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EU4 - Development Diary - 11th of September 2018

Good morning and welcome to the first Post-Dharma dev diary. Dharma was released last week and by most measures was an extremely successful release for us. That said, we have a tradition of post release support for our games and expansions, that's what I'm here to talk about today.

Firstly, While Dharma had very few critical bugs on release, there are still issues out there that merit a hotfix. For us, a hotfix is a swift patch on a released product, aimed to fix two particular types of issues: Ones which disrupt the game/its features in a big way, typically crashes, freezes or features breaking in peculiar ways, or small yet high-impact issues which are quick to fix and test on our end.

We are building a hotfix as we speak, and a preliminary list of fixes we are going to be patching are as follows:

  • Fix crash when supporting heir with negative chance
  • Fixed a peace treaty crash for players continuing their 1.25 saves
  • Fixed Trade Company Investments being lost on tag switch
  • Fixed Trade company Crash
  • Fixed Crash when stopping Area Rebel suppression
  • Revolutionary governments now lose their number of reforms as if they switched via reform
  • Mewar achievement script issue fixed (should be visible if you've formed another nation)
  • Fixes theocracies and hordes not getting aristocratic ideas
  • Fixed rulers swapping religions back and fourth in certain cases
  • Fixed Achievements not being available for released nations
  • Stopped tight-fisted AI chartering provinces for 0 ducats
  • Adopt Islamic government no longe ravailable to Indian Sultanates
More fixes may be added to this list as we continue to monitor bug reports that are coming in. Our plan is to release this hotfix as a beta at some point this week, and fold that beta into the main game after a few days, assuming no other serious issues pop up.

There are certainly other issues which I'm certain people are keen to see addressed. For those, we are beginning work on the main post-release Update, 1.27. Let's talk about that now.

Post release updates come after a big expansion, are free and targeted at a region, much like the 1.24 Japan update. We add some flavour to the target region. It also allows us to round up on a lot of the bugs which come in, both for the recently released expansion and some of the older backlog of issues. They sometimes go hand in hand with other things, and that will be the case, as with 1.27, EU4 will also be joining the ranks of our other games in becoming fully GDPR compliant. More details on this will be released closer to the time, but the result for most users will just wind up being a policy to read before playing the game.

Religious conversion in territories has been a hot topic since its changes were announced for and subsequently released in 1.26. The response on it on all platforms (and I've read almost all of them) has lead to some interesting conversations about that whats and whys of religious conversion and some cool ideas on what do do about it. I'm not quite naive enough to overlook how they were overall negatively received, and we want to address these grievances. In the short term, we're going to look at bringing Religious and Humanist more in line with each other as viable choices for your nation for 1.27. We have longer term ideas for conversions, but we'll talk more about that down the line after 1.27.

So yes, Hotfix this week, 1.27 coming soon. Religious conversions responses not falling on deaf ears. Now how about the target for 1.27? Well, over the past year we've put a lot of work into the "Rest of the World" With focus on Japan, The Far East, The Near East and now India.

I'd say it's high time we put the Europa

Europa.jpg


Back in Europa Universalis
 
Guilty as charged. I normally write these up the night before, but elected to have thirteen hours of sleep last night instead, leaving me without time for elaborate ruses with today's teaser.
Emphasis added ;)
 
Didn't you do Poland fairly recently?
 
It does not stop players from taking land though. As you mentioned yourself they will simply stack tolerance (usually through Humanist) instead. Unless of course this:



means we will see a nerf to Humanist shortly :D

Anyway, since Jake also mentioned a long term plan to change the conversion mechanic I'm personally hoping for a shift away from the rather binary state/territory split and have development play a more important role
Yes and no. Taking Humanist ideas is the magical cure for the problem, but you have to take them. It should be one of the solutions (in my opinion alongside Religious and Administrative ideas). The countries, that did not invest in humanist are actually the ones with limited expansion; they have to more carefully take land or invest in problem-solving idea group, if it proves itself not possible.
And it works pretty well, but the problem is with Religious not being an alternative.
 
Honestly, I've no idea why changing reforms is exchanged for corruption. I understand that the cost is high to refract from making too frequent reforms, but honestly, 10 corruption seems almost draconic. I would way rather get a stability hit, per example. Historically, several of these reforms would have changed quite a lot, even in what is concidered early game, which is why I would definitely like to see a change to reform cost.
 
Conversion doesn't necessarily mean that the common folks have been converted. It could be a matter of installing people of your religion in more key spots than not. Boom, province is "converted".

I think conversion should be split between the people and the administration, or at least a scaling percentage of the province that's being converted. That would make for an interesting feature.
I agree with the sentiment but I think we won’t see something like that without an overhaul to the population system itself (ala Vic2, or the Stellaris changes upcoming).
 
Ah, I was hoping for 1.27 to focus on the Balkans. Mainland Greece in particular has aged badly since the updates to Hungary and Anatolia.
 
The problem is with players who enjoy blobbing and are good at it. They can hit the corruption wall very quickly and just be told to "sit and don't do anything". For some players conquering everything as fast as possible is the way to have fun in EU4 and corruption change simply blocks them from enjoying the game. There is also the problem with TC-railroad, where as every country you are pretty much forced to go into TC regions to make cash and to spend resources, when direct conquest is not possible due to corruption wall.

This can be solved by adding that fancy mechanic from CK2, Stellaris and HoI4 called "Game Rules". Not sure why PDS hasn't done it yet, seeing as playstyles and vision differences with EU4 playerbase are so radically varied.

But not for players. It have only 34% approval in steam.

Steam ratings ceased to mean anything ages ago, for all games. PDS even confirmed that as far as they are concerned, Steam Ratings don't matter.

And why people dont may say they opinion? And why do you think if people have any other opinion this opinion shit?

You must be VERY new to the Internet if by now you haven't realized that people with negative opinions are far, far, far more likely to voice their opinions than those with positive ones. This is, alongside the Steam Bombings, one of reasons why Steam Ratings don't matter (they just say that there are some controversial elements in the game) and why the term "Vocal Minority" exists (and PDS has already burnt itself numerous times by trusting vocal minorities too much).
 
Regarding AI.

We know its a complex issue. BUT there are some glaring issues:

1. AI does nor prioritize rebels for some reason - even when they can. 80k Ming will let forts fall while standing and waiting. Gotta fix that. Happened in Marco's stream.
Maybe be smart and if AI is a bit weaker/close to rebel stack - teach them to sit in mountains to kill rebels, like players would. If possible.

2. War AI - these guys go and siege *seemingly* random province while leaving their country undefended. This is VERY BAD. Player can multiple times faster siege complete AI country.

Typical example: i create fort on mountain, activate defensive edict. AI goes there. I siege their complete country while they typically can't finish my fort. GG won war. Done this last night as Nepal vs quite big Orissa. They tried to siege my march's fort in Tibet...
Only bigger countries like Ottomans that have two stacks can defend against this ... one stack usually tries to do something.

Also it makes it very easy for player to defeat 3-4 countries at the same time, annexim them or just knocking out of the war, because AI have no idea about any cooperation or defending itself.
 
I appreciate the fact that you guys (sorta) listen to the community. But how about addressing the fact that all your changes towards nerfing blobbing are nothing but trying to curtail a play style rather then expand on one (playing tall).

All you’ve done with the changes is create a wall where certain players hit a point of an artificial cap (be it corruption or unrest) where there is nothing to do but put the game on speed 5 and wait for popups.
 
I hope it will be something like this. Almost perfect.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...fire-and-sword-polish-immersion-pack.1118114/

It will be nice if Teutonic Order, Livonian, Brandeburgia, Pomeriania, Saxony, Bohemia, Silesia, Hungary, Moldavia, Austria and Wallachia could get more Dev.

Poland could be about religion or dynastys. Still Poland had after 1444 had Bohemian and Hungary throne for short time.
 
Cheers for the update DDRJake :D. By the look of those fixes (which seem fairly 'nice' fixes for this kind of thing) you've done very well - great work to you and the team and best of luck with the hotfix :).
 
Folks, I get that you want people to focus more on the diplomatic, economic and politic aspects of the game, to get more from the experience. But the issue here is that those aspect just aren't that interesting. Just make them interesting and people will prefer them to conquest and war. I mean, you can't make base building the focus of Age of Empires by nerfing the stats of the units.
 
You must be VERY new to the Internet if by now you haven't realized that people with negative opinions are far, far, far more likely to voice their opinions than those with positive ones. This is, alongside the Steam Bombings, one of reasons why Steam Ratings don't matter (they just say that there are some controversial elements in the game) and why the term "Vocal Minority" exists (and PDS has already burnt itself numerous times by trusting vocal minorities too much).
I dont say aboutt all opinions, but for dharma im agree from many of them. Strange solutions for convert religion in territory, too high corruption for territory (i dont understend why corruption the logical modifier for grow autonomy in territory)