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EU4 - Development Diary - 15th of September 2016

Good afternoon everyone. Thursday rolls around so once more we have some features from the upcoming Rights of Man to share with you. We've already shown off a huge number of changes coming with both the free 1.18 Prussia Patch and Rights of Man but we're still not done yet! Let's check out a couple more new additions.

Bodycount

When concluding a war, it's hard to get a sense of scale for just how many enemies fell to your blades, starved to death in your rolling tundra or were sent to the bottom of the ocean. Personally, I would like to know these figures so I can triumphantly explain to my nation why it was worth exhausting our manpower pool over the Border Friction at Jemtland to inflict massive casualties on our foes.

At the conclusion of a war you will be presented with a Bodycount screen showing losses for both sides and a breakdown of what was lost, how they perished and their unit model, just so you can look them dead in the eyes.

Bodycount 01 DD.png


Additionally, you can select the shields for each nation involved in the war to see their individual burden that they shouldered, so you can see who did and did not pull their weight in a war. Very useful for those times where your ally in a war claims that they were fighting all the battles, you just weren't watching at the time. Clicking on the Defender or Attacker icons will show the losses for everyone on that side.

Bodycount 02.png


As with most pop-ups, you can toggle the display of this one to your liking. You can also observe game-long statistics about this in the ledger, where we have added pages for army and navy losses for all nations. Enjoy some numbers from last night's hands-off and try not to be scared of Russia, France and Ottomans.

eu4_15.png


Another minor change we has as part of Rights of Man is an indicator on the Minimap for friendly and hostile forces.

Minimap.png


At times, panning around to keep an eye on all parts of your sprawling empire to see if your enemies are invading can be time better spent elsewhere. Now, as long as a nation's units are not covered by Fog of War, they will appear on the Minimap, either Green or Blue for friendlies, or red for hostile. Again, this feature can be toggled on and off.

These are two paid features in the upcoming Rights of Man expansion which will be released alongside the Free 1.18 Prussia Patch. Rights of Man will cost $20 or your local equivalent and be released on the 11th October. Our team is hard at work plotting against each other for the ongoing multiplayer finalizing the expansion but we still have a few more things to show, and will be back again next week to maybe, just maybe, explain what Necromunda was all about.

If you hunger for more, perhaps the Rights of Man Developer Multiplayer will take your fancy:

 
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I hear that in Europe they use periods to do the same job, but we all know those people just don't understand things like punctuation and grammar in general, so they can be ignored or appeased with their own option, at your convenience.
PI was European last I checked.:p

But yes you are correct that in Europe (aside from the British Isles) 1,000,000.05 would be 1.000.000,05.
Can't remember if there are numbers which shows three decimal points, but if there are then introducing a decimal separator could be dangerous, since in my experience there are plenty of people on both sides of the pond who aren't aware that things are the opposite on the other side. Meaning that e.g. 1,456 would be read as 1456 by some Europeans, whereas if you go 1.456 instead it would be read as 1456 by some Americans.


Though I fully agrees that some kind of decimal separator would be really nice and frankly is needed. The only problem as mentioned is which to use and how to make sure that the people on the other side of the pond don't get confused.


Found a map of usage:
Blue is . for decimal point, green is ,, dark green is both, red is some Arabic decimal point, and grey is no data.

DecimalSeparator.svg
 
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Cool map! Thanks! (I loves me some maps.)

In what we over here call decimal numbers (digits to the right of the decimal point; I'm not aware of what you guys call them; commimal numbers?) I sometimes see spaces used to separate them into groups of three. A similar tactic could be used on the left side, if PDS doesn't want to create a Preferences setting for it.


PI was European last I checked.:p

But yes you are correct that in Europe (aside from the British Isles) 1,000,000.05 would be 1.000.000,05.
Can't remember if there are numbers which shows three decimal points, but if there are then introducing a decimal separator could be dangerous, since in my experience there are plenty of people on both sides of the pond who aren't aware that things are the opposite on the other side. Meaning that e.g. 1,456 would be read as 1456 by some Europeans, whereas if you go 1.456 instead it would be read as 1456 by some Americans.


Though I fully agrees that some kind of decimal separator would be really nice and frankly is needed. The only problem as mentioned is which to use and how to make sure that the people on the other side of the pond don't get confused.


Found a map of usage:
Blue is . for decimal point, green is ,, dark green is both, red is some Arabic decimal point, and grey is no data.

DecimalSeparator.svg
 
New features seem to be quite good.

Except perhaps the Great Power system. I'm not exactly sold on Power Projection to begin with and there doesn't seem to be any need for Great Powers existing in the game. Or maybe, they shouldn't exist at the start, but after some geographical discoveries and some tech advances they could begin to emerge? It seems unrealistic if Great Powers are not even aware of each other, and that would be the case with Ming, wouldn't it?
 
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While at a glance the minimap tracker feature could use some graphical creative tinkering, its probably the thing I'm looking forward to the most ... while I'd really like to, I'm unable to keep more than one war going at a time unless its in the mop-up phase ... that doesn't play well with really wanting to do a WC just to say that i've done it ...
 
Minimap indicator as a paid feature? Really? Am I the only one who thinks that your CK2 DLC policy is brilliant, while EU4 DLC policy is totally foolish?
+1 I have already said last week it seems to me that the free content features become less and less over DLC.
I do agree that mini-map does sound odd that it´s not under the free feature... But not knowing how much hours they have spend on making it :)

However, based on the amount that is free already due to the technology overhaul I can´t see how free content is screwed over...
What's the blue flag button below your countries flag/shield?
It´s a shortcut to great powers :)
 
Will the minimap indicators also include fleets? It's so hard to notice a random fleet of transports creeping up on my colonies, this would really help with that.

edit: I also agree that this one seems like a strange one to put in the paid feature bucket.
 
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+1 I have already said last week it seems to me that the free content features become less and less over DLC.

Honestly if you really want to make your case, go back and do a comparison of the free patch vs. expansion features for every DLC with their release date and make a post about it. That's really the best way to demonstrate your case if it's valid. Personally I think you're off with it since they've been fairly consistent with big features = free, minor features = paid. Obviously one inconsistency is the mini-map tracker since that is rather odd that it's paid and not free.

When you make next WC for example by Ottomans or Muscovy, when you have four-five-six wars in every corner of the world, this feature very usefull. Of course you can pause the game, but indicators on minimap can greatly reduce amount of pauses.
I've done it as Ryukyu (see signature for proof) and honestly the feature seems underwhelming for SP. Depending on the level of difficulty of what you're doing, you're going to be paused quite a bit regardless. MP it'll be quite a bit better imo. Read an Atwix AAR if you want an idea of the amount of pauses that goes into the more difficult games that the mini-map feature won't do much for :p

That said, for MP and SP games where you decide not to pause to think, it'll be make life a lot better :)

What's the blue flag button below your countries flag/shield?

It's for Great Powers
 
Could you make the total casualty of each battle and the total number of soldiers before and after to be displayed? It greatly slows me down everytime I have to add inf + art + cav numbers to get the picture of the scale and results of each battle.
 
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Cool map! Thanks! (I loves me some maps.)

In what we over here call decimal numbers (digits to the right of the decimal point; I'm not aware of what you guys call them; commimal numbers?) I sometimes see spaces used to separate them into groups of three. A similar tactic could be used on the left side, if PDS doesn't want to create a Preferences setting for it.
It's called a decimal point here too. (A . isn't a decimal; it is a full stop. The first digit after the . or , is the decimal if we are to be strict. Decimal is Latin for something like tenth. The second digit after the decimal separator should actually be called a centimal afaik, but nobody does that.)

And yes 1 000 000 is another way of writing 1.000.000.
 
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Good mini-additions! Will be interesting to hear about Necromunda.
Though I fully agrees that some kind of decimal separator would be really nice and frankly is needed. The only problem as mentioned is which to use and how to make sure that the people on the other side of the pond don't get confused.
Using spaces is the most simple way.
 
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