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I think that's around average for a non-speedrun, yeah!

Well, better late than never!

You're not alone in that sentiment, and I actually thought about making a separate ranking with that precise idea. I ended up not going for it though to keep the video from getting even more complex, but I can definitely see why people would be interested in it. If I hadn't lost the code for the project I might have made something like that after the fact, but as it stands now it would be a bit too much work unfortunately.

I'm glad you liked it! :)

You mean a world conquest? Well awesome job for almost completing it! :) I did imagine that Italy would be a good choice for world conquest, I almost went with them myself actually before changing to Germany. But yes, it sure takes a lot of time to do and it doesn't feel great to trip on the finish line like that!

And then imagine being born in Korea, and also grow up to become part of the reestablished Polish-Lithuanian army for some reason!

Oh really? You didn't go to high school in northern Sweden then I presume? :P

@@xarxos5274 No, i'm from south america, but my friend had a similar hairstyle and glasses

@@wiel5908 I see, cool!

I have no idea. I'm not nearly as experienced with Vic3, especially the later patches which I haven't kept up with very much yet.

Woah, that's high praise, thank you very much! I've enjoyed several of your videos as well, cool to be recognized by a big name like yourself! :D

Yes!

@@xarxos5274 I have close to 10k hours and you make me look like a noob

@@Peanutbutterfella I appreciate the compliment, though there are still parts of this game where I'm closer to a noob as well!

What do you refer to when you say "Ærs"? Heirs? Or something else?

Thank you very much! :)

Yeah that's basically what I did there at the end. In retrospect I probably should have done something like that to begin with, since there actually is a precedent for modifiers with inverted values in the nation designer already, and in those cases they do invert the cost as well.

Henry VI looking very submissive and breedable right now (which is ironic since he has the Infertile trait).

Why spend a bunch of time and effort on something that actually matters, when you can spend it on an incredibly niche curiosity instead? :D

irrelevant as it is, if you ever wanted to create a small/medium sized but strong custom nation, the issue of maximum cost must have hit you, and probably got you wondering if nations like the Ottomans would fit this cost limit so I'm sure a lot of eu4 players would be interested, as well as to find out how did Paradox come up with this cost limit seemingly so low (if the algorithm would bless this video and show it to them)

@@emanuelneagu14 Oh yeah, would be really cool if someone from Paradox saw this video and wanted to comment about how they designed the nation designer, and what they think about my methodology here!

@@xarxos5274 you know I initially wanted to say that if the algorithm would bless the video, the people wondering about these limitations would be interested, but it would be even more interesting if someone from Paradox explained why they did things they way they did, funny positive mistake in expression isn't it :D

@@emanuelneagu14 Oh, I see, haha well both sentiments are intereresting I think! :D

nah if your economy can support a 50k army at start no one stands in your way no matter the ideas (except maybe hordes in plain terrain) and also you can probably support some good advisors to compensate for the bad ruler, and crush your rivals and get that 50 PP giving +1 bonus for each mana type

Gotta love those numbers! I'm glad you enjoyed the video!

Aw, thanks! :)

Hm, I suppose their national ideas should be somewhere in the spreadsheets at least, I haven't really thought about it.

isnotreal I guess ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

You made the correct call, everyone who disagrees is just seething at the fair and balanced nature of the Custom Nation Designer™️.

I agree with your call as well, this way of counting is clearly more accurate for the stated purpose of the video. The silly results are a fault of how paradox coded the game, not your methodology.

That would be cool!

See my pinned comment for further clarification on why I counted all five.

Without the imbalanced categories multiplier? Well, you can look in the spreadsheets at the sheet named "Idea Modifiers", which lists each indiviudal modifier and includes both their "total cost" but also their "base cost", their "slot bonus cost" and their "category imbalance bonus cost". If you know your way around excel you could probably use that to get the cost of each idea set while exclusing the category imbalance multiplier. That's the closest thing I have to what you're asking about (if I understand you correctly).

@@xarxos5274 yeah. Thanks a lot. Great video.

@@arekzawistowski2609 Thank you!

Thank you! :)

If it is anything like CK than not all provinces have that defined, and the best way to do it would be through terrain.bmp

Are you referring to the terrain_overrides in the terrain.txt file? Those only cover a minority of all provinces. Most provinces don't have any explicitly defined terrain, which is why you have to use the complicated method. Or do what I did and use the simplified terrain map mode in-game.

The thing is, the way I treat legitimacy-like modifiers is actually far less arbitrary than many of the other decisions. It's important to understand that, while they appear to be just a single modifier whose effects change depending on your government type, in actuality they are *literally* five different modifiers. You can see this clearly by looking at for example Bosnia's national ideas in the game files: All five of those modifiers are explicitly included, and each of them work entirely independent from the others; they don't affect each other in any way, and you don't have to group them up like that either, you could just as well just have one of them on their own. What's more, each of these five modifiers have a corresponding custom idea that work exactly identical to each individual modifier. There's nothing fundamentally different to these modifiers compared to any other modifiers in the game, so I treat them exactly the same as I treat every other modifier. If I hadn't counted their costs individually, and instead only counted one of them or taken the average or something, then *that* would mean I'm arbitrarily treating these modifiers differently from every other modifier in the game.

yo 1+1+1+1+1=5 it's the most logical thing no matter how imbalanced it is, the custom nation feature is far from perfect that's the issue

Haha yeah, the names of those categories can be a bit misleading, since the nation designer itself isn't very good at measuring the strength of a country :)

I mean, there's no objectively correct answer as to what is the most accurate results, since the nation designer has its limitations. But I don't really understand why you don't think these are accurate results, if you acknowledge that I've applied the rules consistently? The nation designer cost isn't a very good measure of how powerful a country or national ideas actually is, but the point of this project wasn't to rank the most powerful nations. You could try to create a pure power ranking if you want, but it would be something completely different from what I've done, and there's no reason to base that on the nation designer.

You mean if there are more than 1 modifier in a single idea, then we should always just count one of them for that idea? That could be a way to do it, but then you would have a very large number of modifiers that would simply get ignored.

@@xarxos5274 No, I mean that when there are ideas with multiple modifiers it should contribute to it's tier. For example Hanoverian shutzenfest idea should be a tier two idea instead of being two tier one ideas costing 0 both. Then the value should be divided between modifiers (two in case of Hanover) and multiplied according to the modifiers category (1 and 1 in case of Hanover)

@@easytiger6570 Oh, I see! Yeah that's not a bad idea actually, you could certainly have done it like that. There's no objectively right or wrong answer here, but I can see the merit in your approach as well.

Many others have expressed this too. Maybe I can do something like that later, we'll see.

Yeah they really ought to have updated the nation designer to be more dynamic, it's a bit needlessly limited right now.

It's a shame it has such a big impact on the result, I can agree with that, but that's just how the nation designer works. A ranking where they only count as one modifier could perhaps be interesting as well, but it would be something entirely different from this.

The thing is, the way I dealt with them actually isn't some special case or anything: I treated them exactly the same as every other modifier. It's important to note that while it might seem like this is just a single modifier which changes its value depending on government type, it actually is literally five different ones, who all have their own separate effect. There's nothing which inherently ties them together; although in the base game they're always grouped together, you could easily split them up and just have them on their own, they don't affect each other whatsoever. There's fundamentally nothing different about counting all five of them separately than it is to count any other idea modifiers separately.

@@xarxos5274 sure but it should've gotten an exception because it is the only one that changes. countries like athens and jolof shouldn't have been boosted to top 10 because they dared have an in practice (though republics can use it effectively) mid modifier it looks like their ideas are a lot better than they actually are. of course athens is one of the +4 tolerance of heretics countries. though silly I do agree with the result in that regard.

@@notcraig255 You have to remember that custom nation cost doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how good a country or national idea is. You can have two sets of ideas who both have mediocre modifiers that are about equally good, but if one of those idea sets happen to have mostly Administrative ideas while the other has an even distribution of ideas from different categories, then the first one might end up several times more expensive the second one. That doesn't make any sense either if we want the score to match how powerful they actually are, but that's just how the nation designer works. This project aimed to calculate what cost each country would have in the nation designer; it was never intended to rank nations based on their actual power level. If that *had* been the intention, there would be no reason to involve the nation designer at all, because it's not a good measure for that. And again, I just want to repeat that Yearly Legitimacy, Republican Tradition, Devotion, etc, are five separate modifiers with separate effects that don't actually have anything to do with each other, and each of them have one corresponding custom idea that works exactly the same as the original modifier. There's just no getting around the fact that if you have a nation whose ideas includes all of these five modifiers, then to recreate it in the nation designer you have to use all five corresponding custom ideas, which each have a separate cost. That's no different from any other modifier.

Thank you! And yes, quite a lot of work indeed, much more than I thought it would take when I started with it! :D

@@xarxos5274 Me anytime I begin a coding project: I think I can get this done within 1-2 weeks Me 3 months later: Will someone end my suffering?

@@doudline2662 Way too accurate :'D

I understand that it might be interesting to see that. It would take a bit of work though, maybe I could do it sometime, but we'll see!

@@xarxos5274 Do you still have the files you used for this video? If so you could just upload a google drive link on a community post

@@Mag_ladroth I do have the spreadsheets with all the data, and I've already linked to it in the video description. It would still take some work to exclude the extra legitimacy modifiers though, since that would affect the imbalanced categories multiplier and so you would have to recalculate the costs of all the other ideas too.

@@xarxos5274 Thanks! But it's not a big problem for me, I love doing pointlessly long calculations in excel

@@Mag_ladroth Haha well be my guest if you want. I don't think I included the idea "levels" in the spreadsheets though, so you would have to calculate those yourself to begin with.

Oh, they're considered that strong? Well, looking at them, I can understand why they're ranked so low: They got several useful modifiers but none of them have very high values, so they'd be pretty cheap. They're also not dominated by any one category, so they get no multiplier from imbalanced categories. I think this just goes to show that the designer cost isn't necessarily a good indicator for how strong a nation or national is.

Perfectly balanced

Thank you very much! :D

Well, unfortunately, the nation designer isn't very good at giving a fair score. I agree it would have been better if it had worked differently, so the scores better reflected the actual power level of the countries, but that's not how it works right now.

I understand that, and I actually considered adding an alternative ranking for that initially, but decided against it because I fear it would only make things more confusing. Maybe I can add something like that later; it wouldn't reflect the actual nation designer, but it might be interesting nonetheless.

They would never! /s

It's only nonsensical if we expect the custom nation score to be a good measure of how powerful a country actually is. But it definitely isn't, and not just in the case of the legitimacy modifiers: There are plenty of other cases where the designer gives much larger or much smaller costs than what seems reasonable. That's just how it works. I don't understand why you think it doesn't make sense to add all five modifiers. If you're able, take a look at Bosnia's ideas in the game files. You'll find that they literally include five different modifiers for Yearly Legitimacy, Republican Tradition, Devotion, etc. So the decision to include all five of them in a custom nation isn't an arbitrary choice at all: It literally matches how the national ideas of the normal nations are defined. Choosing to ignore some of them makes no more sense than choosing to ignore any of the other modifiers in the ideas: If we were to remove Bosnia's Tolerance of Heretics, then the result is that Bosnia no longer gets a bonus to Tolerance of Heretics. I think we can both agree that this would be wrong. If we were to remove Bosnia's Yearly Republican Tradition, then the result is that Bosnia no longer gets a bonus to Yearly Republican Tradition, even if they become a republic. Why is this not wrong?

Thank you very much, I'm glad you think the explanations were good! :)

The highest cost possible assuming there's no point limit? I'm pretty sure that could in theory become infinite, since you can always make national idea modifiers larger and larger. You'd have to put some kind of restriction on how large the modifiers can get in that case I think!

@@xarxos5274 Ok you can choose an existing national idea/tradition/ambition from a nation in the game or you can use the maximum from custom nation builder. How about that?

@@Prophlol I suppose that could work. I don't know what the maximum cost would be though even then, probably quite massive, since in theory you could give the nation every single province in the world, which would already be quite a lot!

"Yes. Thank you for watching!"

It's just science you know!

'Effect of administrative efficiency' could be calculated based on how much admin eff the average player-controlled nation can achieve. The most 'generic' admin eff you can get without missions or DLC monuments and stuff is 30% from tech and 30% from absolutism so 60% should be the benchmark.

@@ydp868 Those are some good ideas actually. It can get rather complex to try to assemble such modifiers as combination of other modifiers, but you might be able to find a pretty good approximation if you really try. At least you could find something closer to an accurate result than simply ignoring them.