Hello EU4 fans! The team have now all returned them their vacations and resumed work, so it's time to get going with the development diaries once more. Because this week has been a busy one, today's diary will be a bit short but should address a topic that people have asked a lot of questions about:

Future Improvements to the Nation Designer

The Nation Designer is, as has been previously mentioned, probably the biggest feature added to EU4 since launch. It's proven quite popular, with custom nations consistently beating out every historical nation as the most popular choice of country to play. It's also received a number of updates, adding things such as the ability to name your own ideas and improved interface support.

However, much as how it is with EU4 itself, with a feature like the nation designer you never feel quite 'done'. There's always more you can add, things to improve and tweak, and we frequently receive requests for updates and improvements to the nation designer, as well as questions about when previously suggested improvements might surface. As such, today's DD is going to be about updates to the Nation Designer: Specifically which ones we either have already done (internally) or are planning to add in the not distant future. So without further ado, here are the planned changes coming to the Nation Designer:

Saving Custom Nation Templates
Probably the most requested feature for the Nation Designer has been the ability to save your custom nations for later use. This has now been implemented and will be available in 1.14. What it means is that while designing your nation, there are now two buttons called 'Save' and 'Load'. Save will save a copy of your Custom Nation (minus the provinces it currently holds) to your hard drive, and Load will load up that copy, replacing the current Custom Nation you are designing with the saved one (again, minus its provinces). This allows you to, for example, quickly re-use a particular setup of ideas or a flag and color combination that you enjoy.

Choosing Government Rank
This is really more of a fix than an addition, as it was something left out of 1.12/1.13 due to time constraints and will be added in 1.14. When designing a custom nation, you will be able to choose your government rank, with Duchy rank being free, Kingdom rank costing 10 points, and Empire rank costing 30 points.

Improved Color Picking
This is something that is not yet done, but we hope to have done for 1.14. In addition to picking from a list of preset colors, I want to add the ability to choose your country's color from an in-game RGB picker, allowing for true color customization.

More Patterns and Emblems
As above, this is something we hope to have done for 1.14. We want to add support for more texture files for country flag patterns and emblems, so that we can create more options for flag customization.

Better Random Setup
While not fully part of the Nation Designer, the random setup option that fills the world with randomly generated countries is nonetheless a feature that we want to improve on. Right now, it suffers a bit from being 'samey': You'll generally always end up with a couple megablobs, a number of medium sized countries, and a general feeling of lack of plausibility on behalf of the generated world. We want to add more options for controlling the size of the countries generated, as well as better country naming (being able to name countries after regions rather than capitals, for example) and better random idea generation. We're also considering adding options such as different tech group distribution and different uncolonized parts of the world.

Achievements
Though the Nation Designer supports Ironman, there are currently no achievements that are able to be unlocked while playing a Custom Nation. In the future, we plan to add some Nation Designer-specific achievements that will require particular point limits to be followed, and may as an example require you to start as a Norse Custom Nation and conquer Northern Europe.


If you have other improvements you'd like to see, feel free to bring them up in this thread and I will do my best to answer as to whether they are likely to ever happen. Note that I will not discuss ETAs on when patches containing these changes may show up.

 

[ahyangyi]

Will be cool if we could choose a template of a real nation in the "saved template tab" (or in another tab, whatever), and play with this nation in a different year, or even change the nation a little bit to make it more interesting.

I guess the problem is real nation idea sets contain some unique bonuses that are harder to decide a price.

 

[Tullio25]

I like custom things and i really want this in the game (only if playing in nation designer mode ):
When reaching the point of upgrading to a higher rank, or when changing dynasty i want to be able to rename my country name and flag.

 

[ankpraka]

Hey All. I have been away from this game for the last 4-5 months at least. Was thinking of picking this again. Thought of buying the common sense expansion but then saw that steam reviews section is full of negative reviews for this DLC. Some say it ruined a EUIV for them after having spent 1000+ hours in it. People are suggesting to revert to the previous patch before common sense, Why so? What happened? I have spent enough time with Paradox to know that these things normally don't happen and their user reviews are always very high. Can someone please enlighten me as to what happened in the past 4-5 months. Thanks.

 

[sancredo]

I think the only thing I miss from custom nations is the possibility to load unused tags. Let's say I want to play an alternative reality where the Kingdom of Jerusalem never fell; it'd be great to load the preset of the Kingdom, with its colours, its flag, its dinasty, tradition and ideas, and select provinces, instead of having to create a fake K of Jerusalem from scratch.

Ths could also be used to start games with the CKII-imported Roman and Aztec Empires tags and ideas instead of custom usermade ones.

 

[Martin_Mortyry]

Hey All. I have been away from this game for the last 4-5 months at least. Was thinking of picking this again. Thought of buying the common sense expansion but then saw that steam reviews section is full of negative reviews for this DLC. Some say it ruined a EUIV for them after having spent 1000+ hours in it. People are suggesting to revert to the previous patch before common sense, Why so? What happened? I have spent enough time with Paradox to know that these things normally don't happen and their user reviews are always very high. Can someone please enlighten me as to what happened in the past 4-5 months. Thanks.

Some people just don't like changes. And CS changed a lot. Fortunately, most of the changes are positive, though I don't recommend playing the game without the expansion since it contains some vital options such as improving province development. Can't blame them to be honest because I myself find some things being DLC-only frustrating as well.
People might also complain about fort system, which I persoanlly dig, though it sometimes seems bugged. Can't imagine people not liking map changes, these were huge and more historical.

To summarise - it's great expansion, negative outcome most likely comes from the need of owning the Common Sense for full game experience.

 

[ankpraka]

Some people just don't like changes. And CS changed a lot. Fortunately, most of the changes are positive, though I don't recommend playing the game without the expansion since it contains some vital options such as improving province development. Can't blame them to be honest because I myself find some things being DLC-only frustrating as well.
People might also complain about fort system, which I persoanlly dig, though it sometimes seems bugged. Can't imagine people not liking map changes, these were huge and more historical.

To summarise - it's great expansion, negative outcome most likely comes from the need of owning the Common Sense for full game experience.

Thanks. So, as I already own all the previous expansions, if I buy common sense, I should be okay. Right? There is nothing broken in the game as such after CS?

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

Using random nations (or even custom ones) if the Papacy is not on the map, there are problems with the Curia not working correctly - I've seen the Curia under the control of a non-existing non-Papal nation, and it seems impossible to win the Curia and gain control of the Papal functions.

Is it possible to allow a random nation to have the Papacy government and to bring the Curia back on line? Is it possible to allow custom nations to have the government type?

Failing anything else, can we have the fix from EUIII whereby a random Catholic Theocracy can become the Papal States if the current one falls?

 

[eon47]

Thanks. So, as I already own all the previous expansions, if I buy common sense, I should be okay. Right? There is nothing broken in the game as such after CS?

There are a few things that could use rebalancing as always, but nothing I'd describe as even remotely broken. Personally, I think the game is as at a high point right now.

 

[wingzero890]

Some people just don't like changes. And CS changed a lot. Fortunately, most of the changes are positive, though I don't recommend playing the game without the expansion since it contains some vital options such as improving province development. Can't blame them to be honest because I myself find some things being DLC-only frustrating as well.
People might also complain about fort system, which I persoanlly dig, though it sometimes seems bugged. Can't imagine people not liking map changes, these were huge and more historical.

To summarise - it's great expansion, negative outcome most likely comes from the need of owning the Common Sense for full game experience.

Playing with CS off prevents minors from developing their provinces into metropolises, so I honestly think the game is better with it disabled right now. Wallachia should never have a bigger capital than France or the Ottomans.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

Playing with CS off prevents minors from developing their provinces into metropolises, so I honestly think the game is better with it disabled right now. Wallachia should never have a bigger capital than France or the Ottomans.

Sure, and in a similar vein the argument that Wallachia shouldn't be able to build /all/ the pre CS buildings in their capital can be, and was, made. For Wallachia to raise their capital to a similar level to Paris or Constantinople takes an awful lot of points.

Perhaps a limit to how far you can raise things should be put in (whether soft or hard), perhaps the AI should be made less willing to raise the development of their provinces so far. Both of those though are balancing issues that will take time and reasoned feedback.

 

[Galaahd]

How about we just add a monetary cost on top of the monarch points cost for development?

That'd be a good money sink and OPMs like Walacchia will have a harder time becoming a metropolis.

 

[wergy]

I'm kinda disappointed. I was looking forward to some news abou fixing the pile of bugs in 1.13.

 

[Martin_Mortyry]

Playing with CS off prevents minors from developing their provinces into metropolises, so I honestly think the game is better with it disabled right now. Wallachia should never have a bigger capital than France or the Ottomans.

On the other hand it handicapes the player, and as we all know - devs "don't f***ing care about singleplayer".

 

[Carmilla]

-Snip-

Will you be adding cultures as well? I'm thinking specifically of various romance cultures, other older ones such as the pre-arabization egyptian, levant and african ones, celtic ones other than the few we have(gauls and iberian ones for instance) and so forth.

 

[DC123456789]

Why? None of those cultures are even in CK2, so you wouldn't even be able to get them through the converter.

 

[Carmilla]

Why? None of those cultures are even in CK2, so you wouldn't even be able to get them through the converter.

Romans are.

And for fun alternate history scenarios. Why else?

 

[Martin_Mortyry]

Will you be adding cultures as well? I'm thinking specifically of various romance cultures, other older ones such as the pre-arabization egyptian, levant and african ones, celtic ones other than the few we have(gauls and iberian ones for instance) and so forth.

Would also be nice to see old prussian culture back. If not in normal game - then at least as an option for custom nation's culture, similarly to norse religion.

 

[Carmilla]

Would also be nice to see old prussian culture back. If not in normal game - then at least as an option for custom nation's culture, similarly to norse religion.

Stuff like this would also be much appreciated yes.

 

[Itchel]

While it is possible to save your whole custom nation, Can you make it so you can save your idea sets as well?

I'd like to be able to make multiple countries with the same national ideas, Simular to how we have "german ideas" "french ducal ideas" and "indian sultanate ideas"

 

[Promanco]

So all that we need to do is create a ridiculous file in which every name and every regnal permutation of that name is set to male, but then some names also trigger hidden "female" flags, and then make all of the titles and pronouns gender neutral (which is lame, anyway), and then ...

Or, they could just add a simple option to the nation designer. Seems pretty easy to me.

EDIT: Plus, mods don't work in Ironman.

After sleeping about this issue, you have sway me.
ALL female rules should be capable of becoming commanders granted they meet a requirement on minimum MIL stat(I think 4 or 5 but you might disagree), this should be moddable on defines where you can change the minimum MIL stat to become a commander, when set to zero all females can become commander regardless of everything, for the nation designer there should be a toggle= Matriarchy or Patriarchy(names should probably be change for political reasons), if a Patriarchy the rules for commanders are the same as the base game, if is a Matriarchy the rules are flip and the limitation for commanders goes on the Male gender.
The reason for my change of heart is: 1)Historically it is not farfetch that a VERY military capable female rules would lead her troops into battle(altho not very likely still possible if she excels at it)
2)Moddability as I describe in default would make it super easy to control how likely they are to appear(if you want none at all you can just set MIL = 7 and it wont happen), altho it IS already possible to mod this as I described before this would make it easier AND give the modder the ability to control how often it will happen as oppose to all or nothing.
3)Now that Wiz confirmed they will add more CK2 converter religions(without specifying which, but I still like it quite a lot) Hellenistic religion is MORE farfetch than a Matriarchy and I would be a hypocrite if I was happy about Hellenistic religion and oppose the possibility of a Matriarchy.
EDIT:Thinking about it they could add the same minimum requirement on MIL for males on defines, on the base game it would be MIL = 0 (all of them can be commanders, this is historic A LOT of incompetent rulers lead their troops to disaster) but a modder might want only capable male rulers to command troops or maybe they want no ruler at all to lead the troops; under this set up they could just set up both female and male rulers to min_MIL = 7.