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.

 

[jdrou]

Speaking of which - are there any plans to improve CK2 -> EU4 converter?

That would be a question for the CK2 team. The converter is a CK2 product.

 

[Chaos_TLW]

Going off in a slight tangent, is there any prediction of when 1.13 will leave beta? Or are you guys going to just jump straight to 1.14?

 

[thegreatuniter]

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!

Because the productiveness of the EU4 team is measured by Dev diaries? And it's strange that in the very first interaction after the summer vacation no details of a new patch is mentioned while there currently is one in Beta that will be released first?

And apparently a lot of people like custom nations a lot. I'm not one of them either, i played around with them for a bit, but it's hard to find good campaign goals with them.

 

[ASmallFish]

Can you let us edit CK2 imported nations? That would be superb as 90% end up with Generic Ideas.

 

[Greyhound_Gen.]

The planned improvements for the Nation Designer in this diary cover pretty much everything I was hoping for (especially with regards to flag options) - 1.14 will be amazing!

One small thing I would like to request to change but realise probably won't happen (as I doubt it's relevant to many people) would be if Florence (LAN), Malta (JAI), Andhra (YOR) and the Maldives (DGL) could be given new, more suitable tag codes and perhaps the nations they replaced (Lancaster, Jalayirids, York and Doughlat) could be reinstated so that they could occasionaly spawn in games with the Random Nations setup? It just seems a bit of a waste to get rid of them completely when they could be used elsewhere, and a big part of the appeal of Random Nations, at least to me, is giving rarely-seen tags the opportunity to appear and actually be relevant. I don't know if it would be possible to make it so that the game ignores these 'ghost' tags during normal games so that there's no burden on processing speed from the extra tags but if so that would be ideal.

Anyway, I realise there are far bigger priorities for you to deal with at this point, but I figured I may as well ask now while there's still the chance it might happen. Either way, I'm looking foward to seeing what the future brings!

 

[wergy]

I'm kinda disappointed. I was looking forward to some news abou fixing the pile of bugs in 1.13.

 

[Martin_Mortyry]

Playing with CS off prevents minors from developing their provinces into metropolises, so I honestly think the game is better with it disabled right now. Wallachia should never have a bigger capital than France or the Ottomans.

On the other hand it handicapes the player, and as we all know - devs "don't f***ing care about singleplayer".

 

[Promanco]

So all that we need to do is create a ridiculous file in which every name and every regnal permutation of that name is set to male, but then some names also trigger hidden "female" flags, and then make all of the titles and pronouns gender neutral (which is lame, anyway), and then ...

Or, they could just add a simple option to the nation designer. Seems pretty easy to me.

EDIT: Plus, mods don't work in Ironman.

After sleeping about this issue, you have sway me.
ALL female rules should be capable of becoming commanders granted they meet a requirement on minimum MIL stat(I think 4 or 5 but you might disagree), this should be moddable on defines where you can change the minimum MIL stat to become a commander, when set to zero all females can become commander regardless of everything, for the nation designer there should be a toggle= Matriarchy or Patriarchy(names should probably be change for political reasons), if a Patriarchy the rules for commanders are the same as the base game, if is a Matriarchy the rules are flip and the limitation for commanders goes on the Male gender.
The reason for my change of heart is: 1)Historically it is not farfetch that a VERY military capable female rules would lead her troops into battle(altho not very likely still possible if she excels at it)
2)Moddability as I describe in default would make it super easy to control how likely they are to appear(if you want none at all you can just set MIL = 7 and it wont happen), altho it IS already possible to mod this as I described before this would make it easier AND give the modder the ability to control how often it will happen as oppose to all or nothing.
3)Now that Wiz confirmed they will add more CK2 converter religions(without specifying which, but I still like it quite a lot) Hellenistic religion is MORE farfetch than a Matriarchy and I would be a hypocrite if I was happy about Hellenistic religion and oppose the possibility of a Matriarchy.
EDIT:Thinking about it they could add the same minimum requirement on MIL for males on defines, on the base game it would be MIL = 0 (all of them can be commanders, this is historic A LOT of incompetent rulers lead their troops to disaster) but a modder might want only capable male rulers to command troops or maybe they want no ruler at all to lead the troops; under this set up they could just set up both female and male rulers to min_MIL = 7.

 

[Martin_Mortyry]

I don't understand why would anyone not want a slider defining the possibility of female rulers/leaders/whatever for their custom nation, or even better - slider for each. I know, it wasn't common for women to rule over army/nation at that time, but:
1) There were female generals and rulers in that period. For example, just a few decades before the starting date, Hedwig Anjou ruled kingdom of Poland as a king, as for female general - Jean d'Arc is probably the best known example.
2) Though fully matriarchal society was highly unlikely in that time period, this shouldn't really be a problem while creating your own imaginary nation, such as the Amazonas.
3) The slider could be used the other way around as well - there are times when female rulers just don't fit the country you're playing/creating. This reminds me - there should be a slider like that for historical nations too: elective Poland never had a female ruler, neither had pre-Habsburg Bohemia, meanwhile e.g. England had quite a few famous Queens. Of all I know the chance of female heir is already set somewhere in game files, if it is so then with the slider mechanics you could allow players to toggle the chance without playing around with the files.

 

[Aquae Sulis]

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.

 

[One Sun Mirror]

1- Forts
Forts have been a great addition to the game, I really like them! However, when I make a custom nation (or a bunch of custom nations to set up some kind of alternate scenario), there's usually an issue with where the forts have been placed! While they make sense given the borders of the countries in the historical setup of the game, I'd really like to be able to add and remove them from the map so that I can better decide where I want forts to be. This seems like it would be better than having to make do with whatever's already in place or demolishing everything and paying for new forts in-game. One area where this is particularly annoying is in multiplayer games where a group of people may all want to play as custom nations and you all agree that you want to have one fort each (plus the capital one). But there's really no way of doing that at the moment...
I'm not sure how easy that is to implement, but it's an idea I haven't seen being discussed.

2- Cores
While you can click on territories around the map and instantly make them yours, would it be possible to also add cores in other provinces which you DON'T start off with? Obviously this would probably cost an amount of points to do.

3- Vassals
Is it at all possible to start with a vassal?

 

[Bloneapart]

Another nice edition to custom nation designer would be the ability to make the custom nation have pre-existing cores and claims on provinces that the custom nation does not own such as what the ottomans have. The cost prolly would need to be ~3/4 of the cost it takes to actually own it at the beginning since you will have t fight for it to own it.

 

[zdlugasz]

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 might lie in MP games, where every player might end having different set of flags. Unless they were attached to save file.

 

[gnome109]

Thanks Wiz

 

[Sian]

I can't see images

I can't see images

yes, because saying it twice in 10 minutes are certain to fix it

 

[Krebsig]

No thanks.

Norse culture emerging in normal EU IV gameplay (even if a "rare" event) is terribly ahistorical, it's more like fantasy.

Just like colonizing the third Georgia and many other decisions Paradox made in regards to EU4. They said multiple times that sometimes gameplay trumps historical accuracy.

 

[Swenter]

Add Slovak and Slovenian culture alredy ?

 

[Nikolaj-11]

Looking forward to the improvements to random world. I always end up with gigantic blobs in China and West Africa, and sometimes in Scandinavia and Iberia/France as well.

One thing I always had a personal lust for is the "Call of our forfathers" idea that Norway gets

 

[net.split]

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...

Unless we are playing a game with random nations, especially if we also use a random map

Also, it wasn't unheard of for woman monarchs to command their troops. Some of them are represented in Women in History (and allowed to be special leaders in those cases); it seems reasonable to thus allow women monarchs to be generals in a more generic sense. It wouldn't happen often since you usually don't want to risk your monarch anyway and women monarchs are less common (unless using a custom nation with ruler and heir set female).

 

[SchwarzerKaiser]

The majority of women rulers would not be allow by their aristocracy to command armies, how about a compromise a Female Ruler or Heir can become a commander if she has at least 4 on MIL

And if that fictional custom nation is a complete matriarchy where the aristocracy consists of females? Some sort of "Amazon society" if you like?