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.

 

[Martin_Mortyry]

I'd like to have ability to edit historical countries. You know - everything you could do with custom nations implemented to historical tags(adding, removing provinces, changing monarchs and religions, maybe even ideas(although the last one wouldn't really make too much sense)). For custom nations, as many mentioned before, I'd love to see diplomatic interface(adding vassals, allies, historical rivals etc.) and religious/cultural one. Seeing only one province of your chosen culture inside the sea of a foreign one is really weird(by the way - how about allowing custom nations to be cultural unions?). As has been pointed out in this thread already, sudden change of all the owned provinces to the state religion doesn't always make sense. Let's say I want to make diverse state such as, for example, in-game Lithuania with catholics, orthodox, maybe even some heathens - in current version it is, unfortunately, impossible.

 

[Promanco]

Why not go the whole nine yards and include a slider allowing you to go from full patriarchy to full matriarchy (all rulers, leaders, envoys and advisors are female) or anywhere inbetween.
Currently you can't turn female heirs into military leaders and the tool tip says something to the tune of "well, historically yaddayadda different times, etc". That may well be, but then again I'm not playing a historical nation to begin with...

You do realize that even today there is countries (USA) that don't allow women on combat roles.
I am not saying is right, but it is the WORLD we live on which the game is based on...

 

[GrandStrategyX]

Would it be cool if we had the ability to create our own governments in game as well, especially for those who wish for a more unique roleplay style. It could also allow players more of a challenge, as they could create nations with a specific flaw to them. An example of this is a penal monarchy: it would have less cultural penalties, but would have diplomatic relations penalty of like -20, as well as a -15 to royal marriage proposal actually succeeding, and critically reduced yearly legitimacy, but it would have increased troop morale and discipline. The ability to customize religions would be nice as well, such as a militaristic version of Christianity, using the Islam or orthodox religion bar.

Plus, it would be nice if we could create a list of names for our custom monarchies

 

[victimizer]

Why not just add an internal scenario editor, where you could paint cultures, religion, and states on the map freely, and save your work.

 

[tobias.mb]

Is there any chance to get new ideas to choose from in the nation designer?
AFAIK it's missing some nice ones like +production size.
Maybe even the "special ideas" like france's less native attacks or russia's discover adjacent?

 

[delpiero1234]

Will we ever be able to choose which nations are lucky?

I really hope that @Wiz will finally fix this. Lucky nations are a silly feature. Turing them off prevents ironman mode which is dumb.

 

[Hakuromatsu]

Cool. Is 1.13 not shit yet? Oh it's not? You whacky scamps!

"not not shit" is some Steam-caliber review stuff you got going on there mate

 

[MWSampson]

I would like to see the random nations create a random sized HRE based around a certain point on mainland Europe. It would have to be on a normal-ish distribution for its size, but the mono-blob of HRE in amongst nations strikes me as odd.
I also propose that a way perhaps to approach the random nations is to approach it from the RNW new approach. For certain regions create arbitrary sets of nations. For example Iberia and Morocco could have varying degrees of "shattered" with vary degrees of Islam and Christianity. In the British Isles there can be varying amounts of Norwegian, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England.

This would allow borders to be more natural, respecting the region map-view. I guess it's harder work but if each region has 10-12 different settings and you split Europe into 10 regions that's a massive number right off the bat, and although a good amount of work, would make a novel 1-time feature one that I might return to.

 

[sancredo]

I think the only thing I miss from custom nations is the possibility to load unused tags. Let's say I want to play an alternative reality where the Kingdom of Jerusalem never fell; it'd be great to load the preset of the Kingdom, with its colours, its flag, its dinasty, tradition and ideas, and select provinces, instead of having to create a fake K of Jerusalem from scratch.

Ths could also be used to start games with the CKII-imported Roman and Aztec Empires tags and ideas instead of custom usermade ones.

 

[Sarmatian]

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.

A question:

Do you have plans to enhance Westernization? There are several threads about it in the Suggestions sub-forum.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

What I do know is that in my Austria game I have Russia, Ottomans and Ming westernized by 1679.

So talking about people not playing the game they are talking about,when they in fact did, makes you look quite silly. And arrogant.

I don´t know what it is to play non-european countries because what I saw in the beta made me feel it was going to suck. In the sense it was too easy and thus immersion breaking. And I´m not the only one who saw the same thing as I did and feel the same way.

Chaos_TLW ues I know the current setup needs an overhaul. It´s why I won´t play the game until I see it. Seeing a developer diary talking about a feature I don´t bother with doesn´t make me optimistic.

Nations that westernize are not caught up in tech. You have repeatedly ignored counter-evidence and counter-claims to westernization being a serious problem from a gameplay standpoint. The bulk of the case against it is the "feel", any time someone tries to make a viable strict-gameplay (IE not aesthetics) argument against westernization it has been a profound failure, because the costs of not beginning western are quite high in the first place, enough that a player westernizing in 1580, much earlier than your example, still isn't completely caught up by 1680.

Direct misinformation to try to make a case where there is no case isn't a convincing approach. Subjective immersion claims are non-falsifiable, but claims of its relative "ease" (which is true) and "fast catch up" (which isn't) are falsifiable. Arguments are more convincing when using evidence.

 

[SinerakVale]

It's probably already be suggested, but I'd like to see a way to save the map you're creating with the custom worlds. Say if I made 20 custom nations one day, then had to leave, I don't want to re-assign all the provinces. Also, it'd make for some interesting shared maps.

Oh, and a way to make countries vassals/ marches to other countries.

 

[juckil]

Wiz you just made two of these threads you silly

 

[Vitoldas]

I wish we could just simply edit countries, which are already in vanilla game. I know it's not too hard to do it via overwriting files, but using a nation designer in-game would make it way easier and more comfortable. And, since I'm already there, I wish someday DEVs will think about improving sphere in population. I always liked games where you can actually see how well your population improves. I'm sure that something linking to EU3 would be good enough.

EDIT: I just noticed that the first part of my post is identical to a one above mine.

 

[Beagá]

Any ideas for what the next DLC will be?

Suggestion: Westernization.

 

[BarskiPatzow]

Can we assign colors to regular nations? Lets say, I wanted to make Sweden color red instead of blue.

I see trough your words you want to change Croatian color, don't you? )

 

[Promanco]

I don't know about most countries, but the US most definitely allows women in combat roles.

No we do not, right now we are in a period of transition to make it so, but currently there is NO women in combat roles(Artillery and Infantry)
In the next 5 years we should have a few but as I am writing this it is not the case.
EDIT:I will mention preemptively before I am call a misogynist, I think women should be allowed on combat roles as long as they can meet the same standard as everyone else. If a women is able to carry just as much as a Male Infantry and able to run just as fast and for just as long there is no reason to prevent her from participating except Stone Age gender conceptions. However I don't write the laws nor do I control the cultural environment of the world in the 1500's(or even of today)

 

[Krebsig]

Can we have an unlimited point mode for going crazy?

With all the possible new additions, that would be nice. Obviously, the custom nation specific achievements wouldn't work in that case.

 

[NetherViking]

I would love if before declaring war the war declaration pop-up window warns you if either of the following are true:
1. You have ships protecting trade.
2. Your army spending is below full.

Maybe this information could be shown with two little warning checks somewhere. That would be great, thanks!

 

[Bobby555nc]

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!