago, but I'll recap the core of it here.

1. Split up the nobility into at least three but probably more like up to five estates, and name each one after a real life noble house of that country (where possible). Track wealth, soldiers, provinces, etc for all of them independently of one another. To be clear, I would set a limit at about five, but you would not have to be that high, especially as a small country. You might only have two noble families of note besides the ruling one, but as you expand more will tend to come into being.
2. Add family trees. They don't have to be full family trees, at each generation everything besides the immediate family can be pruned, since distant relatives didn't often make it onto the throne, and to go full CK2 would lead to PUs never happening.
3. Give the noble estates (plural, see) the ability to do their own politicking. You can marry your ruling family to other countries ruling families of course, just like now, but also to your own nobles (to decrease their actions against you) and to other countries' nobles (for various purposes). Want to destabilize a rival? Marry into the largest noble family beneath them and start backing them against their ostensible leaders, how about? This can also lead to cadet branches of your ruling house being major houses in other countries, and make it easier to push for particular PUs (but also for others to fight them, since they'll be more aware). If you can put House Trastamara as major noble family in France, it's a strong step to putting them in charge altogether.
4. Let your nobles fight each other. A major consequence of this would be that you cease to be all aspects of the country entirely and become "the ruling family". Your family can change - if you're Brandenburg, and the von Hohenzollerns die out, your game isn't over - but you don't directly control the...whatever their names are nobles beneath you.
5. GIVE THE NOBLE ESTATES TEETH. This is vital. None of this works if there is no effective penalty for giving your nobles a ton of influence. It needs to be a constant push-pull of wanting what they can offer but not wanting to risk them declaring a civil war on you.
6. Invert the estate relationship with absolutism. Rather than having absolutism diminish estate influence, have the estates impact absolutism. The best way to increase absolutism should be, duh, to manage to sideline the nobility.
   1. Edit: for some reason I thought they impacted one another, which is not true, but I'm leaving this in as a counter-view to what lots of others have proposed. Let absolutism be a rough measure of the collective power of the state versus the estates, rather than something you directly adjust.

Some ramifications of this:

1. Accepted cultures can be at least partly based on having nobles of that culture and if so, how many. It might be easier to convince the Dutch that you're on their side and that they shouldn't revolt if you have one or two powerful Dutch families represented in your court.
2. The Civil War disaster can now be a real honest to god civil war. One of your noble families got too uppity, and now their provinces are set against your provinces, with other nobles choosing sides based on loyalty.
3. Much easier to track and target PUs, instead of being left at the mercy of a random number generator.
4. If the Royal Family dies out, you can easily see who
   1. Edit: I neglected to finish this sentence, it should read "If the Royal Family dies out, you can easily see who will take power based on who has the most influence, troops, money, and posibly foreign support. It won't be completely random anymore; the powerful nobles of the land will vie for control instead."
5. The nobles of countries you integrate can join your own court, especially if you are below the limit (so if you are Bohemia and integrate Silesia, then the Piasts become your nobles, and if someone liberates Silesia then they go back to being in charge).
6. All feudal countries can go towards having their non leading nobles represented but special call out to two countries: Japan, for whom the Daimyo will not completely cease to exist after you become Shogun, and Poland, whose Sejm can be a little more properly represented.

The most critical thing about this I think is that I don't really know where the burghers and clergy and special estates like the Jizya fit into this. For the burghers, I think the real issue is the backwards trade system, which also needs an overhaul (though I do not expect that to come, be prepared for an essay if you do ask). I suppose you can just leave them as they are more or less and have them operate as an independent estate amongst the nobles, who will of course support a rival family if they promise good trade rights or are pious or whatever and that generally operate like any other family but without a family tree or the same degree of marriage and international politics.

 

[XSamatan]

EU4 is very much a game about direct action

I play M.E.I.O.U. and the team ditched the "click-fatigue" as you call it to make the estates semi-autonomous agents each with it's own agenda. Estates can be a benevolent partner or an unruly devil-stick - and that all without clicking your mouse to death.

Maybe take a page out of their playbook?

Regards,
XSamatan

 

[Connal_]

If you have the general from the nobility and the nobility disaster happens then the nobility should get the general to lead the rebel armies.

 

[Bearjuden]

Oh and on top of what I said I am also seconding the call to:

1. Merge factions with estates; they are redundant.
2. Have estates interact more closely with advisors, generals, admirals, parliament, anywhere a "character" could conceivably be seen. Estates should be one of the focal points of the game. They should be everywhere. Recruit a general? He's from a family. That family revolts? That general has a decision to make, based on how much prestige he was won for your (and thus for himself) and how much he likes his family. Maybe he's the firstborn son and family is everything. Maybe he's fifthborn and he thinks this is his chance to become patriarch of the clan. If you hire an advisor, their status in the family impacts how much the family spent to educate him (quality of the advisor) but also the influence gain of the family from your recruiting them.

Add estate of "jews" and name them somehow proper maybe like jewish moneylenders or else. This estate can work similiar to burghers.

Besides being really anti-semitic, this is also just not a good way to do this. A passable way to represent minorities is with provincial modifiers, with one modifier per minority. The best way to represent minorities is to have pops, with each pop having its own culture. Something not unlike what Stellaris has, really, only Stellaris beat EU4 to the punch.

But congrats on suggesting something so bad that I felt like I had to call you out on it, I was going to content myself with agreeing, disagreeing and helpful(ing?) with other comments until I saw this one.

 

[cristofolmc]

One thing is clear. Autonomy is the perfect mechanic to end the "ducats disappearing" thing. Where does the money you dont get from autonomy go to? Here its the perfect change to put it to good use. Tie autonomy to estate. Autonomy money goes to the estate. The estate use it to buy armies, and bonuses they give you, be it generals, manpower, armies, advisors, stright cash handouts, buying influence from you to make you do stuff, or.....use them to rebel against you and buy an army of their own.

Powerful and wealthy estates will be able to afford greater bonuses and cash handouts and gifts-for-favours to the crown. On the other hand they will be able to buy bigger more threatening armies should they rebel against you.On the other hand, weak poor estates wont be a threat but they wont be able to afford to give you much, so you won't get much out of it.

On the other hand, autonomy should always be high-ish, and only decrease as time goes on and you get near end game. But it should never be possible to get it down to 0 except maybe the capital. And it should be very hard and cost verious civil wars and conficts against the estates to do so.

I think M&T nails that idea and you should really take up from it.

 

[varetta]

I would like mainly two things, besides the points already pointed out:

• More flavour (like things as simple as different names of states depending on your country -- this maybe already exist)
• More Estates (for example, I would divide Nobility between low & high nobility; the first one focused on military and the last one in autonomy and liberty desire)