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EU4 - Development Diary - 15th of January 2019

Good day all and a Happy New Year to you too. After a somewhat extended break I have finally come back to the office and rejoined the rest of the EUIV team. Our immediate tasks at hand are checking on and potentially ironing out any remaining issues from 1.28 as well as putting our plans together for the year.

As we mentioned in the chunky end of year dev diary our focus for the year will be a large European Expansion, with a heavy focus on crushing outstanding bugs and delivering Quality of Life improvements. We will be getting going with that shortly, after taking care of a few remaining important issues which have been reported in 1.28, including the Trade Company stuttering and save file issues with Expelling minorities. Once we investigate and fix these and other issues, we'll work towards releasing a 1.28.3 Patch.

As we also indicated in last year's wrap-up dev diary, we'll be fairly light on content in these dev diaries for a while, as we take the time both to put together a 1.28.3 Patch and plan out our large end of year Expansion. Frankly put: there isn't the content in the game to be talking about right now, so instead I'll turn attention to how I invited everyone to bring forward longstanding bugs and QoL issues they would like to see taken care of in said expansion. I'll grab some interesting ones and give some thoughts on them.

I'll say ahead of time that these are just thoughts on matters, and not to be taken as firm promises of things to come.

Mothballed Armies

This is something that gets suggested frequently and on one level, it makes nice symmetric sense: One can mothball Navies, why not armies? It will continue not to be implemented however, as while navies serve a variety of roles, including piracy, anti-piracy, trade, transport and combat, your armies serve almost entirely the exclusive role of combat. The ability to mothball parts of your armies would trivialize the cost of maintaining a large army, granting large nations even further advantages.

There are other approaches to this with ideas like higher costs for far flung armies: It could/should be more expensive to operate the Dutch armies in China than in the Netherlands. Such things are not on the cards currently, but make interesting food for thought.

Mod tweaks in the Launcher

I love this idea. Giving more information and flexibility with mods in the launcher would be extremely useful in games with such extensive mod communities as ours, and is certainly something worth exploring how to do right.

Diplomatic Macro Builder

There have been various suggestions for the Diplo Macro since its debut in Mandate of Heaven, not limited to those in the linked thread. Most of them revolve around not correctly targeting who the player is intending, with users not wanting it to target nations who they will soon destroy, or other particular sets of nations such as HRE members/Electors. These were out of the scope when the feature was being made, but as we re-visit parts of the game with QoL in mind, an actual custom list that the player can make at will is an interesting solution for this.

Provide options for subjects colonising regions, to stop them from colonising provinces you want to colonise.

For the precise map painters among us, I've seen this pop up. Colonial Nation subjects currently have some strict rules on lands which their AI will colonize, but I believe there's room for improvement there, where it can be loosened up but give the overlord the ability force colonization within their Colonial Region, so that, for example, Mexico doesn't snake their way into Louisiana and the Eastern Seaboard.

In the coming weeks until we start digging into more meat of what we're planning on doing in our big expansion this year, we'll likely pick up on various other suggestions that have been coming up, as well as a so far unannounced surprise that will be coming in a couple of weeks.
 
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Are you able to give us an estimate when the trade company stuttering issue will be hotfixed?

I was hoping it would've come with this dev diary, as it was reportedly solved on the 7th of Jan :(
 
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Was hoping for hotfix patch - glad to see one is incoming.

as well as a so far unannounced surprise that will be coming in a couple of weeks.
Aaah what could it be....

I have a suggestion for less meaty dev - diaries:

Give us your designers insight into specific topic, choose one... attrition combat, estates, mercs, manpower, whatever is on your mind and you can talk about it. There's plenty in eu4.
 
Make Habsan and Gotland Pirate Nations.
 
Unrelated to the DD, but I'd like to add that the recent influx of suggestions from the community, particularly those concerning future map updates, have been a pleasure to read. Keep up the good work :)
 
as well as a so far unannounced surprise that will be coming in a couple of weeks.
It's not much of a surprise, if you tell us to expect one.
 
But having to pay maintenance for your 40k homeland troops because you don't want your 3k colony troops to lose against 1k natives is the most annoying thing ever. :'(

Maybe an option to be able to change the maintenance for troops overseas? Bound to continents or colonial / trade regions could work?
 
Good day all and a Happy New Year to you too. After a somewhat extended break I have finally come back to the office and rejoined the rest of the EUIV team. Our immediate tasks at hand are checking on and potentially ironing out any remaining issues from 1.28 as well as putting out plans together for the year.

As we mentioned in the chunky end of year dev diary our focus for the year will be a large European Expansion, with a heavy focus on crushing outstanding bugs and delivering Quality of Life improvements. We will be getting going with that shortly, after taking care of a few remaining important issues which have been reported in 1.28, including the Trade Company stuttering and save file issues with Expelling minorities. Once we investigate and fix these and other issues, we'll work towards releasing a 1.28.3 Patch.

As we also indicated in last year's wrap-up dev diary, we'll be fairly light on content in these dev diaries for a while, as we take the time both to put together a 1.28.3 Patch and plan out our large end of year Expansion. Frankly put: there isn't the content in the game to be talking about right now, so instead I'll turn attention to how I invited everyone to bring forward longstanding bugs and QoL issues they would like to see taken care of in said expansion. I'll grab some interesting ones and give some thoughts on them.

I'll say ahead of time that these are just thoughts on matters, and not to be taken as firm promises of things to come.

Mothballed Armies

This is something that gets suggested frequently and on one level, it makes nice symmetric sense: One can mothball Navies, why not armies? It will continue not to be implemented however, as while navies serve a variety of roles, including piracy, anti-piracy, trade, transport and combat, your armies serve almost entirely the exclusive role of combat. The ability to mothball parts of your armies would trivialize the cost of maintaining a large army, granting large nations even further advantages.

There are other approaches to this with ideas like higher costs for far flung armies: It could/should be more expensive to operate the Dutch armies in China than in the Netherlands. Such things are not on the cards currently, but make interesting food for thought.

Mod tweaks in the Launcher

I love this idea. Giving more information and flexibility with mods in the launcher would be extremely useful in games with such extensive mod communities as ours, and is certainly something worth exploring how to do right.

Diplomatic Macro Builder

There have been various suggestions for the Diplo Macro since its debut in Mandate of Heaven, not limited to those in the linked thread. Most of them revolve around not correctly targeting who the player is intending, with users not wanting it to target nations who they will soon destroy, or other particular sets of nations such as HRE members/Electors. These were out of the scope when the feature was being made, but as we re-visit parts of the game with QoL in mind, an actual custom list that the player can make at will is an interesting solution for this.

Provide options for subjects colonising regions, to stop them from colonising provinces you want to colonise.

For the precise map painters among us, I've seen this pop up. Colonial Nation subjects currently have some strict rules on lands which their AI will colonize, but I believe there's room for improvement there, where it can be loosened up but give the overlord the ability force colonization within their Colonial Region, so that, for example, Mexico doesn't snake their way into Louisiana and the Eastern Seaboard.

In the coming weeks until we start digging into more meat of what we're planning on doing in our big expansion this year, we'll likely pick up on various other suggestions that have been coming up, as well as a so far unannounced surprise that will be coming in a couple of weeks.

Considering surprises, I thought your new year's wish was to do less surprises, such that feedback could be considered early on?
 
But having to pay maintenance for your 40k homeland troops because you don't want your 3k colony troops to lose against 1k natives is the most annoying thing ever. :'(

Maybe something like this:

* Implement a new army mission (cf. drilling, rebel suppression), "suppress natives". This could have the same area selection mode as suppressing rebels, so you can tell it where to go.
* An army that is suppressing natives will always be charged at full maintenance, regardless of the maintenance slider (as with drilling armies) and would always fight at full strength, but would not be possible to manually control.
* Manually moving or otherwise ending native suppression will immediately reset the army's morale to zero (as it has to reorganise to it's change in mission and purpose).
* While in native suppression mode, an army will attempt to engage any native uprisings within its assigned areas. When there are no active natives, it will move to sit in any undefended colony within its area.
 
Probably should revise and fix TC cashflow vs Corruption/state mechanic and CN cashflow (nonexistant/tariffs) + Capital province change on different continents.

Kinda important from where I'm sitting.
 
Provide options for subjects colonising regions, to stop them from colonising provinces you want to colonise.

For the precise map painters among us, I've seen this pop up. Colonial Nation subjects currently have some strict rules on lands which their AI will colonize, but I believe there's room for improvement there, where it can be loosened up but give the overlord the ability force colonization within their Colonial Region, so that, for example, Mexico doesn't snake their way into Louisiana and the Eastern Seaboard.

PRAISE JESUS
 
What about cultural minority modifiers? It would be a simpler way to represent demographics. Small, medium, large cultural minority. The larger the minority is in the modifier the less AE and coring costs it will take for the country that has said minority as a main culture. This would let Jews be represented and perhaps enable the creation of a jewish country if the large diaspora becomes the majority.

It can be used also for religious groups as a way to simulate remaining groups from previous conversions. Huguenots in France could be represented this way.
 
Unrelated to the DD, but I'd like to add that the recent influx of suggestions from the community, particularly those concerning future map updates, have been a pleasure to read. Keep up the good work :)

Might have something to do with your new years resolution to engage more with the community about future develoment. I myself made a couple of suggestions back in the days, but didn´t get any response. This pretty much killed my motivation to do it again. After your announcements I did it again and immediately got a response, which felt great... even if not all ideas will be implemented. Of course not every idea can be commented and your development schedule is probably more then full. However I do believe there is still a huge untapped potential, especially in such a community as eu4. I really hope you can keep this up and maybe even dedicate some more resources to it...
 
I was hoping for a double plus thicc DD... Not that I'm disappointed, rather, I can't wait to see what's coming.
 
Maybe something like this:

* Implement a new army mission (cf. drilling, rebel suppression), "suppress natives". This could have the same area selection mode as suppressing rebels, so you can tell it where to go.
* An army that is suppressing natives will always be charged at full maintenance, regardless of the maintenance slider (as with drilling armies) and would always fight at full strength, but would not be possible to manually control.
* Manually moving or otherwise ending native suppression will immediately reset the army's morale to zero (as it has to reorganise to it's change in mission and purpose).
* While in native suppression mode, an army will attempt to engage any native uprisings within its assigned areas. When there are no active natives, it will move to sit in any undefended colony within its area.

wonderful suggestion
 
Mothballing armies could be considered an easy way to simulate feudal armies. In turn army maintenance should increase so that in the early game, mothballing when in peace is a must. As countries grow bigger and military tech advances, there will be more money and less expenses of maintaining an army, thus having now real standing armies.