Think we should probably go with player rating + country rating = 7 or below, otherwise you're going to get one or more of the following issues:
- All big countries are AI, because no one has a rating of 1/5 (lowest so far is 1.5 average)
- HRE going to be crowded as heeeeeellllll
- Tons of players outside Europe, too few in Europe
Also, what rating do we give new players? I propose 3, because on average a player will be better than the AI.
I agree with new players being given a 3, and also with the 'cap at 7' rule.
I think with the nation scale that ultimately the point of this ranking system is to end up with a 'balanced' end-game, in that everyone feels like, even if they're not maybe dominant, that they're at least capable of influencing events - I think it was problematic that the Muscowy-Aragon-Mamluks-Ottoman axis decided the game before a lot of players even really got involved in international politics. The point of this ranking system is to determine fair handicap - so ideally, the way the system works should be designed with that in mind.
So, the way I see it is this: imagine the most 1-est player you would feasibly expect to see playing in our multiplayer sessions, and imagine them playing France, which is pretty definitionally 5 as the best nation in the game. A 1-star ranked nation would be one such that the most 5-est player you would feasibly expect to see playing in our multiplayer session could expect to be roughly as capable as the 1-est star player with France by say 1650 (as nobody actually plays to 1821). For example, if you thought that I was an absolutely rubbish player, and mgo was god's own gift to EU4, then a 1-star nation would be any nation where mgo would only be capable of
overtaking me by 1650ish. That means a 1-star nation is probably not something like Chimu or Albania, they're unranked. A 1-star nation is probably something I'd guesstimate at being say, the Livonian Order, which could probably form a reasonable size Prussia capable of standing up to a poor France solo by around 1650ish.
The rest of the scale works the same way. A 2-star nation would be a country where the player you think is most definitionally a 4-star player would be equal with our 1-est player as France by 1650, a 3-star would be a country where the player you think is most definitionally a 3-star player would be equal with our 1-est player as France by 1650, and so on. This way the very metric of what makes a country 1, 2, or 3 out of 5 is relative to what a player can do with them. I think it also makes the ranking more meaningful: given 2/5 player ranking means "does as well as AI" and 1/5 player ranking means "performs worse than AI", a 4/5 nation ranking means "the AI for this nation could be expected to compete evenly with a bad France player by 1650", as an example. (1 player rank + 5 nation rank = 2 player rank + 4 nation rank). A 1-star nation can still be reasonably viable: catching up to France by 1650 with Genoa even with France headed a bad player is still going to be bloody difficult and I'd consider it an excellent performance by whoever managed it.
I mean, by this ranking I'd probably give Brandenburg 3 out of 5 - if I imagined a 3/5 player with France (better than AI but not hugely so) and a 5/5 player as Brandenburg (GOAT player), it'd still take til 1650ish before that Brandenburg player could feel 100% comfortable going mano el mano, one on one with that France.
