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Hello everyone! We’re getting close to release and there’s not much left to cover in our Development Diaries. So today's diary will be about things I think we’ve missed in previous ones. Even though we have had 57 development diaries, not including this one, there’s still been things that have slipped. So it will be sort of a leftover scraps Dev Diary. First up, shortcut/hotkeys.

So how it used to work in order to set up your own shortcut keys in the interface of EU4 you had to mod the interface files, or download a mod from the Steam Workshop. But we’ve now implemented a way for you to configure these settings inside the game instead. EU4 is a game with a lot of interfaces and buttons so we can’t really have a settings screen listing every single possible shortcut. So instead we added this button in the game.

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Clicking on that will let you then click on any button in the interface that has a shortcut and assign it a new one. Clicking on let’s say the Split in Half button for armies will prompt you with this.

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Letting you pick whatever key shortcut you want for that button.

Next is a pet peeve of many, your subjects using their colonist for settlement growth where or when you don’t want it. So we’ve added a simple little Subject interaction where you can allow or forbid this to specific subjects.

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So not much to say there, so let’s move on to something I’ve seen discussed from time to time within the community, which is the French Vassal Swarm. I thought I had already covered this before but no harm in being extra clear. France starts with a very powerful nobility estate and a special privilege specifically for them.

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Besides being in control of a lot of land from the start, this privilege also gives them +10% Influence making it a hard one to get rid of. There is an equivalent that exists for any other nation that is not French as well, the requirement to pick it requires that you have at least 2 vassals. I hope this clears up any potential misunderstandings from our previous talks about the French Vassal Swarm.

Minority Expulsions have gotten changes to try and make Europe not too homogenous in culture. IT no longer costs diplo power but it also does not convert the home province of the culture/religion. The modifiers that affect its costs are now focused on the money cost instead of the diplo cost. The development that you get in the new world province now also reduces the amount of development that “stays” in the home province to represent the movement of people, and through that sort of making it cheaper for you to culture convert at home. We’ve also made the AI very reluctant to do it overall.

We’ve done some smaller balance changes. First we’ve changed so you can’t overrun an army that can fill out it’s combat width. Overrun being the mechanic where you insta wipe on day 1 if you have 10x the size of the enemy. Going forward we are also looking into redoing some policies values like the 20% Infantry Combat Ability, try and lower the sources of Army Tradition as a whole as we don’t want it to be this easy to get a floor of 100% Army Tradition. We are also looking at reviewing the Hussite modifiers.

I want to end this Development Diary by retracting one of our previous promises, we said at the start of working on this patch that we would solve so you could restart back to the menu. However we have to admit defeat here as we’ve put a lot of resources in trying to fix it but EU4’s architecture simply can’t support resetting it’s game state properly. So even though we thought we had an early victory in getting this to work, after intensive testing it’s shown that we are basically still at square 1. I am very sorry that we have to backtrack on this, especially if it was something you were looking forward to.

Next Dev Diary will be the patch notes for the 1.30 Update.
 
I think I have asked this before and no one replied. Since we have made Ladislaus the same in both Austria and Hungary so that there would not be the case when one dies in one country and still lives in the other. Did we also make it the same for Albrecht Achilles, the heir of Brandenburg and ruler of Ansbach at the start of the game? It would be so annoying for one of them accidentally died and the other one still lives on.
 
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Hi. I have over 5k hours in this game. Please don’t nerf the infantry combat and Calvary combat policies so hard. They make me take ideas I wouldn’t otherwise take and thus encourage different play styles in single player. Taking them away just takes away the fun. Espionage and Aristocratic are hard to justify most of the time unless you go for stacking those modifiers.

This feels like a multiplayer focused change. Again. Make sure to not to use dev clash and multiplayers the as the only guide for these kinds of changes. It just feels punitive. like you’re completely ignoring that most players of EU4 don’t do multiplayer.
 
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Love the ability to toggle subject colonising.

Something I've asked before, and I hope I'm not too late in asking again, is if we could get the ability to toggle whether colonies do or do not colonise outside their colonial regions. Always annoying seeing my colonies snaking into each others' borders, but if the architecture is now in place to control subjects' colonists to a degree would it be possible for this to be implemented as well?
 
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The development that you get in the new world province now also reduces the amount of development that “stays” in the home province to represent the movement of people, and through that sort of making it cheaper for you to culture convert at home.
Please no. It is worthless. It will be an unnecessary feature for people to purchase Golden Century DLC.
 
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I agree with the people above, the "Minority Expulsion" feature is completely useless with that change - it's not worth it anymore. Neither does it change the culture of the province, it even expands the culture which I want to get rid of into the colony and causing unrest and worst of all, it reduces the development of the home province. It's all for nothing honestly. I'd rather convert the culture of the province on my own - this is cheaper and better than the feature of the minority expulsion as it is now.
 
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The various quality of life improvements alone are more than enough for the long wait. I'm in love.
Did we ever get confirmation whether or not hovering over a dead nation's cores will show where else they are? I think it was discussed but I don't recall seeing a screenshot or anything.

Even back to when Johan asked us about the Expulsion changes, I'm just not sure of what the purpose of it is? Development is your most precious resource and reducing your dev just so it's somewhat cheaper to convert is pretty silly. I still think the mechanic should have just been removed as a whole and replaced with something else for GC owners.

I really, really advise you to look for inventing new modifiers. Morale, discipline, combat ability, army tradition,... are all quite common.
Using ones rarely used would be good as well. Arumba's latest modpack has buffed Cavalry Flanking Range a lot and that makes cav have more of a purpose. Making it so they could actually flank further with Aristocratic Ideas or something, even without the boosts from Mil Tech, would be quite nice.
 
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Can you please do some things about CNs?
1. Lock them to their proper Colonial Region. There is a mod about that btw
2. Lock them to their overlord's culture and religion. I'm tired of seeing my chinese colonies become Catholic just because I conquered them from Spain
 
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Would it not make sense to at least add a temporary modifier making it easier to convert a province after using Expel Minorities, just so it isn't made completely useless after it was advertised as a major feature of Golden Century?

I should say I do agree something needed to be done; in my last game, by the late 1600's AI Britain had converted all of Scotland, western France and northern Spain to being English Anglican's by expelling everyone. Their colonial nation in Canada even had Scottish as the primary culture and Reformed as the state religion.
 
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This is beating a dead horse, but I'd like to add a few considerations why expulsion of minorities was a bad feature:
1. It was massively immersion-breaking. Yes, there are lots of other things that can happen in the game that are also ahistorical, but Castilian Catalonia, Galicia, Naples and Sicly is something that happens in most games nowadays with Spain played by the AI. The game should allow for ahistorical outcomes, even wildly ahistorical ones, and it should give ahistorical options to the player. What is problematic is when a result as ahistorical as widespread genocide throughout Iberia and Italy is overwhelmingly likely in an AI-only situation.

2. It didn't make sense. Naples, Barcelona or Dublin become Castilian/English within a decade by sending its entire population to a 1-1-1 dev province in Canada? How?

3. It removes/weakens possible revolter states that are supposed to stick around.

4. (Related to 3) Events based on culture - like the Dutch revolts or the Iberian revolts - are toothless in 1.29. At the point when the Iberian revolts can trigger (after 1600 and MTTH of 400) more often than not Catalonia is already completely converted to Castilian by an AI Spain. AI Spain turning the Netherlands Castilian before the Dutch revolts can happen is more rare, but it is quite trivially easy to do for a player and ridiculously cheesy.

5. For some countries, expulsion of minorities makes the religious group and anything that gives missionary strength obsolete. I am not talking about world conquest/massive blobbing strategies, I am for example talking about a Portugal that follows its mission tree. Portugal is encouraged to take the Moroccan coast by its missions. Turning those Sunni Moroccan provinces catholic used to require quite a bit of an effort. With expulsion of minorities, that difficulty is magically taken away. Yes, it made your life easier, but that doesn't mean it is a good mechanism. Playing Portugal or Spain is easy enough, and controlling North Africa (or other Muslim lands) should be hard for them. An easy and quick way to turn those unruly provinces Iberian and Catholic may be convenient, but it actually makes playing them less interesting.
In my opinion a strategy game is not made more "fun" by easy, convenient no-brainer solutions; it is made more fun by hard choices and things that are actually challenging to deal with.

All that said, I'm inclined to agree that removing the feature altogether is better than keeping it around as (mostly, except in some edge situations) a noob trap. And for the record, I do own Golden Century, I would not want a refund if expulsion is just removed and I think that this is a case where the DLC is actually made better and more valuable by getting rid of something that has made the game much less enjoyable for me and also, in my opinion, objectively worse as a strategy game.
 
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What's a scenario in which you wouldn't want your colonial subject to grow in settlements? Or is this just for MP? Because in SP I tell all my subjects, go, spread, yours is the earth.
Settlement growth is not about colonizing new provinces. It is about using a settler to increase the development of the existing provinces. That prevents you from constructing buildings(required for some missions) and converting the provinces(e.g. for a one-faith).
 
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This is another in a long range of ridiculous posts pretending to worship at the altar of "realism" while willfully forgetting that this is a game and not a text book. The mechanic doesn't need to be "realistic". It does need to be useful. For example, under your narrow definition of play-ability as an exact copy of the real world, then paradox should add overwhelming and crippling unrest and autonomy modifiers to large empires that are so crushing that no player would ever be able to achieve world conquests before their empire completely implodes. The Ming dynasty should never be able to survive until end of the game. The term "sunset empire" should not exist. and India should always end the game as an English colony. However all of those things are fun and so are included in the game. What you want is not a game, its a visual text book. (Actually I suspect you dislike Minority Expulsion for a different reason, but use "realism" as better sounding pretext for your stated beliefs.)

This change does make the mechanic outright bad where it was meh to decent before. It is now a direct detriment to the game and a trap for new players. If Paradox really has decided that Minority Expulsion should not be used, they should just remove it from the game and refund everyone who purchased Golden Century. Instead, they made it so that you are actively harming yourself for no substantive benefit. By neutering it to the point of complete unplayability (you are paying monarch power for no substantial benefit.) you merely maintain an illusion of choice to justify charging players for non-existent features.

That being said, the nerfs to trade companies and colonial nations in the same patch demonstrates that Paradox has made a conscious choice to reduce the power of colonialization.
Absolute cringe post.
Realism =/= railroading historical events. This is an historical game first and foremost, realism and historical accuracy are the core elements under which the entire game is built on. All the historical events you ranted about (unrest, autonomy, big empires imploding...etc) are already present in the game, just not hardcoded to happen to the utmost. This is different, this is something that didn't happen irl and was added to consistently happen in the game for no gameplay purpose whatsoever.
All mechanics are supposed to represent some real life event, even if in an extremely simplified and abstracted way. And the staple of all stategy games is that "usefulness" is something that entierly depends on the context of the situation, all your choices should have a risks/costs and a rewards. Event if the reward is merely immersion and roleplay (which is the only reason why I mess around with cultures in this game).
And I was pretty clear with the reason why i dislike this mechanic as it is. I don't want Old World minories getting wiped out and relocated to the new world. Don't chicken out of throwing your jabs next time.

This mechanic did more harm than good before (immersion/roleplay harm for no tangible benefits) and now at least it has some roleplay factor. The mechanic stil has some niche value, its supposed to be used on high development provinces of a different culture/religion that you want to convert but can't because its too expensive to do so. By shifting the development overseas you keep the overall development and then convert the province for a cheaper price afterwards.

Also, you don't pay monarch power for it anymore so why should i bother replying to someone who hasn't even read the DD?
 
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So not much to say there, so let’s move on to something I’ve seen discussed from time to time within the community, which is the French Vassal Swarm. I thought I had already covered this before but no harm in being extra clear. France starts with a very powerful nobility estate and a special privilege specifically for them.

From the picture it can be seen that revoking the privilege now reduces loyalty by 20 instead of resetting it to 0 (as explained in the dev diary on estates). Does this change affect all privileges or only the "French Strong Duchies" one?
 
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"So we`ve added this ahead of its time hotkey system to the game that is really easy to use, intuitive and in an apropriate corner of the interface" ...uhm...Paradox? Are you okay?

"We've also added two giant buttons to an already cluttered list of interactions to somewhat fix a minor pet peeve instead of just giving you a "colonize this!" button like we did with conversions" aaaah. I was getting worried there!


But seriously, thanks for that button. Its great.
 
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Will there be in future new mission trees for scandinavians nation(Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Gotland) and eastern europe(Russia, Baltic, Ruthenia) as well as government reforms.
 
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