EU4 - Development Diary - 16th of February 2021

[Meka66]

Alrighty, here's clarification on how the religion works. Please keep in mind art is PLACEHOLDER.

Here you got your religion's base modifiers, pretty nice.

Then, just like Hinduism and Fetishism, you have different modifiers you can choose, but this time in the form of Dreaming Stories. You begin the game with just three of them, but there's many more to unlock.

Instead of just having to border other religions like the Fetishists, new Dreaming Stories are unlocked by completing specific missions. These missions range a lot in what they ask you to do, some are as simple as having a large navy or discovering certain parts of the world, but others ask you to take on the daunting task of winning wars against great powers.

If you unlock all of the other Dreaming Stories, you unlock The Rainbow Serpent, one of the most prolific figures in Australian religions and one of few figures who appears across almost all religions in Australia. I won't spoil the exact bonuses of all of the Dreaming Stories, but the design intention behind them is to give players bonuses that are immediately helpful in speeding the player along in what their objective likely is at that point in the game.

Hope that answers every question everyone had about Alcheringa!

 

[Meka66]

I was looking over the oceania expanded mod (couldn't actually play it, so wondering why manaism from it wasn't transfered to the polynesian tribes, I really hate the idea of having animism for them

Mainly because Manaism was completely hacked together using events and variables which meant that performance would drop the more Manaist nations there were in the game. Like, for something in a mod it's fine, but for the base game we prefer to avoid hacking stuff together with content.

@Meka66 Fantastic! Spectacular! The is one of the best dev diaries I can remember seeing. Thank you so much for your dedication to this project and for finally creating gameplay in such an underrepresented region.

One question (not meant as criticism): out of curiosity, why did you decide not to have more provinces in Australia’s interior— even just a few provinces linking the east and west through the wasteland, like the passages from the Maghreb through the Sahara to the Sahel? I am a little sad that the updated map doesn’t contain a new province with Uluru in it, which would have made a great province modifier (maybe triggered by the owner being of Aboriginal culture of having the Dreamtime religion).

Thanks, hope you'll enjoy it when it releases!

Yep, as mentioned before filling out the interior would be nice from an Aboriginal perspective, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for colonizers to start filling the Outback with settlements this early on in history. Coastal Australia was relevant to both colonizer and colonized so it felt like the right choice.

Australia colonization began in 1788, nearly the end of EU4's game timeframe. Australia's gold rush started in 1851. Why is Australia getting all these buffs? Why does Australia need to "be on part with other colonial regions" when those colonial regions were vastly larger, richer, more populated, more important to history, earlier colonized, and stronger? Is the game not supposed to be based in history? Couldn't this exact same rational be used for buffing, say, North Africa to the same level as China?

Well, not really. The point of reference I used when making it on par with other colonial regions was colonial Alaska.

Before this rework, Australia had barely been touched since release and because of the way EU4 mechanics work, both AI and players will end up filling out the entirety of Australia pretty much immediately after discovering it. Australia isn't going to give you as much strategic value as say the West Indies or Brazil, but it'll be more than just an afterthought for your colonial adventures from now on. Rather, like other regions, it's going to be a proper colonial venture as it should be.

Anyway, you're not supposed to know about the North Africa rework with 2000 new provinces, who told you??

 

[SaintDaveUK]

Two questions about Oceania content.
Will aboriginals have advisors portraits?
Will polynesians have advisors portraits and new unit models or will reuse some of the already existent unit models?

Sadly there's not going to be any new advisor portraits for Oceania, but I like your idea of a Polynesian unit model...