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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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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.
Unlike deleting dockspam, you can use the macrobuilder to just plop a courthouse in the province with the most slots.
Considering how many manufactories, churches, workshops, etc. you already build in the average run, this isn't really that much of a problem.

Though, a demolition slot in the Macrobuilder (could just be a sub-tab of the building one) would be pretty useful.
 
How about getting an option to select which fleets to use for automatic transport? That is one of my biggest UI frustrations.

You can specify what fleets you want to be allowed for automatic transport. Or do you mean something else?
 
You can specify what fleets you want to be allowed for automatic transport. Or do you mean something else?
I would love to see a menu listing all of your transport fleets, which would then let you check or uncheck a box next to the fleet(s) you want to use. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to move a little 3-unit stack of new world conquistadores somewhere around the New World, and the game selects, as my only option, my main transport fleet in Europe instead of the 3-boat fleet I've stationed in the Caribbean for just this purpose. The checkboxes would also be useful if a player needed to call in ALL of his or her transports from around the world to one location.
 
You can specify what fleets you want to be allowed for automatic transport. Or do you mean something else?

The problem then is you have to go constantly flipping which ones are on automatic transport.

My last game as Great Britain I had an army in the Americas, an Army in Indonesia, and an army in Europe. I needed my navy to regularly move all three armies so I had transports for each. That got very tedious.

What I think would be optimal is when you order an army across water you are presented with a checklist of fleets on automatic transport and you can select which ones to use.
 
You can't though because building slots. Hence, deleting dockspam.
I've just taken a quick peek at my latest game. The AI has indeed spammed shipyards in every province. However, there are still many states that either have empty slots or are even devoid of buildings. The only nation that has filled almost every slot is a non-sploded Ming because they get insane income.
That being said, the State House taking up a manufactory slot is an entirely different story. The AI seems to be stupid enough to build it in fish and grain, which means that WILL clog things up. Still not as bad as Shipyard-spam though. There are a LOT more coastal provinces than states worth building in.
 
You could just watch let's plays on you tube if you don't want to use your mouse.
Building buildings was never mandatory in EU IV but now over 6 years after release they are effectively forcing me to exploit development and build courthouses everywhere because I like to do world conquests. I refuse to make an extra 10k clicks to build silly courthouses everywhere because it is not fun. More busywork on my leisure time is just what I needed as if the rebels were not already sufficiently annoying. The only reasonable option for me is to keep playing on an older patch or play some other game.
They might as well change the name of the game to "Courthouse Universalis" to reflect its state after patch 1.30. I think someone at paradox needs a bit of "common sense" if you ask me.
 
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Building buildings was never mandatory in EU IV but now over 6 years after release they are effectively forcing me to exploit development and build courthouses everywhere because I like to do world conquests. I refuse to make an extra 10k clicks to build silly courthouses everywhere because it is not fun. More busywork on my leisure time is just what I needed as if the rebels were not already sufficiently annoying. The only reasonable option for me is to keep playing on an older patch or play some other game.
They might as well change the name of the game to "Courthouse Universalis" to reflect its state after patch 1.30. I think someone at paradox needs a bit of "common sense" if you ask me.

I honestly don't understand why you're playing computer games if you don't want to press buttons. That's basically 100% of the content of all gameplay, for any game.

I can understand an argument for improving UI and game flow, but not an argument against pressing buttons.

Large empires can have alot to micro-manage, yes. Could that be improved with better UI and modifications to game systems? Yes. Is just removing content from the game so there's less for the player to do a good solution? No.
 
@Groogy

Can you add something like nº of development and provinces to a country's view?

I think is esencial information about a country, specially the development, and it should be displayed when looking at the tab of a foreign nation.
 
The problem then is you have to go constantly flipping which ones are on automatic transport.

My last game as Great Britain I had an army in the Americas, an Army in Indonesia, and an army in Europe. I needed my navy to regularly move all three armies so I had transports for each. That got very tedious.

What I think would be optimal is when you order an army across water you are presented with a checklist of fleets on automatic transport and you can select which ones to use.

This is what I meant, except Cancerofthehead is saying it more clearly.
 
I honestly don't understand why you're playing computer games if you don't want to press buttons. That's basically 100% of the content of all gameplay, for any game.

I can understand an argument for improving UI and game flow, but not an argument against pressing buttons.

Large empires can have alot to micro-manage, yes. Could that be improved with better UI and modifications to game systems? Yes. Is just removing content from the game so there's less for the player to do a good solution? No.
The "content" as you call it will force players to do an unreasonable high amount of clicking for no good reason. How about making every building mandatory or making coring/converting provinces require 10 clicks for each province instead of 1 (core/convert all button)? Its bad "content" that will make the game even more tedious for the ppl that like to complete world conquests. Regardless you are arguing against something that I did not say; the fact that I said that I like to do WCs means that my willingness to "press buttons" is way, way above average. The game balance needs to be reasonable/fun for as many styles of play as possible and not only for ppl that like to do nothing for 90% of the timeline (Paradox approved (™) way of playing). Maybe for those this will be "content" but for me it will make me stop playing.
 
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The "content" as you call it will force players to do an unreasonable high amount of clicking for no good reason. How about making every building mandatory or making coring/converting provinces require 10 clicks for each province instead of 1 (core/convert all button)? Its bad "content" that will make the game even more tedious for the ppl that like to complete world conquests. Regardless you are arguing against something that I did not say; the fact that I said that I like to do WCs means that my willingness to "press buttons" is way, way above average. The game balance needs to be reasonable/fun for as many styles of play as possible and not only for ppl that like to do nothing for 90% of the timeline (Paradox approved (™) way of playing). Maybe for those this will be "content" but for me it will make me stop playing.
Well something I like doing to my large nations is releasing vassals or client states to make management a bit easier. Recently did a Spain run where I got lots of Personal unions, Austria, Bohemia and UK. Together with 6 colonial nations. I could fight a war where my vassals did most of the legwork and I just messed about.
 
Well something I like doing to my large nations is releasing vassals or client states to make management a bit easier. Recently did a Spain run where I got lots of Personal unions, Austria, Bohemia and UK. Together with 6 colonial nations. I could fight a war where my vassals did most of the legwork and I just messed about.
Comparing just messing around to WC is like comparing putting Mentos in Cola to chemical experiments for creating new medicine.
 
Is it possible to change the french translation of overseas possessions? For example we don't say "Le Français Brésil" but say "Le Brésil Français" (French Brasil).
I think it's frustating for a lot of frenchspeaker.
Otherelse thanks for making such a great game.
 
World Conquesters: We play a serious game, in a serious way. :cool:

Also World Conquesters: Please remove consequences to expansion and empire management, it stops me from my WC! :eek:

Not all people who have done a world conquest want the same things for eu4.

Ps: I wouldnt call spamming courthouses in the macrobuilder "empire management"