Nov 5, 2019

Europa Universalis IV - Addaway

Today's Dev Diary by Groogy

Remember remember, the fifth of November... Fitting today's dev diary is on a date like this considering we have the EU4 Lan Party at Moszna castle just around the corner! Which will most likely be filled with intrigue, honest intentions and so much fun. We will be present at and streaming the entire event just like last year so be sure to catch it starting on Thursday at Paradox Interactive's Twitch Channel.

But let's actually get to the development diary. Today we will be talking quite a bit about some of the Quality of Life things we've done. These ranges from the smallest of fixes to whole new features. The first thing we'll be talking about is the big work put into making every single states interaction be doable in the Macrobuilder. Heavy Placeholder art warning!

We've worked on giving you a tool to easily get a quick overview of how you are administering your empire, managing the states of it, greatly reducing the tedium of using the states interface. But of course just making some land a state or a territory is not the only feature the state interface encompases. We also have the various DLC features that has been added over time.

If you have Mandate of Heaven you can assign state edicts through the macro builder which also feature an easy way to see and sort what states have had what edict for how long. The next thing is a tab that collectively deals with all of the ways to "delegate" the administration of a state. Pashas, Metropolis and the Holy Orders.

And last is the Trade Company Investments that you will now be able to just point and click on the map to build instead of jumping around between provinces trying to figure out if something was built or not.

You might be now wondering though, what about the special units that you can build through the states? Also what about the Estate specific units you used to build through estates? How will all of that work now? Well as we worked on making States a bit easier to manage we also made sure to streamline these so they sort of are built like any other troop. This has meant though we've had to be a little bit inventive and change a bit of the mechanics.

Banners are no longer "stuck" to their states, instead the states increase a national level of how many banners you can have. Janissaries is similar but instead of Manchu culture it is of course any heathen provinces. Cossacks and Rajputs can be recruited in a similar way by giving their estates privileges.

Streltzy is still stuck working as before as they are a defining part of the Russian government.

Next is demanding money from your opponents where the tooltip always ends up in the way of if the AI will accept the deal or not. What we did here were to add some new shortcuts here where the game will instead just set the demanded amount of money to be exactly what the AI will accept taking into consideration anything else you've demanded so you don't need to "feel" the AI out.

Another thing when it comes to demanding things in a peace deal that we have improved is that giving provinces to your subjects through a peace will now reduce the liberty desire just as if you had granted them manually. Removing that extra step for you.

And after you've demanded those provinces it is now also a lot easier to see how long until they will stop hating you. The tooltip for opinion modifiers between two nations will now summarize the yearly change of opinion that you have, so you can see at a glance if the opinion is growing or shrinking and how fast.

For last, technically not a Quality of Life sort of feature but it sort of is for me. Switzerlands as a nation has been made to be a lot more mercenary. Is mercenary an adjective? Anyway we've made them integrate more with the new mercenary mechanics giving them a quite unique play style. Besides changes to their ideas they are getting unique government, even unique mercenary companies.

Mercenary Manpower works like Available Mercenaries did before and will increase the amount Switzerland can send as condottieri to other countries as well.

That's quite a few changes but we have a lot more in the pipeline and I want to give some honorable mentions of real cool features coming for the 1.30 patch.

When building regiments in unit view, it will always show your FL even if you can't build
When using automatic transport the general will always go with the first batch now
Haven't been fixed yet but the truce timer inconsistency is something we are aware of and will fix
The "outraged countries" field for the diplomat macro builder has been made a bit smarter to try and avoid coalitions.
Any interface where you should be clicking on map for provinces should do that now only. Example is fabricating claim interface, peace view(clicking on a map element will not make you leave peace deal mode) This also applies on interfaces like Grant land to Subject, Grant Core/Claim to Subject, Threathen War, and so on.
Alert for when you can use a Piety action as a muslim
Grant Free City has been added to the Diplo Macro Builder
When selecting a leader it will now show if he is drilling or not
Hinted about it in thread of previous dev diary but we now will highlight when your chance to get innovativeness from technology is about to expire.
Generals/Admirals now have their own age and Kings being made Generals no longer suffer the double death chance check

Now to a bit of a meta topic of our development diaries, the development diaries themselves. We do not want to produce filler development diaries and we know you want to hear about cool features whenever we write one. So we will be slowing down the pace at which we are writing these. We will be doing them monthly going forward meaning the next one won't be until 3rd of December where I will be sure to give you something to sink your teeth into. I haven't decided yet what feature we'll be talking about but thanks to reducing to this pace you can be sure it's going to be something big, new and exciting!

So until then! o/

Oct 29, 2019

Dev Diary: Bugfixing and AI Work

Europa Universalis IV - Addaway

Today's Dev Diary by Groogy

Hey! So me and the team are finally back and recharged after a great PDXCON and it's finally time to get going with development diaries. So what I will be covering today is the result out of what we call "Polish Weeks" here at EUIV. These days are dedicated specifically by the team to fix issues and generally improve the game. So today's development diary is me distilling down a somewhat shy of 200 known issues we've fixed but also the Spending/Budget AI work that our programmers have been working hard at.

So during these Polish Weeks Duplo and mikesc have been working hard on improving the economy of the AI.

"While evolving, Europa Universalis 4 became more complex, with a wider range of possibilities both for the AI and the player to use. But this continuous new complexity was not always addressed with the appropriate amount of love while defining the AI interactions with the new mechanics.During the polish time, we monitored the behavior of the AI related to ducats, collected data and plotted colorful charts - like the one below. Our ambition is to make the AI spending their precious ducats in a smarter way, better evaluate its priorities and generally take more reasonable decisions - you heard me, heretics?

All the various things the AI could spend money on are now categorized, and the items in each category run to get the priority based on a normalized desire score that is calculated depending on the nation current situation, the benefit of such an investment, the current availability of money and the trend of the income. The AI will not go anymore accidentally in debt because of badly timed checks on the available budget."

Our goal is to make the AI more competitive towards the player, and this starts with the economy the AI has available to them. Among of the things you should see improve is besides the AI having more money generally available and doing better are features such as the religious conversion being manageable by them.

Something this work by our awesome coders do is also make all of this a lot more exposed meaning modders can tweak how the AI deal with it's economy way more than they ever could before. However it is still quite strict as it would otherwise impact the performance too much.

Colorful charts about AI spending ducats, taking/repaying loans and going into dramatic bankruptcies. Those KPIs helped us (and are still helping) noticing weird behaviors in a glance while refactoring and refining our AI.

So now let's start of strong with what bugs we've been working on and talk about Chartering Trade Company AI. If you are one of the players not wanting to see a non-colonial Papal States buying land in India, the AI will now only consider to do this if they have access to colonists. The players themselves are not affected by this change and can keep using the feature like normal.

Yuan and Qing unintentionally got locked behind the "Empire rank" mechanic meaning you needed Common Sense in order to form both. That's now fixed with equivalent requirements if you don't own Common Sense so you should always be able to form them.

A quite old bug or oversight was the fact that the Wars of Religion in France didn't even acknowledge that the teachings of Calvin was a thing. This making it quite annoying if you wanted to play a Huguenot France. So these events have been reworked and improved to work better accounting for the Reformed faith. For starters siding with the Protestant movement within France won't make you Lutheran anymore.

As an example previously this option would force you to become Protestant if you were Reformed, together with some other technical changes in other events the disaster should work way better now. And when I showed the Content Designers the image above they were unhappy with the text so they might revisit the content again and not only have them fix up the script.

And speaking of the various Christians denominations, we've tried to stop all the ways we could find for you to make the Pope escape his True Faith. We've fixed becoming Anglican, No Religion Pope, releasing through demanding unlawful territory and Bankruptcy Pope. But I'm sure you'll find other ways to to make his holiness become Fetishist yet again.

A thing that have annoyed a lot of people is when they've promised land to their fellow ally AI and then when you all come to the peace table he goes like "Nope don't want any, but I'll still hate you for not giving me anything". The AI will now be a lot more agreeable depending on the situation and not feel betrayed when he tells you he literally wants nothing.

Moving on to governments. You can no longer hold lottery elections to elect strongmen for your dictatorships. This fixes a case where you could perpetually stay as a dictatorship through the sortition reform. Now when the first dictator takes power he will use his powers to abolish elections and you'll lose whatever reforms that gives you the lottery mechanic.

Another government reform fix we also made sure to fix is so Native Americans can't get unique governments like English Monarchy anymore. You should start seeing a lot more United States of America as we've fixed a bug causing the American Revolution to never come. We've tried to make how the AI picks Government Reforms to be generally a little bit better, from how Tribes become Monarchies/Republics to having the AI favor certain picks like their own unique governments etc.

All missing modifiers have now been added to the Nation Designer. The missing ones being but not limited to Artillery Fire, Possible Banners, Monthly Piety, May Explore and Power Projection from Insults. Our goal is always to keep all modifiers available to the player for when he designs his nation.

The Propagate Religion exploit where you created multiple CoR's will no longer work, when you stop the Propagate trade policy it will deconstruct the CoR in the region and stop the conversion. We've also fixed an issue with the gain you get from razing provinces never get reduced when you get passed military technology level 8. The cap instead of 20 is now at 5 monarch points.

For Colonial nations we've fixed a bunch of problems. For instance granting a CoT to a Colonial will no longer decrease the level of the Center. But not only that there were a bunch of ways to circumvent the protection of the overlord. So someone on the Americas could attack your poor subjects but you would be locked out of actually helping them in their time of need. Now the Overlord will always be able to enforce peace on their colonial nation despite if they have a truce with the attacker or not. This only applies if the colonial nation is the defender.

A thing improved is all sources of yearly absolutism. We've had a bunch of 0.1 Yearly Absolutism all over the game which is pretty useless, it means you'll get a single worth of Absolutism in the span of a decade. So all of these have been upped to 0.5.

We've also noticed that the Mission UI could be quite taxing on some people's machine so we've optimized that interface quite a bunch which will help on some of our larger mission tree's but also potentially for any mod that extends on this system. Another similar UI problem that we've dealt with is the macrobuilder for when you hit +1000 provinces which could cause a bunch of problems.

Some other issues I just want to give quick mentions are:

Vassals Integration cost is now affected by Power Cost modifier
Fixed a bunch of Institution Spread issues
Pirate Republics can no longer spawn out of Pirate Republics
Gold can now spawn in Africa when playing with RNW
Firearm Incident is fixed which should make Achievement more plausible
Unify Culture Age Objective now work.

Oh what's this I wonder?

So this was just some of the things we've fixed, and we have so much more that we need to work on. We are already aware of several issues the community wants us to address and improve but in same style as we did with the QoL features we want to give you the oppertunity to highlight to us what you think is most important. This will be done in a more structured way compared to last time and if you are interested in contributing please head over to StarNaN's thread over here.

Next week I'll be talking about some of the Quality of Life features we've implemented, some of these being entirely new features almost on their own.

Oct 19, 2019

An Heir Is Born!

Crusader Kings II - Para_Rod

Crusader Kings III is the newest generation of Paradox Development Studio’s beloved medieval role-playing grand strategy game. Expand and improve your realm, whether a mighty kingdom or modest county. Use marriage, diplomacy and war to increase your power and prestige in a meticulously detailed map that stretches from Spain to India, Scandinavia to Central Africa.

But uneasy lies the head that wears a crown! Your cunning is your greatest weapon, and intelligence is the key to all successful strategy. Guard your life and the future of your dynasty, because enemies foreign and domestic envy your status. Engage in espionage, join political factions, punish heretics or use assassins to make sure your throne passes safely to the next generation.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1158310/Crusader_Kings_III/

Crusader Kings III is the medieval strategy role-playing experience that you have been waiting for.

Shape Your Dynasty: Guide unique characters through history, choosing lifestyles best suited to their personalities and your ambitions.
Rewrite Medieval History: Dynasties will change and adapt to changes in family and politics, swimming in a rich world of religious faith and royal pageantry.
Build a Mighty Kingdom: Use cold steel or warm words to expand your realm; war backed by cunning, and diplomacy that unites bloodlines.
Experience High Drama: Stranger than fiction stories leap off the screen, as characters plot against you and events push you to extremes.
Learn as You Go: Guided advice helps newcomers and veterans navigate a rich medieval world. In-game suggestions tip you off to paths you might not have considered.
The Usual Crusader Kings Fun: Keep a stubborn council in line, scheme against your overbearing uncle or marry rich duchesses for their land and legacy.

Oct 15, 2019

Dev Diary: More Imperial Incidents

Europa Universalis IV - Addaway

Today's Dev Diary by neondt

Good morning once again, and welcome to today’s dev diary. Following on from last week, I’ll be covering a couple more Imperial Incidents, this time focusing on our reworked Dutch Revolt and Shadow Kingdom.

Another reminder in case you’ve forgotten how Imperial Incidents work:

DDRJake said:

“The other thing for us to look into today are Imperial Incidents. One thing we wanted to do was to make the Empire feel alive and rife with bickering princes. To that end, we have rolled some existing occurrences throughout EU4 and History, as well as many others, into a system that has the HRE both create and react to issues in Central Europe and the immediate vicinity.

When the conditions are ripe, an Imperial Incident can trigger for the Empire. All member states will be informed of the incident, and it will prominently be displayed in the HRE interface. The Emperor will then have 6 months to make a decision on the incident, with wide-ranging knock-on effects.”

Let’s start with the Dutch Revolt. You’ll be pleased to hear that this is no longer represented as a potentially endless series of events spawning hundreds of thousands of separatist rebels in your Lowlands provinces. We’ve instead opted to use the Disaster system to constrain the time-frame for when these rebellions crop up. Most conditions should be relatively familiar: don’t have any of the Lowland culture (now including Frisian!) as your primary culture, own at least 5 provinces in the Lowlands region with Dutch/Flemish/Frisian culture, don’t have your capital in the Lowlands region, etc.

We do however have a new set of conditions: there must also be some kind of existing cultural or religious tensions in your Low Countries provinces. In practice, this means owning Low Countries provinces that do not have your religion or have a culture that is not accepted in your nation.

When these conditions are true, the Dutch Revolt Disaster will begin ticking for your nation. When the Disaster fires a large number of rebels will spawn in some of your Low Countries provinces and of said provinces will get extra Unrest until the end of the Disaster. Events will give you the option of fighting additional rebels or granting high autonomy to your Lowlands provinces.

The Disaster ends when one of these sets of conditions is true:

The Disaster has been present in your country for 20 years, there are no rebels in your provinces, and you have at least 1 Stability
The Netherlands exists
You own less than 5 Dutch/Flemish/Frisian provinces in the Low Countries region

If at any point during the Disaster you own at least 5 provinces that are Dutch/Flemish/Frisian culture and either controlled by rebels or 90% autonomous, the Dutch Independence event fires and you’ll find yourself in a bloody war. Not only will the Netherlands be spawned from all appropriate provinces, but an Imperial Incident will begin and all of your rivals will be invited to support the new Dutch state in their quest for self-determination. These events will now directly call your rivals into the independence war rather than simply creating an alliance that is unlikely to be useful for the Netherlands during the initial war, which gives them much more of a fighting chance.

The Dutch Revolt Imperial Incident gives the Emperor a chance to intervene, assuming that the Dutch are not revolting against the Emperor and that the Netherlands are part of the HRE. The Emperor has three options:

If the Emperor chooses to support Dutch independence, they are called into the independence war (assuming that it is still ongoing), become an ally of the Netherlands, and get a significant opinion boost with the fledgling nation.
If the Emperor chooses not to intervene in the conflict, they lose some prestige and send a clear message that the Empire cares not for the Dutch cause. The Netherlands will leave the HRE after the independence war has concluded.
If the Emperor chooses to suppress the Dutch revolt, the Emperor will gain an alliance with the former overlords of the Dutch, and again the Netherlands will leave the Empire after the war is over.

We’ve also taken another look at the Shadow Kingdom event chain that leads to Italy leaving the Holy Roman Empire. In the past this has set a challenge to the Emperor to force Italy into the Empire often through strange and obscure means. In the European update we’ve turned it on its head; you’ll now need to rein in the Italian Princes that are already in the Empire but who are slipping away from Imperial rule. The Emperor gets an event near the beginning of the game about this state of affairs and what must be done to avert a total loss of control in Italy.

An Italian state is considered “reined in” after it has lost a war (any war) against the Emperor or if it has very good relations with the Emperor. We’ll be displaying which nations are at risk of abandoning the Empire in the HRE interface.

Some time around the 1460’s, an Imperial Incident begins for the Emperor in which he has two options:

Continue attempting to rein in the Italians: this begins a timer for the Emperor to attempt to rein in as many Italian states as possible. The risk the Emperor takes here is that failing to hold to this promise will incur a greater penalty to Imperial Authority than simply abandoning Italy early on.
Abandon Italy: all of Italy will be removed from the Empire immediately at the cost of 20 [numbers subject to change] Imperial Authority and 10 Prestige.

If the Emperor attempts to keep Italy within the Empire, they’ll get a follow-up event after 20 years. Italian Princes that were in danger of leaving, if any remain, will leave the Empire and the Emperor will incur a penalty to Imperial Authority for each Prince that leaves.If the Emperor has succeeded in reining in every Italian state they’ll gain 25 Imperial Authority, the Italian Princes will remain in the Empire, and certain future Incidents will be unlocked or barred due to your actions.

That’s all for this week! As you can see the Imperial Incidents system has given us a great excuse to go back and revisit some of the game’s oldest and most impactful content, and what I’ve talked about today is far from all we’ve done in this regard. Have a good week, and for those of you attending PDXCON, I’ll see you there!

Oct 8, 2019

Dev Diary: Imperial Incidents

Europa Universalis IV - Addaway

Today's Dev Diary by Neondt

Good morning, and welcome to today’s dev diary! As Jake foretold last week, today I’ll be talking about some of the Imperial Incidents coming in next year’s big expansion.
For those of you who have forgotten or for some reason do not read our dev diaries with fervent religiosity, this is what an Imperial Incident is:

DDRJake said:

“The other thing for us to look into today are Imperial Incidents. One thing we wanted to do was to make the Empire feel alive and rife with bickering princes. To that end, we have rolled some existing occurrences throughout EU4 and History, as well as many others, into a system that has the HRE both create and react to issues in Central Europe and the immediate vicinity.

When the conditions are ripe, an Imperial Incident can trigger for the Empire. All member states will be informed of the incident, and it will prominently be displayed in the HRE interface. The Emperor will then have 6 months to make a decision on the incident, with wide-ranging knock-on effects.”

These Incidents give us the opportunity to both revisit old content and to design something new. Last week Jake gave a description of the reworked Burgundian Inheritance (which we might revisit in more detail in the future). Today I’ll show off two new event chains and their associated Incidents: The King in Prussia, and The Great Peasants’ War.

Prussia is no longer awarded a shiny Kingdom-rank crown simply for existing. An independent Prussia must establish itself as a relevant power before it has the opportunity to claim its crown. After this event fires, the Imperial Incident begins and the Emperor must decide on how to proceed.

If the Emperor decides to elevate Prussia to an Imperial Kingdom in the fashion of Bohemia, they will lose 10 Imperial Authority but greatly improve their relations with Prussia. This will also anger any electors that have rivalled Prussia.
If the Emperor decides to accept the historical compromise - that the monarch may call himself “King in Prussia” but not “King of Prussia” - the effect is similar but reduced. The Electors will not be angered but Prussia will be only mildly grateful to the Emperor.
If the Emperor refuses to acknowledge any Prussian monarch bearing the title of “King”, Prussia must make a decision between their Kingly crown or their status as an Imperial Prince, potentially being ejected from the Empire. This will greatly anger both Prussia and its Elector allies.

The Great Peasants’ War was a time of great upheaval in the Holy Roman Empire. Driven by religious, economic, and social woes the oppressed masses rose up across Germany against their feudal masters. This event can happen prior to the League War, which is delayed until this conflict is resolved. National unrest is increased throughout the Empire, peasant rebels are more likely to spawn, and countries that break to peasant rebels may become a Peasant Republic. While the Great Peasants’ War rages on, the game will track the success of the rebels throughout the Empire. After several years have passed and the dust has settled, the Emperor must make a resolution:

[Available only if the rebels are not highly successful] If the Emperor chooses to crush the rights of peasants, the Noble estates across the Empire will become more loyal and more powerful. This effect is reduced if the rebels are moderately successful.
If the Emperor chooses to grant concessions to the peasantry and enforce their rights, the Noble estates across the Empire will not only lose Influence but also some of their Land Share. The strength of this effect depends on the success of the rebels. This will mean that Princes of the Empire have more Crown Land, but they will also collect less taxes due to their concessions to the peasantry. If the rebels are highly successful, nations in the Empire will continue to become Peasant Republics when breaking to peasant rebels even after the Great Peasants’ War ends.

We have a lot more Incidents left to talk about: in the unspecified future I’ll talk about such Incidents as the Dutch Revolt and the Shadow Kingdom. For now though that’s all I have to say, I hope you all have a great day and that you return for next week’s dev diary!