Europa Universalis IV - Development Diary 18th of January 2022

[Mindel]

Confucianism get a bonus to harmonisation from the Humanist finisher. It makes more sense since its not centered around converting.

That's an interesting point. Come to think of it, I do like the idea of Confucianism tying into Humanism more than Religious.

 

[KarlReich]

Should probably add a "Neighboring Chinese Warlord" Alliance desire modifier, possibly make it so they cant build Trust with eachother too.

 

[WindingArc]

Moving culture groups is huge for modders. Hope to see it in game as soon as possible!

They'll probably do what they did with Jurchen -> Manchu culture, namely replace an existing culture in-game with one that only existed in the code. Jurchen is called "manchu" in EU4's code, and Manchu is called "manchu_new". Neither culture ever changes culture group in the code.

No, TBH, as undoing previous DLC features is usually a pain code-wise.

Please don't make this a hard rule in further EU4 development. Making colonization function, especially for Catholic countries, will very likely require an overhaul of the Treaty of Tordesillas mechanics. Changing colonization speed won't be enough to prevent early Catholic colonizers from monopolizing entire colonial regions if later Catholic colonizers receive crippling opinion maluses with the pope for colonizing those regions.

No. Ottomans are usually blobbing, but that has always been a thing in EU4, and we think that nerfing them would create more new issues than solutions. What we will be actually doing is taking a look about this Crimea issue mentioned here, as it may help balancing the Ottomans-Russia relation.

The Ottoman AI's failure to understand that European land often won't be as useful as Middle Eastern land is another other big issue. Conquering provinces in the Kiev trade node, for instance, will gain the Ottomans very little trade revenue because Kiev's trade can't be easily steered back to Constantinople. The Ottomans could earn at least as much in tax and production income plus more trade income and probably more manpower by expanding south, or at least into Hungary (where it could then move its trade capital).

Teaching the AI to prioritize expansion into trade nodes that are either upstream from its trade capital or directly downstream from it might go a long way towards fixing colonization priorities as well.

We'll want to rework the Faction system in the future, but that's not a thing for 1.33.

A good way to recycle the faction system would be to make factions represent competing interests within a centralized government and estates represent competing interests within a decentralized government, as they do now. Factions could be unlocked or have their effects scaled up at higher levels of crownland.

Instead of ending abruptly in the 1600s, the gameplay loop in which players accumulate crownland at the expense of estates could lead to a new gameplay loop in which players balance factions against one another. Every country in the game could have access to both estates and factions and would effectively choose to prioritize one system over the other by centralizing or not.

RN: Anglicanism is exceptionalist pandering to Britaboos – Protestant with the divorces and bishops options is a perfectly cromulent representation of the CoE. Innovativeness is just another way to win harder, and the late-game stuff is pointless because for it to matter, I would have to deliberately not win the game before it comes online.

Anglicanism would have been better implemented as a set of special, England/Britain-only Protestant church aspects. Being able to re-dissolve the monasteries every few years has never made sense and, independent of the worth of any other Anglican mechanics, the mutual heretic opinion Anglicans and Protestants have of each other is both ashistorical and bad for gameplay.

 

[Redride' s OG]

Is Sinicize our culture like a new mechanic or new cultures in Chinese group?

 

[AnatolianKebab78]

Greetings, and Happy New Year to everyone! Today we’re coming back to EUIV DD’s, after taking a couple of months’ break from them (unfortunately not due to long Spanish holidays, as some on the forums have suggested ). What we’ve been doing in that time was already mentioned by Johan in the last DD: working on 1.32.1 and 1.32.2 patches, and then moving on to the next one, 1.33, that will be live later this quarter.

As Origins and 1.32.2 release have been mostly well praised (and we're very happy about that!), we thought that we wanted to move on 3 main points for the upcoming 1.33 patch:
1) Fixing most of the remaining bugs from 1.32/Origins.
2) Balancing some mechanics that had been on our list for a while.
3) Continue working to improve AI performance, as some issues appeared in 1.32.

Today I’ll be focusing on the game balance changes that we’ve been working on, as we still have some room for making changes before releasing the patch (although not new content, as we may be adding more in the next immersion pack we will be working on after this patch), and we want to receive some feedback on them from you, the community.

With Origins release, we’ve been able to revamp the setup and balance of Africa, and we’re pretty happy with it, in general terms. So, we thought of moving back to the Far East, as there were some balance issues that were not fully resolved by Leviathan although focusing in part on the SEA region. Regarding that, we were aware of the big discussion on Ming balance in the forums, thus it would be a good idea to tackle it for this patch.

Ming and the Emperor of China is a really hard tag and mechanics to balance out. It starts as the strongest country in the world, and MingBlob was not a desired outcome in past patches, as it hindered Eastern Asia gameplay (even affecting India super-region, as others have said). So, because of that Mingplosion being a regular outcome was useful for gameplay purposes, although Qing and other successors are not usually so successful when it comes to reuniting the EoC, being honest. For players, it's true that it's not the most challenging/rewarding tag to play with it, because it may be not too compelling to handle the disaster if you advance on Mandate of Heaven reforms, while at the same time it won't be a very challenging playtime, if you reach some snowball point early on (which is pretty doable by experienced players).

So, we’ve come with the following changes to Ming/EoC to try to balance it a bit better:



The Idea of the Harmonization Speed increase at high Harmony is to encourage alternating between harmonizing a new religion and accumulating Harmony. It should be possible for you to be just as fast with harmonizing religions as somebody who is chain harmonizing all the time.

Apart from that, we’re doing the following changes to other countries on the Far East neighborhood:



Finally, we’ve been also doing some changes regarding Portugal, Indian estates, a combat pips rework, and other stuff:



So, after most of these changes being implemented, and some still WIP, this is what we’re seeing in our nightlies AI tests:

View attachment 795415
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In some games Portugal is performing really well, while in others Spain is still a top dog in the Iberian Peninsula and America. Regarding China, you can see that Ming sometimes manage to stay stable, while Mingplossion still happens regularly, and even some of the successor states are able to blob a bit after it, recovering MoH.

This is all for today. We’re open to feedback and suggestions given by you to further improve the balance for 1.33, if possible; just remember to have civil discussions about them, as there were some hot-heated ones a couple months ago (basically regarding Ming balance), and we don't want that to be repeated.

Next week my fellow colleague @Gnivom will talk about the changes made to AI in the upcoming 1.33 patch (and yes, he will be tackling the AI deleting forts issue, among others). Hope you enjoy the DD!

Please add Oghuz culture containing Turkish, Azerbaijani and Turkmen cultures within itself

 

[grommile]

Please add Oghuz culture containing Turkish, Azerbaijani and Turkmen cultures within itself

They did this before.

They threw it away because they didn't like the gameplay results compared to putting Azerbaijani in Iranian, Turkmen in Altaic, and Turkish in "Levantine" with the Arabs.

 

[brifbates]

No. Ottomans are usually blobbing, but that has always been a thing in EU4, and we think that nerfing them would create more new issues than solutions. What we will be actually doing is taking a look about this Crimea issue mentioned here, as it may help balancing the Ottomans-Russia relation.

That's it? You post 5 screenshots of utter Russian incompetence and the only concern is ai Ottoman stupidity in expanding in a useless direction? How about addressing its inability to actually make any progress into the East Slavic lands in Lithuania? Or occasionally properly nomming the GH and Nogay? God forbid they actually once in a while actually perform anything close to their historical outcome, let alone exceed it even though you're apparently fine with every other European power doing so on the regular...

 

[Sete]

@Pavía if you allow me a couple last suggestions, I would change the Bandeirantes Idea for Indian Run (Carreira da India), or India Armadas: "While the India armadas were used to ferry troops, officials, missionaries and colonists between Europe and Asia, their primary objective was commercial. They were engaged in the spice trade, importing Asian spices to sell in European markets, especially the five "glorious spices" – pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and mace."

My reasoning being since cloves have a trade efficiency bonus, it makes more sense to have the India Armadas related to the idea than the Bandeirantes, if that makes sense.
Also for the Artillery Idea, if I got it correctly will it be the last one?
Originally it was founded in
1640 - Artillery and Drawing School.
The other name is from 1790. Still within the timeframe but way later.

 

[Grim Thoughts]

This isn't really a balance change, but I would really love to see a really weak Norse Greenlandic nation that is undergoing a disintegration and starvation disaster wherein 99 times out of 100 the nation collapses and disappears when it's AI. It would, be historically accurate, add a lot of flavor (which lord knows Scandinavia needs), and give us a way to play as Norse without custom nations. Aside from that, I would like to see some of the Arabian and Caucasian nations gain at least regional generic missions like with the Natives in the Americas and Oceania, especially for the ones with no unique missions at all (stuff like Hormuz and most other Arabian tags, Karabakh, and the Georgian nations. I would've included Rûm and the nations that can form it, but with this DD that will be rectified, props), but also for nations that have really lackluster unique missions like Persia, Mamluks, and Aq Qoyunlu, as well as nations that have no unique missions but can reform into powerful tags with missions aplenty, like Trebizond/Theodoro into Byzantium and Qara Qoyunlu/Ajam into Mughals (and Persia, but again, mission tree is not comparable for Persia). Additionally, it would be nice for Eastern Europe in general getting touched on, including Poland, the Livonian Order, and especially Scandinavia, but I won't go too into it because a lot of people have been asking for more Eastern Europe flavor.

 

[Naghbar]

Will AI changes make mods that change AI unnecessary or will it enhance them further.

 

[LMao-ZedongVEVO]

I would love to see more flavor in Scandinavia and (possibly) post-colonial nations. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden should be given much more flavor in their missions. Also, add a sápmi culture in the northern areas and have sápmi have cores on it. Maybe also add incentive to form Scandinavia and don’t make it the worst nation to form due to loss of great events. Also, former CN formable tags should be given a set of missions (generic or personalized, doesn’t matter which) to develop their lands, either assimilate or integrate the natives, and also expansion into new areas with colonization bonuses, maybe like a third rome system for them. That’s just a concept though.

 

[Ionxion]

Thanks for telling us!
I would argue that there was actually a problem with the imbalance between regiment types. Players who know the meta get a significant advantage over AIs, and players who don't will arbitrarily have a different experience based on their uninformed choices.
You are right that this will benefit early-game Ottomans, which is a pity but not a huge one. Early-game Ottomans are supposed to be really strong.
As for complexity, I agree, but I think it is worth it.

If we're going to make artillery unique in pip damage compared to regular troops, could we finally make them unique in how much manpower each regiment has? It's unhistorical for there to be 1,000 men per cannon group, something like 100 is more realistic and works well with the system by only being divisible by 10. I know this has been mentioned a lot and hope it can be investigated at last

 

[morarz]

It's a bit bad that when some countries end the war and sign a peace and you skip information about it, you can't find this information anywhere else, I would suggest adding full information about peace between the two countries by clicking on the white flag in the country menu. There should be information about the room you have signed. Second, can our ally inform us from six months or even a few months before an attack on another country? Then we would have time to prepare for war.
the third thing in the game should be more of spying, the spying system should be more complex, for example, if we have a high level of infiltration in a given country, we could receive information that a given country is preparing for a war with another country.

 

[grommile]

It would, be historically accurate

To suggest that a Norse population on Greenland capable of functioning as an EU4 tag (even at the "Siberian Clan Council" level) in 1444 is "historically accurate" requires a rather interesting interpretation of the term "historically accurate".

 

[Jihem]

While we're at it, and since the devs are checking out this thread, would it be possible to change the rule status of Mushasha ? This state is governed by a "duke", which is slightly ridiculous, you will agree.

 

[yyrkroon]

England needs a buff in the mid to late game. We know from history that by the end of game time the British Empire spanned a quarter of the world’s landmass. In AI hands 50% of the time France owns Cornwall by 1500 and I’ve never seen them in India, let alone owning / controlling most of it

basically it’s a sandbox but there should be outcomes that are more likely than others. France in North Africa being one example

This might be more a problem of TROTW being buffed non-stop vis-a-vis Europe since the original release, and the terrible way institutions can spread like wildfire throughout the world so that a tech gap never develops. At best we end up with an "idea gap".

But can you please nerf the ottomans? It's not possible that european countries don't form coalition against ottomans when they start to conquer all of italy, the balkans, Austria and poland.
They even let them conquer more.
If a player is near them he can destroy them, if not they blob too much everygame.
Another thing change the possibility of burgundian succession to go to Austria.

Never underestimate the capability of Christendom to make bone-headed and suboptimal decisions that sacrifice the common good in the name of short sighted self interest. The Crusades, for example, are one tragic tale after another of petty infighting and scheming preventing lasting victory over a common foe.

The French even made common cause with the Turks against what they perceived as a more immediate threat: the Empire. In some alternate dimension Paris is sacked and burned to the ground in the early 1700s by Ottoman troops after the French did nothing to help prevent the Turkish conquest of Vienna in 1683 (time line divergence point).

 

[please add multithreading]

"In the last patches we're following a design philosophy regarding CB's, as we want to enforce their specificity. This is for two reasons: to stop players using cheap CBs to take land, so now they have to choose wisely which CB and War Objective to pick for each war."

But outside if Imperalism, religious CB, and conquest a player doesnt ever use any other CBs unless the game specifically gifts them one either through missions or a special government type. We essentially turned a very niche thing into a niche thing you dont ever wanna use in the first place. I dont feel like anyone will enjoy these changes and the ones who will be affected by it will just go back to 1.32 since its not like they are missing out on a DLC or new mechanic. Very baffling change wich had better and more organic solution.

 

[MoeinSS]

New monuments??

 

[Jihem]

It is a bit unfortunate that Rûm only recovers the Ottoman mission tree (which is obsolete, for lack of administrative, diplomatic and commercial missions) without there being any addition based on the reincorporation of former Seljuk territories.

 

[tacobowler]

I hope that the positive and negative harmany impacts are scaling in some way. Whether actually scaling 0 to 100% or scaling in a way similar to how the effects of crownland scale (changing at 25%, 50%, 75%, etc). I'd hate to fall into a tiny negative harmony and have the full -1 corruption penalty etc.