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Today is thursday, the day of the God of Thunder, so what is a more appropriate way to celebrate than with a development diary for Europa Univeralis IV. We’ve talked about development and politics the last few weeks, so now its time to talk a bit more about warfare again, before going back to more peacetime-related activities.

All of this mentioned in this development diary will be in the free update accompanying the next expansion.

Fortress Rework
Connecting a bit to the previous reveal of our change to how building works, we have overhauled the fortress system.

There are now four different forts, one available each century, providing 1, 3, 5 and 7 fort-levels each. A newer fort makes the previous obsolete, so you only have 1 fort in each province. Each fortress also provides 5000 garrison per fort level, so besieging a fortress now requires a large investment.

Forts now also require maintenance to be paid each month, which currently costs about 1.5 ducats for a level 1 fort per month in 1444. Luckily, you can mothball a fortress which makes it drop to just 10 men defending it, and won’t cost you anything in upkeep.

Garrison growth for a fort is also a fair amount slower than before, so after you have taken a fort, you may want to stick around to protect it for a bit.

What is most important to know though, is that forts now have a Zone of Control. First of all, they will automatically take control of any adjacent province that does not have any forts that is adjacent and hostile to them. If two fortress compete over the same province, then the one with highest fort-level wins and in case of a tie, control goes to the owner of the province. Secondly, you can not walk past a fortress and its zone of control, as you have to siege down the blocking fort first.

Each capital have a free fort-level, but that fort will not have any ZoC, as most minor nations can not afford a major fortress.

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Looting
As we promised, we have now completely revised how looting works. Now there is a “pile” of possible loot in a province, which is directly tied to have developed the province is.

At the end of each month, all hostile units in a province attempt to loot, and the amount they loot depend on how many regiments you have there, and what types they are, where cavalry is by far the best. Some ideas and governments increase the amount you loot each month, where for example Steppe Hordes gains a nice boost.

A province starts recovering from being looted when 6 months have passed since last loot, and it takes up to a year until it has fully recovered.

Of course, the penalty on a province from being looted is still there until it has fully recovered, but it is scaled on how much have been looted.

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Committed Armies
One of the major complaints we have had on the combat in Eu4, has been the fact that you can fully abort your movement whenever you liked. This have been changed, and now you can’t abort your movement if you have already moved 50% of the way. After all, its just common sense that a unit that have already moved halfway between the centers of two provinces is already in the second one.

Force Limits
We felt that the calculations of forcelimits where far too hidden from the player, Players saw stuff like “+25.87 from Provinces”, which based based on projections of base-tax amongst other things, and sometimes those dropped for no obvious reasons.

Now you will be able to see in each province how much it provides to your forcelimits, and we have cleaned up the logic.

Each level of development gives 0.1 land and naval forcelimit.
Overseas will provide -2 land and -2 naval forcelimit
Inland provinces will not provide any naval forcelimit.
However, a province will never be able to provide negative forcelimits.

A nation also have a base value of +3 land and +2 naval force limit, and there are some other ways to get direct forcelimit increased, that are not just percentage increases.

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Next week, we'll be back and talk more about The Devout.
 
This is amazing! Can't wait to play the new expansion.

Do we have any ETA yet?
As far as I can see they are making some very gamechanging conceptual changes. The developer diaries are therefore very general in terms of information to give time for balancing and implementing it smoothly to avoid unwanted interactions (bugs). Given that and their previous statements, I would expect us being at least a couple of months out, depending on how smooth the development goes. I would rather see a better tested and well-working patch than a patch needing several critical hotfixes to work as intended, thus I like their lack of specifying when they are going to release the update. In the end, the back and forth between code monkeys and play slaves should determine if the game is ready for release rather than an arbitrarily set date.
 
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Let me ask a question here, that worries all the russian-speaking community of the forum in strategium.ru.

Is it possible to move the army deeper into enemy territory after lifting the siege of the fort? Can this army enter to another Zone of control?
 
Will Sortie still be in the game? Looks it little bit overpowered with such huge fort armys.

I think this is the idea of forts. Historically speaking, forts were super super hard to take and in EU4 there is no problem taking them as you can plant 3k on a fort and you are guaranteed winning the siege. With the option to now sally a huge fighting force ontop of your other armies, taking forts will be super hard. Basically, it will be a lot of stand stills on fort borders now if both sides have equal-ish army sizes since either one will lose if you send in an army since they will just sortie you.
 
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Will Sortie still be in the game? Looks it little bit overpowered with such huge fort armys.

Forts are powerful but expensive (not just the monetary cost - remember, building slots will be severely limited). You get what you pay for, and in a close contest, the defender naturally has the advantage.

Sorties are going to be more important in the early game, but in the late game I'm guessing they'll mostly be just an anti-carpeting development, or an emergency source of reinforcements if a big battle takes place on top of the fort. If they come out on their own in the open, even a level 7 mega-fort's garrison of 35k men would get crushed by a late-game full stack with general (especially if that '35k garrison' doesn't have the right balance of inf/cav/art). Even if the garrison had a good chance of winning, sending out a sortie when you only have a handful of forts is inherently a very risky move, like sending the goalkeeper on the offensive in a soccer match.
 
This game really needs militia or garrison troop type. Lower discipline and tactics but cheaper.
 
Quick random idea, from playing today, if a forts ZOC stops an army's movement could say a 6 manoeuvre be able to slip through, recreates a Fredrick, Napoleon, Marlborough. The caveat is that such leaders are incredibly rare.
 
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I just realized I have no idea what Maneuver does...
Removes river and strait crossing penalties if higher than opposing general's, increases speed of the army, increases reinforcement ratio and reduces weight of the army(thus attrition).
 
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Quick random idea, from playing today, if a forts ZOC stops an army's movement could say a 6 manoeuvre be able to slip through, recreates a Fredrick, Napoleon, Marlborough. The caveat is that such leaders are incredibly rare.
Could be exploitive though. Switch to 6 manoeuvre general, reach your favoured place & then switch back to your max fire/shock general. If they could make switching generals take a bit of time, then it would be quite a reasonable feature for high manoeuvre leaders to be able to escape ZoC.
 
How about a new combat system with tactical controls like making columns, entering reserves into battle, regrouping of forces?
And separate units like shooters (jaegers), line infantry, light cavalry, line cavalry (cuirassiers)?
 
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At last I can sign up after several days "not working"....

Question about the fortress and ZOC:
- I own a province with no fort, and it is not adjacent to another fort, and I have an army there.
- On the other side of the border, there is a fortress.
- War is declared.
- Do I automatically lose control of my province because the ennemy has a fort adjacent to it and I don't, even if I have an army there?

Personnally, I don't like this ZOC idea very much, if I understand it correctly.

I don't like that a fortress can automatically control alll the adjacent provinces if they are not protected by a bigger fort. Day one of a war, all the provinces adjacent to a ennemy fort and not to one of mine immediately change side! I can't imagine an example in history when this happened. Fortresses are to prevent the ennemy for coming to your place, not to project power and capture the ennemy

- I think it should still be mandatory to send an army to a province to get control. And it shouldn't be immediate. However, we could consider that an province without any fortress could be "besieged" in a relatively short time (one week? One month?) Minimum time to get control of the administration there.

- to keep control of a province, you should keep a regiment there, or be adjacent to a fort (so fort don't give an automatic control of a province, but allows keeping control once the province has been captured.

- I like better the fact that a fortress stops the movement of ennemy units until captured. But I think it should still be possible to cover the fortress and move further in ennemy territory, as it was possible before. If the fortress is surrounded and besieged, it cannot prevent the besieging army from moving, except if the fortress is a "full size fortification of the whole border". But then the fortress would protect only one border, and so prevent movement from only one direction.

So, why not have a better supply line mechanism? With a large increase of attrition if an army tries to go beyond a besieged fortress?
 
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Could be exploitive though. Switch to 6 manoeuvre general, reach your favoured place & then switch back to your max fire/shock general. If they could make switching generals take a bit of time, then it would be quite a reasonable feature for high manoeuvre leaders to be able to escape ZoC.

Don't think it would work, cause if you're slipping a ZoC, it means you're in hostile territory, where you can't reassign generals.
 
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why not have a better supply line mechanism? With a large increase of attrition if an army tries to go beyond a besieged fortress?
Good idea. Sorties should lead to losses in the enemy troops.
Sorties are carried out even if they are not shown by game mechanics.
 
Quick random idea, from playing today, if a forts ZOC stops an army's movement could say a 6 manoeuvre be able to slip through, recreates a Fredrick, Napoleon, Marlborough. The caveat is that such leaders are incredibly rare.

The problem with the ZOC idea is that forts were not capable of blocking an entire province. We're talking at least 100km frontage per province and it's not physically possible for a fortress to block all access. Even with artillery a fortress can't cover more than about 4km. Sure they can dominate major routes but armies of this period were not as road bound as those of 20th century. Even in Napoleon's Italian campaign, with more advanced logistics than existed in the 1400's & 1500's, he was able to slip an army past a small but strong fort blocking the route out of the Alps.
 
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