EUIV - Development Diary - 11th of February 2020

[Groogy]

Hello! So today I will be talking about two smaller sized features coming with the expansion that will be accompanying the 1.30 Patch.

As part of our improvements to the Catholic faith, which we will revisit in a later dev diary, we want to give the player a carrot for keeping their brethren alive. So with that in mind for all religions that can use Defenders of the Faith mechanic, they are getting a bit of an uplift to emphasise that you defend a faith, not only something you claim to be.

So what we’ve done is that we gave the Defender of the Faith 5 tiers that are dependent upon how many nations are following that faith. The more you are defending the more your title as the faith’s defender has as worth to the people and your neighbours. At the highest tier the entire faith gets a bonus together.

The 5 Tiers available to the Defender of the Faith.

Tier 1 - 1 to 4 Countries

• +1 Missionaries
• -10% Missionary Maintenance Cost

Tier 2 - 5 to 9 Countries

• +1 Missionaries
• -10% Missionary Maintenance Cost
• +5% Land Morale
• +5% Naval Morale
• +1 Prestige
  

Tier 3 - 10 to 19 Countries

• +1 Missionaries
• -10% Missionary Maintenance Cost
• +5% Land Morale
• +5% Naval Morale
• +1 Prestige
• -0.03 War Exhaustion

Tier 4 - 20 to 49 Countries

• +1 Missionaries
• -10% Missionary Maintenance Cost
• +5% Land Morale
• +5% Naval Morale
• +1 Prestige
• -0.03 War Exhaustion
• +20% Manpower in True Faith Provinces

Tier 5 - 50+ Countries

• +1 Missionaries
• -10% Missionary Maintenance Cost
• +5% Land Morale
• +5% Naval Morale
• +1 Prestige
• -0.03 War Exhaustion
• +20% Manpower in True Faith Provinces
• -20% Missionary Maintenance Cost on all members of that Faith, including DotF.

Besides the mechanical changes we’ve also given the Defender of the Faith more flavour by giving the feature a bunch of unique events and content that can appear for whoever that claims the title.

The second feature of today is a little thing that just lets you get on with your business a bit faster by not having to sit and wait for rebels to pop so you can deal with them immediately.

It requires the faction to have already reached a progression of 50% before this option can be picked and when done it will cause those rebels to appear 50% stronger than they would have usually. You can also not use this feature at war so you can not rebel bomb your opponents with it.

Next Development Diary coming next week will be covering one feature that is part of the expansion but also free quality of life features. The focus of the features will be to make management of your empire easier and more bearable.

 

[Groogy]

Great improvements on catholic

This is for all faiths that can use Defender of the Faith, the big Catholic faith improvements are coming later

 

[Groogy]

Do colonial nations count towards the number of countries being defended?

Yepp, it just straight up counts all nations following that faith.

 

[Groogy]

1. Is the idea cost and technology penalty for the defender of the faith is gone?

Yes, it never was really a penalty that deterred people from spending that 500 ducats if they could. Instead we're trying to put emphasis on the burden of being a Defender of the Faith

2. Is the Defender of the faith still an exclusive thing for Christian and Muslims?

Yepp

 

[Groogy]

Both are nice editions but religions like protestant or reformed are not gonna be very big. Also theres always gonna be lots of muslim nations that follow Islam while the Christan world is divided.

Together with the new stuff we've added though it's a "solvable" problem

 

[Groogy]

2. Yesterday you tweeted about researching the Hussites, can we get more info on that?

No I wasn't researching, I was referring back to when I first started playing Paradox games it made me want to read more about Bohemia and the Hussites because I never ever heard of either during history class.

 

[Groogy]

Did you do something about rebel numbers? Stacks seem to be too large lots of times? Like killing Crimea that has 12 FL and then getting 16k rebels.

No we haven't tweaked that, and there are two different spawns of rebels so not sure which one you are referring to. Event spawned ones are limited by the supply limit of the province while the faction spawned ones are limited by the size of your nation. Size from faction spawn is calcualted as (dev of province * 0.3 + 1) * tech impact * (0.5 + forcelimit / 2) with forcelimit being scaled to 0 to 1 and capped to 0.5. For now I haven't tweaked any of that spawn and I haven't seen any need for it.

On Events, @neondt have touched up a lot of random events.


edit: actually I see where you are coming from now looking at code, gonna put in our internal database to have a look at it.

 

[Groogy]

Is counting the number of countries the right way to measure success for defender of the faith? This seems to punish defenders if large numbers of small countries start eating each other and consolidate into larger powers. But this phenomenon doesn't seem to have much to do with religion, really.

Maybe a better way to measure would be total development or number of provinces in that faith.

Good point will take into consideration

 

[Groogy]

Neat. I'd say it should maybe be based on Provinces of [Religion] being under the control of Countries of [Religion]. So say Wallachia successfully impales the Sultan and takes Greece and Bulgaria for itself, Orthodox gets stronger. Once you push into anatolia, Sunni gets weaker, and even more so once you get converting. It would give you an incentive to help fellow nations liberating oppressed brethren.

I like this a lot, what I and @Johan want though is that you don't benefit as much if you own literally everything. That it is better for you if there are other nations to defend.

 

[Groogy]

So DotF Mana? Just kidding it would be a very different way of doing something similar yeah.

 

[Groogy]

What's wrong with that? You already have the mechanism in place; this is how old HRE imperial authority used to work i.e. points for beating off France.

Why not adapt it for defender if it gives a better way to measure performance? The title "defender" is suggestive, after all.

Best of all, a defender won't get many points if it already owns everything and has no religious allies to defend.

I was agreeing with you with a stupid joke attached to it

 

[Alfray Stryke]

It is not "mana" if you don't spend it on anything It's just points to measure performance.

So DoTF XP?

 

[Groogy]

So we just pop them right before declaring war.

That's a fair bit more costly though, and especially with the new estates and how they relate to land and rebels it is not such a no-brainer. But as a last stand to try and survive? Yeah probably. Will cover this more in a later dev diary.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Damn, this really weakens the mechanic for Anglicans since spreading religion is highly unlikely

But I can understand that a single Anglican nation adopting Defender of the Faith just for the bonuses is probably one reason why you're making this change

You should at least be able to get the Tier 2 bonuses, assuming colonial nations count (Cascadia, Canada, Eastern America, Louisiana, Australia should all be doable).

 

[Groogy]

It seems like @Groogy is open to the idea of DoF being an experience-style system based on actions actually defending the faith, which is awesome. I was expecting this to be a non-starter since it’s clearly harder to implement/balance, but it’s so much richer! It opens up a new play style for those who like tall play, and it also rewards being the “good guy”, which is incredibly rare in a game where almost every objective is conquest.

As far as having a DoF for non-Christians/Muslims, it seems like it would make more sense if it works this way. Let other faiths have one, but they start with no bonuses. Only after building up a tradition of actually defending the faith do they get bonuses, whereas Christians/Muslims would start with some because the tradition already exists.

Been thinking about it and we will not be going with this, not because it is harder but because it will start interfering with a bunch of other things. One example is the mechanic of stealing the title of DotF. You've built up all that "experience" and someone else takes it, does that mean the new guy gets your hard work? Do you lose all of it? If not does it sit in stasis for ever? Or should it prevent stealing all together? And a bunch of other problematic issues. Even if it is a cool idea of that you build up you being the "good guy" it's not the direction we want to go, we want to focus on the land and the nations part of the faith.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

An event for our lady of Guadalupe to convert Mexico to catholic

What if Mexico is Korean cultured and Tengri religion?