Hello everyone! Common Sense and 1.12 have been released, and our expansion sales continue to shatter previous records! With the expansion and patch now out, we're going to shift into a different gear with our dev diaries for a while, talking about other things than upcoming features. Some ideas we've had is to discuss our design process, how we handle feedback from fans, and reflections on different parts of the game and where we want to see them go in the future.

Today, however, we're busy working on a hotfix for 1.12, so I thought I'd tell you about that, and also a bit about why there will always be bugs on release of a new expansion.

Let's deal with the hotfix first. From what we've seen, 1.12 has been a smooth launch for the majority of users, with a low bug count in new features, but there were some serious technical issues on certain hardware setups.

The hotfix is expected to be released today or tomorrow, and at present contains fixes for the following issues:

Hotfix 1.12.1 (AS OF WRITING OF THIS POST, THIS IS NOT YET OUT)
- Fixed a bug where the AI would declare suicidal wars due to incorrectly calculating defensive call acceptance
- Spain can no longer form Andalusia and vice versa (preventing endless nation forming loop for prestige)
- Forts can no longer take control of other provinces with forts (capital, mothballed or otherwise)
- Fixed a bug where the AI would accept concede defeat as the only concession even when they had 100% warscore.
- Fixed a bug where single player games started with the 'Only host can save' setting would be unable to be loaded.
- Fixed a bug where some AIs would constantly mothball and unmothball forts (this could cause serious performance hit on lower end machines as well)
- Fixed a bug where the AI would continously march back and forth between two provinces in a fort's ZoC
- Fixed exploit where you could give away ally's provinces even if not occupied in coalition war.
- Fixed a bug where rebels would spawn at very low morale when there were hostile units in their spawn province.
- Fixed an issue with steam workshop removing supported_version from .mod files
- Fixed an issue where .mod files would be printed with garbled data, resulting in CTD on launch
- Fixed an exploit where you could give away the provinces of your war allies even if they were not occupied (you should only be able to give away your own unoccupied provinces)
- Unit movement lock can no longer be bypassed by issuing another move order.
- Fixed artillery models for several different unit packs to have the correct infantry model accompanying it.
- Lowered cost of diplomatic annexation from 10 to 8 dip points per development (since there's more ways to decrease adm cost)
- Autonomy from diploannexation is now 60 (down from 75)
- Fixes issues using the MacBook trackpad when interacting with the map on OSX.
- Fixed a CTD in AI province conquest weight calculation
- Fixed a CTD related to rebels in uncolonized provinces
- Game no longer crashes when forcing nations with subjects to revoke claims.
- Save games saved in 1.12 no longer cause CTDs in 1.11 (only applies to saves made after this hotfix is applied)
- The '+' key should now increase game speed correctly on US/UK keyboards.
- Fixed issue where foreign Separatists defecting to your country caused your country to act as if it was just released.

Note that we are only considering important fixes and tweaks for hotfixes, so if you have a bug you think should be hotfixed, take a moment and ask yourself whether or not it can wait until the larger bugfixing patch that we'll be releasing later in June.


Why do patches always have bugs?
This is a question we get a lot, along with 'Do you even test your games?', and 'Do you even play your own games?'. The answer is, yes, we play our own games, and yes, we test our games. Loosely calculated, about 2400 man-hours of QA has gone into Common Sense, and before a launch every feature is tested thoroughly. Over the course of the development of 1.12 and Common Sense, approximately 1200 bugs have been fixed by the team.

So why, then, do bugs still get into the release? There are two sides to this, and the first one is math.

As of Tuesday night, we had around 20000 concurrent players. If we assume that those 20000 people each play 2 hours that night, that is 40000 hours of play. In order to have equivalent QA test hours to only 2 hours of play on a release night, we would need a team of 30 full-time QA. Scenarios that only happen once every 10000 games will realistically never happen for our QA, and when you factor in that those 20000 players have 20000 different hardware setups... you can begin to see why things like the game not launching on a single core computer (we do not have a single core computer in QA because they haven't been making them for over half a decade) or the engine upgrade breaking mac trackpads (we did not have a mac trackpad in QA, we now do and will use to test future versions) happen.

That's one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is priority.

It's always our ambition to release new expansions without bugs in the new features, and for this reason we consider newly introduced bugs higher priority than older ones. We haven't always done a great job of this in the past, but 1.12/Common Sense had a much lower bug count in new features than previous expansions. There were however, a couple immediately apparent issues, particularly the fact that movement locking did not work at all. You might reasonably ask yourself how such a thing slipped through QA. The answer: It didn't.

The movement locking bug was introduced in the very last build we made for release, as a result of fixing another bug where ZoCs would create weird movement paths. It was only found after the build was done and smoke tested (smoke testing is basically a thorough 'does the game actually run' test that we do on anything we release to the public). Given that we had no other serious known issues at the time, I made the call that the issue was not serious enough to warrant spending another half a day making a new build and testing that build. QA found the issue, I chose not to fix it because the time spent making a new build could be better spent working on our back log of older bugs, and I figured that we'd have to make a hotfix anyway due to the risk for technical issues appearing with the engine upgrade.

The simple fact of it is that we are probably never going to have a launch that doesn't introduce at least one or two serious technical issues, because we do not, and cannot test the game on the thousands and thousands of different hardware configurations that will be playing the game the moment we set the patch live. The measure of a successful launch, in my book, is not that there are no bugs, but rather that there are no serious bugs which could reasonably have been caught by our internal testing.

Do I expect this explanation to change much? Not really, because I think people like easy explanations, and 'Paradox does not even test their expansions' is a much easier explanation than 'In a complex piece of software you will always have some bugs no matter how much QA you do', 'Fixing bugs can introduce new bugs' and 'Not all bugs are worth grinding development to a halt in order to fix'.

Nonetheless, for those who wish to know, there it is.

 

[Metz]

Can you add a button to elongate the production, diplomacy, and peace screens? They are kind of clustered due to their size. There is a mod for it but I feel it should be included in the vanilla game. It is useful for less scrolling and less clicking around.

 

[Wizzington]

I doubt it's impossible even now. One tag perhaps, but even there I suspect someone will find a way.

 

[TheeLord]

Thank you! And great job on CS, very clean launch IMO. And I love the changes!!

 

[pikaemperor]

When will the multiple coalitions wars at the same time bug be fixed?

 

[balmung60]

Nice to finally see the DLC unit models extended to artillerymen.

And here's hoping that the hotfix solves my inability to launch the game.

 

[Steelers1990]

Fix 1 bug, 4 show up, fix 4 bugs, 100 show up. Never ending battle vs bugs!!!!!!!

 

[Voidian]

When will the multiple coalitions wars at the same time bug be fixed?

Is there a bug?

Is this related to the reason I lost 6 games since Common Sense through massive coalition wars?

 

[pikaemperor]

Is there a bug?

Is this related to the reason I lost 6 games since Common Sense through massive coalition wars?

# Coalition CB
cb_super_badboy = {

    prerequisites = {   
        coalition_target = FROM
        NOT = { FROM = { is_in_coalition_war = yes } }
        num_of_coalition_members = 3
        has_opinion_modifier = {
            modifier = aggressive_expansion
            who = FROM
        }
        is_revolution_target = no
    }
   
    war_goal = superiority_punitive
}

Took from the 1.11.4 because I just rolled back to finish venetian sea, but that line NOT = { FROM = { is_in_coalition_war = yes } } was still the same in 1.12. Got dow by second coalition with coalition cb that they should not have because I was defending from first coalition.

 

[Tom013]

# Coalition CB
cb_super_badboy = {

    prerequisites = {  
        coalition_target = FROM
        NOT = { FROM = { is_in_coalition_war = yes } }
        num_of_coalition_members = 3
        has_opinion_modifier = {
            modifier = aggressive_expansion
            who = FROM
        }
        is_revolution_target = no
    }
  
    war_goal = superiority_punitive
}

Took from the 1.11.4 because I just rolled back to finish venetian sea, but that line NOT = { FROM = { is_in_coalition_war = yes } } was still the same in 1.12. Got dow by second coalition with coalition cb that they should not have because I was defending from first coalition.

That only prevents the Coalition CB, not (any other) war that involves the whole coalition. If they have an alternate CB, they can still pull in the whole coalition. Are you sure you're seeing a bug there?

 

[erisiamk]

Thank you very much for this rapid hotfix, it's much appreciated. However, I'm not sure that changing the cost for diplo-annexing from 10 DIP to 8 DIP per base tax is the best way of balancing it against direct coring. You say that there are more modifiers for direct coring, but a generic country can only get -35% coring cost guaranteed from a claim and Admin ideas, while a generic country can get -45% annexation cost from Influence ideas and the Influence-Admin policy. Considering the DIP cost of running the policy, this seems pretty balanced as is. Having 8 DIP per base tax also makes it quite annoying to interpret a subject's development from the annexation cost, and could make the process more obscure to new players. Perhaps a better solution would be to keep the old 10 DIP per development cost but provide more countries with diplo-annexation cost modifiers, to match the -10% coring modifiers for countries like Ethiopia? I appreciate that this would be more work but I think it would make for a more transparent and consistent relationship between the coring and annexation mechanics.

 

[Erilaq]

Thank you for the detailed response. This is why I always recommend your games, because of the care given to your customers. You didn't have to write this out, and most companies don't, you have my gratitude and loyalty

 

[Kazum]

I wrote this in r/eu4 as well:

1.12 really changed the game quite alot. Some people don't like it, some do.
Would it be possible to accommodate both parties by having a launcher option to revert to 1.11 (probably without common sense support)?

I would LOVE that. It seems to be a trivial thing to do and as this patch is the most game chaning patch you have ever released, it would make sense to do it. If we got nostalgic towards 1.11 and the old system without forts and all the balance changes we could just check a box and play 1.11 again instead of ranting about change on the forums.

 

[GeneralJhon]

After playing this game for a lot of hours and reading the forums, I see the need for a clarification on how the game is intended to be played. A lot of people will have an objective and run with it and not play until 1821. For the people who did play a complete game, the goal was, commonly, world conquest (yes there are other reasons too, I am, and have to generalize).

What needs to be clarified is this: Is this game intended for people who desire to perform a world conquest?

The game is a sandbox, is a History Simulator. Do whatever you want, if you want to create an empire that spawn the entire planet, do it. If you want to simulate some Alternate History (like me playing with Byzantium) do it. It all depends on your Roleplaying skills or what you want to get by playing the game.

 

[kitemasaki]

I love this new change. Much more strategic depth, much more feeling of accomplishment when you get somewhere and having to rethink where I invest is very much welcomed in my book. I have, in the past, been quite uncivil in patch releases, which I regret. The team is doing what they can and do a pretty good job in retrospect. This patch was much smoother than all of the other patches and that is pretty amazing considering that this was the biggest change that has happened to EU4. Good job guys.

 

[chrnno]

I wrote this in r/eu4 as well:

1.12 really changed the game quite alot. Some people don't like it, some do.
Would it be possible to accommodate both parties by having a launcher option to revert to 1.11 (probably without common sense support)?

I would LOVE that. It seems to be a trivial thing to do and as this patch is the most game chaning patch you have ever released, it would make sense to do it. If we got nostalgic towards 1.11 and the old system without forts and all the balance changes we could just check a box and play 1.11 again instead of ranting about change on the forums.

It is not in the launcher but game properties -> betas has the final versions all the way back to 1.4

 

[Krajzen]

AT gain from battles was doubled, seems we need another non battle source though.

The simplest solution would be to raise AT per sieged fort to 5.0 (based on rough estimate of 1 fort per 5 provinces in 1.12 as opposed to 5 per 5 in 1.11. Or 4.0 AT. This could be added in a hotfix and more sophisticated solution invented in some later patch.

Current levels of AT are critically low, as you should expect when main source of them - sieging forts - suddenly becomes 4 - 5 times more sparse!

And unless I missed something, we can't even mod that...

 

[Blindbohemian]

For sure! Our betas are very important for the more 'regular' play they do compared to QA's more focused testing, and some important issues before launch might not have been caught without them.

:O

Can I be a beta?

 

[tjayharvey]

Unless I missed despite re-reading several times trade fleet continuously giving messages rendering the whole unit arrival warning useless won't be on this? In terms of noticeable bugs that was by far the most, at least here.

As much as I really, really would like this fixed, I would never approve that for a hotfix where I work. It's an interface bug only, for a message setting that, while convenient, isn't strictly needed to play the game. I'm hoping it's in the later June update.

 

[pikaemperor]

That only prevents the Coalition CB, not (any other) war that involves the whole coalition. If they have an alternate CB, they can still pull in the whole coalition. Are you sure you're seeing a bug there?

They cite "Coalition" as their casus belli.

 

[TheDarkMaster]

Will there be any balance changes for the non-common sense university? +2 tax is terrible for 300 gold, it takes three times as long to pay for itself as the original temple building did and you can't built it until much later so it has even less time to turn a profit for you.

It also unlocks pretty late for a flat bonus to be that good, but that's a different issue.