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.

 

[FeedTheHorse]

The ability to use the features of the El Dorado religions (Nahuatl, Maya, Inti) without being primitive would be great. I appreciate it would be very powerful on a Western nation, but equally it's a custom set-up so the user must have considered this - if we want to have a Nahuatl Nepalese nation raiding northern India from the Himalayas for captives why not?

 

[ahyangyi]

Could it be possible to play a nation that is not available at a specific start but exists already as a tag ?

Eg) Playing as Persia in 1444

Not sure about your Persia example, but I do want to be able to play Ashanti in 1444...

 

[Deye99]

Will be cool if we could choose a template of a real nation in the "saved template tab" (or in another tab, whatever), and play with this nation in a different year, or even change the nation a little bit to make it more interesting.

 

[ahyangyi]

Will be cool if we could choose a template of a real nation in the "saved template tab" (or in another tab, whatever), and play with this nation in a different year, or even change the nation a little bit to make it more interesting.

I guess the problem is real nation idea sets contain some unique bonuses that are harder to decide a price.

 

[Tullio25]

I like custom things and i really want this in the game (only if playing in nation designer mode ):
When reaching the point of upgrading to a higher rank, or when changing dynasty i want to be able to rename my country name and flag.

 

[ankpraka]

Hey All. I have been away from this game for the last 4-5 months at least. Was thinking of picking this again. Thought of buying the common sense expansion but then saw that steam reviews section is full of negative reviews for this DLC. Some say it ruined a EUIV for them after having spent 1000+ hours in it. People are suggesting to revert to the previous patch before common sense, Why so? What happened? I have spent enough time with Paradox to know that these things normally don't happen and their user reviews are always very high. Can someone please enlighten me as to what happened in the past 4-5 months. Thanks.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

Using random nations (or even custom ones) if the Papacy is not on the map, there are problems with the Curia not working correctly - I've seen the Curia under the control of a non-existing non-Papal nation, and it seems impossible to win the Curia and gain control of the Papal functions.

Is it possible to allow a random nation to have the Papacy government and to bring the Curia back on line? Is it possible to allow custom nations to have the government type?

Failing anything else, can we have the fix from EUIII whereby a random Catholic Theocracy can become the Papal States if the current one falls?

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

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.

Sure, and in a similar vein the argument that Wallachia shouldn't be able to build /all/ the pre CS buildings in their capital can be, and was, made. For Wallachia to raise their capital to a similar level to Paris or Constantinople takes an awful lot of points.

Perhaps a limit to how far you can raise things should be put in (whether soft or hard), perhaps the AI should be made less willing to raise the development of their provinces so far. Both of those though are balancing issues that will take time and reasoned feedback.

 

[Galaahd]

How about we just add a monetary cost on top of the monarch points cost for development?

That'd be a good money sink and OPMs like Walacchia will have a harder time becoming a metropolis.

 

[Carmilla]

-Snip-

Will you be adding cultures as well? I'm thinking specifically of various romance cultures, other older ones such as the pre-arabization egyptian, levant and african ones, celtic ones other than the few we have(gauls and iberian ones for instance) and so forth.

 

[DC123456789]

Why? None of those cultures are even in CK2, so you wouldn't even be able to get them through the converter.

 

[Carmilla]

Why? None of those cultures are even in CK2, so you wouldn't even be able to get them through the converter.

Romans are.

And for fun alternate history scenarios. Why else?

 

[Martin_Mortyry]

Will you be adding cultures as well? I'm thinking specifically of various romance cultures, other older ones such as the pre-arabization egyptian, levant and african ones, celtic ones other than the few we have(gauls and iberian ones for instance) and so forth.

Would also be nice to see old prussian culture back. If not in normal game - then at least as an option for custom nation's culture, similarly to norse religion.

 

[Carmilla]

Would also be nice to see old prussian culture back. If not in normal game - then at least as an option for custom nation's culture, similarly to norse religion.

Stuff like this would also be much appreciated yes.

 

[Itchel]

While it is possible to save your whole custom nation, Can you make it so you can save your idea sets as well?

I'd like to be able to make multiple countries with the same national ideas, Simular to how we have "german ideas" "french ducal ideas" and "indian sultanate ideas"

 

[Bobby555nc]

Custom game trait I'd like to see is being able to mod or select values from a list for when the ai develops. Right not they are not very smart about it.

 

[Hrayert]

Custom game trait I'd like to see is being able to mod or select values from a list for when the ai develops. Right not they are not very smart about it.

What do you mean? Ofcource we need 43 development in a province producing grain.

Because... You can never have too much grain.

 

[Orctavius]

Thanks for the dev diary. I really wasn't expecting one this week.

 

[DominusNovus]

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

Where is that modded, by the way? I've never been able to find it.

 

[Lee Saxon]

Not a feature I'll use much but it's always nice to see the game becoming more well rounded / that the devs are paying attention to a variety of suggestions.