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Hello, and welcome back to Europa Universalis IV. Last week we talked about features, where most of them will be in the free update, but todays feature will all be part of the next expansion.

First of all, I’d like to mention that we are adding a new government form called English Monarchy, which England will start with. It will give +0.5 Legitimacy, -1 Unrest, -0.1 Monthly Autonomy and give them access to a Parliament.

So what is a Parliament? It is a new mechanic that Constitutional Monarchies & Constitutional Republics has as well. A Parliament is a political body inside your country, which will have debates that if they pass will give you benefits for a decade.

There is quite a lot of different possible debates, and you are allowed to pick one of five random eligible ones.

To have a debate pass, you need to have a majority of the seats backing the issue. Of course, when an debate is started, all seats are against it, and you need to convince them to back it.

Every Seat of Parliament will have their own reasons you must fullfill to have them back an issue, and their reasons will be different for each issue. A coastal Seat of Parliament may want to be Granted Navy commissions, which reduces your naval tradition, while another Seat may want monetary compensation, while another want some military support, or a fourth want some more autonomy. Luckily, you only have to get half of them to support you to get the debate passed.

Any non-overseas province can be granted a Seat in Parliament and your capital will always have a Seat. There is no way to remove a seat in Parliament, unless the province is lost.

A Seat gets +10% to tax, production & manpower, while reducing autonomy by 0.01 per month. However each Seat increases stability & war-exhaustion costs by 2%.

You are also required to grant at least of 20% of your non-overseas cores a Seat in Parliament, and if you have less than that, one random will be picked for you. There is alert if less than a third of your non-overseas cores have a Seat.

If there is no current debate, nor any active benefits of an issue, you will slowly lose legitimacy & republican tradition. And if a debate fails, you will lose 20 prestige, so it is not the end of the world, but its not something you want to happen all the time.

Here are three examples of current issues that can be pushed through your parliament.

Backing the War Effort is available if you are at war, and will give you +1 stability when passed, and a 10 year benefit of -0.05 War Exhaustion, and +10% Manpower recovery

Charter Colonies
is available if you have either filled the Expansion or Exloration ideagroup, and gives a +10 year benefit of +1 colonist and +20 colonial growth.

Increase Taxes
will give you about 1/4th of a years income, and increase your tax-income by 10% for 10 years.

Of course, all of these values will change the more we playtest it.

Only countries with Parliaments will get a button, opening the Parliament View, near the Papacy & HRE buttons. And yes, the button you talked about last week, in the province interface, is the one indicating if its a seat of parliament or not.

U4wjCj1.jpg


Next week, we'll focus on why we build walls.
 
Actually, monarchic constitutionalism was the default during the Middle Ages in Europe. Absolutism was a creation of later centuries, attempts to impose absolutism usually met with massive resistance, and failure was frequent.

I'm fairly certain that most monarchies did not have constitutions during the middle ages. They were feudal monarchies, rather than constitutional monarchies. Constitutions were only the rule after the 1848 Revolutions.
 
I think it might be interesting if, for example: If you elect *not* to start a debate, one is started for you... but it's a negative version. Something like this during a war: "War is not our way!" - All seats in Parliament start agreed to the idea, and you have X amount of time to sway 50% of them away from it, or you get 10 years of bad effects (-10 Manpower recovery, + 20% cost to reduce war exhaustion. No War Taxes and a one time boost of 5 WE).

Anyways. That might be a bit more interesting as a mechanic than "Slowly losing Legitimacy and Republican Tradition"
 
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I'm fairly certain that most monarchies did not have constitutions during the middle ages. They were feudal monarchies, rather than constitutional monarchies. Constitutions were only the rule after the 1848 Revolutions.
They may not have had a written constitution, but there were still laws and customs that the King had to obey. If a 12th Century King said "L'état, c'est moi", people would have thought he'd gone mad.

The no-debate rule reducing Legitimacy is a clear reference to the likes of Charles I not calling Parliament. Basically, instead of dealing with unrest, you're saving it up for the future.
 
More of an internal game, great stuff Team PDS :). Having a parliament as an institution could potentially lay the foundation for other mechanics as well (areas being disgruntled if they don't have a seat in parliament, seats for a cultural minority lobbying for autonomy or even independence/independence as a vassal if they aren't treated well, and whatnot. Great new direction, and think it's great it's in DLC so that those less interested in managing a nation as opposed to blobbing don't feel like they're having the game changed on them. Some random thoughts:

- Can England (or anyone else with an English Monarchy) switch away from this Government type to something non-Constitutional, and if they do, will they risk a huge stability hit/civil war (as it'd be, in effect, the revocation of the Magna Carta, and I can imagine the nobles wouldn't be happy).
- On the flip side, would there ben any impact (beyond cost in MPs) of switching from something non-Constitutional to a Constituational Monarchy/Republic? It's conceivable that engaging the nobles/patriarchs more in the system of Government could lead to an increase in stability.

Looking forward to next week's DD :).
 
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Anyone can tell me if England had parlament in 1444?
 
Anyone can tell me if England had parlament in 1444?

Yes, England has had a parliament since 1215 but it evolved over time, originally it was used as a tax collecting agency for the King but as time passed it became more and more ingrained in England's governance and by 1444 it had become fairly influential.
 
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If you create a large empire it will be insanely costly.



Will the AI keep this in mind to avoid quick expansion?

Also is the Parliament UI still being worked on? It could use some more "decoration".

Will there be a feature to suspend Parliament?

Can modders add extra choices to the Parliament?
 
Adding new peacetime mechanics and depth is really, really great news, but this bit worries me slightly:

"If there is no current debate, nor any active benefits of an issue, you will slowly lose legitimacy & republican tradition."

Considering how the goal of the monarch should be to not have to rely on parliament for support and to rule of his own accord, it seems counter-intuitive to punish the player for being able to act in that way, at least with legitimacy which is something very valuable and hard to replace. Then again, if this is only something that comes up every ten years then that's a very reasonable timeframe in which to operate. But if this kind of system is ever to be extended to the rest of European monarchies, one should remember that Louis XIV didn't lose legitimacy for not calling upon the estates-general.

Basically, I think that instead of punishing the player for not using parliament with legitimacy decreases, it should just be harder to get support from them the longer it's been since the last time you asked. Use parliament often and accept their demands frequently and those demands will stay small, but go a long period without making any concessions or consulting them and when they finally get the chance they'll push you for every last concession they can get.

I say this because it seems like what this game mechanic is representing is extraordinary demands by the monarch from parliament, which was not something that parliamentarians wanted to deal with. The English ideal was always for the king to live off of his own incomes and not have to come to them asking for more. Not asking for extraordinary taxes (i.e. not using this mechanic) would increase legitimacy, if anything.

However it goes, I'm very happy to see Paradox focusing on depth, and I'll buy this expansion for sure, whatever it is.

Actually, I think this makes perfect sense. In this form of government, the parliament is seen as part of the order of things. The monarch is not absolute, and if he or she tries to behave this way, they will lose legitimacy in the eyes of the people (or the nobility, at least). This sounds like it will model very well what happened during the reign of Charles I in England, when he dismissed Parliament and didn't call it back into session for years. He ended up being viewed as a bit of a tyrant and the end result was civil war and his execution.
 
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What I hope is that in the long term as different gov forms are given more special mechanics is that how you use these mechanics contributes to how your gov form changes over time.
A smaller and more easily applicable idea would be if putting seats of parliament in provinces helped with accepting cultures (so a province with a seat would get its base tax/ development multiplied by 2 when counting towards accepting the culture). That would allow you to accept a culture quickly but only by giving them substantial power within your system.
 
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More of an internal game, great stuff Team PDS :). Having a parliament as an institution could potentially lay the foundation for other mechanics as well (areas being disgruntled if they don't have a seat in parliament, seats for a cultural minority lobbying for autonomy or even independence/independence as a vassal if they aren't treated well, and whatnot. Great new direction, and think it's great it's in DLC so that those less interested in managing a nation as opposed to blobbing don't feel like they're having the game changed on them.

Because it will be part of a DLC, I don't think that the parliament mechanic will be expanded in the future, just like the elective monarchy. It is really a shame, it really sounds like it could be much more, but I can't think of another solution for Paradox.
 
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Glad to see we are fleshing out the different government types (if only slowly over time). I've always felt that the different government types aught to play differently in a significant way, the current modifiers just aren't enough.
 
Because it will be part of a DLC, I don't think that the parliament mechanic will be expanded in the future, just like the elective monarchy. It is really a shame, it really sounds like it could be much more, but I can't think of another solution for Paradox.
The nation designer was expanded significantly in the next patch and there are still plans to add stuff, like religions I understand.
 
Actually, I think this makes perfect sense. In this form of government, the parliament is seen as part of the order of things. The monarch is not absolute, and if he or she tries to behave this way, they will lose legitimacy in the eyes of the people (or the nobility, at least). This sounds like it will model very well what happened during the reign of Charles I in England, when he dismissed Parliament and didn't call it back into session for years. He ended up being viewed as a bit of a tyrant and the end result was civil war and his execution.

This mechanic doesn't represent parliament's role in normal government, it represents the king asking parliament for extraordinary aid, which was considered a bad thing. The debate in the screenshot is called "Increase Taxes", not "Collect Standard Revenues" or something like that.

Charles I was considered a tyrant because he used extra-parliamentary tricks like Ship Money to collect the extra taxes that he would normally need parliamentary approval for. It wasn't that he didn't call parliament per se, it was that he tried to find ways to work around them (thus infringing on their traditional rights) while at the same time not calling them.

Then again, I'm no expert. It's just the impression I've gotten from what I've read.
 
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