EU4 - Development Diary - 2nd of April 2019

[Arizal]

I would say rather than "estates", I would like factions. In a republic, they could be less covert, but in a monarchy, you would still have people going one way or another.

Those could include small and important nobles, burgers, clergy, but also minorities, dynamically created factions wanting a change in your religion or even in your diplomatic stance.

Why not a faction wanting you to adopt some set of ideas (like ultra-religious people wanting you to take the religious group of ideas while merchants would like you to take the "trade" idea group.

A faction wanting you to honor the call to arms of your long-time ally? When said ally would betray you, perhaps they would become revanchist.

And a personal pet-peeve of mine, what about being finally able to interact with "rebels" ? Those X people could be swayed in exchange to promises to "liberate/conquer" their ancestral lands, leaving them alone and having administrative autonomy.

I mean, without having an Imperator or Victoria like parliement system, without even having pops (although I would like that), you could have issues popping up which are regarded to as the fundamental problems in your country, and the different people in your country taking stands about them.

Does this make any sense and is it implementable? That's not for me to answer, but this would really revolutionize the game in my opinion.

 

[Marshgo]

I have an idea. Would it be interesting for each province to start at very high autonomy, which then drops as the game progresses and tech, ideas and absolutism are acquired. This is in the spirit of the minimum autonomy in territories modifier. To get any kind of bonus from land that is not your capital, you would need to use estates.

In addition to the autonomy malus I propose an additional, different kind of bonus. Provinces controlled by nobles could provide conscripts, or banners as you will, equal to the amount of force limit provided by their military development. When at war you can start recruiting these units for free in addition to your standing army. Thus you cannot recruit over the force limit without using mercenaries.

Burgers could provide you with a self-building merchant navy equal to production development and the clergy with unrest reduction and taxes.

When thinking of this in ways of game balance, these units shouldn't have unlimited manpower. Their reinforcement rate should drop as the war goes on and the casualties mount. The speed at which these units recruit could also be tweaked.

 

[tsf4]

I find the estate system is not good. As a defensively minded and usually small nation player, I don't want estates to have a huge deal in how I run my country. If they have high influence and loyalty, thats good, hey I get a bonus. BUT PLEASE do not make a system whereby high levels of those make the estates troublesome. In short, if you guys make them work for AI and be more interactive thats cool, but please don't just make them that way for difficulty sake.

 

[cristofolmc]

It would be great if the nobles had standing armies, which could either help or oppose you. Something akin to clans for barbarians in IR.

This this and so much this.

 

[Skullslasher6]

I am glad you guys have recognized that estates are sorely lacking. Right now it feels like the eu3 commission painting button.i still remember reading country history with my friends and laughing at the spam of "King Alfons III did wisely commission painting".

I dont know how you will change it to make internal governance fun, rewarding AND important without it feeling like arbitrary button clicking.

 

[JayD]

Add estate of "jews" and name them somehow proper maybe like jewish moneylenders or else. This estate can work similiar to burghers.
Estate interactions (could be different, rebalanced, it's just proposal):

• Give loans with no interest (you pay once X ducats 4 taking 1 loan) or estate just lowers interest 4 some time
• Recruit cheap adm advisor of jewish faith (maybe treasurer)
• Add 1 workshop in 1 random prov.
• Add 1 dev in random prov.
• Expand jewish rights - (+ 15 estate loyalty 4 small amount of corruption)

Spain (or all countries) could get a (personalized by region) event to: either to get rid of the estate (4 big reward) or keep it (4 some effort). It would add more jewish flavour to the game and none would ever complain of lack of representation of Jews in EU4.

 

[DominusNovus]

Estates should interact more with mechanics like Parliaments and Advisors.

Parliament should ask for favors for the estates, and should generally be more restrictive in foreign and domestic policy (but that''s a separate issue).

Advisors should be associated with a specific estate, and give influence to their faction.

As mentioned, estates should have policy preferences like in Stellaris. Burghers, for example, might want you to avoid a war with a nearby trading nation and could revolt or provide fewer taxes if you do. This should be a system of tradeoffs, something EUIV desparately needs for internal affairs.

A tax system like CK2s should be added with sliders for taxes or troops on different estates.

At least at the beginning of the game, taxes and manpower should be heavily dependent on estate support, with decreasing influence as Absolutism grows.

As someone above mentioned, estate influence, Absolutism, and Revolution mechanics should be antagonistic toward each other, with Absolutism decreasing estate happiness and Revolution risk growing the more Absolutism and estate influence grows.

I want to echo the need for an interaction with Parliament, somehow. Right now, the two mechanics don’t just not mesh well together, they don’t combine at all. Since it is perfectly possible (even likely) to have to deal with them both right now, there should be some interplay.

My ‘quick fix’ is to reformat the parliament mechanic so that it automatically assigns one seat per state, and then have the estates in that state’’s provinced interact with the seat, influencing its demands when a debate is ongoing (a state with noble estate provinces would more likely ask for army commissions, clergy would more likely ask to spend papal influence/patriarch authority/fervor/, etc).

 

[elano_16]

An estate should not give instant monarch power. I think it should be +1 monthly monarch power if the estate is loyal or influenced. Almost every mechanics in the game are based on this.
When we hire an advisor from the estate they should give less monarch point but extra modifier which only applies to provinces that estate holds.

 

[Inquisitor Silenus]

There's something to be said about the idea of making Estates something which could, for example, have their own army or something. But while I think the events associated with estates have a lot of room to make them more interesting, and a lot of what is interesting about estates comes from events: what estates really need though is some way that these things are integrated with the estates themselves and not abstractions called up by an event. For example if the "Nobility" estate had some tab or something which showed them caring or doing any number of things, from dynasties to marriages to culture/religion to their privileges to anything like that. And not just "oh, here's an event which says they are concerned about your foreign dynasty", but actually some sort presence to it, like a tab which said "By the way these nobles are currently concerned about X, they are doing Y"

Actually that's an interesting idea. even if slightly different from what I just said. just a few descriptions of the estate itself. Something like the different modes of China in CK2: an estate might have its status as "infighting" or "Expanding their power" or "Getting into/out of debt". Or they could have certain desires listed: imagine if you had three desires listed and they were "go to war with X" or "make a royal marriage with Hapsburgs" or "Improve legitimacy". Or "Improve relations with neighbor". Sorta like the old missions, but it wouldn't be limited to things that are necessarily good or something you *should* do, but just something that makes them happy (like maybe "raise autonomy!")

Or If they have high influence show them exercising that influence outside of event chains, for example making some sort of semi-autonomous decisions? Imagine if you had Burghers at high influence, you clicked over to their tab and saw that they were building a marketplace in province X, and you could potentially help them do it (and have the price go down over time, to show that they are doing it themselves, but also scale the loyalty boost, so paying full price for a marketplace would get you much more than only the last 10%, which might get you a +1% "It's the thought that counts" bonus). It reminds me of the Victoria 2 economy a little bit, where its possible to see your capitalists are making a factory and decide to invest yourself to speed it along.

If you combined the previous two ideas, you could have it so that perhaps if an estate is at high influence it can potentially make steps to whatever it desires, or trigger an event (perhaps even pre-existing events jiggered to work with the new system) where they make a demand of you, or take some action towards making it happen (like perhaps they want a royal marriage with the Hapsburgs, and you get an event saying that they've used their influence to increase your relations with some Hapsburg Monarch in hopes of securing it), or in some cases even just simply do it without an event (this wouldn't be for big things like "Go to war with the Ottomans" presumably, but for smaller things like for a building).

 

[pacja]

I just don't like how a lot of the interactions are one-click. You mention the Diet, but there are other examples too. I want the clergy to make demands in return for their support, generals from the nobility to become disloyal and potentially revolt if the nobles become unhappy.

I guess the shortest way to say that is that I would love it if the system was more than positive and negative modifiers and felt likeep the Estates had a degree of autonomy and agency of their own as groups that needed to be kept happy, rather than just a set of modifiers that also give monarch power every 20 years

This. Furthermore, I'd like that bonus/malus from Estates events and decisions wouldn't be timed, but permanent: currently a bonus/malus can expire pushing you below/above thresholds without paying much attention and, sometimes, even forcing you to give land or use direct actions to compensate. IMHO it looks like the Estates stakeholders are a bunch of passive-aggressive blokes that would sit disgruntled in a corner waiting for you, the almighty Demiurge, to notice their disappointment, while I'd prefer permanent loyalty/influence changes tied to more frequent and correlated events: now a bonus/malus expires after 10 years? Ok, make it permanent, so the choices would be policy-related and not time-dictated, and fire an event after those 10 years to let me choose whether to change things or maintain the status quo, then immediately starting a new countdown for the next event.
To avoid players resting on their laurels after a lucky chain of events, every choice improving loyalty and or influence towards an Estate should shorten the TTH of other Estates' events and vice versa, to represent them being happy and silent (to avoid the same treatment) when their rivals get penalized or them asking for compensation more often if they think you're giving too much to others at their expenses. In this way, the more you interact with Estates, the more proactive they would be, IMHO resembling much more a live environment populated by factions with a zero-sum game mentality.

 

[Fintilgin]

I think it's going to be hard without gutting the entire current system.

Really, the whole thing should be tied to a simplified pop system, because so many things in the game are a kludge to work around not having any way of representing them.

Whatever it ends up being should be part of a bigger overhaul of government, IMO. I should be dealing with internal factions of noblemen as a kingdom or wealthy landowners as a republic. As a Catholic my interactions with my local church should have a direct impact on my relations with the Pope, and so forth.

There should also be a MUCH stronger focus on how estates change over time. At the beginning of the game my feudal state should be TOTALLY dependent on the nobility for my army. By the end of the game I should be able to have neutered them, and depend on a professional army. Similar with eroding the total power of the Church. Getting there over the course of the game should have real gameplay and consequences though, it should be more then just clicking BUILD VERSAILLES: -10 NOBLE POWER

 

[Totesmygotes97]

Taking a page out of M&T's book would be a great idea here. You could have it so that the estates have their own wealth pool, earning 25% of their assigned provinces tax income and manpower then, in times of war, you could call upon your estates for loans, units etc. You could also have it so that they could use their pool of manpower and wealth to rebel against you if they turn disloyal.
A nice feature with the diets could be a change to the autonomy of the estates. So instead of the estates taking 25% of the income, they take 35%.

You could have this all displayed in the Estates window, showing each estates wealth balance, income, manpower and manpower gain as well as showing the percentage of wealth they take from each province.

They player still has control in all of this, the estates maybe won't build buildings but perhaps the estates could issue 'rewards' for doing certain things, such as attacking another country or building a certain building. The framework for this is also built into the game already through the old missions mechanic.

 

[PiterCoffer]

I would like to see estates as a way of gaining immediate money but with drawbacks like it was in history (for example you can sell the right to collect taxes in an area for X years to burgers or sell administrative nobility titles for cash like France did (the drawbacks of this might be slightly complicated to represent ingame). In addition there could be a system that simulates the constant struggle between the estates council/parliament and the absolutist tendencies of the monarch (many kings avoided calling the council to levy taxes because the council would ask for privileges and rights in exchange, and so they had to finance their politics through other methods such as the ones I described above). Of course this would bring about great changes to the economy ( you'd have to normally earn less ducats thanks to taxes and have to rely on debts, trade and colonial resources, sellings of titles etc. Unless you are willing to compromise with the parliament to be able to levy new taxes in exchange of more autonomy, more estates influence, less prestige and less absolutism. This should apply to when you want to raise war taxes, normal taxes should not be affected, but they should be a lot lower to represent the inability to maitain a huge standing army under normal conditions and to make war taxes more impactful by making so them give more money and more drawbacks and making them avoidable through alternative means such as the sellings of titles). I know this would be difficult to implement without altering lots of things, but I think it would be very useful to make the economy more dynamic (especially war economy), more varied and realistic and also integrate in it the roles the estates had in an accurate and interesting way.

Edit: this would enable a more accurate simulation of revolutions too, as both the english and the french revolutions started in part due to the estates being angered by the kings not wanting to compromise with them and give them any rights

 

[Dannydehz]

Whatever you guys do with estates, please, please, please give Republics estates as well! Either remove the Republican faction system, or keep it in combination with estates, I don't care.

 

[Ziul]

Please don't forget to dismantle "factions" for merch republics and other govs who has this kind of mechanics and replace it with some unique estates/estates interactions like a merch republic MUST give 80% of his lands to merchants for example !

I just hate factions who don't let player optimize autonomy rate with estates to still profit from 1 of the 3 ressources.

 

[leefnmajors]

Land shuffling and starting land are my two biggest issues. You can take all the land in your kingdom/empire, divide it up among the estate, then redistribute it back to the estate with them each getting the same amount of development as they had before and they're somehow angry at you for doing it? It makes no sense.

Starting un-modded games where every country is drawn and quartered between estates which I KNOW I can't mess with for at least a year (probably more without rebellious results) is also a pain. A change is needed.

Also... a hard look needs to be taken at estate events in general. Events are supposed to be balanced as roughly 66% good 33% bad, but often times due to the random nature of your estates' current loyalty it's completely random if they will be good or bad. You might be unable to actually use any of the interactions buttons with any estate for fear of triggering an accident coup when a new event pops that puts their influence over 100 or drops their loyalty under the magic numbers of 60 and 40. Either loyalty should not give penalties and instead be a bonus on a true scale from 0-100 where 100 is actually difficult to get to, or you should modify just how many estate only events impact influence and loyalty.

I would also allow for estates to be generated more dynamically for each nation; sometimes you're railroaded into a certain play style because of this. Example: the Mughals have to leave some Hindu provinces around and play to their Hindu estates for the sake of their mission tree, otherwise three of their five estates become basically useless. In other words, you're railroaded into trying to play more for a Humanities Ideas game than trying to go for a Religious Ideas if you form Mughals as any Muslim nation and convert all your Hindu provinces. You should be able to assimilate estates and have new ones appear based on the cultures and religion present in your states.

 

[BoomKidneyShot]

Maybe instead of having them all be unaaproachable at 90/85% influence for decades after your standard 3 clicks at the start of the game, have influence instead be a shared amongst all estates out of 100, instead of the meter it is now. This would make it much more dynamic and present than the leader/monarch point banks they are today, and make estates as to be sided with over the other estates, making them much more alive and realistic.

This would be interesting, and a good way to merge Estates with the Factions from a few government types.

 

[huyderman]

I'd like estates to be something you'd have to interact with more in ways that feel like they are actual entities, rather than just a number that goes up or down when you press a button. They should try to influence the country and increase their power, and there should be more tangible effects (like events) if they are happy or not. But they should also be more affected by what's going on in your country, not just by specific random events. We have dynamic nations in the game, so it would be cool to have the possibility for more estates to petition or demand autonomy by becoming a vassal nation of the appropriate type. And if you integrate another nation, this should affect the influence and size of estates as the existing power-structures are integrated, e.g. integrating a bishopric should give a boost to the clergy.

While the old version could be annoying and fiddly, as estates are now, they are mostly forgettable. Unless you remember to click into their screen, they mostly are forgettable and the occasional button clicking to get a few extra bonuses.

 

[Thaif]

Conceptually the Estate System models the social, political and economic scene of the Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period well in a simple package. I was happy to see them in a Dev diary way back when, and so were many others.
Little did we know it would not exactly be what everyone expected.

As a concept I like the Estate system. In fact I would say it's one of those features that should have been in the base game much earlier(like manual development). The core issue for many was, and seems to remain; It's just not that deep, fun, interesting, or challenging.

Oh but it can be.
Not everyone agrees about this, but no one can deny that the Council in CK2 past Conclave wasn't more deep. Not perfect, but not boring or shallow.
Despite being really, truly aggravating at times the Council after the Conclave Expansion fits well into the feel of CK2; There you are, a King, ruling your Lands as best only you can, but then there's these people that have constant demands, needs and worst of all; worries that they foist upon you. Regrettably you need these people, or rather, their talents and support to help you, be the best you: A truly Great King.

That is what the Estates should be: Something that's always in the background and that oscillates between helpful and antagonistic. A system you can milk for no actual challenge is boring, shallow and without sounding too pretentious; not very intellectually stimulating.

I really don't think people would hate challenge, we play "grand strategy" games after all, but it's boring and repetitive challenge that kills fun for everyone. The Estate mechanic has enormous potential for the elusive "tall" gameplay many have hope for.
I'd say the greatest strength of CK2, as far as the Council is concerned, is that you get to, usually, pick them yourself and put them to work where you see fit. You are the King after all. Of course there sometimes are people that will be very...difficult if you don't acknowledge them in someway, but that's to be expected. The burdens of leadership.
Plus you have some sort of relationship toward them; your handpicked aides, powerful people that can't be ignored, that one inexplicably incompetent ambitious gloryhound appointed before you, ect.

That's how the Estates should be in EU4; something you have a say in, that does have it's own "agenda" though usually in the form of wanting you to something for them, so they can do something for you and the "politics", if you will, of managing the state with the estates.

Think of how your Councillors, in CK2, can be put to task on what you feel is pertinent and where they would be useful. Mostly they just give nice bonuses depending on how talented or talentless they are, but sometimes they go beyond the call of duty and produce great boons or miserable failures.

That's the kind of gameplay I'd like to see from Estates. They should be to EU4 what the Council is to CK2; a great tool you get to manage and use that occasionally produces interesting results, good or bad depending on the situation.

 

[rho]

My biggest problem with estates is that most of the decisions with them are way too obvious. "Am I allowed to click the estate buttons yet? Yes. OK. Then I will click the estate buttons. There. Done." Expanding each click to add events like an actual diet isn't enough to solve the problem if all the choices are still obvious. In the worst case scenario, it could actually make things worse, if it carries on being a series of no-brainers but takes longer to click through everything.

As far as I'm concerned, what's needed are more down sides, mutually exclusive possibilities, or opportunity costs. These could take numerous possible forms. "Gain military points now but raise army maintenance for the next twenty years", "get this bonus from the burghers or this bonus from the clergy, but you can't have both", "gain a 3 star general, but only if you break your alliance with this great power". Or whatever. You folks are smart; you can think of more examples.

The important part is that there must be actual choices involved, the choices must be non-obvious, and the optimal choice must vary depending on the current gamestate.