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Welcome to another Europa Universalis IV development diary. Everything is going fine with the development of Leviathan, as we are working on polishing content at the moment.

We have talked about some major improvements to playing tall in previous diaries, with possibilities of stacking manufactories and concentrating development. Today we will talk about something that synergies nicely with both these features.

Centralizing a State

The final new Playing-Tall option is the ability to Centralize a State. This action reduces the administrative cost of a state by as much as the value of 20 development points.

Centralizing States costs 100 Government Reform Progress points and takes five years to complete.

This interaction is available both through the state interface and through the macrobuilder.
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Never Mothball
A small thing that might make the top 3 of some peoples requested lists, and may be completely ignored by others is a small toggle for individual forts to never mothball.

We are adding a small checkbox in the province interface that if enabled, that fort will never mothball when you mothball every fort in your country from the military screen. This is something you may want to use when you may want to save money on lots of forts, but never risk it with the important forts next to France.
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Canal changes
With the new monument mechanics, we moved the old great projects system to be using the new monument code internally as well, which gives a few benefits, in that you can upgrade them as well. Each upgrade takes about 10 years further, and about 1000 gold each. We are also making the canals available from an earlier technology as well, from admin tech 26 to admin tech 22.

Previously the canals, besides opening the paths, gave a +20 trade power to the location, now instead they are giving these.

  • Tier 0 +10 Trade Power to Location, and +1% Trade Power to the Controller.
  • Tier 1 +20 Trade Power to Location, and +2% Trade Power to the Controller.
  • Tier 2 +30 Trade Power to Location, and +3% Trade Power to the Controller.
  • Tier 3 +50 Trade Power to Location, and +5% Trade Power to the Controller.




Next week we’ll be back and talk about colonial nations.
 
The final new Playing-Tall option is the ability to Centralize a State. This action reduces the administrative cost of a state by as much as the value of 20 development points.

Centralizing States costs 100 Government Reform Progress points and takes five years to complete.

This interaction is available both through the state interface and through the macrobuilder.
As a mostly tall player, centralization as it stands seems completely worthless. Going into this, I thought centralization might have meant that a large chunk of your state's dev (like 50% of each province or something) would centralize on one province in the state, which would make it a worthwhile click for tall players as it would lower the dev cost of the other provinces in that state. Maybe this could be penalized through losing some of the other provinces' dev (like 20% or something) and increasing national unrest/stability cost/autonomy of the remaining provinces in the state? But as just a way to increase government capacity? Whenever I have been exclusively playing tall, I have NEVER worried about government capacity or reforms in the slightest. I always try to see the good in a mechanic before complaining, but I'll be perfectly honest with you, this doesn't seem like a tall mechanic and it doesn't even seem like a good mechanic. Making centralization actually CENTRALIZE development like I had said before, that'd be more interesting.
 
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Never Mothball
A small thing that might make the top 3 of some peoples requested lists, and may be completely ignored by others is a small toggle for individual forts to never mothball.

This is a great Idea. How about a separate toggle for individual Armies. Especially for countries fighting "Colonial" Wars?

because especially after I become a Great Power....I might only need one stack to fight a war.....especially if I had limited aims or just wanted to honor a Call-to Arms.
 
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Agree. Absolutely love the map expansion and new missions and events etc. None of the mechanics (that every tag can use) are really wowing me though. Hopefully next week's coverage of CNs will be more interesting as I've been hoping they'd get another look for a very long time.
I'm gonna call it:

The CN mechanics will be one button to extract development to the home country and that's it.
 
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This is a great Idea. How about a separate toggle for individual Armies. Especially for countries fighting "Colonial" Wars?

because especially after I become a Great Power....I might only need one stack to fight a war.....especially if I had limited aims or just wanted to honor a Call-to Arms.

Wait for another DLC with 5 new buttons to push. 20$.
 
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Insteadof money (we already have edicts for that) Could perhaps this be done by assigning missionaries/merchants/colonists/diplomats as governors?
Would give a purpose to idle characters.
I was thinking the same. Either them, or unused advisors could do the job.
 
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Canal changes
With the new monument mechanics, we moved the old great projects system to be using the new monument code internally as well, which gives a few benefits, in that you can upgrade them as well. Each upgrade takes about 10 years further, and about 1000 gold each. We are also making the canals available from an earlier technology as well, from admin tech 26 to admin tech 22.

Previously the canals, besides opening the paths, gave a +20 trade power to the location, now instead they are giving these.
Can you maybe make it so you need fleet basing rights from the country controlling the canal to pass through it?

This is historically accurate as well as it makes sense in a game balance. Right now you're paying 10k for something that everyone can use. Adding the fleet basing rights requirement would actually make the canals strategic and useful instead of a RP thing for people to use once they've already won in SP.
 
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As a mostly tall player, centralization as it stands seems completely worthless. Going into this, I thought centralization might have meant that a large chunk of your state's dev would centralize on one province in the state, which would make it a worthwhile click for tall players as it would lower the dev cost of the other provinces in that state. Maybe this could be penalized through losing some of the other provinces' dev and increasing national unrest/stability cost/autonomy of the remaining provinces in the state? But as just a way to increase government capacity? Whenever I have been exclusively playing tall, I have NEVER worried about government capacity or reforms in the slightest. I always try to see the good in a mechanic before complaining, but I'll be perfectly honest with you, this doesn't seem like a tall mechanic and it doesn't even seem like a good mechanic. Making centralization actually CENTRALIZE development like I had said before, that'd be more interesting.
The only way I can see this benefitting tall players more than wide ones is if we assume tall players will be spamming the doubled-up manufactories. Even then expand administration is more efficient as has been repeated ad nauseum. Most of these 'tall' mechanics just feel like spicy wide mechanics.
 
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Whenever I have been exclusively playing tall, I have NEVER worried about government capacity or reforms in the slightest.

Aren't they adding some option to massively boost your state by making it use a lot more government capacity? This change should neatly play into that mechanic.
 
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Centralizing a State

The final new Playing-Tall option is the ability to Centralize a State. This action reduces the administrative cost of a state by as much as the value of 20 development points.

Centralizing States costs 100 Government Reform Progress points and takes five years to complete.

Question.
Wouldn't it make more sense to reduce Development Cost of that state if that's a playing tall feature, by lets say 15-20% ?
Because right now it's a late game going wide feature.
 
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Aren't they adding some option to massively boost your state by making it use a lot more government capacity? This change should neatly play into that mechanic.
Problem is this is just a slower and more expensive reskin of a mechanic we already have. Expand administration. Even then, there's nothing that would make a 'tall' country any more inclined to do it than a wide one.
 
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For some reason at the beginning I read about Centralize a State and thought it will be about spending governing capacity to decrease development cost in a state and I got excited for the tallest of the tall mechanics in the game!
Then I read that sentence again and got deeply disappointed.
 
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This feature is so underwhelming and boring as others have pointed!I mean besides the point that it's boring its useless as a new feature .It would be worthwhile if we had something like focus development that would boost income ,production and trade power as well as dev cost reduction like in ck2.Also we have awful slow reform progress.It would take 1350 points to complete government reforms which would be around 1579 provided that you don't expand at all.You would get like 450-500 gc reduction in the remaining time which would be like 4/5 extra manufactories.I think reform points should speed up faster if we have less states.
 
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I think the point is to use the new centralize state to lower the governing cost with a synergy with the mandala reform (-33% GC), with the reform you GC gain from expand administration is not 20 but 13.3 while the centralization is a pure gain
To consider this option, with the -33% governing capacity reform, expand administration will become less interesting than having few centralized states. Furthermore, you could focus on other reforms than those about more governing capacity...

At least I think this is the objective, but the 100 progress cost is really a lot to make it more interesting than expand administration, even with tall perspectives.

Or maybe there is more mechanics to come that lower even more the governing capacity, making it an interesting choice. We'll see
 
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For some reason at the beginning I read about Centralize a State and thought it will be about spending governing capacity to decrease development cost in a state and I got excited for the tallest of the tall mechanics in the game!
Then I read that sentence again and got deeply disappointed.
Decrease Development cost of a state, or increase development efficiency of a state. I share your disappointment.
 
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If I was going to propose a rework of this feature, first cut the cost down to 50 Governing Reform Progress, and make the reduction in Governing Capacity be instant. What you do then, is for those 5 years after you press the button, the province gets large buffs to Culture Conversion Cost, Development cost reduction, Autonomy reduction and building time.
What if the development cost increase from the provinces' development prior to centralising the state was halved for the period of 5 years (meaning that it would not reduce the dev cost from new development)? This way it would be more beneficial for tall players as it would drastically reduce the dev cost for high dev provinces.

Maybe throw in some flat dev cost reduction cost too, to provide some value to wide players as well.
 
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Features that boil down to just being a single button introduced with a single script which are just worse versions of existing features (in this case Expand Administration) is not a good basis for intriguing or interesting features. The new "additions" can literally be done by modders on the newer engines/games, if not to a better standard and quality. Your new policy of DLC features is just half-thought out scriptable GUI modding. Just because something can be added, doesn't make it a good idea.

Go back to the drawing board and please rethink your current design direction. Plenty of players here, from both Multiplayer and Singleplayer, have plenty of suggestions and areas of the game we'd like to see addressed. The game does not need more free modifier stacking, it does not need more pointless buttons, it does not need more bloated additions hidden as "new features". The core of the game itself needs serious addressing and multiple mechanics could do with reworks to be more interactive and interesting.
 
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