One of the biggest problems with the game (and how to fix it)

[Wrigley]

This post is intended as constructive and actionable criticism, as this is a great game that I'd like to see get even better (also, I own the game on GOG but the devs seem more active here). One of the biggest frustrations that people tend to have with this game (both the base game and Rizia DLC) is that a lot of the decisions lack transparency. But I think players understand that we should have some uncertainty about the decisionmaking in the game, so a lot of that frustration is really about that uncertainty being arbitrary, preventing the player from weighing the costs and benefits. That problem largely comes from the game's inconsistent use of budget values.

The base unit of investment in this game is 1 budget, but players have no idea how much 1 budget is actually worth. For example, at the beginning of the Rizia DLC, you have the option to set up a single concert for 1 budget. 1 budget is also the yearly upkeep of entire military ,* Rizia's income tax revenue for an entire year**, the cost of the Housing for the Poor Initiative, the cost for the lengthy excavation and restoration of an ancient city, setting up a nationalization process for immigrants, and many other things. It's even more jarring for players coming to the Rizia DLC from the base game, as many major enactments in Sordland (rural education institutes, fair trade and competition commission, etc.) cost as much as setting up one concert in Rizia.

It makes no sense for these things to cost the same amount. It seems like the game sets up a scale from "a little bit expensive" (1 budget), "moderately expensive" (2 budget), "expensive" (3 budget), and "very expensive" (4 budget and above). But these expenses do not make sense in relation to each other. One concert, even an extravagant one, costs far less than a national housing program or excavating and restoring an ancient city. Aside from the inherent absurdity of these things costing the same amount, which they should not, it sends the wrong signal to the player that benefit from these investments is likely to be similar, and makes it nearly impossible to make intelligent decisions in-game without the help of guides, which take away the fun of playing the game for yourself.

Now, before someone might get hung up on the concert, it's just one of many, many examples. Donating to a NGO for a conservation project also costs 1 budget. Renovating a single church costs the same amount as building a weapons factory, a consumer goods industrial park, or the Havas Coal Mine. And the cost of erecting some statutes of the royal family is similar. Hopefully the concert doesn't turn into a tour. If it stops in 5 cities, that's the cost of a hydroelectric dam!

In short, keeping things simple is often good. But simplifying to the point where the basic math and the relationships between costs and benefits in a choice-based game make no sense is bad. Luckily, there is a way to fix this problem in three steps. In short, find and use a common denominator.

1. Pick a real currency, preferably something like dollars or euros that gets used a lot to help with understanding costs. Then, find the cheapest expenditure in the game with a real-life comparator that uses the currency you've chosen. Something like the concert could be compared to similar events. Or when nations donate to conservation NGOs for projects like the one in-game, look at those amounts. Based on a quick google search, for example, a project to put a floor back in the Colosseum was projected to cost 18.5 million euros. Archaeological restoration of an entire city is likely to cost more than that, but the point is that there are ways to find a close relationship between an in-game project and real-world currency.

2. Take the best, and cheapest, comparator you find. Round the numbers to make the math easier. Say it's a concert for $1 million. $1 million is now 1 budget in game. Then, estimate the real-world costs of the other projects in the game and divide those numbers by $1 million. That's the new in-game cost.

3. Simplify the numbers. You can do that in several ways. One is to just let the game use decimals, which is the most precise but might be a bit too much for players to figure out. Another is to round the numbers, which isn't perfect, but at least is closer to reality. You can also combine the two approaches by rounding to a tenth rather than a whole number or using a similar convention. A third way is to only worry about budget cost for items that cost more than a certain amount, letting "budget=1" sit higher on the real-world scale and possibly simplifying the remaining items in game. The player never needs to see the denominator or the real-world costs that are being used in the math. The important thing is that the numbers in game make sense in relation to one another.

I get that this would not be the easiest thing in the world, but it would go a long way towards making the game more intuitive and less arbitrary for the players. Right now, so many decisions don't make sense because I don't understand why building a single gold mine, building a military academy, and overhauling national public infrastructure all cost less than buying 25 tanks (however much that is supposed to represent). The Rizia DLC already makes great progress in giving the player a sense of income over time, reducing the arbitrariness of the base game's budget management (which had more to do with timing than numbers over time) by better using the turn-based system and enabling royal decrees at will. What I suggest, or some better variation of it, would take the next step in making this game fun to play and easy to understand even without using guides.

*Your military advisor tells you it takes 1 year for standard military units to train. Those units take 1 turn to train, so 1 turn=1 year.
**Repealing the income tax entirely takes away 1 budget per turn, and doubling it gives you 1 additional budget per turn.

[ManBearPig]

Honestly I hadn't even really noticed this whilst playing but now you mention it it does seem a bit odd some things cost what they do, or even cost anything at all (in the sense that a concert would really impact your budget at all compared to other decrees).

Maybe it doesn't have to go quite as far as what your suggesting but the devs taking another look at how much certain decrees cost in relation to each other would be a good starting point.

[Leser]

I think one of the most glaring examples of this, is when you get the opportunity to visit Sordland to discuss Bond investment opportunity.
It costs 1 budget to arrange the visit (including travel, accommodation and additional expenses for the household), and the "small" investment is also 1 budget, which, based on the discussion, translates to 3 billion Rizian Guilders

[Valtharsus]

Devs take notes.

ESPECIALLY if you continue to insist that the first play-through be a compulsory "Torpor" play-through.

[Timur]

Another important thing would be to tell the player the follow-up costs. I enacted the decree for higher health and education funding which - according to the decree menu - costs 2 authority and 3 budget.


What it doesn't tell you is, that it also adds a "Higher Welfare Expenditure" debuff, decreasing your income each turn by 2, which almost killed my whole playthrough. Why doesn't it tell me that BEFORE I enact it? How am I supposed to make a good decision here, if I don't get the most obvious and most important information?

Also the whole budget is far too strict anyway. There are so many decrees and you can do pretty much none of them, because you just never have the budget needed for anything but the bare-bones necessities.

[Bruther]

Since the devs seem to want to keep currency numbers out of it, another helpful scale would be expressing expenditures and revenues as proportions of GDP: this policy will cost 3% of GDP, this tax will bring in 1% of GDP. That could even be what the arbitrary budget units secretly stand for.

[Wrigley]

A lot of good points here. The right fix is probably different than what I've suggested, but I want my criticism to be as constructive as possible. The point is that something is very wrong with how much things cost in the game. As others point out here, it costs the same amount to prepare a trip to Sordland to discuss bonds as it does to invest conservatively in those bonds. And don't get me started on the royal yacht costing as much as setting up a domestic tank industry. I don't know the best way to fix it, I just suggest one way, but it needs to be fixed. I'd prefer not to need to edit save files to have any sense of immersion!

[REhorror]

Agree with OP.

No, please don't bring in GDP in here, it will even make sense less.

Just use a fictional currency, like literally give you a budget of 3 billion of rubles or so, and you can borrow more from the banks/central reserves at a cost, etc.

[Alf]

I definitely agree that decisions lack transparency, in some cases you spend several discussions with advisors across multiple meetings discussing something trivial, while in others a really important impact or consequence is not communicated at all.

I haven't really noticed the budget thing, but now that you mention it not all if it makes sense. I was able to provide housing for the poor in my entire country for 1 budget, while I spent 3 times setting up a meeting to arbitrate a dispute between 2 other nations. I mean, it ended up getting resolved in a small meeting between 3 people, how many biscuits did they eat?

[StVimes]

Originally posted by Timur:

What it doesn't tell you is, that it also adds a "Higher Welfare Expenditure" debuff, decreasing your income each turn by 2, which almost killed my whole playthrough. Why doesn't it tell me that BEFORE I enact it? How am I supposed to make a good decision here, if I don't get the most obvious and most important information?

I completely agree, lack of information and transparency is a really big problem.
Decrees that provide information like - 1 drugs and - 1 tourism are also strange.
Nowhere else do these things have a numerical value, and it's not like it translates 1 to 1 into budgets or anything.

Originally posted by Timur:

Also the whole budget is far too strict anyway. There are so many decrees and you can do pretty much none of them, because you just never have the budget needed for anything but the bare-bones necessities.

The strangest thing about the budget is energy. In most trades and treaties, we actually give away energy for free. I understand that if we create an embargo, we cannot count on big profits, after all, transport is much more difficult. But total zero is crazy, and to add to that, if we don't manage to hold on, we lose the trade we had from the beginning.

[Timur]

Honestly the easiest way to fix the problem from the OP wouldn't even be to give absolute numbers in a currency, just have the numbers be larger so you can have a larger range of values you can detract.

So instead of having a budget of like 5, have it be 50 and now you can have stuff cost 1 or 8 or 10 or 17 or 31 or 48 instead of just 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

That way you could even build in changes in prices. So when the energy prices go down, selling energy could go down from like 20 to maybe 15 or something. It would also allow for smaller events that just cost like 1 or 2 to add more flavor without breaking the balance.

[Wrigley]

Originally posted by Timur:

Honestly the easiest way to fix the problem from the OP wouldn't even be to give absolute numbers in a currency, just have the numbers be larger so you can have a larger range of values you can detract.

So instead of having a budget of like 5, have it be 50 and now you can have stuff cost 1 or 8 or 10 or 17 or 31 or 48 instead of just 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

That way you could even build in changes in prices. So when the energy prices go down, selling energy could go down from like 20 to maybe 15 or something. It would also allow for smaller events that just cost like 1 or 2 to add more flavor without breaking the balance.

I agree, and I tried to get at that with Point 3 of my suggestion in the OP. It could be done without looking at actual currencies (steps 1 and 2) but I still think there needs to be a reality check on some of these expenses, and I'm not sure how the devs are going to accomplish that without looking at real-life costs when they treat renovating a yacht as the same as setting up a domestic tank industry. Of course, that could just be a lack of ideas or optimism on my part, but the costs being as out of whack as they are has me worried that the devs didn't see this problem when they released. If there is another way for them to redo costs and income like you and others have suggested, then that's great, but how they come up with the numbers is important too, even if there's a larger range of numbers.

One other thing generally, it's also not clear why some things cost money and others don't. You can spend tons of money on setting up a meeting in Sordland (which could have been a phone call) but all the meetings with Wehlen, Pales, and most of the other meetings are free? It all seems arbitrary.