Tinto Talks #75 - 6th of August 2025

[Pavía]

Hello, and welcome to another Tinto Talks, the happy Wednesdays where we talk about Europa Universalis V!

Today, we will take a look at the Black Death situation. It will be slightly different from others, as I will present it in more detail than other Situation-related Talks, almost being an AAR. So, let's start it without further ado.

It is Anno Domini 1346, and some news arrives in Poland:

You might notice a new feature in the Situation alert tooltip - it is a Hint, a system that we now have in EU5, to help and guide the players with different mechanics and features. If we click on it, we'll get to the following on the right side of the screen:

The characters that appear at the top of the Hint are actual in-game members of your Cabinet, not pre-scripted. Gosciwuj has some concerns about the Black Death, apparently.​

As you see, Hints try to give an explanation of what's going on, and also some potentially useful Recommended Actions to follow - actions that are up to the players to follow, or not, of course, as they have other priorities!

So, this new Black Death plague has appeared in a certain place called Dardeling. If you click in the Situation alert, and therefore you open the Situation panel, you'll get to know where the place is, and how the Black Death progresses:

Dardeling is the place where the plague started - could be worse, right?

Some months, maybe a year, since the plague started. It's getting closer...​

After some time, the Black Death may end up reaching your country:

The Black Death has arrived in Poland! And while we're busy fighting the Teutonic Order in a war!​

When the Black Death arrives, a variety of options will be available to the players - let's take an in-depth look at all of them:

Given my current situation - in a war with the Teutonic Order, and in the middle of a unique Polish disaster called 'Rise of the Szlachta':

We'll talk about the unique Polish content in a future Tinto Flavour, as usual!​

I don't really want to get reduced satisfaction with my Estates... So the only action that I'm going to take for the moment is to 'Procure Remedies', to actually raise their support:

While the Situation is active, random events may pop up:

I've decided to do what any sensible ruler in the middle of a war would do - tax the Burghers and get money for the war chest!

I'd say it's the moment for austerity and piousness!​

Some months more into the game, and the Black Death keeps spreading:

The ongoing war is still more important!​

Some more events:

Gosciwuj was right - no Hint could save him!

On our side story, we've been able to peace out the Teutons, so now we can focus our efforts on managing the Black Death:

Peace in our time! The province of Chelmno is now once again part of our country! Poland stronk!​

Focusing on the war has taken its toll, though:

Oops, too much time spent painting the map!​

We use some of the money that we had hoarded plus what we took from the Teutons in the peace deal to build some hospitals:

More events:

And a couple of years since it reached our country (we are now in January 1350), no more locations in our country are affected by the Black Death, but it has taken a big death toll...

The plague will ravage the world for some more time to come, but at least it's over in our country, which will now have to face new challenges

And that’s all for today! We will come back on Friday, as we will talk in Tinto Flavour about the Mamluks!

And also remember, you can wishlist Europa Universalis V now! Cheers!

 

[Pavía]

Will the Black Death sweep across the entire Old World as it originally did, or will it primarily be confined to Europe?

It's semi-dynamic, so it will depend a bit on each game. For instance, in my current game, the country that got impacted the most was Delhi:

By the way, there are a couple of game rules about it that you can tweak; these are the default values:

 

[Pavía]

I don't know how I should feel about it, since you haven't addressed the elephant in the room: the unhistorical spread of the plague into Asia, specifically India, China, and Japan.

Any word on that would be much appreciated.

Since the last time that was shown, we've addressed the resistance to the disease in several regions, of which China is the most important. The higher the resistance, the less time and impact a disease has in our game.

On top of that, please take into account that numbers are a matter of constant rebalance - and the Black Death is probably the situation that has received more balance changes since it was first implemented in the game, since it's probably the most impactful.

 

[Pavía]

An issue has been raised that the Black Death is not punishing enough in the game.
Could this be because, at the start, almost all your pops are 'unemployed, so losing half of them doesn’t feel like much of a setback?

What if countries started with much higher RGO levels and more buildings to employ more pops — and then the Black Death would destroy those as well? Then you would feel what you lose – decimated not only pops, but taxes, profits as well.

Thanks!

Well, in my current ongoing game (I have it open as I write this), I've lost almost 50% of my population to the plague. My income before it was around 10 monthly ducats; as of now, it is 4.49. This is having an impact, both on the short term, and the long run.

 

[Pavía]

The hint system will be really useful for new players to not get completely overwhelmed by this game. Good Job on those

It's our intention, as this is a complex game. Thanks, appreciated!

 

[Johan]

One of the recurring points in feedback from the YouTubers who got to play an early build of EU5 not long ago was that the Black Death didn’t feel impactful long term. You took a financial hit in the short term from trade collapsing, but since so much wealth generation is tied to building employment and the vast majority of the population in the early game is subsistence farming peasant deadweight, losing a third of your population had virtually no economic impact since those buildings would be repopulated within a few short years.
Is the team aware of this, and do they consider it a problem that needs to be (or has since been) solved? Namely, how to make the annihilation of even “deadweight” population a painful loss that will be felt for generations.

Some of them had that opinion though. They fail to account for accumulated growth. Like if you invest 500€ or 1000€ today, which is most likely to give more money long term.


Lost population is the long term killer.

 

[Pavía]

• Are there mechanisms to stop the plague transmitting across overland borders all that quickly? Pretty much every country was infected from its ports, rather than from it overland borders - if it had ports. It sometimes took years for it transmit over underpopulated land such as through the steppes. Russia got the plague a full five years after most of continental Europe and Moscow was one of the last European capitals to be infected, despite its relative nearness to the Golden Horde. I've heard this explained as either an existing migration ban between the Russian principalities and the Golden Horde, the effects of the sparsely populated steppe, or some combination of the two. Is there a mechanism to reflect one of these and make it fairly likely that Moscow will only be infected late?
• I see there are some events to represent the religious scapegoating and persecutions at the time. Will these cause persecuted minorities to flee to more tolerant states? (Historically one of many reasons so many Jews moved to Poland)
• Are there enough buildings and employed pops at the time of the plague's appearance to make it as economically devastating when it culls that workforce and tax population? It seemed from earlier gameplay reveals that the loss of pops didn't hurt economies all that much in practice despite how it devastated them in real life, though that was just an impression and might have had more to do with the lack of balance in the trade system at the time.
• Has the lack of urbanization in the Golden Horde been fixed? The plague was one of the contributors to their decline, so it'd be a shame not to have cities to decline.

1. There's currently an ongoing review by historians about the spread and lethality of the plague, contending the traditional views - of which, probably the Polish one is atop my head. In any case, from a gameplay perspective, we didn't want to make it possible to completely lock a border, and cease the spread of the disease, because the player would actually know how lethal it is, making it too powerful an action, and potentially the Black Death meaningless at all. However, as I've shown, some actions can be taken beforehand and while it's ongoing, to mitigate its effects.
2. Some of the events may provoke a negative migration attraction, so the pops could potentially migrate away from the country.
3. Just replied above on the economic side, but to add another indication of how hurtful it could be - I had around 11K levies in my war against the Teutons; now, I have 6,726.
4. The Golden Horde has some towns spread here and there.

 

[Pavía]

Any chance of an option "Black Death follows historical spread"?

We've been putting our efforts towards making the dynamic part of it work as good as possible, instead of hard-scripting it the historical way. This could potentially be done differently by modders.

 

[Pavía]

Can you show us the mentioned "pest house" building please?

 

[Pavía]

Will the bubonic plague have secondary outbreaks in succeeding decades, separate from the Black Plague situation?

After the situation ends, there might be other outbreaks of the Bubonic Plague, which might be more or less deadly depending on the resistance of the pops:

 

[Pavía]

Are there hints for every situation? Will we got ones for the Hundred Years War/Red Turban Rebellion, ect?

The Black Death is the first situation with a Hint, but we want to implement as many as possible, when the information in the panel is not clear enough, especially for the situations happening in the first ages, as those are the most likely to be seen by new players in new games.

 

[Pavía]

Interestingly, you chose Poland as an example here, even though it was not (or the least) affected by the Black Death
This could be represented by some temporary modifier for Poland (and maybe Lithuania). If they have an ongoing disaster at the same time.

Thanks for the comment about the income and for a great TT.

We discussed a lot about the spread of the Black Death in Poland, because we've had a lot of Poles working for the project, and Zlewikk and Lookas gave us feedback, both from them and from their communities, when they got access to the game some months ago. Our stance is: 1. Recent historical articles have been challenging the traditional view of the Black Death in Poland. 2. We want to favor the dynamic approach to the situation, over hard-scripting it too much.

So, in the case of my game, I was playing as a warmongering King Casimir that took very little care about the Black Death when it started spreading over Poland - but different players may follow different approaches to it.

 

[Pavía]

Spoiler

View attachment 1342669

whatever you guys did to the textures made the 3D map look 100 times better, at least! This is full of character, please share more of the rework it looks so good!

I'll forward to the 3D team, thanks!

 

[Pavía]

quite unrelated, are there any plans for adding situations in eastern europe? halych-volyn wars? livonian war? time of troubles? Deluge?

We want to keep adding more situations in the future, especially regional ones, but we still have some more global ones to present.

 

[Pavía]

Does the plague affect armies in any way such as through a significant increase in attrition in infected locations? Armies were already hotbeds for disease but I imagine casually strolling 12000 levies through a plague torn land would not end well for those poor levies.

Armies can be heavily impacted by diseases in general (not only the bubonic plague), yes, and they also spread diseases while moving.

 

[Johan]

I assume game usses Malthusian theory for its population. So this means with deaths now we have a smaller population with more food for everyone even though output goes down. So with higher wages in terms of food and all those pushes to traditional economy which buffs food production you will recower a lot of your population with time

short term for a few months there is more food, but less people means less food produced.

 

[Pavía]

By the way, we're doing a Play & Fix session at the studio, so as I'm replying here, I keep playing - and the Plague is back!:

 

[Pavía]

I hope the other events or situations in the game have 3d character model to bring it life, because only having text and number is the reason eu4 feels extremely dated and I'm afraid from every preview I see this will release feeling dated.

I just hope that when this game releases it will feels like the most alive game in paradox history instead of just a spreadsheet with a map.

This is one of the few situations without characters on it, as it has no 'starrings'. In any case, our approach to the art of the game is exactly that - a mix of GUI, 2D and 3D art that makes the game feel alive.

 

[Pavía]

According to latest research, the plague should begin in Tian Shan before reaching the Golden Horde.

https://brill.com/view/journals/jesh/66/5-6/article-p513_1.xml

This paper is also relevant to the matter: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04800-3

 

[Pavía]

Looks nice! I really like the new Hint system. One question: Does disease resistance only accumulate with every disease outbreak, or does it also slowly decline over time? If so, by how much?

It accumulates with each disease outbreak, and then it slowly declines.