Originally posted by Mowers
French Wars of religion event? Is it enough?
Yes, especially if the French player chooses the moderates
Are manufactories an exploit any longer?
Not really. Going up by 250d (on VH, haven't checked whether it is the same multiplier on normal) a pop from day one makes one hell of a difference in prices. Sure, everybody can afford a beginners package of say ten manufactories, but prices get really hairy really fast.
Is a 20% inflation rule still a good idea?
Income is down overall, but not enough to counterbalance the 20% inflation. Still, wars are much more expensive to prosecute now, both because of increased maintenance and the new WE rules (even forgetting for a moment that it takes some time to decline, it also rises at twice the rate it used to
)
Still, with the serfdom slider broken, and assuming innovativeness 5, a non-christian province owned by a christian nation costs 100d in stability cost, and with the 20% increase it is 120d. That reason
alone should be enough to get rid of the 20% rule.
Getting rid of it will have the advantage of removing the incredibly beneficial effect of a player getting a -15% inflation RE early in a session, that we have seen happen in the MGC4.
What effect will the maintainance rules have on play?
Only fools and the Netherlands will build anything but weapons manufactories. The +1% trade and trade taxes of a refinery is as nothing compared to the +5K to the support limit of a weapons manufactory. And even the Netherlands will likely choose to build weapons manufactories anyhow.
Additionally, the more ruthless players will march their armies back and forth over the Indian's Fine Arts Academies, hoping desperately to burn them down, thus decreasing the cost of each manufactory they build.
Now, if the price of a manufactory was
base + 250*nOfThisTypeOfMnf rather than the current
base + 250*nOfTotalMnfs, things would be different, and we would see people diversify in manufactory building. But it isn't, so we wont.
Will war change? What will be the new ways?
Short victorious wars will be in vogue - and, as usual, they will seldom be achieved. Rebels will run rampant. The seas will be as blood. The skies will rain flames, and the four beasts will ride.
But apart from that, artillery (post tech 30-40) will be used rather more than before. Since they are no longer ten times as expensive to maintain (thanks for killing that bug!), and since bang for the unit weight is more important than ever, I can see more countries stiffening their armies with artillery. Especially since even the offensively minded countries don't have increased artilly costs, since dp-settings no longer affect maintenance.
Not that they will replace the all cavalry armies on the plains of France, of course, but in many countries they could prove rather more useful than before from a cost/benefit analysis.
Another interesting factor is that countries can now build conscription centres wherever they are eligible to receive manpower. This means that occupying high base manpower provinces outside your core shields is even more important than usual.
That is the obvious observation. The following is the less obvious observation: France just lost
big relatively in the conscription center business compared to the other nations. Not that France wont have an edge on the opposition, but it will not be as great as before. France used to have CBs on most of the European possessions it was likely to get, whereas most other nations were not so fortunate. Now that advantage has evaporated.....
....And the individual manpower bonus per CC has also gone down substantially, which on the other hand aids France. It used to be a multiplier of three and then a constant of one added. Now it is a multiplier of two, without anything added, which strengthens the relative worth of CCs in state cultured provinces.
France will still be a monster come CC time, but so will any other nation that manages to acquire a large number of state cultured provinces, and
that was not usually the case.
