So, at the late stage of my Roman campaign I finally got the "Winning land by the spear" invention, taking dozens of useless +10% max relationship improvement ones, excited for a final showdown with a huge Macedon and it was a huge disappointment.
The first, the most pressing issue is that the AE and WE from capturing provinces is way, way too high. I took 3 barely populated provinces in Germania (yes, Macedon blobbed there) and a few cities on the coast and got over 50 AE and about 13 WE (while burning AE constantly by having Jupiter activated). I never got into that much trouble while conquering more valuable lands from Carthage or more provinces from Celtic minors. I didn't do the math, but it looks like it's worse than just taking unclaimed land in a regular CB (and certainly more WE - I almost forgot that WE existed at all because I fought with legions for a long time). Obviously, there should be limits, but I thought of this CB as the way of Alexander-style conquest of Persia, where I could take much more land than warscore costs allow. Well, I guess, technically I can conquer whatever I want, but it's no fun trying to shake 100 AE and 20 WE. The problem here, I think, is that the devs tried to "balance" regular conquest CB and this CB - they both restrict blobbing by hard cap (warscore cost) and soft cap (huge impact on AE and WE), respectively. But I don't think they need to be balanced: conquest CB is the "basic" way to wage war, available to anyone, and Imperial Challenge we can only get in the late game, beelining to the invention, so it should be better. AE and WE should be scaled back significantly.
The second issue is how annoying it is to capture individual cities and whackamole the enemy stacks doing the same with your land. The CB is designed to be used for a conflict between two huge empires, and huge empires have a lot of cities. Automation helps, but it has issues - carpet sieging stacks aren't aware of each other, so if they end up in one province, they will continue to travel together, eventually forming a big ball of small stacks. I think the CB should have somewhat different mechanic: when we conquer a whole province by regular means (sieging its capital and all forts, if exist), the province flips to us, but not earlier. In civil wars going city-by-city makes sense, especially for small countries, but the mechanic scales horribly.
The first, the most pressing issue is that the AE and WE from capturing provinces is way, way too high. I took 3 barely populated provinces in Germania (yes, Macedon blobbed there) and a few cities on the coast and got over 50 AE and about 13 WE (while burning AE constantly by having Jupiter activated). I never got into that much trouble while conquering more valuable lands from Carthage or more provinces from Celtic minors. I didn't do the math, but it looks like it's worse than just taking unclaimed land in a regular CB (and certainly more WE - I almost forgot that WE existed at all because I fought with legions for a long time). Obviously, there should be limits, but I thought of this CB as the way of Alexander-style conquest of Persia, where I could take much more land than warscore costs allow. Well, I guess, technically I can conquer whatever I want, but it's no fun trying to shake 100 AE and 20 WE. The problem here, I think, is that the devs tried to "balance" regular conquest CB and this CB - they both restrict blobbing by hard cap (warscore cost) and soft cap (huge impact on AE and WE), respectively. But I don't think they need to be balanced: conquest CB is the "basic" way to wage war, available to anyone, and Imperial Challenge we can only get in the late game, beelining to the invention, so it should be better. AE and WE should be scaled back significantly.
The second issue is how annoying it is to capture individual cities and whackamole the enemy stacks doing the same with your land. The CB is designed to be used for a conflict between two huge empires, and huge empires have a lot of cities. Automation helps, but it has issues - carpet sieging stacks aren't aware of each other, so if they end up in one province, they will continue to travel together, eventually forming a big ball of small stacks. I think the CB should have somewhat different mechanic: when we conquer a whole province by regular means (sieging its capital and all forts, if exist), the province flips to us, but not earlier. In civil wars going city-by-city makes sense, especially for small countries, but the mechanic scales horribly.
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