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EU4 - Development Diary - 23rd of January 2018

Good morning all. Tuesday has arrived and as usual delivers double excitement: the next episode in the EU4 Dev Clash, and a new development diary. Last week @Trin Tragula took the wheel and showed off the map changes which will roll out with the upcoming 1.25 update. Before we start talking about the features that come with its accompanying yet currently unannounced Immersion Pack, today I will be showing off another free change with 1.25, which is the Mission System.

Missions in EU3 were a real gamble. You hoped for a good or even possible mission and without hitting up the wiki or trawling through the game files had no idea what you could even be tasked with. You got said mission without choice and would either cancel or try to complete it. EU4 improved on this by always offering you up to 3 missions, one of which you would select and either complete or cancel before getting a new batch of missions. While it was an improvement, it still had the shortcomings of you not being quite sure what all missions you would be able to get for your nations, how to unlock them and even getting missions which would be detrimental for you to do. The missions system is something new players often look to for guidance and when it tells them to simply get 50 prestige or to improve relations with their rival, well, you can see why advice for new players can often counter intuitively be to ignore missions.

All this changes in 1.25 with the new Mission System. rather than picking from a short list of missions, all missions for your nation will be available from the very start, and as you fulfill the criteria for them, you will be alerted as such and can go to the newly segregated Missions tab to claim your reward. Rewards have been accordingly made more relevant, longer lasting and often grant claims towards more missions down the line. Let's take a look at the mission chain from one of my favourite nations, Byzantium, with their Purple Phoenix missions.

byz PP.jpg

humble expansion from my casual Byzantium campaign. Art/layout not final

All Byzantine missions are visible from the start and the progression through them is shown. When the budding Byzantine player reconquers Greece, they will be given a timed reward as well as the claims to help fulfilling the next missions: Recover Albania and Conquer Bulgaria. Once these are completed, they will again be able to claim their reward and work down the mission chain. The mission paths are also split for their different directions to go in, catering towards Western expansion, Anatolian recovery and reclaiming the islands. Mission rewards must be claimed in order, although all missions can be completed throughout a campaign.

byz no pp.jpg

End of the Byzantium mission chain without Purple Phoenix


All nations with specific missions are having those transferred over to this new system. Additionally we have added generic missions for all nations as well as region specific missions so that Europeans can have different missions available to them than, say, Africans or New World Natives. We have also taken the opportunity to clean up older missions while we adapt old ones to work with this new system.

France loveley art.jpg

French Missions, complete with lovely coder art. Something seems odd about the Hebrides though...

This mission change is a free part of the 1.25 Update and our aim is to have the missions feel more relevant for nations, as well as serving as a guiding light for newer players.

I'll try to pre-emptively answer some questions:

  • How do I select a mission?
    • Unlike the previous mission system, you do not select your missions, they are all visible from the game start. All missions at the top of the mission trees will be "active" and when you fulfill an active mission you can go to claim its reward, making any missions below it connected by arrows in its chain active,
  • In the old system selecting a mission would give you the claim/CB you need for the mission, how is that handled now?
    • In most cases, preceding missions will give claims/CBs as a reward which can be used to fulfill the following missions.
  • How does mission gating work?
    • A mission can both be a prerequisite for multiple missions a well as require multiple missions to be completed before it becomes active
  • How moddable is this?
    • Extensively.

Next week we'll start talking about what's coming with the yet unannounced Immersion Pack, due to release alongside 1.25. until then, we shall admire the Ottoman missions in the new system, in all their behemothic glory.

Ottomissions.jpg
 
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I really like the new mission system. Although I gotta ask, will some of the generic ones be repeatable as they are now? Some of those, particularly the colonisation ones, gave nice little bonuses and it would be a shame to no longer be able to get them.
 
Even in the old system national AIs prioritized their tag specific missions :)
But yes the idea is that they will try to fulfill those missions it makes sense for them to fulfill.

@Trin Tragula

Can you add a capstone to Byzantium to allow them to 'restore the Roman Empire' after capturing all of non-HRE Italy and Anatolia?
 
Ok. This is good. Really good. And now, I will have to wait for EU4 too, like I do for Stellaris's Apocalypte.

What about if I finished All quests? Will new quests spawn or that's all?
 
I think provinces should be developed dynamically, and using points would increase it's potential (but still working with getting institutions) instead of just building biggest provinces in the world from zero in one day
 
Oh my! Such a thing of beauty! I may even shed a manly tear or two!

Considering that all available missions start/count as “active” this should also mean that most countries will start with several free claims. Noice!
 
I'm impressed. Not what I was expecting as the "free" portion of an immersion pack. Makes me excited on the possible changes within a major DLC as @Krebsig mentioned in this post...

With missions now being their own tab, this leaves a lot of room in the former tab...

My suspicion about the next big DLC (after this immersion pack) being about the Habsburgs in the HRE and on the Iberian peninsula is now solidified: Revamping decisions and policies along with a general focus on internal factions/policies and dynastic decisions would make perfect sense for such a big DLC. Especially if that also includes adding estates to the base game (something that is still discussed from what I know), plus a potential Catholicism revamp and maybe dynastic mechanics.

I really hope this is the year of internal politics (and Europe) for EU4, just like 2017 was inofficially the year of Asia.
 
I think I heard something about Spain...

View attachment 329450

Icons are clearly placeholder right now, but this is how some of the Spanish missions appear in the new system.
I really hope you don't actually have to conquer Portugal and Aragon to continue the reconquista. Wouldn't make that one more sense to switch with Italian Ambition one and come after build a Crusader Fleet anyway?
 
You decide yourself when you claim the reward for a mission by completing it.
If you complete a later mission in a chain ahead of time you can unlock that reward immediately once you finish the mission before it :)

Some existing events and decisions are now baked into the mission system, the theme system is a good example of this.

Can the rename the province and city reward moved to other missions while you changing the reestablish theme? So after you reclaim the whole eastern Balkan you can rename Edirne without waiting to conquer whole Anatolia. The theme mission can keep the manpower reward as is. It is sort of a bit of annoying that you need conquer whole Anatolia to rename Edirne while other Greek province can automatically change the name and no need to change the capital name manually.
 
And to think this day started of badly... Then my new glasses arrived my bike wasn't broken and you finally did what I have been nagging you to do for ages and implemented something like focus trees in eu4.
Don't get me wrong it looks terrible at the moment, you really need to give this interface some work but I love the idea of giving the countries something to do which actually relates to what they were actually doing in the era.
And it's a free change so unlike the estates you can keep adding stuff to it over time.
 
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Hmm, seems a bit restrictive, for example Ottomans having to conquer Serbia before getting the rewards for conquering Wallachia. Will Ottomans just bypass Serbia, or? If it restricts the order of your expansion I seriously hate this update. I'd prefer it to be a sandbox where you aren't rewarded for making one move before making another.