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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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Hmm its looking great. I decided to hold off playing EU4 until 1.17 comes.

Since there is no mention of AI improvement or changes to triple rival mechanics, I think you can play the current version without feeling it is waste of time. I guess :/

Unless you really like going Espionage.
 
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The one interesting thing that I've come up with so far, is that claims no longer giving an AE discount means vassalizing the target is preferable more so than before, as despite conquest giving no reduction for vassalization, the development multiplication factor is less than if taking the land for yourself.

I don't see the problem with that. If someone chooses to attack you, then it makes perfect sense that they should be punished for their aggressive actions. Right now, it is a significant advantage (in terms of the peace deal) to be on the attacking side of a war, and I don't think that should be the case.

I agree that defending parties should (generally speaking) be seen as somewhat less aggressive; my concern is that as the human player it is relatively easy to manufacture a situation where you are the defending party against the nation you wanted to attack. This would seem to defeat the purpose of the change to AE reduction from claims, and thus I unfortunately anticipate that the defender's discount may be removed or reworked as well.

I think in EU2 or EU3, you were just waiting or hoping for an event to get a claim. Those games were probably exciting enough that now we have EU4. You always have the option to absorb the stability hit and AE btw. Claims are for those who want to take land smoothly. It seems players nowadays want to play aggressively but without being considered aggressive.

A no-CB wardec incurs a base of 20 AE, which is then affected by all the normal modifiers excepting development. Same religion as target will have 30 AE opinion against attacker, same culture group will have 35, same exact culture will have 40, and a nation in the HRE with all of the above could technically hit 50. (Although in practice the lattermost will be difficult to accomplish, as AE does drop off with distance.)

Thus we could take 17.77/11.42/6.66 development in each of those scenarios before hitting 50 AE on our neighbors. Granted, a war does not have a duration of zero, so for each year that the war lasts we can take 1.77/1.52/1.33 additional development (with a base decay of 2). These numbers are of course further modified by distance, but they still indicate the main point here: Should we really have a coalition form against us for taking a single province, or less, even if we do so without a CB?

I like the idea of shifting claims into a last-resort CB, since that's essentially what they historically were anyway (an excuse to go to war; and the AE reduction is nonsense, nobody cared if you had a "claim", only how much power you were going to have), and fabricate-painting everything is silly, tedious busywork. I do agree with others here that a slightly lower fabricate cost (25, with +20 being the discovery threshold) and a slightly higher discovery penalty (~6 months) would be a bit more balanced than the extreme all-or-nothing approach in the dev diary.

The only problem is that claims still give you an ADM discount on coring. As long as that holds true, the ideal meta is still going to be to claim as many provinces as possible, and this just turns the tedious busywork into slow and painful tedious busywork.

Personally I see it as, they know you're aggressive, but at least you bothered with the papers to pretend the land rightfully belonged to you, and therefore they think you have more honor than if you just straight up took it. I imagine you might argue that is accomplished by not incurring the AE for no-CB, and you'd have a point there. I can see both sides of that coin, but I'm still iffy on the change, mechanics-wise.

Fabricated claims give you a 10% discount, but initial coring cost is half in territories, half later. The claim disappears when you gain the territorial core, so it effectively saves you 5%. (Someone correct me if that's wrong.) Granted, I'd still rather have a claim than not have a claim, but >20 months per claim for 0.5 ADM per development saved and no AE discount doesn't sound very enticing to me, even if it does save me some DIP as well.

So I definitely agree, with you and others, that the cost is too high.

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A thought: If the intent is to reduce claim spam on a target, rather than claiming entirely, would it not be better to have the base claim cost be cheaper, but each successive claim cost significantly more (and I don't mean the 10% that was stated)? Something like 20/40/60/80/100 (per claim) would result in a hard cap at 5 claims per target, and realistically less than that in most cases, which would diminish the claim's utility on blobs, but keep it useful for OPMs. (Really, this makes more sense: If they only had one province, it's a lot easier to say all their land rightfully belongs to you with a straight face than it is to say so with respect to Poland, for instance.) I'm actually inclined to say that each successive claim should perhaps double in cost, something like 12/25/50/100, but I'm unsure if that would need to be hardcoded in, and thus as it's potentially a less mod-friendly solution those specific numbers may not be ideal. However, a system of that general type should limit claims sufficiently that you don't have a claim on most provinces, and thus the removal of the AE discount would seem less useful towards that goal.
 
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If AE becomes a problem Paradox will probably balance it, they have done it before.

I just wish they would stop screwing around with numbers so much. At times it seems that Paradox over nerfs/punishes something then ends up over compensating for it. More than once we've had too punitive AE and too weak AE.

I think that's kidn of the point. if they change it a lot then they can keep ahead of the people who likes to pcik apart mechanics. Kind of how MMORPGs rotate which class is the most powerful every so often.

This begs the question of if they should do that. There's always going to be people who push things to the limits. All this frequent back and forth with features, mechanics, and numbers makes things confusing for the casual and moderate players... not to mention those that don't come on the forums to see changes.
 
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This is for MMO but also talks about how the inbalance for tall playing in CK2, Eu4 is punish wide player.

No, that's a false dichotomy.

You can definitely make tall challenging with the right mechanics. In Civ5, tall is the dominant strategy and there's a huge gap between a newbie player going tall and an expert who can beat the game on deity.
 
No, that's a false dichotomy.

You can definitely make tall challenging with the right mechanics. In Civ5, tall is the dominant strategy and there's a huge gap between a newbie player going tall and an expert who can beat the game on deity.

Yeah, but the only real difference between Settler and Diety is that the AI gets a bunch of cheaty bonuses.
 
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Yeah, but the only real difference between Settler and Diety is that the AI gets a bunch of cheaty bonuses.

Sure, so what? The skilled player will still get a lot more out of his 3-4 cities than the unskilled player. If we're both playing separate games on Prince (I believe that's the difficulty where player is on par with AI), I'll get a science victory in 1850 and the inexperienced player will probably lose.

The point I'm making is that you can create tall gameplay where skill actually matters.
 
@Johan

Suggestion for unlocking the espionage actions: have everything unlocked at lvl 0 but all actions have an activation score of 100 (or whatever default score you want it to be set at when it unlocks). That activation score can be further reduced by tech levels or as one of the bonuses within the Espionage group. This would allow users access to those actions but limited probability of success unless they invest an idea group or technology. Basically it would function like a mix between admin efficiency gains and military unit increases.

I would change the 5th Espionage idea from just 25% fabricate claim reduction to -15 points for all activation costs. For example Sow Discount would cost 100 points at game start. Anyone could attempt that action but due to probability would most likely fail. However at tech lvl 9, 19, 23, & 30 that cost is dropped 5 points each time. So it would equal current activation score of 80 by end of game. And if someone had completed Espionage group then they would get an additional 15 points off.

This would be the best of both worlds as all users have access to these actions but would require technology to become effective. Plus anyone picking the Espionage group would have additional perks selecting this idea group in the early game. This would give players more flexibility, more options, and would not be as restricted as the "hard lock" system proposed for 1.17. Because really, who wants to invest in an idea group for actions you can't use until late game?
 
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Its 1.16 now - If you want the most op CB, pick religious. Its not very good for HRE anyway because it doesn't work before 1500 and then you still don't want to take much land there because you would kill yourself.

I think there's a general balance problem with CBs that have 'all provinces' as a justified war concession. For instance, Holy War would make a lot more sense if the justified conquests were limited to holy sites and provinces that are or used to be in your religion group (e.g. liberating the Christian Balkans from Ottoman rule). A blanket license to conquer all the infidels is just too OP and makes most of the other CBs in the game obsolete. As for 'Cleansing of Heresy', the circumstances under which you can use it should be much more limited - it makes sense during the height of the Reformation turmoil in Europe, for instance, but there's no way that Ming would invade South-East Asia on the pretext of 'cleansing the heretics'.
 
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Well, late "agitate for liberty" unlock is indeed a good thing, but lv30 "infiltrate administration"? Really? Personally found this feature very attractive, it really helps in a war with a blob. I thought your focus was to make blobbing harder and add some downsides to wide playstyle. That is why this nasty corruption was introduced, right? And now you're basically removing "infiltrate administration" action from the game. That isn't right at all, it should be unlocked in midgame (if not early game), but definitely not at lv30. And by the way, please finally remove corruption gain from lack of religious unity, it not only makes no historical sense, but makes the game nearly impossible for small nations with starting religious problems. Not even talking about OPMs with different starting religion in the only province. So what do we have now? Blobs can now simply move all the armed forces away without anyone who could've taken advantage of it noticing, blobs can negate corruption cause they are making loads of money anyway, but smaller nations are suffering. Is it the way you really wanted it to be?
 
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"Vetting: +33 Foreign Spy Detection", "reducing the spy discovered cooldown to 3 months, instead of 5 years."
Talking about discovering foreign agents.

Since discovery is giving AE and negative opinion with countries, it would be nice to make the effects of discovery non-automatic. So that every time an agent is caught, the player has the option whether to publish this discovery or not. Sometimes I may choose not to do it (if I am a small country, why agitate a big country; or if I want to vassalize the country; or if I want to keep an alliance; or whatever other reason I may have). Spy cooldown can still be automatic (or not).
 
Corruption - the drop is good, but not sure if not too big (maybe 0.2?), ultimately good decision

Claims - seems like removing the aggressive expansion impact from claims seems like a bad idea - a claim partly justifies your war (which is expressed by casus belli), but it should also impact the peace deal. It's logical, example folows.

Let's assume I attack my neighbour, 2 scenarios:
Situation 1. I have 1 claim, take 3 provinces - my neighbours will think I'm a greedy warmonger, as only one is justified
Situation 2. I hav 3 claims, take 3 provinces - my neighbours will think I'm a greedy warmonger BUT I sort of had my reasons, so it's not as horrible as the first case. I had claims on those so there is no reason to think I'll just keep blobbing everywhere - thus lower aggressive expansion is justified.
 
I've had my ruler die with my heir being a year old a few times, but cannot remember having no heir.. Or I should say, a situation that results in my being put in a personal union. I always have at least 4 royal marriages and if it late game, usually with vassals if I run out of allies.

I have +20% heir chance from marriages and +100% for having the national ideas giving me a total of 120% chance of a new heir. My "empress" is now 46 years old and no heir.

typical story of my empire :(
 
Aww, man! I couldn't play the game yesterday after work because I know these changes are coming. :(

I guess I should get working on those trees I need cut down in the back yard before they bloom...

In other news, I love the changes you are making for 1.17, especially the increase cost of fabricate claims. Hopefully that will force me to use some other CB once in awhile. I don't even know what that trade CB thing does though. ;)
 
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