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EU4 - Development Diary - 13th of August 2019

Good day all, Tuesday is here once again as it often is, so let's dive into another Dev Diary for the upcoming European Update. Last week we were all about how you can project your power externally, so this week let's look more internally, with focus on Estates.

Back in April we had a dev diary which was largely an expunge of thoughts on the Estates feature, where it's been and we still want to take it. Let's get a recap on our thoughts from then:

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

Over the past few months we've been pondering how we can make such aspirations a reality, and today we'll share where we are with that.

As mentioned last week, and will continue to be mentioned, any numbers seen and especially interfaces seen, are not in their final form

13th DD no Estates.jpg


As teased earlier, one of the first things we did with Estates is completely remove their relationship with individual provinces. This interaction with estates was always micro intensive, deeply confusing for new players, caused a lot of issues with 1444 setup for many nations (Nobles eating all my gold provinces) and scaled fairly terribly into the late game. It was not without its charms: assigning individual estates to individual provinces could have a nice internal management feel, but it was not an action that lent itself well to the expansion loop of the game. It was hard to feel excited about the estate allocation to your newest 20 provinces, while a tall player would have little interaction to be done throughout the entire game.

The death of direct province ties gives birth to a new concept in EUIV, that of Crown Land. Every nation with Estates has their Crown Land to manage. Much like how previously Estates started with a share of provinces, now they own a certain percentage of Crown Land. There is 100% of Crown Land which is divided between the various Estates, and the nation's own full control.

13th DD French Crown Land.jpg

Pie-chart, coder art flavour. The French have yet to reign in their nobles

Estates' portion of Crown Land will heavily affect their influence, as well as many of the interactions you have with them. Conversely, your nation's control over Crown Land is of grave importance: If you want to be a strong, absolutist state heaving into the Age of Absolutism, you'll want to wrestle control away from your estates, and giving up all of your crown land will have negative effects of your control over the nation.

You have many avenues of influence over Crown Land. Firstly, there are three direct interactions available in the Estate Screen.

  • Sale of Titles
    • Sell 5% Crown Land to the Estates based on Influence for 1 Year of Income
    • +5% All Estate Loyalty
  • Seize Land
    • Gain 3% Crown Lands, estates loses based on their influence
    • -10% All Estate Loyalty
    • Give +5 Unrest to random provinces up until you equivalent development the estates hold.
    • Spawn rebels fitting for the most influential estate type.
  • Summon the Diet
    • [REDACTED]
    • [REDACTED]
    • [REDACTED]
Additionally, developing your lands directly will increase your direct share of Crown Land, while acquiring new provinces will boost your Estates' share, based on their current influence. Highly influential estates will see it as their right to enjoy the lion's share of new lands.

Another big change happening here are with the interactions one has with the estates. I'll refer to an excellent post from the aforementioned dev diary.

So here are my thoughts on Estates: atm they are unnecessary button clicks that u can do every 20 tears to get free monarch points, also as some governments (like hordes) the best play is to just remove them entirely. I think they should be a lot more impactful, once your nation get's bigger, since they were what helped kings keep big empires together in Europe.

We don't want Estates to be the monarch point and advisor generating buttons that you hammer every couple decades, but in reality, it's how a lot of people use it. Heck, it's how I use it, so what's to be done here?

We actually turned this into a guiding principal of designing the Estate screen and their interactions. We were not to have any interactions which the user would return there on a regular pulse to repeat. As such, all old Estate interactions have been removed, and we have instead introduced a system of Estate Privileges

13th DD Noble Priv.jpg


13th DD Burghers Priv.jpg


Once again, all numbers and Interfaces are far from complete. You won't be seeing a screen full of ??? on release (well, I certainly hope not)

Rather than actions with cooldowns that you demand or bestow your Estates as before, these Privileges are meaty interactions that you can choose to take with your estates. They will impact on their Influence/Loyalty/Crown Land Share and come with a variety of effects, often wide reaching, long lasting and more often than not, impacting on your maximum absolutism. When the age of Absolutism comes around, you may well consider revoking these Privileges to gain absolute control over the state (Although if your ambitions are Revolutionary, you may have other plans...)

Each Estate type have their own Privileges and many of the old functions of estates are accounted for. The nobility, for example, can give you added military power per month if you're willing to guarantee them precious crown land, while the Rajputs will enable the direct recruitment of Rajput Regiments, in exchange for permanently increased influence. While such Privileges can be revoked, much like seizing the crown land away from them, you will invoke their ire, and should be done when you have either sufficiently appeased the estates through other means, or are ready to deal with their rebellions.

We'll certainly be back to talk more about these Estate changes as development on the upcoming European Update continues. As ever, questions and comments are welcome in this thread, and next week we'll go on to talk about another sizeable change of a more Ecumenical variety.

eu4_anniversary_livestream.png
 
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Seize Land

If you manage to defeat a rebellion, you should be able to seize land with reduced negative penalties. BTW, why can't I favor one estate over the other by just seizing/selling/granting land to them?

I'm not sure if I agree that newly acquired provinces should add to estate's influence based on how influential they are. A better metric on how to divide the spoils would be how much they contributed to the war to acquire them. There should be an option to directly increase the crown's lands too which incurs the estates' wrath.

The estate feature is free but is everything (including the redacted feature) part of the free patch too?
 
Give +5 Unrest to random provinces up until you equivalent development the estates hold.

I think this sentence may have got slightly mangled. Could you clarify what it means?

Still excited for the changes :3
 
I think this sentence may have got slightly mangled. Could you clarify what it means?

Still excited for the changes :3

If the estate holds 100 dev and you have 5 provinces with 25 in each, it will cause unrest in 4 random provinces
 
I think this sentence may have got slightly mangled. Could you clarify what it means?

Still excited for the changes :3

If you have 0% crown land ownership i.e. the estates own 100% of the land, every province you own will gain 5% unrest from you seizing land. If you own 95% of the land, the game will give random provinces 5% unrest until at least 5% of your total development has been given total unrest (i.e. if you have 20 provinces, each with 5 development, it will give it to exactly one province).
 
Pie charts for religion and culture next? This would make for good tall games where players try to expand their culture and religion in a realistic way over time instead of clicking and having it done within a few months or years.
 
Should noble estates having too much power lead to noble republics and burghers to oligarchic republic/ merchant republic? These would only come to be if legitimacy is low though.
 
It would be interesting if the cores and territories system was overhauled to include crown lands. The idea of building a state and gaining direct control of land from nobles and clerics is an interesting one.
 
This looks amazing - will it apply to merchant republics? Always felt a bit hamstrung with the guilds/aristocrats and traders... So little interactivity and meagre bonuses. Basically just ignore it unless one group gets too much influence. Can we get this to apply to them too? Or give them their own interactions?
 
Will there still be Estate Coups? i always hated them because they are easy to miss and cost a shitload of Stability, i would like them to still be a major threat but more like this:

A nobility coup would Replace your Monarch with another Monarch from your Dynasty, like maybe with your Heir? This is in contrast with a Pretender Rebel uprising, whwre your dynasty is replaced and all your PU's with it.

A Clergy uprising will install a Theologic government, and completely change your government.

A Burger uprising will install a Republic in your government.

In addition i think you would need to get a lot of bad effects to your nation, like a big prestige hit, diplo reputation hit, a temporary monarch point projection hit?

I just think the current system isnt good enough, it mostly just gives you a stab hit.

Im glad with all the updates though, just sad to have to wait another 6 months to play it :(
 
If you have 0% crown land ownership i.e. the estates own 100% of the land, every province you own will gain 5% unrest from you seizing land. If you own 95% of the land, the game will give random provinces 5% unrest until at least 5% of your total development has been given total unrest (i.e. if you have 20 provinces, each with 5 development, it will give it to exactly one province).
In the second case (5% owned by estates), if I have 2 provinces, one with 3 development and one with 60, will it give 5% unrest to the 3 dev province and then the 60 dev province (because 3 dev province is less than 5%) or to the 60 dev province and then no province (becuse 60 dev is more than 5%)? What is the order in which provinces are assigned unrest? Will it tend to be in one broad area or spread out in random places?
 
Having looked at the unfinished screens looks like once again they give a bunch of global modifiers. Which will turn them into clickable buttons in every X years! I'm not saying it will be a bad design but it shouldn't lose all the gameplay features it offered locally.

Just from my reading of the DD this isn't right - they aren't clickable every X years because they appear to be *permanent* you wouldn't want to click them every X years but rather toggle them as your situation changes - maybe leaving some on for the whole game.
 
I am not sure I totally understand this. whats the difference me having 100% crown land or 0%? I got that it changes the amount of influence the estates have but in this new setting what does it mean? if let say the nobles get 100% of crown land will they seize power imediatelly? would this affect income (since you have 0% crown land is that means that all taxes go to nobility's pocket instead of your own)? i really would like more details and numbers on this as this makes me feel like that estates in this set up might be your absolute worst enemy and need to seize absolutely everything from them so they dont screw you over.