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Europa Universalis IV - Development Diary 26th of April 2022

Hello and welcome to another Europa Universalis IV Development Diary! This week I will be presenting the Roadmap we have been preparing in the last weeks, giving a guide to some of the content that we are working on and will be showing you all in the coming months.

But first, you have probably noticed that I’m not @Johan , who is traditionally in charge of doing this. That’s because I’ve been recently promoted to Content Design Coordinator here in Paradox Tinto, so, as the position speaks for itself, I’ll be coordinating the new content created. Therefore, Johan thought it would be a good idea to take some boring work out from him to delegate this task to me.

On to the Roadmap. We will be sticking to the development principles we outlined in the past year. Those are:
  • Paid Features should be standalone, and easy to maintain.
  • No major feature reworks while we still have lots of bugs.
  • Reducing the bug-count as much as possible.
  • Add more content, like missions, graphics and music.
  • Flesh out the parts of the map that have not gotten attention the last few years.
At the moment, we’re quite satisfied with the current state of the game and we think it’s in a much better spot than one year ago. We’ve not only addressed a lot regarding the Leviathan issues (shivers), but have fixed a lot of legacy bugs (as we discussed on previous DDs), reducing our backlog of existing issues and starting a rebalancing of some parts of the game that were required and requested.

So, what can you expect from the next update (which will be version 1.34 of the game)? We will still be working on reducing our bug-count and improving game performance as much as possible. From a gameplay perspective, @Gnivom will continue making improvements to AI, and we are already addressing the combat balance (topics that will be discussed in future DDs, so you can give us feedback about it after we’ve finished a first round of internal tests). We’re going to do some rebalancing of Idea groups (nothing groundbreaking, but trying to diversify a bit their usefulness). Also, we want to keep improving the Religion balance, making some changes to a few of them to make them attractive enough, as we have done in the last two updates.

Regarding the new content, we believe that we need to improve the state of the base game before we start introducing more major reworks. We also think that we have room to keep expanding already existing features. So, in that sense, you can expect that there will be more government reforms, more estate privileges, and a few more goodies here and there. But our main focus in this field will be to continue improving and developing mission trees and other accompanying features in regions considered a bit backwards content-wise. And, speaking of, we’ve got a clue of the area where we will be focusing from next week’s DD:

shipwreckTOP-800x534.jpg

And that’s all for today! We’re very excited about the new upcoming content, and I promise you that my colleague @Ogele will show you more detailed content next Tuesday. Stay tuned, see you!
 
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Also @Pavía i have one slight suggestion. If you guys consider touching Eastern Europe perhaps some estate privilege could be added for Eastern Catholic nations like Austria, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania and PLC. Now i'll call it "Uniat Administration" and what this would do is give them +100% religious unity and - 100% missionary strength for all Orthodox provinces. The idea here is to give Eastern Catholics some sort of tollerant aproach. Just a suggestion.
 
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Let's see what will emerge from that swedish sinking!

We’re going to do some rebalancing of Idea groups (nothing groundbreaking, but trying to diversify a bit their usefulness).

Yeah, bring back the choice, especially in MP games where you get easily punished if you don't follow the obvious meta..


Also, we want to keep improving the Religion balance, making some changes to a few of them to make them attractive enough, as we have done in the last two updates.

If Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea are the main focus of 1.34, you may consider to change the starting religion of the northernmost provinces in Scandinavia and Russia areas. Animism might be a better pick. Or.. Something new...

Totally out of the scope, Maronites and Alawites could be represented too in Syria and Lebanon.
 
I hope for reworking map for Baltic region (Scandinavia, Prussia (with Pomerania and Silesia), PLC and western Russia).
 
Let's see what will emerge from that swedish sinking!



Yeah, bring back the choice, especially in MP games where you get easily punished if you don't follow the obvious meta..




If Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea are the main focus of 1.34, you may consider to change the starting religion of the northernmost provinces in Scandinavia and Russia areas. Animism might be a better pick. Or.. Something new...

Totally out of the scope, Maronites and Alawites could be represented too in Syria and Lebanon.
Last European pagans? Romuva, Slavic and Norse?
 
So hyped for a baltic rework after binging SandRoman's videos. Reworked league wars, brandenburg prussia events (due to vasa kings on both Poland and Sweden's thrones claiming each other titles and so rightful ownership of prussia), reworked reformation, all and more could come
 
Also @Pavía i have one slight suggestion. If you guys consider touching Eastern Europe perhaps some estate privilege could be added for Eastern Catholic nations like Austria, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania and PLC. Now i'll call it "Uniat Administration" and what this would do is give them +100% religious unity and - 100% missionary strength for all Orthodox provinces. The idea here is to give Eastern Catholics some sort of tollerant aproach. Just a suggestion.
Slightly beyond the scope of the patch but I'd love Venice/Genoa to have something similar, I'm tired of Venice immediately converting the Greek Orthodox islands they have.
 
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Sure, but the amount of provinces at the start of the game is the same as in lategame. The amount of nations populating the game has been reduced through time and yet mid-to lategame is where performance is worst.

I'm guessing the amount of armies also has to do something with it. Or the information that's being saved everywhere, like a province history that always becomes longer as time goes on.
Personally I think its pathing thats partly problematic. With less nations and larger nations spread out on many continents - armies can walk longer distances so more pathing calculations has to be done. Especially when considering using transports to other continents.
 
ffs
We have been waiting for 2 weeks for one screenshot and placeholder text "we will be working on AI and balance and bla bla"
So now we have one spring month and what after? Another 2 month of silence and "summer holidays"
I don't want to be so toxic, but there are no new content for month now, and it's just hilarious
I'm perplexed by how you could play the game so exhaustively that you're starved for new content, but not play it enough to realise just how urgently it needs fixing and fleshing out in legacy areas. I'd actually expect this kind of reaction if they'd announced a new DLC due in 6 months.
 
Nice! One thing re: game performance is that it will be really cool if we can get some insight on how you measure game performance. For example, some data on speed 5 at 1444 across different patches. It'll also be useful if there are some details on what changes and factors across patches that the team thinks is causing these performance drops, since I see many people speculate about how it's the new world natives, new tags, provinces, etc., and I'd like a more informed opinion from the development team on this.


Is the rebalance with singleplayer or multiplayer in mind? For example, mil ideas or eco ideas are extremely weak in singleplayer while things like diplo, humanist, etc. are exetremely weak in multiplayer. It's unclear to me how to address these two disparities without separating them (many MP groups seem to make their own balance mods anyway) or making more drastic changes. Based on the combat changes on 1.33, I worry that tweaks will be quite arbitrary without following a well-defined principle, so I'd definitely appreciate more transparency and communication regarding changes like this as ideas get developed. I am always happy to throw out my opinions for "balance" changes from a SP perspective if my opinion is ever cared for.


This sounds great, and I'm definitely in total agreement! However, I have this impression that a similar attitude was claimed for the 1.33 dev diaries, yet there was a sloppy combat rework which to me ought to be considered "major." I hope this attitude of "not tweaking random things that already work decently and instead prioritizing things that are for sure not working well" is uniform across the entire team...
Our most basic tool is we run the game every night on number of machines (our test node play as observer) then we gather the time needed for single tick and monthly tick. Then we have data per machine and global one so we can see what is the current performance. We can gather more data when investigating certain game features of course.
 
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I hope it won't be only Scandinavia DLC but Scandinavia + The Baltic Sea Drainage Basin (and maybe even Hanza). I would also love to see formable Sarmatia (very low absolutism Eastern Europe empire). Oh and I want to even propose the DLC name:

Dominium maris baltici

 
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If it's time to look forward, I'd like to throw my pennies into the wishing well: I strongly believe you guys should fly to the CK team and nick their game rules screen before anyone notices that they can't turn off AI seduction.

There are so many things I miss from earlier versions! CK2 was sent off great. Everyone had their favorite way to play it, and more or less we always get the chance to do so. I realize some of what I want can be achieved through mods, but having that "do you want shattered retreat or not/ do you want medieval coalitions or not?" in CK2 makes all the difference.

Lastly, considering the decade-long effort, the features of earlier versions that are currently not at all being used makes me sad.

To give imperfect, arbitrary examples: (I'm sure most of you can come up with much more important stuff)
  • I really enjoy the estate rework, but if someone didn't, I'd not blame them for wanting their 200 mana in instant clicks back.
  • I do not enjoy the automatic fleet exploration for Random New Worlds, It was so neat clicking on something and not knowing what it might reveal. Why can't it work like the conquistador, having both options?
  • Personally, I do not enjoy the random nature of institutions, the only one I find engaging is the Global Trade. Because I know if I tried hard enough I could get it to spawn as anyone with no luck having been necessary. A game rule screen would let me tweak that. It would take away my achievements, probably, but all I want is to be given the choice.
  • While your resident wiseguy is visiting Stockholm, why not also misappropriate Stellaris' (and HOI4s) difficulty selections? Let us set the AI aggressiveness. Let us tweak the lucky nations. I'd love to buff 1.33 Ottomans to the moon and watch in abject horror.
EU4's a great game I'd feel sad if it was sent off to that good night in an imperfect state, which would be for most of us if the game stays this rigid.
 
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Happy to see this region reworked.

I really wish North America will be fixed, it's really a pain in the *** to play/see... Same for Oceania. Too many useless nations.
 
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