Europa Universalis IV: 1.33 Open Beta Updated (February 11th)

[Elraito]

Will there be any changes to republics? The loss of absolutism is not countered by the monarch point generation because the events constantly eat your republican tradition and thus you need to strengthen government so they are not even closely comparable anymore and putting -40 max absolutism to just being republic nuked the more flavorful republics like milans, swiss or dutch ones.

 

[Sergeant Major Gross]

The way it works now is that you cannot select any provinces until you have the "Union with Bohemia" peace treaty selected. If you have done then you can conquer provinces atop of it.
In a way, it works like the Independence War works in 1.32 - you cannot take provinces unless you also demand your independence.

I'm so glad you listened to the players and did this instead of not allowing to take provinces at all. Now you will avoid that backlash at least.

 

[SaoMagnifico]

I don't love the CB and unconditional surrender changes, but I really don't love that they aren't clearly explained in tooltips. As I alluded to upthread, I used the Diplomatic Insult CB to declare a war only to discover taking provinces with that CB has — without it being noted in the tooltip — been disabled. (Vassalization is still allowed though!)

If I might suggest another change: Why not add a main menu option to disable the unconditional surrender mechanic? IMO the game worked fine without it, and I'd probably turn it off if I could since I rarely play ironman and don't care about achievements.

 

[subzero12479]

I don't love the CB and unconditional surrender changes, but I really don't love that they aren't clearly explained in tooltips. As I alluded to upthread, I used the Diplomatic Insult CB to declare a war only to discover taking provinces with that CB has — without it being noted in the tooltip — been disabled. (Vassalization is still allowed though!)

If I might suggest another change: Why not add a main menu option to disable the unconditional surrender mechanic? IMO the game worked fine without it, and I'd probably turn it off if I could since I rarely play ironman and don't care about achievements.

you can already use a mod to change/remove the effects of unconditional surrender.

 

[Jxkeh]

Is anyone having issues with AI allies not helping during wars? Every war I declare my allies' troops walk to the furthest province away from the enemy they own and refuse to move to help me, even in battles only a couple of provinces away from them. Any help is appreciated!

 

[Sergeant Major Gross]

- Added a birthday for the ruler of Morocco.

 

[James Capstick]

Will there be any changes to republics? The loss of absolutism is not countered by the monarch point generation because the events constantly eat your republican tradition and thus you need to strengthen government so they are not even closely comparable anymore and putting -40 max absolutism to just being republic nuked the more flavorful republics like milans, swiss or dutch ones.

We put -40 on republics in general, but then altered all the level one republican government reforms to make it overall work exactly the same as before, except there's now a that -40 penalty for NOT having a level one reform selected. Most of the level one reforms allow you to claw some of that penalty back, e.g. Swiss Cantons used to be -30 itself, it's now +10.

 

[James Capstick]

Did you not catch my point that it's not necessarily in their best interests since other nations that is at war with the player can unsiege their provinces, allowing them to come back?

Fair, but can't this argument be extended to a situation where a player who is significantly stronger than the AI declaring on them? To avoid devastation and losing their army, they should just unconditionally surrender immediately, no?

Is it possible you can list some of these refinements that your team is looking into? I'm curious...

Personally, I find the idea of suffering heavy war exhaustion in a war that I don't want to peace out for one more year due to inherent game limitations (like the points I mentioned before) more unenjoyable than swallowing the pill to micromanage a stack to prevent AIs from unconditionally surrendering, so I'd be doing the latter.

I'm not sure if this is due to a language barrier, but I sense a bit of sarcasm; are you implying that people who are complaining are bad at the game and can't time wars properly? Given how RNG heavy EU4 wars are (battles, sieges, etc.), it's not possible to accurately predict when you will finish wars, and deviations of a year or so is normal in my experience. The standard call for peace (5 years) seems to be a reasonable limiter already for what you seem to be talking about.

- catch my point..... yes, that's one of the refinements we're looking into.
- immediate unconditional surrender.....yes, sometimes it might be beneficial for the AI to do this, but we think that would make it too easy for the player and AI blobs to just hoover up nations fast.
- other refinements...we can't list all of them as it's still under discussion, but if you've enough troops left on your side to siege back provinces is definitely one, although if the ratio is hopeless then they'll still most likely surrender. It is possible that bluntly adding WE is not the best penalty for ignoring unconditional surrender, but it is an effective way of disincentivising a human exploit.
- sarcasm....not really, it's more about a change of thought process. Certainly in my experience of the game, the main reason I've left a war won for a couple of years or more is what you said earlier, and I've definitely done it a lot:

1. They want their AE to tick down before peacing out and/or first declare on other nations who will join a coalition. Waiting for OE to tick down is a similar reason.

...and it's really a consequence of me not thinking through properly my timing, trying to "game" the AI, or simply getting impatient, which isn't something to be rewarded. Plus, it's a human tactic. If you're in a war against another human, and you've lost, you unconditionally surrender for precisely the same reason we're getting the AI to - it's in your interest.

I personally don't think the act of unconditionally surrendering is something that can validly be argued against (with tweaks as to exactly when it happens), although what happens as a result of ignoring it may be.....but the aim is to close "exploit" loopholes and I think this is important.

 

[adin85]

There will be Dev diary today?.

 

[Romanix90]

Yeah, will there be DD today?

 

[Manwe_Sulimo]

This is pretty inconvinient. This buttos is for checking the exact values of loans you have to pay. They buttons to pay out loans were already disables, so why would you disable this as well?

I fully agree, this is a big problem, as you don't get an overview of your loans anymore and it it makes impossible to consolidate old small loans for larger loans to reduce inflation and avoid the loan cap.

Another UI issue: It would also be great to have a button showing available Estate privileges when you have 4 privileges handed out -> currently you need to spend 20 loyalty for this by removing a privilege and worst case hand out the same privilege again.

 

[lambda x.x]

- other refinements...we can't list all of them as it's still under discussion, but if you've enough troops left on your side to siege back provinces is definitely one, although if the ratio is hopeless then they'll still most likely surrender. It is possible that bluntly adding WE is not the best penalty for ignoring unconditional surrender, but it is an effective way of disincentivising a human exploit.

Cool, these all sound fantastic for the "final version" of making AIs properly use unconditional surrender

- sarcasm....not really, it's more about a change of thought process. Certainly in my experience of the game, the main reason I've left a war won for a couple of years or more is what you said earlier, and I've definitely done it a lot:

1. They want their AE to tick down before peacing out and/or first declare on other nations who will join a coalition. Waiting for OE to tick down is a similar reason.

...and it's really a consequence of me not thinking through properly my timing, trying to "game" the AI, or simply getting impatient, which isn't something to be rewarded.

I don't think that is always the case; you could very well declare a war thinking it'll take 3 years, but due to very lucky siege/battle RNG, you finish sieging everything in 1.5 years. I don't think that's your or the player's fault, and I'm not sure if that should be punished.

Plus, it's a human tactic. If you're in a war against another human, and you've lost, you unconditionally surrender for precisely the same reason we're getting the AI to - it's in your interest.

Yes, I definitely agree with that.

I personally don't think the act of unconditionally surrendering is something that can validly be argued against (with tweaks as to exactly when it happens),

I agree with that, but I think it's extremely important to emphasize "with tweaks as to exactly when it happens."

although what happens as a result of ignoring it may be.....but the aim is to close "exploit" loopholes and I think this is important.

I can also understand and sympathize with the patch all exploits sentiment. However, my point is that this change does not at all patch anything, since my proposal of micromanaging a 1k to delay an unconditional surrender can be done at almost no cost to the player except micromanagement/sanity.

So in reality, I feel like there was an attempt to patch something but it didn't work since there is a workaround that costs minimal in game resources. As a side effect, this seems to cause weird scenarios (unconditionally surrendering when perhaps it still has a chance to come back, like in the example of AIs with troops) and isn't yet refined enough to account for many edge cases. To me, it seems like it is better to iterate on this great idea internally instead of iterating across public patches, because as of currently, I really don't think this makes any meaningful difference to the whole patching exploits movement except adding slight tedium to players.

Also, I'd like to add that you don't seem to be able to offer demands against unconned nations. That also seems weird to me.

 

[xwavew]

I don't understand the purpose of AI unconditionally surrendering at 100% warscore. Has a justification been given for this?

This is good, because some players declare war and stay in war for 10 years until AE decrease and can take more land without coalition.

 

[RhoxOS]

- The Korean mission "Build to Force Limit" now revokes the "Inwards Perfection" estate privilege if done by a player.

I think the name of the mission needs to be changed into something like "Prepare invasion" or "Revoke inward perfection" or "Outgoing destiny" or even "To broadly benefit the human world (홍익인간; Hongik Ingan)"?

The mission name looks like a generic one and players are having a hard time figuring out that this mission is the one that revokes the privilege.




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EDIT:
If the mission name changes into "To broadly benefit the human world" the description should also change like this:

Yangban scholars say an only a handful of an army is mandatory as long as the northern border is secure from the Jurchens raiders and southern shores are secure from Japanese pirates. They say the burdens of peasants are too heavy and we need to lessen their's by disarmament and mothballing forts. They say take care of our people and others will follow the precedent.

How wrong could we be? This is just a self-justification of only caring for our own people and forsaking everyone else. We need to follow our ancient teachings and benefit all human beings. If others are not willing to listen, we'll do it by force. To do that, first, we'll need to maintain a reasonably sized army.

Yeah, I get a bit carried away.

 

[Noble Steel]

Hopefully some of the stuff I wrote about in my threads in getting worked on/will be discussed in the dev diary today. You guys have been cranking so much content out! Can't wait!

 

[wkscrombie]

No dev diary today?

 

[BigHamster]

- immediate unconditional surrender.....yes, sometimes it might be beneficial for the AI to do this, but we think that would make it too easy for the player and AI blobs to just hoover up nations fast.

Might I propose absolute oposite to surrender.
I wander if it would be a valid option to have AI sometimes be as stubborn as human and go into huge debt and go over forcelimit and not accept any deals but stabhits, just not to lose war or at least make war for opponent as expencive as it can. It should not happend often but probability of having such a war might spice game a bit.

 

[santali]

Since 1.33 does rework China and Manchu a fair bit, I was wondering if there is a possibility for a tweak for the "Mandate of Heaven" Manchu mission. It gives the "Mukden Palace" modifier in the nation's capital. Since forming Manchu moves your capital to Jilin, and forming Qing to Beijing, there is no way for the modifier to be in it's historical place of Shenyang, unless the player explicitly spends admin for that purpose in-between formations. Since Mukden is simply the Manchu name for the very city of Shenyang, the most obvious tweak imo would be for the mission reward to apply the modifier to the province, regardless of what the player's capital is, provided that the player still owns Shenyang of course.

 

[Katrex]

Not sure if the centralize and concentrate changes are exactly where they need to be, but I think they are in a good enough spot to spend a few months testing them in Mps before making further ajustments.

 

[Katrex]

- Centralize State now decreases State Governing Cost by 25%, and now affects only the state, not the whole country, while State Maintenance is reduced by 20%. It also increases the Local Prosperity Growth by 0.1, while the action now costs 50 ADM.
- Centralize State Governing Reform now costs 50 Reform Progress instead of 100 due to the newly added Admin cost.
- Expand Infrastructure now costs 50 ADM, and increases governing cost by 10% + 15 Governing Cost flat instead of 50% Governing cost + 100 Flat Governing Cost. Additionally, it now only increases Local Defensiveness by 5% per level instead of 15% (same goes for Local Garrison Growth). The Monthly Autonomy reduction has been increased from -0.001 to -0.005.

It appears that the expand infrastructure +15 governing cost, applies after the percentage reduction rather than before.

Eg a 30 dev province will with 2 centralizations and a town hall and a statehouse will cost 0.3 gov capacity, and then when you expand infrastructure twice (15 + 10%), it costs 30.3, rather than 0.6
Essentially making investing in town halls and statehouses useless if you plan to expand infrastructure.

I hope this is a bug, and wont be too dificult to fix?