Mar 3, 2020

Claim What You Deserve in Europa Universalis IV: Emperor

Europa Universalis IV - BjornB

STOCKHOLM - 03 MARCH 2020 - From the churches of Rome, the people are called to abide by the one true faith. From the palaces of Vienna, the subjects are commanded to obey their chosen ruler. From the streets of Paris, a new generation of citizens pursues its own zealous mission. All choose their path, all aspire to Empire.

Paradox Development Studio announces Europa Universalis IV: Emperor an expansion for its classic game of early modern exploration and conquest. Emperor revitalizes gameplay for the Holy Roman Empire, the Papal State and other Catholic nations, while also adding greater interactivity in the management of a kingdom’s internal affairs.

Features of Europa Universalis IV: Emperor include:

A Powerful Pope: Appoint cardinals, publish Papal Bulls and gather tithes. The Vatican and Papal Controller now have new abilities to sway the souls of Christendom.
New Holy Roman Empire Systems: Imperial Incidents provide new challenges to the Emperor's power and authority. Will your empire follow a course to a centralized monarchy or decentralized federation?.
Revolutions Revamped: The spirit of Revolution is a contagion that must be either embraced or vigorously opposed. Use the guillotine and revolutionary guard to enforce the new way of thinking.
The Hussite Faith: Bohemia has an early game chance to embrace heresy and stand alone against the Pope until The Reformation.
Hegemonies: If you accomplish great feats, you should expect great rewards. Seize the mantle of honor for accumulating great wealth and armies.
New Missions: Over 20 new unique mission trees for a variety of European nations
Defender of Faith: With great responsibility comes great power. Earn more bonuses for defending a major religion than for defending a small one.
The Council of Trent and Counter-Reformation: Join other Catholic rulers to slow down the spread of the Reformation by making concessions to the unruly mob or harshly imposing the will of God.
Provoke Rebellions: Risk a larger rebellion now while you think you can manage it instead of waiting for discontent to take its course.

Emperor will be accompanied by a major update free for all Europa Universalis IV players, that includes a redrawn map of west and central Europe, Crown Lands, new ideas and a host of other major changes.

If you want to know more of what's coming in Emperor and it's accompanying free update, then check out our development diaries!

Mar 3, 2020

Dev Diary: The Kingdom of God

Europa Universalis IV - Addaway

Today's Development Diary by Groogy:

Hey! So today’s development diary will be a bit shorter as we’ll have something really juicy to show later today at 15:00 CET. Something which a lot of you have been waiting for a long time and are as hyped up for as I am.

But of course for the ones that can’t wait that long, let’s talk about some of the new features coming in 1.30.

First feature is that the Kingdom of God has gotten a bit of a do-over to not be such a trap decision anymore. Previously it would disable the Curia removing an entire feature from the game as a “reward”. Now this doesn’t really fit with us both wanting to make the Pope more of a power player among the Catholics but also give the Catholics more features to play with.

I’ve seen suggestions on the forum for the Papal States to be given a new tag if they take the decision, but for technical reasons we want to keep the PAP tag around, so we figured out a different way to reward the player. Upon declaring the Kingdom of God the Papal States will be renamed and given a new unique government reform that promotes them up to Empire rank.

We will no longer disable the Curia when the Kingdom of God decision is taken. Instead we will be giving you some new goodies that we will cover more in detail in a future Catholic focused development diary as it will play in with some of the new features we've worked on.

Now as we did this we also realized that the old Unify Islam decision could do some touches up as well. For one we removed the requirement that you need to convert your entire realm. It doesn’t jive well with the name and since the conception of the decision we’ve added several mechanics that require that you keep non-muslims around. Like the Dhimmi or the Janissaries.

But as you can see we have also changed the decision rewards. If taken you will now become known as The Caliphate and be given Feudal Theocracy as a government reform.

Next is some more Quality of Life, because you can never have enough of that. It goes a bit in the same vein as the change we did with warning you of that the Innovativeness Gain from Tech and Ideas are about to time out.

The alert for when you are about to hit your maximum cap for monarch power have been changed so it will popup if you hit it in 3 months instead of at the moment of when it’s too late. Now when you do actually hit the upper limit it will turn red instead to really try and grab your attention.

And I want to finish with some changes to the Introduce new heir mechanics. First up England starts with 100 Legitimacy again and in cases like the War of the Roses, Granadan Succession war or other similar things, we will instead be looking at claim strength of the heir or check if the dynasty is of the correct one to avoid cheating yourself out of it. Also to not allow you to cheat out of being a potential junior partner in a PU, anyone you have a royal marriage with will gain a Claim Throne CB on you.

All of the changes mentioned in this development diary except the Introduce New Heir new behavior is part of the 1.30 Patch. That’s it for the Development Diary, stay peeled for 15:00 CET for more information! Next development diary will be about the Estates and how we have changed how you play with them completely.

Feb 25, 2020

Dev Diary: Mercenary Companies

Europa Universalis IV - Addaway

Today's Development Diary by Groogy

Hello everyone! So we have worked on this update for quite a long while and already covered a lot of features in previous diaries. However just because we’ve already covered something doesn’t mean we’ve stopped working on those features but we have been polishing and constantly improving them. Today we will be revisiting and diving deeper into the new Mercenary mechanics.

I want to highlight as usual, that any numbers you see in the pictures are very work in progress.

Let’s start with the concept and the premise we had for doing this change of a core part of the game. Mercenaries have gone through a lot of iterations over the years to try and solve problems created by the mercenaries themselves, Despite these changes the problems have never really changed. Mercenaries as in how they are currently implemented lets you completely bypass or ignore an entire core feature of the game if you are rich enough. Manpower. And Manpower being cheapened meant that a lot of other features as well lost quite a bit of meaning, like supply limits.

Manpower is supposed to be something you have to budget, just like your treasury, something that becomes exhausted as you fight a heavy war versus your rivals. Mercenaries are supposed to supplement this, being more prevalent early in the game and fade away in their use as your nation modernizes and gets access to way bigger sources of manpower. Fundamentally why the Mercenaries do not act like this, is because they exist in a never ending supply to the player. One example of trying to address this issue was to try and make manpower using regiments more valuable with features like Army Professionalism and special units. However a 0 strength regiment is still 0 strength regardless of how good it is.

Jake and I far back when working on the design threw together some points of what our vision was and what we had to achieve.

Mercenaries must be in some way finite
Mercenaries should not be scalable for late game
A player should not be able to screw over another player by clicking first

Working with this framework we bounced a lot of ideas between us and discarded a lot of ideas. For instance a favorite of my ideas did not fulfill the last requirement as it would let you before a war exhaust on purpose the available mercenaries for your enemy.

So as you know from previous development diaries we settled on the Company mechanic inspired from Crusader Kings and Imperator but with a twist. Let’s go through a bit quickly what this is for people who haven’t read Jake’s old Dev Diaries.

The old way of recruiting mercenaries and how they interact with your armies is gone and reworked from the ground up as part of the 1.30 Update. You now recruit a whole company, that function as a fully individual army only consisting of mercenary regiments. As you buy a Mercenary Company you also buy the accompanying manpower with that Company giving the Company sort of a finite amount of time fighting for you limited by how well you can manage them. These companies are either seen as “local” or “foreign” and the foreign ones will have unique modifiers and content revolving around them. When the company becomes disbanded, it used to be unavailable to you for 10 years but this has been increased to 20 years. Another change since last dev diary on mercs is that the upper cap of regiments in a company has now been set to 60 instead of 40. Mercenary Companies are still scaled by the development of the hiring nation, but it has as well been tweaked slightly.

To clarify a bit though, a “local” is a company that does not have a home province, each nation has a set amount of these and are always available to you. The foreign ones have a home province and can be hired in your empire if they are within your trade range (not counting stuff like trade winds and such). Foreign Companies also come accompanied with a General and these do not count for your own Leader limit so can be quite handy boost early game for your money.

Since the last development diary covering mercenaries we have done quite a lot of changes besides some number tweaks. What I am covering now wasn’t originally part of our design but something that we’ve been testing as of late.

A big change we’ve done is to emphasize more on the locality of mercenaries. This gives quite a strategic element especially for widespread empires, like colonizers. A Foreign Mercenary Company is recruited from their home province and the further away you recruit from that home the longer time it takes for that mercenary company to form up there. What provinces within your control you can recruit these companies on is determined by your trade range calculated from the companies home province. Most of the base values of the mercenaries will also be now based on their home province, like technology groups and so on. All of this to give a sense of locality to them.

What we want to achieve is that you wouldn’t hire some German Jaegers to fight in India, unless you are willing to transport them all the way over there as well. What we want to promote is inspired in part by history, where the Brits would hire local manpower to fight in India for the most. But we were also solving a problem where you had access to so many Mercenary Companies that it became a non issue again. In essence previously Purbiyas would appear in Paris fully ready to fight another European power in just a matter of days.

Some other changes are the cost of Mercenaries which have been heavily rebalanced. They are no longer as expensive as they were to more fit their new limited nature with manpower. We’ve added some cheaper alternatives for smaller states in the game but with their own drawbacks as to represent their lower pay.

For instance above is the Local Companies available to smaller nations and the one for Free Cities. The idea of these Companies (numbers not final as usual!) are to be incredibly much cheaper to fit the budget of smaller nations, but to compensate they are also not the best of company, being slow to reinforce and slow to regain their morale.

Even though we’ve made Mercenary Companies cheaper we’ve made the over time inflation of land maintenance cost grow faster for Mercenaries. While normal regular troops grow by 2% each military technology you take, the Mercenaries will grow by 8%.

There’s a lot of unique content that has been made now for the Mercenary Companies. Especially for countries such as Hungary and it’s Black Army. Last time we had a lot of [REDACTED] when we talked about it but this time I’m going to tell you more about it.

Hungary has for a long time had some unique decisions and events relating to their historic Black Army founded by Matthias Corvinus which relied more on paid standing mercenaries rather than manpower from the nobility. This is now integrated with the new mercenary system where Hungary early on gets access to unique Mercenary companies to them.

These mercenary companies have events tied to them giving you some unique flavor but they also have a 5% discipline modifier associated with them and are a bit cheaper than other companies.

And when you finally reach a date where the Black Army starts to become out of date historically (This is tied to Age of Reformation) you as a player get a choice to keep them in your employ however at the cost of your Nobility’s faith in you.

We’ve added somewhere around 100 different mercenary companies and several of these are tied to content in the game trying to give them some reliance on the actions of actors in the game. For instance we have the Pontifical Swiss Guard available to the Papal States as a mercenary company now, though quite small, just like the Black Army features a 5% Discipline benefit.

Some other interesting companies to spike your interests are Forlorn Hope that function well like a vanguard, the Dahomey Amazons available to whoever holds Bahomey and last the Hessian Jaegerkorps that become available later in the game and which @Ofaloaf describes as “the perfidious enemies of all God-fearing americans”

So you might be asking why after nerfing Mercenaries so hard, why are we giving them these benefits? Just because we do not want them to be the main fighting force of your nation and be able to scale properly with the growth of your empire, does not mean we want them entirely gone or not keep them interesting to consider. They still fulfill a function as either auxiliary troops or as veteran soldiers that can give a hard punch even though they might not be able to replenish them as well or be as reliable as your regulars. And a nice thing with how they will work going forward is that we can create a lot of unique and interesting content with them.

As I’ve covered before, this is also why we’ve been going over sources of manpower for the player, we are quite happy with the numbers as is but we wanted the player to have a bit more control than just getting a lot of manpower from ideas, hence the changes to Drill, Professionalism and Buildings as some examples. Some other examples are we have reworked how supply limit and attrition modifiers interact to be a bit softer on you. Another change done is changing the overrun mechanics a bit. This is when you have 10x more forces than the enemy at the instant the battle is created, the combat is concluded the first tick and the enemy gets wiped. This still works but if you have enough to actually fill the combat width it is ignored. You will probably lose the battle if you are facing 30 000 versus 300 000, and you might still get stack wiped during the combat lock part, but you won’t get overrun anymore meaning in face of such an opponent you can still lower the sizes of your stacks. Of course mainly that affects multiplayer because I doubt you’ll see AI walking around with stacks in the range of half a million.

Let’s finish with Mercenary-based modifiers and what has happened to them now. I think we have covered this before but I still see the question so I’ll reiterate on it. Mainly this is about Available Mercenaries which was quite desirable previously. This of course no longer exists and has been remade into a new modifier called Mercenary Manpower.

So now instead of Available Mercenaries you have Mercenary Manpower. This modifier increases the amount of manpower a company comes with when they are hired by you. It also increases how many Condottieries you can rent out just like how Available Mercenaries did.

Everywhere you would have had Available Mercenaries previously you will now instead have Mercenary Manpower. And since Mercenaries no longer rely on your FL to calculate how many you can have this is a sort of indirect nerf to several idea sets like Quantity and Offensive/Diplomatic. Let’s give you some examples of changes:

Switzerland Ideas/Governments been made a lot more Mercenary
Their government gives +50% Mercenary Manpower
Their ideas gives +50% Mercenary Manpower
Their ideas gives -15% Mercenary Maintenance
Their ideas gives +5% Mercenary Discipline
Burgundy ideas now gives +50% Mercenary Manpower
Administrative Ideas now gives +50% Mercenary Manpower

All other modifiers should work as expected, mercenary cost reduces the cost of the company, mercenary maintenance reduces the maintenance, discipline makes them stronger.

It’s hard to try and figure exactly what I should cover and what to go deeper into, especially also since I have the influenza while writing this, but the good with the bad, it means that I can sit and read this thread free of disruptions and try to help clarify any questions people have as well as I can.

Next week’s development diary I’ll be covering some new religious changes.

Feb 18, 2020

Dev Diary: More Quality of Life

Europa Universalis IV - Addaway

Today's Development Diary by Groogy

Hello! So today we’ll be covering a fair bit of various functions, most of it is free quality of life improvements coming with the next patch. I’ll also be talking about some changes we’ve done since previous dev diaries in response to feedback from these threads and other platforms. So we’ll start with the one feature that will be accompanying the expansion.

So ever been sitting just hoping that you are going to get an heir that will safely take over your Kingdom when you pass on? You be damned if you let the Habsburgs get their hands on your titles! We’re adding a feature for monarchies where a highly esteemed King can appoint someone to be their successor who is not of their dynasty. You can Introduce an Heir to the court.

Requirements to use this is:

Not in a Regency
Not at War
Positive Prestige
At least 90 Legitimacy

Using it will cost you 20 Legitimacy and 20 Prestige but give you an heir with a local dynasty not of your current one with weak claim to the throne.

Next up are features who all are part of the 1.30 Patch. First one we’ll talk about you might have spotted in the previous development diary.

Now when you hover over a country shield it will highlight that country on the map with a red outline that pulsates. This will work with all shields, except some like the large shield representing your country in the top left corner.

Next one I teased about yesterday, a small addition but I believe will be quite loved. We’ve added a Core All button in the Stability interface

If you compare with last dev diary you can see as the stability interface is being reworked to get space for the new Governing Capacity mechanics and to convey all the necessary information to the player.

Not much to say here, it does what it says on the tin. It will try and core as many provinces as you can afford. I can add that the programmers have worked on a bunch of issues that start to appear in the macro builder and various other lists when you start to have more than ~3 000 provinces.

Next is you can now view the mission screen of your subjects.

It should help anyone that wants to optimize what they get out of their vassals and even be able to get some out of their mission trees to benefit you in the long run.

Speaking of missions, our Content Designers have been going over them trying to make their requirements and tooltips way clearer.

Part of that has also been to add support where it will show your progress clearer to achieve one of the requirements. For modders some of the triggers that have been improved are:

Num_of_owned_provinces_with
Num_of_provinces_owned_or_owned_by_non_sovereign_subjects_with
Calc_true_if

Next are some changes to generals to help you manage them a bit easier.

In the military interface for your country you can now detach your leaders from whatever army or navy that they are in control over. Besides this function we’ve also changed a little bit fundamentally how they work, or specifically how they die.

They now have an age just as if they were a monarch. This has been done for two reasons, one to give you a straightforward way to try and guess if the leader has long for this world or if you should get a younger general on that front. Second, this made it possible for us to tweak how death chance is calculated for Monarchs who are also leaders. Monarchs leading an army no longer get the double check for death based on their age, however of course being on the field is still an elevated risk to his Highness health.

Last improvement is to prove what we all already know to be true, that there are no Swedish Bias in the team ;). So I went ahead and updated the Danish ideas to be more competitive with other naval powers in Europe.

Traditions
5% Ship Durability
10% Tax Modifier

Bonus
10% Naval Engagement

Nordic Rulers Legacy
10% Shock Damage

Vornedskab
20% Global Manpower Modifier
20% Global Sailors Modifier

Old Naval Traditions
10% Naval Morale
5% Disengagement Chance

Rentekammer
-15% Build Cost

Klaedekammer
-15% Naval Maintenance Modifier

Expanded Dockyards
+50% Naval Force Limit Modifier

Den Danske Lov
-1 Global Unrest

Before ending the Development Diary for today, I want to cover some changes we’ve done since some previous development diaries and what was covered in them.

First is that we have raised the Base Disengagement Chance for ships to 10% from the previous 3% giving ships a bit more of a reasonable chance of getting out of the battle and letting your fresh ships get in and fight.

We’ve swapped out the Admin Efficiency penalty from going over Governing Capacity to +20% Core Creation and +100% Advisor Cost when at 100%. In the end we felt that Admin Efficiency had too many side effects as well besides what we wanted to achieve so we swapped it for Core Creation. We looked at potentially adding State Maintenance as the monetary burden of going over capacity but it had problems with it, you do not pay maintenance for territories and if we would add that you can very easily get into a death spiral where you have no option to get out of it, including calling for bankruptcy you could still sit at a net negative afterwards. So we felt Advisor cost was a good middle ground, representing the strain on your administration, it being a cost you have full control over and it as added bonus has an indirect effect on your mana generation.

Together with Governing Capacity we’ve also now hooked in some old government mechanics into it that previously were tied to provinces. Merchant republics and Prussian Militarization have had their width penalties redone. Merchant Republics no longer suffer the republican tradition penalty as previously from fully cored land but instead their stated land and territories have an additional 25% Governing Cost compared to other nations, while trade companies for them will be cheaper. Militarization penalty is now based on the governing capacity of your country, getting -1 Militarization for being 100% over. But Prussian Monarchy/Republic also have -50% Governing Capacity modifier in their government not letting them efficiently manage as large swaths of land as an Ottoman Empire.

Next week we will revisit a mechanic we talked about in a very old development diary, Mercenaries, but a lot of stuff has happened since we last mentioned them. The vision remains the same but we’ll go more into details on how they work and talk about the content around them. I will see you next Tuesday!

Feb 11, 2020

Dev Diary: Reworked Defender of the Faith

Europa Universalis IV - Addaway

Today's Development Diary by Groogy

Hello! So today I will be talking about two smaller sized features coming with the expansion that will be accompanying the 1.30 Patch.

As part of our improvements to the Catholic faith, which we will revisit in a later dev diary, we want to give the player a carrot for keeping their brethren alive. So with that in mind for all religions that can use Defenders of the Faith mechanic, they are getting a bit of an uplift to emphasise that you defend a faith, not only something you claim to be.

So what we’ve done is that we gave the Defender of the Faith 5 tiers that are dependent upon how many nations are following that faith. The more you are defending the more your title as the faith’s defender has as worth to the people and your neighbours. At the highest tier the entire faith gets a bonus together.

The 5 Tiers available to the Defender of the Faith.

Tier 1 - 1 to 4 Countries
+1 Missionaries
-10% Missionary Maintenance Cost

Tier 2 - 5 to 9 Countries
+1 Missionaries
-10% Missionary Maintenance Cost
+5% Land Morale
+5% Naval Morale
+1 Prestige

Tier 3 - 10 to 19 Countries
+1 Missionaries
-10% Missionary Maintenance Cost
+5% Land Morale
+5% Naval Morale
+1 Prestige
-0.03 War Exhaustion

Tier 4 - 20 to 49 Countries
+1 Missionaries
-10% Missionary Maintenance Cost
+5% Land Morale
+5% Naval Morale
+1 Prestige
-0.03 War Exhaustion
+20% Manpower in True Faith Provinces

Tier 5 - 50+ Countries
+1 Missionaries
-10% Missionary Maintenance Cost
+5% Land Morale
+5% Naval Morale
+1 Prestige
-0.03 War Exhaustion
+20% Manpower in True Faith Provinces
-20% Missionary Maintenance Cost on all members of that Faith, including DotF.

Besides the mechanical changes we’ve also given the Defender of the Faith more flavour by giving the feature a bunch of unique events and content that can appear for whoever that claims the title.

The second feature of today is a little thing that just lets you get on with your business a bit faster by not having to sit and wait for rebels to pop so you can deal with them immediately.

It requires the faction to have already reached a progression of 50% before this option can be picked and when done it will cause those rebels to appear 50% stronger than they would have usually. You can also not use this feature at war so you can not rebel bomb your opponents with it.

Next Development Diary coming next week will be covering one feature that is part of the expansion but also free quality of life features. The focus of the features will be to make management of your empire easier and more bearable.

Feb 4, 2020

Dev Diary: Hegemonies

Europa Universalis IV - Addaway

Today's Development Diary by Johan

The purpose of Hegemonies is to create a greater narrative for the endgame, but there are two cases in which this will become the most used one.

First of all, our goal was to create something for those of you who like to conquer the world, and make part of that more interesting, and hopefully less tedious.

Secondly, our goal is to create an interesting and dynamic last century in larger multiplayer games.

So what is a Hegemony then?

A Hegemony is something a Great Power can proclaim when they fulfill certain conditions.There are 3 different types of Hegemony, each excelling in their own area available to Great Powers. They do come with their own requirements to become Hegemon and you must excel in their specific area. The AI will proclaim Hegemony whenever they can.

What is interesting is that there can only be one of each Hegemon, and a Hegemony is lost when you lose a war, no matter how you lose it.

Proclaiming a Hegemony gives you a bonus which partially depends on which Hegemony you have proclaimed, and the longer you keep your Hegemony, the bigger your scaling bonus gets, and finally when you reach max progress you gain a further finisher. Currently it takes about 20 years for a nation to get their Hegemony Power maximised, but that's subject to tweaking. If you no longer fullfill the requirements to be that hegemon, you will slowly lose power.

A Hegemon can not be allied with one of the other two Hegemons, and all other nations get a relation penalty against you. A Hegemon gets a very nice power projection boost, and will also gain score at a higher gain, while any nation allied with them gets less power projection and score. All other nations will always have a Imperial War Casus Belli on the Hegemon.

All Hegemons have -0.1 monthly War Exhaustion and a +25% to Spy Defence.

Let's take a look at the different Hegemonies then.

Economical Hegemony
The Great Power with the highest monthly income, with at least a monthly income of 1000£, can proclaim this Hegemony

The base bonus is +100% manpower on all mercenary companies recruited, and the 100% power bonus is +33% Governing Capacity

The scaling powers go up to.
+10% Mercenary Discipline
+10% Trade Goods Produced
-20% Autonomy in Territories

Naval Hegemon
The Great Power with most Heavy Ships, and at least 250 Heavy Ships can proclaim this Hegemony

The base bonus is +10% Naval Engagement Width, and the 100% power bonus is +20% Backrow Artillery Damage

The scaling powers go up to.
-20 Liberty Desire of Subject
+200% Sailors
+200% Blockade Efficiency

Military Hegemon
The Great Power with most Regiments, and at least 1000 Regiments can proclaim this Hegemony

The base bonus is 10% cheaper warscore cost, and the 100% power bonus is +20% Siege Ability

The scaling powers go up to.
+10% Faster Movement of Armies
-20% Less Attrition on land.
-3 Unrest

Please remember that no numbers are finalised yet, and also that the Great Power mechanics will be unlocked by this expansion as well..