Follow up Post - RIP hourly ticks and my immersion

[MrTobster]

I thought I would make a new post and clarify my rationale on the change since it generated a bit of debate. Here is my thinking, I welcome any further thoughts—but guys, keep it chill...

Summary:
The shift from hourly ticks to daily ticks for combat in EU5 isn’t just a performance optimisation, it deeply alters how warfare plays out on both a systemic, mechanical and strategic level.

Systemic Implications:
1.
Higher Variance & Unpredictable Outcomes: Combat calculations in Paradox games are probabilistic. With fewer total ticks per battle, the sample size drops drastically, making combat far less deterministic. To mitigate high variance and avoid instantaneous stack-wipes, each battle now has to stretch over a much longer duration of in-game calendar time to hit a sufficient number of calculation ticks.


Mechanical and Strategic Effects:
1.
The Reinforcement Trap: Because battles now drag out over weeks or a month of calendar time (especially in the mid-to-late game), neighboring armies have vastly more time to march in and reinforce. Strategic positioning and catching isolated armies matter far less when an enemy force three provinces away has ample time to walk over and turn the tide. I think this disproportionate effects smaller nations ability to engage in a lightning strike war against larger countries.

2.
Compressed Campaign Seasons: Longer battles mean significantly less time spent sieging or maneuvering before winter sets in. You will simply accomplish less per war season. Anyone who has had to fight their way through the mountains in Armenia can imagine the nightmare this creates for seasonal timing.

3.
Unintended Attrition Spikes: Dragging combat across month-end ticks in harsh winter regions or diseased provinces exposes armies to monthly attrition ticks mid-battle—damage that previously wouldn't have occurred during a swift hourly ticks engagement.

4.
Vassal Swarms Become a Logistical Nightmare: Fighting nations with numerous small vassals (e.g., the HRE or France) becomes exhausting. If 20–30 battles against small stacks each take 7–10 days instead of a few hours, you will spend 6–9 calendar months trapped in minor combat animations rather than weeks.

5.
Macro Strain & Soft-Locked Diplomacy: Because every individual battle eats up so much calendar time, total war duration inflates massively. This forces you into longer periods running a costly war economy, accelerates passive War Exhaustion build-up, and keeps diplomacy (alliances, annexations, peace deals) soft-locked while technically trapped in minor skirmishes.

Conclusion:
Each of these implications is immersion-breaking. It results in a worse simulation with less realistic outcomes in the single system we interact with the most: warfare.

[Tobijon]

easy to fix, battles can be balanced to be shorter

[MrTobster]

Originally posted by Tobijon:

easy to fix, battles can be balanced to be shorter

I refer you to my first point - combat is probablistic and needs a minimum amount of ticks to work without significant variance.

[Tobijon]

Originally posted by MrTobster:

Originally posted by Tobijon:

easy to fix, battles can be balanced to be shorter

I refer you to my first point - combat is probablistic and needs a minimum amount of ticks to work without significant variance.

you can simulate its 3 times in one tick and battles will be three times shorter without any difference in result

[MrTobster]

While sub calculating multiple rolls within a single daily tick is technically possible, doing so completely negates the CPU performance gains Paradox sought by moving to daily ticks. Furthermore, compressing those calculations removes intermediate player feedback, turning battles into black-box instant wipes without any opportunity for tactical retreats.

Originally posted by Tobijon:

Originally posted by MrTobster:

I refer you to my first point - combat is probablistic and needs a minimum amount of ticks to work without significant variance.

you can simulate its 3 times in one tick and battles will be three times shorter without any difference in result

[MT]

Originally posted by Tobijon:

Originally posted by MrTobster:

I refer you to my first point - combat is probablistic and needs a minimum amount of ticks to work without significant variance.

you can simulate its 3 times in one tick and battles will be three times shorter without any difference in result

Any performance gain would be lost if you kept the same level of detail from hourly ticks. The ticks themselves are not the problem and never has been. It's poor allocation of AI decisions over ticks. Some things that were in hourly ticks should not be there.

The performance you get is based on the AI doing less. You get a dumber/simpler game now.

[KroganCharr]

I think a dedicated battle resolution window in the same style other grand strategy games such as Total War have it would do the job. When one of your armies meets an enemy army, you have the choice to either instantly resolve a battle, so it'll be over by the next tick, or bring up the battle window, where you can influence it in whatever way the devs feel appropriate, including the ability to call in other armies if they are close enough to make it there in time. During battle resolution, ticks stop.

Originally posted by MT:

Any performance gain would be lost if you kept the same level of detail from hourly ticks.

Not if the detailed battle resolution happens only when the player is battling. Nobody cares if AI vs AI battles are a simple "calculate overall army strength multiplied by luck factor" formula, that's what it effectively boils down to regardless without player involvement.

[mathalamus]

Originally posted by KroganCharr:

Not if the detailed battle resolution happen only when the player is battling. Nobody cares if AI vs AI battles are a simple "calculate overall army strength multiplied by luck factor" formula, that's what it effectively boils down to regardless without player involvement.

that is a good point, actually. you can drastically improve AI performance if you simplfy the actions. it might not be realistic, but you cant actually *see* them in the fog of war, can you?

[KroganCharr]

Originally posted by mathalamus:

Originally posted by KroganCharr:

Not if the detailed battle resolution happen only when the player is battling. Nobody cares if AI vs AI battles are a simple "calculate overall army strength multiplied by luck factor" formula, that's what it effectively boils down to regardless without player involvement.

that is a good point, actually. you can drastically improve AI performance if you simplfy the actions. it might not be realistic, but you cant actually *see* them in the fog of war, can you?

The question of realism isn't really relevant in this context anyway, because you can boil down any EU5 AI vs AI battle to a mix of army strength and luck. (Army strength in this context adjusted to factors such as terrain advantage). The more complex simulations are relevant when you are observing and pontentially intervening into the battle, but if they happen in a "blackbox" (fog of war), the result is the only thing that matters, so you can collapse them all into a random factor and it's indistinguishable. All you have to do is run a bunch of simulations to compute the random factor in a way that accurately reflects proper battle resolution, and you are good to go.

[eaerion]

Originally posted by KroganCharr:

I think a dedicated battle resolution window in the same style other grand strategy games such as Total War have it would do the job. When one of your armies meets an enemy army, you have the choice to either instantly resolve a battle, so it'll be over by the next tick, or bring up the battle window, where you can influence it in whatever way the devs feel appropriate, including the ability to call in other armies if they are close enough to make it there in time. During battle resolution, ticks stop.

Originally posted by MT:

Any performance gain would be lost if you kept the same level of detail from hourly ticks.

Not if the detailed battle resolution happens only when the player is battling. Nobody cares if AI vs AI battles are a simple "calculate overall army strength multiplied by luck factor" formula, that's what it effectively boils down to regardless without player involvement.

If I ever fund a developing studio, remind me to never hire you as a game designer.

[DSago]

I think you're confusing the frequency of combat calculations with the actual quality of the combat system.

Fewer ticks don't automatically mean more randomness, longer battles or worse gameplay. That entirely depends on how the underlying mechanics are balanced.

And I actually disagree with your point about reinforcements. If armies can support each other, positioning, coordination and keeping reserves nearby become more important, not less. That's strategic depth.

Your vassal swarm example also assumes that 20–30 battles happen one after another, which obviously isn't necessarily the case.

Most of your arguments are about potential balancing issues rather than inherent flaws of daily ticks.

More calculations don't automatically mean better warfare. What matters is whether the system produces interesting strategic decisions, and personally, I quite like the new direction.