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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.
 
@Groogy Will the various start dates on the home screen accurately reflect England/United Kingdom’s religion to be Anglican (if you have the Rule Brittania DLC) as opposed to Protestant? This also applies to their overseas colonies (with the notable exception of New England which is accurately represented as Reformed)
 
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Will there be a separated content pack at release as usual for units packs or there will be bundled into the expansion directly?Hope it's a separate content pack.I prefer in that way as i will buy it anyway.
 
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Isn't the "French Strong Duchies" privilege too generous? -10 absolutism is negligible and you will still be able to hit the cap easily, influence can also be reduced. Meanwhile +3 diplomatic relations is a massive buff unseen in national ideas or other permanent modifiers. I see no reason why you'd want to get rid of it in the late game.
 
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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.
It's fine.

Next Dev Diary will be the patch notes for the 1.30 Update.
Still no unit pack preview?
 
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Love the hot key button. Has the potential to be the best improvement.

Thanks for letting us know you tried to improve the time it takes to get a hard start going.

The estate privileges look like they will be fun to min max. Especially with the coming nerf to polices now that they are the past expansion?

The dip relations one may be the most mandatory one. Austria and most christian nations will certainly want them.

The monarch power one will also be necessary probably.

Is the first tier government reform for monarchs going to be changed? Presently one of them gives influence.
 
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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.
I don't think reducing development in Europe is the right way to do it, purely because there is no dynamic development right now (and the AI barely develops provinces that are not the capital). But it's close to being good, because, as you said, removing dev makes religion converting/culture converting cheaper and faster.
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 really, really advise you to look for inventing new modifiers. Morale, discipline, combat ability, army tradition,... are all quite common. The rather new pip modifiers (cf the artillery fire +1) weren't the greatest, as they tend to be (too) strong early and weak late. I'm advising this out of my modding experience (I had for a long time my own personal Idea Variation version). Things get stacked way too easily now. This is true for other areas too, but military modifiers have this issue that being behind in them is very bad (during my Oman game, I really suffered from having no military modifiers in my NI). I sense the team is getting aware of this, as most new NI contain discipline and/or morale, but that makes those modifiers so common that countries without these feel very underwhelming. Fortunately, without adding new mechanics, all kinds of modifiers are still possible:
- Max attrition: the local modifier already exists, why not a global one?
- Extra morale damage & lower morale damage taken: just like this exists for fire and shock
- More (or less) combat width: more combat width would work great with cavalry/infantry-focused countries. Lower combat width can on the other hand work well for smaller armies who have good artillery backup. Note that this should be a very rare modifier in case it gets added.
- Lower enemy dice advantage: if the enemy has a dice advantage, lower it (so 3 <-> 5 becomes 3 <->5-1 ). This should be around the strength of a general pip. It would work in only less than 50% of the cases (so excluding when status quo dices or when you're winning) unlike a general pip, but would work during all phases.
EDIT:
-Less desertion: no, this is not a new mechanic. It's actually like the hospitalization in vicky2: you regain a bit of manpower back after the fight. I don't think that hospitalization was noteworthy during much of the time period. But desertion has always been a thing. I think something like 2.5% less desertion could be already nice as modifier. Fight a battle, lose 10K, get 250 manpower immediately back after the battle.
 
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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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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.
PepeHands
 
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I thought the vassals were supposed to nerf France in the early game. How is that achieved in any way right now? France actually seems to be buffed by this. How often does AI Burgundy "throw a spanner in the works" as you stated earlier, considering they are going to almost always PU'd now?

Are there any other changes to colonial nations now, like where they colonise or if PU subject colonial nations merge with yours if you inherit them? Does the AI also colonise more historically now, or according to their missions?
 
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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
Wonderful, will see how it work and might actually be able to buy GC finally.

I myself would love to see more estate's privileges, as we only got a peek at them in all this time.
And speaking of which, in regards to modding, will we be able to add limited time privileges, ones that expire after a certain time?
Or maybe ones that expire when a certain condition is met (be it using an effect to manually remove the privilege or setting the condition on the privilege itself)?
 
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Similarly to the interaction you just added to Colonial Nations that allows or forbids them to use their colonist for settlement growth, can you please fix CNs colonizing territories that are outside their colonial region?
 
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I know this isn't a major change of this patch but I'm very happy with this change:
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 love getting a bunch of vassals reconquering and also keeping some big one's around and this will allow me to have 3 more ones of slightly bigger size (at cost of some absolutism).
 
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Really not seeing how the return of the French vassal swarm isn't going to lead to a return of threads calling it OP. The noble privilege doesn't seem to stop this.
 
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Wonderful, will see how it work and might actually be able to buy GC finally.

I myself would love to see more estate's privileges, as we only got a peek at them in all this time.
And speaking of which, in regards to modding, will we be able to add limited time privileges, ones that expire after a certain time?
Or maybe ones that expire when a certain condition is met (be it using an effect to manually remove the privilege or setting the condition on the privilege itself)?

Yepp you can, the Monopoly privileges are examples of those. They also have an effect when cooldown ends so you can hook in whatever you want. In monopoly's cases the estate will ask the crown if they are willing to renew the monopoly.

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