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EU4 - Development Diary - 2nd of July 2019

Hello all and welcome to today's dev diary for EUIV. Over the past eight dev diaries, our content design team @neondt , @Caligula Caesar and @Ofaloaf have been serving up a plethora of content that will be coming your way in the upcoming European Update and its accompanying expansion. There's certainly been plenty of it (and I'm told even more to come) but today I'm here to update you on the development plans for EUIV leading up to said expansion, and to tease the new mechanics to come.

As we laid out early on in the year, we intend to take our time with the upcoming European update. We have previously said that we aim to release said update late this year, but this is now being moved into 2020 for a variety of reasons, not least of all that we have many ambitions for this update, and want to give it the development time it deserves.

Unpleasant news for some, I've no doubt. I've been seeing comments along the line of wanting the expansion released as soon as possible from people excited about the content updates when we haven't even touched on the mechanical ones yet. While the expansion release is certainly a long time away, we believe that this is the best way to deliver the quality that EUIV deserves.

In the meantime, as this is an unprecedentedly long time between releases for the game, we will be releasing a free update to the game post-summer. This will be an update with the 64-bit support and bugfixes, but will not contain any of the things we've been discussing around the European Update. We'll have more details on this once the July holiday season is over.

Ah yes, July, the dreaded month where everything in Sweden shuts down, including game development studios. Devs are already entering vacation mode, so there won't be much news coming from us over the month, however I believe @neondt has threatened that he may make a few more small content Dev Diaries as he defies the Swedish Vacation Standards.

So what about after July? Well, as you've no doubt been aware, we have been focusing heavily on the content that's in our upcoming European release, but not so much the mechanics. Dev Diaries will start delving into said mechanics after the Summer Holidays and we have some meat to delve into there. In Dev Diaries of past, we have openly talked about design ambitions for Mercenaries and Estates, as well as our desires to “Make Catholicism and the Pope feel like a force to be reckoned with, rather than just another colour of Christianity and country”. We're going to dive into these and share what we've been doing to make these aspirations a reality.

Of course, I don't want to leave you for Summer with worlds alone, so here are three completely contextless screenshots from the development version of the game for all your speculative needs.

teaser 1.png


teaser 2.png


teaser 3.png


Have a wonderful Summer everyone. Regular Dev Diaries shall return on Tuesday August 6th.
 
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U = Units
M = Mercenaries
T = Templates

So mercenaries will come from certain provinces on the map, can players create their own mercenary companies? like replacing the condotierre mechanic with that
 
I hope that each Merc. Company can has its own specific unit graphic.

P.S. I don't mean that Devs must create special unit models arts for every Merc. Company, providing a data-vise definition to define specific Merc. Company unit graphics for modders is good enough.
 
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Proper mercenary companies!
Yeah though 30.000 men seems a bit much for your avarage mercenary company. Maybe The Light of Italy could field that many but I think most mercenary companies were somewhat smaller than that.
Does this mean we are no longer assigning estates to provinces?! If this is the situation, how you will adapt the rajput regiments with the new system since number of regiments directly related to assigned provinces
It would be a great help, especially for that mission for the Mughals where you have to hand the Rajputs a certain number of provinces in some specific areas, because the ai may have converted provinces there to muslim and then you might not be able to get enough provinces to fullfill the mission.
What does UMT mean?
U = Units
M = Mercenaries
T = Templates
Most Likely.


As for loading screens if they're redesigning mercenaries then Federico da Montefeltro (The Light of Italy) ought to be the guy on the loading screen.
 
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U = Units
M = Mercenaries
T = Templates

So mercenaries will come from certain provinces on the map, can players create their own mercenary companies? like replacing the condotierre mechanic with that
I hope that templates will be saved separately. As I often use the same combination of units.
 
Just some late ideas and critisism on the austria dev diary ;)

First of all: My home city of Steyr - old capital city of Styria - has taken it's rightful place on the Map. (Maybe a Styrian mission idea here...)
I'm so happy right now.
Thank you Paradox

By the way, has Styria finally a core on Steiermark?
It has always been strange for me that as Styria's real name is Steiermark, it doesnt have a core on the province.
Also the Province should probably called Obersteiermark (Upper Styria) anyway and the capital should rather be Leoben than Judenburg.
I study in Leoben so I know more than a litte bit about the regions history and Leoben at that time (as it is today) was vastly more important and lager than Judenburg.
 
Well, that's a bummer. :(

I'll gift a copy of eu4 to friends and family for every quote mocking the British.
I might have reused it in a tooltip knowing that the heading wouldn't stay... :oops:
 
I love that there are going to be Mercenary companies, but straight out of the blue 32,000 is way too many, that will not stop the merc spam..

I had been thinking and no way do i believe armies at this point, or any point in history were there this many mercenaries, i think at most maybe there were 10k mercs involved in a war..
 
I really hope that this hint
relates to the condottieri mechanic and does not hint at a complete overhaul of the mercenary system. It would be great if you could put one of your armies up for sale as condottieri. It would however be disastrous if the only way you could hire mercenaries is by paying entire mercenary companies. Here is when I typically use mercenaries: In the early game when I need to fight a tough war or multiple wars back to back and after 1630 when I am constantly fighting wars and rebels due to the game only being about blobbing at that point. In the first instance you would typically only hire a couple mercenary regiments, an entire army of mercs would bancrupt you if you start as a small tag. Not being able to hire single mercenary regiments in an instance where every singular increase to your force limit makes all the difference would ruin your experience. I really hope that stays in the game, but then why bother with the merc company mechanic? In the second instance you have no other choice than to rely on mercenaries, as manpower simply does not recover fast enough and there are too many sources that drain manpower needlessly. Here is an example from real history: Napoleon knew that even if his entire army would be wiped out to the last man, after two years of peace we would be able to field a new army at full strength again. In this example I am of course talking about the super late game, but there is simply no way that manpower recovers fast enough even in the age of revolutions. If we should rely more on regular units then manpower recovery needs to be significantly faster. As an instance of the game needlessly draining your manpower I would point at the attrition mechanics: I am sure everyone has encountered a situation in which you want to use a full stack (combat width x2) for battle only to discover that the only province in which that stack does not suffer attrition is your capital. I do not wish to play the late game at speed 2 and watch it like a hawk only to prevent all the silly manpower losses from attrition in my own land. That of course could easily be fixed by removing attrition in owned provinces entirely (even if someone then makes a screenshot of a 500k Russian stack in a 3 dev province in Siberia not suffering attrition it would be significantly better than the current system) or by simply increasing the supply limit of a province to combat width x2 of the tag that owns it. You could then change it to say 75% for a province you occupy and 50% for a province you do not occupy.
If the devs really want to nerf mercs, I believe they first need to buff manpower recovery speed in the second half of the game. If people still rely on mercs too much at that point then they could attach upkeep cost modifiers and combat modifiers depending on the age (say upkeep is 1.5x that of a regular and they receive +2.5% extra discipline in the age of discovery and upkeep is 5x that of a regular and they receive -7.5% discipline in the age of revolutions) and if that still is not good enough they could just implement a constant upper bound for mercs any tag can hire (say 50k) and remove all associated modifierers (available mercs). That way you could still use mercs to help out in the early game regardless of the tag you start with, but you could no longer rely on them in the late game and you would no longer see "merc spam".