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EU4 - Development Diary - 11th of April 2017

Hello everyone and welcome to another Europa Universalis development diary. Last week we released the 1.20 ‘Ming’ Update and the Mandate of Heaven expansion. It is almost four years since we originally released the game, and it is still growing in popularity!

We just released a hotfix to address some urgent issues, but we’re also working on a new patch called 1.21 ‘Hungary’, which will be released in late April, if all goes well.

In 1.21 we’ve worked a lot on further improving the AI, fixing bugs and balanced the game as we usually do.

You may remember the talks we had in the winter, about how we were not satisfied with Sailors. Now in 1.21, we’re solving this problem, by doing the following things. First of all, ships out on the sea, will drain 2% of their Sailor build cost each month. Now with current values and playstyles, that would not be ideal, as your sailor pool would quickly be drained.

  • Each development now provides 30 instead of 25 sailors.
  • Naval Tradition provides 20% faster sailor recovery instead of +10%.
  • Docks and Shipyards (both versions) have swapped placed in the technology tree.
  • Autonomy from Burghers Estate no longer impact sailors from development.
  • Sheltered Ports in Maritime Ideas group reduces Sailor Maintenance by 10%.

We are rather happy with the end result, a better naval game, where all buildings are viable choices, and you need to invest in having the support for a naval force.

We also strengthened the naval ideagroup, by making Naval Cadets also reduce morale damage from sunk ships by 33%, increase Press Gangs from 20 to 25% Sailor Recovery Speed, and changing Superior Seamanship from 15% Naval Morale to 10% Naval Morale and adding +10% Naval Engangement modifier (ie, lets 10% more ships fire each round).

sailors.png



A cool thing we are adding in 1.21, is a new decision to form Yuan!

In 1444, the Ming dynasty is still in its relative infancy, having taken over China from the Yuan Empire in in the late 14th century. The remnants of the Yuan still remain in our start date in the form of the Mongolia tag (something you can already see in the tooltip for previous Emperors in the Empire of China interface).

For patch 1.21 we have expanded a bit on this and added a decision for Altaic countries to restore the Great Yuan Empire and reclaim the heritage of Kublai Khan. It will require you to unite the Eastern Altaic cultures and be the Empire of China (or at least Empire rank if you lack the Mandate of Heaven DLC) and will grant claims and ideas based on the Yuan Dynasty.

yuan.jpg



Speaking of forming nations, any manchu culture nation can form Manchu in 1.21


Next week, Trin Tragula will tell you all why the patch is called Hungary...
 
Hello everyone and welcome to another Europa Universalis development diary. Last week we released the 1.20 ‘Ming’ Update and the Mandate of Heaven expansion. It is almost four years since we originally released the game, and it is still growing in popularity!

We just released a hotfix to address some urgent issues, but we’re also working on a new patch called 1.21 ‘Hungary’, which will be released in late April, if all goes well.

In 1.21 we’ve worked a lot on further improving the AI, fixing bugs and balanced the game as we usually do.

You may remember the talks we had in the winter, about how we were not satisfied with Sailors. Now in 1.21, we’re solving this problem, by doing the following things. First of all, ships out on the sea, will drain 2% of their Sailor build cost each month. Now with current values and playstyles, that would not be ideal, as your sailor pool would quickly be drained.

  • Each development now provides 30 instead of 25 sailors.
  • Naval Tradition provides 20% faster sailor recovery instead of +10%.
  • Docks and Shipyards (both versions) have swapped placed in the technology tree.
  • Autonomy from Burghers Estate no longer impact sailors from development.
  • Sheltered Ports in Maritime Ideas group reduces Sailor Maintenance by 10%.

We are rather happy with the end result, a better naval game, where all buildings are viable choices, and you need to invest in having the support for a naval force.

We also strengthened the naval ideagroup, by making Naval Cadets also reduce morale damage from sunk ships by 33%, increase Press Gangs from 20 to 25% Sailor Recovery Speed, and changing Superior Seamanship from 15% Naval Morale to 10% Naval Morale and adding +10% Naval Engangement modifier (ie, lets 10% more ships fire each round).

View attachment 255544


A cool thing we are adding in 1.21, is a new decision to form Yuan!

In 1444, the Ming dynasty is still in its relative infancy, having taken over China from the Yuan Empire in in the late 14th century. The remnants of the Yuan still remain in our start date in the form of the Mongolia tag (something you can already see in the tooltip for previous Emperors in the Empire of China interface.

For patch 1.21 we have expanded a bit on this and added a decision for Altaic countries to restore the Great Yuan Empire and reclaim the heritage of Kublai Khan. It will require you to unite the Eastern Altaic cultures and be the Empire of China (or at least Empire rank if you lack the Mandate of Heaven DLC) and will grant claims and ideas based on the Yuan Dynasty.

View attachment 255545


Speaking of forming nations, any manchu culture nation can form Manchu in 1.21


Next week, Trin Tragula will tell you all why the patch is called Hungary...

it's truly impressive to still have expansions for a 4-year old game. Well done in reinventing the game continually. :)
 
Maybe I am missing something but the sailor 'fix' seems wrong imo. The sailor pool, which arguably is on land, inside provinces should not be reduced because ships are at sea. Rather, ship 'efficiency' in terms of combat, speed of traveling, or protecting trade should be reduced as sailors on board the ships die. Only by docking for a short period, and adding new sailors from the pool, should the efficiency be back at 100 (provided the ship/s) are at 100% condition.

I i decide to leave some ships out at sea to blockade, knowing full well the risk of losing the ships - rather than sailing all the way back to my land to replenish sailors - that shouldnt impact the sailor pool. I may or may not wish to rebuild the lost ships right away, instead use the pool to repair ships that are in battle elsewhere.

What am i missing here ? Is the 'solution' Johan mentioned really a good one ?
 
i'd say the one in Serbia is Belgrade--which in 1444 should be in Hungarian hands, so that's a very welcome change (and if i'm not wrong, it was informed by a very informative post in the suggestions forum).

if the new Hungarian province is indeed Pest, i'd recommend changing the name of Budin to something else; you see, the Ottoman eyalet of Budin was named after Buda, a right- or west-bank constituent of today's Budapest, likely located in the purported new Pest province, while Pest itself lies across the Danube from Buda, on the east bank, in Budin province. keeping these names as they are would make the impression that both cities are on the wrong banks of the river (something the forum will never cease moaning about).

nonetheless, it's great to see some well-deserved map tweaks in the Balkans. are you guys going to look into suggestions for other changes in the region, like the ones regarding Corfu/Epirus, or making a landlocked province for Montenegro?



could it be Croatia in personal union with Hungary? although the screenshot comes from an ongoing game, so perhaps it doesn't represent any actual startgame setting.



it's already south of the river in Johan's screenshot. :)

agreed

gqbXzR.jpg
 
Maybe I am missing something but the sailor 'fix' seems wrong imo. The sailor pool, which arguably is on land, inside provinces should not be reduced because ships are at sea. Rather, ship 'efficiency' in terms of combat, speed of traveling, or protecting trade should be reduced as sailors on board the ships die. Only by docking for a short period, and adding new sailors from the pool, should the efficiency be back at 100 (provided the ship/s) are at 100% condition.

The issue with that is the micro involved is going to be painful, constantly having to move ships into port and back out, splitting/merging fleets constantly to rotate ships back to port while keeping a blockade up, etc. It's one of those realism vs. gameplay things, probably.

My greater concern is that naval power in general doesn't play an important role for land based campaigns, as there's no need to keep naval supply lines open to keep your armies going. Sailor maintenance makes sailor numbers/recharge matter, but doesn't make dominating the sea more important in general.
 
You may remember the talks we had in the winter, about how we were not satisfied with Sailors. Now in 1.21, we’re solving this problem, by doing the following things. First of all, ships out on the sea, will drain 2% of their Sailor build cost each month. Now with current values and playstyles, that would not be ideal, as your sailor pool would quickly be drained.

  • Each development now provides 30 instead of 25 sailors.
  • Naval Tradition provides 20% faster sailor recovery instead of +10%.
  • Docks and Shipyards (both versions) have swapped placed in the technology tree.
  • Autonomy from Burghers Estate no longer impact sailors from development.
  • Sheltered Ports in Maritime Ideas group reduces Sailor Maintenance by 10%.

We are rather happy with the end result, a better naval game, where all buildings are viable choices, and you need to invest in having the support for a naval force.

We also strengthened the naval ideagroup, by making Naval Cadets also reduce morale damage from sunk ships by 33%, increase Press Gangs from 20 to 25% Sailor Recovery Speed, and changing Superior Seamanship from 15% Naval Morale to 10% Naval Morale and adding +10% Naval Engangement modifier (ie, lets 10% more ships fire each round).

This will hit tags with bonus for galley hardest. Venice for example.

Galley take 100 sailor to build and takes 2 sailor each month while on mission. You can usually build 3 of those instead of having a Heavy Ship due to engagement width.

Heavy Ship takes 200 sailor to build and takes 4 sailor each month while on mission.

Trade Ship take 50 sailor to build and takes 1 sailor each month while on mission.

Transport Ship take 50 sailor to build and takes one sailor each month while on mission.

Since you need ~300 sailor (3 galley) to fight a Heavy Ship ~200 sailor. Before? it was only when you lost ship that sailor came into play.

Also to echo other question that has been asked before. What happens if your sailor pool hit zero and have negative sailor recovery?

I am not sure those change will have me build more naval building at all. Most of the time I am very full on sailor and hardly need more of them. It is only when I upgrade ~200 trade ships at once that I actually see a serious drain on sailor. Otherwise I need shipyard, for the naval forcelimit to be raised so I can build more ship to fight other that has more boat than you currently do. I don't EVEN use dock for the sailor bonus.

I am not even sure boosting naval idea group would take it out of "trash tier" idea group. But we will see.

A cool thing we are adding in 1.21, is a new decision to form Yuan!

In 1444, the Ming dynasty is still in its relative infancy, having taken over China from the Yuan Empire in in the late 14th century. The remnants of the Yuan still remain in our start date in the form of the Mongolia tag (something you can already see in the tooltip for previous Emperors in the Empire of China interface.

For patch 1.21 we have expanded a bit on this and added a decision for Altaic countries to restore the Great Yuan Empire and reclaim the heritage of Kublai Khan. It will require you to unite the Eastern Altaic cultures and be the Empire of China (or at least Empire rank if you lack the Mandate of Heaven DLC) and will grant claims and ideas based on the Yuan Dynasty.

Speaking of forming nations, any manchu culture nation can form Manchu in 1.21


Next week, Trin Tragula will tell you all why the patch is called Hungary...

Cool a new tag to form and Hungary? Considered me intrigued.
 
Well they might have, we don't know for sure who the original Huns really were, or what language group their language belonged to. The most popular suggestions are Iranian (like the scythians sarmatians alans and so on) and Altaic (Making them the first altaic people to arrive in the west) though, some have even suggested that since gothic was the lingua franca of their armies they may have been germanic, or even the first major slavic tribe. Oh and Hungary loves to claim that they were fennougric and their ancestors, despite that being a very suspect story at this point.
My personal guess would be that they were Iranian, would explain their disappearance, they simply melted away into other iranian steppe tribes. While if they were altaic they would have left more of a cultural mark being so different. None of the other theories seem anything but nationalistic pandering trying to claim the great conqueror for themselves.
There could be other links of the hungarians to the huns though perhaps the Hungarians migrated south during the hunnic era. It's also been suggested that the split in the slavobaltic peoples into slavs and balts may have been that the slavs were the slavobalts who ended up under hunnic rule while the balts were those that did not. Provided of course that the huns were themselves not slavs (again a kind of obscure theory with not many supporters).
I have gotten of topic but the mystery of the huns and their part of the migratory period interest me.

I wrote an essay on the roots of the Magyars a few semesters ago, which I can't find right now - only a few notes, which is why I'm a tad bit uncertain about this - but as far as I remember, we can, with a lot of certainty, pinpoint the exact spot where the Magyars - or at least their language - originated. Some linguists disemboweled the Hungarian language and tore out all the words they took over from other peoples - mostly old Iranian tribes, especially the Sarmatians - until only the words remained that were undoubtedly of fennougric origin. They then took the words naming plants and reconstructed the climate and flora of 1500 BC from fossilized pollen. Their findings suggest that the Hungarians likely originally hail from the river Pechora region in the northern Ural region. From there (~500 BC), they slowly started migrating southwards - most of their words relating to farming are of Iranian origin - and founded the first Hungarian empire on the middle Volga in coalition with the Iranian Alans and Sarmatians at some point between 350 and 550 - no one really knows what happened in the 1.000 years inbetween. Around 750, they were forced westward by the invading Pechenegs - although Hungarian-speaking groups still existed there in 1230, when a Hungarian monk searched for them - and entered a federation with some Turkish tribes and were somehow intertwined with the Khasars. Around 840, they were, again, forced westward by the Pechenegs, now somewhere north of Bulgaria, and became mercenaries to pretty much everyone with power in Europe. Finally, in 895, the Magyars were attacked by the Pechenegs yet again and retreated - with around 500.000 people - to Pannonia, which was mostly empty ever since Charlemagne had smashed the Avar empire in 803. There, they stayed.

tl;dr: Hungarians are linguistically not slavic, the languages have literally nothing to do with each other. Maybe ethnically, but the Slavs were already well-established when the Hungarians arrived in Europe. Some of them might have been part of the huns, but since we do not really have linguistic sources of the Huns, we can only guess were they came from - as far as I know, it's most likely that they were a wild mixture of ethnicities, anyway, likely communicating in some pidgin language.
 
Can the Great Khan achievement can be earned by Mongolia->Yuan? Or do you need to stay as Mongolia to do it?

at least currently the achievement only says that you should start as either the Great Horde or Mongolia ... not that you have to stay as them ... as in, you're allowed to tag-change as much as you want or can without suddenly finding yourself unable to get the achievement
 
I wonder if in those times four people would die each month on your average galleon doing a routine run in the Mediterranean? This sounds like a lot.
 
Oh i'm liking the naval changes. Seems really exciting. what is the maintenance of sailors about? are we actually going to pay for sailors, or will it just be a cost reduction for navy in general?
 
The changes to sailors are nice, but the effects of navies on war need to be increased overall (stuff like making -75% trade power multiplicative, increased WE/WS from blockades, etc). They matter very little for even Mediterranean nations.
 
The new sailor change just made it more tedious to micro your navy but still naval combat is pretty non-consequential aside from playing as GB or doing some cheesy bosphorus strait blocking strat to cripple Ottoman early on as an Anatolian minor or something....

By the way, is 1.21 going to break 1.20 saves? Asking this because 1.21 is a balance/fix patch and not adding anything new.
 
Sailors draining from deployment at sea? Wait what? That's awesome!
Sarscasm?
Uh, no. I'm just American. We tend to overemphasize in the moment.

So how is naval action improved? A story from my grandpa about his ancestors... I am told we are descended from a line of proud Mexican sailors, he told about how hard the sea was, and how so many sailors would reach a port and you would never see them again.
The Manila Galleons were especially difficult. You send an silver ship from Acapulco to Manila, fill up the hold in Manila with fine China and silks and stuff, hire Asian sailors (or just take them from remote villages), sail back to Mexico. When the ships landed, many of the sailors would disappear into the jungle, taken in by locals who were not so happy by the Spanish control of the colony. You had to constantly find new sailors every year. And this was just the Galleon trade.

I didn't believe the crazy stories his grandfather told to him and he passed on to me, but I have since seen validation. My genome (checked on the DNA websites), interestingly has a small fraction of South East Asian ancestry from approximately three to four centuries ago. Lines up with the stories. Little fractions of my genome all line up with other stories, Great Great Uncle writing the music to the Mexican National Anthem, distant ancestor being one of the first Spaniard Conquistadors in Mexico... the guy might not have been lying, after all this time (at least the part about who our ancestors were).

Add scurvy and other seaborne illnesses that didn't have treatments until the 1700s or 1800s, and a little sailor attrition added to cut your ship's ability to just travel for years... elegantly, and simply, does so many things, and ties with a supposedly ancient story passed on from Grandfather to Grandson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy#Early_modern_era

During the Age of Exploration between 1500 and 1800, it has been estimated that scurvy killed at least two million sailors.[31] Jonathan Lamb wrote: "In 1499, Vasco da Gama lost 116 of his crew of 170; In 1520, Magellan lost 208 out of 230;...all mainly to scurvy."

Awesome!

edit - After reading more posts, it seems people just didn't want the sailors as a feature, at all. So the feature is unpopular enough that being happy they are improving the feature would be seen as sarcasm? Understood.

...Still, it's an improvement.

edit - Shoot! It's only maybe an improvement now... other posters are coming up with questions that need to be answered... We already use sailors to recover from attrition, it could be a duplicate mechanic that causes more problems than it solves... :(
 
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