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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.
 
The acts of union was under Queen Anne. She was a Stuart being the daughter of the deposed James II. But she was brought up as English she said "As I know my heart to be entirely English, I can very sincerely assure you there is not anything you can expect or desire from me which I shall not be ready to do for the happiness and prosperity of England."
So trying to stuff the parliament with Scots is unlikely.

The Acts of union were essentially the result of Scottish nobles getting into debt over the Darien adventure and subsequently selling Scotland out for a bailout of English money to the tune of about £400,000
the more you know, thanks.
 
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....
Whelp. There goes my plan to play France with a parliament. :eek:
 
As I said in my earlier comment on this thread, I was disappointed to see that there isn't a transition to where Parliament becomes more important and general elections are held, Cabinet develops, etc. in other words, the English/British government after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. But perhaps in EU5, this parliament mechanics could be further developed to provide the Cabinet, general elections where you could spend gold or MPs (or both) to try to influence its outcome towards a faction or parties you want which becomes more expensive to represent waning Crown influence on elections, etc.
Solution: We design a unique Faction system for England on top of this new Parliament system.

England/Great Britain can have a Monarch AND an elected Prime Minister with the Monarch Points contributed by both of them at different weights. Weight numbers gradually shift towards PM in an Event chain.
 
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This mechanic doesn't represent parliament's role in normal government, it represents the king asking parliament for extraordinary aid, which was considered a bad thing. The debate in the screenshot is called "Increase Taxes", not "Collect Standard Revenues" or something like that.

Charles I was considered a tyrant because he used extra-parliamentary tricks like Ship Money to collect the extra taxes that he would normally need parliamentary approval for. It wasn't that he didn't call parliament per se, it was that he tried to find ways to work around them (thus infringing on their traditional rights) while at the same time not calling them.

Then again, I'm no expert. It's just the impression I've gotten from what I've read.
This gives me an idea for an actually powerful Parliament mechanic. As well as using Parliament to justify extra taxes, you must gain it's consent to collect taxes that aren't from crown estates (for monarchies) or state assets and prerogative revenues (for republics) every 10 or so years.
 
Solution: We design a unique Faction system for England on top of this new Parliament system.

England/Great Britain can have a Monarch AND an elected Prime Minister with the Monarch Points contributed by both of them at different weights. Weight numbers gradually shift towards PM in an Event chain.
This would be nice. So if you have a situation with a very bad diplomatic monarch, you could elect a diplomatic PM, that would compensate for that. There could also be a slider: parliament (PM) vs monarch authority like in the Dutch Republic.
 
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scrapped
 
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I always felt that factions were a rather weak system for simulating anything other than court politics.
 
You don't get junior PUs when you annex the senior, you get vassals when you annex the overlord.
It was changed long time ago.
When you annex Provence you don't get Lorraine as PU.
But when you annex Byzantium you get Athens as vassal.
 
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Solution: We design a unique Faction system for England on top of this new Parliament system.

England/Great Britain can have a Monarch AND an elected Prime Minister with the Monarch Points contributed by both of them at different weights. Weight numbers gradually shift towards PM in an Event chain.

England didn't have a prime minister until the 1720s - certainly not a thing for 1444
 
Cool, I like the deeper mechanics so far, but is there a name for this expansion yet?
 
Cool, I like the deeper mechanics so far, but is there a name for this expansion yet?
No, none yet. According to Johan earlier in the thread, it will take a while before it is released.
 
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They may not have had a written constitution, but there were still laws and customs that the King had to obey. If a 12th Century King said "L'état, c'est moi", people would have thought he'd gone mad.

If there is no constitution, then obviously it's not a constitutional monarchy. Laws and customs are not the same as a constitution, almost every state ever has had customs and laws, yet they weren't constitutitonal monarchies. You have to have elections and a constitution that limits the monarch's power for it to be a constitutional monarchy. And if a 12th century king had said "I am the State", they'd have thought he was mad because his, de facto, power was rivaled by some of his vassals.
 
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If there is no constitution, then obviously it's not a constitutional monarchy. Laws and customs are not the same as a constitution, almost every state ever has had customs and laws, yet they weren't constitutitonal monarchies. You have to have elections and a constitution that limits the monarch's power for it to be a constitutional monarchy.
The UK doesn't have a written constitution to this day, but most people would class it as a constitutional monarchy.
 
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The UK doesn't have a written constitution to this day, but most people would class it as a constitutional monarchy.
I think one must develop the very idea of a constitution, a set of wholly inviolable laws, before you can claim that a country has a constitution. That sort of ideology didn't exist back in the day. Laws could be changed, and customs and precedents could be broken.
 
Actually, monarchic constitutionalism was the default during the Middle Ages in Europe. Absolutism was a creation of later centuries, attempts to impose absolutism usually met with massive resistance, and failure was frequent.

'A lot of feudal nations having an assembly' was why I wrote "A lot of nations should have this form of government, not just England". They were no exception.

However, the power of these parliaments, assemblies, (you name them) was nothing worth noting, everything but influential. And especially in 1444. It's my point from previous posts.

About the bolded part, why should 'absolutism' be de jure imposed when it was already de facto imposed? The reason it was 'on the chart' in later centuries was due to the fact the bureucratic system got more complex, but the substance was exactly the same.
 
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There'll probably never be a written constitution in the UK because the de facto City State of London plc and it's practices would probably fall outside any reasonable regulation and rules that would be set in a bill of rights.
 
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There'll probably never be a written constitution in the UK because the de facto City State of London plc and it's practices would probably fall outside any reasonable regulation and rules that would be set in a bill of rights.

This will be the City of London Local Council where most of the voters are businesses. Business votes were only abolished in the rest of the country in 1969, in 2002 the number of business votes in the City of London Local Council was actually increased. And they call it a democracy?
 
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England didn't have a prime minister until the 1720s - certainly not a thing for 1444

But it had favourites. And they ruled, moreso than the king sometimes. Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More, Cardinal Wolsey, Walsingham, the Duke of Norfolk... not PMs, but they ruled nonetheless. Some were Chancellors, some were Lord Privy Seal, some were just relatives or close friends (Mortimer with Isabella of France, Despensier with her husband...); in Spain you get Constable Alvar de Luna for Castile while Alphonse V had Galceran de Requesens ruling over Aragon. Later the Habsburgs made full use of their favourites: Cisneros and Floorenz ruled during Charles V minority and continued to do so later on, and the "Lesser Austrians" Felipe III and IV had the Duke of Lemos and the Count-Duke of Olivares to rule the land (rather woefully, by the way).

I asked some time ago that EUIV included both favourites, prime ministers and other "ruling heads without crowns", in a system that might include keeping the balance of power. You need a favourite of your trust, which needs to be more important than his/her stats. You need someone capable too, but if he's more capable than you, you loose popularity or legitimacy. Nobles and people can revolt against a favourite (it happened many times, "long live the king, death to bad rule" was a common chant all over Europe whenever a king was controlled by an awful favourite). Other friends of yours (candidates) can take the favourite's place. Think lovers, relatives, especially powerful people...)



However, the power of these parliaments, assemblies, (you name them) was nothing worth noting, everything but influential. And especially in 1444. It's my point from previous posts.

You are so wrong. Parliaments were very influential, and especially in the 1400's. Look at Poland, a kingdom already on its way to become a noble republic in the late 1300's; at Hungary, already one in all but name by 1420. At Aragon, which had such a strong Parliament that it had built an institution to rule and collect taxes parallel to the King's bureaucracy, a kingdom in which the king had no power to call armies or collect new taxes. Not as much a noble republic as Poland, but in 1410 the Parliament decided to try and become an elective monarchy (it didn't work in the long run). In England, Parliament was losing ground in the 1500's, and especially thanks to the War of the Roses messing it up a lot, but in most of Europe, saving France and Castile, powerful Parliaments were the norm, not the exception. In some places they'd grow to become even more powerful, to the point of being the government themselves (Poland-Lithuania, the Netherlands), in others they'd vanish away slowly (Spain), but to say "Palriaments were not worth a damn" in 1444 is not knowing your history, sorry.

***

The bad point about "English Monarchy" vs Constitutional Monarchy is that most countries with Parliaments had them way before they had Constitutions. And the way they modelled Parliaments is so reminiscent of late medieval Parliaments that I don't see the Feudal Parliaments and the Constitutional Parliaments having anything to do with each other.

For one, Constitutional Parliaments were permanent, while Feudal Parliaments were summoned by the King (or some other high ranking official in very special cases and places).
 
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