This is a mostly response to TT31 that, as far as I know, is the only TT with overwhelmingly negative response, but I will also refer to TT30 and TT32.
I am mostly an EU4 player and hope that in PC many of my frustrations regarding the game will be fixed, or at least mitigated in some way. Unfortunately, after TT31 I think this might not be the case in terms of war and peace deals. So here are my comments and proposals for modifications of the war and peace deal system described in TT30 and TT31.
I assume the peace deal works as described in TT30 and TT31, and what is not described there will work exactly as in EU4.
To avoid confusion I list abbreviations I use:
TT - Tinto Talks
PC - Project Caesar
EU4 - Europa Universalis 4
AE - aggressive expansion
All proposals below are related to war and peace and somewhat to each other, but they could be implemented completely separately.
I - 100% hard cap
I think this is one of the main issues I have in EU4. 100% war score is a hard cap on how much you can take in war. In TT31 describes exactly the same mechanic.
Problems
Problems with 100% hard cap in EU4 that will possibly translate to PC:
So having in mind both - mentioned problems and development issues - I tried to come up with a solution that would at least partially solve the above problems, but would not make the system too different from the existing and too demanding to implement.
1. Remove 100% hard cap
This is most important point:
2. 100% soft cap
To limit the conquest to make peace deals up to 100% an optimal option, there should be a scaling penalty when getting a peace deal over 100%:
Penalty to the conquered land should work in a way that rebellions there should be harder to stop, progress faster and be stronger. I think it should multiply the "-50% conquered" satisfaction penalty - As far as I understand TT32 this would make more pop join the rebellion and make it progress faster, so that should be enough.
Since at this point there was no TT about subjects I don't know how to make subjects' loyalty be affected by the peace deal penalty. The result should be less loyal subjects released in the penalized land, fed the panalized land, and subjegatated in the peace deak. The point of this is to prevent avoiding the previous rebelion penalty easily by just giving the conquered land to a vassal.
Peace deals without conquest/subjegation (e.g. monetray reperation, humiliation etc) would not have the conqured land penalty, and I am not sure if any penalty here is necessary. If it is, I guess it should be the same multiplier to diplomatic penalty (in EU4 terms negative diplomatic reputation, however I am not sure how it works in PC).
With the soft cap, optimal peace deals would be still up to 100%, since this is the most demands you can make without any additional penalty. AI should also not desire peace deals over 100%, unless they are very aggressive (in EU4 terms, a militarist AI personality with some trait, like cruel or naive enthusiast), so AI vs AI wars would not be very different.
II - Occupation resistance
This would be another mechanic limiting conquest, ability to wage war, and at least in my opinion, make the world of PC a more immersive place. This could be supplementary for the peace deal changes, but not necessary.
In EU4 occupation costs nothing. It increases devastation, but unless you occupy a fort (that costs the same as usual fort) no costs are added to holding the control there.
My proposal is to make land pop in PC resist the occupation and liberate itself if not stopped:
In TT31 it is described that to demand land in a province the occupant needs to control the capital of the province. So to make a huge conquest, it would require to occupy a lot of land and thus a lot of resources, that the aggressor could not be able to acquire, and force them to end the war sooner. It would integrate the pop system into the land control, and make it feel that occupation is not something people want. This occupation resistance could be calculated just from the province capital, or the province as a whole, so it would not result in the occupation of non-province-capital locations wasteful.
III - AI aim of war
From TT30:
"If your War Goal is fulfilled then the warscore from it ticks up to a maximum of 25, and the total impact from battles in this game can be worth up to 50, while occupations and blockades have no cap and can reach over 100 warscore if possible.
In Project Caesar, therefore, not every war is necessarily a total war like some previous games we have made.”
I do not agree with this last statement. In EU4 war goal also gives 25% ticking warscore, battles similarly add up to 40%, and occupations and blocades also are not limited untill the total warscore of 99%/100%. And yet most AI lead wars are death wars. If there are no further factors than in EU4 (and I don't see any in TT30 and TT31) I think it still would be the same lengthy wars and AI not wanting to finish them.
I think the main problem of long AI wars is with the core calculation of AI willingness to end the war. In EU4 AI will accept a peace deal that is a value of their warscore + their war enthusiasm (where both can be negative) with some possible exceptions, like offer exceeding earscore or the AI leader being a fierce negotiator. This is reasonable in many cases, in others it is absurd, like:
This would not be hard "we are ending the war", but a guideline for AI what they expect from winning the war. If their enemy crumbles (e.g. the entire army got stacked wiped), then they could try to get more, but if they had an equal or weaker advantage, they would just demand what they aim in the war, and not much else.
IV - Bilateral peace deals
I don't care much about this mechanic being implemented, but it would be nice to have in the game for historical reasons. I also understand that they would be hard to implement without being able to exploit AI, so I tried to propose the simplest and least exploitable way I can see it.
The aim of the option of dual peace deals is to allow a long and costly stalemate wars to reasult in something instead of ending in a white peace pointlessly after many people and resources were lost.
The dual peace deals would be proceeded like this:
V - General war and peace information improvements
This is a point about just quality of life and displaying clear information for the player what numbers in a peace deal mean. As I don't have full information about the game interface, I may suggest something that is already implemented or its equivalent.
1. War goal is 25% cheaper to take
First, I want to say I am very happy that the information that "wargoal province is 25% cheaper" is displayed for the player as visible in a screenshot in TT30. In EU4 it is completely hidden and for people who didn't know, the offer values sometimes magically changed.
The QoL addition here would display each possible war goal's warscore costs to determine which one is the optimal to declare the war for (declaring on the most expensive war goal allows to take land the cheapest).
2. Making gains
This mechanic was an enigma for me for many years and it would be great to be explained in the game UI. For people who don't know, it seems like an arbitrary value that randomly appears in AI war enthusiasm sometimes. In the screenshot in TT31 it is visible that the PC uses a mechanic with the same name, so I assume it is the same.
As far as I know in EU4 "making gains" is a kind of 90 days report on how well war is going. Every 90 days of the war AI compairs current warscore and warscore from 90 days ago. Then half of the difference is added to the war enthusiasm (if the warscore grows for them it is positive, negative otherwise).
It would be good to display for the player:
Expand the "suggested offer" button tooltip (as it is called in EU4) or its equivalent in PC, so it is visible:
- siege: X
- blockade: Y
- received loses: Z
- inflicted loses: W
- etc...
Conclusion
This is my major contribution as community feedback, and it took definitly too long to write than it should. I hope the developers will read this, and maybe use some of those ideas, but I understand if not. I am just a player and have no game design experience. I tried to proposed changes that would make PC a better game and that are hopefully not that problematic to implement.
Thank You @Johan and the rest of the dev team for your work. I know this post is not that positive as it suggests changes to what I don’t like, but your previous games and the vast majority of TT shows that Project Caesar may become one of the best historical strategy games.
References:
I am mostly an EU4 player and hope that in PC many of my frustrations regarding the game will be fixed, or at least mitigated in some way. Unfortunately, after TT31 I think this might not be the case in terms of war and peace deals. So here are my comments and proposals for modifications of the war and peace deal system described in TT30 and TT31.
I assume the peace deal works as described in TT30 and TT31, and what is not described there will work exactly as in EU4.
To avoid confusion I list abbreviations I use:
TT - Tinto Talks
PC - Project Caesar
EU4 - Europa Universalis 4
AE - aggressive expansion
All proposals below are related to war and peace and somewhat to each other, but they could be implemented completely separately.
I - 100% hard cap
I think this is one of the main issues I have in EU4. 100% war score is a hard cap on how much you can take in war. In TT31 describes exactly the same mechanic.
Problems
Problems with 100% hard cap in EU4 that will possibly translate to PC:
- It is immersion breaking - Hard to rationalize why this is max for arbitrary valued provinces and other peace deal options. Why can't you take more from the perspective of in-game characters? Yes, AE, and other costs might be too much, but you may demand it when you have enough force and then suffer the consequences.
- It is frustrating in multiple cases, e.g.
- When you need to own certain provinces for missions, decisions or other reason, but they all would cost e.g. 101% warscore, so you need to wait 15 years of truce and have an go to yet another war or truce break, only to get the last little bit of land.
- Not being able to fully annex a country despite destroying it completely.
- You can get much more territories in the same amount of time if they are multiple separate countries in a region than a single big one - not because a united enemy is stronger, but because you are just blocked from clicking the button. This is especially visible with game time passing as there are less and less countries that are only getting bigger.
- It is ahistorical - It's visible when comparing historical peace deals and the peace deals you can make in EU4 in the same years. In multiple cases it’s now scripted to ignore this limit, like Ottomans subjugation of Mamluks but this issue is still present in the generic mechanic.
- Limiting expansion (for both AI and the player).
- Easier implementation for AI to understand peace deals and avoid exploits.
- It's already implemented and tested system, so it will definitely work.
So having in mind both - mentioned problems and development issues - I tried to come up with a solution that would at least partially solve the above problems, but would not make the system too different from the existing and too demanding to implement.
1. Remove 100% hard cap
This is most important point:
- allow creation of over 100% peace deal offers
- remove "unreasonable demands -1000" when offer exceed 100%, or its equivalent in PC
- remove block on sending the peace deal button when demanded offer is above 100%
- In the most general case the peace deals would stay the same. When demanding a peace deal above current warscore (that would be always the case with over 100% peace deals) there would be a negative modifier to AI acceptance "the offer exceeds warscore", so as long as their enthusiasm is not very negative and enemy warscore is not high AI will not accept offers over 100%.
- When their enthusiasm will be very negative and enemy warscore high, they would accept offer with over 100%. This would happen when e.g. they are very occupied, don't have military strength, or after the war takes a very long time.
- If AI unconditionally capitulates they will agree to any offer, including full annexation regardless of their size. I assume AI would unconditionally capitulate only when fully occupied.
- Players could agree to whatever they want in multiplayer.
- 100% warscore could be considered (from the point of view of the characters in-univers) a "reasonable peace deal" when fully defeating the enemy. But going above it would still be possible.
- It would avoid frustrating situations, as you can effectively take anything you need in a war if you occupy far enough and have enough resources to do so.
- Any historical conquest would be possible, just maybe hard to achieve.
2. 100% soft cap
To limit the conquest to make peace deals up to 100% an optimal option, there should be a scaling penalty when getting a peace deal over 100%:
- To AE
- To unrest/satisfaction/anything that makes the pop in conqured land rebel
- To subject loyalty when releasing/feeding vassal the land conquered in the peace deal
- To diplomatic reputation
Penalty to the conquered land should work in a way that rebellions there should be harder to stop, progress faster and be stronger. I think it should multiply the "-50% conquered" satisfaction penalty - As far as I understand TT32 this would make more pop join the rebellion and make it progress faster, so that should be enough.
Since at this point there was no TT about subjects I don't know how to make subjects' loyalty be affected by the peace deal penalty. The result should be less loyal subjects released in the penalized land, fed the panalized land, and subjegatated in the peace deak. The point of this is to prevent avoiding the previous rebelion penalty easily by just giving the conquered land to a vassal.
Peace deals without conquest/subjegation (e.g. monetray reperation, humiliation etc) would not have the conqured land penalty, and I am not sure if any penalty here is necessary. If it is, I guess it should be the same multiplier to diplomatic penalty (in EU4 terms negative diplomatic reputation, however I am not sure how it works in PC).
With the soft cap, optimal peace deals would be still up to 100%, since this is the most demands you can make without any additional penalty. AI should also not desire peace deals over 100%, unless they are very aggressive (in EU4 terms, a militarist AI personality with some trait, like cruel or naive enthusiast), so AI vs AI wars would not be very different.
II - Occupation resistance
This would be another mechanic limiting conquest, ability to wage war, and at least in my opinion, make the world of PC a more immersive place. This could be supplementary for the peace deal changes, but not necessary.
In EU4 occupation costs nothing. It increases devastation, but unless you occupy a fort (that costs the same as usual fort) no costs are added to holding the control there.
My proposal is to make land pop in PC resist the occupation and liberate itself if not stopped:
- After being occupied the province would have a value of resistance to the occupation. How much would depend on pop willingness to be conquered by the occupant.
- If the land is the occupant's core and the majority of the culture/religion there would be primary/accepted in the occupant country, the land would not resist much as pop is willing to be part of the occupant country, but also would get less devastation. This is mostly the case when occupying land to reconquer.
- Otherwise the land pop resistance would start a libaration process to end the occupation and if left unchecked, they would completely liberate it.
- The occupant is able to counter the resistance by maintaining the occupation garrison in the occupied land. The occupation garrison would either use manpower directly, or an army stack (levies, regular, mercenaries).
- The occupation garrison using directly manpower would just be a province/location status and would be the default, but could be switched off/reduced to save manpower.
- The occupation garrison using a stack would be similar to "suppress rebels" army action in EU4.
- To stop the libaration, the occupation garrison would fight it and thus get a passive damage that would use manpower directly or decrese the stack strength. The value of the damage would depend on how much pop resistance there is in the province. If the occupation garrison is too small to counter the resistance, or it was reduced too much, it would still slow the libaration down, but it not prevent its progress.
- If the garrison is not strong enough (not enough manpower/stack strenth/limited too much) in comparison to the resistance for too long, the land would eventually remove the occupation.
In TT31 it is described that to demand land in a province the occupant needs to control the capital of the province. So to make a huge conquest, it would require to occupy a lot of land and thus a lot of resources, that the aggressor could not be able to acquire, and force them to end the war sooner. It would integrate the pop system into the land control, and make it feel that occupation is not something people want. This occupation resistance could be calculated just from the province capital, or the province as a whole, so it would not result in the occupation of non-province-capital locations wasteful.
III - AI aim of war
From TT30:
"If your War Goal is fulfilled then the warscore from it ticks up to a maximum of 25, and the total impact from battles in this game can be worth up to 50, while occupations and blockades have no cap and can reach over 100 warscore if possible.
In Project Caesar, therefore, not every war is necessarily a total war like some previous games we have made.”
I do not agree with this last statement. In EU4 war goal also gives 25% ticking warscore, battles similarly add up to 40%, and occupations and blocades also are not limited untill the total warscore of 99%/100%. And yet most AI lead wars are death wars. If there are no further factors than in EU4 (and I don't see any in TT30 and TT31) I think it still would be the same lengthy wars and AI not wanting to finish them.
I think the main problem of long AI wars is with the core calculation of AI willingness to end the war. In EU4 AI will accept a peace deal that is a value of their warscore + their war enthusiasm (where both can be negative) with some possible exceptions, like offer exceeding earscore or the AI leader being a fierce negotiator. This is reasonable in many cases, in others it is absurd, like:
- When winning the war, AI war enthusiasm grows and they want more and more in the peace deal. Even if they could get everything they wanted years earlier, they would still continue the war, as e.g. the other side will not agree on a 100% peace deal at 60% warscore, and getting to 99% will take another few years.
- When defending against an enemy with a big advantage, AI will not understand that their best interest is to end the war asap. This may lead to situation where e.g. a small defender liberates war goal what makes the warscore from -40% to 0% and they can white peace (assuming the attacker has low war enthusiasm at this point) - but at the same moment they get the "making gains" +20 war enthusiasm and will want at least +20% peace offer for them, even if they don't end the war now they will just get annexed.
- General tendency of AI to keep being at war for years (I think all EU4 players experienced a call for peace in a war where AI was a war leader).
- In an offensive war, this would be depending on the casus belli and war goal: getting conquering their desired provinces, subjugation, reparations, humiliation, monetary benefits etc.
- In a defensive war the aim would be protecting the provinces and themselves, so white peace would be more desirable than in offensive wars.
This would not be hard "we are ending the war", but a guideline for AI what they expect from winning the war. If their enemy crumbles (e.g. the entire army got stacked wiped), then they could try to get more, but if they had an equal or weaker advantage, they would just demand what they aim in the war, and not much else.
IV - Bilateral peace deals
I don't care much about this mechanic being implemented, but it would be nice to have in the game for historical reasons. I also understand that they would be hard to implement without being able to exploit AI, so I tried to propose the simplest and least exploitable way I can see it.
The aim of the option of dual peace deals is to allow a long and costly stalemate wars to reasult in something instead of ending in a white peace pointlessly after many people and resources were lost.
The dual peace deals would be proceeded like this:
- After a long time of war (in EU4 it would be 5 years, as it is a time for auto white peace), and the war score is low (e.g. 20-30%) for any side, and there are meaningful loses on both sides (some threshold depending on country resources and pop), the option for dual peace deal would become acceptable by the AI.
- The only option for this would be agreement of selling land - one side get land, the other gets money.
- The total warscore value of transfer provinces also should not exceed e.g. 20-30% (again example numbers, but the exchange should not be that big).
- The price would be a base price for selling the province without any negotiation.
- The offer still would be rejected if the the buying side can't afford it without going too deep into debt, or the selling side would give away too much of their territory (so they don’t sell half of their country).
V - General war and peace information improvements
This is a point about just quality of life and displaying clear information for the player what numbers in a peace deal mean. As I don't have full information about the game interface, I may suggest something that is already implemented or its equivalent.
1. War goal is 25% cheaper to take
First, I want to say I am very happy that the information that "wargoal province is 25% cheaper" is displayed for the player as visible in a screenshot in TT30. In EU4 it is completely hidden and for people who didn't know, the offer values sometimes magically changed.
The QoL addition here would display each possible war goal's warscore costs to determine which one is the optimal to declare the war for (declaring on the most expensive war goal allows to take land the cheapest).
2. Making gains
This mechanic was an enigma for me for many years and it would be great to be explained in the game UI. For people who don't know, it seems like an arbitrary value that randomly appears in AI war enthusiasm sometimes. In the screenshot in TT31 it is visible that the PC uses a mechanic with the same name, so I assume it is the same.
As far as I know in EU4 "making gains" is a kind of 90 days report on how well war is going. Every 90 days of the war AI compairs current warscore and warscore from 90 days ago. Then half of the difference is added to the war enthusiasm (if the warscore grows for them it is positive, negative otherwise).
It would be good to display for the player:
- Summary how this mechanic works
- The date when the next 90 days report happens, as it depends on the war start date and not month tick (or any time length that is a tick in PC)
- War scores values compared and the calculation formula
Expand the "suggested offer" button tooltip (as it is called in EU4) or its equivalent in PC, so it is visible:
- Value of warscore AI would accept at a given moment
- What AI requires to be part of the offer, e.g. "Requires provinces X to be part of the offer"
- What AI will not accept in the offer, e.g. "Will not betray ally for gold"
- Warscore from battles
- War participation
- Tradition form battles
- siege: X
- blockade: Y
- received loses: Z
- inflicted loses: W
- etc...
Conclusion
This is my major contribution as community feedback, and it took definitly too long to write than it should. I hope the developers will read this, and maybe use some of those ideas, but I understand if not. I am just a player and have no game design experience. I tried to proposed changes that would make PC a better game and that are hopefully not that problematic to implement.
Thank You @Johan and the rest of the dev team for your work. I know this post is not that positive as it suggests changes to what I don’t like, but your previous games and the vast majority of TT shows that Project Caesar may become one of the best historical strategy games.
References:
- 11
- 4
- 4
- 2
