the good and the bad, full feedback for you guys at tinto

[AHolySpanner]

ill sweet-talk you with what you did right (because you simply dont hear about it enough):
the italy changes were all excellent. literacy, development, artsitry, events, flavour for the whole area. and padua, omg padua is beautiful, you did the saluzzo thing where they gave the most goodies to the hardest nation. it still needs some tweaking, for exaple padua being occupied does not flip them currently in the scaglieri war. you can either fix that or just make it an event to flip sides after 6 months, so long as padua can become independent w/o having to wait for the truce to be up with milan.
guelphs and ghibellines is mechanically wonderful, though the progress bar could do with a single colour (we have the contribution info on the bottom to clean it up). hundred years war is much better, england appears to actually be able to win again, dunno how dunno why but well done on that one. italian wars actually matter and it feels good for external powers to engage in
HRE moves much faster and the parliament popup helps engage people. austria is stronger and beats up hungary much more often. the HRE emperor is a nice balance between the main ones i.e austria, bavaria and bohemia. none of them hold a hegemony for long.

artists matter now. they keep your prestige up and i genuinely notice the influence, promotion and institution buffs they bring now. all i'd ask is make it easy for us to see the art that is made. an ai chat prompt or a bunch of starving art majors could make any new picture you need, but it doesnt matter unless we have to dig through the ui to see them. i should be able to see the mona lisa in full view the moment i bring up the works of art tab if i have it.

now for the stuff i love but you probably wanna balance anyway:
estate interactions! waay too OP. 20 stability for 10% satisfaction every 5 years? stealing half the burghers' wealth every 5 years, 15 legitimacy, max diplomats (yet more reason to keep diplomacy slider off until you need it) its all too much. if your goal is to make things slower, this patch essentially shifted the momentum from the economy to the government. also the army levy size increase when asking any estate applies to all armies currently. its awesome, but up to you if you think its too powerful.
england ai is strong but it doesnt take the stuff its supposed to (english coastline, normandy, aquitaine cores etc) so you may need to look at the ai conquering preferences for that one. ottomans are absolutely slaying in this beta, please keep buffing the ottoman ai into the stratosphere, everyone wants them as the endgame final boss

and now for the bad:
economy is overnerfed. the idea seemed to be that you nerf the baseline production efficiency to slow the exponential economy curve, the reality is not even the most profitable buildings can make more than a ducat. this is mainly caused by THE MOST IMPORTANT BUG IN THE BETA, PATCH IMMEDIATELY: market stockpile currently crashes the price of goods, making everything sell for its bedrock 10% price. if you want it to affect markets positively, have it reduce the price of input goods only, not RGO's and buildings. currently silver currently sells for less than salt, masons are the most profitable building by far, and none of those "specialised" cities can actually sell their specialised goods. so long as this bug remains in place, there cannot be useful feedback on the rest of the changes.
one exception i can see is urban rights. certain rights that reduce production efficiency now completely destroy profits, making the vast majority unuseable. they become auto-remove if you start with them. if your base production efficiency is 20%, urban rights that trade money for prosperity, literacy etc, now reduce profit margins by 5% out of that 20%, resulting in 5/20, or 25% reduction. so if you wish to keep the production change, anything that does not provide a goods specialisation bonus should reduce production efficiency by 1/2% (around the same resulting amount they did before the beta).

HRE advances are a little too smooth. the ai can quickly get to landfriede and theres nothing you can do to stop the vote. landfirede means the emperor is called in to stop any war between HRE members. as you can imagine, this can essentially halt player expansion entirely which could be game ending for folks like brandenburg or milan. landfriede should never be allowed by the ai to impose on the player.

the research debuff from control is simply too harsh. you cannot expect nations like france, england to get control over the country before 1400, let alone the ai's. big empires should not be debuffed for their starting lands. ai's dont know how to build local governors, so if you insist on this change then at least build a couple local governors in the big western european lands to start them off with high control. you wont get much feedback on this research change since most ppl will be playing in italy with high proximity, but it is certainly a big issue for most other countries. (i wont lie though, its a very sneaky way to nerf china so good thinking there).


finally, i appreciate the fact you added in late game beauracracies but be bold, add in some unique beauracracies for other nations too. papal states, hre emperor and china could do with some unique beauracracies to invest in the efficient running of their international organisations for example. lock them behind the byzantium dlc to bring some real life profits in.

overall, im glad this is a beta. loads of new changes, and i think your going in the right direction. but theres one or 2 big holes in the system that need to be fixed as soon as you can







PS: i hope you have the patience to listen to my suggestion on how to fix trading:

trade is gonna need a beta patch of its own. trade will always be a problem so long as you tie the supply to the demand of each market, since everyone will just go full autarky so theres nothing to trade. but you can make it work, you did it before in victoria 3. consider adding the viccy pop "addictions" system. untie the trade price to demand, but keep it tied to starting market supply. it would be such that pops would be addicted to a certain good, so much that theres a portion that cannot be filled by their own markets. tie this system to cultures like in viccy. germans should want to import beer (except the bavarians who want to make it themselves). the french and english should want gold and furs to pimp themselves up against the other. the bohemians and hungarians and greeks want fine cloth to look like emperors. the irish need wheat and sturdy grains to feed the cattle. japan NEEDS iron like a fish needs water. the list goes on. so long as pops desire things they prefer to get from other places, it will work. you cant make a persian rug in italy after all. call it an exotic charm. you already have this in palce for new world/china goods, but it should be expanded to other goods too.

[athuya]

and for the trades, I think selectively or strategically holding some goods may effects the price. for example holding irons not to export making the price goes down in my market for my tools and weapons production, making my army production and maintainance cheep, meanwhile others depending on my iron have to pay high price for their tools.
For now I think AI is selling off all the irons if it seems profitable to other markets.

another thing If I overproduce fine cloths or cloths from wool , for e.g England and intentionally flood it to nearby markets to crush their market price so our rival markets could never be able to build on cloth economy. (may be overcomplicate but trade can be weaponized)

[Dang]

I have not played the beta, but have been looking into the feedback. It seems like Paradox is adjusting too many systems at once, when they should be focusing on one, maybe two, systems for these patches.

The continued changes to the economy are, in my opinion, unnecessary. They are tweaking an already very complicated system each patch, and while they may revert/change some things before the 1.3 patch goes live, I am very tired of relearning how to get my economy going each patch. In a straightforward sense, my economy should rest on control, just like so many other mechanics in the game do. If I am 200 years into the game and making a ridiculous amount of money, I don't see that as a problem. I don't want exponential cost increases for buildings or cost of court; If I have played this long, let me enjoy being rich and playing the game as I like. I can't imagine many people are playing the game and saying "I make way too much money, this isn't fun." If that's so, play a different country, up the difficulty level, etc. That's just my opinion since playing from launch and having about 500+ hours in game.