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EU4 - Development Diary - 7th of November 2017

Good day everyone. With Cradle of Civilization releasing on Thursday next week I want to round off on a last goodie bag of features, covering the few additions we haven't covered yet and the Achievements for 1.23.

Firstly, let's look at these Achievements and their awesome artwork by our talented artist @The Real Timor

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Great Moravia - Restore the Great Moravian borders as Nitra or Moravia

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Parisian Pasha - Assign Pasha to Paris

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Narcissism: Name a general after yourself and lead your army to victory.

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Protect the Secret - As Yemen, prevent any European Nation from owning a Coffee-producing province in the Old World until 1700.

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Sworn Fealty - Starting as an Arabian Tribal Federation, unite Arabia and have Maximum tribal Allegiance

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Saladins Legacy - Playing as Hisn Kayfa, reforge the Ayyubid Empire (conquer Egypt, Mashriq, Hejaz and Yemen).

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Multiculturalism - Have 4 different Cultures and 4 different religions represented in your court.

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The Prince of Egypt - Starting as Florence, form Egypt.

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A Hero’s Welcome - As Karaman, form the Sultanate of Rum

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Around The World In 80 Years - Starting as a Custom Nation of up to 400 points in the British Region, own New York, San Francisco, Suez, Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong and Yokohama by 1524.11.11

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Voltaire's Nightmare
- Have at least 75 countries in the HRE.

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Avar Khaganate - Achieve Empire rank and conquer Hungary as Avaria

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Cowardly Tactics: have a fort and a supply depot in a mountainous province producing livestock.

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David The Builder
- As Imereti, form Georgia and have no free building slots.

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Early-Modern Warfare
- Have 100 regiments at 100% Army Drill.

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Good King Renee - Starting as Provence, form the Kingdom of Jerusalem

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Bunte Kuh - As Hamburg, trade in both Gems and Livestock.

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Hard Bargaining - As Defender of a Muslim Faith, propagate your religion in The Moluccas through trade to convert 5 provinces.

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The Levant Turnabout - As the Mamluks, have 100 Army Professionalism and annex the Ottomans

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Pandya Empire : Starting as Madurai, conquer the Pandya Territories.

20 in total, we'll be excited to see how people go about getting some of these. It was already good fun seeing people speculating over what these could be when they were teased in the Feature Breakdown video. I just know I can't look at Moravia the same way ever again.


Next up I feel like I've been working my Advisors to the bone lately. As of Cradle of Civilization, you are able to give your Advisors a hard earned raise with Promote Advisor, a new interaction in the court tab allowing you to increase an Advisor's skill level by 1 in exchange for 5 years' of their salary. This is also a way to bring their level above the long-standing limit of 3 all the way up to 5, so if you have more money than you can possibly know what to do with, you can enjoy vastly increased benefits from a full court. The caveat is that only Advisors of your culture group or your promoted cultures are eligible for promotion. Nobody within or outwith the Court will approve of an unaccepted one rising through the ranks.

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A small addition that was teased last week is the addition of 2 new buildings, the Farm Estate and the Mill. These are both manufactories to coincide with the addition of new trade goods and come free with the 1.23 Persia Patch

Farm Estate unlocks at tech 6 and is an early-game Manufactory which works for the less glorious goods of Grain, Livestock and Wine.

Mill is a mid-game Manufactory available for the more lucrative goods of Paper, Gems, Tropical Wood, Glass and Chinaware.

Incense, as the 5th new trade good, is exploited with the Trade Station Manufactory which, as is indicated above, has shed some of its previous goods.

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Finally we have added the ability to Exploit Development in your provinces in Cradle of Civilization. When times are tight, you have to ask yourself if your denizens really need their homes, farmlands or their young. when exploiting the development in a province, you will permanently reduce its development by 1, and gain a lump-sum benefit from doing so.

Exploit Base Tax to gain 60 months' worth of that province's tax income
Exploit Production to gain 60 months' worth of that province's sailors
Exploit Base Manpower to gain 60 months' worth of that province's manpower

Of course, development must be at least 2 in a category for it to be exploitable, and this action requires at least a Territorial Core in that province. A province cannot be exploited in the 20 years following its last exploitation.

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And that about wraps things up. Also be sure to tune into our Twitch Channel as we launch into our latest Dev Clash campaign at 1500CET. To whet your appetite, meet the competitors.

 
Who would ever try to sacrifice dip dev to get more sailors? Sailors?!
Maybe It could give a small buff to trade goods for a short time in the name of 'aggressive production' or something.
 
Have you guys found the ai to be better at building manufactories and such now instead of forts and courthouses everywhere?
I'd like my vassals to not be bankrupt at least some of the time
 
Have you guys found the ai to be better at building manufactories and such now instead of forts and courthouses everywhere?
I'd like my vassals to not be bankrupt at least some of the time

In dev diary by 24th of October

"The AI has always been horribly bad at deciding where to build buildings, which means an experienced player could easily be many times richer and stronger than the AI after only 100 years, with the same development. This has now turned around completely. Instead of deciding buildings based on scripted rules, it now calculates precisely how much it will gain from building each building, convert all values to ducats, and consider how big a treasury they need for the return on investment to be worth it. The reaction from QA after their first handsoff game with the new building AI was “You have created a monster”. Indeed, late-game AI is extremely rich."
 
Saladins Legacy - Playing as Hisn Kayfa, reforge the Ayyubid Empire (conquer Egypt, Mashriq, Hejaz and Yemen).

So Ayyubid isn't formable?

Good King Renee - Starting as Provence, form the Kingdom of Jerusalem

Most pointless achievement ever. Why not just adjust the King of Jerusalem achievement if you were allowing Provence to form it? Hell; both achievements have 'King' in their name.

That said; I do like playing Provence... so I might have a shot at this one.

There are now two 'Form Jerusalem' achievements which seems pointless. I mean Provence is a slightly easier start... if you ignore PU threat via France for almost the entire game... or France deciding to eat you.

The Prince of Egypt - Starting as Florence, form Egypt.

I think this is the 1st achievement that outright requires a cultural shift. [Croatia can be done as Ragusa. Greece can be done by Naxos/Corfu/Athens] Unless; of course; the requirements to form Eygpt have changed.

Voltaire's Nightmare - Have at least 75 countries in the HRE.

There's no way to force nations to join the HRE; and there's only so many releasable nations. Kinda a bad achievement since it requires AI actions [AI joining the HRE]; not your own. Unless you're going to balkanize France and release the minors after adding their provinces to the HRE [Which requires you to core them; which seems overall very inefficient]

Nice reference to a mod however.

I just went in-game to check this acheivement:

Nations in the HRE in 1444: 58

Additional Nations that can be released within the HRE in 1444: Tyrol; Luxemborg; Hainaut; Thauringia; Moravia; Styria

Total: 64 / 75; and getting that would require annoying two Electors and no CB wars which would almost certainly lose you re-election and thus ability to add provinces easily to release later.

Note this 64 will also reduce as vassals get annexed [EG: Holstein; Montferrat; Silesia]; ; Shadow Empire fires; and infighting. Even if you add in all the French releaseables; you STILL don't get 75.

And good luck beating up Bohemia; Burgundy and France [Multiple times] as well as No CB'ing Saxony; while stopping the Shadow Empire as well.

This is a very hard achievement. Even if things happen like Burgundy getting cut down and deciding to join the HRE [But not fireing the inheritance while doing so] or TO joining.
 
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Most pointless achievement ever. Why not just adjust the King of Jerusalem achievement if you were allowing Provence to form it? Hell; both achievements have 'King' in their name.

That said; I do like playing Provence... so I might have a shot at this one.

Getting all old Anjou territories would have been better (including Jerusalem but also Naples and Sicily)
 
Have you guys found the ai to be better at building manufactories and such now instead of forts and courthouses everywhere?
I'd like my vassals to not be bankrupt at least some of the time

Last time I had the manufactories institution spawning I scrolled over to china, only to see it grow there in all provinces except those producing gold...
 
So will we able to use our Steam name in the game now ? Like for events and stuff ? (Don't know why anyone would, but we never know)
 
Who would ever try to sacrifice dip dev to get more sailors? Sailors?!
Maybe It could give a small buff to trade goods for a short time in the name of 'aggressive production' or something.

Since sailor maintenance/attrition is a thing, this can actually be useful. I definitely had situations where I had to call back my big warfleet because I was out of sailors during a prolonged overseas war.
 
Not to INSIST...

but can we please see the updated idea groups for any countries changed in the next patch? With only one dev diary that will likely be the patch notes it feels a bit like we can use the new idea group changes now.
 
I feel that this latest dev diary did add enough non-regional things to make me decide that I'm not overpaying. Still unlike Mandate, getting this one was not a no-brainer.
I guess that it also hurt that we didn't really see these features demonstrated in a multiplayer clash. Some features can sound awesome in the diary directly, like professionalism, and the Mamluk changes, others like the Islam changes are hard to evaluate from the dev diaries without seeing them play out.
The Asia dev clash did a lot to help build hype for Mandate, this latest dev clash mostly felt like a filler that was mostly watched for full Scottish.
 
So will we able to use our Steam name in the game now ? Like for events and stuff ? (Don't know why anyone would, but we never know)

Not really, I just added support so that specific achievement can test if the name of the general is the same as your steam name.
 
A new way to get manpower - interesting. I can see MIL having more and more importance (for certain play styles at least). Interesting.

Not sure anyone would ever exploit production though. Sailors really still kind of a joke (or are they??).

And this is an indirect buff to -development cost modifiers as well. All very interesting.
 
Was expecting War college/ War Academy for the 2 announced buildings to be honest.
Any chance the professionalism sistem to be implemented in to the naval warfare in the future?

PS: more provinces/ states to Wallachia/ Moldavia & Bulgaria