One of the Q&A questions asked if CA has any thoughts on the current implementation of Public Order and Corruption and the answer from the dev was they have thought of it and if enough players ask for it they would do it. I am here to say, and hope you agree, that the current implementation of Public Order and Corruption is a sad one. You need not pay heed to these two mechanics since they basically auto manage themselves. Even on Legendary Difficulty, you get a +8 public order buffer for free at around -90 public order which just removes the public order penalty of Legendary Difficulty. Corruption is maxed out or completely removed in basically two battles whereas it should, especially on Legendary Difficulty, be more akin to how it worked in WH2 where you needed to invest into anti corruption buildings and park heroes in the province to get rid of it.

Propositions:

1. Make public order have ramping recruitment cost increase, growth decrease, construction cost increase, and remove the free +8 buffer for Legendary.

                 This will serve into reducing the rapid snowball the player is able to achieve and give the AI a chance.

2. Heavily reduce how much battles affect corruption in a province, increase attrition amount, and increase debuff potency of corruption other than effects to Public Order(which should affect the AI too).

                 Different types of corruption should add more debuffs to a province and the AI should not get, if they do get any, cheats to untainted or their own specific corruption levels. For example, have Nurgle corruption reduce public order and casualty replenishment rate for enemy factions and vampiric corruption reduce campaign movement range for armies in the province. Things like this would make it more interesting and incentivize the player to make use of corruption spreading agents and actions.

Agree, it is very easy to deal with these two mechanics as they are. The need to have more impact on the campaign like they do in WH 1.

The only faction I really even notice public order with for the most part is the dark elves ever since they nerfed their public order building. most especially with malus darkblade as he does not have the rite to temporarily increase public order that all the rest of them do. Corruption is sometimes noticable as a malus for a few turns but is also rather easily kept under control. This is all on legendary campaign difficulty. I think I've only seen the AI get a rebellion if I was specifically raiding their territory for awhile or sacking their settlements. Even then in the latter case sacking all their settlements seldom leads to a rebellion.

Passthechips#4366 wrote:

Removing the buffer for PO in Legendary would be miserable. Legendary naturally gives the player a malus of -8 PO so your PO naturally normalizes at -80. The real solution would be adding some unique penalties for being low, or a % chance for rebellion to occur while at a low PO. Also introduced some unique benefits for being at high PO so it’s worth increasing (and don’t make it an income reward).

Corruption spread shouldn’t be tied to battle, I agree, but the downsides don’t need to increase in potency. The problem right now is the player never has to deal with the downsides because they can clear it easily, not that the downsides aren’t potent enough.

Instead we should bring back corruption having an impact regardless of the amount of Untainted in area like WH2. If there is enough corruption production in an area to reach the minimum threshold of the next tier, that stage should apply to the province, it just can’t grow if there is enough Untainted.

For example, if there is +17 Undivided Corruption generation in a province, but +18 Untainted generation in the same province, the province will normalize at 15 Undivided corruption (the minimum of the second stage of corruption) which imparts -2 Control. In order to get to the minimum next stage there would have to be a total of +25 Undivided corruption.

This way Untainted will prevent growth of corruption, but in order to really cleanse an area you have to deal with the sources. This gives Corruption much more impact and on Legendary it will be more impactful in tipping PO to spiral into rebellion.

Legendary is supposed to play unfair and not be the cakewalk it currently is

I think a chance of rebellions being able to occur from -75 to -100 public order would be fine. The exception for this is dark elves ever since their public order building was randomly nerfed so that it is more worthwiile to use the detection building as your first public order building since it gives + 3 control where your other rank one uses slaves adn only gives +1 control. Also a large part of the problem with dark elves public order is their slave thresholds (which affect their public order) are static rather then dyanmic based on number of owned settlements. Keeping your total slaves under 2000 for max public order when you have 5 settlements is understandable, but it is the same number you need to keep them under for if you have 50 settlements which is problematic. When you add the -8 public order from legendary, negative public order from corruption and from too many slaves it adds up fast. If you decided to pick up the sword of khaine on top of all that (foolish move from a public order aspect) you are getting rebellions every 3-4 turns. If you are mauls darkblade doing this you will get an average of 3-4 NEW rebellions EACH turn. It's kind of strange that the one faction that in the lore keeps trying to get the sword of khaine probably has the hardest time mantaining public order if the player chooses to do so. Granted grabbing the sword is a trap but regardless just some factions can mitigate it more then others. Except for beastmen, no downside if they manage to get it for them, but they also cannot build the building so it's fine.

It needs to be harder to manage. I think the corruption system of two was better and some regions should still have inherent corruption. Anti corruption buildings are pointless right now.

Passthechips#4366 wrote:

GreenColoured#3418 wrote:
Legendary is supposed to play unfair and not be the cakewalk it currently is

Yes, but a natural -8 PO Malus without a buffer would in no way be fun or particularly strategic. It would just make building a PO building and turning on a PO commandment (if available) mandatory.

Instead Legendary mode should introduce more ways to impact your PO in a way that a player can respond to. Bring back Medieval 2 heretics that can suddenly start dropping your control or untainted in an area. Bring in spawning more raiding Rogue Armies to impact PO. Active threats the player has to plan for and respond to, otherwise their provinces start spiraling. 

Not to mention corruption/PO are far from the only things that need tweaking to make Legendary matter more. There should be gradual tweaks to all systems to make them relevant, not sledgehammers to particular systems to make them overtly punishing.

Public Order buildings SHOULD be mandatory to begin with. You're supposed to be managing an empire here, controlling public order is literally more than half the job. Right now the mechanic literally solves itself.

Not to mention the entire reason a so-called "hardest difficulty" exists is to be unfair and masochistic. If you don't want the odds stacked against you unfairly, that's what Easy Mode is for. Only problem is, current Legendary is already Easy Mode.

GreenColoured#3418 wrote:

Passthechips#4366 wrote:

GreenColoured#3418 wrote:
Legendary is supposed to play unfair and not be the cakewalk it currently is

Yes, but a natural -8 PO Malus without a buffer would in no way be fun or particularly strategic. It would just make building a PO building and turning on a PO commandment (if available) mandatory.

Instead Legendary mode should introduce more ways to impact your PO in a way that a player can respond to. Bring back Medieval 2 heretics that can suddenly start dropping your control or untainted in an area. Bring in spawning more raiding Rogue Armies to impact PO. Active threats the player has to plan for and respond to, otherwise their provinces start spiraling. 

Not to mention corruption/PO are far from the only things that need tweaking to make Legendary matter more. There should be gradual tweaks to all systems to make them relevant, not sledgehammers to particular systems to make them overtly punishing.

Public Order buildings SHOULD be mandatory to begin with. You're supposed to be managing an empire here, controlling public order is literally more than half the job. Right now the mechanic literally solves itself.

Not to mention the entire reason a so-called "hardest difficulty" exists is to be unfair and masochistic. If you don't want the odds stacked against you unfairly, that's what Easy Mode is for. Only problem is, current Legendary is already Easy Mode.

As always, Green, you managed to hit the nail right on the wrong head. If building x or y building is mandatory then where's the management aspect? You just have to build a particular building because that's what the difficulty requires, which means you effectively have less building slots in each province. Woo!! Such a difficult thing to do, right? 

And once you realise that the UI is actually lying about the number of building slots and that you have to build one or two PO buildings, the money building, and some growth buildings and everything else is just for show, then where's the actual management? Where's the actual player choice? And if there's no real player choice then what's the point of even having it in the game? Where's the point of having a mechanic that has one solution that is essentially the same in all circumstances?

So "fixing" PO that way doesn't actually make the game more difficult at all, it just adds a level of annoyance in that you don't have the ability to do much of what you want with your provinces because the mandatory stuff eats up the building slots. But annoyance factor doesn't equate to actual difficulty. Eating a bowl of rice one grain at a time is immensely annoying but not actually all that hard.

And of course you're ignoring how this probably doesn't hit all factions equally. You'd have to consider the building slot economy of every faction to fully understand what this does, but of course you can't actually be bothered with any of that. Which is why you're not responsible for designing anything. You randomly do shit without thinking through the implications of the shit you're doing. That's not a great thing in game design, software design, or really any kind of design.

Likewise for corruption. There are plenty of "great ideas" as to how that could be hurting the player more but the thing nobody considers are the wider implications of their changes. Again, this has to be considered on a faction by faction basis, because otherwise we're making wide, sweeping changes that completely fuck up one or more factions, and fucking up factions because we couldn't be bothered thinking things through is not a good look.

Management is fun, if you have the tools. Managing stuff that you're not allowed to have the tools to manage, not so much fun. In fact it's something commonly referred to as "unfun". It's something that almost universally is considered "not fun" by just about anyone. For PO management to be fun, there has to be better tools for it, and right now there are no such tools. For corruption management to be fun, there has to be better tools to manage it, and right now there are no such tools. 

Understanding this, CA did the only sane thing they could have done and underplayed the mechanics until a time where better tools are available. If you want to suggest the tools players should have to actually make meaningful choices in order to manage PO, corruption, or both then *that* would be a good use of bandwidth. But just arguing for a shit solution and insisting that it's great because hard is supposed to be unfair? Not really.

One thing I wanted to add, Corruption spreading by agents should become an active agent action instead of a passive one. For example, using a chaos sorcerer, I target a settlement and have a success and fail chance of spreading corruption in that province. The difference is it will increase a larger amount per hero action. At level 1, if the sorcerer succeeds, he will boost corruption in that province up to 5 and at level 10 he will boost corruption to 15. Two reasons why I think this would be a good change: 1. The hero can accumulate experience and rank up instead of standing passively on the campaign map. 2. Corruption can be spread quicker. Legendary Lords and Lords will still have the spreading corruption passively. Perhaps the failure chance can be increased based on how much untainted the enemy province has?

Both these changes don't fix the issues with the game...

Both just lead to rebellion farming...

The map AI needs to get massively buffed. 

I have seen some nice gold vetted armies from gameplay in this patch so hopefully that's across the board. I seen 5 undead very strong armies all rank 7 units with level 30+ lords attack a town but the dwarfs are that strong half a garrisons and 2 barges wiped the lot lol... vampires have nothing vrs dwarfs... 8 terrorgeists just melted and along with the lords and heroes and then vc had no counter...

MonochromaticSpider#5650 wrote:
Understanding this, CA did the only sane thing they could have done and underplayed the mechanics until a time where better tools are available. If you want to suggest the tools players should have to actually make meaningful choices in order to manage PO, corruption, or both then *that* would be a good use of bandwidth. 

I’d say we do have the tools available. Buildings, commandments, lord/hero placement, skills and sometimes faction mechanics are more than enough tools to deal with the current issues, they’re just not necessary.

CA did not have to underplay the mechanics. Corruption wasn’t exactly overwhelming in WH2 . Corruption spread/removal did not have to be made trivial by tying it to battle. 

I won`t touch PO because right now bonuses are too plentiful from LL, tech and landmarks, other can make better point, but I will speak on corruption.

The rework of corruption from game 2 to game 3 solved one issue: less time needed to remove/spread corruption and possibly making it 100 or 0 at any region, except the number system has big drawback in making it entirely pointless by trying to remove it completely or spread it completely.

Warhammer 2 had a big  mechanical problem with corruption in that it inherited Attila`s religious system without considering the matters of attrition and bonus/malus from faith (events that could happen and from techs). As a result it took far too long to spread corruption and remove corruption but none of the depth of the older title, as coupled with the implementation of older system, it made rebellions far too common and paved way to rebellion farming (skaven thrived on their own PO malus).

The thing is the older system needed some mechanical tweaks so 1 corruption would not exactly mean 1 untainted and vice versa, reworking the formula for untainted and corruption and even adding the new -minus from corruptions would have fit the new system rather well.

Now corruption doesn`t need just a mechanical rework but graphical one aswell, vampires and skaven have horrible textures and  graphics compared to their older counterparts and chaos feels overly samey. This is a result of lack assets and making it all the same, in fact, undivided corruption looked better in game 2, whilst, the undivided in game 3 feels more like a mixture of khorne`s corruption and the old corruption.

So yes, corruption does need some changes mechanically and graphically, the latter has already been proved to be possible with dynamic world and forestry mods.

MonochromaticSpider#5650 wrote:

GreenColoured#3418 wrote:

Passthechips#4366 wrote:

GreenColoured#3418 wrote:
Legendary is supposed to play unfair and not be the cakewalk it currently is

Yes, but a natural -8 PO Malus without a buffer would in no way be fun or particularly strategic. It would just make building a PO building and turning on a PO commandment (if available) mandatory.

Instead Legendary mode should introduce more ways to impact your PO in a way that a player can respond to. Bring back Medieval 2 heretics that can suddenly start dropping your control or untainted in an area. Bring in spawning more raiding Rogue Armies to impact PO. Active threats the player has to plan for and respond to, otherwise their provinces start spiraling. 

Not to mention corruption/PO are far from the only things that need tweaking to make Legendary matter more. There should be gradual tweaks to all systems to make them relevant, not sledgehammers to particular systems to make them overtly punishing.

Public Order buildings SHOULD be mandatory to begin with. You're supposed to be managing an empire here, controlling public order is literally more than half the job. Right now the mechanic literally solves itself.

Not to mention the entire reason a so-called "hardest difficulty" exists is to be unfair and masochistic. If you don't want the odds stacked against you unfairly, that's what Easy Mode is for. Only problem is, current Legendary is already Easy Mode.

As always, Green, you managed to hit the nail right on the wrong head. If building x or y building is mandatory then where's the management aspect? You just have to build a particular building because that's what the difficulty requires, which means you effectively have less building slots in each province. Woo!! Such a difficult thing to do, right? 

And once you realise that the UI is actually lying about the number of building slots and that you have to build one or two PO buildings, the money building, and some growth buildings and everything else is just for show, then where's the actual management? Where's the actual player choice? And if there's no real player choice then what's the point of even having it in the game? Where's the point of having a mechanic that has one solution that is essentially the same in all circumstances?

So "fixing" PO that way doesn't actually make the game more difficult at all, it just adds a level of annoyance in that you don't have the ability to do much of what you want with your provinces because the mandatory stuff eats up the building slots. But annoyance factor doesn't equate to actual difficulty. Eating a bowl of rice one grain at a time is immensely annoying but not actually all that hard.

And of course you're ignoring how this probably doesn't hit all factions equally. You'd have to consider the building slot economy of every faction to fully understand what this does, but of course you can't actually be bothered with any of that. Which is why you're not responsible for designing anything. You randomly do shit without thinking through the implications of the shit you're doing. That's not a great thing in game design, software design, or really any kind of design.

Likewise for corruption. There are plenty of "great ideas" as to how that could be hurting the player more but the thing nobody considers are the wider implications of their changes. Again, this has to be considered on a faction by faction basis, because otherwise we're making wide, sweeping changes that completely fuck up one or more factions, and fucking up factions because we couldn't be bothered thinking things through is not a good look.

Management is fun, if you have the tools. Managing stuff that you're not allowed to have the tools to manage, not so much fun. In fact it's something commonly referred to as "unfun". It's something that almost universally is considered "not fun" by just about anyone. For PO management to be fun, there has to be better tools for it, and right now there are no such tools. For corruption management to be fun, there has to be better tools to manage it, and right now there are no such tools. 

Understanding this, CA did the only sane thing they could have done and underplayed the mechanics until a time where better tools are available. If you want to suggest the tools players should have to actually make meaningful choices in order to manage PO, corruption, or both then *that* would be a good use of bandwidth. But just arguing for a shit solution and insisting that it's great because hard is supposed to be unfair? Not really.

Wow! Someone gets it. People don't seem to think one step beyond the concept phase. What is the IMMEDIATE impact of this new idea? What happens in regions that are flush with resources and or landmarks? Do we add new stats to old buildings in order to ultimately lead us back to where we already are? A: Without a real plan, then yes. 

Agree. They are so underwhelming that you can just ignore them. Rework their effects CA. 

And add Hashut Corruption. It has no sense CD using Undivided Chaos Corruption. 

MonochromaticSpider#5650 wrote:

GreenColoured#3418 wrote:

Passthechips#4366 wrote:

GreenColoured#3418 wrote:
Legendary is supposed to play unfair and not be the cakewalk it currently is

Yes, but a natural -8 PO Malus without a buffer would in no way be fun or particularly strategic. It would just make building a PO building and turning on a PO commandment (if available) mandatory.

Instead Legendary mode should introduce more ways to impact your PO in a way that a player can respond to. Bring back Medieval 2 heretics that can suddenly start dropping your control or untainted in an area. Bring in spawning more raiding Rogue Armies to impact PO. Active threats the player has to plan for and respond to, otherwise their provinces start spiraling. 

Not to mention corruption/PO are far from the only things that need tweaking to make Legendary matter more. There should be gradual tweaks to all systems to make them relevant, not sledgehammers to particular systems to make them overtly punishing.

Public Order buildings SHOULD be mandatory to begin with. You're supposed to be managing an empire here, controlling public order is literally more than half the job. Right now the mechanic literally solves itself.

Not to mention the entire reason a so-called "hardest difficulty" exists is to be unfair and masochistic. If you don't want the odds stacked against you unfairly, that's what Easy Mode is for. Only problem is, current Legendary is already Easy Mode.

As always, Green, you managed to hit the nail right on the wrong head. If building x or y building is mandatory then where's the management aspect? You just have to build a particular building because that's what the difficulty requires, which means you effectively have less building slots in each province. Woo!! Such a difficult thing to do, right? 

And once you realise that the UI is actually lying about the number of building slots and that you have to build one or two PO buildings, the money building, and some growth buildings and everything else is just for show, then where's the actual management? Where's the actual player choice? And if there's no real player choice then what's the point of even having it in the game? Where's the point of having a mechanic that has one solution that is essentially the same in all circumstances?

So "fixing" PO that way doesn't actually make the game more difficult at all, it just adds a level of annoyance in that you don't have the ability to do much of what you want with your provinces because the mandatory stuff eats up the building slots. But annoyance factor doesn't equate to actual difficulty. Eating a bowl of rice one grain at a time is immensely annoying but not actually all that hard.

And of course you're ignoring how this probably doesn't hit all factions equally. You'd have to consider the building slot economy of every faction to fully understand what this does, but of course you can't actually be bothered with any of that. Which is why you're not responsible for designing anything. You randomly do shit without thinking through the implications of the shit you're doing. That's not a great thing in game design, software design, or really any kind of design.

Likewise for corruption. There are plenty of "great ideas" as to how that could be hurting the player more but the thing nobody considers are the wider implications of their changes. Again, this has to be considered on a faction by faction basis, because otherwise we're making wide, sweeping changes that completely fuck up one or more factions, and fucking up factions because we couldn't be bothered thinking things through is not a good look.

Management is fun, if you have the tools. Managing stuff that you're not allowed to have the tools to manage, not so much fun. In fact it's something commonly referred to as "unfun". It's something that almost universally is considered "not fun" by just about anyone. For PO management to be fun, there has to be better tools for it, and right now there are no such tools. For corruption management to be fun, there has to be better tools to manage it, and right now there are no such tools. 

Understanding this, CA did the only sane thing they could have done and underplayed the mechanics until a time where better tools are available. If you want to suggest the tools players should have to actually make meaningful choices in order to manage PO, corruption, or both then *that* would be a good use of bandwidth. But just arguing for a shit solution and insisting that it's great because hard is supposed to be unfair? Not really.

I wouldn`t say PO should be mandatory, but I will say this all PO buildings should come with a decent bonus (dwarves have ale, elves wealth, empire has upkeep reduction, brettonia spreads PO and so on). I`d say the biggest culprit right now is not the stabilizing PO but rather the over abundance of factionwide effects from lords, techs and landmarks, on the other hand, the negatives for PO are far too few unless you spam a hero stack.

The matter of building slots is a problem but some need changes either by removing redudancy or making it all building have at least one garrison troop. Still right now post battle loot is very high, you can sell items and wars and as a result you don`t have to care much for economy until you get your second stack,  by then the slots are free to keep pumping resource buildings as such, you can build the specific unit chains or advanced military buildings more easily early on.

Lets be fair why some faction need 3 basic military buildings? Why not condense into one and free up the space?