Europa Universalis IV - Development Diary 20th of December 2022 - Unit Pips Rebalance

[Pavía]

Hello and welcome to another EUIV DD!

Today we will be talking about the rebalance of the Unit Pips we're working on for the upcoming 1.35 update. This task has been led by our QA Team, which was reinforced throughout the year, and that has been key to the release of Lions of the North, as the new members that have joined the Team credit over 5,000 hours of gameplay on EUIV. But apart from testing the game, they are also involved in the game design process, a classic at Paradox, which usually relies on close cooperation between the different teams. Therefore, this is the proposal we'll be testing in the following weeks, taking also into account the feedback we receive in this DD, of course!

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Hello everyone, I'm @Pintu , one of the Embedded QA’s working at Tinto.

I want to show you the rework we are doing on the Unit Pips of the different Techgroups, one of the Systems that saw very few changes since the Release of EU4. As we implemented changes to the Combat calculations in the 1.34 update, we think now it’s a good moment to address this rebalance.

First I want to quickly outline what the Unit Pips do in what parts of combat they matter, for those not as experienced in the game. In each combat phase, Strength Damage is dealt depending on the Offensive Damage Pips of the Units, while Morale Damage is dealt based on Offensive Damage and Offensive Morale Pips. Defending works the same way with the Defensive Pips of the Unit, but half of the Defensive Pips (rounded down) of the Backrow Units is added on top of that. That means that over the course of the game, the priority of pips shifts from having a strong Shock Phase to a strong Fire Phase with a focus on defensive Pips, especially for Infantry.

With this rebalance of Unit Pips we mainly want to focus on Infantry Units that are clear strong or weak outliers on their Tech level and the introduction of more choices in Artillery Units beyond the first Technologies when they become available. As always, these are by no means final numbers and will be under close observation during our Testing, apart from the feedback we are receiving in this DD, so there are good chances these will change until the release of the patch.

One of the swiftly explained changes is that related to Aboriginal and Polynesian Units: both got their total amount of pips reduced, to be in line with the American and African Unit Groups. These changes make them preserve some of their strengths, while not being an outlier over other units.

Now onwards to a change that influences other groups as well, which means they have to get adjusted together. The Anatolian group has a very big advantage with their early Units with their Offensive Moral Damage. We decided to tune that down a little in their Unit Options on technologies 5 and 9. Unfortunately, this affects Muslim Unit groups, which should not have an advantage over Anatolians at that point, which in turn affects Indian Units. That's why we had to tune them down as well.

The Anatolian Group will keep one of their big Spikes in Pips on Tech 12, which will let them be a threat to the groups around them. This is also partly because their Unit will stay around until Tech 18, significantly later than other groups get new units.

Speaking of the Muslims, let's take a look at the changes the group got independently from other groups. The Muslim Unit on Tech 23 suffered from both very poor Offensive and Defensive Fire Pips. They do have great Morale and Shock Pips to make up for it, but with the importance of Fire Phase in the later stages of the game, we decided to help them out a little by buffing their defensive Fire on the cost of their defensive Shock.

The Chinese Group has one outlier in their Unit selection, which is situated on Tech 19, with both 3 offensive and 3 defensive Fire Pips, in addition to 3 Offensive Morale. The one drawback with that Unit is that its successor becomes available only on Tech 25, later than most other groups. Since they have an edge with that against most of their neighboring groups, the solution for this is that they lose one offensive Morale.

On the same Techlevel, the Nomadic Group has a very solid, while not great, Infantry Unit, that would do with a small Nerf to fit their theme of military decline more.

The African Groups (this includes Central, East, and West African), got a small reshuffle of Pips, to make their Last Unit on Tech 30 an actual upgrade over the previous version.

Last but not least a small change to the High American Group, where their Unit from Tech 18 gets a small bump in Pips. Before this Unit had the same amount of total Pips as the previous unit level.

Let's now move on to the Changes to Artillery. These mainly focus on the Introduction of one new Alternative per Unit, which focuses more on a defensive style, where Artillery is used to push half of their defensive Pips towards the frontline while sacrificing their damage output with lower Offensive Fire and Morale Pips. There will also be a small Adjustment on Tech 13, with making one of the Options a defensive one.

You may notice that for the new types of Artillery we've just named them the 'Defensive' version of each level. This is not definitive, as it's mainly a placeholder; so, we will accept suggestions for naming each of the unit types.

And this will conclude the Dev Diary for this week and this year. Just like the Idea Group rebalance of last week, we are very eager to read your feedback and suggestions on this topic to improve it as much as possible.

See you at the next DD, on January 10th!

 

[Pavía]

Interesting changes.

Are changes to cav planned too?
Especially muslim cav has very underwhelming pip distribution towards lategame iirc. A buff would be really nice potentially for persia and and mameluk (to enjoy those camel unit models). Also western cav early game is extremely weak.

Also noticing high american gets adjusted. My tin foil head is tingeling. Is the next reworked region going to be mesoamerica?

Cavalry units pips changes were discussed, and they're not getting a general rebalance, as the Infantry and Artillery does. The reason is that we still want to assess more in-depth the changes to the combat system we implemented in 1.34, and Cavalry is the most difficult set of units to rebalance. Maybe there could be some surgical changes, but it's too soon to comment anything on that.

Could it be possible to have mutliple different variations of units recruited and not only 1 type?
So in macrobuilder you could have a list to recruit different types of inf units, for example like both Latin Medieval Infantry and Halberd Infantry options, not only one type, thus giving more varierity to battles and even how you take battles and reinforce (or cut off enemy reinforcements).

We don't plan to have that at this moment and to be honest, that would be such a big rework of a kay game system, that is very unlikely that we would be designing something like that.

Hi, are you considering further changes to the combat calculations? Currently it appears that the best way to play the late game is to merge your entire army into one single stack to stack wipe everything. This causes rather silly results in which in late game mp the wars consist mostly of running single stacks worth several million men as anything lower than that gets instantly wiped when first row dies.

Maybe some tweaks here and there, but nothing as systemic as with 1.33 and 1.34 changes.

 

[Johan]

Sigh. The Ottomans already vastly underperform their historical counterparts. The last thing they need is another nerf. Quite the opposite--I'd give them their cores on the Beyliks and better CCR value back if I were in charge.

I really hope they get a great mission tree when the Middle East immersion pack is released.

currently in our nightly 1.35 tests ottomans are doing better than in 1.34..

 

[Pavía]

Hi there! It looks like we're dealing in this DD with some controversial topics, not only related to the Unit Pips themselves. It's fine for us to discuss them, as we in PDX Tinto have been working on being more open to the community since Leviathan; but please stay civil and kind with the Team, as we also deserve respect for our work, and this is a red line not to cross when discussing issues.

I also want to say to stress that we read and take into account all the comments, even if we don't reply to all, or if it takes some time for us, so be sure that we will be thinking about everything commented on the DD (being the main reason for showing these changes early in the development cycle!). This is also something for those of you that are not so noisy, but usually nice in your posts: again, we're reading you, and your posts are very helpful to us.

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Classical let's nerf Ottomans again. Also a cavalry pip rebalance would be nice.

I don't feel like you should nerf the ottomans that much earlygame. They were a genuine threat and their unit pips being so much stronger early techs helps them be that threat that they were historically. Nerfing them just so they're more on par with western countries when they don't even reach their historical borders half the time ingame feels a bit silly. I don't like the change. It'd be better to nerf them on lategame techs rather than earlygame.

As Johan has already pointed out, what we want is not to outright nerf the Ottomans, but to try to better balance them. It's a difficult task, as they're a very central country in the game, and we've got to cover a bunch of different scenarios (SP, MP, AI...), so take this is a first step, not a final one.

But you do realise, that playing late game on mp game started to be unplayable? Instead of playing the game and use what was the bast in late game you have a shi### game, where you fight With doom stacks because you can get instant sw if they have twice your size? When you add huge perf issues game has in a late when you start to use those few kk stacks it adds to totally broken game after 1750. The same with single Player, when you just abuse this 2x size army thing to wipe all AI enemies. I hope that "some tweeks" will mean like changing this stack wipe rule to like 4-5 Times bigger. Not twice only.


Just think how stupid it is now. You are sieging enemy fort with, Well 240k troops (so waaaay overstacked). Then the Defender just use 500k stack and force march in your stack. You wont react quickly enought to sent instant reinforcements. So after 1750 you will have instant wipe after like 10 days of battle. So as attacker you need to have much bigger stacks end this ends up in stacks of few mln fighting few mln. And one missclick when you and your allies armies won't be combined then you can see stackwipe for 1kk Just because first line broke. So one mistake, one missclick, one lag and your whole army is wiped.

I cant understand, why you are changing such a meaningless thing as unit pips, when the game is completely broken at current state. It doesnt matter at all, what pips unit have, if you have 2 times more units. Fighting strong AI? Just merge all of your units in one stack, wipe all their armies. Simple as that.

Playing Multiplayer? Right now is completely unplayable. You have more disciplined army? More ICA/ACA/Whatever? Doesnt matter. Just merge all of your units in one stack, wipe all their armies. Simple as that. There's no strategy. There's no tactics. There's no way to outplay your enemy. If you ever enter to battle outnumbered 2:1, you will get stackwiped. There's no reinforcements. No real battles. Just stackwipes. Try to loose 2-3 million army in one stack, cause of 2:1 rule. No matter, how strong your army is.

Do you even know, how your game looks like lategame? Just some tweaks? Remove 2:1 rule or there is literally no point playing this game anymore. Im not even talking about performance issues - playing with lag/spikes on speed 1 is just absurd. Looks like no more EU4 for some people...

But this is a new feature, or rather bug, introduced in one of last patches.

I'm avare that game devs curretly don't know how they game looks like in multiplayer late game but maybe they should have at least check that? Few months ago war was really fun. You had to properly manage your stacks, reinforce battles, try to intercepts support stacks with your arty stack. Just game where skill could win the war with more powerful enemy. Currently game devs ruined that. Last mp is a clownfest. All players have 1 stack with over million troops. Just that, no skill, no fun. Additionally game is lagging at speed 1 !!!

I have an advise. When introducing new features maybe it's worth to do some regression tests? With people that do understand the game? At this moment you have killed muliplayer games.

And these are the kind of posts that are very, very close to the red line I mentioned. Do you want to drag our attention to the imbalances of the current MP meta? That's fair, and as I also said, we can discuss it. What it's not fair is stating this so aggressively. Our intention as devs is to drive the game in the right direction, and we're putting a lot of effort into it. We also play regular MP games, even if we don't broadcast Dev Clashes as before (mainly because of infrastructure issues attached to the setup of the new studio). And we run regression tests regularly, too, run by people with a lot of hours poured into the game. So, again, and I don't want to repeat this anymore, we deserve respect for our work.

That said, going into the topic, we may want to make some tweaks to the new combat system. In this case, the more detailed feedback and proposals you give to us, the better for everybody, as it would be easier for us to adjust the changes. It looks like one of those could be precisely to change again the stackwiping rules, to numbers more fitting gameplay not based on doomstacking. Any other suggestions that you may think would help with this?

Regarding game performance, this is something we've been working on in the last few months. We already improved it in 1.34, but it's true that we have a lot of lag and spikes in the late game, which is also the hardest to tackle; we'll try to do our best on this, although we can't promise anything, as this is a very complex issue.

All in all I'd wager this is bad change to the game (besides for me liking the nerf to Anatolian because I have unreasonable hatred to the Ottomans), what this change primarily does is widen the gap between Europe and rest of world. I understand tech groups exist to emulate trends within history, that being of European military might, along other things like decline of nomadic powers.

But tech groups are imo really bad way of emulate it, it does not matter how well you are doing as Asian power for example, whether that be up to tech Mughal Empire or Japanese empire, your army will simply be worse then Europeans for no fault of your own. Even if you go military ideas, even if your nation is drilled/built for war, even if you are same if not higher tech then Europeans, if its not unit pip tech it does not matter, you will be behind for no fault of your own.

Sacrificing Muslim tech group for sake of keeping gap between Anatolian and Muslim is so bizarre to me, Morocco already has hell of journey to go on, and now their gap with Western Castile/Aragon/Portugal is even wider?

Further defensive pips for artillery are more or less always better then offensive pips, so what is the point of adding defensive artillery? It's an automatic pick. If anything this is nerf to the AI who won't automatically pick defensive, and buff to players of certain skill/knowledge who will always know to take defensive artillery from now on.

I like the idea of tinkering with tech groups/unit pips, but this to me just seems like nerf to Polynesian/Aboriginal/Anatolian/Muslim/Indian/Chinese and Nomadic, and buff to High American and artillery.

And this is an example of a well-driven criticism, so thanks for it. We're going to think about this, as we're aiming for a general rebalance, not regional, with these changes, so we will take what you are saying into account in the further tests and rebalance we'll be doing.

Given that you are mostly considered a noob until 1444 hours - that means you've added at most 3 more QA testers or they are all noobs.

I am not sure which is better.

third possibility: they each, individually, have over 5000 hours.

Yes, each of our Embedded QAs has more than 5,000 hours at the game individually, and there are other members of the Team with those figures as well.

 

[Pavía]

Hi, thank you for the answer. I for no means wanted to sound disrespectfull or so. I only wanted to emphasize the current state. If a bit too hars? Then sorry for that. In general, The game in 1.34 seems to by much more stable on MP game. Just this 2x SW rule should be, imho, changed. Simple rebalancing it to like 4-5x would probably fix the problem as this would still allow to do a sw on much smaller armies and yet again would force to buil one, big stack as it wouldn't be so effective any more

Thanks for your apologies, it's appreciated. And I'm glad about your comment on the stability of the MP, as we've put a lot of effort since the new Nakama environment was released (in late 1.30) into reducing as much as possible the number and frequency of desyncs (and this is also something that we've internally noticed quite well, having participated in the EUIV Grandest Lan in 2021 under 1.32, and in 2022 under 1.34, and experiencing a much more reduced number of desyncs and rehosts).

 

[Pavía]

Hello there everybody! Quick update: today there won't be a new Dev Diary, we will come back to them next Tuesday, January 17th.

I'll come back later today or maybe tomorrow to this DD, and reply to the comments, as this is something pending for a few weeks.

For those curious, the reason for these delays is basically the Christmas break, and now the catch-up phase after it; we decided to be extra sure about the quality of the new content to present before starting the new DD cycle (which will last a few months).

 

[Pavía]

Next Tuesday is not January 20th

Do you mean it will happen in 2026?

I meant Tuesday, January 17th.

As I said, we're still on post-Christmas catch-up, or at least me.

 

[Pavía]

Hello there! Thanks for your feedback during these weeks, we've gone through it, and we're currently working on changes according to it.

This is definitely a bug and not intentional. A quick review of the history of this change:

In 1.34 zombie regiments were removed. I spotted that this leads to 2:1 overruns not working in a lot of cases. The reason for this is that now regiments can retreat before 12 days have passed. And what happens, if all regiments retreat before day 12? This actually depends on the order of calculations. Does the overrun condition get checked first or the retreat condition. If you check the retreat condition first, the army will just retreat without getting stack wiped even though the 2:1 conditions are fulfilled. Therefore, I advised to be cautious about the order of checks, as this is a new problem due to the fix to zombie regiments.

Unfortunately there seems to be an error in the new implementation. While the idea was to check whether one has a factor of 2:1 and the whole enemy army is out of morale( and therefore has no reinforcements), somehow only the first row seems to be taken into account.

Therefore, this should be just a bug in the implementation, which can happen but should clearly be fixed as soon as possible.

I will give a more detailed explanation of the interaction between 2:1 overruns and zombie regiments, as there seems to be a lot of speculation regarding this.

One of the conditions for the 2:1 rule is that the average morale is zero. The crucial point is the definition of average morale here. I.e. over which set of units is the average actually taken.

Prior to 1.34 all units in combat where taken into account. They can be divided into 5 distinct subsets:
(i) Units in the front row
(ii) Units in the back row
(iii) Units in reserve
(iv) Units which already retreated from battle
(v) Units which were never deployed, as they started the battle with zero strength.

Note that Zombie regiments guaranteed that subset (iv) is always empty while 2:1 overruns are still possible.

Further note that one cannot damage regiments in subset (v). Therefore, they completely prevent overruns. This is a very old problem, but was a major issue in 1.33, as the AI learned to shift-consolidate. This led to subset (v) often containing regiments.

I talked to @Gnivom about removing (v) to fix the bug and I learned about the plan to remove zombie regiments. Therefore, I argued that (iv) also needs to be removed from the calculation. And further the order of checks suddenly becomes relevant, as described in an earlier post.

Therefore, only (i)-(iii) should remain.

According to quite a few posts here it seems that unfortunately (ii) and (iii) have also been removed and only (i) remains, which is problematic.

Thanks a lot for helping us identify this very specific problem issue!

I think its pretty evident that the issue regarding armies getting stackwiped is because of a bug and not because of an intentional design decision.

Cant speak for everyone obviously but I assume their frustration is that we are having a conversation about unit pips for the purpose of combat balance while a major bug that flattens the mechanic of combat had yet to even be acknowledged, let alone hotfixed.
And it isnt just ~multiplayer meta~, this bug trivializes single player experience as well

Not to say the work behind rebalancing pips is unappreciated (I like it), it would just be confidence inspiring to have led the diary with something like "we are aware of the issues regarding stackwipes and are working to hotfix"

Well, now we're working on fixing it. Having identified the very specific problem causing it, our QA team going to monitor that the fix works correctly, and that no further side issues appear (which will take some time, but it's going to be fixed in the 1.35 patch for sure).

All in all I'd wager this is bad change to the game (besides for me liking the nerf to Anatolian because I have unreasonable hatred to the Ottomans), what this change primarily does is widen the gap between Europe and rest of world. I understand tech groups exist to emulate trends within history, that being of European military might, along other things like decline of nomadic powers.

But tech groups are imo really bad way of emulate it, it does not matter how well you are doing as Asian power for example, whether that be up to tech Mughal Empire or Japanese empire, your army will simply be worse then Europeans for no fault of your own. Even if you go military ideas, even if your nation is drilled/built for war, even if you are same if not higher tech then Europeans, if its not unit pip tech it does not matter, you will be behind for no fault of your own.

Sacrificing Muslim tech group for sake of keeping gap between Anatolian and Muslim is so bizarre to me, Morocco already has hell of journey to go on, and now their gap with Western Castile/Aragon/Portugal is even wider?

Further defensive pips for artillery are more or less always better then offensive pips, so what is the point of adding defensive artillery? It's an automatic pick. If anything this is nerf to the AI who won't automatically pick defensive, and buff to players of certain skill/knowledge who will always know to take defensive artillery from now on.

I like the idea of tinkering with tech groups/unit pips, but this to me just seems like nerf to Polynesian/Aboriginal/Anatolian/Muslim/Indian/Chinese and Nomadic, and buff to High American and artillery.

The early fire pips of Anatolian, Muslim and Indian tech groups were meant to represent the earlier adoption of gunpowder by the armies of Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals (the so called "Gunpowder Empires") and lategame these tech groups fall behind compared to Western and Eastern by 2 and 1 pips respectively as they should. For cavalry, Western and Eastern lategame units has 21 and 20 pips respectively, compared to most of the other groups' 18 pips. Muslim and chinese groups fare a little better, having maximum value of 19. So the devs are keeping the lategame western edge while nerfing early game advantages other tech groups possessed, disregarding history when it doesn't suit Europe.

Also, Chinese tech group is one of the better ones barring Western/Eastern, they have 19 pip cavalry (most tech groups have 18) and their best infantry unlocks at tech 26 compared to others' tech 30.

Also why are the aboriginal and polynesian lategame pips so high, compared to technologically superior african/native american nations, anything goes I guess.

From @Pintu : The first time when Western units become clearly better (2 pips difference) than their European and Asian competitors is on Tech 28, which is available without the ahead-of-time penalty in 1775 (so at best this advantage is present for 60 years of the game, and that is only with taking it significantly ahead of time). They equalize their disadvantage around Tech 12-15 and start pulling ahead slightly on Tech 19, all while Unit Pips are less of a "king-maker" the more other different combat modifiers pour in.

Although that said, I share the concerns for North African Nations and their struggle against Iberian expansion. This is something we will think about addressing, as one of our priorities for 1.35 is to keep (and improve, if possible) a good balance between different countries and regions.

@Pintu I decided to have a go at naming these. Most of these cannons were developed in the 15th century, so I had be very liberal with coupling the name to the approximate time the tech level is reached. Sometimes the 'defense' cannon is just another name for something very similar to the 'offensive' cannon.

I also decided just having two choices at each artillery level is too boring for my taste, so I mixed it up slightly For two levels I changed the amount of available choices. For mil level 10 I have three types to choose from, to represent the expansion of artillery use in the 15th century (and because ingame, this is the about level where I care most about the choice ). For level 25 I decided that this tech uniquely should keep a single option, since tech 25 is called 'Royal Mortar' I think it is fitting all cannons get upgraded to 'Royal Mortar' here.

My suggested list is:

7	Houfnice
	Large Cast Bronze Mortar
10	Culverin
	Falconet
	Basilisk
13	Small Cast Iron Cannon
	Large Cast Iron Cannon
16	Chambered Demi-cannon
	Demi-culverin
18	Leather Cannon
	Three Pounder
20	Swifel Cannon
	Peterero
22	Coehorn Mortar
	Horse Artillery
25	Royal Mortar
29	Flying Battery
	Grande Battery

Thanks a lot for this feedback, it's going to be quite useful for us!

What is the point of the defensive cannons? As implemented many are a false choice due to having an odd number of defensive pips and therefore having fewer effective pips overall, but even if that were corrected what do they actually add to gameplay? I don't see much added if anything at all.

As already pointed out by other people, giving a bit more diversity to the decisions of the players, even if it's not a game-breaking one.

 

[Pavía]

When is version 1.35 coming out, please?

Pavia said yesterday that we can expect at least a few months of DDs so I guess there is lots to be expected and we won't get date now

This year.

Now seriously speaking, we have already set the date for the update internally, but it's obviously too early to reveal it; you will know when we're at the end of the DD cycle, as usual.

 

[Pavía]

where's next dev diary?

Where diary

Hello there everybody! Quick update: today there won't be a new Dev Diary, we will come back to them next Tuesday, January 17th.

I'll come back later today or maybe tomorrow to this DD, and reply to the comments, as this is something pending for a few weeks.

For those curious, the reason for these delays is basically the Christmas break, and now the catch-up phase after it; we decided to be extra sure about the quality of the new content to present before starting the new DD cycle (which will last a few months).