Tinto Talks #1 - February 28th 2024

[Panagean]

Regarding believable world

I think about game world being belivable and immersive, the history simulation needs to be able to reproduce the real world history.

What i mean by this, is in-game systems should allow player and AI to follow the real history - it should be extremely unlikely, but still possible. Or at least it should feel like it is possible.

For me in EU4 one of the biggest changes making the world unbelivable was rewark of native tribes in 1.31. The changes made playing natives much better, but they weren't exactly ideal. They were nerfed and adjusted from the pretty bad initial state, but it still is immersion breaking.

One of the effects of various mechanics is that the natives fully colonise vast lands when unitiming into federations or forming hordes. They do that on their own, not as an reaction for European colonisation - they do that even if nobody colonises.

I can't belive that tribes who lives in a very similar way for hundreds of years will (specifically in perion 1444-1600, not eatlier) always unite and colonise vast lands in NA even with no contact with colonisers. It should be a reaction to the changes, not a default behaviour.

Also, the side effect of faster native colonisation, is that European colonisation also goes faster. Colonisation speed is currently too big, but colonisers doesn't even have to use agent-colonists, just conquer already colonised native land. So almost n every game with enabled CoP North America is colonised in 1600s.

It all makes the game don't feel like you're actually in the historical period, you're just playing a game that you like to click battons and paint maps.

I think the test you're looking for here is that the modal outcome in almost all scenarios is to produce real world history, but that the combination of many different scenarios, most producing non-modal outcomes, generates something new but conceivable. When we're talking about the gap between railroading and sandboxing, I think we're talking about how wide we'd ideally want that distribution of non-modal outcomes to be in each scenario, and therefore one of scale and not type. Sandboxing that never produces any thing like real world history is for my money just a bad sandbox.

 

[Workiwork]

A picture of olive oil? Well, clearly, this is about Sengoku 2, an amalgamation of Crusader Kings character interactions, Hearts of Iron military micromanagement and Victoria population mechanics, in as excruciating detail as possible, but small enough to not make the processors melt.

I'll bite, you actually did disprove sengoku :O


"In Japan, the first successful planting of olive trees happened in 1908 on Shodo Island, which became the cradle of olive cultivation in Japan"

 

[Notme1]

Europa Universalis V confirmed

 

[Lightwell]

Sandboxing that never produces any thing like real world history is for my money just a bad sandbox.

I think, when you take into account the many unlikely things that had to happen to get us to "British Raj", you'll find that it's very unfair. Our timeline's events were relatively unlikely to begin with. By all means, we should look at something like a united Habsburg empire reigning over France and Britain, and being the sole entity capable of connecting Europe and the Americas to India in trade.

 

[amocpower]

I should buy more Paradox shares

 

[GrandEurypterid]

I think, when you take into account the many unlikely things that had to happen to get us to "British Raj", you'll find that it's very unfair. Our timeline's events were relatively unlikely to begin with. By all means, we should look at something like a united Habsburg empire reigning over France and Britain, and being the sole entity capable of connecting Europe and the Americas to India in trade.

On the other hand, there's a lot of features in the UK that made it particularly well-suited to long-term prosperity. It has an incredible geographic position in terms of minimising risks of facing armies on their own soil (see: Napoleon, both world wars, etc), it possesses large quantities of a vital resource for industrial development (ie coal), and it was fortunate enough to combine an urbanised political environment with early and (relatively) undivided bourgeois institutions (see the paper 'Different paths to the modern state in Europe: the interaction between warfare, economic structure, and political regime'- it is open access, you can use scholar.google.com to find it) that allowed it to easily ratchet up taxes after each war and develop a powerful state. Additionally, its position on the Atlantic made it perfectly positioned to take advantage of the era of global trade, which other urban centres such as those in Greece and Italy lacked.

Meanwhile, competitors such as France- with its divided, more rural Estates General that tended to argue for their own needs, and which didn't have a say in the process of deciding 'will I actually support this war if you declare it'- didn't have a lot of those preconditions for major success by the end of the period. So while things certainly could have gone very differently if other nations had (say) developed a strong bourgeois-urban system that combined 'strong state' and 'powerful cities' with 'not susceptible to revolution and reactionism', and ideally with 'not likely to be invaded'- say, an early Dutch Republic, a Denmark that looked to the Atlantic rather than the Baltic, some sort of Parisio-Normandy, possibly a Northwest German state, or maybe even a North Spanish kingdom that put its capital somewhere more sensible- that's a tall order to come by. Admittedly, a lot of this just means 'a different winning super-state in EU is likely to do poorly in Vicky' rather than 'the UK should always be the winning empire near the end of EU', since a lot of my reasoning is based on 'urban democracy + democratic tax revenue + defensible geography = strong state', but you get the gist of the argument.

 

[bokorthedust]

Words fail me to express what I felt when I first saw this thread pop up yesterday. I have immense hope that something genuinely awesome will come from Johan's vision, ideas and experience and the community's feedback. We, developers and players alike love the type of games Paradox has become famous for, and uniting our passion during the development phase of a game should result in something exceptional.

As for the questions asked, here are my answers:

Believable world
In order for a game's world to feel alive for me, it has to be populated by different actors that together, through their motivations and the resulting push and pull relationship between their goals create an emergent story, building the world from the ground up. History (whether our own or an imagined one) doesn't happen in a vacuum, it's a complex phenomenon, so a game for me to be believable has to simulate a myriad of smaller things which combined together will make me feel that it's alive. Generally, that means that even though a pre-defined world/setting exists as a snapshot of how this given world starts out, once you unpause, anything else you or the AI does has to come organically or at least semi-organically. If we're talking about a historical GSG, I'm conscientious of the need of compromising between some of the players wanting to replay history as it happened and some not, and I consider myself to be part of the latter group, but this topic also plays into the second question Johan asked.

Setting immersion
I never really could come to love, or even like CIV games because their setting was too contradictory for me to be able to immerse myself. I know that they come with a myriad of settings for world customization and generation, but personally I could never get over stuff like playing the Germans and having the Egyptians, or Chinese or Indians as my immediate neighbors, or the fact that factions come with pre-defined strengths or specialties. Why should the English be the masters of the seas, the French the be all end all of culture, the Russians the aid-de-camps of General Winter, the Spanish the Inquisitors of the world, especially in a generated setting always different from their historical counterpart? I can immerse myself in a world where outside of the moment the game starts nothing is inherently set in stone, rather, it is driven by the needs and wants of the actors populating said world. City states shouldn't be able to exercise control over their immediate borders, trade should be a lucrative affair no matter in which corner of the world you find yourself in, ultimate militaries can pop up anywhere, given these things happen as a result of emerging cause and effect, and not just because it happened like that in our history.

Replayability
If the first two criteria are satisfactory, replayability automatically lends itself to the game. I'm against developer provided narratives in grand strategy games, because they essentially push the players towards a pre-defined goal, instead of allowing them to set their own goals or reacting to how the game unfolds. The game should take us for a different ride every time, even if we start a run in the same position, to quote a cliché, it's the journey that counts, and the frenemies we make along the way, and not the destination.

 

[P.G.T Beauregard]

Hello everyone and welcome to .. yeah, what is this really?

Is this a game called “Tinto Talks?” No.. not really.

First of all Tinto stands for “Paradox Tinto”, the studio which we founded in Sitges in 2020, with a few people moving down with me from PDS to Spain. We have now grown to be almost 30 people. Now, that is out of the way, what about the “Talks” part? Well…

A long time ago, we started talking about a game as soon as we started working on it. Back in the long almost forgotten past we used to make games in about 8-9 months. I remember us announcing Vicky2 with just 2 mockup screenshots, and half a page of ideas.

This changed a bit over time, with first the rule of not announcing a game until it passed its alpha milestone, in case it would be canceled… as happened with Runemaster. And then when projects started going from an 18 month development cycle with games like EU4 to many years like our more recent games, the time from announcement to release became much closer to the release of the game.

Why does this matter?

Well, from a development perspective communicating with the players is extremely beneficial, as it provides us with feedback. But if it's so late in the development process that you can not adapt to the feedback, then a development diary is “just” a marketing tool. I think games like Imperator might have looked different if we had involved the community earlier and listened to the feedback.

If we look back at HoI4, this was from the first time we talked about Air Warfare, about 10 years ago, and it has not much in common with the release version..

However, talking about a game for a long long time is not great for building hype either, and to be able to make proper huge announcements is an important part as well.

So what is this then? Well, we call this sub-forum “Tinto Talks”. We will be talking about design aspects of the game we are working on. We will not tell you which game it is, nor be able to tell you when it will be announced, nor when it will be released.

We will be talking with you here, almost every week, because we need your input to be able to shape this game into a masterpiece.

Without you, and your input, that will not be possible.

So what about Project Caesar then?

Project Caesar? Yeah.. At PDS, which Tinto is a "child" of, we tend to use roman emperor/leader names for our games. Augustus was Stellaris, Titus was CK3, Sulla was Imperator, Nero was Runemaster, Caligula was V3 etc.. We even named our internal "empty project for clausewitz & jomini", that we base every new game on Marius.

In Q2 2020, I started writing code on a new game, prototyping new systems that I wanted to try out. Adapting the lessons learned from what had worked well, and what had not worked well. Plus, recruiting for a completely new studio in Paradox Tinto, training people on how to make these types of games, while also making some expansions for EU4.

Today though, even though we are a fair bit away from announcing our new game, we want to start talking weekly about the things we have worked on, to get your feedback on it, and adapt some of it to become even better.

However, we’ll start with the vision, which is not really something you do change at this stage.

Believable World

You should be able to play the game and feel like you are in a world that makes sense, and feels rich and realistic. While not making the gaming less accessible, features should be believable and plausible, and avoid abstraction unless necessary.

Setting Immersion

Our games thrive on player imagination and “what if” scenarios. We ensure both a high degree of faithfulness to the setting which will give a “special feel” to the game. We will strive to give this game the most in-depth feeling of flavor possible.

Replayability

There should be many ways to play different starts and reasons to replay them. Different mechanics in different parts of the world create a unique experience depending on what you choose to play. With a deep and complex game, there should be so many choices and paths that the player should feel they can always come back to get a new story with the same start.

Yeah, sounds ambitious right?

Which games do YOU think represent these pillars well?

Cheers, and next week, we’ll talk about the most important things in the world.. Besides family, beer, friends, and the Great Lord of the Dark… MAPS!

For me, the pinnacle of believability was probably Suzerain, where you actually play as the person, and not as omniscient omnipotent 'spirit of nation', and have to deal with limited knowledge and capabilities to make decisions that will influence where the story and your country goes.

HOI IV national foci system was something similar, and, in my opinion, something that really added to it's charm and popularity. Although there you could see it all, see the future. The fact that many successful modders chose to add dynamic focus trees (feature closer to Suzerain-style, I guess) shows that moving in this direction helps the immersion and is somehat popular with players. And this system added to replayability and the sense of agency, you could feel taking a country towards your preferred set of ideas and at least somewhat reaping the consequences.

I also liked the economic system of V2 with the concept of gardening and indirect influence. If you want to go a particular path - make it viable for your citizens.

I liked the invention system from V2, money allocation from EU3, research points from V2 and tech spread. All in all, I think that with more advancement in institutions, literacy, prestige you should have more research potential, slowly accumulating in slightly randomized manner and the ability to slightly favour one or another field with investment, making probability of advancement slightly better.

So, to sum it up - I think that playing as a person instead of 'spirit of nation', with a well thought-out branching story and decisions akin to ones person in such position would typically make would make a game believable, immersive, and, in best case, also replayable, if done right.

 

[HansFlammenwerfer]

I'm a team member for the mod MEIOU and Taxes, which I almost always use when playing EU4. This might colour some of my thoughts. But I think there is a reason why I play M&T, and it definitely comes back to the questions asked in this post.

MEIOU and Taxes?
For those that don't know, M&T is an extremely ambitious overhaul mod that adds population mechanics and an in-depth political system, along with a vast number of new tags and provinces, religious minorities, and a deep economic simulation. All of these combine to give the world significantly more life than vanilla EU4.

I played a lot of MEIOU 2.0 and 2.5, sadly 3.0 was such a performance hit that I couldn't play it.

What I especially appreciated about 2.5 though, was the ability to negotiate with the burghers and the nobles, offering them even privileges when times were desperate, because I needed them on side to win a war by either raising additional taxes or levies. It felt like the estates mattered, and in a way, they *tried* to retain their powers too. Whereas estates in vanilla (in 1.29 and 1.30+) just roll over and let you extract a ton of benefits out of them while you're chipping away at their influence.

The other aspect of MEIOU which would be a great addition to this mystery game is the way the Italian powers played. Essentially, you'd start as a minor power, then you scale up bit by bit (minor, to regional, then to major iirc) -- all the while, you'd be earning minor buffs, until you became 'menacing'. That's when you got slapped with a ton of debuffs and the Italian states around you saw you as someone who upset the natural natural dynamic of the region. It was a really intuitive way of limiting my expansion, and the modifiers (e.g., the extra AE, the drops in my diplo rep and the opinion maluses incurred) all felt like the natural reaction of the AI to the player who overstepped and became a clear threat.

Those are just two aspects from MEIOU which added so much life to the world and really gave weight to my decisions, it felt like the consequences were earnt and provided a challenge after the fact as well.

 

[DSMyers1]

Assuming this game is set in the real world:

The challenges that I see with previous Europa Universalis games is that they did not simulate very well the actual people behind the systems.

For instance, we must remember that there were actual people in real life that made up the armies. There were actual people that did the production of goods.

Why has no one conquered the world? Because of people and their personal desires and incentives. Why did Alexander the Great stop his conquests? Because his soldiers did not agree with going further. Because they saw no reason and had accomplished all that they felt was necessary.

People fight as soldiers for their own reasons. People migrate for their own reasons. People desire to improve their life for themselves and for their children. People do not like to be oppressed and treated badly. People want to have plenty of food and a peaceful place to live. People also have to be really convinced to risk their life for something. (Unless their life is bad enough they might as well risk it.)

These personal goals and way people behave drove the events that happened in the real world that Europa universalis and other historical games are trying to simulate. It's usually relatively logical or at least well-known what incentives led people to do various things.

In other words the motivations and risks for individual people's lives drive decisions.

The more a game like EU can simulate those things, the more the overall environment will behave realistically. Which should lead to more replay value as well.

 

[Lightwell]

On the other hand, there's a lot of features in the UK that made it particularly well-suited to long-term prosperity. It has an incredible geographic position in terms of minimising risks of facing armies on their own soil (see: Napoleon, both world wars, etc), it possesses large quantities of a vital resource for industrial development (ie coal), and it was fortunate enough to combine an urbanised political environment with early and (relatively) undivided bourgeois institutions (see the paper 'Different paths to the modern state in Europe: the interaction between warfare, economic structure, and political regime'- it is open access, you can use scholar.google.com to find it) that allowed it to easily ratchet up taxes after each war and develop a powerful state. Additionally, its position on the Atlantic made it perfectly positioned to take advantage of the era of global trade, which other urban centres such as those in Greece and Italy lacked.

Meanwhile, competitors such as France- with its divided, more rural Estates General that tended to argue for their own needs, and which didn't have a say in the process of deciding 'will I actually support this war if you declare it'- didn't have a lot of those preconditions for major success by the end of the period. So while things certainly could have gone very differently if other nations had (say) developed a strong bourgeois-urban system that combined 'strong state' and 'powerful cities' with 'not susceptible to revolution and reactionism', and ideally with 'not likely to be invaded'- say, an early Dutch Republic, a Denmark that looked to the Atlantic rather than the Baltic, some sort of Parisio-Normandy, possibly a Northwest German state, or maybe even a North Spanish kingdom that put its capital somewhere more sensible- that's a tall order to come by. Admittedly, a lot of this just means 'a different winning super-state in EU is likely to do poorly in Vicky' rather than 'the UK should always be the winning empire near the end of EU', since a lot of my reasoning is based on 'urban democracy + democratic tax revenue + defensible geography = strong state', but you get the gist of the argument.

I think this view places the magnifying glass too close to individual states, looking for reasons to retroactively justify their respective fortunes. There's just a world of difference between the UK of our time, and the UK as a modest and well-financed economic unit, thriving on revenues from its control over North America. There's also the UK as a de facto extension of Spain, whose king rules over all of Europe, or the UK as an outlying territory of France.

While Europe was sure to play an important role during this time from the moment Spanish ships reached the Americas, the magnitude of this importance was still a question. If Spain hadn't wasted its fortunes trying to subdue the Dutch, and if the Armada hadn't been made the laughingstock of history by the efforts of Drake, could we really expect to see the UK become a real power in the Old World? If Ming's Single-Whip law had been better scrutinized before implementation, the revenues from coastal trade managed more flexibly, and the Emperor more capable of managing his court, would the Spanish crackdown on illegal silver movement have been so disastrous as to lead to the rule of China by tribals from Manchuria? If not, what role would China have played in the global economy?

If the Ottoman invasion of the Mamluk sultanate hadn't succeeded so thoroughly, would a power balance in the Middle East have been reached capable of letting Venice and its collaborators in Egypt undermine the Atlantic trade? What would be the implications of this alliance for trade in Europe and West Asia?

Things like these can't be brought down to just local factors. There's a lot of interplay and variability here.

 

[GalaXion24]

An interesting experiment in community engagement. Excited to see where it goes! I'll try to give my input:

Believable World:
I think the Paradox games which are strongest in this regard are Imperator, Victoria and Stellaris, and what they have in common is some sort of pop system. Even though these systems differ quite a lot between games, a distinction between "development" represented by things like buildings and infrastructure, and population anchors the game in a way that naturally makes the world more believable. When farmers produce food and factory workers produce steel, building a city is not just a click of a button, nor can production increase fivefold in an instant. Moreover they create depth in terms of things like religion, culture, migration, assimilation, etc. and make the world feel like it lives and breathes. Slaves are actual people and they are taken from somewhere and go somewhere and work somewhere. Sieges and wars affect population, a lack of food may lead to starvation, migration may be needed to fill factories, trade may be restricted to raise the living standards of certain pops.

Crusader Kings has a focus on characters which can create a believable immersion in its own way, but EU4 falls short in terms of believability and immersion and I would say that have to do with the kinds of abstractions it uses. Naturall all games require abstractions, but some abstractions feel more organic and grounded and more like representations of the real world than others.

Another thing often overlooked is laws, which I think function best in CK2 and Victoria 3, defining how your realm/country works and requiring some sort of politicking to pass changes. In CK2 this often does end up simply being a matter of amassing favours, which with enough money may even become trivial, so it's not flawless, and Vic3 still seems to have some issues to iron out with its politics, but both games make laws and governance more essential to gameplay and changes are often deeper than just a small bonus modifier.

Setting Immersion:
I think this goes hand in hand with a believable world. To illustrate using the alternate history example, migrating to Pannonia as the Scythians, bringing my population over, assimilating the locals, enslaving my rivals and centralising my realm is considerably mroe involved and immersive than any time I've migrated to Pannonia as the Hungarians in CK2 or CK3 or settled as nomads elsewhere.

However, I do want to give credit to EU4 for having a lot going for it in this field despite its flaws. Just naturally through being set in the early modern period with recognisable countries and cultures as well as various formables, not to mention its relatively long timespan, EU4 provides a real sandbox for all sorts of interesting and varied scenarios. I think EU4 too often devolves into blobbing with neither a real balance of powers nor internal challenges/things to do, but it does allow you to play and survive as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, win the Hundred Years' War as England, modernise Japan, fight the 30 Years' War as Prussia and so much more. Country-specific flavour is too often used as a crutch for the lack of deeper mechanics which would already have simulated them, but that doesn't mean country-specific flavour is itself bad and there's in principle a lot of interesting things to do and history to recreate or change. For anyone other than minmaxers, it's this that carries the game far beyond its mechanical limitations. A game set in the same time period with more immersive mechanics would be the dream.

Replayability
Crusader Kings 2 with its varied religious mechanics and related government mechanics, not to mention different time periods actually worth starting in, is probably the most replayable and varied experience Paradox has created.

Stellaris suffers from always starting more or less the same way, but the varied origins, ethics and governments as well as the various different paths and goals you can go after still make it very replayable as well.

Victoria 3 I feel has also become quite replayable as each country starts with different ednowements and a player can take a country in such different directions economically and politically.

 

[Sqeep]

Ich halte mich kurz

- I love Mana
- I love painting the Map
- please no Pops in EU like Vic

Take u time

 

[Spartakus]

Believable World

You should be able to play the game and feel like you are in a world that makes sense, and feels rich and realistic. While not making the gaming less accessible, features should be believable and plausible, and avoid abstraction unless necessary.

Setting Immersion

Our games thrive on player imagination and “what if” scenarios. We ensure both a high degree of faithfulness to the setting which will give a “special feel” to the game. We will strive to give this game the most in-depth feeling of flavor possible.

Replayability

There should be many ways to play different starts and reasons to replay them. Different mechanics in different parts of the world create a unique experience depending on what you choose to play. With a deep and complex game, there should be so many choices and paths that the player should feel they can always come back to get a new story with the same start.

Yeah, sounds ambitious right?

Which games do YOU think represent these pillars well?

Let me check my library.
FTL, Shadow Tactics/Desperados 3 and maybe Anno 1404 come to mind - Anno likely being closest to whatever you guys are cooking.
Assuming you are doing a GSG I would however point out how important it is to have a competent AI. By wich I don't mean one that can beat me, but one that can handle all important mechanics.
When CK3's AI can't do a single crusade or when Stellaris couldn't handle post-tile-economics it potentially breaks all three of your pillars.

I also wan't to point out that achievments add a lot of replayability - with a qualitly over quantity policy in mind. Shadow Tactics/Desperados are excelent in that regard - by forcing you away from your normal "optimized" playstyle. And I really hope that I won't have to play ironman or shun mods to enable them.

 

[Pornek]

Replayability

There should be many ways to play different starts and reasons to replay them. Different mechanics in different parts of the world create a unique experience depending on what you choose to play. With a deep and complex game, there should be so many choices and paths that the player should feel they can always come back to get a new story with the same start.


Most replayability to me was finding new broken strategies, dev oversights and what not. Achievements are a close 2nd. Third place goes to interesting starts.
I dont need eg. Aztec mechanics, Prussia mechanics, CE mechanics to enjoy a game. In the end its just a different way of stacking modifiers. Altough I appreciate and enjoy it.

Most believable and immersive EU5 experience would be a 30 pages forum discussion on why Ottomans are OP.

 

[RL0323]

So if project Caesar is the game we all think it is there are three simple things I want to see (or not see).

Firstly, the game's UI should follow its predecessor, I don't want to see a repeat of Vicky 3 and CK3 where the UI is completely different from the game that came before, the existing UI design is perfectly fine and the core player base are very comfortable with it and don't need learn a completely new layout that really isn't any easier to use. Additionally, the newer UI's are not as good looking as the older styles, Imperator for example had an absolutely beautiful UI that fit the theme of the game and added to immersion where as CK3's more modern UI feels out of place for the game's setting. EU4's current UI is pretty nice and really would only benifit from a minor face lift and maybe more style variants for different regions.

Secondly, please please please do not add unnessesary 3D charecter models. The only game that actually looked good in was Imperator, since then they have become more doughy looking and indestinct. It makes sense to have them in CK3 as its a charecter driven game but for games like EU and Vicky they are unessesary, taken development time that could be used elswhere, making life harder for modders and introducing more potential problems with immersion breaking bugs. This is not to say I wouldn't like to see a charecter system similar to Imperator in this project, I just belive that using 2D models like in CK2 would be much easier and add to immersion though unique charecter art styles.

Lastly, please use a mapmode system similar to EU4. Ever since Imperator the terrain maps have become much more beautiful and I understand the desire to show them off but, the zoom level determianed map modes where a huge mistake. It is very annoying as a player to have your map modes change as you zoom in and out when sometimes you want to preform tasks in a certian map mode at a certian zoom level but the game fights you.

So just to reiterate, please use the old UI layout (EU4 style), no 3D charcter models, no zoom level changing mapmodes. I belive these three small revisions would do much to endear old fans of the franchise to this project.

 

[Arizal]

Replayability

There should be many ways to play different starts and reasons to replay them. Different mechanics in different parts of the world create a unique experience depending on what you choose to play. With a deep and complex game, there should be so many choices and paths that the player should feel they can always come back to get a new story with the same start.

As so many discussions about them already pointed it out, mission trees are antithetical with replayability. Why? Because they set a preferred, or ideal way to play a country, without letting the player choose where he steers it.

I would say the same about national ideas, really anything that gives country specific mechanics. We need to have an evolving world, not static parts behind the curtail who railroad the game into history.

At the same time, I agree with the immersion pillar. Those countries (because I'm assuming we are talking about EUV or Imperator II) should feel different based on the way their difference is portrayed at first. Victoria 3 does this well, though incompletely, with the laws and IGs. And I would argue that here is why internal politics rendition matters.

 

[MathyM]

As for replayability, this is what I think:

If this is a game spanning a short amount of real world time (like HoI 4), I think that a historical mode should be a priority, but if it spans about 400 years of our time, then let me please suggest less railroading for the AI. No lucky nation bonuses to ensure the big bads will always be the same, no OP static nation buffs, no guaranteed PUs. Instead, provide the mechanics to achieve such results.

Instead of army bonuses for being Prussia, allow the player to build up their army in a situation similar to the one Prussia had. Could the “Prussia” of this alt world be in India? Maybe, if the sociopolitical situation is adequate. Could the “Ottomans” be in China? They didn’t have janissaries, sure, but what if they adopted a similar succession scheme, with the same expansionist fervor? Why can't shouldn't non-Iberian nations be barred from employing societies like the Jesuits in America?

And I don’t just mean being able to do that as a player. I mean being able to watch the AI achieve such feats. What if, as Spain, you destroy England early on, thinking you have finally ridden yourself of the only nation that can challenge you at sea, only to realize Venice has united Italy and is building a fleet to come for your overseas territories? This is what makes me want to replay a game. Not just being able to start elsewhere, but have different, unpredictable rivals each time.

 

[Castle Adrian]

As a longtime developer of a CK3 mod that doesn't exist... yet...

I've been conspiring for YEARS to create a mod that meaningfully represents:
1) works of art
2) propaganda
3) cultural evolution
4) soft power

The start of my project began with this thought:

Venice and Florence were two of the most interesting places in the WORLD for several hundred years. But they were small! Florence basically didn't even bother expand. So what made them interesting? IT'S NOT JUST MONEY. IT'S NOT JUST MONEY = POWER.
They were:
- vibrant
- socially-and-legally complex
- diplomatically-connected
- institutionally-integrated
- artistically-original
- commercially-innovative

Internally
- Venice had its islands, beauty, glassworks, silk works
- Florence had literal "towers" WITHIN the city, built by paranoid families to guard themselves against hostile factions

So to conclude my "initial thought": How do you build a game such that Venice, Florence, Milan, Rome can be just exciting as a large power even if they never expand their borders ONCE?!

The answer I believe goes back to the things I listed at the top.

I just searched all 9 pages of comments so far (for the words art, culture, and "soft"). Only 1 comment seems to be on the page:

Something else that I think yould be interesting is fleshing the concept of cultures out. In the ck2 series, each religion has unique features and abilities and in ck3 something like that exists for cultures as well, but I find those a bit basic and you usually want to take the same path. What I was thinking of was some things that characterises the culture you are playing. There should be some kind of bonuses or abilities and mechanics that could be unlocked by that. Are you fighting wars all the time? Then your culture will become more warlike, maybe even at the expense of other things. That could allow the levying of extra units or having to pay them less. These features of a culture shouldn't be directly changeable by the player but be impacted by the actions of all nations of that culture. If over a longer period of time two actors of the same culture act differently enough or are influenced by neighbours, then they might separate.

 

[GrandEurypterid]

Venice and Florence were two of the most interesting places in the WORLD for several hundred years. But they were small! Florence basically didn't even bother expand. So what made them interesting? IT'S NOT JUST MONEY. IT'S NOT JUST MONEY = POWER.
They were:
- vibrant
- socially-and-legally complex
- diplomatically-connected
- institutionally-integrated
- artistically-original
- commercially-innovative

Internally
- Venice had its islands, beauty, glassworks, silk works
- Florence had literal "towers" WITHIN the city, built by paranoid families to guard themselves against hostile factions

So to conclude my "initial thought": How do you build a game such that Venice, Florence, Milan, Rome can be just exciting as a large power even if they never expand their borders ONCE?!

I do think soft power is a very useful idea, now you mention it. In EU4, you can get a lot of soft power by- say- stacking Diplomatic Reputation, but... it's something you get by who your country is, rather than what they do, you know? Switching it around so that a country can invest in its reputation with its actions, rather than simply 'I have good national ideas and survived long enough for Diplomatic Ideas and have a big army', would be great.

On the other hand, that does also imply a need for this to have intrinsic value to a player, so they might actually decide to ally Venice instead of just wiping them out. There's hints of this in EU4 with Merchant Republic goods-produced buffs, but that's generally much less value than 'dominate the trade node', right? You'd need more complex diplomacy for that- perhaps getting part of your power (e.g Prestige, Legitimacy) from who you know, and how well they fit your beliefs, rather than troops and intrinsic traits alone. So being friends with the cultured people of Venice and their naval, economic and artistic power, or the holy Papal States and their religious power, is prestigious in and of itself- while the upstarts of Revolutionary France are effectively untouchables until they've become a stable, respectable nation that can rejoin the alliance system of Europe, one way or another.