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EU4 - Development Diary - 23rd of October 2018

Hello! We’ll finally reveal some features of the upcoming Immersion Pack coming with the 1.28 patch. However I need to warn you: HEAVY USAGE OF CODER ART INCOMING!

Our artists nor me have had time to get our hands on the new features yet to make sure the interface is up to par for user usage. So everything is just how the programmer left it. Terrifying thought.

We’ll start with a feature only available to the Catholic Iberians. Establishing Holy Orders. Keep in mind numbers are as usual up for tweakage!

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These are inspired by Jesuit Reductions in the new world but an Iberian nation can put them anywhere as long as the nation own the entire state and that it is fully cored and stated. The available orders are: The Society of Jesus, The Order of Preachers and The Order of Saint Francis.

When an order is selected for a state these following effects are applied to all provinces in that state.
  • Jesuit Order
    • +1 Tax Development
    • 1.5% Local missionary strength
    • -10% Local Build Cost
  • Dominican Order
    • +1 Production Development
    • Removes slaves if trade goods and replace it with something else
    • -30% Culture Conversion Cost
  • Franciscan Order
    • +1 Manpower Development
    • -3 Local Unrest
    • -0.05 Local Monthly Devastation
Each of these costs 50 monarch power to put in place, 50 of the type that order represents. Administrative for Jesuits, Diplomatic for Dominican and Military for Franciscan. As an overlord of a colonial nation you can still place these in their land. The AI will know if a player is involved and restrain itself from placing these orders themselves letting the player optimize their usage.

For the few that manages to recreate the Cremé Pheonix, an Andalusian Muslim, we'll see what we can do for you ;)



Next Feature is one for every colonizer which we have done together with trying to improve the Colonial Diversity, to try and prevent the Colonial AI to spend so much dip points on purging away cultures. Instead allowing the Americas to become the melting pot of cultures it was. Also yet again I warn you that everything you see is in a state of work in progress.

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With Expulsion of Minorities feature you can now tell those damned Puritans in East Anglia to head off to Plymouth Harbor and get on the Mayflower.

Using this costs you diplomatic points akin to how much it would take to culture convert in that province, but upon colony completion it both converts the religion and culture of the province while making the colony have the old religion and culture of home. Also upon completion you get some extra development in the finished colony based on how big the home province were for the minority you sent to live in the colony.

Besides the Culture conversion cost modifier reducing the cost to do this action, in Exploration ideas there is now an idea that will also reduce this cost if you own the Immersion Pack.



Now I’m going to hand it over to our beta who have helped us out with the map in this iteration and helped us overhaul the Spanish Main.

Hello, I’m Evie. You may remember me (as GuillaumeHJ) from old Dev Diary classics like “How to add provinces to Western Africa without getting bored” and “There’s no such thing as too many provinces in North America”. For those of you who joined us since Art of War: nice to meet you.

As you can probably gather, I’m here to talk to you about more map changes. After all, it’s one thing to add provinces to Spain, but much of Spanish history in the Europa Universalis timeline happened outside Spain, in the part of the world that would receive the apt name of “Spanish Main.”

Stretching from the coast of Texas all the way to the mouth of the Orinoco, across the Caribbeans, and back into Florida, the Spanish Main was the heart of the Spanish colonial empire, where the great Treasure Fleets sailed to gather the wealth of the New World. As a result, the “Spain” update also includes extensive additions to the region.

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Map-wise, the changes are extensive – upwards of eighty new provinces and twenty new tags in Mesoamerica, Central America, the Southwestern United States, the Caribbeans, Florida, Colombia and Venezuela. But Cuba and Hispaniola are now up to nine provinces. Colombia and Venezuela get a plethora of new provinces as well along the coast, bringing them much closer to the density found in Central America. The lion’s share, of course, goes to Mexico, especially the heart of Mesoamerica.

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The most important (and by far the most requested) of those provinces are, without a shadow of a doubt, the two we split off from the original Mexico province, representing Texcoco and Tlacopan, the two cities that (along with Mexico-Tenochtitlan) formed the Aztec Triple Alliance. Reducing the Valley of Mexico and the Aztec power base to a single province always felt wrong, so when the opportunity came to update the region’s map with smaller provinces, adding these two was the very first item on the list of changes that needed to happen.

More than new provinces, though, the heart of the update is the new tags. Nine in Mesoamerica proper, six in the Mayan regions, six in the deserts around the US/Mexico border, and one each in Central America and Colombia bring a great deal of depth to the region. Who are they? Read on to find out.

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Mesoamerica

Northwestern Mesoamerica, beyond Colima and the Tarascans, is often thought of as a void, but actually it was a Greece-like patchwork of cities. Representing them all is beyond the scope of this patch, but we’ve added two of the more significant local powers, Tonala and Xalisco, to bring relief to the area.

At the northern edge of Mesoamerica lived a plethora of people that the Aztecs collectively called the Chichimeca (roughly compared with the Greek “Barbarian”). Though they didn’t have the great cities of Mesoamerica proper, they played a fundamental part in regional history, and provided formidable resistance to Spanish expansion for half a century. For them, we’ve added three tags: Otomi and Guarames are two of the more significant people, while Chichimeca covers a variety of smaller groups.

Near the Chichimecan, we find a historical oddity: a Mayan group that wandered far from Yucatan and Central America, to the opposite end of Mesoamerica, the Huastec people.

Closer to the Aztecs, a number of additional states represent various regional powers of some note. To the south, Coixtlahuaca, a mixtec kingdom, fell early when their king defied the Aztecs. To the south-east, Teotitlan became a loyal ally of the empire. To the west, meanwhile, Matlatzinca served as a buffer between Aztecs and Tarascans - until the Aztec invaded it, precipitating war with their powerful rivals.

The South: Mayans, Central America and Colombia.

Further south, the Yucatan peninsula was home to about sixteen Mayan polities in this timeline. Having them all would, again, be impossible, but instead of just having the two rival dynasties of Cocomes and Xiu (whose rivalry dominated Mayan politics in the era), we’ve added two of the better known late post-classic city-states, in the form of Can Pech (Campeche) and Chactemal (Chetumal).

In south-eastern Mexico, a pair of additional Mayan tags add depths to the Tabasco and Chiapas regions. In the former, they’re the Yokotan (or Chontales), who claim descent from the ancient Olmec civilization. In the later, the Tzotzil, one of the more significant local group, serve a similar role.

In Honduras and Guatemala, the Kiche kingdom no longer can afford to get complacent – their perennial rivals (and erstwhile vassals), the Kaqchikel, are now in the game plotting to gain the upper hand, while further east, the Chorti people could also turn into quite the threat.

In Colombia, the Tairona, sister people to the Muisca (who are already in) form a new addition at the northern edge of the country, where the last of the Andes come to die in the Atlantic.

Last, but not least, we have our first non-Mayan Central America tag, based in the coastal jungles of Nicaragua: the Miskito people, who remained independent of Spain long enough to become a British protectorate instead.

The North: Pueblos and Natives.


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To the north, we find ourselves drawn to the upper end of the Rio Grande valley. There, the old Pueblo tag has been split in three to represent the various groups that together formed the Puebloan people. In addition to the old Pueblo tag (now limited to the Rio Grande valley itself), we now have the Keres tag (covering famous pueblos like Acoma and Zia, to the west of the Rio Grande), and the Zuni one, near the New Mexico/Arizona border.

Beyond the Rio Grande valley, our additions take the form of Native American tags. Adding depths to the Apachean people on top of the already-present Navajo and Apache tags, we find the Lipan and Mescalero ready to make trouble for colonizers in New Mexico and Texas, where they were a formidable obstacle to the Spanish historically. Further west, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, California finally get representation of its native people in the form of the Yokuts. Finally, in the deserts of north-western Mexico, the Yaqui people, who resisted Spanish then Mexican dominion into the twentieth century, join the fray.

Together, all these additions bring a lot more depth to the areas of the map that ended up being conquered by Spain.


Thanks Evie! Next week I'll be back to talk about more features, one of which that Sweden had quite an excellence of building ....
 
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More buttons to press and some new tags, mostly condensed in the New World, and lackluster map changes in Europe compared to the Americas? Still waiting to see how this will shape up to be a proper Iberian immersion pack and how it puts the Europe back in Europa, so once again I'm left eagerly awaiting next week's dev diary.

Edit: good map changes nonetheless
 
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So instead of encouraging people to do ahistorical campaigns with non-catholic Spanish nations, you're making it so switching religion as Spain gets even less beneficial now (before you just lost one national idea, now you'll also lose an entire new feature). I can't say I'm a fan of that.
 
This looks pretty good but something that has always bugged me about colonization is that your allies seem to want to take areas you desire more than your enemies which is very frustrating as when I play as England/Great Britain (wish the U.K. was there as well) and in most of them I ally with Castile/Spain and they always seem to want to colonize the places I want to while my enemies like France stay away and I really frustrates and conflicts me as usually they are my strongest ally and so if I were to break the alliance I may not be able to get the rightful British lands since I would be enemies with France, Spain, and who knows what else and the enemies I’m not at war with would probably want to declare war on me if I did go to war. Keep in mind that I am just saying this as an example to my point that I want to bring forward and would like to know if this is truly the case that an ally takes advantage of you more than an enemy and if you plan to change that (also in almost all of my playthroughs Castile/Spain colonizes Brazil or North America and completely ignores the places they actually colonized which usually is colonized by Portugal which as a perfectionist and history buff I find that this bugs me to no end).
 
Because whats the point of having colonial regions based on historical reasons if in the end CN are gonna expand in a horrible way causing border gore and making the CN formation system a pain in the ass.

"C'mon Carribbean CN, colonize your damn islands, fast!"

*5 minutes later*

"Ok, time to start colonizing Colombia and form my second Colonial Nation... oh, no, wait... WHAT ARE YOU DOING CARIBBEAN, I TOLD YOU TO COLONIZE YOUR BLOODY ISLANDS, NOT THE COAST OF COLOMBIA!"
Totally don't understand why you want to control their natural expantion, border gore is natural thing in that game...
 
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The legacy of my people, ladies and gentlemen :confused:



So special emphasis on the region, then, I assume you agree. : p
My initial statement was correct. Much fewer slaves were sent to Spanish colonies than to Portuguese colonies, but OVER ALL the Caribbean slave trade took in more slaves than the Brazilian one. To be clear, the Spanish had about a third the slave imports as the Portuguese in Brazil did. However, the British, French, Dutch, and Spanish in the Caribbean COMBINED imported more slaves overall.
 
We need to be able to set what regions our colonial nations colonize so that we can keep the borders nice and neat and not have the Caribbean extended to the Pacific and Canada be extended into the Thirteen Colonies region!
 
Like for example restricting Hispaniola from colonizing and conquering the New Granada and New Spain regions! Of course there will be a small downside for doing so like more liberty desire but once it gets to a certain point you could disable their restrictions because the right areas have been colonized by the right Colonial Nation and also maybe a setting to where provinces you colonize in region can be set to whether you want to let the colonial nation next door have it or keep it for yourself until the proper colonial nation forms to keep the borders historical or historical for and althistory like the Brits winning the American war for independence and then letting the Thirteen Colonies colonize westward.
 
Totally don't understand why you want to control their natural expantion, border gore is natural thing in that game...

Because it isn't natural. Colonial Nations represesent the local control of the colonial region, they're separate tags just for gameplay. If I set up a colonial nation in the Caribbean, it's because I want them to focus on the Caribbean. If I wanted to prioritize colonizing Colombia, I'd have colonized Colombia first.

So Portuguese Caribbean should colonize the other islands and let me do the heavy work in Colombia. Specially because I can get a Colonial Colombia to also help me out in colonizing, unlike Portuguese Caribbean.
 
Wow, your team works very hard. I hope you look at the America revolution and the United States ideas.
However, the more provinces for the colony nations means the scary rebellious subjects of the Empire.
How the empire combat the revolution of the colonies if it happened?

Please replace +20% Religious unity tradition idea (expect with Salem witch trials) with +10% infantry combat ability (Minutemen).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minutemen
Please replace the Indian Removal Act with Manifest destiny which replaces "Can fabricate claim overseas in the colonial region" with "Automatically discover adjacent when a colony is built."
and "May establish American Frontiers"

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny

Please replace Workshop of the World with Tobacco Economics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_in_the_American_Colonies
 
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So instead of encouraging people to do ahistorical campaigns with non-catholic Spanish nations, you're making it so switching religion as Spain gets even less beneficial now (before you just lost one national idea, now you'll also lose an entire new feature). I can't say I'm a fan of that.

Welcome to historical grand strategy game genre.
 
Yay!! I'm v excited for this pack! :D
I like the work in the Caribbean most!

Would suggest to move the Caribs and Arawaks to the islands instead of South America mainland. I agree with historians about them coming from there but this was in a period prior to Nov.11th, 1444. As there has been a great split in the old MesoAmerican nations, some love to the Caribbeans wouldn't hurt (In the end the map is totally empty, and neither the Caribs or Arawak settle there :(
I believe in the distinction of Arawak and Taíno. Tainos dealt a great deal with early Spanish colonization of Cuba, Hispaniola & Puerto Rico. Some incorrectly believe that Arawak translate into Taino in Spanish, not the same tribes.

Maybe Trinidad & Tobago could use a split!
And an extra province in Jamaica would help with their sugar trade in the Caribbean. (Historically surpassing Cuba in export/production!)

Thank you all!