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EU4 - Development Diary - 6th of December 2016

Hi everyone and welcome to another development diary for Europa Universalis IV. We’ve been working on the 1.20 patch and its accompanying unannounced expansion for a while now.

We’ve reworked some internal mechanics so looted and scorched earth are no longer just binary-statuses, but instead they affect something we call devastation.

A provinces’ devastation ranges from 0 to 100%, and it affects local autonomy, supply limits and how much goods are produced in the province. It also reduces the spread of institutions into that province, and increases the development cost of the province.

Each time a province is looted, its devastation is increased by 5%, and a scorched earth increased it by 25%.

Each year devastation is reduced by 1%, and within the zone of control of a fortification, it is reduced by 2% for each fort level each year.

Unrest is also increasing the devastation of a province by the amount of unrest each year.

devastation.png


What does this give you? Well, loot is is no longer just a strong penalty for a short period of time, but continuous conflict zones will grow far worse.


A cool feature for the expansion though is the concept of Prosperity, which is a state-level bonus. Any state that has 0 devastation in all its provinces and the country is at positive stability will have a small counter tick up each month, depending on the abilities of its government. It is a random chance, but when the counter reached 100%, then the state has reached Prosperity.

A state with prosperity gives -10% to development cost, and +25% to goods produced.

prosperity.png


Stay tuned, next week we’ll talk about something that will probably be the biggest feature added to the game since we started EU4.
 
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Added unrest because of looting makes intuitive sense but is separatism staying at present levels. If it is that's not all that objectionable BUT we need a button or some form of option to toggle looting on and off.

Oh - another huge nerf to hordes!
 
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It would be nice if you could end war with "draw", but because all of it happened in enemy territory they are devastated to the ground and then you win, but not directly.

Yep fun. Lets call it White Peace :)
 
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Seems like Humanism will be buffed
 
So you try to solve the problem of nobody liking forts (except in mountain chokepoints) with another stopgap measure. Great.

1ffzlz


Unless you give us something to prevent carpet sieging AI and make them affordable, this will be horrible for any wide empire strategy. Every province looted and devastated. Now I have no choice to build forts but still can't:
1. In early game I can't afford a fort in every zone of control
2. From mid-game on upgrading them costs tons of money or I give away warscore for free with outdated forts.
3. Zones of control...how should I even know where to build the damn forts in the first place?
 
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Prosperity of Dalaskogen seems balanced. Will the production bonus scale with other production efficiency modifiers or is it just flat 25%?
 
I like it, but what is the real life rationale behind forts helping to reduce devastation faster?
Peasants hiding in the fort. More people being protected means it's easier to recover. It's an abstract value so it's hard to say, but that's my take on it
 
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Rework of combat mechanics?

Imho this is one of the weakest features of EU4 right now, I LOVE the game, but combat is just so basic, no real strategy involved (in the battles themselfs) it's just raw stats that make units stronger/weaker... Would be awesome if there could be some actual strategy in army composition, positioning, tactics, etc.. with specific formation working beter with specific army composition and being usefull to counter other composition/tactics, etc.. Right now it's just to lines of men vs each other, where all the modifiers to it (tactics, morale, pips, discipline, combat ability etc) are just all the same: the more, the beter...

Ya this really needs a rework. Even just some basic stuff like deciding formation of your army. - put cavalry in center, or stagger 1in/1cav/1in/1cav. Tell the cannons to form up behind infantry or behind cavalry.

I suggested tactics a LONG time ago where you could tell your army to be defensive, be aggressive, use guerrilla warfare, etc... And these tactics would affect the time the battle took as well. 2 armies that both have aggressive would be a quick battle with the phases doing lots of dmg. 2 armies both selecting defensive would take longer and the phases do less dmg. Guerrilla warfare could not be used on flat land, and it would take long time.
etc... lots of fun stuff that is kinda simple to implement.



And add Slovenian culture, it's at least as wrong to see them austrian, as to see frisian being westphalian/dutch

The only way Slovenian culture can come into being is if part of Croatian culture stays catholic while the rest converts to a different religion. ....same with Flemish but we don't like to talk about that :)
 
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Why make prosperity binary when you explicitly make another similar feature non-binary in the same breath?

It's not like it makes particular sense for prosperity to be binary either. Should be a scaling modifier.
 
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