Europa Universalis IV

[fantadomat]

Fuck,i am half way my spain game and their three is halfassed on the max. Really shit one compared to dharma ones. The whole Iberia is halfassed even if it supposed to be the center of the dlc.

 

[Space Satan]

They are realizing the problem with mercspam. That is enough to make me happy because mercs are the cancer of EUIV

 

[Agame]

To be fair, there IS a Mea Culpa tone.

True but at the moment its just words, lets see what next year brings. They NEED to make a "Holy Fury" for EU4, regardless of sales the community is starting to react against the incredibly lackluster DLC.

The only real fix for the game is to make EU5. But I wonder what the timeline is for this game, do they have an end date? Or do they just keep making DLC until the sales finally start going down.

 

[fantadomat]

They are realizing the problem with mercspam. That is enough to make me happy because mercs are the cancer of EUIV

And endless loan spam. I do always disable mercs in the game's file and have a good game.

The only real fix for the game is to make EU5.

That one will backfire epicly because they will make it bare bones and milk it by selling the same dlcs from EU4. I just remembered how i was finding copy paste code from EU2&3 back in the day. I was very confused at the beginning.

 

[Beavery]

The only real fix for the game is to make EU5.

That's a weird way of spelling Victoria 3.

 

[Popiel]

Which is better for playing my best buddy Oliver "Our Chief of Men" Cromwell and kickin' some serious royal ass in 17th century, this one or EU3? Or better, which one let's one play protectorate form 1653 onward?

 

[fantadomat]

Finally after a few games i ended up having fun. Tried all the Iberians and they were boring mess. So in the end i decided to go for glorious Naxus . Here is how i ended after conquering only the mission land...and a border beauty in the face of Crimea and Iraq.

The fun part was that i did it as a pirate empire I was doing only Mediterranean islands for the first 50 years,then i just took all the provinces needed for restoring Byzantium. Ended up having great fun.

Also everything is Orthodox.


PS:And yeah,Madagascar was a mission perma claim,part of the pirate flavour.

 

[Fedora Master]

BELIEVABLE WORLDS

 

[Agame]

New DD

Spoiler

Good day all and a Happy New Year to you too. After a somewhat extended break I have finally come back to the office and rejoined the rest of the EUIV team. Our immediate tasks at hand are checking on and potentially ironing out any remaining issues from 1.28 as well as putting out plans together for the year.

As we mentioned in the chunky end of year dev diary our focus for the year will be a large European Expansion, with a heavy focus on crushing outstanding bugs and delivering Quality of Life improvements. We will be getting going with that shortly, after taking care of a few remaining important issues which have been reported in 1.28, including the Trade Company stuttering and save file issues with Expelling minorities. Once we investigate and fix these and other issues, we'll work towards releasing a 1.28.3 Patch.

As we also indicated in last year's wrap-up dev diary, we'll be fairly light on content in these dev diaries for a while, as we take the time both to put together a 1.28.3 Patch and plan out our large end of year Expansion. Frankly put: there isn't the content in the game to be talking about right now, so instead I'll turn attention to how I invited everyone to bring forward longstanding bugs and QoL issues they would like to see taken care of in said expansion. I'll grab some interesting ones and give some thoughts on them.

I'll say ahead of time that these are just thoughts on matters, and not to be taken as firm promises of things to come.

Mothballed Armies

This is something that gets suggested frequently and on one level, it makes nice symmetric sense: One can mothball Navies, why not armies? It will continue not to be implemented however, as while navies serve a variety of roles, including piracy, anti-piracy, trade, transport and combat, your armies serve almost entirely the exclusive role of combat. The ability to mothball parts of your armies would trivialize the cost of maintaining a large army, granting large nations even further advantages.

There are other approaches to this with ideas like higher costs for far flung armies: It could/should be more expensive to operate the Dutch armies in China than in the Netherlands. Such things are not on the cards currently, but make interesting food for thought.

Mod tweaks in the Launcher

I love this idea. Giving more information and flexibility with mods in the launcher would be extremely useful in games with such extensive mod communities as ours, and is certainly something worth exploring how to do right.

Diplomatic Macro Builder

There have been various suggestions for the Diplo Macro since its debut in Mandate of Heaven, not limited to those in the linked thread. Most of them revolve around not correctly targeting who the player is intending, with users not wanting it to target nations who they will soon destroy, or other particular sets of nations such as HRE members/Electors. These were out of the scope when the feature was being made, but as we re-visit parts of the game with QoL in mind, an actual custom list that the player can make at will is an interesting solution for this.

Provide options for subjects colonising regions, to stop them from colonising provinces you want to colonise.

For the precise map painters among us, I've seen this pop up. Colonial Nation subjects currently have some strict rules on lands which their AI will colonize, but I believe there's room for improvement there, where it can be loosened up but give the overlord the ability force colonization within their Colonial Region, so that, for example, Mexico doesn't snake their way into Louisiana and the Eastern Seaboard.

In the coming weeks until we start digging into more meat of what we're planning on doing in our big expansion this year, we'll likely pick up on various other suggestions that have been coming up, as well as a so far unannounced surprise that will be coming in a couple of weeks.

TLDR: Nothing very interesting, they are just gearing up for "Big" Europe focused dlc this year.

 

[Fedora Master]

They have an entire entry on a feature that people want but they won't implement, lol

 

[AwesomeButton]

In an Immersion Pack you'll certainly find new Music for the region, new unit models, Dynamic Historical Events, features for the focused nation*, map changes and other revisions.

* - Read "any useless shit we can push for $10"

 

[Dux]

I returned to EU4 this eve after a long break. Even though I still have the old DLCs from back then, I've already seen some new things. Missions, for example, have been revamped. For some reason.

I came back after recently completing two concurrent campaigns on EU and EU2. One with Sweden and the other with the Netherlands. Even though these games are "archaic" compared to everything that's been happening since their hayday, I confess I had a really fun time playing them. I can't even remember the last time I had such a fulfilling experience with Europa Universalis. One might wonder why considering that neither EU or EU2 offer as much depth as EU4 purportedly does - they're just plain fun to play. Even though micro-managing merchants to keep those monopolies isn't exactly terrific, it's still something that kept me focused while I colonised and tried to complete my missions. I'm not saying these games are flawless. I mean, England went through three centuries with a non-existing navy, for example, and a rampant Turkey decided it was a good idea to try to conquer Pomerania even though we were worlds apart almost. What I am saying is that stepping back into the EU4 arena has left me ambivalent, to say the least. There is so much stuff to everything. In the old games I just played and what I got was a grand strategy experience that was both smooth and addicting. Now that I've come back to EU4 the gameplay is suddenly very halting and muddled. There is so much clutter, so much noise. I can't even imagine how it must be with all of the DLCs installed. I only have a third of the available DLCs.

Maybe people asked for this and consequently the game just lost me somewhere. Don't know. Maybe I'm just getting old?

 

[AwesomeButton]

No, I totally agree with you. One of the best things about EU and EUII is that the income comes once a year and you have to plan and make contingencies for the next 12 game months. Besides being more "strategic" this is much more realistic, and also adds randomness to war, which is not present in the EU3/4. Unless you start with a good war chest, you are under the threat of going out of money because of some random event, and then you have to make ends meet until the end of the year. Just one thing that really changes the gameplay in EU/EU2, and is missing in EU3/4.

 

[Average Manatee]

Monthly/Yearly income split was in EU3. I think you got 1/12th of 25% of your tax every month and the 75% came on january 1st. Production and trade you didn't even get, they were invested in tech and you were penalized by inflation if you minted coins with them. I think this was completely unchanged between EU2 and 3, haven't played the original.

Aside from that, almost instant coring and too predictable rebels really make EU4 feel shallow. Getting cores fast means you get cash fast and never stay overextended for long, and the current rebel mechanics means you know you either never need to fight rebels or you need to fight them exactly once and you know when they'll rise up within a 3 or 4 month period. The EU4 devs really cut out almost all the uncertainty or feeling of being temporarily weakened by victory that previous games had. Pretty much the only thing random in EU4 now is combat and sieges, and both are also way less random than EU2 or 3.

 

[fantadomat]

Monthly/Yearly income split was in EU3. I think you got 1/12th of 25% of your tax every month and the 75% came on january 1st. Production and trade you didn't even get, they were invested in tech and you were penalized by inflation if you minted coins with them. I think this was completely unchanged between EU2 and 3, haven't played the original.

Aside from that, almost instant coring and too predictable rebels really make EU4 feel shallow. Getting cores fast means you get cash fast and never stay overextended for long, and the current rebel mechanics means you know you either never need to fight rebels or you need to fight them exactly once and you know when they'll rise up within a 3 or 4 month period. The EU4 devs really cut out almost all the uncertainty or feeling of being temporarily weakened by victory that previous games had. Pretty much the only thing random in EU4 now is combat and sieges, and both are also way less random than EU2 or 3.

Oh yeah,because it was sooooo much fun running around killing of random stacks of rebels that popped up in places. Too much pointless randomness doesn't have a place in a Grand Strategy.

 

[Tigranes]

*Talks about several different ways in which a degree of uncertainty can help gameplay*
"yeah but rebels sux too much randomness sux"

This might be memory playing tricks on me, but I seem to remember events being more capable of fucking your plans up in EU2/3. Or perhaps that was just AGCEEP at work? In Eu4 vanilla, there's almost never a moment in which you feel like the caprice of fate, a probabilistic bet gone sour, a bold risk taken, ends up screwing up your plans. It's more like you have a plan and you execute the plan and then you have another plan. About the only thing that can happen is France declaring war on you, or you being dumb enough to attract a big coalition when you're not ready.

 

[Average Manatee]

Oh yeah,because it was sooooo much fun running around killing of random stacks of rebels that popped up in places. Too much pointless randomness doesn't have a place in a Grand Strategy.

The point is that uncertainty forces higher level strategic decisions. Reloading guns in an FPS isn't fun either, but it forces an extra layer of strategy on normal FPS gameplay.

*Talks about several different ways in which a degree of uncertainty can help gameplay*
"yeah but rebels sux too much randomness sux"

This might be memory playing tricks on me, but I seem to remember events being more capable of fucking your plans up in EU2/3. Or perhaps that was just AGCEEP at work? In Eu4 vanilla, there's almost never a moment in which you feel like the caprice of fate, a probabilistic bet gone sour, a bold risk taken, ends up screwing up your plans. It's more like you have a plan and you execute the plan and then you have another plan. About the only thing that can happen is France declaring war on you, or you being dumb enough to attract a big coalition when you're not ready.

Yeah, pretty sure all random events (especially -1 stability ones) have been toned down in frequency. Or rather, lots of events use a pool system where 1 event of the pool is chosen every x years. As Paradox adds more events in every expansion the old bad ones get less frequent.

Of course, there's also still plenty of events from EU2/3 that make no sense in the EU4 mechanics yet still haven't been altered. Like the one that gives a choice between 10 ADM and 50 ADM + 0.5 inflation. EU4 lets you buy down 2 inflation for 75 ADM, so why the hell do I get this non-choice once every 50 years?

I do like generally more predictable AI though. EU3 AI border gore was awful with all the random wars and taking land across the map.

 

[Tigranes]

Stability seems to have become pointless in EU4. Such changes are great for players who want to blob blob blob blob get larger eat nations win wars, but it becomes harder and harder to experience a nation that goes through ups and downs, where your ambitious campaign has to be abandoned to deal with a domestic crisis, etc.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

One reason that there are less negative events might be, because a lot of random events in 2 and 3 came from sliders. It was actually kind of interesting because it made your slider positions have consequences, and the more extreme your positions were, the more extreme were the bonuses or penalties.

EUIV, on the other hand, got rid of the Sliders and put focus on Ideas and Opportunity Costs, which ins't exactly bad design, but its pretty different.

 

[fantadomat]

One reason that there are less negative events might be, because a lot of random events in 2 and 3 came from sliders. It was actually kind of interesting because it made your slider positions have consequences, and the more extreme your positions were, the more extreme were the bonuses or penalties.

EUIV, on the other hand, got rid of the Sliders and put focus on Ideas and Opportunity Costs, which ins't exactly bad design, but its pretty different.

It would have been better if there was positive and negative side to ideas.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Well they probably shouldn't be done in an indirect way like events tho. Overall the entire problem with trying to do "ups and downs" in a grand strategy game is because that goes contrary to the game part. The downs in principle can only be consequence of you doing bad, having them happen because of fucking FRAMED! would be just plain stupid. You'd need a different sort of game to create that kind of scenario of managing a country/whatever through and ups and downs, and most likely a preset campaign, because in EU it will only happen if you are doin it rong or the game uses an event to take control away from you.

The main thing about giving positives and negatives to ideas would really be avoiding redundancy. A lot of negatives you could give would either be offset by or just negate other ideas. I suppose a better way to look at it might be that the negative is relative, as in the negative is in not having an idea to match up to an enemy's value in it, ie not having Discipline and Morale up to enemy's ideas+country bonuses would be the negative to picking whatever else instead. The real problem there I'd figure is really just the thing with sliders, namely that the limited number of choices necessary to make those choices seem relevant also means you aren't struggling that much to prioritize. Which brings us to...

Sliders were shit. Like, really shit. Only extremes really mattered, and one core combination was always better than all the others with only real differences being between choosing Plutocracy instead of Aristocracy or Naval instead of Land (or use Free Trade instead of Mercantilism because you are refusing to blob for whatever reason or you have a thing for torturing yourself), since otherwise it's 99% certain that Centralized/Free Subjects/Narrowminded/Defensive (there's a little wiggle room here too, but overall superior siege wins)/Quality is just plain better at everything. In every other case the alternative is just uncompetetive and you are just operating the changes within restrictions placed by government type until you get Absolute Monarchy and no longer have them.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Overall the entire problem with trying to do "ups and downs" in a grand strategy game is because that goes contrary to the game part. The downs in principle can only be consequence of you doing bad, having them happen because of fucking FRAMED! would be just plain stupid.

I think that only works with emergent gameplay through proper mechanics, and that's more on Crusader Kings' side of the line. It gives you more of a "expect the unexpected" mind-set.

(it does have a few bullshit events, like the "Chess with Death" event-line, where the computer pretty much decides its time to die)

CKII is more of a "Easy come, easy go" game due to the emphasis on royal marriages, vassals and inheritance. EUIV is more of a game of gradual but sure conquest and growth.

ITs why I don't think Pdox would be capable of doing a Dark Ages/Late Antiquity game, because a good part of its mechanics would have to be focused on dealing with the fact that everything is going to hell in a handbasket and shit is generally burning, yo

 

[Space Satan]

Something else that this patch marks the end of is something that has been requested quite a bit. 1.28.3 is be the last 32-bit version of EUIV, as we are going to upgrade EUIV to 64-bit in the next update. This comes with various advantages, but it also means that EUIV will no longer be supported by 32-bit systems for all platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux. 1.28.3 will be the last playable version of EUIV for 32-bit systems.

With a growing lack of support industry-wide for 32-bit, we have made this rather heavy decision. When we roll out the next update for EUIV, 32-bit users will either have to roll back to 1.28.3, or upgrade their system. We are letting you know this as soon as we can, so that users have the opportunity to upgrade in the coming months. This change will affect the 1.1% of our players who are currently playing EUIV on a 32-bit system.

We'll make further reminders regarding 32-bit support closer to the next update, but this will be months away.

 

[Agame]

DD on Estates:

Spoiler

Good day and welcome to today's EU4 dev diary. Now that the 1st of April is over, I can return to being online. A day of having hopes dashed when awesome stuff is announced, only for it to be a hoax is too much for my heart to take.

Last week we had a fun dev diary where we talked about our current thoughts on the Mercenary system. To re-iterate, that dev diary was, much like this one, not a promise of things to come, but more an airing of current design thoughts and a way to involve the community (if you're reading this, that's you!). As we could see, there was a lot of followup discussion from forumgoers and has given us much to ponder on during our current development period of bug crushing and tech debting.

Today we'll have a similar expunging of EU4 thoughts, and for our subject matter, we'll pick a mechanic which has been through a small journey of its own, and may well have some distance to go yet: Estates

Again, what is mentioned here are not changes that are currently in the game, nor are they promises of things to come, but more to share our thought process and ideas we have, potentially for the upcoming expansion and update.

The Estate system joined the roster of EU4 mechanics back when The Cossacks Expansion was released. It added internal factors to balance within your realm such that patronizing your various estates heavily could grant wonderful bonuses, while letting them run away with power could put your nation in jeopardy with said Estates seizing direct control. EU4 is very much a game about direct action: so your primary interactions with said estates come from Estate Actions such as granting monopoly charters to the Burgers, or calling a Diet for your Nobility.

EUIV is a game very much about building empires, and while the external elements of this: outward diplomacy, warfare and expansion are generally strong, the internal aspects had been somewhat lacking in comparison. Estates were designed to bring meaningful choices within your realm, to match those outwith.

The reception of Estates at the time was a mixed bag, and has continued to be ever since. While the system did indeed bring internal mechanics to the game, they came with their own baggage, which we see ourselves, and have heard from various comments and feedback, much of which on these forums.

Common issues have included:

• The system is only available for The Cossacks Expansion owners, creating a large rift between playing with and without the expansion, as well as a belief that the mechanic won't be expanded upon since
• Managing province allocation is a lot of scutter and brings on click fatigue
• The above issue only compounds itself as your nation expands, creating more busywork as the game goes on
• The steps involved in expansion are needlessly bloated at every conquest, by needing to be at the Estates' beck and call
• The actions are not as involved as they could be: you call a Diet for your Nobility, but where is the Diet? What came from it?
• Estate types and their flavour is limited.

Some of these have been tackled in the three+ years since Estates were added to the game. Dharma saw the system becoming part of the base game, opening it up for further changes, while Estates no longer made minimum demands for land, reducing the bothering necessity of adding new land to the estates lest you suffer their wrath. We also added to the variety of Estates, bringing in special types for the subcontinent of India.

Ultimately though, the system retains some issues which leave us wanting to take a big swing at improving it. Like Mercenaries last week, I'm talking in broad-sweeping statements about what we want to do with the feature, so again, take this as airing out our thoughts rather than our rock-solid mandate of what we plan to do with Estates.

Firstly, the busywork element of Estates should be removed, or at the very least reduced. our Grand Strategy games are about creating , without sounding too pretentious, intellectually stimulating experiences, and the current methods of interacting with your Estates are not up to par with this.

Additionally, the actions done through the estates should be more impactful. I've said it quite a few times before, but I'll say it again, when a Diet is called, perhaps there should be...a Diet? Impactful is an easy word to throw around with various different meanings being drawn from it, but in Estates' cases, the existing interactions often make little change worth noting outside of their influence and loyalty, which has limited meaningful effect on your nation until hitting crisis point where they can seize control of your nation through disaster.

On another note, making the Estate UI more accessible would be a boon. Currently, much of the hands-on actions are somewhat buried as menus within menu

With Estates being made a basegame feature in EU4, we believe this came with an unspoken promise to continue to work on and improve the feature. It is certainly on our radar for something we would like to do this year, but as I continue to believe people are getting sick of hearing, we continue to spend our time on ironing out tech debt and gearing up for development of this year's Update and European Expansion. The question I leave to you as we conclude today's dev diary: What are your experiences with the Estates system, what do you most enjoy and what are you left most wanting from it?

TLDR: Estates are bad and they want to fix them but no commitment here to whether they do anything at all.

Clearly they need to scrap the current system and rebuild it from the ground up, it should be something more like Council from CK2, that has real ramifications and consequences on the game, instead of another shitty "click a button and get mana" system. I think Estates have huge potential to simulate internal empire management, make large empires more difficult to run etc. This could be something that really "fixes" EU4.

BUT WHO KNOWS WHAT WILL HAPPEN!?

Probably nothing that great.

 

[Zeriel]

Man, as someone who only played EU4 on launch with no patches and recently with everything (special treasure island edition), the Estates system was so, so bad. I don't even know what else to say, what an abomination of design.