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Hello, and welcome to a new era of EU4 development, where we’ll have development diaries talking about what we are doing almost every week.

One of the criticism we’ve had regarding EU4, have been that the game has always premiered conquest, and if you didn’t expand, you fell behind. In the next major update, you’ll be able to make an empire that is more focused on tall than on wide. After all, it is just common sense of us to listen to what the community is requesting.

Most of you are familiar with the concept of base tax. This permeates the game at so many fundamental levels, with everything from forcelimits to coring costs being coupled to this. We also had a value in a province that was called manpower. Trade-Goods produced was arcanely connected to the basetax, and there is not a single human being that could calculate how much manpower in a province actually

Now we have 3 separate values in a province called Base Tax, Base Production & Base Manpower.

Base Tax affects your monthly tax income as before, and also increases your defence against hostile spies.

Base Production impacts the amount of trade-goods produced in the province, and how quickly ships gets build in the province.

Each level of base manpower increased your nations maximum manpower by 250, and also impacts the garrison growth in the province, and how quickly regiments is recruited in that province.

All of them together is called “Development”, which describes how heavily populated and built up the province is. Each level of development increases the supply limit, forcelimits for your armies and navies and makes it harder to converts its religion.

Finally, the development level also allows you to be able to build more buildings in that province.

Wait?

What am I talking about here? Well, first of all, we have reduced the amount of possible buildings, as a large part were fillers. Secondly, we removed the power-cost for building buildings. And finally, not every province can have the same amount of buildings. Currently, a province can have 1 building as default, with some terrains like desert or mountains reducing it by 1, and some increasing it, like farmlands. And, every 10 development allows another building slot in a province. So Paris may be able to have 6 buildings in 1444, while Figuig can not support a single building.




Now you say that we haven’t really talked that much about wide versus tall, but bear with me.

You will be able to spend adm, dip or mil power to increase base tax, production and manpower respectively in a province, where of course the cost keep increasing, but if you dream about a 20 base tax Dublin, then you can do that :) Doing this in deserts or arctic climate is far more expensive than doing it in better climates. The ideas that affected build power costs, now affects the cost of improving your province. There is also technologies that decrease the cost of improving development in the later half of the game.

SgIW348.jpg


Here’s the example of a few buildings in the game.

Marketplace - Dip4 - +2 Trade Power - 50 gold
Barracks - Mil 6 - +25% Manpower - 50 gold
Cathedral - Adm 19 - +3% Missionary Strength & +40% Tax Income - 200 gold
Stock Exchange - Dip 22 - +100% Trade Power - 400 gold
Town Hall -Adm 22 -5 Local Unrest - 400 g

Next week, we’ll talk a little about something that fits England very well..
 
Will it be possible to transform certain terrain into others as that was pretty fundamental in development especially in Europe?
 
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Does this mean we don't have to build chains to get to the expensive buildings?
If I at Adm 22 conquer a province which has no buildings, can I immediately build the 'Town Hall' ?

Town Hall has 1 pre-requisite that it replaces.. The courthouse, which gives -3 unrest and comes much earlier.

If you can build a town hall, you can no longer build a courthouse, and if you build a town hall where you have a courthouse, it will replace the courthouse.
 
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Jesus Christ that is a MASSIVE change.

Finally "population" will be put into the game, even if a bit abstracted. That is good.

Now all that remains if for option to build trade posts to reach Asia instead of having to use colonies.
 
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I would say please put any changes in EU5!
PDX changes this game faster than I can play it. It is a pity that all manuals are obsolete. Some features I get only by hap. For example the gold mines in oversea: In v1.7.3 I got a 75% penalty on all provinces in overseas. In v1.10.1 I discovered by hap that gold-mine provinces do not suffer from this penalty. It is a pity for my latest game. I can not change my strategy on it. It is too late. I have to play a new game.

You don't have to update if you don't want to.
 
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This is why i got a faster computer to speed through peace times, 5-9 seconds per month beats +22 plus seconds. This game is more about war than anything else, besides what else is there to do during this era?
Honestly? A damn lot. One could argue that war was, all in all, a pretty minor factor in the course of the Early Modern Era in Europe, a notable exception being the Thirty Years War - balance of power seldom shifted by means of conquest before Napoleon. France conquered what, five provinces or so after the end of the HYW; Austria's backbone was inheritance, as it was for Castile; elsewhere, borders moved back and forth a lot with little changes overall.

But out of conquest...ooooh, boy. The Renaissance spread from Italy to the rest of Europe, mecenatism becoming a very real factor again in the prestige of nations. Technology moved from almost exclusively technical to theoretical, with obvious consequence on the technical too; and from private initiative to state-sponsored research. Power centralized, vassals lost their power or had to strengthen it exclusively in the context of central government, like in England; Absolutism as an ideology was born, grew and by the end of the timeframe had started dying.

If you gave a man of 1444 a political map of Europe in 1820, he might have been surprised at some aspects but on the whole he would recognize what he saw; if you gave him a treaty on the internal workings of France or the United States, instead, he would probably fail to understand most of it. It's the literal opposite of what you say: war in Europe was a mean, a mere reflection of the truly important stuff happening inside the nations.
 
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Will development descrease because of events, wars, war exhaution, sieges, etc.?
This - will there be events to decrease development in prolonged wars and if a province is sieged for a long time?

This could properly simulate the downfall of hungarian lands because of the austro-ottoman wars, so hungary wouldn't need to start so poor.
 
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I was not anticipating such a dramatic overhaul of the Europa Series before V
 
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What really excites me about this is that it means I can play more nations in the same little area of the world but have the games evolve more differently.

For example, consider Portugal, Castile, and Aragon. Your starting moves are a bit different, but after the first 50-100 years they'll all be pretty similar (you'll own at least one of the other two countries, if not both, and be doing lots of colonizing and trading). National Ideas are the main factors differentiating them. See also: Burgundy vs France, British Isles nations, German minors, Italian minors, Muscovy vs Novgorod, Indian states. Each of these have distinct starts, but if you're successful, the mid and late games are very samey.

Province development gives you a viable alternative to just eating all your neighbors. Aragon can choose to invest the MP into its starting territory instead of incorporating Castilian provinces. Done properly, it's a reasonable alternative to forming Spain and will create a very different sort of game from a rapid-expansion colonization-focused Castile choice.

You could always play Aragon as a Mediterranean trade power, intentionally avoiding taking over Castile, but doing so was mostly for roleplay and challenge purposes. Now the choice should be much more interesting (and validating).
 
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Some questions that remain after the thread in the old forums:

  1. What's the button top-left next to capital and trade port?
  2. What's the check-box in the military section above the fort image?
  3. What's the deal with the 10k garrison?
Did I forget anything?
 
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"Yes, but manpower cannot be used to create money" It can with Looting and various Peace Options.

Y'know, one thing that would be cool. Historically when Horde's conquered rich cities they tended to abduct skilled tradesmen and send them back to whatever capital they had decided on. Samarkand was an example of this and good old Temujin did this with his capital as well.

What if... Hordes could not invest MP in Development directly, or did so at a vastly increased cost, however instead when they raided/looted a province, some Development Progress would be added to their capital automatically, with more being added the richer the Province, or perhaps this only happens if the province's Development is higher than the Horde's Capital's Development. At the same time, the Province being raided would experience a proportional decrease in development.

That could give Horde's a nice bit of unique flavor, its pretty historical, and could lead to some really interesting shifts in Base Tax in Central Asia.

ADDENDUM: I am still curious if we can make buildings which don't take up a Building Slot.
 
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But where are they in the interface? Are they occupying the same slot as other buildings?

They work like all other buildings.
 
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This sounds very interesting, and good job listening to your players. This will give us many more things to do and offers new possibilities.

Things this will do for us:
1.) Smaller nations will now have a chance and won't be gobbled up now
2.) Natives will now have something to do
3.) Monarch Points will be better put to use
4.) We will be able to build more buildings

The only thing I'm worried about is whether or not the AI will be able to do these things. Any big changes that add new features or edit existing ones means the AI has to be tweaked..
 
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I've said it before (in a post lost in the aether during the forum changes) and I'll say it again, this little bit of focus on the internals of a nation is the best thing to happen to EU in a while, and hopefully the start of some more good things to come (preferably optional stuff through DLCs, so blobbers don't need to worry about it if they don't want to) :). Dynamic base tax (but still subject to terrain/natural conditions) is a brilliant step forward, and should make the colonial game much better (rather than just making the places that ended up being developed high BT because of what happened IRL instead of in-game). Keep up the great work team PDS :).
 
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Sounds good to me, but will be interesting to see whether it is of equal choice to conquest.
Even if from a theorycraft point of view buildings are better, if going tall is as boring it is now, nobody is going to do it. I've done it with Ragusa. Half of the time I was waiting for cash/monarch points to build stuff and half of the time I was afraid to start too serious of a war otherwise foreign occupation might cancel my construction process.

Buildings themselves, unless they are spiced up, can't compensate for the lack of stuff to do during peace time and for the brittleness of the construction/conversion process.
 
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