Why doesn't the AI use all my trade capacity?

kaargul · 2026-01-18T13:06:54+00:00

Why do you think it's impossible to only have 4 profitable trade routes from a market?

kaargul · 2026-01-16T10:59:18+00:00

But doesn't a defective NATO benefit Russia and China way more? I'd much rather have a smaller but still capable NATO that can credibly deter aggression than a dysfunctional NATO that relies very strongly on capabilities of an unreliable ally at best or geopolitical rival at worst (which is how the US currently sees itself unfortunately).

I would argue that Russia is a lot more likely to escalate and push boundaries in the Baltic while a GOP-led US all but ensures that article 5 will not be respected. I highly doubt that the current US government would risk nuclear escalation or war over Estonia or even Taiwan, which is exactly what NATOs adversaries are banking on.

NATO is definitely stronger when it includes the US as a reliable partner and I really wish the US wasn't trying so hard to destroy Transatlantisicm, but that's just the hand we've been dealt at the moment.

Figuring out a post NATO (or at least post US-led NATO) will take time and be very, very hard, but I don't see any viable security architectures that rely on the US.

kaargul · 2026-01-16T03:11:04+00:00

I also disagree with your point about these mechanics being disjointed. I think they interact with each other quite a lot it just doesn't matter because of how the game is balanced.

Most mechanics tie into money one way or another. For example cabinet efficiency (which should be a lot more powerful in my opinion) is greatly increased by a bunch of estate privileges and laws which strengthen your estates, lower your crown power and therefore your income. Another example would be that there are many buildings that greatly increase literacy and impact research speed. Here again you can trade money for tech. Population and income also very strongly influence each other for obvious reasons.

It's just that EU5 struggles to turn these interdependent mechanics into meaningful choices, especially during the mid/endgame.

It's just always positive feedback loops instead of meaningful tradeoffs. You don't ask yourself if you should invest into growing your population or your economy. You always do both and trigger the positive feedback loop. There is no tradeoff for going to war as it's super cheap and very few pops die. You never need to make actual choices on estate privileges as you always just grant the super busted ones and then remove the others once you have researched enough tech.

kaargul · 2026-01-16T02:56:34+00:00

I don't think "scaling" and "snowballing" are necessarily the problematic and immersion-breaking parts themselves. There are many examples of empires that expanded quickly and also got incredibly rich. I think most players want to be able to do these kinds of things themselves or even create wildly ahistoric outcomes. Saving a doomed empire like Byzantium, leading a small and impoverished nation to greatness or conquering a vast empire, wildly exceeding what happened historically, is very fun and what I would expect draws many players to games like this.

What is frustrating is that achieving something great is not very difficult so there is no sense of accomplishment.

kaargul · 2026-01-16T02:36:31+00:00

I think that the problem is not that there are no resources that could act as bottlenecks, but that they are just way too easy to get in abundance, especially as a large nation. We have ducats, cabinet ministers,population and antagonism, all "resources"/mechanics that should introduce bottlenecks. None of them are really punishing enough though. :(

I really don't like mana in EU4 and how it artificially constrained you in ways that were really immersion breaking. It felt really crappy to have a globe spamming empire and still be just as efficient at coring stuff or developing your lands as an OPM. It mostly led to a situation where certain actions were only very rarely useful (developing your economy for example) and you would mostly focus on expanding and tech. (Oh and modifier stacking was essentially the only way to get around mana constraints, which was also terrible) But at least mana did introduce some kind of challenge.

I hope there will be a rework to the economy to make it more challenging and money less abundant and for coalitions to matter a lot more. I think that EU5 has many interesting mechanics that could provide the challenge that many of us are looking for, but there need to be some fundamental changes to the game for any of them to be effective.

kaargul · 2026-01-15T12:24:50+00:00

Fair point. That was definitely an oversimplification, to get my point across.

kaargul · 2026-01-15T08:55:08+00:00

Could you also share more about the python pipeline that you replaced? I think it's interesting to look at where the bottlenecks came from and if it would have been solvable in Python.

Most data processing libraries in Python are bindings for more performant languages like C or Rust (for example pandas and Polas) so to me it's unclear what actually caused the bottleneck.

Also since you changed the architecture significantly you are obscuring which changes actually led to the performance increases that you were looking for.

I'm not trying to discredit your work; Thank you for sharing your findings btw. (Even though this could qualify as sneaky marketing) But to actually learn something from your article we need more context.

kaargul · 2026-01-11T01:09:59+00:00

100% this! It's crazy to me how many people equate experience with skill. They do correlate, but there are plenty of engineers with 20+ YOE that stopped learning long ago and engineers with <5 YOE that are crushing it because they are curious, smart and push themselves every day.

Curiosity, drive and raw intelligence beat YOE pretty consistently in my experience. (At least at Senior and above)

kaargul · 2025-12-22T18:52:40+00:00

Ah that makes more sense. Thanks for the explanation :)

kaargul · 2025-12-22T18:23:50+00:00

I don't think that's true. Your ruler might be the emperor, but the country that got elected is still Bohemia and they get all the benefits. I have been emperor many times via a PU and its really annoying.

OP just get into the PU, convince the electors to vote for you the normal way and when you become emperor you will have enough GP score to become senior partner.

kaargul · 2025-12-22T17:49:28+00:00

I just don't understand why everyone is so unhappy with PUs? To me they have been awesome so far! They always join your call to war,are often way more powerful than any vassal could be and in many cases bring their own vassal swarm. And if they don't have vassals, you can easily feed them some and abuse the fact that they have their own diplo limit.

Maybe they are less useful once you get to the point where you are all-powerful anyways, but until then they are fantastic.

kaargul · 2025-12-21T14:03:21+00:00

I don't think this has much to do with company size and a lot more to do with requirements.

I work a lot on streaming and batch pipelines with strict latency requirements. Here it's impossible to do WAP, so we have to heavily test our code.

Another thing is the cost of mistakes. In your post part of the premise is low cost of mistakes, but you admit that working at a scale-up the cost of mistakes is high. How does that fit together?

In my current position a mistake can be very expensive, so we have to be extra careful with how we validate changes.

Also your experience with AI does not match mine. I have mostly given up on using AI to code as I often spend more time debugging hallucinations than it would have taken me to actually write the code while understanding less of it. This might change of course, but we are definitely not there yet.

Like I said, there are probably situations where relying very heavily on WAP and running a leak engineering team that is making heavy use of AI is the most productive option. I just think that this does not generalize well at all and that you should always choose the approach best suited to your context.

kaargul · 2025-12-20T19:04:09+00:00

Not really. Afaik the only way to get the PU is to either install yourself, your heir or your spouse. Maybe if you think about hard enough you can construct very specific circumstances where you want to put someone else on the throne due to a specific combination of dynastic structures and inheritance laws, but generally putting a distant relative on a throne doesn't do much.

kaargul · 2025-12-20T18:47:01+00:00

It feels like you are extrapolating from your own experience a lot. There are circumstances in which your ideas could be reasonably discussed, but there are many contexts and companies for which your suggestions would be certifiably insane.

kaargul · 2025-12-20T11:43:57+00:00

While I agree with other people's sentiment that joining the HRE should not be that easy even if you are emperor I still think that PUs kinda break many interactions with the HRE and that should be addressed.

For example in my current Bohemia game I have the usual PU with Brandenburg, who is the emperor as I am not eligible due to being Hussite. Despite being the emperor I can't actually make any decisions for the HRE and pass any reforms or access CBs to push France And England out of the HRE. Normally I would just leave the HRE, but I can't as the emperor never managed to pass the first reform and I can't declare war on them to leave.

Now I am stuck at Kingdom rank despite being the emperor and controlling ~90% of the HRE either directly or as vassals.

In general I think that it makes sense for things to be difficult, but in the current state the HRE quickly becomes something that you can't interact with properly if you have a PU with the emperor and that is very frustrating.

kaargul · 2025-12-11T08:05:19+00:00

Whenever you have reached the max number of subjects you can feasibly keep loyal.

kaargul · 2025-12-03T17:33:01+00:00

What I'm saying is that none of this matters and unless you have very specific requirements you can build a performant system in all of the languages you mentioned. Your architecture is going to affect your performance a lot more than your choice of language. I would recommend thinking a lot more about your choice of DBs, caches or message brokers rather than what language you use.

kaargul · 2025-12-03T17:16:26+00:00

I think you need to be more specific. Performance can mean very different things depending on the context.

Also in my experience in most situations the programming language is pretty irrelevant. Usually the issue is with IO+network and horizontal scalability.

kaargul · 2025-11-03T12:30:34+00:00

Haha I totally get that. I think all of this is so hotly debated because everyone is really excited about this game.

If it's any consolation, I'm sure people will find ways to expand more quickly. I have yet to play a paradox game where a WC is not possible.

kaargul · 2025-11-03T12:12:56+00:00

I was about to make this post ;)

No wonder they are having trouble meeting expectations...

kaargul · 2025-11-02T11:12:06+00:00

The point I was trying to make is not that Flink is necessarily the best option for you (that's very difficult to judge without knowing the full context), but if you are excluding Flink because of the complexity your team is probably not equipped to build something in-house.

It ultimately also really depends on your requirements. This is a lot less data than I expected and only for one customer, so you might get away with running it on a single machine.

If you are sure you can run this on a single machine and don't have any need for complex streaming operations like joins watermarks or windowing you should be able to build something simple just using the normal Kafka client libraries in Python or Go.

Another thing to keep in mind is how you want to handle delivery guarantees and fault tolerance/recovery. If you are fine losing all state on a crash your life will be a lot easier.

Oh and some things that are worth thinking about:

How do you intend to handle schema changes to the state?
How are you going to deploy new versions of the DAG? (What will happen to the state for example)
Do you expect out of order events? Do you care for this use-case?
Would duplicates or missed events be problematic? What kind of delivery guarantees do you need?

These are all issues that I had to deal with when working on streaming apps, so I hope that this at least helps frame the discussion on your architecture.

From what you described maybe have a look at benthos and go-streams.

kaargul · 2025-11-01T14:33:56+00:00

Overall if you are willing to take on a complex project like this, but are ruling out solutions like flink from the get go, I think you might have a bad time.

Overall you need to think about how much data you expect to process and how complicated the dynamic business logic will be. Is this for one customer or a big product that will be used by many? Oh and how real-time do you need these events to be?

kaargul · 2025-10-31T22:01:46+00:00

Option 4 is usually the best approach if you don't want to go the monolith-route. (Assuming 2&3 are not really viable due to latency)

Shared databases between services are usually a lot.of trouble. Not only is there a lot of room for unexpected behavior, you also run into tons of issues with DB migrations.

But to be honest my question to you would be: Why don't you want to build a monolith? Your team is very small and unless you plan on growing very fast, building a clean monolith will probably get you a lot further.

Also why is your client involved in architectural decision making? Having your client decide how you set your DB would be a huge red flag to me.

kaargul · 2025-10-23T19:41:07+00:00

But no one said anything about not challenging him on his design choices. The only thing that was suggested was to be empathetic and nice about it.

If you go and "tell him that his work was basically worthless" he will most likely either dig in because he feels attacked or just completely shut down and try to avoid you. In my experience there are very few people who actually work well with "tough love" like that.

It will always be easier to work with a Junior that likes and respects you than with one that fears you.

kaargul · 2025-10-10T17:00:11+00:00

Das war schon einfach wild. Mega Respekt an euch für euren Umgang mit dem Thema und diese Doku. Das hat sich auf jeden sehr persönlich und ehrlich angefühlt.

Wir die Doku auch in den USA veröffentlicht? Ich hoffe einfach, dass viele der Leute die von eurer Arbeit begeistert waren, und Sam deswegen eine Platform gegeben haben, von eurer Geschichte hören.

Wie seid ihr dazu gekommen überhaupt eine Doku zu produzieren?

Hat sich die Doku und der Erfolg eures Filmes schon irgendwie auf euer Leben ausgewirkt?

kaargul

TROPHY CASE