Home Trending Latest threads New posts Developer diaries
Jump to latest Follow Reply
  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Europa Universalis IV 81902 EUIV: Bug Reports 449 EUIV: Suggestions 19149 EUIV: Technical Support 6720 EUIV: FAQ & Strategy Guides 235 EUIV: AAR's, Let's Plays, and Fan Fiction EU IV: Alternate History Short Story Contest Contr 29
Previous dev diary Next dev diary
Show only dev responses

EU4 - Development Diary - 24th March 2016

Hello everyone and welcome to another development diary for Europa Univeralis IV. Today we’ll look at a few of new features available for those with the Mare Nostrum DLC.


Whether it’s 10 days or 10 years into a war, there are moments when you know deep down that there is no victory in sight. Currently you might have to wait for your enemy to siege down certain provinces and put your army at great risk before you are able to sign peace, or you are fighting another player who is more interested than your total destruction than simple terms. For these moments, we have added an Unconditional Surrender button.

1.jpg


Upon offering unconditional surrender, all of your currently unoccupied provinces will fall under enemy control and your enemy will gain 100% warscore. Your armies in your own provinces will become exiled and unable to fight in future battles until peace is signed. For the recipient of an unconditional surrender, you will be alerted of your enemy’s surrender and from then on will be able to enforce any possible peace up to 100% warscore cost. If you do not sign peace, then after a couple months you will get Call For Peace giving you monthly war exhaustion which increases faster than normal. The peace you offer will automatically be accepted by the surrendering nation.

For the time being, the AI does not offer unconditional surrender. They will however, gladly accept them.

2.jpg


If you find yourself so busy crushing your enemies to the point of Unconditional Surrender that you have neglected to explore the world around you, Mare Nostrum also bring a new option to the table by way of the Map Share feature.

3.jpg


Map sharing is a new diplomatic action. If you have good relations with a nation who has discovered land which you have not, you can request that they share their maps of a region with you. This will cost you a lump sum of 15 prestige of which 10 will be granted to the kind sharing nation. Colonizing nation are greedy and will not want to share but nations who share a common foe may be more willing to share.

If asking nicely is simply not your thing, you can take the shady path and swipe the maps. It will require the Espionage idea group and cost a moderate amount of Spy Network points, but you will be able to steal the maps right from under their noses.

4.jpg


Stay tuned for more information next week


Mare Nostrum will be available on April 5th for €14:99
 
  • 112
  • 46
  • 12
Reactions:
Sort by date Sort by reaction score
You should consider having the AI offer unconditional surrender when it is losing a war at -100% warscore, it would prevent players from sitting on them for a few years and slowly wrecking their economy by encouraging the player into peace at 100%.
 
  • 73
  • 1
Reactions:
So the unconditional stuff: I assume it gives control of the provinces to the warleader?

What about being in multiple wars? I mean if I surrender to one enemy, all my provinces switch to him, then I surrender to another, he doesn't occupy anywhere close to a hundred percent, how does that work then?
 
  • 26
  • 12
Reactions:
riadach said:
One question that arising the Stream on Tuesday. Are territories and states now based on areas rather than regions?
Click to expand...

Yes, States And Territories now works off of Areas instead of Regions. The number of States you can have in total has been increased accordingly.

mwyeoh said:
With the change to maps, I hope auto-exploration has been fixed to not reveal the whole map so quickly, otherwise it wont be worth it
Click to expand...

It has indeed.
 
  • 20
  • 12
Reactions:
Man, this has got to be the poorest Dev Diary I have ever seen, considering we already knew about sharing maps, and after the Condottieri stream. The real blow to the gut however, is that the Unconditional Surrender is a placeholder, not an actual feature... Disappointing.

I was kinda hoping that since they are confident enough about the AI's ability to pull off Condottieri then perhaps loans between countries would make a return.
 
Last edited:
  • 37
  • 29
Reactions:
Ah Good, another pointless Multiplayer-Only Doodad that will probably never be used even in Most Multiplayer Games.

Y'know your time could have been better spent in programming a "Crushing Defeat" condition that would automatically apply to both the AI and the Player. Something like;

* Capital is Occupied
* Army is below 5% of Force Limit
* Army is at less than half the strength of the Enemy's army.
* Total Alliance Army Strength is below one quarter of the Enemy Alliance's Total Army Strength.

When this happens it triggers a "Crushing Defeat" during which basically automatically pushes the "Unconditional Surrender" button. To improve AI in general, make it so if points 2-3 is satisfied, the AI will be willing to White Peace Out.

Boom, AI is improved and the feature can be used by the Player agains the AI and the AI against the Player.

"But the Player will exploit this?!?!?" The Player already exploits the AI's pointless Obstinance even more. So the player, and the AI, will be better able to quickly seize territory from countries that it has Clearly Beaten. So what? They'll still have to deal with over-Extension and Aggressive Expansion. Hell, make it so the game records what the Warscore was 'before' the Unconditional Surrender happened and if you go over that with your demands you get extra AE.

If you want to really start getting into fancy stuff have Truces that are flagged so one side can break them early at less penalty. Actually, why not tie that into Revanchism? If a country has a great deal of Revanchism let them break truces against people who hold their cores with no stability penalty. Make it so suffering a "Crushing Defeat" automatically adds some Revanchism before the peace even happens.

There are planety of ways this could be an interesting feature, but as it stands now it's just pointless fluff for people who don't need it anyways.
 
  • 15
  • 4
  • 3
Reactions:
A feature that will hardly be used. Usually when a player would be willing to take a 100% warscore loss, he just rage quits and starts over. And the AI hasn't got enough 'I' to use this feature.
The map thing... Meh... Kind of useless imo.

Then the €14,99 tag... I pass. Just as i did with Cossacks.
 
  • 14
  • 4
  • 2
Reactions:
Chief of Staff said:
I think the chance of AI offering this before the end of EU4 lifecycle is nil, because to allow that would require AI be capable of thinking on their own which is currently impossible unless we somehow developed sentient AI before then.

Otherwise, all of these features sounds good to me. Also, it is usually customary to tell us what will be in next week's dev diary... this hasn't been done in last 3 dev diaries including this one, I believe. A policy change? :X
Click to expand...

You do not need sentience from the AI in order to give it a better heuristic on when to stop throwing away resources.

The dated kludge that is "length of war" should not survive to the end of EU IV, it's one of the most damaging aspects of core gameplay. Few things shackle the AI worse.

From a design perspective, regency councils are probably worse, but from a "this damages every game to a degree without exception" perspective, the AI's peace logic is a glaring issue. Nations in the process of being sieged with no units on their side of the war will conclude that "nope, won't peace out for white peace cuz not long enough". That goes against developers' advice to rookie players, basic logic, and AI resource management.

What conditions would be appropriate for AI surrendering unconditionally? First, we need the AI to evaluate based on better modifiers at all. -44% war score with 2 regiments is not a situation where the AI should refuse white peace!
 
  • 14
  • 3
  • 2
Reactions:
EphemeralJun said:
If anything, Unconditional Surrender makes the game harder. And with "the game" I mean getting a salt trophy after a dev MP.

(Because if I recall correctly, the whole salt thing started with @Da9L getting salty about people trying to peace him and France out for 100%... each. The fact that this becomes harder to do in MP is an... interesting change in my opinion.)
Click to expand...

Well, my salt in that case was justified, since we were graceful in our peace and they were not going to be that... I got my revenge later so I'm fine :D and I got the best trophy, it's actually useful :)
 
  • 10
  • 5
Reactions:
Interesting, good additions. I hope the discovery has been fixed with the DLC and accompanying patch so this is a reasonable thing to do. Besides, there's something off about Russia allying Ming in 1550.
 
  • 13
  • 1
Reactions:
What a joke of a mechanic. So the AI doesn't have the intelligence to use Unconditional Surrender, when the AI is the one that has problems with staying in wars for far longer than is in its best interest (Length of War kludge is miserable because of this), so it's almost entirely just a player-vs-player mechanic that nobody asked for, that typical multiplayer sessions have house-rules for anyways.

I'm entertained and baffled that developer time was wasted on this in its current implementation, honestly.

208 said:
Just because it's impossible for them to "win" doesn't mean they should always roll over and make it painless and hassle-free for the attacker.
Click to expand...

When it will destroy their entire country and economy in the process, it is generally better to just roll over so less damage is done to you than it is to stay annoying and invoke further damage.
 
  • 13
  • 7
  • 1
Reactions:
riadach said:
One question that arising the Stream on Tuesday. Are territories and states now based on areas rather than regions?
Click to expand...

Jake said during the feature stream yesterday that states had been rebalanced to areas rather than regions and that you would have more available as such. The idea being that the player has more customisation over they're realm and what they wish to be seen as a core state within it.
 
  • 8
  • 5
  • 1
Reactions:
While unconditional surrender is a nice feature it is rather disappointing that a way of getting the AI to use it sensibly has not been included.

The AI using it if it was big enough to not be outright annexed as the result of a surrender, but was heavily outnumbered and had lost wargoal and/or capital would not be totally outrageous, I think.
 
  • 12
Reactions:
DDRJake said:
For the time being, the AI does not offer unconditional surrender. They will however, gladly accept them.
Click to expand...
kind of a useless feature then for the vast majority of players.

OldmansHQ said:
Man, this has got to be the poorest Dev Diary I have ever seen, considering we already knew about sharing maps, and after the Condottieri stream. The real blow to the gut however, is that the Unconditional Surrender feature not actually being a feature... Not impressed.
Click to expand...
idk, the score cards one was pretty shit too
 
  • 12
Reactions:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back