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EUIV - Development Diary - 28th of January 2020

Hey again! So I know the last development diary I said that the next one wouldn’t be coming until 4th of February, and if you check your calendar it is still not yet 4th of February. However we’ve gotten to a point of 1.30 where we feel we can more regularly provide development diaries again. So for this one I will be visiting an old favorite though before we dig into new features that are going to be coming with the upcoming expansion and patch. Features made just to make the game simply better, quality of life.

I will warn you though, a lot of the UI you are about to see is very much work in progress and is not representative of how it will look upon release.

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First up we’ve made information about other countries' military strength more readily available to the player. It has always been possible to discern this information in the ledger, and it will still be available there, but we’ve also now placed it in two interfaces that you might look at a bit more often. First is the Diplomacy View where below the usual information you can discern of a country. Here it will list specific the land forces and the naval forces fielded and last the manpower of the country.

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Then we have the War Declaration view, this one is a bit more complicated. It will sum up the infantry, cavalry and artillery of each side that will be called in to the war. The last column is the full amount of forces deployed and the amount of manpower available to that side. You can see the breakdown of these numbers for each called nation by hovering over each number.

These values are hidden if you are playing with limited or locked ledger in multiplayer. But they will show up if you have infiltrated administration in a nation. In the case of the War Declaration screen it will show incomplete numbers but also warn you of this unless you have infiltrated every member of the opposing sides governments.

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Next is a little handy thing just to help you pick your rivals a little bit better. Each option when picking your rivals will now highlight if that country has also picked you as their rival.

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We’ve made endgame tags optional now. You can turn it off in the options before starting a campaign. It does however invalidate achievements.

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Last thing is on events that affect a specific location in the world. We’ve added some nifty buttons, these will take you directly to the province that the event is concerning. Making it a lot easier to get a grasp on what you are getting where. Image shown here is an example with a banner in the top which will be used for if the entire event affects a single province while the one on an event option is for if there’s a difference between the options.

I also want to update you on that since last dev diary I and Johan have listened to responses and based on that feedback done some balance changes. Courthouse and Town Hall reduces governing cost -25% and -50% respectively. We've added State House which uses a manufactory slot and gives -20% governing cost and -5% minimum autonomy on entire area with double effect on provinces of paper, gem or glass. They can only be built one per area. Merchant Republics and Prussian Monarchies penalties are now based on Governing Capacity instead of amount of provinces. They will also as a base have less Governing Capacity available to them.

We've also changed the requirements for making a province part of Trade Companies, there are no longer any religious requirements, it only requires the province to not be in your super region. This means Russia can make Siberia into a TC if they so want to. Their autonomy penalty have been changed to 90%, however they have only 45% production efficiency loss from autonomy and no penalty on naval FL. Propagation of Religion available to Muslims have been limited to anywhere but Europe.

That’s it for today's dev diary. Next one will come next week and will be written by Johan about a new upcoming feature part of the expansion focusing on making conquest more rewarding.
 
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How are we supposed to be able to afford town hall and courthouse when we're playing a non-major nation? Duchies and Kingdoms have such low administrative capacity from what you've told us so far that even growing your nation at all to pay for buildings seems completely unviable. Are you trying to encourage slower growth and tall play? (I'd hope not). I just don't understand how an expansive horde for example is supposed to be able to afford those buildings. Most nations barely have any money to begin with for the first half of the game until manufactory money creep kicks in, so I don't understand how this is meant to be balanced. I really hope this patch isn't going to be another one which encourages the player to sit around and click the "develop province" button rather than actually expanding like every patch since 1.24.

They have not really told us how much administrative capacity we get, and all numbers are work in progress. The only thing we know so far is the number based on government rank, but one of the devs said that you would get a lot of admin cap from technology aswell, and there are probably other modifiers we haven't heard about yet.
 
Yeah, I would prefer to just exclude all abrahamic religions from being a target of propagate religion. Maybe as an additional requirement they need to have an active "defender of the faith" to be immune.
How did it works historically? I mean, I know in EU4 that is not really relevant, but in the OTL how often did catholic/orthodox 'provinces' converted to islam (while not under muslin rule) ?

Troop numbers should be unknown unless you have spy network on a nation. It would be very interesting if your level of spy network on a nation affected how accurate your understanding of their military strength was. This would mean that you could not know how powerful militarily a nation was until you had some spy network on them. At 0 spy network you would either have no idea how many troops the nation had or you would know a really vague number like < or >50. As your spy network increased the margin of error would decrease, with 10% being +- 20k, 20% with +-15k, 30% at +-10 and so on until 50% spy network gave you a total understanding of their military strength. This would apply to the AI as well as multiplayers and so would remove the army info from the ledger. This however would vastly improve the importance of spy network and espionage ideas as well as any idea groups that add a diplomat. This would also make the game more challenging and interesting as you would have to keep an eye on your rivals to have a good idea of their strength. All numbers could be changed as fits the bill.

It isn't a bad idea, but it would change the game too much (and the AI could never handle it, as it is, it can't even handle the fog of war - the AI always know where are your troops).
Also I simply don't think it can be done with the actual engine, if it was, someone would already made a mod of it. (somebody know if there is a mod that do that? Giving vague/incomplete data on other nation's military)
 
Sons of Carthage
As Tunisia, own and have cores on Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearic Islands, the coast of Algiers and the southern coast of Spain.
Challenge is doing this as Tunis right. So why not make it Starting as Tunisia like Unlikely Candidate? Game has already has protections for such achivements. Why not use them? On top of that I can form Tunis as Castile.

Protect the Secret
As Yemen, prevent any European Nation from owning a Coffee-producing province in the Old World until 1700.
Then form Yemen with Mamluk. Mamluk is not an endgame tag.

Re-reconquista
As Granada, form Andalusia and reconquer all of Iberia.
You can't form Granada.

Should I go on, or do you see my point?
Please go on because I don't see your point.
 
This is just the same restriction as endgame tags, just rephrased
Not it isn't. It strictly decides your start. For an unlikely candidate run you can do Mzab > Tunis > England > France > Andalus and you will get the achievement. You can do The Three Mountains as starting as Ryukyu, conquering a tag, releasing and switching to that tag, annexing ryukyu and releasing and switching to Ryukyu back. Challenge is starting as that and if achivement is so much tied to a tAG Paradox already has means to enforce it. Your fears of Ottoman is absurd when you have Mamluks in much better position right at the start with easier access to Yemen and Tunis.
 
This is just the same restriction as endgame tags, just rephrased
It's absolutely not -- if you care about the "challenge" of these country-specific achievements, I absolutely agree that the achievements themselves are better off being locked to starting as that specific country (if they exist at game start).

Otherwise, if anyone wants to do a ridiculous (maybe fun for some people) run like Ming -> Mughals -> Russia -> Ottomans, I wouldn't want to lay down the banhammer on all 295 achievements, so they can't even get "We bled for this" or "Fanatic Collectivist".

In any case, I feel like we're getting extremely sidetracked and discussing matters less than 10% of the player base cares about (judging from stats on most achievements), when there are far more important QoL issues up for debate.
 
Not it isn't. It strictly decides your start. For an unlikely candidate run you can do Mzab > Tunis > England > France > Andalus and you will get the achievement. You can do The Three Mountains as starting as Ryukyu, conquering a tag, releasing and switching to that tag, annexing ryukyu and releasing and switching to Ryukyu back. Challenge is starting as that and if achivement is so much tied to a tAG Paradox already has means to enforce it. Your fears of Ottoman is absurd when you have Mamluks in much better position right at the start with easier access to Yemen and Tunis.
Many of the later added achievements also have a restriction on released vassals for this reason
 
@Groogy
You know why I do not play Imperator Rome? Because as you become bigger the game becomes an unbearable click fest (way worse than in EU IV). I like to do world conquests but I do not like clicking and that is one of the reasons I almost never build buildings in my runs. The amount of clicking in today EU IV is already excessive due to the lack of good automation/UI but it is still bearable for me. This new administrative capacity mechanic and balance will force me to exploit dev and build courthouses, etc. so that is another 10k clicks or so. I am afraid that was the last straw that broke the camel back forcing me to not update my game to 1.30.
 
@Groogy
You know why I do not play Imperator Rome? Because as you become bigger the game becomes an unbearable click fest (way worse than in EU IV). I like to do world conquests but I do not like clicking and that is one of the reasons I almost never build buildings in my runs. The amount of clicking in today EU IV is already excessive due to the lack of good automation/UI but it is still bearable for me. This new administrative capacity mechanic and balance will force me to exploit dev and build courthouses, etc. so that is another 10k clicks or so. I am afraid that was the last straw that broke the camel back forcing me to not update my game to 1.30.

You could just watch let's plays on you tube if you don't want to use your mouse.
 
I don't want to delete a building and construct a courthouse a thousand times unless there is a way to automate deleting process. I know it is really outrageous think to ask for some convenience though.
This is my thought as well. Deleting the AI dockspam is already tedious enough, and I've only been doing it in limited areas when I had too much $$$. It looks like courthouses are going to be a must-build practically everywhere, which is going to make this issue a lot worse.
 
I don't want to delete a building and construct a courthouse a thousand times unless there is a way to automate deleting process. I know it is really outrageous think to ask for some convenience though.
I made a suggestion re "State Governors" once. I believe, that would be a nice feature at which level we could configure our preferences for buildings: there could be some AI logic here (similar to subject military behaviour) or we could prescribe "always prefer courthouse to temple, if necessary delete temple" etc. State Governors could then be given a budget, e.g. "if treasury is >1000 ducats then activate state governor AI". The local state governor AI then would automate all decisions having to do with buildings for us.
 
ADD OPTION- WHEN SENDING WARNING- ALL POSIBLE CONTREYS/ YOU SELECT WITH CLICK WITCH YOU WANT TO WARN/ HOW MANY DIPLOMATS TO PERFORM TASK/ SEND/ IT GOES ON IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER UNTIL IT IS DONE/ OPTION FOR REAPITE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE OR GIVEN OTHER COMAND
 
I see many people understands the problem with arbitral tag switching blockade. Some powerful nations are blocked and some are not. Current "solution" is not a solution, right now same result can be achieved with a mod or console.

Just allow all tag switching with no restrictions (other than in game restricions such as culture, religion etc) in single player with achievements available. Keep tag switching blockade as an option for multilpayer games - perhaps even make it more strict.
 
Re tag switching: why not allow it with some severe penalties instead of blocking it completely? E.g. -100 prestige and +10% corruption. Because if you tag switch from Ottomans into Byzantium then you deserve this :D