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EUIV - Development Diary - 18th of February 2020

Hello! So today we’ll be covering a fair bit of various functions, most of it is free quality of life improvements coming with the next patch. I’ll also be talking about some changes we’ve done since previous dev diaries in response to feedback from these threads and other platforms. So we’ll start with the one feature that will be accompanying the expansion.

So ever been sitting just hoping that you are going to get an heir that will safely take over your Kingdom when you pass on? You be damned if you let the Habsburgs get their hands on your titles! We’re adding a feature for monarchies where a highly esteemed King can appoint someone to be their successor who is not of their dynasty. You can Introduce an Heir to the court.

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Requirements to use this is:
  • Not in a Regency
  • Not at War
  • Positive Prestige
  • At least 90 Legitimacy
Using it will cost you 20 Legitimacy and 20 Prestige but give you an heir with a local dynasty not of your current one with weak claim to the throne.

Next up are features who all are part of the 1.30 Patch. First one we’ll talk about you might have spotted in the previous development diary.

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Now when you hover over a country shield it will highlight that country on the map with a red outline that pulsates. This will work with all shields, except some like the large shield representing your country in the top left corner.

Next one I teased about yesterday, a small addition but I believe will be quite loved. We’ve added a Core All button in the Stability interface

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If you compare with last dev diary you can see as the stability interface is being reworked to get space for the new Governing Capacity mechanics and to convey all the necessary information to the player.

Not much to say here, it does what it says on the tin. It will try and core as many provinces as you can afford. I can add that the programmers have worked on a bunch of issues that start to appear in the macro builder and various other lists when you start to have more than ~3 000 provinces.

Next is you can now view the mission screen of your subjects.

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It should help anyone that wants to optimize what they get out of their vassals and even be able to get some out of their mission trees to benefit you in the long run.

Speaking of missions, our Content Designers have been going over them trying to make their requirements and tooltips way clearer.

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Part of that has also been to add support where it will show your progress clearer to achieve one of the requirements. For modders some of the triggers that have been improved are:
  • Num_of_owned_provinces_with
  • Num_of_provinces_owned_or_owned_by_non_sovereign_subjects_with
  • Calc_true_if
Next are some changes to generals to help you manage them a bit easier.

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In the military interface for your country you can now detach your leaders from whatever army or navy that they are in control over. Besides this function we’ve also changed a little bit fundamentally how they work, or specifically how they die.

upload_2020-2-18_8-47-13.png


They now have an age just as if they were a monarch. This has been done for two reasons, one to give you a straightforward way to try and guess if the leader has long for this world or if you should get a younger general on that front. Second, this made it possible for us to tweak how death chance is calculated for Monarchs who are also leaders. Monarchs leading an army no longer get the double check for death based on their age, however of course being on the field is still an elevated risk to his Highness health.

Last improvement is to prove what we all already know to be true, that there are no Swedish Bias in the team ;). So I went ahead and updated the Danish ideas to be more competitive with other naval powers in Europe.

Traditions
5% Ship Durability
10% Tax Modifier

Bonus
10% Naval Engagement

Nordic Rulers Legacy
10% Shock Damage

Vornedskab
20% Global Manpower Modifier
20% Global Sailors Modifier

Old Naval Traditions
10% Naval Morale
5% Disengagement Chance

Rentekammer
-15% Build Cost

Klaedekammer
-15% Naval Maintenance Modifier

Expanded Dockyards
+50% Naval Force Limit Modifier

Den Danske Lov
-1 Global Unrest


Before ending the Development Diary for today, I want to cover some changes we’ve done since some previous development diaries and what was covered in them.

First is that we have raised the Base Disengagement Chance for ships to 10% from the previous 3% giving ships a bit more of a reasonable chance of getting out of the battle and letting your fresh ships get in and fight.

We’ve swapped out the Admin Efficiency penalty from going over Governing Capacity to +20% Core Creation and +100% Advisor Cost when at 100%. In the end we felt that Admin Efficiency had too many side effects as well besides what we wanted to achieve so we swapped it for Core Creation. We looked at potentially adding State Maintenance as the monetary burden of going over capacity but it had problems with it, you do not pay maintenance for territories and if we would add that you can very easily get into a death spiral where you have no option to get out of it, including calling for bankruptcy you could still sit at a net negative afterwards. So we felt Advisor cost was a good middle ground, representing the strain on your administration, it being a cost you have full control over and it as added bonus has an indirect effect on your mana generation.

Together with Governing Capacity we’ve also now hooked in some old government mechanics into it that previously were tied to provinces. Merchant republics and Prussian Militarization have had their width penalties redone. Merchant Republics no longer suffer the republican tradition penalty as previously from fully cored land but instead their stated land and territories have an additional 25% Governing Cost compared to other nations, while trade companies for them will be cheaper. Militarization penalty is now based on the governing capacity of your country, getting -1 Militarization for being 100% over. But Prussian Monarchy/Republic also have -50% Governing Capacity modifier in their government not letting them efficiently manage as large swaths of land as an Ottoman Empire.

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Next week we will revisit a mechanic we talked about in a very old development diary, Mercenaries, but a lot of stuff has happened since we last mentioned them. The vision remains the same but we’ll go more into details on how they work and talk about the content around them. I will see you next Tuesday!
 
Nice QoL changes! Have you considered adding a nobility estate loyalty penalty or increased pretender rebel chance to introducing a heir? It would be great to feel that your own estates would try to meddle in this process.
 
You increase prestige with wars, advisors, power projection etc
None of them are direct translation into prestige, none of them actually costs MP, and all of them needs time.
passive prestige is super slow (even with +2/+3 per year), and i never get more than 20 per peace deal in one war (for comparison, end rivalry x3 is 15 prestige for 90 warscore) and taking provinces have dangerous consequences in coalition and overextension. Wars already cost money/manpower in itself so that's even more expensive.

If you start doing this at 100 prestige, 2 times and you'll be down to -40 prestige which will take some time to climb back, all while getting relation/AE/morale penalty.

All these for weak heirs (equals pending pretender rebel, lower max absolutism, less tolerance/unrest reduction) of a different dynasty (screwing any pending PU game, if any) and unknown stats? Not worth for an exploit, if you ask me.
 
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Last improvement is to prove what we all already know to be true, that there are no Swedish Bias in the team ;). So I went ahead and updated the Danish ideas to be more competitive with other naval powers in Europe.

Now do Norway!
The sailor regen is very nice (lovely not to have to worry about having too many ships on missions), but they are definitely in dire need of getting their light ship combat ability national idea back. Privateering efficiency or marines boni would also make sense.
 
Very much like the changes to generals, but can we please get the ability to rename them?

Interesting changes to Denmark too, might have to bump them up in my list of nations to play!
 
The other changes are really good :) but I have to say that this "introduce heir" feature doesn't sound that good.

Heirs and rulers used to be an important thing in EU4 earlier. If you had a bad ruler, you had to accept and adapt your game around it. Maybe it wasn't fun for calculator-wielding minmaxer Youtubers, but it was realistic. This was also the main selling point of republics - if your kingdom was plagued with bad rulers or PU issues, you could become a republic and start voting them out instead. Rulers sat well with every government and gameplay type in the EU4.

With the introduction of abdication/disinherit buttons there emerged some problems, because you could remove any bad-stat ruler or heir at will, without any consequences except for prestige (that you could recover in a war or two). Don't like Enrique? Just press a button and he is gone, no civil wars or angry nobility anything. The game gave you a button to solve half the problems, which wasn't good. At least it had age restrictions and didn't hurt the game's basics.

...But now there is this thing. A button to generate a random character the moment your ruling dynasty lacks one. Is Johan back in Imperator mode again?

I am sorry but it feels cheap and weird, "press button to instantly buy new heir" doesn't sound like a good feature. It essentially kills any PU risk for players, you can now marry anyone without caring about prestige because you can simply spawn a successor out of thin air.

And the cost is abnormally cheap too.
- No large stability hits from sudden dynastic change for heirs? Even random events create larger stability hits.
- No reaction from nobility estate at all?
- No diplomatic hits from your international marriage partners, who were set to PU originally? No loss of marriages, alliances and such? Not even a war of succession?
- No loss of diplomatic reputation?
- No temporary negative modifiers to represent how no one respects the new heir/monarch?
- No change in corruption?
- No civil wars/claimant rebellions by loyalists of the old dynasty, until the generic civil war from low legitimacy spawns on succession later anyway?

...Just 20 legitimacy and prestige, that one can simply get back in a few years?

At least the AI won't use it, but it will be prone to player abuse.

This would undercut a lot of historical and gameplay events I think. England broke away from Catholicism because a tyrannical king wasn't able to produce an heir, and then had multiple dynasties die out and Scottish kings take the throne. The powerful Habsburg empire rose and fell almost entirely on the strength of their ruling dynasty, and wars of Spanish and Austrian succession happened due to the same thing, and eventually shifted to a separate Habsburg line. Romanov dynasty took the throne of Russia because Rurikid main line was dying out. One minor Bavarian dynasty came to control large estates around Europe. Ming emperor's lack of a proper heir was one of the few ways to bring down China. All that stops being an issue with this button.

It only makes sense in places outside Europe where adoption wasn't an issue, but then the game already has random nobles taking over when ruler dies heirless, doing the same thing. If anything, that needs to include generals/admirals and such rather than a generate heir button.

For this feature to be viable, there really needs to be much harsher costs to changing anything around heirs and rulers. Whether disinheriting, abdicating or generating them. And the generate heir button should be very restricted to certain situations, and clicking on it should give you an event window about selecting the type of heir like theocracies do.

Aside from this change, I think the patch is looking stellar so far. :)
 
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The mechanics for governing still need to be majorly revamped... Even in singleplayer I don't see a reason to not go 100% over governing capacity and tank the 20% CC for literally twice as much income, manpower and force limit.
 
Introduce heir should be like CK2 imo. The earlier you introduce the more people get used to the guy. The later the less used to it they are.

The starting legitimacy would be based on how early he was introduced. Like if it was death bed introduce he should have 0 while if he was introduced 20 years ago he should have max legitimacy.

The weak claim should stay.

Some kind of forcing pu option for the previous dynasty should be available.
 
Using it will cost you 20 Legitimacy and 20 Prestige but give you an heir with a local dynasty not of your current one with weak claim to the throne.
Instead have it bring up the same interface/event as the theocracy does. And add in the option of saying "none of these options seems good" but you forfeit your upfront cost if you do that. Also let theocracies use this function (instead of it triggering automatically whenever you don
t have an heir) for free (or cheap) and have the same option of passing but make the penalty for dying without an heir really severe for them.
 
Introduce heir should be like CK2 imo. The earlier you introduce the more people get used to the guy. The later the less used to it they are.

The starting legitimacy would be based on how early he was introduced. Like if it was death bed introduce he should have 0 while if he was introduced 20 years ago he should have max legitimacy.

The weak claim should stay.

Some kind of forcing pu option for the previous dynasty should be available.
They are not comparable.

Introduce heir in this suggested scenario is like having an option in ck2 to generate an heir instantly
 
Any way to prevent generals and admirals from teleporting between armies? Maybe a distance modifier from capital or from the other army/fleet?
 
Would be possible/simple to have a option to set colonists to automatically move between upgrading provinces once a criteria is met? Maybe either a set development or once the percentage chance to increase development gets too low. Since currently its quite annoying having to check all 3 colonists when the outcome window pops up and then check the percentage and then find a nearby province with a high chance of success and switch them. Default option could be once it gets to 33% chance then the colonist moves to the lowest development province you have and stays there till the chance is 33% and moves on. Would make improving North America when you own 80% of it much easier.
 
While it’s gonna be great to get more info on mercenaries next week, it is a little bit disconcerting that development of this update has taken so long that mechanics from dev diaries 6-9 months ago are redesigned... Can we get a time frame at least on when to roughly expect this update or should I be prepared for seeing another dev diary 6 months from now announcing everything from today’s post got blown up and reworked? (Not trying to throw shade at all, I’d just like an idea of how far off we are at this point cause there’s been a lot getting changed)