EU4 - Development Diary - 15th of May 2018

[maidros]

If anything, the Mughal Dewan mechanic of automatic cultural acceptance once the Mughals have conquered all provinces of a particular culture should apply more to the Hindu kingdoms of India. This is how they expanded historically. Secondly, the anti-Muslim edict that currently applies to all pagans should apply only to other Muslims.

 

[Chazb5046]

ESTATES REWORK AND INTERNAL POLITICS CONFIRMED.

If this is true I will die happy (hopefully not too soon)

 

[Chazb5046]

Cheers for the DD Groogy . 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 ). 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).



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)?

Please do this paradox. Please. Please. Please. This is a really good idea. I also wonder at the ‘sort of’ one sided nature of trade. If trade goods are going west from India that means other goods or money is coming east. There are all kinds of examples of the specific goods of Europe being traded for teas spices and furs in N. A. , a reciprocal trade benefit for a nation that sells a province would be a good boost. But also further looking at the trade system as well as suggested in the above quote would be great!

 

[cristofolmc]

If this is true I will die happy (hopefully not too soon)

So will I, my friend. So will I...

 

[Regaccio]

If you have a 4 tech advantage over Bahmanis as Russia, your game is somewhat exceptional.

These graphs show the average number of military techs nations in a certain region were behind western Europe over the course of four different observer games, from a video by Reman's Paradox. As you can see, the highest average advantage the Europeans get is just under three techs, and that's only for 25-50 years. Before ~1500 and after ~1750, so for about a third of the game, there is an even playing field, and at the end of the game India is actually a little ahead of Europe on average.

Institutions were implemented long after the devs stopped doing serious work on the historical start dates. Technology itself however has remained virtually unchanged since the game came out, so unlike institutions technology is supposed to be somewhat balanced in the start dates.

Wow. That data is ridiculous. I knew it was bad, but damn, this puts it in perspective. Why even have institution tech penalties if they barely mean anything? I really hope this gets rebalanced at some point...

 

[Tantara]

Will these assimilation capabilities be extended to other traditionally multicultural empires?
I'm thinking the Byzantine, Ottoman, and Arabian Empires for example.

 

[Chazb5046]

Will this assimilation capabilities be extended to other traditionally multicultural empires?
I'm thinking the Byzantine, Ottoman, and Arabian Empires for example.

Would especially like to see it in Otto and Byz , very fitting

 

[Easterling]

Hmm, very interesting..

 

[Hessian Mercenary]

Will these assimilation capabilities be extended to other traditionally multicultural empires?
I'm thinking the Byzantine, Ottoman, and Arabian Empires for example.

I like the idea of giving Ottomans access to the mechanic because then we could get rid of the atrocity that is Levantine culture group

 

[Chazb5046]

I like the idea of giving Ottomans access to the mechanic because then we could get rid of the atrocity that is Levantine culture group

Fantastic point. I was really disappointed to it made its way through CoC dlc unscathed

 

[Chief of Staff]

Is their any chance that Protectorates could be re-added. Make the government localised to Princely States for Indian protectorates. Lock the option to a diplo tech like Client States are locked to tech.

Funny that you say this since, playing as England/Britain, I actually have my vassals in India localized to Princely States in my personal mod. I even created a subject type named the same, separate from Protectorates that is reserved for the Nepal and Tibet. I probably could publish it later as a separate mod at some point if anyone is interested, at least for Princely States strictly since there is already a mod that resurrected the Protectorates.

As for an autonomous trade company, it might be doable in a theory. Simply use merchant republic as the base for a government but with its ruler appointed by a court of directors (as the board of directors was called back then) based in London somehow. This may make sense as shareholders would be de-facto an oligarchy ruling over the territories through their directors, albeit not resident there unlike the Merchant Republic.

Later, the selection of a ruler in Company would be subject to an approval from the government back home as it begin to assert a greater control over the Company, particularly with Pitt's India Act, so you might get events selecting a ruler from a list submitted by the court of directors or something, not entirely sure how it exactly worked. At any rate, that would only happen if the said company ran up a significant debt enough to require assistance from the HM Government.

One of the things, though, that should be considered is that the Company should have as bonuses for its own government type the accepted culture for all of the India or at least extra accepted culture slots and/or higher tolerance for heathens. Otherwise, without these, the Company would act like colonial nations and convert all provinces in India to its religion and primary culture which would only be a fact in settler colonies (e.g. in Americas and Australia / New Zealand where settler effectively displaced the natives as the majority culture there). Alternatively, restrict the conversion of provinces to religion and primary culture through the scripted_functions files. But unless the Company have those accepted culture bonus or somehow have a reduced penalty for unaccepted cultures, my concern would be that it could highly susceptible to revolts which would make it highly unstable and unsustainable.

At the present time, as far as modding is concerned, I don't think you can set the government type for a colonial nation based on conditions (e.g. where it is located) right now so this would require either an event to do so or wait for PDX to implement an actual mechanic representing the autonomous trade company.

 

[Khadagan]

If you have a 4 tech advantage over Bahmanis as Russia, your game is somewhat exceptional.

These graphs show the average number of military techs nations in a certain region were behind western Europe over the course of four different observer games, from a video by Reman's Paradox. As you can see, the highest average advantage the Europeans get is just under three techs, and that's only for 25-50 years. Before ~1500 and after ~1750, so for about a third of the game, there is an even playing field, and at the end of the game India is actually a little ahead of Europe on average.

Institutions were implemented long after the devs stopped doing serious work on the historical start dates. Technology itself however has remained virtually unchanged since the game came out, so unlike institutions technology is supposed to be somewhat balanced in the start dates.

How fast tech spreads outside of Europe could do with a rework

 

[Battlex]

Would especially like to see it in Otto and Byz , very fitting

Byz would be interesting, would they go with bonuses to show assimilation, or raw culture conversion cost reduction so everyone is Roman

 

[Don Funk]

Looks to me like a useless DLC, even worse than juletide

 

[cristofolmc]

Looks to me like a useless DLC, even worse than juletide

If you don't play in india nor in Europe then yes. If you do, its kind of a must have. Although it may be a bit overpriced if you don't play india, its worth the money even if only for their effort to rework policies and integrate estates into vanilla.

 

[Xetfield]

Am I really the only one who thinks that new Mughals feature will break the balance?

 

[Raminel]

Nothing to say one way to expand rules out another. Expansion in Indonesia and Philippines can still be mostly military just like it is in release.
As was already hinted there might be more that we have yet to reveal though

Not really, since the Mandate of Heaven update/DLC now Ming consistently and aggressively forges tributaries all around East Asia including the Phillipines, etc. It's always a pain to conquer tributaries and for the AI it's virtually impossible.

 

[macky527]

Excellent! Because we all know that one of the big problems in EU is that blobs are too unstable. And particularly that historic powerhouse of stability, the Mughals, just keep on collapsing every game I play, unlike history.

Well the Mughals did fall, bringing the Marathas and later Brits to Indian supremacy.

 

[Ixal]

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.

If that is how features are designed than it is no wonder that the recent expansions made the game worse, not better.

Instead of actually finding out what the root cause is that Europeans are not able to expand historically, something they were quite able to do in older versions of the game you instead try to sell us a bandaid and a badly implemented at that.

 

[macky527]

Btw will Tajik culture be included in this update?

I am not sure actually.

Sedentary Uzbeks and Tajiks were lumped into 1 group (Sarts) in EU4's time period:
http://www.geocurrents.info/geopoli...uistic-and-political-identity-in-central-asia

But even if you take that out of account, this is an Indian update, and if Paradox would ever add a Tajik culture, it would either be on a Tartary expansion or have already been done in CoC.