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EU4 - Development Diary - 22nd of November 2016

Good day all. Over the weekend, the team and indeed, the entire company was away conquering Malta. Great times were had and I'm sure there will be many pictures and tales of the occasion making the rounds but now Tuesday is upon us and I want to talk about feedback on our updates.

While we have our in-house QA team and a closed group of Betas who provide valuable feedback, sometimes we want to get a wider playerbase to try out our game builds by way of an Open Beta. A prime reason for this is to try out a large core change to the game where we want to get a lot of feedback from the community. In this case, we wanted to get feedback on a new area-based fort system.

For reference, we are fairly happy with how the 1.18 fort system works. It blocks movement, forces some sieges without requiring carpet sieging and, especially with the terrain bonuses, adds a good amount of strategic mid-long term planning for your nation. However there were some undeniable issues with the system in lack of clarity and overlapping Zones of Control. We wanted to try a new system out and hear what you had to think

It didn't take long for the feedback to mount up. The new system was unclear, forts blocked nothing on their own, small and mid sized nations struggled to offer much movement blocking, Military access rules became messy. The following week we decided as a team to revert to the 1.18 fort system.

Of course, there were some who liked and even loved the beta version's area-based fort system, and reverting was a disappointment to them. You're never going to make everyone happy, no matter what you change but I would like to thank everyone who played and continues to play with the 1.19 beta, as your contributions help make it a better update.

Of course, forts were not the only things on the cards for 1.19. There were plenty of changes to the Scandinavian experience, map changes and such which were well received. Nothing warmed my cockles quite like seeing screenshots on various platforms of beautiful resurgent Golden Hordes though!

Soon™ 1.19 will be out of beta and released for all to play, with additional fixes for bugs found during the beta period. This is another great part of the Open Beta process. Your bug reports have been appreciated, as well as the crash reports that get sent in, leading to dozens of additional bugfixes for 1.19, including the particularly nasty subject integration bug.

Since we've shown off most of 1.19 and we've been talking about forts anyway, how about seeing the Paradox Fort in Malta, complete with Garrison:

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Inside which the army draws up plans to occupy the rest of the island

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See you again next week where we will talk about how we see EU4 moving forward and our goals for what we want to do with the game.

If that's simply too long for you, be sure to tune in for the EU4 Developer Multiplayer, where the world shall be lit in flames at 1500 CET www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive
 
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I was one of those who really liked the area fort system (though it needed changes, like not needing double areas). Something needs to be done about forts, whether it by making assaults via breeches actually viable or changing late game forts to be more realistic in that they should last half a year at most if you bring artillery, like during the Napoleonic Wars.
Even though I like ZoC maybe towards the end game have some kind of boast to siege ability tied MIL tec as late game the high fort level make it very slow for large wars.

Tbh as a side the revolutionary target needs to happen more reliably (only had it happen once in about 8 games , anybody else find this?)
 
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It didn't take long for the feedback to mount up. The new system was unclear, forts blocked nothing on their own, small and mid sized nations struggled to offer much movement blocking, Military access rules became messy. The following week we decided as a team to revert to the 1.18 fort system.

Is it possible to have an option inside the game to choose weather you want one fort system or the other @DDRJake , I personally *loved* the new system and I'm sure other people liked it too and didn't find it confusing at all...
 
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Is it possible to have an option inside the game to choose weather you want one fort system or the other @DDRJake , I personally *loved* the new system and I'm sure other people liked it too and didn't find it confusing at all...

I think having to support two systems at once would be a nightmare.
 
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Is it possible to have an option inside the game to choose weather you want one fort system or the other @DDRJake , I personally *loved* the new system and I'm sure other people liked it too and didn't find it confusing at all...


I liked that it was area based, however i saw Many enemy troops ignore whole lines off defences at once and that is rather silly.
 
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I'm glad they reverted it, but the 1.19 system could have worked without the baffling decision to allow armies to pass through an area with a fort simply because the enemy area next to it doesn't have one. I'm never going to understand the logic behind that.
 
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I'd quite like to see Offensive have better siege bonus and I'd get rid of spending MIL points to attempt an assault. I'd try and make Aristocracy useful and give it a forlorn hope idea (+to fort assaults), having soldiers attempting to be the first through the breech for promotion, as that was one of the only ways a common solider could rise in ranks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forlorn_hope
 
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They completely removed it, they weren't confident it would be better than the previous system.
That's why I asked if they could keep both ( Never hurts to ask )
I think having to support two systems at once would be a nightmare.
They aren't that complicated for a developer, and they already have everything set up for the area-based ZoC, they'd just need to touch it if it was glitchy, and looks like they fixed the fort only-based ZoC, and the area-based one has always worked great.
 
I'm glad they reverted it, but the 1.19 system could have worked without the baffling decision to allow armies to pass through an area with a fort simply because the enemy area next to it doesn't have one. I'm never going to understand the logic behind that.

That was the whole reason for the change. The problems with the existing rules were around the confusion of tracking what province you came in from and the confusion of many people unable to understand that you can only leave the way you came in. If they got rid of the double area requirement all you did was take the worst of both worlds and make ZOC even more complicated than before and would introduce even more bugs. The 1.18 system make a lot of sense except when something goes wrong and the AI ignores ZOC or you split your stack etc and it loses track of where you came in. All of those problems would be back in your system. The area rules were set up to make it extremely easy to determine where you can and cannot move based on forts without having to know where you came from. The problem was that it didn't make logical sense that a fort was useless for ZOC if there wasn't one in the area next to it.
 
That was the whole reason for the change. The problems with the existing rules were around the confusion of tracking what province you came in from and the confusion of many people unable to understand that you can only leave the way you came in. If they got rid of the double area requirement all you did was take the worst of both worlds and make ZOC even more complicated than before and would introduce even more bugs. The 1.18 system make a lot of sense except when something goes wrong and the AI ignores ZOC or you split your stack etc and it loses track of where you came in. All of those problems would be back in your system. The area rules were set up to make it extremely easy to determine where you can and cannot move based on forts without having to know where you came from. The problem was that it didn't make logical sense that a fort was useless for ZOC if there wasn't one in the area next to it.


The most important thing about the 1.19 forts for me was that the AI finally stopped cheating when it came to fort maintenance. I hope they didn't remove that, but if it's reverted to 1.18, then i fear they did, which is a sad day for all.
 
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That was the whole reason for the change. The problems with the existing rules were around the confusion of tracking what province you came in from and the confusion of many people unable to understand that you can only leave the way you came in. If they got rid of the double area requirement all you did was take the worst of both worlds and make ZOC even more complicated than before and would introduce even more bugs. The 1.18 system make a lot of sense except when something goes wrong and the AI ignores ZOC or you split your stack etc and it loses track of where you came in. All of those problems would be back in your system. The area rules were set up to make it extremely easy to determine where you can and cannot move based on forts without having to know where you came from. The problem was that it didn't make logical sense that a fort was useless for ZOC if there wasn't one in the area next to it.

Don't buy it in the slightest. You can easily have an area based system that doesn't need to 'track' where they come from, and makes a lot more sense than the current one. The flaw was that they treated an enemy area as 'neutral' if it had no forts in it, when it should have been hostile.
 
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That was the whole reason for the change. The problems with the existing rules were around the confusion of tracking what province you came in from and the confusion of many people unable to understand that you can only leave the way you came in. If they got rid of the double area requirement all you did was take the worst of both worlds and make ZOC even more complicated than before and would introduce even more bugs. The 1.18 system make a lot of sense except when something goes wrong and the AI ignores ZOC or you split your stack etc and it loses track of where you came in. All of those problems would be back in your system. The area rules were set up to make it extremely easy to determine where you can and cannot move based on forts without having to know where you came from. The problem was that it didn't make logical sense that a fort was useless for ZOC if there wasn't one in the area next to it.

I think that there could be an "easy" fix for the problems with tracking what province you came from. A few days ago I tried hearts of iron 4 and realized that when you attack you remain in the original province until you conquer the next one. The same principle could be used for forts in eu4 so when you enter in a zone of control you can attack the fort or leave the zone of control. I haven't thought a lot about it but maybe something like that could improve the fort system.
 
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+1 to Florryworry's suggestion of a fort force limit. I would like to see this introduced as well as scaling the time it takes to occupy an non-fort enemy province according to its military development.
 
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Oh now :( I was looking forward to the fort changes :/ Will we see the changes in a future patch, when it is more worked out?

They were obviously in Malta to study its fortifications.
 
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What's all the fuss about "AI cheating on border forts"? Lol so they get extra 1-3 ducats early game, big deal egh, what do we do now.... 99% of the players wouldn't even ever even notice without devs telling them. To the player this doesn't matter in the game anyway.
 
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