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

Hello and welcome back to another Europa Universalis IV Dev Diary!

It’s been a while since the last one, back in September. The main reason for this is that the Team has been quite busy during these months. In October we released the 1.34.4 update, that fixed most of the issues we wanted to cover after Lions of the North, and participated in the last edition of the Grandest Lan, which could be organized again at Moszna Castle (and that you can watch at the Paradox Grand Strategy YouTube channel!). In November, the team focused on launching EUIV on a new platform, GOG, with the 1.34.5 update; this is the fourth platform in which the game can be played, after Steam, Microsoft Store, and Epic Games.

So now comes December, and we feel it’s the proper time to give you an insight into what we’re working on and share with you a roadmap to the 1.35 update (as we won’t be releasing more patches for the 1.34 version).

First and foremost, and although we’ve already said this, we want to thank all the players that have bought and played EUIV: Lions of the North, making it one of the most successful releases in the history of this game. We think that a non-trivial part of this has been the quality of the 1.34 ‘Sweden’ free update, and we are very happy about the fact of having to patch it only two times, as we deem this version quite stable.

So, what are our plans for the future? Well, not surprisingly, we want to keep focused on continuing to reduce the bug count as much as possible; in the last couple of years, the Team has fixed between 2,000 and 3,000 backlog bugs, and we think that the state of the game is much better after this effort. However, we still have hundreds of issues in our backlog, so more effort needs to be put into it.

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.

And when is new content going to be shown? We will get started with that in January after the Team comes back from the Christmas Holidays. We’re very excited about it, but you will have to wait a bit more to take the first look at it. And with no further words to say, let's go with the first ideas we want to share with you!



Idea Group Additions and Rebalance

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.

First things first, we wish to introduce 3 new idea groups:
  • Infrastructure Ideas for the Admin Category
  • Court Ideas for the Dip Category
  • Mercenary Ideas for the Mil Category
A few notes we should mention here! This by no means reflects which will be the released version of the changes. Lions introduced a very high bar of quality and our intention is - at the very least - to meet this bar. So please keep in mind that what you see here is far from finalized, in fact, this is hot code. Having said that, I would genuinely like to encourage you all to give feedback, especially on stuff you don’t like and help shape this beautiful game together. The intention behind these new groups is not to introduce a new powerful single-line meta, but rather to spruce up the game and maybe offer more options for the player, in the interest of making your games more fun and enjoyable. Enough with the boring stuff, onto the Ideas!

The goal behind Infrastructure ideas is to give you the ability to build up your nation, by granting you the tools to speed up construction, reduce its costs, autonomy levels, and more. Let’s take a look:

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For the purpose of creating this new group, we chose to separate it from Economic Ideas, which now focus exclusively on the money-making aspect of the game, directly. More on that later, when we tackle existing idea groups.

image (73).png

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:

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Note: Years for Personal Union Integration: -10

And a quick peek at the Policy Combination of Infrastructure + any Military Idea Group except Aristo/Plutocratic/Horde/Theocratic:

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Infrastructure and Aristocratic:
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Infrastructure and Plutocratic:
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Infrastructure and Horde:
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Infrastructure and Divine:
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Note: the prestige gain here is 0.5 per Development Point

Moving to the next set of new Ideas, the goal behind Court ideas is to introduce some internal flavor, maneuverability in regards to estate manipulation, and more. Let’s take a look:

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We took the decision to make some room for the Prestige here, by moving it over from Religious ideas, more on that later!

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

Court Ideas + any Admin idea group policy:

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Court + any Mil idea group policy:

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

Court and Aristocratic:
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Court and Plutocratic:
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Court and Horde:
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Court and Divine:
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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.

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Mercenary Ideas + any Admin Group Policies:

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Mercenary Ideas + any Dip Group Policies:

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Moving on, we have made some tweaks to existing idea groups, let’s look into them:

Religious Ideas
  • Removed Stability Cost Modifier and replaced with Religious Unity
Humanist
  • Removed Religious Unity and replaced with Max. Tolerance of Heathens and Heretics
Administrative Ideas
  • Removed Merc Cost and replaced with Admin Advisor Cost
  • Removed Merc Maintenance and replaced with Max Promoted Cultures and Promote Culture Cost
  • Removed Interest and replaced with Religious' Stability Cost modifier
  • Removed Merc Manpower and replaced with States Governing Cost
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)
  • Increased Interest to 1 instead of 0.5 due to 0.5 being removed from Admin Ideas (this will probably get nerfed and the other half will be reintroduced elsewhere)
  • Removed Monthly Autonomy and replaced with -25% Reduce Inflation Cost and -33% Autonomy Chance Cool down
  • Removed Development Cost and replaced with +10% Goods Produced Modifier
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.

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Note: most of these Improve Relations Modifiers are Placeholders for relations with own religion/culture group and similar modifiers.

We also aim at revisiting more existing idea groups in the Diplomatic and Military Groups as well as the Events from all idea groups. Furthermore, here’s a little event you may get if your ruler has poor diplomatic skills while Court Ideas are active:

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Note: shameful display!

And that’s all for today! We’ll be glad to receive your feedback regarding these changes, as we really wanted to tackle them as early as possible with the community, so we have enough time to change/rebalance the different issues that could arise from discussing them with the community.

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!
 

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Will it thou? Presumably if you want to go for it for the -100% depletion you'd be getting it pretty early on. But how can you fit the new eco idea on your first 4 groups? By starting in Africa you spend the first 100 or so years playing catch up with Europe so investing 2.8K adm just so you don't have to spend adm in combating inflation and your mines never deplete isn't a very good call.

I honestly don't see any situation where Eco is now worthwile, except maybe if you want to go with the lowest possible loan repay cost (which the devs already foresaw as a potential issue). If you are going full gold mine you don't need this group (overkill) and if you don't then it is a dead group.

It will become the new Naval ideas group: very good in a very specific situation and also overkill to get it.
I am thinking of adding a new mechanic that someone suggested, wherein building a Manufactory grants 1 Base Production or Manpower based on type of manufactory, to the province (and removing the manufactory will take that development away). After reading through every reply to the Dev Diary and all feedback thus far I do agree that Eco Ideas with this iteration are quite weaker due to the lack of Construction Cost and Dev Cost. Moreover I would love to add more cool little mechanics like the one I mentioned above. Thoughts ?
Note that both effects of palace_of_splendor idea are DLC-locked (Mandate of Heaven and Res Publica or Common Sense, respectively), so it would be empty in a base game.
These will either be given non-DLC alternatives or they will be amended to grant some non-DLC bonuses on top of their DLC-bonuses, we will see.

edit;
One of our hardworking QA's has put together a list with the highlights of feedback so far and once I am back from vacation I will tackle each point and make necessary changes, happy holidays y'all and Merry Christmas!
 
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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.
But maybe you could merge some advisors, or add two boni for them? To be honest the Boni are often a little bit weak, compared to the high prise of the advisors.

For example the guy who reduces army mmaintanaince, could also get some armytradition decay reduction/drilling speed to became a good peacetime advisor ect.

And trough merging you could maybe recycle some of the old portraits for new Advisors?
 
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There is something that's bothering me with the "global_allowed_num_of_buildings".

I like playing tall, but there is this hard cap on the max number of buildings a province can have. Nice to get 12 buildings on a high dev province, (and only 10 when there is a COT, which is really a shame). To be clear, this modifier is not about the hard cap, but the soft cap which can be upgraded with devlopment?
 
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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.
Yes something like the buffs from the religious culture privilege, or the manpower from the devine ideas would be great and would be a perfect addition.

Furthermore, most religions are not that keen on moneylending. So if you want to reduce the high interestreduction from your new economicideas this could be the place to go.
 
I will take a closer look at the policy side of Defensive ideas and adjust accordingly
Ideas for defensive ideas +1 defensive bonus for each 3 levels of forts would be nice combined with like additional 50% buffs to ramparts, while making them cheaper and giving extra manufactury slot, would be nice thing... Also with free rise of garrison.. just to let enemy think about if he rly want to siege that province
 
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But maybe you could merge some advisors, or add two boni for them? To be honest the Boni are often a little bit weak, compared to the high prise of the advisors.

For example the guy who reduces army mmaintanaince, could also get some armytradition decay reduction/drilling speed to became a good peacetime advisor ect.

And trough merging you could maybe recycle some of the old portraits for new Advisors?
By default this is a good idea, however there's an obstacle here; if we are to merge advisors and increase the number of bonuses they give by default (with which i am totally on board at least on paper) we would also need to rework the advisors UI so both bonuses are properly displayed. For example if you try to do that as the UI is adjusted now, you'd have ugly overlapping numbers. However, sadly we have already planned out most - if not all - of our UI time for the patch and therefore this is not something we can realistically do with the time we got in our hands :(
(I could make a mod for this though in my spare time, it's a genuinely great idea)
There is something that's bothering me with the "global_allowed_num_of_buildings".

I like playing tall, but there is this hard cap on the max number of buildings a province can have. Nice to get 12 buildings on a high dev province, (and only 10 when there is a COT, which is really a shame). To be clear, this modifier is not about the hard cap, but the soft cap which can be upgraded with devlopment?
This is not something we can do right now, due to coding constraints however I would love to look into mechanic-like bonuses for Ideagroups, especially some that benefit tall nations (difficult to achieve but certainly worth to try)
Ideas for defensive ideas +1 defensive bonus for each 3 levels of forts would be nice combined with like additional 50% buffs to ramparts, while making them cheaper and giving extra manufactury slot, would be nice thing... Also with free rise of garrison.. just to let enemy think about if he rly want to siege that province
A mechanic tied to ramparts or forts is a pretty cool idea, for the Defensive Group.
 
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By default this is a good idea, however there's an obstacle here; if we are to merge advisors and increase the number of bonuses they give by default (with which i am totally on board at least on paper) we would also need to rework the advisors UI so both bonuses are properly displayed. For example if you try to do that as the UI is adjusted now, you'd have ugly overlapping numbers. However, sadly we have already planned out most - if not all - of our UI time for the patch and therefore this is not something we can realistically do with the time we got in our hands :(

I don't know if it's possible, but I would like to see a rework of the advisor system as a whole. Having to keep firing people because you can't find the one you want is expensive and annoying, to say the least.
This is what I was thinking about:
You can post a "job posting" (select a category you want (adm, dip, mil) and the role that would give the bonus(es) you want - for example, if I wanted a discipline advisor, I could spend a certain amount of money to "post the offer" and only advisors that offer diplo rep would show up. Maybe selecting the skill would also be good, but it would cost more money to post the offering.

Again, I don't know if it's possible, but I think it would greatly improve one of the most annoying but fundamental parts of the game, whilst still keeping the idea that advisors give mana and a certain bonus (or more than one, it would also be great).

Thanks for the work, Merry Christmas and a Happy 2023!

Edit: I just made this quick mockup of how it could look like
1671020537516.png
 
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Can you look at the influence tree as well. This because i think vassalisation and its process is not so clear anymore when applying vassalisation to many not so easy to be vassalised states.
 
Ideas for defensive ideas +1 defensive bonus for each 3 levels of forts would be nice combined with like additional 50% buffs to ramparts, while making them cheaper and giving extra manufactury slot, would be nice thing... Also with free rise of garrison.. just to let enemy think about if he rly want to siege that province
I have strong negative feelings towards anything that makes attrociously long lategame sieges last even longer and more common.
 
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I really like all of this in principle - it addresses a couple of the quirks identified last idea group tweek. Mercinaries have definatly been a bit of an add on and the economic/infrastructure split feels like it brings in choices if you are going that route.

Court I am not really getting - diplo groups are often a little less attractive and I don't see which situations it become a must have.

One extra change I would love is Maritime - I would love for trade to be more land trade based and Maritime to get sea trade bonuses. It would create the same choice you get elsewhere with paired policies (e.g. huminist vs religious, diplo vs influence)
 
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i like infrastructure ideas the only one that feels out of place would be state_efficiency maybe that could be moved to economic ideas,
you could replace this with something like:
efficient_reinforcements -10% reinforcemnt cost, + 20% reinforcement speed
or
efficient suply train +20% suply limit, +20% reinforcement speed

for economic ideas, how about giving it
+0.5% National tax modifier and +0.5% Production efficiency X average development (total development / owned provinces)
 
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Court Ideas need somethimg like MaxAdvisorLevel +1 (allowing to boost advisors to level 6) or NumberOfAdvisors +1 (opening up a 4th advisor slot. Blow up the UI!) As it is now, it seems really weak, with that +1 prestige idea bordering a blankspot/insult.
 
Regarding advisors, there is a mechanic that I would like to see implemented: That firing advisors costs more than a few ducats. Imagine a president/emperor/king hiring and firing ministers in short periods of time. It is not very realistic and could have serious consequences for the stability of the country. Maybe have a 50% chance of losing a stability point if you fire an adviser 10 years before you hired him?
It would also help to better think about the events in which they give you the option to fire advisors.

English is not my native language, sorry if there are mistakes.
 
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I really like the peculiar idea group for each government type (aristocratic ideas for monarchies, plutocratic ideas for republics...). And I have this weird "Religious and Humanist ideas have this christian feeling to them". Why not having a specific idea group for each religious group?
Perhaps it's a bad idea, I'm not sure.

Another suggestion, in line with the Middle-East focus, would be to add new estates for muslims countries : Janissaries (or other slaves-based estates, I'm not sur how to call them for the Mamluk sultanate and the Delhi sultanate where they hold the power).
 
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I like the new idea groups, but there are 8 idea groups to choose from. This limit should be increased further, otherwise there would be no point in increasing the number of idea groups. In my opinion, every two idea groups chosen should unlock one idea group. This open group of ideas should be independent of the technology level. In short, the player who completes 8 idea groups can access 4 extra idea group slots.
Great idea, I love it.
 
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I've read most of the feedback here and this is what I can say about the changes:

Religious Ideas loses a good amount of value due to stab cost being removed
and Religious Unity only makes sense if you still have much to convert.
-> I also think that Tolerance of True Faith would be more fitting.

The strongest things you can do with Religious ideas were always being able to convert provinces you wouldn't be able otherwise,
the stab cost reduction and mainly the Imperialism (Light) CB. -> still often a good pick.


Removing the Religious Unity modifier from Humanist ideas was overdue.
and getting Max Tolerance of the H's is quiet nice. -> solid change.


Administrative Ideas really provide what the name suggests now lol.
This is a admin points powerhouse. easy&early Lvl 2 Admin Advisors and Stab Cost Reduction.
The extra +1 Promoted Cultures and its CR sure helps as well.

Still I think it's not too powerful as some others in here said,
although it's certainly a must-take.
-> If you decide to nerf some of the slots, you should definetely consider buffing some policies in exchange.


For Economic Ideas I just give a big F.
This needs totally new ideas IMO.
It would be neat if you add a never-ending event chain,
that gives +1 Tax in a random province every few years.
It would open up a new way to start as a very small and weak country as you can just wait for your income to rise.



For the new Idea Groups I say the following:

I like the ideas for the Infrastructure Idea Group.
Especially Prosperity Growth, Movement Speed, Dev Cost and +1 Building slot seem very powerful
Prosp+DevCost is a wet dream for playing tall.
France with its many farms will be busted af.

On top of that you can easily catch up to any army with your Elan stack wipe.
And when you are done with that you go Colonial and get lots of free Dev Points from the policy.

It certainly makes playing as one of the easiest nations, a lot more easier. GG.
-> I feel like you have to nerf that Idea Group in more than 1 slot.


The Curt Idea Group seems very niche, which is not automatically a bad thing.
But still I think it adds too little to be picked over 1% of all games.
It needs lots of overhaul IMO and there is much room for ideas,
so I won't be suggesting anything specific.


Mercenary Idea Group is somewhat niche as well, but does a far better job
at giving tools that can be very useful in games.

You can mix armies now so manpower is less of a limiting factor, which is good.
You can stack Military Advisor Cost Reduction to easily go max lvl Advisor and pre-tech,
which is very powerful but still balanced, because you dispense other mil modifiers for that.

Also the Peace-Keeping Force Act Policy doubles the effect of Rebel Suppression,
which could potentially delete rebel uprising entirely, plus you get reduced Harsh Treatement Cost,
which lets your Absolutism sky-rocket as soon as it gets available.
 
It's a bit of a random question, but do you plan to revisit the Age Splendor bonuses. I feel like the 4/age unique bonuses could be expanded to include bonuses for more interesting nations. Also, the UI could be remade to only have 1 "unique" slot that would show the bonus available for your tag (if any) and 3 more bonuses for anyone could be added.
 
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The gold depletion reduction is a cool addition, but it should be tied to something else. The vast majority of nations do not have a gold province, which means it is just a waste of admin in most cases.
 
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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.
Muslim steppe update would honestly be so cool. Every last one of them currently has the same Mission Tree and there's definitely so much flavor to be had in the steppe. Would definitely love this and even buy a small DLC of it if it got released 100%
 
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