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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.

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Next week, we'll focus on why we build walls.
 
Who cares about England (Frenchman spotted)? ;)I want to know what happened to Burgundy!o_O

U4wjCj1.jpg


Flanders independant, as well as apparently more countries in the Netherlands, I smell specific mechanisms for the Burgundian crown. (please, let me have this dream :p).


Who is Flanders bordering there near Calais?
 
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Just when I think I can walk away, you drag me back.:p
 
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It's essential that Great Britain will have an Act of Union decision. Great Britain realistically needs to be presented by both a Scottish and an Irish parliament prior to the Act of Union.
 
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It's essential that Great Britain will have an Act of Union decision. Great Britain realistically needs to be presented by both a Scottish and an Irish parliament prior to the Act of Union.

I always took the "Form Great Britain" decisions as being the Acts of Union, after which there isn't any need for a Scottish or Irish Parliament.

If in-game England actually conquers Scotland outright instead of PUing/vassalising it and annexing it via the Form GB decision, then it also makes no sense for England to have a Scottish Parliament for its Scottish dominions.
 
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Couple of ideas I've had today regarding this:

Culture
All cultures in your nation will want some degree of representation in your parliament, and a seat's culture will influence how easy it is to get to agree with you. Concentrate your representation in your areas of primary culture, and you'll find it relatively easy to get them to go along with your aims, but other people who are supposedly integrated into your nation (accepted cultures) will get rather upset if they aren't being given a say in government. Of course, if you give them representation, their goals might not align quite so well with yours as the primary culture's peoples would.

On the other hand, those people who aren't integrated into your nation (non-accepted cultures) might well object to being under your control significantly less if they feel they are represented in Parliament.

This would apply even to cultural unions - while both Scots and English are equally happy as part of Great Britain, if your parliament is made entirely of people from the Home Counties, you might find you've got a 17th century Alex Salmond on your hands....

Colonies
"No taxation without representation" Well, what if ol' Georgie had given the people of the 13 Colonies seats in Parliament? How about you have the option to grant seats to your colonial nations? Doing so would reduce their liberty desire (assuming they get a fair number of seats - a 80 province CN isn't going to be happy with a single MP), but again, it'd be harder to get their representatives to agree with you. After all, are the people of Canada really that interested in your conquest of Norway?
 
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meh

It would be cool if you had to unify Great Britain via parliament, but I'm rather ambivalent to this feature as it stands. Having different parliaments for Ireland and Scotland would be interesting, but frustrating, prompting the player to work towards unification of the administration.
 
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.


Whilst I agree on this point I think this just shows how the 'parliament' wasn't much of an influence and dictated to by the Kings council. Parliaments only real control was taxation unless the monarch was particularly weak (low prestige or legitimacy?). The acts above would suggest that parliament was able to increase legitimacy, so we have that effect and changes to taxation.

Perhaps parliament shouldn't have any further power unless the king/queen had very low prestige or legitimacy as it was only in the 1600s that problems or disagreements started between parliament and monarchy. Could this be modelled by the English Civil War - i.e. they only get a parliament when this event fires?

It would also be worth considering that until the mid 1600s the power in parliament was entirely with the nobility and the less important house of commons voted for by ~3% or the population (others not eligible to vote), were just bought or coerced positions.

Someone previously mentioned factions and in the English parliament as soon as it started to develop any power these developed, such as Parliamentarians (Roundheads) and Royalists (Cavaliers), whigs and tories, each with their own agendas and preferences (like the merchant republic factions but with more influence?).

Also I think the +ve malus for parliament actions are too high - but that's another thing.

I would add that I'm not an expert on any of this so feel free to correct me - I just don't see how England 1460 is so very different to be worthy of a separate govt type, post civil war it's a different matter if parliamentarians win. The results of the civil war could be England gets a parliament or Absolute monarchy.
 
I would have thought that's why the home country’s government wouldn't give them any representation - upstarts!

I'm talking about their own domestic governance.
 
I always took the "Form Great Britain" decisions as being the Acts of Union, after which there isn't any need for a Scottish or Irish Parliament.

If in-game England actually conquers Scotland outright instead of PUing/vassalising it and annexing it via the Form GB decision, then it also makes no sense for England to have a Scottish Parliament for its Scottish dominions.

It wasn't until 1800 that Great Britain abolished the Irish Parliament. The Scottish parliament was merged with the English one; what? In 1700? That's quite far into timeline.
 
It wasn't until 1800 that Great Britain abolished the Irish Parliament. The Scottish parliament was merged with the English one; what? In 1700? That's quite far into timeline.

I don't know enough about the Irish Parliament to comment, but like I said, the Scottish Parliament's continued relevance in 1707 was a result of the fact that England and Scotland were in a personal union, and as such Scotland's existing institutions had to be respected by a monarch who was just as much King of Scotland as King of England.

In-game, however, there generally is no PU, and England just kicks the crap out of Scotland and annexes its lands violently instead of diplomatically; that being the case, it is fairly unlikely that a victorious conquering England in-game would give the Scots the same degree of autonomy vis-a-vis a parliament as they had when they were constituent partners of a personal union. The in-game King of England is not, usually, also King of Scotland and thus has no existing duties or obligations towards the Scots in terms of obliging them by granting them the separate Parliament they previously had.
 
From what I read the Act of Union was an attempt to stuff the english parliament with scottish ministers. The King of that personal union was from Scotland, not England. He chose to sit down south because it was the stronger seat of power. He didn't have to keep Scotland separate out of respect for an institution. Allegedly he was trying his damnedest to corrupt the english institution with scottish manpower.
 
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From what I read the Act of Union was an attempt to stuff the english parliament with scottish ministers. The King of that personal union was from Scotland, not England. He chose to sit down south because it was the stronger seat of power. He didn't have to keep Scotland separate out of respect for an institution. Allegedly he was trying his damnedest to corrupt the english institution with scottish manpower.

And the Scottish saw that as a treason... I guess you cannot please everyone!
 
Policies is the rulers prerogative decrees.

Isn't it a bit contradictory to have things like the Combination Act, which actually went through British parliament, passed by decree now that actual parliament mechanics exist ingame? I understand the necessity for policy by decree for non-parliamentary government forms, but the lack of integration with existing systems is going to make this new system feel tacked on.

Not to mention that having Decisions, Policies, and now Parliamentary debates all carrying out similar functions is bound to feel crowded. From what's detailed in the diary, it sounds like the former two could largely become Parliamentary debates that are unlocked due to Social Policies/set conditions. Even for autocratic systems, it would be more user-friendly to have the three systems integrated into the same UI to eliminate redundancy.
 
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