• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Most of the team is now off for the holidays, and the final remaining of us leaves today for up to two weeks of relaxations with friends and family.

The Europa Universalis IV team have worked very hard this year in making the foundations of a rather awesome game which has now reached the alpha stage, which means that the game is feature complete. When we get back from the holidays, the team will work towards the beta, where the remaining content gets into the game, including final events, tutorial and AI.

In the last two weeks, we've done quite a lot of multiplayer testing with QA Team and the Design Team.
It sounds a bit pretentious to say team when QA is 3 people and design team is me and King, but well :)

We have run multiple campaigns as the 5 western powers for the first 100-150 years to tweak the start of colonisation and expansion.
Constantly rotating players between countries and tweaking mechanics and balance to improve playability.

What we discovered was that the game, in this early stage, it is damn fun!
And sometimes you have to admit that you lost a war, and cut your losses.
Sometimes you become really proud of your accomplishments, and sometimes you go, why the hell did I just do that??

So what has worked out the best?
- Trade, where navies are vital.
- Monarch Power, the strategies are endless.
- Combat, the changes make warfare so much more fun and battles interesting.

OTOH, there are some interfaces that needs to be reworked to be easier to handle and give better interfaces, especially the diplomatic and province interfaces..

Here's a screenshot of my France in one of the sessions, a few months after the peace where I had finally defeated Burgundy and their perfidious allies..

eu4_8.png

We're back after January 6th to conquer the world and enslave humanity!

[video=youtube;W35yQuO4fq0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W35yQuO4fq0[/video]
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Well, now that you've mentioned some of the strengths this game has in it's developing stage, what would you say still needed more work?


---------
PS : My eyes just popped, amazed by the game graphics...
 
IIRC devs stated somewhere that province culture-change would be purchased with Monarch Points. Hopefully it would pretty damn expensive, for sake of realism.

Coring yields as much a benefit, if not more, than changing culture, though, so for balance's sake its best if cost remains manageable/comparable. Ideally, tie it to population size and other modifiers that exist(ed?) for random culture conversion, this way for instance it would be much cheaper to do in the colonies or against Steppe nomads than against heavily populated cities of Europe.
 
Design team is 2 people? How many hours do you guys work a day? Respect BTW.

I think by design team they meant the number of people who make feature/mechanics calls, not the number of people who code everything - for example i think they use a map specialist, soft coder (events, decisions, thats CaptainGars isnt it?), AI specialist (Johan does that too?), interface person (someone who adds functions and coordinates with whomever makes graphics), and so on. Probably a bit too hard for just 2 ppl to handle?
 
I think by design team they meant the number of people who make feature/mechanics calls, not the number of people who code everything - for example i think they use a map specialist, soft coder (events, decisions, thats CaptainGars isnt it?), AI specialist (Johan does that too?), interface person (someone who adds functions and coordinates with whomever makes graphics), and so on. Probably a bit too hard for just 2 ppl to handle?

Youre correct. Then again, they dont really tell us much about the full size of the team. I asked previously for who-does-what but they didn't reply, I guess its part of market strategy. For instance if there's overall "only" 6-9 people working on this project, which is entirely possible given they're building on Divine Wind and Paradox isnt exactly EA, well, admitting this in the open might hurt perception or sales. That was my best guess anyhow.
 
Youre correct. Then again, they dont really tell us much about the full size of the team. I asked previously for who-does-what but they didn't reply, I guess its part of market strategy. For instance if there's overall "only" 6-9 people working on this project, which is entirely possible given they're building on Divine Wind and Paradox isnt exactly EA, well, admitting this in the open might hurt perception or sales. That was my best guess anyhow.

Did you read this thread? Just checking since I don't see you in the reply list. Sure it doesn't list every last individual, but you've got your project heads lists and how many people they have to a team. I'd guess the 4 man team is for East vs. West since it seems to be the most from scratch game in production.

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?615175-Paradox-Development-Studio-Overview
 
Did you read this thread? Just checking since I don't see you in the reply list. Sure it doesn't list every last individual, but you've got your project heads lists and how many people they have to a team. I'd guess the 4 man team is for East vs. West since it seems to be the most from scratch game in production.

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?615175-Paradox-Development-Studio-Overview

Nah.. Besuchov, zoft, nusia and captain gars are the coders for eu4.
 
Thanks for doing an MP oriented DD. I didn't expect to see one this early, so I'm especially pleased.

I look forward to seeing a post that highlights all the changes from the EU3 mp system.

Happy Holidays and whatnot.
 
Looks good. It especially should be much better than eu3 multiplayer. Even just the removal and replacement of badboy completely fixes my main issue with eu3's multiplayer. Everything else is just a bonus, a very fun one. A lot of people seem sceptical about the gameplay of eu4 but honestly... every single dev diary shows something that's either a medium or a major improvement and there's no way that eu4 isn't going to be much more fun (in mp as well). The gameplay design seems to be very very good.