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EU4 - Development Diary - 24th March 2016

Hello everyone and welcome to another development diary for Europa Univeralis IV. Today we’ll look at a few of new features available for those with the Mare Nostrum DLC.


Whether it’s 10 days or 10 years into a war, there are moments when you know deep down that there is no victory in sight. Currently you might have to wait for your enemy to siege down certain provinces and put your army at great risk before you are able to sign peace, or you are fighting another player who is more interested than your total destruction than simple terms. For these moments, we have added an Unconditional Surrender button.

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Upon offering unconditional surrender, all of your currently unoccupied provinces will fall under enemy control and your enemy will gain 100% warscore. Your armies in your own provinces will become exiled and unable to fight in future battles until peace is signed. For the recipient of an unconditional surrender, you will be alerted of your enemy’s surrender and from then on will be able to enforce any possible peace up to 100% warscore cost. If you do not sign peace, then after a couple months you will get Call For Peace giving you monthly war exhaustion which increases faster than normal. The peace you offer will automatically be accepted by the surrendering nation.

For the time being, the AI does not offer unconditional surrender. They will however, gladly accept them.

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If you find yourself so busy crushing your enemies to the point of Unconditional Surrender that you have neglected to explore the world around you, Mare Nostrum also bring a new option to the table by way of the Map Share feature.

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Map sharing is a new diplomatic action. If you have good relations with a nation who has discovered land which you have not, you can request that they share their maps of a region with you. This will cost you a lump sum of 15 prestige of which 10 will be granted to the kind sharing nation. Colonizing nation are greedy and will not want to share but nations who share a common foe may be more willing to share.

If asking nicely is simply not your thing, you can take the shady path and swipe the maps. It will require the Espionage idea group and cost a moderate amount of Spy Network points, but you will be able to steal the maps right from under their noses.

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Stay tuned for more information next week


Mare Nostrum will be available on April 5th for €14:99
 
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That unconditional surrender looks like a multiplayer intended feature, to stop people from breaking people's nations, and deathspiraling but I thought that's what revanchism was for?

Oh wait, that completely failed, didn't it?

Lol...

I am getting sick and tired of these rehashing of features in new DLCs to try and get another $20 from us, or these rehashing of fixes.

Random new world original, $20.
Random new world fixed, $20.
Breaking nations revanchism fix, $20
Breaking nations unconditional surrender fix, $20. (I heard mare nostrum might be $30? Count me right out of that nonsense lmao)

Quite a bit off mate.

RNW = CoP. Don't have to buy Cossacks to get the new version of it. Cossacks doesn't even unlock RNW iirc.

Revanchism was part of a patch, not a DLC feature.

Unconditional surrender is part of the patch as far as I can tell. Not part of the DLC.

They already announced the price of MN. It's $15. AoW, CoP, and Cossacks I think are the only DLCs over $15.

Do some basic research before editing in your price rant. You have a right to complain about some of their practices if you feel it is not right. But at least be smart about it and do your research before ranting.
 
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Definitely think Unconditional Surrender is more important for the AI than the player, as they're the ones who are more likely not to realize when a war is hopeless, at least in Single Player. I hope there's a way to implement that.

Except that if the AI does not realize it's wasting ressources in a hopeless war, it's not going to realize it has to press unconditional surrender button. If it does realize that, it can just pretty much send you 100% worth WS regardless of the presence of the surrender button, and others AI will know if they'll agree to 100% WS because they all have the same logic.

Unconditional surrender is part of the patch as far as I can tell. Not part of the DLC.
But at least be smart about it and do your research before ranting.

Today we’ll look at a few of new features available for those with the Mare Nostrum DLC.
 
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What if the buyer pays an exorbitant amount of money?
Given Paradox, I could imagine there being a "-1000 Who the &^*!"£^ is France?" modifier.
 
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What if the buyer pays an exorbitant amount of money?

Except it only trades a fixed amount of prestige as far as I understand?... It's share map, not sell map feature.
 
After some very good Dev Diaries about Mare Nostrum, it seems like we have reached the bottom of the barrel.

These very minor features seem unlikely to be invoked by most players. While I like the idea of an unconditional surrender, it needs to be usable by the AI in order to have wider utility - this could and should cut short a lot of wars that drag out for way too long, particularly power grabs by large empires.
 
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These are some very minor features. They're not bad, per se - I'd use Unconditional Surrender in MP from time to time, and possibly steal maps as a RotW for early Westernization purposes - but I don't think I'll be using them very often at all. Honestly, I'm really underwhelmed by Mare Nostrum's feature-set at the moment. It's an expansion apparently about navies that doesn't make navies useful, plus some other odds and ends that really aren't central to play. I think I'm getting DLC fatigue at this point.
 
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I look forward to these most Thursdays, but the past few have been rather lackluster. Normally a dev diary has at least one thing to get me excited and looking forward to the new patch. This one has nothing.
 
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I see a lot of people complaining about the exploration mechanics, and I'm not sure how I feel about it myself. I did notice in my last game, though, that there's almost no limitations to where you can explore. I think you should at least have to hold outposts in an adjacent region to keep pushing forward. Exploration should also be rather slow, in my opinion. Like, slower movement for those armies/fleets.
 
That would make WC games impossible. Colonization is already agonizingly slow.

Definitely think Unconditional Surrender is more important for the AI than the player, as they're the ones who are more likely not to realize when a war is hopeless, at least in Single Player. I hope there's a way to implement that.

Implementing that is actually very easy via triggered event if certain conditions are met.
 
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When it will destroy their entire country and economy in the process, it is generally better to just roll over so less damage is done to you than it is to stay annoying and invoke further damage.

The point of having big forts is to delay and make conquest harder. If the AI just automatically surrenders if it projects it cannot win (given its current circumstances - it's nigh impossible for the AI to project if it could win in a hypothetical situation in a year or two from now and plan how to reach that situation), then it may as well not even have forts, and the game would see far too easy. There's also the possibility of hindering your attacker enough in the hopes that someone else will jump on them while they're busy, even if you can't win on your own. Finally, wars become a lot more attractive for an aggressor if they know the target is going to roll over because of the odds, so there's something of a deterrence factor involved in putting up a good fight even if you can't win. It's very much more complex than merely an economic calculation.
 
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The point of having big forts is to delay and make conquest harder. If the AI just automatically surrenders if it projects it cannot win (given its current circumstances - it's nigh impossible for the AI to project if it could win in a hypothetical situation in a year or two from now and plan how to reach that situation), then it may as well not even have forts, and the game would see far too easy. There's also the possibility of hindering your attacker enough in the hopes that someone else will jump on them while they're busy, even if you can't win on your own. Finally, wars become a lot more attractive for an aggressor if they know the target is going to roll over because of the odds, so there's something of a deterrence factor involved in putting up a good fight even if you can't win. It's very much more complex than merely an economic calculation.

I literally do not even know what the point of forts are, right now. In single player, the player just deletes all their forts and uses the money on more troops (or if anything, they just put one on their capital). You can't tell me that forts are actually doing anything as intended right now.

Regardless, it is one thing to say that in regards to situations where the AI is stalling because it doing so serves as bait as reinforcements make gains to bail it out. This is not the case in most player vs AI wars, and instead the AI just sits occupied with no army while the player goes and fights the other people in the war, or just sits on its hands because the AI's ally is Britain and Britain sucks at actually being an ally (or some other long-distance/island nation whose only function in the war is to inflate the unit count).
 
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Jake said during the feature stream yesterday that states had been rebalanced to areas rather than regions and that you would have more available as such. The idea being that the player has more customisation over they're realm and what they wish to be seen as a core state within it.

Some of those areas look a little on the small side like Poland and the Baltic ones...

Conversely, I'm wary about the AI being able to use this feature on the player in the future. It's normal for me to be fighting multiple wars at once after a certain point in the game. I sit on countries with 100% war score not to break them, but to wait on cores to finish and AE to burn off. Taking stab hits and war exhaustion before 5 years into a war would be the end of that.

I did not think of this when reading the DD. Looks like that's one strategy that would be killed by the DLC if the AI ever has the logic for its use implemented.

Ah Good, another pointless Multiplayer-Only Doodad that will probably never be used even in Most Multiplayer Games.

Y'know your time could have been better spent in programming a "Crushing Defeat" condition that would automatically apply to both the AI and the Player. Something like;

* Capital is Occupied
* Army is below 5% of Force Limit
* Army is at less than half the strength of the Enemy's army.
* Total Alliance Army Strength is below one quarter of the Enemy Alliance's Total Army Strength.

When this happens it triggers a "Crushing Defeat" during which basically automatically pushes the "Unconditional Surrender" button. To improve AI in general, make it so if points 2-3 is satisfied, the AI will be willing to White Peace Out.

Boom, AI is improved and the feature can be used by the Player agains the AI and the AI against the Player.

"But the Player will exploit this?!?!?" The Player already exploits the AI's pointless Obstinance even more. So the player, and the AI, will be better able to quickly seize territory from countries that it has Clearly Beaten. So what? They'll still have to deal with over-Extension and Aggressive Expansion. Hell, make it so the game records what the Warscore was 'before' the Unconditional Surrender happened and if you go over that with your demands you get extra AE.

If you want to really start getting into fancy stuff have Truces that are flagged so one side can break them early at less penalty. Actually, why not tie that into Revanchism? If a country has a great deal of Revanchism let them break truces against people who hold their cores with no stability penalty. Make it so suffering a "Crushing Defeat" automatically adds some Revanchism before the peace even happens.

There are planety of ways this could be an interesting feature, but as it stands now it's just pointless fluff for people who don't need it anyways.

This actually sounds wonderful, something to circumvent "Length of War" without forcing the AI to go into a massive debt spiral.
 
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