The End of Your Empire

[zchmrkenhoff]

I think that one of the reasons why at the end of a strategy game there is no challenge is that we fundamentally fail to understand culture and empires to the degree that we need to. The moral character of the people needs to be evaluated, to the extent that as you become more powerful and rich, there should be an attribute that shows how your people are becoming weaker and corrupted.Your military should become weaker, more ethnic, populated by undesirables, and finance & etc should come to dominate your country. Basically, the sort of internal dissension that realistically racked an empire needs to be present in these games in order to make them more viable to play.



We should incorporate Spengler into strategy games, accurately portraying not only the rise, but also the fall of cultures and empires.

 

[Miganto]

Someone just read a book or finished a part of a course at uni.....

 

[zchmrkenhoff]

Someone just read a book or finished a part of a course at uni.....

No. In fact I'm still reading Spengler and haven't actually touched it in a while, but that has no bearing on what I need from a game. The substance of what I'm saying is that strategy games, be them Paradox, Total War, or anything else, excellently portray the rise, but not the fall of an empire.

 

[Miganto]

Portray your desire in a game-state that people would want to play and maybe they will listen. Elaborate.

 

[Lemont Elwood]

Portray your desire in a game-state that people would want to play and maybe they will listen. Elaborate.

He pretty much said it: mechanics to simulate decadence and overextension.

 

[Xinkc]

He pretty much said it: mechanics to simulate decadence and overextension.

But how do you do it in a way that's fun or interesting?

 

[Lemont Elwood]

But how do you do it in a way that's fun or interesting.

Beats me. Overextension mechanics especially tend to come across as just an arbitrary way to make the player take a break. At least with the way Paradox uses them in EU4...

 

[zorkman]

Beats me. Overextension mechanics especially tend to come across as just an arbitrary way to make the player take a break. At least with the way Paradox uses them in EU4...

Trouble is EU4 gameplay is based on expansion & war, so it is difficult how this could be changed without a big overhaul of the direction of the game.

 

[The Fremen]

Read my signature.

 

[Miganto]

He pretty much said it: mechanics to simulate decadence and overextension.

That isn't how to do it, that's his vision of what needs fixing written in a way that says 'make this happen'. Trying to make that in to a fun and interesting game mechanic that makes people want to play is the tough part.

It's easy to say 'make trade better' for instance, but if you have no clue as to how to actually achieve that, it's a pointless thing to say. I am hoping he's got some kind of solution to the problem he sees, else it's just a complaint which helps nobody.

 

[keynes2.0]

"Decadent empires" is just latching onto the most obvious, easiest to understand solution, not necessarily the right one. Often it's much more mundane issues of difficulty projecting power at a distance.

 

[RELee]

 

[GC13]

I don't like the "decadent empires" meme, since it really sounds like someone taking The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as gospel truth when we have a much better understanding of Rome than Gibbon did back in his day. I'm more a fan of using the decadence concept to explain the cycle of nomads conquering a people they perceive as weak, coming to rule it in exactly the same manner as the conquered did, then being overthrown by a nomadic group themselves; you can't both have nice things and a warrior society—guns must come at the expense of butter.

To make empires naturally decline you need a steady internal pressure, and the diplomatic game has to be fun. Let's say I want to conquer some of my neighbor's land. I'm large and powerful, so I can surely win the war. Conquest takes soldiers though, and soldiers take money. To pay my soldiers I've necessarily been taking a fair amount of taxes from my empire. My home culture doesn't mind so much, but the people I've already conquered? They'd love to see the bulk of my forces off somewhere else. If they storm the citadels in their cities and lay siege to the forts I've built in the area, restoring order will be quite expensive for literally no gain—I'd simply be keeping hold of what I already had. If an enemy in good health sees that my forces are off somewhere else? Even an empire can lose territory, and they'd have a much easier time besieging my lightly garrisoned forts and cities with no army opposing them than I'd have trying to retake them, fully garrisoned, with an enemy army in the field.

So I have a few options. I want weak enemies, it's true, but ideally my neighbors wouldn't hate me in the first place (though as a conqueror I can only do so much for that). Negotiating truces (like how you can exchange hostages in Sengoku) and supporting claimants should probably be in the game. Depending on their government type and your strength, you might be able to lean on the right people and get a satisfactory claimant in without a fight. Of course if it comes down to a fight, succession wars can be some of the longest and least profitable. If I'm a real jerk, I might try to get someone to attack the person I'm really worried about, or at the very least intrigue to keep them too worried with domestic matters to take advantage of my distraction.

Internally, I've already mentioned that I have to worry about rebels. I really like Victoria 2's POP model, and any game that wants to realistically portray empires needs to have something very similar. Managing my empire should get more difficult as it gets larger, as conquered people are less happy about paying taxes but require troops to keep down hopes of rebellion all the same. I like what EU4 tried with the ability to temporarily increase local autonomy to keep unrest down, but it decreases automatically as does the reason you probably increased autonomy in the first place (nationalism). Clawing back autonomy you grant to the provinces should really upset them, make future autonomy grants to them less effective, and generally tie up some kind of "administrative bandwidth", which would also be an important general concept: some government types just are not good for administering large empires. Bureaucracy is expensive, and if you appoint big men to govern large areas for you to allow you to govern more territory then you shouldn't be surprised to see governors declaring their independence every time you have a succession, which means more money spent holding on to what you already have.

The ossification that tends to happen in large empires would be really hard to implement. Pressures need to make someone who's losing have an easier time adapting and improving than someone who is "winning". The best way I can think of would be to increase social unrest in POPs, and take more administrative bandwidth, to push through reforms when you're on top. A player will know that they need to do this, so it needs to be finely balanced so that they always feel like they're advancing too slowly. This way they're in danger of pushing it too quickly and having major revolts on hand which their elite military units (usually near the top of a given social order) join, but at the very least they'll start getting handed some very real external defeats (losses to internal rebels would have no effect on reform approval, but maybe loss of conquered territory to native rebels would have some effect) to speed things along. Of course once you've started losing territory, administrative bandwidth you're spending on reforms is administrative bandwidth you're not spending raising armies to counter-attack.

Finally, I think a game needs to have a way to represent the fact that there is constant low-level fighting in an area. There are no armies rising up for you to smash, just groups of people hitting you wherever you're weak and then fading back into the wilderness or the populace. Remember, soldiers are expensive whether you're fighting an enemy army or a bunch of insurgents, but if you let the insurgents run wild then you don't exactly control, or benefit from, the territory.

So basically you need POPs from Victoria 2 to represent the populace, simplified characters from Crusader Kings 2 to represent important people, and the will to tell the player that "no, the game mechanics don't make it feasible for you to conquer the world."

 

[Axe99]

I fully agree that EU/CK need something to stimulate the difficulty of holding large empires together. However, large empires do not automatically, because they are large or they have been around a while, become decadent.

Riffing off the top of my head, how I'd go about it is (mostly from an EU perspective):
- Have internal factions in an empire, not entirely unlike Stellaris sounds like it will have.
- These internal factions have needs and interests that need to be balanced.
- As the empire becomes larger, in the vast, vast majority of cases, the number of factions will increase.
- Further, over the course of a game of EU, things like the bourgeiousie will increase in strength, changing faction balance.

The gameplay would be balancing the needs of a range of competing factions, and these needs could be both internal (more autonomy, development, buildings, political influence, what-have-you) and external (help our oppressed brothers over the border or we'll be unhappy). As empires become larger, there'll be more factions, creating a natural and plausible way of increasing the difficulty levels of large empires without some kind of fairly arbitrary "you're large and have been for 100 years, so here's +5 unrest, or +5% technology cost, or similar".

As well as that, I'd love to see some kind of logistics/very basic supply system work its way into the game, such that sending forces to maintain control in far-flung outposts is both difficult and expensive (for both CK and EU), but from an EU perspective this'd require a complete re-thinking of how Europe currently imposes its will on the Americas and Far East (which would be far from impossible, but a lot to do at once).

I think it's definitely going to have to wait until at least EU5, I'd expect it to require quite the engine overhaul, although I can but hope.

 

[Dutch Empire]

I agree with some parts.
I would like to see that the larger an empire becomes, the harder it is to maintain. Especially with colonial empires. I never liked the fact that in EU IV when playing the Netherlands and allying with France I didn't have a real existential threat. In Europe I had not much to fear, more then half of my armies were in Asia or the Americas. And miraculously I could train in Asia the same quality of troops as in Europe. Even the troops trained come out of one manpower pool instead of a pool per theatre. So mainting a firm grip on your empire is far to easy and became way too much blobbing in the late game. Other then that I think EU IV is great.

 

[SheaferDaDawg]

One thing to represent the difficulty of maintaining order through successive rulers in eu4 could be by increasing autonomy in all non-primary culture provinces by x each time a new monarch rises. If it goes above a set amount as a result of a succession, all those provinces belonging to that culture spawn nationalist or pretender rebels.
Same thing for a republic, except it happens every time a reelection occurs at a slower rate, to balance things out.

 

[ZomgK3tchup]

From a sociological perspective, I think that overhead is more of a problem than complacency or decadence.

The larger the state, the larger the government, and the more overhead you need to ensure that the government acts in cohesion. When it takes weeks to months for your government to communicate with itself and its people, this becomes difficult. You send a message to your colonial government and then find out that your message arrived too late, and your colony is revolting against you.

It's true that a more complacent group will be less likely to advance or that a corrupt government might be filled with disloyal or less than qualified individuals, but these are problems are secondary to a government unable to act as a single cohesive entity.

China is probably a good example of this.

The fact that the bureaucracy was filled with the sons of wealthy men and not the most qualified individuals was secondary to the fact that governors or military generals would outright refuse orders from the central government.

I think the game would benefit from expanded faction mechanics (the aristocracy, the bureaucracy, the church, the merchants, etc...) and for localized refusal of assistance where a highly autonomous region might refuse to pay taxes or a section of the military might refuse your commands. Similarly, I think it would benefit from a more dynamic autonomy system. If you give the church too much power, parts of the country under church influence become more autonomous, if you give the aristocracy too much power, areas under the control of powerful aristocrats become more autonomous, etc, etc.

If we want to use China as our example, concessions to a powerful warlord might make the region under his rule pay fewer taxes and its military refuse to service.

In other words, I think it's that the more complicated your government and the more interest groups there are within that government, the more difficult it is to keep that government together. When something catastrophic happens, everyone scrambles and the whole system comes tumbling down.

 

[jorishilhorst]

just basically allthat ZomgK3tchup said. Once you start hitting critical mass size wise, the efficiency starts to wear you down. Perhaps both as a function of distance (to show slow communication/miscommunication as messages get crossed much more easily) and quantity of titles/people. The endgame is afterall the napoleonic wars and there was a good reason he planted puppets / created kingdoms. France as 1 large entity would never have been able to rule all the territory acquired.

Might be fun to station troops in an area for a while to increase the centralization again. (and needing this regularly) to have the emperors might felt. If you fight a long war, you wouldn't have tropps to do this which causes your decentralization to rise again.

Additionally high decentralization and a non accepted culture (or cores of a nation) should trigger independence factions IMO or de-annexation (vassal instead of territory).
like start of HOI3 with the chinese warlords being indepenent for practical purposes but can be united in the face of an external threat.

 

[Jackw2As]

So from what I can understand the best way of implementing a decline mechanic is to have a Delay mechanic. Where players orders are delayed and so are their maps. Thus as the empire expands, comunications break down, and it becomes harder to successfully maintain it.

 

[Summercat]

So from what I can understand the best way of implementing a decline mechanic is to have a Delay mechanic. Where players orders are delayed and so are their maps. Thus as the empire expands, comunications break down, and it becomes harder to successfully maintain it.

I had a game design where the entire central concept was "There is a literal fog of war. You can only see what the unit representing you can see. Your orders take time to arrive, so plan ahead. A lot."

The idea was managing starship survey and cargo, and later a war. So you can send your fleet off 5 turns away to another system to guard it, but then if you want it moved it'll take 5 turns for the order to arrive.

I determined it sounded like a nice concept but wouldn't be that great a game.