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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.
 
Finally something useful to waste money on during peacetime! :)

I really like the new trade goods as well. Perhaps later you could add even more of them, some appearing much later in game - like coal, in fact whole the 18th and early 19th century could use some revamp/expansion, there isn't even a single Hint about discovery of steam or other important things in EU IV, despite that happening in its timeframe.
 
Betting $100 that generals will have an increased chance of death while drilling. If there's anything I've learned playing Paradox games it's that good things have extremely short lives.
 
Instead, if you're France / Otto's / Ming you're getting a 10% auto buff, and if youre a small underdog youre getting more loans.
I guess it will be important how exactly the proportion of size of the currently drilling army to force limit will play a role for increasing leader pips. If you have a small nation, you are much more likely to have your whole army currently drilling compared to a very big nation with multiple stacks.
 
Normally I like to take these questions as they come in throughout the day but I've been swamped with meetings and such. I should be heading home by now but eh, what the hell, let's get cracking with some feedback and questions.

Does that scale with the absolute size of the army as well? For example, will a leader drilling 6 units out of a force limit of 8 have the same chance of improving as one drilling 60 units out of a limit of 80? Or will the latter have a higher chance because of the overall larger army?

It scales with forcelimit rather than absolute size of army. Small nations will not be penalized just because they can't field 60 units.

I have a no-tolerance policy regarding lower maintenance ... I love the fact that my armies are always 100% ready to kill.

You. I like you.

Why does Aq Koyunlu have 5 PP from the start?

Age objective + rivals

Look at new buttons/icons at the army screen! Warfare focused DLC?

Leaking teasing things in dev diary screenshots? Nope, never!

how will the Army Drill relate to army tradition?

Rather than tradition, Drilling will impact [REDACTED]

No Persia dlc :-( TF.... Perhaps next week.

We have quite a number of dev diaries to bring, stay tuned on Tuesdays.

Why do all people never read the last line of all the Dev-Dairys?

Moooo~.

Can we drill during war? Can army in a drill stance attack and move? I hope that won't become an exploit with mothballing half of your army and fighting small wars with another half.

Drilled units are stationary and moving them will end their drill. During drill they also have their morale set to 0.5 to prevent this.

@DDRJake Would love to take a small look at the possible new tradegoods in China proper!

I'll keep this in mind for the upcoming dev dairy!

Will the steppe get more livestock than the other area's?

Undoubtedly. The vast ovine domination of the steppes have been nerfed.

Good morning?

It was morning when I wrote it.

@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?

The Cost of Army Drilling is having your Drilling units cost full maintenance regardless of the maintenance slider and said units being reduced to low morale (0.5)

when you add this new countries to game?

On the release of 1.23. We do not have an exact release date to share currently, but as this is our 4th developer diary on 1.23 and its accompanying expansion, well, I'm sure there are people who are willing to guess.

Frisian/holsteen cows in the Egyptian desert looks weird.

This is true, but when creating icons for things we must ensure that they are easy to recognize at a glance. We would be mooving to a far too complex affair if we were to milk the trade good system to model many different livestocks and that's not a step I dairy to take.

@DDRJake

I liked this mechanic for about twenty seconds. Then it came to me.

You're going to code the AI to relentlessly drill, aren't you? On VH, with their 50% cheaper maintenance. And I'm going to be stuck fighting +10% everything everyones until the end of eternity.

You monster.

(well played)

Now now, in Very Hard mode, the AI only gets a 33% reduction to maint....ah! I see what you're getting at. Say no more!
 
Looks wierd thus far.
Isn't this something like what you didn't wanna add at first, like mothballable armies? So you can pay(drill) for one army you wanna use and they'll be as good as fully maintenanced army? Gonna wait for more explicit information, thus far feature looks a bit dumm and unfaire.
 
Apart from horses, camels, cows, pigs, and dairy products, Livestock now covers a fair number of the pastoralists in the world. Previously they were always assigned wool. :)
Wool and Grain are now much more clearly for regions that actually produced cereal or wool.

okay, stop. But there's still enough grain to for the achievement "I'll gaze my horse"? xD
 
Can navies also drill?

It would also be nice if drilling armies next to other country borders would slightly increase the aggressive expansion penalty. (Would not affect allies).
 
This drill-meter thing seems unnecessary. I would make it so that drilling armies reduces army tradition decay. But I like the idea of drilling. It honestly seemed to be lacking from the base game.

Guess we are getting Art of War 2? This may be good. This may even be awesome. Hope you guys at paradox don't break the game for those who do not have specified DLC like you did with Common Sense.
 
From the screenshot, it seems that drilling will be quite fast, as it took one single month for the Mamluks troops to reach 80% or their potential. Of course, it could have been console-altered, but it kinda feel like it is the expected result.
 
To be honest I am a bit concerned about power creep with the military of larger nations getting more and more powerful making them even more superior over mid sized countries.
 
It's always been one free patch -> one free patch + dlc -> one free patch -> one free patch + dlc and so on. What are you talking about?
I think he meant that it used to be one paid DLC for every two patches, i.e. alternating. Now it appears that 100% of patches will include paid content, since 1.22 was also paid. Not to mention the fact that the time between 1.20 and 1.21 was an unprecedented 19 days, meaning very little actual content went into that free patch.
 
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Nice chevron, there. Looking forward to being able to actually have feared and reputable armies as opposed to just nameless drones pumped from a factory.

I may actually name my armies now...
 
I wonder how this effects Discipline, because from my understanding part of discipline thing was how well drilled your units were, but that drill I becoming its own thing...
 
Map changes seems fine army drilling seems pointless. There are already several features representing similar concepts. Morale of armies, discipline, army tradition, prussian militarism and so on.
 
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