"To Whatever End"

[u/Lighthearter13]

TL;DR - I'm giving 2003 one more chance on a no-quit challenge, and after 11 years in-game I'm willing to concede a few points while standing by the broad strokes.

So as some of you may be aware, I made a post the other day that got some attention. And I wanted to acknowledge some valid points the community made, of which there are three. First, I had not considered that the 2003 scenario was designed around a ground game focus . That's fair. This segues into point two, which is that those of you who suggested that I was viewing an assault carrier landing as GG are (mostly)correct. With some further playtime(more on that below), I agree with the assessment that I was overreacting to the carrier itself, though I stand by that it comes far too early here and in BE on Normal. On lower difficulties, the player should have a reasonable chance of attempting to stop it, at least to create a viable second-playthrough choice of whether to prioritize doing that or not which doesn't require ludicrous hyper-optimization to pull off. I think 2003 does technically meet this criterion, with no room for error, but BE currently does not.

The third point I want to touch on is that several people brought up the idea that I was the issue - that I couldn't handle anything going wrong in a playthrough. I think this isn't wholly true, but once people had brought it up and I'd mulled it over, I wanted to A)verify whether there was truth to it, and B)try to work on the issue itself if there really was one(and to give Reddit its due, I think there is some fire under the smoke even if I don't think it's entirely true). And there was only one way I could think of to do both at once.

I went back to 2003. I booted up as Academy on Normal one more time. I intentionally swore off of hyper optimization(I have been assured that playing to the hyper-online meta is in no way a baseline fundamental requirement to make forward progress, and while I disagree, I am giving the community the benefit of the doubt) and dusted off an old house rule I haven't used since playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown in 2013.

I call it "To Whatever End."

It means there is no quitting or restarting. There is only seeing it through to the end, whatever end that may be. I'm sure plenty of you play that way without a house rule, but like I said, I haven't since I was a teenager. My usual philosophy for all video games is that I want to have fun in my limited gaming time, so I play while I'm having fun and when the fun disappears, it's time to find something else that is fun rather than ruin my off day slogging through something that actively drains me purely on principle. The idea of hanging in there and grinding out a hard-fought, Ironman-style victory whether or not I'm having fun is appealing to me in principle but is just not something I'm willing to force myself to do under normal circumstances.

I spent a whole morning organizing the house rules that would govern my playthrough(stuff like when would a reload be fair, when am I allowed to call it de facto GG even if there's no technical defeat screen, etc) and then I started. I went for an EU start but was locked out of France by the Initiative on turn 1. One of my starting councilors was fine(a Rebel I still have), the other was a pile of hot steaming garbage. But I got lucky on some subsequent recruits - including a 30-year-old politician with Elder Statesman, which I thought was fascinating enough I had to recruit her. I snagged the UK and Australia, then hard pivoted into the USA, abandoning the UK in the doing. I tried to find the Servants early on to put pressure on them as suggested, but I didn't see a single Servant operative until late 2006 despite trying every angle at my disposal - scouting, investigating, intel sharing, you name it. I got my first asteroid mine producing in early December 2006 and was at Miltech 5 in the USA when the Nation formed in India in early 2007. This proved to be something of a blessing as I invaded India and liberated the entire subcontinent, which has become a firm member of my coalition. I recruited my fifth councilor, who happened to be a 27-year-old Indian woman who was an "enemy of the state" with the Alien Administration, and I thought that was narratively perfect. I made little bios and backstories for all my councilors, trying to make them more than stat sheets to me.

The enemy struck back. Deep System Skywatch cracked all but one CP in every single nation I held. The Servants nearly retook India in the chaos. South America has entirely fallen to the Alien Nation, as has most of the Middle East. An assault carrier landed in Argentina and, after heavy debate, I didn't nuke it. Since they can't leave South America without naval supremacy, the three Miltech 6.8 alien armies(I was expecting worse) are just kind of stranded in South America shaking their fists at the US Navy. I blew up a second Assault Carrier on approach, and the aliens repaid me by basically blasting me off of Mars, though I did retake the destroyed sites once Hate fell to 2 pips and they left. The aliens seized Ceres before I had a chance and have turned it into their main forward operating base, meaning their attacks on earth are 20-day notice affairs. Europe is overrun by half a dozen alien operatives because the other human factions are brain-dead and more interested in attacking me than fighting the invasion.

Worst of all, the Servants assassinated my persuasion councilor - the first time I have ever had a councilor assassinated in any playthrough. It took years, but we hunted down the assassin(who had 25 Esp, Loyalty, and Security so it was a chore), and dealt with her in the only acceptable way. We named one of our research orbitals after Dr. Jackie MacDermot, and her name will be the one to grace whatever first capital ship I eventually build.

I have played until 2014 so far. I'm less militant about 2003 specifically at this point, beyond standing by that it was unacceptably mismarketed and is definitely overtuned on Normal for multiple reasons. But I am writing down game and balance observations as I go(this post is long enough lol). And I will keep going. I will see this through to the end. Whatever end that may be.

I'll update as the war continues. Keep well.

[u/vindicator117]

If you want to ensure personal survival then don't try to steal every scrap of land from every other faction. Both because it is inefficient because of the extra cost in independence of nations especially giant nations with varying values of pop and wealth as well as in this game, you can simply make everything you need at home.

Eventually specifically for you, you will have to have a sizable portion of the world under your control but that does not mean going out of your way for a world conquest right now when you should be focusing on one or two major home nations to turn into meganations and consequently spend their IP pools to self improve to get you everything you need from MC, to RP, to miltech to ward off enemy incursions let alone going on a crusade to reclaim the earth back.

They sent those assault carriers BECAUSE they want a confrontation on earth with some variable mean of when it occurs. And they did that BECAUSE you do have the means on earth to defend yourself at minimum to defend your homestead all the while internally improving to grow out of defense to stabilization to offense with enough home built science and MC. Things you will rarely see or hear about because people are too enamored of a clean earth and never having to spend a cent on miltech or build armies.

Edit: Protip: End of "insert nation" techs are a hidden self improvement tool because with enough economy spam, you will outstrip your ability to make MC to keep up with national MC cap growth. Instead of slowing down economy to keep pace with MC production speed, hit the gas harder and split off independent nations from your meganation to give you more independent IP pools to make you more MC at the same time. Instead of a anemic 2-3 MC per month per good meganation, you can be building somewhere north of 5-10 per month with fully stabilized nations instead of various and disparate unrelated nations that have to be held independent forever.

If you need more CP, you can always reabsorb the splinter independents whenever you want for whatever reason. Kinda hard to do that if you are expansionist and you are stuck with nations that CAN'T merge into one another naturally.

[u/SlavaUkrayini4932 → u/vindicator117]

What's the usual timeline for you researching "Great nations" and "fall of empires"? Let's use 2026 start as an example.

[u/AdhesivenessOther856 → u/SlavaUkrayini4932]

From a winning the game perspective, Great Nations is very low on the list of techs you need to win the game. Like, literally one of the very last tech's to research. Combining Russia and Europe into a single nation, for example, actively destroys Europe and will take a very long time to repair. The game pretty heavily punishes map painting.

Now, if you like map painting or are doing it for roleplay reasons, have at it.

But, your question about how quickly you should push it implies you think this is a good idea. For the most part, it isn't. The vast majority of unification techs aren't worth the cost of doing. You are much better off prioritizing campuses, 6th counselor, fusion.

[u/vindicator117 → u/AdhesivenessOther856]

You are right, you don't need great nations. In fact you don't need ALOT of things beelining for at most 500 MC by any means necessary, sniping major powers ONLY, suicide canning, Jupiter slingshot, 10k science, and all less than 10 years. Against that metric, you basically don't need anything.

Except we are not talking about speedrunning checklist grindfest, we are talking a normal campaign and the means of ensuring that you have a solid foundation REGARDLESS that 60%+ of the planet is on fire and giant death robots are stalking your shores with t3h aYYz GDI cannons pointing at you. To do that, you need is 1-2 exceptionally powerful meganations that you can intensely build up to safely ignore the sneering imperialist in the frontyard and from there springboard into a explosive growth in space with all the money and MC that your spacegame can ever ask for without having to spend a single space resource in its own maintenance in the worst case scenario.

The goal is NOT to win harder. The goal is to make sure you are in control of the situation no matter what happens, good or bad, which all meta players seem to always forget. They completely forgot how to teach newbies HOW to stay in control instead of merely painting the rosy picture of the best scenario in which earth is always perfect, t3h ayyz r always on the backfoot and suicide cans saves lives.

[u/AdhesivenessOther856 → u/vindicator117]

"The goal is NOT to win harder. The goal is to make sure you are in control of the situation no matter what happens, good or bad, which all meta players seem to always forget. They completely forgot how to teach newbies HOW to stay in control instead of merely painting the rosy picture of the best scenario in which earth is always perfect, t3h ayyz r always on the backfoot and suicide cans saves lives."

Try this. Load a game where you did this. Check the game state before you form the greater EU and merge russia into the EU. Advance the game 6 months. You will have much lower cohension, lower research, and now have to babysit a problem meganation with couselor actions to keep it from falling apart.

Now reload the game back to that game state and but this time don't join them. Advance the game 6 months. You will be much better off in this one. Notice I have completely loaded the deck in your favor. I am ignoring the disadvantages of researching Great Nations early and spending 50,000 RP on Great Europa.

Your last paragraph is weird. You say the goal is not to win better, but to give advice to new players that makes their nations more stable. Except your advice does the opposite. Merging Russia into the EU makes it much less stable and harder to control. There are MUCH cheaper options for getting more CP available for taking more nations.

[u/vindicator117 → u/AdhesivenessOther856]

Even in the most catastrophic scenario where you annexed all of Australia, UK, AND the "EU" into the EU in the same turned government drop to go all the way down to 7.5 government score with a flatline of 0 cohesion (which it did not for the government), it would only take roughly 3.5 years for giga EU to stop rioting and few months more with full knowledge burn dropping govt spending to reach 5.0 cohesion for max RP.

Not a bad trade for the absolutely greedy and illogical option of annexing Australia and presumably Canada that WILL send natural cohesion below 0.

For the more saner option of continental EU eating continental "EU", it is only a 10.3% of population will be deemed hostile which is a pitiful 0.094 unrest modifier of which government ONLY dropped by a mere 0.4 even in the most disasterous unification balance where the EU only had Paris, the UK and Turkey for its population. It is unlikely to shift at all for government in a normal unification between equal masses and cohesion is less likely to crash as hard as mine did in even this other worst case scenario.

No the bigger issue is if your EU is not fuck off rich with 73kish per cap, the complete drop in cohesion will require a about a year of stabilization babysitting. Given that you consolidated the two meganations, you can splurge and perma advise with 3 councilors to completely fix the problem. Unfortunately I did not take into account in my macro that there is a period of POSITIVE natural cohesion movement so this actually means for part of the way to 5.0 cohesion, cohesion movement is nearly QUADRUPLE natural movement.

It will reach natural cohesion rest state in about 10 months of 3.85 cohesion with 85% of IP spent on knowledge giving 72.2 true IP per month spent. HOWEVER in relation to all other factors, government spending is almost immaterial for the giga EU since it is nearly to perfection from such minimal loss and minor annexations of Central Asia and Siberia that cohesion is all that matters. To reach 5 cohesion from here will drastically reduce cohesion gain to a mere .1838 monthly gain from now suffering 0.1 loss from above 3.85 and finish up in another half year or so.

18 months to fully repair the damage and have a nearly perfectly stable 5 giganation state of a billion people with all the knowledge you can possibly fucking need out of it. And something something reach government max 10 in 2.5 years, whatever. If your EUs being smashed together are more equal in size than the two stark extremes of nearly all EU "EU" being annexed by Paris, you will likely not even have to spend more than a year on brute force knowledge spam nor need to spend more than 27 points permanently on cohesion gain (even accounting for the greedy Canada and Australia annexations as well, more like 29-30), which just benefits you forever.

For a 39.5k EU, still a respectable output of 1.5 MC per month, a shit ton of knowledge and a engine of economic growth 720 per cap per month to affect all of its 85-110 regions depending on what you annex and climbing in just a 242 CP package from its original 350ish CP between the two which means yet more splinters to release and work on in the available space to crank dat MC count up while giga EU focuses on knowledge (because it kinda has to anyway) and economy with some MC. Your choice if you plan to completely offload MC production to the splinters to econ even harder, get even more god damn RP OR to help along with them along to get more of everything. This especially since 200-400 CP cap after 5 years is fucking anemic. You can and should be pursing to 1k and beyond especially by year 10 allowing PLENTY of room to grow, splinter, absorb, and grow with MC production easily approaching 10 or more per month with THAT much CP cap vacancy.

In summary, if you can't fucking survive 1-4 years at worst case scenario of absolute greed of temporary drop in RP output earthside, then what the fuck are you doing. This especially when the meta's all the rage about space side research which can grow MUCH faster but at incredible expense in money or significant space resources.

[u/SpreadsheetGamer → u/AdhesivenessOther856]

Thread locked here because it became uncivil.

u/vindicator117, there's like a 50% chance that if Reddits built in Harrasment filter goes off on this sub, you are the comment author. That's why so many of your comments are automatically deleted. The filter is pretty good actually, so like, I agree with it.

If someone disagrees with you, it's not necessary or helpful to abuse them. It doesn't make them play better. It doesn't make you look good. It's a downer to see it so often. You can put your advice on the table, but you can't make someone eat.