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EU4 - Development Diary - 28th of March 2017

Hello and welcome to another development diary for Europa Universalis IV. We’re about 9 days away from release of Mandate of Heaven on the 6th of April 2017. Next week we’ll go into the patchnotes in detail, but for now, let’s look at some of the features we’ve not got into detail yet.

First of all, we have added a new feature in the expansion when performing a siege.

Artillery Barrage is something you can order an army to do, when you have fullsized artillery regiments than the fortress have fort-levels. A barrage costs 50 MIL power, and creates a breach in the forts walls.

barrage.png


A new cool thing that is free in the patch is the ability to declare bankruptcy at will. Of course, this can only be done when you have a loan, and is not already in a bankruptcy. The effects of bankruptcy have changed as well, in that you lose 3 stability, get all your power set to -100, lose all advisors, mercenaries & current constructions. All loans are gone, but all your provinces suffer 10 devastation and lost the “recent uprising” modifier. You also lose all buildings you have built in the last 5 years. You gain a penalty for 5 years as well, which reduces morale by 50%, increases tech, idea & advisor costs by 50% and increases autonomy and decreases absolutism in your nation.


Another improvement to the 1.20 patch is the changes to the macrobuilder when it comes to buildings. Now, when you have selected a building, you will see a list of all provinces where it can be built, which can be sorted on cost, profit and other aspects, making it easier to optimise your economy.

macrobuilder.png


For those of you that like the ledger, but find it hard to navigate with the large amount of nations, we have now added filter buttons so you can see just those nations that interest you for the moment. We’ve also colored the row of your own nation, so it is always easy to see. This is of course part of the free patch.

ledger.png

As you may have noticed, the military overview got a bit cramped with the previous layout. This have been changed now, allowing us to add other important values here, like the new cavalry to infantry ratio.

milview.png


Stay tuned, its just a few days more…..
 
5 years allows for some interesting interactivity with forcing truced with your neighbors and then going bankrupt to clear your debt being perfectly fine. You just need a bit more than a white peace now. Still, it requires longer term planning now since you must build your buildings 5 years before starting the plans to go into bankruptcy. Still, if you hvae land with right religion/culture and no unrest problems it should still be perfectly doable to make use of it, with some planning.

Not that I ever do things like that, of course.
 
I can understand all the other maluses that declared Bankruptcy would inflict, but I don't really get why we have to loose buildings.
 
I can understand all the other maluses that declared Bankruptcy would inflict, but I don't really get why we have to loose buildings.
Because currently when you're considering going bankrupt you can take a ton of loans and invest all the money on buildings before going bankrupt. This makes it a lot harder to make a profit out of a bankruptcy. It's still doable but it requires way more planning and leaves you vulnerable for a longer period of time.

I think it's a good change, but I'm still waiting on a loan & interest revamp. Interest reduction stacking is so OP I actually felt like i needed to make a mod that increases the interest floor for my multiplayer games.
 
I can understand all the other maluses that declared Bankruptcy would inflict, but I don't really get why we have to loose buildings.

Confiscated by the creditors to pay the debt(?) One has to pay back as much as possible to the creditors after all. I'm guessing that's an abstraction for some sort of collateral. But the tricky thing is Johan wrote "have a [1] loan" as prerequisite which, unless a typo, means one could declare bankruptcy with a single loan - which seems rather silly but also insanely disproportionate to the consequences.
 
Confiscated by the creditors to pay the debt(?) One has to pay back as much as possible to the creditors after all. I'm guessing that's an abstraction for some sort of collateral. But the tricky thing is Johan wrote "have a [1] loan" as prerequisite which, unless a typo, means one could declare bankruptcy with a single loan - which seems rather silly but also insanely disproportionate to the consequences.
Yeah, but I don't see those creditors having the power to confiscate anything from the state. It's more like the state voluntarily surrendering those assets to the creditors.
When Edward III couldn't repay the tuscan bankers loans, in the hundred years war, the Bardi's companies mostly bankrupted, they didn't become rich with english properties.
I don't like the loss of buildings change, but I can live with it.
 
Is there any chance that you'll get rid of automatic loans? Why not auto-decrease spending, or give scaling penalties for staying under 0?
 
Yeah, but I don't see those creditors having the power to confiscate anything from the state. It's more like the state voluntarily surrendering those assets to the creditors.
When Edward III couldn't repay the tuscan bankers loans, in the hundred years war, the Bardi's companies mostly bankrupted, they didn't become rich with english properties.
I don't like the loss of buildings change, but I can live with it.

Agree. When you owe bank 10000$ and you cannot pay, you're in big trouble.
When you owe bank 100000000$ and you cannot pay, it's the bank that's in big trouble!

Rather than take away your buildings, bankruptcy could increase corruption and/or inflation.
 
Maybe the economic crash accompanying the bankruptcy means that the buildings either go out of business or can no longer be effectively operated?
 
It was 25 before, and then it was a "hit it every siege".

Is that really a bad thing though? Late[r] game forts already take obnoxiously long to siege even when you have all the odds stacked in your favour (and that in and of itself can incur some rather significant, sometimes crippling attrition losses depending on where exactly the fort is). This would help to sizably reduce that.

If anything, I'd say lock the ability behind MIL tech to restrict it to the second half of the game and make it cost 25. Hell, maybe even reduce it down towards 10 MIL points through multiple subsequent techs to further reduce the cost.

50 just seems much too costly, to be frank.
 
Maybe the economic crash accompanying the bankruptcy means that the buildings either go out of business or can no longer be effectively operated?
Bankruptcy is not an economic crash for the economy of the state, it is bad for the economy of the creditors. Bankruptcy means that the state will not repay its debts, not that it won't pay wages or afford manteinance on buildings.
wages =/= debts
 
Bankruptcy is not an economic crash for the economy of the state, it is bad for the economy of the creditors. Bankruptcy means that the state will not repay its debts, not that it won't pay wages or afford manteinance on buildings.
wages =/= debts
But the state being unable to pay loans would discourage future creditors from offering more loans (I assume there are smaller-scale loans being abstracted away aside from the big ones), and decrease the confidence in that country's economic future, wouldn't it?

Besides, economic damage is kind of implied by the devastation effect that bankruptcy would have. Bankruptcy is also accompanied by a massive stability shock too.
 
50 is too much? What else do you people do with all your MIL points? Half the time I just get a tier 1 advisor since otherwise I just end up spending all my MIL points on development or something. 50 for a wall breach on a critical fort in a war is if anything too low. Wall breaches are insanely strong.
 
Maybe the economic crash accompanying the bankruptcy means that the buildings either go out of business or can no longer be effectively operated?

I can understand not being able to afford the upkeep on a Barracks, but a Marketplace? Or a privately owned Workshop?
 
Bankruptcy is not an economic crash for the economy of the state, it is bad for the economy of the creditors. Bankruptcy means that the state will not repay its debts, not that it won't pay wages or afford manteinance on buildings.
wages =/= debts

Not entirely true since bankruptcy is more involved than a simple divesting of all debts. It usually involves restructuring, forfeiture of collateral, seizure of assets, etc.

Obviously the game just has an abstraction, but loans in the game that can force bankruptcy are from national banks not foreign banks so your earlier Tuscan analogy doesn't really apply.