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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.
 
Mao changes seems fine
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Unrelated to Dungen, I'm guessing the two unknown buttons in the bottom to being a button to replenish Fort garrison instantly from your army manpower, and the other is for a "dig in" with defensive bonus or "mothballing"
 
So it looks like the Eastern Balkans aren't getting any new provinces, which makes sense for a Middle East patch but still leaves me a bit disappointed. (Besides, the Balkans were traditionally part of the Near East.)

It also looks like drilling may be an indirect horde nerf. I often keep army maintenance up with non-hordes just because the non-microing is worth the income loss. However from my experience with hordes, you need to either be at war with war taxes raised (in which case you can't drill) or at peace with maintenance at zero (in which case you can't afford to drill). The hordes' AI neighbors will, however, drill relentlessly.

Unless adding a new religion (unlikely) a religion map mode screenshot couldn't reveal anything (probably)
I think it's likely that they'll at least add Zaydism, which would be the predominant religion in northern Yemen and Asir. It would probably cover about as much development as Ibadism with the new patch, and as many tags.
 
That general pip system looks super alarming for game balance, historicalness, and abuse cases.

Increasing your force limit now has an additional penalty of lowering your general pip chance. Countries with massive force limits that don't really use them until times of war (Russia) get punished as well.

It also encourages countries that don't really build up their force limit which just seems odd, as the two countries with the best generals (Prussia, France) both had massive force limits for their size.

Lastly, I'm afraid it's going to cause "general-farming" small countries in MP
 
Increasing your force limit now has an additional penalty of lowering your general pip chance. Countries with massive force limits that don't really use them until times of war (Russia) get punished as well.
Even if you fill your force limit, good luck training them all under one general and take a massive attrition.
 
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.

I thought Paradox' plans were to release one free update after each expansion...
Instead 1.21 was rushed in a few weeks, with only minor map changes and 1.23 is now also released with an expansion ?

I am also disappointed to see that expansions focus on features such as army drilling, which feel useless (if you want higher morale, simply pay your troops) potentially risking balance on top of that, while there are countless demands for improved mechanics (such as trade/elective monarchies) or even more for new peace mechanics such as law, centralization, development, population, which are still largely missing even after Cossacks estates
 
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Will there be new ideas that are related to drilling? e.g. lower drill decay or monthly drill gain? that would be interesting. although, if combined with countries like Prussia... the result could be horrific for the rest of the world
 
Will there be new ideas that are related to drilling? e.g. lower drill decay or monthly drill gain? that would be interesting. although, if combined with countries like Prussia... the result could be horrific for the rest of the world
Maybe they could finally nerf Prussia's deathball of stats and give them drill bonuses? If you give Ottomans Janissaries special units and remove their deathball stats, we'de be much closer to a fun game.
 
Drilling is pretty cool and a nice way to reward having army leaders during peacetime. Reminds me of how admirals boosting "protect trade" missions rewards having naval leaders during peacetime. Also encourages "tall" nations like Prussia to actually recruit normal soldiers and by extenstion care about their manpower pool. I'm guessing these were all deliberate choices.

Can rulers and heirs also drill? Will any Ideas or NIs be adjusted to give bonuses to drilling in some way?
 
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I like the idea of army drill, but that should spawn by 1520s at the start of early modern warfare, where armies started to become professionalized
 
I wonder what Florryworry's opinion on the new drilling feature is? Given his recent experience and all.