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[WealthyRadish]

Make an army with nothing but artillery. It's hilariously effective at the late tech levels (like tech 22+ it'll be better than infantry).

[Loud Whispers]

They even have artillery on their flag.  Along with a chicken.

• National flag - artillery (and chickens)
• National pastime - making artillery
• National ambitions - using artillery
• National tradition - raising artillery chickens
• Sole export - artillery munitions (used once)

[Rex_Nex]

Up from the fourth page!

My current game:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Main enemy at this point is Bohemia. Absolute monster due to their alliance with the Scandinavian/Swedish stormtroopers. Greece and Bulgaria are my vassals, Russia and Ferrara are my allies.

This is the last time I play a nation in these parts without Humanist. Religious is great and all but christ is that casus belli not worth all your land being poor due to unaccepted cultures and having to constantly run into 40k+ rebel doomstacks.

[Orange Wizard]

Andulasia, Toothpaste, Ireland, and Hansa formed? Wow.

[WealthyRadish]

That Iberia is wonderful, also great to see the fabulous Sardinia-Piedmont. Who formed Bharat?

[Rex_Nex]

Vijaynagar

[Loud Whispers]

ARGH! My Smolensk has found some horrendous setback. I had wiped Muscovy from the map, vassalized the last Kievans, absorbed the Crimeans and send forth my first colonies into the Russian interior. In my moment of undisputed strength I attacked one of the neighbouring Mongol hordes to wipe this horrifying foe from my side. Should have been easy... Only every single Mongolian horde in a stone's throw distance had been united under the Nogai horde.

It was a painful defeat. Novgorod had their territories returned, rebels broke Muscovy free (with more land than it had when I conquered it), the colonies were lost and the century of expansion Smolensk had achieved was set back by 60 years. In this time Novgorod conquered some Muscovite lands back and the Nogai horde combined all its vassal hordes into one great big horde, one to make Genghis proud.

Truly I had sinned, I had not BUILT ENOUGH CANNONS

[Bouchart]

Patch 1.15 will be out today.

[WealthyRadish]

Looks like it's mostly centered on fixing the broken stuff with Cossacks, but there are a few other good changes. New modding triggers and scope stuff, and some define values for curbing AI development (DEVELOPMENT_CAP_BASE and DEVELOPMENT_CAP_MULT). Now the AI won't develop a province past twice its starting value (unless twice that value is 10 or less) but I don't think it'll have a major effect on the AI going completely bonkers with development, except for some OPMs. It also means you should be able to keep the AI from developing at all now, whereas previously they would still happily spend 999 points on it when all you could change was cost.

[Icefire2314]

As far as buildings and development go I think they shouldn't cost MP.

Sure, it's a good restriction, but realistically speaking, I should be restricted by wealth as far as they go, not some number which, really, doesn't even represent any realistic value.

If I'm make a massive surplus in ducats per month from colonialism I should be able to pour that into developing my provinces. I guess I can use that to buy advisors, but that's only helpful to a certain degree.

[Rex_Nex]

I think the main problem with a ducat-based development system is that it's a rich-get-richer system. While realistically this is alright (that's how the world works!), in terms of gameplay effects it seems bad to me. Playing poorer countries would get incredibly hard as time went on, to the point where you've basically got to game the mechanics to get anything done at all. Additionally, playing richer countries (So, trading-focused countries) would make the game laughably easy as time passes and you have more development than half the continent combined.

If you truly want a ducat based development system, there needs to be more considerations made. You need more ways to drain a rich nation's economy, large developed nations need more mechanics to keep them from blobbing ever larger, etc. To me a ducat development system would be fine in a game that's a bit more realistic with its economy, but EU4 is not that game. There's just too much money and too much control over the money you do have for a system like that to ever work out.

[WealthyRadish]

The simplistic solution I went with to avoid some of the pitfalls was to make developing have a bad return on investment. Idea being that even in the ideal where you're only paying like 120 ducats after all the build cost penalties (from total number of provinces, local development, terrain, etc), it'll still take ages to pay for itself. Since development has other uses than money, it's still often worthwhile, but at least so far as the AI goes it seems to avoid that feedback loop of getting exponentially richer (*glares at Mutapa*).

For the player it's a whole other barrel of biscuits, there definitely need to be more severe problems with getting huge and having massive amounts of money. I've been testing an autonomy system that gives constant autonomy off of the total number of provinces (+0.1/month at 100 provinces is no joke) and other things like unaccepted cultures, with EU3-ish faux policy sliders and other measures like emergency policies to counter it. One funny thing I've tried that I like is having local autonomy generate more autonomy, so it's harder to get rid of when you raise it or let it creep high by fighting constant wars (and makes conquest less profitable long term). I think what's really critical though is some sort of a decadence system to really make things inefficient when you get huge, but it's hard to toe the line between being sufficiently harsh without making it unfun.

[Orange Wizard]

Stick the mod on the Steam workshop once you've got the numbers right, so the rest of us can praise you as Messiah enjoy your work.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

Stick the mod on the Steam workshop once you've got the numbers right, so the rest of us can praise you as Messiah enjoy your work.

There's only so much you can do with the current development system modding wise. The ducat development mod works by adding three buildings that, when combined with a 30 day pulsing event that checks for these buildings, increases the development in that province.
This is obviously not ideal since adding maintenance events tend to have a negative impact on performance. It also means that all development is linked to building cost which makes tweaking the value a lot harder since it will make the other buildings either too cheap or expensive to build. Would be nice is Paradox would just open the mechanic up for modders though.

The autonomy suggestion is an interesting one. Especially if it was linked to a dynamic centralisation mechanic that heavily penalises rapidly expansive blobs. Autonomy right now is just increase in newly conquered land and maybe lower it later when the land is all converted with no separatism. Once you start getting more advance governments/government ranks the whole system because pointless due to the huge ticking reduction you get (I still believe government ranks are stupid and only make it easier for big blobs).

I would love to see a better rebel revolt system influenced by EU:Rome and CK2. Have factions that revolt into independent states that have to be bought back into the fold. Other nations can engage in diplomacy with these rebel states which would be a massive improvement over the current rebel supporting mechanic. Finally it would stop the ridiculous rebel stack problem and better simulate historical revolts like the War of the Roses and the Dutch Revolt.

None of this will happen though because for some reason Paradox think EU4 has to be a lite strategy multiplayer wargame. EU4 needed a stronger lead designer right from the start with clearer design goals instead of flip-flopping with no clear cohesion. 

[WealthyRadish]

One thing that I'm strongly considering attempting right now is an autonomy system that dynamically changes a nation's "resting" autonomy. So for example, a large nation that's only done a small amount of centralization may have a resting autonomy of 40%, with any province higher than that ticking down and any province lower ticking up (with all other sources of reduction removed). It'd be less hamfisted than minimum autonomy and constant upticks, but the real issue is in the implementation. It'd have to be an event that checks every province regularly and swaps local modifiers constantly, while also interfacing with some convoluted system using the basic variable math available. I don't really want to go full Dei Gratia here, but it may be the best way.

The issue with the system that I've made now is that it has many pitfalls that can abused by the player. I still think it's an improvement, and the AI-AI interactions seem fine, but the AI-player interactions would be really abusable, without a clear solution.

The performance with Ducat Development (at least on my machine) has been encouraging, though, since it also uses recurring events that check every province. After around 20 years, as the events get desynchronized, I don't notice any performance dip at speed 5, even on the 30 day interval.