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EU4 - Development Diary - 05 of June 2018

Hello! Today we’ll talk about yet another system reworked in Dharma and another feature to make European presence in the rest of the world more interesting. Let’s start with the new feature.

So when we talked about the Charter Trade Company feature, a bunch of you wondered why in the name of Shiva would an Indian ever surrender a province to the Westerners even for a big pile of gold? So I am here to answer that.

We’ve had since Wealth of Nations that you could create Trade Companies in special Charter Regions of the world. It was always a pet peeve for me how they worked out and always wanted more out of it. Company provinces never really covered the interaction you had between the various companies and the local rulers of the area. The initial interaction between the Europeans and India was one of trade, except one… staring at you Portugal. Either way we wanted a way for Europeans and Indians to benefit from each others presence… at first at least :)

So now when a European have established their Trade Company they can further their investments in them by building them up. You’ll have 10 investments you can build up per area you have a company present in, and 5 special ones you can build per charter. They are not the cheapest, the lowest going for 300 ducats, it’s upgrade 600 and the special ones goes for a 1000 ducats. So someone wanting to exploit the full riches of the Far East is going to heavily invest their resources into it.

eu4_13.png


The effects of these investments in their benefits given to you are fairly powerful but most of them also gives bonii to the immediate area or even the larger area for some of them. A little note though they do not stack with modifiers from other nations investments. Here’s an ambitious attempt to list them in full, in case not specified otherwise, the effect is only on the area they are built in.
  • Local Quarter - 300 Ducats
    • +15% Defensiveness, 25% Supply Limit for your TC Provinces
  • Permanent Quarters - 600 Ducats
    • Upgrades from Local Quarters
    • 30% Defensiveness, 50% Supply Limit to your TC Provinces
  • Officers’ Mess - 1000 Ducats
    • 1 Per Trade Company Charter
    • +5 Land Force Limit for TC Owner
  • Company Warehouse - 300 Ducats
    • +2 Local Trade Power to your TC Provinces
    • 25% Production Efficiency in entire Area
  • Company Depot - 600 Ducats
    • Upgrades from Company Warehouse
    • +4 Local Trade Power to your TC Provinces
    • 50% Production Efficiency in entire Area
  • Admiralty - 1000 Ducats
    • 1 Per Trade Company Charter
    • +5 Naval Force Limit for TC Owner
  • Brokers Office - 300 Ducats
    • +25% Production Efficiency to your TC Provinces
    • 0.15 Goods Produced in entire Area
  • Brokers Exchange - 600 Ducats
    • Upgrades from Brokers Office
    • 50% Production Efficiency to your TC Provinces
    • 0.30 Goods Produced in entire Area
  • Property Appraiser - 1000 Ducats
    • 1 Per Trade Company Charter
    • 50% Trade Steering in Trade Node of Charter for TC Owner.
  • <Adjective> Settlements - 300 Ducats
    • 25% Tax Modifier in your TC Provinces
    • -7.5 Development Cost in Area
  • <Adjective> District - 600 Ducats
    • Upgrades from Settlements
    • 50% Tax Modifier in your TC Provinces
    • -15 Development Cost in Area
  • <Adjective> Township - 1000 Ducats
    • 1 Per Trade Company Charter
    • 10% Trade Value on entire Trade Company Charter.
  • Company Administration - 300 Ducats
    • +25% Local Manpower, +25% Local Sailors in your TC Provinces.
  • Military Administration - 600 Ducats
    • Upgrades from Company Administration
    • +50% Local Manpower, +50% Local Sailors in your TC Provinces
  • Governor General’s Mansion - 1000 Ducats
    • 1 Per Trade Company Charter
    • -2% Ship Cost for TC Owner.
Note that this is till work in progress and numbers are subject to change as we test for balance.

That’s it for Trade Company Investments, next up is the system rework that we’ve been so cruel to hint around about on the Dev Clash stream.

There are 120 different policies but there are a very few select that stand out as favorites making pretty much most of it obsolete. Never cared for that and wanted to see a lot more interesting builds be available we’ve reworked the entire thing to change how you interact with it, but also rebalanced a big bunch of them. No longer is Quality Standard policy giving you 5% discipline an Administration policy and the 50% Transport Combat Ability policy is gone. But we’ll get to that later.

First let’s dive into the mechanical changes we’ve done. You can no longer activate 5 policies anymore but you enact 3 per category of monarch power. This means you can at max have 3 policies activated in each category. You also get 1 policy for free per category in order to promote long-term usage. These numbers are however not fixed, some government reforms will let you tweak these, national ideas can also be a source like the Deccan ideas who get an extra administrative policy for free. However this requires Dharma.

eu4_12.png


So for how we went through and balanced these, removed old bad policies, added new interesting ones, I’m not even going to attempt to list 120 policies in this diary. But instead I’ll share an image of the document I used to view everything at once so I knew sort of how it was looking.

capture(194).png

Yet again I can not stress enough, all of these numbers are work in progress!



Hope you’ve enjoyed this dev diary and that it has been meaty enough for you. Next one will be covered by your favorite scotsman, Jake, who will go through some much requested quality of life features.
 
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The answer to your question, yes I have played OPM's especially Mysore and conquered all of India and Britain. BS you say? Well I just happen to be from Mysore, and it is nation I wanted to play. I have played Albania, Byzantium, Granada as well successfully. Is that hard enough? When I say I want the game to be hard, I want it to be near impossible for me as England to have PU over France, Scotland, Portugal, Austria and vassals like the entire Ireland, Britanny, Savoy, Norway, and Dutch vassals (of Burgundy) by the early 1500s.

Ohh I also played that Safavid minor and formed the ancient Persian Empire, Ardibil into Achemenid was it?
Those are some impressive runs. It *would* have been BS had you only played the Ottomans and complained about the game being too easy, and I’m glad to confirm that it isn’t the case. Then, with your experience I believe you’d agree that OPM starts aren’t ‘easy’, unlike majors? Isn’t there still fun in that, at least until you reach the point where nobody poses a challenge to you?

On the other hand, if you’ve reached the skill level that you can achieve that England with 4 PUs and vassals everywhere by the early 1500s, it would mean that you’ve essentially mastered the game, so mayne EU4 has already given to you all it can offer you. Perhaps it’s a sign that it’s time to move on to another game? Either that or you’ll have to chase ever greater highs like Florry to make the game fun, or perhaps try out different mods like Common Universalis or MEIOU that provide a very different gameplay experience, maybe something that’s more suited to your tastes.

Or, if you’re arguing on the base of historicity that this kind of thing shouldn’t be possible, then well, isn’t this game all about breaking history? It’s ultimately a strategy game, using history as the context, not the framework. And while I too would like things like internal politics to be represented better, which could also make the game more challenging in a sense, at its core EU4 is a game of numbers, and it’s not easy to represent history as it was even if that were the design motive.
 
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Policies reworked? Includes a free one? Thanks goodness. Policies felt like wasted potential in a mechanic, and not well-integrated into the gameplay. This looks good.
 
Diplo humanist, meh, improved relations not that great in multiplayer, when its useful early game with lots of ai, means i have to delay a mil idea group untill admin tech 10? No thanks.
Diplo defensive, useless, number of relations is not my bottleneck
Diplo plutocratic is nice, but requries you to be a republic. Republics in the hre have a reasonable excuse to go diplo first then defensive, (someone like dithmarchen)
Diplo quality is yeah sort of all right. But not sure it makes diplo good enough to warrant taking.
Influence humanist, seems completely useless for me also.

Seems you seem to value aditional diplomats and relations a lot. While they are situationally useful, not worth taking a bad idea group for.


Diplo offensive is frankly the most tempting reason to take it, and that competes with other mil policies so its really a trap pick
 
@Athanatidas @Groogy Seriously, it's bonuses.
bo·nus
ˈbōnəs/
noun
noun: bonus; plural noun: bonuses
bonus, a, um, adj. for duonus, cf. bellum, bis, and cf. root dvi-, I. good; comp. melior, us, better; sup. optimus, best. -Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary
Now, we probably should be using bonum, bona, but if you're gonna use the masculine substantive form, the plural is boni, not bonii, otherwise the nominative would have to be bonius or perhaps bonus with a genitive bonius. And "bonuses", seriously? That would be third declension!
 
Diplo humanist, meh, improved relations not that great in multiplayer, when its useful early game with lots of ai, means i have to delay a mil idea group untill admin tech 10? No thanks.
Diplo defensive, useless, number of relations is not my bottleneck
Diplo plutocratic is nice, but requries you to be a republic. Republics in the hre have a reasonable excuse to go diplo first then defensive, (someone like dithmarchen)
Diplo quality is yeah sort of all right. But not sure it makes diplo good enough to warrant taking.
Influence humanist, seems completely useless for me also.

Seems you seem to value aditional diplomats and relations a lot. While they are situationally useful, not worth taking a bad idea group for.


Diplo offensive is frankly the most tempting reason to take it, and that competes with other mil policies so its really a trap pick
Well it would've helped if you mentioned beforehand that you're playing MP.
 
But i mean even in single, youre obviously taking admin ideas. humanist or religious. Economic inovative trade, and a bunch of mill ideas. Still not much room for diplo.

Assuming you're not going exploration.

Maybe you could argue for diplomacy or influence in the hre... Still abit grim. And more importatnly the policies really dont make it less so.
 
I'm still scratching my head at how removing annexation cost policy "encourages vassal play". There's no coherent basis for that; nerfing the cost proposition of vassals --> annex will discourage vassal use, not encourage it.

If the goal is really to encourage vassal play, a more coherent approach than nerfing them would be to fix them. Ignoring objectives, supportive focus = enter enemy territory alone and ignore attach, making buildings (even manufactories!) in uncored provinces, terrible army composition, awful UI for granting provinces...these are just a few things you can expect to "enjoy" with keeping vassals around.

The inability to control movement is a deal breaker, and the DLC features for it don't work. If we could get subjects that actually build full combat width front/back of cannons, maybe they're not completely worthless to keep around. Even then, the AI will never pre-position for war and move speed is slow so this is STILL slower than just controlling own units, but you'd at least have less of a liability.

Altering annexation cost in this environment rather than talking about the overtly broken aspects is missing the point. Realistically, so are the India choices. It's one of the best cost propositions in the game right now as-is. Making it stronger is awkward...what's the design goal of buffing the strongest options in the game and nerfing weaker ones?
 
This is all very interesting, but it seems like the already very powerful Trade Companies are about to become absurdly powerful...

This. Actually what I think is that there are two situations at play here:

1. Player selectively takes COTs etc, makes some local 'friends'/subjects, but local AI countries still exist: sure, give more ways to invest in this situation without blobbing (and remove the silly events that keep badgering you into taking more provinces).

2. Player paints the entirety of TC-land in their colour, giving a ridiculously large amount of zero-autonomy land with a ton of bonuses on top: this is already massively over-rewarded (with the cherry on the cake being the result that countries with a mostly Asian power base are actively rewarded for putting their capital in literally any other continent). In India especially, it's bonkers how easy it is to just casually form Mughals (something else that's apparently getting buffed in Dharma DLC) and cover the entire Indian subcontinent in TC-able territorial cores at a bargain basement price.

To make trade enclaves more than just a prelude to all-out conquest, and make some kind of sense out of the idea that local powers will voluntarily invite Europeans etc into TC-land, new beneficial mechanics are needed to encourage 1., together with nerfs to the raw value of simply owning a ton of TC provinces. I don't see how the mechanics introduced in this dev diary do anything to achieve this relative shift though. I worry that this will be another example of making the trade game more profitable for blobs without giving any rewards for building a more nuanced empire, like when they made the TC goods production bonus apply equally to all provinces (previously it was only provinces owned by countries with non-TC-eligible tech, so there was something of a trade-off between production income and trade income), or when they abolished protectorates (removing the main 'indirect rule' option for controlling TC-land on a large scale).
 
But i mean even in single, youre obviously taking admin ideas. humanist or religious. Economic inovative trade, and a bunch of mill ideas. Still not much room for diplo.

Assuming you're not going exploration.

Maybe you could argue for diplomacy or influence in the hre... Still abit grim. And more importatnly the policies really dont make it less so.
I think you may be in the minority in thinking Innovative and Trade outmatch Diplomatic and Influence for single player performance.
 
One of the most impactful and yet unnoticed changes is allowing both MR and TC goods production bonus to apply to your own provinces.

Previously, killing every competitor in the node meant that you would no longer get the goods production bonus. It was basically one of the few trade mechanics that rewarded coexistence, and taking a few strategic provinces over massacring everyone in the node.

So that's gone now, in place of that tradeoff you now have an average ~25% goodsproduced bonus on every node you 100%'d. Do devs even realize this bonus exists and the impact of this change?

I don't think something like this change is made accidentally, but I can hardly imagine that its consequences were carefully considered.
 
Those are some impressive runs. It *would* have been BS had you only played the Ottomans and complained about the game being too easy, and I’m glad to confirm that it isn’t the case. Then, with your experience I believe you’d agree that OPM starts aren’t ‘easy’, unlike majors? Isn’t there still fun in that, at least until you reach the point where nobody poses a challenge to you?

On the other hand, if you’ve reached the skill level that you can achieve that England with 4 PUs and vassals everywhere by the early 1500s, it would mean that you’ve essentially mastered the game, so mayne EU4 has already given to you all it can offer you. Perhaps it’s a sign that it’s time to move on to another game? Either that or you’ll have to chase ever greater highs like Florry to make the game fun, or perhaps try out different mods like Common Universalis or MEIOU that provide a very different gameplay experience, maybe something that’s more suited to your tastes.

Or, if you’re arguing on the base of historicity that this kind of thing shouldn’t be possible, then well, isn’t this game all about breaking history? It’s ultimately a strategy game, using history as the context, not the framework. And while I too would like things like internal politics to be represented better, which could also make the game more challenging in a sense, at its core EU4 is a game of numbers, and it’s not easy to represent history as it was even if that were the design motive.

I agree, but what I am on about is that different parts of the world posed different challenges, they are now homogenizing everything. Makes the game bland. For the sake of PC culture, they are making it super easy for Eastern nations to be tech savvy as Europe. What is even the point of Technology types now; Eastern, Western, Anatolian, Muslim, Indian, etc. what do they even impact in game? I can pick many more points in which the game has gotten easier and easier, but I am sure they know that they are doing it too.
 
I agree, but what I am on about is that different parts of the world posed different challenges, they are now homogenizing everything. Makes the game bland. For the sake of PC culture, they are making it super easy for Eastern nations to be tech savvy as Europe. What is even the point of Technology types now; Eastern, Western, Anatolian, Muslim, Indian, etc. what do they even impact in game? I can pick many more points in which the game has gotten easier and easier, but I am sure they know that they are doing it too.
Surely, with the Renaissance etc. usually starting in Europe, it's very much harder for Asian states than European states to embrace the Institutions and thus get Tech costs low? My view was that they were trying to evoke the root causes of tech disparity more, rather than saying "you get Tech slowly because you have a label syaing you do". For me, at least, that enhances the quality of the game.
 
I agree, but what I am on about is that different parts of the world posed different challenges, they are now homogenizing everything. Makes the game bland. For the sake of PC culture, they are making it super easy for Eastern nations to be tech savvy as Europe. What is even the point of Technology types now; Eastern, Western, Anatolian, Muslim, Indian, etc. what do they even impact in game? I can pick many more points in which the game has gotten easier and easier, but I am sure they know that they are doing it too.
Indeed the only differences between tech groups are shared maps and unit pips, the latter of which only really matter for Anatolian and horde nations, and western being slightly better than everyone else late game. With the introduction of institutions tech groups aren’t as relevant as they used to be.

That being said, I abhor the idea of giving certain tech groups a flat increase in tech cost, as Westernisation wasn’t even a thing in 1444, not to mention the tentacles of knowledge necessary to westernise back in the earlier patches, which is why I still vastly prefer the new institutions system. However, I’m definitely open to the idea of making the pips difference in tech groups increasingly apparent as the game progresses, but only if there are more options to change tech group that aren’t like the old Westernisation mechanic which you had to border a western nation. As far as I know, right now it’s impossible to change tech groups outside of formation decisions like Qing.
 
bonus, a, um, adj. for duonus, cf. bellum, bis, and cf. root dvi-, I. good; comp. melior, us, better; sup. optimus, best. -Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary
Now, we probably should be using bonum, bona, but if you're gonna use the masculine substantive form, the plural is boni, not bonii, otherwise the nominative would have to be bonius or perhaps bonus with a genitive bonius. And "bonuses", seriously? That would be third declension!

Bonus and bonuses in the english language is not the same as the latin bonus/boni. It is rooted in latin, but original latin bonus is just "good", while the english bonus is "some positive extra". Plural of english bonus is bonuses.
 
Hello... When will you "reform" the portuguese geography too? Several provinces are missing... If you "found" 13 provinces in Ireland (I'm not saying that's wrong) why not in Portugal too?... Santarém, Leiria, Aveiro, Setúbal, Braga, Portalegre, Elvas (the most fortified city in the worl), Castelo Branco, Guimarães, etc.... Hope finally you put Damão (Daman) in India and I think that the game ignores that Cochim (Kochin) was one of the portuguese ports in India too... and the "Portuguese Guinea" too short in provincies too (Cachéu, Bijagós Archipelago, etc...)... And about Spain.. Galiza (Galícia) shoul be divided in 2 or 3 provinices and Sevilha (Sevilla/Seville) is not that big. I think you could make 2 provinces there, 1 would be Huelva with a port city, and an inner province, Sevilla! Angolan area I think that should be reformed too, too short in provinces.. Brazilian Areas: Please, connect Guapora with Manaus pls. XD By the way, you've been doing a great job in game guys, Egipt area, Congo Area and Madagascar too and looks like that India will be really cool. Gratz. But I'm just trying to help a lil bit in another areas too... Thanks guys.
 
Hello... When will you "reform" the portuguese geography too? Several provinces are missing... If you "found" 13 provinces in Ireland (I'm not saying that's wrong) why not in Portugal too?... Santarém, Leiria, Aveiro, Setúbal, Braga, Portalegre, Elvas (the most fortified city in the worl), Castelo Branco, Guimarães, etc.... Hope finally you put Damão (Daman) in India and I think that the game ignores that Cochim (Kochin) was one of the portuguese ports in India too... and the "Portuguese Guinea" too short in provincies too (Cachéu, Bijagós Archipelago, etc...)... And about Spain.. Galiza (Galícia) shoul be divided in 2 or 3 provinices and Sevilha (Sevilla/Seville) is not that big. I think you could make 2 provinces there, 1 would be Huelva with a port city, and an inner province, Sevilla! Angolan area I think that should be reformed too, too short in provinces.. Brazilian Areas: Please, connect Guapora with Manaus pls. XD By the way, you've been doing a great job in game guys, Egipt area, Congo Area and Madagascar too and looks like that India will be really cool. Gratz. But I'm just trying to help a lil bit in another areas too... Thanks guys.
You're not the first person to voice their desire for more provinces in Iberia, but this isn't the thread for it. They'll get to it when they get to it. They are never going to reveal what the future expansions are when they're still in the thick of the diaries for this one.
 
bonus, a, um, adj. for duonus, cf. bellum, bis, and cf. root dvi-, I. good; comp. melior, us, better; sup. optimus, best. -Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary
Now, we probably should be using bonum, bona, but if you're gonna use the masculine substantive form, the plural is boni, not bonii, otherwise the nominative would have to be bonius or perhaps bonus with a genitive bonius. And "bonuses", seriously? That would be third declension!
See: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...-05-of-june-2018.1103564/page-7#post-24333702

This is a commonly discussed topic online. You will not find a single dictionary that supports the plural of "bonus" being anything but "bonuses" in English.