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EUIV - Development Diary - 28th of January 2020

Hey again! So I know the last development diary I said that the next one wouldn’t be coming until 4th of February, and if you check your calendar it is still not yet 4th of February. However we’ve gotten to a point of 1.30 where we feel we can more regularly provide development diaries again. So for this one I will be visiting an old favorite though before we dig into new features that are going to be coming with the upcoming expansion and patch. Features made just to make the game simply better, quality of life.

I will warn you though, a lot of the UI you are about to see is very much work in progress and is not representative of how it will look upon release.

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First up we’ve made information about other countries' military strength more readily available to the player. It has always been possible to discern this information in the ledger, and it will still be available there, but we’ve also now placed it in two interfaces that you might look at a bit more often. First is the Diplomacy View where below the usual information you can discern of a country. Here it will list specific the land forces and the naval forces fielded and last the manpower of the country.

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Then we have the War Declaration view, this one is a bit more complicated. It will sum up the infantry, cavalry and artillery of each side that will be called in to the war. The last column is the full amount of forces deployed and the amount of manpower available to that side. You can see the breakdown of these numbers for each called nation by hovering over each number.

These values are hidden if you are playing with limited or locked ledger in multiplayer. But they will show up if you have infiltrated administration in a nation. In the case of the War Declaration screen it will show incomplete numbers but also warn you of this unless you have infiltrated every member of the opposing sides governments.

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Next is a little handy thing just to help you pick your rivals a little bit better. Each option when picking your rivals will now highlight if that country has also picked you as their rival.

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We’ve made endgame tags optional now. You can turn it off in the options before starting a campaign. It does however invalidate achievements.

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Last thing is on events that affect a specific location in the world. We’ve added some nifty buttons, these will take you directly to the province that the event is concerning. Making it a lot easier to get a grasp on what you are getting where. Image shown here is an example with a banner in the top which will be used for if the entire event affects a single province while the one on an event option is for if there’s a difference between the options.

I also want to update you on that since last dev diary I and Johan have listened to responses and based on that feedback done some balance changes. Courthouse and Town Hall reduces governing cost -25% and -50% respectively. We've added State House which uses a manufactory slot and gives -20% governing cost and -5% minimum autonomy on entire area with double effect on provinces of paper, gem or glass. They can only be built one per area. Merchant Republics and Prussian Monarchies penalties are now based on Governing Capacity instead of amount of provinces. They will also as a base have less Governing Capacity available to them.

We've also changed the requirements for making a province part of Trade Companies, there are no longer any religious requirements, it only requires the province to not be in your super region. This means Russia can make Siberia into a TC if they so want to. Their autonomy penalty have been changed to 90%, however they have only 45% production efficiency loss from autonomy and no penalty on naval FL. Propagation of Religion available to Muslims have been limited to anywhere but Europe.

That’s it for today's dev diary. Next one will come next week and will be written by Johan about a new upcoming feature part of the expansion focusing on making conquest more rewarding.
 
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Am I assuming correctly that if we turn off the ledger (or turn on limited ledger); the military information will be hidden?

Additionally, have you thought of displaying dead nation provinces when hovering over one of their cores?


EDIT: Somehow missed the second part regarding the ledger where they say that the info will be hidden (unless inflitrated the administration). Apologies

Second question still stands
 
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Thanks for the dev diary. :)

Could it be possible, to disable the military strenght in the diplomacy menu? Because I dont use the ledger to get information. I like the lose of control and that I dont know everything. Or better: We must use the spy network to get approximate information. :)

Obviously the ledger has been part of the game since the beginning, but I still think information regarding enemy troops should not be readily available in SP.
I am not saying espionage should be required, but at the very least a spy network action to get the real number. Perhaps you could initially have an educated guess based on intel "Milan is fielding between 40-60 thousand troops" without getting a specific number, which would then be revealed via spying.

Am I assuming correctly that if we turn off the ledger (or turn on limited ledger); the military information will be hidden?

Additionally, have you thought of displaying dead nation provinces when hovering over one of their cores?

They litterally stated in the DD:
These values are hidden if you are playing with limited or locked ledger in multiplayer. But they will show up if you have infiltrated administration in a nation. In the case of the War Declaration screen it will show incomplete numbers but also warn you of this unless you have infiltrated every member of the opposing sides governments.

For clarification: When starting a game you can choose if the ledger should give full or limited information or to disable it. The outlined changes will only appear if you have full info for the ledger activated.

If there's still time to add small thing or tell me you did it: When reaching above 950 adm/dip/mil power the text with number could become yellow, when reaching 990 & above the text could become red. I know that when you reach 999 the text becomes green but it's usually too late to see it coming when you have 998 or sth around it but are engaged in war or sth and didn't pay attention to adm/dip/mil and you loose sometimes even 10 power or more. This happened so many times to me...

I second this. Not necessarily in this exact fashion, but there should be a warning before you hit the limit, not after you already lost points.
 
Propagation of Religion available to Muslims have been limited to anywhere but Europe.

This feels a little arbitrary to me. If a muslim state overruns the christians, why wouldn't they be allowed to propagate religion?

May I suggest an alternative:
Propagate religion can only be done in trade company regions where you have an actual trade company (that way, superregion restrictions will apply)
Dhimmi influence diminishes propagate religion strength
 
So there is no longer any reason for a nation elected emperor to not join the HRE?
I guess there's the opinion hit with the new emperor if you lose the election & leave the empire? plus you would be a duchy, meaning you'd need the prestige to re-promote yourself to the appropriate rank (assuming you had the dev. There are many kingdom rank countries that don't have enough dev to be kingdoms)
 
Thanks for the dev diary. :)

Could it be possible, to disable the military strenght in the diplomacy menu? Because I dont use the ledger to get information. I like the lose of control and that I dont know everything. Or better: We must use the spy network to get approximate information. :)
You can do this by locking the ledger. They've said that the numbers will only be present if you have infiltrate administration when ledger is set to limited or locked
 
@Groogy: Does that mean one can script area effects for buildings now? Could you show a code example? Because I implemented area effects for court houses for my mod as well and it would be lovely if such things were easier to implement now.
And does it also mean that the state house can only be built once per area?
 
Nice Quality of Life changes !
As for showing the force limit of a country in the diplomatic view, maybe it could be more realistic to show at first only an estimation (as in HOI4) and to show the real number if Espionnage Ideas are unlocked/completed ?
 
I have to admit, these interface tweaks seem very handy. Particularly the army numbers in the war declaration screen. I suppose it is one of those cases where you did not know you needed the changes until you got them....
 
I have to admit, these interface tweaks seem very handy. Particularly the army numbers in the war declaration screen. I suppose it is one of those cases where you did not know you needed the changes until you got them....
I'm concerned it will turn us into the AI :p Groogy was unsure when I asked, but I have a hunch that the implementation (at least as it stands) will only calculate the strength of the countries actually listed in the war screen. It won't count the strength of the allies subjects, and I'm doubtful that it will even calculate the strength of people who will be called in by a co-belligerent defender (and indeed, their subjects :p) and I can definitely see us getting lazy and just trusting that number, forgetting that it isn't counting that Brandenburgs ally poland is bringing in his PU subject lithuania :p

edit: but it is worth mentioning that the fact that they seem to be happy to take as long as this patch needs and aren't pressuring themselves with strict deadlines does increase the chance that this kinda thing is ironed out before the patch launches :D
 
Love the 'at a glance' military strength.
 
These values are hidden if you are playing with limited or locked ledger in multiplayer.

PLEASE, make this OPTIONAL. My friends and I always play co-op multiplayer games, and we hate that so many information are hidden in multiplayer! Especially in the war view, where we can't see the numbers of our common enemies (while it's all shown for single players). We can find the numbers in the ledger, but this creates click fatigue and slows down our games unneecessarily. We all want to have all the information available, just like in regular single player campaigns. Why can't it be optional? Even if it's an opt-out checkbox!

edit: this is a suggestion that I had already posted in the suggestion forum before: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...on-is-hidden-in-multiplayer-optional.1124154/
 
Please give us a function to tell Vasalls to get ready for war... Its always funny that all vasalls are drilling like crazy and get rofl-stomped in the first month. We can do it already with allies, why not with vasalls?
 
PLEASE, make this OPTIONAL. My friends and I always play co-op multiplayer games, and we hate that so many information are hidden in multiplayer! Especially in the war view, where we can't see the numbers of our common enemies (while it's all shown for single players). We can find the numbers in the ledger, but this creates click fatigue and slows down our games unneecessarily. We all want to have all the information available, just like in regular single player campaigns. Why can't it be optional? Even if it's an opt-out checkbox!

edit: this is a suggestion that I had already posted in the suggestion forum before: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...on-is-hidden-in-multiplayer-optional.1124154/
the new functionality is optional... They stated it will only be restricted if you turn limited or locked ledger on. I think we're all in agreement that troop counts in the war should be visible when the ledger is set to open in MP though :D
 
Will the war declaration screen show army counts for "hidden" allies? Like subjects of allies, allies of cobelligerants or allies of the emperor? Otherwise it'll still be as misleading as the current war declaration screen, and I'll still need to check alliances, the ledger, and other war declaration screens to get the actual numbers.

Also, if we're quality-of-lifeing that screen, could we also highlight great powers so we can see at a glance if we'll be vulnerable to interventions?
 
The 'go-to-province' button is something i Wished many, many times in my games.

Speaking of QoL I have some suggestion that I think would improve the game.

- when a modifier expire in the message put what effect the modifier had. With dozen of modifiers around sometime it is hard to remember exactly what they did and it can be important, expecially if are things are extra discipline/morale or a +1 diplomat.

- I'd like if you could flag a modifier so that, let's say, a month before it expire you get a warning flag, useful for things like discount to development/builidings cost or bonus to technology or things like that, so you can have a last chance to use it.

- warning flags that warns you when change National focus, or delete/change policies or similar.
 
@Groogy: Does that mean one can script area effects for buildings now? Could you show a code example? Because I implemented area effects for court houses for my mod as well and it would be lovely if such things were easier to implement now.
And does it also mean that the state house can only be built once per area?

Nope, I just created a "State wide" variant of the modifier that the building uses.
 
Looking at the "endgame tag setting" image it shows an "E" in the place of the symbol of the dlc.
It's now clear the name of the new dlc: "Emperor"

The changes you guys showed today are a good step forward, I was tired to look at the ledger everytime before declaring war.
I look forward the new feature coming next week though
 
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I honestly think EU4 is about to go into a new golden age, can't express how happy I am with the changes being made.