Single player game flow experience

[scriptkiddy]

Look at all those beautiful tables. The excel fix I didn't think I needed.

Who would’ve thought that controlling could be that much fun and even beautiful.

 

[tpapp157]

I don’t feel that it’s the case since the introduction of levies and culture mechanics. The reason why I keep so many vassals is because annexation of territories with wrong culture and religion is de facto useless. You just get some taxes and manpower out of it, in exchange for regular civil war because the province loyalty tanks. I’m also very hesitant with integrating newly conquered cultures, 3 is my absolute limit because I prefer my stability and loyalty of my characters, especially of those holding offices, being high. Vassals are way more useful.

Definitely, these changes helped a lot relative to how the game was before but I still think the game is too generous and it's too easy to snowball. If you take the Roman Empire as an example. During the 2nd Punic War, Rome was fielding campaign armies in the range of about 30-80K men. At the height of the Roman Empire, Rome was generally fielding campaign armies in the range of about 50-100K men. That's a pretty minor increase considering Roman territory nominally increased ~15x in the intervening centuries. Of course the overall Roman military bureaucracy was far larger during the Empire but the large majority of it was occupied with garrison and border patrol duties. This meant that it was common for far smaller nations/tribes/rebellions to be on an equal footing or even superior to the Roman Empire locally. As powerful as the Empire was, it lost battles and campaigns quite regularly. This dynamic is just not possible with current game mechanics. There just isn't enough room for friction (in the forms of autonomy, inefficiency, corruption, and passive disloyalty) in the mechanics of internal management.

 

[IsaacCAT]

My bad, I didn’t know that with „nation‘s power“ you were actually referring to the ingame metrics. Tbh, I wasn’t focusing on it because I don’t know how it’s being calculated anyway, and my personal „winning condition“ is achieving my achievement goals. That’s why I haven’t played until the end yet, and it’s when you need that score, no?

I do not think nation power is only metrics. I use them to prove a point beyond gut feelings. For me nation power is what you describe as winning condition = achieving your own goals.

However, I also agree with @tpapp157 that the average player winning condition in the game can be achieved at small-mid sized nation and from there on the challenges are less alluring.

I like @Marcus Pica suggestion for mid to late game scripted events that help evolve/move our winning condition and @Torugu idea of trade off between much more efficient legions that cost more money than any big nation could possibly pay but you need them in order to reign over other nations. All of this can help with the idea of diminishing returns of @tpapp157, including the subject states.