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Hello and Welcome to another development diary for Europa Universalis IV. As it is another one written by me, it might be a bit shorter than you’d like, but I hope the information is interesting enough.

One of the things we wanted to focus on with Leviathan was to strengthen the ability to play “tall”,or in other words, how to become more powerful without necessarily expanding all the time. We talked in an earlier diary about the first of three new features regarding playing tall, Expand Infrastructure, which allowed you to stack multiple manufactories in the same province.

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Today we’ll be talking about the second of the ‘play tall’ features for Leviathan, as we delve into Concentrate Development.

Concentrate Development is an interaction that is done to either one of your territories or to one of your subjects states or territories.

This will reduce the development in that area by an amount comparable to a horde razing it, and then that development will be distributed to your country.

Fifty percent of that development will be going directly to your capital, while thirty percent will be distributed randomly among stated provinces, while the final twenty percent is lost.

There is a cooldown of 50 years for how often you can do this in an area.

Doing this to one of your subjects will upset them and also increase their liberty desire, so be careful.

There are also two government reforms that makes this loss less painful, as it removes the twenty percent lost, and instead adds that development to the capital.
  • The Mandala Reform, available to the chinese techgroup and either dharmic, eastern or muslim religions.
  • Siamese Absolutism - which is given from some missions.

Speaking of the Mandala Reform, it's a first tier reform, that besides giving you free development concentration also grants the following.
  • +15% Vassal Income
  • +1 Vassal Force Limit Bonus
  • -33% Governing Capacity

eu4_21.png


Connected to this, is a new peace treaty called Pillage Capital!
As sometimes you want to grow your power, and weaken your enemy, but you do not want to take on more territory. In that case, just use the new “Pillage Capital”(™) peace treaty, which will concentrate development on their capital state, benefiting you!


Stay tuned for next week, when we will talk more about playing tall, and maybe something about canals.
 
I honestly think this sounds like a horrible feature. It does not at all improve tall play as it requires wide gameplay to support and aside from that I don't see the point. It's not at all interesting gameplay (in my opinion). If this is the sort of stuff that's going to be added from now on I'd want to see a redirection of effort into making the game more moddable and into making EU5 or something
 
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AFAIR its both--there is a malus for number of times developed, as well as current total development.
You can mouse over the development cost in-game to show the modifiers that affect it. I've never seen number of times developed listed there, nor have I seen anyone else mention it. It doesn't seem to be in the wiki. There are plenty of other modifiers of course, but this just isn't one of them.
 
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You can mouse over the development cost in-game to show the modifiers that affect it. I've never seen number of times developed listed there, nor have I seen anyone else mention it. It doesn't seem to be in the wiki. There are plenty of other modifiers of course, but this just isn't one of them.
You're right, I misinterpreted the fact that this cost doesn't update until the next month when the province loses development.
 
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Pillage capital seems really weird. There is already a peace term for that not take land purpose: Humiliate or even Show Strength. Also it is being a peace term extra weird. We have sack events already, that is also another weird thing. Finally, I can't imagine this represents what exactly. It's exactly like razing but nations that do raze already have that ability. Everyone is a semi-horde now? Imagine France bringing home the English population like slaves with chains after "pillaging" London. I really don't get it.

On the other hand, I actually liked the consolidate development feature. But it looks like a useful tool for wide play :) Or I'm missing some things.
I think it's SUPPOSED TO BE something along the lines of the Roman sacks of ctesiphon or the venetian CRUSADER sacking of Constantinople. The cities remained and stood as the capitals for long after the sieges but a lot was seized.
 
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I think it's SUPPOSED TO BE something along the lines of the Roman sacks of ctesiphon or the venetian CRUSADER sacking of Constantinople. The cities remained and stood as the capitals for long after the sieges but a lot was seized.
Agreed. This does make it somewhat questionable from a historical point of view, as deliberate pillaging raids were starting to decline by the time EU4's timeline begins. There was obviously still plenty of looting, but declaring war solely for the purposes of pillaging was becoming increasingly rare AFAIK.
 
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