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Hello and Welcome to another development diary for Europa Universalis IV. As it is another one written by me, it might be a bit shorter than you’d like, but I hope the information is interesting enough.

One of the things we wanted to focus on with Leviathan was to strengthen the ability to play “tall”,or in other words, how to become more powerful without necessarily expanding all the time. We talked in an earlier diary about the first of three new features regarding playing tall, Expand Infrastructure, which allowed you to stack multiple manufactories in the same province.

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Today we’ll be talking about the second of the ‘play tall’ features for Leviathan, as we delve into Concentrate Development.

Concentrate Development is an interaction that is done to either one of your territories or to one of your subjects states or territories.

This will reduce the development in that area by an amount comparable to a horde razing it, and then that development will be distributed to your country.

Fifty percent of that development will be going directly to your capital, while thirty percent will be distributed randomly among stated provinces, while the final twenty percent is lost.

There is a cooldown of 50 years for how often you can do this in an area.

Doing this to one of your subjects will upset them and also increase their liberty desire, so be careful.

There are also two government reforms that makes this loss less painful, as it removes the twenty percent lost, and instead adds that development to the capital.
  • The Mandala Reform, available to the chinese techgroup and either dharmic, eastern or muslim religions.
  • Siamese Absolutism - which is given from some missions.

Speaking of the Mandala Reform, it's a first tier reform, that besides giving you free development concentration also grants the following.
  • +15% Vassal Income
  • +1 Vassal Force Limit Bonus
  • -33% Governing Capacity

eu4_21.png


Connected to this, is a new peace treaty called Pillage Capital!
As sometimes you want to grow your power, and weaken your enemy, but you do not want to take on more territory. In that case, just use the new “Pillage Capital”(™) peace treaty, which will concentrate development on their capital state, benefiting you!


Stay tuned for next week, when we will talk more about playing tall, and maybe something about canals.
 
Stealing development from another nation just seems like making "playing tall" closer to wide play, rather than distinct. Win war, profit, repeat.

But I guess the line between tall/wide is somewhat imaginary, as most peoples' play styles are likely somewhere between.
 
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Although I'm becoming more and more annoyed and frustrated by the game lately, I like this new feature.
However, it should come with a macrobuilder tab and notification on the top left corner, once you are able to concentrate dev. Otherwise this whole new thing is going to become yet another unnecessary state interaction. As if metropolitans, pashas, state edicts (especially the edicts), wasn't enough to break your fingers. The game is full of fancy buttons that you have to press periodically. For each decision you make, you have to make multiple clicks. One thought equals 100 clicks.
So please paradox, give me nice and convenient implementation of this potentially interesting feature. Thank you.
 
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Holy shit. This... This is great! I always wanted a way to strengthen myself without blobbing endlessly. This reminds me of Stellaris, where I can steal pop instead of conquering planets outright. This is... excellent.

But are there limits to this? Or can I really build some 999 dev capital?
 
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Any precedent from the EU4 era?

Burmese–Siamese War (1563–64)​

In 1563 Bayinnaung took as a pretext for war the refusal of the Siamese to acknowledge his suzerainty. The following year he captured the Siamese capital of Ayutthaya and brought the Siamese royal family to Myanmar as hostages. In 1568, when a revolt flared up, Bayinnaung again invaded Siam. Because the Siamese put up fierce resistance, Ayutthaya was not captured until August 1569. The Myanmar king installed a new vassal on the throne and deported thousands of Siamese into Myanmar as slaves.

Burmese–Siamese War (1765–1767)​

in Burmese-Siamese war the city of Ayutthaya was attacked and razed by the Burmese army in 1767
sack of the city tens of thousands of captives were led away to Burma in captivity.
 
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I don't know if this has been suggested or considered, but one way to encourage playing tall would to be able to raise the floor to the existing development penalty for provinces, something like 10 base like current (variable depending on the province terrain?), +5 per building, +10 per manufactory, +5 or 10 per trade center level, and maybe global flat bonuses via ideas/traditions? Before you reach the floor, the existing development penalty doesn't kick in.

As it stands the single greatest obstacle to playing tall and developing is the fact that a wide player will always be able to get more efficiency out of their development clicks since they can spread it more out more to mitigate the existing development penalty. Even reduced development cost percentage modifiers like economy ideas or traditions benefit wide players more than tall players for this reason. It seems like "concentrate development" doesn't really do anything to mitigate this since you still need to expand to have territories to concentrate from, it doesn't really do much to help a historical Netherlands (except maybe constantly concentrating from Frisia and then redeveloping it?) or North Italian minor.
 
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So, the province developments are regarded as MANA that can be squeezed or seized?

Shame for watching you group this method to squeeze every rest drop of this old game's value , you have lesser noble characters than the latest IR group.
 
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As it stands the single greatest obstacle to playing tall and developing is the fact that a wide player will always be able to get more efficiency out of their development clicks since they can spread it more out more to mitigate the existing development penalty. Even reduced development cost percentage modifiers like economy ideas or traditions benefit wide players more than tall players for this reason. It seems like "concentrate development" doesn't really do anything to mitigate this since you still need to expand to have territories to concentrate from, it doesn't really do much to help a historical Netherlands (except maybe constantly concentrating from Frisia and then redeveloping it?) or North Italian minor.
I think a historical Netherlands would be able to use concentrate development on its American, African and South-East Asian colonies.
 

Burmese–Siamese War (1563–64)​

In 1563 Bayinnaung took as a pretext for war the refusal of the Siamese to acknowledge his suzerainty. The following year he captured the Siamese capital of Ayutthaya and brought the Siamese royal family to Myanmar as hostages. In 1568, when a revolt flared up, Bayinnaung again invaded Siam. Because the Siamese put up fierce resistance, Ayutthaya was not captured until August 1569. The Myanmar king installed a new vassal on the throne and deported thousands of Siamese into Myanmar as slaves.

Burmese–Siamese War (1765–1767)​

in Burmese-Siamese war the city of Ayutthaya was attacked and razed by the Burmese army in 1767
sack of the city tens of thousands of captives were led away to Burma in captivity.
Also sacking of Angkor by Ayutthaya during collapse of the Khmer empire, and sacking of Vientiane by Siam during the reunification after a successful revolt from Burma.

ref: Siege of Angkor
ref2: Sacking of Vientiane

In the case of Burma (or Taungoo/Ava empire), they also sacked Prome, Martaban, and many big cities in this regions so many times throughout the history.

ref3: Military history of Myanmar (Burma)
 
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I like the idea from pillaging the enemy's capital as well as transfering dev from your subjects to your own. Considering the AI also devs their capitals quite a lot, it shouldn't result in underdeveloped provinces everywhere.

I'm not a fan of the exploitation of development on your own territories though, this feels very gimmicky and will probably result in stuff like having 1/1/1 provinces everywhere and then having a 250 dev capital. Maybe if you let it have diminishing returns?

Err... The peace deal is really a terrible idea. It is simply a bad mechanic.

Unless it costs a lot of diplo mana, it will be just free dev. No need for coring, no need for diplo annexing. One can get crazy amounts of dev just destroying capitals around. Imagine the war lear in the Religious Wars reducing the best cities in HRE to ashes through separate peace deals.

Considering it results in aggressive expansion, I don't think you'd want to pillage every HRE minor's capital like that, unless you like fighting coalition wars until the end of the game.
 
Please rework the Castille/Spain mission "Expell the Moriscos" with the Concentrate Dev mechanics ; because the mission feels broken to me since expel minorities does not convert culture anymore. I could see other objectives like "Spain has used Concentrate Dev on Andalusia" + "Spain has embraced Colonialism Institution" ==> boom mission reward -10% dev cost for Spain 20 years but the 20% development that should be lost on Concentrate Dev action is awarded for free to Maghrebi rival.
 
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this will be great for getting rid of all that tax dev in italy. raize everything to the ground, make florence like 100 dev. And then dev everything with propper deving ratios back up to 30.
 
Lets be honest, there is no real world equivalent to it, Paradox just wanted another button
I mean, there is real world equivalent.
In 20th century it was quite common to take factories and engineers of conquered nations, put them on rails/boats and ship into your own country.


Not exactly sure how that would translate to medieval period though.
 
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This doesn't sound like a tall feature to me at all tbh.

At first glance I guess the best use will be to lower diploannexation costs during a wc.
it is hard to make a mechanic that mostly benefits tall play. It is harder to even agree on what "tall" means and what is the fun factor in it. Rather than just sitting there and make the game a peaceful simulator, they tried to tie the mechanic to war. A few months ago with a different leadership, they tried more peacetime-micromanagment options but it wasn't well received.
 
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When you conquer land you have to spend ADM coring it, then there is the risk of revolt, high autonomy, wrong culture/religion. This means that newly adquired land is, most often than not, a net negative for a few decades (not taking into account the inherent advantages of having more development like bigger loans).

With the new transfer Dev you will get development added directly into your best estate -- your capital. It costs you no ADM, no revolt risk, no wrong culture/religion and no autonomy whatsoever.

Imagine having your capital city on a gold province and both sacking your own territory and your opponent's territory on peace deals. It won't matter if the gold mine will deplet or not, you will make ducats over fist exceptionally quickly.
That is a really good point. I think they could potentially help balance this by adding events around the new people and wealth that's been brought to your capital.
Eg. revolts, race riots, enemy whose people you've taken getting a core on your capital, etc?
 
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Uh... is fighting and winning a war not a valid cost for you?

As for such wars, I'd wait and see how they turn out to happen in game, surely there will be plenty of testing and such a thing will not regularly happen.
As for the 1st question: No for a lot of wars. It is quite easy to bully tall minors just to steal their dev for free.

As for the 2nd question: really? Are you serious? How many well balanced features we had on release of last patches and DLCs? Did they look well tested to you? They didnt to me...

Other ways to obtain development through war cost monarch power as well as requiring you to win a war.

This.

And they are inherently quite superior than siphoning a bit of dev.

No they arent superior in cost-benefit if you take just cost in mana into consideration.

Option A: you take 30 dev in provinces and spend, like, 200 mana to sate-core.

Option B: you steal 15 dev spending 0 mana. (Most of that go to your capital, sparing GC.)

B is infinetly more efficient than A, just compare 30/200 and 15/0...
 
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One somewhat fitting real-world equivalent would be Sweden's looting of the Imperial art collection in Prague in 1648.
Considering the perpetrator (and the fact that some of the unlawful spoils are still in Stockholm), Paradox might have a special incentive to model this ;)
The Mona Lisa has been in the Louvre, in Paris, since Napoleon stole it. It's never been allowed to leave (i.e. go back to Italy) and is basically an outstanding argument between France and Italy.