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EU4 - Development Diary - 10th March 2016

Hello everyone, and welcome to another development diary for Europa Univeralis IV. Today, we focus on many of the core aspects of Mare Nostrum, our next expansion.

First, we have completely changed how naval missions work, introducing a unified system that includes settings for when your ships should return to port for repairs and how aggressive the fleets should be.

Naval Missions are selected from the new mission interface, and each mission targets either a sea/coastal region or a trade node. The old missions to Protect Trade, privateer, Hunt Pirates and Explore are available (depending on which expansions you currently own), just as before, but Mare Nostrum adds three new naval missions.
  • Hunt Enemy Fleets - Your ships will automatically try to hunt down weaker enemy fleets in the region to sink them.
  • Blockade Enemy Ports - This divides your fleet, and attempts to blockade as many ports as possible in the region.
  • Intercept Transports - Your ships will protect coastlines in region and prioritize attacks on any transport fleet.
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The Detach Damaged feature for Ships has gotten a huge boost in Mare Nostrum. Now, ships that are detached from a fleet will a automatically rejoin their original fleet when they have been repaired.

In 1.16, naval leaders will also get siege pips. Each of those pips will increase blockade efficiency by 10%. If you have Mare Nostrum, you’ll now also able to reassign naval leaders while fleets are at sea, as long as they are within supply range.

Some people have complained about how blockades are not really visible. Now there is also a thick red line on the coastlines where you are blockaded, and a purple one is shown where you blockade.
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Naval Combat has gotten a complete overhaul as well. First of all, we removed the positioning mechanic, as it was not terribly useful, and players couldn’t really affect it anyway.

Now, there is a restriction in how many ships can fire at a single time in a naval combat. 20 ships is the baseline, 10% more ships can fire in coastline, and there is a variation of 10% more or less based on the differences between the maneuver ability of each fleet’s commander..

Also, Morale Damage is inflicted on all ships still floating whenever a ship is sunk, with up to 2% damage.

A ship being sunk has a chance of being captured instead of sunk, which depends on the enemy commanders maneuver value. If a fleet retreats, all its captured ships are immediately scuttled.

Stay tuned, because next week, we’ll tell you all about condottieri !
 
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How about adding a special "fort" building with huge cannons(that is unlockable later in the game), that is possible to build on coastline provinces, or only on islands/strait crossings that add attrition to ships?
It shouldn't be a special building, but a function of coastal forts, as coastal forts actually actively helped against blockades. The star fort in St. Augustine, Florida, was sieged twice by the English, and the cannons in the fort were sufficient to hold back the naval blockade to the extent that the Spanish were able to resupply the fort through the blockade, keeping the fort from falling. I'm not sure if full on attrition is the best way to model it, but at the very least having a coastal fort should make that province harder to blockade, given that the ranges for the cannons mounted in those forts were greater than those in ships, and were more accurate, allowing them to stand the ships off to a degree. (Part of the success was because this was in the New World, and the English didn't have as many ships as they would have had back in Europe, so weren't able to maintain the blockade fully from out of cannon range.
 
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Do you have a source?

Pretty sure we have seen pictures of an improved Ireland and the talked about Scotland and Scandinavia being improved too. Let me see if I can find any of those pics.
They were discussing it on a live-cast with BjornB and DDRjake where they looked through the map and discussed some the changes :)
 
They were discussing it on a live-cast with BjornB and DDRjake where they looked through the map and discussed some the changes :)
The one last Tuesday? Do you know around when?
 
So is this new "awesome" mission mechanic for the fleets going to be like the mission exploration mechanic where we can no longer control what our ships do, and instead click a button and have them automatically do things out of our control?

To clarify: As of now we manually blockade, fight other navies, transport, and generally move them however we like. Leading us to blockade and set up fleets early to have maximum damage before a war starts.
Before El Dorado or was it CoP? We manually explored which was tedious for many people, however the DLC and patch we lost all control over our exploration efforts and instead sent them on automated missions with almost no interaction or say on where they explored.

Will this be the same with Mare Nostrum/patch 1.16 will we now lose control completely on our navies? and instead of freely moving them around, will we instead be forced to click a "mission" button and have them go things completely out of our control?

If so when will the much anticipated army mission button come about when all we do is click on the "siege mission" "fight mission" or "defend mission" and excitedly watch as our armies go about on their fully automated journey through the war?


Not that I'm expecting an official response from PDS, since they only ever answer one question on the first page then leave and never have much more interaction...
 
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This... looks like it fixes approximately zero of the major issues with naval gameplay. It actually looks like it'll be adding a few more instead.

Thoroughly disappointed with this (and the previous diary as well). I've been waiting for improvements to this aspect of the game since the day I bought it, and now it seems like I need to accept that it's never going to get better.

Definitely not buying this expansion, and I think I might actually be done with EU until the next title. Very, very discouraged.
 
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The one last Tuesday? Do you know around when?
I believe that´s the one, should be one youtube anyway, named trade leagues and something... They start talk about some of the provinces in about 2 minutes in but that´s africa, as far as I can recall about 8 minutes in they talk about scandinavia and some minutes after Russia... It´s really mostly scattered around, but mostly it´s in the beginning or mid of the show :)
 
Ok, I hope these are not the only changes to Naval warfare in this expansion, because they are very disappointing to say the least.

There are two major problems I currently believe exist in the Naval Warfare area of this game.
  1. Navy's (unless your Japan or England) are almost useless in winning wars
  2. Navy size and power in no way affects a countries ability to create a global empire.
These changes do nothing to fix these two problems, they merely make naval combat a bit better and add (useless) blockade efficiency from admirals (which are rarely used anyway because Navies are so useless).

So to fix the first problem I identified I think these solutions would be good (many of them I stole from other people in this thread, so I'm really just consolidating them).
  1. Heavy ships blockading provinces that are 100% blockaded or friendly (your own, occupied by you or ally, ally or subject owned) will count as a single cannon for purposes of battling and sieging. The numbers could definitely be tweaked here so that it takes two Heavies to equal one cannon or some such. In addition I'm unsure whether the Heavies should be subject to fire damage from the cannons of the land armies, but that can be figured out. However, Heavy ships can never siege without troops which would be fixed by number 2
  2. Fleets should have a "Deploy Marine" button that allows you to send X amount of sailors onto the province selected. These sailors would just function as a normal infantry stack, except they would come from the sailor manpower pool, not the general manpower pool. This could only be done if your fleet has at least 2000 sailors in it (so that your fleet at least has some sailors left to sail the ships). This would allow Navies to take all those pesky Islands and unprotected provinces all over the globe (and it would be realistic).
  3. A slight boost to warscore for blockading, perhaps a ticking warscore for blockading
For the second problem I propose a few changes.
  1. Everyone hates LD I know (me included I've railed against it multiple times). So I propose a colonial nation limit based on not your naval forcelimits, but how many Heavy and Light ships you have. (If your Navy was destroyed you would not lose your CN, but just have to rebuilt before you could create more CNs) The number of Light ships should also effect tariff efficiency in a small way - without having to patrol, just as a reward for building them up.
  2. This is more difficult because of the change to States/Territories, but I think that the number of ships you have (light/heavies again) should effect coring costs in regions with a coastline not directly connected to your capital by either a sea or land zone. Really just make it somehow distance based. This would make it very important to build up a big fleet to keep those juicy ADM points. I would prefer to tie this to autonomy instead of ADM points, but with the distant overseas penalty gone I don't see an easy way to do so (this would be more realistic and would prevent players from spamming Light Ships then selling them immediately after coring)
Thoughs?
 
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I was hoping for more substantial changes to naval combat- particularly the heavy ship spam and cranking out galleys to over double your force limit. Imo there should be a hard cap on heavy ships and a buff to make them stronger, making them much more valueable.
Also- it's still impossible to win the numbers battle as a small(er) country. What if sea provinces with a straight acted like mountain provinces by reducing combat width and giving defenders a bonus, so smaller higher quality navies could stand a chance? (Much like the Athenian fleet held off the Persians to help the battle of Thermopoli)
 
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Ships should be able to attack coastal provinces and dismount marines for assaults on coastal provinces, it seems silly that ships are useless besides naval combat, when you could dismount troops from ships to assault land, sure they would be weaker than normal soldiers on land, but would add new mechanics and add further realism
 
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This Is going to make playing as England much easier.

Before you had to chase french boats a ton, and you had to constantly stop people getting on boats and boarding your glorious island. Now you can set your navy to get those pesky french cogs, and those annoying scottish fleets.