Are Great Nations beneficial

[Luminous Dark]

I am on my first playthrough. We researched Unity Movements and Great Nations, which allow countries to form up into bigger nations. However, I don't know if these are worth getting or if they will severely cripple me or force me to just abandon them after having formed them.

I say this because I've noticed that larger economies tend to provide worse output per command point cost. The larger the country's economy, the more command points it has, but also each command point costs the entire nation's initial investment budget. So if you have a small country with one command point and 5 investment points, it costs 5 CP to maintain, but a country with 10 investment points and 2 command points costs 20 CP to maintain, but you still only get 5 investment points per command point owned, meaning a country that's twice as big costs 4x as much to maintain, and a 6 CP nation with 30 investment would cost 36x as much to maintain while providing the same amount of investment. Presumably this is offset by the fact that the infrastructure is already larger to begin with, but I'm not sure it really is. I've checked the boost, funding, and science outputs per CP cost, and smaller countries are consistently better across the board.

So, for people who have turned big countries into enormous ones, I ask you: how much does the CP cost increase, and is it overall a good or bad move in terms of resources per CP cost?

[Torpex]

I am on my 4th failed game atm. So take that into account.

Maintaining a bunch of small countries, which specialize into boost, develop mission control etc, is more efficient than one megastate. Direct investments are also more efficient in small countries.

As you develop your space economy, Earth becomes a secondary theatre and then you'd want a QoL of a large state so you do not babysit 10 little countries. Some factions also require you to control % of Earth population and that is done via unifications. IMO mega countries are endgame thing. I think reddit has a thread on how to do those.

And there is a bunch of threads here, not sure how relevant to the current version, which discuss IPs and best countries to do different things.

[soulfreezer]

The main benefits of giant nations are that they are more resistant to purges/coups/etc from other factions and more importantly, they allow you to control a lot of regions for less control points. For example, if you turn all of europe and russia into one giant nations, you get control over 63 regions with the potential for several hundred mission control for less than 200 cp, that's a lot cheaper than controlling all those small nations individually.

Obviously you want to keep those smaller nations around long enough, so that they can build up close to their mission control limit, before you merge them into a larger nation.

Creating giant nations will also allow you to control most of the world later in the game, EU/Russia + USA + Caliphate + China with all claims conquered gives you the entire world expect for south america and 3 provinces in india for an achievable cp cost. Doing this greatly reduces the income of the other factions and finally stops them from screwing up the entire world by running spoils everywhere.

[debott]

Short answer: You don't need Great Nations. But eventually you'll want them.

[RawCode]

you will eventually want them if want to actually win the game as most of factions.

only faction that do not need to control entire earth to win is exodus, everyone else have such condition (in some form).

[debott]

Please keep in mind, first time players might appreciate not to have their win conditions spoiled. ;)

Also, I'd like to argue that it can be done without Great Nations. Would be incredibly hard and likely tedious, but doable. Maybe stuff for a challenge?