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EUIV - Development Diary - 29th of October 2019

Hey! So me and the team are finally back and recharged after a great PDXCON and it's finally time to get going with development diaries. So what I will be covering today is the result out of what we call "Polish Weeks" here at EUIV. These days are dedicated specifically by the team to fix issues and generally improve the game. So today's development diary is me distilling down a somewhat shy of 200 known issues we've fixed but also the Spending/Budget AI work that our programmers have been working hard at.


So during these Polish Weeks @Duplo and @mikesc have been working hard on improving the economy of the AI.
While evolving, Europa Universalis 4 became more complex, with a wider range of possibilities both for the AI and the player to use. But this continuous new complexity was not always addressed with the appropriate amount of love while defining the AI interactions with the new mechanics.During the polish time, we monitored the behavior of the AI related to ducats, collected data and plotted colorful charts - like the one below. Our ambition is to make the AI spending their precious ducats in a smarter way, better evaluate its priorities and generally take more reasonable decisions - you heard me, heretics?

All the various things the AI could spend money on are now categorized, and the items in each category run to get the priority based on a normalized desire score that is calculated depending on the nation current situation, the benefit of such an investment, the current availability of money and the trend of the income. The AI will not go anymore accidentally in debt because of badly timed checks on the available budget.

Our goal is to make the AI more competitive towards the player, and this starts with the economy the AI has available to them. Among of the things you should see improve is besides the AI having more money generally available and doing better are features such as the religious conversion being manageable by them.

Something this work by our awesome coders do is also make all of this a lot more exposed meaning modders can tweak how the AI deal with it's economy way more than they ever could before. However it is still quite strict as it would otherwise impact the performance too much.

aicharts.png

Colorful charts about AI spending ducats, taking/repaying loans and going into dramatic bankruptcies. Those KPIs helped us (and are still helping) noticing weird behaviors in a glance while refactoring and refining our AI.

So now let's start of strong with what bugs we've been working on and talk about Chartering Trade Company AI. If you are one of the players not wanting to see a non-colonial Papal States buying land in India, the AI will now only consider to do this if they have access to colonists. The players themselves are not affected by this change and can keep using the feature like normal.

Yuan and Qing unintentionally got locked behind the "Empire rank" mechanic meaning you needed Common Sense in order to form both. That's now fixed with equivalent requirements if you don't own Common Sense so you should always be able to form them.

A quite old bug or oversight was the fact that the Wars of Religion in France didn't even acknowledge that the teachings of Calvin was a thing. This making it quite annoying if you wanted to play a Huguenot France. So these events have been reworked and improved to work better accounting for the Reformed faith. For starters siding with the Protestant movement within France won't make you Lutheran anymore.

warofreligion.png

As an example previously this option would force you to become Protestant if you were Reformed, together with some other technical changes in other events the disaster should work way better now. And when I showed the Content Designers the image above they were unhappy with the text so they might revisit the content again and not only have them fix up the script.

And speaking of the various Christians denominations, we've tried to stop all the ways we could find for you to make the Pope escape his True Faith. We've fixed becoming Anglican, No Religion Pope, releasing through demanding unlawful territory and Bankruptcy Pope. But I'm sure you'll find other ways to to make his holiness become Fetishist yet again.

A thing that have annoyed a lot of people is when they've promised land to their fellow ally AI and then when you all come to the peace table he goes like "Nope don't want any, but I'll still hate you for not giving me anything". The AI will now be a lot more agreeable depending on the situation and not feel betrayed when he tells you he literally wants nothing.

reasonableai.png

I've promised Augsburg to Munich, but Austria managed to snipe it before and such I am left without anything to give him but he understands it wasn't my fault.

Moving on to governments. You can no longer hold lottery elections to elect strongmen for your dictatorships. This fixes a case where you could perpetually stay as a dictatorship through the sortition reform. Now when the first dictator takes power he will use his powers to abolish elections and you'll lose whatever reforms that gives you the lottery mechanic.

Another government reform fix we also made sure to fix is so Native Americans can't get unique governments like English Monarchy anymore. You should start seeing a lot more United States of America as we've fixed a bug causing the American Revolution to never come. We've tried to make how the AI picks Government Reforms to be generally a little bit better, from how Tribes become Monarchies/Republics to having the AI favor certain picks like their own unique governments etc.

All missing modifiers have now been added to the Nation Designer. The missing ones being but not limited to Artillery Fire, Possible Banners, Monthly Piety, May Explore and Power Projection from Insults. Our goal is always to keep all modifiers available to the player for when he designs his nation.

modifiers.png


The Propagate Religion exploit where you created multiple CoR's will no longer work, when you stop the Propagate trade policy it will deconstruct the CoR in the region and stop the conversion. We've also fixed an issue with the gain you get from razing provinces never get reduced when you get passed military technology level 8. The cap instead of 20 is now at 5 monarch points.

For Colonial nations we've fixed a bunch of problems. For instance granting a CoT to a Colonial will no longer decrease the level of the Center. But not only that there were a bunch of ways to circumvent the protection of the overlord. So someone on the Americas could attack your poor subjects but you would be locked out of actually helping them in their time of need. Now the Overlord will always be able to enforce peace on their colonial nation despite if they have a truce with the attacker or not. This only applies if the colonial nation is the defender.

A thing improved is all sources of yearly absolutism. We've had a bunch of 0.1 Yearly Absolutism all over the game which is pretty useless, it means you'll get a single worth of Absolutism in the span of a decade. So all of these have been upped to 0.5.

upload_2019-10-29_9-4-52.png


We've also noticed that the Mission UI could be quite taxing on some people's machine so we've optimized that interface quite a bunch which will help on some of our larger mission tree's but also potentially for any mod that extends on this system. Another similar UI problem that we've dealt with is the macrobuilder for when you hit +1000 provinces which could cause a bunch of problems.

Some other issues I just want to give quick mentions are:
  • Vassals Integration cost is now affected by Power Cost modifier
  • Fixed a bunch of Institution Spread issues
  • Pirate Republics can no longer spawn out of Pirate Republics
  • Gold can now spawn in Africa when playing with RNW
  • Firearm Incident is fixed which should make Achievement more plausible
  • Unify Culture Age Objective now work.
upload_2019-10-29_9-27-13.png

Oh what's this I wonder?

So this was just some of the things we've fixed, and we have so much more that we need to work on. We are already aware of several issues the community wants us to address and improve but in same style as we did with the QoL features we want to give you the oppertunity to highlight to us what you think is most important. This will be done in a more structured way compared to last time and if you are interested in contributing please head over to @StarNaN's thread over here.

Next week I'll be talking about some of the Quality of Life features we've implemented, some of these being entirely new features almost on their own.
 
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Ah I see you've made more stops to some more of the player exploits. What will streamers do now to make entertaining runs? You're really trying to take away the odd runs.
 
Any chance that you fix the dreaded problem of colonial claims for Catholic nations? As of now, if you get a claim as England and then form Great Britain, the claim is still belonging to England. As a consequence, you suffer a penalty for colonizing, even though it is factually the same country.
 
Before I touch on anything else, or the bugfix questionare thread by StarNaN...

But has there been any changes planned, or fixes to the whole "AI not converting unless under very rare circumstances" issue that's been a thing for a while now in game's latest patches? @Groogy
 
Nice you fixed some colonial nation issues, but have you considered the one where for example if you as Spain have PU over Portugal there is nothing you can do to prevent natives to eat up Portugals colonial subjects as they are not counted as your subjects in any way.
At least some kind of notification would be nice that you are about to loose halve of luisiana to an OPM native...
 
Another government reform fix we also made sure to fix is so Native Americans can't get unique governments like English Monarchy anymore. You should start seeing a lot more United States of America as we've fixed a bug causing the American Revolution to never come. We've tried to make how the AI picks Government Reforms to be generally a little bit better, from how Tribes become Monarchies/Republics to having the AI favor certain picks like their own unique governments etc.

Does it fix republican-only governments? Or you still need to jump through hoops to reform from colonizer instead of colonial nation?

And I am not really fan of such specific effort to keep Pope catholic, not that I ever wanted to play otherwise.
 
We are already aware of several issues the community wants us to address and improve but in same style as we did with the QoL features we want to give you the oppertunity to highlight to us what you think is most important.

Naval combat, naval mechanics, maritime and naval ideas, and the glorious Age of Sail? All sorts of ideas and concepts were posted in the suggestion subforum. It's time. Make Navies mean something significant, rather than an afterthought. Thank you
 
Lots of AI bug fixes and colony AI updates but this ancient bug still needs acknowledging.

If you think that this bug is ancient then the peace notification incorrect display must be from before the earth existed :)

Devs rarely answer bug posts and they don't need to in order to acknowledge a bug. Necro is against the rules of the forum and bumping your own bug report won't do you any good. Your best bet is to *wait*.
 
If you guys are looking into AI behaviour, please, I beg of you, put an end to the AI that runs to the ends of the earth once and for all. Deny my vassals the right to ask for and give away military access. These are the only things I want for Christmas.

Exactly ! Sometimes I just consider annexing vassals or just don't create them at first place because of the access they give to stupid nations. Also AI running ends of the world with his army so I can't wipe his army for more peace deal reason is absurd. Needs fix.
 
Hey, here is a bug that it would be nice if it was fixed:
European Catholic nations that have relocated to the New World do not get access to the Treaty of Tordesillas, even if their capital is in the region and they have much more than five provinces there. In addition, the Catholic Americans still get negative consequences from other nations recieving Tordesillas benefits in that region. In my case, I played as the Papacy headquartered in Havana and had to edit the save game to prevent a latecomer from claiming all of my land.
I recognize that making Tordesillas available to tags in America would cause problems (like Native Americans claiming whole regions), but might I suggest that Catholic tags in America don't suffer the negative effects of Tordesillas (decreased opinion & settlers, etc.). Thank you!
 
I'd like it if you guys could do something about the RNW generation and how terrible it is. I'm glad to see that we don't have to restart the game anymore when backing out to the main menu? That is a huge annoyance when trying to get a good RNW. Another problem of RNW generation is that you almost always have to look at it. Unless you want to play for 10 hours only to get out there and find a tiny collection of islands. Where it wasn't even worth dumping all those points into exploration.

I think a fix for this could be something like a slider, for the size of the new world, just so you can have some idea of what you are getting. Small/medium/large/random. Way too many of these new worlds that get generated are only a handful of small islands. More tiles maybe?

Yet another problem of RNW generation is that trade nodes are not displayed at start and sometimes you will get a RNW where you will not get a trade node anywhere close back to your home country. (not to mention that lately I've had a bug where connections from the RNW do not appear in game, you can still send merchants, but can't tell them which way to send things)

It would be nice to have trade node connections appear on the start screen. I'm not sure how to solve the problem of not getting a trade node going in your direction. Perhaps trade nodes could be somewhat dynamic, as in, they have a few preset destinations (australia, girin, seville, etc) and depending on what nation owns the trade node, then it will be directed to whichever trade node has a direct land route to that nations capital. This, I think, would also add more weight to really controlling trade in the new world by land ownership and sending it all back home. Ideally, trade routes from the new world should be much more dynamic, but I understand if perhaps this is a limitation of technology.

I know that RNW has always been kind of wonky, and maybe not as popular with everyone (but maybe that's because it kind of sucks?), but it is definitely my favorite way to play the game. So I hope you can find the time to tweak it a little bit. I was really hoping golden century would have changed some of this stuff. But now I know that we are running out of DLC's!
 
I've promised Augsburg to Munich, but Austria managed to snipe it before and such I am left without anything to give him but he understands it wasn't my fault.

Don't forget that player can give own captured province to any other allies... Then player can use Ally without price.
 
Two things. One, your comment about the Pope flipping religions seems laser directed at Florrworry. I have never, ever seen an atheist Pope outside of his shenanigans. Why patch a crazy thing that never happens unless the player forces it? That's just removing fun, or calling it badwrongfun or something. Bankrupt Pope should be patched, I remember that happening to the AI, but atheist? It's not like it gives broken bonuses or anything, it's just silliness.

Second, I feel like I should mention that I just read a reddit post of a normal player playing a normal game - Prince of Egypt achievement - being unable to finish because of end game tags and capital movement restrictions. He formed Italy, as you do when you start as Florence, and nothing warned him that he couldn't then form Egypt. He also ran into a brick wall of being unable to move his capital to Cairo, because it's in Africa, and Italy is very high dev.

I am very glad you are fixing bugs, and especially at vassals requiring 100/month income to convert provinces that cost 0.79/month. But I sincerely ask that you revisit the capital movement and end game tag restrictions.

I used to take the Ottos, flip to Croatia, then form Rum. I like the color better, and I don't want the utter slog of being Karaman just for a color. Maybe have end game tags as an optional rule? Like balanced idea groups, something you can tick or untick as you like - that would fix the multi-player consideration.

I don't see why someone couldn't go Florence -> Tuscany -> Italy -> Egypt. Most exploits were of the HRE variety.

Edit: actually, didn't banning forming nations more than once fix that? So why are there end game tags, then?
 
Two things. One, your comment about the Pope flipping religions seems laser directed at Florrworry. I have never, ever seen an atheist Pope outside of his shenanigans. Why patch a crazy thing that never happens unless the player forces it? That's just removing fun, or calling it badwrongfun or something. Bankrupt Pope should be patched, I remember that happening to the AI, but atheist? It's not like it gives broken bonuses or anything, it's just silliness.
The other one that did it, was DDRJake with his sunni pope crusading against christians. Although that run was very old.
 
Don't forget that player can give own captured province to any other allies... Then player can use Ally without price.

From what I gather, Groogy was talking about provinces annexed by another country, not simply occupied by another country. So giving your own occupied province to another ally would only work if that ally peaces out early and takes it before the final peace conference.