EU4 - Development Diary - 13th of August 2019

[JackHarkness115]

Well, there goes me giving all the major trade provinces to the Burghers/Merchant Guilds to try and boost that trade income. I still am really interested in these overhauls though, seems it'll make the Estates a greater force to be reckoned with, which in my view will make the game more fun.

 

[Silesian Burd]

What was the particular problem with 1.26?
The only thing I can remember estate wise was that it became a free feature (and then, it's assumed) it would become easier to completely overhauling, which they are doing now.
It seems like it's something going in the right move, but it seems to soon and too incomplete yet, but I like the general idea so far.

Estates were effectively neutered and turned into free-stuff-dispensers, as you won't risk revolts from them until you give them 100% influence, whereas before 1.26 they could cause problems at 80% influence. In most cases, you now have to force Estates disasters for them to happen. They were basically made optional to focus on; except for the provincial aspect at the game's start, which annoyed a few players on the subreddit.

Paradox wants to add depth to their gameplay, but they just can't seem to do it in EU4.

 

[TheDarkMaster]

Could we maybe get a little bit of control over how newly conquered lands are distributed? Influence seems like a reasonable base, but I'd like it if that wasn't my only option.

Maybe something like this?

• Give things out based on influence: no cost and all estates gain a little loyalty.
• Favor a minor estate: Player chooses one estate to half or more of the land to, with the remainder going based on influence. Costs diplomatic power to use this. The chosen estate gains loyalty and influence. The most powerful estate loses a little loyalty.
• Take the land for the state: Most of the land goes directly to the crown. Costs military power and estates lose loyalty according to their influence. The new lands gain extra separatism.

 

[tpapp157]

I like the new direction toward an M&T-style estate system which is far more realistic than the current (very gamey) system.

I'm confused by the reference to "crown lands". Crown Lands are by definition the lands owned by the crown (the King's personal feudal demesne) and therefore they are the only lands in the entire country which the monarch has complete authority over and which are not directly owned by another estate. In fact, it's everything other than the Crown Lands which are owned by other individuals as represented by the estates.

While technically the Monarch had authority over the lands of his de jure titles (the estates), practically the Monarch only had as much authority as he could convince the estates to follow his direction (whether through persuasion or force). While we do like to focus on the powerful absolute Monarchs of this period, far more often Monarchs had little real power beyond their own court and weak Monarchs were regularly sidelined and ignored by powerful estates.

It's this contradiction that makes the internal politics of the period actually interesting (and something that EU4 has always lacked). Even the most absolute of Monarchs could only accomplish as much as the estates allowed since Monarchs relied entirely on the estates to enforce their laws, man their armies, and collect their taxes at the complete discretion of the estates. It wouldn't be until very late in EU4's time period that modern mechanisms of centralized governments which we often take for granted (centralized administrations, bureaucratic institutions, professional armies, etc) began to take shape which in turn allowed the central government to reduce their complete reliance on estates (although history has shown that even these institutions of the central government can become estates separate from the government in their own right as well).

I understand that EU4 is a power fantasy game. In the same way that Call of Duty lets you play a super-soldier that has never actually existed, EU4 lets you play as a super-emperor with the sort of power and authority that has never actually existed in history. Even still, I think a lot more can be done to increase the interesting gameplay of internal affairs by reducing the control of the player. After all, even though we like to focus on the wars and external affairs of great empires, the emperors themselves spent the vast majority of their time focused on internal political affairs and in particular managing their relationship with their estates. Indeed, most external wars often have internal causes.

From a gameplay perspective I see powerful estates as providing huge benefits to the player if the player can keep their support and huge penalties if they cannot. Huge swings of the pendulum in terms of numerical modifiers and events that can shower the player with power and gold on the one hand or cripple their income and fill the country with rebellions on the other. The estates should be simultaneously saving the country and ruining it. Weak estates on the other hand would provide much more stable gameplay, the player never able to reach the highs that estates can provide but also shielded from their extreme lows and instead always having a steady reliability.

 

[grommile]

Yes gutting the strategy from a strategy game will do wonders for gameplay. It's more fun when there's nothing to think about and every choice is blatantly obvious and the same every time.

The single-player experience is badly let down by the proliferation of complexity the AI cannot cope with.

 

[rimworld inbox]

I don't see how estates were necessarily broken, and I think there was some understated planning involved with them, but this doesn't seem as disastrously put together with no thought like the merc rework.

So I guess that's a solid 10/10 rating given my new expectations.

 

[rimworld inbox]

And if you already have +5s? I think this kind of thing is gonna be really helpful for getting a new peak ADM monthly gain - what is it now? 15ish right? +1 on that is a huge increase. Also worth noting that if it gives you (for example) -20 max absolutism that's only -8% admin efficiancy. Assuming you go from 100 to 80 cap. Also not that you can have -20 max and still have 100.

at the common absolutism timing of 1623~1630, that's only +18% AE +18% coring cost +18% warscore cost +18% overextension multiplier and +18% corruption while coring, but hey that's only like 1.5 full idea groups worth of modifiers so no big deal, I would also take the +1 adm per month

 

[Grease5]

The single-player experience is badly let down by the proliferation of complexity the AI cannot cope with.

Then the problem is the failings of the AI, not the complexity. All these features are (and should be) designed with the player in mind and if the AI can't handle them then it needs to either be changed to better handle them or give them more cheats behind the scenes to ignore them (sailors, naval attrition) but gutting them for the AI's benefit at the player's expense is lazy, defeatist and downright awful game design. I agree with your post on it's own but that's definitely the wrong way to solve the problem.

 

[Cancerofthehead]

I don't see how estates were necessarily broken, and I think there was some understated planning involved with them, but this doesn't seem as disastrously put together with no thought like the merc rework.

So I guess that's a solid 10/10 rating given my new expectations.

It isn’t that they were broken, but that it was very uninteresting and unnecessarily obtuse merchanic for a lot of players. The proper use of them is hard to understand for most players and they boils down to “click every ten or twenty years to get my gold/points/whatever”.

There is a reason they recently gave players the option to largely just ignore them (removing the land requirement).

The new system sounds much more accessible and less tedious. We shall see how it works out.

 

[Prince Ire]

As a personal want I would love the ability to interact with other nations estates or absorb estates when you conquer land. Perhaps have a situation where you can mitigate the inevitable rebels that pop up by giving concessions to the local nobility. Also inter country estate interactions would allow funky stuff like: The foreign shenanigans in Poland and Sweden when they had very powerful parliaments, the English (and I am sure many other cases) offering the crown to a foreigner, or the British Raj using the local nobility to assume control. It would be probably be too broken and open to abuse and I know that most of what I just mentioned is covered by events but with the rework of events I think it would allow a certain conflict that is missing at the moment.

This was actually the case when estates were first introduced. Conquered land would come with any estates it had been given to still in control of it. I'm not sure when this was changed. My guess would be when states and territories were introduced, because all newly conquered lands are territories and estates cannot exist in territories (insert complaint about how this, historically, doesn't make sense except for newly colonized areas and how in gameplay terms it massively reduces the importance of the cossack estate, since cossacks can only be given province types that are generally located areas it would be a terrible idea to turn into states here).

 

[Cancerofthehead]

at the common absolutism timing of 1623~1630, that's only +18% AE +18% coring cost +18% warscore cost +18% overextension multiplier and +18% corruption while coring, but hey that's only like 1.5 full idea groups worth of modifiers so no big deal, I would also take the +1 adm per month

The correct solution to that is to add benefits to low absolutism (or drawbacks to high absolutism). The fact that there isn’t even a pseudo-choice on whether to max absolutism or not is dumb. The comment about not wanting to cancel the estate interactions if you want to go revolutionary makes me hope that they are adding benefits to low absolutism.

 

[mechanical_Critter]

The correct solution to that is to add benefits to low absolutism (or drawbacks to high absolutism). The fact that there isn’t even a pseudo-choice on whether to max absolutism or not is dumb. The comment about not wanting to cancel the estate interactions if you want to go revolutionary makes me hope that they are adding benefits to low absolutism.

My understanding is that it's exactly what the dev have in mind, with the full array of estate interactions available to a country that doesn't care about their absolutism, while others (hordes? theocracies? ) who are barely above 100 max would probably want to abstain, and last, heavily reformed absolutist monarchies would be able to get away with SOME interactions. Oh and probably some don't even affect max abs so should be available to everyone.

So all in all there already IS this tradeoff, thought about in imo a satisfying way since the player can tune and play with it, suggested in this dev diary. This looks promising. As is stated before, there's still a lot of room for a majestic ruination thereof, but that doesn't mean it will fail for sure. And no one, not even Marco, is immune to being wrong from time to time.

I take the point that there will be no more using estates to use high autonomy lands effectively though. It was something satisfying that's gonna disappear. I think it's relatively justified though because of that replacing mechanic and for the sake of simplicity.

Oh also another point that wasn't mentioned, I don't think it's fair to punish the entirety of a country when you seize (arguably locally) lands belonging to the estates. That's going overboard imo. Applying the malus to that random (set of) province(s) should be good enough (and if it's not, it's probably more justified to increase the unrest penalty than the set of eligible provinces for that unrest). Besides it's something that an experienced player would used effectively to get free stab/we reset whenever he wants, while a less prepared player would fight lots of rebels, because the best course of action is gonna be weird.

 

[grommile]

This was actually the case when estates were first introduced. Conquered land would come with any estates it had been given to still in control of it. I'm not sure when this was changed.

Estates were added in The Cossacks alongside patch 1.14.

Inheriting the estate assignments of provinces conquered from members of your own religion group was removed in 1.15. (To the great relief of large slices of the player base, because the AI was terrible at assigning estates in the first place. My main 1.14 playthrough was as a Zoroastrian custom nation, so I cared not one jot for their trials and tribulations )

The States and Territories system was added in 1.16.

 

[tedc]

With estates now influencing absolutism does that mean we may see changes to it? Making it deeper than 'high absolutism good, low absolutism bad'?

 

[BarrosRodrigues]

Yes gutting the strategy from a strategy game will do wonders for gameplay. It's more fun when there's nothing to think about and every choice is blatantly obvious and the same every time.

I have to highlight this IMO brilliant post as this is the direction this game is going since 1.16 with very few exceptions (like for example institutions and tributaries) that kept it interesting up until 1.26. By 1.26 this game was only a shadow of the great strategy game it once was.

 

[Soulburger]

I did like the estates from the onset as an attempt to replicate some of the internal struggles. I didn't mind too much about the micro with assigning them but I understand that can come across as very tedious for others. Excited to see how the new format works out. Hope that the dynamic doesn't simply change to the crown vs estates. I did like the feeling of estates vying for attention even at the cost of others. That made it more interesting when you favored the nobles at the expense of the burgers or vice versa. So hopefully some of that internal rivalry is retained.

 

[BarrosRodrigues]

at the common absolutism timing of 1623~1630, that's only +18% AE +18% coring cost +18% warscore cost +18% overextension multiplier and +18% corruption while coring, but hey that's only like 1.5 full idea groups worth of modifiers so no big deal, I would also take the +1 adm per month

ROFL

 

[BarrosRodrigues]

And no one, not even Marco, is immune to being wrong from time to time.

I am NOT wrong on this one because there are a few mechanics in this game that ruin it and one of them is absolutism. Despite not being as bad as corruption from territories it shows the same line of abysmal thinking wrt strategy. The influence of absolutism is such (due to its gigantic impact on coring costs, war score cost of provinces and AE just to name the most important ones) that anything that goes against it instantly becomes non-viable. When absolutism comes along a host of otherwise legitimate options become so terribly bad that the player will avoid them like the plague (some of them were even introduced with DLC like the debase currency). This reduces the gameplay options to one, it kills playstyles (...) because of reasons (cant say them without getting a ban on this forum). A good strategy game cant have only one (obvious) good option as that at the very least reduces its replay ability. Absolutism did not instantly make this game bad because the other changes introduced on that patch were overwhelmingly positive so that kept the game interesting. The same cant be said about the vast majority of the changes past 1.26 and now the projected changes for 2020.

BTW I´ve just touched the tip of the iceberg here so I wont even talk about the economic mini game that the estates pre- 1.26 provided which increased the player options by a lot especially when starting small due to how they interacted with LA (which translated into either money or manpower and force limits again just to name the most important ones). Now it is all gone and replaced by another set of boring and laughable (from a strategy POV) estates "policies".

Sadly I could go on and on but I wont since it is hopeless (...)

 

[Etrutian]

A very minor request; but instead of 'the nobility 'CONTROL' x% of your land', can the word Control be switched with 'Manage'

 

[Metz]

Those charts already exist under economy tabs for pie charts.

For individual provinces.