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Greetings to our most loyal and lovely mod enjoyers and creators. Community Manger Ryagi here to bring you a community made Mod Spotlight.
Before we begin showing off today's modding Shenanigans, we'd like to officially unveil our latest series over on YouTube . Our very own EU4 Modding Guide!
Whether you're crafting custom nations, designing unique religions, or scripting dynamic missions, this official 2025 tutorial series gives you everything needed to bring your grand strategy visions to life.
If you are reading this as it's released. Module 1 is out now, with the next 4 being released very swiftly!
Course Curriculum:
Module 1: Modding Basics – Setup, tools, and your first mod
Module 2: Nation Creation – Cultures, flags, and historical authenticity
Module 3: Creating Custom Event Chains
Module 4: Custom Religions & Mechanics – Modifiers, events, and balancing
Module 5: Mission Trees – Branches, triggers, and rewards
️
- Tools You’ll Learn: Paradox Modding LanguageLocalization & File ManagementDebugging & Testing Best Practices
Link here
We hope these guides will help beginners on their modding journey.
With that out of the way, lets have a look at creations cooked up for Season 4 of the EU4 Modathon. Most of you are probably familiar with the community run Modathon series by now. Incase you are not, Modathon is The biggest Europa Universalis IV modding event where people of all experience levels come together and make mods over a short 2 week period. Think a Game Jam, but for EU4 mods. The best part of these events is that, Anyone can participate, whether you're a veteran modder or trying it out for the first time.
Below are the Category winners for this Season, and the mods we'll be covering today, as voted on by participants and overserves:
Lets now hand it off to the modders themselves to talk about their work.
EU4 Chess
Have you ever thought that EU4 isn’t strategic enough? Have you wished for a single feature of this game with zero RNG? Or ever been bored in a 15 year regency, wishing you could actually play the strategy game you signed up for?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, or if you answered no to any of those questions, EU4 Chess is just the mod for you!
What is EU4 Chess? If the name somehow didn’t give it away, EU4 Chess adds the game of Chess into EU4. You can play against another player in a multiplayer game, or against the AI - more on that later.
Who needs the Atlantic Ocean anyways?
From this UI, you can select a piece you want to move. This will highlight all the squares that piece can move to. Select any of the highlighted squares, and hit the other button, to move the piece to that square. That’s it, your turn is done, and it’s time for your opponent to go!
Here, we can see how the knight on b1 can move
The game is over when one player checkmates another, or it ends in a draw. If at any point you feel like the game is going nowhere, or that you are guaranteed to lose, you can always offer your opponent a draw, or resign the game, both through a decision.
En passant is, of course, in the game. See if you can catch the AI Playing it!
The classic matchup, Byzantium and Persia, now fought out on a new battlefield
You can always change your piece’s visuals, even in the middle of a game. And don’t worry, there is a decision to change the theme of the AI’s pieces too, if you are playing against it, so you’ll never have to worry about a mismatch!
Sometimes, playing in 2d is just easier
What does this mean? Well, EU4 doesn’t allow modders to run external files or communicate on the network - so just using Stockfish or another premade computer wasn’t an option. The full chess engine code, everything it does, had to be fully implemented within EU4 itself - working around all the drawbacks that presents, because the devs obviously never intended someone to do this.
[skip this paragraph if you don’t like coding] The chess engine uses a Minimax with depth 4. EU4 does not allow recursion, and loading times scale exponentially if you attempt to mock it - this means the backbone of the Chess AI fires, on average, 25000 events each time the AI has to calculate (not doing this would lead to loading times measured in years, if my napkin math is accurate). Of course, depth 4 is not exactly phenomenal, but the game will freeze for minutes in calculations if you attempt to exceed this.
While this was a team project that would’ve been impossible without the contribution of all 4 team members, the code and the AI was all me, and I must say I’ve absolutely tanked my own sanity to bring you all EU4 Chess!!!!!!!! I hope you appreciate the sacrifice.
Failed bishop 3D model
The models were made in a well known program called Blender.This was my first time ever using Blender and I went from 0 hours to 55 in no time. The first step to creating the models was finding out how blender works. During that process, I slowly began gaining experience in the methods to make the model from scratch (extrude, shrinking/ fattening, etc). To make the models look as close to real life as possible, I used a background of chess pieces as reference material.
Chess pieces with background
As shown on the picture, the 3D models are overlaid with brown examples of the pieces. There was one piece I didn’t manage to make in time, which was the knight. This was because it was too hard to make the knight's face without it looking too flat or too ugly. That is why I used a free online model for that piece.
After the models were made, I had to shade and export them to EU4. Blender has an extension that makes it easier to export and shade models from Blender into a .mesh file for EU4. This extension goes by the name io_pdx_mesh and works for Blender version 4.2. The shading is done automatically and all I had to do was add the textures for the diffuse, normal and spectral. All the models did not use spectral and normal, so I could just add the nonormal.dds and nospec.dds files for those, which are included in the base game.
Shading for the persian king
Once this shading has been done one last part has to be made to apply the shading properly: UV mapping. The UV map makes it so the shading is applied in the way you want it to look. The UV map ended up being the most time consuming part since I had to manually change each part of the model in the UV map.
I enjoyed working together with my team on this project and will continue making 3D models for other projects as well. Hopefully I don’t have to leave my bed at 5 AM for Sol next time .
V-Guy-fighter / Scrublord666 - 3d piece art, all theming
Xorme - Chessboard art, 2d piece art, ui art
Lemon Cake - The Chessboard, playtesting
Albania Universalis
Dearest readers, lords and ladies, conquerors and conquadoras (does that word even exist?)
With great honor and a lot of pride we would like to present to you the culmination of two weeks of frantic keybashing, geolocating villages, disputing about the differences between muslim sects....
Albania Universalis!
First order of business was to decide the scope of the project. The questions were: How much do we want to include? How detailed will the map be? Which parts of the game to keep and which to overhaul?
The ultimate decision was to limit ourselves to ONLY Albania. There was a temptation to include for example Kosovo, which is majority Albanian, but we quickly decided against it.
The detail of the map determined the amount of playable tags as well. We decided to go with all the communes of Albania and make them the starting playable tags. This gives over 370 playable counties, each with unique ideas, culture, religion, etc. The flags of the communes were generated procedurally and the ideas randomised (leading to some hilariously broken or useless sets)
The process of creating such a wonderful map began way before the Modathon even started. We have mapped all of the villages, their most likely Cultural and Religious population according to real world maps and statistics.
This lead to more problems later. It is always an interesting thing to me at least to learn about other places, and their rich history.
By the end of week one, we had a working map thanks to the hard work of Gindisi, so we could begin to populate it with all our other stuff.
To incentivise conquest, the 61 municipalities and 12 counties were decided as formables. These also are represented as areas and regions.
And of course - Albania itself as the final goal.
Each province had its culture and religion set according to the current data.
When it comes to religion, we decided against adding irreligiousness, as it would provide no interesting gameplay. Plus - it would be additional work and we were on a tight schedule. One additional religion was added, however - the Bektashi Order. In our world, it's a Sufi Order especially popular in Albania, and, despite not being a separate religion perse, its importance merited adding it. One province received the Jewish religion in recognition of the historical Jewish community of Albania, and obviously, to add more variety.
The cultural map wasn't as controversial, but we still boosted the importance of some of the ethnic minorities to increase variety. Of course - this would still leave most of the map as Albanian, which we decided to split between its two major ethno-dialectic groups - the Tosk and the Gheg varieties.
Each province was also assigned a trade good, mostly based on real history, but many were added just for the fun of it.
Each tag was given a mission tree, allowing for formables and aiding in expansion.
Some of the idea groups (for example exploration) made no sense in the mod. That's why the mod introduced many new groups to replace them. Furthermore, every group got a brand new, flavourful (and very meme-y) image…
Last minute additions like difficulty setting were also added. Sadly some of our original plans had to be scrapped due to time constraints. The timeline is restricted to only 100 years, so better be quick!
I would like to thank Minnator and the Modathon team who made all of this possible, and pulled all the autistic code monkeys for another run together
And to you, dear reader, for playing (or at least reading about)...
Albania Universalis!
From the proud team of Albania Universalis:
● Jey the Count
● Gindisi
● _pzacca
● Cetai
…
Seriously, go play the mod. It's hilarious and after two weeks of post-launch fixes it's even playable to the end
Post Finem Shattered Pages
Events that set the stage and briefly elaborate on the lore
Initial Britanian mission tree
Of course, it can't be a smooth journey all the way. Being the greatest civilisation to ever exist (acording to Romans), Rome gives rise to equally great people. However, sometimes these people can be rather ambitious and forget that the glory of Rome comes before any personal glory. But none of them could ever topple the robust Republic, right?
As the Roman armies make their way across Europe, they might notice the land is inhabited by barely civilised barbarians. And ruling over such rowdy people all the way from the Celtic Isles would prove difficult. To alleviate this issue, Britania can establish Provincial Governorates. This new subject type enjoys a great deal of autonomy and doesn't need to join Roman wars, but in exchange, they supply the overlord with a great amount of manpower. However, their primary function is to civilise the barbarians by introducing Roman elements into their culture. It is a slow process, but over time, their cultures are sure to turn into a more acceptable variety.
Romanised culuters spreading throughout Provinces
And once Italy is freed from the barbaric Punics? Well, the world will lie open before Rome. The mighty eagle will spread its wings far beyond anyone could ever dream of.
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam!
It was a rather silly idea that turned into a pretty interesting sub-project of Shattered Pages. As I had never played Post Finem before, I wanted to escape Europe and its lore. So I gathered some Carthage nobles and merchants in the first Punic war and jumped out to West Africa to settle there and start making a new new tag. - Červený Drak
The idea behind New New Carthage was to make a Venice of West Africa. But in the fantasy world of Post Finem, the first Punic War happened like 1600 years ago. So what would those New New Carthageans look like? Well, they could probably keep some traditions and religion, but don’t expect them to be similar to the Carthaginians that came here.
I decided that the original settlers were assimilated long ago. Locals kept their religion, technology and idea of being superior to neighbors. New New Carthage is not exactly imperial blobbing power, but rather cultural and sphere of influence blobbing power. Something like: “Keep your independence, give us your trade and enjoy our protection.”
So what’s so special about New New Carthage? They are a monarchy with True Punic culture that is part of the West African culture group. See that “true” in the culture name? Yes, that is a DoW for Carthage in terms of the end goal for this tag.
This protectorate can act as an independent nation. They can fight among themselves, they can make allies or expand. The only limitation is transferring trade power to NNC. But they will get from time to time some bonuses for monarch points in exchange for manpower or development, etc… And what’s most important is that they can’t be annexed nor help the NNC in wars. So if anybody DoW New New Carthage, all those 20 protectorates just watch like: “Gimme more popcorn!” But if anybody attacks the protectorate, NNC will be called into war.
Protector can also force the subject to change culture to True Punic. To be honest, the Protectorate doesn’t really care, as they will just accept their previous culture without caring about culture conversion. (It's a meme nation. Don’t expect useful things!)
NNC has a few ideas focused on the navy. I thought it wouldn't be necessary to give them more than morale, sailors and some offcoast bonus. They also have their own doctrine that is focused on naval invasion. I wanted to make it a little stronger to be attractive for some players. Otherwise, it might seem useless.
In the world of Post Finem, there were no large-scale Slavic migrations, so all the Slavic tribes are left to be pastured in Poland, and I simply had to rectify that.
That spawned an idea in my head of: “what if the Slavs migrated *now* and by player choice?”.
I have been cooking up a similar idea in my head for the Anglo-Saxons for some months prior (which is now submitted in the Post Finem discord’s suggestions channel), but this time, I wanted to make it big. But I had to settle for smaller, as what I like to call “real life side quests” and the sudden realisation that everything I made was half broken creeped in and out of that struggle,
were born Litava and Balkanija.
I initially had this idea of the Slavic countries bordering non-Slavs to somehow expand into those territories and culturally fragment (especially the Rus) but in my inexperience, I had to settle on just two tags and cultures instead of... 12.
These two are:
They are playable through the “my line ends with me” decision in the event, the bottom portion remaining for those who wish to still (for whatever reason) play normal Silesia. The event spawns in True Silesia in the western half of Silesia and gives the player side some essential resources. It also converts your ruler into a general.
But the ever so ambitious new Knyaz Bojan Nevsky will not be idle for long...
Not even 2 months after the civil war ends, the event “Call of the Knyaz!” will fire, giving you a temporary buff and permanent claims on a few territories, as well as a now-unlocked new casus belli. The claims then lead to the formation of the great nation of Litava, formed via the decision given to True Silesia. Of course, Litava also gets its very own mission tree courtesy of Červený Drak!
Last but not least, for Litava, they get their very own monument, enabled via the event “A new Litavan capital?” which offers the player the option to relocate the capital to a new location.
The new monument, dubbed “Velygrad Academy of Knightghood”, gives permanent military buffs to the player and is exclusive to Litava.
Enough about my favourite child, I suppose I should also mention the younger sibling.
In the first month since the start date, they will also get an event like Silesia, that is the “call of the knyaz” event, not the civil war, heh. But their call of the knyaz will convert their ruler to a general.
I envisioned it as a “byzantine-like” start, where you gobble up your weakest neighbour first and then get on with fighting the big guy in the Balkans. Ironically, this time, those being the Greeks!
All that being said, the event gives you permanent claims on Dacros, but what it doesn’t say (and I should change that tbh) is that it gives you the very same “expand Slavic hegemony” cb as Silesia!
And just like in Litava, upon the lands being cored and reaching admin tech 6, you can form the mighty nation of Balkanija. We unfortunately ran out of time to make a mission tree for Balkanija, so we opted as a temporary solution to gove them permanent claims on the region they are meant to expand into first and let them keep the generic Post Finem slavic mission tree (I hope that doesn’t break some stuff with the rus...)
Speaking of Balkan, a nice flavour addition to Balkanija we opted for is giving them a decision to found a new and strategically important capital in Byzantion, or should I say... Bazilegrad?...
The event that fires unlocks a great project in the province and adds some development, while also changing the culture and religion of the province, but there is a slight drawback to it.
To close this off, we also have a minor flavour ability for both of the Slavic formables:
A naval doctrine called “Supremacy of the Lodja”, which mainly grants buffs to Transport ships.
That concludes the Slavic part of the mod! I am really grateful I chose to undergo this endeavour and very thankful to my comrades Červený Drak and Nerazmsus, who helped me immensely!
However, I don't want to completely close the book quite yet. There are still more pages that can be shattered, after all. So if you enjoyed this mod, keep an eye on the Submod section in Post Finem discord, you might see some spicy teasers in the future. Hell, come and throw your own wild ideas there.
With Slava, Ave and Elephants
-daBo1
-Nerazmus
-Červený Drak
Italian Wars
War of the League of Cambrai, colorized
Saluti from the Italian Wars team and a little starting sidenode from Sealand!
The initial inspiration for the Italian Wars mod stemmed from Upon a Crimson Horse, a mod from Modathon Season 3, which had this awesome looking GUI map of the Persia and Khorasan regions, showing who controlled what. But sadly interaction with that map was limited. So I set out a goal to make something similar for the next Modathon with expanded functionality. Italy, during the period of the Italian Wars, seemed most fitting to achieve this vision. A region where powers across Europe would try to gain influence. Where you would either unite Italy as sole ruler or diplomatically under one of the League factions. And all the life that was put into the Italian Wars, was made by the rest of the team. More about it from Nolexios, who will give a closer look at all that life that was created in the 2-week Modathon period.
Hi, Nolexios from the Italian Wars team here! Those of you familiar with Italian history during EU4’s timeline will know about the crazy and convoluted century-spanning series of wars which began with the French invasion of Italy in 1494. Maybe you’re familiar with the insanity of the War of the League of Cambrai, during which Venice and the Papal States famously switched sides multiple times. We felt the craziness of these conflicts was underrepresented in EU4, so we set out to correct that! Starting with…
The Factions
We chose to represent the many competing interests of foreign and domestic powers in Italy with 4 factions: the Italic, French, Iberian, and Imperial Leagues. In this way the conflict is more or less centered around the powers which historically had the largest stakes in it, though depending on the course of the game, you may see alternative factions such as the Angevin or German Leagues.
Of course, EU4 has no mechanic to represent factions like the International Organizations that will be coming in Project Caesar. We considered all the options. Alliances? Coalitions? Trade Leagues? None of them could do everything we needed. There was just one game mechanic flexible enough to suit all our needs, as well as allowing the factions to be visible on the diplomatic map mode… In comes a new subject type: League Members! Similar to Tributary States in their independent diplomacy and ability to have their own vassals, this new subject type, assisted by many shenanigans with global event targets and country flags, would form the backbone of the mod’s mechanics.
The Wars
While the Italic League can form as early as 1445, introducing the mechanics of the mod, the rest of the factions will not begin spawning in until the death of Alfons and the Neapolitan Succession. Depending on the fate of Naples, the French (or Angevin) League will declare the 1st Italian War upon either the Iberians or Italians. The player should prepare as much as possible before this point, for the road ahead will not be easy…
Aftermath of the death of Alfons…
My goal was to push the limits of what’s possible in EU4’s wars. Whenever an ‘Italian War’ is declared by the leader of one League upon another, the remaining factions will get an event shortly thereafter allowing them to join on either side, remain neutral, or even declare war on both sides, starting a free for all! This means every Italian War will look entirely different. It could be a 1v1, 2v1, 2v2, 1v1v1, or 1v1v1v1!
An example of a 4-way Italian War
After passing a special peace treaty and emerging from one of these bloody conflicts, you’ll have only a short respite… the carnage won’t completely end until there is one master of Italy!
The GUI
Speaking of which, how does one become master of Italy? You’ll find the answer within the mod’s lovely GUI designed by Sealand!
The button to open the new GUI
Behold!
Working from right to left, first we have the tabs for each of the 4 factions (in the picture above those being Florence, France, Aragon and Austria but not only limited to those nations). Here you can see who the faction leaders are, as well as 4 tiers of special modifiers granted to League Leaders and their members, depending on the size of the League. Below that is the button to Usurp Leadership of a League you’re a member of, or declare an Italian War if you’re already the leader of a League.
In the center-right of the GUI are the Italian treaties: five different treaties which can be imposed upon the other factions after winning an Italian War and taking a special peace option. Only one faction can impose each treaty at any given time, and each one comes with a positive modifier for member states, as well as a negative one for non-member Italians.
If another League has already imposed a specific treaty, you’ll have to beat them to steal it!
Above the treaties sits the pièce de résistance: the Iron Crown of Lombardy which was used to crown Kings of Italy since at least the 11th century. This button represents asserting ultimate dominance over Italy, disbanding all other factions and finally ending the Italian Wars! But not so fast - before clicking this button, you’ll have to fight through at least 5 Italian Wars, imposing each of the 5 treaties, and bring every province in Italy under the control of you or one of your league members. The treaties you’ve enacted will remain in place, as well as your League members, should you choose to keep them under your protection to maintain the benefits. The struggle will be great, but the reward even greater.
"God gave it to me, woe to him who touches it!"
Finally, moving to the left side of the GUI we have what is easily the most technically impressive part of the mod: the fully interactive map of Italy! Clicking on any province in Italy will reveal a submenu with a progress bar representing your nation’s influence over that province. By interacting with the button on the left, you can spend various resources to increase that influence until it reaches 50%. At this point, you can choose the path of peace or war, unlocking different interactions above and below the progress bar depending on your choice. These new buttons will directly impact the province and push you further towards 100%, when the final button becomes available.
If you choose the path of peace, this final button will result in the peaceful transference of the province to your direct control. If you choose war, a revolting city state will emerge from the province as your vassal and you will be called to defend it against its former overlords! Currently only the player can interact with these functions, but in the future we plan to allow the AI to use it as well, and add counter-influence measures enabling players to lower the influence of other nations on their own provinces.
The map colors represent the state of your influence over a particular province
There are many more flavorful events and interactions to be discovered playing our mod, and we still have many ideas to improve and expand upon the content which didn’t make the cut in the short 2 week period of the Modathon. I hope you’ll check it out, and thank you to everyone who voted for our project!
The Music
Hello there people, Kyhler here. I will quickly take over to add something about the music. This time I have composed a new Main Theme for the mod, “Deus ex Denario”. The question is always “where to start” with these mod spotlights in regards to music, so let us just go through it like I am making the piece.
When making a theme for a mod, the first question is “how do I make it fit”, and with this being a historical mod, the best course of action is to take a look at the contemporary music from the period and hear what they did. This is the reason for the instrumentation I chose, the organ. The organ is an instrument that has many options and one that I myself am quite familiar with, as it is my main instrument. I have to give a disclaimer for anyone thinking I performed this piece myself; I did not have time for it, so I instead try my best to use a blend of 3 instruments to give the feel of different voices on the Organ.
The composition itself is pretty basic to say the least. Most of it follows I-V-ii broken chord arpeggios with a good amount of repetition in it. It might be simple, but it is a very effective tool to use, especially when you don’t want it all to be too “adventurous” so to speak. I chose this since I asked myself “what do I believe could be played in a Church at this time” but also having a bit of secularism to it, like the renaissance was shifting towards.
The last thing about any piece is the name itself, and that is honestly as hard of a part as the rest of the creation process. Think of it as a super short summary of either your thoughts on the piece, or of the feelings you want portrayed. Here I opted for the first more than the second. “Deus ex Denario” roughly means something like “God from Money” (if my Latin skills haven’t died out completely). It is mostly a joke about how God is “Power” but what really made someone powerful, especially in the Italian Wars, was how much money they had to run a good old ‘merc stack’, hence their God (Power) was more the money than God himself.
With all this said I too want to thank everyone for liking this mod and voting for it, and give a huge thanks to the rest of the team, since in the end they did so much work, and I myself am honestly impressed to have been working with them.
Our Team:
Sealand - GUI Art, Scripting, & Implementation
Nolexios - Mechanics, Events, Leagues GUI Scripting, Countries
Inferno - Flavor Events
Lordvarangian - Province Influence Buttons, Flavor Events
Kyhler - Main Theme & GUI Sound Effects
Ryagi back to wrap things up for us.
A big thank you to all the authors who participated in this season of the EU4 Modathon, and to those who shared their work with all of us here. We hope perhaps you've been inspired enough to make your own mods. Remember to check out our newly released modding guide series over on YouTube.
Thank you all, I give you the encouragement to keep up the amazing work modding EU4! Until next time.
Before we begin showing off today's modding Shenanigans, we'd like to officially unveil our latest series over on YouTube . Our very own EU4 Modding Guide!
Whether you're crafting custom nations, designing unique religions, or scripting dynamic missions, this official 2025 tutorial series gives you everything needed to bring your grand strategy visions to life.
If you are reading this as it's released. Module 1 is out now, with the next 4 being released very swiftly!
Course Curriculum:
Module 1: Modding Basics – Setup, tools, and your first mod Module 2: Nation Creation – Cultures, flags, and historical authenticity Module 3: Creating Custom Event Chains Module 4: Custom Religions & Mechanics – Modifiers, events, and balancing Module 5: Mission Trees – Branches, triggers, and rewards️
- Tools You’ll Learn: Paradox Modding LanguageLocalization & File ManagementDebugging & Testing Best Practices
Link here
We hope these guides will help beginners on their modding journey.
With that out of the way, lets have a look at creations cooked up for Season 4 of the EU4 Modathon. Most of you are probably familiar with the community run Modathon series by now. Incase you are not, Modathon is The biggest Europa Universalis IV modding event where people of all experience levels come together and make mods over a short 2 week period. Think a Game Jam, but for EU4 mods. The best part of these events is that, Anyone can participate, whether you're a veteran modder or trying it out for the first time.
Below are the Category winners for this Season, and the mods we'll be covering today, as voted on by participants and overserves:
Lets now hand it off to the modders themselves to talk about their work.
EU4 Chess
Have you ever thought that EU4 isn’t strategic enough? Have you wished for a single feature of this game with zero RNG? Or ever been bored in a 15 year regency, wishing you could actually play the strategy game you signed up for?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, or if you answered no to any of those questions, EU4 Chess is just the mod for you!
Introduction
Hello, this is Sol Invictus. You may recognize me from my previous mods, like EU4 Minesweeper, EU4 Blackjack, or EU4 Cookie Clicker. Today, I’m introducing my latest mod - EU4 Chess - my team’s entry for the EU4 Modathon Season 4, and the Overall Second Place mod this season!What is EU4 Chess? If the name somehow didn’t give it away, EU4 Chess adds the game of Chess into EU4. You can play against another player in a multiplayer game, or against the AI - more on that later.
Who needs the Atlantic Ocean anyways?
Playing Chess
Load into EU4 playing any country of your choice. When you’re in, you’ll notice a new decision: Play Chess. Hit this, and you’ll be given an event, to choose which side you want to play, and if it will be a multiplayer game or if you want to play against the AI. Once you’re in a game, clicking on a piece will open up a UI on the bottom left. This also has a handy reminder on how all the pieces move!From this UI, you can select a piece you want to move. This will highlight all the squares that piece can move to. Select any of the highlighted squares, and hit the other button, to move the piece to that square. That’s it, your turn is done, and it’s time for your opponent to go!
Here, we can see how the knight on b1 can move
The game is over when one player checkmates another, or it ends in a draw. If at any point you feel like the game is going nowhere, or that you are guaranteed to lose, you can always offer your opponent a draw, or resign the game, both through a decision.
En passant is, of course, in the game. See if you can catch the AI Playing it!
Piece Themes
In EU4 Chess, visuals are highly customizable, for both players! There are a variety of themes beyond the default 3D white and black pieces. There are 2 sets of 2D themes for each player, which allow for players used to online chess to easily adapt to EU4 Chess. There are also 3 sets of Country-inspired themes for each player - Byzantium, Great Britain, and Austria for White, and Persia, Russia, and France for Black. These change the piece themes to a design based on that country’s flag - allowing you to recreate your favorite EU4 matchups inside the minigame!
The classic matchup, Byzantium and Persia, now fought out on a new battlefield
You can always change your piece’s visuals, even in the middle of a game. And don’t worry, there is a decision to change the theme of the AI’s pieces too, if you are playing against it, so you’ll never have to worry about a mismatch!
Sometimes, playing in 2d is just easier
The Chess Engine
I’ve mentioned the AI a few times now, and it’s time to talk about it. Chess engines, computer programs that can play chess, have been a major player in both the history of Chess and the history of Computing. So, I decided to code a chess engine fully inside EU4!What does this mean? Well, EU4 doesn’t allow modders to run external files or communicate on the network - so just using Stockfish or another premade computer wasn’t an option. The full chess engine code, everything it does, had to be fully implemented within EU4 itself - working around all the drawbacks that presents, because the devs obviously never intended someone to do this.
[skip this paragraph if you don’t like coding] The chess engine uses a Minimax with depth 4. EU4 does not allow recursion, and loading times scale exponentially if you attempt to mock it - this means the backbone of the Chess AI fires, on average, 25000 events each time the AI has to calculate (not doing this would lead to loading times measured in years, if my napkin math is accurate). Of course, depth 4 is not exactly phenomenal, but the game will freeze for minutes in calculations if you attempt to exceed this.
While this was a team project that would’ve been impossible without the contribution of all 4 team members, the code and the AI was all me, and I must say I’ve absolutely tanked my own sanity to bring you all EU4 Chess!!!!!!!! I hope you appreciate the sacrifice.
3D Art
Hello, this is V-Guy-fighter (Scrublord). This is the first mod I have worked on to be released to the Steam workshop. I had no experience in making models so I gave it a try in this project. I used blender to make the 6 different main pieces of chess, however there were some failed attempts. One of these was that i didn’t know hidden objects in blender do show up in EU4:
Failed bishop 3D model
The models were made in a well known program called Blender.This was my first time ever using Blender and I went from 0 hours to 55 in no time. The first step to creating the models was finding out how blender works. During that process, I slowly began gaining experience in the methods to make the model from scratch (extrude, shrinking/ fattening, etc). To make the models look as close to real life as possible, I used a background of chess pieces as reference material.
Chess pieces with background
As shown on the picture, the 3D models are overlaid with brown examples of the pieces. There was one piece I didn’t manage to make in time, which was the knight. This was because it was too hard to make the knight's face without it looking too flat or too ugly. That is why I used a free online model for that piece.
After the models were made, I had to shade and export them to EU4. Blender has an extension that makes it easier to export and shade models from Blender into a .mesh file for EU4. This extension goes by the name io_pdx_mesh and works for Blender version 4.2. The shading is done automatically and all I had to do was add the textures for the diffuse, normal and spectral. All the models did not use spectral and normal, so I could just add the nonormal.dds and nospec.dds files for those, which are included in the base game.
Shading for the persian king
Once this shading has been done one last part has to be made to apply the shading properly: UV mapping. The UV map makes it so the shading is applied in the way you want it to look. The UV map ended up being the most time consuming part since I had to manually change each part of the model in the UV map.
I enjoyed working together with my team on this project and will continue making 3D models for other projects as well. Hopefully I don’t have to leave my bed at 5 AM for Sol next time .
Credits
Sol_InvictusXLII - game code, chessboard & piece display, Custom UIV-Guy-fighter / Scrublord666 - 3d piece art, all theming
Xorme - Chessboard art, 2d piece art, ui art
Lemon Cake - The Chessboard, playtesting
Albania Universalis
Dearest readers, lords and ladies, conquerors and conquadoras (does that word even exist?)
With great honor and a lot of pride we would like to present to you the culmination of two weeks of frantic keybashing, geolocating villages, disputing about the differences between muslim sects....
Albania Universalis!
First order of business was to decide the scope of the project. The questions were: How much do we want to include? How detailed will the map be? Which parts of the game to keep and which to overhaul?
The ultimate decision was to limit ourselves to ONLY Albania. There was a temptation to include for example Kosovo, which is majority Albanian, but we quickly decided against it.
The detail of the map determined the amount of playable tags as well. We decided to go with all the communes of Albania and make them the starting playable tags. This gives over 370 playable counties, each with unique ideas, culture, religion, etc. The flags of the communes were generated procedurally and the ideas randomised (leading to some hilariously broken or useless sets)
The process of creating such a wonderful map began way before the Modathon even started. We have mapped all of the villages, their most likely Cultural and Religious population according to real world maps and statistics.
This lead to more problems later. It is always an interesting thing to me at least to learn about other places, and their rich history.
By the end of week one, we had a working map thanks to the hard work of Gindisi, so we could begin to populate it with all our other stuff.
To incentivise conquest, the 61 municipalities and 12 counties were decided as formables. These also are represented as areas and regions.
And of course - Albania itself as the final goal.
Each province had its culture and religion set according to the current data.
When it comes to religion, we decided against adding irreligiousness, as it would provide no interesting gameplay. Plus - it would be additional work and we were on a tight schedule. One additional religion was added, however - the Bektashi Order. In our world, it's a Sufi Order especially popular in Albania, and, despite not being a separate religion perse, its importance merited adding it. One province received the Jewish religion in recognition of the historical Jewish community of Albania, and obviously, to add more variety.
The cultural map wasn't as controversial, but we still boosted the importance of some of the ethnic minorities to increase variety. Of course - this would still leave most of the map as Albanian, which we decided to split between its two major ethno-dialectic groups - the Tosk and the Gheg varieties.
Each province was also assigned a trade good, mostly based on real history, but many were added just for the fun of it.
Each tag was given a mission tree, allowing for formables and aiding in expansion.
Some of the idea groups (for example exploration) made no sense in the mod. That's why the mod introduced many new groups to replace them. Furthermore, every group got a brand new, flavourful (and very meme-y) image…
Last minute additions like difficulty setting were also added. Sadly some of our original plans had to be scrapped due to time constraints. The timeline is restricted to only 100 years, so better be quick!
I would like to thank Minnator and the Modathon team who made all of this possible, and pulled all the autistic code monkeys for another run together
And to you, dear reader, for playing (or at least reading about)...
Albania Universalis!
From the proud team of Albania Universalis:
● Jey the Count
● Gindisi
● _pzacca
● Cetai
…
Seriously, go play the mod. It's hilarious and after two weeks of post-launch fixes it's even playable to the end
Post Finem Shattered Pages
Shattering of Pages
It is often said that answering a question only raises more questions. That couldn't be more true when it comes to alternate history scenarios, where every answered possibility branches out into an ever-sprawling web of potentialities. The alt-history mod Post Finem imagines a world where Carthage won the Punic Wars and tries to present how such a world would develop. Shattered Pages then tries to imagine even harder and present some of the more unlikely scenarios while weaving them into the world in a fun and interesting way.There be Romans
As said in the introduction, the main premise of Post Finem is that Rome lost the Punic Wars. Naturally, the question arises, what would happen if some Romans managed to escape the destruction of their civilisation? Where would they end up? Would the Roman tenacity prevail even in this situation? Would their ambition still give birth to a world-spanning empire?Distant shores
Rome might have lost the battle, and even the war, all three of them, but it never lost its spirit. Battered and beaten, refugees of the war sailed west, far beyond the Pillars of Hercules, where they happened on never-before-seen shores. Here, in the land of the Britons, the Romans would slowly pick up their pieces and rebuild. Not having many resources, they'd fall back on the well-known Roman diplomacy, helping the locals and being helped in return.
Events that set the stage and briefly elaborate on the lore
On the Verge of Greatness
As the Romans's benefactor, Trinovantes, consolidates the Celtic Isles with their help, the Romans will eventually get an opportunity to establish an autonomous governance. With their tenacity and willpower, the Romans will surely have no trouble establishing themselves as the dominant power of the Iseles. And as their influence spreads, the locals will get to enjoy the marvels of Roman civilisation. Then, after the Isles are firmly in Roman hands, it is time to prepare for a long journey home. To assist you with this imposing task, Britania receives a unique national ideas, government reform and an extensive mission tree.
Initial Britanian mission tree
Of course, it can't be a smooth journey all the way. Being the greatest civilisation to ever exist (acording to Romans), Rome gives rise to equally great people. However, sometimes these people can be rather ambitious and forget that the glory of Rome comes before any personal glory. But none of them could ever topple the robust Republic, right?
As the Roman armies make their way across Europe, they might notice the land is inhabited by barely civilised barbarians. And ruling over such rowdy people all the way from the Celtic Isles would prove difficult. To alleviate this issue, Britania can establish Provincial Governorates. This new subject type enjoys a great deal of autonomy and doesn't need to join Roman wars, but in exchange, they supply the overlord with a great amount of manpower. However, their primary function is to civilise the barbarians by introducing Roman elements into their culture. It is a slow process, but over time, their cultures are sure to turn into a more acceptable variety.
Romanised culuters spreading throughout Provinces
And once Italy is freed from the barbaric Punics? Well, the world will lie open before Rome. The mighty eagle will spread its wings far beyond anyone could ever dream of.
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam!
New New Carthage
It was a rather silly idea that turned into a pretty interesting sub-project of Shattered Pages. As I had never played Post Finem before, I wanted to escape Europe and its lore. So I gathered some Carthage nobles and merchants in the first Punic war and jumped out to West Africa to settle there and start making a new new tag. - Červený Drak
The idea behind New New Carthage was to make a Venice of West Africa. But in the fantasy world of Post Finem, the first Punic War happened like 1600 years ago. So what would those New New Carthageans look like? Well, they could probably keep some traditions and religion, but don’t expect them to be similar to the Carthaginians that came here.
I decided that the original settlers were assimilated long ago. Locals kept their religion, technology and idea of being superior to neighbors. New New Carthage is not exactly imperial blobbing power, but rather cultural and sphere of influence blobbing power. Something like: “Keep your independence, give us your trade and enjoy our protection.”
So what’s so special about New New Carthage? They are a monarchy with True Punic culture that is part of the West African culture group. See that “true” in the culture name? Yes, that is a DoW for Carthage in terms of the end goal for this tag.
Cultural protectorate
NNC (New New Carthage) has a special type of subject option. They can ask neighbours to be their cultural protectorate. You can also use term Giraffe vassal This protectorate can act as an independent nation. They can fight among themselves, they can make allies or expand. The only limitation is transferring trade power to NNC. But they will get from time to time some bonuses for monarch points in exchange for manpower or development, etc… And what’s most important is that they can’t be annexed nor help the NNC in wars. So if anybody DoW New New Carthage, all those 20 protectorates just watch like: “Gimme more popcorn!” But if anybody attacks the protectorate, NNC will be called into war.Protector can also force the subject to change culture to True Punic. To be honest, the Protectorate doesn’t really care, as they will just accept their previous culture without caring about culture conversion. (It's a meme nation. Don’t expect useful things!)
Military and Navy
New New Carthage military has bonus ideas at the end of the idea tree and one meme bonus. You may encounter that in the first war. I thought it would be funny if NNC used elephants, as they are closer to their native lands and also because they pretend to be True Carthage. What would be more Carthaginian than war elephants? NNC also got its own sprites. At least for 1st and 2nd level. I wanted to show a transition from Punic armour to African uniforms.NNC has a few ideas focused on the navy. I thought it wouldn't be necessary to give them more than morale, sailors and some offcoast bonus. They also have their own doctrine that is focused on naval invasion. I wanted to make it a little stronger to be attractive for some players. Otherwise, it might seem useless.
Missions
NNC missions are focused on development, colonization of West Africa, and on being better than Carthage. It is quite short and straightforward. I kept a generic tree, and then down below is the NNC mission tree. It was a decision that I must have made to save time and be able to help with other things. But you are still kept with 100 years of content and the ultimate end goal.
There be Slavs
Unlike the previous additions, this one has no correlation to the Punic Wars, but was rather an odd question: what of the Slavs?In the world of Post Finem, there were no large-scale Slavic migrations, so all the Slavic tribes are left to be pastured in Poland, and I simply had to rectify that.
That spawned an idea in my head of: “what if the Slavs migrated *now* and by player choice?”.
I have been cooking up a similar idea in my head for the Anglo-Saxons for some months prior (which is now submitted in the Post Finem discord’s suggestions channel), but this time, I wanted to make it big. But I had to settle for smaller, as what I like to call “real life side quests” and the sudden realisation that everything I made was half broken creeped in and out of that struggle,
were born Litava and Balkanija.
I initially had this idea of the Slavic countries bordering non-Slavs to somehow expand into those territories and culturally fragment (especially the Rus) but in my inexperience, I had to settle on just two tags and cultures instead of... 12.
These two are:
Silesia
A relatively unnoteworthy country, it now begins with a very quick and simple civil war. The civil war consists of the rebelling “true Silesians” in the form of True Silesia in the western part of the region; a sort of zealous branch of tribesmen who seek glory and power out of fear of their Germanic neighbours.
They are playable through the “my line ends with me” decision in the event, the bottom portion remaining for those who wish to still (for whatever reason) play normal Silesia. The event spawns in True Silesia in the western half of Silesia and gives the player side some essential resources. It also converts your ruler into a general.
But the ever so ambitious new Knyaz Bojan Nevsky will not be idle for long...
Not even 2 months after the civil war ends, the event “Call of the Knyaz!” will fire, giving you a temporary buff and permanent claims on a few territories, as well as a now-unlocked new casus belli. The claims then lead to the formation of the great nation of Litava, formed via the decision given to True Silesia. Of course, Litava also gets its very own mission tree courtesy of Červený Drak!
Last but not least, for Litava, they get their very own monument, enabled via the event “A new Litavan capital?” which offers the player the option to relocate the capital to a new location.
The new monument, dubbed “Velygrad Academy of Knightghood”, gives permanent military buffs to the player and is exclusive to Litava.
Enough about my favourite child, I suppose I should also mention the younger sibling.
Dunavija
They start off relatively easy compared to Silesia, but that does not mean they start too peacefully.In the first month since the start date, they will also get an event like Silesia, that is the “call of the knyaz” event, not the civil war, heh. But their call of the knyaz will convert their ruler to a general.
I envisioned it as a “byzantine-like” start, where you gobble up your weakest neighbour first and then get on with fighting the big guy in the Balkans. Ironically, this time, those being the Greeks!
All that being said, the event gives you permanent claims on Dacros, but what it doesn’t say (and I should change that tbh) is that it gives you the very same “expand Slavic hegemony” cb as Silesia!
And just like in Litava, upon the lands being cored and reaching admin tech 6, you can form the mighty nation of Balkanija. We unfortunately ran out of time to make a mission tree for Balkanija, so we opted as a temporary solution to gove them permanent claims on the region they are meant to expand into first and let them keep the generic Post Finem slavic mission tree (I hope that doesn’t break some stuff with the rus...)
Speaking of Balkan, a nice flavour addition to Balkanija we opted for is giving them a decision to found a new and strategically important capital in Byzantion, or should I say... Bazilegrad?...
The event that fires unlocks a great project in the province and adds some development, while also changing the culture and religion of the province, but there is a slight drawback to it.
To close this off, we also have a minor flavour ability for both of the Slavic formables:
A naval doctrine called “Supremacy of the Lodja”, which mainly grants buffs to Transport ships.
That concludes the Slavic part of the mod! I am really grateful I chose to undergo this endeavour and very thankful to my comrades Červený Drak and Nerazmsus, who helped me immensely!
Closing the Book
Needless to say, this modathon was fun, and we can’t wait for the next one. We all enjoyed working on this mod while expanding our horizons and learning new things, as always. We'd like to thank each other and everyone who helped us playtest the mod. Of course, huge thanks go to everyone who tried the mod and enjoyed it. Modding without this awesome community would be no fun at all.However, I don't want to completely close the book quite yet. There are still more pages that can be shattered, after all. So if you enjoyed this mod, keep an eye on the Submod section in Post Finem discord, you might see some spicy teasers in the future. Hell, come and throw your own wild ideas there.
With Slava, Ave and Elephants
-daBo1
-Nerazmus
-Červený Drak
Italian Wars
War of the League of Cambrai, colorized
Saluti from the Italian Wars team and a little starting sidenode from Sealand!
The initial inspiration for the Italian Wars mod stemmed from Upon a Crimson Horse, a mod from Modathon Season 3, which had this awesome looking GUI map of the Persia and Khorasan regions, showing who controlled what. But sadly interaction with that map was limited. So I set out a goal to make something similar for the next Modathon with expanded functionality. Italy, during the period of the Italian Wars, seemed most fitting to achieve this vision. A region where powers across Europe would try to gain influence. Where you would either unite Italy as sole ruler or diplomatically under one of the League factions. And all the life that was put into the Italian Wars, was made by the rest of the team. More about it from Nolexios, who will give a closer look at all that life that was created in the 2-week Modathon period.
Hi, Nolexios from the Italian Wars team here! Those of you familiar with Italian history during EU4’s timeline will know about the crazy and convoluted century-spanning series of wars which began with the French invasion of Italy in 1494. Maybe you’re familiar with the insanity of the War of the League of Cambrai, during which Venice and the Papal States famously switched sides multiple times. We felt the craziness of these conflicts was underrepresented in EU4, so we set out to correct that! Starting with…
The Factions
We chose to represent the many competing interests of foreign and domestic powers in Italy with 4 factions: the Italic, French, Iberian, and Imperial Leagues. In this way the conflict is more or less centered around the powers which historically had the largest stakes in it, though depending on the course of the game, you may see alternative factions such as the Angevin or German Leagues.
Of course, EU4 has no mechanic to represent factions like the International Organizations that will be coming in Project Caesar. We considered all the options. Alliances? Coalitions? Trade Leagues? None of them could do everything we needed. There was just one game mechanic flexible enough to suit all our needs, as well as allowing the factions to be visible on the diplomatic map mode… In comes a new subject type: League Members! Similar to Tributary States in their independent diplomacy and ability to have their own vassals, this new subject type, assisted by many shenanigans with global event targets and country flags, would form the backbone of the mod’s mechanics.
The Wars
While the Italic League can form as early as 1445, introducing the mechanics of the mod, the rest of the factions will not begin spawning in until the death of Alfons and the Neapolitan Succession. Depending on the fate of Naples, the French (or Angevin) League will declare the 1st Italian War upon either the Iberians or Italians. The player should prepare as much as possible before this point, for the road ahead will not be easy…
Aftermath of the death of Alfons…
My goal was to push the limits of what’s possible in EU4’s wars. Whenever an ‘Italian War’ is declared by the leader of one League upon another, the remaining factions will get an event shortly thereafter allowing them to join on either side, remain neutral, or even declare war on both sides, starting a free for all! This means every Italian War will look entirely different. It could be a 1v1, 2v1, 2v2, 1v1v1, or 1v1v1v1!
An example of a 4-way Italian War
After passing a special peace treaty and emerging from one of these bloody conflicts, you’ll have only a short respite… the carnage won’t completely end until there is one master of Italy!
The GUI
Speaking of which, how does one become master of Italy? You’ll find the answer within the mod’s lovely GUI designed by Sealand!
The button to open the new GUI
Behold!
Working from right to left, first we have the tabs for each of the 4 factions (in the picture above those being Florence, France, Aragon and Austria but not only limited to those nations). Here you can see who the faction leaders are, as well as 4 tiers of special modifiers granted to League Leaders and their members, depending on the size of the League. Below that is the button to Usurp Leadership of a League you’re a member of, or declare an Italian War if you’re already the leader of a League.
In the center-right of the GUI are the Italian treaties: five different treaties which can be imposed upon the other factions after winning an Italian War and taking a special peace option. Only one faction can impose each treaty at any given time, and each one comes with a positive modifier for member states, as well as a negative one for non-member Italians.
If another League has already imposed a specific treaty, you’ll have to beat them to steal it!
Above the treaties sits the pièce de résistance: the Iron Crown of Lombardy which was used to crown Kings of Italy since at least the 11th century. This button represents asserting ultimate dominance over Italy, disbanding all other factions and finally ending the Italian Wars! But not so fast - before clicking this button, you’ll have to fight through at least 5 Italian Wars, imposing each of the 5 treaties, and bring every province in Italy under the control of you or one of your league members. The treaties you’ve enacted will remain in place, as well as your League members, should you choose to keep them under your protection to maintain the benefits. The struggle will be great, but the reward even greater.
"God gave it to me, woe to him who touches it!"
Finally, moving to the left side of the GUI we have what is easily the most technically impressive part of the mod: the fully interactive map of Italy! Clicking on any province in Italy will reveal a submenu with a progress bar representing your nation’s influence over that province. By interacting with the button on the left, you can spend various resources to increase that influence until it reaches 50%. At this point, you can choose the path of peace or war, unlocking different interactions above and below the progress bar depending on your choice. These new buttons will directly impact the province and push you further towards 100%, when the final button becomes available.
If you choose the path of peace, this final button will result in the peaceful transference of the province to your direct control. If you choose war, a revolting city state will emerge from the province as your vassal and you will be called to defend it against its former overlords! Currently only the player can interact with these functions, but in the future we plan to allow the AI to use it as well, and add counter-influence measures enabling players to lower the influence of other nations on their own provinces.
The map colors represent the state of your influence over a particular province
There are many more flavorful events and interactions to be discovered playing our mod, and we still have many ideas to improve and expand upon the content which didn’t make the cut in the short 2 week period of the Modathon. I hope you’ll check it out, and thank you to everyone who voted for our project!
The Music
Hello there people, Kyhler here. I will quickly take over to add something about the music. This time I have composed a new Main Theme for the mod, “Deus ex Denario”. The question is always “where to start” with these mod spotlights in regards to music, so let us just go through it like I am making the piece.
When making a theme for a mod, the first question is “how do I make it fit”, and with this being a historical mod, the best course of action is to take a look at the contemporary music from the period and hear what they did. This is the reason for the instrumentation I chose, the organ. The organ is an instrument that has many options and one that I myself am quite familiar with, as it is my main instrument. I have to give a disclaimer for anyone thinking I performed this piece myself; I did not have time for it, so I instead try my best to use a blend of 3 instruments to give the feel of different voices on the Organ.
The composition itself is pretty basic to say the least. Most of it follows I-V-ii broken chord arpeggios with a good amount of repetition in it. It might be simple, but it is a very effective tool to use, especially when you don’t want it all to be too “adventurous” so to speak. I chose this since I asked myself “what do I believe could be played in a Church at this time” but also having a bit of secularism to it, like the renaissance was shifting towards.
The last thing about any piece is the name itself, and that is honestly as hard of a part as the rest of the creation process. Think of it as a super short summary of either your thoughts on the piece, or of the feelings you want portrayed. Here I opted for the first more than the second. “Deus ex Denario” roughly means something like “God from Money” (if my Latin skills haven’t died out completely). It is mostly a joke about how God is “Power” but what really made someone powerful, especially in the Italian Wars, was how much money they had to run a good old ‘merc stack’, hence their God (Power) was more the money than God himself.
With all this said I too want to thank everyone for liking this mod and voting for it, and give a huge thanks to the rest of the team, since in the end they did so much work, and I myself am honestly impressed to have been working with them.
Our Team:
Sealand - GUI Art, Scripting, & Implementation
Nolexios - Mechanics, Events, Leagues GUI Scripting, Countries
Inferno - Flavor Events
Lordvarangian - Province Influence Buttons, Flavor Events
Kyhler - Main Theme & GUI Sound Effects
Ryagi back to wrap things up for us.
A big thank you to all the authors who participated in this season of the EU4 Modathon, and to those who shared their work with all of us here. We hope perhaps you've been inspired enough to make your own mods. Remember to check out our newly released modding guide series over on YouTube.
Thank you all, I give you the encouragement to keep up the amazing work modding EU4! Until next time.
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