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EU4 - Development Diary - 3rd of July 2018

Good day all! We have entered a historically dark month for many of you: July. The heretics of Sweden frequently take this entire month off as vacation to praise the tiny sliver of sun that deigns to bless the country with its presence. The end result means that Development Diaries often take a turn to the silent for the month.

Well fear not! I have decided to engage in the most taboo of actions and keep my butt firmly planted by my desk at work this month. We shall have dev diaries this month, and we're going to start by looking at Climate, Weather and Elephants.

To those who are of patrician enough taste to follow me on Twitter you will have noticed my latest teaser where I showed off a winter in the far south of the Americas. Previously there has been a limitation in how our game can model winters, only managing them in the northern hemisphere. Long unsatisfied with this, we took the time to ensure that in the 1.26 Update this is rectified, so that the winters of Southern Africa, South America and the furthest down under reaches of Australia and New Zealand have their winters correctly modeled. As the icy grip on Russia recedes, expect to bundle up in Chile. This can be seen in our re-purposed mapmode, Weather.

Weather.png

The Weather mapmode previously was called winters

As you can likely tell, there are more than just winters in this view. That's correct, because as part of enriching the Subcontinent in Dharma, we have added Monsoons. During the monsoon season (varies by location), the grounds will become visibly muddier and both movement speed and attrition will be impacted if you are on the military offensive. While we added these to spice up India, we decided to expand it to all Monsoon areas across the map, so across East Asia, Africa and South America.

Feeling Muddy.png

"We want the Spintires audience"

In addition to the map effect and province modifiers, there are also a handful of events for nations experiencing particularly destructive or fruitful Monsoons.

Now it's time to address the elephant in the room, so to speak. People seeing screenshots and watching the devclash have clearly noticed that a new animal has found its way into the arsenal of Indian nations. Yes, in Dharma, we have added Elephants.

Tonnes of fun.png

I'm getting Resident Evil Outbreak flashbacks already

This is something we've added purely for immersion in the Subcontinent, as well as for the South East Asians who also used these majestic creatures in warfare. The elephants are simply a new 3D model for cavalry units for these nations without gameplay impact, but we feel that the empowerment of trampling over puny infantry armies with your walking mountains is worthy as-is. Owners of Dharma will see these elephants in Indian and South East Asian nations.

To recap, all players who update to the 1.26 Mughals Update will enjoy Winters across the world, while Dharma owners will enjoy that along with Monsoons and Elephants.

Next week we'll take a gander at the less visual but highly impactful changes we have made by way of new National Ideas and Formable Nations
 
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So crossing what is basically a stream gives you the same penalty as crossing the Danube or the Yangtze which are so wide at some points they may as well be a sea zone. I'd like to see rivers split up into Major and Minor with different graphics, minor ones can freeze over,
Funny you should mention the Danube there.

Before industrialization, lengthy stretches of it would freeze over in winter every year.
 
Lots of comments about the capped attrition in the game. I am not a fan of the 5% attrition cap and would like to make attrition overall much more meaningful, however we need to do so in such a way that doesn't destroy the AI.

It won't be happening in Dharma, but it is on the "we would love to get this sorted" list.

Thank you for your reply. Helpful, really.

Could you please write down your design vision for the game and the issues you identified and are planning to solve? (in some of the near future DD)

Would be great if you prove me terribly wrong. Don't really like the way EU4 took after your takeover but still love the game, so... Hope that will change :)
 
Lots of comments about the capped attrition in the game. I am not a fan of the 5% attrition cap and would like to make attrition overall much more meaningful, however we need to do so in such a way that doesn't destroy the AI.

It won't be happening in Dharma, but it is on the "we would love to get this sorted" list.

It did use to be 10% attrittion.

I feel 5% cap is too low for attrittion to be meaningful as it dosen't put enough of a strain on finances to stop the solution merely being Mercspam.

But at the same time; a 10% cap is generally too high and makes regions that are Arid/Tropic/Russia nightmares to both invade and play in.

Maybe 8%?
 
Lots of comments about the capped attrition in the game. I am not a fan of the 5% attrition cap and would like to make attrition overall much more meaningful, however we need to do so in such a way that doesn't destroy the AI.

It won't be happening in Dharma, but it is on the "we would love to get this sorted" list.

Perhaps some modders might be able to find a solution to this problem which you could then adopt. Unsure if that would be feasible or not, though. Not unheard of, though, for the devs to adopt things from various mods, however. Think of them as your R&D laboratories. ;)
 
the weather map mode is an excellent addition...
 
@DDRJake hey dude, is there really enough Dharma related content to last for the next month and a half of Dev Diaries? Or there will be some non Dharma related DDs in that time? I’m guessing that all the major Dharma reveals have already been made?
 
It looks like 1.26 and Dharma will be quite a large update, which is nice. I much prefer big updates at with long intervals to the small but frequent alternative. Hopefully we'll see some good AI fixes as well :)

I had noticed the monsoons from the dev clash. Wheather/climate for the southern hemisphere is also a nice touch, even though I doubt I'll spend much time enjoying/cursing the snow since I pretty much never enable the terrain map mode.
 
MONSOONS = YES

I would also love to see other dynamic weather effects and disasters. Add floods, earthquakes, hurricanes/cyclones, tsunamis, locusts, droughts, crop failures, heatwaves, tornadoes, ice storms, blizzards, famines, wildfires, landslides, volcanic eruptions, and so on. The earth itself can and should be an opponent! Sliders at startup could determine the frequency and intensity of disasters.
 
Perhaps some modders might be able to find a solution to this problem which you could then adopt.
Modders have no scope to tune the necessary parts of the computer player logic, AFAIK.
 
Perhaps some modders might be able to find a solution to this problem which you could then adopt. Unsure if that would be feasible or not, though. Not unheard of, though, for the devs to adopt things from various mods, however. Think of them as your R&D laboratories. ;)
And we would investigate, if we had an way to do something about it. But, as grommile said, we don't have the tools... it's a matter of AI coding, which is out of our reach.

And i can vouch for the fact that, before, the AI would be willing to suicide in provinces of high attrition.
 
Lots of comments about the capped attrition in the game. I am not a fan of the 5% attrition cap and would like to make attrition overall much more meaningful, however we need to do so in such a way that doesn't destroy the AI.

It won't be happening in Dharma, but it is on the "we would love to get this sorted" list.

How about Reinforce speed going all the way down to -100% instead of more attrition
 
Lots of comments about the capped attrition in the game. I am not a fan of the 5% attrition cap and would like to make attrition overall much more meaningful, however we need to do so in such a way that doesn't destroy the AI.

It won't be happening in Dharma, but it is on the "we would love to get this sorted" list.
It may just be putting a bandaid on a gunshot wound, but I may have a "solution." One of the first things you learn in the game, is how to maneuver your armies, and pretty much everyone can out-do the AI in that way. And doesn't maneuver also affect how much attrition an army takes during sieges? So do you, or anyone, think that giving the AI a +1 or +2 to maneuver pips to compensate for that, and allow attrition to be more of a thing? Another way, like how AI doesn't take naval attrtition from distance, maybe do the same, or nerf the amount of attrition the AI takes on land?
 
Just to let the good boys at Paradox know, monsoons are common in the American Southwest, the border states. Apparently they are not nearly as devastating as the ones in India, it may be something to consider.
 
Lots of comments about the capped attrition in the game. I am not a fan of the 5% attrition cap and would like to make attrition overall much more meaningful, however we need to do so in such a way that doesn't destroy the AI.

It won't be happening in Dharma, but it is on the "we would love to get this sorted" list.

What a coincidence. I just made thread about how to use max_attrition as a global modifier (since my way is rather process-heavy). Could you please consider adding a global_max_attrition modifier so that modders can do some tests? :) Also, about the AI: why not give them a portion of the lost manpower back to their manpower pool? That way they will have a weakened army when they siege like always, but they won't get as punished as a human would, as they can reinforce back. Seems rather fair to me.
Example: an army sieges a provinces, and gets attritioned, losing 1K. For a human, it is lost, but the AI will have received 350 men back, who can be used to reinforce the army back. The difference compared to lower attrition damage is that the army is still juicy to attack after the attrition.
 
Which means you took measures to limit attrition by splitting up your stacks, using only as many units as needed to siege a fort, mercs, probably even Quantity Ideas. Which means attrition mattered enough for you to take those steps.

I think you're missing the point here...

But as DDRjake says, it seems to be an AI imposed limitation at this point. Having more multiplayer hosting options would be nice though, especially limiting starting nation picks by Dev range, culture, region etc. Would save hundreds of collective hours arguing on lobbies.