I seriously hope there's something so that the "meta" doesn't become to snake through a big country so it loses control in 80% of its land.
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Sounds to me that a "distance from reachable" war score cost modifier would be helpful in preventing things like Denmark snake between Lithuania and Moscow. Maybe have the distance modifier be quadratic or something. Maybe grabbing more stuff at "low distance" would make the distance modifier less harsh to not hinder sensible peace deals. So if you as the Ottomans grab Crimea, and the rest of the coastline (reachable stuff), grabbing ie Kiev wouldn't be that much more expensive than it otherwise would. Maybe a cost and willingness modifier if you cut bits off, as mentioned previous.
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See my post at the first page.
Firstly, Stalemate in post-Yuan isn’t impossible, because most things in this world is technically “possible”. The stalemate situation, in late Yuan civil war time, is just very hard.
Secondly, put it in the Late Yuan scenario, what do we have?
North:
- Repetitive plague sweeping Northern China;
- Devastating yellow river flood, flood induced famine;
- Population running from north to south;
- Around 10-20 yrs rebellions and massive killings in central plain China.
- Mongol lords sort of merged with local Han society, but still minority;
- Largely untouched by flood, plague and other natural disasters;
- Food and goods production flourish, because they are largely untouched in wars in a divided Northern China for centuries, only exception is the Mongol invasion, but recovery is fast;
- In the late decades of Yuan, sea based transport was adopted as the main means of transporting taxes and goods the Empire collected around the Country to Khanbaliq (Beijing), which gave rise to a strong coastal China economy;
- Strong tax farmer gentlemen, leading local society;
- Limited loyalists due to distance to Yuan capital;
- Han Confucianism scholars survived from Mongol war;
- Earlier rebels in Anhui and Henan province attracted loyalists attention, acted like a block for southern rebels and warlords.
The result is that, although Northern warlords are more exposed and experienced in war, their economy to support long conflicts just very fragile to sustain. When they ran out their elite soldiers, their army could collapse in a very quick pace. This is unlike in 3k where you got a weaken north but still relatively stronger to south (historically southern China developed very late in time), or during N and S dynasties and post Tang collapse China where you got chaotic north and south due to various factors.
Another thing is that, most of the southern warlords were spin-outs from early Red Turbans, who in no means lack of elite fighting power. And surprisingly, they have also been very hostile to each other. Leading to short-lasting peace deals and swift switching of their sides between loyalists of Yuan and rebels led by Liu Futong and his puppet emperor.
Another thing about late Medieval China is that you got a fertile, well-connected and almost entirely continuous “Central Plains” extending north to Manchuria and south to Fujian province. The economic and cultural drive for unity were strong, and aided by imperial infrastructure and Han-Confucianism characters. This makes all stalemate difficult to sustain. Because the situation in Early Medieval China about the Yangtze River and Qinling Mountain being a natural barrier no longer there. Not mentioning you got gunpowder to speed up siege process.
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Multiple different AI wars ending in a exclaves isn't the same thing as the AI intentionally creating an exclave by snaking into the AI, which is what I thought this thread is about.
But as the post you quoted says...
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The problem with an absolute ban on creating enclaves is that it prevents a victor from taking ANYTHING useful if the only enemy province bordering it would create an enclave if taken. It should be possible to do so, but expensive enough to make it unappealing as a means of purposely fragmenting a country. The AI could probably be deterred by a higher war score needed to create an enclave, but there's no practical way to prevent the player from doing so without making it impossible to reduce an adjacent threat.
The peace process might be made so that any demand creating an enclave must define the status of the enclaves created, such as a choice between free passage of control through the lost province for the loser in order to maintain control of the enclave, creation of a vassal of either the victor or loser, release of an independent state, or any other possible solutions, with differing war score and infamy costs for those outcomes.
In EU3, France began as two winding snakes of provinces with a few multi-province lumps, one enclave in the north and one in the south of Western Europe. There were numerous points where the only way to take an adjacent province from them would create another enclave. Banning it completely merely replaces one problem with another.
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Yup. I can understand wanting a way to make it harder to snake into the AI, but now we're talking about making it impossible to create excalves. I.E. Serbia taking parts of Northern Greece but leaving Constatinople and Southern Greece, but why should Serbia have any concern for the viability of the state they leave behind after conquering the territory they want?
I have never seen the AI snake (outside of edge cases where they have claims from something/weird HoI4 nonsense) but exclaves? Sounds like the guy getting chopped up shouldn't have been so bad at war if they didn't want to be dismembered. So if the concern is snaking, then just don't do it yourself and the problem is solved.
Agree, I think it should be possible but more expensive, by making the AI consider control after the peace. Maybe make war score cost proportional to total control lost? This would also make taking low control provinces cheaper, which I think would be a good feature. I'm scared though that the current algorithm wouldn't be able to handle this so I doubt we'd get this on release, maybe with an AI rework later on. I hope I'm wrong!
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From the perspective of one player that's a reasonable attitude. From the perspective of the designer if you give players the ability to do something stupid/implausible/unfun/annoying but optimal, they will do it constantly and complain about it the entire time.
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My idea is that we can take examples from Civ6. In Civ6, their devs decided that "Settlements" in their game should have "Loyalty".
The "Loyalty" value is not solely influenced by situations in one Civ, but the strength of all Civs around the settlement. Assume you never play that game, a good demonstrate would be:
There is a Location X, owned by Byz, enclaved by Turks and perhabs Venicians. Like here:
Scenario A:
TUR - TUR - TUR
TUR - BYZ - TUR
VEN - VEN - TUR
or
Scenario B:
TUR - TUR - TUR - TUR - TUR
TUR - BYZ - BYZ - TUR - TUR
VEN - BYZ - BYZ - TUR - TUR
VEN - VEN - TUR - TUR - TUR
Then, the BYZ locations here would have a "Loyalty" or maybe just "Control" in the game, which is a value like:
Loyalty defined by internal variables - (Infilitration* given by TUR presence + Infilitration given by VEN presence).
If, after computation, Loyalty after computation of that location falls to 0, and no land-or-maritime connection has been made between that province and owner's capital, an event pop up and the following could happen:
a) A rebellion that, if win, forces all "BYZ" enclaves, like scenario A and B, flip to neighbour with highest Infilitration score;
b) BYZ decides to just gave up the province to neighbour with highest Infilitration score, in exchange for some sort of reward, like truce or relationship boosts;
c) Suppress local wills for switching sides by certain means, reducing local pop satisfactory, and reduce the "Control" of neighbouring enclaved locations* (Available only to Scenario B)
One limitation of this idea is that, how in codes can we "ID" enclaves. Could the devs hard code "Enclave flag" into provinces tied in an enclave? Could they be numbered? Idk.Another thing is that, Loyalty shouldn't be just "Control" or the idea of "Control" should be slightly modified, because uncontrollable locations logically would first declare independence then flip to your enemies (or being subjugated). Like in Civ games, your settlements would first turned to un-controlled free-cities, then convert to whoever having highest influence to them.
Tbh, I think make enclaves with low Loyalty or Control go independent is much easier in coding. You just have the first of them go independent into randomly numbered TAG (exist in both EU4 and HOI4) and loop around it to find whether there are other locations in the same enclave. If there are more locations in a different enclave after the search loop, you just let the event trigger again and create a new randomly numbered TAG. Or better, make them as a peaceful rebel tag.
*The Infilitration here would be a new variable determine a TAGs attrativeness to subjects of another. It could be determined by law sets (better laws appeal pops), military strength and combined estate satisfactions and etc.*neighouring enclaved locations: Use listing function to loop around all neighbouring locations which have no connection to capital.
I guess I just don't care about the complaints of people who have optimized the fun out of a game. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Games are meant to be fun. If they way you are playing the game robs you of your enjoyment, you're the problem. It's different when you have to play in broken ways because the "right" way doesn't work, but this is something 110% in the player control, like early HoI4 1 man horse armies running around after a breakthrough screwing up front lines for the AI. You don't have to play this way if you aren't having fun.
Because all of the above *is* fun for someone. Watching Florry take EU4 to woodshed using utterly insane strats with 0 basis in reality is a good time, but that's now how I liked to play EU4 so I didn't.
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There's a difference between jumping through hoops and using gray zone exploits to metagame, and just taking 3 provinces from an empire to completely cripple them forever.
Fair enough
Bini control of the land around Lagos past the suzerainty of several kingdoms then Oyo, Iranian control of various territories around the Persian Gulf (admittedly both coastal), Yuan holdouts in Outer Mongolia and Yunnan, Timurid control of some cities in Iraq but not others formed exactly the type of border pdx players hate and the Jalayirids were rarely vassals of the Emir or his successors
The Triple Alliance had extremely messy borders because state ideology and religion demanded the long-term existence of enemy states to war against. Several Indian empires controlled Gujarat or the Deccan plateau and the roads from the Indogangetic plain to those regions without controlling the territory between them. Kilwa is another obvious example, it and it's subordinate city states controlled their hinterlands and some inland regions of resource production but the lands between weren't possessed by the Sultanate as it was connected by sea
And like others have mentioned the Ottomans more broke the Hungarian state at Mohacs at which point the whole country became a borderland crisscrossed by Austrian and Ottoman lines of control. Convention is what dictates that we split the territory between them but that's for ease of mapmaking
In general, I don't think you are talking about bordergore at all. You are simply saying "areas of control between premodern states were vague" which does not address the actual discussion at hand.
At no point during the Austro-Turkish wars did anything approaching a "paradox bordergore" scenario occur. The Ottomans never cut off Transylvania from Austria, and even if they did, Transylvania was a self-governing entity and was not dependent on Austria for its defence. Also, I think "convention is the only thing dictating that we depict part of Hungary as belonging to Austria and part belonging to the Turks" is a really weird sentence, even if you can argue there were disputed or depopulated areas making it hard to draw a clear line, there was definitely a stable Ottoman controlled region in the south-centre and a stable Austrian controlled region in the north and west of the country.
In general it seems to me that most of the "unclear borders" you are talking about are actually internal borders, are not actually very messy at all, persisted for brief periods of time, are "exclaves" that were in reality basically their own regimes, were connected via the sea, or fit multiple of these listed qualifications. It makes me somewhat unhappy that your arguments seem to fall into the category of unconstructive apologetics, that is to say, is you are just trying to find excuses to tear down anyone who is unhappy with the way the game works, but you are declining to contribute productively to further our understanding of how and if the game can represent reality.
I assure you that any example of bordergore you might be able to find in the real world has a "story" behind it that allows it to make sense, but the problem with paradox games is that no such "stories" exist, the game mechanics simply allow random garbage to emerge as a result of rebellions and peace deals and then persist for hundreds of years.
Like, I think generally speaking we can all agree that China looking like this for centuries is a ludicrous outcome. The fact that China permanently looks like this in pretty much every other EU4 game is a serious bad thing. It's clear that the control mechanic is not sufficient to solve this problem. So please tell me what you think could be done to solve it!
Yes that's true. But it doesn't really solve the issue. The thing I am complaining about is where you (where "you" could be either the AI or a player) occupy a bunch of land, and then only take some of the land you conquered, and the land you don't take automatically reverts to the original owner even if they have no realistic way to control it now. For example, as concerns the image of China in 1436 I shared in the original post, I'm quite certain that the random Yuan exclaves in Ming did not originate from any actual military or political reality, the Ming AI just decided not to take them in the peace deal. The topic of the thread is that I think this should be blocked from happening in some way.
According to my understanding, there are basically four examples of "long-lasting" stalemates in China where the country was divided, which between them have maybe three obvious causes:
1. Three Kingdoms. In this case, Wei was unable to conquer Wu because their border was along the Yangtze River and Wu, despite being overall poorer and weaker, had a much stronger navy (and here we find yet another reason why the Yangtze River should be a navigable water space you can sail boats up). Shu Han meanwhile survived despite being very weak because of its talented leadership and defensible position.
2. Sixteen Kingdoms/North and South dynasties. In this case, the Southern dynasties were able to persist for centuries despite being poorer and weaker because the North was ruled by Xianbei warlords who were constantly exploding into civil war.
3. Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Much the same explanation as 2 (the North was strong but constantly exploding in civil war)
4. Jurchen Jin and Southern Song. In this case, the explanation is much the same as 1, the Song navy prevented the Jurchens from securing a foothold south of the Yangtze, although there is also the added factor that the Jurchen armies were significantly superior in quality and the Song leadership generally poor which prevented Song from conquering the north despite being wealthier.
Meanwhile in EU4 (and presumably EU5) the reason China persists un-unified for long periods of time is unrelated to any of these. The Yangtze is no more difficult to cross than any other river, and it's impossible on land for true military stalemates to exist in these games (where both sides can defend successfully but neither can attack successfully) because of the lack of logistics (though hopefully EU5's supply system can be rebalanced to fix that). Instead the reason is just that the AI isn't motivated to declare wars, even though in real life, whenever China was divided there was constant warfare until one side unified the country.
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If I'm understanding you correctly, the issue you have is less about "bifurcating an empire" and more about "deliberately taking exclaves".
The problem is that this is a hard problem to solve. It's easy enough to require no exclaves of your conquests when building up a peace deal, by simply requiring that whatever you're taking in a peace deal be adjacent to an ocean (if you have ocean access), your own lands, or lands you're already taking in the peace deal. The problem is that with how peace deals work in this game, you can also remove any location from a pending deal. There's no "clean" fix to this (pretty much any solution will create an interface that's frustrating for a player to use). There's also circumstances where you're already starting as an exclave (see: Philadelphia) and there's no guarantee that any peace deal taken will break the exclave circumstance (say, any war not in Anatolia). Even if you do mandate taking everything that you occupy, that doesn't stop you from occupying disconnected land deep in enemy territory (say, late-game where you get the ability to bypass ZoC, or simply having the enemy siege back some of their stuff as to cut you off).
There's a few options. One is that, in the event of any peace deal that results in an exclave (defined as territory with no land or sea path to land that you held prior to the end of the war), simply return all those territories to the enemy but with, like, zero control or something. This is bad primarily because it violates WYSIWYG. No one wants a peace deal where they are told "you will get X" and then don't actually get X. It's bad design. You could release them as a subject instead, but I don't think that really solves your problem in a satisfactory way.
At the end of the day the only "good fix" is to try to make it so that taking such exclaves is something that's easily punished and reacquired. To take your example of China, look at Shun. They can declare war on any of those Ming exclaves and, presuming that the main Ming army is nowhere near those exclaves, have no issues conquering them at all. That, I think, would be the best starting point: make the AI recognize when the territory they're adjacent to is a disconnected exclave of a state for which they otherwise share no border and make the conclusion that they can conquer those lands without penalty or fear of reprisal. Not that there's no guarantee that they can't try to broker for military access (though given the exclave status it's likely that they were just at war with whatever state is now splitting their lands in two, so military access is unlikely) or that they don't have a standing army presence in that exclave, but I think it's certainly worth the gamble.
Not that calculating exclaves is particularly hard. Hell, one of the things we developed for HIP was a game rule to release exclaves every few years. If we could come up with a way to find exclaves in CK2, we can certainly do so in EU5. Then just... identify locations as exclaves of the state that rules them as a sort of periodical check (yearly?). Give increased aggressiveness to states adjacent to exclave locations of a country but not non-exclave territories. And maybe once exclave territories hit zero control, pop 'em off as subjects or outright independent states.
This is not true. In EU4 (and presumably this game too), the game enforces the inverse of this rule, the territory you take has to be contiguous and accessible. If you select a long "chain" of provinces, and deselect one of the problems at the base of the chain, all of the provinces in the chain are automatically deselected. No-one ever complains about this being "frustrating".
My suggested solution was that if an occupied province is not annexed in a peace deal, instead of being freely returned to its original owner, it spawns automatically occupied by separatist rebels, therefore forcing the original owner to either retake it by force or lose the province. I don't see any reason why this wouldn't work fine, although it might be tricky to implement via mods.
That doesn't really solve the problem with the other example of China I provided. A common situation is something like this.
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I'm still not sure which it is that you're arguing. Is it that you can take exclaves, or that you can take territories that lead to exclaves?
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...alright, I reread everything and I think now I understand what you're actually talking about.
Your issue is that you can, say, occupy an entire province and then in your peace deal take everything except for an exclave of your enemy despite the fact that you have it occupied.
The cleanest solution I can think of is that the war score cost of any peace deal is equal to... you take the current status of the empire (take each location's intrinsic worth times its control), take the expected status of the empire following the peace deal (including expected change in control from things like exclaves and the like), and subtract the two. That gives you how much a given treaty "costs".
With that equation, now those occupied exclaves are literally free to take.
Your issue is that you can, say, occupy an entire province and then in your peace deal take everything except for an exclave of your enemy despite the fact that you have it occupied.
The cleanest solution I can think of is that the war score cost of any peace deal is equal to... you take the current status of the empire (take each location's intrinsic worth times its control), take the expected status of the empire following the peace deal (including expected change in control from things like exclaves and the like), and subtract the two. That gives you how much a given treaty "costs".
With that equation, now those occupied exclaves are literally free to take.
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Does anyone agree that the integrity of their provinces is important for AIs?
It is really about how they make peace deals to avoid broken shapes, though we know humans often ignore this rule.
Should AI start with the interest in a smaller area and trying to unify its small corners, and later, states and regions?
It is really about how they make peace deals to avoid broken shapes, though we know humans often ignore this rule.
Should AI start with the interest in a smaller area and trying to unify its small corners, and later, states and regions?
And I REALLY hate that people. It is really annoying to see people trying to change the game because they don't have self control.
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