Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Jabor
Jul 16, 2010

#1 Loser at SpaceChem
Sliders would be much less fiddly if there was a "lock this at the current amount of inflation/corruption gain/pop satisfaction" button and you didn't have to keep loving with it once you'd made your decision.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Dayton Sports Bar
Oct 31, 2019
The older Heartses of Iron had something like that, didn't they? Speaking of,


Holy poo poo we're so back

YF-23
Feb 17, 2011

My god, it's full of cat!


I think people are misunderstanding the Tinto project sliders and are thinking of EU3. The main thing about taxation in that dev diary is that you are taxing the estates instead of the provinces, the taxation sliders are closer to V2's taxation sliders in that regard. Which makes sense for wanting to fiddle around and minmax your taxation of an estate depending on what level their satisfaction floats towards.

Mantis42
Jul 26, 2010

The Tinto team should make a Vicky2 sequel next

Dr. Video Games 0031
Jul 17, 2004

YF-23 posted:

I think people are misunderstanding the Tinto project sliders and are thinking of EU3. The main thing about taxation in that dev diary is that you are taxing the estates instead of the provinces, the taxation sliders are closer to V2's taxation sliders in that regard. Which makes sense for wanting to fiddle around and minmax your taxation of an estate depending on what level their satisfaction floats towards.

No, that's what I understood it as. Still not a fan of sliders. I don't see what they add. Adding in the ability to fiddle and minmax isn't always a positive.

Yaoi Gagarin
Feb 20, 2014

Jabor posted:

Sliders would be much less fiddly if there was a "lock this at the current amount of inflation/corruption gain/pop satisfaction" button and you didn't have to keep loving with it once you'd made your decision.

yeah I think sliders + autotuning would be very good. like in vicky 3 I would love it if you could tell the construction budget to use up exactly your budget surplus, or run at a specific deficit percentage. instead of having to carefully choose a number of construction sectors where you're at break even or a small deficit but not going too far in the red

or from the other direction, the tax rate could auto adjust to meet your expenses.

like in general step functions suck, we are playing on very advanced computers, let the machine do some linear interpolation on its own

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
Yeah, you generally want to have either the slider all the way to the right, or to the left, or at some breakpoint.

Buttons can do the first two, but the third option is always going to leave something on the table.

A slider can do all three, but the player has to look for the third option themselves, manually.

The question is whether the breakpoint is obvious enough to be turned into a rule that the computer can look for themselves.

Dr. Video Games 0031
Jul 17, 2004

the thing about being able to manually adjust to a specific breakpoint is that the breakpoints change over time. i don't want to have to constantly monitor a slider to make sure it's always in the optimal position. automating this somehow could be a good thing, but it better be loving perfect at it.

the vicky 3 approach of "just push this button for medium taxes" takes out the opportunity to obsess over small details that probably aren't important anyway. are you missing out on some ability to get a super optimal min-maxed tax setting by having so little granularity? maybe, but also i just don't think it matters. thinking about taxation sliders isn't fun, so i appreciate them just doing away with them.

Mandoric
Mar 15, 2003
The approach of "just never move the slider from 50%" also gives you no-fuss medium taxes, though. I don't think there's any more value in preventing people from constantly fussing over a tax slider than in preventing them from pausing the game and fussing for half an hour over exact troop movements, to be honest. Probably less, because overwhelming enemy command facilities through an operational tempo they can't coherently react to is an actually useful concept in strategic thought. But there certainly aren't many calls for no paused speed.

Ideal, though, yeah, is pin-and-flag where the slider setting moves to produce the same output, throwing a warning if the inputs have changed significantly.

Jazerus
May 24, 2011


Yaoi Gagarin posted:

yeah I think sliders + autotuning would be very good. like in vicky 3 I would love it if you could tell the construction budget to use up exactly your budget surplus, or run at a specific deficit percentage. instead of having to carefully choose a number of construction sectors where you're at break even or a small deficit but not going too far in the red

the construction sector thing is mostly so you can get into hilariously bad situations during market crashes i assume. a slider or auto-tune would be too responsive

DrSunshine
Mar 23, 2009

Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!
I dunno, it might be fun to fiddle with the sliders if they made them continuous instead of discrete sliders. Let me tax at increments of a hundredth of a percentage point!

Frionnel
May 7, 2010

Friends are what make testing worth it.

Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:

the vicky 3 approach of "just push this button for medium taxes" takes out the opportunity to obsess over small details that probably aren't important anyway. are you missing out on some ability to get a super optimal min-maxed tax setting by having so little granularity? maybe, but also i just don't think it matters. thinking about taxation sliders isn't fun, so i appreciate them just doing away with them.

The V3 approach is the same as a slider with only 5 steps instead of 1000. It makes no difference. If you want to have medium taxes with no fuss, move it to 50% and leave it there.

OddObserver
Apr 3, 2009
Clearly the number of digits of precision on tax rate you can set must depend on your country's numeracy rate.

PittTheElder
Feb 13, 2012

:geno: Yes, it's like a lava lamp.

Look just give me a 64 bit field so I can set the tax rate bits in the double directly.

i like the sliders, what I actually want is for them to show fewer numbers and introduce uncertainty

Mandoric
Mar 15, 2003

PittTheElder posted:

Look just give me a 64 bit field so I can set the tax rate bits in the double directly.

i like the sliders, what I actually want is for them to show fewer numbers and introduce uncertainty

Ah, a self-adjusting slider that actually does nothing with no adm advisor, rounds to the nearest 25% with a level 1, and only self-adjusts if they're level 3. That's the stuff.

HerpicleOmnicron5
May 31, 2013

How did this smug dummkopf ever make general?


Johan posted:

Having some buttons for just a few possible options for taxes or expenses, like in Imperator, is not really fitting for a GSG with deep economical gameplay.

regardless of if sliders are good or not, this is a really lame and lovely jab at vicky 3 and is a real bad look

Yaoi Gagarin posted:

yeah I think sliders + autotuning would be very good. like in vicky 3 I would love it if you could tell the construction budget to use up exactly your budget surplus, or run at a specific deficit percentage. instead of having to carefully choose a number of construction sectors where you're at break even or a small deficit but not going too far in the red

or from the other direction, the tax rate could auto adjust to meet your expenses.

like in general step functions suck, we are playing on very advanced computers, let the machine do some linear interpolation on its own

if economic simulations allowed you to automatically adjust to perfectly balance all of your expenses and incomes, it would be a bad economic simulation.

Dr. Video Games 0031
Jul 17, 2004

You can't just add unfun mechanics and then say "well, don't engage with them if they're not fun." If it's optimal to engage with them, then players will do so regardless of how tedious these mechanics are. Good game design involves eliminating opportunities for players to optimize the fun out of the game.

CommonShore
Jun 6, 2014

A true renaissance man


joking aside it would be actually interesting if one of the things that you could improve is your state's legibility to itself - having a variously better or worse idea of how much money, manpower, etc is available, and this improves through tech and ideas.

Not sure how that would be implemented, but that's the dev's job not mine get on it nerds

HerpicleOmnicron5
May 31, 2013

How did this smug dummkopf ever make general?


Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:

You can't just add unfun mechanics and then say "well, don't engage with them if they're not fun." If it's optimal to engage with them, then players will do so regardless of how tedious these mechanics are. Good game design involves eliminating opportunities for players to optimize the fun out of the game.

“all it does is add 995 more steps, five options is the same thing” and you’re exactly right with that - if you have those 995 irrelevant or fringe options, then simplify down and let players compromise between those fewer options instead of searching for their precise preference for 10x more time.

Koramei
Nov 11, 2011

I have three regrets
The first is to be born in Joseon.
A grand strategy game revolving around that kind of obfuscation is probably my dream game, but I don't think that game can be EU. Players rely too much on having total information; I think one that put you in a blinder spot would have to be designed to revolve around that mechanic.

Mandoric
Mar 15, 2003
Jokes aside alike, I do think that illegibility is better implemented, both in game and simulation terms, as actions (even passive or automatic actions) reducing in variance than as first-order numbers increasing in accuracy, in part because the higher accuracy isn't that useful of a number to begin with. The difference between a hide or 石 of land and a modern farmer's tax return isn't that the first produces ??? and the latter's axiomatically stable, it's that the first produces on average rather than demonstrably this past year 240 silver pence worth of general produce (at, remember, legally fixed prices) or 180.4 liters of rice (or locally-assessed equivalent.)

"This province can be levied for five regiments" transitioning to "this province supplies 5,000 manpower" is not necessarily bad, in part because historically the call was more like to go down for five regiments which could show up over- or under-strength, but face it, you're just going to combine them anyway to avoid the penalties and it's more useful to have the "levy troops" button produce 3,500-6,500 on a d100 table that gradually has its tails sliced off to create a 4,900-5,100 d4 table.

HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:

“all it does is add 995 more steps, five options is the same thing” and you’re exactly right with that - if you have those 995 irrelevant or fringe options, then simplify down and let players compromise between those fewer options instead of searching for their precise preference for 10x more time.

Especially in single-player strategy games, though, the fun is the friction and the narrative it creates until it stops being fun, and the problem with broad proclamations is that each player can't stand not just different degrees but different types of friction. So "it's there if you wanna" is kind of the least bad of both worlds, because "I hate it and ignore it" and "I love it and spend most of my time with that window open" are satisfied and only "I hate it but I spend most of my time with that window open" types have a bad time--and it's (at least, I hope) a lot easier to learn to just get over yourself and hit the bricks than to completely rewire your tastes.

Mandoric fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Apr 11, 2024

feller
Jul 5, 2006


HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:

regardless of if sliders are good or not, this is a really lame and lovely jab at vicky 3 and is a real bad look


lmao

OddObserver
Apr 3, 2009

Mandoric posted:


Especially in single-player strategy games, though, the fun is the friction and the narrative it creates until it stops being fun, and the problem with broad proclamations is that each player can't stand not just different degrees but different types of friction. So "it's there if you wanna" is kind of the least bad of both worlds, because "I hate it and ignore it" and "I love it and spend most of my time with that window open" are satisfied and only "I hate it but I spend most of my time with that window open" types have a bad time--and it's (at least, I hope) a lot easier to learn to just get over yourself and hit the bricks than to completely rewire your tastes.

Not being able to precisely balance (or rather unbalance to the desired degree) your budget by tweaking the tax rate just right is one of the sources of friction in Vicky 3, IMHO.

Yaoi Gagarin
Feb 20, 2014

HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:

regardless of if sliders are good or not, this is a really lame and lovely jab at vicky 3 and is a real bad look

if economic simulations allowed you to automatically adjust to perfectly balance all of your expenses and incomes, it would be a bad economic simulation.

1) it doesn't have to be perfect on every game tick, just average to the target over time

2) from a "realism" perspective its pretty reasonable because its an abstraction over an army of bureaucrats who calculate that this month we only have enough budget to build X things

e: and why, if it's supposed to be an economic simulation, are construction industries built in exact multiples of 5,000 workers, and the tax rate can be only 5 possible values, and so on. that argument doesn't make any sense

Yaoi Gagarin fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Apr 11, 2024

Mandoric
Mar 15, 2003

OddObserver posted:

Not being able to precisely balance (or rather unbalance to the desired degree) your budget by tweaking the tax rate just right is one of the sources of friction in Vicky 3, IMHO.

I'll cop to that, though I maintain my argument that "don't like don't click" friction-frustrates fewer people than "do like too bad".

In terms of the other direction, (at least pop-?) historical simulationism, though, I'll also say that precise tax sliders actually land better for me in an EU than a Vicky IMO--the latter fits in a granularized "x pence per barrel as duly recorded and arguable in newly-reformed civil courts" age, but the first is the territory of legends from every culture about the bad king's overweening tax collectors not leaving until their quota was fulfilled and drat the actual law or the year's trade-ledgers.

Vizuyos
Jun 17, 2020

Thank U for reading

If you hated it...
FUCK U and never come back
the problem with sliders is that they're awkward from a game design perspective

if there's only a few spots on the slider that are worth picking, then just give the player those few spots and get rid of the stuff in between

if every single spot on the slider could potentially worth picking depending on the exact timing and circumstances, then congrats, you've probably damned the player to a confusing micromanagement hell

if they can just leave the slider in the middle and be fine the entire time, then the slider doesn't matter and there was no point in adding it in the first place

if you give the player an "auto" setting that takes care of the slider setting for them, then why is the slider even there?

it's better to have 5 options and have all of them matter, rather than adding 10 options the player might use and 90 options they won't ever touch

Mandoric
Mar 15, 2003
That argument can be inverted, though--the problem with the button system is also that there are only three spots on the button-slider out of five "worth picking" in terms of being aligned to an immediate goal without fiddliness, "I want more of the output than I have now and don't care as much about the input", "I want more of the input than I have now and don't care about the output", and "I'm fine with things as they are."

If there's only value in deciding whether you want to gain burgher loyalty equilibrium at the cost of ducats or ducats at the cost of burgher loyalty, sure, you're right. But if there's value in deciding between gaining 20 ducats at the cost of 20 burgher loyalty equilibrium or 10 ducats at the cost of 10 burgher loyalty equilibrium, the latter to be chosen when your yearly deficit is only 10 ducats, then surely there's also value in being able to gain 15 ducats at the cost of 15 burgher loyalty equilibrium when your yearly deficit is 15 ducats?

E: And, again, the "auto" at least I'm envisioning isn't "let the AI pick", it's "having set a tax policy to raise 10 ducats from the nobles, double the arm-twisting in a bad year and drat the grumbling as long as 10 ducats still come in, and halve it in a good year and hey you're popular at feasts again." Essentially, the use of a slider in that context allows rather than forbids a goals first, numberfuckery second playstyle.

E2: For an example, look at the "fifteenth and tenth" that formed the backbone of English taxation between 1334 and early 1514 and which persisted until 1624, or 177-287 years of the likely EU5 spread. It was nominally assessed on one-fifteenth of rural and one-tenth of urban production of movable goods, but in practical implementation it was assessed on a fixed valuation that produced a standard baseline assessment of approx. ₤39,000 in either that was then, as granular buttons, collected at rates as high as three-fifteenths or three-tenths (during the price spike of the immediately post-Plague era.) So elements of both systems--slider to determine the base value expected over the long term, double and triple buttons for emergency spending.

This is definitely pushing too arcane for the average user as buttons within a slider, but as "set your tax rate in a context of essentially flat prices 1337-1550, per Bank of England stats" and "burn mana or immediate loyalty for a wartime or plague-time cash influx" it's got potential. And it would also set up a really interesting midgame transition as, around 1550, inflation does begin to occur (Spanish silver back from the new world?) and you need to struggle toward designing (okay this should just be a tech) and pushing through a direct and dynamic assessment instead of a fixed sum, with situational multiples, from each bottom-level administrator.

Mandoric fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Apr 11, 2024

Poil
Mar 17, 2007

The Anno series realized quite early that auto-adjusting tax sliders are a good idea.

Innovativeness should have a slider, and be put into its own mana pool you can spend for short term buffs, from inside a sub-sub-sub menu.

ilitarist
Apr 26, 2016

illiterate and militarist

Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:


the vicky 3 approach of "just push this button for medium taxes" takes out the opportunity to obsess over small details that probably aren't important anyway. are you missing out on some ability to get a super optimal min-maxed tax setting by having so little granularity? maybe, but also i just don't think it matters. thinking about taxation sliders isn't fun, so i appreciate them just doing away with them.

Another thing I like about Imperator/Victoria3 buttons is that you can get non-linear dependencies and different values for different positions. E.g. in Imperator underpaying soldiers dramatically lowers they morale by 25% and increases population happiness by 5%, overpaying by the same amount increases they morale merely by 10% and decreases population happiness by the same 5%. This is a more interesting choice and dependency than the one you can do with sliders. I guess you can make a slider with non-linear dependency but it will look very strange.

That's an emotionally charged choices in Imperator, you know what I mean?

ilitarist fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Apr 11, 2024

Mandoric
Mar 15, 2003
In my opinion, and eh my opinion I'm one person, that... Doesn't look strange? You're deciding whether you want 100% of the morale penalty and 100% of the pop happiness bonus or 100% of the morale bonus and 100% of the pop happiness penalty, so other somewheres along that continuum don't confuse, yes?

And then conversely when you're angling for a flat production (say of taxes) it works in the context of "I'm placing what I need from this subsystem, the red number is what it costs me", with multiplicative or even exponential swings in costs per effect at the high or low end being pretty standard.

ilitarist
Apr 26, 2016

illiterate and militarist

Mandoric posted:

In my opinion, and eh my opinion I'm one person, that... Doesn't look strange? You're deciding whether you want 100% of the morale penalty and 100% of the pop happiness bonus or 100% of the morale bonus and 100% of the pop happiness penalty, so other somewheres along that continuum don't confuse, yes?

My point is nonlinear dependency feels more, for a lack of a better word, immersive. There's an optimal value and beyond that you get diminishing returns, there's a minimal value beyond which you can't go. EU4 already has something like that in sliders, as in while army maintenance looks like it goes from 0 to 100 it really goes from 50 to 100 and you can't pay your troops less than 50% but at this point they're useless. There's no interesting choice there, at war you always go to 100, and I guess there's some choice for how much you fear possible rebels at the moment of peace, whether you go to 50 or 60% mantainance. Imperator/Victoria 3 choice of paying troops extra for diminishing returns is an actual interesting choice. You probably never go to low mantainance during the war, but you have to wonder if this war is worthy of paying your troops 25% more for mere 10% of increase of morale. It would be hard to do the same with sliders, unless you have notched slider with clear different areas. I guess they had something like that with EU3 national policies slider, but this one was very descrete and you couldn't affect it directly, you never made a decision on where on the slider you want to land, only if you're going to move it one step in any direction.

Mandoric
Mar 15, 2003
Also, on further thought isn't manpower 'uncertainty' based on that levy concieved as a ratio but legislated as a flat model too?
The bad data wasn't so much 'we don't know how many people are here and that hurts our recruitment' as 'the explicit social contract itself is 20 manpower per block of land assessed at £100 produce per year, we have a solid number we will get that is a hidden wastage from the actual potential of growth areas and a visible malus to the output of shrinking ones.'

ilitarist posted:

My point is nonlinear dependency feels more, for a lack of a better word, immersive. There's an optimal value and beyond that you get diminishing returns, there's a minimal value beyond which you can't go. EU4 already has something like that in sliders, as in while army maintenance looks like it goes from 0 to 100 it really goes from 50 to 100 and you can't pay your troops less than 50% but at this point they're useless. There's no interesting choice there, at war you always go to 100, and I guess there's some choice for how much you fear possible rebels at the moment of peace, whether you go to 50 or 60% mantainance. Imperator/Victoria 3 choice of paying troops extra for diminishing returns is an actual interesting choice. You probably never go to low mantainance during the war, but you have to wonder if this war is worthy of paying your troops 25% more for mere 10% of increase of morale. It would be hard to do the same with sliders, unless you have notched slider with clear different areas. I guess they had something like that with EU3 national policies slider, but this one was very descrete and you couldn't affect it directly, you never made a decision on where on the slider you want to land, only if you're going to move it one step in any direction.

You can just as easily have that with a slider, though, even without the notches! Middle is neither bonus and neither malus, left is all the morale malus and all the happiness bonus, right is all the happiness malus and all the morale bonus. EU4's lack of diminishing returns
is not inherent to the system.

Mandoric fucked around with this message at 09:11 on Apr 11, 2024

Groke
Jul 27, 2007
New Adventures In Mom Strength

HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:

if economic simulations allowed you to automatically adjust to perfectly balance all of your expenses and incomes, it would be a bad economic simulation.

Am not an economist but I work in a building full of them, so I've heard most of the jokes already.

(An economist is someone who could have predicted eight of the last three market crashes, etc.)

GrossMurpel
Apr 8, 2011
The minting slider in EU3 didn't matter that much once you're sufficiently big or have a giant trade income (you just set it to the maximum you can without getting inflation), but as a small nation just starting out it was very important to be able to set it to just barely mint enough that you can pay for your expenses while keeping inflation low.

ilitarist
Apr 26, 2016

illiterate and militarist

Mandoric posted:

You can just as easily have that with a slider, though, even without the notches! Middle is neither bonus and neither malus, left is all the morale malus and all the happiness bonus, right is all the happiness malus and all the morale bonus. EU4's lack of diminishing returns
is not inherent to the system.

Slider with diminishing return would be very awkward to use. As in you move it 10 pixels to the right and pay 10% more but then you get only 5% more morale. But if you move it 5 pixels instead you get what, 3% more morale? And moving it 20 pixels gives you 7% morale so unless we deal with decimals there's probably optimal position somewhere at 16 pixels that gives you 7% boost and 16% maintance increase. Or do you change the maintanance value only when the value you want to increase changes?

Maybe there are ways to solve this but you can probably see it's all unintuitive. I can imagine a set of areas for slider (most likely 2, like in EU3 policies or in EU4 for various indirectly affected sliders e.g. Mysticism/Legalism) and it might work in case of army maintanance, I guess, though I can hardly imagine a lot of uses between "pay sensible amount" and "pay all the money to squeeze some additional performance" positions on that slider. I can also see a big general slider for spending/treasury working, with a notched position for 0.

What we say though were sliders for taxing the estates, and there I understand you have these clear positions where if you raise taxes further the estate becomes disloyal. There I can totally see a set of buttons working well. Tax them as much as it's expected (this position will give you optimal loyalty/income), tax them more or less (this will give you optimal loyalty OR income without sacrificing the other too much), don't tax them at all (maximum loyalty), tax them as much as you can (maximum income). Of course without playing the game I don't know how it works, but if it requires constant fiddling with the sliders I probably won't like it. If it's set and forget till the situation changes then I expect you'll seek one of the positions I mentioned, and people around the world will spend thousands of man-hours looking for a pefrect pixel position.

Tomn
Aug 23, 2007

And the angel said unto him
"Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself."
But lo he could not. For the angel was hitting him with his own hands

Mandoric posted:

If there's only value in deciding whether you want to gain burgher loyalty equilibrium at the cost of ducats or ducats at the cost of burgher loyalty, sure, you're right. But if there's value in deciding between gaining 20 ducats at the cost of 20 burgher loyalty equilibrium or 10 ducats at the cost of 10 burgher loyalty equilibrium, the latter to be chosen when your yearly deficit is only 10 ducats, then surely there's also value in being able to gain 15 ducats at the cost of 15 burgher loyalty equilibrium when your yearly deficit is 15 ducats?

I think they've already covered that in their post:

Vizuyos posted:

if every single spot on the slider could potentially worth picking depending on the exact timing and circumstances, then congrats, you've probably damned the player to a confusing micromanagement hell

In a perfectly spherical simulation in a vacuum, sure, maybe choosing between 20 or 15 or 10 or 19 ducats could be a worthwhile, valuable choice, but in the context of a larger simulation with a bunch of other moving parts for the player to focus on I'm not convinced that making it so that it's optimal to spend a bunch of time working out how to optimize a single slider and then checking and adjusting that constantly as the situation changes is worthwhile even if the choice itself is hypothetically valuable.

The question is, what do you want the player to spend more time doing? How much of a percentage of their playtime should revolve around fiddling with sliders or buttons or what have you? Increased granularity can be valuable if that granularity is related to a central pillar of the game's design - but if that granularity is focused on something less important, it just ends up creating tedious busywork. So I suppose the question of whether sliders or buttons is better isn't actually one you can argue in the abstract, but needs to be discussed in the context of the specific game design and its goals. Which is going to result in a bit of mind-reading for a game that hasn't actually be released yet.

Popoto
Oct 21, 2012

miaow
when you think about it, the 5 tax levels in vic3 are only a slider with 5 increments :smug:

YF-23
Feb 17, 2011

My god, it's full of cat!


Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:

You can't just add unfun mechanics and then say "well, don't engage with them if they're not fun." If it's optimal to engage with them, then players will do so regardless of how tedious these mechanics are. Good game design involves eliminating opportunities for players to optimize the fun out of the game.

I think this is overstating how much overhead taxation/expenses sliders require. I would like to think that a good amount of people in this thread remember EU3 and V2, and as much as I think the way EU4 handles technology and stability through singular monarch power investments is good, or V3 handling taxation by having you deal with impactful decisions like having to pass better taxation policies and having to deal with significant radicalism/approval penalties if you want to increase taxes makes for compelling design, I don't think anyone ever praised those changes for reducing overhead relative to the previous games.

In fact, for V2 -> V3 I would argue that you probably choose to make changes to taxation severity about as frequently in either game. It only happens when you think "I really need more money now" or "I can afford to take a hit to state finances for the sake of POP SOL", the only difference is that in the first game you set the sliders wherever feels right and in the latter you press a button. I think there's a good argument to be made that V3's taxation is better designed, but not because it cuts down on minmaxing.

Frionnel
May 7, 2010

Friends are what make testing worth it.
I just don't see sliders or buttons as really too different, besides people getting riled up that Johan was once again unprofessional and smugly called out his fellow devs for a minor creative difference.

We don't know how the game plays, how much you have to use the sliders or even how the automation feature works. Like, i agree that steps of 0.1% is too much but would be perfectly satisfied with steps of 1%.

Frionnel fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Apr 11, 2024

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

DrSunshine
Mar 23, 2009

Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!
Continuous sliders and they come with a graph with projected tax/morale/etc effects that visualize the nonlinearities with equilibrium curves.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply