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EU4 - Development Diary - 31st of March 2020

Hello everyone! Today’s Development Diary will be focusing on features part of the Emperor expansion. These features aim to enrich the gameplay surrounding the Holy Roman Empire, both for Emperor and Princes part of the Empire.

You might have noticed that there’s been some quite heavy changes to a very old interface in our Developer Clash.

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So now let’s go through these changes today. First up is the new reforms. We wanted to accomodate more playstyles than simply always uniting the Empire under the Emperor. So the Reforms have been divided up to three types, Common, Decentralized and Centralized. In order to access either the Decentralized or Centralized path you need to first get some of the Common reforms. Specifically you need to establish a permanent diet for the Empire.

The common reforms are

Call for Reichsreform
  • -5% Construction and Development cost in Imperial Provinces.
  • Enables Imperial Ban
Institute Reichsregiment
  • Emperor gets +1 Diplomat, +1 Diplomatic Reputation
  • Imperial Provinces gets -2 Unrest
Absolute Reichsstabilität
  • Imperial Provinces gets -25% State Maintenance
Enact Gemeiner Pfennig
  • The Emperor gets 0.5 Tax Income per Prince.
  • All Princes gets +1 Diplomatic Reputation.
Perpetual Diet
  • +50% Imperial Authority Gain
  • Establishes the Perpetual Diet in a Free City.
Create the Landsknechtwesen
  • Mercenaries with home in HRE are cheaper for HRE Members by 25%.
Ewiger Landfriede
  • Emperor gets 0.5 Monthly Prestige
  • All members gets -5% Tech cost
  • Imperial Provinces gets +10% Institutional Spread.
  • Disables internal HRE Wars
After you’ve taken the 5th reform, Perpetual Diet, you can go into one of the specialized paths. However these are mutually exclusive and you can’t go into both.

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Following is the Decentralized Reforms

Establish the Reichstag Collegia
  • +3 Free Cities
Expand the Gemeiner Pfennig
  • Emperor gets +100 Manpower per Prince
  • Electors gets 200 Manpower per Prince
  • Imperial Princes gets 10% Friendly Movement speed.
Embrace Rechenschaft Measures
  • +1% Imperial Authority per Prince.
  • +1 Max Electors
Geteilte Macht
  • Electors get +0.5 Tax Income per Prince.
  • -5% Development cost in Imperial Provinces
Reichskrieg
  • Emperor & Electors get +500 Manpower Per Prince when at war against Imperial Enemies
  • Enables Reichskrieg Diplomatic Interaction.


Following is the Centralized Reforms

Reform the Hofgericht
  • Emperor gets -10% Core Construction cost
Curtail the Imperial Estates
  • +25% Imperial Authority
Proclaim Erbkaisertum
  • +25% Imperial Authority
  • HRE becomes hereditary
Revoke the Privilegia
  • +25% Imperial Authority
  • Princes & Free Cities gets -10% Stability Cost
  • Members are given a choice to stay within the empire and become a vassal under the Emperor or to leave the empire.
Renovatio Imperii
  • The Emperor unites the empire under the Holy Roman Empire tag.

The centralized reforms are based on the old vanilla reforms to unite the empire with some slight changes. The idea is still that you are uniting the empire under one monarch. The Decentralized path has more of a focus on a strong united empire by devolving some of the responsibilities and powers to the Electors.

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The last reform on the Decentralized path might not unite the entire Empire in one tag under the Emperor, but it does give the Emperor a powerful tool to call upon the entire empire in a war against the empire’s enemies. This costs 25 Imperial Authority.

If you become Emperor and the previous Emperor has gone into a path you didn’t want, you can now also revoke reforms once per Emperor. This act costs 50 Imperial Authorities just like adding a reform.



To give the Empire a bit of life we’ve implemented something we call the Imperial Incidents. These are big dynamic historical events that affect huge swaths of Europe. From the Burgundian Inheritance, the German Peasant War, the Question of the Swiss to the Dutch Revolt. In total we’ve made 13 of these.

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Every single prince will be allowed to weigh in on the issues at hand. For instance, in a case where Burgundy is properly invited to join the Empire, Princes at the border worried about the duke’s ambitions might not want to permit that.

However the Emperor still gets to pick what option he wants to happen, but if it goes against the diet it will hurt the unity of the empire considerably. The Emperor will either gain or lose imperial authority depending on how the diet positions itself in the incident. It calculates this relative between your pick and the option with most support (besides your pick so if you picked the most supported one it takes the second most picked). Princes are worth 0.2 Imperial Authority each and Electors are worth 1 Imperial Authority. Besides the Imperial Authority there’s also opinion changes with members of the empire depending on what you pick.



Together with these new features we’ve done quite a few balance changes. First let’s cover how things are added to the empire. We don’t want you to keep a “reserve of provinces to add” in order to burst through the reforms of the HRE. We want a “healthy” empire is what leads to progress within it. So when you join all legible provinces gets added at once and a lump sum of 10 IA is given. You can add more provinces as you conquer but this is also done with all provinces all at once in the HRE screen instead for one by one. This does also mean that when the Reformation hits and if left unchecked, it becomes a serious blow to the authority of the emperor.

Of course we’re giving the Emperor some more ways to garden his Empire though, for starters there are now 12 Free Cities at start which gives a good baseline of Imperial Authority generation. Overall there’s a lot more princes & fabricating claims within the empire is 50% more expensive. This together means it’s easier to keep the empire above the 25 princes limit for a lot longer. We’ve also made it easier for the Emperor to enforce peace within the Empire by being able to ignore the opinion requirement so you no longer only have the Imperial Ban as an option.

We’ve also added a Force into HRE CB that the Emperor can use. Nations that have their capital in the same continent and that borders the Empire can be forced in through this treaty.



That’s it for today! Next development diary will be two things you’ve seen hinted here and there from time to time in various screenshots from previous development diaries and in the dev clash.


Edit: Since I keep getting asked this no matter how many times I try to clarify....
You do not get 10 IA for adding provinces to the empire, that's only for when a new prince joins the empire. You do not get IA for adding provinces to the Empire.
 
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Very interesting, thank you!
A little offtop though:
I understand that most likely we won't see it in EU4, maybe in EU5 (if there's gonna be EU5), so here's the thing:
Could you please consider making a toggle on/off historical AI? That way we could see the sandbox elements preserved along with the railroaded ones...
 
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Initially I was curious about the "Imperial Authority change" that you can see in this picture. Later in the dev diary I read that this would either be a positive or a negative change. To provide better feedback to the player, wouldn't it be an idea to make the number green if positive and red if negative?
 
Excellent dev diary but the "force into the HRE" is a terrible mistake and is going to break both SP and MP. The commonwealth into the HRE? Really? The emperor only has to kill a single elector and give it to him so that poland can remain a kingdom and that is, no more need for alliances with him and Poland gets yet more dev reduction modifiers. Not to mention that now thanks to a single fake war with another player the Holy Roman Empire stretches from Barrois to Moscow.

It better give nasty modifiers like remaining into the empire for Italy right now and -100 prestige for players and the AI to be coded to leave as soon as the emperor loses a war with him or is too weak, because if not is too broken

Edit: Paradox already clarified that is not going to be possible with big nations in the comments. Should have been in the diary
 
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Next development diary will be two things you’ve seen hinted here and there from time to time in various screenshots from previous development diaries and in the dev clash.
Hussites?
 
Love the new HRE interface, looks great!

and... I apologize for off topic but could you please fix the borders of Moldavia? You dont have to move anything or add any new provinces, just change a few pixels on the map. The border between Moldavia and Bessarabia should follow Prut river.
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Excellent dev diary but the "force into the HRE" is a terrible mistake and is going to break MP. The commonwealth into the HRE? Really? The emperor only has to kill a single elector and give it to him so that poland can remain a kingdom and that is, no more need for alliances with him and now thank to a single fake war with another player the Holy Roman Empire stretches from Barrois to Moscow.

It better give nasty modifiers like remaining into the empire for Italy right now and -100 prestige, because if not is too broken

I guess the war score cost would be similar to vassalizing otherwise it is indeed busted. That way you can't force large neighbors (like France) into HRE but require to break them up first the force into hre piece by piece
 
Excellent dev diary but the "force into the HRE" is a terrible mistake and is going to break MP. The commonwealth into the HRE? Really? The emperor only has to kill a single elector and give it to him so that poland can remain a kingdom and that is, no more need for alliances with him and Poland gets yet more dev reduction modifiers. Not to mention that now thanks to a single fake war with another player the Holy Roman Empire stretches from Barrois to Moscow.

It better give nasty modifiers like remaining into the empire for Italy right now and -100 prestige, because if not is too broken
I suspect it would probably work like Force Religion, where you need the nation's total war score to force them in. Otherwise yeah, being able to force the Commonwealth and later Russia would be a bit broken.
 
Excellent dev diary but the "force into the HRE" is a terrible mistake and is going to break both SP and MP. The commonwealth into the HRE? Really? The emperor only has to kill a single elector and give it to him so that poland can remain a kingdom and that is, no more need for alliances with him and Poland gets yet more dev reduction modifiers. Not to mention that now thanks to a single fake war with another player the Holy Roman Empire stretches from Barrois to Moscow.

It better give nasty modifiers like remaining into the empire for Italy right now and -100 prestige, because if not is too broken
Surely the 100% warscore cap will apply for nations that are too big.
 
I'm slightly concerned that there is no way to stop internal wars in the HRE, especially for the Decentralization route. Does it still hurt IA and does the increased claim cost somewhat counteract this?

I also don't like that you still get a vassal swarm in the centralization route. I thought the idea of splitting reforms into Centralization and Decentralization was to change the fact that having the Vassal swarm was much better than uniting the Empire? Are the NI for the HRE Tag amazing or is there something else?
 
Surely the 100% warscore cap will apply for nations that are too big.

Yepp, there's limitations on it. Having my lunch break right now but I'll get back to you later on exactly what those are.
 
I'm slightly concerned that there is no way to stop internal wars in the HRE, especially for the Decentralization route. Does it still hurt IA and does the increased claim cost somewhat counteract this?
It is still there, just forgot to write it, fixed DD.