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Europa Universalis IV

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Sep 25, 2013
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I've found something interesting that seemingly fixes the prevailing problem of institutions not being eurocentric enough, though I am clueless as to how well the mod performs. Guess I'll go about testing it out in my next playthrough.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1881890980

EU4 takes place during the Early Modern era, a period that is historically notable for the meteoric rise of Europe to world prominence.

However, this never really plays out in the game thanks to the questionably balanced Institutions system. Native American nations typically form a western-style monarchy less than a decade after contacting Europeans. Institutions spread very quickly, even to non-literate tribes in the heart of the African jungle. Morocco often gets Colonialism before England does.

And by the last 100 years of the game, tech differences are essentially nonexistent. The entire world has caught up to the West, instead of falling behind them. Imported games to Victoria 2 usually end up with every single nation as Civilized. Maybe an interesting fiction, but not very historical.

This mod seeks to fix the Institutions problem, without going back to tech groups. All Institutions spawn in Europe, and changes to their spread make it more likely for Europeans to rise above the rest. Furthermore, the final institutions, Enlightenment and Industrialization, cannot be embraced by any nation that isn't in the Western, Eastern, or Anatolian tech group, meaning Europe will really move ahead near the end as the era of New Imperialism dawns.

All hope is not lost for the rest of the world, however. Institutions can still be reinvented through development, but they will have a hard time spreading and may be very costly to create from nowhere. A clever ruler will also note that conquering provinces with desired institutions is a viable alternative to waiting for them to spread... Just don't bite off more than you can chew!

Institution Changes

General Changes:
Generic neighbor province spread reduced. This means it spreads more slowly to non-European provinces and low-development backwaters.
All institutions except Feudalism will never spread to provinces owned by countries with Tribal or Native governments.
All institutions except Feudalism have reduced spread based on country tech group.

Feudalism:
Reduced spread for Steppe Hordes, Siberian Clan Councils, and Native Councils. Passive spread through non-friendly provinces is now negated.
Feudalism now has an 80% tech penalty instead of 50%.

Renaissance:
Before 1550, only provinces on the continent of Europe, provinces belonging to countries with a European capital, or provinces in the Near East/Egypt/Persia/East Africa/Maghreb regions may embrace this institution. (to prevent Korea inventing Renaissance in 1500 every game)

Colonialism:
Will always spawn in a European province.
Reduced spread in the Maghreb region, Egypt region, and Near East super-region, to rebalance the Berbers against the Iberians and to represent traditional Near East trade routes being circumvented by European explorers.

Printing Press:
Will never spread to Confucian or Shinto provinces owned by Chinese tech group countries. This is meant to represent the unpopularity of movable type in East Asian countries during this period - due to logographic languages with thousands of characters, differences in ink technology, etc., the impact of the Printing Press in East Asia was not the same as in the rest of the world.
There is one exception: In the 1590s, Jesuit missionaries introduced the Gutenberg press to Japan, and used it to print religious texts in a romanized form of Japanese. If you are playing a Shinto country and choose the "A Kirishitan Realm" result of the Spread of Christianity incident, this penalty will be negated and Printing Press will spread in your provinces. The country does not have to actually convert to Christianity, they just have to choose the most Open result of that incident which involves protecting and patronizing missionaries.
Will never spread to Central African, North American, South American, or Andean tech group countries. (Non-literate cultures would have no use for a printing press)

Global Trade:
Will always spawn in a European province, owned by a Western tech group country with at least one province part of a trade company. The province must either be a capital or a center of trade. [If you don't have the necessary DLC, a trade company won't be required, instead it will require you to own a province within a trade company region outside of Europe.]
If conditions for spawning aren't met by 1630, then Trade companies or province within a trade company region won't be required.

Manufactories:
Will always spawn in a European province.
Spread slightly reduced to Muslim and East African tech group countries. (Passive spread is no longer enough, the province must have a Manufactory to get the institution)
Spread reduced to Indian tech group countries, and Shinto provinces owned by Chinese tech group countries. (Province must have a Manufactory to get the institution, and it's slower to spread)
Spread greatly reduced to non-Shinto Chinese tech group countries and Nomadic tech group countries. (Province must have a Manufactory AND border a friendly province with Manufactories embraced, and it's extremely slow to spread)
Will never spread to provinces owned by West African, Central African, Mesoamerican, Andean, North American, or South American tech group countries.

Enlightenment:
Will always spawn in a European province.
Can only spread to provinces owned by Western, Eastern, or Anatolian tech group countries.
Can only embraced by Western, Eastern, or Anatolian tech group countries.

Industrialization:
Can only spread to provinces owned by Western, Eastern, or Anatolian tech group countries.
Can only embraced by Western, Eastern, or Anatolian tech group countries.

Other Changes:
"Crisis of the Maghreb" event now gives -5% institution spread and +15% tech cost, and lasts for 50 years instead of 5, to make it an actual crisis, and make it more likely that the Iberians survive.
The "A Kirishitan Realm" event now has a tooltip informing the player that Printing Press may now appear in their provinces.
Reduced Institution gain from manually developing provinces. (40% of what it used to be)
For owners of Rule Britannia: Knowledge Sharing will no longer spread institutions.

Compatibility
This mod should compatible with any mod that doesn't change the institutions.
 
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I'd sooner believe that it's a bullshit excuse for why they haven't attempted to create a sequel or to implement Vicky2's systems to their other franchises.
I dunno, I haven't delved into Vicky 2 since like 2012, but I've noticed on occasions that the community, to this day, modders included, genuinely struggle to comprehend the mathematics behind certain systems within the game. After 10 years or so, the gameplay systems in Victoria 2 are still an enigma for most of the part, whereas when it comes to shit like EU4 the maths behind it are quite transparent and well known, to the point where certain streamers/youtube video makers get flak directly from paradox due to at times, pointing faulty and nonsensical mathematical operations within the game.

No, people pretty much know how Vicky 2 works. It's just that there's lots of other people who know nothing and make up stuff about how they think it should work and misinformation gets passed on.

Historical accuracy drivel falls on deaf ears when the same kind of people who say Maoris shouldn't be able to resist European colonization are the same type of people who want Byzantines to have easier time against Ottomans or cheer on absurd revenge fantasy events like Moldovans being able to impale the Ottoman Sultan.

It's just Risk with awkward and nonsensical trade system, paint the map that's all the game is good for.

"Resist"

If you mean roughly 3-5k rebels once or twice, that'd be accurate. Instead we'll have 20k stacks from every native in australia coming in with full tech and artillery support. And of course they'll have some defensive alliance so you'll have to fight 40-60k. lol. Remember that the Abbos won't even be nerfed the way new world natives are.
 

Preben

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I'm too lazy to verify by actually checking the official forums, but it doesn't seem like a lie to me. Lmao
A7Y1hbQ.png

Probably true. Back in the days developers usually didn't keep proper documentation of in-house engine and tools. Everything was all in the heads of programmers. Now imagine them leaving for greener pastures because the management is a bunch of hacks.

This makes sense because I remember of of devs writing that there are some chunks of code which are known to cause stutter that nobody dares to touch.
 

thesecret1

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Probably true. Back in the days developers usually didn't keep proper documentation of in-house engine and tools. Everything was all in the heads of programmers. Now imagine them leaving for greener pastures because the management is a bunch of hacks.

This makes sense because I remember of of devs writing that there are some chunks of code which are known to cause stutter that nobody dares to touch.
This tends to be true everywhere. All you need in order to produce unreadable code everyone is afraid to touch is to crunch for a bit – programmers are pushed to hurry, so they go for the fast solutions rather than the proper solutions. Do enough of those and your codebase becomes a nebulous mire that nobody wants to touch.
 

Theodora

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Could be the case, I just find it highly unlikely that the devs wouldn't know what they were implementing to such an extent. Coding isn't magic and you can't just code mechanics without having some basic understanding of how they'll function (whether originally or after the fact in terms of noticing the difference between what was intended and what is happening).

Yeah, reads like nonsense tbh. Unless the "source code" is some partially decompiled gibberish there's no way someone couldn't refactor it until it was vaguely transmissable / something tangible with the potential to be edited and reiterated upon once more.
 

thesecret1

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Unless the "source code" is some partially decompiled gibberish there's no way someone couldn't refactor it until it was vaguely transmissable / something tangible with the potential to be edited and reiterated upon once more.
That requires a lot of manhours, so it's a no-go.
 

trais

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Grab the Codex by the pussy
I decided to not remove from the inventory the latest version of the game with all the dlcs included, to see if the game improved since the last time I played it (Art of War iirc).

Since I was to (re)learn stuff as I played, I decided to pick something easy and familiar, although on the hard difficulty. So Poland it was, but I opted out of forming Commonwealth with Lithuania. The plan was to play solo and tall-ish. Well, game got wacky pretty damn quickly (Hungary got Moldavia as vassal, Burgundy didn't get inherited, Pomerania became Hussite etc.), but it was this that made me seriously question my life's choices:

7Fkiwla.png
 

Delterius

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I like how currently the portuguese partition Canarias with the Spanish only to partition Australia with the mamlukes. Its a beautiful world of half islands. The revenge of Haiti.
 

Riddler

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I decided to not remove from the inventory the latest version of the game with all the dlcs included, to see if the game improved since the last time I played it (Art of War iirc).

Since I was to (re)learn stuff as I played, I decided to pick something easy and familiar, although on the hard difficulty. So Poland it was, but I opted out of forming Commonwealth with Lithuania. The plan was to play solo and tall-ish. Well, game got wacky pretty damn quickly (Hungary got Moldavia as vassal, Burgundy didn't get inherited, Pomerania became Hussite etc.), but it was this that made me seriously question my life's choices:

7Fkiwla.png

That happens in like 2/3 of my games.
 

trais

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The Saracens fear the Samurai!

ZRgBkNV.png


Edit:

To be fair, they were asking for it, colonizing so close to the Glorious Nippon

ijuCnKr.png
 
Last edited:

Mortmal

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Austria & Bohemia are absolutely bonkers in latest DLC.
They blob like mad most of the time yes, but strangely one time i saw the ottoman eating them ,why ? That's simple i was playing a tall hindoustan, max dev stack , the gigantic trade income coming from me was fueling them i think.
 

trais

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Grab the Codex by the pussy
Austria & Bohemia are absolutely bonkers in latest DLC.
They blob like mad most of the time yes, but strangely one time i saw the ottoman eating them ,why ? That's simple i was playing a tall hindoustan, max dev stack , the gigantic trade income coming from me was fueling them i think.

Yeah, I kinda like the new trading mechanic, it's basically the only major element that was significantly improved over its EU3 counterpart. It creates some emergent gameplay, like e.g. I wasn't initially interested in expanding into Crimea, but since I broke Lithuania's spine, there wasn't anyone left to pull significant amount of trade north. So Ottos were able to move all that lucre into Constantinople and that was waaaay to much money to simply let them have it. So I had to put my other plans on hold and rush into into the area to secure high trade power provinces, if only to deny them to my rival. Drang nach Osten basically.
 
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i never managed to get enough money from trade, not even at the end of the 1001 provinces achievement. fleets of fleets, steering everywhere, collecting only at dead end nodes, owning all the caribbeans, central and south america, it provided just peanuts, barely enough to keep 100% army and navy.
 

thesheeep

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i never managed to get enough money from trade, not even at the end of the 1001 provinces achievement. fleets of fleets, steering everywhere, collecting only at dead end nodes, owning all the caribbeans, central and south america, it provided just peanuts, barely enough to keep 100% army and navy.
Not even as a focused trading nation?

Anyway, most value is not really in the Americas, but in what comes back to Europe from there. That's where you gotta collect.
At least that's what I remember from last playing it - which is probably 2 years ago (hard to go back to that combat after HoI4).
 
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not even as venice.
while in eu3 with venice i managed to end the hre in 1420. i'm not a noob, but there must be something glaringly obvious i completely missed.
 
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Most of the time its actually better to collect with all of your merchants rather than steer. Steering is only for when you have >90% power in all nodes along the path along with the end node.

Also EU3's trade is obviously superior to EU4's trade in every way.
 

Mortmal

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not even as venice.
while in eu3 with venice i managed to end the hre in 1420. i'm not a noob, but there must be something glaringly obvious i completely missed.
For that you need the tall build i explained earlier, you probably pick ideas as soon you can , dont, only pick 3 mains ideas Quantity first, economy second, and quality last just to fill your nation bar. Stack up every provinces development cost bonus and level up the provinces to insane levels. Anything will snowball into a powerhouse.
 

trais

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Trading in EU4 can be quite unintuitive, but once you understand how it works, it's quite easy to manage it.


So here's my Trading in Eu4 101 with pictures, starring my trusty vassal BigMackl:

QlwGL4U.png


As you can see, he's quite a unit, but nonetheless, most of his income comes from trading. So how is he doing that? How can my republic be as rich as BigMackl? Do I need to 200 Light Ships for that? Well, let's see...

Z2R89YU.png


Nope, AI being retarded as it is, has sunk most of it naval capacity into Heavy Ships, Galleys and Transports. Only 5 ships are currently Protecting the Trade. But BigMackl can rake its fat stacks of money regardless of that, by focusing on other things.

But before we get into that. We need to know what makes any business successful. There are 3 key things to that and those are: location, location, LOCATION!

sdRW9iU.png


As you can see in that red box, BigMackl has that covered, by sitting in quite rich trading node, that gives it +28.53 Local Trade value to begin with. Where does this number comes from? It's simply number of Goods Produced x its Price, from each and every province that belongs to that node (marked red on the map). When someone builds a Workshop, Manufacture or raise Base Production development in such province, this number goes up.

But in this case, way more goods are coming into this node from elsewhere, as shown in the Incoming number. BigMackl helps with that, by sending his merchants to other nodes to Steer Trade in appropriate direction (red circles).
Still, to actually get your hands onto that pile of moolah, you need to have lots of Trade Power, and there are two ways you can get that.


IRHtCHY.png


As you can see in the box, Trade Powers comes either from Light Ships or Caravans (depending on whether Trade node is sea based or land based) or Provinces, and then it's later modified by various stuff.
Now, Light Ships are based on well... having Light Ships do appropriate Missions in the node. Caravan power is based on your total development, but it's capped at +50, so it hardly matters anyway.
Provinces are much more interesting, because when it comes to trade, not all provinces are created equal.

boJKYCg.png



As you can see, BigMackl has many provinces in the node, but in reality only 3 of them matters. So what makes Hamburg 10x more important than the 4th one on the list? Let's take a look:


gcNdd02.png


Those tiny pictures marked in the red box are what make Hamburg that important. Those are Estuaries and Centers of Trade. Some provinces have either one of them or both. And they're super important, because those raise Base Trade Power, which you can further enhance by building Marketplace, Trade Depot or Stock Exchange. Without them, even +125% to fuck-all is still fuck-all. So don't build Marketplaces in provinces without them, or you'll make Baby Jesus cry. Unless you're already at the point in game when you earn more money than you can spend, then like whatever, do what you want. At that point Baby Jesus doesn't care anymore.

But before you go and dominate your first Trade Node with ships or properly developed key provinces you hold, let's look at modifiers first:

wAu2Cwh.png


There lots of things that give you boni or mali to Trade Power: Ideas, Traditions, Prestige, Power Projection, Events etc. But what's that "Transfer from ..." stuff? Those are your merchants, steering trade from upstream. They don't need to be in continuous chain, just somewhere upstream and NOT COLLECTING. When you collect somewhere and that "somewhere" isn't your Main Trading Node, you're gonna lose all that bonuses. All of them. Not to mention, you're gonna get slapped with hefty penalty to your Trade Power, just like Sweden in this case:

rsyittH.png


Sweden's main node is in Baltic, so they get -70% for collecting in Lubeck. Plus whatever they lose in Baltic by not having those transfer bonuses applied there as well. And they have both Trade and Expansion Ideas unlocked, so that gives them at very least 6 merchants for potential +60% Trade Power.

I don't know why Sweden's AI simply haven't moved their Main Node to Lubeck, maybe it doesn't have diplo power to do that. Or maybe it did the math and calculated that it's still marginally better off the way it is now.
Anyways, be like BigMackl, not like Sweden.

Now, what does all this Trade Power stuff gives you? It gives you a slice of the pie, more power equals bigger slice obviously.

j2RF9na.png


In our case, BigMackl gets 30% of the pie. I know, I know, tooltip says 30% of Trade Power "among countries Collecting from Trade", but tooltip is wrong. It's total Trade Power in a node. You need to trust me on that, but there's another tooltip I didn't screenshot, that says that BigMackl "collects 32.56 gold from that Trade Node", so it's 30% of all the goods that are Local + Incoming. Outgoing is simply what's left after countries that are collecting are done, and that amount is transferred further downstream. That makes Total, well, quite simply the total amount that is collected by all the countries that are collecting in the node.

"But wait", you're gonna ask, "how come our hero BigMackl makes 80 gold in profits, when it only collects 32.5 gold from the trade? And this is where another modifier, called Trade Efficiency comes into play.

FoNV7RG.png


This is all the stuff that modifies your actual income. As you can see, it grows naturally with tech, but there are also plenty of stuffs that add to or subtract from it, from Policies through Advisors, to estate loyalty. Long story short, when you multiply 32.56 that is collected by 246% from Trade Efficiency it gives you your final profit of 80.1 gold per month from trade.



So to summarize all of that above, how to make money from trade:
1. Find a rich Trade Node, or make your Trade Node rich by producing goods locally or steering trade into it
2. Dominate it with your Trade Power either by controlling key provinces or sending Light Ships or both
3. Stack on appropriate modifiers to (Global) Trade Power and/or Trade Efficiency to maximize profits
 
Last edited:
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tl;dr. i picked the game again with all the dlcs, naples game, usually a very poor start. never had this much money since i imported in eu4 the ck2 save where i conquered the whole map (back when it was only europe and a sprinkle of middle east). as soon as i caught venice off guard i've been swimming in gold.
 

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