EU4 Development Diary - 3rd March 2016

[Oceanflex]

This is a much better representation of The Hansiatic Leauge, and also, much more generic. I approve!

 

[FleetingRain]

So, let me see

I can't be a 30 dev 2PM, but if I'm a 40 dev OPM, I can join a trade league?

Why are we using such an outdated measure when we have had development for months now? We already don't use number of provinces for cultural acceptance and (iirc) religious dominance, why use it for trade leagues?

There should be a lower dev limit to join and an upper dev limit to not be expelled. Something like 30 dev to join and then you can't have [leader+30] dev before getting kicked out. Number of provinces is something egregious.

 

[grommile]

Paradox is trying so hard to punish conquest and make this game a non-blobbing game.

> forthcoming patch makes the -50% coring discount more broadly applicable
> forumite says Paradox are punishing conquest

 

[Oscaretti]

Does transferring trade power still cost relation slots?

 

[Buladelu]

I hope this "Promote mercantilism" button is a stub. Otherwise it's a continuation of a bad trend: UI can't properly integrate game changes and the game is less comprehensible with each iteration.

 

[WilliamTheIII]

In the game becoming a merchant republic is pretty tedious and takes a while. At the start of the game there aren't too many merchant republics making trade leagues weak and pointless early game. Also your not going to find that many opm's left by the time you become a merchant republic and the only real group of them are in the HRE. Is there a way that becoming a merchant republic is easier and less tedious or could y'all change the rule about having to be an opm?
Yours Truly,
WilliamTheIII

 

[Closet Skeleton]

Mercantilism did ruin the Spainish Empire.

Only if you deliberately write a history of the Spanish Empire that focuses on its problems and ignores all the things it had going for it right up until the Napoleonic Wars actually did it in.

'Mercantalism' and 'ruin' are basically made up concepts created to tell a story that's more about politics than data.

OK, so I've been thinking about Mercantilism vs Corruption, and it actually sort of makes sense.

Funny how the anti-mercantalists were so incredibly corrupt in real life.

 

[Freudia]

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.

And is that really solving the problem when the entire reason the HRE plays like that right now is because it's boring as hell to sit on your hands all day because the game doesn't model what goes on in your nation outside of war in an interesting and engaging manner?

If anything that's just putting a bandaid on something without actually fixing it.

 

[SarumanTheWise9]

Why restricting the membership of trade league to OPMs ????(other than the leader). A good way to ruin features with restrictions.at least make it so that only duchies are allowed to join.
..
And what happen when a member annexes more land ???

 

[sterrius]

or u can say
whats the point of corruption

Corruption is a nice way of controling the speed of expansion just for the sake of expanding. EU 4 lack a lot of things to actually make smaller countrys more desirable to play and stay that way.


Merchantilism need to be a trade off, but as it is right now i can only see it as penalty with very little benefit, even more if you get a little sucess and become a medium sized country that can control a huge chunk of a trade node without merchantlism.

Im just saying the merchantlism bonus should be worth the extra corruption, otherwise there is no point having a button to increase it unless you run for the achivement,.

 

[DominusNovus]

Suggestion: remove province limit for merchant republics. Any MR, no matter the size, can join a lesgue. May want to add a mechanic for large subordinate members to usurp the leader in that case.

 

[Freudia]

Hehe - it may be just me, but all three of these sound like thoroughly positive developments, not downsides!

Mercantilism is easy to boost up, but becomes a bad thing and is harder to put down - hooray! Think before you go all gung-ho boosting it!

It's easy and profitable to boost Mercantilism rather than boost tech, but you end up with shedloads of corruption? Well, yeah - the road to hell is easy and broad! Discipline may be a harder road, but it brings rewards.

Being in a trade league is better than being in an alliance, albeit limiting? Good - that is exacly what it should be, since that was always the basic idea (band together to be worthwhile the big boys allying with).

Finally, I'll say I.m really pleased that Mercantilism is getting a downside. Grabbing all you can of it is too much of a no-brainer right now (and, with a parliamentary democracy, you can grab quite a bit).

Except nobody sane would spend diplo points on mercantilism. A false choice that exists only as a newbie trap might as well not exist at all. Also buying mercantilism double-dips your corruption values as mercantilism adds corruption and being behind on tech adds corruption; by this logic it is never worthwhile to actually buy mercantilism. They literally wasted developer time on a feature nobody sane would ever use.

And you misread what I was saying about trade league alliances. I said that attacking into one results in pulling in a ton of allies that don't take up diplo slots. You get something like eight or nine allies for the price of one slot, and that's busted. Doubly so if you're attacking into a trade league from outside the HRE, because then you pull in the emperor as well. This can result in you fighting ~15 different nations just because you declared on an OPM in the HRE. That amount of nations on an OPM's side feels oddly reminiscent of the days when war leadership changed, despite it being fairly different in how it happens.

Lastly, if mercantilism did need a downside (I don't really think it did, given how tricky it was to gain for a lot of nations), swinging it in too far the opposite direction is just as bad as having it with no downside.

 

[Sun_Wu]

Glad to see the new features, but seems it accidentally covered a lot of features in our mod(Common Universalis)'s ver2.2 which updated a month ago.Mercantilism have changed months ago in mod Common Universalis.View attachment 161925
The Hanseatic League in mod Common Universalis
View attachment 161926
View attachment 161928
Trigger of this modifier
View attachment 161929
And we have lots of decisions for improving/reducing mercantilism(which respect to DIP power)(if anyone want pics about this I'll edit it asap)
I'm glad that EU4 is improving and being a better game, and I'd rather think this is just an accident, but it happened before(Razing for Nomad countries which have some sort of same mechanics in our plundering&slaughtering events), if you're noticing those changes are including in some mod pls just give us a call or something and we'd happy to accept that, I don't know if someone care or not but our mod suffered a lot from this list of changes.

Here's our mod, Common Universalis.
If anyone doubt about my words pls check my paradox forum, I haven't updated the manual link yet but it'll be updated in a few minutes.

Didn't you notice how Paradox basically claims it owns all mods? That is specifically designed to prevent anyone from complaining about Paradox "coincidentally" adding something similar to that which exists in a mod. I actually brought up to the rest of my team mates on M&T that we should make mercantilism not a straightforward increase as much as you can because there are no downsides mechanic and we discussed trying to represent the Hanseatic league over a year ago. Basically I'm just trying to say that just because you had it in your mod doesn't mean it is impossible for someone to completely independently come up with the same concept. Furthermore in the case of trade leagues I think EU3 actually had something similar so that may have actually influenced them.

 

[AndreasPhokas]

*insert DD here*

 

[AndreasPhokas]

What is this mean I could not understand.

what I got. if one nation controls the node pmuch pirates will siphon a ton of money if multiple nations are there they wont siphon as much.

 

[solidprice]

I like it much better than last week's.

I like the idea of trade leagues, free cities havnt blobed too much so i have faith in PDI.
However I think some slight tweaks could help them become more relevant and fun.

Sill,It should be a bit eaiser to join, to add, and to stay in a league. Here's my 2 cents.

1. Easy solution, HRE prince states should be more likely to join. Want more slightly bigger members? Add land to the empire.
Solves Mecklenburg problem.

2. League members can be 5 or less.
Non opm Monarchy govt. Would be less likely to join. Replublics more likely to join.

3. Released nations from a replublic should become Replublics.
So if Novgorod makes muscovvy release perm,than perm should be a replublic too.

4.a way to get new members from a peace deal.

5. Bonus:
Not count league members overseas provinces into account. For laughs and for
More variety.

Thank you,hope you take into account the players thoughas into account.

 

[Wilson Ciao]

From what I've gathered, Trade Leagues seem like they have the potential to spice up a few regions (especially the Baltic). I assume one of the goals of trade leagues is to add a bit of variety to the already blobby nature of progression in EU4 which I can personally agree with.

More members means more of their trade power & steering for you--if you don't want to outright conquer them yourself--and more defensive allies. Generally speaking, you get money through trade; members get their income shifted toward production (net gain or loss? I would assume gain, they're OPMs after all); and both the leader and members receive/provide protection to one another.

So how might this promote survival of a league and its members? Well, a direct attack will pit you against several OPMs and their leader, so:

• Smaller nations and alliances will probably avoid attacking a trade league directly.
• Larger, more powerful kingdoms and empires should still pose a direct threat (as Sweden, Russia, and Prussia did to the Hanseatic league).
• Members attacking members would be discouraged as the offender would end up fighting the whole trade league as well as the defender and his allies (right?).
• Indirect attackers (those who attack an ally of a member to drag the member into war without that member's allies/protectors) will probably be able to annex members while avoiding alliances which is not good in my opinion, so some proposed solutions or ideas might be:
  • Give the leagues leader a CB that would allow him to release the conquered member state (and maybe monetary/trade concessions). It shouldn't allow for the leader to gain land, as that wasn't what trade leagues were really about.
  • Annexing members in a trade league would generate increased AE with ONLY the trade league such that a coalition of the trade league's members might form, so that they can band together for an offensive war to release their former member.

Trade leagues aren't supposed to be unbeatable, so I kind of agree with an OPM requirement or at the very least a development requirement from a balance standpoint. How would it sound if fighting a blobby Lubeck meant fighting 5 or more 10+ stacks from his OPM defenders on top of his other alliances/vassals? Now imagine if his defenders could field 50% or 100% more troops due to their increased size. 5 * 10k = 50k becomes 75k or 100k from just 5 members. Looser restrictions would mean more members and more members would mean even larger defending armies for a meager 1 diplo relations slot. A trade league leader could expand as much as he can with little fear of ever getting attacked himself.

I think trade leagues have the potential to make a nice change to the Baltic and even Italy/The Mediterranean creating defensive blocs where there used to be easily conquered land.

To sum up my concerns:

1. Are they reasonably beatable (AI vs. AI or Player vs. AI or AI vs. Player)?
2. Can players excessively exploit the protection a Trade League provides?
3. Will maintaining a healthy number of members be reasonable? It would be a shame to have members getting annexed left and right with little to no prevention possible. It would be similarly frustrating to have members constantly leaving OPM status and thus leaving the league. I am not saying neither of these should ever happen, but will they happen too much to bother with leading a trade league?

It would be nice if Trade Leagues could have an impact/benefits without necessarily gaining direct members. Too many members would mean a huge defensive alliance, so an alternative to grow in influence would be nice. In a way, I sort of suppose that trade steering for the leader is supposed to represent that.

TL;DR They look fun, I just hope they don't become a hassle to maintain, and I hope that they are not too strong defensively especially in the hands of a competent player.​

 

[ruzen]

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.

 

[Gorton]

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…

So basically:
Oh. People who take control of the defined trade nodes which don't change do well, since that means they get money.

I don't get it. Why have a system where it's good to own a trade node for the express purpose of getting more money and then punishing the countries that play smart and get that trade power?

 

[Sian]

I would suggest a less restrictive limiter being 2PMs