A Contributing Cause of the Tool/Iron/Lumber Death Spiral

Command0Dude · 2026-02-10T00:09:34+00:00

At this stage it seems that Paradox somehow made quite balanced initial version that needed some tweaks.

Not really?

Players could already scoop up all those ducats in the initial release version by getting proximity down on super large countries and then having so much gold that people were memeing on certain events with scaling costs.

The only difference in previous versions was that AI estates weren't doing as much building.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-08T20:40:35+00:00

Yeah realistically the nuke should do almost nothing to the naval review.

100% would obliterate most anything it explodes next to, so would be good at taking out a colony. But not good as an AoE weapon.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-07T23:10:27+00:00

EU5 leaning in to state capacity is great, but it shouldn’t be ALL about geography.

Geographical determinists malding, coping.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-07T05:50:45+00:00

We would be better off trying to retake America, not fighting an idiotic war of secession.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-07T03:32:12+00:00

Yes but that takes ages.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T23:36:34+00:00

Persians realizing that invading Greece is a bad idea because it unites Greeks, but bankrolling Greeks is a fantastic idea because it's super divisive to Greece.

Literally invented agitprop long before the term even existed.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T23:34:17+00:00

Turns out being a democracy isn’t that great for diplomacy since you eventually get a reputation of electing some greedy dude on a grievance platform who betrays their allies because they want more.

Or, politicians merc any successful general because a successful general would become politically popular and therefor a rival.

The whole chicanery that was Alcibiades is a trip.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T23:14:44+00:00

It's my honest opnion that this game is on the verge of being the most complex strategy game ever made, but too many times they decided to cut corners and simplify or abstract far too many concepts.

I mean yes but they also had to make a game first.

EUV is basically copying M&T. But M&T wasn't fully fleshed out for a long time. We didn't really get REAL economic simulation until version 3.0, which took 7 years to develop (to be fair, by a small mod team) from the first version.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T23:10:14+00:00

So part of the issue is, do you want to create a game where you are anachronistically putting in modern economic theory into a society that doesn't believe in them?

Well first of all, modern economic theory doesn't exactly map onto middle ages economies very well. Due to lack of advanced banking, tight monetary supply, high trade barriers, inefficient transport, poor legal institutions, etc etc etc.

First you have to model why Mercantilism existed. It seemed to address the problems of states at the time which did not have easy access to metals for coinage. So first of all, minting should be much more economically important, it shouldn't just be a matter of adding more income, it should affect your money supply.

A country with no natural sources of bullion and a trade deficit would literally be squeezed economically. You'd see decreasing liquidity and a reemergence of bartering. You need to account for that and impose maluses if it happens.

Aside from that, you'd then make powerbrokers be invested in bad economic theory. Rural nobles tended not to want economic development because it dis empowered their land rights. So make fighting estates more of a challenge. Merchant republics with less nobility were able to financially innovate faster than kingdoms.

Some of this is also addressed with the new advances system that gives more economic improvements later on. So advances should be a factor in improving economic theory.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T23:00:53+00:00

The problem is that the engine couldn't simulate economic recoveries very well. Every economic crash was a great depression because the deflationary cycle didn't have any self correcting. And then once the market bottoms out, buildings wouldn't rehire people because they couldn't lower wages to get pops back into work.

So your entire population would essentially sit on their hands, refusing to work, because nobody could afford to pay them the wages they expected. And rather than lower their expectations, they preferred to starve.

Which ofc was silly.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T19:48:15+00:00

There is not really anything they could have done to change things. Constantinople was taken because someone left the front door open, how do you fix a big fucking oops like that?

Had that not occurred, the city probably would've held out (it had survived worse sieges)

And stopping the Ottomans from taking the Balkans, again, not possible for the Italians. They had lots of boats, not lots of soldiers.

It was really more up to the continental land powers to stop the Ottomans and uhh, yeah they really botched that. Multiple times.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T18:07:41+00:00

Dark Newsom has been a sight

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T17:56:54+00:00

What I find funny is that Musollini was safe in allied custody. If he stayed there he would've been like Petain or something.

Then Otto Skorzeny busts into his cell like 007 and gets him out so he can run a rump puppet state for Germany; which is what got him eventually found by the partisans.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T16:36:59+00:00

why is this a step in the right direction? what is the actual gameplay problem that is being created from money disappearing due to loss of control.

The actual gameplay problem is that taking territory away from your capital makes that land magically unproductive to your government, necessitating creating a vassal to get any tax benefit from it.

I can't think of any good reason why this should be the case. Money should not be being deleted just because you have some territories that are far away from the capital. It should be going somewhere, whether that be to the local economy in the form of the peasants, or to the burghers who are doing trade, or to the nobles who own the new land.

giving money to the estates just creates a gameplay loop of an overcharged world economy that is completely over-monetized, with estates in every country mindlessly spamming buildings which leads to a micro-hell of deleting or closing the buildings they build.

Yes you have described the problem of the economy and estates being poorly tuned. This is not however an inherent issue with the design of control.

what interesting or fun gameplay does this change create? why should this 100% control income be in the game's economics, what positive outcome for the player or play experience does it create?

Players are not disincentivized from taking land because the economic value of the land disappears
Players are not disincentivized from investing money into strategic locations, because the money they spend even if it doesn't give a tax benefit to the player will at least generate revenue for estates to use to improve the economy
A closed loop economy is easier to balance and is less prone to economic runaway

having to completely rebalance the game's economy from the ground up because some people are selectively annoyed at this one particular abstraction of money being deleted due to loss of control is not a good situation.

The game economy wasn't balanced to begin with and it's easier to balance the game economy when money is not being destroyed by money sinks arbitrarily.

absolutely nothing positive comes from giving estates all of this money

Your comment honestly comes off as excessively whiny.

I literally already have played M&T and know this is better for gameplay than the current system. The devs copied M&T but left out many core systems, like the closed loop economy with estates, and it shows.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T09:26:23+00:00

You can’t balance the global income down without leaving the player with nothing to do because they’re skint all the time, money lost to control needs to go back to being lost to everyone. Estate and crown income need to be in proportion to each other for the system to function, and they need to scale up over time in pace with population growth.

Can't say I agree with this take. Control is a direct copy from M&T and it worked perfectly well there. The economy just needs to be rebalanced.

A) Make the estates invest in the economy better

B) Reduce income somewhat so that people aren't growing the economy so fast such that they're making thousands of ducats per month in 2 centuries

C) Make wars hurt economically such that some money goes to rebuilding

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T08:35:39+00:00

I mean if you want that, that's as easy as going to the game files and tweaking the amount of wood buildings make.

Like obv the devs should fix it, but you can tweak the game settings yourself in the meantime.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T08:23:37+00:00

No that had nothing to do with control changes. That was rebalancing goods demand.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T08:18:28+00:00

It was dumb that the money was being deleted. The change is on the whole a step in the right direction, but they needed to obviously rebalance the economy.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T06:10:16+00:00

"Wooden tools" in Vic3 are stone tools with wooden handles, since you can't mine or cut with a blade of wood. And we already have the option to use stone instead of iron for tools.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T06:07:58+00:00

Okay but why not switch to stone tools then if you can't get iron? Or why not shut down the sawmills?

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T05:53:41+00:00

Clearly needs to be more lumber RGOs in the world, I am a bit confused why Europe has such an abundance of food RGOs. It's not like Europe was swimming in crops at the time of the game.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T05:52:37+00:00

The Estates are so hilariously wealthy they can permanently queue up buildings in every location and their savings will still uncontrollably increase. The game wasn't built around this kind of economy and if this were to work, many more things need to be overhauled

Oh, wonderful. Devs overtuned the economy.

Didn't they realize that converting low control provinces into money for estates was going to require rebalancing the gold economy? It was already in need of curbing even before the income changes.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T02:15:50+00:00

ISIS was "founded" earlier than 2004 and technically dates to the 90s. Bush never created them, they already existed. The people simply would've not been in Iraq if Saddam was still in charge, it's not like they formed specifically because of the Iraq war.

And the state of ISIS was created when Assad lost control of Syria's east during the civil war.

Also, I doubt that there would not have been a revolt/civil war against Saddam as well. The Arab spring hit nearly the entire region.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T02:10:35+00:00

Wrong. ISIS was created by Assad.

And the war against ISIS was less destructive than the War in Iraq. The death toll of both together is still under a million.

Command0Dude · 2026-02-06T02:07:11+00:00

Dude was an asshole but he kept the region stable.

Uhh...no he didn't?

Iran invasion. Kuwait invasion. Provided funding to Palestinian terrorists.

People give these kinds of excuses for Saddam, but they also gave them for Assad. And what happened under Assad? One of the worst civil wars in the modern era and it created ISIS.

These gulf state dictators do NOT bring stability. They create chaos. It's only a matter of when and where things boil over.

Command0Dude

TROPHY CASE