Tinto Talks #31 - 2nd of October 2024

[krobbi]

Welcome to another Tinto Talks, the Happy Wednesday where we spill the secrets of our upcoming game, with the codename Project Caesar.

Last week we talked about wars and wargoals, and today we are going to talk about how wars will end, as we discuss the peace system. If you have played other GSG games for Paradox, some of this may not be news to you though.


Peace Offers
To end a war you need to negotiate a peace with either the leader on the other side, or if you are the leader on your side, you can negotiate a separate peace with a single independent country on the other side.

One thing that is important to notice, is that if you declare war for a war goal to conquer a certain province, then you can not take any other land, UNLESS you take the wargoal.

To be able to take land, you also need to have control over the province capital.

A Peace Offer, will consist of a set of treaties that can have a total value of up to 100 Peace Cost. Of course the other side would have to agree, and they are very likely not to accept anything where the peace cost is higher than the current warscore.

View attachment 1196504
Peace in our time?

Peace Treaties
A peace treaty can be the transfer of a location, province or area. It can also be to force another country to stop sending privateers, or transferring gold to you, or dismantling fortification in a location, humiliating them or any other of the dozens upon dozens of possible peace treaties of Project Caesar.

The cost of each treaty depends on many factors, whether it’s part of the wargoal or not, the population, the type of the treaty and so on.

View attachment 1196506
Numbers are still being tweaked..


Aggressive Expansion
Aggressive Expansion is one of the drawbacks of strengthening your own country ahead of others. Taking territory is one of the easiest ways to increase it. While taking land impacts your own country a fair bit, it also impacts the opinions of other countries near the source of the aggressive expansion a fair bit. If you get your AE high enough, countries with a low enough opinion of you may join a coalition against you. A Coalition is an international organization oriented around severely reducing the power of a single country.

View attachment 1196508
We can probably live with this AE though?


War Enthusiasm
When it comes to how willing a nation is to fight, much comes down to their War Enthusiasm. If this is high then the AI is unlikely to accept a peace that is not favorable to them. This is determined by the state of the country, with war exhaustion, control of capital and military strength are big factors. For the leader of a side in the war the overall military balance is a huge factor as well.


View attachment 1196509
Bohemia really wants to continue this war…


War Participation
Most of the time you bring allies to help you out in a war, but they expect to be rewarded for the part they pull. The War Participation is how much a country has contributed to the progress of the war. This is primarily done through battles, blockades and sieges.

You may sometimes have to convince your allies to join an offensive war that you are starting, and thus you can promise them part of the spoils of the war. If the part that they gain from signing a peace is less than their participation they will get upset.



Stay tuned, as next week, we’ll talk about the conflicts in the world that do not involve declarations of war, and negotiations of peace.

I

 

[MasterPaw]

The provincial capital is just one location.

But that's one location per province you want

I guess it's like IR

 

[Brynjar]

Sad to see there are no two way peace deals

Can you do a bilateral peace deal?

Please add two way peace deals, Concessions and Demands until both parties are in agreement.

No bilateral peace deal then?

EU4 already has bilateral/two way peace deals. The higher war score the peace deal, the longer the ceasefire applies to both parties. In reality, what you all seem to want you want is a system where the player can basically give away worthless land or money to take much more valuable land. It would end up with a terrible mechanic which would be pretty much impossible to fix.

 

[Brynjar]

Is this a new concept?

I like It very much as It can be used in many instances. For example, the attitude a nation has of your nation.

War participation/contribution has been a thing for at least close to a decade in EU4 by now. I believe it was introduced with the cossacks dlc only diplomacy rework, if not earlier...

 

[krobbi]

I fear "you can't take provinces if you didn't take war goal" can be abused by the players. If a player is getting completely bodied in a war they shouldn't have an easy way out just by cheesing around the war goal

 

[Brynjar]

I fear "you can't take provinces if you didn't take war goal" can be abused by the players. If a player is getting completely bodied in a war they shouldn't have an easy way out just by retaking the war goal for a couple months.

That is referring to taking it in the peace deal, not occupying it. Also, if you can't hold the war goal, you didn'y "body" anyone.

 

[perceval350]

EU4 already has bilateral/two way peace deals. The higher war score the peace deal, the longer the ceasefire applies to both parties. In reality, what you all seem to want you want is a system where the player can basically give away worthless land or money to take much more valuable land. It would end up with a terrible mechanic which would be pretty much impossible to fix.

I would prefer a system in which you can trade land worthless for you but valuable to the ennemy for land valuable to you but worthless to the ennemy

 

[IsaacCAT]

War participation/contribution has been a thing for at least close to a decade in EU4 by now. I believe it was introduced with the cossacks dlc only diplomacy rework, if not earlier...

Thank you, I was not aware of this metric.

I think they could expand their utility. Players are asking for more multilateral action, not only with bilateral peace deals you can achieve a World more alive.

The idea is to get many other nations to participate in each local war. Having a 1vs1 is not exciting as having a 4v4. Definitevely a 4v1 should be avoided if possible.

For multi sided wars expectations of each nations should be factored in when going to war. When war enthusiasm reduces the will to stay at war due to increased costs or achieving the war goals, then the need to perform compared to your partners should come in.

Every nation will compare its war participation/contribution to each partner and if they are below the expected value (lets say 25% if there are 4 participants in one side of similar power) then that nation should stay at war to perform compared to its peers.

If the participation is far above the expected value, that nation may want to push for a quick end of the war as the others are struggling to reach their quotas.

In the end, these are not bilateral peace deals but a way to account for other participants, unlock unilateral treaties and above all, foster participation of as many nations with local interest as possible.

IMHO is better to have wars with many war goals every time involving many parties than always a boring block of nations defending against one due to AE.

 

[Mateus VIII]

I feel like something you guys should absolutelly add is bilateral (or two-way) peace deals. Diplomacy has always been very flexible and in so many historical instances you have both sides making some degree of concession in order to reach peace. It would work as a way to "balance" peace cost/war score. So maybe I am fighting a tough war that is dragging out, I have the advantage but I can't force the peace I want, but I can get to the "score" I need if I concede maybe another weak province in my colonies, some cash, or maybe other things that could be relevant to my enemy and would allow me to actually annex the province I was aiming for, for example.

Especially in big wars with multiple parties I always felt in general all Paradox games need more flexible and interesting peace deals to replicate the complexity and creativity of diplomatic practices.

 

[akshitgaur1239]

Really disappointed by this TT, with systems that are essentially the same as eu4. I do see the point made by @Johan, implementing bilateral peace deal is going to be very difficult, but I think despite that, they should be developed. War and thus, peace treaties are one of the most overt and significant ways a player can interact with the game and no improvement in it will lead to a general feeling of "saminess" with eu4 despite all the brilliant systems that you have showcased so far! Therefore, I think even if it increases the dev time, peace treaties should be reworked.

Some suggestions from my part-
1. Many restrictions could be placed on what can be done in these treaties depending on the war goals. For example, AI and player can only exchange lands which is not their core and border them. (except for occupied locations of course)
2. Control could be made a significant factor, higher the control, higher its bargaining power.
3. Culture, the chance of potential rebellion in next, let's say 10 years, could be taken into account.
4. Also, a very simple economic model could be used which allows the AI to gauge the worth of the locations.

One thing that we have to accept is that every system in the game will be eventually gamed. EU4 did not have bilateral treaties yet that did not stop players from "playing" the AI.

 

[crowdemon]

Just to confirm, does a cabinet member reduce aggressive expansion?

 

[TheDungen]

it would increase the evaluation complexity

The travelling salesman problem? You do know there are some pretty awesome workarounds for that these days right? And seriously two way peace deals would be a very important tool in keeping the game from being a race to the biggest blob.

 

[Mopdsed]

Yeah, its not really something thats feasible to do, as the AI logic for it would be very very complex, and all our previous negotiate systems like that have been exploitable even when blindfolded.

If the concern is that peace deals essentially turn into trade deals where the player gives some junk in return for more provinces, have you considered making the winner's concessions not affect warscore costs and only have other diplomatic effects? Essentially, offering a few locations to the enemy won't make them give you more but it could for instance offset some AE. Say you are beating up France as Prussia for Alsace-Lorraine; in my idea you would still have to win and force your treaty on them but giving them your old inherited locations in Picardie in return might make the other major powers see you as less of a threat, since it signals that you're not just expanding everywhere and lends some legitimacy to your claim of only being after this particular region.

 

[Kimudena]

I think we get thrown too far from the Art of Global Conquest...

 

[darcler]

If you want to do it that way, then you'd use a peace treaty..

However, currently at the start of the game, Egypt has low control, and entire Levant & Syria is less than 50 WS. The challenge here is not "how do I get lots of territory", but "how do I handle lots of territory"

You've raised a good question here: how do I handle lots of territory? Is there anything to the handling process that would actively engage the player for however long it's going to take? Since PC is apparently bent on curbing blobbing by making expansion less viable or desirable from what it was in, say, EU4, thus making warfare seemingly less pivotal to the entire gameplay, then how exactly does the game intends to hold player's interest for a dozen-hour-long session? I hope that the "handling" of lots of territory will involve something more than simply wait until the various modifiers reach acceptable levels. Will there be some kind of internal politics, per any chance? Something that would give the player plenty of things to do while waiting for said modifiers to settle? And I mean something more than what it was in I:R, where the internal politics basically boiled down to bribing characters that have randomly decided to become disloyal. I know there's plenty of TTs yet to come, but even though we're at TT31, I've yet to see any indication of an engaging internal gameplay...

I fully realize that pretty much the entire genre of strategy games (and not only those from PDX) suffers from the "chill for a bit" syndrome, where the player doesn't have much to do besides patiently waiting for something to happen, but at the same time I'm afraid that some of the systems presented in the hitherto published TTs will end up generating a lot more of these periods of idleness than they should.

 

[NikuraQ]

:/ This combined with last week's post 'SEEMS' like Paradox is trying to make playing WIDE and creating huge empires impossible and that kind off sucks honestly.

 

[TheDungen]

yes, but it also removed a fair bit of griefing and exploits.

It could have been sovled by a softcap. anything you take without taking the primary wargoal is twice as expensive. And or give syou extra war exhaustion or a stabiltiy hit.

It was the best system we have made for a GSG.

I got to disagree there. the EU4 system is proably my least favourite one. It sets the game on the path of just being a map painter. Every war is fought to 100% and every bit of warscore is transalted into blobbing.

 

[Merrivale]

Folks who desperately want bilateral peace treaties--please in the future say what existing development feature you will axe in order to make this happen. Unless we want to call Johan a liar, it will cost significant development time to implement this feature at all which means time they will not have to spend on something else.

I'd also love to hear some examples of existing games where this feature exists and actually works, in other words isn't an avenue for the player to abuse the AI (an honest question). We all know that Vicky III's sucks, in Stellaris they had to remove trading for favors because it was easy to abuse the AI. Because I'm also inclined to take Johan at his word that if they did dump all the development time into this feature (again at the expense of something else), the end result would suck. But if there's an example of this done well, then perhaps it's something to reconsider for a DLC (yes, I know I just incurred the wrath of red Xs, but again--what feature are you cutting in the base game to make room for this?)

 

[Booperboberino]

I made this point already in last TT, but Aggressive Expansion (AE) feels extremely outdated compared to other much more innovative approaches of PC. If Bohemia takes Berlin from Brandenburg, why would Brandenburg ever forget that the Bohemians did that to them? Did Maria Theresia ever forget that Frederick took Silesia from her (well no, she didn't, and she did everything in her power to make friends with her arch enemy, the French, in order to take Silesia back).

Again, to quote from this post long time ago, I feel that "threat" is a vastly better mechanic than AE.

A small country at the border to the Ottomans should not just join a coalition once the Ottomans gobbled up every other state around them, and then come to the conclusion "well, I had enough now," they should always be willing to join any coalition vs. the Ottomans. Once the Prussians take Silesia, which is the most prosperous province of the Austrians, the way how Prussia is perceived by others in terms of their military capacities should overall change; the potential threat that Prussians now pose to others does not just magically tick down over time, they are now considered as one of the most powerful countries in Europe. If someone becomes the economic hegemon, they too should be perceived as someone who could be a threat in many terms as they could just hire a bunch of mercenaries against others.

Honest feedback here, AE is a bad mechanic for many reasons:

1. It is "gamey" because it is just a number that ticks down, which implies other actors just "forget" about the incidents that triggered it.
2. It is applied only after the peace treaty has been signed, so only to some degree useful in terms of preventing snowballing.
3. The threshold of 50 seems arbitrary, which is against the general design philosophy of PC which removed arbitrary limits like force limit
4. AE is just a number, and many players don't care about it too much anyways as they will continue expanding somewhere else.

And many more reasons that we will hopefully discuss here.

@Johan I usually wouldn't ping but I hope that this is something you guys see, this could fix a lot of the problems you are seeing and introduce a new innovative way to handle coalitions

 

[Brynjar]

The travelling salesman problem? You do know there are some pretty awesome workarounds for that these days right? And seriously two way peace deals would be a very important tool in keeping the game from being a race to the biggest blob.

It has nothing to do with the travelling salesman problem. The difficult part would be to define how the AI should value basically everything compared to everything else in any peace deal.

If you really want to use the travelling salesman problem, it would be more like trying to find a way for the computer to millions variants of it without knowing the distances between the nodes, and with the distance between the nodes being various functious with several variables which changes at an unknown rate over time. The problem is deciding the unkown variables, not solving the problem once those have been decided.