Europa Universalis IV - Development Diary 1st of February 2022

[Pavía]

Hello everyone, and welcome to another EUIV Dev Diary! Today we’ll be talking about more changes we’ve been doing for the 1.33 ‘France’ patch, one new concept that we’ve implemented called ‘Script Debt’, and the workflow behind bugfixing. So let's get started with my colleague @Ogele talking about the balance changes!

Greetings everyone!

As you all are aware we have no precise, official “regional focus” for this patch unlike the other free patches such as 1.29 “Manchuria Update” or 1.27 “Poland Update”. While it means we haven’t created mission trees for a region, this at least allows us to concentrate on balancing existing content, adding Quality of Life changes and fine tuning some other areas of the world.

Starting with China, we received your feedback and implemented some changes which makes the unification of China a less tedious process for the non-horde Chinese tags. One of them is the addition of the following government reform for every Confucian Chinese which gets released by the Celestial Empire:

One huge problem with the released countries in China was that they tend to create hugboxes around them which prevented them from actually unifying China. In order to prevent this all the Chinese Kingdoms have a -100 Opinion penalty for fellow Confucian countries. At the same time, they also gain access to the Unify China casus belli, which received a substantial buff:

We were experimenting with giving every Chinese tag cores over the whole region, but this resulted in really awkward situations where a province had cores of like 8 different tags + these cores were too much of a freebie. By gaining the cores through occupation the process of conquering China feels more natural.

Here are some of the nightly results:

A natural occurring Qing, which we wanted to see too, sadly did not happen yet. However, we are pleased to see that a unified China is now more likely to happen.

Even if it happens through means we did not expect…

Apparently, in this timeline there was a Bengali dynasty in China…

Other changes we introduced is the inability for the Celestial Empire AI to make countries their tributaries, which have their capital in China, as it felt very immersion breaking to us when the Celestial Emperor blocked themselves in such a fashion.

We also made a small change to Korea too:

1. The Gyeongbok Palace no longer gives tech cost reduction. Instead, it now has the following modifiers:

2 .Their national idea “The Hangeul Alphabet” now gives -10% Tech Cost instead of -5%

3. The estate privilege “Inwards Perfection” gives now the following penalties / benefits:

It also ensures that the Korean AI is a diplomat or an administrator unless another nation holds one of their cores. This way you have an AI Korea which actually plays tall instead of blobbing into Manchuria, which wasn’t really liked by the community.

While we’re at the estate privileges: all privileges, which have modifiers scaling with the Crownland owned by the estate, now exempt the estate from the “Seize Land” action. This change allows you to have a little more control over who you seize the Crownland + makes these estate privileges a little bit more useful. Also, the “Increased Levies' ' estate privilege has been slightly buffed, giving now 33% increased Manpower Modifier at 100% Crownland instead of 25%.

One final balance change I want to address are the “Expand Infrastructure” and “Centralize State” features from Leviathan. Their goals were to enhance playing tall. While the idea was neat, we felt like these two buttons didn’t have the punch needed to be worth the attention. The issue with “Expand Infrastructure” was the relation of governing cost and manufactory slots: manufactories are useful in low dev provinces as they give a flat bonus, but a governing cost increase means a province is more expensive to hold which is why you don’t waste it for a benefit which could be accomplished by holding one additional 3 dev province with a manufactory. So the times where you would use this button would be if you want a province to have something like a rampart, which is a very niche situation at best. Because of that we have decided to give “Expand Infrastructure” some more power, which makes their cost worthwhile:

I want to point out that this is NOT the final version. We will take the Beta feedback into consideration for adjusting this feature.

Next point is the “Centralize State” button, which has one big issue: it competes with much more useful and global “Expand Administration” button from the government tab. To make “Centralize State” more viable, we have decided to change its identity a little bit by changing the governing cost from a flat reduction to a percentage reduction. We also added some other bonuses to the centralized state:

Here are a few other balance changes we have done for 1.33:

• Winter Palace’s modifiers have been reworked as they didn’t feel right for Russia and the seat of Peter the Great. Now it gives at level 3 the following modifiers:
• 
• Tibetan (just like Vietnamese and Korean) can now sinicize their culture and adopt a culture of the Chinese culture group. It should be noted here: we are using the Manchu way of doing this as the engine is way too outdated for dynamic culture groups unfortunately.
• Syncretic religions now give the bonuses of the monuments of the secondary faith. Example: Oirat which has Sunni as Syncretic religion will be able to benefit from the Hagia Sophia.
• Feudal Theocracies have access to the Divine Ideas Group instead of the Aristocracy ideas.
• Muslim subjects will no longer enact “Guaranteed Dhimmi Autonomy” if their Muslim overlord has religious ideas.
• Roman Empire’s ideas have been buffed to bring them on par with the ideas of the HRE.
• Selling Crownland now requires you to actually have the 10% to sell.
• Manpower, Sailors and Forcelimit granted by colonies are reduced by 25%.

That was all from my side! I wish you a nice week, and we will see you in the next DD!

Alright, now @Pavía again in charge, into the workflow for this patch. When tackling 1.33 fixes, we obviously gave priority to bugs being reported after the 1.32.2 patch was released, and those that didn’t make the cut owing to not being implemented in time. In the Content Design Team we also addressed and discussed some balance changes we wanted to make for this patch, specifically for the Eastern Asia regions, as @Ogele has just pointed out. But we found that as the bugfixing process was going well, as the ‘Songhai’ patch had been much less troubling than the previous ‘Majapahit’ one, we had some development time at our disposal to go back, and try to fix even older script-related issues.

That is what we called ‘Script Debt’, following the ‘Tech Debt’ concept that was also addressed in older versions of EUIV (for 1.30 patch there were a lot of issues addressed this way, if you recall). So we focused for a few weeks on cleaning up all these older issues that for one or other reason hadn’t been solved yet, and trying to have as few remaining legacy problems from older versions as possible. We also cleaned and simplified some scripts that were a bit convoluted, something that we’ll continue doing in future versions when possible (because for the next patch we’ll be more focused on creating new content, as previously said).

What are the actual results of this work? So we've solved around 40 older script issues for this patch. And regarding all the bug fixes done, I’ll show you some pictures and metrics, as they may speak better of it than I:

Spoiler

Here you can see that we’ve solved over 400 reported bugs, reducing the total count by at least 100 bugs and issues for this patch alone, which puts the EUIV bug-count lower than any GSG game has been in the last decade, according to our metrics (yay!).

So, what can you expect from the team in the next months regarding this topic? Apart from developing new content, we’ll continue addressing Tech Debt, Script Debt, and QoL improvements; you can help us by posting this kind of problems in the Bug Reports subforum, as we keep a regular track of it. And if you have any suggestions for improving the state of the game that are not bugs, we will continue tracking the Suggestions subforum in that regard. Listening to the voices of players is important for the Tinto Team at this point of the development of EUIV, as we’re trying to polish the game as much as possible.

To finish, when can you expect the 1.33 patch to be released? Well, the good news is that we’re pushing it as an open beta this evening! We’ll keep it open for a couple weeks, and then we will release the full patch later in Q1, after the testing is done, and we’re sure that we’ve solved all the issues appearing in the open beta.

By the way, we noticed that we have an issue regarding the Linux version of the game that we’re already trying to fix, so those users should NOT opt-in into this open beta.

You’ll be able to take a look on the changelog along with the release of the open beta. See you, and we will be answering issues raised in this thread during the week!

 

[Ogele]

[Winter Palace picture] picture is missing atm.

Good griefs, something slipped my mind. I add it asap!

EDIT: it's added now

 

[Ogele]

My goodness, these are a lot of replies in just three hours! But I am glad to see that the overall reaction is quite positive here

I feel like as long as they have a common enemy they hate enough, they will end up ally each other (but obviously only with a bit of effort).

In other news, centralise state is an even more unenticing prospect. The flat -20 on governing cost of the state was just about ok, but now it's only worth using if the state has at least 200 dev to get the same value on reduced governing cost. The state maintenance reduction and prosperity gain are redundant - if you've got that much dev in that state, when you centralise, you're likely to be producing enough money from the state to nullify the state maint cost, as well as having full prosperity on it already.

To make centralize state a useful button, it needs to be a much, much higher bonus. With admin ideas, each expand administration is +25 gov cap. With just town halls in each province — which when expanding to the point that gov cap is an issue, I know I do, each (stated) dev just costs half a gov cap. So expand administration effectively gives you 50 gov cap in any serious blobby run (40 if you don’t have admin ideas). To make centralize state worth it, it needs to not increase in price the way increasing gov cap does, and should save/free up around 35 points of gov cap. Or maybe it should fully counter the penalty from expanding infrastructure.

These are good points. They will be kept in mind when Centralize State gets further adjustments after the initial Beta feedback.

Is a particular reason why the -100 opinion penalty for Chinese kingdoms is based on being Confucian and not, say, being another Chinese kingdom, or a nation with a capital in China, or a nation holding a lot of Chinese land?

There are many variant criteria that could be used. I don't see why religion is the most natural one to pick. If a Chinese kingdom somehow gets out of being Confucian, then it loses the penalty with its peers, which seems odd.

I would suggest also making Chinese kingdoms always set all Chinese provinces as being of vital interest. This situation is a textbook example of what the vital interest flag was intended to model in the first place.

In fact, this alone may be enough to produce the dog-eat-dog results we want. I think it would be a better approach than imposing the -100 opinion penalty for fellow Confucians. The religion criteria feels a bit contrived; one based on land ownership of the Chinese heartland seems more natural.

It would, for example, make Chinese kingdoms hostile to any Christian Western colonizers who come in to snatch up parts of the Chinese coast. As they should be.

I think a good middle ground would be to give Chinese kingdoms a 50% (or even 75%) core creation cost reduction on Chinese land. This would replicate some of the effects of giving everybody cores without being as awkward or as much of a freebie.

It would also fit with modeling the historical practice of new dynasties retaining the administrative bureaucracy of previous dynasties.

To be honest: it is the most easiest and performance friendliest solution from a scripting point of view. Due to the technical debt of EU4, the focus was on solving issues without further need of code support. We already had the "Relations with same religion" modifier in our develop branch, so the decision was to use that as a tool to hinder hug boxes to form as Confucianism is religiously isoloated from everyone else.
"Relation of Same Culture / Culture Group" modifier, however, is definitely a more elegant solution to this, but it's unclear if the engine plays along with it or not. This needs to be tested internally first.

These changes to China look promising.


Does this work if Korea takes additional provinces in either a defensive war or in a revanchist reconquest war? I can see Korea's AI personality becoming increasingly unstable and becoming militarist more often if either scenario happens. Otherwise, it's good and interesting idea.


I like both of these conceptually. The seize land exemption especially looks promising.


I don't own Leviathan, but all of these look like positive changes.


As a general question since more explicit and implicit development cost reductions are being added with these changes: is there any concern about development cost being too cheap now overall? In my recent EU4 games, I've been able to easily double my average province development as most great powers and OPMs (especially free cities) are still getting to 30+ or 40+ development relatively early in the game.

It seems that development cost went from being relatively low with few sources of cost reduction when it was introduced to being far too cheap now thanks to myriad, often passively obtained sources of cost reduction. To my eye, the obvious solution is increasing the base cost for developing provinces and ensuring that "tall" countries have more and greater sources of cost reduction than "wide" countries.

Well, Korea's personality is not influenced if they are in a defensive war. They do, however, like to take provinces regardless of personality. Their attitude just determines how likely they are to declare war on their own (I found out that the AI does not care about the stab hit + AE caused by the stab hit when they have a militarist personality, which is why we saw Korea blobbing into Manchuria on a regular base).

I won't give a comment about the dev cost reductions just yet, however. I think it is best if there is some beta feedback first before we start tackling with development costs.

Very much hoping that with the changes to the region, we'll get an achievement inspiring a good Tibet run. A Confucian Dai Viet achievement would also be appreciated, as it looks like a very interesting tag but the existing achievement for them is Buddhist-exclusive and relatively short.

Other wishlist achievements in the area would probably be a more difficult Ming achievement (current one is relatively trivial) or an achievement requiring the player to use the new "play as a released Chinese Kingdom" option and reunify China.

There won't be any new achievements for 1.33. I am sorry to disappoint you

Is religious culture not supposed to work with harmonized religions? And if so, this should be changed for balance reasons.

I am pretty sure it actually works for harmonized religions. If not then please make a bug report for this (but I think to remember that it worked pretty fine in my own Korea game).

Indeed. I'm glad the devs updated their idea set to buff the -5% tech cost to -10%, but it still lacks any flavour, nor the real factor required to help it in a 'tall' playstyle *cough* no dev cost modifier *cough*, while also dearly missing any real defensive military buffs to help out in an inevitable outnumbered war against Manchu or Japan.

Korean NI's

Small repost of the one that I made in the January 18th DD. Seeing how Portugal finally got a decent idea set after a long crusade by a few well-known members of the forum *cough* @Sete *cough* @Bandua_of_Gallaecia , would it be possible for you...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

The -100 opinion with same religion modifier that the Chinese Kingdoms get means that AI Korea is effectively stuck with ZERO allies when Ming collapses, and since their new 'tall' modifiers effectively mean that it would have done jackshit in the AI's hands by then, it's all too clear what's gonta happen when their much larger neighbours come knocking.

Korea does deserve a more detailed and proper adjustment to their ideas, but due to the additional localization work which needs to be done in short time the ideas changes have to be postponed.
On a different note: a new event has been added to Manchuria which asks Korea to become Manchuria's tributary in return for all their provinces they might have lost to the Manchu earlier. This idea was from a forum user who commented it in the first DD, but I don't remember who it was again (please notify me who it was so I can add credit where credit is due).

EDIT: Credit for the idea goes to @PrussicAcid with this post!

The idea for switching culture to another group is pretty good. But I think that naming them with brackets "*old cultere name*(Chinese)" is not a such a grate way to do it. For example Tibetan culture after the shift: on the map it says "Cultere: Chinese(Tibetan(Chinese))", in the government tab "Tibetan (Chinese) (Chinese), and it is also in events and other messages. Thje Brackets in general don' look that good.

Suggestion: Rather than having them be named in the style "*Culture Name* (Chinese)", you should name them as "Sino-*culture*. This would emphasize the cultural reorientation of the country, as well as the integration of the original ethnic group into the Chinese sphere.

Loving this idea!

Any plans to "fix" the Ottoblob? Saw them in quite a lot of dev AI only maps and they always end up absolutely humongous

Plans? Yes. But not for 1.33 as the Ottomans are a delicate matter to cover. Nerf them too hard and you kill the only reliable endboss for the player.

Good changes overall:

• The push for Chinese breakaway states to actually unite China is one I've wanted for a while. East Asia is better with a boss nation.
• The buff to the Unite China CB looks good.
• The buffs to the monuments, especially the Korean one, look great. This should be the baseline powerlevel of monuments, as way too many of them are too weak to be worthwhile in normal games.
• The nerf to CNs is unfortunate and unnecessary, as colonizing is *still* a very weak playstyle overall. Forcing 1-2 suboptimal idea groups on top of ridiculous colonial maintenance costs means colonizing really needs to give massive returns to be worthwhile, so this change is going in the opposite direction.

CNs seem to be one big can of worms. One large group despises the manpower benefits they give, another group thinks they are borderline useless to create on your own. With that said, I think it might be worth to touch the money gain from tarrifs again so the loss of the additional manpower would be recovered in the gain of more Ducats if your colonial nation is prospering. However, there is no promise that this will be done for 1.33.

How Persia is gonna work now? Like, Divine ideas are giving Devotion as the first idea from the set which is absolutely and utterly useless for Persia with Legitimacy. Not to mention those few events Persia have to get Yearly Legitimacy... How will it work?

Gosh, I really hope we will see Persia region getting a proper update. Since you know, "Persia Update" didn't even give Persia proper missions... Persia really need some love.

The Divine Idea, which gives Devotion, gives now legitimacy too.
And yes, Persia does deserve more love, but this has to wait for a patch after 1.33.

Did Bengal take the Mandate in this run, or did they just invade the whole of China? Thank you so much for hearing the community and implementing these changes!
Another question regarding the free cores in China: How does it trigger? Do I need to have my capital in China? Use the "Unify China" CB? Have the new government reform? Thanks!

I think they actually took the Mandate, but I am not sure. I will give a definitive answer tomorrow when I can check the nightly run.
Regarding how the core mechanic works: it only happens when you are the offensive or defensive war leader of the Unify China CB and you successfully occupy a province in the China Subcontinent. It should be noted that coring a province this way will remove your claim on it.

United Japan has a problem that make former daimyos a tributary, just like Chinese warlords.
Do you have a plan to fix it?

Japan was not forgotten for this one. Similar how the Celestial Emperor is disallowed to make countries, which have their capital in China, to their tributaries, so is the Shogun not allowed to make former daimyos to their tributary. I decided to not mention it because this idea is not finalized yet, and if you pay attention to the nightlies you can that Japan is rather inconsistent with their behavior. It will be officially mentioned when the problems with it have been resolved.

Since you're reworking some stuff i wondered if you planned to add a little bit of flavor to "ages" and reform progress. Both don't have a lot of ways to be influenced by the player and it consists basically in waiting and sometime getting notified to have a free buff... I believe it could be re-thought to be more interactive with the player

The ages and government reform systems are two great mechanics which have potential to be so much more than they are right now. With that said, there are no plans to add flavor or content to them for 1.33.
I would love to change this for a later patch though.

If you don’t set a cooldown for remove it, you can simple use it at peace and remove it when you go to war. you can easy use the benefits with no penalties...
Considering the nature of this privilege i think the cooldown should be 20, 25 or even 50 years

That's a good idea!

Maybe add an ability for the Chinese emperor to add cultures to the Chinese group of though sinizization? Irl the Chinese used extremely effective cultural assimilation to integrate other cultures that either the took over or that took over them (Manchu as an example). It could work like the harmonizing mechanic for confusionism and take a while to do. Also the mandate bonuses need to be sorely increased for the mechanic to be actually worth it. The penalties for low mandate are so awful that it is often times not worth the risk of the mandate unless you are a country with mandate increase ideas and such (like Qing). Maybe make the bonuses a much larger unrest reduction in Chinese culture group provinces, much faster prosperity growth, less dev cost, much lower army maintenance (lower than the already shown changes) and maybe lower separatism. Also maybe increase some of the decree bonuses like increasing the infantry combat ability one to 20 percent along with maybe a discipline bonus.

While this idea sounds really great, it runs into one issue: the engine of EU4 does not allow dynamic culture group changes, and touching this part of the game might cause more crucial bugs then it is worth.
For the Mandate bonuses: there might be some room for adjustments as long it doesn't make Ming to an unstoppable force from 1444 until the end of the game.
No promises though.

Is it too late to ask for a fix to Lubeck's Unite the League mission?

Currently it leads to gaining 6-10 vassal, that will all be pissed off and eat all your diplo points.

I don't know what should be done. Making them free relationshipwise sounds OP. Making them all Historic friends would help with the liberty desire.

I don't think you should gain 4 diplo slot either. I am not sure what a balanced solution should be but this unique mission tree (nothing similar to this exists in terms of trade league focused tree).

All I ask is for that mission reward to be revisited so that it is less a diplomatic suicide to click on it.

Agreed especially since it makes for a nice change of pace since its not all about blobbing and building the strongest military if you use the merch mechanics. However i think lübeck needs more work then just the one mission fixed. For once the faction mechanics in general feel very outdated compared to estates. The other major issue with lübeck is that towards midgame it is mandatory to move the tradecapital into the english channel and subsequently conquer it. Mainly because it is impossible to prevent a lot of trademoney leaking from lübeck node towards EC. Once trade fleets grow and GB/Ned gain a few trademodifiers they project tonns of tradepower into lübeck node.

Personally, I have to agree that Lübeck needs more changes then just adjusting the "Unite the League" mission.
I am not sure if they can make the cut into 1.33 though.
However, I will take a look at their mission at least so it doesn't feel as bad to have your own vassal swarm, which immediately tries to kill you after pressing the button.

 

[Ogele]

One thing you might whant to look into is Ethopia turining sunni in the last patches when winning against adal in my last few games this happend 2 out of ten times, wich should be 0 out of ten. I do think this comes from a fast expansion and then sunni rebels take over, I might be wrong though, has someone else seen this?

And here I was thinking that my games were just cursed as hell haha
Sure, I take a look at it and see if there is something which makes Ethiopia more than happy to change its religion to Sunni.

 

[Ogele]

Is it really more technically demanding to make Chinese kingdoms set all Chinese lands to be of vital interest? I would have thought the infrastructure for this would already be in place.

You know what, I will ask tomorrow the programmers. Maybe I am wrong in my assumption and we can make all of China to their vital interest without too much coding issues.
Again, no promises though that it will be done for 1.33

 

[Gnivom]

Please add the backrow morale damage define to the 1.33 open beta @Gnivom @Pavía

It's unfair to force this on the multiplayer community with no real testing.

If you give us the define we can test it as a community and give proper feedback. If you don't the majority of the remaining multiplayer community (using heavily modded eu4) will likely stay on 1.32 or previous patches.

You're right. I'll try to get this in to whatever will be the next patch/hotfix

 

[Pavía]

As my colleague @Ogele said, thanks for your comments, as we've already received a lot of feedback on 1.33 changes! I'll left him to comment most of the issues related to East Asia regions, while I'm going to focus on others.

"Muslim subjects will no longer enact “Guaranteed Dhimmi Autonomy” if their Muslim overlord has religious ideas."
Yay, thanks for that!

Also, why is this patch called the 'France' patch, if you say that there's no official "regional focus", and all the regional stuff we've seen so far is related to Asia?

Why is that patch called 'France' while it focuses on east Asia?

Because of this:

Probably because France isn't nerfed enough yet, they sometimes accomplish in-game what they have achieved historically, which players tend to hate.

Well, no, not really. Honestly speaking, it's more related to this one:

Pls not another french person in the loading screen. We need some more variety in countries represented.

As when starting it was a general update patch, we just used 'France' as placeholder because it already had a couple kings in the loading screen. Then we shift the focus to East Asia, but 'Ming' and 'Manchu' were already patch names, and for instance either 'Korea' or 'Vietnam' would have been a bit deceiving, as they were not the real focus of the changes (but the MoH/EoC rebalance, instead). On top of that, our Art Team is already working on the pre-production of the next Immersion Pack, so they didn't have enough sparse time to create a new loading screen in time for the Open Beta... So we just decided to keep things simple, focus on the important stuff, and left 'France' as the patch name.

I presume because France did have colonial empire in Africa as well Asia and Americas. And since 1.33 covers every corner of the globe it does make sense to name it "France".

This is the attitude, do you work on Marketing?

I'm liking everything I see that's written in the dev diary, but I'm not entirely sure I like the results of the nightly runs all that much. China unified is good. France constantly being eaten hurts my soul. India always results in one or two big blobs, which is kinda unfortunate. While the Korea changes seem great for a player, for an AI I feel it'll be: "play tall for a while, until you get eaten by whatever neighbor that got to blob". An update to their NI's might be in order (fort defense in traditions?), but I feel it's a result of EU4 game's design in general, so it'll be hard to fix. Either you get bigger, or you get eaten.

Regarding suggestions, maybe we can post some here as well, since they are often so small that's almost daunting to make a thread for them?

A few small ones from me:
1) Make a notification for being able to seize (crown)land. Yellow when it's possible, green when it's possible without rebellions.
2) Make a notification for diet.
3) Add a hotkey to automate armies (like drilling: 'j')
4) Make said automated armies a little bit smarter. Now they don't check that if they add their stacks would actually improve a siege status by running towards it. For example: A 10k infantry stack will go and join another 10k stack on a fort without actually improving the siege status. Make the stacks check:
A) If there already is a siege going on there
B) If yes, is it progressing? If no, it can walk to the province
C) If it's progressing, would adding this stack to the sieging stack speed up the siege process? (due to cannons, or a general) If yes, it can walk to the province. If no, it should try and find another target
5) Make automated armies check if they're black-flagged. If yes, they should try to walk to your own territory first.

France is not constantly being eaten. Take into account that with the nightlies we post here we want to show specific outcomes, but those are not the bulk of what we have. So, for instance, I just checked the last 10 nightly pictures we have, and in 8 France is big enough, and it has managed to expand either into Iberia, Italy or HRE depending on the game.

Regarding your suggestions, thanks, I think some may be really useful regarding QoL! We'll work on implementing some of them, although probably for the next version (we want to be careful with code-related changes).

Will Mongol (Altaic) culture be able to Sinocize? Like if they restore Yuan.

@Pavía Also please make decion Sinocize our Culture available for Mongols (Altaic).

Suggestion: Rather than having them be named in the style "*Culture Name* (Chinese)", you should name them as "Sino-*culture*. This would emphasize the cultural reorientation of the country, as well as the integration of the original ethnic group into the Chinese sphere.

Well, to be completely honest, we had already talked about making another Sinicize decision for Altaic people, because it would make sense regarding both Mongol and Tartar mission trees (which encourage conquering China). However, it skip implementation because reasons; we've just introduced that for the patch. And we've also changed the culture names, following this style, too.

Hope the performance is sorted for late game, especially with big wars it's just dragging past 1550

We are already (and still) working on improving the performance, but unfortunately I cannot compromise on it being better in 1.33. We've identified some fields where we can work out to flesh it out, as in some script changes to make calculations less demanding, but it will still take some time to implement those improvements and check they're working as they should. We're going to try give priority to this for 1.34, however.

Rather than restricting the selling of crownland to requiring at least 10% to enact, I would suggest tweaking it so that you can sell what you have if you have < 10%, but you (naturally) get proportionally less money and loyalty bonus as a result. The option should only be blocked if you own literally 0.00% crownland.

For now this change would be out of the table, as it would be very demanding script-wise.

United Japan has a problem that make former daimyos a tributary, just like Chinese warlords.
Do you have a plan to fix it?

We are always looking upon fixing problems related to Shogunate/Daimyos mechanics. So, please, it would be nice if you could open a request in the Bug Reports subforum, with precise information about it.

Will you be balancing the Iberian peninsula? Granada is too OP and tends to hang around for decades longer than it should it almost all games leading to spain/ castile never getting the Alhambra decree.

Well, one of the former problems we had was Castile AI focusing in Portugal early on; maybe this change will make it focus earlier in Granada, instead. Let us know about this.

What are the devs opinions on some mission claims going against good gameplay to extreme extents?

Scotland for instance has a starting mission to conquer 2 provinces from England and as a reward gets claims on 2 more. Obviously, this isn't a situation that should ever happen, as Scotland has to go into debt and fight a huge first war with a stronger England and taking just 2 provinces after all that trouble just to get claims on 2 more is horribly sub optimal.

We're always open to fixes to older mission trees, although not as much for reworks, because it's more time-consuming. Just create a post in the Suggestions subforum, for instance, and we'll take a look on it.

Will there be a mission tree for the chinese successor states like the Shun? It would be great if there was some missions to further insentivize you both during and after the unification wars! I also think Ming should have a better mission tree even if it mostly focuses on internal affairs and then the other Chinese tags could gain it as a reward for seizing the Mandate.

As I said, creating new missions for the Warlords states was out of our development time for this patch, unfortunately.

 

[Ogele]

I would suggest also making Chinese kingdoms always set all Chinese provinces as being of vital interest. This situation is a textbook example of what the vital interest flag was intended to model in the first place.

In fact, this alone may be enough to produce the dog-eat-dog results we want. I think it would be a better approach than imposing the -100 opinion penalty for fellow Confucians. The religion criteria feels a bit contrived; one based on land ownership of the Chinese heartland seems more natural.

It would, for example, make Chinese kingdoms hostile to any Christian Western colonizers who come in to snatch up parts of the Chinese coast. As they should be.

Why tie it to religion, and not to culture group? I vividly remember the time, I PUed the emperor of china, who was at the time a orthodox siberian tribe.... Not to mention buddhists and shito countries meddling in chinese affairs, spreading their religion and later spitting out chinese tags with their religion.
There is so much shinannigans going on in the region, I think it would be safer, to make the reform culture dependend, and adding sth like: Opinion of same culture group: -100

Is it really more technically demanding to make Chinese kingdoms set all Chinese lands to be of vital interest? I would have thought the infrastructure for this would already be in place.

I think the real discrepancy is what happens if an outsider comes in and starts to conquer Chinese land. Chinese kingdoms should be hostile to foreign invaders for the same reason they are hostile to each other.

Looks great, I agree with what some others have said though - negative opinion of culture would be a better modifier for the Chinese kingdoms. I would assume that otherwise, they're likely to become hostile to Korea and try to conquer it (something which seems borne out by the nightlies) when ideally we'd want them to make Korea a tributary.

Big agree on the problems of how this solution affects Korea. Provinces of vital interest is absolutely a more elegant solution, though I imagine there may be some other steps necessary to ensure it always works.

The programmers are going to look into replacing the Confucian opinion penalty by instead making Chinese kingdoms set Chinese lands to be of vital interest. If this works out, it should produce more natural results than the ones in the beta.

Well, I talked with @James Capstick about it. The bad news is that Vital Interest provinces is very convoluted and it cannot be really connected to the government trait. And hardcoding it for the subcontinent might have more devastating consequences in the long run. I stand corrected, however, that performance might have not been an issue.

EDIT: I misunderstood my colleage regarding the Vital Interest topic:. It's not as convulated as I thought. Still, for 1.33 there will be no chnages to it for now.

The good news is that we have new modifiers called "Opinion of same Culture" / "Opinion of same Culture Group" / "Opinion of Accepted Culture" / "Opinion of Non-Accepted Culture" (to be clear here: the opinion of Accepted Cultures only affects cultures OUTSIDE your culture group, so if you are England for example and accept Scottish, your opinion of the Scots will be modified by "Opinion of same Culture Group" nonetheless). With that change the opinion penalty from the same religion is no longer required.
I would, however, highly recommend to not sinicize your culture until you are about to unify China on your own anyway.

Suggestion: Rather than having them be named in the style "*Culture Name* (Chinese)", you should name them as "Sino-*culture*. This would emphasize the cultural reorientation of the country, as well as the integration of the original ethnic group into the Chinese sphere.

Will Mongol (Altaic) culture be able to Sinocize? Like if they restore Yuan.

@Pavía Also please make decion Sinocize our Culture available for Mongols (Altaic).

This needed a good amount of console commands, but I hope this answers both questions. And yes, forming Yuan will now convert all "Mongol" cultures such as Oirat, Mongol, Korchin and Khalka cultures to Sino-Altaic.
The mission "Unite the Mongols" has been adjusted so that you are not locked out of it if you form Yuan first, though you will get the 3 Accepted Culture slots instead of the event.

Did Bengal take the Mandate in this run, or did they just invade the whole of China? Thank you so much for hearing the community and implementing these changes!
Another question regarding the free cores in China: How does it trigger? Do I need to have my capital in China? Use the "Unify China" CB? Have the new government reform? Thanks!

I managed to look it up. Sadly, Bengal remained an Indian Sultanate.

Maybe Sunni becomes the dominant religion and the itinerant capital moved to a Sunni provinces which enables the decision Adopt Islam as the State Religion(trade_propagation_convert_to_islam)

Hmm... this would explain the Sunni Ethiopias in my game. I make sure that the AI prefers to move its capital now to provinces of its own religion now.

Taking religious ideas stops Muslim AIs from implementing the autonomy privilege?

Yes, though it is currently bugged in the Beta and will be fixed with the next update.

View attachment 801314
Just checked this event. Wouldn't it be better if Manchu's 'Invade Joseon' mission accept tributary as a success condition?

Good call. Will be adjusted with the new changes in mind.

View attachment 801336

A few of my opinion on this.
1. This is an event from a Korean perspective right? If so, I think it should be Jangbaek Mountains or Baekdu Mountains, or Paectu Mountains. It's a seldom-used word in South Korea but mostly due to reason number 2 below and it's a northern border that belongs to North Korea.
2. Korea's borders were meant to be and are Amnok River (Yalu River, 압록강) and Dooman River (Tumen River;두만강). Rivers are not meant to be a wasteland in EU4 so Chanbai Mountains are kind of regarded as a game license in Korea. However, seeing it in flavor text as a natural border feels kind of weird.


View attachment 801339
This is kind of a sidenote but could you add owns and have a core in Gyeongseong (2743) as an additional condition? Paektu Mountain was and still is an area of dispute and it is split between China and North Korea. The most recent one is the border treaty of 1962 (조중 변계 조약, Korean Wikipedia link)

I will adjust the text, thanks for the info!

Hi @Ogele . I was thinking in terms of this; the EU4 engine is too old to change cultures dynamically, so the EoC cannot simply Sinicize any culture they come across. So an alternative I think would be you add a button to the EoC interface where the Emperor can spend X Mandate (maybe 50?) to add +1 Promoted Culture slot permanently. This is repeatable, so instead of "Sinicizing" cultures, EoC can just accept them which removes all the penalties and would work in an identical way as changing all the cultures to a "Sinicized" Chinese version, at a cost of X Mandate and 100 Diplo power. To make it a bit more like Sinicization, you might wanna give the EoC a -50% cost to Promote Culture, as a 100 Diplo point cost would be a bit steep if you have to do it a lot, and as Ming is an Empire this won't give Ming a lot more Diplo points at any point in the game so no need to worry about that.

So now before you say infinite Promote Culture slots is broken, we already have that as a feature in the game; the Mughal Diwan system Gov Reform. This automatically promotes a culture when you own all provinces of that culture, AND gives you a permanent bonus depending on what the culture was you assimilated. This has produced no issues whatsoever and has no negative perception in the community, and the Sinicization version wouldn't give permanent bonuses per culture assimilated, so is less powerful than the Mughal Diwan. Additionally, Ming/EoC and Mugahls are successor states to the Mongol Empire so them having similar systems of cultural assimilation might make sense/be thematic? Also gives a good Mandate sink late game in addition to converting Tributaries into Vassals. Hope you consider this as a valid option, loving the changes!

This does sound like a cool idea for the Mandate. I highly doubt it would make the cut for 1.33 though.

Many Chinese Minor tags exist however they lack interesting ideas to make them interesting. Would it be possible to add a Chinese Emperor Idea set for Chinese Minor tags that unify China?

e.g.
Chinese Emperor Ideas:
Traditions: 33% Manpower, 50% Force Limit (Large Armies like Russia)
Idea 1: 25% Governing Cap (Large Chinese Empire)
Idea 2: 5% Admin Eff (Similar to Yuan and Qing)
Idea 3: +0.25 Harmony (Synergy with Confucian)
Idea 4: 15% Morale (Unifier of China)
Idea 5: +1 INF Shock (Enhanced version of the 10% ICA group national ideas get)
Idea 6: Mandate growth
Idea 7: +2 Diplo Rep (Tributaries)
Ambition: 25% Domestic Trade Power (Resist european powers stealing trade)

Cantonese nations could have a trade and naval focused idea set.

Would this be part of the scope of 1.33?

The biggest issue of adding ideas is not the balance or getting the theme of them for the country but the localization work. The more text which needs to be translated, the more problematic it becomes to get a release on time. Because of that we won't be able to get new ideas into 1.33.

Came again after looking at Uzbek in game again and it's really shocking how much of an afterthought Bukhara is. It doesn't even have any unique ideas and the only missions it have are just to go the Mongol Empire route. They really do need content of their own.

Bukhara does deserve some attention, yes, but due to the time limitation regarding translations they will have to wait for another patch

Tested the expand infrastructure yesterday and i kinda want to disagree on the note that it doesn’t make sense although i would agree that some finetuning is needed. Mostly because it can be granted and revoked at any time. E.g. as byzantium one can expand infrastructure day 1 one constantinople to gain a bit extra for 0 costs since you have gov cap to spare. Once you expanded a fair bit you and get close to gov cap, just revoke it for free. Somewhat like a state edict just for provinces.
Thats also the part that can be abused. Nothing is stopping a 10k dev empire well above gov cap to pause the game, use expand inf to use the dev/construction and ship building discounts and then revoking it before unpausing.
Thus i suggest a cooldown before it can be revoked or a local autonomy increase upon revoking (however that might get abused in age of absolutism)

tldr: its a free bonus mechanic with 0 downsides (just very micro intensive) and might require some „nerfing“

Yeah, this will require some kind of cost. It is not entirely sure what kind of cost it will get though

 

[Pavía]

I really like that you are taking a look at some of the of the absurdly niche tall options. However, I have things to say about every one of them:

• Bringing Centralize State to %-based governing capacity reduction is a good idea, but as has already been noted in the comments, -10% is pathetically low for what is a very expensive button.
• Expand Infrastructure looks good, i will likely be using it in tall runs in the current form, but as it stands it is really abusable. I think a cooldown alone will still see it abused in the earlygame when countries aren't at their governing cap yet. I would argue for an upfront cost, maybe in exchange for some points off of the governing cost increase, as 50 points pr province really is quite steep.
• Inwards Perfection looks lovely like that, so much so that i would like to see an equivalent for European countries for playing tall HRE princes or isolationist UK with. It obviously needs to get a hefty cooldown to revoking it, and maybe a stability hit for revoking it even. One other concern i have is that a War Score Cost increase that big might make some single provinces go over 100% War Score Cost which would be annoying for runs where you resolve to never revoke it for RP/challenge reasons.

I want to mention that the most core issue of tall play was not addressed: The way Development Cost from Existing Development scales. Dev Cost Reduction currently benefits relatively wide play much more than tall play because of how drastically more effective it is on low dev provinces than any others. And that will stay the case as long as the calculation remains [(Other Dev Cost Modifiers + Dev Cost from Existing Dev) * Base Cost] with such an exponentially scaling Dev Cost from Existing Dev, because that modifier ends up completely dwarfing the others. This is compounded by the floor on Dev Cost being way too low (As low as it could possibly be basically). Just letting other Dev Cost modifiers apply fully on the Dev Cost from Existing Dev would completely break it, but having them apply at half effectiveness could be an option.

Thanks for your detailed suggestions, that we're already taking into account. All the feedback regarding Centralize State and Expand Infrastructure features is specifically very well received, because we will tweak the final numbers for the release version of 1.33 patch at the end of the Open Beta.

Some revealed Problems and Suggestion for 1.33 Beta

Problems

Spoiler

View attachment 801412

1. After Sinicize Korean culture, Korean cities' name turn into Chinese one (Vietnamese and Tibetan culture have no problem)
Ironically Chinese cities' name remains as Korean one

Spoiler

View attachment 801413

2. New Chinese Kingdom governments are filled with anger at all other confucious countries. After Mingsplosion, confucian AI tributaries of old-Ming suffers when they want to make a new Chinese ally. Their choice only one left is allying theirselves with Ming, which collapse soon. Chinese Kingdom governments' anger should remain for their other Chinese rivals. The same government or culture group will be nice alternative.

Spoiler

3. Well, it seems like a little bug, 6th reform of EoC can make a non-tributary country a vassal unconditionally. It should be fixed until release


Suggestions

1. Problems of Reconstruct Celestial Empire : "celestial_empire" government reform requires "NOT = { has_global_flag = empire_of_china_dismantled }". It makes Chinese Empire never reunite when Ming are full annexed.
It would be right making decision for Reconstruction of Celestial Empire. Also, it's because Chinese Warlords should have chance to be a new emperor when Ming falls without other EoC. They cannot reform their government without being a EoC so decision would be a way to reform.

2. When a Chinese warlord attacks Ming, they should declare war using the “Take Mandate of Heaven” or "Unify China" CB, rather than the "Reconquest" CB. I saw Shun attacking Ming with reconquest CB. It wouldn't be their best strategy.

Spoiler

View attachment 801415
View attachment 801416

3. AI should more consider about their internal missions. I saw AI Korea nether developing their lagged region nor change Jurchen culture to their one to solve their missions until 1600. If I observed more and they could survive, they would remain without solving these until 1821. Countries with internal missions, especially when they are shacked until finish them, should do their best to avoid their planned disasters.

Spoiler

View attachment 801417

4. Spread of Institutions : After Feudalism, first three institutions, "Renaissance","Colonialism","Printing Press" mostly occur in Europe. It is historic and necessary. However, spreading of institutions is too late without player's intervention. AI's developing a province seems to not increase institution of the province as player's developing do. AI European countries cannot expand their territory to far east, so far eastern countries fall behind compared to their historic capability. I want to see that European countries spread their institutions more actively to India, SEA, and East Asia, and I think it is essential and more historic.

Spoiler

View attachment 801418

5. Tall nations AI : I agree some countries playing tall. Netherlands dominated the seas with small mainlands. However playing-tall AI are easily taken by other big nations because playing-wide is far more effective in game. There are another problem; OPM usually develops its province well, but moderate-size nations doesn't develop their one frequently. During my observing, AI Korea raise their development to 156. They raise just 11 developments since 1444 until 1501; they even got great boost on developing cost by Inward perfection, economic ideas, and Gyeongbokgung. After they win a war against Jianzhou invasion, they got almost 40 developments at once.
I suggest some special AI to playing tall nations. These countries' AI should consider spending their mana to develop their provinces best choice than other alternative until mana to develop is too high. Linking these AI with some privilege like "Inward perfection" can also be the way.

6. This is just my wish. Like HRE which finished 'Revoke the Privilegia' or the country who takes a shogun, how about the Celestial Empire with the 6th reform can command free-relationship subjectives when they converted from a tributary? Instead annexing them, making tributaries free-relationship subjectives by using more mandate and some diplomatic points would be very nice.

Hello, and thanks for your feedback! We've already fixed the 3 problems you pointed out. Regarding your suggestions, we're going to take a look on them, specifically about the Chinese tags, as this is an important focus of this patch.

Regarding the Sino-Altaic culture, I'd propose you make it a valid culture for Mongol Banners if you go Yuan -> Mongol Empire, otherwise you've lost a key feature of going that route. Regardless, it's cool you've allowed that to happen.

We've changed that Mongol Banners will be still allowed, even after taking 'Sinicize' decision.

Just a thought, but the cultures of Zhuang, Bai, Yi and Miao may also have access to the decision to sinilize their culture. I know these cultures can rarely be played by human players, but it would be more consitent with other cultures if the Tibetan or Vietnamese have the decision, and makes sense as well considering their close interaction with the Chinese dynasties and Han people through the history.

Changed the Tibetan Sinicize decision to cover the entire culture group.

I ended up playing the first 100 years as total pacifist Korea to test out the new Inwards Perfection and Expand Infrastructure. I stacked Religious Culture on top as well, so my Scholars estate sat at an average influence of 110%, not for a single day all game going below 100%, but it helped me get the true hyper-tall experience. I also went Economic -> Innovative, so no colonizing or diplo-vassalizing either until the 3rd idea group right toward the end.

My takeaways so far:

• The patch notes said Religious Culture would go to 20% influence, but it is currently 25% instead. I don't think it should be higher than 20%.
• Tall countries still use up a lot of governing capacity, because 1 dev made takes as much as 1 dev conquered. I hit the point of needing to give gov cap privileges with Korea's starting provinces alone.
• 50 governing capacity for Expand Infrastructure is a lot. I have courthouses everywhere and two of the +100 gov cap privileges given, and i still had to downgrade to only 2 Expanded Infrastructures. It will be alleviated as i advance in tech in this case, but in a normal tall game i would still do some conquering that i would rather use that capacity on.

I would say give Expand Infrastructure an up-front admin point cost and lower the governing cost, as admin points even more so than governing capacity is something tall players have in excess over wide players.

And just to put into perspective how undertuned current Centralize State really is: I doubt even this super tall run will reach a point where it will be worth using except maybe for the state of Eastern Korea (5 provinces, 3 with good trade goods), because I'm starting to colonize trade companies to develop now. Its cost should really scale with the number of provinces in the state now that i mention it.

Again, thanks a lot for your report! As just said, this is really helpful to tune up the changes you're mentioning, and fix some of the issues (as the Religious Culture one, already done). There may be also some changes to 'Inwards Perfection' and Korea gameplay to improve it a bit further, from players' feedback.

 

[Pavía]

As I've said in other posts (I'm repeating myself a bit ), thanks for your feedback, and now I'm going through some of your posts in more or less detail:

Consider making some events of the Ming and Qing dynasties common to all Chinese cultures? Such as the The Perfection of Ming Porcelain and The Closure of China

Chinese missions(It's a little sketchy but I'll make do with it)​

The warlord country is still too monotonous. Can we give him the factions before Ming?
Commanderies of the Five Armies and Offices of Maritime Trade and Grand Secretariat

Yeah, already said that we'd have liked to rework a bit East Asia region mission trees, but that was out of our scope for this patch. We'll see in the future.

While you're making changes to the Celestial Empire experience, is there any room for a minor trade routes rework in the region? At the moment, it always feels a little inefficient dealing with trade in the South China Sea, as there's no way to channel that trade into Beijing. Moving the trade capital to Malacca allows you to collect all of the trade from the south, but then you lose trade income from the Beijing node (which is a lot of money) as there's no way to get trade south from Beijing. I understand that the layout at the moment is focused on efficiently getting trade value West for coloniser gameplay, but it makes the experience of playing as the Emperor of China feel a bit messy. It seems more natural to me that there be a route from the South China Sea to Beijing, as this has historically been a major economic and political focus of Chinese powers, but I understand that may make it very difficult to avoid loops while still allowing efficient transfer for European powers.

Interesting point. We're not making trade nodes changes for 1.33, but we'll explore them for 1.34, as there were a couple of interesting suggestions (although I can't promise we'll make any changes, if we don't think they're useful for the game).

A few more Asia notes after poking around the beta a little bit (I'll have a more detailed report after I log more time with it):

Seems odd that Vietnamese, Altaic, Tibetan, Jurchen, and Korean cultures can choose to Sinicize, but Zhuang (which is actually almost wholly within mainland China in the 1444 start) and other Tai cultures cannot? Unless I'm missing something? I'd even think maybe the Burmese and Malay cultures (the latter of which has historically been at least partially Sinicized) should have the option, although I think it would be rare to see it in-game.

Conversely, I'm really not sure about all Altaic cultures being able to Sinicize, especially en masse. It makes sense for Korchin, Mongol, Oirat, Uyghur, and Khalkha, but not so much for the Central Asian Altaic cultures (Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Turkmeni). If those latter four are excluded as non-Mongol cultures, I'm good with it. Altaic and Levantine are strange and overlarge culture groups; I personally think Turkmeni, Azerbaijani, and Turkish cultures ought to be in their own "Turkmen" group, even though they are separated from one another in 1444, like the Mon-Khmer cultures are. But that's probably a discussion for another patch.

It's weird that Nivkh starts out with Enchiw (and Hokkaido also) as terra incognita, especially since Ainu starts out with most of Nivkh (including Nangha'er) visible. Not that many people are going to be playing either of these nations in 1444, but Ainu can declare a war on conquest against Nivkh before Nivkh (which starts with an unknown attitude toward Ainu) is even aware that Ainu exists. I'm guessing that is a bug.

Japan's "Take the Kurils" mission ought to also give a permaclaim on the province of Nagha'er, which I believe is the only province in its immediate vicinity that Japan never gets claims on through its mission tree (maybe also North Ilin Hala?). Arguably "Take the Kurils" should also be a prerequisite for "Invade Manchuria".

Sir, the Zhuang Culture is now in the Thai Culture Group, not Tibetan. Does this mean in 1.33 we will got Zhuang Culture moved into Tibetan Culture Group?

By the way, what about giving Myanmar Countries and Uyghur a chance to sinicize their culture? Since as far as we know Vietnamese, Korean, Mongol, Manchu and Tibetan all had got their chance to sinicize their culture. Uyghur and Myanmar needs boost.

You've made a point with Zhuang culture, I think that we may give it also the 'Sinicize' decision, although it would come in 1.34 patch, and I don't see think we'll extend it to other Thai, Burmese or Malay cultures; although they had historical links with the EoC, they were less intense, generally speaking.

About the Sino-Altaic decision, we implemented it to make Mongol and Tartar mission trees a bit more consistent, as they have mission aiming on conquering China, and Yuan tag can actually be recreated.

Can one thing be fixed? This bothers me for some time, not sure if people (players and devs) are aware of it and/or had the same experience.

As curia controller I get 1 extra diplomat. Menawhile I'm annexing my subject and then after some time when I'm no longer a curia controller I loose +1 additional diplomat and among all my diplomats I loose the very one that was annexing my subject and all my annexation progress is gone. Does it WAD? Can it be fixed so another diplomat disappears not the one that is annexing, I had like 3 other diplomats that were improving relations...

Oh, that's something really annoying, yes. Will talk with the programmers to take a look on it for 1.34, for sure.

For Sino-Altaic, remember to add it as one of the cultures that can use the ‘annual kurultai’ province modifier that Mongol Missions give to Qaraqorum.

Yeah, already fixed.

 

[Pavía]

Yikes. Can you guys sneak this into 1.33?

This is the kind of issue that takes a bit more of extra time just to test rightly that is WAD, so probably not.

 

[Pavía]

• Ah, you misunderstood
  • I'm talking about the four missions that are currently in use(Ming)
  • So when I say the task in China is simple, I don't mean to push you to a deadline
  • The secend task "The Mandate of Heaven"Can you provide some destiny?
  • I suggest ransition it over is the task I found the old version of QING also used

Oh, right, I misunderstood. We've already changed Ming's some events and missions script, so they may be used by other countries becoming EoC, yes.

Will there be a dev diary today?

Also, a quick question/request: there’s this weird arbitrary restriction that you can’t convert to pagan religions, even if religious rebels enforce demands with more than half of your provinces/development, unless that religion is animist. Could that be removed? If you’re jumping through all the hoops to turn Tengri or whatever, it seems like it’s kind of a bizarrely unnecessary step to have to find an animist province and let them convert you first.

Also also, just another little balance thing with pagan religions— could you make it so Zoroastrianism could use pagan monuments? It seems odd to me that they’re unable to use the pyramids, which were controlled by the Achaemenids at the height of Persia’s power, but some random animist tribe from Sulawesi can.

We'll take a look on that for the next patch.