So, a number of people have taken issue with the way I dealt with the Legitimacy-modifiers for countries such as Bosnia. I don't think everyone has the exact same reasons to disagree with it, but I just wanted to clarify a few things, just in case that happens to address your concerns: 1) I realize I didn't do a very good job explaining how the Legitimacy-modifiers work in the video: It's easy to think that the Legitimacy-modifier such as the one in Bosnia's national ideas is a single modifier whose value changes depending on your current government form. But in reality it's actually five different modifiers, like, literally, if you look in the game files where Bosnia's national ideas are defined you can clearly see that they have five different modifiers listed for Yearly Legitimacy, Republican Tradition, Devotion, Horde Unity and Meritocracy. Each of these modifiers has its own specific effect which isn't tied to the others, and each of them also have a corresponding custom idea in the nation designer which has the exact same effect. So, I want to make it clear that the fact that I'm counting the costs of all of these five modifiers is not just some arbitrary decision on my part; there actually are five different modifiers and five different custom ideas that correspond to each of them, and if you want the custom ideas to work the exact same way as the original national ideas, then you need to add all five of them, which of course means you need to pay the cost for all five of them. If you don't add all five, then your custom nation will *literally* not have the same ideas as the original nation. 2) The nation designer cost of a country is not the same thing as how powerful they are. The nation designer has never been particularly good at representing the actual power of a country, especially when it comes to national ideas. The purpose of this project is *not* to rank countries based on how powerful they are, its *only* purpose is to rank them based on the cost they would have as custom nations. So if you take issue with the fact that relatively weak countries like Bosnia can end up with a higher score than much stronger countries like Ming, just remember that it doesn't necessarily contradict the purpose of this project. If you want to do a ranking based on actual power levels, then that would be something entirely different and there would be no reason to involve the nation designer in that case. If you still disagree with me despite this, then I don't think we're going to be able to come to an understanding no matter what. It's likely we're just talking past each other and might even refer to different things. We'll just have to agree to disagree. Now, regardless of whether you agree with me or not, there have been some people who have requested an alternative ranking where you only count one Legitimacy-modifier instead of all five. I can understand why one might find that interesting, and if I can find the time and energy I might try to produce such a list for those who are interested in it. But I will continue to stand by my assertion that such a list would be significantly less accurate than the one I made originally, in regards to how closely it matches the actual nation designer. Anyway, thanks for all the kind comments about the video, whether you agree with me or not, I appreciate it! :)

@mcbeaty3971

19 күн бұрын

You made the correct call, everyone who disagrees is just seething at the fair and balanced nature of the Custom Nation Designer™️.

This guy has been COOKING

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Over-cooking you might even say!

Leave it to Paradox to give a buff to Sweden, even if it's only a tiny bit of development. Super interesting video, thanks for putting in all the work.

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Sweden Is Not Overpowered!

A very good video idea. I wondered about it in the past.

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Thanks! Yeah me too. Finally decided to do something about it!

Excellent work on this video, looking forward to more Eu4 from you!

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Thank you! We'll see what I might do in the future.

@Klijavards

20 күн бұрын

See, Mahafaly is not so bad

@LemonCake101

19 күн бұрын

@@Klijavards only because he counts the legitimacy/republican unity/etc 5 times over.

@Klijavards

19 күн бұрын

​​@@LemonCake101Excuses Edit: Also, no stream today?

@LemonCake101

19 күн бұрын

@@Klijavards no I am taking a break today, this is starting to really add up, should be if all well back at it tomorrow

Xarxos making one of the most intricate and well thought out videos about a concept almost completely irrelevant to the game itself (it is the most entertaining thing I've seen all week).

@xarxos5274

18 күн бұрын

Why spend a bunch of time and effort on something that actually matters, when you can spend it on an incredibly niche curiosity instead? :D

@emanuelneagu14

16 күн бұрын

irrelevant as it is, if you ever wanted to create a small/medium sized but strong custom nation, the issue of maximum cost must have hit you, and probably got you wondering if nations like the Ottomans would fit this cost limit so I'm sure a lot of eu4 players would be interested, as well as to find out how did Paradox come up with this cost limit seemingly so low (if the algorithm would bless this video and show it to them)

@xarxos5274

16 күн бұрын

@@emanuelneagu14 Oh yeah, would be really cool if someone from Paradox saw this video and wanted to comment about how they designed the nation designer, and what they think about my methodology here!

@emanuelneagu14

15 күн бұрын

@@xarxos5274 you know I initially wanted to say that if the algorithm would bless the video, the people wondering about these limitations would be interested, but it would be even more interesting if someone from Paradox explained why they did things they way they did, funny positive mistake in expression isn't it :D

@xarxos5274

15 күн бұрын

@@emanuelneagu14 Oh, I see, haha well both sentiments are intereresting I think! :D

Counting the legitimacy/rep trad/etc thing that way really skews the results, and I'm not convinced it's a fair way to apply it...especially because it's further breaking the calcs by stacking the "admin" category so much...this one modifier is in effect being more than quadruple counted, then multiplied, arbitrarily dominating the "most costly" category. I think it would be less damaging to the evaluation to simply count those as the highest value national idea possible (republican tradition), even though that is also grossly over-costed :p. IMO, we can do this because a) government switching is rare and b) biased towards whatever the player values the most. 60 is still a ton for that idea, but at least we're not fabricating a massive admin cost multiplier onto a bunch of nations which would otherwise not even sniff top cost! Still very entertaining!

@liamreitsma5312

20 күн бұрын

The other option is ignoring the unbalanced modifier of it tbh. Count them all, but only take the most expensive (republican) as counting towards the unbalanced cost.

@joshuasims5421

20 күн бұрын

Agreed, I’d love to see this analysis done reducing those to a single modifier. It seems like it really skews the results and perhaps obfuscates the actual ranking.

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

I agree that these modifiers are overrated by the nation designer, and as a result those nations get grossly overrated as well. But that's just how the nation designer works, it's not very good at measuring the actual power level of countries. The fact is, that the countries that use these modifiers do have all five of them (they're even explcitly defined as such in the game files), the fact that only one is active at a time is just part of how they function in the game. So if we were to exclude some of them then that would be the more arbitrary decision, and in that case there are loads of other modifiers that we could consider adjusting the cost of too, since there are many more that are over- or undervalued as well. But at that point, why even use the nation designer at all?

@TheMelnTeam

20 күн бұрын

@@xarxos5274 However, only one is active at the same time, and thus its comparability most closely resembles a single modifier, not quad+ counting modifiers that don't exist and then stacking that multiplicatively to get absurd costs! The decision to count it that way basically defined the top 10 by itself, and I strongly doubt pdox would cost it even kind of close to that. Strongly enough that I would bet money on it.

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

@@TheMelnTeam It resembles a single modifier, but it isn't a single modifier, it's LITERALLY five different modifiers. If you look in the game files you can see that countries like Bosnia have all five modifiers listed in their ideas, not just one. If you mod the game to remove all but one of the modifiers from Bosnia's ideas, then they won't get the benefits from the others if they switch government form. I don't understand why we should pretend that it's just one modifier when it literally isn't? And honestly, I agree that I don't think Paradox would have defined the cost like this if they had thought about it more. It's definitely not a reasonable cost if we want the cost to reflect how powerful the modifiers actually are. But the fact is that this is how the designer currently works, probably because the developers didn't think about this particular case. It doesn't make sense to me that we should count these costs based on how we think the designer *should* work, and ignore how it actually works.

i would like to see a version of this with an fix for the government-specific modifiers being massively overinflated in cost, even though that's arbitrary and not accurate to the nation designer. Perhaps only counting the modifier that actually applies for that nation's starting government? I think a list that (somewhat) better represents the actual power levels of the 1444 countries would be interesting, instead of Bosnia being the second most expensive/powerful nation because they get meritocracy and horde unity that they will likely never use

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

I understand that, and I actually considered adding an alternative ranking for that initially, but decided against it because I fear it would only make things more confusing. Maybe I can add something like that later; it wouldn't reflect the actual nation designer, but it might be interesting nonetheless.

Great video! I’d argue that for negative national ideas (like for the Synthetics) the original equation should have all the signs flipped. So the equation would be: cost(n) = a + b * n * (n+1) where n b would also have a negative value, from the separate equation: b = (second - first) / 2. This way, the cost is still negative but for a less arbitrary reason while the scaling of the negative ideas better follows the pattern of the positive ideas. In the Synthetics’ case, the n= -10 modifier would be -225, as 2.5 * -10 * -9 This parallels the calculation for the n= +10 level, which is 2.5 * 10 * 9 = +225

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

That's a reasonable suggestion for sure! There's no objectively right or wrong answer for this, but I like your reasoning here.

I believe the absolute mess that is terrain type calculation came from the day that, rather than take the plurality terrain to be the be all/end all for that province, the terrain on any given action (read: battle) in the province was probabilistic in EU3 and maybe early EU4. It's interesting to see how they calculated it now, but I remember it being incredibly frustrating to play with that level of uncertainty.

@blueshellincident

20 күн бұрын

I thought I remember in the earlier updates it was still based on probability for EU4

@4sythdude549

20 күн бұрын

I legit thought that he was making a joke when he started talking about terrain. It just sounds so stupid to make the computer figure out what the terrain of the province is rather than just assigning a terrain type to a province.

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Yes I believe you are correct, and I'm pretty sure early EU4 worked that way too. It makes more sense with that in mind, but it still seems kinda crazy how complex it is!

This might be my favorite video on KZread

@xarxos5274

6 күн бұрын

Woah, that's high praise, thank you very much! I've enjoyed several of your videos as well, cool to be recognized by a big name like yourself! :D

really cool video man

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Thank you! :)

Wow! That’s amazing! I have been following since Vic 2 WC as Germany and damn. The details that you made here are incredible. Congratulations!

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Thank you very much! Glad you like this even though it's a bit different from my earlier content! :)

awesome work! thanks for the video

@xarxos5274

16 күн бұрын

Thank you very much! :)

Great video, very informative and everything well explained!

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Thank you very much, I'm glad you think the explanations were good! :)

Very good vid. Keep up the interesting work!

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Thank you very much! :D

Would you consider doing a kind of sequel to this with formables? Prussia, Great Britain, Russia, Spain or even Rome itself would be interesting to run through this system, as formables usually have overpowered ideas and custom government types

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

I did sort of do that for national ideas, but judging the formable countries in their entirety is difficult because they don't have any fixed territory or any specific rulers etc. You could probably do an approximate estimation based on the territory needed to form them and the average ruler they might have, but I don't know if I'd really want to do that.

@hrsmp

17 күн бұрын

​@@xarxos5274you can take historical size of the country based on the year it appears on the map first, as well as take their first historical ruler.

@xarxos5274

17 күн бұрын

@@hrsmp I suppose that's a way to do it, though it would make things a bit complicated, not the least because the later start dates in EU4 are not very well maintained and have a lot of weird stuff on the map. So then you have to decide if you're gonna base it on the actual state of the game at those dates despite obvious inaccuracies, or try to manually adjust for those inaccuracies, which would make it harder to automate the entire process in code.

Wow this was amazing keep up the great content.

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Thank you very much!

Great video, thank you! I'm sure so much work went into this.

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

Thank you! And yes, quite a lot of work indeed, much more than I thought it would take when I started with it! :D

@doudline2662

19 күн бұрын

@@xarxos5274 Me anytime I begin a coding project: I think I can get this done within 1-2 weeks Me 3 months later: Will someone end my suffering?

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

@@doudline2662 Way too accurate :'D

If you have an idea that has multiple modifiers that are mutually exclusive (like the legitimacy/devotion/etc modifiers) should not count as 5 different ideas but as a more buff version of that idea, maybe a 2 times multiplier for being "versatile".

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

But that wouldn't be accurate to how those ideas actually work. If you want to recreate those ideas in the nation designer then you have to add all five of them, or else they won't work the same way as the original. And adding all five of them would of course add the cost of all five of them as well.

finally someone done this XD

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Indeed, about time! :D

Shame that the legitimacy modifier kinda screwed with the results. It would have been nice to see a ranking if they counted as one modifier depending on what government the nation starts with

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

It's a shame it has such a big impact on the result, I can agree with that, but that's just how the nation designer works. A ranking where they only count as one modifier could perhaps be interesting as well, but it would be something entirely different from this.

I am playing paradox games because of numbers go brrr (and history ofc)... So this video is just everything i need. Thank you very much, still in it, and i like it so much!

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

Gotta love those numbers! I'm glad you enjoyed the video!

Great idea!!

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

Thank you! :)

I hate the fact you can not add two modifiers in one idea, Paradox should’ve adressed that a loooong time ago

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

Yeah they really ought to have updated the nation designer to be more dynamic, it's a bit needlessly limited right now.

“We’re finally ready to talk about top and bottom rulers” I didn’t know that was a trait

@xarxos5274

18 күн бұрын

Henry VI looking very submissive and breedable right now (which is ironic since he has the Infertile trait).

Respect for the effort, subscribed

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Thank you, it was quite a lot of effort indeed! :D

Oh hey! You’re back! I was just checking your channel lately! How are you? How’s your job?

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Yeah! I'm good, I have vacation right now so that's nice! My job is fine for the most part, it was a bit extra stressful lately, but hopefully it will calm down soon!

@user-wh5se3cb2y

20 күн бұрын

@@xarxos5274 And I hope for your own good too :) I was actually really surprised that you uploaded video. Will there be more of it in near future?

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

@@user-wh5se3cb2y Thank you! I didn't originally plan to turn this into a video, but after finishing the code and all that I figured it might be interesting to explain it all properly. So you know, I was kinda surpised too in a way! I doubt there will be more in the NEAR future, maybe something further down the line. But I don't know for sure, I have no concrete plans right now.

1:12:00 Just put it into the formula as -50% fire damage recieved then multiply the cost by -1 because it's negative

@xarxos5274

18 күн бұрын

Yeah that's basically what I did there at the end. In retrospect I probably should have done something like that to begin with, since there actually is a precedent for modifiers with inverted values in the nation designer already, and in those cases they do invert the cost as well.

15:21 insert “paradox making sweden OP” joke

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

They would never! /s

return of the king 🤴 🙌

@2Links

20 күн бұрын

lol was on my way to comment this

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Haha well thank you!

Ranking the starting tags in 1444 by difficulty according to the amount of points required to recreate them is a really funny concept to me? It makes me think of someone looking exclusively at point costs and saying things like "Yeah, Castile is Very Easy difficulty, Scotland is too." "You wanna form Russia? Play as Novgorod, they're objectively easier to play than Muscovy. Look how much cheaper they are!" "Bro, Jolof is literally broken OP, why does PDX allow achievements as this country???"

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

Haha yeah, the names of those categories can be a bit misleading, since the nation designer itself isn't very good at measuring the strength of a country :)

This is such a cool project, it’s really funny to see that most of the world ranks easy at best.

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Thanks! Yeah I hadn't necessarily expected that going into this, but I suppose it makes sense.

I mean, kind of expected I guess? An OPM with good ideas can easily get a hundred new provinces, a big empire with terrible ideas is stuck with them (unless they switch to a different tag ofc).

@emanuelneagu14

16 күн бұрын

nah if your economy can support a 50k army at start no one stands in your way no matter the ideas (except maybe hordes in plain terrain) and also you can probably support some good advisors to compensate for the bad ruler, and crush your rivals and get that 50 PP giving +1 bonus for each mana type

le epic video

Yoooo he is backkkkk what next?

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Yeah, at least for now! And I don't know, I'm very tired right now! :D

@mr_JackSchwarze

20 күн бұрын

@@xarxos5274 lol fair

1:15:54 hanover, a nation whos ideas are often taken over that of prussias due to how good they are in multiplayer, being all the way down at the bottom 10 is crazy to me.

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

Oh, they're considered that strong? Well, looking at them, I can understand why they're ranked so low: They got several useful modifiers but none of them have very high values, so they'd be pretty cheap. They're also not dominated by any one category, so they get no multiplier from imbalanced categories. I think this just goes to show that the designer cost isn't necessarily a good indicator for how strong a nation or national is.

@easytiger6570

19 күн бұрын

Perfectly balanced

One thing to add. Legacy government forms are not in the game anymore. Government reforms aren't dlc-locked anymore.

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Oh really? I haven't played without Dharma in forever so I never knew. Oh well, using the cost of the legacy governments is probably still the best option.

@sirflasm3456

20 күн бұрын

@@xarxos5274 yeah it's good that they left that in the code

this will explode

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Haha we can hope! :)

Can you make a list while not accounting for the legitimacy idea problem? I feel the results of that would be much more interesting!

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

I understand that it might be interesting to see that. It would take a bit of work though, maybe I could do it sometime, but we'll see!

@Mag_ladroth

19 күн бұрын

@@xarxos5274 Do you still have the files you used for this video? If so you could just upload a google drive link on a community post

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

@@Mag_ladroth I do have the spreadsheets with all the data, and I've already linked to it in the video description. It would still take some work to exclude the extra legitimacy modifiers though, since that would affect the imbalanced categories multiplier and so you would have to recalculate the costs of all the other ideas too.

@Mag_ladroth

19 күн бұрын

@@xarxos5274 Thanks! But it's not a big problem for me, I love doing pointlessly long calculations in excel

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

@@Mag_ladroth Haha well be my guest if you want. I don't think I included the idea "levels" in the spreadsheets though, so you would have to calculate those yourself to begin with.

also interesting is wich countries you can instantly (re)form so you have some Missions. i know you can Form Tunis within the 200 points limit with still nice ideas on day 1 of your campaign.

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Custom nations can't form other countries though, can they?

@sirflasm3456

19 күн бұрын

They can if player-controlled. They don't get "new traditions and ambitions" though so they have to stick with their ideas. ​@@xarxos5274

@kevinkabali7201

19 күн бұрын

@@xarxos5274 they can. my example is tunis because i did that. take all provinces from tunis, take the tunisian culture of course, pick your custom ideas. pick a few more provinces if you like. start your 200 points game. on day one form tunis. it should be possible with all nations that can be formed by just beeing a certain culture. it also works with nations you can form later in your campaign of course like netherlands, westphalia, germany and so on. custom nations do not block that. i did my 800 points ideas guy achievment while becoming russia ^^

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

@@kevinkabali7201 Huh, I'll admit I haven't tried to form other countries as a custom nation so I didn't know for sure, I've just read some people claim that you can't do it. But if you say so then I'll believe you!

16:20 You mean, most difficult, unless you look into the file that directly says which provinces have what terrain?

@mcbeaty3971

19 күн бұрын

If it is anything like CK than not all provinces have that defined, and the best way to do it would be through terrain.bmp

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

Are you referring to the terrain_overrides in the terrain.txt file? Those only cover a minority of all provinces. Most provinces don't have any explicitly defined terrain, which is why you have to use the complicated method. Or do what I did and use the simplified terrain map mode in-game.

I would like to see the results but excluding the point inflation from legitimacy ideas

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

Many others have expressed this too. Maybe I can do something like that later, we'll see.

Now this is some real high effort, high quality EU4 content! (Unlike some other youtubers out there) Take my like and subscribe, you have my support 😊

@ydp868

20 күн бұрын

An interesting idea for a mod would be a 'balance mod' where nations that are over budget in custom points are randomly 'nerfed' by losing ruler stats, provinces etc, while under budget nations are buffed to reach 200 hundred points. I know there are already many 'balance mods' out there, but the fact you can have a statistical basis for the balancing is interesting.

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

@@ydp868 Thank you! A "balance mod" sounds like an interesting idea, although I wouldn't say that the nation designer is actually a very good measure for a country's actual power level. So balancing around that might not be so balanced after all! :P

@ydp868

20 күн бұрын

​@@xarxos5274 looking at the way you dealt with the +1 legitimacy modifier I can see why 😂

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

@@ydp868 Yeah that's the most obvious case, but there are many other places where the nation designer is very unbalanced as well :)

Custom nations should let you edit the missions

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

That would be cool!

Can you please share national ideas list without inbalance factor?

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

Without the imbalanced categories multiplier? Well, you can look in the spreadsheets at the sheet named "Idea Modifiers", which lists each indiviudal modifier and includes both their "total cost" but also their "base cost", their "slot bonus cost" and their "category imbalance bonus cost". If you know your way around excel you could probably use that to get the cost of each idea set while exclusing the category imbalance multiplier. That's the closest thing I have to what you're asking about (if I understand you correctly).

@arekzawistowski2609

19 күн бұрын

@@xarxos5274 yeah. Thanks a lot. Great video.

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

@@arekzawistowski2609 Thank you!

i really wanted to see the scores without the national idea cost multiplier to see the actual fair score

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Well, unfortunately, the nation designer isn't very good at giving a fair score. I agree it would have been better if it had worked differently, so the scores better reflected the actual power level of the countries, but that's not how it works right now.

Very interesting video and the arbitrary decisions all feel logical, all except the decision for the legitimacy-like ideas. It's especially weird to see that despite the very good arguments and alternatives proposed by people in the comments, you still argue that your decision was right.

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

The thing is, the way I treat legitimacy-like modifiers is actually far less arbitrary than many of the other decisions. It's important to understand that, while they appear to be just a single modifier whose effects change depending on your government type, in actuality they are *literally* five different modifiers. You can see this clearly by looking at for example Bosnia's national ideas in the game files: All five of those modifiers are explicitly included, and each of them work entirely independent from the others; they don't affect each other in any way, and you don't have to group them up like that either, you could just as well just have one of them on their own. What's more, each of these five modifiers have a corresponding custom idea that work exactly identical to each individual modifier. There's nothing fundamentally different to these modifiers compared to any other modifiers in the game, so I treat them exactly the same as I treat every other modifier. If I hadn't counted their costs individually, and instead only counted one of them or taken the average or something, then *that* would mean I'm arbitrarily treating these modifiers differently from every other modifier in the game.

@emanuelneagu14

16 күн бұрын

yo 1+1+1+1+1=5 it's the most logical thing no matter how imbalanced it is, the custom nation feature is far from perfect that's the issue

1:05:54 The fact that you decided to add the value of every single legitimacy modifier into the calculation AND let them affect the unblanaced ideas multiplier at the end completely throws the entire ranking out of whack. Even you recognized that Bosnia being ahead of Ming because of this was nonsensical, and yet you decided to go ahead with it which I struggle to understand why. You could have just set the composite legtimacy modifier's value to the same as the normal legitimacy value (which you did for the culture advisor modifier), you could have set it to an average of the 5, you could have set it to the highest value of the 5 (60 from the republican tradition), but this completely biases the calculations towards only nations that have the composite legitimacy idea. Your reasoning that the only way to implement this in the custom nation builder is to add all five modifiers makes no sense since we were already leaving the physical limitations of the actual EU4 custom builder behind when we were discussing ideas with more than 7 slots and ideas with levels that aren't in the custom builder.

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

It's only nonsensical if we expect the custom nation score to be a good measure of how powerful a country actually is. But it definitely isn't, and not just in the case of the legitimacy modifiers: There are plenty of other cases where the designer gives much larger or much smaller costs than what seems reasonable. That's just how it works. I don't understand why you think it doesn't make sense to add all five modifiers. If you're able, take a look at Bosnia's ideas in the game files. You'll find that they literally include five different modifiers for Yearly Legitimacy, Republican Tradition, Devotion, etc. So the decision to include all five of them in a custom nation isn't an arbitrary choice at all: It literally matches how the national ideas of the normal nations are defined. Choosing to ignore some of them makes no more sense than choosing to ignore any of the other modifiers in the ideas: If we were to remove Bosnia's Tolerance of Heretics, then the result is that Bosnia no longer gets a bonus to Tolerance of Heretics. I think we can both agree that this would be wrong. If we were to remove Bosnia's Yearly Republican Tradition, then the result is that Bosnia no longer gets a bonus to Yearly Republican Tradition, even if they become a republic. Why is this not wrong?

I’ve wondered this too lol

I think we've all had more coherent test runs with the console, than the coding of EU4 itself

Like for Yellow Fars

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Best Fars!

Tell me more about Ærs and formulas for Ærs

@xarxos5274

15 күн бұрын

What do you refer to when you say "Ærs"? Heirs? Or something else?

It's unfair to count double ideas as separate, since they are considered one for balance purposes. So, for example, the legitimacy idea should be a tier 10 idea instead of 5 tier 2 separate ones

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

You mean if there are more than 1 modifier in a single idea, then we should always just count one of them for that idea? That could be a way to do it, but then you would have a very large number of modifiers that would simply get ignored.

@easytiger6570

19 күн бұрын

@@xarxos5274 No, I mean that when there are ideas with multiple modifiers it should contribute to it's tier. For example Hanoverian shutzenfest idea should be a tier two idea instead of being two tier one ideas costing 0 both. Then the value should be divided between modifiers (two in case of Hanover) and multiplied according to the modifiers category (1 and 1 in case of Hanover)

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

@@easytiger6570 Oh, I see! Yeah that's not a bad idea actually, you could certainly have done it like that. There's no objectively right or wrong answer here, but I can see the merit in your approach as well.

I saw the Reddit post!

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

Yay!

I think this is how one would evaluate the tricky national ideas that don't have any specified values: - the "country allows X" ideas are all worth 0. Both for the reason you gave in the video, and because special units are pretty irrelevant anyway unless you have missions/privilieges etc to really boost up the special forces limit. - complex modifiers like "effect of absolutism" and "overextension impact" can be broken down into a combination of other similar modifiers. For example, +5% admin eff can be roughly compared to 5% CCR + 5% province warscore cost. Overextension impact is tricky, but it's effect is similar to a scaling national unrest modifier. At 100% OE you get +5 national unrest, so 20% overextension impact reduction is like -1 unrest. These modifiers both scale so they're impossible to value precisely but that would be a way to approximate it.

@ydp868

20 күн бұрын

'Effect of administrative efficiency' could be calculated based on how much admin eff the average player-controlled nation can achieve. The most 'generic' admin eff you can get without missions or DLC monuments and stuff is 30% from tech and 30% from absolutism so 60% should be the benchmark.

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

@@ydp868 Those are some good ideas actually. It can get rather complex to try to assemble such modifiers as combination of other modifiers, but you might be able to find a pretty good approximation if you really try. At least you could find something closer to an accurate result than simply ignoring them.

The legitimacy thing causes too much imbalance. I understand that applying these rules is the most consistent, but it doesn't give the most accurate results. I believe you should use the multiplier applicable to the considered government choice

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

I mean, there's no objectively correct answer as to what is the most accurate results, since the nation designer has its limitations. But I don't really understand why you don't think these are accurate results, if you acknowledge that I've applied the rules consistently? The nation designer cost isn't a very good measure of how powerful a country or national ideas actually is, but the point of this project wasn't to rank the most powerful nations. You could try to create a pure power ranking if you want, but it would be something completely different from what I've done, and there's no reason to base that on the nation designer.

I simply don't agree with the use of all legitimacy modifiers. I would've taken just one. you should know those modifiers exist so if you're a theocracy you don't have a useless +1 legitimacy. you can see the problem of over representation of this quirk in your data.

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

The thing is, the way I dealt with them actually isn't some special case or anything: I treated them exactly the same as every other modifier. It's important to note that while it might seem like this is just a single modifier which changes its value depending on government type, it actually is literally five different ones, who all have their own separate effect. There's nothing which inherently ties them together; although in the base game they're always grouped together, you could easily split them up and just have them on their own, they don't affect each other whatsoever. There's fundamentally nothing different about counting all five of them separately than it is to count any other idea modifiers separately.

@notcraig255

19 күн бұрын

@@xarxos5274 sure but it should've gotten an exception because it is the only one that changes. countries like athens and jolof shouldn't have been boosted to top 10 because they dared have an in practice (though republics can use it effectively) mid modifier it looks like their ideas are a lot better than they actually are. of course athens is one of the +4 tolerance of heretics countries. though silly I do agree with the result in that regard.

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

@@notcraig255 You have to remember that custom nation cost doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how good a country or national idea is. You can have two sets of ideas who both have mediocre modifiers that are about equally good, but if one of those idea sets happen to have mostly Administrative ideas while the other has an even distribution of ideas from different categories, then the first one might end up several times more expensive the second one. That doesn't make any sense either if we want the score to match how powerful they actually are, but that's just how the nation designer works. This project aimed to calculate what cost each country would have in the nation designer; it was never intended to rank nations based on their actual power level. If that *had* been the intention, there would be no reason to involve the nation designer at all, because it's not a good measure for that. And again, I just want to repeat that Yearly Legitimacy, Republican Tradition, Devotion, etc, are five separate modifiers with separate effects that don't actually have anything to do with each other, and each of them have one corresponding custom idea that works exactly the same as the original modifier. There's just no getting around the fact that if you have a nation whose ideas includes all of these five modifiers, then to recreate it in the nation designer you have to use all five corresponding custom ideas, which each have a separate cost. That's no different from any other modifier.

For Bosnia's 2nd, you should've taken the average and not the total of the five in my humble opinion.

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

See my pinned comment for further clarification on why I counted all five.

man missed yo fr

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

Aw, thanks! :)

Perm will be the highest point for ruler/heir/consort, calling it now.

@anora8973

20 күн бұрын

Update: I didn’t know they would be listed separately. If you add them together, I think Cuzco is the highest. Then Ottos being carried by Mehmed, and then Perm in third.

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

@@anora8973 I suppose I could have included a combined list too, but either way, not a bad guess on Perm!

Here’s a video idea, is the average EU4 player on the spectrum?

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

"Yes. Thank you for watching!"

Ok now try and make the custom nation with the highest cost possible. Then you can ask us to try and beat you! Have to have a maximum province count though.

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

The highest cost possible assuming there's no point limit? I'm pretty sure that could in theory become infinite, since you can always make national idea modifiers larger and larger. You'd have to put some kind of restriction on how large the modifiers can get in that case I think!

@Prophlol

20 күн бұрын

@@xarxos5274 Ok you can choose an existing national idea/tradition/ambition from a nation in the game or you can use the maximum from custom nation builder. How about that?

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

@@Prophlol I suppose that could work. I don't know what the maximum cost would be though even then, probably quite massive, since in theory you could give the nation every single province in the world, which would already be quite a lot!

I was hoping Israel would have come up somewhere in this .. haha.

@xarxos5274

19 күн бұрын

Hm, I suppose their national ideas should be somewhere in the spreadsheets at least, I haven't really thought about it.

@emanuelneagu14

16 күн бұрын

isnotreal I guess ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Athens >>>> Ottomans confirmed

@xarxos5274

20 күн бұрын

It's just science you know!