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EU4 Development Diary - 3rd March 2016

Welcome to another development diary for Europa Universalis. We finally announced Mare Nostrum earlier this week, and today we’ll talk about a few more features for it.

First of all. We’re adding Trade Leagues to the game. There existed a feature with the same name in EU3, but this is radically different.

Any Merchant Republic can create a Trade League by inviting other countries to it. However, only countries with 1 province can be a member of a trade league, excluding the leader.. Only a merchant republic can lead a trade league, and if the leader is annexed, another merchant republic in the league takes over leadership, if no new leader exists the league is disbanded.

Members get a small relation bonus with all other members, and the trade league is a defensive alliance between all members, and will consume one diplomatic relation. All members automatically embargo anyone the leader embargo, without a penalty.

If any members in a league gets embargoed, the leader gets a casus belli on the offending party.

Trade league leaders automatically have a trade dispute casus belli on any countries they would be able to generate such a casus belli on via spy action. That Casus Belli has been changed so that it is not possible to take territory, return cores, cancel vassals or release countries when using it.

The Leader gets 50% tradepower from all its members, and it gets a nice bonus to trade steering that is based on the amount of members in its league.

The members also have the following benefits. Doubled bonus on goods produced from the leaders merchant republic ability, and a +20% tradepower bonus on its ships. A member can leave a league at any time.

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Another part of Mare Nostrum is a greater control of Mercantilism. Now you’ll be able to increase your mercantilism at any point you have enough diplomatic power. Of course, there are drawbacks to mercantilism, in that the more you have, the more money is lost through corruption.

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One aspect of the trade system in Europa Universalis has been how powerful a trade-network could become, and especially where a nation have basically have a monopoly. So one of the major tweaks in 1.16 is that the more monopolised a node is, the more effective pirates are there. When the leading power in a node has 100% of the tradepower there, then pirates will have a 100% power increase. Of course, if there are privateers in that node, then they reduce the power of the monopoly…


Next week we’ll be back with a diary about the new naval mission system, naval combat changes, naval leader enhancements and other naval improvements.
 
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Worth the wait, the trade leagues look super cool!
As I understand it, this means the leader can be as large as desired? Or do all merchant republics stay the same size?
 
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Looks great :) I was wondering when and how The Hansa would be returning. A little bit more motivation to remain an OPM.

I'm also glad that "Mercantilism" has some drawbacks now in EU4, in the form of "corruption", as it does in real life. Mercantilism did ruin the Spainish Empire.
 
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Sounds pretty good, especially the new way to increase mercantilism. Seems a bit expensive, but at least it's better than relying on luck/pope only.

Next weeks naval one sounds interesting though!
 
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@Johan Will Lubeck (or any other OPM that is the leader of a trade league) also get CBs to unify the trade league into a single country (to recreate the Hansa of previous game version)?

However, I am getting quite excited about this expansion with the naval & trade focus ;)
 
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Greater control of Mercantilism seems silly when you have no way to lower mercantilism without events. Given that mercantilism adds corruption now, I can see good reason to get rid of it, but no way for the player to do so.

Also, 200 diplo points for 1% of Mercantilism seems extremely overpriced to the point where it won't be used. Keep in mind that lagging behind in tech for a few points of mercantilism isn't desired because lagging behind in tech raises corruption now for some silly reason.

Trade leagues sound like they'd be okay on paper, but then you factor in that the whole union takes just a single diplo slot, so trying to invade an OPM inside a union would bring you to war with the entire union and the other allies the OPM would have. This could potentially result in Denmark declaring on Lubeck and suddenly fighting 9 OPMs and 3 other allies of Lubeck, not counting the ones that'd get pulled in via declaring war on the empire from outside. This doesn't sound sane.
 
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Thanks for the DD; the actual one this time ;)

A few quick questions:
1. Can Trade Leagues be renamed and will there be a special mapmode for them?
2. Will the Diplo cost for promoting mercantilism change based on the % of mercantilism you ahve or is it a fixed number? 200 DIP sounds like a lot.
 
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*insert DD here*
 
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200 DIP for 1 mercantilism!

One question: can subjects lead / be part of Trade Leagues? If guessing no, which would mean Revoke the Privilegia would destroy basically all Trade Leagues?
 
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Mmhh. Only OPM's. That severely limits things. I get that it should be only small nations, but that's pretty restrictive :/
 
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I love it when you make expansions based on my suggestion both this and prior, just hire my already to spit out ideas for you, I will come cheap ;-) well... It´s more likely just two great minds think alike :p looks great, looking forward to this :)
 
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OK, so I've been thinking about Mercantilism vs Corruption, and it actually sort of makes sense.
All other things (gov rank, techs...) being equal, your corruption spending increases linearly with your mercantilism and time.
Your trade income ideally increases linearly with your mercantilism and the value of your provinces (in reality you can get a better increase if you have access to end nodes, or simply nodes where more comes in that goes out, and less if some of your provinces are in a node where you can't steer home).

So for mercantilism to be worth it in the long run, you simply have to get better provinces faster than the rate at which your corruption spending is scaled. If it's the same as advisors, it should be easy.
 
Trade leagues sound like they'd be okay on paper, but then you factor in that the whole union takes just a single diplo slot, so trying to invade an OPM inside a union would bring you to war with the entire union and the other allies the OPM would have. This could potentially result in Denmark declaring on Lubeck and suddenly fighting 9 OPMs and 3 other allies of Lubeck, not counting the ones that'd get pulled in via declaring war on the empire from outside. This doesn't sound sane.

Well, it might at least help "some" parts of the world (HRE *cough*) to retain a number of princes (ie. stay in its intended shape) for a bit longer than right now.
 
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So one of the major tweaks in 1.16 is that the more monopolised a node is, the more effective pirates are there. When the leading power in a node has 100% of the tradepower there, then pirates will have a 100% power increase. Of course, if there are privateers in that node, then they reduce the power of the monopoly…
What is this mean I could not understand.
 
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Nice, but between Diplomatic idea groups and diplomatic tech, it will be impossible to increase mercantilism for a navy/trading focus country... 200 points... :s
 
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