skasion posted:

FWIW I enjoy Anbennar and I think the mission trees are fun by and large, but someone at Pdox does need to find a way to translate mission objectives into plainer English. Picking through layers of nested “one of the following must be true: all of the following must be true: no provinces in province group Grouped Provinces has: provinces” is no one’s idea of a good time.

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

They do! I am talking about requirements:


I just plain do not understand what is being asked of me after "Any Ally:" without reading it like three times. Does Any Ally have to have that stuff AND I also have provinces there? Bullet Points and a descriptor of and/or indicating what I have to do would help me tremendously. If "Any Ally" had a square bullet point then anything attendant to "Any Ally" had an indented round bullet point I would understand what is specific to that and not something else entirely. I'm confused why it seems to be saying something about an ally but then also has something to say about what I have to do without any clear delineation between them.

Here is another one that takes several reads for me to understand because it is just a slightly formatted wall of text:


This would be so much more comprehensible to me if each of the requirements each had their own bullet point.
All of the following must be true:

• Irish Culture is an accepted culture in England
  
• Highlander Culture is an accepted culture in England
  
• 10 owned provinces with:
  --The culture is Irish
  
• 5 owned provinces with:
  --The culture is Highlander

50 owned Provinces (current: 30) with:

• The Culture Group is British

edit: to be clear, I am NOT asking for advice here, I am simply pointing out something that I struggle with due to the way my brain is wired. I dont need help with EU4 or understanding these specific missions.

skasion posted:

FWIW I enjoy Anbennar and I think the mission trees are fun by and large, but someone at Pdox does need to find a way to translate mission objectives into plainer English. Picking through layers of nested “one of the following must be true: all of the following must be true: no provinces in province group Grouped Provinces has: provinces” is no one’s idea of a good time.

skasion posted:

FWIW I enjoy Anbennar and I think the mission trees are fun by and large, but someone at Pdox does need to find a way to translate mission objectives into plainer English. Picking through layers of nested “one of the following must be true: all of the following must be true: no provinces in province group Grouped Provinces has: provinces” is no one’s idea of a good time.

oddium posted:

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

They do! I am talking about requirements:


I just plain do not understand what is being asked of me after "Any Ally:" without reading it like three times. Does Any Ally have to have that stuff AND I also have provinces there? Bullet Points and a descriptor of and/or indicating what I have to do would help me tremendously. If "Any Ally" had a square bullet point then anything attendant to "Any Ally" had an indented round bullet point I would understand what is specific to that and not something else entirely. I'm confused why it seems to be saying something about an ally but then also has something to say about what I have to do without any clear delineation between them.

Here is another one that takes several reads for me to understand because it is just a slightly formatted wall of text:


This would be so much more comprehensible to me if each of the requirements each had their own bullet point.
All of the following must be true:

• Irish Culture is an accepted culture in England
  
• Highlander Culture is an accepted culture in England
  
• 10 owned provinces with:
  --The culture is Irish
  
• 5 owned provinces with:
  --The culture is Highlander

50 owned Provinces (current: 30) with:

• The Culture Group is British

edit: to be clear, I am NOT asking for advice here, I am simply pointing out something that I struggle with due to the way my brain is wired. I dont need help with EU4 or understanding these specific missions.

pdxjohan posted:

Wtf? Where did you get that prealpha screenshot ?

Raenir Salazar posted:

Honestly this has been a massive pain, where some of the Grombar missions that involve building X, Y and Z in various provinces are super unclear.

Speaking of grombar, you can through the orc migration events, lose tolerance and end up oppressing regular orcs if you're half-orc, which is annoying for the face of the north mission, as it was like 60 years to work it back up to co-existence.

It is kinda funny though, all of the half-orc ignoring/avoiding grandapa orc like the plague (he's says racist things about elves).

Raenir Salazar posted:

Honestly this has been a massive pain, where some of the Grombar missions that involve building X, Y and Z in various provinces are super unclear.

Speaking of grombar, you can through the orc migration events, lose tolerance and end up oppressing regular orcs if you're half-orc, which is annoying for the face of the north mission, as it was like 60 years to work it back up to co-existence.

It is kinda funny though, all of the half-orc ignoring/avoiding grandapa orc like the plague (he's says racist things about elves).
i

Wafflecopper posted:

There are tricks you can use to boost tolerance up faster. Using racial focus set to orc will make their tolerance events fire more often. If you beat a nation that is expelling or purging orcs you can make them stop for a big tolerance boost. Accepting orcish cultures will also boost it.

pdxjohan posted:

Wtf? Where did you get that prealpha screenshot ?

Kild posted:

The AI really just wants the peace of westphalia (joke)

Johan posted:

We mentioned taxes before, and while this is not the development diary where we go into details about the economic system, it is important to mention that the estates of a country have wealth that is increased by the amount of money that you have not taken from them in taxes. Rich estates will use their wealth on many things, primarily to invest into things that benefit them, but will often also build things that also benefit the country.

KOGAHAZAN!! posted:

This is the most interesting part to me.

The M&T influence is very obvious here.

Raenir Salazar posted:

Any talk of how militaries work yet? One thing I'd like to see is a move away from the manpower pool and regenerating in the field regiments model which makes wars kinda feels out of place and more attritional than they were in reality.

I feel like how it should work is for a while anyways, armies should be more regional in nature, more culturally specific (i.e Swiss Mercs), and more tied to specific depots where you need to bring them back in order to reconstitute them; and maybe a little more complexity to attrition that isn't just a flat number that slowly drains your armies into nothingness because you parked it somewhere weird.

It would also be nice if instead of moving from province to province there was something for sub province-wise for movement or an entirely different map. It's weird for there to be attrition the way its modeled in EU4 while also having an army occupying an entire province and presumably looting it.

And some sort of supply line/wagon-baggage train system to make combat more interesting than rolling at each other with doomstacks.

CommonShore posted:

And mercs should be much different from how they are rn. They should have minds of their own to a certain extent and represent a perpetual threat to the state in (again in the EU4 vocabulary) low-stability, low-legitimacy, and/or low-prestige environments, maybe in some cases taking over their own movement or deciding to retreat from battles, or in worst-case scenarios converting to rebels or switching sides.

Jay Rust posted:

That sounds really annoying to deal with

Jay Rust posted:

That sounds really annoying to deal with

Gaius Marius posted:

Good. Convenience is the death of interesting game design.

CommonShore posted:

But it's a big part of the historical model that's lacking in the current design. Like read Machiavelli: half of it is "don't trust the mercenaries, and don't forget really don't trust the loving mercenaries". Half of the 30yw was armies owned by dudes who were some unholy mix of landed noble and mercenary warlord. Foreign mercenaries deciding just to start raiding the countryside or declaring themselves warlords was a major problem for the Romans for centuries. The Normans carved out tons of states on a model of "Get hired as mercenary - claim legitimate ownership of territory after victory," which is one way of understanding the First Crusade. These guys switched sides all of the time. The dilemma that states faced was risking all of these problems if they wanted a well-equipped, professional army right when they needed it.

And it's the kind of thing that could be mitigated by idea groups or other modifiers. Hell, different mercenary groups could even have their own stats - "this free company is cheap but low professionalism but extremely loyal, this one is more expensive with good professionalism and reliably loyal, but this one here has top notch professionalism and a low price tag but the leader is chaotic and they have no loyalty." Also the equivalent of espionage ideas could be used to muck around with your enemies mercenaries.

Jay Rust posted:

I contend that this is first and foremost a video game, and losing a dice roll and having a mercenary army break ranks to go siege down your capital is not fun, no player would use high-risk mercs.

Sybot posted:

Very interested by the brief mention of levies in regards to the estates. Modelling the change from feudal levies to professional armies by having you rely on estate troops in the early game and then starting to build up a standing army as you gather more power onto the crown would be a good way to do it. I wonder what sort of levies you get from the other kind of estates. Maybe mercs from the merchants, and peasant mobs (that can be buffed in the right hands) fromthe commoners.

CommonShore posted:

Then don't hire them. Or perhaps expect that there would be other ways of interacting with these mechanisms and managing their loyalty, just like every other mechanism in the game.

Historically mercs revolt when they can overpower the rest of a state's available army, when they think that the population will accept them as leaders, when they don't get paid, or when they get bribed by a foreign power. Historically states hire risky mercs when they're desperate. Or there are other ways to model this loyalty problem - maybe mercs increase local autonomy wherever they go.

For all the talk of wanting realistic simulation, that mercenaries right now are "materialize an army out of nowhere for basically no cost other than duccats" is ridiculous.

Jay Rust posted:

I suppose it's that i am much less interested in the game's historicity, and already look at eu4's bloat and think "what does this not need". Complicated merc management is a step towards extra micro that i don't think any of us really want.

Although maybe i'm generalizing? Does anyone here pay attention to condottieri opportunities? Do people regularly use spy actions like sabotage rep and slander merchants? Wait until winter is over before invading england?

cheetah7071 posted:

And then every so often you learn that like, support rebels is actually weirdly strong? Not because the rebels do anything useful. But because it gives power projection scaling with the ducat cost of the action, and because, if the rebels have already spawned, it gives you a CB on the country regardless of range. All the insane nooks and crannies means you essentially never fully master the game, and is what gives it its longevity, I think. Even if some of the stupid options really are just completely pointless, if you remove too many of them, you risk losing what makes the game what it is.