Home Trending Latest threads New posts Developer diaries
Jump to latest Follow Reply
  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Europa Universalis IV 82755 EUIV: Bug Reports 1341 EUIV: Suggestions 19379 EUIV: Technical Support 6895 EUIV: FAQ & Strategy Guides 241 EUIV: AAR's, Let's Plays, and Fan Fiction EU IV: Alternate History Short Story Contest Contr 30
Previous dev diary Next dev diary
Show only dev responses

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.

uw9kMf4.jpg



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
61T6yeq.jpg


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.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
  • 307
  • 216
  • 55
Reactions:
Sort by date Sort by reaction score
The more I think about it, the less I think corruption being tied to technology makes any sense at all. What purpose does penalizing nations who lag in one of their techs serve? Is it to attempt to balance out opportunity costs between spending points on tech and spending points on other things? If so, why not just attempt to balance the numbers that already exist in the game? Surely that'd be an easier and wiser use of development time than coding corruption interactions with tech levels would be.

Really just comes across as punishing players for making certain tradeoff expenditures; certain tradeoff expenditures that've been viewed as acceptable for many patches in a row now.
 
  • 6
Reactions:
Freudia said:
The more I think about it, the less I think corruption being tied to technology makes any sense at all. What purpose does penalizing nations who lag in one of their techs serve? Is it to attempt to balance out opportunity costs between spending points on tech and spending points on other things? If so, why not just attempt to balance the numbers that already exist in the game? Surely that'd be an easier and wiser use of development time than coding corruption interactions with tech levels would be.

Really just comes across as punishing players for making certain tradeoff expenditures; certain tradeoff expenditures that've been viewed as acceptable for many patches in a row now.
Click to expand...

It seems like they don't like us deliberately sacrificing diplo-tech levels in order to get useful Idea groups like Influence. Now if I were a game designer I'd make Diplo-tech actually important rather then punishing the player for making strategic decisions.
 
  • 19
Reactions:
Freudia said:
The more I think about it, the less I think corruption being tied to technology makes any sense at all. What purpose does penalizing nations who lag in one of their techs serve? Is it to attempt to balance out opportunity costs between spending points on tech and spending points on other things? If so, why not just attempt to balance the numbers that already exist in the game? Surely that'd be an easier and wiser use of development time than coding corruption interactions with tech levels would be.

Really just comes across as punishing players for making certain tradeoff expenditures; certain tradeoff expenditures that've been viewed as acceptable for many patches in a row now.
Click to expand...

I think the purpose is to curtail people who go nuts with conquest and spend all their bird and scroll mana diplo-annexing and coring. The problem is that it doesn't directly address the problem and leaves behind a lot of collateral damage.

I mean, if there were a solution that would cause the conquest sprees to result in realm weakness them I'm all for it. But this won't do anything to them unless they're already a weak tech group, in which case they're going to exorbitantly feel it regardless.
 
  • 2
Reactions:
durbal said:
I think the purpose is to curtail people who go nuts with conquest and spend all their bird and scroll mana diplo-annexing and coring. The problem is that it doesn't directly address the problem and leaves behind a lot of collateral damage.

I mean, if there were a solution that would cause the conquest sprees to result in realm weakness them I'm all for it. But this won't do anything to them unless they're already a weak tech group, in which case they're going to exorbitantly feel it regardless.
Click to expand...

Surely there's a better way to do it than this, assuming that's even a problem in the first place (this is a game centered around conquering and building an empire, so I don't believe that it is a problem, but hypothetically speaking if it is, then...), at least one that results in less arbitrary penalties that punish players who have bad RNG or are in disadvantaged tech groups. As you said, there's a lot of collateral damage that comes along with this kind of coupling, and I really don't see how that coupling will improve the game. In order for tech disparity leading to corruption to play well with the game, hey'd have to basically make the counterplay to corruption be so trivial that it might as well not have wasted design and development time being put into the game to begin with.
 
  • 2
Reactions:
Sounds interesting.But it seems a "state" is too large and not flexible enough. For Silesia,Hamburg would be a "free province" without maintenance for but Krakow couldn't ,it seems a little rediculous. Maybe making states and territories basing on "area" rather than "region" could be more sensible?
 
Last edited:
  • 6
Reactions:
ROTW countries will benefit the most from corruption. :p:p:p:p:p:p:p:p

What i find interesting is that if you want to turn your territory into a state you have to spend additional admin power, which offsets reduced coring cost in the first place. :eek::eek:
 
Last edited:
  • 2
Reactions:
Me_ said:
I am surprised by the circular design here. Being behind in tech gives you a tech cost bonus (lowered tech cost), which means you have more MP to spend on other stuff. Meanwhile corruption will make it so that being behind in tech will make everything cost MP. A simple nerf to the strength of the tech cost reduction would accomplish the same desired effect, without complicating the issue by having it rely on two variables.
Click to expand...

Except corruption is not inevitable even if lagging behind on tech increases it. People seem to imagining that being 2 techs behind will slap them with an instant 100% corruption instead of something along the lines of +0,05 monthly growth. Just means you have to spend a bit more money and attention to lowering corruption via other means.

In other news: a player went 2 over his army force limit, is now bankrupted forever.
 
  • 5
  • 2
Reactions:
Yugoslavs said:
What i find interesting is that if you want to turn you territory into a state you have to spend additional admin power, which offsets reduced coring cost in the first place. :eek::eek:
Click to expand...
Yes, there is no (long term) advantage of coring as a territory first. I guess the idea is that you choose whether to make the region a state or a territory, with different costs and advantages. I think that is a better design than just having territory->state progression be an automatically good thing.

And I actually think using static regions is a good thing, because while it gives you less choice than a more dynamic system might, it also gives more(?) interesting tradeoffs. You need to choose whether to state a region that you can conquer a couple of provinces in now vs. one where you will later have more opportunity to expand.
 
  • 2
  • 2
Reactions:
Szer said:
By the way CK2 has real DYNAMIC borders for all subjects like Duchy, Kingdom and Empire.
CK2 also has 'de jure' fixed borders but that wont restrict you to create whatever empires you like with whatever kingdoms inside it.

Not sure why Paradox can't take that great feature.
Click to expand...
Thats true but you made a little error its only kingdoms and empires that are dynamic while duchy are fixed.
 
TheMeInTeam said:
That said, I don't anticipate the "state vs territory" mechanic having the same potential for damage as corruption unless the surrounding mechanics change significantly.
Click to expand...

If we have a problem with Paradox updates it's that surrounding mechanics are often left unchanged. Especially noticeable with Republican and Chinese factions still existing in the same game as Estates.
 
  • 5
Reactions:
Buladelu said:
If we have a problem with Paradox updates it's that surrounding mechanics are often left unchanged. Especially noticeable with Republican and Chinese factions still existing in the same game as Estates.
Click to expand...

Re-balancing old mechanics after new ones were introduced has never been PDS's strong point. You strongly suspect that they are waiting for the modders to do that.
 
  • 2
  • 1
Reactions:
The idea behind Territory / states could have been better served with accepting cultures.

Basically a territory is a culture group, or a mix of culture groups. You want an explanation why some new territory isn't as "solid" in your country as the core lands. That is already modeled by autonomy. Freshly conquered land is in tumult. Given time, the tumult subsides (the autonomy ticks down). The autonomy floor currently depends on whether it's controlled by an estate, or whether it's a colony.

IMO Paradox should have done away with the non-accepted culture group penalty and just should have made non-accepted culture group add to autonomy floor.

So non-accepted cultures, that's your region concept. If you wanna bring conquered lands with different cultures up to the same level as your core lands, you have to have their culture accepted. Paradox could have simply scrapped the current too-cheap culture conversion and replaced their regions with cultures.

After all, it's not the land that's making it difficult to integrate it, it's the people living there.
 
  • 11
  • 2
Reactions:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back