Ech Heftag wrote:
2) Rebalancing:
a) There should be a possibility to get more leaders with growing forces, and the command costs of units should be overall reduced
I think this was supposed to be in. The official database includes numbers for increases to the leader limit over time, but there are no events to actually change them.
b) The C-in-Cs should be 4-star-generals, to make this role more distinct from the "normal" field officers. It's also easier to keep track of a distinct 4-star general and -admiral than to scroll through all your 3-star generals to find out who's the current C-in-C. The special C-in-C ability should only appear on the 4-star level (currently, most C-in-C abilities for 3-star generals are effectively wasted abilities). It should not be possible to manually upgrade a 3-star to 4-star level (only one 4-star at a time for each branch, promoted automatically by the program according to seniority).
You get one C-in-C per theatre not just 1. At the moment it is very hard to identify the theatre's C-in-C. you have to look at every 3-star general in the theatre. I think that simply showing them as 4-star would help. The alternative is to strip the whole concept from the game.
c) The development level of a province should influence the size to which a structure can be expanded. For example, a well-developed province in Europe can support a large factory (in game terms, a lvl. 2 or lvl. 3 factory, once the respective techs have been researched), while a province with thick jungle and few roads in Africa can just barely support a small farm (in game terms: economic structures limited to lvl. 1 , even if better tech has been researched). To make matters easy, maybe just choose 25%, 50% and 75% as the thresholds. With 25% development, you can start to build structures in a province. 50% allows for lvl. 2 structures, while 75% lets you upgrade to the final lvl. 3 structures.
I like the idea, however the problem is that level 2 structures replace level 1 structures in the force pool. So there are no level 1s to build.
d) To balance this effect even more, the development level should no longer increase by itself over time. Instead, the player should have to use cards (colonial or regional decision cards) to increase the development level of provinces.
Then you will need to add more decisions to do this. You may also run into problems when the dev level drops. one potential issue is that if the dev level is too low you can't raise it.
e) Major colonial rebalancing: The average requirements for protectorates, colonies, dominions and vassals should be higher. Furthermore, there should be possibilities to contest or lift the protectorate as a player of a third country (currently, once you've established a protectorate, the area is basically yours, in my opinion, for historical and gameplay reasons, only a real colony should have this definite effect). Also, in general, there should be more options to reduce or contest the colonial penetration of a rival player. This is especially interesting and important for MP games.
I disagree about raising the limits, I think the root problem is that CP accumulates far too quickly. The naval decisions look to be the worst offender here - it is easy to go from unclaimed to being able to play protectorate in a few months - this should take years. Colonisation in our MP have is massively ahead of schedule. So much so that France is running into problems with events that convert areas into protectorates that are converting colonies back to protectorate.