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EU4 - Development Diary - 22nd of August 2017

Good morning all, welcome to this week's dev diary for Europa Universalis IV.

Over the past 3 weeks our map aficionado @Trin Tragula has been sharing our latest handiwork over in The Near East, Anatolia, Caucasus and Iran. In addition, we also showed off five new trade goods being added to the game: Livestock, Paper, Gems, Incense and Glass. By popular request, I have a few screenshots to show the distribution of trade goods in our reworked map.

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Arabia, complete with a coastline of Incense, while a lot of provinces previously aflock with wool enjoy livestock.

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Timur's home has a wide variety of goods, with a handful of gem and paper provinces finding their place

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Anatolia is seeing relatively small additions of new trade goods, but the city of world's desire now produces lucrative glassware.

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Bonus European shot to bring Italy to light. The already wealthy region enjoying the prosperous goods of glass and Paper, each with their own set of events to alter their prices throughout time. Throughout the dev diaries, we may be showing off other regions where trade has touched, all depending on what people want to see.

These map changes and new trade goods will all be free additions to the 1.23 Update, which will accompany an as-of-yet unannounced expansion, meaning that whether you purchase the upcoming expansion or not, you can enjoy a revamped experience both on the map and in the pasture.


Today we're also talking about the first of the paid features from the expansion, Army Drilling. Currently in the game if you're not fighting and have no immediate threats or rebellions, you slam that military maintenance bar down as low as you can, leaving your armies to eat grass and dull their blades until such time that you pay them to fight for you again. With the addition of Army Drilling, you can pay to have your armies train so that when it comes to times of war or uprising, you can smack down on them with a far more effective force.

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Any Army with a leader can Drill, during which their morale will be lowered and each non-mercenary unit will gain a Drill value. This value will directly correspond to better performance in battle. When not drilling, a unit's Drill will degrade over time, and will suffer if the unit is damaged and must reinforce.

Scaling up to 100, Army Drill gives:
  • +10% Shock Damage Dealt
  • +10% Fire Damage Dealt
  • -10% Shock Damage Received
  • -10% Fire Damage Received
(Army drill gives no effect for Mercenaries)

Drilling requires a leader, but during the Drilling process, your leader may also find themselves improving, and gaining additional pips, so not all is lost for that 0-0-1-0 General you roll. This likelihood depends on how much of your army they are drilling, relative to your forcelimit.

Drilling armies will cost full maintenance, regardless of the budget slider and will contribute well towards having a better, more professional army, less reliant on soldiers of fortune. Next week. We will explore this idea further.
 
I think the general requirement is to model the peasant levies with no real combat training or experience. You need someone with actual knowledge of tactics etc to lead the drill, and information wasn't as easy to come by in those days.

I get (and agree with) the rationale - I just think it might lead to messy play. Maybe have it that armies with generals have a higher maximum drill, but it's not so large a difference that players (and AI) should in theory optimise by moving units around to have them all under the one general? That, or some auto-drill AI that does this automatically for the player? Just throwing ideas around though - I could well be way off :).
 
I get (and agree with) the rationale - I just think it might lead to messy play. Maybe have it that armies with generals have a higher maximum drill, but it's not so large a difference that players (and AI) should in theory optimise by moving units around to have them all under the one general? That, or some auto-drill AI that does this automatically for the player? Just throwing ideas around though - I could well be way off :).

Did not think of how much of a hassle this could be, but then again, historically, forces were drafted and gathered by a leader, and then possible trained if there was time. Sadly, the game doesn't really model the disbanding of armies after the war (or after some period of time), as was common in those times.

Also, I think the hassle might be a bit diminished by the fact that this would be a very useful feature for smaller countries, while once you reach infinite money blob level, you won't need to do this anymore.
 
It's great we are moving away from the 0 maintenance in peace model. But I am worried that this will lead to a micromanagement situation similar in EU 3 where every battle you had to attach/split off your cavalry to take advantage of it being superior in speed to infantry. I foresee newbie players taking the money that would go into drilling to just buy a bigger army and min-maxers detaching artillery from drill stacks, having cheap undrilled stacks for sieging or to manipulate AI into not attacking...
Will there be any mechanics to prevent at least the worse of these problems?
 
It's great we are moving away from the 0 maintenance in peace model. But I am worried that this will lead to a micromanagement situation similar in EU 3 where every battle you had to attach/split off your cavalry to take advantage of it being superior in speed to infantry. I foresee newbie players taking the money that would go into drilling to just buy a bigger army and min-maxers detaching artillery from drill stacks, having cheap undrilled stacks for sieging or to manipulate AI into not attacking...
Will there be any mechanics to prevent at least the worse of these problems?

Why would you not want +10% fire damage on your cannons?
 
@DDRJake Would love to take a small look at the possible new tradegoods in China proper!
 
Why would you not want +10% fire damage on your cannons?

I would want it if its free, but in a game with limited resources, artillery with + shock and fire reduction is (for a good player) useless. Add to that artillery having a much bigger ducat maintenance, not paying artillery drills and using that money on more troops/infantry drills seems like a better choice.
 
New trade goods sound awesome.
I always hope for more trading stuff / mechanics.
I think there is a hidden potential there for the game to expand.

Army Drill also sounds nice.
 
Looks like a bad game design decision, because that practically forces players to additional enormous amount of micro management (gathering armies in the largest province for a drill in peace time and disassembling for a real armies stacks at the moment war starts).

Looks like an intended change to make it easier for smaller countries to have better generals. Sadly smaller countries is also those that have a harder time to get any gold since their trade income is kinda low. Unless the OPM happens to own a center of trade.
 
So does this cost ducats or military power?

Also, it's strange seeing the Ottomans' Anatolian provinces all get split but everything stays the same in their Balkan provinces.

EDIT: Also, how about naval drilling? That'd help make navies less flat.

@DDRJake
So does this new drill action cost additional money or military points? So far all we know is that it requires full maintenance. And how big is the morale penalty while drilling?
 
Anatolia is seeing relatively small additions of new trade goods, but the city of world's desire now produces lucrative glassware.

Who are you and what have you done to DDRJake? o_O
 
Drilling will be a nice option rather than constantly lowering maintenance, and it does make sense that HoI4 is no longer the only game with this kind of ratings. The game will both be more realistic and strategic. I hope we will get more new warfare features, in addition to the new buttons that can be seen in the interface, such as basic logistics and maybe something to feudal levies vs standing armies.
 
Now THAT is how you dev diary.

Any Army with a leader can Drill, during which their morale will be lowered and each non-mercenary unit will gain a Drill value. This value will directly correspond to better performance in battle. When not drilling, a unit's Drill will degrade over time, and will suffer if the unit is damaged and must reinforce.
From the picture it looks like that army has a morale of about 40? I'm guessing a Drill of 100 will leave you with 20 morale?

But how fast does the morale recover when not Drilling? Hopefully it's faster than normal morale recovery.

Also, does Drill reduce naturally even in wartime? I understand having to reinforce will reduce it but hopefully being at war will keep the troops sharp.