How much does « flavour » affect gameplay?

[Mindstorm]

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Some things need to be a bit forced if you want to have any semblance of history.

Take Timur for example. The chance of him becoming a great conqueror before dying was basically 1/100. Just like Chinggis, there were a ridiculous number of events where he could have died, with much of his life spent in exile. He only became a conqueror in his elder years.

If we went by realism instead of historicity, Timur would likely never appear in a campaign.

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Unless the starting date is better than 1337...

 

[Ispil]

I'm sorry, I have no idea what you're trying to say here. How is this different from culture? And how does this justify tag-specific content? What does it mean that England claims to be England and represent English heritage, and how does that justify them having unique civil wars in the 15th and 17th centuries (or whatever bespoke content England ends up getting)?

I mean I wouldn't tie things like the War of the Roses to England being England; that to me is dynastic content (the Plantaganet line dying out for whatever country that they happen to rule as their "primary", whatever the hell that can be made to translate into, with two or more active cadet branches in their country, historically Lancaster and York). Countries shouldn't magically get the War of the Roses just because they're England; that makes no sense at all.

As for the English Civil War, that one's more complicated but again there's nothing specifically wedding that to England as a country. More the political situation involving personal unions and the religious situation involving imposition of religion onto junior members of a personal union, among other things. I don't mind the idea of trying to catch a specific "War of the Three Kingdoms"-style disaster when otherwise spinning up a generic disaster of that sort (as was suggested earlier), but to me that's mostly just uniqueness in naming.

The key is that, to me, most content should be divorced from tags and instead be focused on religious, political, geographical, or whatever other circumstances make sense. I'm not saying that the devs agree with me, or that they aren't gonna inundate England with hundreds of events specific to England that would be better off migrated to larger categories. I'm just saying that, to me, the only country-specific flavor should stem from what those countries represent as their claim and their heritage.

 

[SAmaster]

I mean I wouldn't tie things like the War of the Roses to England being England; that to me is dynastic content (the Plantaganet line dying out for whatever country that they happen to rule as their "primary", whatever the hell that can be made to translate into, with two or more active cadet branches in their country, historically Lancaster and York). Countries shouldn't magically get the War of the Roses just because they're England; that makes no sense at all.

As for the English Civil War, that one's more complicated but again there's nothing specifically wedding that to England as a country. More the political situation involving personal unions and the religious situation involving imposition of religion onto junior members of a personal union, among other things. I don't mind the idea of trying to catch a specific "War of the Three Kingdoms"-style disaster when otherwise spinning up a generic disaster of that sort (as was suggested earlier), but to me that's mostly just uniqueness in naming.

The key is that, to me, most content should be divorced from tags and instead be focused on religious, political, geographical, or whatever other circumstances make sense. I'm not saying that the devs agree with me, or that they aren't gonna inundate England with hundreds of events specific to England that would be better off migrated to larger categories. I'm just saying that, to me, the only country-specific flavor should stem from what those countries represent as their claim and their heritage.

See that's where I disagree- I'd say that civil-wars should certainly be dynamic, but yes the War of the Roses IS uniquely English. In the same way that the Scottish War of Independence should be UNIQUELY Scottish, or the American Revolution should be UNIQUELY American.

There's a lot of historical events that are closely tied to national identities, and I don't see the point in making them generic- people who want to play the American Revolution, whether or not they be American, are gonna want to see unique content related to figures like Washington, Jefferson, Benedict Arnold, CHARLES LEE, Ben Franklin, and so on. They aren't gonna want to see 'randomly generated general was dynamically bribed to turn over randomly chosen fort somewhere in the country'.

There should certainly be dynamic events for colonial wars, but I mentioned earlier we should have a 'two-cakes' approach. We can have both a unique War of the Roses disaster for England, while having generic civil war disasters for everyone. I don't see why the two would be in conflict.

 

[Arizal]

@Ipsil And then, whenever you would have those - truly - Dynamic Historical Events, you could click on a button telling you : "this event that just happened to you happened because XYZ triggers, and it represents how, in real history XYZ led to "this specific event", that you will now suffer the consequence or reap the benefit from.

 

[Arizal]

Nobody is saying that the "War of the Roses" should happen in Norway. What we are saying is that something resembling the War of the Roses, with a different name, certainly different characters, *could* have happened in Norway. As for the War of the Roses, as a name, it should stay English.

 

[JacceDON]

@Ipsil And then, whenever you would have those - truly - Dynamic Historical Events, you could click on a button telling you : "this event that just happened to you happened because XYZ triggers, and it represents how, in real history XYZ led to "this specific event", that you will now suffer the consequence or reap the benefit from.

That sounds really dumb, don't make a historical event dynamic and then try to hijack the irl historical background. A bland alt-history event represents nothing relating to irl history, it's just a bland AI-generated thing in a videogame.

 

[SAmaster]

That sounds really dumb, don't make a historical event dynamic and then try to hijack the irl historical background. A bland alt-history event represents nothing relating to irl history, it's just a bland AI-generated thing in a videogame.

It doesn't have to be, but it sounds like he wouldn't like tailored/hand-written alt-history content either.

 

[Ian001022]

You know, this is one of those situations where I feel like one of those "that wasn't real Communism"-types - because that wasn't a real sandbox, it was just a fundamentally flawed game.

Haven't played Vic 3, which I'm sure you're referring to, but since you imply multiple such events I will take the case of CK3, which does get flak for being rather same-y (a description I agree with completely). However, the issue in that case is not that there isn't enough "flavor" for certain regions/religions/cultures/whatever (tags don't make sense in CK, after all), but rather because they decided to make a le funny incest simulator so that Redditors could post their horribly-inbred, yet superhuman homunculi on r/CrusaderKings. Which is why you have absolutely inane things going on, like being able to change the very tenets of a religion or culture because you have a lot of "piety" or some other nonsense. And why they seem to be focusing on adding more content regions to the game rather than actually changing systems (but that is speculation on my part).

I don't mind if flavor events occurred when certain simulate-able conditions are met, and hey - if the text and some options are unique (and even tag-specific), all the better! In fact, I would welcome such systems. What I dislike is when you are prevented from doing certain things, even when they make sense, because you do not have such-and-such name. My entire argument hinges on that phrase - when it makes sense. CK3 is an example of what happens when you throw that baby out with the bathwater.

The issue is not a (historically-grounded) sandbox. The issue is when the sandbox lets you do what you want, without consequence.

Your argument makes no sense because CK3 does not stray from the definition of a sandbox game at all. You don't like CK3 doesn't mean CK3 as a sandbox game is fundamentally flawed. Please specify your standard for a game to be a good sandbox game. Following your logic, all paradox games are fundamentally flawed, and your standard for a game to be a sandbox makes even Minecraft not a real sandbox game. Also, consequences don't correlate with a good game, as Skyrim, which is almost universally praised as some kind of masterpiece, has almost no choices and consequences.

 

[Ispil]

See that's where I disagree- I'd say that civil-wars should certainly be dynamic, but yes the War of the Roses IS uniquely English. In the same way that the Scottish War of Independence should be UNIQUELY Scottish, or the American Revolution should be UNIQUELY American.

There's a lot of historical events that are closely tied to national identities, and I don't see the point in making them generic- people who want to play the American Revolution, whether or not they be American, are gonna want to see unique content related to figures like Washington, Jefferson, Benedict Arnold, CHARLES LEE, Ben Franklin, and so on. They aren't gonna want to see 'randomly generated general was dynamically bribed to turn over randomly chosen fort somewhere in the country'.

There should certainly be dynamic events for colonial wars, but I mentioned earlier we should have a 'two-cakes' approach. We can have both a unique War of the Roses disaster for England, while having generic civil war disasters for everyone. I don't see why the two would be in conflict.

I guess at this point we're mostly arguing over semantics. I think that the War of the Roses is uniquely Plantaganet in the sense that if England managed to form some other country, or culture-switched, or religion-switched or whatever, that you're still gonna have to contend with that. In the event that England manages to suffer a coup and lose the Plantaganet dynasty, it stops making sense.

I'm not saying that we don't get unique flavor for the War of the Roses. I'm saying that it's attached to the dynasty more than it is the country. Don't mistake my suggestion for "make everything generic"; far from it. Just attach it to the relevant scopes.

 

[SAmaster]

I guess at this point we're mostly arguing over semantics. I think that the War of the Roses is uniquely Plantaganet in the sense that if England managed to form some other country, or culture-switched, or religion-switched or whatever, that you're still gonna have to contend with that. In the event that England manages to suffer a coup and lose the Plantaganet dynasty, it stops making sense.

True, but I figure even with the earlier start-dates that'd be a lot of edge-cases, unlikely to occur.

Far as I know though we can't attach content to dynasties, hence it's better to attach it to the country. I get what you mean- that say culture-converting to Aztec probably wouldn't prevent the disaster, but I don't think that's the same as saying we need dynasty specific content.

 

[SAmaster]

Your argument makes no sense because CK3 does not stray from the definition of a sandbox game at all. You don't like CK3 doesn't mean CK3 as a sandbox game is fundamentally flawed. Please specify your standard for a game to be a good sandbox game. Following your logic, all paradox games are fundamentally flawed, and your standard for a game to be a sandbox makes even Minecraft not a real sandbox game. Also, consequences don't correlate with a good game, as Skyrim, which is almost universally praised as some kind of masterpiece, has almost no choices and consequences.

Yeah, I think the issue should be first arguing why paradox games SHOULD be a sandbox.

In these discussions I've used the Civilization games as an example of a grand-strategy game that's the ultimate sandbox- you can randomize the map, starting position, who your neighbors are, etc. which you can't do in any Paradox game (barring 'random start' modes that were added but rarely used). But Civilization doesn't really strive to simulate history all that much, and most of its mechanics are abstractions. It has to be for its scope. Meanwhile EU5 is starting with as close to the historical standard of 1337 as they can get- if someone doesn't want to be constrained by real history, why would that attention to detail matter? If you want an ultimate standpoint, what does it matter that Scotland starts in the historic War of Indpedence? If you want everything to be balanced, should every country start in the same starting position more or less?

I can understand if you like the mechanics of EUIV, and that if you want a spreadsheet simulator like quill18 (as he likes to joke) then you like the simulationist aspects of Europa Universalis. But this desire for an ultimate sandbox is undermined by the historical start of the game- by it simulating events that were happening prior to the start date outside of player control that will have ramifications moving forward.

It sounds to me like these people want a 'sandbox mode' to be released with EUV, which hey I wouldn't be opposed to even.

 

[Friedrich von Deutschland]

And I don't really get it. It's kinda obvious that it's generally a good idea to industrialize and so on. Some nations should industrialize and others shouldn't, just so that they could be "played differently"?

It’s not that there’s an optimal path in these games, we know the history enough to say that some strategies are vastly superior to others, but that the difficulty of executing that strategy is relatively consistent, even when it goes hard against the historical trends. In Vicky 3 countries feel very similar because interest groups all feel the same with only minor variations, and disrupting historical tendencies is far too easy (ending American slavery and industrializing ahistorically being the two big ones, but I’d note how I turned the U.S. into a monarchy under Norton on a whim as exemplary of how maliable countries are, to the point they barely have an identity). Imperator might actually be worse because at least in Vicky 3 the starting positions are about what you’d expect. In Imperator every country plays like a weird mashup of Rome and the Diadochi, with the Diadochi feeling the best, but really nobody coming off as especially well represented. Should it have been possible to adopt Roman style inclusive citizenship? Sure, it was absolutely a winning formula, but for most tags getting it adopted should be extremely destabilizing, and is absolutely shouldn’t be implemented by default with how the assimilation mechanics function.

I’m optimistic EU5 will avoid this though. The HRE shouldn’t play like France, which shouldn’t play like China, which shouldn’t play like Japan, which shouldn’t play like Timur, etc. not maybe I’ll be wrong and all the worst problems of the previews where every tag was a blober where going all in on trade capacity was the winning move will be as as present as ever, never to be rectified, but the devs seem conscientious of these problems and even if they aren’t I can see the tools for moderately to fix these things.

 

[Ivashanko]

I think one thing to say about flavour is that, flavour is actually a compromise. Because, devs aren't 100% history + computer-science expert that can design a game with all details of human societies.

Even if they were history and computer-science expert geniuses they still would not be able to design a game with all the details of human society crammed into it. Our tech isn't good enough.

 

[Aart]

Yeah, I think the issue should be first arguing why paradox games SHOULD be a sandbox.

In these discussions I've used the Civilization games as an example of a grand-strategy game that's the ultimate sandbox- you can randomize the map, starting position, who your neighbors are, etc. which you can't do in any Paradox game (barring 'random start' modes that were added but rarely used). But Civilization doesn't really strive to simulate history all that much, and most of its mechanics are abstractions. It has to be for its scope. Meanwhile EU5 is starting with as close to the historical standard of 1337 as they can get- if someone doesn't want to be constrained by real history, why would that attention to detail matter? If you want an ultimate standpoint, what does it matter that Scotland starts in the historic War of Indpedence? If you want everything to be balanced, should every country start in the same starting position more or less?

I can understand if you like the mechanics of EUIV, and that if you want a spreadsheet simulator like quill18 (as he likes to joke) then you like the simulationist aspects of Europa Universalis. But this desire for an ultimate sandbox is undermined by the historical start of the game- by it simulating events that were happening prior to the start date outside of player control that will have ramifications moving forward.

It sounds to me like these people want a 'sandbox mode' to be released with EUV, which hey I wouldn't be opposed to even.

I gotta deviate from CIV vs EU discussion and use a completely different and for the first impression completely unrelated game as an example. "Scramble: Battle of Britain".
This is a turn based WW2 air dogfight simulator with actual 3D movement and so
As each turn is something around 3 seconds, at the end of it you end up heading at some direction, with some speed, altitude and of course your plane's construction integrity. Based on which game computes and suggest you your trajectory for the next step, however you are free to alter it within your situation+ your pilot's skills. So, if you just want to descend a 100ft, that's relatively simple. However if you want to end up in the exact spot you are, but heading completely different course - that would require you a lot of turns and some manoeuvres. And of course, the more changes you do in your subsequent turns, the more your trajectory would differ from what an AI would take. And your opponent actually reacts to your manoeuvres as well

The same I would like to see in EU5. You have your trajectory, defined by your starting position: economy, population, balance of power - both internal and external. But every agent (player and AI) will slowly change their trajectory both proactively - chasing their ambitions - and reactively - answering to the changes happening around them

 

[Arizal]

@Aart That’s like the boat metaphor someone used in another thread. Of course if your country starts in a completely different position, it’ll take a while before it can mimic another and catch up to it.

 

[Lindaegan]

I want to play, I don't want to be puppeteered by the devs. By the way, I don't consider games like Skyrim to be Rpgs. Just because there is character customisation and a story doesn't mean it is an Rpg. Otherwise Gta5, the Metroid serie and all the Mario games are also Rpgs. The only video games I call Rpgs are games like Baldur's Gate 3, Fallout New Vegas and the first two Fallout games. And even them are pale copies in comparison with a Dnd session for example.

Amen. I always say that the greatest trick to help roleplay is enable the character to say one thing in ten different ways (a TT session would have infinite ways, Skyrim has one). Same thing here, I think - I'd want to be able to do the same thing in ten different ways.

*Typed this out and realized @Ru8bin said exactly this but much more eloquently. But I'm still going to post it because I like the comparison.

Please specify your standard for a game to be a good sandbox game.

Kenshi, Minecraft. One is the standard for a sandbox with roleplaying elements, the other is pure sandbox.

Also, consequences don't correlate with a good game, as Skyrim, which is almost universally praised as some kind of masterpiece, has almost no choices and consequences.

Never said it did. I said that's what I'd like to see. That being said - Skyrim is not a masterpiece, it just revolutionized the RPG-space by making devs realize that people did not care about consequence (Oblivion did this more so, actually). And in any case, the only things that are praised about Skyrim are its handcrafted map, moddability, and abject fear of ever telling the player the word "no". I've never seen anyone call its role-playing, or its progression, or its writing, or its worldbuilding, or its characterization, or its utterly idiotic "radiant" system, anything other than middling, or painfully average. And the fact that most people played it when they were eight, and that most of those people are seemingly unable to grow up from having played that one game at that one time, does not, in my eyes, change anything.

But this is not a dogfight I'd like to get into (for the twentieth time in my life). If you like Skyrim, good for you. I do as well.


Also, to be clear, I don't want EUV to be a sandbox game. I was just responding to someone saying that CK3 and Vic3 are bad because they are sandboxes. I disagree. They are bad because they are poor games, and I suppose they look like a giant sandbox because that's what an empty construction lot looks like, too.

 

[Arizal]

This thread seems to illustrate how flavour can disadvantage TAGs for no reason. Venice and Genoa are both merchant republics. They both should have the same abilities. Yet a "special" building is given only to Genoa. If Genoa started with an advance giving it this building, and Venice didn't, it could make sense, but the fact that Genoa is the only one that can ever access this is disappointing.

There are probably a lot of buildings which are the special plaything of TAGs for no reason other than them being X. I wouldn't like the game to devolve into a competition of unique buildings. This isn't Age of Empires.

 

[ATSCMS]

Any alternatives to real history are shallow and uninteresting by design. Once you diverge from the timeline we actually know anything about (our own) you end up with having to make stuff up

If you lack imagination hehe

With a game like EU5 the result of removing the railroading (and leaning into the sandbox) is about as deep as fantasy written by ChatGPT, fantastical but pointless to even pay attention to. Real history is so deep and vast that you can spend an entire professional life just learning scraps and pieces of it - THAT is the lore I want in a historical GSG, not the randomized slop of an AI-algorithm.

I want to see historical empires rise, because I don't want to play through, as another person put it, ChatGPT history.

That sounds really dumb, don't make a historical event dynamic and then try to hijack the irl historical background. A bland alt-history event represents nothing relating to irl history, it's just a bland AI-generated thing in a videogame.

You aren't calling the principles that run our universe "chatgpt" and "IA slop", are you?

I think you misunderstand a bit what I'm saying - I want the game resemble history through robust systems, not necessarily events that give certain countries free PUs or something like that. For example a problem with EU4 is that through the systems in place Spain becomes super powerful, similarly the PLC dominates it's region, but the historical crisis that led to their decline are not well modelled, so both kinda stay in that powerful position.
Some of these things are very hard organically model, so a certain amount of specifc PLC flavour is probably needed to model it's problems - and I think that only makes the gameplay more interesting.
Portugal trying to get to India was not a random occurance, but a centuries long policy, the game should model that.
Similarly, a resurgent HRE after the Interregnum is quite likely given the dynamics of the time, but the EU4 AI simply was incapable of modelling that, and I hope the EUV AI can.

What's needed is a healthy balance of railroading and a pure sandbox.

Yeah, but that still isn't good for roleplay.

While I agree with you, I think the argument of OP is that the bare mechanic simulation of the game should be deep enough to allow history to be simulated organically, and not that it should have randomized alt-history narratives. I.e. "make all the unique privileges available for everyone".

Yes.

There are two problems with this approach:

1. It would definitely cause the game to lose content overall, because unique flavor elements that were crafted to tell a specific narrative will be folded into generalized ones that probably already exist. For example, many unique disasters will be just replaced with the generic ones.
2. There is a realistic limit to how deep the sandbox can go. Actual history is so vast that unique flavor always touches upon things that are not represented in the sandbox at all, and to extend the sandbox so much that it can simulate anything in history is obviously impossible because this is a game and the game should be released eventually.

I disagree that they are problems. This "content" is simply the historically determined consequences of events that happened before the start date. And most of them shouldn't even be 100% likely to happen. And it is true, there is so much you can simulate, but doesn't mean they should't try.

And to be fair, I am also an advocate of having a sandbox that is deep enough to make for immersive alt-history scenarios, but this shouldn't come at a cost for the historical flavor. For example in the Mali Tinto Flavor thread I suggested that there should be a generalized disaster for an empire to collapse in a similar way to the unique Mali disaster, and Pavia agreed with me. I just don't think that the existence of such a generalized disaster should mean that the unique Mali one should be deleted - it's cool that it exists, because actual history gives us more to see in that narrative.

I will go even further than that and i will say that historical flavour should be optional through a game rule.

I don't think it's about the 'optimal' way to play, for instance colonizing in most instances is optimal in that it's a way to expand your land, but a lot of players ignore it, because colonizing doesn't offer too much engagement outside of historical colonizers. Even then depending on the run it may be ignored.

I'd say it's more about engagement- does playing this playstyle get rewarded? For instance, Horde gameplay is fun because you are constantly rewarded for conquest, and the ability to raze rewards you with mana points and cheaper provinces to core- even though the land you get is worth less when you get it. Playing Tall is engaging when it allows your small nation to compete as a global power, and influence global events in a way you otherwise wouldn't. Forming the HRE vassal swarm is engaging because you can sick them on enemies and let wars run on autopilot.

Now I don't think tags should be created equally- there should be winners and losers because that's what happened in history. If you want to pick a nation with no bonuses or flavors and use it to try to do a world conquest (like say a Three Mountains run) then that should be made to be challenging. I think there's a question of balance, but the answer isn't 'Uniform equal balance for all tags'. You're not gonna get that anyway, since some nations will start off in stronger positions than other- certain parts of the map are gonna be richer than others due to geography.

What I think is important about flavor mechanics is that the engage with a certain kind of playstyle that makes playing that game unique- not that it makes them overpowered. For instance, playing as the Knights is fun because you engage with the papacy and you get to raid coasts- so you have a strong position despite being a OPM. You can expand sure, but the strengths of the Knights suit them being an OPM, rather than a playing wide nation.

Oh no, please, leave that to eu4.

Exactly. The two cakes approach.

I would advise against eating two cakes at the same time.

What is a tag, really?

Primary culture and religion can be changed. Ruling dynasty can be changed. System of government can be changed. Even the name can be changed, from a technical perspective (the name of a country is something entirely scriptable). Flags are no different.

So what makes a tag, a tag? What makes England, England, in this game, if so many core components of it can be changed out with something else? It's not the culture, or the religion, or the ruling dynasty, or the system of government, or the name, or the flag.

It is what they lay as their claim for what they are. The heritage in which they claim to represent.

Well, I was going to say what a country, nation, tag, state is. It is a huge organisation and structure determined by its geography, terrain elevations, soil fertility, ressources, climate, diplomacy, geopolitics, cultures, religions, governments, rulers, history, etc. That's where uniqueness and deepness should come from. The uniqueness and deepness that come from historically railroaded flavour are a charming illusion that hides a poor game design.

I gotta deviate from CIV vs EU discussion and use a completely different and for the first impression completely unrelated game as an example. "Scramble: Battle of Britain".
This is a turn based WW2 air dogfight simulator with actual 3D movement and so
As each turn is something around 3 seconds, at the end of it you end up heading at some direction, with some speed, altitude and of course your plane's construction integrity. Based on which game computes and suggest you your trajectory for the next step, however you are free to alter it within your situation+ your pilot's skills. So, if you just want to descend a 100ft, that's relatively simple. However if you want to end up in the exact spot you are, but heading completely different course - that would require you a lot of turns and some manoeuvres. And of course, the more changes you do in your subsequent turns, the more your trajectory would differ from what an AI would take. And your opponent actually reacts to your manoeuvres as well

The same I would like to see in EU5. You have your trajectory, defined by your starting position: economy, population, balance of power - both internal and external. But every agent (player and AI) will slowly change their trajectory both proactively - chasing their ambitions - and reactively - answering to the changes happening around them

The only thing I will add to this is that Civ is much more railroaded than apparent. And no, I won't elaborate any further lol.

I will finnally add an example of something that is kind of similar to how I role play:

Massalia Tales - Rome 2 Narrative Let's Play [Complete]

A Rome 2 NLP as Massalia, fighting to remain an independent city state and maybe even become a power to rival the other Mediterranean rulers...

m.youtube.com

 

[JacceDON]

If you lack imagination hehe


You aren't calling the principles that run our universe "chatgpt" and "IA slop", are you?

No PDX GSG is able to simulate "the principles that run our universe", therefore we need to introduce railroading so that the came can follow the only known instance of history as it happened - our irl history. We are decades away from a simulation that can produce anything even remotely interesting as far as alt-history is concerned, anything natively generated by the Clausewitz engine will be AI-slop.

 

[Arizal]

I fail to see how intelligently giving general conditions for some events or content to happen is "not interesting". It can be done partially at first, like when you remove the wheels from a bicycle but don't let go. If the "generic" implementation fails because there are historically adapted events happening everywhere, such as every country having a "war of the roses" like civil war and every country opting for space marines, then you readjust the requirements.