https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive

The huge 2019 EU4 Lan will begin today at Moszna Castle, Poland.

102 players split among 36 teams will be battling it out in an EU4 game played amongst the most opulent of surroundings.

Every second will be streamed live on the PDX twitch, starting at 19:00 CET tonight and continuing through the weekend on the schedule below.



We'll have a rotating cast of PDS developers hosting, with occasional appearances from players when there is interesting insight to be gained.

Expect three days of intense diplomacy, intrigue and warfare, and we hope to see you all in twitch chat!

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/

The second ruler of the Monarch's Journey, Llewellyn II "the Great" Aberffraw, is now available to play in CKII! Launch Crusader Kings 2 to play as Llewellyn II "The Great" and earn yourselves rewards you can use in Crusader Kings 3!

As a reminder: the Monarch’s Journey is a new way of exploring the world of Crusader Kings and will help you earn cosmetic add-ons for Crusader Kings III through Ruler Challenges.

The Ruler Challenges present you with a new realm with a specific objective to achieve. Whether you are a newcomer or a veteran The Monarch’s Journey is your chance to (re)learn parts of the game, try new worlds and new ways of play in our infinite medieval sandbox!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/203770/Crusader_Kings_II/

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.