EU4 Development Diary - August 14th

[Wizzington]

Hello EU4 fans! The team have now all returned them their vacations and resumed work, so it's time to get going with the development diaries once more. Because this week has been a busy one, today's diary will be a bit short but should address a topic that people have asked a lot of questions about:

Future Improvements to the Nation Designer

The Nation Designer is, as has been previously mentioned, probably the biggest feature added to EU4 since launch. It's proven quite popular, with custom nations consistently beating out every historical nation as the most popular choice of country to play. It's also received a number of updates, adding things such as the ability to name your own ideas and improved interface support.

However, much as how it is with EU4 itself, with a feature like the nation designer you never feel quite 'done'. There's always more you can add, things to improve and tweak, and we frequently receive requests for updates and improvements to the nation designer, as well as questions about when previously suggested improvements might surface. As such, today's DD is going to be about updates to the Nation Designer: Specifically which ones we either have already done (internally) or are planning to add in the not distant future. So without further ado, here are the planned changes coming to the Nation Designer:

Saving Custom Nation Templates
Probably the most requested feature for the Nation Designer has been the ability to save your custom nations for later use. This has now been implemented and will be available in 1.14. What it means is that while designing your nation, there are now two buttons called 'Save' and 'Load'. Save will save a copy of your Custom Nation (minus the provinces it currently holds) to your hard drive, and Load will load up that copy, replacing the current Custom Nation you are designing with the saved one (again, minus its provinces). This allows you to, for example, quickly re-use a particular setup of ideas or a flag and color combination that you enjoy.

Choosing Government Rank
This is really more of a fix than an addition, as it was something left out of 1.12/1.13 due to time constraints and will be added in 1.14. When designing a custom nation, you will be able to choose your government rank, with Duchy rank being free, Kingdom rank costing 10 points, and Empire rank costing 30 points.

Improved Color Picking
This is something that is not yet done, but we hope to have done for 1.14. In addition to picking from a list of preset colors, I want to add the ability to choose your country's color from an in-game RGB picker, allowing for true color customization.

More Patterns and Emblems
As above, this is something we hope to have done for 1.14. We want to add support for more texture files for country flag patterns and emblems, so that we can create more options for flag customization.

Better Random Setup
While not fully part of the Nation Designer, the random setup option that fills the world with randomly generated countries is nonetheless a feature that we want to improve on. Right now, it suffers a bit from being 'samey': You'll generally always end up with a couple megablobs, a number of medium sized countries, and a general feeling of lack of plausibility on behalf of the generated world. We want to add more options for controlling the size of the countries generated, as well as better country naming (being able to name countries after regions rather than capitals, for example) and better random idea generation. We're also considering adding options such as different tech group distribution and different uncolonized parts of the world.

Achievements
Though the Nation Designer supports Ironman, there are currently no achievements that are able to be unlocked while playing a Custom Nation. In the future, we plan to add some Nation Designer-specific achievements that will require particular point limits to be followed, and may as an example require you to start as a Norse Custom Nation and conquer Northern Europe.


If you have other improvements you'd like to see, feel free to bring them up in this thread and I will do my best to answer as to whether they are likely to ever happen. Note that I will not discuss ETAs on when patches containing these changes may show up.

 

[Johan]

Late developmental diary about really vague improvements to the custom nation option. Ya vacations really make people more productive *eye roll*. And definitely dont ask about the next patch!

Are you trying to troll?

 

[Wizzington]

The ability to copy an existing nations ideas and modifying them for your custom nation would be nice.

Changing existing nations would require a huge amount of work and honestly isn't too likely to happen. Same goes for copying ideas from one.

Will we be able to import our own TGA files for this feature ? Right now we can change a country flag quite easily by swapping the TGA, but i don't think we're able to change the flag of a custom nation (best would be to be able to add our own patterns/emblems to the flag designer in game+ )

The problem with this is multiplayer - different people using different tga files etc.

 

[Wizzington]

What about setting up royal marriage?

Adding the ability to set up diplomatic links would be cool but would be such a huge undertaking it's not too likely.

So is this a no on Hellenic and other Pagan religions on the Nation Designer? D:

We're still planning to add more of the CK2 religions.

I would like to see the possibility to add "two things" to the same idea, like florence that has -5% to both tech cost and idea cost in the first idea. Maybe the cost in creating such an idea should be higher than just the sum of the two.

You can mod this but we have no plans to support it in the base game.

 

[Wizzington]

Is it possible to add regnal numbering to costum nations? At the moment if i name my king Johann I and the heir Johann he will be king Johann and not king Johann II. Just a minor detail really.

This sounds pretty easy, I'll look into it.

Wiz!

Pay points for development in claimed provinces. I started a separate post about this a while ago, but it is something I always wished I could do when designing a nation. I want to start as a two-province iceland, but with an alternate history, as the pinnacle of civilization.

Thanks for the greatest strategy game ever!

This is something I'd like to add as well, but can't promise we'll ever have time for.

Can we have an unlimited point mode for going crazy?

You can easily mod the point limits if you want unlimited points.

 

[Wizzington]

Has anyone mentioned the restrictions on distances between provinces in nation designer.

It's frustrating that, for example, you can include Spanish and Portuguese islands in a united Iberia or combine the Kongo with South Africa or have Iceland combined with Denmark or the Shetland with Scotland or form Genoa ad it starts the game. (Been on holiday also so apologies if this has changed).

I understand it's gamey to spam provinces across the world but I not sure the restriction should apply to same continent provinces.

Here's the problem: Aleppo and Kamchatka are 'same continent provinces'. I'll see about increasing the range though.