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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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Yes. Its the same as a regency coucil in THAT aspect.

There will be different types of challenges depending on which estate that takes power.
I'm a keep it real with you Johan; I will never extend a regency if it means extending the period of time where I can't declare new wars.
 
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Inflation
Advisor cost * year
Corruption * dev
Drilling * force limit
Loan * dev
Production * dip or arm tech

What other forms of inflation are there?
Don't forget increase of ship maintenance modifier with tech level, and increase of army maintenance modifier with tech level. Interestingly, they are calculated differently.

Although I did not count production as it's the other side of the balance sheet that gets increased.
 
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Interesting content, I suspect very few will extend the regencies if one can't declare war though haha, none the less welcome increase in depth.
@Johan if possible I think the community would be really grateful for any news on progress with fixing the debt spirals and smaller AI deleting their armies. I know you guys are primarily working on new content design not bug fixing but as game head I think it'd be very welcome news if you could possibly reassure us that this isn't just going to be an artefact for the rest of the game's lifespan.
 
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One day I hope we have enough time to kill the faction system with fire and salt its remains forever.

That day is not today :(
I’d suggest stealing an idea from MEIOU & Taxes and treating factions as parties in a state’s central government. Give both factions and estates to most countries, but reduce/increase factions’ effects as crownland shrinks/grows. Countries that have another form of central government, like a parliament, would use those mechanics instead of factions.

That might give centralized states more flavor, especially if higher absolutism decreases the power and effects of factions.

yes, all estates are considered.
What about for countries with parliaments? It seems weird that England, for example, will have regents from the clergy or burghers when most of England’s historical regents were nobles, many of whom were members of parliament.

Would it be possible to repurpose the “seat of powerful nobles” mechanic from domestic consorts to represent this? If crownland is high enough compared to the influence of any estate (say, 50% the influence or more), a “noble” from parliament would be generated as regent, assigned a province as his seat, and use flavor events associated with noble regencies.
 
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I’d suggest stealing an idea from MEIOU & Taxes and treating factions as parties in a state’s central government. Give both factions and estates to most countries, but reduce/increase factions’ effects as crownland shrinks/grows. Countries that have another form of central government, like a parliament, would use those mechanics instead of factions.

That might give centralized states more flavor, especially if higher absolutism decreases the power and effects of factions.
The problem with Factions as they are now is that they work in a somewhat absurd way by being easily abusable.

Eg. as a revolutionary nation you can go to war with The Imperials, using better dip rep for more/better alliances spend a little of MIL mana to wage war as The Girondists to get better armies and then just before peace spend some DIP mana to go back to the Imperials to avoid the increased AE. Basically entirely subverting the idea of factions having pros and cons with just a tiny mana investment.

Basically there is always only one way to play factions - keep everyone close to 33.3 so as to be able to change them at a whim.
 
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The problem with Factions as they are now is that they work in a somewhat absurd way by being easily abusable.

Eg. as a revolutionary nation you can go to war with The Imperials, using better dip rep for more/better alliances spend a little of MIL mana to wage war as The Girondists to get better armies and then just before peace spend some DIP mana to go back to the Imperials to avoid the increased AE. Basically entirely subverting the idea of factions having pros and cons with just a tiny mana investment.

Basically there is always only one way to play factions - keep everyone close to 33.3 so as to be able to change them at a whim.
They’re definitely abusable. I’d make a cooldown timer on interactions with them, increase the mana cost, or find another way to balance them.

I wasn’t saying they’re an amazing mechanic in their current state but that if factions are overhauled, I’d rather they were improved and repurposed instead of being stripped from the game completely.
 
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and extends the current regency with another 5 years.
by! Hate seeing all the "with x" statements in the game. No, my innovativeness will not be "increased with 2", it will be "increased by 2". Is there even a place to report grammatical errors, or should they just go with bug reports?

Other than that, this sounds like a cool new feature. I saw earlier that this won't change the inability to declare war during a regency, shouldn't that depend on the estate though? I mean if you end up with a Rajput or Cossack regent for example, maybe declaring war should be a possibility still.
 
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I feel like certain government reforms should make a certain estate always take the regency. As an example, the reform "Plutocracy" should maybe lock the regency to the merchant estate, or the Celestial Empire should always have a noble estate (Qinwang) regent as regents of Ming and Qing China were always princes or Empress Dowagers.
 
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They’re definitely abusable. I’d make a cooldown timer on interactions with them, increase the mana cost, or find another way to balance them.

I wasn’t saying they’re an amazing mechanic in their current state but that if factions are overhauled, I’d rather they were improved and repurposed instead of being stripped from the game completely.
Yeah, they could be repurposed, I even feel like they could work with just a little bit of really heavy rebalancing. But that is a thought for the future.
 
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Inflation
Advisor cost * year
Corruption * dev
Drilling * force limit
Loan * dev
Production * dip or arm tech

What other forms of inflation are there?

Methods of slowing player expansion:
Governing capacity, overextention, coring time, agressive expansion, trucetimers.
 
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Expanded regency mechanics are a good idea but regency councils are very rare in my experience since the implementation of regent-queens.
Would be interesting if queen's regency had not automatic priority against estate's regency, but the priority be decided by some dynamic factor.
 
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Imho, nothing in the Dev Diaries about the upcoming expansion really stands out.. A little bit on South East Asia here, a little bit on Amerindian tribes there and a sprinkle on the even smaller island nations of the Pacific. I mean, where's the real meat coming from?
 
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This seems really interesting! I hope for some events that gives cb and the opportunity to wage wars during estate regencies.

One more thing with estates, will Sweden get the fourth estate they actually had? I have been waiting for that since the estates came into the game. It has had real significance in the history of sweden and would be nice to see it in game. Is it ”Peasantry” or maybe ”Farmers” or just plain ”Bönderna”
 
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First of all i like to say it's nice that we will receive more content for amerika next week. I would like to see more changes for the middle americans. We need a system like mandats of heaven, the historical aztecs hadn't a vasall system like in game but they had a tribut system which would need to crumble with the first contact of european where the vasalls would receive 100% freedom desire and pls change the aztec flag

Aztec Historial Flag: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Aztec_Triple_Alliance.png

The aztec ideas need also a change pls delet the aztec 10% Infantry combat and give them 5% Disziplin and the moral too 20% the aztec Was a war society like the ancient sparta
 
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Hm, can you look at the balance between monarchies and other government forms, especially republics, again?

Republics are already much better than monarchies with their government reforms and ability to push monarch points and now monarchies get hit with a potential legitimacy penalty for heirs when RNG kills them off and you had to get a new one.
 
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I'm a keep it real with you Johan; I will never extend a regency if it means extending the period of time where I can't declare new wars.

Enrique de Trastamara

vs

a 6/6/6 regency council ?
 
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Pretty good overall. I like legitimacy starting off lower and earning it over time.

Good additional flavor for regents. I do note that by adding an option to extend regencies, you are reducing the impact of rolling a bad ruler once again.


Please note that corruption in your court increases [legitamacy], as there is nothing screaming legitimate future King as much as a few sacks of gold in your pocket.

This doesn't really make sense. General corruption isn't necessarily the ruler paying people to accept his heir. Someone surely could be using sacks of gold to undermine the authority of the heir.

Pervasive corruption has always had the effect of undermining legitimacy and stability because people worry about their power being sold from under them.

Corruption undermines law, the heir depends upon law for legitimacy. If anything corruption should reduce legitimacy.
 
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Enrique de Trastamara

vs

a 6/6/6 regency council ?

What is the logic behind a regency council monarch points? Are they gonna have a higher amount of points?

It's definitely true that a regency council can be benificial for some time, for AE to go down etc. But there are only a few situations where it is good to prolong it, even when you have a shitty heir, since there isn't that much to do besides wars.

Will the chance for a regency council to take over the country increase if you extend it?