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EU4 - Development Diary - 28th of April 2016

Hello and welcome to another EU4 development diary. There has been a fair amount of bugfixing going on for 1.17, and our current estimated release week is the second week of May, if the gods smile upon us.

One of the many balance things we have done for 1.17 is further tweaks to the covert actions. First of all, instead of having all of the cool unlocks tied to the Espionage idea group, making it a too binary choice, we have moved the unlocks from ideas to tech.
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As you can see from this screen, you gain espionage abilities at about every 3rd level, with Agitate for Liberty being late, and stealing maps early in the game.

We have completely changed the Espionage Ideas, removing the unlocks and adding some new more interesting abilities, to create an ideagroup focused on internal strength.
  1. Efficient Spies: +50% Spy Network Construction & -10% Advisor Costs
  2. Agent Training: +1 Diplomat
  3. Vetting: +33 Foreign Spy Detection, +10% Provincial Trade Power
  4. Additional Loyalist Recruitment: -10 Liberty Desire in Subjects.
  5. Claim Fabrication: 25% Fabricate Claim Cost
  6. Privateers: +25% Embargo Efficiency & +33% Privateer Efficiency
  7. Audit Checks: -0.1 Yearly Corruption
Ambition: +50% Rebel Support Efficiency.

For modders, there’s a new modifier called 'reduced_liberty_desire' which reduces the liberty desire of all your subjects. We primarily use it in the espionage ideas for now, but will probably be applied at more places later on.

We moved the claim fabrication idea from Influence to Espionage. And what did Influence get, well.. They get an idea which increases prestige and heir chance, because monarchies are cool..

Another things we did with spies, was reducing the spy discovered cooldown to 3 months, instead of 5 years.

While the code now supports to put Fabricate Claims behind a tech, it is still going to be allowed from the start of the game, as we have assigned it to tech 0. If a modder wants to put it later in their mod, its very trivial.

There have been some changes to how Claim Fabrication works. First of all, the cost of fabricating a claim is now 30 off your spy network, before other modifiers. If you already have claims on a nation, you cost increases by 10% per claim you have on that nation.

With the threshold of discovery being above 25 in Spy Network, there are now risks with building up a spy network to fabricate claims, unless you have invested into Espionage Ideas, which reduce the cost.

Claims are there to save you from major stability hits when you declare war, and to make it possible to fight wars inside the HRE without the emperor stomping down on you. There is no longer a small reduction in AE when using claim war goals, but it will still be cheaper to take it in dip power.

If you are not eager to directly gain territory yourself, we are working on adding a casus belli which is valid against all your rivals at all time, where you humiliate them, or force them to release nations or return cores.


Oh yeah… The impact from Religious Unity on corruption have dropped from 0.5 to 0.1.
 
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That Espionage idea may have some pretty strong bonuses there: 25% claim fabrication cost is a bit on the heavy side. It may be better to lower first claim to 20 or 25 (moving getting caught chance to 10 instead of 25!) and make the extra cost scale exponentially to avoid the awkward bonus there. With 50% claim fabrication cost, you would still be able to drink their milkshake, while the hardcap is still about the same!

Furthermore: The tying of spy-actions to diplomatic ideas is a good idea in general, but if it is an active action it may be better to give them in the first half, while making the static incentives later occurances. For the current list: Corrupt officials, agitate for liberty and particularly infiltrate administration are going to be of very limited use if they will ever get used, which is a pity.

A CB to make it cheaper to force release a nations is a very good idea since the options in the peacedeals is a bit pricy.

Oh... And slight... Corruption... Reduction... Is at least close to the right direction. I still think the current implementation lacks an incentive to use the span of corruption you have made events for...
 
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30 of spy network cost is so much... makes WC slower and harder again.
You know that the goal of Paradox has always been for WC to be virtualy impossible, right?
NOT saying that I agree with the 30 cost, but using WC as argument is just wrong.
 
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Regarding influence, it probably got buffed now with moving fabricate claims and adding prestige and heir chance. Both of these are great. That said influence is great group, the reason other groups are not picked is because Influence and Diplo are too good for a long time already.
 
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Fabricate claims being more expensive is reasonable, but 30 is way too much in my opinion. One of the best changes with Mare was the change to fabrication - popping them out so fast was so welcome and needed, I absolutely adored the change. Now it'll take even longer than claims pre-patch, aka more speed 5. Very unnecessary if you ask me, hoping for a change to that.

Edit: The dev diary makes it sound like as if claims very needingly reducing AE and being a casus belli is not even intentional. Exactly what are claims for, @Johan? I mean an ideal situation is always to have a claim on the province you want. In Europe, what hinders expansion the most is AE (at least to me). By increasing AE in this fashion aren't you going to make expansion in that continent an even larger journey on speed 5? I suppose the HRE will be extremely boring at this rate.
 
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It's a change in the way claims are intended to work.

As it stands, claims are something you spam along the entire length of all your borders, omitting only provinces belonging to countries you want to make happy. The change makes them something you use to get a CB allowing territorial transfer when you can't get one any other way.
 
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The change makes them something you use to get a CB allowing territorial transfer when you can't get one any other way.
Don't give them idea of disallowing taking any non-claimed land.
 
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It's a change in the way claims are intended to work.

As it stands, claims are something you spam along the entire length of all your borders, omitting only provinces belonging to countries you want to make happy. The change makes them something you use to get a CB allowing territorial transfer when you can't get one any other way.

The side effects of their rework is that, if you have to rely on the fabrication button, then you get no AE reduction at all. Barring not having the instant 20 AE and the stab hit for declaring no-CB wars, declaring no-CB and declaring with a fabricated Conquest claim are functionally identical now. I don't think I agree with that, though.

Another apt comparison is that declaring with a fabricated Conquest claim is equivalent to being on the defending side in a war as far as what your CB grants you.
 
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Fabricate claims being more expensive is reasonable, but 30 is way too much in my opinion. One of the best changes with Mare was the change to fabrication - popping them out so fast was so welcome and needed, I absolutely adored the change. Now it'll take even longer than claims pre-patch, aka more speed 5. Very unnecessary if you ask me, hoping for a change to that.


I thought I would enjoy the revamped claims system until it dawned on me that it meant that my spies would not ever get caught even once during the entire duration of a campaign (or several for that matter). It was just silly. Send a diplomat to a neighbouring country and remember to press the fabricate claims button between 10 and 25 spy network strength.
 
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The side effects of their rework is that, if you have to rely on the fabrication button, then you get no AE reduction at all. Barring not having the instant 20 AE and the stab hit for declaring no-CB wars, declaring no-CB and declaring with a fabricated Conquest claim are functionally identical now. I don't think I agree with that, though.

Another apt comparison is that declaring with a fabricated Conquest claim is equivalent to being on the defending side in a war as far as what your CB grants you.

To be fair, there's still the bird mana cost saved from fabricating claims. Even though I think that the claim fabrication nerf is largely unnecessary, as Conquest CB is already the last resort as things currently stand.
 
It seems the developers desperately want to make the espionage group relevant, but can't really think of a consistent and fun way to do so. So, their solution is to add things to the espionage group that really should be in other groups, hoping people will then pick espionage a little more often.

This is the umpteenth change to espionage now. Why not delete the whole espionage group and replace it with something else if it is so difficult to make it relevant?
 
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Another things we did with spies, was reducing the spy discovered cooldown to 3 months, instead of 5 years.

I like this but I think it would be better to have it inside the Espionage idea group. Something like:

2. Agent Training: +1 Diplomat, -75% spy discovered cooldown

I also think that moving the aggressive expasion impact idea from Influence to Espionage might be good. At the same time the "Additional Loyalist Recruitment: -10 Liberty Desire in Subjects" idea should be moved into Influence for influence being the idea group that focus on vassal management and annexation (and you need LD below 50% to annex).
So this two ideas should be swapped because it just make sense for the actual focus each idea group have.

We moved the claim fabrication idea from Influence to Espionage. And what did Influence get, well.. They get an idea which increases prestige and heir chance, because monarchies are cool..

This is very meh... As a republic this idea will mean just 400 diplo points wasted.
 
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While the code now supports to put Fabricate Claims behind a tech, it is still going to be allowed from the start of the game, as we have assigned it to tech 0.

Do my eyes deceive me? A paradox patch with a slight buff to native Americans?! :O

They're actually available to make claims now!

I wonder what stealth nerfs they have received in this patch to balance out the disturbance in the Force. :p
 
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Do my eyes deceive me? A paradox patch with a slight buff to native Americans?! :O

They're actually available to make claims now!

I wonder what stealth nerfs they have received in this patch to balance out the disturbance in the Force. :p
I wouldn't be too sure. They might still have the "Natives cannot fabricate claims" cockblock.
 
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What about it do you want to change?
Asturias, vizcaya and cantabria should be hills instead of grasslands, I think these are the most important mistakes. In addition, farmlands is a more accurate terrain for Seville and tarragona. Portugal needs more woods, for braganza and oporto.

Edit: Cuenca should be highlands.
 
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