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EU4 - Development Diary - 6th of August 2019

Good day and welcome to another Development Diary for EU4's upcoming European Update + Expansion. After enjoying a plethora of maps, missions and other content work from our esteemed content designers, I'm here to turn our attention towards the mechanical changes and additions we can look forward to in said European update.

We're going to start with Mercenaries. Not too long ago, I penned a dev diary outlining our ambitions with mercenaries

I'll take this moment to draw attention to the fact that the UI and numbers are far from final

6th Aud DD macro.jpg


In the upcoming Euro update, the old method of recruiting mercenary units one by one in individual provinces is replaced by the action of hiring Mercenary Companies. Mercenary Companies are complete armies of pure mercenaries, as such will not consume from your manpower pool. They can be recruited in any of your core provinces, where they spawn at full strength, but with low morale.

Mercenary Companies come in two flavours: Local Mercenaries and Foreign Mercenaries.

All nations have three bands of local mercenaries available for recruitment, ranging in size from small to large, capped at a minimum of 2 units and a maximum of 40, depending on the development of your nation. Other than the fact that all nations will have local mercenaries available for hire, there is nothing special about them.

6th Aud DD company available.jpg


Things get a little more interesting with foreign mercenaries. Across the world, there will be foreign mercenary companies, tied to a province of origin; the Free Swiss Guard from Bern, the Flemish Company from Vlaanderen, the Raiders from Navajo etc. These companies come with their own General who is loyal to that unit and that unit only. They also can have different costs and modifiers on the unit, depending on which company you hire from. These companies can spawn and despawn over the course of the grand campaign, but no matter how much you want any particular mercenary company, you can only recruit Mercenary Companies within your trade range. So while you may feel confident invading a colonial Portugal, know that they may well have a far larger pool of Mercenary Companies to draw upon.

6th Aud DD Frisians.jpg


So let's take a closer look at the mercenary units themselves. They are typically more expensive than your standard nation's armies, although those costs compared to the current 1.28 mercenaries are likely to be reduced. This is largely due to how Mercenaries will no longer have unlimited manpower, able to feed themselves with coins and bandage wounds with solid gold. No, from the upcoming European update and going forward, Mercenaries will have their own local manpower, unique for their army

6th Aud DD local manpower.jpg


Not to belabour the point, but UI and numbers shown and discussed here are far from final

Once you hire, for example, this Cossack Host, they will replenish any lost souls from their own unique manpower pool until, eventually, they will be completely exhausted and no longer able fight at full strength, leaving them liable to be wiped out in battle. Our intention here is for mercenary companies to be the muscle you flex in times of war and conflict, rather than the go-to permanent standing army for all nations. To this effect:

Make mercenaries always stay at 100% maintenance

We added this and are quite happy with the results. If a nation chooses to rely heavily or exclusively on mercenaries at all times, they will certainly be footing the bill for them.

As for when you terminate your deal with any Mercenary Company, they will leave your nation and your command like all other units, but will not be available to hire by your nation for 10 years. If, in time of great war, you may find yourself at a disadvantage if you have exhausted your access of mercenaries against a foe who has many other companies at their disposal.

You may notice that the Local Manpower for a mercenary army replaces certain actions in the UI. While mercenary regiments can still be consolidated, they fight as a single unit under their leader. They will not accept being lead by another leader or army and cannot be split, nor merged with another. In the event that their leader dies, they shall elect a new leader from within.

6th Aud DD dead leader.jpg


In playtesting, this has lead to it feeling rather chunky, when manoeuvring multiple stacks which cannot be merged together, as they can have different arrival times and movement paths. We are looking into a better way to manage such stacks of armies, and as inconsistent arrival times has been a bugbear for some time, it seems a fitting moment to address it.

Some other points about Mercenaries which warrant bringing up here:
  • Hiring a Mercenary Company won't prevent another nation from hiring from that company too. We didn't want to create a situation where the player who clicks fastest gets those juicy Swiss mercs.
  • Mercenaries will use your nation's military stats, then apply any of their own modifiers on top of that. We did not want to echo the situation in EU3, where mercenaries would end up clearly spending all your money on booze because they were too drunk to fight well.
  • Mercenaries will be hired through the macro builder rather than through the provinces. This should help reduce click fatigue, but also necessitates some work on the Macro Builder, which we'll address in a future DD.
  • With Mercenaries no longer being a bottomless source of manpower, base manpower is likely to increase for all nations, likely by increasing the base amount development gives and/or boosting the value of manpower buildings.
  • Mercenaries are to use unit models fitting for their origin.
  • All changes above are going to be part of the free update.

This is a major change to system that has been largely untouched since EU3, and it won't be until 2020 that this update hits the shelves. The system is likely to get some refinement based on playtesting and feedback. Early results show a lot more involvement with Mercenary Companies, especially in multiplayer. Hearing "Oh bollocks he hired the Swiss" down the microphone certainly evokes much glee, but we shall continue refining the system. We shall be back with more about Mercenaries, as well as the content that goes hand in hand with the system, as development continues.

As ever, comments and feedback are welcome in the thread. Next week we'll be tackling another large change coming in the European Update.
 
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Mixed emotions for the changes.

Likes:
(1) Mercenary companies
(2) Local and foreign flavour for mercenary companies
(3) Manpower pool for mercenary companies.

Dislikes:
(1) Any number of countries can hire the same company
(2) No bidding competition to acquire mercenary company, espionage to attempt twisting mercenaries to turncoats.
(3) No restrictions on the hire of mercenaries based on culture religion, relationships etc.
(4) No changes to current abysmal state of manpower
(5) No indication of Idea group changes to reflect the changes to mercenaries.
(6) Inability to carpet siege with un-split-able mercenary companies.
 
So, if one wants to fight, you have to have several armies, with some military leader juggling, roaming about to reinforce/arrive at the same day as your mercs. Mercs whose army comp, by the way, you have to SALVAGE because default is gonna be shitty?

This is just so much micro. eu4 is not a micro friendly game, that's why in the first place people are talking about click fatigue. it baffles me that in the same diary where you introduce potentially the most insanely TEDIOUS mechanic designed in eu4, you claim to reduce click fatigue by including them in macrobuilder, lol. The level of tedium is just drastically less for the latter.

There would be a way to make this work, if you could merge mercs with regular armies. If @DDRJake doesn't want the mercs themselves to be split for his own personal fetishes, fine - just make it so they function as a unit in that merged stack, merging and separating them as a unit. But if you're not even able to achieve that, you need to drop this silly restriction.
 
Any situation with limited rather than unlimited resources demands a degree of strategy

Not necessarily, no. Some things offer strategy when left unrestricted. In this case, unrestricted availability of every magical merc spawn offers more strategy than auto-denying mercs to your opponents.
 
I really like where this is going.
Have you considered allowing players to found their own merc company, ripping off the way ck2 does it? I feel like it would work well.

If the country chooses to found a merc company, they'd get a little less manpower from each of their provinces, and in return they'd get a portion of any income from the mercenaries. You could also add the option to fund the merc company to make it bigger (or incentivise certain unit types etc)
 
"hey Vladislav, since units in the back line take full morale damage, and we can't use cannons yet, maybe we should split part of your army so we can reinforce like non idiots. So we don't have to ask on reddit why we lost this battle in which we outnumbered the enemy 1.5:1"

"nah brah I'd rather take the double morale damage. Also I'm unsplittable and unmergeable."
 
(3) No restrictions on the hire of mercenaries based on culture religion, relationships etc.

Actually, each mercenary company has a trigger field where we can put conditions in for who can recruit them. So certain ones are only available for e.g. Christian countries, and others need your capital to be in the same region. So expanding into a new region will usually mean you get more mercenaries available, but it doesn't mean that you will now be able to access all of the mercenaries that are present in that region as some will be reserved for the locals.
 
"hey Vladislav, maybe we should occupy all this prosperous unforted land to accelerate the resolution of this war."

"haha go detach your own ****ng army, and have fun deselecting me specifically when ordering carpet siegings. No hotkeys to make this easy for you. Also I'm unsplittable and unmergeable."

"will reduce click fatigue"

I'm starting to think you should hire someone other than Vladislav :D
 
Actually, each mercenary company has a trigger field where we can put conditions in for who can recruit them. So certain ones are only available for e.g. Christian countries, and others need your capital to be in the same region. So expanding into a new region will usually mean you get more mercenaries available, but it doesn't mean that you will now be able to access all of the mercenaries that are present in that region as some will be reserved for the locals.
Will rivalries and/or wars affect availability of certain companies as well?
 
How about bid wars for mercenaries so the player who clicked the Swiss first needs to keep dishing out cash to keep them and maybe one very expensive but normal strength company has an immunity to it
 
How about bid wars for mercenaries so the player who clicked the Swiss first needs to keep dishing out cash to keep them and maybe one very expensive but normal strength company has an immunity to it

You'd make (the best) mercs exclusive to the richest nations that way. Also, I have a hunch we'll already get bidding systems for papal controllership and HRE elections.
 
Few things, coming from a largely mp player:

1) Can this merc manpower be looked at. For seiging this amount is not problematic, but in a multiplayer war for example, where you are constantly taking battles, and then if you win assaulting a fort since otherwise you won't have time to seige it properly before their army is regrouped and back to fight again, these 2 full reinforcements worth are way too low. If you want this to be a mechanic, I would ask to make these mercs good for at least like 10 battles (so 20x their troops since you usually lose about 1/2 troops in battle in my exp), or at least a much higher mechanic. Otherwise, having them slowly fill their manpower pool would imo not be a problematic mechanic.

2) The 10 years of unavailibility is pretty lame. Means that in multiplayer or early in a single player war, if you fight a big war (in which you'll use mercs), you are then super vulnerable. Maybe make it so being declared on/getting a defensive CTA resets this or so, since getting vultured and not being able to fight a fair war not because of a lack of funds but because you cant spend those funds due to this arbitrary limitation is dumb.

3) These merc regiements have very random and quite generally bad compositions. I understand that's in part the idea, but it's just really not a mechanic I think they need. Give me mercs, say its 13k manpower worth or w/e, and let me decide if I want this to be 8/5/0 or 13/0/0 or 9/2/2 or w/e else I may possibly want, or let me set a countrywide cav/cannon limit maybe, where I don't want units hired going over x amount total cav and y amount total cannons. Getting insufficient cav support because my merc inf are dying before the cav are and I have no way to influence which ones reinforce, or having 10 units do literally nothing since the mercs I hired have 40 cannons with 30 CW, and then losing a battle because of these would feel pretty awful I'd imagine.

4) Base manpower increases are scary. There's already so much manpower that can be gotten off devving with efficient players hitting like 20k mothly recovery with consistency, and this already means that in a multiplayer sense it's almost always better to dev at peace than to war in order to grow your country (once you have enough land for decent trade income). If these are buffed more, you'll just see less and less wars, and any declared will really be a desperate nation likely getting shitstomped, or like 4 nations ganking the top dog, which aren't the fun experience people play mp for. I don't know the exact current formula, but I would like manpower recovery to be the thing buffed, maybe at peace time only, with the max manpower limit staying similar. This would let nations who war with no downtime be forced to take a break as their troops availible run out, but not really force people to stay at peace for overwhelming times either.

5) click fatigue: is this really a problem people feel mercs have? Just clicking a template in a few provinces isn't at all tiresome imo. Only thing I would say here is that making the macro builder better usable in occupied territory would be nice here, but I dont see how forcing me to click 6 different companies if I wanna hire 6 stacks reduces click fatigue compared to me getting 6 of my template.

I understand there's the single player aspect of players there using mercs to avoid management of manpower as a resource, but in multiplayer I think mercs are the only thing keeping war as a possibility even, since without them being unlimited its too hard, risky, and punishable to try and push. If assaulting manpower and mana costs go down a good chunk, or if forts gave a smaller defensive bonus on terrain (maybe a flat like 5% damage dealt instead of the +1 to rolls), or if some form of unlimited mercs to be opportunistic with would still exist I think it would be much better.