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EU4 - Development Diary - 23rd of April 2019

Good day all. Today's a fairly brief Dev Diary, even by recent standards, as two of the five previous workdays were swallowed whole by Sweden's love for public holidays. To that end, I hope a good Easter day was had by all.

Last week I went over some Quality of Life suggestions that came up internally, and today I want to touch on one in particular detail. Again, these are not iron-clad promises of things to come. They are certainly improvements that we desire to make for the game, but or not that translates to being in our upcoming European Expansion and its accompanying update is for reality to dictate.

I mentioned at the end-of-year dev diary before that improving Custom Nation options was something we would like to achieve in said European release. Now a question that may come to mind is why this would be on the radar for our European expansion. Well Custom Nations remain one of the most popular choice for players. It has spent plenty of time as the number one choice in the past, although in the past months it has been playing second fiddle to France, see our handy nations chart:

Played Nations.jpg

No huge surprises here, except perhaps that England have fallen from grace, as they used to consistently be near the very top. These are most fun to observe when a release is done for a certain area, such as Rule Britannia, where England spiked like crazy.

What we see is that custom nations (D00 here) continue to stand the test of time, despite being added to the game with El Dorado back in February 2015. We have updated the designer with features as they have appeared, such as Consorts and ruler personalities, and updated the custom National Ideas as new modifiers have been added, but we feel there is still more that we can do.

In particular, myself and @Groogy have been looking at what we can do to boost the functionality of the custom nations feature, and something we both find lacking is that, while we have hundreds of sweet-looking unit models, there is no way to specify which ones your custom nation uses, leading to a fairly generic visual experience in battles. We may be dipping a bit into the HoI4 inspiration well with their way of previewing units for this.

unit previewer.jpg


In addition to a way to customize your unit models for your nation, I'd say we're due another pass of the available National Ideas for said custom nations. To the custom nation players out there, what would you really like to be able to tweak in your customized experience?

For those champing at the bit to see us move forward with development of the upcoming expansion, know that we are wrapping up this long period of tech debt. We have a couple more aspirations dev diaries to come, before we're likely going to return to our more regular dev diaries of showing off ongoing development.
 
More custom nation achievements please. I wouldn't hate the addition of some random world achievements either. Ideas guy is one of the best achievements out there because there are so many different paths you can choose for doing it.
 
I'd really like to see a finer-toothed brush swept across the ideas, so that nations that receive bonuses such as +yearly legitimacy have a backup should they switch to a Republic. This is especially relevant now that you can swap government forms so easily with Dharma now.

This also applies to ideas that give Papal Influence, Church Power, etc., because while some nations are given this, not all are, which results in some nations losing an entire idea slot if they play differently.
 
In regards to Custom Nations, is there a way for you implement a way to customize a country's diplomatic situation? For example, making another country a vassal or overlord in the Custom Nation creation menu. Thanks.
 
Might be a bit out of scope but I'd love to modify existing nations. Like, to recreate the Sunset Invasion versions of Aztec and Inca in my custom Vinland game to make things more interesting.
 
This may be a little too ambitious but I'd really like to see a feature where you could save a map that you added custom nations to. What I mean is that if you add a bunch of customs to a map to make your own scenario, you could save this map so you can play a different custom nation without having to place all of them again every single time. Another way to do this could be just an option that allows you to save the provinces you assigned to a nation so you can load them in quicker.
 
I really love the Custom nation feature but rarely use it because i am a ironman player and love achievement hunting
Anyway here are a few suggestions for custom nations and the game in general.

-DLC packs as graphics option
-More Flag Patterns and Colors
-Flag Symbols re-centered and visible on Province flags
-More Symbols to choose from
-Stacking Ideas
-Diplomacy management
-Custom Mission Trees
-More idea variety
-Making more achievements available for custom nations (under 400 points to balance it out)
-Improvements to the Random New world Mechanic
- Full Random New world with Larger continent Tiles for Variety
-Fleshing out some of the minor and non existent Religions such as Jewish and Norse
-More Custom Religions (like Hellenic and Druidist)

Here are a few unrealistic but fun suggestions
-Custom Cultures and Religions (ironman compatible)
-Custom HRE or additional HRE like mechanic you can create
-Custom Scenarios and events (ironman compatible)
-Custom Formable Nations and decisions
-Custom Religious Mechanics (like custom gods for Norse and stuff)
-Custom Ages and Modifiers for Ages
-Custom Government Reforms


Also i think Ironman could really use some love because it's generally not very fun to play unless you want achievements, playing some nations are very RNG
based and sometimes you have to restart like 20 times before a game is even possible (im not even talking about hard nations like Albania since they make sense, even nations like Novgorod and the Timurids require you to pray to the RNG gods.

And one additional note - please make the Pheasent Strut Achievements actually a Achievable without extreme cheese. Prussia literally never forms and it won't ever be big enough for you to kill 100k of the men

Love you Paradox, please be kind to my wallet, im not very rich and i can't keep buying all your DLC and not get anything out of them, make them worth my while :)
 
Sometimes, while playing a regular (or costum) nation, I dream of changing my current national ideas to emulate change in my country. Or to make up for a missing intermediate formable tag, like Franconia for example.
Spend 250 government reform points and suffer a stab hit to access the nation builder and swap out one of the ideas for a new one of the same mana category and of the same cost (or less). This would probably end up being extremely vulnerable to abuse by min maxing players, but a man can have his dreams. Not entirely related to costum nations, but sort of.
 
Good day all. Today's a fairly brief Dev Diary, even by recent standards, as two of the five previous workdays were swallowed whole by Sweden's love for public holidays. To that end, I hope a good Easter day was had by all.

Last week I went over some Quality of Life suggestions that came up internally, and today I want to touch on one in particular detail. Again, these are not iron-clad promises of things to come. They are certainly improvements that we desire to make for the game, but or not that translates to being in our upcoming European Expansion and its accompanying update is for reality to dictate.

I mentioned at the end-of-year dev diary before that improving Custom Nation options was something we would like to achieve in said European release. Now a question that may come to mind is why this would be on the radar for our European expansion. Well Custom Nations remain one of the most popular choice for players. It has spent plenty of time as the number one choice in the past, although in the past months it has been playing second fiddle to France, see our handy nations chart:

View attachment 473429
No huge surprises here, except perhaps that England have fallen from grace, as they used to consistently be near the very top. These are most fun to observe when a release is done for a certain area, such as Rule Britannia, where England spiked like crazy.

What we see is that custom nations (D00 here) continue to stand the test of time, despite being added to the game with El Dorado back in February 2015. We have updated the designer with features as they have appeared, such as Consorts and ruler personalities, and updated the custom National Ideas as new modifiers have been added, but we feel there is still more that we can do.

In particular, myself and @Groogy have been looking at what we can do to boost the functionality of the custom nations feature, and something we both find lacking is that, while we have hundreds of sweet-looking unit models, there is no way to specify which ones your custom nation uses, leading to a fairly generic visual experience in battles. We may be dipping a bit into the HoI4 inspiration well with their way of previewing units for this.

View attachment 473430

In addition to a way to customize your unit models for your nation, I'd say we're due another pass of the available National Ideas for said custom nations. To the custom nation players out there, what would you really like to be able to tweak in your customized experience?

For those champing at the bit to see us move forward with development of the upcoming expansion, know that we are wrapping up this long period of tech debt. We have a couple more aspirations dev diaries to come, before we're likely going to return to our more regular dev diaries of showing off ongoing development.

My ideas for custom nation mechanics: Fantasy art pack for custom nations, (for example, Orcs, Dwarves, Elves), access to more government types, (for example, 'HRE' and 'Chinese Empire' governments. Please, allow them to be dynamic named for the custom nations), and finally, unique dynamic events for custom nations, or access to unique nation events; for example, if I took all of 'ENG's' cores with my custom nation, it should have access to those events somehow.
 
I don't use nation designer much, it isn't really my thing, so I don't have much to suggest.

BUT

Last I checked, you can't adjust diplomatic status, no? All custom nations are fully independent. That should be fixed, assuming I'm not just straight up out of date and/or wrong. If you want to make a custom nation that is a vassal or has a vassal, that should be possible.
 
One thing that I've always kinda wanted is the ability to change historical friends/rivals. As I recall, it was possible to lose a historical friend, but that's the only change. Can't even do anything with console. It's a little thing, but it would be nice.
 
I'm really happy to see custom nations getting some love! I play them a lot!

Other mentioned it, but my wishlist would be:
-More flag/color options. If you play in europe you've got a lot of emblem to choose from, outside of europe, you are lucky if you find something that fit.
-More possibilities with the custom ideas. Ideas with more thn one bonus, but also more "level", rather then 2 or 4. Usually you can only increase by 5 or 10%, some half-step would be nice, sometime you have a few points left and cannot use them.
-More events
-That generic mission tree is so boring! Bring back those dynamic mission from the old system please!
-Let us go crazy? Sometime I just wan't to play as a japanese Daymo in Corea and I am not allowed.
-Dynamic names for the colonial nations when playing with the "random nations" setting. Trying to figure out who is "Afghan Canada" is a bit tedious.
-More option for the random nation setting really.
-I'm not overly obsessed with achievements, but EUIV have a lot of fun objectives in it's achievements. A few more for custom nation would be nice.

And while you are at it, maybe you could check the RNW a bit? It's a bit buggy right now with vanilla colonial region appearing, trade nodes connection not making any sense, bad pathfinding, area map mode being bugged etc.
It's low priority, I know, but it would be nice.
 
I really hate starting a game and seeing more than half my initial estates shown as Nobility, especially in a province with something like 5-6-2 development and a trade center.

Why not let the player pick his own estates? Or at least start with a decent placement.
 
I would love the ability to customize historical nations. Maybe I want France to be a Norse Republic at the game start or maybe I want Novgorod to own more of Russia, I think being able to modify historical nations to further customize the playing experience.
 
Stacking multiple ideas into one slot.
And also allowing an unlimited points choice in addition to the others. I think itd be fun to play against decked out ai custom nations with immortal rulers and decent dev in some roleplay scenario.
 
It baffles me how France has such a high playrate. Dosen't it get boring starting so strong?

Also Ming, which literally defeats the purpose of playing.
Yes, but I am willing to bet that a lot of those games don't last very long. In fact, whenever I launch the game to test a mod I'm working on, my nation of choice for testing is Ming (because it's an ideas mod and Ming's -10% idea cost NI minimizes the necessary number of clicks), but none of those launches are actual games and none of them go for more than a few years.