EUIV - Development Diary - 29th of October 2019

[Lars M]

No the Pope is sort of special in the game so we'd prefer to keep him Catholic. Do you often see a Pope with all of his provinces being wrong religion and him unable to convert them?

Thank you for a very promising DD.

Would it be possible to have some mechanic similar to how "Trading cities" are created with the Mare Nostrum DLC enabled, if rebels in the Papal State converts its state religion, spawning new custom nations where predefined countries are not available and possible releasing relevant tags?

This could then spark an event or event chain inspired by the Avignon Papacy, where a Catholic country get the possibility to house the Papacy, ceding one of their provinces to a resurgent Papal State. Either simple by giving the Curia controller the opportunity or more dynamic letting countries with high papal influence, prestige, great power status etc. compete for it.

Giving the Pope a new home, could then be considered to give benefits to future papal influence, prestige, missionary strength, maybe an additional missionary, etc.

 

[jkchart]

Thanks!

You're welcome

 

[covya]

Very happy to see those missing modifiers being added to the nation designer. Now my dream of playing a nation that only uses artillery is one step closer to reality <3

 

[klingonadmiral]

Unify Culture Age Objective now work.

Does this include New World no longer being considered? It's funny how Spain struggles with getting any age objectives fulfilled in what was historically the zenith of their power.

 

[ck1ller]

Iberia/GC:
should be possible if u swap "Spanish Inquisition" (castile idea) for Devout Catholicism (spain)? let me explain: castile lives whit muslim people around hundreds years and they tolerate each other, you can see this in the novel "el mio cid" when cristhian people and muslim people live togheter in the south and people crhistian/muslim worked for muslim/crhistian lords, when formed Spain otherwise, they not tolerate more muslim people and expel them to north africa and turkey (muslim/jews) so, is more historical o spain ge the conversion and castile the buff for catholisiscm (or tolerance).
Also should change how works expel minories like native policies, for example, if I wish have a multicultural new world plus they wouldn't worry about religion and culture penalties, if I choose one culure one religion instead, they MUST to convert and get penalties for Religion and cultures whit the correspondent penalties.

Generals/Admirals:
there could be 2 pools, one for generals and other for admirals, I never pick admirals, ever fullfil my pool whit generals only, and there is a lot of people
do he same

Diplomatic:
could be great if in the dip macrobuilder we get a regions/option for outrage countrys, his will le you whit less micromagment burns AE in extensives zones and focus in other ones, when we are ready whit that place whit can focus in another one.

Building:
hsould be better if AI countrys buidl more factories/money buildings instead shipyars, docks and training fields

these are my humbles proposals.

 

[mergele]

Can I just say this has me more hyped than the new mechanics diaries? It's gonna feel so good.

 

[Miroku20X6]

We are probably not going to remove the limit but we are having a look at what to improve with those governments and conquering land.

While it won't address conquering land, I believe the easiest and most important way to improve those governments is to make the leader of a trade league a co-belligerent any time one of the members is attacked, rather than simply being called in themselves.

If HREmperor gets to call in their allies when defending HRE members, then Venice et al should be able to call in their allies as well.

 

[thejayroh]

I would like to be able to give my armies AI control. Don't like micro-ing them all over the place. Especially when there's a lot.

Love this idea on paper, but I know the AI can do silly, unintended things like run off to Siberia and siege that down.

 

[Dalos]

Love this idea on paper, but I know the AI can do silly, unintended things like run off to Siberia and siege that down.

Maybe specify areas where they should operate, level of aggression...?

 

[TheDungen]

Another government reform fix we also made sure to fix is so Native Americans can't get unique governments like English Monarchy anymore. You should start seeing a lot more United States of America as we've fixed a bug causing the American Revolution to never come. We've tried to make how the AI picks Government Reforms to be generally a little bit better, from how Tribes become Monarchies/Republics to having the AI favor certain picks like their own unique governments etc.

How about natives reforming becoming republics because the colonial nations they reform off of are republics? Is that fixed?

Maybe you could add a nation the Pope would form if he turns protestant or Reformed? Seeing a papal states who are protestant in all but the state religion is quite weird, especially if rebels start to trigger but he still can't become protestant.

That's a cool idea.

No the Pope is sort of special in the game so we'd prefer to keep him Catholic. Do you often see a Pope with all of his provinces being wrong religion and him unable to convert them?

This would esnure that though, if the papacy istantly forms something else when they become non catholic then the event for the papacy being landless fires and a catholic nation grants land to a new papacy.

 

[Ruian]

@Groogy @Caligula Caesar first of all, thanks for the positive attitude and work on important bug fixes. My number one thing is the AI being bad at war, it's killing the replay ability. I see the team is already on it and that's great.

A few other things that haven't been mentioned:
Truce timers not giving the correct end date. Vassal boats being loyal regardless of loyalty status of vassal (i.e. disloyal vassal boats are always loyal). Pretender rebels often times do not show the correct stats of the pretender (i.e. it will say 6/3/4, the pretenders enforce and you get a 2/4/4). Light ships on missions to protect trade or privateer in trade nodes give the incorrect value of income (i.e. it says you will earn +2.44 ducats per month but in reality it is much lower or greater). Territory corruption, while not a bug, is a big balance issue, it's really killing the game for many starts.
It would be nice to either have more ways of reducing corruption that don't require money, larger anti-corruption modifiers like 0.25 from Espionage ideas instead of 0.1, or better yet, removed from the game altogether. The issue is it reduces strategic depth by heavily emphasizing taking really good land over strategically important land (as if we needed more reasons to take great land in India in the first place). A look at that would be greatly appreciated as the forums have been in uproar about it for the better part of a year.

One QoL suggestion that would go a long way is the amount of clicks required to give vassals newly conquered land. It can be extremely cumbersome to do if you need to give away 10+ provinces. It would also be nice if they were better at dealing with their own rebels. I believe their priorities are screwed up, they'll stab up before coring, for example. And we all know stabbing up while having high overextension is extremely expensive.

 

[LazyTitan0514]

Any more detail on how fixing conversions will work? Will we see a return to the good days before you had to pay 200 ducats a month to convert 1 province

 

[NickTwoPointOh]

Speaking of the nation designer, could you please add the CKII religions that are already part of the game? Or is that meant to be locked behind the converter DLC?

It would be cool for a CK3 converter that works better than CK2

 

[Chief of Staff]

Here is my thoughts on these:

So during these Polish Weeks @Duplo and @mikesc have been working hard on improving the economy of the AI.

Our goal is to make the AI more competitive towards the player, and this starts with the economy the AI has available to them. Among of the things you should see improve is besides the AI having more money generally available and doing better are features such as the religious conversion being manageable by them.

Economy is a foundation for the successes of a nation. Without it, you can forget being able to expand or to defend your own nation. It goes without saying that military is useless without economy. They are interdependent, so I think it is critical that AI be able to manage their economy well enough to defend or to expand themselves. I think this will make AI players a more interesting challenge to be reckoned with. Of course, this would be modified by AI ruler personalities on whether they managed economy competently (Greedy personality comes to mind...).

Something this work by our awesome coders do is also make all of this a lot more exposed meaning modders can tweak how the AI deal with it's economy way more than they ever could before. However it is still quite strict as it would otherwise impact the performance too much.

While it is unlikely that I will make use of modding for AI economic management, I nevertheless am pleased to see more codes being exposed to allow the modders to get creative with things like how AI do things. You never know, modders might even outdo you in some areas such as this!

So now let's start of strong with what bugs we've been working on and talk about Chartering Trade Company AI. If you are one of the players not wanting to see a non-colonial Papal States buying land in India, the AI will now only consider to do this if they have access to colonists. The players themselves are not affected by this change and can keep using the feature like normal.

One problem: Austrian East India Company comes to the mind. I don't think Austria has a NI that gives a colonist nor does it adopt colonial or expansion idea but I could be mistaken. What I would suggest is to have AND/OR requirement in which an AI nation have a colonist AND/OR is a Great Power while it must have coastal provinces in the same area containing their capital before the AI may consider chartering a trade company "purchase" for a province. The downside, though, is that GP status can fluctuate since Austria was not a GP at the 1444 game start but given the time would become GP and can also lose this status, going back and forward. Not exactly a stable requirement but it might still work, I dunno.

Additionally, I would suggest allowing in limited circumstances a AI nation with Merchant Republic reform to consider chartering only if their ambitions or strategic focus were to somehow change to overseas instead of being confined to their own home region. Perhaps a mission may affect this. It is basically a matter of "what-if" alternate history scenario. I think chartering a province in a lucrative trade region might not be out of character for a country whose government is effectively ruled by the merchants.

Another government reform fix we also made sure to fix is so Native Americans can't get unique governments like English Monarchy anymore. You should start seeing a lot more United States of America as we've fixed a bug causing the American Revolution to never come. We've tried to make how the AI picks Government Reforms to be generally a little bit better, from how Tribes become Monarchies/Republics to having the AI favor certain picks like their own unique governments etc.

That might explain why when I tried to create a separate government reform file with a copy of English Monarchy with modifiers slightly changed for a modern constitutional monarchy distinct to England/Great Britain following the Glorious Revolution, I spotted various natives adopting the new government reforms inexplicably. Was this bug present from when government reforms was introduced or did it came later? I would like to know this so to rule this out as the source of the issue I described here.

For Colonial nations we've fixed a bunch of problems. For instance granting a CoT to a Colonial will no longer decrease the level of the Center. But not only that there were a bunch of ways to circumvent the protection of the overlord. So someone on the Americas could attack your poor subjects but you would be locked out of actually helping them in their time of need. Now the Overlord will always be able to enforce peace on their colonial nation despite if they have a truce with the attacker or not. This only applies if the colonial nation is the defender.

I am concerned this might partially bring back the situation we had earlier where if a overlord of a CN were to intervene in a war with your CN and your country would then get dragged into that war. I believe that was stopped in a patch shortly after the version that introduced the colonial nations. Maybe I am misreading this, I am not sure.

We've also noticed that the Mission UI could be quite taxing on some people's machine so we've optimized that interface quite a bunch which will help on some of our larger mission tree's but also potentially for any mod that extends on this system. Another similar UI problem that we've dealt with is the macrobuilder for when you hit +1000 provinces which could cause a bunch of problems.

Speaking of the UI, what would be great is to change the way buildings UI are done to a scheme similar to that of missions UI. Right now, you have to specify X and Y, height, width, and so on for that UI. Then you have to test it out to only find out you got some numbers off and have to go back to change the values for these attributes. And then start up game again and test it again. Repeat if must. This can get pretty tedious. Unless there is a console command to quickly refresh the GUI with the changes made in the files while game is running?

ATTACH=full]521895[/ATTACH]
Oh what's this I wonder?

That's great! That mean no more accidental clicking "Back" button only to suffer a significant loss of time due to game completely restarting as a result.

So this was just some of the things we've fixed, and we have so much more that we need to work on. We are already aware of several issues the community wants us to address and improve but in same style as we did with the QoL features we want to give you the oppertunity to highlight to us what you think is most important. This will be done in a more structured way compared to last time and if you are interested in contributing please head over to @StarNaN's thread over here.

I am very pleased overall with this dev diary even if no new features had been announced. Not only that but there were many bugs I didn't know about here so I thought it was interesting to read.

Our content design team is always covets new code features that we can make use of We've already gotten quite a few new effects and triggers, and in terms of QoL, a personal favourite of mine is that we no longer need so many custom tooltips because an unknown province in a trigger will now display as "Province" rather than "any/all"

It is really awesome to see new effects and triggers for scripting that we modders can also use. Especially that join_war effect which should be very interesting with many possible scenarios we can think of.

 

[Archangel Dino]

I'd love to see more work done with rebels. More specifically, I find it too easy to deal with them when they spawn and when they don't spawn. When they haven't spawned yet, simply raising autonomy in your problem provinces works 80% of the time of eliminating their threat. When they have spawned, having forts in the right locations and consolidating all of your units into one large stack almost always means the end for rebels.

I'd prefer a CK2-style rebellion system whereby rebels declare independence with their own country followed by declaring war on you. It would result in a more lively game with rebels taking a portion of your force limit and income when they rise against you.

 

[Canute VII]

The allies will still get angry in that case yes because otherwise we'd open up a can of worms of problems in this feature.

Maybe at least a string of text on the secondary peace deal like "Your ally will not consider any land given in this peace deal as fulfillment of your original promise"? That would already help avoid some really unfortunate loss of trust in between most trustworthy allies.

 

[KacperMaster15]

Ulm mission tree!

 

[Sian]

Got depressingly deep into the DD before i realised that Polish was used as a verb and not a noun

 

[Wolfrex]

I'd love to see more work done with rebels. More specifically, I find it too easy to deal with them when they spawn and when they don't spawn. When they haven't spawned yet, simply raising autonomy in your problem provinces works 80% of the time of eliminating their threat. When they have spawned, having forts in the right locations and consolidating all of your units into one large stack almost always means the end for rebels.

I'd prefer a CK2-style rebellion system whereby rebels declare independence with their own country followed by declaring war on you. It would result in a more lively game with rebels taking a portion of your force limit and income when they rise against you.

For three months the rebels stand in one place and do nothing. And they die in defeat, except for candidates for the throne. They do not pursue their goals, they are made to create inconvenience, and therefore instantly die. Most of all I liked the rebel system in Victoria 2, where the rebels accumulate strength and rebel just to win, so they correlate their forces with the capabilities of government forces. But this is still a different game.

 

[Darth.]

Hopefully, it would be whenever we feel Europa gotten far enough to be playable

*puts on tinfoil hat*
You would have said EU4 if you meant the game itself. Does this mean the next DLC is called Europa?