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EU4 - Development Diary - 19th of January 2021

Hello and Welcome to another Europa Universalis IV development diary. 2020 was an interesting year to say the least, but now we are in 2021, and the Tinto team is now fully up to speed with working on the new expansion. Today we’ll focus on some new aspects related to Heirs, Regencies and Estates.

First of all, one change for heirs and their legitimacy is that it will start a fair bit lower on average, and slowly increase over time as the heir grows older. Having high prestige increases it faster. Please note that corruption in your court increases it, as there is nothing screaming legitimate future King as much as a few sacks of gold in your pocket.

Secondly, with this new expansion, we have removed the regency councils, and instead replaced them by Estate Regencies.

Instead, a Regent will be generated from your most powerful estate. This will further increase the power of that estate, which might also give you a specific benefit or not.

eu4_18.png

Please note however that this does not replace consort regencies - consorts will still take priority over an estate-led regency

Thirdly, we are adding the option for extending a regency. Extending a regency reduces legitimacy by 10, and extends the current regency with another 5 years. Of course, the claim of the heir continues to increase. While a regency has some drawbacks, this can be very beneficial, if your heir is an imbecile, and your regency council is not entire incompetent.

Lest we forget, we have also changed so that you are no longer constantly losing legitimacy the longer you have a regency, but instead its an increase in stability cost.

We are also adding a fair bit more interesting events that occur when you are in a regency, all to add more interesting flavor to the experience, not to mention interesting situations.

As you may have noticed, this is one of the shorter development diaries, even if it gives you some new features, but next week, we’ll return to an interesting look at some more american nations and their content.
 
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It’s long overdue, but really, it deserves a DLC entirely of its own. I’m gonna hope they update it in depth a couple patches from now, rather than doing a cursory update now that’s tacked onto all the other regions they’re focusing on.

We are not touching south america in 1.31
 
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Right now New Zealand has more tags than Brazil and Argentina together... It is quite crazy...
I kind of wish places like Kuhikugu would be represented at game start, but then again, there would need to be a very heavy form of European diseases disaster for them, which could make playing them unfun.
Perhaps in the next DLC.
 
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I kind of wish places like Kuhikugu would be represented at game start, but then again, there would need to be a very heavy form of European diseases disaster for them, which could make playing them unfun.
Perhaps in the next DLC.
Or a challenge!
 
It’s long overdue, but really, it deserves a DLC entirely of its own. I’m gonna hope they update it in depth a couple patches from now, rather than doing a cursory update now that’s tacked onto all the other regions they’re focusing on.
Now that you put it like this, I totally agree. It’ll be worth the wait I think if South America gets its own DLC in the future.
 
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Awesome! Nice work :D

Thirdly, we are adding the option for extending a regency. Extending a regency reduces legitimacy by 10, and extends the current regency with another 5 years. Of course, the claim of the heir continues to increase. While a regency has some drawbacks, this can be very beneficial, if your heir is an imbecile, and your regency council is not entire incompetent.
I especially like this mechanic, since I often find myself heavily sympathising with the last sentence.

On that note, would it be reasonable to add the ability to designate your consort as your heir, either at will or only if you die heirless but with a consort (e.g., an event where you can choose)? I'm no scholar in succession law, so just wondering :)
(If not, I don't think it should be too hard to mod in afterwards.)
 
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Not planned.. with how the codestructure works regarding monarchs, heirs and unions, I'd go "could try, but thats would add a few weeks of crazy bugs to fix, and probably some we never discover internally, but some of the community will see day 1 and will crucify us for".

So no, I don't think its something we'd add at this point.

A shame to hear that it would be that difficult to implement.

I think a lot of modders (including myself) would love the opportunity alone to play with such wacky features.

It is often when the developers add stuff for their own purpose that modders are able to do the crazier things, such as the renaming of countries, being super useful to many modders

Anyhow, I do understand and the feature already looks very interesting, so either way its a bonus.
 
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Hmm. I could interpret that two ways. In one sense, it could just be outside the purview of the game mechanics, which is fair enough though it’d also mean that the game mechanics could be altered so that it is within their scope. In the second sense, it could be that it’s beyond the scope of EU4’s timeline, which would be inaccurate. Over half of the game’s timeline takes place prior to the Peace of Westphalia; it was only after that that the dynasty began to be superseded by the state. I think having more in-depth dynastic mechanics at least up until the Age of Absolutism would do a lot to improve the game’s historical accuracy/realism, as well as making it even more fun.

Hopefully EU5 in ... 2025? AHH Just take my money now.

Dynastic warfare was so important and it's sad to see it not happen.

Think of all the events that can't really happen because you really only ever get one heir...

  1. Glorious Revolution in England
  2. Every Ottoman civil war - though we have mechanics to help simulate it
  3. Stuarts taking over England
  4. The Hasburgs controlling Spain and Austria
  5. Spanish Succession
  6. Henry VIII and his kids
  7. etc
 
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Or there is a third reason,since EU4 is an old game,making this type of big mechanics change at this stage of his life can broke a lot of things,including the AI.So this type of feature will probably be for an eventual EU5.

Its not that its an old game, its that it was an old game that was not disigned in a way that was friendly to adding lots of expansions to. Games can be built from the ground up for longevity.
 
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Hopefully EU5 in ... 2025? AHH Just take my money now.

Dynastic warfare was so important and it's sad to see it not happen.

Think of all the events that can't really happen because you really only ever get one heir...

  1. Glorious Revolution in England
  2. Every Ottoman civil war - though we have mechanics to help simulate it
  3. Stuarts taking over England
  4. The Hasburgs controlling Spain and Austria
  5. Spanish Succession
  6. Henry VIII and his kids
  7. etc
Only if they actually have some good design principles. Otherwise it will once again jsut become a cumbersome hard to learn topheavy game.
 
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Its not that its an old game, its that it was an old game that was not disigned in a way that was friendly to adding lots of expansions to. Games can be built from the ground up for longevity.
Yes,that's what i wanted to say,but this is not really a surprise since the engine version of EU4 is the same than CK2,and EU4 was built partly on EU3 codebase if i'm not mistaken.
 
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@Johan Are there rare events where the Regent attempts to seize power and declare himself ruler?
Hordes already have this if the heir is underage, and Queen regent can become Queen regnant if the heir dies via event its very rare tho. There's also an event as a Muslim with - 3 stab and high WE for your heir to try and seize the throne himself, that would be great if it was more common
 
Only if they actually have some good design principles. Otherwise it will once again jsut become a cumbersome hard to learn topheavy game.
There's always room for consolidation and simplification whenever the number at the end goes up. There are a number of basic game elements that could be merged into fewer more coherent systems. Here's hoping for example that EU5 will not have 5 different versions of inflation, of which only 1 is called inflation and works the least like real-life inflation of the 5.
 
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Not planned.. with how the codestructure works regarding monarchs, heirs and unions, I'd go "could try, but thats would add a few weeks of crazy bugs to fix, and probably some we never discover internally, but some of the community will see day 1 and will crucify us for".

So no, I don't think its something we'd add at this point.
Any chance of addressing the ability for a regency to put an heir of the regent's dynasty on your ally's throne, as well as being able to force a PU because your regent shares dynasty with the relevant tag, or looking at how it's decided which nation you royal marry gives you a consort
 
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There's always room for consolidation and simplification whenever the number at the end goes up. There are a number of basic game elements that could be merged into fewer more coherent systems. Here's hoping for example that EU5 will not have 5 different versions of inflation, of which only 1 is called inflation and works the least like real-life inflation of the 5.
Inflation
Advisor cost * year
Corruption * dev
Drilling * force limit
Loan * dev
Production * dip or arm tech

What other forms of inflation are there?
 
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