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Hello, and welcome back to Europa Universalis IV. Last week we talked about features, where most of them will be in the free update, but todays feature will all be part of the next expansion.

First of all, I’d like to mention that we are adding a new government form called English Monarchy, which England will start with. It will give +0.5 Legitimacy, -1 Unrest, -0.1 Monthly Autonomy and give them access to a Parliament.

So what is a Parliament? It is a new mechanic that Constitutional Monarchies & Constitutional Republics has as well. A Parliament is a political body inside your country, which will have debates that if they pass will give you benefits for a decade.

There is quite a lot of different possible debates, and you are allowed to pick one of five random eligible ones.

To have a debate pass, you need to have a majority of the seats backing the issue. Of course, when an debate is started, all seats are against it, and you need to convince them to back it.

Every Seat of Parliament will have their own reasons you must fullfill to have them back an issue, and their reasons will be different for each issue. A coastal Seat of Parliament may want to be Granted Navy commissions, which reduces your naval tradition, while another Seat may want monetary compensation, while another want some military support, or a fourth want some more autonomy. Luckily, you only have to get half of them to support you to get the debate passed.

Any non-overseas province can be granted a Seat in Parliament and your capital will always have a Seat. There is no way to remove a seat in Parliament, unless the province is lost.

A Seat gets +10% to tax, production & manpower, while reducing autonomy by 0.01 per month. However each Seat increases stability & war-exhaustion costs by 2%.

You are also required to grant at least of 20% of your non-overseas cores a Seat in Parliament, and if you have less than that, one random will be picked for you. There is alert if less than a third of your non-overseas cores have a Seat.

If there is no current debate, nor any active benefits of an issue, you will slowly lose legitimacy & republican tradition. And if a debate fails, you will lose 20 prestige, so it is not the end of the world, but its not something you want to happen all the time.

Here are three examples of current issues that can be pushed through your parliament.

Backing the War Effort is available if you are at war, and will give you +1 stability when passed, and a 10 year benefit of -0.05 War Exhaustion, and +10% Manpower recovery

Charter Colonies
is available if you have either filled the Expansion or Exloration ideagroup, and gives a +10 year benefit of +1 colonist and +20 colonial growth.

Increase Taxes
will give you about 1/4th of a years income, and increase your tax-income by 10% for 10 years.

Of course, all of these values will change the more we playtest it.

Only countries with Parliaments will get a button, opening the Parliament View, near the Papacy & HRE buttons. And yes, the button you talked about last week, in the province interface, is the one indicating if its a seat of parliament or not.

U4wjCj1.jpg


Next week, we'll focus on why we build walls.
 
However each Seat increases stability & war-exhaustion costs by 2%.
If there is no current debate, nor any active benefits of an issue, you will slowly lose legitimacy & republican tradition.
Eh, sounds like 2 good enough extra reasons to not pick constitutional monarchies/republics. It's been nice knowing you England.
 
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Yeah I was just using an example, maybe a poor choice. But my question still stands what happens to unrepresented provinces? And you only have to have 20% of provinces represented. I don't think Burgundy outnumbers Austrian provinces 5 to 1.
Nothing happens. This system doesn't really represent provinces or regions.
 
Why should only England start with that form of government?

I do not see how having a House of commons was particularly unique -or influential- in 1444.
 
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Nothing happens. This system doesn't really represent provinces or regions.

With all due respect as you didn't design this feature my question wasn't to you. Thanks for calling though.
 
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Why should only England start with that form of government?

I do not see how having a House of commons was particularly unique -or influential- in 1444.

Who said anything about the House of Commons?
 
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Nothing happens. This system doesn't really represent provinces or regions.
I wouldn't be so quick to say so without a Dev's comment. It's possible that there may be some negative events if you have, say, X provinces of culture Y but none of them has a seat in parliament or similar.
 
I said I can see how representation might be difficult in a multicultural empire- but what about Colonial nations with homogeneous populations?

Given that those were the first nations to be able to make large scale representstive government work, it would seem reasonable for such nations to have a bonus in that regard.
 
With all due respect as you didn't design this feature my question wasn't to you. Thanks for calling though.
You never know, he might be a member of a beta or something. If he was, he'd probably know a fair bit about how the system works. Is there even an official beta?
 
So, does England start with a random set of seats (other than the capital) or are they predetermined? Or does the player spend the first minutes before unpausing on assigning seats?

Fixed.
 
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You never know, he might be a member of a beta or something. If he was, he'd probably know a fair bit about how the system works. Is there even an official beta?
I seem to recall something about a hundred testers total but only vaguely so take it with a grain of salt.
 
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I really love how this ties in with the previous diary!

If you go wide, picking a constitutional government won't be very good for you; you'll have huge national cost increases on some things, and the local bonuses you get for Seats won't be as important (because they're percentages, and you probably haven't been developing a lot of provinces). Plus, you'll have a lot more Seats to have to satisfy for every debate, which could get extremely expensive.

However, if you go small & tall, you could make practically every province a Seat (at least the valuable ones you've been developing all game). You'd get the percentage bonuses on top of all the development you've been doing, but you still don't have so many Seats that you're unable to pass debates or restore stability.

World conquerors thus need to stick with less representative governments. Which of course makes tons of sense. And tall states that have survived to late game get another notable bonus once the constitutional governments become available to help them against the blobs.

I continue to be impressed, well done!
 
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Quick follow-up note: overseas empires (Britain, Portugal) actually still benefit notably from having constitutional governments just like tall empires do, which is also pretty cool. It helps balance the risk and cost of overseas subject-based empires versus more traditional same-continent empires that get more immediate returns from provinces.
 
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Love the attempts to try to add more peacetime options, not crazy about how ahistorical this is in regards to England.

Really think you guys should go in another direction for internal politics
 
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I haven't bought any of the expansions as they don't interest me at all. This new expansion, on the other hand, from what I have seen so far looks very promising. I am not a warmonger, & the thing that always puts me off the EU games, despite me spending 100's of hours playing them, has been how to survive you have to keep conquering & taking over land. This new direction seems to be more to my liking.
 
Why should only England start with that form of government?

I do not see how having a House of commons was particularly unique -or influential- in 1444.
When Henry IV and Richard III seized power, they both took care to secure their power by having an Act of Parliament confirm them as King. Nobody thought to summon the Estates General to confirm Henry V as King of France.
 
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Lastly, I think by excluding overseas provinces, I think they're missing opportunities to make it feel less tacked on. American patriots' entire gig was "taxation without representation" and objections to England's system of virtual representation. Granting seats to colonial nations could significantly reduce liberty desire, perhaps in exchange for unhappiness from people of the homeland (lost legitimacy, maybe?)

Took the words right out of my mouth! There was some talk of giving the people of the Thirteen Colonies seats in parliament.

There should be an event after a certain year (second half of the 18th century), and diplomacy level; to allow seats to be granted in CN's. Allowing seats would reduce liberty desire greatly but at the cost of: non-oversea lands getting a tax reduction and unrest modifiers (non-seated get harsher modifiers), anatomy in your country and CN's gets set back to around 50%+ (government has to be reorganised). These modifiers should last until almost the end of the game. If you refuse liberty desire in your CN's liberty desire goes up.

Maybe there could be a special flavour text event for England/GB which could mention/quote Thomas Powneall?
 
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