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Europa Universalis IV: Developer diary 40 - What is our mission ?

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Johan

Johan

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Welcome to the 40th developer diary of Europa Universalis IV, and this week we’’ just talk about some more mechanics. Nothing super serious or important, since we’ve covered so much over the last 40 weeks. But, since you may want to know…

Missions

In Europa Universalis III missions tended to be used to get around game mechanics and often gave rewards that were too big to say no to. For the first century or so, you’d be a fool for not having an active mission.
In Europa Universalis IV we have moved more towards missions being used as suggestions of actions that the player might want to pursue. They are nudges in the direction of history, and then just general pokes to keep things moving forward. Yes, there are still rewards, and some of them are quite nice. But they aren’t necessarily game changers all the time.

Missions are no longer randomly assigned. You now have three missions to choose from, often with one connected to each monarch power.
We have also added a target list of provinces to missions, so when choosing a historical conquer mission we can dynamically tag which province should be part of the mission instead of having to rely on pre-scripted victory conditions.

Decisions

We merged all decision lists to a single menu list in EU4. We also made a large overhaul of many of the decisions you might recall from EU3, rebalancing a lot of the common decisions, and pruning others entirely. Important decisions like Forming Spain (or Russia, or Hindustan, or Scandinavia) have been given another color so that they stand out from he list more clearly.

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Achievements

EU4 will ship with 50 different achievements, all using the Steam achievements mechanics. Some are easy to do like signing a royal marriage, and some are slightly harder to do like dismantling the HRE. However, achievements can only be done in Ironman mode – you will need to earn them. What is Ironman mode, you ask?

Ironman

The purpose of Ironman mode is to help the single player gamer to resist the urges to correct mistakes and change decisions already made. It is the ultimate challenge for you to ride out history’s waves and tumults.
In practice this means that EU4 itself will save the game at various points using only one and the same save game, thus removing the option to save the game, experiment with a course of action and then reload when your plans blow up in your face.
Playing an Ironman game is meant to be a bit of a challenge so some other game settings will be disabled or locked and of course _NO_ cheating is allowed. Not that any of you would cheat.

Other stuff..

We’ve got cloud saves as an option for EU4, so if you play on multiple machines, you don't have to move your saves manually between computers, or be afraid to lose them if you have to reinstall for some reason.

Steam workshop is also fully integrated in the game, and makes it easy to view and download mods without any technical hassle.

And just in case you missed these, here are the Europa Universalis IV Hands-on gameplay videos by Quill18! :)

Europa Universalis IV - England - Part 1
[video=youtube;ZlcscBCW4DQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlcscBCW4DQ[/video]

Europa Universalis IV - England - Part 2
[video=youtube;ISwe85jwkuI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISwe85jwkuI[/video]

Europa Universalis IV - England - Part 3
[video=youtube;BvG-MDahwfA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvG-MDahwfA[/video]

Europa Universalis IV - England - Part 4
[video=youtube;Ja4GQTiknrA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja4GQTiknrA[/video]

BestVacationEver_EuropaUniversalisIV.jpg
 

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This is actually quite ingenious. It smacks the Determinism vs. Sandbox nail right on the head. And totally stoked on Ironman--I will be even more stoked when we get details of the scoring system. What kind of end-game stats are available? Is there a Hall of Fame?
 
Ironman mode :D That's great and the only way I'll be playing SP. The achievements only in Ironman is a good idea too.

Changed to missions seems a lot better and decisions seem better organised.

Now I just can't wait to start playing!! (Sadly going on holiday for 2 weeks in 3 days after release :( )
 
I like the missions. I hate the "sign a royal marriage" achievement. Those are just pointless. Achievements should be really achievements, not something you'll have done in the first 2 minutes of every game.
 
Love the move of decisions to one big list. It was annoying in eu3 when you would have to have specific conditions just to see a decision. A great improvement!
 
and of course _NO_ cheating is allowed. Not that any of you would cheat.
Click to expand...
So I can't tag around and play different countries either, I'm guessing, because that uses console codes. Meaning you have to just use one country the whole time. Well, I guess Ironman (and consequently, achievements) is only for unskilled/low-skill players who want to build a single nation up indefinitely for endless blobbing.
 
my first game is going to be in ironman mode, to help break my cheating habit. the game is some much more fun if you don't cheat
 
I'm too goin to play in Iron Man mode. The problem is that either it will lag the game down with autosaves constantly, or it will be possible to just alt f4 whenever you make a mistake and restart at the save? Am I getting it wrong?

I'm not going to do that though, just speculating how the mechanics work.
 
jockedahl said:
I'm too goin to play in Iron Man mode. The problem is that either it will lag the game down with autosaves constantly, or it will be possible to just alt f4 whenever you make a mistake and restart at the save? Am I getting it wrong?

I'm not going to do that though, just speculating how the mechanics work.
Click to expand...

Pretty sure a monthly autosave won't be too resource intensive, and it's not like EU movements occur at a speed where individual weeks matter all that much. I'm obviously assuming monthly autosaves, I don't think it's been stated.
 
Cruxador said:
So I can't tag around and play different countries either, I'm guessing, because that uses console codes. Meaning you have to just use one country the whole time. Well, I guess Ironman (and consequently, achievements) is only for unskilled/low-skill players who want to build a single nation up indefinitely for endless blobbing.
Click to expand...

Is you want to pwn n00bz with your 1337 skillz there is multiplayer, I don't see connection between enjoying sandbox game any way you like and "skill"... /sigh.
 
Cruxador said:
So I can't tag around and play different countries either, I'm guessing, because that uses console codes. Meaning you have to just use one country the whole time. Well, I guess Ironman (and consequently, achievements) is only for unskilled/low-skill players who want to build a single nation up indefinitely for endless blobbing.
Click to expand...
I assume you can't change countries by saving and starting the game as another country either, so yes, if you want to play like that, don't do ironman mode...

If you don't like endless blobbing, you could just start a new game as another country...
 
Johan said:
Ironman

The purpose of Ironman mode is to help the single player gamer to resist the urges to correct mistakes and change decisions already made. It is the ultimate challenge for you to ride out history’s waves and tumults.
In practice this means that EU4 itself will save the game at various points using only one and the same save game, thus removing the option to save the game, experiment with a course of action and then reload when your plans blow up in your face.
Playing an Ironman game is meant to be a bit of a challenge so some other game settings will be disabled or locked and of course _NO_ cheating is allowed. Not that any of you would cheat.
Click to expand...

Is there a way to "force" or anticipate an ironman autosave, if you for some reason have to quit in hurry, can't play till next scheduled save and don't want to lose the progress?
 
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