When will you cease with the meme that blobbing is bad?
The truth of the matter is that expanding is where you have to make interesting choices when it comes to strategy, where as "playing tall" is just following the same build template every time. They made a game JUST for tallgays and guess what, it's called Victoria 3 and the play style sucks.
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Stop making those moronic bait threads.
Vicky 3 isn't for tallgays, otherwise they wouldn't have basically forced you to blob by spreading resource deposits out. You quite literally cannot run a lategame economy without TNO tier bullshit like annexing the entirety of the modern UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, plus most of sub-saharan Africa
Just saw a YouTube video and the guy has a VERY successful economy as sikkim, all he ever blobbed into was Bhutan and Nepal
>the guy
who?
The guy that made the YouTube video
What youtuber? jesus christ c'mon man
Quarbit gaming
The British Empire blobbed brehz. 25 percent of the world. no blobbers allowed!
We've had this exact same thread already.
When will jannies begin doing their jobs?
blobbing is just unimaginative
>Merchant empire that doesnt have access to the most lucrative trade node in the game unless they take it by force next door
nah you still gotta blob
Looks like you have a lot of vassals.
Same here. Look at the new world on the minimap.
>using the shortest A* path.
As opposed to the longest A* path?
>he doesn't know about the Hundred Years War
Subject nations are not blobbing.
Blobbing is bad for RP, so more or less you're right
What games strike a real balance between wide and tall playstyles? And which of those don't do it by cucking wide playstyles with artificial penalties?
Having someone post screencaps your posts feels weird. Kind of like having a fanboy.
The problem is blobbing is easy, not punished, and snowballs super hard. CK3 is the only game that has even a semi-realistic punishment in the forced gavelkind. In every other game you could have a nation that spans half the world and as long as you knew how to prevent rebels it would be the most stable nation in the world. A nation will never collapse or fragment. If you don't go over the arbitrary make everyone angry limit noone will ever care how many nations you absorb. You blob and you grow richer and stronger so you can blob and grow richer and stronger and it's a never ending cycle of growth.
Paradox genuinely doesn't know how to mitigate blobbing. Look at shit like the arbitrary attrition for troops crossing the sea in EU4. Did that stop people from doing World Conquests?
The problem is that strategy games can't really simulate bad choices that lead to nations' collapse well. Most of the history is due to people not knowing what they are doing, but strategy games are easily solvable.
That's why you play ck2/ck3 with a "swap dynasty on death" mod
OKAY, YOU get to get hired into the eu4 devteam
How do YOU "fix" this without overhauling the entire game
Different anon but I'd make provinces suffer an admin penalty that grows with each contiguous owned povince away from the capital, using the shortest A* path. Sea provinces treated as owned but with a higher penalty. At zero admin efficiency you don't levy any taxes or troops from them and they have basically no value beyond prestige. Improving tech and infrastructure mitigates the penalty but never overcomes it.
Creating vassals / clients reduces this penalty in that they're administered from their own capital, but the more of them you have & further away, the more autonomous they are, more dangerous in civil war, and you won't be assimilating them.
This would also penalize snaking and you'd want to expand in a more uniform manner.
Yes moron this is why the UK took over France instead of India and North America, closer to london you see
>north america
colonial nation, ergo doesn't suffer the admin penalty
>india
trade company, negating the penalties
Okay so you blob by creating trade companies everywhere which is basically what you do in eu4 except without the 50% territories nonsense
so your ideal eu4 experience would be like ck3 where you need to create a vassal state for every region you conquer and then wrangle them?
I assume in your ideal world trade companies would be subjects like new world nations not eu4 trade companies which are just funny territories
France was a great power at the time and Britain had no means of conquering it.
North America had no meaningful local opposition, but because of the distance most of their colonies there rebelled.
India was a bunch of feuding princedoms that gradually got annexed or vassalized by clever EIC directors. It was then nationalized by the UK, which only managed to hold onto it for about a century before it became untenable.
Okay so the only reason the UK didn't just annex France is because they couldn't beat their military. So if they could win battles and occupy, they'd annex.
This REWARDS blobbing since it means you should be annexing Benelux as Germany first thing and then Namibia would bebe useless to you
Targeting the Netherlands for annexation as Germany IS a reasonable goal if you can get away with it so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
So it's game over when I hit max admin efficiency
Better yet, make it so revolt risk is based on the distance to the capital. And tie the revolt risk to the presence of troops.
So, if France annexes Sweden, they are forced to station a large army (costs more than Swedish income) in Sweden in order to keep revolt risk down. So, annexing Sweden wouldn't be profitable to France.
Distant provinces needing maintenance seem to be a common problem with empire. Eventually, you will reach diminishing returns, so did Achemenids, so did the Romans, so did Japan.
This would be more meaningful if the entire game's economy didn't exist on its own in a handful of Western European states from 1444.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1435555719
this guy already fixed eu4. a shame the mod stopped working, eu4 is unplayable without it.
I've played a bunch of those anti blobbing mods. They arguably make the game worse since AI countries are constantly collapsing. You can't really stop or punish blobbing in EU4 because of two core problems
>no restrictions on military power projection
If the ottomans can send 100k men to any point of their empire, you can't model the gradual erosion of an empire on the frontiers due to rebellion or foreign powers. Blobs can only be defeated by other blobs, and changing the conditions by which effective blobs are formed (e.g. meiou) doesn't change that.
>states have no survival instinct
AE is supposed to model states banding together against blobbers but it doesn't work because the game is designed around temporary AE and a strict AE limit. If you stretch out your conquests, you can blob with impunity and nobody will care.
no, england took over india because india was full of browns infighting browns and france was full of white men that actually fought back and didn't switch sides willy nilly
Ah yes.... France.... Famous for no infighting.......
Remind me..... What's the war at the start....
if you're talking about the 100 years war it was a civil war between frenchmen with no outside involvement
yes that sounds like infighting to me
except they united every time an external enemy attacked
Took them long enough,
make me, israelite
Terminally boring ESLism
52
Make AI more competent in general.
Make Agressive Expansion permanent or near-permanent.
Is this blobbing?
yes
Nope, that's transitioning.
If the cost for blobbing goes up superlinearly, then it's fine, in theory. I think the problem is when you win the game 1/3rd of the way in and then you all you have to do is just blob your way to victory. There must also be opportunities for little guys to fracture the blob, or for the blob to fracture itself so that the little guys can seize the opportunity.
The whole "tall vs wide" meme came from shitters who were bad at Civ and wanted to have comfy simpsons threads with 2 or 3 cities in the corner of the map and just turtle to victory no matter the circumstances. Obviously on higher difficulties or against other players this isn't an effective strategy.
Unfortunately devs caved in to the incessant whining and it became an industry trend and now you see the same shitter mindset in paradox games despite "blobbing" (ie expansion) having always been the aim because paradox games have board game roots like most wargames.
It is fun to try and achieve with 4 states what normally requires 40
I think it's different if you know that you're imposing challenges on yourself or just playing at a leisurely pace. I haven't played paradox games in a long long time but when I did that was basically how I played them too. But asking developers to rewire the game so that sitting on your mountain of hot pockets is as effective as expanding and eliminating the competition is asinine. There'll never be a wargame like that. It's like asking for blunt swords to be as good as sharp ones.
>occupy province
doesn't actually involve "occupation", a garrison spawns from the void, without any maintenance or recruitment costs
walls also magically repair
in fact there's very little permanent damage from war in general, most of the time it is temporary modifier penalties and there are 0 repairing costs
as for your casualties, they are automatically replenished every monthly tick through your manpower pool or levy reinforcement (vicky is an obvious exception)
so you have a game where occupations do not actually require any troop investment, conquered provinces do not get depopulated or damaged and an army that can just mindlessly march forward
under these circumstances, how would blobbing ever not be the best decision?
paradox keeps coming up with the dumbest shit to control this, things like caps on peace deals, CB limitations, mana costs, softcaps, etc
all these ideas are bandaids that desperately try to cover up how fricked the core mechanics are
meanwhile in total war
>occupation
you actually need to maintain a military presence to prevent an uprising or an instant reconquest
>damage
conquest actually causes damage to infrastructure that you need to repair, some games also feature population loss. this damage/loss is proportional to how violent your take-over is
>casualties
in the old ones you actually had to retrain damaged units or bring reinforcements from home
i fricking hate totalwar brainlets
Blobbing is bad because it deprives the game of any challenge it might have, it also makes for shitty screenshots
Total War has zero challenge regardless of what you do, no playing on the hardest difficulty so the AI gets massive bonuses to everything is not a solution
Modern TW is still better than EU4. Probably CK3 too.
I'm glad that Stellaris got rid of admin cap, at least the old style of it
You just grow logarithmically rather than being punished, that's how wide should be handled. There should always a little bonus to expanding, but it can have diminishing returns aside from controlling more area
>GIVE THE PLANET TO THE AI OR SUFFER A (X*10/100) PENALTY FOR OVER CAP PENALTY
>LET'S BUILD A FARM IN EVERY SQUARE AND SLAVE AVERY POPULATION, FRICK YOUR ECONOMY/RESEARCH
Fricking moronic
>conquered provinces do not get depopulated or damaged
This actually did happen in EU3. They removed it in EU4.
Why do people feel the need to open their mouths when they don't know what the frick they are talking about? You don't know what blobbing means. It's not just "expanding". It doesn't involve any "interesting choices". The whole fricking point is that the game gets easier the bigger you get to the point that it just becomes a meaningless chore akin to painting a map in MS Paint. The opposite of blobbing is not "playing tall". It's a game that allows for interesting and challenging expansion with realistic constrainst while also providing interesting and challenging peacetime gameplay. Note how Vicky3 does none of this. In fact the disaster that was Vicky3 was directly caused by asinine morons like you who think tall vs wide is some kind of game design decision rather a strategy to execute within an already well designed game.
Is that why your mother expand herself to the whole fricking city and that's what you learned from her?
>enters the pro-blob thread
I see you don't value your time
on the contrary, afk-ing through the game in at max speed is more time efficient than microing wars
Playing tall is a cope and there is always a ceiling
Inspect my pants. GO ON! I DARE YOU! You will see my pants are full of poo! Such is the excitement of playing Victoria 3.
I don't get it
Blobbing is boring because you just get stronger and stronger. Empires tend to collapse faster the bigger they are, because the bigger the empire bigger its internal threats are.
I don't recall a single game that depicts this properly... Ultimately a game about politics should be about politicians, not countries because countries are mere means to an end.
When you annex a province, it should be done only because the politicians needed it, but because player just wanted to blob.
Stop cheating, play on a higher difficulty
Difficulty in PDX games is just giving AI more bonuses
the blobbing adds to the realism
Blobbing is the only fun part of these games, playing le tall and just watching numbers go up is boring as frick just like how Victoria 3 proved
I suppose map-painting creates a sense of accomplishment, but the real question is how do you create an equivalent without just "watch numbers grow"?
Anything that doesn't result in "Acquire territory/vassals" is tall play. That means making trade wars, humiliation wars, lending, navies, mercenaries, and peace treaties much more significant.
This means being able to add much more vicious terms to peace treaties, such as "a full destruction/confiscation of naval equipment, a ceding of income on certain good types to the victor, longer-lasting "Steer Trade" agreements (15 years isn't enough if we have to declare a second or third war to keep the benefits), manpower/army seizure, and the destruction of buildings/conversion of them into tribute money.
See, the complaint originally that blobbing is boring and easy, that the game does not create any difficulties in creating a massive empire and so any nation with large lands would easily snowball and face no threats past the beginning of the game.
Then braindead redditors, corporate apologists and mindless repeaters of what they see others saying misunderstood that complaint that it was bad for the player to blob
Making conquest difficult is easy but PDX isn't interested.
Take EU4 for instance, in EU4 occupying an entire country is easy even if you only have a few regiments, because "occupation" just means sitting on a province for a week with any number of men, it doesn't tie units down. So, if Paris isn't a fort, 1,000 men can occupy it and move out.
It's pretty awful, especially when you are arbitrarily limited to what you can take in a single war, so you just end up in full-occupying countries every war.
If "occupation" would require you to leave soldiers to occupy enemy provinces relative to province's development, the total occupation would become extremely difficult or outright impossible in a single war.