Europa Universalis IV - Development Diary 13th of December 2022 - Roadmap to 1.35

[annulen]

I think that 1.35 will be a free patch. It might still add a few mission trees to some smaller area, like Ming or Muslim Steppes, or Caucasus (if they decide to do them separately from a ME update). I'm also wondering, if we're going to see some new monuments for this update.

I hope not. I don't mind paying for a DLC if I can be sure they will not lowball me on middle eastern content.
I want the ME update to be at least as good as Lions, possibly even better since they've said they have a bit more room to rework older mechanics now.

I believe for most of players it would be more beneficial to have a separate free patch with rebalances and fixes, and another one with DLC. DLC patch needs to add new stuff which can lead to new bugs and (possibly game-breaking) mistakes in balance of new features, which would require a few minor patches to sort out. In this case players would have an option to stay on free patch for a while. However, it's less advantageous for developers, because if you don't update, you are less likely to buy DLC soon

 

[AlknicTeos]

my games hardly last longer than to 1570-1600. I have "won" a game and there is no kind of challenge left... I have some hours in EU4. The games wouldnt last longer, but the games would be finished with some magical world conquest war cb. Like in EU3 the final challenge was to beat bbb

 

[PDXBigBoss]

If you're revisiting older idea groups, what are the odds we'll see a buff to defensive ideas? I feel like they should be the key to smaller nations surviving against larger neighbors, but forts only slow them down and your armies are just too weak.

I will take a closer look at the policy side of Defensive ideas and adjust accordingly

 

[Hezekiah]

Instead of adding +% religious unity to Religious ideas, maybe you could add another missionary or more conversion power? Compared to older patches, more religions have a competitive amount of missionaries and missionary strength these days, but there remain cases where having more is desirable. If not that, then maybe Religious ideas could give additional benefits to true faith provinces?

I hope you continue to look at ideas and policies overall; while things are better than they used to be, there remain idea groups that are not very competitive with their peers. With the sad state of navies and the overwhelming importance of land warfare and land military access, Maritime and Naval ideas are rarely optimal, and with the Trade Company changes, Trade ideas have relatively less to offer than before.
On the other hand, single-player conquerors often take Administrative for the core creation cost and governing capacity, Diplomatic for its amazing combination of relation benefits and war score modifier, and Offensive ideas for siege ability, land leader pips, discipline, and force limit.

The whole set of ideas could really use a shake up.

 

[bpabalate]

Most changes to the idea groups look good to me. Definitely makes sense to have separate Mercenary ideas and take the merc-related ideas out of the Admin group.

The only thing that didn't make a ton of sense to me were the changes to the Economic idea group - I don't understand all the gold-related ideas. I don't see a need for those ideas honestly as ideas to manage inflation from Gold or reduce change of depletion are not applicable to the vast majority of nations, at least in my experience. And IMO the two best ideas were removed from the group - the construction cost reduction and dev cost reduction. I think bonuses that help with gold/inflation should be contry-specific or event-specific for countries that could reasonably be dependent on gold (Ethiopia/Kilwa for example. But if I don't come across any gold mines in my run I don't want those gold/inflation-specific ideas taking up two slots in Economic ideas and would prefer the construction and dev cost reductions.

 

[SebasR]

First of all I am going to clarify what type of game I am going to talk about below. i will talk about playing tall and expand at the same time, not as aggressive as a world conquest but as much as you can without being negligent in deving and building. like how people play in multiplayer. I'm going to ignore world conquest and speed running because the meta in these types of games it is totally different.

Infrastructure ideas:
this idea is full of potentially very strong modifiers. dev cost, autonomy reduction and build cost are very strong when they get stack i suppose is compensated by moving them from economic ideas. global prosperity growth is a very strong modifire that people can underestimate, this can be very strong because prosperity is strong (dev cost -10, good produced +25% and autonomy reduction). Since it's only 0.25, I'll say it's fine. (33 years x 0.25 = ~100 prosperity). movement speed is also very strong in my opinion this should only apply in your territory and be only 10% to avoid stacking.
-25% Building and gobal allowed numer of buildings +1 are in my opinion the strongest of all the ideas, the first one should get nerf and the second one remove. this is a game where snowballing can happen very fast. Building construction speed is one of the biggest limitations to snowballing while building your country. 25% is alot of time save. i think it shoudnt be more than 10%. regarding the +1 buildings, another major limitation to snowballing is the number building slots usualy you need to dev provinces to bypass this limitation this takes time buy adding +1 slot you are raising this limitation, the player will be allow to build more buildings before it use to be capable therefore the snowballing will increase.

I am not convinced with removing modifires so important from economics (dev cost, building cost) to give them to another idea. I think this is a very strong nerf to economics and it does not convince me considering that in the previous version it was also nerfed. Right now I see these new economic ideas as something useful only for those who have many gold mines. I think the dev cost should stay. if you are concerned about stacking you can remove it from province edict, i find very annoying having to micro the edicts every time i want to dev.

The policies i think there are okey. i spotted two that can be especialy strong if use correctly ("average monarch lifespan +25%" and "movement speed +10% and artillery levels available vs fort +2")

court ideas:
these ideas seem very weak to me. the only strong modifier they have is reform progress growth, the others are very circumstantial.

Mercenary ideas:
These ideas are okey. my only proble is with if you add mercs_cost_no_profe (since there is a # I guess it's just an idea). this would be very strong since it would be like indirectly adding +100,000 manpower to the country without penalty.
reserves_organisation = 0.5 is also a very dangerous modifier especialy if stacked with 80 professionalism (other reserves_organisation = 0.5). with this to stacked the reserves moral lose will be 0. so this is encourage stacking all your trops in 1 army. especially that now there is a bug in late game. you can stack wipe any amount of enemig troops if you have doble the troops and the first line is demoralized before the withdrawal time limit (this happen only in late game because in early you dont do enough to make the first line retreat in time, but in late game it can happen very easy). because in this bug right now late game battles meta is stacking your troops and try to wipe the enemig this is specially common in multiplayer games. I've seen millions of troops stackwiped for this bug.

Another thing i want to point out is that there is more and more advisor cost. in almost all my games I am able to have level 4-5 advisors as early as 1500, thanks to how easy it is and how much advisor cost there is. i think you should nerf advisor cost in general.

Naval ideas:
although they were not mentioned in this DD. I wanted to take the opportunity to recommend things about them. in the last version you tried to improve the naval ideas but no substantial change was achieved. I think the problem is the premise, you said that the naval ideas were weak. The naval ideas are very strong, to the point that people ban them in multiplayer. The reason why no one uses them is that in Singleplayer you can win against the IA with out them. there's no need to take them when you can trick the AI into letting you cross a strait, beat it with more ships, or win by micromanaging the battle. Honestly, I don't really know what to do with those ideas either. My only idea is to nerf them and move them to diplomatic.

Thanks for reading all this and I hope you'll excuse me if there are any mistakes. my English is not the best.

 

[Grave461]

This is a genuinely interesting suggestion, let's address it.
We could definitely take another look at advisor bonuses if time allows for it (looking at you, -10% stab cost guy) and try to bring them up a step, so all of them are as closely balanced as possible. It's very difficult to add new advisors due to the amount of portraits each one needs.

What about a conditional bonus for advisors, depending on which Idea, Idea Group, or fully unlocked group you have?

Example: Treasurer offers +15% National Tax modifier instead of +10% if you have Economics Ideas fully unlocked?

 

[namewhichisnottakenyet]

I need more idea group slots!

 

[DominusNovus]

My gut reaction:
Giving religious ideas a religious unity boost might be pretty powerful. It makes conquering wrong-faith territory much easier to digest while you work on converting them.
I like the Court ideas for Republics. The boost to Republican Tradition (and the plutocratic policy) could be a little too powerful, but you didn't hear that from me.

 

[Tempscire]

I have to take some time to go through all of these and make my judgement. But there are clearly some overly strong and overly weak choices.


There are still some modifiers which just cannot be very competitive without giving absurdly high numbers. A nice example from this DD is the following:

Infrastructure and Plutocratic:

I think putting some work in small mechanical changes which would allow bonuses like the one above to shine, could be very beneficial for EU4.



"Next week there will be another Dev Diary focused on another aspect of the game that we are working on rebalancing: Unit Pips. See you then!"
Very interesting.

 

[Terixis]

Economic as the gold mine+inflation idea group is nifty, although it'll be very niche. Huge buff for the African tags with controlled gold mining privilege though, bringing it up to 100% depletion reduction and finally making it worth taking.

 

[Svenska Super]

change the build buildings gui also because its confusing when a factory can be built in a province. also state government cost as well as absolutism are bad explained think too much clutter gui needs a refresh

 

[Reyshi]

In fact, even with 25% you need to conquer quite a lot of lands just to cover up for admin points invested in idea group. However, without all mercenary dead weight in the group, it's effective cost have been reduced...

CCR is not only saving admin mana, it's also reducing coring time. It's like two modifiers in one.
And yep with the recent changes, I think admin ideas are way more powerful than before especially when you don't use mercenaries.
+ With the cheaper admin advisor (which will be the first idea unlocked ?), you'll save way more admin mana than before.

For the Free Colonies (6th idea unlocked for exploration ideas), it's on average equivalent to 30 settlers / year / colonist. I think halving that idea would slow colonization a little bit.

 

[Kurfürstin Adelheid]

I will be spoilt for choice with all these new idea groups! I already have a hard time choosing

 

[Wendigo514]

Religious unity doesn't seem in the right place in the religious idea group and it instead seems better in the humanist idea group imo. It could be replaced with either some benefit for having true faith provinces (manpower or institution spread?) or warscore against other religions (but this could make deus vult even stronger).

Talking about religious unity, currently there's at least one nation, the Papal State, that has a useless +25% religious unity tradition at the start of the game despite having already 100%, I think it could be nice to give a reason for having it over 100%, uncapping the effects for each percentage point and maybe reversing the maluses for the points below 100% into bonuses for each percentage point over the maximum.

One last wish since you're planning revisiting some features of the game, I'd really like to see the Sich Rada Government Reform getting access to the Cossacks Estate and to the Horde Idea group with the Bonus increasing Cossacks Loyalty Equilibrium.

 

[annulen]

For the Free Colonies (6th idea unlocked for exploration ideas), it's on average equivalent to 30 settlers / year / colonist. I think halving that idea would slow colonization a little bit.

Compare to my linked screenshot with 130 settlers/year without colonist.

30 settlers/year is not that much, and it requires colonist to be present which is a big deal if you have only one colonist from Exploration.

 

[Winfield Scott]

I feel religious should give more bonuses to true faith provinces, so that you reap extra benefits of true faith provinces, whilst humanist mitigates the penalties of other faiths.

Currently religious doesn't do anything outside of the conversion, and that is kinda limited.

Maybe put them in policies rather than the group itself. Or replace religious unity with bonuses to churches and cathedrals.

 

[WindingArc]

The good news is that now we have some extra room to rework some game mechanics. Don’t expect anything very ambitious, but some more changes that are on the line with the fixes for the AI and the new government reforms we implemented for 1.34, fleshing out features of the game that haven’t received any update in a while. We will cover two of these topics today and next week.

Can we expect any additional support for modders?
There's a short thread full of requests here and probably lots more scattered throughout the EU4 forums.

Hey everyone, here @PDX Big Boss ! We decided to add a few new idea groups to the game as well as a lot of new policies and new events, to accompany a general rebalance of the existing idea groups.

Did you change any of the historical_idea_groups choices in common/countries files?

View attachment 926933​

+1 global buildings makes this a must-have idea group for every country with more than a handful of provinces, which is what you said you're trying to avoid. Global movement speed doesn't fit well either because it implies you're building roads in foreign provinces.

To keep with the the construction theme, I'd replace them with any combination of the following:

• Unit recruitment time reduction
• Unit recruitment cost reduction
• Unit reinforcement speed increase in owned provinces
• Unit reinforcement cost reduction in owned provinces
• Ship construction time reduction
• Ship construction cost reduction
• Ship repair speed increase in owned provinces
• Supply depot cost reduction
• Increased supply depot duration
• Increased garrison size
• Increased garrison recovery rate

Infrastructure Ideas offer great bonuses such as construction cost and time reduction, a merchant, autonomy decay, and development cost. Let’s take a look at the Diplomatic Policies for it:

View attachment 926919
View attachment 926926
Note: Years for Personal Union Integration: -10

The Colonial Improvement Act sounds way too strong. I'd replace it with colonial maintenance cost reduction.

As a general note, colonization happens too quickly - most of the Americas are colonized by the end of the game, and many historical colonial latecomers are shut out - and it costs too much. Instead of making colonies more beneficial via increased development, make them less beneficial via reduced colonization speed but dramatically less costly to maintain.

Note: an idea we’ve had is to add a unique modifier here ‘max_privilege_slots = 1’ somewhere in this set

I'd replace reform progress growth with that. Reform progress is already an overly abundant resource.

Court Ideas + any Admin idea group policy:

View attachment 926934

I think increased monarch lifespan is a little weird as a modifier. It's not like better courts led to markedly better royal healthcare. If it doesn't affect heir lifespans, it also would mitigate the main drawback of having a long-lived monarch, which is getting an old heir who can't easily produce an heir of his own.

No stability loss on monarch death is strong enough, especially if you have 2+ stability and can't afford to increase it easily.

Note: hmmm this 0.5 Yearly Army Professionalism looks a bit too strong hmm…

Yes.

Finally, let’s look into the new Mercenary Ideas. This one is a bit deeper of a rework because one of our plans is to accompany this new Idea Group with somewhat of a rework on how Mercenaries are distributed, so as to make them a tad bit more interesting at certain points during the game.

View attachment 926941​

A better rework of professionalism loss from mercenaries would be making it a monthly reduction based on the amount of force limit taken up by hired mercenaries.
Removing that monthly reduction via the mercenary idea group would still be a good idea.

Mercenary Ideas + any Dip Group Policies:

View attachment 926943

I'd hate to see client states reworked this way because I think it's a missed opportunity. (Client states also didn't have much to do with mercenaries.) Maybe give bonuses to the mercenaries of subject nations instead of unlocking client states early.


EU4 client states are meant to represent strong nations dictating the government forms of neighboring satellite nations, particularly as the First French Republic and Empire did. Unlike client states in EU4, most French client states corresponded with existing or formable EU4 tags.

Instead of only giving nations the ability to make brand new tags out thin air, I'd also make parallel formation decisions for client states: nations could form and release tags whose formation requirements they control as client states. For example, if France conquers the Rhineland and doesn't want to core it or deal with unaccepted German cultures, it could release Westphalia as a client state from the provinces required to form it.

Humanist

• Removed Religious Unity and replaced with Max. Tolerance of Heathens and Heretics

I'd replace all national ideas that remove penalties from heretic and heathen provinces with either increased base tolerance or increased max tolerance of heathens and heretics. Colonial nations and the United States in particular are supposed to be quasi-humanist melting pots, not utopias where religious strife didn't exist.

Economic Ideas

• Removed Construction Cost and replaced with -25% Monthly Gold Inflation and -25% Gold Depletion Chance reduction (This is a niche change, we would would welcome feedback on this)

• Replace it with the first Infrastructure idea - increased prosperity growth and decreased state maintenance
  • Both modifiers fit better with the theme of Economic Ideas, which is efficient management resulting in greater profits and lower expenses
  • Reduced gold inflation is also somewhat redundant with the existing inflation reduction in Economic Ideas.
• Instead, add a cost reduction to upgrading Centers of Trade to Infrastructure ideas, which fits better with the group's construction and development theme
  • This could replace the existing cost reduction in Expansion ideas, which could be replaced with a cost reduction in trade company investments; alternatively, the cost reductions could stack across the two idea groups
  • For people who don't own Dharma, the Infrastructure idea would increase domestic trade power and the Expansion idea would continue to increase trade power abroad

The goal of this rework is to breathe some new life into the Idea Groups that were introduced nearly 10 years ago. On top of that, many existing groups will potentially receive new modifiers such as Humanist’s Heretic Opinion of Us (name TBD) which would increase Heretics’ opinion of your nation, due to your humanist approach towards their people.

I like the humanist opinion bonus, but I'd much rather see the concept of variable heretic opinion generalized. Anglicans and Protestants shouldn't dislike each other as much as they dislike Catholics and Reformed countries, if at all. Catholics shouldn't get opinion penalties with Orthodox and Coptic countries from the Council of Trent.

As long as you're somewhat reworking heretic opinions, could you please fix the balance issues with the existing heretic opinion system?

 

[firespark 84]

Anyone else think that admin is still too strong (and even more so with these changes if they come to pass?) it’s still always a must pick for any serious play through and it would be nice to see it brought down to a level where other ideas in its category can compete

 

[Cruxador]

Nice! Infrastructure ideas look like they'll be my most common pick since their focus on directly building up the nation is one of my favorite things to do. Court ideas also have some cool stuff, and while mercenary ideas aren't relevant to my playstyle, taking the mercenary stuff out of the admin ideas is nice, even though what replaces them is mostly kind of low impact too.