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EU4 - Development Diary - 22nd of August 2017

Good morning all, welcome to this week's dev diary for Europa Universalis IV.

Over the past 3 weeks our map aficionado @Trin Tragula has been sharing our latest handiwork over in The Near East, Anatolia, Caucasus and Iran. In addition, we also showed off five new trade goods being added to the game: Livestock, Paper, Gems, Incense and Glass. By popular request, I have a few screenshots to show the distribution of trade goods in our reworked map.

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Arabia, complete with a coastline of Incense, while a lot of provinces previously aflock with wool enjoy livestock.

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Timur's home has a wide variety of goods, with a handful of gem and paper provinces finding their place

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Anatolia is seeing relatively small additions of new trade goods, but the city of world's desire now produces lucrative glassware.

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Bonus European shot to bring Italy to light. The already wealthy region enjoying the prosperous goods of glass and Paper, each with their own set of events to alter their prices throughout time. Throughout the dev diaries, we may be showing off other regions where trade has touched, all depending on what people want to see.

These map changes and new trade goods will all be free additions to the 1.23 Update, which will accompany an as-of-yet unannounced expansion, meaning that whether you purchase the upcoming expansion or not, you can enjoy a revamped experience both on the map and in the pasture.


Today we're also talking about the first of the paid features from the expansion, Army Drilling. Currently in the game if you're not fighting and have no immediate threats or rebellions, you slam that military maintenance bar down as low as you can, leaving your armies to eat grass and dull their blades until such time that you pay them to fight for you again. With the addition of Army Drilling, you can pay to have your armies train so that when it comes to times of war or uprising, you can smack down on them with a far more effective force.

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Any Army with a leader can Drill, during which their morale will be lowered and each non-mercenary unit will gain a Drill value. This value will directly correspond to better performance in battle. When not drilling, a unit's Drill will degrade over time, and will suffer if the unit is damaged and must reinforce.

Scaling up to 100, Army Drill gives:
  • +10% Shock Damage Dealt
  • +10% Fire Damage Dealt
  • -10% Shock Damage Received
  • -10% Fire Damage Received
(Army drill gives no effect for Mercenaries)

Drilling requires a leader, but during the Drilling process, your leader may also find themselves improving, and gaining additional pips, so not all is lost for that 0-0-1-0 General you roll. This likelihood depends on how much of your army they are drilling, relative to your forcelimit.

Drilling armies will cost full maintenance, regardless of the budget slider and will contribute well towards having a better, more professional army, less reliant on soldiers of fortune. Next week. We will explore this idea further.
 
Can we drill during war? Can army in a drill stance attack and move? I hope that won't become an exploit with mothballing half of your army and fighting small wars with another half.
He said maintenance is different, not morale.

So I figure all your armies will be null if you set it to 0, but maintenance for drilling armies will have to be paid as if the slider was max.

Can't really exploit much with 0.51 morale.
 
This likelihood depends on how much of your army they are drilling, relative to your forcelimit.

Looks like a bad game design decision, because that practically forces players to additional enormous amount of micro management (gathering armies in the largest province for a drill in peace time and disassembling for a real armies stacks at the moment war starts).
 
So does this cost ducats or military power?

Also, it's strange seeing the Ottomans' Anatolian provinces all get split but everything stays the same in their Balkan provinces.

EDIT: Also, how about naval drilling? That'd help make navies less flat.
 
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Will achievements involving high number of specific trade goods be adjusted given the trade goods rework? I'm thinking in particular of the Horde achievement requiring 200 grain provinces for grazing here, given the livestock introduction.

Also, if there isn't a Livestock-related 'Moot points' achievement of some sort, I'll be sad. Surely, there must be a handful of mountaintops with Livestock on 'em scattered about the planet? :p
 
Is there gonna be another dev diary next week? Or is this last one for this patch/dlc ? So I don't get my hopes up :'(.

If they're talking about the first item of the paid DLC this week, it's going to be at least a few months before this patch/dlc drops. Porbably late this year, November would be my guess.

EDIT: Fixed bad writing.
 
Looks like a bad game design decision, because that practically forces players to additional enormous amount of micro management (gathering armies in the largest province for a drill in peace time and disassembling for a real armies stacks at the moment war starts).

I think it's a good design decision because it helps smaller nations and they need it more than larger nations because playing as a large nation is too easy anyway. But that's just my personal opinion

I hope we will also get some system for combat experience, it would seem weird if your troops got better by drilling but not by actual combat

And I wonder about that Camp icon. It would be cool if stationary armies could fortify provinces to get a defensive boost for the next battle (like in Empire TW, where an army got field defenses when being stationary for 2 turns IIRC). Or maybe it's just reduced attrition from being stationed in a low dev province (or increased reinforcements)
 
New Resources? Drilling? Must mean we can discover oil resources.

Victoria 3 confirmed!
 
I don't know, it sounds like drilling morale is reduced regardless of the maintenance.
You misunderstood, that's what I said.
 
I'm not sure if it has been answered, but I wonder whether we will get new manufactory types in the upcoming patch?
 
Cheers for the DD DDR Jake :D. Trade goods look great (any chance of seeing Britain and the channel, if they've changed much? I play all nations in EU4, but playing England, Scotland or Ireland are old favourites) - but changes to drill sounds very interesting. Drill sounds like a good thing in terms of giving nations choices over how good they want their army to be.

One thought though, that others have touched on as well - instead of requiring a leader, why not have all armies have a potential 'drill' button (with perhaps a 'drill all' button in your military tab, like the mothball/unmothball all forts buttons). Otherwise it could be a bit fiddly transferring between the best drill formations, and wartime armies. You could still have leaders in charge of drilling armies improve, it'd just be a way of allowing all troops (and not just those in 'en-generalled' units) to drill - as otherwise there'll be a lot of shuffling of units around.

Would probably also be good for the AI as well - easier to manage drill on/off if they don't have to worry about generals as well. Just a thought - please ignore if not useful. Keep up the great work - EU4 is bloody good :).
 
Add to garrison could be awesome! Rather than getting destroyed by a superior army, you could hide in your fortresses and force them to commit too many men to take them.
Guess someone watched Florryworry stream too. He accidently did that a few times while trying use an exploit to merge the garasion with the army
 
Oh wow; Drilling really helps nerf Mercs and make Regulars better; at least in the opening phases of the war! And it sounds from the ending that there's going to me more focus on Regulars over just Mercspam.

Although; it also seems it will make Discipline even more important; because these drilled units will lose the bonuses as they take losses and reinforce with greens.

Also; note you can have army maintainace low; and have certain stacks drilling; and others just chilling. For example; the Fire/Shock damage reductions are usually uselessfor cannons; so you can have those [Which happen to be your most expensive troops] sitting idle; while drilling your frontline troops.
 
Looks like a bad game design decision, because that practically forces players to additional enormous amount of micro management (gathering armies in the largest province for a drill in peace time and disassembling for a real armies stacks at the moment war starts).
I would suspect this to be deliberate to make players move troops around during peacetime, not just wartime.
 
Cheers for the DD DDR Jake :D. Trade goods look great (any chance of seeing Britain and the channel, if they've changed much? I play all nations in EU4, but playing England, Scotland or Ireland are old favourites) - but changes to drill sounds very interesting. Drill sounds like a good thing in terms of giving nations choices over how good they want their army to be.

One thought though, that others have touched on as well - instead of requiring a leader, why not have all armies have a potential 'drill' button (with perhaps a 'drill all' button in your military tab, like the mothball/unmothball all forts buttons). Otherwise it could be a bit fiddly transferring between the best drill formations, and wartime armies. You could still have leaders in charge of drilling armies improve, it'd just be a way of allowing all troops (and not just those in 'en-generalled' units) to drill - as otherwise there'll be a lot of shuffling of units around.

Would probably also be good for the AI as well - easier to manage drill on/off if they don't have to worry about generals as well. Just a thought - please ignore if not useful. Keep up the great work - EU4 is bloody good :).

I think the general requirement is to model the peasant levies with no real combat training or experience. You need someone with actual knowledge of tactics etc to lead the drill, and information wasn't as easy to come by in those days.