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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 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
Would be good to tie it to ages
 
With the additions of these new resources, it is becoming clear that EU IV is just a testing ground for the true flagship of Paradox games - Victoria III! As it should be.

All hail Victoria!
 
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.
Exactly :D.

"So your 5/4/6 heir is almost of an age finally? No not going to happen, Strange fever event on you!" :p
 
It would be a nice cosmetic feature to have localized recruitment graphics. In the sense that if you are Britain and raise a regiment in India, the soldiers use British uniform but look Indian. Or if you are Russia and raise regiments in Central Asia, the regiments wear Russian uniforms but look Turkic.
 
Drilling armies will cost full maintenance, regardless of the budget slider and will contribute well towards having a better, more professional army
Ok, but what do you mean by that? When you say Full Maintenance, do you mean that you need to have the slider at 100% for it to take effect, or that it'll take 100% of what you put into maintenance to do its thing?
 
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.
Your comment made me laugh quite a bit... thanks.
 
A Drilled army will cost its full maintenance, regardless of whatever maintenance you have chosen.
So it'll cost whatever it normally cost Pre-DLC? Good, good...
 
Now why would you use this horrific Frisian cattle as the symbol for overall livestock? If you want to use cattle as representaion, at least use a somewhat more generic, brownish one instead of this milk cow that is way too prevalent in our modern mindsets of dairy cattle, but is very immersion-breaking in many areas of the world when playing a historic game like this.

P.S: It is a tiny complaint, i know-but to me, the small crtic points only show how great of a game EU4 really is :)
 
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Now why would you use this horrific Frisian cattle as the symbol for overall livestock? If you take cattle, at least use a somewhat more generic, brownish one instead of this milk cow that is way too prevalent in our modern mindsets of dairy cattle, but is very immersion-breaking in many areas of the world when playing a historic game like this.

P.S: It is a tiny complaint, i know-but to me, the small crtic points only show how great of a game EU4 really is :)
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I love how the trade good map is now 75% cows instead of wheat. These are the changes I like
 
I love how the trade good map is now 75% cows instead of wheat. These are the changes I like

I guess we'll all just have to eat more chicken to avoid upsetting our new bovine overlords.
 
I'm not so quite convinced that the drilling boni are doing all that much for you but we will have to wait until launch to see that.
I rate the possibility to train general pips as far more important than having a drilled army. Having that extra shock pip can easily offset those 10% boni you get.

I also don't like the decision to bind pip-training to force limit. If you have 3 army stacks merge them to 1 to train them, then you have to manually reassign your stacks again which is unnecessary micromanaging there. I would really like to see a better solution that doesn't end in endless micromanagement.

Last, I also share the thought that the Frisian cow is simply a bad choice for livestock. Both for historical and recognition reasons. It would be far better to have a goat and a brown cow as the icon. I can't really see how this could be more irritating than the current picture. Frisian cows in Arabia is just.... ugh ...
 
One more thing that i wonder about is that will i be able to set my vassals to do army drilling during peace time?
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No