• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

EU4 - Development Diary - 15th of May 2018

Hello! So today's Dev Diary will be covering the ways to enter the Subcontinent of India. We’ve added two mechanics to help you gobbling up all those new juicy provinces in India if you are coming from distant lands.

First is the new unique government that the true heirs of Timur the Lame can claim, or as we good friends of him like to call him, our good Amir Timur. The Mughal Diwan will give the empire a bureaucracy capable of integrating the vast swaths of lands that lie before it. The reform mechanic replaces the promotion of cultures to one where the nation integrates a culture by assimilating it into its government. Assimilation of a culture happens when the nation have conquered every single province of that culture and that will make that culture a permanently accepted culture of the country.

eu4_4.png


Though besides only becoming promoted, if the Mughals manages to integrate an entire culture group into their empire they’ll get some small boni from the cultures contribution to the empire's administration. However this bonus is not permanent and is only kept as long as they can keep control of all the provinces.

Keep in mind all values are very work in progress and are very much subject to change and hit with nerf hammers!

eu4_5.png


The second feature we’ve added is for the Europeans and is called Charter Trade Company. This is a new diplomatic tool which will let you setup a trade company in foreign distant lands like Africa, South East Asia or India. The interaction has a base cost for establishing the expedition to the east. This cost is calculated on your colonial range meaning as you progress in technology it will get cheaper, or if you have modifiers that steers your nation to the more adventurous type. This action can only be used on Trade Company Charter regions and any provinces you gain from this will automatically be made into a Trade Company province.

eu4_6.png


It’s a small feature, but we put a lot of focus on making sure the AI uses this as one would expect . We did this since we know this has been a major pet peeve of you lot, ranging from it not being worth it shipping your troops over half the world to just simply the AI never does.

So we put our elbow grease on to make it possible to “get started” in the far east and that the colonizers of Europe would understand how to do this. While playing this is how it turned out for me with Spain buying provinces in Madagascar, Gujarat, Coromandel and Portugal in Goa and the Malabar Coast. Also bonus with the Turkish West India Company next to the Spanish Gujarat.

eu4_8.png


Next thing on the agenda is PDXCON! You should look up the EU4 booth and I'll happily tease you about how cool the upcoming features are :cool:
See you there!
 
They did say you can get a Charter Company on the Arabian coast though and that isn't a trade company in game atm...
Yes, the game is confusing - even to it's designers :D But this is a classical hen and egg, ehem, paradoxon :eek: (Groogy got it wrong, probably was purposefully thinking of dry and sandy deserts to distract himself from ice cream)
 
But wouldn’t you admit it’s quite problematic for units to be of different strengths with the same tech level?
That's already the case and I don't see many people complaining about it
 
I'm surprised how excited people are. These are some of our smaller features and. We have a lot more in store...
All the more reason to tread cautiously. Failed expectations can become bitter.
@Groogy No, it doesn't make sense. Like I said and showed, one unconnected province owned by a 5000 dev country gives Ming less than -0.01 mandate/month. It's been based on a number of connected non-tributary provinces for a long time now.
The real question is: why should EoC sell a province when it has 20k ducats in its treasury? o_O:p
 
Why do you try and find the worst in every new feature? Naive as I may be, I genuinely don't think this was implemented with the goal of being a money sink for the sake of money sinking.
No it was not meant as a money sink, I was sick of having to take forever and way too much effort to get to India last time I played Netherlands. That's why I wanted the feature. Making it help the AI was a happy side thing that I together with the AI programmer jumped deep into to try and make it work well because I know it's a problem people hate.
 
No it was not meant as a money sink, I was sick of having to take forever and way too much effort to get to India last time I played Netherlands. That's why I wanted the feature. Making it help the AI was a happy side thing that I together with the AI programmer jumped deep into to try and make it work well because I know it's a problem people hate.
There is always hope when devs play the Netherlands. :D
 
Aside from Portugal which gets boosts to get there early in EU 4 as it stands, European presence in India was pretty light before 1600. In current patch NED can make a run there and get there decades ahead of time by taking just to exploration 3, in only a few hops.

I bet if you really pushed you could extend colonial range on hops across the Pacific and still hit India by 1600...how much effort is "too much"? IRL Dutch had to fight other Europeans over India too.

I'm all about mechanical interactions if they make sense, but AI making land purchases/sales a human player would not accept is fishy. How is this not at cross purposes with other game incentives, when considering the perspective of players in both Europe and India? Push sale value too high and Europe should never buy. Too low and India should never sell. Maybe AI will have good province sale/purchase logic in general? It's hard to believe that will happen at this stage but we'll see.
 
I'm not even gonna touch on the English of the post, but the word 'adopt' in the tooltip in the first screenshot should be 'adapt'...
It’s almost as if the writer isn’t a native English speaker...
While the grammar wasn’t the best, the point came across and we could all understand it.
Stop picking apart Groogy’s writing abilities and talk about the features :p
 
It’s almost as if the writer isn’t a native English speaker...
While the grammar wasn’t the best, the point came across and we could all understand it.
Stop picking apart Groogy’s writing abilities and talk about the features :p

Which is why I wasn't, and I'm not usually a grammar nazi on the internet for exactly that reason. That said, I think we can hold professionals and internationally orientated companies to a different standard than random people on the internet. Don't get me wrong, I love Groogy to bits, its more of a criticism of Paradox in general; the English in the game is often very poor or badly written, and really is it too much effort to have someone check the texts before sending them out or making them part of the game?
 
And why shouldn't people complain about obvious bandaids instead of actual fixes to the main problems that everyone is the same tech level nowadays and Europan AIs fail to compete with India or China?
I don't give two hoots whether he complains or not; there's certainly enough reason to throughout the game. Indeed I completely agree with the two examples you gave; tech/institution parity is probably my biggest gripe with EU4.

I told him to speak for himself because the way he complained in the part I quoted it looked like he was trying to speak for the entire playerbase on a feature that had only been revealed the same afternoon.
 
Cheers for the DD Groogy :D. A most excellent couple of features there (although I have sympathy for the poor content designer who had to come up with Mughal bonuses for every culture :eek: ). The buying ports thing sounds great, although will be important not to have money overflowing for AIs or I suspect it could get a little silly or at the very least tough to balance (this may well not be an issue right now, but has been in the recent-ish past).

Ah no must have miss spoken. Arabia is not a company .

This is possibly a very silly idea, but what about allowing trade companies in all non-colonial regions outside of a nations' home continent? Seems a bit odd that a surging, powerful China couldn't create trade companies (or purchase trade ports) in a fragmented Europe that it's torn itself apart by war, say.

Another random idea - what about, as well as the price paid for the province, local rulers that sell trade ports (or perhaps all local rulers in the trade area) get a bonus to trade income from that port? One of the odd things about EU4's trade model is that trade only goes one way, but historically, as best I understand it, the trade from the east was, by and large, trade, and involved things going east as well. A bonus to trade income might go some way to modelling that (and making it a local nation's interest, even a player one, to sell a trade port - but perhaps have it so that you only get the bonus once from a province for each nation in a trade zone - hence no interest in selling more than one province per nation per trade zone to anyone)?
 
There is no sarcasism so thick that people will detect it in a forum post.

When is the last time you've seen the Mughals formed by the AI in one of your games? I'm pretty certain I've seen the AI form Qing more recently than that.

Among the things I would like Paradox to work out is a way for the AI to form certain nations(Qing, Mughals, among others) more often without it being so blatantly railroaded that it happens every game.
 
Aside from Portugal which gets boosts to get there early in EU 4 as it stands, European presence in India was pretty light before 1600. In current patch NED can make a run there and get there decades ahead of time by taking just to exploration 3, in only a few hops.

I bet if you really pushed you could extend colonial range on hops across the Pacific and still hit India by 1600...how much effort is "too much"? IRL Dutch had to fight other Europeans over India too.

I'm all about mechanical interactions if they make sense, but AI making land purchases/sales a human player would not accept is fishy. How is this not at cross purposes with other game incentives, when considering the perspective of players in both Europe and India? Push sale value too high and Europe should never buy. Too low and India should never sell. Maybe AI will have good province sale/purchase logic in general? It's hard to believe that will happen at this stage but we'll see.

I agree it's a bit oversimplistic and it should be about diplomacy. A bit of like protectorates work, which is what happened in reality. Trade posts were given, not entire provinces in the beginning in exange for protection and other diplomatic favours until it was too late and the company had so much power that they could demand full control. But this is a game about simulation and then again every game feature in EU4 is oversimplistic. But at least for the time being it will do the trick. I'd still prefer if they brought back protectorates which simulates a lot better the 1600 europan companies there, but hey...again, at least its something better than no presence whatsoever on Indian for the whole game.
 
I've been playing with the Expanded Estuaries and Trade Centers mod, which has events to cede a specific province (forgot the name) in india and macau in china to portugal, and I think hong kong to england as well. I'm fine with that kind of solution, but since we are getting this new system, why not do it right?

Because it was a specific one off event for the Dutch who didn't buy it and which didn't really translate to any real sovereignty over Nagasaki? I'm all for historical gameplay but I think this requires a much more complex mechanic since most of the European footholds in Asia and subsequent expansion came from conquest, diplomacy/cloak-and-dagger activities rather than land purchasing.
 
Aside from Portugal which gets boosts to get there early in EU 4 as it stands, European presence in India was pretty light before 1600. In current patch NED can make a run there and get there decades ahead of time by taking just to exploration 3, in only a few hops.

I bet if you really pushed you could extend colonial range on hops across the Pacific and still hit India by 1600...how much effort is "too much"? IRL Dutch had to fight other Europeans over India too.

I'm all about mechanical interactions if they make sense, but AI making land purchases/sales a human player would not accept is fishy. How is this not at cross purposes with other game incentives, when considering the perspective of players in both Europe and India? Push sale value too high and Europe should never buy. Too low and India should never sell. Maybe AI will have good province sale/purchase logic in general? It's hard to believe that will happen at this stage but we'll see.

Well, OP shows Spain being able to buy a province for 1743 ducats in 1551, which I see as a very nice trade-off (imagine the chaos you can cause with a jumpstart of 1700 dollarydoos). The real issue is later in the game when everyone has more money and the diplomatic action would get cheaper due to colonial range, so I hope @Groogy and the others take this into account and make it scale.
 
Eh that's not how the Europeans conquered India though. Britain conquered it by supporting local regimes when a power vacuum was created (see the fall of Mughals)
The Indian military machine was not as primitive as you perceive it. In fact the Mughals and the Brits both relied on the Rajput's Purbias who were excellent riflemen. Among a lot of other also hired local guns.

Just to add to this, note that the British lost their first major war with the Mughals. In Child's War (1686 - 1690), they lost all their possessions in India outside of Calcutta, including even Bombay, to the Mughals. They were only allowed to regain what they lost on Aurangzeb's sufferance and their (obviously quickly broken) promise of good behavior. European conquest of India was by no means preordained, and really only became an option once the Mughals collapsed, and the Europeans become one of several players attempting to fill the vacuum.
 
No their stuff is already too strong so I find it will have to be a useless idea for them I'm afraid :/
If you know that the feature is too strong then how about nerfing it? Like restricting the number of cultures which can be assimilated and increasing it by humanist, etc.

You technically can buy a province there, but a nation with EoC mechanics will refuse to sell based on the reasons you stated.
Then won’t we be able to see Portuguese Macau? Well, under current trade system, it doesn’t have great meaning though.
 
This culture assimilation thing looks promising. Not really that useful, but it can tweak some awkward situations like PLC wastes an accepted culture slot on tiny Lithuanian culture. PLC tag can be hardcoded to have Lithuanian assimilated etc. I hope this feature can be integrated into the old government system instead of a Mughals (player) only thing.