They made them a province modifier but AFAIK the argument is that by this point in history they where too out of date (not my argument, but one provided in dev diary discussions to be clear) I am aware that Edinburgh Castle isn't also known as the most up to date building either
@@LemonCake101 "They were out of date" is one of the most BS explanations I've ever heard, lmao. At the time they were probably one of if not the most extensive defensive works in the world and if the siege where the Byzantines finally were put in the coffin is anything to go by- even with stuff like the Great Bombard they still gave the vastly outnumbered Byzantines a fighting chance- which if rumors are to be believed- only truly collapsed once a traitor/idiot left the gates open... Also, out of date?? This has to be a joke- there's plenty monuments from thousands of years ago being in the game (like the pyramids) but most comparable imo is the Great wall of china- which is in the game, but irl was never truly finished and is argued to have been ineffective even when it was new- which is in the game... what
It's still absurdly easy to hit the cap even with the monument nerfed down to 5% Start as any non endgame tag Form Sardinia-Piedmont, England, Prussia, Hungary (temp modifier) and Russia (doesn't give adm eff but does give 15% CCR from the first mission), then form HRE and you will smash the 90% cap, potentially even before tech 27.
Same for the zorastrian monument, if I remember max level and as a zorastrian nation you gain +10% discipline, +20% fire damage, +20% shock damage and - 10% fire reduction.
One thing that is really missing from vanilla great projects is flavour text. While obviously not the most important issue, it is so fun to read about the stories behind all the great projects in the Anbennar monuments submod. It would probably go a long way to actually adding flavour to regions imo
It's actually baffling why EU4 doesnt explain the monuments when you mouse over them, a short paragraph giving a brief history of it like they have for- idk literally every mission in every unique mission tree would be quite nice.
Absolutely, i was very dissapointed when i saw they didn't have it, such a shame. One of the main reasons i still enjoy this game is the flavour and role play aspect, without it it just becomes a blob and numbers game which after like 10 years of playing is boring to me.
The video (unconsciously) hits on the inherenit issue of Eu4 which is, if I'm not trying to world conquest, what am I trying to do? In Anbennar, which this video mentions, many factions have significantly more content to distract the player, ranging from civil wars, the artifice system, or making an eternal ice queen.
I think the biggest one that makes Anbennar more replayable is that the world isn't as European centric, geographically and in trade. So, this results in Cannor itself ALWAYS getting quite strong, buuuuut there is a whole slew of other giant great powers that will rise up, even in the late game, to threaten your hegemony. I mean, when is the last time you've run into a nation with 1k dev in vanilla that ISN'T a GP? In Anbennar that's absurdly common. I mean like I'm playing a Larankar campaign rn as #1 GP by a mile, but the #3 and #4 GP are allies and actually giving some real resistance. Sure, it can sometimes make the game a slog when you're staring down the barrel of needing to war the same nation 6 times in a row to wipe it out, but that's where unique mechanics, religion and far more involved MT's come into play. This is further reinforced in the game, as Anbennar sets up SOOOO many more colonizers, meaning you can never have a monopoly on colonizing these provinces. The adventurers WILL take large chunks in different waves, and it's just about hopeless to stop every last EoA (the not HRE) tag from colonizing something Once Insyaa comes into being I think this game will be quite the masterpiece. As Insyaa's big feature will be a late game continent that is suddenly accessible and features literal Kaiju to stop your colonizing efforts. (Also, the wider Adventurers and Magic Overhauls should be nice too for varieties sake.) The big downside of Anbennar I'd say though is also an upside. It is far less of a sandbox, but what happens in each game has far more variety especially on this new patch. This combines with your MT's to mean you are definitely playing a story, but it's not your own hand crafted story.
I do feel like Great Projects could start of a bit cheaper as they are usually not worth to build until the mid-late economic game as you said. But I feel like making them exponential is just so horribly unrealistic. Why can't an empire which can afford to build thousands or farm estates every month, and a huge palace in Versailles, suddenly not afford to put some big rocks in England? Thus, I think the Anbenar way is the best way, make them only unlockable in specific circumstances.
Harsher GP requirements such as requiring either primary culture or cultural union would would IMO make projects less of a modifier stacking pick and choose but a unique flavor for various regions. For instance, most projects might only give limited or downsized bonuses if one only promoted the required culture.
Roman culture goes BRRRRRR! With one weird exception (Amsterdam bourse), the roman culture works for every great project in and near Europe that requires some accepted culture.
@@owentucker6215 it's already the case, you can convert all of Europe + the Levant to the roman culture and use all cultural monuments with the exception of that dutch one. (Which may still work so long that you accept dutch culture, the conditions seem different than the others).
I also like how theres a solid chunk of Anbennar great projects that are basically just for allowing troop movement. With the marhold tunnel and the various elevators over the mountains in Noruin.
I think if it's ever added, it should only happen when upgrading multiple monuments at once- making it multiplicative/exponential for every monument in the game would make upgrading more than just a handful of them nearly impossible even with insane income.
@@WelcomeToDERPLAND obviously specific numbers are up for debate but here's how it can be put: 1) basic price is 10 times lower than what we got now 2) for each monument you get a multiplicative penalty to the price (t1 0%, t2 20%, t3 40%), queued upgrades also count 3) at 10 dev you get the standard price with +-2% per dev. Yes, a free project in a 60 dev province.
You can get combat ability and pips so high it's honestly ridiculous. If you ever thought that countries in Anbennar are OP don't even get me started with custom nations, were you can get 45 cav combat ability just from Gov, Religion and racial military. It's not even hard to get to 85 cav combat ability. With certain mods you can also stack general pips so that your (non-warwizard) general has the same pips like an actual warwizard. Same with infantry combat ability. (Harimari are to Infantry what centaurs are for cavalry)
@@fragolastrawberry5920tbf Custom Nations will always been heavily unbalanced, youre quite literally picking and choosing your starting provinces, your ideas, your government and the mp's of your first ruler and heir. Its only nation specific events and formables that they lack
I think a good change would be to have tiered buffs based on culture. Primary and cultural union can enjoy the full buffs, accepted culture can enjoy slightly nerfed buffs, and non accepted culture can enjoy halved buffs. This would help the issue you mentioned in the video while not locking GPs out entirely
I'd say some monuments do work really well in the early game though. If they start at a certain level or are part of a mission which rewards them leveling up they can really add a lot of flavour to specific nations. when it comes to large empires conquering gp's and just building them, I'd think it would be really cool if there were like quests you had to do to be able to upgrade them, which would be costly in other ways
One point about the cost of projects that I think didn't translate well from the CK2 implementation is the availability of large cash injections into Catholic domains after crusades. The crusade system allows regions which otherwise could not afford a great project to occasionally get a large cash injection which gives them the option to get a set of modifiers which are (mostly) not game breaking (scaling military power from the great walls and fort aside), but which are meaningful for players at lower power and income levels. Cash can then further be spent on upgrades which offer variable bonuses which further rewards the player investing large cash injections into great projects as the choice of bonuses ensures that you are significantly less likely to end up with a project that is simply useless to your play style. The exponential growth in cost then limits the replicability of these bonuses as crusades offer diminishing value towards great projects making them not overly-present (and thus less special) in large, wealthy domains. I know this dynamic doesn't translate to other religions in CK2, and the crusade system is not really implementable in EU4 given the historical context of the game. Also, with money having significantly more uses in EU4, the cost-benefit of building a stage of a great project vs a bunch more other buildings and military units is a lot more contentious. However, I think the lack of a mechanism to get the mass cash injection required to actually make great projects an option for players in the early game, and the lack of customisation of bonuses, are an overlooked aspect as to why they fell flat in the EU4 implementation compared to the significantly more positive response in CK2.
My issue with features like Great Projects is that only the player understands how to utilise them. For example, in CK3, they added a feature allowing you to station your men-at-arms in your castles to buff them. Military buildings in castles buff stationed men-at-arms If you build: militia camps, outposts and workshops, your stationed archers become 9th-century space marines! Unlike the player, the AI doesn't understand how to combine certain buildings with certain types of men-at-arms. Meaning anyone with more than a beginners understanding of CK3's war mechanics can take on kingdoms as counties and win!
Some mechanics like this fall into a big trap. If the AI knew how to do this the AI would often be stronger than the player or be too capable of defeating the player. Which can ruin a game that is such a 'craft your own narrative' of a game.
I think there should be some separate Great Project building capacity, which represents the countrys ability to procure expensive building materials necessary for GPs. When building GPs this capacity then gets spread over all GPs currently under construction. Also getting rid of the possibility to just throw money at the building time, which is just silly. Maybe there can be manufacturies which increase the GP building capacity representing something like quarries.
Two things I’d add to fix great projects, one being why can you move exclusively Stonehenge and assorted other “it’s a funny rock” projects to your capital? Just a really janky mechanic honestly and one that nobody really recognizes. Second and more importantly being able to endlessly speed up the construction is also a strange choice. I shouldn’t be allowed to sacrifice 50k men to make the Parthenon slightly fancier immediately, just really weird mechanics with great projects tbh
I think it might be good if great projects were put into categories, and each country could only get the bonuses from like 2 great projects in any category. As you said, it doesn't make sense for a single nation to get a dozen palaces, no government is going to run its empire from every palace on earth. You should be able to click a button which places you court, or your clergy, military administration whatever in the great project, and only then do you get the global bonuses. You can have Alhambra and Versailles, but if you want the Winter Palace as well you'll need to deselect one of the other ones. This is a nerf to large nations, but it still is of some benefit to get multiple great projects as you can switch around a bit to suit your needs. As for local flavour, just reduce the cost to build monument for the original nation who built it historically. Edinburgh castle cheaper for Scotland, normal or slightly higher price for others.
I think there's a lot of ways to bypass the exponential cost solution. Like you can have a subject own the great project and you build it in their province for them before annexing. There's also a lot of missions out there that give free great project upgrades, so you can just build up the great projects you want, before popping the great project missions for the free upgrades.
No indeed, this is why I said the system will need tweaks, the easiest being that an annexation militarily, or as you pointed out diplomatically, should downgrade/disable the monument.
I don't really like the exponential one, but I can see the usefulness it would bring. For prestige specifically, I would go for another solution. Palaces, castles and whatever great projects should give you prestige because : - you are the only one who have them - you have the bigger one - you have more than other countries. Thus we could have a pool of prestige from great projects that you access if you have more/bigger GP than other countries. And we could go the other way as well where you get negative prestige if countries of your size/power have more than you on average. I don't see a problem with local modifiers on great projects but for global ones (discipline/AE/etc), I think we could either remove them or have some kind of upkeep instead that would be exponential if you want to use it. Maybe a discount if your great project is in your initial land (like the scotland one) ?
I like the idea of the exponential cost, the perk of allowing countries to build their native monuments is a neat one, though if they're so free you can get them up early it does make me worry about things like Spain starting with the OP admincost wonder vs Scotlands crappy castle or the myriad ones that are even worse than it. I don't think I'd like the exponential scaling to be uncapped though. I feel like at the point where you're asking for 128k you're talking about games that are already fundamentally won, might as well let people enjoy their modifiers at (or before) that point if they want to get silly. It'd also avoid a situation where, if GPs are essentially capped on a certain number, there isn't some prescribed route through the world to pick up the right wonders and upgrade them correctly, otherwise it works against the idea of your first GPs being cheap if you're a country such as Japan, because upgrading your cultural GPs would be a massive handicap to the overall game if they make the "good" ones either only buildable significantly later or, potentially, not at all. I suppose another potential option would be to have the cost scale not with the count of GPs built, but the frequency - if you had a global modifier that increased cost but decayed over time then it would allow for nations to build their local GPs without worrying about the ramifications of having done that a few hundred years later when they find something important across the other side of the world, but would still mitigate countries ability to baloon to a certain size then go on a global GP heist and building bonanza.
Lowkey expected some mention of Stellaris's megastructures as another equivalent to Great Projects, but then I remembered that most megas aren't really meant to be ""balanced"" per se.
That's fair, although that system when made 'absurde' with say the Gigastructures mod actually becomes quite fun imo. Remember if its fun, its a good mechanic :)
For a sec, before seeing the channel name, I thought that this was about real life and you would talk about the Great Projects like The line or some new island or whatever
Congrats on the huge growth from the last video! I was shocked to see you blew past the 32k goal you had! I was hoping for 32.1k or something, but saw 38k!
I think the number of tier 3 trade centers being capped by the number of merchants and also requiring 25 development in the province was a cool way of balancing trade centers. Something similar to this could be used to balance great projects too. I also think the Amsterdam Bourse is a great example of how great projects could have different costs depending how strong the modifier is. Lastly, more culture restrictions and something that prevents tag switching to allow you to build other culture's great projects might help.
I also think that the base cost of monuments needs to be changed. From a gameplay perspective, some monuments are just objectively better than others and they shouldn't cost the same. From a historical perspective, its bizarre that building Stonehenge and Versailles costs the same. One is a bunch of big rocks, and the other is the one of the biggest palaces in world history.
I like the Imperator system where you get your OG world wonders that have one modifier. But you can spend Money And resourses and Population output(if you have more workers it gets built faster so no Golden Pyramids in Ireland in 40 BC unless you are trying) you can get 3 modifiers and they upgrade only over time and you need to pay for it to upgrade. So you Spend 7k gold(that is like 70k gold in EU4 numbers) and 20 years building a Mausoleum near Rome to get 0,5 of something but in 50+ years you can buff it up more. Plus they are custom you can chose how they look. And even AI builds projects that are cheaper I saw big Iberan tribes build wooden structures which are cheaper to do when I conquered them.
limiting the ability to speed them up would help a lot too. It's funny when I take a great project from 0 to 3 in 3 days because I have infinite money but it still takes a year to build a church. If the build time could be reduced only by up to 75%, or the build times for buildings, that would still make a big difference to the ability to just dump money into them.
I definitely agree the core issue is that they are only available, purchasable, affordable (choose whatever word you want) so late that they are effectively useless. Every single “20% local defense bonus” makes me cry because it would be so cool in the first 10-20 years, but is practically useless past 1500. And that’s the problem with like 90% of all great projects. Secondly, many of the great projects that give you money are also useless, because you have to pay so much. So it’s an investment, but the investment is so big that it’s not worth it. Would you rather have 8k ducats to defeat Moscow, or +10 ducats a month after having built up the Falu Mine? Because you know that conquering 8k ducats worth of Moscow is gonna give you a net bonus >10 ducats/month anyways. The 8k to build up Falu Mine are only available once you are already making “too much” money and can’t make more by expanding. And it’s just too late to actually impact the game.
I would suggest a maintenance cost for monument to balance the cost and it also is a real thing, humans pay crazy amounts of money each year to maintain the original state of a monument. Also scaling requirements would be interesting. Like a palace that gives its bonusses scaling with legitimacy and prestige since the people of a country care more about a palace when the ruling dynasty got a proper reputation. Or like a religious monument scaling with religious unity. I also feel like the regional bonusses are for too little provinces to make an impact. While the global bonusses make it so your whole country gets more tolerance of true faith for finding 🗿in the middle of the ocean. I would suggest to make bonusses for big specific regions. For instance a monument that gives +manpower and taxes for the a whole culture group. This could make monuments worth it situationally and not always when you have the money available.
Or you do like in Atlas Novum where great projects mostly give province, area or regional modifiers. And if a great project do give a global modifier, it is required it is the capital province of your country, like the palace of Versailles.
My suggestion would be to make the bonuses partially affected by the culture, make the big global modifiers only available for nations that have the monument's culture as their primary or in their culture group, with accepting the culture limiting the modifiers to minor modifiers or local stuff to take alhambra as an example: have it give the admin efficiency buff only for nations in the iberian culture group, while a foreign empire can accept the local culture and build it but it only gets stuff like local defensiveness and an extra fort level or something
I like the exponential cost idea, though I would maybe qualify it in the same way that colonial exponential cost is, with a "Number of Great Projects" modifier which is strictly controlled, say a base of 1, +1 for Empire Rank, then two or three over the course of technology, and that's it. In the course of the game you only get four or five "cheap" projects, and no other ways to change this. Also perhaps bite the bullet and instead of just accepting a culture, force your country to actually be that culture - or maybe the culture group to be merciful - a lot more. Perhaps the only monument well designed in being locked to specific culture/religion is the Zoroastrian one in Shirvan, rewarding an obscure religion with powerful modifiers, and maybe monuments giving out prestige like candy aren't so bad if there was only one or two of them per culture group. And yeah I'd be interested in a Leviathan video, the combination of incomplete graphics, clearly unbalanced mechanics and a bug which regularly corrupted save files was an interesting time. The frustrating thing was Alhambra originally coming out with +15% Admin Efficiency at Tier Three in the Dev Diary, everyone on the forums saying this is clearly overpowered, Paradox saying these aren't final numbers and will be changed, and they just weren't, not until a patch or two into Leviathan. In 1.31.0.0 Granada could get 15 Admin Efficiency for a total of 3000 gold (because every upgrade step was only 1000 gold regardless). Actual playtesting was clearly not done. Also the El Dorado city hunt mechanic used to grant you game-long modifiers if you kept at it instead of a province modifier. Long ago I completed the Korean Ship Durability achievement thanks to a modifier from exploring.
I made my own monument mod that compiled over a dozen other monument mods together, and then removed as many of the requirements as I could. I want my big empire to be able to build loads of monuments and vanity projects, power scaling be damned. I play eu4 to RP and map paint Edit: finished the video. I like the exponential idea. Would have to be picky and choosey about which monuments you upgrade first.
I think an interesting, but potentially harder to implement solution could be to reduce the GP's effects the more of them you build. Could be explained as "The more monuments you have the less impressive each feels" or somesuch
Anbennar, up till the most recent patch, had a monument that gave something like 20% manpower recovery speed, +1 yearly prestige, and +2 (?) yearly army tradition, which when combined with a couple dwarven hold specializations trivialized both army tradition and prestige simultaneously. Pretty sure it was Bal Ourd. Think it was changed to give naval bonuses, but it was quite a nice pickup. So I don't really know that Anbennar is a great example for 'balanced great projects'. Personally I think the conversation around prestige is actually a point in Great Projects favor. One thing I've noticed with Paradox games is that they have a lot of situationally interesting mechanics that go from interesting to work with in the early game to being a chore in the late game (looking at you CK3 plagues). Prestige generation really doesn't seem particularly difficult even without Great Projects, but the beauty of the Great Projects is that they take a mechanic, prestige, that is not particularly difficult to navigate at that stage of the campaign and make it so that you no longer have to actively manage it, because once the management becomes trivial to do it stops being an interesting mechanic and starts being a chore. I also personally think the dwarven expedition variant of great projects is pretty bad, because it makes the utility of individual projects so rng dependant. Getting something like Wytlramvar ( -2 global unrest) or the one that give -20% reduction in great project cost, or the one that gives 2500 off the great dam upgrades is useful anywhere, but getting the one that increases local defensiveness in a random cave that doesn't even reliably cover any routes of attack is useless, and getting the one that converts all goods to silk in a province where you happen to have found mithril, iron, and gold is even worse than useless. And you're telling me that there a province called 'Yidab's Nest', surrounded by spider themed provinces, but the spider themed great project that creates silk provinces, and even says it may be the home of Yidab, is halfway around the world? Its slightly immersion breaking in a fantasy mod, I cant imagine finding the Taj Mahal in Bavaria in historical. I recognize that rng is a pretty significant element of the game overall, but I think that turning great projects into a gacha minigame is largely a step in the wrong direction.
One thing that this video touches on that has been always a part of the power creep problem is prestige. Outside of the early game or a *really* desolate start, just about every nation can be capped or close enough to it and has been for as long as I can remember, and considering that I started playing around Mandate of Heaven, that's a while. It's effectively useless to the point where if there's only negative options for an event and prestige is one of them, I'll take the prestige hit 99.9% of the time. The only reason someone might choose to keep it capped these days if they're rerolling for heirs or buying loyalty is if they're DoF, since we all know how those podunkadunk OPM's like taking it at any opportunity. Frankly, decay should have been buffed to -10.0% (While keeping the 5.0% gain for negative prestige. It's hard to lose a bad reputation after all.) and negative prestige events need to be buffed (effectively doubled for all of them) so it wasn't so comically easy to have it maxed out after 1550. It would make prestige a lot more valuable and maybe make someone consider what's more important as opposed to just click the bad prestige option. But at this point in EUIV's life, it's fairly obvious that the game revolves around modifier stacking to the heavens and given where the game has been in the past, it's probably in a better place than most times in the last four years. I really don't think that Paradox is going to rock the boat officially at this point with EUV well under development.
Love the exponential cost for more and more monuments idea, would solve part of scaling of everything problem in the game and make countries starting with a monument being actually able to build it up in the first place without getting economy worth of half a continent. Other thing I though about is what if prestige from monuments was capped to the highest level you own? Tier 1 = +1 yearly prestige and -1% prestige decay Tier 2 = +2 yearly prestige and -2% prestige decay Tier 3 = +3 yearly prestige and -3% prestige decay (Exact numbers up to debate) And that's it, if you got max tier of a monument, congrats, you're a great builder. What if you own 5 special palaces, 7 towers and 3 castles? Well the same, as much prestige as the most magnificent thing you built my liege, we get it, your country's great, no need to brag about it so much. Would eliminate infinite prestige exploit from just dumping excess money into fancy buildings and even at tier 3 you wouldn't get to the max for just existing, would require some work from ideas, missions, battles or events to keep it high.
That could be quite cool too, like you if you can get one great project to level 3 thats impressive, but getting 10 to level 3 isn't x10 more impressive.
I think a solution (which is probably too much for EU4 as it would mean a vvery drastic change for a game that's very close to where it wants to be) would be adding scaling costs to growth Owning the entire world doesn't do much beyond making rebel management tedious and even that can be solved with ideas, government reforms and monuments Adding administrative growth costs that scale exponentially (as larger administrations become harder and harder to manage) would be nice, but also a thing they've mention for project caesar (and I think would be very welcome for CK3) which is control based on distance to the capital, making far away provinces very autonomous by necessity and everything that entails The point would be curbing growth and encouraging playing tall or through vassals
Another potential solution would be to trivialize great projects completely by adding a whole bunch of them (this will however imply the decision to rebalance them). That may kill their purpose as GREAT projects (not to mention Paradox already scraps the bottom of the barrel with their ideas for great projects), but that would at least keep the system alive and engaging. Another rebalancing idea is to make most of great project start as level 1 (again, with weakening those effects) to make them more dynamic and meaningful (and in some reason,sort of historic). Besides,this can have an added bonus of giving some normally fringe nations who happen to possess a good great project a more often pick, adding the game more variety (the most projects are already controlled by majors/regional majors,but rebalance can fix that and make them weaker, maybe with ability to make the strong again somewhere in the focus tree of said major. Lemon didn't really point out the existing system of giving great projects additional bonuses via focuses (instead of leveling then as he proposed) which could also be very beneficial for the game The huge mistake Paradox made (well,we can only see that a mistake if the purpose of great projects was to re-implement CK2 mechanic) was making all great projects non-generic. It does add a tone of flavor,but we could have gotten a possibility to make more generic projects,too P.S. I can't help but notice Lemon going further and further down the Anbennar pipeline and I'm all for it. More Anbennar content pls?
I have dabbled in Anbennar before, and while looking back at those videos they 'recovered' they always do really bad for a while, which can be very discouridging
I really like the mission tree way. Monuments should feel powerful and important, but not for everyone. Just accepting a culture should not give access to their powerful buffs, as it makes no sense. It should be able to give the province modifiers, maybe even modifiers for every province of needed culture, but not the global modifiers. Existing monuments from past time should not be very strong but have buffs that unlock via a mission tree. Non-existing monuments should not be able to be build unless your mission tree allows it to (or event/decision). That way not everyone gains access and the monuments themselves are artificially kept back. Versailles wasn't build in 1550, so it shouldn't exist. Making something exponential more expensive will kinda fix it, but at the same time it won't. There are nations that can gain a massive amount of money from the start on. Nations like Ming, England, Ottomans, Mamelucks, Timurid can get their economy up and running insanely quick. It will also make it very hard to build mutliple buildings for smaller nations. You would need to focus on one building. In that way, you don't want to use your money for the wrong monument. Also conquering monuments would need to stop decreasing their level. Imagine your conquer a monument and all the money that was spent for level 3 is gone. Its even worse for someone losing one. Getting it back to level 3 after a reconquest is way too expensive. There is also the problem with power creep and power difference. Building stonehenge vs poulders in amsterdam is quite the difference. Noone in their clear mind would ever spend their money on stonehenge, but Krakow cloth halls or pantheon of athens makes sense to spend money on. It would then make more sense to adjust cost individually to every monument, regarding their power and the possibility of usage (barely any religion, gov reform, chinese empire comes to mind, zoroastrism or hordes) But yeah, the Anbennar way seems best. It makes monuments like a very relevant factor of your culture or nation.
This week I'm playing as Incas. My great project that I got only comes as an event. It's called 'Temple' It cost me 10 years of income, but it was worth it.
Instead of arbitrary price hikes, perhaps lock upgrade levels (both the ability to build the improved level and to benefit from it) behind being in that culture/group and having capital in the region, this way leaving WC runs with only the first level, which is rarely super broken. This going along with religious limits on things that are appropriate.
I have never tought about that and that make so much sense! It's terrible that you, playing as the country that a specific project was designed for, can't build it in time to make use of that (Scotland was the perfect example) Another solution besides the 'exponential cost' could be just make that much cheaper for the country(ies) that building that would make sense
Like just straight up cut a zero from the GP cost for those selected countries (100g 250g 500g) The meaningless tons of Gold problem would not be fixed tho
The scaling system sounds good. At the end game I buy GPs just because I can, then throw it onto my horde of cash and forget about it. The power creep is real, but since the AI has been revised to actually dev their provinces, the game has become considerably harder to WC (I'm looking at you Korea, with your 50-60 dev in every province). There's a solid 33%+ development that needs to be paid for in coring in some way
i think the best way to prevent overstacking and still maintain different strats viable is connect great projects to ideas group . u cant unlock them all in one ran and u still can use them and it will give more reasons to use unpopular ideas group in some region to enable it like innovative in italy or diplomatic in hre
I never really played Crusader Kings, but i always thought "custom" monuments would be a good idea. Maybe give each culture group/religion a pool of monuments gated off by tech or even ideas. Then, once the requirements are met, you can pay to build the monuments anywhere you want. You could even make the cost scale with province development or terrain to incentivise building in a city, or on a plain. It never really made sense to me why you have to build a monument where it exists irl. Its a game about altering history, I should be able to build Notre Dame in East Turkestan if I want to
I do like how Civ 6 handled Wonders, where you essentially only got bonuses for building them, so the Ottomans and Zulu couldn't just walk around stealing steroided cities from everyone. That's not really something you could do in EU4 because they're wildly different from each other for two historical strategy games, but you could have some similarities using mission conditions and rewards. Say for the sake of Edinburgh Castle, you would have to do something hard but not crazy hard, and you'd get a decent but not OP reward that would only last two decades. You wouldn't have to be Scotland or even accept Scottish, but you'd have to own Edinburgh and play at least a bit of Scottish gameplay. The hardest thing there would be figuring out what's "Scottish" that Scotland can do that's not on the mission tree, and that another nation can do without simply existing there. If it's Scottish to stomp down the English, you've probably already done that as France by the time you get to Edinburgh.
Honestly EU4 should add a non reducible Inflation increase, like 1% every 20 years, this doesn't count towards missions that require you to have less than x inflation and it makes sure that by 1450 everything is 5% more expensive, maybe even have that scale exponentially so by 1500 everything is 12% more expensive and by 1550 everything is 20% more expensive and you can still get your usual inflation on top of that base inflation. Same can be done with Prestige, as more and more nations become prestigious it should be harder to stand out as the most prestigious, increase the prestige decay over time.
Makes sense historically too, Versailles shouldn't cost the same to build as Edinburgh castle, projects like these should have a cost to maintain too, since you know it's a nobles house , hagia Sophia is an old ass building etc
Prestige during art of war and some early DLC was completely broken(basically winning battles kept it at 100). Now it's more balanced, where battles don't impact it to the same absurd degree(+6-9 back then). It remains though fundamentally broken, due to its decay mechanic. Fish any prestige decay mechanic(which are basically everywhere due to DLC bloat) and you have the exact same problem as early eu4 gameplay(100 prestige non-stop). Prestige should really be reworked to give scaling decay(the higher you have, the higher the decay percentage) and make earning prestige even harder than it currently is! Heck, make it scale with empire size. The bigger the empire, the harder it will be to gain prestige/easier to lose it. It's only logical for a small, cohesive nation to be able to earn more prestige by battles, events or victories than a bigger nation with more resources at hand! Loss of prestige should follow the same paradigm. Disowning a heir from a nation such as England should be a momentous event compared to say Navarra! Projects may be broken in other aspects, but the prestige aspect is not their fault. Prestige is fundamentally broken by itself!
I would suggest that the exponential UPFRONT cost is a bit gamey for my taste. What if instead it actually took some of the normal prestige ye event mechanics and governing cap / colonies as inspiration? You get an upfront dump of prestige at the beginning and end of construction, but it comes with increasing prestige decay and a maintenance cost? Representing the cost to both figuratively maintain the grandeur of an empire with so many great monuments (think losing hegemony) combined with gov cap where each monument also has a direct reoccurring financial cost where not only does every the maintenance increase per great project but increase by distance too? So you’re incentivized to have a theoretical “core” to your monument building which is clearly intended by the dispersement of certain modifiers? This would also finally act as prestige sink which is desperately needed for this game while also not making me ask why I can build Versailles for 250 ducats and then Prague cost me 120k
wonder how will EU5 handle this ? I mean on 1 hand stacking monument and mission tree bonus to get insane modifier is fun :)) while just simply adding only prestige and political strength but no requirement is also make sense :))
Almost 230 videos and you still haven't talked about the biggest problem of eu4: Why do the "prestige from land battles" and "Army tradition from battles" modifiers have the same icon?
Ngl if you really wanted to see why EU4 is the way it is today, you need to go ALL the way back to Rule Britannia which introduced mission trees and I believe (I could be wrong here) when they introduced the corruption penalty for going over your state limit which was the biggest ballache known to man. That's the hard cut off between Old and New EU4. For me at least.
It would probably help a little bit if you couldnt just magdump 20k ducats into a GP and be done with it instantly. make em wait the 70 years for the project to complete. add additional modifiers that increase or decrease the time it takes like local dev, autonomy, separatism, whether its your primary culture, your stab, manpower, devastation, etc. This way you build projects quicker in your homeland, but you will probably be waiting a whole century for a GP to get done constructing on the other side of the world. stretches stuff out a bit.
1. I don't see nothing wrong in big empires having permanent +100 prestige. Roman Empire had so much prestige that until today we all have wet dreams about it and in E4 we can created far more glorious empires. 2. I disagree with your proposed solution, because it essentially transforms Great Projects into noob trap. There are few great projects that would be worth the scaling cost, so you would be ignoring your own regional flavour just to get monuments like Alhambra, Kaaba, Malta Forts or Borobudur Temple* etc. I don't know what solution would be better I would probably made some some great project far more expensive because, because why "upgrading" Stonehenge (I don't know? building a fancy museum around and a parking lot?) is as expensive as upgrading Great Wall of China or whole Historical Centre of Prague? * People sleep on how good Borobudur Temple is. -25% culture conversion cost? With religious ideas, adjacent culture, golden era and 50% Inattentiveness you already have maximum culture conversion cost reduction and you don't have to wait for Enlightenment or go for Influence ideas.
Those are both excellent points. There are drawbacks in my proposed solution too in fairness, I was never wanted to claim its the best idea ever after all!
@@LemonCake101 Just started watching your Great Project tier list and you also undervalued Borobudur Temple, probably because you did not noticed you don't have to be Eastern religion, accepting a culture is enough. But this is probably on Paradox and readability of their tool tips. :P
@@Hadar1991 oh good point, huh: I remember doing a Mughal one faith and not being able to use it so it must be a recent tweak too (or I was just wrong)
Investment is a great project seems like it should be done similar to colonization. Start it and slowly grows over time. It is a bit silly that we can take over the land where a great project has been sitting and instantly complete it. I mean the great pyramids weren't built in one day... or were they?
This video focuses on the gameplay consequences of the monuments, but personally the thing I find more off-putting is the immersion. The modifiers given are so arbitrary--why does Alhambra give admin efficiency but the imperial city of Kyoto not? Do they just not administrate in Japan? And whatever is sepcial about Alhambra, why can I not recreate elsewhere? What is so special about Granada specifically that makes the palace built there give efficiency? Why cant I build the cheap chinese knock-off alhambra in Shanghai?
On one hand i can agree that Great Projects are a little too good if you stack them at this moment, But limiting any country to (virtually) only 2 great projects, feels too restricting, when there were countries irl with multiple of those at the same time. Also, i think balancing the game for Florry-level of players is bad, when majority of the playerbase is just mediocre at the game But your proposed solutions would make for a good mod for multiplayer
The idea of making them cheaper initially was to offset the 'Florryflation' if you want to call it of the skill level, because honestly for brand new players etc Great Projects are so unfordable they may as well not even be there
@@LemonCake101 Yes, but 160k for the third means that As France you can only build Notre Dame and Versailles, Palace of the Popes is off limits till you conquer half the world. Maybe increase the costs linearlly so you could build 5-10 monuments (which would be realistic for at least a few countries irl)
It's bad for singleplayer because the player can just go off and take every great project they want, but in MP games you have to fight people for them. MP games also are better on the economic side of things. It's not as easy to just steal everyone's trade, so you don't get as rich as quickly, and you stay in a moderately developed economy for longer. Also, with competent people playing, by 1500 a lot of regional powers will be able to afford their local great projects, which does help contribute the the unique identity of their nations.
I mean that’s why I play MP but as much as I would love to get everyone to do the same, its dumb to ignore that 95% of players if not more play exclusively single player
I decided to go for a more 'controlled slow' video style here. Complain (or say hi) here: discord.gg/pb5b33YTpB
Why are* some random boulders in Nova Scotia a monument but the Theodosian walls arent???
They made them a province modifier but AFAIK the argument is that by this point in history they where too out of date (not my argument, but one provided in dev diary discussions to be clear)
I am aware that Edinburgh Castle isn't also known as the most up to date building either
@@LemonCake101 How about Stonehenge-Dont think that has ever been up to date........(of course there is historical significance, but still)
@@BolphesarusMaximusWardius counter argument, circle rocks.
@@LemonCake101 Damn, got me there.
They are some cool circle rocks.
@@LemonCake101 "They were out of date" is one of the most BS explanations I've ever heard, lmao.
At the time they were probably one of if not the most extensive defensive works in the world and if the siege where the Byzantines finally were put in the coffin is anything to go by- even with stuff like the Great Bombard they still gave the vastly outnumbered Byzantines a fighting chance- which if rumors are to be believed- only truly collapsed once a traitor/idiot left the gates open...
Also, out of date?? This has to be a joke- there's plenty monuments from thousands of years ago being in the game (like the pyramids) but most comparable imo is the Great wall of china- which is in the game, but irl was never truly finished and is argued to have been ineffective even when it was new- which is in the game... what
The 15% admin efficiency for Alhambra when Leviathan came out was absolutely broken too, did not help with power creep one bit
Peak Leviathan moment.. if only someone made a compilation of Leviathan release monuments so I could make a video on the topic in the future ;)
@@LemonCake101 oooh yeah those were absolutely insane
It's still absurdly easy to hit the cap even with the monument nerfed down to 5%
Start as any non endgame tag
Form Sardinia-Piedmont, England, Prussia, Hungary (temp modifier) and Russia (doesn't give adm eff but does give 15% CCR from the first mission), then form HRE and you will smash the 90% cap, potentially even before tech 27.
Same for the zorastrian monument, if I remember max level and as a zorastrian nation you gain +10% discipline, +20% fire damage, +20% shock damage and - 10% fire reduction.
I mean at this point we might as well have the mod stacking fun.
One thing that is really missing from vanilla great projects is flavour text. While obviously not the most important issue, it is so fun to read about the stories behind all the great projects in the Anbennar monuments submod. It would probably go a long way to actually adding flavour to regions imo
Its a very underrated part of the game honestly but its so true
It's actually baffling why EU4 doesnt explain the monuments when you mouse over them, a short paragraph giving a brief history of it like they have for- idk literally every mission in every unique mission tree would be quite nice.
@@WelcomeToDERPLANDeven trade goods have this btw
Absolutely, i was very dissapointed when i saw they didn't have it, such a shame. One of the main reasons i still enjoy this game is the flavour and role play aspect, without it it just becomes a blob and numbers game which after like 10 years of playing is boring to me.
The video (unconsciously) hits on the inherenit issue of Eu4 which is, if I'm not trying to world conquest, what am I trying to do? In Anbennar, which this video mentions, many factions have significantly more content to distract the player, ranging from civil wars, the artifice system, or making an eternal ice queen.
I think the biggest one that makes Anbennar more replayable is that the world isn't as European centric, geographically and in trade.
So, this results in Cannor itself ALWAYS getting quite strong, buuuuut there is a whole slew of other giant great powers that will rise up, even in the late game, to threaten your hegemony. I mean, when is the last time you've run into a nation with 1k dev in vanilla that ISN'T a GP? In Anbennar that's absurdly common. I mean like I'm playing a Larankar campaign rn as #1 GP by a mile, but the #3 and #4 GP are allies and actually giving some real resistance.
Sure, it can sometimes make the game a slog when you're staring down the barrel of needing to war the same nation 6 times in a row to wipe it out, but that's where unique mechanics, religion and far more involved MT's come into play.
This is further reinforced in the game, as Anbennar sets up SOOOO many more colonizers, meaning you can never have a monopoly on colonizing these provinces. The adventurers WILL take large chunks in different waves, and it's just about hopeless to stop every last EoA (the not HRE) tag from colonizing something
Once Insyaa comes into being I think this game will be quite the masterpiece. As Insyaa's big feature will be a late game continent that is suddenly accessible and features literal Kaiju to stop your colonizing efforts. (Also, the wider Adventurers and Magic Overhauls should be nice too for varieties sake.)
The big downside of Anbennar I'd say though is also an upside. It is far less of a sandbox, but what happens in each game has far more variety especially on this new patch. This combines with your MT's to mean you are definitely playing a story, but it's not your own hand crafted story.
@@alecshockowitz8385 I do hope that we get some natives or just general nations to play in Insyaa as well.
I do feel like Great Projects could start of a bit cheaper as they are usually not worth to build until the mid-late economic game as you said. But I feel like making them exponential is just so horribly unrealistic. Why can't an empire which can afford to build thousands or farm estates every month, and a huge palace in Versailles, suddenly not afford to put some big rocks in England?
Thus, I think the Anbenar way is the best way, make them only unlockable in specific circumstances.
I'd disagree. When I play Lubeck I bankrupt myself while upgrading that damned mine, in the Age of Discovery.
Harsher GP requirements such as requiring either primary culture or cultural union would would IMO make projects less of a modifier stacking pick and choose but a unique flavor for various regions. For instance, most projects might only give limited or downsized bonuses if one only promoted the required culture.
Roman culture goes BRRRRRR!
With one weird exception (Amsterdam bourse), the roman culture works for every great project in and near Europe that requires some accepted culture.
@@Duke_of_Lorrainewhich could make it an excellent reward for forming Rome.
@@owentucker6215 it's already the case, you can convert all of Europe + the Levant to the roman culture and use all cultural monuments with the exception of that dutch one.
(Which may still work so long that you accept dutch culture, the conditions seem different than the others).
I also like how theres a solid chunk of Anbennar great projects that are basically just for allowing troop movement. With the marhold tunnel and the various elevators over the mountains in Noruin.
Exponential price is a good idea. I'd also add some discount for the province's development.
I think if it's ever added, it should only happen when upgrading multiple monuments at once- making it multiplicative/exponential for every monument in the game would make upgrading more than just a handful of them nearly impossible even with insane income.
@@WelcomeToDERPLAND obviously specific numbers are up for debate but here's how it can be put:
1) basic price is 10 times lower than what we got now
2) for each monument you get a multiplicative penalty to the price (t1 0%, t2 20%, t3 40%), queued upgrades also count
3) at 10 dev you get the standard price with +-2% per dev. Yes, a free project in a 60 dev province.
Just play with the Anbennar monuments submods and you get to enjoy stacking even more OP modifiers in the mid to late game 😎
You can get combat ability and pips so high it's honestly ridiculous. If you ever thought that countries in Anbennar are OP don't even get me started with custom nations, were you can get 45 cav combat ability just from Gov, Religion and racial military. It's not even hard to get to 85 cav combat ability. With certain mods you can also stack general pips so that your (non-warwizard) general has the same pips like an actual warwizard. Same with infantry combat ability. (Harimari are to Infantry what centaurs are for cavalry)
@@fragolastrawberry5920tbf Custom Nations will always been heavily unbalanced, youre quite literally picking and choosing your starting provinces, your ideas, your government and the mp's of your first ruler and heir.
Its only nation specific events and formables that they lack
I think a good change would be to have tiered buffs based on culture. Primary and cultural union can enjoy the full buffs, accepted culture can enjoy slightly nerfed buffs, and non accepted culture can enjoy halved buffs. This would help the issue you mentioned in the video while not locking GPs out entirely
I'd say some monuments do work really well in the early game though. If they start at a certain level or are part of a mission which rewards them leveling up they can really add a lot of flavour to specific nations. when it comes to large empires conquering gp's and just building them, I'd think it would be really cool if there were like quests you had to do to be able to upgrade them, which would be costly in other ways
One point about the cost of projects that I think didn't translate well from the CK2 implementation is the availability of large cash injections into Catholic domains after crusades. The crusade system allows regions which otherwise could not afford a great project to occasionally get a large cash injection which gives them the option to get a set of modifiers which are (mostly) not game breaking (scaling military power from the great walls and fort aside), but which are meaningful for players at lower power and income levels. Cash can then further be spent on upgrades which offer variable bonuses which further rewards the player investing large cash injections into great projects as the choice of bonuses ensures that you are significantly less likely to end up with a project that is simply useless to your play style. The exponential growth in cost then limits the replicability of these bonuses as crusades offer diminishing value towards great projects making them not overly-present (and thus less special) in large, wealthy domains.
I know this dynamic doesn't translate to other religions in CK2, and the crusade system is not really implementable in EU4 given the historical context of the game. Also, with money having significantly more uses in EU4, the cost-benefit of building a stage of a great project vs a bunch more other buildings and military units is a lot more contentious. However, I think the lack of a mechanism to get the mass cash injection required to actually make great projects an option for players in the early game, and the lack of customisation of bonuses, are an overlooked aspect as to why they fell flat in the EU4 implementation compared to the significantly more positive response in CK2.
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My issue with features like Great Projects is that only the player understands how to utilise them.
For example, in CK3, they added a feature allowing you to station your men-at-arms in your castles to buff them. Military buildings in castles buff stationed men-at-arms
If you build: militia camps, outposts and workshops, your stationed archers become 9th-century space marines!
Unlike the player, the AI doesn't understand how to combine certain buildings with certain types of men-at-arms. Meaning anyone with more than a beginners understanding of CK3's war mechanics can take on kingdoms as counties and win!
Some mechanics like this fall into a big trap.
If the AI knew how to do this the AI would often be stronger than the player or be too capable of defeating the player. Which can ruin a game that is such a 'craft your own narrative' of a game.
I think there should be some separate Great Project building capacity, which represents the countrys ability to procure expensive building materials necessary for GPs. When building GPs this capacity then gets spread over all GPs currently under construction. Also getting rid of the possibility to just throw money at the building time, which is just silly. Maybe there can be manufacturies which increase the GP building capacity representing something like quarries.
Two things I’d add to fix great projects, one being why can you move exclusively Stonehenge and assorted other “it’s a funny rock” projects to your capital? Just a really janky mechanic honestly and one that nobody really recognizes. Second and more importantly being able to endlessly speed up the construction is also a strange choice. I shouldn’t be allowed to sacrifice 50k men to make the Parthenon slightly fancier immediately, just really weird mechanics with great projects tbh
I think it might be good if great projects were put into categories, and each country could only get the bonuses from like 2 great projects in any category.
As you said, it doesn't make sense for a single nation to get a dozen palaces, no government is going to run its empire from every palace on earth.
You should be able to click a button which places you court, or your clergy, military administration whatever in the great project, and only then do you get the global bonuses.
You can have Alhambra and Versailles, but if you want the Winter Palace as well you'll need to deselect one of the other ones.
This is a nerf to large nations, but it still is of some benefit to get multiple great projects as you can switch around a bit to suit your needs.
As for local flavour, just reduce the cost to build monument for the original nation who built it historically.
Edinburgh castle cheaper for Scotland, normal or slightly higher price for others.
I think there's a lot of ways to bypass the exponential cost solution. Like you can have a subject own the great project and you build it in their province for them before annexing. There's also a lot of missions out there that give free great project upgrades, so you can just build up the great projects you want, before popping the great project missions for the free upgrades.
No indeed, this is why I said the system will need tweaks, the easiest being that an annexation militarily, or as you pointed out diplomatically, should downgrade/disable the monument.
@@LemonCake101annexing a province militarily already downgrades monuments by 1 stage.
@@miquelgarcia2946 I am aware, but in this system it should be downgrades by 3
That would be the worst possible solution. To the point of rendering all but a few projects pointless.
@@LemonCake101 ahhh gotcha, excuse me then. I think that'd be fairly reasonable.
Happy new year! You're up to 104 years of Lemon Cakes
Thanks :)
I don't really like the exponential one, but I can see the usefulness it would bring.
For prestige specifically, I would go for another solution.
Palaces, castles and whatever great projects should give you prestige because :
- you are the only one who have them
- you have the bigger one
- you have more than other countries.
Thus we could have a pool of prestige from great projects that you access if you have more/bigger GP than other countries.
And we could go the other way as well where you get negative prestige if countries of your size/power have more than you on average.
I don't see a problem with local modifiers on great projects but for global ones (discipline/AE/etc), I think we could either remove them or have some kind of upkeep instead that would be exponential if you want to use it.
Maybe a discount if your great project is in your initial land (like the scotland one) ?
Well done as usual! Nice way to explain the EU4 power creep issues. Mods are amazing!
I like the idea of the exponential cost, the perk of allowing countries to build their native monuments is a neat one, though if they're so free you can get them up early it does make me worry about things like Spain starting with the OP admincost wonder vs Scotlands crappy castle or the myriad ones that are even worse than it.
I don't think I'd like the exponential scaling to be uncapped though. I feel like at the point where you're asking for 128k you're talking about games that are already fundamentally won, might as well let people enjoy their modifiers at (or before) that point if they want to get silly. It'd also avoid a situation where, if GPs are essentially capped on a certain number, there isn't some prescribed route through the world to pick up the right wonders and upgrade them correctly, otherwise it works against the idea of your first GPs being cheap if you're a country such as Japan, because upgrading your cultural GPs would be a massive handicap to the overall game if they make the "good" ones either only buildable significantly later or, potentially, not at all.
I suppose another potential option would be to have the cost scale not with the count of GPs built, but the frequency - if you had a global modifier that increased cost but decayed over time then it would allow for nations to build their local GPs without worrying about the ramifications of having done that a few hundred years later when they find something important across the other side of the world, but would still mitigate countries ability to baloon to a certain size then go on a global GP heist and building bonanza.
3:11 is the first time I've seen that avatar frown
I do use the sad lemon cake rarely
Administrative efficiency, absolutism, province war score cost reduction, and core creation cost for the low, low opportunity cost of... ducats.
Lowkey expected some mention of Stellaris's megastructures as another equivalent to Great Projects, but then I remembered that most megas aren't really meant to be ""balanced"" per se.
That's fair, although that system when made 'absurde' with say the Gigastructures mod actually becomes quite fun imo. Remember if its fun, its a good mechanic :)
Cool vid and i think you should make a vid about how pdx does ground unit organization
Could be cool!
For a sec, before seeing the channel name, I thought that this was about real life and you would talk about the Great Projects like The line or some new island or whatever
Congrats on the huge growth from the last video! I was shocked to see you blew past the 32k goal you had! I was hoping for 32.1k or something, but saw 38k!
Yeah that part has been incredible! It did ‘help’ that the video took so long to make I was already on 32.5k when it went live too XD
I love the idea of exponential project cost!
I think the number of tier 3 trade centers being capped by the number of merchants and also requiring 25 development in the province was a cool way of balancing trade centers. Something similar to this could be used to balance great projects too.
I also think the Amsterdam Bourse is a great example of how great projects could have different costs depending how strong the modifier is.
Lastly, more culture restrictions and something that prevents tag switching to allow you to build other culture's great projects might help.
I also think that the base cost of monuments needs to be changed. From a gameplay perspective, some monuments are just objectively better than others and they shouldn't cost the same. From a historical perspective, its bizarre that building Stonehenge and Versailles costs the same. One is a bunch of big rocks, and the other is the one of the biggest palaces in world history.
I like the Imperator system where you get your OG world wonders that have one modifier. But you can spend Money And resourses and Population output(if you have more workers it gets built faster so no Golden Pyramids in Ireland in 40 BC unless you are trying) you can get 3 modifiers and they upgrade only over time and you need to pay for it to upgrade.
So you Spend 7k gold(that is like 70k gold in EU4 numbers) and 20 years building a Mausoleum near Rome to get 0,5 of something but in 50+ years you can buff it up more. Plus they are custom you can chose how they look. And even AI builds projects that are cheaper I saw big Iberan tribes build wooden structures which are cheaper to do when I conquered them.
limiting the ability to speed them up would help a lot too. It's funny when I take a great project from 0 to 3 in 3 days because I have infinite money but it still takes a year to build a church. If the build time could be reduced only by up to 75%, or the build times for buildings, that would still make a big difference to the ability to just dump money into them.
Very good point: 3 days to build Cologne Cathedral, but a year to build a church!
I definitely agree the core issue is that they are only available, purchasable, affordable (choose whatever word you want) so late that they are effectively useless. Every single “20% local defense bonus” makes me cry because it would be so cool in the first 10-20 years, but is practically useless past 1500. And that’s the problem with like 90% of all great projects.
Secondly, many of the great projects that give you money are also useless, because you have to pay so much. So it’s an investment, but the investment is so big that it’s not worth it. Would you rather have 8k ducats to defeat Moscow, or +10 ducats a month after having built up the Falu Mine? Because you know that conquering 8k ducats worth of Moscow is gonna give you a net bonus >10 ducats/month anyways. The 8k to build up Falu Mine are only available once you are already making “too much” money and can’t make more by expanding. And it’s just too late to actually impact the game.
I would suggest a maintenance cost for monument to balance the cost and it also is a real thing, humans pay crazy amounts of money each year to maintain the original state of a monument. Also scaling requirements would be interesting. Like a palace that gives its bonusses scaling with legitimacy and prestige since the people of a country care more about a palace when the ruling dynasty got a proper reputation. Or like a religious monument scaling with religious unity.
I also feel like the regional bonusses are for too little provinces to make an impact. While the global bonusses make it so your whole country gets more tolerance of true faith for finding
🗿in the middle of the ocean. I would suggest to make bonusses for big specific regions. For instance a monument that gives +manpower and taxes for the a whole culture group. This could make monuments worth it situationally and not always when you have the money available.
Or you do like in Atlas Novum where great projects mostly give province, area or regional modifiers. And if a great project do give a global modifier, it is required it is the capital province of your country, like the palace of Versailles.
My suggestion would be to make the bonuses partially affected by the culture, make the big global modifiers only available for nations that have the monument's culture as their primary or in their culture group, with accepting the culture limiting the modifiers to minor modifiers or local stuff
to take alhambra as an example: have it give the admin efficiency buff only for nations in the iberian culture group, while a foreign empire can accept the local culture and build it but it only gets stuff like local defensiveness and an extra fort level or something
Maintainence for great projects that you can't turn off. Increasing considerably for each level as a percentage of total income.
Babe wake up new LemonCake upload just dropped!
I like the exponential cost idea, though I would maybe qualify it in the same way that colonial exponential cost is, with a "Number of Great Projects" modifier which is strictly controlled, say a base of 1, +1 for Empire Rank, then two or three over the course of technology, and that's it. In the course of the game you only get four or five "cheap" projects, and no other ways to change this. Also perhaps bite the bullet and instead of just accepting a culture, force your country to actually be that culture - or maybe the culture group to be merciful - a lot more. Perhaps the only monument well designed in being locked to specific culture/religion is the Zoroastrian one in Shirvan, rewarding an obscure religion with powerful modifiers, and maybe monuments giving out prestige like candy aren't so bad if there was only one or two of them per culture group.
And yeah I'd be interested in a Leviathan video, the combination of incomplete graphics, clearly unbalanced mechanics and a bug which regularly corrupted save files was an interesting time. The frustrating thing was Alhambra originally coming out with +15% Admin Efficiency at Tier Three in the Dev Diary, everyone on the forums saying this is clearly overpowered, Paradox saying these aren't final numbers and will be changed, and they just weren't, not until a patch or two into Leviathan. In 1.31.0.0 Granada could get 15 Admin Efficiency for a total of 3000 gold (because every upgrade step was only 1000 gold regardless). Actual playtesting was clearly not done.
Also the El Dorado city hunt mechanic used to grant you game-long modifiers if you kept at it instead of a province modifier. Long ago I completed the Korean Ship Durability achievement thanks to a modifier from exploring.
I made my own monument mod that compiled over a dozen other monument mods together, and then removed as many of the requirements as I could.
I want my big empire to be able to build loads of monuments and vanity projects, power scaling be damned. I play eu4 to RP and map paint
Edit: finished the video. I like the exponential idea. Would have to be picky and choosey about which monuments you upgrade first.
I think an interesting, but potentially harder to implement solution could be to reduce the GP's effects the more of them you build. Could be explained as "The more monuments you have the less impressive each feels" or somesuch
Anbennar, up till the most recent patch, had a monument that gave something like 20% manpower recovery speed, +1 yearly prestige, and +2 (?) yearly army tradition, which when combined with a couple dwarven hold specializations trivialized both army tradition and prestige simultaneously. Pretty sure it was Bal Ourd. Think it was changed to give naval bonuses, but it was quite a nice pickup. So I don't really know that Anbennar is a great example for 'balanced great projects'.
Personally I think the conversation around prestige is actually a point in Great Projects favor. One thing I've noticed with Paradox games is that they have a lot of situationally interesting mechanics that go from interesting to work with in the early game to being a chore in the late game (looking at you CK3 plagues). Prestige generation really doesn't seem particularly difficult even without Great Projects, but the beauty of the Great Projects is that they take a mechanic, prestige, that is not particularly difficult to navigate at that stage of the campaign and make it so that you no longer have to actively manage it, because once the management becomes trivial to do it stops being an interesting mechanic and starts being a chore.
I also personally think the dwarven expedition variant of great projects is pretty bad, because it makes the utility of individual projects so rng dependant. Getting something like Wytlramvar ( -2 global unrest) or the one that give -20% reduction in great project cost, or the one that gives 2500 off the great dam upgrades is useful anywhere, but getting the one that increases local defensiveness in a random cave that doesn't even reliably cover any routes of attack is useless, and getting the one that converts all goods to silk in a province where you happen to have found mithril, iron, and gold is even worse than useless. And you're telling me that there a province called 'Yidab's Nest', surrounded by spider themed provinces, but the spider themed great project that creates silk provinces, and even says it may be the home of Yidab, is halfway around the world? Its slightly immersion breaking in a fantasy mod, I cant imagine finding the Taj Mahal in Bavaria in historical. I recognize that rng is a pretty significant element of the game overall, but I think that turning great projects into a gacha minigame is largely a step in the wrong direction.
That's a way to do it. GP cost reduction would become an amazing bonus as well.
Broken? Yes.
Adds lots of fun to the game? Yes.
The 'too much money problem' is ultimately a consequence of the mercenary changes.
One thing that this video touches on that has been always a part of the power creep problem is prestige. Outside of the early game or a *really* desolate start, just about every nation can be capped or close enough to it and has been for as long as I can remember, and considering that I started playing around Mandate of Heaven, that's a while. It's effectively useless to the point where if there's only negative options for an event and prestige is one of them, I'll take the prestige hit 99.9% of the time. The only reason someone might choose to keep it capped these days if they're rerolling for heirs or buying loyalty is if they're DoF, since we all know how those podunkadunk OPM's like taking it at any opportunity.
Frankly, decay should have been buffed to -10.0% (While keeping the 5.0% gain for negative prestige. It's hard to lose a bad reputation after all.) and negative prestige events need to be buffed (effectively doubled for all of them) so it wasn't so comically easy to have it maxed out after 1550. It would make prestige a lot more valuable and maybe make someone consider what's more important as opposed to just click the bad prestige option.
But at this point in EUIV's life, it's fairly obvious that the game revolves around modifier stacking to the heavens and given where the game has been in the past, it's probably in a better place than most times in the last four years. I really don't think that Paradox is going to rock the boat officially at this point with EUV well under development.
Love the exponential cost for more and more monuments idea, would solve part of scaling of everything problem in the game and make countries starting with a monument being actually able to build it up in the first place without getting economy worth of half a continent.
Other thing I though about is what if prestige from monuments was capped to the highest level you own?
Tier 1 = +1 yearly prestige and -1% prestige decay
Tier 2 = +2 yearly prestige and -2% prestige decay
Tier 3 = +3 yearly prestige and -3% prestige decay
(Exact numbers up to debate)
And that's it, if you got max tier of a monument, congrats, you're a great builder. What if you own 5 special palaces, 7 towers and 3 castles? Well the same, as much prestige as the most magnificent thing you built my liege, we get it, your country's great, no need to brag about it so much.
Would eliminate infinite prestige exploit from just dumping excess money into fancy buildings and even at tier 3 you wouldn't get to the max for just existing, would require some work from ideas, missions, battles or events to keep it high.
That could be quite cool too, like you if you can get one great project to level 3 thats impressive, but getting 10 to level 3 isn't x10 more impressive.
I think a solution (which is probably too much for EU4 as it would mean a vvery drastic change for a game that's very close to where it wants to be) would be adding scaling costs to growth
Owning the entire world doesn't do much beyond making rebel management tedious and even that can be solved with ideas, government reforms and monuments
Adding administrative growth costs that scale exponentially (as larger administrations become harder and harder to manage) would be nice, but also a thing they've mention for project caesar (and I think would be very welcome for CK3) which is control based on distance to the capital, making far away provinces very autonomous by necessity and everything that entails
The point would be curbing growth and encouraging playing tall or through vassals
Another potential solution would be to trivialize great projects completely by adding a whole bunch of them (this will however imply the decision to rebalance them). That may kill their purpose as GREAT projects (not to mention Paradox already scraps the bottom of the barrel with their ideas for great projects), but that would at least keep the system alive and engaging.
Another rebalancing idea is to make most of great project start as level 1 (again, with weakening those effects) to make them more dynamic and meaningful (and in some reason,sort of historic). Besides,this can have an added bonus of giving some normally fringe nations who happen to possess a good great project a more often pick, adding the game more variety (the most projects are already controlled by majors/regional majors,but rebalance can fix that and make them weaker, maybe with ability to make the strong again somewhere in the focus tree of said major. Lemon didn't really point out the existing system of giving great projects additional bonuses via focuses (instead of leveling then as he proposed) which could also be very beneficial for the game
The huge mistake Paradox made (well,we can only see that a mistake if the purpose of great projects was to re-implement CK2 mechanic) was making all great projects non-generic. It does add a tone of flavor,but we could have gotten a possibility to make more generic projects,too
P.S. I can't help but notice Lemon going further and further down the Anbennar pipeline and I'm all for it. More Anbennar content pls?
I have dabbled in Anbennar before, and while looking back at those videos they 'recovered' they always do really bad for a while, which can be very discouridging
I really like the mission tree way. Monuments should feel powerful and important, but not for everyone. Just accepting a culture should not give access to their powerful buffs, as it makes no sense. It should be able to give the province modifiers, maybe even modifiers for every province of needed culture, but not the global modifiers.
Existing monuments from past time should not be very strong but have buffs that unlock via a mission tree. Non-existing monuments should not be able to be build unless your mission tree allows it to (or event/decision). That way not everyone gains access and the monuments themselves are artificially kept back. Versailles wasn't build in 1550, so it shouldn't exist.
Making something exponential more expensive will kinda fix it, but at the same time it won't. There are nations that can gain a massive amount of money from the start on. Nations like Ming, England, Ottomans, Mamelucks, Timurid can get their economy up and running insanely quick. It will also make it very hard to build mutliple buildings for smaller nations. You would need to focus on one building. In that way, you don't want to use your money for the wrong monument. Also conquering monuments would need to stop decreasing their level. Imagine your conquer a monument and all the money that was spent for level 3 is gone. Its even worse for someone losing one. Getting it back to level 3 after a reconquest is way too expensive.
There is also the problem with power creep and power difference. Building stonehenge vs poulders in amsterdam is quite the difference. Noone in their clear mind would ever spend their money on stonehenge, but Krakow cloth halls or pantheon of athens makes sense to spend money on. It would then make more sense to adjust cost individually to every monument, regarding their power and the possibility of usage (barely any religion, gov reform, chinese empire comes to mind, zoroastrism or hordes)
But yeah, the Anbennar way seems best. It makes monuments like a very relevant factor of your culture or nation.
Me, never touched EUIV before: Hmm yes, very true.
This week I'm playing as Incas. My great project that I got only comes as an event. It's called 'Temple' It cost me 10 years of income, but it was worth it.
Instead of arbitrary price hikes, perhaps lock upgrade levels (both the ability to build the improved level and to benefit from it) behind being in that culture/group and having capital in the region, this way leaving WC runs with only the first level, which is rarely super broken.
This going along with religious limits on things that are appropriate.
Those ducies are burning a hole in my pocket!
nice to see a mirror dinghy randomly show up...
Oh god, i remember leviathan on release, what a magical event...
Ngl, with tinto and johan at the helm, i'm really not optimistic about eu5
Thankfully johan didn't touch Leviathan afaik, well apart from the 'fixing it' bits
I have never tought about that and that make so much sense! It's terrible that you, playing as the country that a specific project was designed for, can't build it in time to make use of that (Scotland was the perfect example)
Another solution besides the 'exponential cost' could be just make that much cheaper for the country(ies) that building that would make sense
Like just straight up cut a zero from the GP cost for those selected countries (100g 250g 500g)
The meaningless tons of Gold problem would not be fixed tho
The scaling system sounds good. At the end game I buy GPs just because I can, then throw it onto my horde of cash and forget about it.
The power creep is real, but since the AI has been revised to actually dev their provinces, the game has become considerably harder to WC (I'm looking at you Korea, with your 50-60 dev in every province).
There's a solid 33%+ development that needs to be paid for in coring in some way
i think the best way to prevent overstacking and still maintain different strats viable is connect great projects to ideas group . u cant unlock them all in one ran and u still can use them and it will give more reasons to use unpopular ideas group in some region to enable it like innovative in italy or diplomatic in hre
diplomatic and unpopular?
Count,influence and spy are better than diplo in hre @@andrek6920
I never really played Crusader Kings, but i always thought "custom" monuments would be a good idea. Maybe give each culture group/religion a pool of monuments gated off by tech or even ideas. Then, once the requirements are met, you can pay to build the monuments anywhere you want. You could even make the cost scale with province development or terrain to incentivise building in a city, or on a plain. It never really made sense to me why you have to build a monument where it exists irl. Its a game about altering history, I should be able to build Notre Dame in East Turkestan if I want to
I think the scaling cost thing is a brilliant solution and it would be awesome if they implemented it
I do like how Civ 6 handled Wonders, where you essentially only got bonuses for building them, so the Ottomans and Zulu couldn't just walk around stealing steroided cities from everyone. That's not really something you could do in EU4 because they're wildly different from each other for two historical strategy games, but you could have some similarities using mission conditions and rewards. Say for the sake of Edinburgh Castle, you would have to do something hard but not crazy hard, and you'd get a decent but not OP reward that would only last two decades. You wouldn't have to be Scotland or even accept Scottish, but you'd have to own Edinburgh and play at least a bit of Scottish gameplay. The hardest thing there would be figuring out what's "Scottish" that Scotland can do that's not on the mission tree, and that another nation can do without simply existing there. If it's Scottish to stomp down the English, you've probably already done that as France by the time you get to Edinburgh.
Honestly EU4 should add a non reducible Inflation increase, like 1% every 20 years, this doesn't count towards missions that require you to have less than x inflation and it makes sure that by 1450 everything is 5% more expensive, maybe even have that scale exponentially so by 1500 everything is 12% more expensive and by 1550 everything is 20% more expensive and you can still get your usual inflation on top of that base inflation.
Same can be done with Prestige, as more and more nations become prestigious it should be harder to stand out as the most prestigious, increase the prestige decay over time.
The biggest thing I miss is flavour Text to read up on random stuff and give them a Bit More roleplay feeling and not a modifer dispenser
Makes sense historically too, Versailles shouldn't cost the same to build as Edinburgh castle, projects like these should have a cost to maintain too, since you know it's a nobles house , hagia Sophia is an old ass building etc
I never realized the prestige problem even exists, as a Anbennar only player i never played a nation under 100 prestige by 1500
Similar to trading hubs. Max amount for lvl 3's based on something relevant like merchants for trade hubs. Say Admin advisor bonus?
Prestige during art of war and some early DLC was completely broken(basically winning battles kept it at 100). Now it's more balanced, where battles don't impact it to the same absurd degree(+6-9 back then).
It remains though fundamentally broken, due to its decay mechanic. Fish any prestige decay mechanic(which are basically everywhere due to DLC bloat) and you have the exact same problem as early eu4 gameplay(100 prestige non-stop).
Prestige should really be reworked to give scaling decay(the higher you have, the higher the decay percentage) and make earning prestige even harder than it currently is! Heck, make it scale with empire size. The bigger the empire, the harder it will be to gain prestige/easier to lose it. It's only logical for a small, cohesive nation to be able to earn more prestige by battles, events or victories than a bigger nation with more resources at hand! Loss of prestige should follow the same paradigm. Disowning a heir from a nation such as England should be a momentous event compared to say Navarra!
Projects may be broken in other aspects, but the prestige aspect is not their fault. Prestige is fundamentally broken by itself!
I would suggest that the exponential UPFRONT cost is a bit gamey for my taste. What if instead it actually took some of the normal prestige ye event mechanics and governing cap / colonies as inspiration? You get an upfront dump of prestige at the beginning and end of construction, but it comes with increasing prestige decay and a maintenance cost? Representing the cost to both figuratively maintain the grandeur of an empire with so many great monuments (think losing hegemony) combined with gov cap where each monument also has a direct reoccurring financial cost where not only does every the maintenance increase per great project but increase by distance too? So you’re incentivized to have a theoretical “core” to your monument building which is clearly intended by the dispersement of certain modifiers? This would also finally act as prestige sink which is desperately needed for this game while also not making me ask why I can build Versailles for 250 ducats and then Prague cost me 120k
Some Great Projects are whole Idea sets for just 1000 ducats
What do you exactly mean by power creeping?
Is your tag playing against some tag from an old version where the new content gives in unfair advantage?
specifically for completeting challanges/achievements. A one faith is easier on current patch for example.
Anbennar also have a GP submod. I refuse to play Anbennar without it. I love modifiers.
I would love if great works modifiers were customizable and if you could build wherever you want them like in ck2
wonder how will EU5 handle this ? I mean on 1 hand stacking monument and mission tree bonus to get insane modifier is fun :)) while just simply adding only prestige and political strength but no requirement is also make sense :))
Almost 230 videos and you still haven't talked about the biggest problem of eu4:
Why do the "prestige from land battles" and "Army tradition from battles" modifiers have the same icon?
WAIT THEY DO?
I had no idea wow, that is genuinely the first I am hearing about it! Just goes to show how quickly I ignore those buffs
EL Dorado not giving a great project is a really missed thing oO
I love Great project mods juicy modifiers
Ngl if you really wanted to see why EU4 is the way it is today, you need to go ALL the way back to Rule Britannia which introduced mission trees and I believe (I could be wrong here) when they introduced the corruption penalty for going over your state limit which was the biggest ballache known to man. That's the hard cut off between Old and New EU4. For me at least.
It would probably help a little bit if you couldnt just magdump 20k ducats into a GP and be done with it instantly. make em wait the 70 years for the project to complete. add additional modifiers that increase or decrease the time it takes like local dev, autonomy, separatism, whether its your primary culture, your stab, manpower, devastation, etc. This way you build projects quicker in your homeland, but you will probably be waiting a whole century for a GP to get done constructing on the other side of the world. stretches stuff out a bit.
great projects being expensive as you build more of them is stupid. but they should have a maintenance cost i guess
Could you make a video where every paradox game is good at? Maybe split vic2 and vic3 cause they are good in different aspects
I did I made a video specifically talking about where CK as a series did really well!
Yeah no one watched it XD put a lot of effort into that one too
I just realize great monument come with leviathan dlc. Is this mean they are p2w feature?
yes
just add an upkeep cost that you gotta keep paying or they degrade back down in levels or fall in ruin
hoi4 has secret projects wich are special wunderwaffe tipe weapons researched in special facilities
1. I don't see nothing wrong in big empires having permanent +100 prestige. Roman Empire had so much prestige that until today we all have wet dreams about it and in E4 we can created far more glorious empires.
2. I disagree with your proposed solution, because it essentially transforms Great Projects into noob trap. There are few great projects that would be worth the scaling cost, so you would be ignoring your own regional flavour just to get monuments like Alhambra, Kaaba, Malta Forts or Borobudur Temple* etc. I don't know what solution would be better I would probably made some some great project far more expensive because, because why "upgrading" Stonehenge (I don't know? building a fancy museum around and a parking lot?) is as expensive as upgrading Great Wall of China or whole Historical Centre of Prague?
* People sleep on how good Borobudur Temple is. -25% culture conversion cost? With religious ideas, adjacent culture, golden era and 50% Inattentiveness you already have maximum culture conversion cost reduction and you don't have to wait for Enlightenment or go for Influence ideas.
Those are both excellent points. There are drawbacks in my proposed solution too in fairness, I was never wanted to claim its the best idea ever after all!
@@LemonCake101 Just started watching your Great Project tier list and you also undervalued Borobudur Temple, probably because you did not noticed you don't have to be Eastern religion, accepting a culture is enough. But this is probably on Paradox and readability of their tool tips. :P
@@Hadar1991 oh good point, huh: I remember doing a Mughal one faith and not being able to use it so it must be a recent tweak too (or I was just wrong)
Gae Fugg xD absolut legend
Investment is a great project seems like it should be done similar to colonization. Start it and slowly grows over time. It is a bit silly that we can take over the land where a great project has been sitting and instantly complete it. I mean the great pyramids weren't built in one day... or were they?
The Great Pyramids actually took 3 days in fairness!
This video focuses on the gameplay consequences of the monuments, but personally the thing I find more off-putting is the immersion. The modifiers given are so arbitrary--why does Alhambra give admin efficiency but the imperial city of Kyoto not? Do they just not administrate in Japan? And whatever is sepcial about Alhambra, why can I not recreate elsewhere? What is so special about Granada specifically that makes the palace built there give efficiency? Why cant I build the cheap chinese knock-off alhambra in Shanghai?
I think the ones with big global modifiers like Malta Forts should cost more and the ones that are more local like Swayambhunath should cost less
I love getting like 300% (or more, depends on your dedication to the bit) religious unity by abusing monuments
On one hand i can agree that Great Projects are a little too good if you stack them at this moment,
But limiting any country to (virtually) only 2 great projects, feels too restricting, when there were countries irl with multiple of those at the same time.
Also, i think balancing the game for Florry-level of players is bad, when majority of the playerbase is just mediocre at the game
But your proposed solutions would make for a good mod for multiplayer
The idea of making them cheaper initially was to offset the 'Florryflation' if you want to call it of the skill level, because honestly for brand new players etc Great Projects are so unfordable they may as well not even be there
@@LemonCake101 Yes, but 160k for the third means that As France you can only build Notre Dame and Versailles, Palace of the Popes is off limits till you conquer half the world. Maybe increase the costs linearlly so you could build 5-10 monuments (which would be realistic for at least a few countries irl)
That is because Lithuania has too much of them so they had to be collectively nerfed.
So true, Lithuania definitely has 'peak' Great Projects
Exponential costs is just a "invalidate 98% of this mechanic" decision. Meaning any Gp that isn't a top tier one just won't be built.
It's bad for singleplayer because the player can just go off and take every great project they want, but in MP games you have to fight people for them. MP games also are better on the economic side of things. It's not as easy to just steal everyone's trade, so you don't get as rich as quickly, and you stay in a moderately developed economy for longer. Also, with competent people playing, by 1500 a lot of regional powers will be able to afford their local great projects, which does help contribute the the unique identity of their nations.
I mean that’s why I play MP but as much as I would love to get everyone to do the same, its dumb to ignore that 95% of players if not more play exclusively single player
One way to fix GPs would be only impacting a certain region in most cases.
I love how you put gigachad images in all of your fucking thumbnails
3:20 would argue religious unity.
Prestige gets wholesale replaced by prestige from missionary
Eu4 is a goddamn mess and I love it