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EU4 Development Diary - 25th February 2016

Hello and Welcome to another development diary for Europa Universalis IV. Today we’ll talk about features that will be part of the next patch, and will enhance the historical feeling of the game.

The first of these major paradigm shifting concepts is what we refer to as States and Territories. A large part of the game has been related to what you can do with a province depending on if it is overseas or not. With the overseas concept, there have been very many limitations that have reduced immersion.

What we have now, is that every region you own and control is represented as a Territory. Provinces in a Territory, unless the Territory is upgraded to a State, is considered overseas for almost all previous rules when it comes to things like coring, autonomy, trade companies etc. So why would you not just make everything into a state then you ask?

Well.. First of all, each state that is not your capital has a maintenance cost in gold, which is dependent on its development, the distance to the capital and if it is on another continent or not.

Secondly, there is a limit on how many states your empire can control. Everyone can have at least 1 state in their realm, with a Kingdom being able to add 1 more state, and an Empire 2 more states. All non-tribal states can also add another state, and the Celestial Empire can have 2. Administrative technologies can add up to 7 more states to your realm, and if you get the administrative ideagroup fully filled out, you get another state as well.

You can at any time abandon a state to become a territory, but then it’s autonomy will grow to 75% immediately, while it takes time for it to decay down after making a territory to a state.

Your capitals region is always a state, and can not be downgraded to a territory. Another benefit from this is the rule change when it comes to capitals. You can now move capital to any province in a state that is your core.

Coring in a Territory is 50% cheaper, but the cores created are “colonial cores”, which require an instant upgrade cost when it becomes a state. If a province is still a colonial core and not upgraded when a state, the autonomy will not go below 50%.

While doing this we have revised the setup of regions on the map, so they are more similar in the amount of provinces they contain.

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Our second large feature from today is Corruption. Corruption is a state in your country, easily seen in the topbar. The higher corruption you have the worse off your country becomes. Corruption affects all power costs in a country by up to 100%, and it also increases minimum autonomy by up to 50%. Corruption also affects your defence against hostile spies and your capacity to build up spynetworks in another nations.

Corruption increases include the following.
  • Mercantilism
  • Being an Empire
  • Hostile Spy Action
  • Having one tech being more than 2 techs behind another.
  • Being more than 1 tech behind a neighbour.

Corruption is reduced by the following.
  • Investing money, you now have a slider indicating how much money you want to spend on combating corruption. This cost is scaled like advisor costs are scaled through time.
  • Being ahead of time in administrative or diplomatic technology.
  • Being a Duchy
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The actual numbers are still in the balance phase here, so won't mention them just yet..

There are alerts indicating if corruption is growing or not, and there are plenty of events triggering and/or affecting corruption. Having no corruption, and not having corruption growing can even trigger some really beneficial events.

Finally, one of the remaining espionage actions we mentioned in an earlier development diary is related to corruption. You can for a very high cost of your network place down a spy to increase corruption in the target country for five years. Of course, only one can do it in the target at a time.
 
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While I do have to say that these mechanics seem interesting, they don't seem fun at all.

The one thing that made me fall in love with EU4 was the fact that it was for all intents and purposes a sandbox game where the player was free to pursue and do whatever he/she wants. All this micromanaging with corruption and states seems to limit this sandbox by forcing the player to focus on dull and nonintuitive administrative stuff or else his entire country will collapse.
 
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I'm not really sure how I feel about this states and territory stuff.... seems to me it will cut down income and manpower down... depends on the number of regions at least.
 
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Honestly this might very well be the first EU4 dlc I wont be buying, and I hope that these new mechanics will not be free features as it might very well just ruin the game.
i dont think i like it

so i bet state/territory is only dlc ? cause then its the first i just wont buy :( sadly cause i would even pay for the rest alone :( i even own every cosmetic one but as its mentioned now, state/territory for the HOME CONTINENT sounds aweful.

And now to crush some hopes :rolleyes::
Today we’ll talk about features that will be part of the next patch.
 
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Looks like its time to increase the size of the UI tabs. Or at least allow it to be bigger for larger resolutions. It's starting to get crowded and will get even more crowded with newer stuff down the line.
 
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Corruption is not automical increase for being behind in tech. It just means you may be forced to spend more money keeping it down.
For being clear:

I am 0 tech behind. I pay 5 ducats per month (lets say its half of the slider) to stop other corruption modifiers.

Someone around me tech up and...

I am 1 tech behind. I will pay 6 ducats per month for same slider position because I has been "forced to spend more money keeping it down".
But my economy is the same as it was moment ago so I could only afford 5 ducats per month.
So I lower corruption slider which gives me +0.1 corruption per year because of lowering the slider.

It seems that being behind tech is increase of corruption. Not directly but very connected.
 
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Would be nice if either the states/territories/corruption limits are in the defines file so we could set them high and ignore them if we want or if all the states/territories/corruption changes are moved into the DLC and we can simply not buy the DLC. ( up to this point I have bought all the DLC but I am not sure about this one)

Maybe I am not understanding the changes. I like to recreate the british empire with a few provinces here and there world wide and then slowly expand. So If I have 3 provinces in NW africa, 3 in the carribean, a few in south africa, some more in various parts of India from Bombay to Madras to Calcutta, one or two more provinces in east asia, and a few more in new england how does the new limits impact this? I do not want to expand by full regions - I want to own a few provinces all over then expand.

I also like the AI to have the possibility to recreate what they did historically. I am not talking about forcing anything or railroading anything but having a good chance to do what they did historically.

So how does the new changes impact this?

Also a naval DLC that added graphics for late game iron ships would be nice.
 
Wouldn't the "behind in tech" corruption malus make the ROW unplayable?
 
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Why not tie corruption to systems that are already directly aimed at reducing overly-expansionist realms? Stuff like OE, unrest, rebels, etc. Instead it seems like it's aimed at curtailing players that go on coring and diplo-annexing sprees but has a lot of other nations as unfortunate collateral damage. Being non-western is already a big enough penalty. Corruption should be aimed at large blobs that are able to just toss their weight onto any other country and swallow it in a horde of mercs. Instead, those are going to be least affected by it.
 
Shouldn't corruption be at a provincial level? The level of national bureaucracy should be the sum of the total province bureaucracy.

It should happen especially when you are overstretched in province amount as well as when you own provinces who don't have accepted culture or religion (makes people feel they are different from their rulers and will most likely not care for the well-being of the country they live in).
 
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In what way is this from Victoria 2? There are no hard-capped state limits or corruption in the game.

In VickyII states get to vote, while "overseas" are provinces, which can be upgraded into states. It's not a cut and paste, but it's the idea of ordering provinces into states and then dealing with cores/rulership on a state level is VickyII (ish)
 
What I don't like about corruption is the absolute need to deal with it at its earliest stage, at 0% corruption.
The game can really benefit from a mechanic having multiple equilibrium points with corresponding pros and cons.
For example, introducing a -0.01 corruption/year for every 1% corruption, allowing large nations to tolerate something like 10-20% corruption with the consequences of that much corruption.
 
The cost depends on development levels [as well as other modifiers]. It would seem as for now the numbers are 0.01 duct to 13 development [subject to change].
It would make the France region cost 7.16 ducts and the Low Countries region 3.04 ducts.

It is rather 0.76 Ducats for the whole France region and 0.30 Ducats for Low Countries if you use your equation 0.01 Ducat for 13 Develpment.
 
Wouldn't the "behind in tech" corruption malus make the ROW unplayable?
no it dosnt since even ROTW nations have money they can spend on reducing corruption. if your behind in tech you just need to spend more.
Dosnt it make sense that nations that have for example worse administrative tech have a harder time administrating their country and thus have to use more ressources to keep corruption down ?

Also this is not confirmed but i believe the behind in tech is only applied to nations of same tech groups since that would make sense.
 
Shouldn't corruption be at a provincial level? The level of national bureaucracy should be the sum of the total province bureaucracy.

It should happen especially when you are overstretched in province amount as well as when you own provinces who don't have accepted culture or religion (makes people feel they are different from their rulers and will most likely not care for the well-being of the country they live in).

I was thinking the exact same thing. I hope that this replaces the 'behind in tech' since it largely accomplishes the same thing (increased corruption during coring and diplo-annex sprees) yet does it in a more elegant way and has the added benefit of increasing corruption for superblobs.
 
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