Dec 20, 2022

Developer Diary - 1.35 Unit Pip Rebalance

Europa Universalis IV - PDXRyagi

Hello and welcome to another EUIV DD!

Today we will be talking about the rebalance of the Unit Pips we're working on for the upcoming 1.35 update. This task has been led by our QA Team, which was reinforced throughout the year, and that has been key to the release of Lions of the North, as the new members that have joined the Team credit over 5,000 hours of gameplay on EUIV. But apart from testing the game, they are also involved in the game design process, a classic at Paradox, which usually relies on close cooperation between the different teams. Therefore, this is the proposal we'll be testing in the following weeks, taking also into account the feedback we receive in this DD, of course!

Hello everyone, I'm Pintu, one of the Embedded QA’s working at Tinto.

I want to show you the rework we are doing on the Unit Pips of the different Techgroups, one of the Systems that saw very few changes since the Release of EU4. As we implemented changes to the Combat calculations in the 1.34 update, we think now it’s a good moment to address this rebalance.

First I want to quickly outline what the Unit Pips do in what parts of combat they matter, for those not as experienced in the game. In each combat phase, Strength Damage is dealt depending on the Offensive Damage Pips of the Units, while Morale Damage is dealt based on Offensive Damage and Offensive Morale Pips. Defending works the same way with the Defensive Pips of the Unit, but half of the Defensive Pips (rounded down) of the Backrow Units is added on top of that. That means that over the course of the game, the priority of pips shifts from having a strong Shock Phase to a strong Fire Phase with a focus on defensive Pips, especially for Infantry.

With this rebalance of Unit Pips we mainly want to focus on Infantry Units that are clear strong or weak outliers on their Tech level and the introduction of more choices in Artillery Units beyond the first Technologies when they become available. As always, these are by no means final numbers and will be under close observation during our Testing, apart from the feedback we are receiving in this DD, so there are good chances these will change until the release of the patch.

One of the swiftly explained changes is that related to Aboriginal and Polynesian Units: both got their total amount of pips reduced, to be in line with the American and African Unit Groups. These changes make them preserve some of their strengths, while not being an outlier over other units.

Now onwards to a change that influences other groups as well, which means they have to get adjusted together. The Anatolian group has a very big advantage with their early Units with their Offensive Moral Damage. We decided to tune that down a little in their Unit Options on technologies 5 and 9. Unfortunately, this affects Muslim Unit groups, which should not have an advantage over Anatolians at that point, which in turn affects Indian Units. That's why we had to tune them down as well.

The Anatolian Group will keep one of their big Spikes in Pips on Tech 12, which will let them be a threat to the groups around them. This is also partly because their Unit will stay around until Tech 18, significantly later than other groups get new units.

Speaking of the Muslims, let's take a look at the changes the group got independently from other groups. The Muslim Unit on Tech 23 suffered from both very poor Offensive and Defensive Fire Pips. They do have great Morale and Shock Pips to make up for it, but with the importance of Fire Phase in the later stages of the game, we decided to help them out a little by buffing their defensive Fire on the cost of their defensive Shock.

The Chinese Group has one outlier in their Unit selection, which is situated on Tech 19, with both 3 offensive and 3 defensive Fire Pips, in addition to 3 Offensive Morale. The one drawback with that Unit is that its successor becomes available only on Tech 25, later than most other groups. Since they have an edge with that against most of their neighboring groups, the solution for this is that they lose one offensive Morale.

On the same Techlevel, the Nomadic Group has a very solid, while not great, Infantry Unit, that would do with a small Nerf to fit their theme of military decline more.

The African Groups (this includes Central, East, and West African), got a small reshuffle of Pips, to make their Last Unit on Tech 30 an actual upgrade over the previous version.

Last but not least a small change to the High American Group, where their Unit from Tech 18 gets a small bump in Pips. Before this Unit had the same amount of total Pips as the previous unit level.

Let's now move on to the Changes to Artillery. These mainly focus on the Introduction of one new Alternative per Unit, which focuses more on a defensive style, where Artillery is used to push half of their defensive Pips towards the frontline while sacrificing their damage output with lower Offensive Fire and Morale Pips. There will also be a small Adjustment on Tech 13, with making one of the Options a defensive one.

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You may notice that for the new types of Artillery we've just named them the 'Defensive' version of each level. This is not definitive, as it's mainly a placeholder; so, we will accept suggestions for naming each of the unit types.

And this will conclude the Dev Diary for this week and this year. Just like the Idea Group rebalance of last week, we are very eager to read your feedback and suggestions on this topic to improve it as much as possible.

See you at the next DD, on January 10th!

Dec 13, 2022

Developer Diary - 1.35 Roadmap and Idea Groups

Europa Universalis IV - PDXRyagi

Hello and welcome back to another Europa Universalis IV Dev Diary!

It’s been a while since the last one, back in September. The main reason for this is that the Team has been quite busy during these months. In October we released the 1.34.4 update, that fixed most of the issues we wanted to cover after Lions of the North, and participated in the last edition of the Grandest Lan, which could be organized again at Moszna Castle (and that you can watch at the Paradox Grand Strategy YouTube channel!). In November, the team focused on launching EUIV on a new platform, GOG, with the 1.34.5 update; this is the fourth platform in which the game can be played, after Steam, Microsoft Store, and Epic Games.

So now comes December, and we feel it’s the proper time to give you an insight into what we’re working on and share with you a roadmap to the 1.35 update (as we won’t be releasing more patches for the 1.34 version).

First and foremost, and although we’ve already said this, we want to thank all the players that have bought and played EUIV: Lions of the North, making it one of the most successful releases in the history of this game. We think that a non-trivial part of this has been the quality of the 1.34 ‘Sweden’ free update, and we are very happy about the fact of having to patch it only two times, as we deem this version quite stable.

So, what are our plans for the future? Well, not surprisingly, we want to keep focused on continuing to reduce the bug count as much as possible; in the last couple of years, the Team has fixed between 2,000 and 3,000 backlog bugs, and we think that the state of the game is much better after this effort. However, we still have hundreds of issues in our backlog, so more effort needs to be put into it.

The good news is that now we have some extra room to rework some game mechanics. Don’t expect anything very ambitious, but some more changes that are on the line with the fixes for the AI and the new government reforms we implemented for 1.34, fleshing out features of the game that haven’t received any update in a while. We will cover two of these topics today and next week.

And when is new content going to be shown? We will get started with that in January after the Team comes back from the Christmas Holidays. We’re very excited about it, but you will have to wait a bit more to take the first look at it. And with no further words to say, let's go with the first ideas we want to share with you!

------------------------------------------------

Idea Group Additions and Rebalance

Hey everyone, PDX Big Boss here! We decided to add a few new idea groups to the game as well as a lot of new policies and new events, to accompany a general rebalance of the existing idea groups.

First things first, we wish to introduce 3 new idea groups:

Infrastructure Ideas for the Admin Category
Court Ideas for the Dip Category
Mercenary Ideas for the Mil Category

A few notes we should mention here! This by no means reflects which will be the released version of the changes. Lions introduced a very high bar of quality and our intention is - at the very least - to meet this bar. So please keep in mind that what you see here is far from finalized, in fact, this is hot code. Having said that, I would genuinely like to encourage you all to give feedback, especially on stuff you don’t like and help shape this beautiful game together. The intention behind these new groups is not to introduce a new powerful single-line meta, but rather to spruce up the game and maybe offer more options for the player, in the interest of making your games more fun and enjoyable. Enough with the boring stuff, onto the Ideas!

The goal behind Infrastructure ideas is to give you the ability to build up your nation, by granting you the tools to speed up construction, reduce its costs, autonomy levels, and more. Let’s take a look:

For the purpose of creating this new group, we chose to separate it from Economic Ideas, which now focus exclusively on the money-making aspect of the game, directly. More on that later, when we tackle existing idea groups.

Infrastructure Ideas offer great bonuses such as construction cost and time reduction, a merchant, autonomy decay, and development cost. Let’s take a look at the Diplomatic Policies for it:

Note: Years for Personal Union Integration: -10

And a quick peek at the Policy Combination of Infrastructure + any Military Idea Group except Aristo/Plutocratic/Horde/Theocratic:

Infrastructure and Aristocratic:

Infrastructure and Plutocratic:

Infrastructure and Horde:

Infrastructure and Divine:

Note: the prestige gain here is 0.5 per Development Point

Moving to the next set of new Ideas, the goal behind Court ideas is to introduce some internal flavor, maneuverability in regards to estate manipulation, and more. Let’s take a look:

We took the decision to make some room for the Prestige here, by moving it over from Religious ideas, more on that later!

Note: an idea we’ve had is to add a unique modifier here ‘max_privilege_slots = 1’ somewhere in this set

Court Ideas + any Admin idea group policy:

Court + any Mil idea group policy:

Note: hmmm this 0.5 Yearly Army Professionalism looks a bit too strong hmm…

Court and Aristocratic:

Court and Plutocratic:

Court and Horde:

Court and Divine:

Finally, let’s look into the new Mercenary Ideas. This one is a bit deeper of a rework because one of our plans is to accompany this new Idea Group with somewhat of a rework on how Mercenaries are distributed, so as to make them a tad bit more interesting at certain points during the game.

Mercenary Ideas + any Admin Group Policies:

Mercenary Ideas + any Dip Group Policies:

Moving on, we have made some tweaks to existing idea groups, let’s look into them:

Religious Ideas

Removed Stability Cost Modifier and replaced with Religious Unity

Humanist

Removed Religious Unity and replaced with Max. Tolerance of Heathens and Heretics

Administrative Ideas

Removed Merc Cost and replaced with Admin Advisor Cost
Removed Merc Maintenance and replaced with Max Promoted Cultures and Promote Culture Cost
Removed Interest and replaced with Religious' Stability Cost modifier
Removed Merc Manpower and replaced with States Governing Cost

Economic Ideas

Removed Construction Cost and replaced with -25% Monthly Gold Inflation and -25% Gold Depletion Chance reduction (This is a niche change, we would would welcome feedback on this)
Increased Interest to 1 instead of 0.5 due to 0.5 being removed from Admin Ideas (this will probably get nerfed and the other half will be reintroduced elsewhere)
Removed Monthly Autonomy and replaced with -25% Reduce Inflation Cost and -33% Autonomy Chance Cool down
Removed Development Cost and replaced with +10% Goods Produced Modifier

The goal of this rework is to breathe some new life into the Idea Groups that were introduced nearly 10 years ago. On top of that, many existing groups will potentially receive new modifiers such as Humanist’s Heretic Opinion of Us (name TBD) which would increase Heretics’ opinion of your nation, due to your humanist approach towards their people.

Note: most of these Improve Relations Modifiers are Placeholders for relations with own religion/culture group and similar modifiers.

We also aim at revisiting more existing idea groups in the Diplomatic and Military Groups as well as the Events from all idea groups. Furthermore, here’s a little event you may get if your ruler has poor diplomatic skills while Court Ideas are active:

Note: shameful display!

And that’s all for today! We’ll be glad to receive your feedback regarding these changes, as we really wanted to tackle them as early as possible with the community, so we have enough time to change/rebalance the different issues that could arise from discussing them with the community.

Next week there will be another Dev Diary focused on another aspect of the game that we are working on rebalancing: Unit Pips. See you then!

Oct 13, 2022

Europa Universalis IV - 1.34.4 Patchnotes

Europa Universalis IV - BjornB

Greetings all!

Today we release the 1.34.4 patch for Europa Universalis IV with some balance changes and addressing some issues that has come to our attention. Please read the spoiler below for the complete patch notes.

As usual - we strongly recommend that you finish off any ongoing saves you have in previous versions before updating your game. You can read how to revert your game version here! In our tests 1.34.3 saves are working, but this can never be guaranteed!

And as always, please report any issues in our bug report forum or submit a support ticket. Thank you!

We will not be collecting bug reports from the Steamhub so please use above linked channels if you encounter any issues

###################
# Gamebalance
###################

# Governments
- Consolidated Power government reform cannot be chosen if the head of state rules for life.
- Venetian Doges will now die less frequently.
- Germany now has access to the Prussian Monarchy T1 Government Reform either by becoming the Military Hegemon or by having 25% Discipline or by having 500 Development in provinces with the Prussian culture (the reform stays after you pick it.
- Grabbing the Prussian monarchy as a custom nation will no longer remove it immediately after the game starts.
- The government reform "Empower the Monasteries" now strengthens the Monastic Temples estate privilege, increasing the Karma gain and loss from 3 to 5, removing the influence and absolutism penalties and increasing Yearly Karma Decay by +0.03.
- The government reform "The Social Contract" now gives -1 Global Unrest instead of Religious Unity. Additionally, it now removes the Max Absolutism and the Clergy loyalty penalty from the "Enforced Interfaith Dialogue" privilege.
- The reform "Machiavellianism Reign" now hits -1 Stability on Declare War (which means a no-CB with that would give you -1 Stab instead of -2).
- The government reforms "Centralized Bureaucracy" and "Centralized Monarchical Bureaucracy" now refund 50% of the cost of centralizing a state instead of 100%.

###################
# Interface
###################
# Country
- Fars is now slightly pinker.

# Tooltips
- Added proper tooltip for Guns Drums and Steel volume 3 on the lobby screen.
- Fixed 2 tooltip errors in the "Loyalty of the Regent" event.
- Renamed the modifier "+1 Tax, +1 Production and +1 Manpower when Colony Finished" to "+1 of §Yeach Development§! when Colony Finished.

# Other
- Bahmani’s' mission "Southern Frontier" no longer shares the same icon name as a Norwegian mission, they are now titled southern_frontier_dharma and southern_frontier_lotn.

###################
# Usermodding
###################

# Other
- The scripted triggers which ask you to have a building of a certain type now have a custom tooltip.

###################
# Script
###################

# Decisions
- AI will now look to actively form Prussia after the Reformation has begun, to a reasonable degree.

# Events
- The Teutonic Order should no longer be able to cheese its entry into the HRE via the mission tree after deciding to follow the Crusader of the steppes path.
- The "Times of Need" event does not refer to a dynasty if you don't have one.
- The Burgher Estate agenda to expand your Trade Company does not fire for the Lapponian area since it does not have enough provinces that fulfill the criteria of the agenda.
- The event "Bergen Riots" now correctly reduces Norway's opinion of Denmark, instead of reducing Denmark's opinion of Norway.
- Picking the Holy Horde or the Crusading Kingdom as the Teutons no longer mistakenly replace a non-T1 reform for them.
- The event "A Helping Hand" no longer mentions "nodynasty”.
- The event “A Helping Hand” will not fire if all owned great projects are already fully upgraded.
- Polish-Hungarian and Polish-Bohemian events now correctly reflect when the player is not playing as Poland and is instead playing as the Commonwealth.
- Declaring war against the HRE will no longer cause the Illegal War event to fire if you are not the Teutonic Order anymore.
- The Rigan event "Religion as a Business" adds instead of removing government reform progress and the estate loyalty if you refuse to take the government reform.
- The Shadow Kingdom incident now informs you that you lose Imperial Authority per development which breaks away from the Empire.
- The event "The Crown of Rome" will now only convert provinces in the Balkan region to your culture and religion.
- The Spanish event "The Valladolid Debate" will no longer clutter your entire screen if you happen to have many colonial subjects.
- The event "Repairing the Great Wall" now requires you to own and control Ningxia to fire.
- Adjusted the localization of Incan events which revolve around Machu Picchu to reflect that the monument is actually in Abancay and not Cusco. Also, the event "Machu Picchu" will give Abancay 4 Base Tax and make it to your capital.
- The event options of the Livonian event "Administrative Chaos in the Office" will no longer clutter the entire screen.
- The Teutonic event "Fate of Moscow" and the Danish event "A new Capital for the North Sea Empire?" now give 100 diplomatic power if you cannot accept the culture.
- The Spanish event "A Very Strategic Marriage" now grants all Austrian provinces in the Low Countries to Spain / Castile properly.
- The event "Incompetent Cousin" now tells you which of your vassals has the incompetent ruler.

# Ideas
- Norse national idea "Berserkir" now grants +20% Shock Damage, and "Norse Seamen" now grants +15% Morale of Navies and +1 Combat Roll off owned Coast.
- The Norse National Idea "Norse Seamen" now grants +1 Combat Bonus Off Owned Coasts and +5% Ship Durability instead of +15% Morale of Navies.

# Missions
- Being a pirate no longer blocks progress in your East African-based mission tree.
- Aragonese Mission "Integrate Naples" can no longer be autocompleted if you do not own Golden Century.
- Fixed a typo in the Lithuanian mission "Enforce the Tribunal" so now it properly counts Noble Estate privileges.
- Rearranged the Third Rome mission tree for minor Russian nations to fit more missions and enable a little more flavor.
- The Polish mission "The Commonwealth" now correctly highlights provinces needed even if they are owned by a non-tributary subject.
- Lithuania now has access to the entire Commonwealth tree's branching path about developing Ruthenian lands.
- The mission “Store Kopparberget” can now be completed without requiring prosperity if you do not own the Mandate of Heaven.
- The Polish mission 'Break Livonia' now grants claims to conquer Pomerania.
- The PLC mission Path of entering and interacting in the HRE now has alternatives in case the HRE is dissolved after picking your missions.
- The Majapahit mission "The Porch of Mecca" allows you now to convert Muslim and Christian provinces through Propagating Religion.
- The Danish mission "Eliminate Novgorod" can now be completed if subjects own the provinces instead.
- The Danish missions "Integrate Norway" and "Integrate Sweden" now remove the diplomatic reputation hit from annexing subjects when completed.
- The Livonian mission "Secularize the Order" no longer requires you to wait for Protestantism to spawn.
- The Livonian Crusader mission "Heal the Schism" no longer requires you to own the Russian provinces yourself.
- Fixed the encoding of the Swedish mission file. By Odin, Novgorod shall now be renamed Hólmgarðr.
- Adjusted the tooltips of a few Danish, Gotlandic and Swedish mission requirements so they are easier to understand.
- Made the first missions of Livonia available for Kurland too.

# Setup
- The game no longer steals your custom nation points by taking away the Great Veche Republic reform once you start the game as a custom nation.

# Other
- The emperor will now always reject the Teutonic wish to join the HRE if they take the Crusader Path during the incident.
- Republic AIs in the HRE no longer pick "Union of States" if they are an OPM so they do not refuse to become a Free City.
- The scripted trigger "province_has_current_tech_fort_trigger" is now true if you have a fort that is ahead of its time in a province. This fixes an issue where missions like "Fortify the Caucasus" could not be completed.
- The tooltip of the government reform "Regional Councils" now tells you what these state edicts for the ages are.
- The Norse culture is now a valid culture for recruiting Carolean units.
- The estate privilege "Grant Orthodox Autonomy" is now available to all non-Orthodox/Coptic Christian nations and is no longer locked behind mission tree rewards.
- Adjusted the localization of the government reforms "Open Public Elections", "A Dynastic Order" and "Lords of the Sea" to make them more fitting with non-monastic orders.
- Government reforms which previously needed an idea group to be visible are now always visible. They, however, still require you to take the necessary idea group to be picked.
- Poland and the Commonwealth's modifiers now have descriptions.
- The Monument "Dujiangyan" now gives only local dev cost in the area instead of global dev cost.
- The progress list for the Dutch Revolt has been simplified so it does not bloat your screen anymore.
- The Custom Nation idea for Expand Administration Cost modifier has been buffed now, decreasing the cost by 100% for each level.
- Added new ideas available for Custom Nations.
- The objective "Asian Trade" of the Age of Reformation can now be completed if you trade in Cloves too.
- State Centralization now grants -20% Local Governing Cost and +0.25 Prosperity Growth instead of -25% Local Governing cost and +0.1 Prosperity Growth.
- The Teutonic mission "Secularize Prussia" no longer requires you to wait until Protestantism spawns to be completed.
- Lübeck will no longer get two events related to "Georg Giese". The event which gives you him as your advisor as its only option will no longer fire.
- Lubeck's modifiers now have descriptions.
- The Teutonic/Prussian mission "The Silesian and the Sorbian" can now be completed if there are no Silesian or Sorbian in North Germany and Poland present.
- Finland's modifiers now have descriptions.
- Lithuania's modifiers now have descriptions.

###################
# Bugfixes
###################
- The triggered province modifier "Imperial Prussian Capital" is now working properly for the Stratocratic Administration reform.
- Fixed an issue that made you lose the Prussian government if you form Germany.
- Conquering a province with a temple or a cathedral while having the "Expand Temple Rights" government reform will now apply the modifier to the province.
- Fixed missing strings for the unlockable Livonian governments. Also, fixed a bug for the Livonian Plutocracy where the Global Trade Goods Modifier was not applied correctly.
- The events "The Situation of the Teutonic Order" and "The Situation of the Livonian Order" now triggers if you have Lions of the North instead of Emperor active.
- Fixed a bug that prevented Riga from maintaining the Propagate Religion trade policy.

Sep 22, 2022

1.34.3 Sweden Patchnotes

Europa Universalis IV - BjornB

Greetings all!

Today we released a patch to address some issues that has been brought to our attention since the initial release of the 1.34 Sweden Update.

As usual - we strongly recommend that you finish off any ongoing saves you have in 1.33.x before updating your game. You can read how to revert your game version here! In our tests 1.34.2 saves are working, but this can never be guaranteed!

And as always, please report any issues in our bug report forum or submit a support ticket. Thank you!

###################
# Gamebalance
###################

# Governments
- The Prussian Monarchy / Stratocratic Administration / Militaristic Divine State reforms are now available for Germany if it was formed by the Teutonic Order even if it never formed Prussia before.
- The native reform "Land Tradition" now also grants +1 Monthly Administrative Power so players without Conquest of Paradise do not have a reform without modifiers.
- Polish unique reforms "Legislative Sejm" and "Integrate the Sejmiks" are now available with the new Polish T1 Reforms.
- Removed the reduced governing capacity from the Mandala System reform.

# Units
- Carolean units now have 5% Morale Damage instead of 10%.

# Other
- The Aristocratic idea "International Nobility" now gives -10% General Cost instead of -20%.
- The Divine idea "Friends in High Places" now gives -33% Cost of Reducing War Exhaustion and -10% Leader cost instead of 20% Leader cost.
- Dynastic Administration now grants +0.2 Yearly Corruption instead of +0.15.
- Fixed that you could prolong battle excessively by only reinforcing to backrow. Now artillery is forced to reinforce front row cells opposite enemy regiments as a last resort.

###################
# AI
###################

# Other
- Made AI understand new morale damage modifiers.

###################
# Interface
###################

# Tooltips
- Guns Drums and Steel Vol. 3 now has a proper localized description on the lobby interface.
- Fredman's Epistles music pack does not reference Sweden when you play as Gotland in the Lobby.

###################
# Usermodding
###################

# Other
- Made the government traits and flags which enable and disable estates more uniform and consistent.

###################
# Script
###################

# Decisions
- The decision "Adopt Hussitism" is no longer usable for junior partners.

# Events
- The option "The infrastructure of the mine needs more attention." of the Swedish event "Investment of Falun" is no longer disabled if it already has a manufactory and a counting house. Reason for this change is because it is possible to get locked out of getting a Counting House in the province under certain circumstances.
- The Swedish event "Rise of the Swedish Kingdom" now gives permanent claims on the areas required for the Swedish mission "The German Coastline".
- The opinion bonus of the Swedish event "Sweden asks for Support for their Independence" is now applied on Denmark instead of vice versa if you refuse to help Sweden.
- The event "The Pacta Conventa and the Henrykian Articles" can now only fire if the event "The Nieszawa Privileges" already occurred before.
- The event "Sack of Capital" has its event option back.
- Added a go to button for the Noble demands events for the Kalmar Union.
- The event "Peasants' War" has now a go to button and the effects are now in the event option itself.
- Livonian event "The Role of the [Root.Monarch.GetTitle]" for the creation of your government reform no longer requires you to have a 3/3/3 ruler to fire.
- The event "Nobles Demand Recompensation" can now only fire if you have the Nobles estate in your country.
- The Papal event "Sublimis Deus" will not trigger twice for the same country in Iberia.
- The Machu Picchu events can now all trigger properly for the owner of Machu Picchu.

# Ideas
- The event 'The Rule of God' no longer grants 25% Morale of Armies and 5% Discipline, it now grants 5% Morale of Armies and 5% Discipline to better match its negative equivalent event.
- Persian Traditions no longer grant +1 Cavalry Shock, they now grant +15% Cavalry Power instead as in previous version.

# Missions
- Getting Gold in your capital as Lubeck (instead of Fish) removes the "Lubeck Herring Market" modifier.
- The event Pact of Cooperation that can happen between Poland/PLC and either Hungary or Bohemia no longer grants Poland the Union if Poland does not exist.
- The Swedish mission "Integrate the Sami" no longer requires that the owner accepts the culture of the province if the owner is your subject.
- The Swedish missions "The Crown of Norway" and "The German Coastline" now override claims with permanent claims in their rewards.
- The Ethiopian mission "Surpass the Past" now requires you to be at peace to complete it.
- Lithuania has its access to the default missions back if you do not own Lions of the North.
- The Byzantine mission "The Eternal City" will no longer punish you with stability hits when you do not have the Purple Phoenix DLC. Instead, you will heal the schism and ask all Catholics to convert to Orthodoxy.
- The reward of renaming your country to "Burma" has been moved from the mission "Chakravarti" to "First Burmese Empire.

# Other
- The Noble privilege "Increased Levies" and the Maratha privilege "Increased Maratha Recruitment" are now mutually exclusive.
- The Livonian Order is now called "Livländischer Orden" instead of "Livonischer Orden" in the German version of the game to keep it consistent with all the other references of the order.
- The Black Army mercenary company no longer costs Army Professionalism when recruited.
- The Angkor Wat monument is now available for Dharmic religions too.
- Added a condition for government reforms which compete with an estates-enabling reforms. Through this condition, it is no longer possible to swap the estate reform with a non-estate one as long the unlocked estate has any privileges.
- Removed the "take no Admin ideas" condition from Imperial Prussian Capital as it feels bad for being punished for taking an idea group.
- The Estate Statutory Rights Privilege events will now fire even if you have more than four privileges active.

###################
# Bugfixes
###################
- The Polish mission "Cultural Flowering" now correctly checks if your ruler has fourteen monarch stats in total.
- Fixed Lübeck mission name in Spanish for “Double Entry Bookkeeping” being out of place.
- The reward tooltip for the center of trade upgrade in the Swedish mission "Window to the East" is now always shown.
- Poland / PLC Now properly gets permanent claims in the "Varna Aftermath" mission if Bohemia or Hungary are not eligible for a Union.
- The Teutonic mission "Develop Prussia" gets its progress no longer reset if you form Prussia.
- The Danish mission "Challenge the English Navy" will only request a flagship if you own Golden Century instead of Rule Britannia.
- Shun will now always be at war with Ming with the "Claim the Mandate" CB if the player chooses to play as them.
- Fixed a bunch of typos.
- Forming another country while having the Norse ideas previously refused will no longer override your ideas with the already rejected Norse ideas.
- Fixed a bug which made the conversion of Catholic provinces impossible for Riga through propagating religion.
- The native government reforms "Trading with Foreigners" and "The Great Plains calls to us" are no longer blocked for no reason if you do not own Conquest of Paradise.
- Fixed an issue which made the usage of the Karma decision from the government reform "Empower the Monasteries" impossible.
- The Kalmar Union is no longer active when you do not own Lions of the North.
- Fixed that new morale damage modifiers did not work when applied to a country.
- Fixed issue that the winner of a battle could get stack wiped.
- Fixed rare crash when country trade view was open.
- Fixed mercenary-related crash when using incompatible version of Extended Timeline mod (and potentially others).
- Fixed crash when using old mod in nation designer.
- War taxes no longer increase monthly military power gain by 2 instead of decreasing it.
- Trading Posts from Reform 'Union of States' no longer persist after Government Change.
- Vassalization Acceptance is no longer called "Vassalizatation Acceptance”.

Sep 20, 2022

Dev Diary: Post Release & Norse Easter Egg

Europa Universalis IV - PDXRyagi

Hello everyone!

It's been a week since we released EUIV: Lions of the North and 1.34 'Sweden' update, and I'll start by saying that the entire team involved in it wants to thank the community for their great support. The feedback we have received so far has been very positive and we greatly appreciate the passion with which players have embraced this release. The teams that have worked on this project at Paradox Tinto and Paradox Interactive have put in a lot of effort, and we feel very rewarded to see this great reception. So let me say on behalf of us, thank you very much!

But even if the release has been really good from our point of view, there will always be issues appearing, and our goal is to continue to improve the state of EUIV. Therefore, we’re currently working on the first hotfix of the update, version 1.34.3, which will fix a bunch of issues reported since last week. Stay tuned, as it will be released in the next few days.

Apart from that, we also want to address today some content that was not previously revealed but was planned since we started designing Lions of the North: the Norse Easter Egg we included in it.

First question: Why was this content made secret? We had a couple of reasons behind this. The first is that even if we wanted to create some Norse-focused content, we also wanted to keep LotN’s focus on what we thought was its core content, the new deep, branching mission trees we were creating for the countries in the Baltic region. So we were a bit afraid about the new Norse content hijacking the LotN discussions and negatively affecting the general opinion on the other content (which was the main focus of the Immersion Pack, at the end of the day). On the other hand, we also thought that it would be interesting to create some secret content, as usually EUIV has not used so many ‘easter eggs’ compared to other GSGs; but it would also be a challenge, if created under certain conditions. So we went ahead with this overall design, even if we had to tackle some critics during the development process, especially in the dev diary devoted to Norway; at the time we were so adamant about adding more Norse content, because we had already added it to our development version, and we didn’t want to mess that up!

Second question: How do you become Norse? We know that many of you probably know the ways from the guides that this community has made, but we figured out it would be nice to give an official answer to this question, so that’s what we’re going to do with the help of my fellow colleague Ogele. For those of you who may not want to have this content revealed to you go no further!

There are two different ways of changing your religion to Norse: one is based on a lot of luck, the other is a lot more technically doable, but less flavorful.

Let’s start with the more flavorful way first. If you have the following conditions complete then the the event “A Wave of Curiosity” will fire:

Your Primary Culture is either Danish, Swedish, Norwegian or Icelandic
The current age is the Age of Discovery
You are Catholic
You are independent
You are either excommunicated or you declared Statute in Restraint of Appeals
Your ruler is either a 5/5/5 or is a Scholar or is a Sinner
You own the province of Bergslagen
You have a lot of luck, as the event has a Mean Time to Happen of 100 years. This can be at least halved if you are excommunicated despite also having Religious Ideas

If you select the first option then your ruler will start to rethink his life choices and to question the purpose of the Catholic Church. This triggers a chain of events with each event having roughly ~2 years of time to happen:

Keep in mind that the event chain is immediately broken if you ever take the second option or if your ruler dies during his journey. And you also can get this event chain only once per campaign.

For those who are worried that the stars align and the AI gets the event: the AI will always pick the second option, immediately ending this event. So a Norse AI Scandinavia is impossible to see without player shenanigans.

However, luck is not always on one’s side. For those who want to become Norse without having to… get unfortunate “crashes” every 5 minutes, there is another way to achieve your goal. If you fulfill the following conditions the event “The Awakening of the Norse Faith” can fire with a Mean Time to Happen of 24 months:

Your religion group is NOT Pagan
Your primary is either Danish, Swedish, Norwegian or Icelandic
Any owned province in Scandinavia is Animist and has animist rebels active
The current age is the Age of Reformation

From there oonwards you just use the normal rebels to get yourself force converted to Norse.

Some of you might be aware of a supposed third way of becoming Norse, which is through the Norwegian mission “The Colony of Greenland” and the event “The Lost Greenland Settlement”:

In the current game files, this event has been commented out (and this even rather early during development). While we did our research for the old Norse faith we had to accept that Iceland and Greenland had a much closer tie to the Church than mainland Scandinavia, which is why our first iteration of getting access to Norse had to be scrapped - it just wouldn’t have felt natural enough. So if you want to become Norse right now then doing the Norwegian Greenland mission won’t be your best bet. However, we’re always open to suggestions from the community, so maybe you can change our minds on this…

And that’s all for today. In the following weeks, we’ll have a more irregular Dev Diary schedule, as we’ll be focusing mostly on the Post Release Support, and we also need to take some rest after showing new content for 4 months. The team will let you know when we have new content ready to be shared, probably aiming for the 1.35 update. Until then, see you!

Sep 13, 2022

Europa Universalis IV: Lions of the North is now available!

Europa Universalis IV - BjornB

For almost a decade, Europa Universalis IV has encouraged players to explore new and exciting alternate histories of the early modern world. In the newest immersion pack, Lions of the North, dramatically different pasts can unfold before your eyes. Denmark can keep its hold on its northern subjects. The Teutonic Order can retreat to its past crusader glories. Gotland can become a pirate haven.

All of these dramatic “what ifs” are now available in the new Baltic Sea themed add-on to Europa Universalis IV. With branching missions, new government options for major players and even new military units, Lions of the North is packed with variety and excitement. Make your enemies hear your roar!

Highlights of Europa Universalis IV: Lions of the North include:

Expanded Branching Missions: Decisions taken along some mission trees will determine what options are available to you in the future, allowing you to follow distinct and dramatically different alternate paths.
New Mission Trees for Denmark: Maintain power in Scandinavia while expanding your influence over the northern German cities.
New Mission Trees for Sweden and Norway: Break free from Danish dominance, and turn a foothold on the continent into the base for a northern empire.
New Mission Trees for Teutonic Order, Livonian Order and Riga: Follow a path of religious zealotry or secularize your realm with an eye on the future.
New Mission Trees for Poland, Lithuania and the Commonwealth: Vast lands on the border of East and West present unique challenges for ambitious rulers.
Other Mission Tree Changes: Pirate kings of Gotland, unique options for a united Scandinavia, a free Finland, and a powerful Danzig.
New Government Reforms and Estate Privileges: Some regional powers will have unique government options and new ways to court the favor and influence of local estates.
New Units: The Swedish Carolean Infantry and Polish-Lithuanian Winged Hussars will be available for recruitment.
New Unit Art: 35 new army sprites for regional powers.
New Music: 3 new pieces of Scandinavian music, plus 3 other Baltic themed songs.

Lions of the North is accompanied by a major update to Europa Universalis IV, free for all players.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2012010/Europa_Universalis_IV_Lions_of_the_North/