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Besuchov

Studio Manager, PDS
Paradox Staff
64 Badges
Mar 6, 2001
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To build a new Nation
Its that time of the week when I have to write a dev diary again. This week its time for an old feature that has gotten a major overhaul, namely buildings and province decisions.

Buildings have always been part of the EU gameplay, as the game progress you build tax collectors and cathedrals to improve each of your provinces to give you things like more tax, improved stability and lower revolt risk. Later we added the province decisions where you used magistrates to improve your decisions further with things like population censuses, grain depots and monuments. What we ended up with was a collection of lots of cool things you could do with your country but we started to see to many of them where overlapping and quite a few of them were no brainier decisions to take and you found yourself clicking some of them way to often. The time had come for some consolidation.

So for Divine Wind, the first thing we did was to get rid of a lot of the province decisions and merge in their effects in the buildings system. Then we had some unemployed magistrates so we made it so that each building you build requires a magistrate. The good thing with this is that we get rid of the gamey tactic of minting furiously when you know that the workshop is coming up in a tech or two and then carpet your country in them within a day, now you have to manage your magistrates and prioritize.

Then we looked over all the effects of buildings and province decisions and tried to get rid of overlapping and useless effects. After this was done we ended up with 56 different buildings. It become clear that if we wanted to keep the interface and the clicking of buttons on a manageable level we needed to do further refinements.
We then divided the buildings into there types:

1.Regular buildings: These are buildings that you might want to build in just about every province. These are divided into categories for the 6 different technologies plus one category for forts. Each building in a category is a prerequisite for the next one, so you cant build a Shipyard if you don't have a dry dock for example. This 'leveling' system now reduces 42 different things to choose from, when you come into the province screen, down to choosing between 7 at a time. It also give a specialization feel to the system where some provinces become administrative centers and other become army building provinces. To reinforce this we made the last two levels extra juicy but also made them exclusive. Do you want to build a Conscription Center for extra manpower or do you want to build a Customs House to give your merchants 1% extra compete chance?

2.'One Per Country'. These are extra powerful buildings with both local and nationwide effects. The drawback is that you can just have one of each in your country at any given time. Some of these require a certain property of the province they are built in, like the Grain Depot that requires a certain resource or the March that can only be build in non core provinces, while buildings like the War College can be built anywhere.

3.Manifacturies. These are already rather expensive and specialized and the act of building one is a real decision so we felt that these fitted into our design philosophy so we kept them as they where.

Now, as some of you realize, even with this rationalization we where left with the problem of where to fit this into the interface and we realize that something had to give. Our sacrifice for this new system was the city view, which is now gone to give room for a new interface where you plan your province improvements. Another advantage of this is that its less work to add new buildings in the future since its much easier to redo the regular interface than to try to fit new buildings into the 3d city view.
So that's it for now, lets hope you enjoy this new feature that I personally think will have a really interesting effect on gameplay. I will now get back to work on the feature that I will tell you about next week.

Thomas Johansson
Associate Producer and Project Lead on Europa Universalis III: Divine Wind
 

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Promising! This is the first diary (other than the map one) that I actually am excited about. So, the province decisions are completely gone then, and merged with the buildings?

Too bad about the city view, I rather liked it though it was only a gimmick. I can live with what we get in return though. :)
 
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To build a new Nation
So for Divine Wind, the first thing we did was to get rid of a lot of the province decisions

I hope this means 'establish march' is history.

Edit: Just read the part about building marches in non-core provinces. As long as it doesn't halve the province's tax income for a negligible defense bonus I'm happy.
 
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This sounds absolutely terrific. A much needed improvement to fundamental features, core mechanics.. Sounds like it will make playing a major much less repetitive and much more fun :cool: Exclusive top-tier buildings sounds like a fun strategic choice. Also, reconsideration of overlapping existing features is good, exactly what I asked for recently.

With the risk of sounding like a fanboi, I even support removing the city view. I think this is also something I have argued for here some time ago.

Keep up the good work!

Do you want to build a Conscription Center for extra manpower or do you want to build a Customs House to give your merchants 1% extra compete chance?

This is one thing I'm not too certain about. +1% compete chance for a province improvement sounds like it will massively favor large empires.
 
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One question Besuchov. (Well multiple questions for one topic! :p)

What happens when you conquer a country's territory that also has a "One Per Country" building?

Do you then end up with 2 of such buildings?

Or is the newly conquered one then destroyed?
 
lots of marketplaces in that screenshot :p

(kidding, i know you need to design the icons still)
 
Interesting! That's going to require considerable modification to my gameplay - and I like it!
But please tell me you can build a fort without a magistrate... at least a level 1?
 
This sounds promising, building have so far been a nonbrainer, most of the I just built in all provinces.
Some questions though:

If we need one magistrate per building we build, wont a large colonial empire be left with fewer building (say you have 2-300 provinces). You would need most of the magistrates just for building forts in new provinces...

Does the new interface mean that we have to click from provinceto province to build new buildings? Hopefully there will be some kind of an overview also!

And how will this affect trade goods prices? Since demand before was closely connected to some of the building...
 
Sounds something like the Civ system, especially with unique buildings standing in for national wonders.

This is going to make the magistrate generation rate of the various government types extremely important. Are we still going to be able to increase the rate that they're generated by provincial decisions, such as road building, or have these too been removed along with post offices, etc?

I'm a little sad to see the end of the city view, but it's hardly the most vital part of the game and this seems like a fair swap.
 
I also wonder if the province decision page in the ledger will get worked on or not.

Besuchov said:
This week its time for an old feature that has gotten a major overhaul, namely buildings and province decisions.


Seems pretty clear to me that the answer is yes. If I interpret it correctly they're mostly if not all replaced by buildings.
 
Yes! Great! No more city view, the most useless thing in all EU3 games, and taking away precious screen "real estate". Thank you! :)

I assume this means that province decisions are gone completely? Good thing, with less clicking and micro. It remains to be seen if the buildings can take over that function, of course, but I feel that it's a step in the right direction.
 
It looks really nice, I like that!

A solution to the lack of city view could be a toggle where you can switch between city view and building list (or maybe even province decisions, army/navy recruitment, etc., so that you have province stats on hand all the time, but the left part of the panel changes depending on what you want to do). I don't really mind losing the city view, but it was a nice touch.

Also, hopefully the number of magistrates one can get will be balanced properly, so that you don't end up with a situation where for the first ~100 years you have no magistrates at all, and afterwards you are swimming in them.
 
Hmm, no decisions button on the province interface anymore...

Also, those are some nice new building graphics.

I would also like to know if building forts also requires magistrates, and if so, is there any new idea or decision that gives you more of the guys if you're playing a colonial or a conquering nation?
 
On the one per civ and conquering, if I can make a suggestion on how to deal with it.

When you conquer the province- you get a decision where you decide which one to keep. Option A would be the keep the old one, which the AI would pick most of the time.

You get a few ducats for demolishing the building (trivial amount)

Awesome update this week BTW.
 
It looks really nice, I like that!

A solution to the lack of city view could be a toggle where you can switch between city view and building list (or maybe even province decisions, army/navy recruitment, etc., so that you have province stats on hand all the time, but the left part of the panel changes depending on what you want to do). I don't really mind losing the city view, but it was a nice touch.

Also, hopefully the number of magistrates one can get will be balanced properly, so that you don't end up with a situation where for the first ~100 years you have no magistrates at all, and afterwards you are swimming in them.

Agree with this post.