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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.
 
Yepp you can, the Monopoly privileges are examples of those. They also have an effect when cooldown ends so you can hook in whatever you want. In monopoly's cases the estate will ask the crown if they are willing to renew the monopoly.

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Btw will new estates have an effect regarding autonomy now that province assignments are out of the way? I hope they have.
 
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Expulsion minorities change is questionable, making expulsion (almost) completely useless for historical colonizers, while buffing random Koreans and Japanese with ability to constantly 'exile' for free from some 1/1/1 Jurchen province. Also, I can imagine all those AI Iberians picking Council of the Indies and not actually using it (also - what it will even do now??)
 
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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.

Curious about the technical details as to why this problem exists in EU4 but not CK2 despite it coming out later. (Nerdy response more than welcome! My best guess is something to do with the 'new' world.)

Thanks for trying to fix it all the same. :)
 
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Similarly to the interaction you just added to Colonial Nations that allows or forbids them to use their colonist for settlement growth, can you please fix CNs colonizing territories that are outside their colonial region?

And of course they changed expulsion of minorities unnecessarily, they did not touch this definitely necessary colonial mechanic.
 
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I agree with the people above, the "Minority Expulsion" feature is completely useless with that change - it's not worth it anymore. Neither does it change the culture of the province, it even expands the culture which I want to get rid of into the colony and causing unrest and worst of all, it reduces the development of the home province. It's all for nothing honestly. I'd rather convert the culture of the province on my own - this is cheaper and better than the feature of the minority expulsion as it is now.
 
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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.

I thought the culture of the provinces would be changed to castilian through an event which fires when you conquered all of the andalusian provinces?
 
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There is a short list on the wiki so you can use it as a base if you wish https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Controls

Also, not sure if applies to EU4, but some keys are contextual and may have different actions depending on the active window. Others may be able to correct/offer more info than me.

Still doesn't change the fact that the default locations are in interface files, which are a nightmare to hunt through even if you know how to mod them. If nothing else a list of controls would help at some point with a tool I suppose.
 
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I thought the culture of the provinces would be changed to castilian through an event which fires when you conquered all of the andalusian provinces?


There is no such update and there were no such event previously. They did not think of Castilian mission tree when trying to make Minority Expulsion useless.
 
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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.
Is this going to raise the liberty desire? Those colonials might not take well to some far off government telling them they can't claim new land behind the mountains.
 
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I think I have asked this before and no one replied. Since we have made Ladislaus the same in both Austria and Hungary so that there would not be the case when one dies in one country and still lives in the other. Did we also make it the same for Albrecht Achilles, the heir of Brandenburg and ruler of Ansbach at the start of the game? It would be so annoying for one of them accidentally died and the other one still lives on.
 
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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.

1590497428132.png

Does that mean that you can decide whether your colonial nation or perhaps some other subjects can or can't do colonizing? If does this will finally save me form ugly borders.
 
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As someone who's left handed I appreciate this! Though I have a question. Where is this data stored and what format is it? (I'm asking as I'm curious if I or someone else) could hack together something that could allow for some form of an external list to customize these hotkeys in some way. I absolutely appreciate what is previewed for hotkeys, but it'll take me ages to find every hotkey that I cant use and figure out what I want it to be without a list.

If you're asking where is the user-customization going to be stored, I'd imagine it's in $LOCAL_SETTINGS/Paradox Interactive/Europa Universalis IV/something.txt, where something is a filename whose exact name I can't predict, and $LOCAL_SETTINGS is the OS-equivalent for where applications are supposed to store user-local data (on Linux it's ~/.local/share, on Windows it's C:\Users\$USERNAME\AppData\Local, on OS X I have no idea). The actual fileformat will probably be PDX's usual file format.
 
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Will there be in future new mission trees for scandinavians nation(Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Gotland) and eastern europe(Russia, Baltic, Ruthenia) as well as government reforms.
 
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I agree with the people above, the "Minority Expulsion" feature is completely useless with that change - it's not worth it anymore. Neither does it change the culture of the province, it even expands the culture which I want to get rid of into the colony and causing unrest and worst of all, it reduces the development of the home province. It's all for nothing honestly. I'd rather convert the culture of the province on my own - this is cheaper and better than the feature of the minority expulsion as it is now.

I am not a fan of it either. My favourite would have been an adjustment by making expel minorities really good for you, but permanently increasing a CN liberty desire for every point of the origin province. And as soon as the age of absolutism the liberty desire from previous expelled minorities grows and even further in the age of revolution. Some kind of system that would lead to rebbeling CN's more often, but reward you during the age of discovery. Eg increased settlers, convert culture/religion.
 
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The privilege of giving diplomatic relations seems to be usable only in countries with nobility estate.
Is there compensation for countries that do not have access to nobility estate, such as those with a republic or parliamentary system?
 
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The various quality of life improvements alone are more than enough for the long wait. I'm in love.
Did we ever get confirmation whether or not hovering over a dead nation's cores will show where else they are? I think it was discussed but I don't recall seeing a screenshot or anything.

Even back to when Johan asked us about the Expulsion changes, I'm just not sure of what the purpose of it is? Development is your most precious resource and reducing your dev just so it's somewhat cheaper to convert is pretty silly. I still think the mechanic should have just been removed as a whole and replaced with something else for GC owners.

I really, really advise you to look for inventing new modifiers. Morale, discipline, combat ability, army tradition,... are all quite common.
Using ones rarely used would be good as well. Arumba's latest modpack has buffed Cavalry Flanking Range a lot and that makes cav have more of a purpose. Making it so they could actually flank further with Aristocratic Ideas or something, even without the boosts from Mil Tech, would be quite nice.
 
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