Tinto Talks #31 - 2nd of October 2024

[Fish4me]

Is it necessary to be so rude.

Necessary? No, but some (frankly mild) mockery of a community's group-think isn't undesirable. This community has an issue with labeling mechanics as things like 'Gamey' or 'mana' without actually presenting a critique of how those mechanics make the game worse, they just fit into some imaginary undesirable category and therefore the community must be angry.

Things like locking whole features behind options or multiplayer are unfortunately probably unworkable (this is my opinion as a different sort of software developer, I can't speak to what Tinto/Johan's policy should be). I would love bilateral peaces in multiplayer, it makes for cool roleplay possibilities. But there is a real cost to having a unique feature like that locked to a specific game mode, it can make maintaining and updating the game more difficult quite quickly. Every change to peace AI or new peace option will need additional development/testing to make sure it doesn't break multiplayer. And lets face it, multiplayer is always going to have lower priority. It is not in the interest of MP players to make their preferred mode more prone to game breaking bugs.

 

[Ispil]

Any substantial improvements you can suggest? I mean real improvements, not poorly thought out ideas that will create more problems than they solve while demanding a disproportionate amount of development resources.

There's been several threads at this point, several months old each (hell I wrote a few, even) offering ways to improve the system.

 

[Fish4me]

There's been several threads at this point, several months old each (hell I wrote a few, even) offering ways to improve the system.

I've read a lot of threads with these kinds of suggestions, they're usually quite bad once you actually think about them.

 

[Ispil]

I've read a lot of threads with these kinds of suggestions, they're usually quite bad once you actually think about them.

"Do you have any suggestions? And I only mean suggestions I like; if I don't like it, it doesn't count as a suggestion."

I see this discussion isn't worth the time or effort.

 

[Fish4me]

"Do you have any suggestions? And I only mean suggestions I like; if I don't like it, it doesn't count as a suggestion."

I see this discussion isn't worth the time or effort.

I did pretty clearly stipulate I was looking for well thought out improvements that, y'know, improve things rather than make them worse.

Besides, did you think gesturing vaguely at the existence of old threads elsewhere and saying "there's probably an idea that isn't garbage in there somewhere" was a way to create a meaningful discussion?

 

[Miffelman]

What I don't understand is why the amount of stuff you can take in a war has to be artificially limited. There are already systems in place to punish players for excessive expansion. It's not only external deterrents like AE but also internal ones like rebellion, lack of administrative ability, lack of control. If these maluses are applied exponentially past a certain point it would have the same effect of limiting expansion while not resorting to arbitrary limits.

In real life there is nothing stopping a country that has fully occupied another from declaring the entire territory as their own and then treating it as such. However, as soon as they do they will find significant backlash from other countries (this should be handled in a more interesting way than just AE, for example embargoing an aggressive country might provide some diplomatic bonous or a liberation CB could be liberally handed out to interested countries) as well as massive internal issues (Rebellions, cultural issues that should not be removable with a single button click, a strained beaurocracy, the sheer expense of the entire exercise).

There is also the added benefit of uncapped peace deals increasing the skill cieling.

 

[Agamidae]

Will there be a way to see what a peace deal was after a war ends?
Perhaps in the truce tooltip?
This comes up so much during the Grandest Lan. A war ends and people go "what happened, what was the peace deal?"
maybe we can get this in early this time

 

[Friedrich von Deutschland]

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"

So would the Ottomans be able to make their historical conquest of the Mamluks, assuming they remain unstable as they historically did, without special missions/events/mechanics like in EU4?

 

[SytroStormlord]

I kind of feel like them being of the 'same religion' ought to be a negative factor for war cost and AE, not a positive one? Wasn't that one of the factors causing wars between christians to be really granular in border changes, and all? While territories of enemy religions were seen as fair game by your peers.

Depends how you look at it:
Declaring a War towards a country of your religion was definately seen as wrong... that it, unless reasonable casus beli existed... but still.

Taking land of your religion, it depends:
- if it was a valid casus beli, probably neutral
- if it was from country following different religion: it was encouraged, and seen as 'salvation from infidels/heretics/pick_your_own_word_for_religious_enemy')
- taking lands from foes that declared on you... this was tricky... unless you had some claims or you totaly crushed your foe, that was probably uncommon ( if anything, such enemies would be forced to return lands or forced to brake their overlordship over smaller fries)

 

[Ekyman]

EU4 has the best current peace system - I don't think anyone can deny that - but people are disappointed that this is just the same system without introducing anything new.

I'm not a coder, so I (and I assume others) would appreciate if you could explain why you can't. The AI already values parts of the peace deal, why can't you try to balance those? People will always try to game to AI, so I feel that isn't a sufficient explanation.

The AI already needs to understand why* it should/shouldn't have pieces of land, else it cripples itself in it's own preferred deal

*'My' control over these locations would be too low to be worth it, these locations don't provide enough money/resources/people compared to the land/money 'I' would lose, etcetera.

Making the AI correctly understand an ordered ranking of which locations it wants to acquire, perhaps with a threshold to avoid it wanting really bad provinces, is easier (though not easy) than making the AI correctly understand the exact worth of those locations in terms of giving up other locations to get them, let alone the worth of those locations in money or some even more abstract tradeoff. Also you then also have to make the AI know when to stop - with one-way treaties each concession is essentially free, so you can just add concessions in order of AI value until you either run out of warscore or run out of net-positive concessions (or hit an AE cap). With two-way treaties you could theoretically trade almost everything you can ask for in exchange for almost everything you can give them. And players don't necessarily want to always see the AI make theoretically beneficial trades either. AI Scotland conquering Manchester because they dominated the war is fun; AI Scotland trading less productive Scottish locations to get Manchester because they slightly won the war and got the better trade is going to upset a lot of players, even if it might be mathematically beneficial for Scotland.

I'd love to see true negotiated peace treaties but it's a far more complicated beast than one-way treaties. I also suspect - multiplayer aside - that most of the use of them would in fact be in ways that are at least borderline exploitative of the AI. As cool as the idea of negotiating two-way peace treaties is, I think in practice most players most of the time want to get things and not give up things.

Would it really add that much if the only “counter offer” option was money? Because that was a fairly common “bilateral” concession and since its just a single item of equal value to everyone in all instances (i.e. its value ain’t situational/subjective like provinces or treaties), surely it could just be subtracted from the war score value without any additional ai thought?

And yet "buy a province" mechanics are infamous in grand strategy and 4X games for regularly having bad or inconsistent balance. Partly because putting a consistently good monetary value on such a thing is actually quite hard, partly because humans typically outstrip the AI economically and therefore money is actually not always of equal value to everyone, partly because humans often put game-external value on owning locations which render the in-game price calculations worthless.

 

[Nellike]

Would be possible to enable bilateral peace deals only in peaces involving 2 human players? (Considering that it was stated in an answer that for AI is very difficult)
Currently what happens in EUIV is that we end a war with white peace, then remove the player as rival and exchange provinces, money, ships, etc.

 

[SytroStormlord]

Lol Poland has no cities ahahah
View attachment 1196566

Yeah, not even Kraków with its university founded by Casmir the Great...
Not mentioning Gdańsk ( aka Danzig)
which was the biggest city along Vistula river arround XIV- XV century.

 

[wkscrombie]

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.

Ngl, I was hoping for something a little more innovative here— at least peace treaties with the possibility of some give and take. Also, “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” seems needlessly (and ahistorically) restrictive.

 

[wkscrombie]

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.

:/

 

[wkscrombie]

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

It just seems so artificial. And so frustrating if you declare for an ambitious wargoal, then have a tougher war than expected and come away with nothing rather than something lesser than you’d hoped.

 

[CrabHelmet]

Necessary? No, but some (frankly mild) mockery of a community's group-think isn't undesirable. This community has an issue with labeling mechanics as things like 'Gamey' or 'mana' without actually presenting a critique of how those mechanics make the game worse, they just fit into some imaginary undesirable category and therefore the community must be angry.

This is almost word for word what was said in some quarters when people criticised many of the systems in Imperator: Rome before release... that was hardly an imaginary lack of desire! This is the first Tinto Talks to have had such a negative reaction. Almost every other one has been received with significant positivity, other than the tech system, which was only mixed. I think there's a lot of value in the dev team seeing this as an early warning system and thinking about changes. Even if you argue that consumers can't coherently set out what they want, which in this case I don't really accept but will do for the purposes of addressing your point, consumers certainly can coherently set out what they *don't* want and designing another system is really what the whole business of game development is about. Tinto should be up to rising to that challenge.

 

[SytroStormlord]

Jesus Christ...
View attachment 1196578

Hordes liked to do that a lot:
Execute the current one+ force nobles to pick new one to become their ruler and... a tributary of the Horde.
There are also reports of tributary rulers becoming 'obsolete' if their Overlord wasn't satisfied with them.

 

[Focus my son]

subjects have no say if they are loyal enough.

And what if they are not loyal enough is it similar to EU4, where they simply refuse to comply, or is there room for negotiation through diplomatic channels? Even if a vassal remains loyal, that doesn't necessarily mean they will automatically come to your aid, despite expectations.

For instance, if a vassal's realm is in ruins following a previous war but has somehow managed to maintain its loyalty, they might respond by expressing willingness to serve while also stating that, for the sake of their stability, joining the new cause is impossible. This adds depth to vassal behavior and provides realistic limitations based on their condition.

To avoid these situations, the player shouldn't ignore the needs and concerns of their subjects, as often happens in EU4, where loyalty only becomes a concern if it drops below a certain threshold. It would be far more engaging if players were encouraged to actively nurture and develop their diplomatic relationships with their vassals, even after they have been subjugated, rather than treating loyalty as a simple binary value. This approach would foster deeper gameplay and add meaningful decisions to the management of subject states.

 

[merudin]

Honestly, I am quite shocked by the complete lack of any improvements in diplomacy. If there were no pictures, I would think we are talking about EUIV. Especially since I found the EUIV diplomacy system the most frustrating part of the game.

If there was a single thing to change about EUIV, I would say - REMOVE WAR LEADERS.

My most frustrating moments in EUIV were when I joined my ally in a defensive war, spent a few years bankrupting myself to defeat enemies, and at the end, I just got the message "Your ally has concluded peace, you get five and half ducats, fuck you" with no possible way to make demands or to continue the war if I don't like peace treaty. Your only option is to reload the last save and conclude separate peace (which is treason and your ally will probably get overrun by the enemies) or to open console commands, TAG COUNTRY, and conclude peace to your liking, but this is cheating...

There should be SOME WAY that countries who are not war leaders can contribute to the peace treaty. Either state their desired war goals before entering the war (Victoria 3 way) or implement peace treaty mechanics with more participants (HoI4 way). But this "war leader makes all the decisions" is really the worst system you can implement.

 

[ramius3443]

And yet "buy a province" mechanics are infamous in grand strategy and 4X games for regularly having bad or inconsistent balance. Partly because putting a consistently good monetary value on such a thing is actually quite hard, partly because humans typically outstrip the AI economically and therefore money is actually not always of equal value to everyone, partly because humans often put game-external value on owning locations which render the in-game price calculations worthless.

Except the AI already does this in EU4 though for the purposes of one way peace offers, accepting a certain number of button presses on the gold meter (the precise amount of money that entails depends on the economy of the sender in question) as equivalent to X amount of war score, the same as it does with provinces, and thus the AI already allows you to "buy" provinces (or rather, forgo gold to take more provinces). And since the gold button presses are scaled to the economy of the *sender*, it is wholly irrelevant for these purposes that player economies tend to be stronger than the AI. If anything, its an argument in favor.