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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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I'm surprised the corruption bonus events haven't really entered into this discussion yet, though I suppose that's due to lack of detail in the original post. Anyways, if the mentioned 0% events are appealing enough, siphoning off some gold may not seem like such a big deal. It won't address the lack of depth, but it could at least salvage the system from feeling strictly punitive.

What concerns me far more than the slider are random estates/ideas/etc. events adding instant chunks of corruption that must then be slowly burned off. How frustrating is it going to be to have some corrupt nobility event suddenly crank up all your MP costs by 10%?

Until they start revealing events (which they've never done) and the events end up being mostly good at 0%, I'm going to assume they're terrible. My money is that it'll play out like stability in that you have a larger chance of getting stab hit events at higher stability levels. In the same way, I expect a higher chance of getting events that raise corruption at 0% corruption.
 
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@Chimeric

Your post helped me to understand how a State mechanic centered around culture could work, but I disagree with you that PI DLC model makes it unlikely, as those changes (States and corruption) are coming to the base game and I don't see how the ability to play with development is so important for the system you propose.

Something which could give even more agency to the player would be to manually carve his regions (with a few limiting factors, like distance), while perhaps keeping the possibility that a State would be cut in a few parts. It could work by development, like you are suggesting, so that each "State" would represent the equivalent of a kingdom. The disadvantage would be that a player could then make snakes everywhere and assign every important provinces to a State while leaving the less important ones languish. This would be a bad design. Thus, your idea of regional capitals radiating in some way until filled could be interesting, but then in which direction would they go? It could be frustrating for a player to be unable to direct that "X province" should be in region A instead of region B.

(merged to prevent multiposting)

I'm surprised the corruption bonus events haven't really entered into this discussion yet, though I suppose that's due to lack of detail in the original post. Anyways, if the mentioned 0% events are appealing enough, siphoning off some gold may not seem like such a big deal. It won't address the lack of depth, but it could at least salvage the system from feeling strictly punitive.

What concerns me far more than the slider are random estates/ideas/etc. events adding instant chunks of corruption that must then be slowly burned off. How frustrating is it going to be to have some corrupt nobility event suddenly crank up all your MP costs by 10%?


I just hope each events give us meaningful choices. I must agree with you that those pesky nobles asking me a year worth of revenue at the worst moments are getting on my nerve and I hope we don't reveive trolling events which will have as effects more corruption or an absolutely bad effect.
 
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But should a bored OPM have that kind of power over a large nation? "Hurr durr look at me, I can afford to have cutting-edge tech but can't afford to have an army worth talking about and thus no real presence on the world, and yet I can still make everyone I border have corruption!"
Well, look at real life Switzerland. Small, very rich and developed country in which corrupt people from all over the world launder their money. It doesn't seem too far-fetched IMO.
 
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I've been reading people complaining over and over that blobbing is the best way to play and it's easy to be so big by mid game that nothing is a challenge. So they add corruption and States to add drawbacks to explosive growth. It's actually fewer points to expand but you get less back. And now people are complaining.

I just don't get it.

EUIV is an empire management game and they've added features to mimic the problems with very large Empires.

The same content stretched over a longer period of time because it is continually made more time consuming for a dozen different reasons is not more content.
 
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  • "Having one tech being more than 2 techs behind another." Why trying to Limit the different strategies?? Must we have to play a steady pace of technology all the time? This will lock the game really hard!
 
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I'm not a huge fan of these new changes. The mana system (is bad and needs an overhaul) is already stretched to the breaking point and now you want to add a thing is going to put even more strain on those points. As for the states and territories, it doesn't make sense that if a Northern German country dips into the Southern German region that they have to go through this whole territories process. It would make way more sense to me if Europe was it's own region.
 
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It makes sense that laggers in technology grow more corrupt. Presumably the effect becomes more pronounced when you are severely lagging and not when you're like one or two techs behind your neighbor.

It's meant to penalize the early mega expanders whose techs are usually like 12 mil, 5 dip, 5 adm because they've been coring like crazy and diplo annexing every one and their mother. It's meant to depict a state that is conquering like crazy but not really governing well.

This is actually pretty tame. I think it's too weak. The ottomans can expand like crazy and scarcely ever fall behind in tech.

Edit: I think all the coring cost bonuses should be replaced with a "negative coring" ability. That is, the higher your "negative coring" is, the more you can accumulate negative admin points through coring and pay for them later.
 
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  • "Having one tech being more than 2 techs behind another." Why trying to Limit the different strategies?? Must we have to play a steady pace of technology all the time? This will lock the game really hard!

Will give you 0.05 corruption per year. It will mess up with my world conquest strategy.
 
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Until they start revealing events (which they've never done) and the events end up being mostly good at 0%, I'm going to assume they're terrible. My money is that it'll play out like stability in that you have a larger chance of getting stab hit events at higher stability levels. In the same way, I expect a higher chance of getting events that raise corruption at 0% corruption.
Why would you expect it to work the exact opposite of what is said in the OP?
Having no corruption, and not having corruption growing can even trigger some really beneficial events.
 
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It makes sense that laggers in technology grow more corrupt. Presumably the effect becomes more pronounced when you are severely lagging and not when you're like one or two techs behind your neighbor.

It's meant to penalize the early mega expanders whose techs are usually like 12 mil, 5 dip, 5 adm because they've been coring like crazy and diplo annexing every one and their mother. It's meant to depict a state that is conquering like crazy but not really governing well.

As has been pointed out numerous times, it also penalizes nations that are behind in tech because of factors they cannot control (bad ruler, events that drain MP where you can't pick an alternative).

So you get a 0 admin 0 dip 6 mil ruler, or something. You national focus admin (assuming you even have that DLC). You end up behind in dip tech. As a penalty for being behind in tech, you now have to incur additional cost in the form of being penalized on getting tech.

Having no corruption, and not having corruption growing can even trigger some really beneficial events.

Okay, and here we have the other side of it. Because of a factor you have less control over (you have more control than if you had a bad ruler, because you can choose to spend points you have a surplus of or work to incorporate them vs. you can't do anything with points you're not getting) you have a point surplus and are nicely ahead in tech. Because you are ahead of tech you don't get a penalty to not getting more tech. Because you are ahead of tech you will now get events that help you even more.

It punishes nations that are already suffering and rewards those that are already benefiting - because they (apparently) want to slow down (not make things more interesting for) extreme expansion. They already hamstrung your ability to unlock multiple idea groups of the same type, now there's this as well. Why does anyone think this is a good idea?
 
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Bad rulers are not beyond your control, especially now that we've got other government types accessible.

I've never severely fallen behind in tech unless I've expanded like the Turks stoned on hashish.
 
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The fact that the "State" regions are locked and pre-defined makes no sense. They should be dynamic. I appreciate the need to cut large empires' economic potential by forcing more of their land to become overseas, but I think it should be up to player to decide which areas to control directly. Like - set a limit on the number of provinces that can be held before you are forced to create another "state", but let the player decide for himself which provinces are assigned to which state.
 
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As has been pointed out numerous times, it also penalizes nations that are behind in tech because of factors they cannot control (bad ruler, events that drain MP where you can't pick an alternative).

So you get a 0 admin 0 dip 6 mil ruler, or something. You national focus admin (assuming you even have that DLC). You end up behind in dip tech. As a penalty for being behind in tech, you now have to incur additional cost in the form of being penalized on getting tech.

I just don't agree with that explanation.
The only scenarii were this is true is when i have a rengecy council ( so corruption is just pure logic ) or i'm between 1444 and 1500 otherwise i just revoke my policies or i choose a national focus, i don't spent my points for development or conquest and i'm never behind in tech for more than 5 month (not exactly). And i would clearly compensate a 0.05 corruption modifier by 1.7 ducats a month for those 5 or even 10 months
 
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The fact that the "State" regions are locked and pre-defined makes no sense. They should be dynamic. I appreciate the need to cut large empires' economic potential by forcing more of their land to become overseas, but I think it should be up to player to decide which areas to control directly. Like - set a limit on the number of provinces that can be held before you are forced to create another "state", but let the player decide for himself which provinces are assigned to which state.
I think the regions are predefined to cut down amount of micro one has to do in order to interact with the system and to make it less taxing on performance (AI using an individual province based system could be a waste), and to facilitate multiplayer games where you can't hit pause and micro every province w/o sacrificing effort that could be spent waging wars.
 
I'm playing as Russia right now and I would like to paint you a picture of what I'm struggling with and why corrupt is a bad mechanic. Firstly, Russia auto converts to an Empire when you form it so yay bonus corruption! Secondly I'm eastern tech so I'm routinely 1-2 techs behind by virtue of having to spend more. Lastly I have a crap ton of things I need to spend mana on. Tech, ideas, core creation (so much core creation), generals, development, peace deals, culture conversion. So NOW you want to slap me with a corrupt hit that is going to make things even more expensive, just madness.
 
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I'm playing as Russia right now and I would like to paint you a picture of what I'm struggling with and why corrupt is a bad mechanic. Firstly, Russia auto converts to an Empire when you form it so yay bonus corruption! Secondly I'm eastern tech so I'm routinely 1-2 techs behind by virtue of having to spend more. Lastly I have a crap ton of things I need to spend mana on. Tech, ideas, core creation (so much core creation), generals, development, peace deals, culture conversion. So NOW you want to slap me with a corrupt hit that is going to make things even more expensive, just madness.

How many ducats do you make ?
 
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I don't remember off hand but it's a reasonable amount. Enough to pay for +2 advisers although I'm about 60 regiments short of my army force limit. It's largely thanks to Siberian gold mines xD
 
Well, Russia is pretty corrupt, so you're saying "stop making this historical game more historical".

And Russia is no exception. All of the countries formed by large gunpowder empires: India, former Ottoman holdings, China and the formerly Spanish Latin American countries all suffer from a persistent culture of corruption and political dysfunction.

Large premodern empires always created corruption because they lacked monitoring technology. Their rulers had no means to ensure that their numerous agents worked with their rulers best interests in mind and didn't take undue liberties with the subjects. In economic parlance, this is called "agency cost":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_cost
An example of a study of historical agency costs: http://www.gsm.pku.edu.cn/resource/uploadfiles/docs/20121109/201211090356082838.pdf

The more middlemen a ruler has spread over a larger area, the more opportunities the middlemen have for graft and abuse. The longer this goes on, the more corrupt the middlemen become, simply due to their incentives. The lack of electronic communications ensure that the subjects have little means of reciprocity with their distant monarch and cannot compel his agents to clean up their act.
 
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I believe it would just impact and in some sort of way balance your income. Espacially between nations like netherlands and russia. (related to the state/territory mechanic which weirdly was posted the same day as corruption, and you forgot that making you an empire gives you access to one more state and with the points you spent on coring territories instead of state you can't actually compare your tech level with the one you will be in 1.16).

I also believe that it will make you form russia earlier but you will have another interest to westernize (surely at risk) your country and espacially try to conquer danzig (which i think was a historical objectif of russia or at least going west)
 
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