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Welcome to the fifth and last development diary for Europa Universalis 4: El Dorado. Today we’ll be talking about the gold and silver mines of the new world and how to best secure that wealth for your colonial empire.

Treasure Fleets
It’s no secret that the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Central and South America was primarily driven by a desire for gold and silver. The Spanish crown had sole rights to mine these precious metals in their colonies, which were then loaded onto well-guarded ships and sent back to Spain. Unsurprisingly, this floating wealth drew the attention of pirates and privateers, leading to the Golden Age of Piracy and the Pirates of the Caribbean that we all know and love.

In the El Dorado expansion, we represent this through a mechanic we call ‘Treasure Fleets’. For those that have the expansion, Colonial Nations with gold provinces will no longer gain the income of that gold for themselves, but instead will store it in a ‘Treasure Fleet Counter’ that counts up towards a certain sum depending on the size of the colony’s gold mines. Once the counter is full (usually about twice a year), the colony will send a Treasure Fleet. The Treasure Fleet travels downstream along the trade routes, passing each node between the Colonial Nation and its mother nation’s trade capital. If there are privateers present in these nodes, they will steal a share of the gold relative to their power in the node - so if privateers hold 50% of the power in the Caribbean, they will take half the value out of any treasure fleet that passes through there. At the end of the journey, any money that remains is given to the mother nation, who suffer some inflation depending on the amount of money relative to the size of their economy.

Nations who do not have their trade capital downstream of their colonies’ trade nodes will be unable to receive treasure fleets. In these cases, the colonial nation will simply keep the gold for themselves, paying just the usual amount in tariffs.

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Pirate Hunting
If you see a lot of your treasure going into the pockets of filthy buccaneers, we have given you a new way to stop them. To repel the privateers that are stealing your trade or seizing your gold fleets, we’ve added the option for your navies to go Pirate Hunting in the El Dorado expansion. Heavy Ships and Light Ships can be sent pirate hunting in a particular node, and will reduce the efficiency of all pirates in that node based on the amount of guns that the pirate hunting fleet can bring to bear. This gives you an way to combat piracy without having to go to war and gives Heavy Ships some use at peacetime besides sitting mothballed in port.

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Terrain Rework
As a bonus feature in the free patch, we’ve majorly reworked province terrains and the terrain mapmode. Many parts of the world have had their terrain updated to better reflect reality. For example, Spain is no longer mostly desert, and Eastern Europe is no longer one big swamp. The map has also been tweaked so that it is much easier to tell the terrain of a province simply from looking at said province.

As part of this reworking, we’ve added four new terrain types:
Highlands: Hilled but deforested regions (such as the Scottish Highlands). The old Hills terrain has been modified to represent forested, more inaccessible hilled regions.
Drylands: Arid regions that can still support agriculture, such as southern Spain.
Farmlands: Densely populated and cultivated areas with rich soils, such as you’d find in northern Italy.
Savanna: Largely open regions with alternating dry and wet seasons, such as the African Savannas.

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That’s it for the El Dorado dev diaries! Over the next week, we’ll be posting excerpts from the 1.10 patch notes, and Thursday the 26th of February the El Dorado expansion and corresponding patch will be released.

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Europa Universalis: El Dorado Live Stream from PDXCon 2015
[video=youtube;zM7q2CjikLE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM7q2CjikLE[/video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM7q2CjikLE
 

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Gold fleets sounds interesting, makes sense to start privateering in Sevilla now. More counters against Privateering also makes sense and sets up wars if one side starts getting the advantage.
 
Will gold fleets be visible on the map? Or is it just an abstraction?
Would be nice, I would appreciate following a visual representation of the gold fleets on the map.

One question, are the pirates only privateers sent by other nations or are there any independent pirates too? When I first read about pirates in this DLC I did expect it to be about hunting and destroying unique and independent pirate captains and havens, any new flavour events concerning "The Golden Age of Piracy"?
 
Does income from privateering generate inflation? Sounds like it should just the same as gold income from the treasure fleets. Sounds like it doesn't, so if 100g come in a fleet, privateers take 50g without inflation while the mother country takes 50g with inflation.
 
Gold fleets look promising. Perhaps that now, privateering will effectively be worthy in the "golden age of piracy"!
 
The pirate hunting button sounds like an arms race button between privateers and the defenders now. I don't like it.

Gold fleets look promising. Perhaps that now, privateering will effectively be worthy in the "golden age of piracy"!

It already was in a given number of starts. Power projection from privateer gain is pretty noticeable, especially if you can nail multiple rivals in the same node.
 
The pirate hunting button sounds like an arms race button between privateers and the defenders now. I don't like it.



It already was in a given number of starts. Power projection from privateer gain is pretty noticeable, especially if you can nail multiple rivals in the same node.

PP and getting ducats from it are two different things. As of now, it's almost all about PP, which feels wrong to me. "golden age of piracy"; it was about wealth, not lowering WE at home, or unlocking tercios faster. Some PP is fine for sure though.
 
Sounds like privateering will become more interesting. Hope you've nerfed the PP gain from it.

One question this DD raises is how the features will work if the user has only one of El Dorado or Wealth of Nations (which added privateers)...
 
Pirates and treasure fleet with no naval battles ... might have been quicker to rework naval combat entirely. :(
Yeah, a little sad :(

And I guess I now like the terrain map changes again, nice to see the new types :)
 
"Treasure Fleet Counter" is a bit of a mouthful, don't you think?

What about, like, Treasure Chest? Or anything more catchy, really.
 
Clean and simple, though I think you should change the verbage of "Protect Trade." It's too confusing thematically with pirate hunting; the explanation is basically the same thing.

Instead it should be something more like "Facilitate Trade" or "Assign Trade Ships" or the like, so that the explanation is that your light ships are actually helping to carry cargo, navigate, and whatnot.

An interesting result of this treasure fleet system is that nations with Safi as a home node (Morocco) are unable to generate any treasure fleets for themselves without either moving south or moving to Seville. I'm probably okay with that, because it's a strong push in the "piracy" direction for them. Still, I'll probably wind up moving my home node south in such a game so I can bring home some wealth from South America. It's kind of frustrating that Safi can't participate in trade around Africa; Portugal took a number of ports there for that exact purpose.
 
Here's a quick question: From the tooltips, you can see that treasure fleets will increase your inflation. For those nations that are pirating those fleets, do they also suffer from inflation increases?
 
Quite underwhelmed, personally. Not sure who asked for another New World/trade-oriented DLC, but beyond the nation designer and liberty desire changes all I see is a bunch of throwaway mechanics.