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Hello everyone! We’re getting close to release and there’s not much left to cover in our Development Diaries. So today's diary will be about things I think we’ve missed in previous ones. Even though we have had 57 development diaries, not including this one, there’s still been things that have slipped. So it will be sort of a leftover scraps Dev Diary. First up, shortcut/hotkeys.

So how it used to work in order to set up your own shortcut keys in the interface of EU4 you had to mod the interface files, or download a mod from the Steam Workshop. But we’ve now implemented a way for you to configure these settings inside the game instead. EU4 is a game with a lot of interfaces and buttons so we can’t really have a settings screen listing every single possible shortcut. So instead we added this button in the game.

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Clicking on that will let you then click on any button in the interface that has a shortcut and assign it a new one. Clicking on let’s say the Split in Half button for armies will prompt you with this.

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Letting you pick whatever key shortcut you want for that button.

Next is a pet peeve of many, your subjects using their colonist for settlement growth where or when you don’t want it. So we’ve added a simple little Subject interaction where you can allow or forbid this to specific subjects.

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So not much to say there, so let’s move on to something I’ve seen discussed from time to time within the community, which is the French Vassal Swarm. I thought I had already covered this before but no harm in being extra clear. France starts with a very powerful nobility estate and a special privilege specifically for them.

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Besides being in control of a lot of land from the start, this privilege also gives them +10% Influence making it a hard one to get rid of. There is an equivalent that exists for any other nation that is not French as well, the requirement to pick it requires that you have at least 2 vassals. I hope this clears up any potential misunderstandings from our previous talks about the French Vassal Swarm.

Minority Expulsions have gotten changes to try and make Europe not too homogenous in culture. IT no longer costs diplo power but it also does not convert the home province of the culture/religion. The modifiers that affect its costs are now focused on the money cost instead of the diplo cost. The development that you get in the new world province now also reduces the amount of development that “stays” in the home province to represent the movement of people, and through that sort of making it cheaper for you to culture convert at home. We’ve also made the AI very reluctant to do it overall.

We’ve done some smaller balance changes. First we’ve changed so you can’t overrun an army that can fill out it’s combat width. Overrun being the mechanic where you insta wipe on day 1 if you have 10x the size of the enemy. Going forward we are also looking into redoing some policies values like the 20% Infantry Combat Ability, try and lower the sources of Army Tradition as a whole as we don’t want it to be this easy to get a floor of 100% Army Tradition. We are also looking at reviewing the Hussite modifiers.

I want to end this Development Diary by retracting one of our previous promises, we said at the start of working on this patch that we would solve so you could restart back to the menu. However we have to admit defeat here as we’ve put a lot of resources in trying to fix it but EU4’s architecture simply can’t support resetting it’s game state properly. So even though we thought we had an early victory in getting this to work, after intensive testing it’s shown that we are basically still at square 1. I am very sorry that we have to backtrack on this, especially if it was something you were looking forward to.

Next Dev Diary will be the patch notes for the 1.30 Update.
 
Heya, I'm curious about the french vassal swarm's power relative to 1.29. I think a lot of people, myself included are worried about this change tipping the balance in the surrender of maine even further in france's favour.
Is there a way for england to weaken or sabotage these vassals, or some other subject type, or is there some other way you've prevented this from making france even more unbeatable?

Thanks in advance

this is what I asked at the end of the last Dev diary, not about Frances dip upkeep but it’s now increased OP’ness’

however. In many of my recent games Frances gets its ass handed to it so maybe it needs thiss buff? Then again I play with lots of mods so...
 
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When we're by fixing pet peeves, there is just a little pet peeve of mine, but I've noticed that Byzantium still uses English province names instead of Greek ones for their starting provinces (Corinth instead of Korinthos and Constantinople instead of Konstantinoupolis) in the screenshot with the Hungary key assignment. It's a small thing, but kind of weird to see, especially after reestablishing the Themes system, where all of Anatolia turns Greek/Latin and Constantinople still remains English. As I said, a small thing, but it would be sure nice to see it changed :)
 
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I thought the vassals were supposed to nerf France in the early game. How is that achieved in any way right now? France actually seems to be buffed by this. How often does AI Burgundy "throw a spanner in the works" as you stated earlier, considering they are going to almost always PU'd now?

Where did they say that the vassal swarm was supposed to nerf France in the early game? I believe that, to the contrary, they wanted to reintroduce the vassals because France was too much of a pushover early on and needed a buff.
 
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There will be but I felt it was important to cover things like the restart not being implemented so that we are as transparent as possible. I'll see for when we can squeeze in the renders.

thank you as always.

please, please please, can we have HRE, Lorthangria, SCA and other formables with their own sprites (or even just copied ones) please. You can take my wallet.
 
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Can you add an option to separate colonies? Suppose your colony annexes land in a different colonial region and you want them as separate entities. Additionally there can also be a merge colony feature.
 
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Where did they say that the vassal swarm was supposed to nerf France in the early game? I believe that, to the contrary, they wanted to reintroduce the vassals because France was too much of a pushover early on and needed a buff.

The return of the vassal swarm was to buff France, yes. However, there was mention of a then-undisclosed feature to make it less of a buff than a return to the old OP vassal swarm, now with more vassals.
 
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With regards to the change to expulsion of minorities; has there been consideration to how this change affects the Castile/Spanish mission tree? Specifically, the mission to turn Andalucia into Castilian culture.
 
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Where did they say that the vassal swarm was supposed to nerf France in the early game? I believe that, to the contrary, they wanted to reintroduce the vassals because France was too much of a pushover early on and needed a buff.

Yes, they did:
”but how will you balance this, I preemptively hear you asking? Won’t France need extra diplomatic relations to cope with this? Won’t France be horrendously overpowered in the early game? Fear not, for we have answers and solutions - which I am not going to reveal today.” https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/eu4-development-diary-4th-of-june-2019.1185235/
 
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I've noticed that Wallachia and Serbia have slightly different looking unit models from the ones we normally see in 1.29. Is that a hint towards new models for the generic eastern European troops?
 
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Yes, they did:
”but how will you balance this, I preemptively hear you asking? Won’t France need extra diplomatic relations to cope with this? Won’t France be horrendously overpowered in the early game? Fear not, for we have answers and solutions - which I am not going to reveal today.” https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/eu4-development-diary-4th-of-june-2019.1185235/

But I think the new french mission tree will require you to integrate your vassal swarm to progress in it (Centralize France, first mission in the right side). And AI will always integrate it's subjects.
 
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Next is a pet peeve of many, your subjects using their colonist for settlement growth where or when you don’t want it. So we’ve added a simple little Subject interaction where you can allow or forbid this to specific subjects.
Speaking of, it's a pet peeve of modders too - there is currently no way to disable settlement growth for specific countries, or even just in general.

Most other mechanics have at least a scripted_functions or defines entry, but this one doesn't...

We'd be pretty grateful if a way of disabling this mechanic could be added, so that it stops eating up colonists and increasing dev that isn't meant to be increased.
 
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Where did they say that the vassal swarm was supposed to nerf France in the early game? I believe that, to the contrary, they wanted to reintroduce the vassals because France was too much of a pushover early on and needed a buff.
The story of France in our period is one of consolidation, and to that end we feel that the return of the vassals would make playing as France feel more like you are slowly building a centralized nation out of a fragmented feudal realm.
The idea was that France was supposed to have a bit of a build up to it to become an unstoppable juggernaut, but not be a pushover at the start. Now it just starts OP it seems.
 
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Can someone smarter than me give me the pros and cons of the French vassal swarm - will it be worth it to keep them around and use them to expand or will I want to integrate them into the Crown ASAP?
 
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Yes, they did:
”but how will you balance this, I preemptively hear you asking? Won’t France need extra diplomatic relations to cope with this? Won’t France be horrendously overpowered in the early game? Fear not, for we have answers and solutions - which I am not going to reveal today.” https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/eu4-development-diary-4th-of-june-2019.1185235/

Err, no. By that exact quote, they stated that they would have "answers and solutions" to avoid France being "horrendously overpowered" in the early game.
This means that they were well aware that the vassal swarm would strengthen France and would include mechanisms to prevent them from being "overpowered"

That statement does not mean that the vassal swarm was supposed to be a "nerf", as the poster that I replied to claimed. It was clearly supposed to be a buff, and Paradox promised that they would try not to make it too much of a buff.
 
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