Welcome back to our weekly series of development diaries about Europa Universalis. This time we’ll talk about four new features that will be part of the next expansion.

Free Cities of the Holy Roman Empire
Now the Emperor can designate up to seven free cities in the empire. A free city is a one province minor with a minimum of 10 development.

Free cities provide Imperial Authority to the emperor, as well as manpower and income. A Free City also have some rather nice bonuses to their development.

If a Free City gains another province or leave the HRE. they lose the free city status. And a Free City is always a type of Republic, so countries that aren't a Republic will become one upon accepting Free City status.

A Free City is always protected by the Emperor if attacked, so be careful when expanding in the HRE. A Free City can never be the subject of another nation.

Of course, as the ruler of a OPM, you can always refuse the offer of becoming a free city, and the emperor can spend some Imperial Authority to revoke a cities rights.

Remove Electorate
The next expansion lets you get even more control over your electors. If your religion is now official in the Empire, you can now spend IA to remove the Electorate status of your disloyal Electors.

Pause Westernisation
Sometimes while you are westernising, you end up where you need to use your power for something else, like boosting stability, but currently you can’t. Now we have added the option to pause westernisation. You’ll still get the unrest from westernising, but there will be no events spawning while westernisation is paused. Most importantly though is the fact that your power is accumulating again instead of contributing to the westernisation process.

Retire Advisor
Have you ever sat there with a lot of money, but cursing the options you for advisors. In the next expansion, you can now spend the amount of money it would cost to hire an advisor, and permanently retire him. Within a month, if there is available space in your pool of advisors, you will get a random new one in the same category. Maybe you get the +discipline one you wanted..


Next week we’ll focus on Luther and Buddha.

 

[TheDungen]

Frankfurt should really be Hessian.

It depends on how far Franconian is spread. If it's only in northern Bavaria, I could imagine Würzburg being the primary nation (it also has the CoA of Franconia). If it includes more provinces in Western Germany, the Palatinate could be it.

Shouldn't franconian kind of reach all the way to france? it's the culture that the franks who created the frakish realm came from right?

 

[TheDungen]

I am not talking about alien space bat things like world conquest. I am talking about alternate history. Which is what you walk into the moment you stop doing exactly what happened in history. There is a huge difference between alternate history which has to be plausible and just fiction.

Yeah but I find the evetn which did happen to be the most plausible ones. If nothing else becuase if hisory is railroaded slightly then it much easier to make event further down the line while if you go for snowballing then the possible scenraios you could plan for will quickly run out.

 

[yls3431]

I ve noticed one extra province for lowlands. Loons,possibly dutch.

 

[Delta21]

Well you will have to siege with larger stacks so attrition should work better. More defensiveness means more time on siege and that means more dmg from attrition. Forts will finally do their jobs and not just be there as a time saver. Regarding hordes and looting, well they are gonna be killed with new forts if they dont change hordes from scratch

Or just do what people do now and keep a small siege stack for the fort and have the main stack directly behind it, ready to jump as reinforcement. Less forts - less attrition, that's what it looks like to me.

On another note: A 20-province nation would have 40k manpower distributed across all lvl 2 forts. Let's assume that the average number of neighboring provinces for any given province is 5. That would make it so that an optimum country-shape with optimum fort-coverage would result in 4 forts being built (each covering 5 provinces).
To keep a defensive capability (mostly the "sortie" action comes to mind) that is similar to the previous fort system you'd have to put 10k troops in each lvl "new" 2 fort, which sounds pretty damn unreasonable from the perspective of an OPM that tries to go on the offensive.

 

[in heaven]

Awesome! Just one thing, i hope retirement will have cooldown or something so it would not be abusable to get any advisor bonus you want.

 

[crowdemon]

I'm so behind in my EU4 expansion (collections).

Keep the good work up.

 

[BarskiPatzow]

Or just do what people do now and keep a small siege stack for the fort and have the main stack directly behind it, ready to jump as reinforcement. Less forts - less attrition, that's what it looks like to me.

On another note: A 20-province nation would have 40k manpower distributed across all lvl 2 forts. Let's assume that the average number of neighboring provinces for any given province is 5. That would make it so that an optimum country-shape with optimum fort-coverage would result in 4 forts being built (each covering 5 provinces).
To keep a defensive capability (mostly the "sortie" action comes to mind) that is similar to the previous fort system you'd have to put 10k troops in each lvl "new" 2 fort, which sounds pretty damn unreasonable from the perspective of an OPM that tries to go on the offensive.

What if it is like CK2? I think you can't siege a fort that has less men than the garrison there. Dunno how big the garrison will be, I forgot that info and I'm lazy to look it up

 

[Kombatdoctr]

Considering the fact that we're already past 1.9 and the next version was 1.10, at this point it would make sense to name the next patch 1.12.
On top of this, if there's any patch that deserved to be called 2.0, it was 1.8. 1.8 was humongous.
I doubt the next patch + DLC are so big that they surpass 1.8 and can be named "2.0", but hey, Johan and Wiz have only revealed a part of the changes they've made.

I think the changes are already much larger than 1.8. They've radically changed forts, completely redone the way province income/manpower works and added a way to increase province value, completely redone the building system, added a Parliament system, modified Europe's borders to be more historical and added new European nations, gave more depth to the HRE, revamped Protestantism and Buddhism, and that's not even all the changes, I mean we haven't even gotten the name of this expansion yet!

Calling it 2.0 seems reasonable to me, the province/building changes alone are huge and have made tall nations viable finally, and the new fort system is going to completely change the way warfare works.

 

[Wagonlitz]

Yeah but I find the evetn which did happen to be the most plausible ones. If nothing else becuase if hisory is railroaded slightly then it much easier to make event further down the line while if you go for snowballing then the possible scenraios you could plan for will quickly run out.

How is it more plausible to have things happen like it did in history? Many things in history happened due to a fluke. The duke of Burgundy dying heirless at Nancy was a fluke which lead to 2 centuries of fighting. Denmark lost Skåneland due to a fluke (the Swedish king deciding to walk on the ice, the ice holding, and the Swedes getting news about the ~21000 man strong Brandenburgian/Polish relief army a few days before the Danes got those news). Prussia wasn't destroyed in the 7 years war due to a fluke (the Russian empress dying and being replaced by a Prussiophile Tsar). And there are many more. Some things happened due to being the most likely; but many things happened due to a fluke---either directly or indirectly.

 

[Spiritraiser]

Can you make diplomatic annexations pausable too? That would be great too!

 

[IceTytanFang]

How is it more plausible to have things happen like it did in history? Many things in history happened due to a fluke. The duke of Burgundy dying heirless at Nancy was a fluke which lead to 2 centuries of fighting. Denmark lost Skåneland due to a fluke (the Swedish king deciding to walk on the ice, the ice holding, and the Swedes getting news about the ~21000 man strong Brandenburgian/Polish relief army a few days before the Danes got those news). Prussia wasn't destroyed in the 7 years war due to a fluke (the Russian empress dying and being replaced by a Prussiophile Tsar). And there are many more. Some things happened due to being the most likely; but many things happened due to a fluke---either directly or indirectly.

That last example brings up an interesting point. I'd love to see rulers to have personal rivals/ friends that could be assigned upon rising to the throne.

 

[TheDungen]

How is it more plausible to have things happen like it did in history? Many things in history happened due to a fluke. The duke of Burgundy dying heirless at Nancy was a fluke which lead to 2 centuries of fighting. Denmark lost Skåneland due to a fluke (the Swedish king deciding to walk on the ice, the ice holding, and the Swedes getting news about the ~21000 man strong Brandenburgian/Polish relief army a few days before the Danes got those news). Prussia wasn't destroyed in the 7 years war due to a fluke (the Russian empress dying and being replaced by a Prussiophile Tsar). And there are many more. Some things happened due to being the most likely; but many things happened due to a fluke---either directly or indirectly.

With the end of the hundred years war it's very likely that burgundy would have been contested between the HRE and france anyway. They have been fighting over that land between them since the kingdom of lotharingia failed.
Denmark would eventually have lost land to sweden, becuase sweden was a much bigger and more powerful nation while denmarks importance was fading. It's more of a fluke that the dutch managed to save denmark from full annexation that day.
You'll find that most of these scenarios while triggered by a fluke were quite rational.

 

[Wagonlitz]

TheDungen would you mind to explain why you think flukes are really plausible just because they happened in history?

Edit: Emu'd

 

[Delta21]

What if it is like CK2? I think you can't siege a fort that has less men than the garrison there. Dunno how big the garrison will be, I forgot that info and I'm lazy to look it up

CK2 adds the raisable levies to the garrisoned units when under siege. EU4 doesn't levy troops from individual provinces, instead it uses a global manpower pool and standing-army recruitment fashion, so garrisons and armies are entirely separate. Complementing a fort's garrison with part of your army(which you can later recall) sounds interesting though, but it needs to be justified somehow...hmmm....

 

[Wagonlitz]

With the end of the hundred years war it's very likely that burgundy would have been contested between the HRE and france anyway. They have been fighting over that land between them since the kingdom of lotharingia failed.

Sure. But it was a fluke which led to the Burgundian inheritance. Without that you could well have seen a Burgundian kingdom, which would have seriously changed how things later developed.

Denmark would eventually have lost land to sweden, becuase sweden was a much bigger and more powerful nation while denmarks importance was fading. It's more of a fluke that the dutch managed to save denmark from full annexation that day.
You'll find that most of these scenarios while triggered by a fluke were quite rational.

It was during the siege of Copenhagen, about a year later, that the Dutch helped us.
And it si far from certain that Denmark would have lost land hadn't the march across the Belts happened. Because even the neutered Denmark--Norway still was able to equal Sweden. And the sack of Jutland in ~1623 by catholic forces played a significant part in why the Swedes could manage to steal Skåneland.
And Sweden wasn't much bigger and it wasn't more powerful; for instance as far as I remember we continued having the larger population until we lost Skåneland---and that is only considering Denmark proper. Including Norway, Sweden wasn't much bigger and more powerful.

 

[Te. Kenzo]

Personally I hope for a Geneva with is own province, can have a potential other than fact that is important.

 

[indalecio248]

We already have Doomdark and Besuchov working on two different unannounced projects, adding Wiz with a third project seems unlikely.

Victoria III confirmed!

 

[illathid]

Free cities look cool. Excited to see more!

 

[TheDungen]

TheDungen would you mind to explain why you think flukes are really plausible just because they happened in history?

Edit: Emu'd

I disagree but this is neither the time nor the place.

You know who cares let's consider the game, if sweden enver goes protestant then the whole 30years war will be a curbstomp and that's not fun for anyone.

 

[BarskiPatzow]

CK2 adds the raisable levies to the garrisoned units when under siege. EU4 doesn't levy troops from individual provinces, instead it uses a global manpower pool and standing-army recruitment fashion, so garrisons and armies are entirely separate. Complementing a fort's garrison with part of your army(which you can later recall) sounds interesting though, but it needs to be justified somehow...hmmm....

I've just read what I wrote I meant that you can't siege a fort that has more men in it than you have in army. I think new forts will have more men in garrison than the old ones had. I'm not talking about sizes of CK2 garrisons, just about the ability to siege a fort with a smaller army than in the fort. I think that EU 4 has that actually, only all forts have at least 2k men and it's hard to have less than that. Even stack of 4 or 5k men in Russia will get burned pretty much by attrition in winters, and you shouldn't be able to siege with less men than that if the garrison is that size.