Has power creep become an official dev policy for EU4?

[nuurori]

This is not an easy task, as the game has almost 10 years old, its systems being the oldest of Paradox's games, and has many, many mechanics and features coming from different DLCs.

I understand the challenges caused by technical debt and derivative desing, but its our job as fans to complain and cook up conspiracy teories, just like it's a dev's job to make excuses!

You could, however, really get rid of those mercs, they are figuratively unplayable with the varied stack sized and linking acrobatics. THAT would be an improvement to the game that would not divide audience!

 

[Shinkuro Yukinari]

No.

We are not trying to make the game easier, nor 'power creep' is our design philosophy. What we're trying to do since a couple of years ago when PDX Tinto's tenure of EUIV started, is to fix, balance and polish the game systems and mechanics while trying to add more and deeper content. This is not an easy task, as the game has almost 10 years old, its systems being the oldest of Paradox's games, and has many, many mechanics and features coming from different DLCs. But when possible, we've freed up or made compatible mechanics from different DLCs, while keeping adding as much content as possible to older DLCs and the base game. We've also tried to actively refresh and rebalance old systems, as the idea groups, and we've also tried to implement challenging content, as with the disasters for Mali, Ottomans, or Castile. There was also a big update to the AI in 1.34, and I'd say that it's in better shape than it had been for years.

Can we do things better, and keep improving? For sure. I think that we could do better with features like the disasters, and maybe we could give some more love to things like the AI management of reforms that Jarvin has mentioned. But I also think that we've influx replayability and more gameplay differentiation to the game with the new reforms, privileges, ideas, etc., opening new possibilities that were not there 3 years ago.

The unfortunate reality is that EU4 has serious powercreep, most notably since the 1.30 Austria patch and its nation specific content. The fact that most of those were for countries in weaker positions or more isolated regions obscured the powercreep, with the exception of Austria, of course, however with 1.35 and Domination we have insane buffs for nations poised to be/which are great powers, who then proceed to completely dominate the landscape with a boatload of modifiers.

On top of that, so many mechanics, modifiers and effects players can stack for little effort, especially with the Estate system and privileges that can often invalidate various downsides.
Lack money? Have 5 loans with tiny interest.
Wanna keep your Diplo Reputation high while annexing vassals? One privilege, simple.
Still lacking money? Just sell some crownland, the downsides are mostly irrelevant.
Wanna have more vassals? Strong duchies, easy!

Fact of the matter is, EU4 needs to either nerf perks across the board or introduce downsides, which you more or less acknowledge through nation-specific disasters. Only some of these downsides are conditional and can easily be avoided cause through all the modifiers you stab up for like 50 admin points and maintain +3 stab easily.

 

[EarlKonrad]

But I also think that we've influx replayability and more gameplay differentiation to the game with the new reforms, privileges, ideas, etc., opening new possibilities that were not there 3 years ago.

I might be in the minority here, but to me replayability never had anything to do with which buff I'd pick for a nation. Nor to replay a mission tree. Instead, I'd pick the same nation again to see how things would change due to AI RNG or if I took a different route of expansion. In this sense, reforms and ideas are merely a means to an end and, by themselves, are meaningless. As are privileges. Give me 50 different privileges and I'll ignore all but the ones that will benefit my run.

Likewise missions, from what I observed, hurt replayability instead of helping it as they encourage players to go down a very specific route while simultaneously rail roading AIs to some extend (specially when mission treea feature a lot of permaclaims as these have a big impact on how the AI conducta diplomacy).

I don't have an issue with many nations always taking basically the same routes of expansion and becoming strong, but it is tiresome when you always see every major have the exact same borders and a minor never comming out on top. I do miss the days when Castille would get eaten with a coalition of portugal and Morrocos, or the Teutons would dominate the Baltic.

 

[Mindel]

No.

We are not trying to make the game easier, nor 'power creep' is our design philosophy. What we're trying to do since a couple of years ago when PDX Tinto's tenure of EUIV started, is to fix, balance and polish the game systems and mechanics while trying to add more and deeper content. This is not an easy task, as the game has almost 10 years old, its systems being the oldest of Paradox's games, and has many, many mechanics and features coming from different DLCs. But when possible, we've freed up or made compatible mechanics from different DLCs, while keeping adding as much content as possible to older DLCs and the base game. We've also tried to actively refresh and rebalance old systems, as the idea groups, and we've also tried to implement challenging content, as with the disasters for Mali, Ottomans, or Castile. There was also a big update to the AI in 1.34, and I'd say that it's in better shape than it had been for years.

Can we do things better, and keep improving? For sure. I think that we could do better with features like the disasters, and maybe we could give some more love to things like the AI management of reforms that Jarvin has mentioned. But I also think that we've influx replayability and more gameplay differentiation to the game with the new reforms, privileges, ideas, etc., opening new possibilities that were not there 3 years ago.

It's comforting to know that all of this is a bug and not a feature. Honestly, this is not so easy to tell from outside of Tinto.

What I see is a studio making local adjustments one at a time, adding missions here and features there. Each DLC focuses on one region or theme. Individually these contributions can be fun and interesting. Who doesn't love turtle ships or samurai, after all? And in adopting this approach I think the team isn't doing anything wrong. Incremental additions is how all continuing software development happens.

But all of these local contributions add up to change the global nature and balance of the game. The course of development gradually changes the EU4 meta. And it seems that there is no one at Tinto whose job is to periodically step back and assess this meta, to examine the total weight of all adjustments and features added over a long timespan, and to determine whether this is moving the gameplay in a desirable direction.

I believe this lack of global review is what causes the meta to slide in certain ways over time, hence the term power creep. I don't know how noticeable this may be to a dev team focused on carrying out a pre-planned, multi-year road map for future DLCs. But I (and others) have observed that EU4 has been become easier over the last few years. Of course, I have more experience and am (presumably) better at the game now than I was 5 years ago. But I don't think this perception is due only to a change in the observer.

I can recall multiple instances where, thanks to years of DLC additions, it has become very easy to pull the right button (or estate privilege, or mission, etc.) out of our big bag of modern EU4 features to dismantle whatever problem comes our way. And sometimes in doing so we completely circumvent some major obstacle we were supposed to face. We win the prize without having to face the intended challenge.

Here's a little (obsolete) example. Before the whole Teutonic mission rework, the Teutons had to please Austria enough to join the HRE. In the beginning this usually required a large bribe (> 125 ducats). But with the introduction of scornful insults, it was enough to just scornfully insult an Austrian rival to get over the opinion threshold.

From my empirical experience, a lot of this creeping is happening because some mechanics may be added, adjusted, or updated, but other mechanics or scenarios relying on them will be overlooked and not updated. This can distort the interaction between these different elements, leading to dramatically changed (and unintended) gameplay dynamics. Someone at Tinto needs to monitor these second-order interactions, because a lot of bugs and power creep results when they break.





Take a prominent example mentioned in my opening post: the Hundred Years War.

In the oldest patches, England starts off already at war with France, and so it had to fight alone if it wanted to win a PU over France. This was also (as far as I'm aware) England's only opportunity to PU France outside of the usual dynastic RNG, so there were no second chances or postponing to a more convenient time in the future. It was now or never.

All of this made perfect sense from a game balance perspective. England getting a PU over France effectively means winning the game in the first 10 years. The rewards are so huge that the challenge should be considerable, and England losing should be the norm.

This balance began to drift apart when the opening setup was changed to take into account the Treaty of Tours. Now that England no longer starts the game at war, this opened the way for it to collect allies for the HYW. To be clear, adding the Treaty of Tours is correct history and I absolutely support it. By itself, this was not a problem. But when combined with the possibility to call in allies by promising land, this enabled England to bury France under a pile of large allies, making the HYW a cakewalk and shattering the game balance there.

There were multiple ways to address this issue, some of them quite simple.

One was to impose a -1000 penalty for calling allies into union CB wars. If this seems too blunt, then turning the HYW into a custom war (which it now is anyway) allows us to add this blocking penalty specifically for the HYW and nothing else.

Or, for a different approach, we could simply add truces between France and Castile/Aragon/Burgundy to prevent them from getting called in. In fact, it would enough to just make them not interested in any French land. This has always kept Austria out.

Let me add that all these proposals are still very simple to implement as of 1.35.6.

But instead of doing any of this, the DLCs have doubled down on making it easier for England to get a PU over France. We have the Paris mission giving England a union CB, at a time of England's choosing. This is but one of the more egregious cases of a mission handing out an overpowered union CB. I would perhaps be less offended by this if AI England was smart enough to think ahead and to try to profit off this mission by starting a war with the objective of occupying Paris. But the AI isn't smart enough to start wars just to beeline for mission rewards, so in effect this mission becomes a player-only buff.

We have even institutionalized this power creep into the English mission tree. There is now an entire mission branch and tag (Angevin) built around the idea of England PUing France. To be clear, I don't think any of this extra content is a problem per se, provided that it is difficult for England to get that PU over France. While in my opinion it is not such a great use of developer manpower to build so much English content around the outcome where England effectively wins at the very opening of the game, the existence of this content in itself doesn't hurt the game balance. Personally, I'm actually a fan of Angevin content; it is a niche corner of history I enjoy.

But the fundamental issue, that it is way too easy for England to conquer France using big allies, has remained unaddressed up to now. And this fact combined with the presence of so much Angevin content conveys the impression that the Angevin path is intended to be so accessible and mainstream that any player can pursue it without too much hassle. It makes me think that PDX is deliberately beating down the grass so that this path becomes easily walkable for anyone.





For a different type of example, take a look at Austria's complete apathy about defending its position as HRE emperor. This one seems to be a case of mechanical power creep contributing to an issue of (if not deliberately easy design) stupid AI.

Thanks to a number of generic and HRE mission bonuses combined with clergy privileges, it is easier than ever before for HRE OPMs to get elected emperor. Against a competent Austria player this wouldn't be nearly enough to win, but AI Austria simply doesn't pay any attention at all to its re-election. Which makes absolutely zero sense, as all of Austria's might and influence springs from its position as HRE emperor. If AI Austria hasn't been hardcoded to understand this, then it certainly needs to be.

In my opinion, the Austrian AI should be so pro-active about being re-elected HRE emperor that it should identify serious competitors well ahead of time and work to sabotage them. Otherwise, what is the point of being a diplomatic superpower and having a diplomacy-focused build? It should require a war to weaken Austria enough to make it vulnerable to losing the election. Personally, I think there should even be HRE events centered around confrontations between Austria and its electoral competitors.

But in fact election is easy for the player, because AI Austria usually does nothing. If it loses the election, AI Austria is perfectly content and doesn't even try to dislodge the new HRE emperor. I cannot fathom how the Austrian AI has behaved this way for so long without ever being addressed by Tinto. What kind of "diplomatic superpower" behavior is this? It is examples like this one which lead me to think that there is a deliberate attempt to make it easy for a player to get elected HRE emperor, by keeping AI Austria stupid.





So while I am relieved to hear that power creep is not an intended feature, I do believe it is nonetheless seeping into the game. Perhaps this is undetected to Tinto, but it is certainly noticeable to others. I would guess this is because we players enjoy the freedom of not having to dedicate 90% of our brainpower and attention to planning future content for the game and stressing about product deadlines. We can just sit and play, and through this playing become front-row witnesses to any broken second-order interactions resulting from first-order mechanical adjustments. We live the meta.

But power creep really is there, and I hope at some point Tinto will be able to dedicate some serious time to compiling and rebalancing some of these problems.

 

[grommile]

Can we do things better, and keep improving?

You'd have to start by telling people "sorry, this list of DLC features you paid for is too broken to fix".

 

[AFKaiser]

No.

We are not trying to make the game easier, nor 'power creep' is our design philosophy. What we're trying to do since a couple of years ago when PDX Tinto's tenure of EUIV started, is to fix, balance and polish the game systems and mechanics while trying to add more and deeper content. This is not an easy task, as the game has almost 10 years old, its systems being the oldest of Paradox's games, and has many, many mechanics and features coming from different DLCs. But when possible, we've freed up or made compatible mechanics from different DLCs, while keeping adding as much content as possible to older DLCs and the base game. We've also tried to actively refresh and rebalance old systems, as the idea groups, and we've also tried to implement challenging content, as with the disasters for Mali, Ottomans, or Castile. There was also a big update to the AI in 1.34, and I'd say that it's in better shape than it had been for years.

Can we do things better, and keep improving? For sure. I think that we could do better with features like the disasters, and maybe we could give some more love to things like the AI management of reforms that Jarvin has mentioned. But I also think that we've influx replayability and more gameplay differentiation to the game with the new reforms, privileges, ideas, etc., opening new possibilities that were not there 3 years ago.

It may not be your design philosophy, but it is true that every new DLC adds so much "depth" to the countries it touches that it becomes hard to balance the rest of the world, or very hollow in comparison.
For example, Great Britain can create the East India Company in India. Why can't the Netherlands create VOC? Because the mission tree from the Netherlands is 5 years old.
Currently a lot of tags have a +5% admin efficiency mission reward, which used to be a very, very rare reward after a long chain of missions.
When Leaviathan was added, it was the same case with Subjugation CBs: why can't other tags gain it "naturally" instead of just getting them for free because of a mission?
And on a side note, every mission tree benefits only the player, I have never seen an AI going after a mission, but rather just getting random bonuses if it casually appears in its path of expansion.

 

[ero_sk]

No.

We are not trying to make the game easier, nor 'power creep' is our design philosophy. What we're trying to do since a couple of years ago when PDX Tinto's tenure of EUIV started, is to fix, balance and polish the game systems and mechanics while trying to add more and deeper content. This is not an easy task, as the game has almost 10 years old, its systems being the oldest of Paradox's games, and has many, many mechanics and features coming from different DLCs. But when possible, we've freed up or made compatible mechanics from different DLCs, while keeping adding as much content as possible to older DLCs and the base game. We've also tried to actively refresh and rebalance old systems, as the idea groups, and we've also tried to implement challenging content, as with the disasters for Mali, Ottomans, or Castile. There was also a big update to the AI in 1.34, and I'd say that it's in better shape than it had been for years.

Can we do things better, and keep improving? For sure. I think that we could do better with features like the disasters, and maybe we could give some more love to things like the AI management of reforms that Jarvin has mentioned. But I also think that we've influx replayability and more gameplay differentiation to the game with the new reforms, privileges, ideas, etc., opening new possibilities that were not there 3 years ago.

The problem is that Domination basically rendered "Lucky nations" setting irrelevant, because with Domination those major starting powers are "lucky" by design. That's for the AI. For the player, the new mechanics, missions and events make the game meta-oriented (as I mentioned earlier in this thread) by railroading bad factors (e.g. disasters) and thus pushing player to compensate by reaping the (huge) benefits from missions.

 

[Pavía]

Some thoughts on the last replies:

1. We're trying to nerf perks across the board when possible. We nerfed Manpower and Force Limit sources across different features, as we acknowledged that there was an 'inflation' of those modifiers. We also reworked the sources of Development Cost reduction, as we thought that it was too trivial to stack them. We also nerfed the Loyalty given by Estate Privileges, as with the expansion to 6 possible, plus the number of available ones, it was too easy to stack it as well. Why don't try to dodge or avoid these rebalances, but we have to be careful, because the fix might be worse, as it may affect different game systems.

2. AI RNG is still a thing. We have a number of automatized nightly runs, and we observe different outcomes on each game. We obviously try to redirect things that might be troublesome for the player (for instance, AI Russia was broken for a few weeks during the development of Domination, making the Ottomans even more powerful as they had free reign to expand to the north until we found what was causing the issue), but we don't want to force specific outcomes, as we know that experiencing different outcomes is part of the game's core.

3. I beg to disagree with the idea that no one at Tinto is taking a look and assessing the 'meta'. One example, regarding Idea Groups: last year, we experienced in the Grandest Lan, but also from videos and streams, that Quantity+Econ ideas were widely used by almost everyone. So we took a look at how to change this, and we introduced a number of changes that peaked at 1.35, with the new Idea Groups (something that had been static at 21 since 1.0). Now a new meta will appear, obviously, but this is something we're not ignoring at all. The same could be said with the changes to the Combat System and Unit Pips in 1.34 and 1.35; these changes already make the game different from 1.30 and previous versions. I could look for even more changes that we've been introducing since 1.32 (the rebalance of religions such as Catholicism, Protestantism, or Reformed, the changes to older systems such as Army Professionalism and Slacken Recruitment Standards, etc.), but my point here is that we indeed take a look at rebalancing older systems and mechanics, and how they interact with the new content we add.

4. Mission trees are probably the hardest to balance regarding 'power creep', I concede that, as there's a fine line between making rewards appealing, overpowered, or meaningless. We try to adjust and readjust them as much as possible, and we'll keep polishing them among versions, that's something we're committed to, although not being an easy task.

5. There is no such as 'undetected to Tinto'. We proactively encourage reporting existing issues and making suggestions to improve the game, because we read this feedback, and try to answer it (and this is why I'm here, discussing the design philosophy and state of the game with you all ). I think that we're trying to be very open and honest with the community since a couple of years ago, as we want to answer the demands of making the best possible game. The only thing we request is kindness when interacting with us, and a bit of patience, as usually the changes are more incremental than radical (which we think is the way to go, given the scale and limitations of the game).

 

[necro84]

4. Mission trees are probably the hardest to balance regarding 'power creep', I concede that, as there's a fine line between making rewards appealing, overpowered, or meaningless. We try to adjust and readjust them as much as possible, and we'll keep polishing them among versions, that's something we're committed to, although not being an easy task.

In my opinion the biggest problem is stacking modifiers by tag switching. 10-20% warscore reduction, 5% admin efficiency are nice bonuses and alone not too strong. If you form multiple nations and get all modifiers it becomes broken.
There should be some way to keep modifiers when you go e.g. Milan -> Italy to make it different from Savoy -> Sardinia-Piedmont -> Italy but lose them when you form 10-20 tags.
Maybe changing culture or culture group would be sollution? Or limit us to do it only once per game

 

[Brynjar]

In my opinion the biggest problem is stacking modifiers by tag switching. 10-20% warscore reduction, 5% admin efficiency are nice bonuses and alone not too strong. If you form multiple nations and get all modifiers it becomes broken.
There should be some way to keep modifiers when you go e.g. Milan -> Italy to make it different from Savoy -> Sardinia-Piedmont -> Italy but lose them when you form 10-20 tags.
Maybe changing culture or culture group would be sollution? Or limit us to do it only once per game

If the biggest problem is a problem the players have to go out of their way to create, it's not really a problem in my opinion.

I beg to disagree with the idea that no one at Tinto is taking a look and assessing the 'meta'. One example, regarding Idea Groups: last year, we experienced in the Grandest Lan, but also from videos and streams, that Quantity+Econ ideas were widely used by almost everyone. So we took a look at how to change this, and we introduced a number of changes that peaked at 1.35, with the new Idea Groups (something that had been static at 21 since 1.0).

I guess this explains why the single player meta hasn't really changed at all...

Mission trees are probably the hardest to balance regarding 'power creep', I concede that, as there's a fine line between making rewards appealing, overpowered, or meaningless. We try to adjust and readjust them as much as possible, and we'll keep polishing them among versions, that's something we're committed to, although not being an easy task.

The whole mission tree system seems to be designed to sell railroaded power creep. Hopefully EU5 will stay far away from such mechanics.

 

[Travis_Bickle]

2. AI RNG is still a thing. We have a number of automatized nightly runs, and we observe different outcomes on each game. We obviously try to redirect things that might be troublesome for the player (for instance, AI Russia was broken for a few weeks during the development of Domination, making the Ottomans even more powerful as they had free reign to expand to the north until we found what was causing the issue), but we don't want to force specific outcomes, as we know that experiencing different outcomes is part of the game's core.

The biggest RNG factor regarding the Ottomans is whether they take Quantity or not.

If they do, it's game over for everyone else. They could have no unique mission trees, special units or government type and the sheer act of them taking Quantity with their national ideas breaks the game.

This is not the case for Russia, who often puts itself into insurmountable debt trying to field even a respectable army.

Just saying, this is one thing I wish was looked at because Quantity Ottomans is just going to beat all AI with ease including other "strong" tags like Austria, PLC and Russia.

 

[uberjedi]

Mission tree power inflation is bad.
But what is even worse is when different playstyles are made impossible by mission trees.

For example, as Teutonic Order, try joining the HRE using the base mechanic and thus ignoring the railroaded mission tree that demands you to first win a war against Poland.
No Sir, you are not supposed to play that way anymore!
War with Poland is mandatory!

 

[Oporto]

The biggest RNG factor regarding the Ottomans is whether they take Quantity or not.

If they do, it's game over for everyone else. They could have no unique mission trees, special units or government type and the sheer act of them taking Quantity with their national ideas breaks the game.

This is not the case for Russia, who often puts itself into insurmountable debt trying to field even a respectable army.

Just saying, this is one thing I wish was looked at because Quantity Ottomans is just going to beat all AI with ease including other "strong" tags like Austria, PLC and Russia.

Has Russia's performance improved this patch? After "Lions of the North" came out, I've constantly seen Russia wiped out by Sweden and PLC.

 

[agonistes]

In theory the power creep should benefit AI as well, as long as it is capable enough to utilize them. At least AI korea managed to dev the shit out of their peninsula, making it a significantly harder opponent to conquer than before.

I would perhaps rather speak about balance shift. Some nations have received buffs while others have not, not unlike in a moba game some champs get buffed after a round of patching.

But there is one thing though, also addressed before by others too. Since missionse were introduced, and after that, even more, that playing a specific nations have been systematically herded toward a certain direction, like railroaded. The more powerful mission rewards are, the more you are inclined to follow them.

I remember time before missions at all, and at that time you'd only organically look around in the environent around and act accordingly. Now you can do the same, but you should still first take all of the Aegean Islands to get the claims on balkan!

National ideas have also been blamed about forcing nations to molds "you can, but should not play maritime prussia". I see that point also, but ideas only adhere to playstyle, not act as a navigator telling where to turn next, at least. And Personally I do like different nations having different set of abilities, like characters in a RPG.

Back to original point: Yeah, It seems to me that devs are trying to make EUIV experience more controlled. When a player picks England, player maybe expects to have The England Experience catered to him. I dont think all players expect that, but I think PDX things that this picky kind of player is the one they should cater to. maybe because that way the game feels more accessible?

There are still nations I have not played left so I Guess that would not be that big of a problem, though, if the big mission trees were somewhat readable

My France has some real estate near Egypt I'd like to sell you, if interested

I've been trying to sell it to Russia, but she's too busy trying to unload Norway.

 

[agonistes]

You basically can't *exist* anywhere from the Pontic Steppe to the Near East to Persia without the Ottomans getting claims on either your provinces, or provinces you'll want to expand into.
And they'll hate you with a burning passion, so you best hope it's at least the late 17th-century when they're scheduled to explode, because otherwise you'll have a bad time (meanwhile, they still haven't conquered Egypt).

Changing the ai so that every nation will attempt a wc once it gets big enough was a horrible idea. The world is boooooring with only 7 nations in it.

 

[Tempscire]

3. I beg to disagree with the idea that no one at Tinto is taking a look and assessing the 'meta'. One example, regarding Idea Groups: last year, we experienced in the Grandest Lan, but also from videos and streams, that Quantity+Econ ideas were widely used by almost everyone. So we took a look at how to change this, and we introduced a number of changes that peaked at 1.35, with the new Idea Groups (something that had been static at 21 since 1.0). Now a new meta will appear, obviously, but this is something we're not ignoring at all. The same could be said with the changes to the Combat System and Unit Pips in 1.34 and 1.35; these changes already make the game different from 1.30 and previous versions. I could look for even more changes that we've been introducing since 1.32 (the rebalance of religions such as Catholicism, Protestantism, or Reformed, the changes to older systems such as Army Professionalism and Slacken Recruitment Standards, etc.), but my point here is that we indeed take a look at rebalancing older systems and mechanics, and how they interact with the new content we add.

Some notes here:
(i) Revisiting and rebalancing old mechanics is very good. It is also quite difficult to get right as you say and the desire to add more and more options does not make this easier. Take for example the government reform rework. The reform "Centralized Bureaucracy" was clearly problematic in its first iteration. I remarked upon this in one of the corresponding dev diaries. But the problematic parts remained on release. This lead to the reform being weakened shortly after, as a lot of players found out about its strength. The problem here is that a large part of the focus regarding the balance of the new government reforms was on this single reform. This allowed some other problematic outliers to fly under the radar and remain in the game until today. To be fair I think that the reaction to feedback was to some degree better in the 1.35 release (e.g. the buff to slacken, or the nerf to some special naval units). But this still shows that it might be very useful, if more of the most egregious power outliers could be spotted beforehand, by someone on the team, as there are also few people here on the forum which spot these beforehand and take their time to write a post about it.
(ii) The focus on nation-specific content leads to large amount of content which has only a very low chance of being rebalanced. For example the "Fate of Zimbabwe" mission is still unchanged. While the power of the mission seems to be taken into account in future iterations of similar rewards (which is good), the mission itself remains and it is still ridiculous (you can have a world with more than 100000 development, where ~40000 development points come from this mission alone). Older weaker mission trees also remain the same, see e.g. Netherlands. This leads to very different balancing approaches coexisting, leaving the balance all over the place.

5. There is no such as 'undetected to Tinto'. We proactively encourage reporting existing issues and making suggestions to improve the game, because we read this feedback, and try to answer it (and this is why I'm here, discussing the design philosophy and state of the game with you all ). I think that we're trying to be very open and honest with the community since a couple of years ago, as we want to answer the demands of making the best possible game. The only thing we request is kindness when interacting with us, and a bit of patience, as usually the changes are more incremental than radical (which we think is the way to go, given the scale and limitations of the game).

From my experience the reaction strongly depends on the problem/bug raised. As the game is quite old (and part of the code is still from EU3), there are quite a few problems with basic mechanics: For example Assaults, Privateering, AT, WE and WS calculations from battles and quite a few parts of the AI code (just to name a few).
Investigating these takes quite a lot of work, as the mechanics are mostly undocumented and almost nobody knows the details. But reporting these issues often leads to no reaction at all. To name two examples:

(i) I put a lot of work in reverse engineering the exact AI calculations to estimate land combat outcomes and found out that they are very far from actual unit strength. But for a long time there was no reaction whatsoever. Then Gnivom worked on the AI and used these findings to implement an improved calculation based on a very accurate model of land combat we talked about. Quite a few problems where fixed, but some remain and one part of the implementation (related to the difference max morale and current morale) has a distinct weakness. But now that Gnivom is gone, there seems to be no progress in improving this. I reported the problem related to the morale evaluation 7 months ago and it is not marked as in review.

(ii) The monopoly bonus for privateers has not been working for most of the games lifespan. I reported this several times and I do not even know, whether there is any intention of fixing this. Which is interesting, as an intended mechanic is completely missing.

There are quite a few other examples like this. In the end this leads to the question, whether it is worth to invest the required work to investigate these issues, when the odds of this mattering seem very small. Which is sad, as the game would definitely benefit from these problems being fixed.

 

[Elminster12]

Changing the ai so that every nation will attempt a wc once it gets big enough was a horrible idea. The world is boooooring with only 7 nations in it.

Except for Korea. Korea just sits behind its little mountain fortress and devs into the stratosphere. Pretty sure EU4 Korea is preparing to colonize the moon by mid-game Victoria.

 

[agonistes]

Some thoughts on the last replies:

1. We're trying to nerf perks across the board when possible. We nerfed Manpower and Force Limit sources across different features, as we acknowledged that there was an 'inflation' of those modifiers. We also reworked the sources of Development Cost reduction, as we thought that it was too trivial to stack them. We also nerfed the Loyalty given by Estate Privileges, as with the expansion to 6 possible, plus the number of available ones, it was too easy to stack it as well. Why don't try to dodge or avoid these rebalances, but we have to be careful, because the fix might be worse, as it may affect different game systems.

2. AI RNG is still a thing. We have a number of automatized nightly runs, and we observe different outcomes on each game. We obviously try to redirect things that might be troublesome for the player (for instance, AI Russia was broken for a few weeks during the development of Domination, making the Ottomans even more powerful as they had free reign to expand to the north until we found what was causing the issue), but we don't want to force specific outcomes, as we know that experiencing different outcomes is part of the game's core.

3. I beg to disagree with the idea that no one at Tinto is taking a look and assessing the 'meta'. One example, regarding Idea Groups: last year, we experienced in the Grandest Lan, but also from videos and streams, that Quantity+Econ ideas were widely used by almost everyone. So we took a look at how to change this, and we introduced a number of changes that peaked at 1.35, with the new Idea Groups (something that had been static at 21 since 1.0). Now a new meta will appear, obviously, but this is something we're not ignoring at all. The same could be said with the changes to the Combat System and Unit Pips in 1.34 and 1.35; these changes already make the game different from 1.30 and previous versions. I could look for even more changes that we've been introducing since 1.32 (the rebalance of religions such as Catholicism, Protestantism, or Reformed, the changes to older systems such as Army Professionalism and Slacken Recruitment Standards, etc.), but my point here is that we indeed take a look at rebalancing older systems and mechanics, and how they interact with the new content we add.

4. Mission trees are probably the hardest to balance regarding 'power creep', I concede that, as there's a fine line between making rewards appealing, overpowered, or meaningless. We try to adjust and readjust them as much as possible, and we'll keep polishing them among versions, that's something we're committed to, although not being an easy task.

5. There is no such as 'undetected to Tinto'. We proactively encourage reporting existing issues and making suggestions to improve the game, because we read this feedback, and try to answer it (and this is why I'm here, discussing the design philosophy and state of the game with you all ). I think that we're trying to be very open and honest with the community since a couple of years ago, as we want to answer the demands of making the best possible game. The only thing we request is kindness when interacting with us, and a bit of patience, as usually the changes are more incremental than radical (which we think is the way to go, given the scale and limitations of the game).

Using ai runs to evaluate is a HUGE issue. The best ai cannot think like a player. You need to have a few people playing constantly to assess things.

Firsxis does the same thing. And the gameplay of the civ series has become pitiful. Paradox is moving in that direction.

4x sandbox grand strategy games should remain 4x sandbox grand strategy games from beginning to end, and they should remain challenging as well.

Nobody wants to powerglide for 400 years.

 

[grandadmiralbob]

Some thoughts on the last replies:

1. We're trying to nerf perks across the board when possible. We nerfed Manpower and Force Limit sources across different features, as we acknowledged that there was an 'inflation' of those modifiers. We also reworked the sources of Development Cost reduction, as we thought that it was too trivial to stack them. We also nerfed the Loyalty given by Estate Privileges, as with the expansion to 6 possible, plus the number of available ones, it was too easy to stack it as well. Why don't try to dodge or avoid these rebalances, but we have to be careful, because the fix might be worse, as it may affect different game systems.

2. AI RNG is still a thing. We have a number of automatized nightly runs, and we observe different outcomes on each game. We obviously try to redirect things that might be troublesome for the player (for instance, AI Russia was broken for a few weeks during the development of Domination, making the Ottomans even more powerful as they had free reign to expand to the north until we found what was causing the issue), but we don't want to force specific outcomes, as we know that experiencing different outcomes is part of the game's core.

3. I beg to disagree with the idea that no one at Tinto is taking a look and assessing the 'meta'. One example, regarding Idea Groups: last year, we experienced in the Grandest Lan, but also from videos and streams, that Quantity+Econ ideas were widely used by almost everyone. So we took a look at how to change this, and we introduced a number of changes that peaked at 1.35, with the new Idea Groups (something that had been static at 21 since 1.0). Now a new meta will appear, obviously, but this is something we're not ignoring at all. The same could be said with the changes to the Combat System and Unit Pips in 1.34 and 1.35; these changes already make the game different from 1.30 and previous versions. I could look for even more changes that we've been introducing since 1.32 (the rebalance of religions such as Catholicism, Protestantism, or Reformed, the changes to older systems such as Army Professionalism and Slacken Recruitment Standards, etc.), but my point here is that we indeed take a look at rebalancing older systems and mechanics, and how they interact with the new content we add.

4. Mission trees are probably the hardest to balance regarding 'power creep', I concede that, as there's a fine line between making rewards appealing, overpowered, or meaningless. We try to adjust and readjust them as much as possible, and we'll keep polishing them among versions, that's something we're committed to, although not being an easy task.

5. There is no such as 'undetected to Tinto'. We proactively encourage reporting existing issues and making suggestions to improve the game, because we read this feedback, and try to answer it (and this is why I'm here, discussing the design philosophy and state of the game with you all ). I think that we're trying to be very open and honest with the community since a couple of years ago, as we want to answer the demands of making the best possible game. The only thing we request is kindness when interacting with us, and a bit of patience, as usually the changes are more incremental than radical (which we think is the way to go, given the scale and limitations of the game).

There are too many buffs. It's a balance between people who want a challenge, and the WC people. This game has gotten much easier and while the missions are ok for leading the AI and the player along historical paths, it handicaps the AI even more so. The player will know when and how to complete the missions better than the AI will. That poses another problem that you either have to make missions easier so the AI can do them, but makes it more boring for the player. Or make mission that are more difficult to do but the AI will have problems completing them. The first of it's kinda is Orissa getting 5 vassals. I have NEVER seen the ai do it, even though it's easy to diplo vassalize the garjats.

 

[Jarvin]

There are too many buffs. It's a balance between people who want a challenge, and the WC people. This game has gotten much easier and while the missions are ok for leading the AI and the player along historical paths, it handicaps the AI even more so. The player will know when and how to complete the missions better than the AI will. That poses another problem that you either have to make missions easier so the AI can do them, but makes it more boring for the player. Or make mission that are more difficult to do but the AI will have problems completing them. The first of it's kinda is Orissa getting 5 vassals. I have NEVER seen the ai do it, even though it's easy to diplo vassalize the garjats.

I think you misunderstand. AI straight up doesn't know how to prioritize fulfilling any of the requirements from the missions it has except for, I believe, conquest.
If an AI is able to fulfill a mission with different conditions, then it was entirely by accident.

I don't think there's ANY chance of the devs actually taking time to teach AI how to use the tools it has (like missions) because at this point there's just too many years of neglect.