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Information about developments at snowballing problem
- Thread starter mexxico
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I am also wondering how the total amount of payd tribute effects the kingdoms over the course of a playthrough. I still think a predetermined total amount over x time is A more logical way.
Now declaring war is the only way to stop paying tribute.
Killer Kitten
Regular
I just learned they solved this problem! Armies don't fight at all! Brilliant!
ElCrisp
Sergeant at Arms
Yeah infinite tribute on its face seems like an odd system, risks people winning in the bank rather than on the battlefield.
I dont fully understand war calculations in depth. But currently it seems like tributes work as a grudge system -- kingdoms look to reduce the tributes they are paying, this leads to some behaviour that is logical for the tribute system but is odd from a gameplay perspective. Namely short negotioation type wars.
I have seen this play out quite rationally (as far as the system is concerned) as a merc for NE I saw them enter into 3 different wars in turn to reduce tributes they were paying from 1000 down to paying 300. These wars were quite short not enough time for me to even move to the front on one of them. But succesful wars in terms of tribute. During these wars with various kingdoms, SE, BA, and WE the whole time NE was paying a wopping 3k from a very early war with Khuzait, total pay out around 270k. So from an early war where no territory traded hands Khuzaits are subsidised to the tune of 270k to fight wars with their other opponents.
So you can see in a hypothetical situation a dominate kingdom could end up collecting tribute from most of their neighbours. Which provides continuous motivation for those kingdoms to declare war on the stronger kingdom.
But how does that play out in practice when the dominate kingdom gets war declared on them from multiple kingdoms. I know there is code to encourage kingdoms to not fight multiple wars atleast to some extent, is it only the strong kingdoms who get these peace deals though?
Do they actually recieve the tribute in this situation because they are stronger, or does the fact they are the ones seeking peace bias negotiations so the strong kingdom fighting multiple enemies end up paying tribute.
So while you expect it to be the strong kingdoms collecting tributes motivating the weaker kingdoms to go to war with them.
The tributes could be a result of historic lopsided 1v2 war negotiations. Leading to a strong kingdoms holding a tribute grudge against a weaker kingdom.
This grudge type system has it merits I think. I just agree that after a set time the money part of it should end as to not be a "win more" mechanic.
So while this grudge value could persist untill the next war re-negotiates it, the part where money changes hands could end after 30 days (number pulled out of butt) as to not pin weaker kingdoms getting drained by one faction and being at war with others targeting them for their weakness.
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Ok so ive finished pulling all the data together from my first snowball test for 1.8.0. As I mentioned in the patch thread, defections are nonexistent now which is a good and bad thing. This has been my theory for a long time but defections are a major driver in snowballing and when you see high defection you see high snowballing while no defections can lead to interesting back and forth between kingdoms and limits snowballing.
So lets look at the data.
For those that want to watch a timelapse of the test here ya go. Shoutout to @scarface52 for modding me visible castle name plates and extending the map zoom, also @Flesson19 for showing me how to turn off day night cycles.
@SadShogun overall the changes to defection are definitely working as a temporary solution! I am curious about if you fixed factions being able to create armies at peace in order to fight rebellions? Also any insight into why clans are overall richer?
So lets look at the data.
- The 20 year snowball score of 19 is way down compared to 1.8.0 beta which had an average snowball score of 80 by 20 years.
- With snowballing being this low there are no dead factions compared to an average of 3 dead factions in 1.8.0 beta.
- Interestingly we see the snowball score actually improve from year 15 to 20 (25 down to 19), this is mainly due to the western empire making a comeback against the northern empire who had seemingly expanded too much to control without being able to recruit defected clans like they normally probably would.
- As you can see in the clan table above, there were no defections.
- When looking at rebel clans there were only 5 who survived long enough to get recruited, which is about half as many as 1.8 beta. My guess is this is likely due to less snowballing and no factions taking large swaths of land that belonged to another faction.
- So this one surprised me, ever since we started testing snowballing back in 1.5 ive never seen more than 3 very rich clans, in 1.8 live we had 10. I don't have an explanation for this one, typically we see very rich clans due to their factions snowballing and owning tons of fiefs but that clearly isnt the case in this test. My guess, which isnt founded in data, is that maybe tributes are overall lower letting factions build much more wealth?
For those that want to watch a timelapse of the test here ya go. Shoutout to @scarface52 for modding me visible castle name plates and extending the map zoom, also @Flesson19 for showing me how to turn off day night cycles.
@SadShogun overall the changes to defection are definitely working as a temporary solution! I am curious about if you fixed factions being able to create armies at peace in order to fight rebellions? Also any insight into why clans are overall richer?
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Great test as always!
interesting Guess. I was questioning this same thing. The way tributes are for an unlimited time seems strange. There should be a fixed amount of Tribute paid over a curtain amount of time so declare war is not the only way to get out of paying tribute.
Is there a way to catalogue the total paid tribute per faction and received tribute per faction? This way you can see if there is a correlation between wealth and tribute.
Unfortunately there isn't that kind of granular data available to us as players, its actually one of my suggestions as I would love to see this kind of data available to the player. Back when mex was still around he use to provide us the raw data so we could analyze this very thing.
Yes this never made sense to me. It's should be more akin to war reparations. What we have now is more like continually squeezing your neighbor for money until he gets can't stand it anymore.
Yeah my guess is that because they dont have real diplomatic reasons for wars this was a way to get the AI to have some value to use to decide when it was time to declare war and peace out. They are constantly evaluating whether they can get a better deal on tributes and thats what triggers war and peace declarations. If the tribute was just a set amount then they could just wait it out and wouldnt have a reason to declare war if the tribute wasnt that bad. If you can remember back to when there was no tributes wars were basically never ending and lasted years which people hated. Not how I personally want it but I understand the logic behind it.
Also honestly if anyone is against snowballing being limited for 20 years then high never ending tribute is actually something you probably want as it causes the quick downfall of kingdoms (if clans actually defect due to being poor).
Personally i liked the system warband had as it made the world feel more alive and like events were occurring that caused war. Was always fun to go do the quest to cause a border incident to entice factions to fight. But i think we are probably too deep in for this kind of a fundamental change to occur unfortunately.
This is one of those things that can be done in a day or two, but it won't be.
When you are dependent on someone who won't listen, you better prepare for constant frustration. Or disengage and cut your losses.
As bloc has proven, all the things we want could be implemented in a few hours but it aint in the vision unfortunately.
Don't worry I'm not disillusioned about the chances.
