Can we please change the rivals system

[titan.bevel]

I agree with @benjaminoon , the thread on https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/can-we-please-change-the-rivals-system.1728452/ has already some discussions on it, I'd say it's better not to create a new thread when another active one on the same subject exists.

 

[zeruosi]

I agree with @benjaminoon , the thread on https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/can-we-please-change-the-rivals-system.1728452/ has already some discussions on it, I'd say it's better not to create a new thread when another active one on the same subject exists.

yep

 

[Watered_Down]

I think it would be at least worthwhile to test how the rival system performs if a bunch of constraints were added to it. Something like:
Tag (X) will rival other tag (Y) if some mix of these is true:

• X and Y are similar in size
• X and Y are competing for market control in a market
• X has claims on Y
• X has no claims, but has a ruler personality making it want to conquer Y (expansionist, etc)
• X and Y have poor relations
• X and Y have previously been on opposite sides in a war (possibly multiple times?)
• X and Y have different culture and/or religion

Ideally this would be a system that doesn't change as abruptly with zero player input, as often happens in EU4, and instead is more understandable and has more player choice. My preference would be something like:

• Rivalries are based on poor relations between tags - so an ally doesn't flip immediately to a rival, but the alliance relationship decays first
• Players can take steps to maintain positive relations with allies to prevent a rivalry (a lot of trade and royal marriages, etc)
• Rivalries occur for understandable reasons: competition over territories by countries that want to expand, competition over market control, poor relations from previous wars or cultural differences
• Rivalries can become a player tool to target a tag they want to fight - this would bring in more strategic choice for players, that they can aggressively tank relations with or compete against another tag, to get to the level where they can declare a rivalry, and then get some bonuses to spy networks, less AE for taking provinces, more prestige from winning a war against them, etc.

I don't know if just applying some constraints to the rival system as-is would make it function the way I want, but I would be curious to see how the game plays out if you replace the default "every tag picks 3 rivals" with a more constrained set of options based (at the very minimum) on opinion score between tags.

 

[SAS]

Merged Threads

 

[benjaminoon]

I personally don't even think you should be able to choose a rival ,at least not by just selecting the country you don't like

• Rivalries are based on poor relations between tags - so an ally doesn't flip immediately to a rival, but the alliance relationship decays first
• Players can take steps to maintain positive relations with allies to prevent a rivalry (a lot of trade and royal marriages, etc)

As a bonus it could also make the whole "send insult letters" diplomatic action somewhat more useful. Making the rivalry something you have to work toward / create should you want it rather than a "click and become rival".

What do you guys think about having rivals as a relation you have to maintain diplomatically? Think of it as a relation that is activated when X county is most hostile towards you, but the negative relations decay overtime so you eventually fall out of a rivalry if there's no input. There should also be restrictions as to which countries that are hostile to you can actually be rivals. You would have to maintain poor relations or occasionally oppose X country in some way etc. to keep them rivals and vice versa. This would provide both more depth and give reasons for players to revisit the rivals system instead of just choosing rivals once and never interacting with the system again. It would also solve the issue of rivals not making sense narratively speaking, because you would have to always be at odds in some way.

This isn't how rivals actually behave. From time to time you may be thrown together with a rival on the same side of a war, or even form a temporary alliance with them. Not to mention how frequent noble/royal marriages were between "rivals" like France and Habsburg Spain/Austria actually were.

• Rivalries can become a player tool to target a tag they want to fight - this would bring in more strategic choice for players, that they can aggressively tank relations with or compete against another tag, to get to the level where they can declare a rivalry, and then get some bonuses to spy networks, less AE for taking provinces, more prestige from winning a war against them, etc.

I also don't think rivalries should completely block out diplomatic interactions and there should definitely be more nuance involved. I would also like to see unique diplomatic options unlocked for having rivals too. As Project Caesar is a grand strategy game, its game systems should really be feeling "Grand Strategy". There should be more thought and planning on the players part when interacting with a rivals system than what is currently in place. I want rivalries to be part of my overall strategy which interconnects with other parts of the game.

For example, let's say I want to declare war on my neighbor. To prepare for the future war, I am thinking about rivaling them because it will open up opportunities for my neighbor's other rival to possibly ally me. In order to push my neighbor over the edge to become rivals I would have to embargo them, but parts of my country are in their market. Should I rival them to gain an ally, even though it would make my economy weaker for the upcoming war? There would be strategic thinking involved in this, rather than the current system where you will always pick 3 rivals or suffer a debuff.

 

[titan.bevel]

What do you guys think about having rivals as a relation you have to maintain diplomatically? Think of it as a relation that is activated when X county is most hostile towards you, but the negative relations decay overtime so you eventually fall out of a rivalry if there's no input. There should also be restrictions as to which countries that are hostile to you can actually be rivals. You would have to maintain poor relations or occasionally oppose X country in some way etc. to keep them rivals and vice versa. This would provide both more depth and give reasons for players to revisit the rivals system instead of just choosing rivals once and never interacting with the system again. It would also solve the issue of rivals not making sense narratively speaking, because you would have to always be at odds in some way.

I wouldn't say you especially need to diplomatically maintain them, unless there are some advantages to being rival (increased relationship with tags that also have them as rival ?) But most of the time the "being rival" would be triggered / announced by "enough hostile actions" imo. And afterwards maintained more by hostile action than "mutual insult letters" But having it take a bit of diplo relation could be good, to push the "choose which rivals you have or risk more diplomatic isolation". Or, rather than eating diplo cap, it could only reduce the amount of available diplo capacity. In any case it'd be good to have it be more than "click and forget" and more "emergent gameplay of who is actually a rival"

 

[Álvaro Núñez de Lara]

I absolutely hate the system. Does not break the game for me. But forcing me to make a rival out of countries I have absolutely no problem with beecause otherwise I get maluses, it's terrible game design.

Im all for a rivalry system but it needs to be dynamic and realistic. Why do I need to rival as France egypt to fill up a slot? Why do I need to rival in early game England as Castille when in fact I want to ally them against France?

It makes no sense. Let me rival whoever I want, like, my actual rivals.

I understand for the IA you might have to force her to pick always 3 rivals at random, and thats fine. But PLEASE dont force the player.

The Victoria system is much better. Im not force to declare rivals if I dont want to. And i dont get penalised for not doing it, and its not an static number.

As mentioned by other it also creates a bunch of stupid problems that should not exist, like friends or neutral nations becoming rivals because they need to fill up a slot, no other reason, or smaller nations rivaling each other, while the real big blob rival looms next to them, waiting to eat them one by one while they rival each other.

 

[Martocticvs]

Seeing this system ported across from EU4 has been my biggest disappointment so far. Was really hoping it would be removed, or extensively reworked into something more natural and dynamic, as it is 100% the most gamey thing with the way it works in EU4. That doesn't fit with the feel of EU5 as given in the rest of the dev diaries so far.

 

[Dev2150]

I think it would be at least worthwhile to test how the rival system performs if a bunch of constraints were added to it. Something like:
Tag (X) will rival other tag (Y) if some mix of these is true:

• X and Y are similar in size
• X and Y are competing for market control in a market
• X has claims on Y
• X has no claims, but has a ruler personality making it want to conquer Y (expansionist, etc)
• X and Y have poor relations
• X and Y have previously been on opposite sides in a war (possibly multiple times?)
• X and Y have different culture and/or religion

I would also add adjacency

 

[benjaminoon]

I absolutely hate the system. Does not break the game for me. But forcing me to make a rival out of countries I have absolutely no problem with beecause otherwise I get maluses, it's terrible game design.

Im all for a rivalry system but it needs to be dynamic and realistic. Why do I need to rival as France egypt to fill up a slot? Why do I need to rival in early game England as Castille when in fact I want to ally them against France?

It makes no sense. Let me rival whoever I want, like, my actual rivals.

I understand for the IA you might have to force her to pick always 3 rivals at random, and thats fine. But PLEASE dont force the player.

The Victoria system is much better. Im not force to declare rivals if I dont want to. And i dont get penalised for not doing it, and its not an static number.

As mentioned by other it also creates a bunch of stupid problems that should not exist, like friends or neutral nations becoming rivals because they need to fill up a slot, no other reason, or smaller nations rivaling each other, while the real big blob rival looms next to them, waiting to eat them one by one while they rival each other.

I agree that at the very least the game shouldn't give maluses for not picking rivals if that's something the player doesn't want to do. That is just the game forcing a specific playstyle on the player and punishing them if they don't want to play that way. Terrible design.

 

[LAF1994]

I agree rivals feel very gamey, but they seem necessary. It was the only way for long-standing alliances to break down, since there were only a few available rivals and you were penalized by not picking them in Eu4. One would expect certain nations to be natural rivals for geopolitical reasons, but I just don't think that the AI is up to snuff to understand balance of power theory. So the rivals system is something of a crutch.

But it doesn't actually do that. The problem with the EU4 rival system (and alliance mechanics generally) is that it is far too static.

 

[EmperorPalpatine]

I wonder if the devs are going to respond to this. Also, I found that they ignore many concerns from old diaries too

 

[benjaminoon]

I wonder if the devs are going to respond to this. Also, I found that they ignore many concerns from old diaries too

I don't think the devs respond to regular forum posts. They only respond to people commenting in the tinto talks, but only up to about 2 hours after the dev diary is released and then they don't really respond to comments made after that. It would be nice though if they would, or maybe once a month make a post which says what feedback they have looked at or are working on so it doesn't just feel like the users on here are making suggestions into the void.

 

[titan.bevel]

I think it depends of how much "noise" each post makes. They have answered to some posts made by the commu. They also said repeatedly they DID read every post made in TT, though they didn't answer to every single one of them. (and even if said posts were posted some time after)

Agreed a post saying which feedback is being considered or not may be useful, but at the end of the day the whole goal of this forum is to give feedback for THEM to actually work on the game, and time spent on the forum is time not spent developing. So I'd rather have them take the feedback they need and then "let them cook".

Also we need to keep in mind our concerns are necessarily made "without too much concrete" to base ourselves on, so it's only logical they nuance it based on what the actual game feels like. And lots of messages doesn't necessarily translate to lots of forum users actually considering it a problem, which wouldn't translate necessarily to it being a problem in the live game.

 

[bretjemaine]

I agree they should redesign the system.

However, it is critical that they have a system in place that stops the game-ruining tactic you can employ in almost every other strategy game (particularly CK3): where you just ally the most powerful nations you can.

The rivals system isn't great, but it prevents that. It's one of the key reasons I can play a lot on EU4, but CK3 feels trivial.

 

[Kovax]

Problem is, it doesn't stop you from allying the most powerful nations unless you're already one of them. Your choices of rivals ae selected to be of similar size and power as your own country, so you can still ally with a country considerably more powerful, then let them do the heavy lifting for you, as is often done now.

Then, the country you've been allied to and fighting alongside for the better part of a century, having bailed each other out of countless difficulties, with no conflicts in terms of areas of interest, suddenly rivals you and breaks the alliance for no rational reason.

 

[ero_sk]

I agree and to me it's part of the broader "make things organic" idea. Things such as rivalry, stability or inflation should be an effect, not the cause. Currently, at least in EU4, it's the opposite. In other words, they shouldn't be modifiers nor triggers to more modifiers. Instead, they should be "just" a figure reflecting the situation. A useful piece of information to benchmark against. For example (just using some arbitrary numbers):

- If on average prices raised by N% YoY, then inflation is N%, NOT inflation is N% therefore everything is N% more expensive.
- The country is heavily indebted/is devastated by war/has large revolt going on/etc therefore stability is -N, NOT stability is -N therefore there is -N% malus to X,Y,Z.
- Countries A and B have had their relations at -N and had been at war X or more times in the past Y years therefore they are rivals, NOT you select country B as your rival hence you have worse relations now.

 

[ArchaeoFish18]

I just don't think that the AI is up to snuff to understand balance of power theory.

I'd love to see alliances of different types and character. Many alliances end up being more like the Auld Alliance (which was pretty rare, and predicated entirely on a common English threat) than the Stately Quadrille/balance of power type of shifting alliances of expedience. Indeed the latter seems more common than the former overall in the period. Right now it seems like it's not that hard, especially if you don't have direct borders, to maintain a centuries long alliance to the death, dragging your alliance partner into war after war without giving them much in return.