Home Trending Latest threads New posts Developer diaries
Jump to latest Follow Reply
  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Europa Universalis IV 82786 EUIV: Bug Reports 1359 EUIV: Suggestions 19383 EUIV: Technical Support 6899 EUIV: FAQ & Strategy Guides 241 EUIV: AAR's, Let's Plays, and Fan Fiction EU IV: Alternate History Short Story Contest Contr 30
Previous dev diary Next dev diary
Show only dev responses

EU4 - Development Diary - 27th of October 2020

Hello everyone! Today we are going to talk about some improvements in some interfaces for how you deal with governing capacity and one new feature that uses a lot of governing capacity but also let you “keep growing” on the land you already own.

First to make it easier to manage your governing capacity we’ve been adding needed information in two places. First we have added so when a building affects governing capacity it will now show that so you can get a sense of where you will get most value out of it in your realm, helping players with larger empires.

1603787892909.png


This means buildings such as courthouses will now show how much governing capacity they will remove if built in that specific province.

Next is a little help to everyone who have been amassing a lot of vassals to hold land for them. Previously there was no way to see how much governing capacity a vassal had or how much was being used.

1603787978875.png


We’ve now added so that can be viewed under the subject interface when you go into the details window for that subject.


Now to the new feature, for the one that has extra governing capacity, a Switzerland hiding in the mountains wanting to play tall. So in a province that is at least 15 development you can expand its infrastructure to allow for another building and manufactory in it. This increases the governing cost of the province by a flat 200 which can not be reduced by province modifiers.

1603788042280.png


Then for every 15 development of the province and further 200 governing capacity you can expand the infrastructure more for more slots of buildings and manufactories.

Hope you’ve enjoyed today's development diary! Next week we’ll be back with a new diary which will be written by Johan!
 
  • 96Like
  • 35
  • 25Love
  • 18
  • 6
Reactions:
Sort by date Sort by reaction score
Groogy said:
Of course. Believe I made it so it will try and keep the oldest buildings first.
Click to expand...
Would it be possible to make an event when you conquer/integrate and expanded province giving you the option of expanding the infrastructure yourself/which building to destroy? I also think 200 is a little high; thinking back to my Tall Japan campaign, 100 seems more reasonable.
 
Perhaps a better way to contextualize how awful expanding infrastructure is:

A goods manufactory is directly translatable to being worth 5 production dev (except worse, since it won't give forcelimit or half of a new building slot).

A manpower manufactory is directly translatable into being either 3 or 6 manpower dev (also no forcelimit or building slot bonus).

Does 200 unmodifiable GC for 3-6 dev make sense? Even the smallest, tallest nations aren't going to be able to afford to expand infrastructure more than 5 or so times. That's a total effective +15 to +30 dev for the absolute best case. It's not just a bad option for players, but a complete waste of dev time to design such a meaningless mechanic.

The only potential relevant usage of this is some exploit-y behavior where you spam it and go thousands over GC because you are in a situation where GC doesn't matter. And if this turns out to be useful then the devs will just waste more time patching out the exploit in the next version.
 
  • 17
Reactions:
Answer me: but why PDX, ultimanete does not seem to think when it puts new features? (not only on EU4)
Less2 said:
Perhaps a better way to contextualize how awful expanding infrastructure is:

A goods manufactory is directly translatable to being worth 5 production dev (except worse, since it won't give forcelimit or half of a new building slot).

A manpower manufactory is directly translatable into being either 3 or 6 manpower dev (also no forcelimit or building slot bonus).

Does 200 unmodifiable GC for 3-6 dev make sense? Even the smallest, tallest nations aren't going to be able to afford to expand infrastructure more than 5 or so times. That's a total effective +15 to +30 dev for the absolute best case. It's not just a bad option for players, but a complete waste of dev time to design such a meaningless mechanic.

The only potential relevant usage of this is some exploit-y behavior where you spam it and go thousands over GC because you are in a situation where GC doesn't matter. And if this turns out to be useful then the devs will just waste more time patching out the exploit in the next version.
Click to expand...
Answer me: but why PDX, lately does not seem to think when it puts new features? (not only on EU4)
 
  • 3
Reactions:
To put the cost in perspective, I heard about this from a friend and the conversation went like this:

Them:
hmm they are adding a new click in eu4 for governing capacity
you can spend 200 to open a new building slot

Me:
That is pretty cool
A global building slot?

Them:
just for the province
 
Last edited:
  • 12Haha
Reactions:
Seriously, the more time passes, the more it seems that that programmer / game designer of a browser game I played has become the head / CEO of paradox and comes up with stupid ideas, which in his idea should solve the problem but in reality:
Or the features are absurdly bugged,
or give absurd exploits,
or are they so useless that no one uses them!
Sorry, but I have seen too many games (browser based and normal) fail because the game designer "went crazy" and proposed absurd ideas that destroyed the game ...
 
  • 3
  • 1Like
  • 1
Reactions:
Groogy said:
Definetly not as that would be a feedback loop as more dev means you could stack even more dev cost in one province. So if you go for a standard meta play here you would end up with +20 dev provinces that costs 5 mana to dev.
Click to expand...

One way to have a similar effect (which would also be somewhat thematic) would be for the first infrastructure to remove any dev cost malus from terrain (or remove a percentage of that malus per level of infrastructure). So building roads in a mountain province would make it easier to put bigger cities there, but it doesn't do anything like as much for farmlands where it is already easy to expand.

Of course, to avoid exploitation, if you did that then when the infrastructure was removed you would also have to remove a chunk of development as well. Maybe also have an additional cost to the province war score, to denote how the owner is more reluctant to part with their nice province?
 
  • 1
Reactions:
I don't really see how this helps a tall game, since we already start with only a few GC. It might make obligatory to select gov reforms that give more GC just to keep doing this, taking away the possibility of choosing another path
 
  • 5
Reactions:
Ionxion said:
New mechanic might have use but at current costs I hope this is a typo. 200 governing capacity for +1 building slot/manufactory is completely imbalanced and never worth the investment. Even by building the statehouses and reducing to an absurd -50%, 100 development is still going to be far more beneficial than +1 building slot
Click to expand...
Very cool idea but had at a terrible cost that will only penalize people who don't realize what a waste of a resource that is... It needs to be at least half
 
holyvigil said:
A number that I like is 100 + 100% of the dev of the province. So 150 for a 50 dev province.
Click to expand...

I like this idea

Edit: It will also mean that the modifier of +100% can be modified by other modifiers, like buildings. While the base set will remain untouchable but can be set to lower.
 
Last edited:
  • 17
  • 8
  • 4Like
Reactions:
These are all good quality of life changes but even 50 governing capacity might be too much for me to use for an extra build slot. 50 development spread out, is better than an extra build slot, and an extra manufactory as far as economic benefit.
 
@Groogy If you are considering alternative additional benefits to expanding, one that springs to mind for me would be a supply limit increase. It would be thematic, and it would actually be useful in or around chokepoint provinces to allow the defender to maintain a larger standing army.
 
  • 4
  • 1Like
Reactions:
I dont feel too alarmed at a flat or a wibbly wobbly amount of governing capacity dished out at the size of the nation, i just see it as a natural curve of tall gameplay to eventually pick up pace. Later game trade means that a additional single manufactory as a net-gain benefit isn't too great when i can have a lot of trade-companies with a functional amount of autonomy all equipped with manufactory one-slots to brute-force materialise a monopoly but in the present tall gameplay helps apply important value to local nodes by properitor points of value added to the total trade network.

Trade is always the superior option to tax/production or that will never indent the popularity or success of international empires, but this feature just... isn't really made for them. If you skip straight into international empires with spain/portugal & colonizers then maybe probably not, but if you're landlocked its very nice.

Making +6.00 (from a 40 development province with local manufactory + infrastucture probably in your capital) of a highly valued resource like dyes or porcelain in the Saxony area especially skips a few diplomatic development point milestones, with the high level of local trade power you want to assert to push money towards yourself and culminatively making your local products more prosperous. Bavaria for example with its many mission tree centres of trade can spin money out of whatever they wish, simply exert the nessecary influence then trap it in their pseudo-end node.

My personal hat-trick of OPM republic into Germany would greatly benefit from it, then i could (in theory) collapse the infrastructure when i finally reach my endgame tag goal and use the intertia to help skyrocket my HRE secessionist goals as im always clamoring within my high development provinces for a little bit of anything.
 
Groogy said:
If province switches hand then it is destroyed
Click to expand...
Groogy said:
Of course. Believe I made it so it will try and keep the oldest buildings first.
Click to expand...
Will this same mechanic also apply to provinces conquered from states with level 3 centers of trade? Free cities especially often upgrade centers of trade to level 3, use all available building slots (including the bonus slot), and are then conquered by neighboring powers, thereby giving the conqueror an extra building.

FAB11AN said:
I like the extra building for governing capacity feature as it would allow for tall play style to be viable, although I worry that it will become a bit useless in center of trade provinces as, due to the fact that centers of trade already take up the space of 2 building slots, this feature might become useless once 40/50 development with a lv3 center is achieved, making the whole idea of a tall play obsolete.
Click to expand...
This is one of the biggest hindrances to tall play. Centers of trade are clearly meant to be urban centers - level 2 and 3 centers grant development reduction costs, and many are in high development, low development cost provinces to begin with - but they partly preclude the construction of buildings, which are the game's representation of urbanization. (Development is sometimes used to represent productive resource extraction operations or large tax bases and manpower pools rather than cities necessarily.) This design choice has always baffled me, particularly because it was implemented through the UI and seemingly almost by accident.


@Groogy wouldn't it make good sense to move the center of trade icon from the building slot user interface to the blank space where local estates UI used to be?

  • It would be another a way for tall nations to gain building slots - even with +2 building slots from farmlands/grasslands/drylands and a level 3 center of trade, a province would still need 80 development to unlock all 12 potential building slots
  • It would make building coastal defenses (which are considered nearly useless under the current meta) more viable as well - 1.30 added a lot of new buildings but no new sources of building slots, which is partly why coastal defenses and the new manufactories aren't used as much as they could be
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back