EUIV and the Discipline of History

[jimmy olsen]

This guy's blog is excellent. Really enjoyed his series on way Sparta is hideously overrated and currently reading and loving his break down on the assualt on Helm's Deep.

[Solmyr]

Read the Sparta series as well. It really was the North Korea of the ancient world.

[The Minsky Moment]

Read the Sparta series as well. It really was the North Korea of the ancient world.

That analogy would work if the Korean War lasted 3 decades and ended in a crushing victory by a North Korean-led alliance and the establishment of a North Korean communist puppet regime in the United States. 

Mr. Pedant makes some good points, but this is polemical writing, not strict historical writing.  For example, in listing Spartan victories and defeats, he lists Mantinea as a victory and Orneae as a defeat.  But these are not remotely equivalent - Mantinea was a significant  pitched battle where the regular Spartan army played the critical role.  Orneae was a city taken by Sparta and then left with a garrison of exiled Argives; the "defeat" consists of these exiles being driven out by an overwhelming Athenian force. 

And yes I am aware that Spartan victory in the war was as much do to Athenian self-inflicted injuries, but a weak, hapless power would not have been able to survive to that point, much less capitalize on those mistakes when they occurred.

[Solmyr]

I think the comparison was more about the Spartan child indoctrination program and the general nastiness of their society even by ancient standards.

[Josquius]

Reading it in a bit more detail than when I glanced before some further thoughts:

State based views of history has been something that has bugged me for some time. These days when paradox's games are becoming very popular and internet communities heavily influenced by them when history topics come up its particularly iffy. There's an overly large obsession with maps from different periods of history and so many people just fail to understand that the modern nation-state is not the natural order but a pretty modern blip.
I get the impression that many people imagine say Ancient China as basically just a big country. Less advanced than the modern day but in other ways the same.
The fundamentally different world view and the way in which they operated just doesn't compute.

Interesting story about the Prussian forests and screwing themselves long term for short term gain. Would be nice to see more games doing this. All too often in games there's obvious right and wrong choices.
It annoys me when story-driven games give you choices that are too grey but in a strategy this absolutely should be the case for most decisions.

EU4 showing you full data on provinces- yes. A problem for sure. There does need to be some level of extraction between the actual wealth of a province and your tax efficiency. It should be very possible that you rule the richest city in the world but fail to extract much in the way of taxes for it.
The way war taxes work could do with an overhaul- perhaps something like if its been a while since you've gone to war or you have a particularly good CB or an event then you can raise a huge amount of war tax as a bulk amount to go start a war.

The point I made in the other thread on this also comes to mind again here as he talks about people. Victoria 2 pops are the best thing ever. Though I guess this leads into the issue of provinces being too static. It should be very possible that a independent town in your CK2 county manages to become a major power in its own right.

The talk of screwing over the little man...another outside the box thought of maybe we could introduce kharma. A sort of prestige/piety offshoot which refers to whether you're a good ruler or not. Launch a war and conquer half of Europe and you're prestige is going up but your kharma is way down.
As I started writing this I was thinking this is an irrelevant gameplay stat which only shows up at the end of the game and is something purely for players who are so inclined to challenge themselves with and teach a little lesson to genociders... though there could perhaps be a gameplay implementation with this score acting like actual kharma albeit for a state rather than a person and influencing the quality of future rulers and events you get (gamey and unrealistic but hey ho).

Culture...definitely needs to be more dynamic and not so obviously controllable. Culture naturally turns depending on the wealth and success of neighbouring provinces et al.
Thinking here Imperator might have had the right approach on culture with its not immediately obvious best solution and nuanced different rules.

That sounds good Raz, but doesn't it unbalance the game? Intrigue becomes the most valuable attribute by far.

Could link it to the stats themselves- a skilled warrior can spot who is a good warrior or not.
Experience could feed in too- somebody actually uses their skills, particularly with your character there to see it, and their skill becomes more visible.
Will stop players from randomly marrying their king to a martial 19 Swedish peasant but everyone will know your world famous master general is a 16.

[The Minsky Moment]

I think the comparison was more about the Spartan child indoctrination program and the general nastiness of their society even by ancient standards.

Pedant is on stronger ground there using contemporary moral and ethical standards but he glosses over the fact that Spartan institutions were widely admired in their own time notably by Plato who used them as a model for his Laws.  And while Aristotle was critical - in many cases it was for the opposite reasons we would be. His main complaint is that the Spartans give their women too many rights and too much power and influence.  Secondarily,  he complains that men of limited means are allowed into the ephorate.  The mistreatment of the helots is not a consideration  other than to point out that controlling the helots is an annoyance, and that Sparta faces a dilemma over treating the helots favorably - which will make them insolent and disobedient - or harshly, which will make them rebellious.  Neither Aristotle nor any other ancient writer I know considers the matter from the helots side of things.

I think it is appropriate to criticize Sparta using anachronistic criteria from our own times to counteract ill-played present day Spartan fanboyism; at the same time, if one is providing a historical POV, consideration should be given to the mores of that time as well.

[Solmyr]

I think the comparison was more about the Spartan child indoctrination program and the general nastiness of their society even by ancient standards.

Pedant is on stronger ground there using contemporary moral and ethical standards but he glosses over the fact that Spartan institutions were widely admired in their own time notably by Plato who used them as a model for his Laws.

He actually mentions this in the blog entries. The sources we have on Sparta were mostly written by people who personally favoured the Spartan way of life or wanted to pump up Sparta's reputation for one reason or another. So if read uncritically, it could be inferred that Sparta was somehow excessively admired. Yet actual events seem to show that they had few if any friends in Greece, and their actions didn't put them in the best light (e.g. essentially giving Ionian cities to Persia in order to expand their personal influence).

[The Minsky Moment]

He actually mentions this in the blog entries. The sources we have on Sparta were mostly written by people who personally favoured the Spartan way of life or wanted to pump up Sparta's reputation for one reason or another. So if read uncritically, it could be inferred that Sparta was somehow excessively admired. Yet actual events seem to show that they had few if any friends in Greece, and their actions didn't put them in the best light (e.g. essentially giving Ionian cities to Persia in order to expand their personal influence).

Yes I found that rather unconvincing.

The sources we have were written by an array of people with different views at different times, expressing different positions.  What they all had in common was that none of them had any moral objection to Sparta's brutal treatment of its helots.  The reflects the reality of ancient thinking on the subject, thinking that doesn't even begin to change for several more centuries.

A fair reading of the sources that address the period of the Peloponnesian War is that neither Sparta, nor Athens, nor any other city-state, was loved or excessively admired. Both Athens and Sparta were would-be hegemons and thus naturally would have been viewed with suspicion by other city-states jealous of their position.  However, it is clear that Sparta was able to rally and mobilize allied cities to the anti-Athenian cause throughout this period.  Pedant glosses over this fact in a glaring way, skipping from Sparta's alleged diplomatic slight to Athens in 461 to its conflict with Corinth in 394.  In between that long hiatus, Pedant criticizes not Sparta's treatment of Greek allies - which holds up pretty well compared to Athenian high-handed treatment of its de facto vassals - but their supposed lack of tact in dealing with the *Persians*.  Even that claim is highly questionable - we can't know for certain what happened, but it is at least as credible to argue that Tissaphernes' failure to provide consistent support for the Spartan cause had more to do with his own intrigues than some failure of Spartan diplomacy.  Darius certainly thought so - once Tissaphernes' apparently fecklessness became apparent to all, he was replaced and Persia followed a pro-Spartan line for the rest of the war.

[Solmyr]

Interesting. Maybe we should invite him to post on Languish!

[The Brain]

Interesting. Maybe we should invite him to post on Languish!

Maybe. Does he have any social skills?

[Solmyr]

Interesting. Maybe we should invite him to post on Languish!

Maybe. Does he have any social skills?

Is that a requirement to post here?

[The Brain]

Interesting. Maybe we should invite him to post on Languish!

Maybe. Does he have any social skills?

Is that a requirement to post here?

It's frowned upon. Hence my question.

[Maladict]

Interesting. Maybe we should invite him to post on Languish!

Nah, he's not attacking anyone commenting on his posts.

[Syt]

Part III is up: https://acoup.blog/2021/05/14/collections-teaching-paradox-europa-universalis-iv-part-iii-europa-provincalis/

[Valmy]

It was focused almost entirely on trade and slavery, which makes sense because those are not the best parts of EU4 from a historical perspective even if trade is kind of fun as a game mechanic sometimes. But I was kind of hoping for discussion on Asia a bit more. Ah well maybe later.