Europa Universalis IV - Development Diary 23rd of May 2023 - 1.35.3 known issues and the road to 1.35.4

[Rossarness]

Hello everyone! I’m Kuba, Release Engineer & Interim QA Coordinator here at Paradox Tinto and today I’d like to talk about some known issues and our plan for upcoming weeks.

After making 1.35.2 and following the hotfix, we addressed most of the pressing issues that could negatively impact your gameplay and could be prepared and tested in the time we had available. That being said, we are not yet done with improvements and bug fixing, as there are issues that are brought up by the community in the forums as well as discovered by our internal testing. The following list is the Known Issues to let you know that we are actively working on fixing these.

1. Issues regarding the canals, that that makes them disappear or not appear at all
2. Issues with missing Expand Empire Casus Belli
3. Further fixes for the events of the Chinese floods
4. Issues related to Taking land in war result in losing all crownland

Also, we are preparing for other less prominent issues, which are nevertheless important to us. Some examples would be:

1. France has access to Strong Duchies after integrating all their Appanages
2. Issues with Land of the Christian Sun reform for Republic / Theocratic Japan
3. Siam’s Ideas Rebalance
4. Fixes in the game translations
5. Around 100 more upcoming bug fixes like those!

Those examples were chosen to give you an idea of what kind of issues we will be fixing in this patch as well. As you probably noticed I mentioned weeks instead of days, which means the next patch which will be 1.35.4 will come out probably next month, as we want to properly test all changes, especially the balance changes, so we need more time to do it.

We will be monitoring all the bug reports and social media for other issues as well to ensure that our focus is on the bugs that are annoying our community the most. While I cannot promise any particular fix at this point, we will attempt to prioritize and fix as many as we can.

This also means that we won't be posting new development diaries soon, but we will keep the communication open to keep you all informed of our intentions and plans.

 

[Rossarness]

I feel the same way and would like to request a hotfix for this bug, even if it addresses nothing else.

I understand, but we are already in the progress of preparing a larger patch,

Concerning Chinese events, there's a very simple test you can use to gauge their balance:

Can AI Ming survive, at least some of the time?

If AI Ming is consistently dying in the first century of every single observation campaign, then this is a clear sign that mandate events are just strangling any semblence of balance with pure spite.



Another needed reality check is to ask the question:

Is it actually desirable to be Emperor of China and to pass reforms?

Would you even want it if it was offered to you (along with the land) for free?

If not, then again, this shows that the mandate setup is just horribly out of whack. When any sensible player would rather be a peasant than deal with being emperor, then you are not modeling China correctly.


I feel that the dev team didn't ask themselves these questions at all when designing the current events.

There will be a large number of fixes done to EoC and China-related content

Hi.
Is the bug related to not begin able to sort by dip point in peace deal on your radar?

Not to my knowledge, will ask the team to check if we can make it to this patch

Can you make AI Ottomans actually turn the Mamluks into an eyalet instead of just taking their land directly like they used to?

It's not that difficult, I have almost no experience with coding and managed to fix it.

country_event = {
    id = flavor_tur.240
    title = flavor_tur.240.t
    desc = flavor_tur.240.desc
    picture = COUNTRY_COLLAPSE_eventPicture
    fire_only_once = yes
    major = yes
    is_triggered_only = yes
    trigger = {
        has_dlc = "Domination"
        tag = TUR
        exists = MAM
        FROM = {
            is_capital = yes
            owner = {
                tag = MAM
            }
        }
        is_in_war = {
            casus_belli = cb_ottoman_invasion
            attacker_leader = TUR
            defender_leader = MAM
        }
    }

    option = {
        name = flavor_tur.240.a
        custom_tooltip = flavor_tur.240.a.tt
        set_country_flag = tur_decided_to_go_eyalet
        add_war_exhaustion = -2
        add_prestige = 20
        MAM = {
            country_event = {
                id = flavor_tur.241
            }
        }
        ai_chance = {
            factor = 1
        }
    }

    option = {
        name = flavor_tur.240.b
        custom_tooltip = flavor_tur.240.b.tt
        add_war_exhaustion = -2
        add_prestige = 20
        MAM = {
            country_event = {
                id = flavor_tur.241
            }
        }
        add_country_modifier = {
            name = tur_egyptian_annexation
            duration = 7300
        }
        ai_chance = {
            factor = 0
        }
    }
}

I literally just swapped aroung the 0 and 1 factors in the ai_chance sections

I will ask our Content Designers, not sure what is their intent here.

 

[Rossarness]

By the way, could you please implement a better way to sell ships? Having to do it manually is a huge pain, and the system hasn't been updated since Art of War.

That is a good suggestion for QoL improvement, thank you I hope we will do it in closer future, tho certainly not with the next patch

Can you please fix mercenary discipline?
Here's the writeup of the issue. https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...rcenary-discipline-bug.1501050/#post-28943948
In short mercenary discipline gives much smaller strength boost to mercs than actual discipline, possibly because it doesn't give land tactics.
I applaud trying to make mercenaries work but because of this bug mercs are still barely viable.

I will check if this issue is tracked internally by us.

And how about the problem that recruiting special units like marine and cossack is unavailable when absolutism under 0?

That one is on our radar, don't wanna promise but the high chance it will be in

 

[Rossarness]

Is there a plan tô create a auto missionary?
Maybe how autonomous siege or how diplomatic relations.

I will add it to QoL proposals but it´s not as trivial

Are generals going to get back their old sorting order (instead of the new change that displays siege first)?

I believe it is on our list of things to be fixed

I don’t think this will work because the event "Fall of the Mamluk Sultanate" needs a +90 warscore and other conditions. With a +90 warscore, the AI will ask for peace, preventing the event from firing. Probably the easiest way to fix this without major changes is to add a path only for the AI with easier conditions.

We want to avoid AI-only paths as they create a lot of tech debt in the future

 

[Rossarness]

I´d like to thank you all for all your opinions and reports, even if I don´t reply directly to your post doesn´t mean it´s ignored. Sometimes I push things directly to our content designers, they are also checking forums to ensure the focus is on the important parts of the game.

 

[Rossarness]

I don't know if it is on the list of things to fix but in case it isn't I hope that it would end up in there:

I noticed a rather weird thing while playing Japan. Japanese mission The Balance of Power which grants you special tier 1 government reform in theory requires you to either have 100 absolutism to unlock a Supreme Shogunate reform OR 6 privilages granted to each estate to unlock a Divine Empire reform. As far as I know mission was supposed to unlock only one of the reforms depending on how you complete the mission

BUT

When I completed the mission by granting privilages to get the Divine Empire reform it unlocked both of them depite the fact that I did not have 100 absolutism (in fact I didn't have any absolutism because It was still Age of Reformation). Also, I didn't find out that Divine Empire reform required to keep the priviliges granted after completing the mission until I revoked a privilage from one of the estates so they had <6 and the reform got automatically abolished, thankfully I was able to reestablish it after granting the privilages again. The Supreme Shogunate reform however was still available regardless of how much absolutism I had.

Moreover, when the Divine Empire was granted the Supreme Shogunate reform was still visible and available to switch to but when the Supreme Shogunate was granted the Divine Empire reform became unvisible until I changed from Supreme Shogunate to any other tier 1 reform.


I understand that it is a rather specific situation (all the refom switching and all) but I started testing things out when I noticed a problem coz' the game wasn't on ironman. The mission should deffinitely unlock only one of the reforms and I don't think it was intentional that Divine Empire gets abolished if you drop below 6 privilages for any of the estates (it can even happen accidentaly if you pay off estate loans or lose access to trade good you granted monopoly on).


P.S.
There is also other problem with Japan missions I noticed. The mission Port of Dejima does not appear even if it should.

it´s more to acknowledge most vocal issues, The list of fixes we will do is quite extensive. I don´t want to provide more details as those fixes are still to be tested so we might revert some if they cause more issues than they fix. I will let our Content Designer responsible for Japan be aware of this post, but I already saw some fixes prepared on our internal list

For the love of Parliament, please, make an instrument for quick appointment of seats in provinces. I just got Parliament in Russian Empire and have to manually click, like, 100+ provinces to appoint them? Oh come on!

Good idea, we will look into it in the future, but not for this patch

 

[Rossarness]

Hello Sir/Ma'am,
Ref. the bugs especially Expand empire CB and to a lesser extent crown land.
It is disappointing to say the least after the time put in to the game playing Byzantium, after engineering the peace of Westphalia and converting as many nations to orthodox as possible to get IA to a slight positive, then joining the empire after being made emperor to enact the third reform to find this broken. It is 1631 on ironman and this now makes it unplayable. The issue is that due to other commitments i have limited time and by the time i come back another expansion will most likely be out. I have several questions please.
1. Will the future bug fix render the save games obsolete?
2. What happens if i use the expand empire fix in the workshop?
3. Can i make a backup save on ironman?
4. Can a hotfix not be implemented for at least this issue?
The rendering obsolete of saves and game breaking bugs is one reason i have stopped for the time being buying the DLC, as great as the games are. Thank you.

1. While we cannot guarantee it, it should be safe to continue on a new patch, I have a playthrough from 1.32 that I can still play with Ironman ( ofc it´s missing new stuff but works )
2. I assume it´s not Ironman compatible
3. It should do so automatically
4. Due to internal processes that follow every release we are not able to do so. Currently, we are in the process of testing the full big patch

Again, we are sorry it affects your gameplay and we do what we can to provide the fix at earliest possible window.

 

[Pavía]

Your internal process allows small updates post release, it has been done already this dlc release let alone pretty much every previous one. Someone has obviously made an arbitrary decision to not update in the usual multi release schedule and has decided that one big massive fix a month and a half after release despite massive game affecting bugs is the new policy. I hope you are providing feedback to your management that this is a weird arbitrary decision which downright sucks for people that have purchased the dlc and expect the usual prompt updates. Stellaris can do it, so arbitrary internal policies seems like a pretty weak excuse.

Is there any release date for this “hot”fix? It kind of sucks paying $20 for a DLC that breaks the game for a month and a half post-launch.

Well, it's only "somewhere in June". They tend to release patches on Tuesdays, but it's not always the case for hotfixes. My bet is, that we could get patch on 20th of June (next Tuesday). But it can be any day, actually.

I do totally understand that software development takes time, but the decision to not do a quick hotfix with the few most urgent issues and instead take more and more weeks to release a patch containing 100s of fixes was a really bad one.

I also feel that there is a lack of communication from the team here on why this decision was made and what the timeline for the next patch is. "Somewhen in June" is not accurat enough when players have to decide to continue their game with issues or maybe wait just a few days until the patch is there.

I'm hoping we will have news, it's been long.

So we just released the patch, June 20th was the best bet, after all the speculation.

A few comments, if you don't mind:
1. This is the fourth patch after the release of Domination, with two hotfix patches that were released as fast as possible (1.35.1 and 1.35.3), and two bigger patches that required more time for testing (1.35.2 and 1.35.4).
2. We understand the inconvenience created by some of the bugs (the Expand Empire CB one, for instance), but we also wanted to aim at this patch for the best possible stability and polish, to be completely sure that 1.35.4 could become a stable version of 1.35.4.
3. We couldn't be more precise than 'sometime in June', as it also involved the release of the new History Lessons DLCs, so we needed to clear out certification in all the stores (Steam, MS, Epic, and GOG) for both the patch and the DLCs, which is not an automatic process.
4. In any case, we tried to be as clear as possible with communication, as it's been the case since PDX Tinto started its tenure of EUIV, and we'll try to continue this way of interacting with the community.