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EU4 - Development Diary - 6th of December 2016

Hi everyone and welcome to another development diary for Europa Universalis IV. We’ve been working on the 1.20 patch and its accompanying unannounced expansion for a while now.

We’ve reworked some internal mechanics so looted and scorched earth are no longer just binary-statuses, but instead they affect something we call devastation.

A provinces’ devastation ranges from 0 to 100%, and it affects local autonomy, supply limits and how much goods are produced in the province. It also reduces the spread of institutions into that province, and increases the development cost of the province.

Each time a province is looted, its devastation is increased by 5%, and a scorched earth increased it by 25%.

Each year devastation is reduced by 1%, and within the zone of control of a fortification, it is reduced by 2% for each fort level each year.

Unrest is also increasing the devastation of a province by the amount of unrest each year.

devastation.png


What does this give you? Well, loot is is no longer just a strong penalty for a short period of time, but continuous conflict zones will grow far worse.


A cool feature for the expansion though is the concept of Prosperity, which is a state-level bonus. Any state that has 0 devastation in all its provinces and the country is at positive stability will have a small counter tick up each month, depending on the abilities of its government. It is a random chance, but when the counter reached 100%, then the state has reached Prosperity.

A state with prosperity gives -10% to development cost, and +25% to goods produced.

prosperity.png


Stay tuned, next week we’ll talk about something that will probably be the biggest feature added to the game since we started EU4.
 
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How does having your coasts raided affect devastation?
It empties your loot bar.

The big feature next week is a rescaling of the map to make Japan more realistically sized so you can get more provinces into it for the big Japan/Ming rework this patch, right? 1.20 China patch right? Right? Right????
 
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Does devastation reduce by 1% per year or per month? Because it says per year, but that would me it could take 100 years to get down from 100% devastation. Or is it not possible to get to 100%? And if unrest is increasing devastation by the amount of unrest, then if you have a non-accepted culture, wrong religion, separatism province with ~20 unrest, by the time that province is able to start lowering it's devastation it could already be crippled for the rest of the game.
 
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Paradox should add a "Reserved Looting" option for armies. This would mean your army's looting would be severely reduced, and thus you can preserve provinces you wish to take.

Alternatively, adding an option to highlight specific provinces for reserved looting would work too.
 
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Does devastation reduce by 1% per year or per month? Because it says per year, but that would me it could take 100 years to get down from 100% devastation. Or is it not possible to get to 100%? And if unrest is increasing devastation by the amount of unrest, then if you have a non-accepted culture, wrong religion, separatism province with ~20 unrest, by the time that province is able to start lowering it's devastation it could already be crippled for the rest of the game.

If there are methods to speed it up like forts and courthouses, I don't see what's wrong with this. Devastated places could take a lot more than a century to recover.
 
Random world. I've been expecting that for a while...they already basically had the technology to do it for the Random New World feature, it just needed what would probably be a significant amount of work for implementation. It may require some modification of the Trade system, particularly adding or changing nodes and routes, so that might be part of it as well.

There are allready mods that do that - instable but it works, basically - so with access to the source code it should be no problem at all (work load wise).

Will be interesting, but tbh. not what i would like in the game right now.
 
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I don't get the obsession with states.

First you introduce more provinces. Then you make states to make provinces less of a thing.
....States is not the future of this game. I know some guy in the office thinks its the coolest thing ever and is pushing for it, but its really not. We already have borders for provinces, use that.

Why not just take out all provinces and just use states as 1 province?
 
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WOOOHOOO! First Jake appropriates my Player Slayer and now there's a mechanic called Devastation where provinces in war zones get damaged, and forts are directly tied into it, which is basically what I suggested ages ago.

9b7.jpg


Since I'm pretty much already one of the devs... when do I get my salary? ^_^
 
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I can't think of a bigger addition since release other than a timeline extension. The 1444 date is awesome, but if we could start a little earlier it may allow some less skilled players a chance to play as Bulgaria or someone new, and starting out as the Ottomans in 1399 will be a lot more difficult than the 1444 killing spree.
 
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As a new player who just spent countless hours trying to figure out the mechanics of the trade system: if the big chance coming up really is a complete trade overhaul, as some people are guessing it might be, I'm going to cry myself to sleep
 
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:eek:

Does this tie into the major update? Are you introducing supply into EU4? Has God finally answered my prayers?

I can answer that prayer for you. :D There is a supply system already. It is based per province and (thank god) does not follow a micro-obsessed flow mechanic like in HOI3. As these OCD-like supply systems were not adopted in EU4 or HOI4, you will be happy to hear that any such non-sense will be highly unlikely to ever torture us again. You are very welcome! :p
 
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I can't think of a bigger addition since release other than a timeline extension. The 1444 date is awesome, but if we could start a little earlier it may allow some less skilled players a chance to play as Bulgaria or someone new, and starting out as the Ottomans in 1399 will be a lot more difficult than the 1444 killing spree.
It has been repeatedly said by Paradox that moving timeline back to 1399 in EU3 was a mistake so that is extremely unlikely at best.
:eek:

Does this tie into the major update? Are you introducing supply into EU4? Has God finally answered my prayers?
I find it unlikely. HoI is far better suited and required to make a decent supply system and there it has changed greatly through the series without really hitting the point though HoI4 is at least better than HoI3 in that regard.
As a new player who just spent countless hours trying to figure out the mechanics of the trade system: if the big chance coming up really is a complete trade overhaul, as some people are guessing it might be, I'm going to cry myself to sleep
You know I keep seeing people say that but I came from EU3 with it's completely different trade system without watching or reading pretty much anything to start with Portugal of all countries and found the trade system rather straightforward and intuitive. You collect at your home mode and want to direct trade there.
 
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Cheers for the DD Johan :). More great changes, both prosperity and devastation are excellent additions imo, should add to the dynamism of things and make it more important not to let our lands be rampaged over by unfriendly folk. One of the big benefits of 'continuous development' may well be cross-pollination of ideas (with adjustments as appropriate for the game in question) between different teams in PDS :).

Random thought - any thoughts on whether war taxes or corruption could be something that removed/reduced prosperity, with prosperity not being a binary on/off thing?

Am very curious as to what the big feature to be discussed next week is.....
 
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I found devastation mechanic really interesting if building forts on the borders, what's quite logic. Then after massive, exhausting war those borders will recover faster then heartland. That can lead to interesting strategies or strange use development balance on the long term.
How will capital fort affect devastation? Will it have some additional bonus?

After all i think that mechanics should be implemented years ago! Good job!
 
Why?

Forts will block that dramatically.
Will the upkeep cost of forts be adjusted so we will be able to afford building them?
 
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I've some questions about prosperity.
It works at state level and it slowly increase to 100%.
Now let's suppose that after 70-80 years a state has 95% of prosperity. Then a province is looted. Does the state prosperity drops to 90% (being -5% the devastation of the province) ?
So after 5 years (when the province has recovered) the state starts from 90% and goes again toward 100% ?
If not which is the prospected mechanism ?

Another thought is the following: some areas are clearly more prone to be occupied/besieged (let's think to central germany) . It's not the same for central Siberia. So actually it should be more easy to have prosperity in siberia than in bavaria... Which actually seems strange to me.

OTOE, I really love desolation: very realistic. Really after a long war and multiple sieges/occupation a province would be "desolated". ^_^
 
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