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Hello, and welcome to a new era of EU4 development, where we’ll have development diaries talking about what we are doing almost every week.

One of the criticism we’ve had regarding EU4, have been that the game has always premiered conquest, and if you didn’t expand, you fell behind. In the next major update, you’ll be able to make an empire that is more focused on tall than on wide. After all, it is just common sense of us to listen to what the community is requesting.

Most of you are familiar with the concept of base tax. This permeates the game at so many fundamental levels, with everything from forcelimits to coring costs being coupled to this. We also had a value in a province that was called manpower. Trade-Goods produced was arcanely connected to the basetax, and there is not a single human being that could calculate how much manpower in a province actually

Now we have 3 separate values in a province called Base Tax, Base Production & Base Manpower.

Base Tax affects your monthly tax income as before, and also increases your defence against hostile spies.

Base Production impacts the amount of trade-goods produced in the province, and how quickly ships gets build in the province.

Each level of base manpower increased your nations maximum manpower by 250, and also impacts the garrison growth in the province, and how quickly regiments is recruited in that province.

All of them together is called “Development”, which describes how heavily populated and built up the province is. Each level of development increases the supply limit, forcelimits for your armies and navies and makes it harder to converts its religion.

Finally, the development level also allows you to be able to build more buildings in that province.

Wait?

What am I talking about here? Well, first of all, we have reduced the amount of possible buildings, as a large part were fillers. Secondly, we removed the power-cost for building buildings. And finally, not every province can have the same amount of buildings. Currently, a province can have 1 building as default, with some terrains like desert or mountains reducing it by 1, and some increasing it, like farmlands. And, every 10 development allows another building slot in a province. So Paris may be able to have 6 buildings in 1444, while Figuig can not support a single building.




Now you say that we haven’t really talked that much about wide versus tall, but bear with me.

You will be able to spend adm, dip or mil power to increase base tax, production and manpower respectively in a province, where of course the cost keep increasing, but if you dream about a 20 base tax Dublin, then you can do that :) Doing this in deserts or arctic climate is far more expensive than doing it in better climates. The ideas that affected build power costs, now affects the cost of improving your province. There is also technologies that decrease the cost of improving development in the later half of the game.

SgIW348.jpg


Here’s the example of a few buildings in the game.

Marketplace - Dip4 - +2 Trade Power - 50 gold
Barracks - Mil 6 - +25% Manpower - 50 gold
Cathedral - Adm 19 - +3% Missionary Strength & +40% Tax Income - 200 gold
Stock Exchange - Dip 22 - +100% Trade Power - 400 gold
Town Hall -Adm 22 -5 Local Unrest - 400 g

Next week, we’ll talk a little about something that fits England very well..
 
Provinces change with nations, lose province lose the cost increase with it. Plus it will avoid things like this: creating a lot of subjects, letting them upgrade their provinces, and then annexing them back. You end up not having to spend anything but still get upgrades, plus it won't increase the cost of more.

If it's set on an national level it will be like this.
I don't see that as a problem, why would my people be less happy to improve their land just because I conquered someone else's improved land? With the old system of basetax and buildings, part of the reason vassal swarms were so strong was because vassals would build buildings with their own money+mana. Also, if you're soaking up vassals all the time, you're going to have bad Liberty Desire and Dip Rep. Not to mention that you're spending dip to annex, and additional dip for every improvement they make. The province will also be at 75% LA.

If it is a problem, then yeah, it would make sense to add up all province improvements to a nation-wide total to determine the cost of the next one.
 
Storing how many times you have upgraded a province on the National Level seems terrible, like it will just be rife with ridiculous exploits that Paradox will spend the next several patches trying and failing to properly close when none of them would happen if the costs were localized.

Seriously what is Paradox's ridiculous obsession with making things National when they should be Localized?
 
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Jesus Christ that is a MASSIVE change.

Finally "population" will be put into the game, even if a bit abstracted. That is good.

Now all that remains if for option to build trade posts to reach Asia instead of having to use colonies.
 
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Hmm if the cost of coring territory increase with development does that mean that by developing a province and stacking coring cost increases would it become impossible to core? (e.g. cost goes over 999). You can already get 250% core cost increase quite easily as like Bohemia with aristocracy and diplomatic defense act I imagine if you had a province any better than paris combined with those the cost could go to 1000 quite easily. That would be so funny to do to your capital in multiplayer. No one would ever attack you.
 
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These are probably the best changes overall that I have heard of in a very long time. I am very impressed. What I would suggest, however, is to give everyone five diplomats like you got in EUII and maybe EU III. That is, so long as fabricating claims is a major part of the game. Especially if special buildings no longer exist.
 
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Hmm if the cost of coring territory increase with development does that mean that by developing a province and stacking coring cost increases would it become impossible to core? (e.g. cost goes over 999). You can already get 250% core cost increase quite easily as like Bohemia with aristocracy and diplomatic defense act I imagine if you had a province any better than paris combined with those the cost could go to 1000 quite easily. That would be so funny to do to your capital in multiplayer. No one would ever attack you.

They would just leave you as OPM, and in following war maybe perma-sieged
 
Been waiting so long for something like this. Finally a native american gone western global empire can finally have a decent base tax province in their homelands; instead of sitting there with tons of land but no income and getting all jelly of those European base tax provinces.
 
A much needed change. Buildings will NEVER be useful until they cost no mana. Population is also good too, as Germany has more base manpower than China in the current build of the game.
 
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Anyone else feel like they can't play EU4 in it's current state until this change is released?
 
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Allthough this looks like a bigger change, i am still wondering when PI will finally work on the biggest problems of EU4: The primitive religion and culture system, which is even more simple then in Total War and also the fact that Non-European nations still have European technology-trees. These problems have to get solved to make EU4 indeed a grand-strategy game.
 
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I just thought- the new system aims to allow building small (and hopefully medium) yet internally strong and advanced states. I like it, but... if take it logically, blobbing will still be the way to get most benefits. If you have a country of 10 highly developed provinces and a country with 50 provinces of which 10 are highly developed- small country is still in bad position. If there are no such plans already, I would recommend to introduce some mechanism allowing to prevent such situation. Perhaps some powerful modifier which would simply take the average advancement of a country. Whether a country overall is internally strong could be simply calculated by dividing total developement (total += province) by number of provinces. Based on the average, appropriate benefits would be applied (prestige, manpower boost, tax boost etc.).
 
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I just thought- the new system aims to allow building small (and hopefully medium) yet internally strong and advanced states. I like it, but... if take it logically, blobbing will still be the way to get most benefits. If you have a country of 10 highly developed provinces and a country with 50 provinces of which 10 are highly developed- small country is still in bad position. If there are no such plans already, I would recommend to introduce some mechanism allowing to prevent such situation. Perhaps some powerful modifier which would simply take the average advancement of a country. Whether a country overall is internally strong could be simply calculated by dividing total developement (total += province) by number of provinces. Based on the average, appropriate benefits would be applied (prestige, manpower boost, tax boost etc.).
The mechanism is in place already -- it's MP. It takes MP to conquer and absorb provinces; it also takes MP to develop provinces.

The problem with the old building system is that it primary took gold to develop provinces; there was an MP cost, but unless you developed tons of provinces, it wasn't all that substantial (so you develop only your rich accepted culture same religion provinces and occasionally specific others). So, a big nation could develop a handful of provinces even easier than a small nation could.

Under the system Johan describes, gold costs are gone for base development (removing the advantage of large, wealthy nations). The MP requirement will increase as you develop further, so a big nation that's spending lots of MP taking and absorbing provinces won't be able to also develop those provinces much.

Balanced properly, on average it should be the case that spending MP developing internally has comparable costs to expansion.

Of course there's tons of variables here. Starting province value is critical, as is number of building slots. If the MP costs never stop increasing, you'll reach a point where it makes no sense to invest further in a province, which means eventually a tall state will need to conquer a province or two to continue building up. If the MP costs start out really small, a wide nation could just do light development on all provinces and maybe get a better return on investment from the MP.

It's all going to depend on the tuning. And that may take a couple patches (so, if you're waiting for this to resume playing EU4 -- don't, it likely won't work super great at first anyway, so you might be waiting a long time).
 
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*sigh*

I'm currently getting really annoyed by this dev diary.....I want to play EUIV with these features now....

:p

Happens to me every time...

Step 1: New Patch & DLC come out. I get excited, play a few short to medium length games.
Step 2: I decide to take a break while I wait for the bugfixes and balancing of smaller patches.
Step 3: The game is patched a satisfactory degree, and I start a long campaign.
Step 4: Right around the time that I'm in final 1/3 to 1/4 of the game, they announce an exciting new mechanic for the next patch/DLC.
Step 5: I lose interest in my current campaign.
Step 6: See Step 1

Seriously, I have a 1.09 Byzantine Game where I pretty much have completely restored Trajan's Empire and rule over almost all of America. But I lost interest when 1.10 was announced. And I was in the 1770s! It was even Ironman!