Hello and welcome to another development diary for Europa Universalis. This time I’ll talk about a new feature for our soon to be announced expansion. This is the mechanic we called Hegemony.

The purpose of this feature is to create a greater narrative for the endgame, but there are two cases in which this will become the most used one.

First of all, our goal was to create something for those of you who like to conquer the world, and make part of that more interesting, and hopefully less tedious.

Secondly, our goal is to create an interesting and dynamic last century in larger multiplayer games.

So what is a Hegemony then?

A Hegemony is something a Great Power can proclaim when they fulfill certain conditions.There are 3 different types of Hegemony, each excelling in their own area available to Great Powers. They do come with their own requirements to become Hegemon and you must excel in their specific area. The AI will proclaim Hegemony whenever they can.

What is interesting is that there can only be one of each Hegemon, and a Hegemony is lost when you lose a war, no matter how you lose it.

Proclaiming a Hegemony gives you a bonus which partially depends on which Hegemony you have proclaimed, and the longer you keep your Hegemony, the bigger your scaling bonus gets, and finally when you reach max progress you gain a further finisher. Currently it takes about 20 years for a nation to get their Hegemony Power maximised, but that's subject to tweaking.

A Hegemon can not be allied with one of the other two Hegemons, and all other nations get a relation penalty against you. A Hegemon gets a very nice power projection boost, and will also gain score at a higher gain, while any nation allied with them gets less power projection and score.

All Hegemons have -0.1 monthly War Exhaustion and a +25% to Spy Defence, and all get 10% cheaper power costs when they have their hegemony power maxed.

Let's take a look at the different Hegemonies then.

Economical Hegemony
A Great Power with a monthly income of 1000£ can proclaim this Hegemony.

The base bonus is +100% manpower on all mercenary companies recruited, and the 100% power bonus is +50% Global Trade Power

The scaling powers go up to.
+33% Mercenary Discipline
+25% Trade Goods Produced
+25% Tax Income


Naval Hegemon
A Great Power with 1000 Heavy Ships can proclaim this Hegemony

The base bonus is +20% Naval Morale, and the 100% power bonus is +50% Naval Engagement Width

The scaling powers go up to.
+100% Naval Force Limit
+200% Sailors
+200% Blockade Efficiency


Military Hegemon
A Great Power with 500 Infantry Regiments can proclaim this Hegemony

The base bonus is +20% Land Morale on all mercenary companies recruited, and the 100% power bonus is TO BE DETERMINED.

The scaling powers go up to.
+10% Discipline
+30% Manpower
-10% Land Maintenance

Please remember that no numbers are finalised yet, and also that the Great Power mechanics will be unlocked by this expansion as well..

 

[lolada]

I'm almost scared to point oit that the numbers make no sense because then you'll misinterpret that the problem is with the numbers. In reality, the win-more mechanic is fundamentally flawed and completely not fun. It'a just one more heavily abstracted gamey mechanic disconnected from the rest and seems borne of dev MP sessions.

One issue here is what is really the goal of this mechanic? Win-win mechanic is ok for single-player - it would allow people actually to finish up whatever they do.. but obviosuly terrible for MP.

Design goal is:
1. Reduce tedium
2. Late multiplayer balance

Looks like the mechanic currently fails to do both. I am really not a fun of balancing SP and MP at the same time. Its a larger issue and its hurting both worlds..

In single-player we would like those big numbers to help us finish teh game and not give up. Mostly everyone gives up between 1650-1750. But it does not work for MP its broken.. riuch getting richer thing.. If you do balance for MP single-player will likely (and righlty) complain about useless "features".

I'd rather have it on on/off option or sp/mp balance switch. Same could go for idea groups and some other balance things in the game.

 

[TheHostName]

Ok I have a proposition for a more engaging und less power creep version of this:

Naval hegemon:
This hegomon is supposed to be Great Britain in the 19th century if im not mistaken. You are the nation that is unrivaled on the seas. You can be everywhere at the same time and still crush the local nation’s navies. How about making the requirement to be about the amount of Heavy ships and Galleys.

Requirement:
Instead of a two power standard, the game compares the next 5 nation’s Heavy ships and Galleys combined against yours. Heavies count thrice because of the cost/maintenance and capabilities.

Benefit:
-+20% Naval Morale
-+50% Naval Engagement Width

Scaling modifiers until 25 years have passed:
-+100% Naval Force Limit
-+200% Sailors
-+200% Blockade Efficiency

After 25 years:
-Enforce a province per Trade region through charter compeny


For the mil hegemon:
I propose to have two mil hegemons. One for Europe and one for Asia.
Im thinking towards Macedon and the hegemony over Greece for a reference:

Requirement:
-You need to be the strongest military power on your continent by military ranking (the one that determines protestant league leader).
-Additionally you should have a greater standing army than the next 2 nations on the continent combined.

Benefits:
-You have unlimited diplo slots for vassals and get the subjugation cb on bordering nations (their lib desire prohibits you from abusing this. Except in late game when you have the age abilites than you can get huge amounts of them).
-Furthermore, you get the ability to demand mil access through everyone exept Great powers and HRE Emperor and Chinese Emperor.
Scaling modifiers until 25 years have passed:
- 10% admin eff

After 25 years:
-25% reduced diplo integration cost

Drawbacks:
-You will be unable to gain allies/ lose the ones you had


Eco hegemon:
I dont think it is necessary to give the nation with the best economy more money.
I believe it would be better to have the hegemon weaken other nations instead.

Requirement:
-Most trade power in your home trade node.
-All tax and production income divided by stated dev needs to be some high value to represent an efficient economy
-500 ducats total income or total income - expenditures

Benefit:
-40% less trade eff for nations in domestic trade nodes and 20% in non domestic
-20% less trade stearing for nations in domestic and foreign trade nodes; 40% if you have a merchant present

Scaling modifiers until 25 years have passed:
-Embargo eff +100%

After 25 years:
- 1 mercantilism per year


I hope the hegemons can be modded as to make this a possibility.
Also can we have the ability to forbid these in sp games?

Looking forward to the patch

Edits: spelling mistakes

 

[Badesumofu]

How does this make ANYTHING less tedious?!

10% power costs and more powerful troops. Ticking negative WE. Potential to have everyone gang up on you which could lead to fewer but more challenging wars. Or just quicker and easier steam-rolling. Either is good at that point.

 

[Borgratz]

Most of those bonuses don't really combat the tediousness.
Fighting enemy armies is probably the part of the end game that is still somewhat interesting and making your army/ships/economy even more OP doesn't really help with the "boredom to playing" ratio.

Things that make WCs tedious at the end of the game are:
having to crush overwhelmingly inferior enemies over and over again because you run out of warscore; sieging and rebel ping pong.
So maybe change the bonuses to help with those if you want to make the game less "work"ish.

But definetely also add something like increased AE or something else to make the AI focus on you more and add some challenge. Clicking that button should help you conquer the world faster BUT also feel dangerous.

Also this seems to directly go against your design goals for the new admin cap penalty. Why are you introducing a snowball mechanic AND a snowball excelerator in the same patch?

No idea if this is fun for MP. It has "win more" problems, but someone painting a target on their back for more score sounds like a good idea.

 

[tom025]

I dont like at all this mechanic. It make stronger nation even more op, its not necessary.
I hope we can remove this feature when we start à game

 

[MAROQ]

Hello, i spended over 1000 hours in multiplayer games. We can easily reach 500k infantry and 1k income before 1600. These huge military bonuses will totally broke game.
It's great you want change endgame but multiplayer has different reality than singleplayer. If u want add this please give us option to remove this like we can locked ledger before start campaign or make it harder to take in early game. Maybe 1500-2000 income 1000 infantry troops.
Thanks for your work, have a nice day

 

[Arizal]

I often proposed such a mechanic, so I am glad it is considered. However, as much as I think the diplomatic maluses are good, there is something wrong with the bonuses. As it stands, they are a bit goofy and unrealistic.

Being an hegemon should relate on how others perceive you, not on the inherent strenght of your country. So the link with power projection makes sense, though I still dislike this whole feature. What I envision as bonuses for each category would be the following :

Admin : admin efficiency or core cost creation (so that you can conquer more land more efficiently/rapidly
Diplo : A bonus on how easily you can diplo-vassalize people and the end of the 100 Dev limit (altough the 100 Dev should really go away in every cases); though it could also be warscore cost. (That would represent how the other nations perceive your diplomatic weight)
Mil : That one is trickier, but I could see a morale malus on everyone attacking the country (the attacking armies would fear you more), or else maybe some increase in professionalism and military tradition, which are both maxable variable

As for the requirements, I believe it should be more scalable than fixed requirements. Something like second power strenght x 1.5. The bonus would trigger at the moment you gain that value and disappear once you wouldn't have it anymore. It would be more organic than a fancy title you buy. The values to check could be :

Admin : Total development (excluding vassals) (second X 1.5)
Diplo : Total income (which resembles the current economical hegemon) (second X 1.5)
Mil : Total army strenght (which I believe is a modifier you can find in the AIs calculations. It could be available for everyone to see) (second X 1.5)

There could also be other objectives, to avoid players concentrating on only those. For example Force limit for military, trade income for diplo.
And to avoid countries to be hegemon in 1500, maybe there could be hard caps too, like a minimum of 1000 development, a total income of X (really not sure here) or a total FL of Y.

 

[Marmelado]

Guess I'll wait for EU5 for internal governance mechanics, sensible economy, functional trade, proper scientific advancement, culture (literature, paintings etc.) and naval gameplay.

 

[Denkt]

Guess I'll wait for EU5 for internal governance mechanics, sensible economy, functional trade, proper scientific advancement, culture (literature, paintings etc.) and naval gameplay.

Well to start with it could represent the nations realistically with realistic economic and technology growth, not stuff that is more fitting for the 21th century in which if you don't have keep up with peek tech you will get destroyed and enormous economic growth when this whole time period with all countries combined probably saw less economic growth than what single nations today have managed to do in decades.

 

[sprites]

for once this doesn't thrill me, you've baiscally already won the game by then.
and i'm not too sure on the losing a war part, you could still qualify for these afterwards...

 

[cxell]

 

[Denkt]

View attachment 543146

A good argument for a naval drill mechanic or so.

 

[Marmelado]

Well to start with it could represent the nations realistically with realistic economic and technology growth, not stuff that is more fitting for the 21th century in which if you don't have keep up with peek tech you will get destroyed and enormous economic growth when this whole time period with all countries combined probably saw less economic growth than what single nations today have managed to do in decades.

Thing is that I believe EU4 could be much more than a map-painter, endless conquest game. It could be about building a unified nation after chaos of Medieval age. Developing institutions like police system, court system, early capitalist economy, flags, dynasties, music, literature. What makes France France? What makes Spain Spain? This period had so much going on beyond war. Napoleon era could be separated into its own period as a proper map-painter, like what Total Wars series did.

 

[Arrowkill]

@Johan
After reading through and seeing your responses to other critique and my own thoughts, I just want to say thank you for taking the critiques well. I was initially worried about this, but after seeing how you responded to others concerns, I am much less worried and I think you guys are going to make this into a great mechanic.

 

[Denkt]

Thing is that I believe EU4 could be much more than a map-painter, endless conquest game. It could be about building a unified nation after chaos of Medieval age. Developing institutions like police system, court system, early capitalist economy, flags, dynasties, music, literature. What makes France France? What makes Spain Spain? This period had so much going on beyond war. Napoleon era could be separated into its own period as a proper map-painter, like what Total Wars series did.

That is basically what Imperator: Rome seems to aim at, a civilization builder

 

[holyvigil]

The main complaint of this thread and my main complaint is the stated goal of Hegemony.

Imo big countries already get way more benefits because they are big than small countries get. The GP benefit, most big countries are also lucky, they also more often than not have a deeper mission tree, trading in bonuses and more all are abitrary benefits for being big just because they are big.

Unlike all benefits a country gets for being small (which really are benefits for choosing to be small not benefits when you are forced to be small) they are tied to actual real effects based in the real world and attitudes of different countries. All these GP/Hegemony/age objective benefits are just arbitrary benefits with no cost or basis in real life.

 

[MateuszNH]

Hello, i spended over 1000 hours in multiplayer games. We can easily reach 500k infantry and 1k income before 1600. These huge military bonuses will totally broke game.
It's great you want change endgame but multiplayer has different reality than singleplayer. If u want add this please give us option to remove this like we can locked ledger before start campaign or make it harder to take in early game. Maybe 1500-2000 income 1000 infantry troops.
Thanks for your work, have a nice day

1000 infantry doesn't change anything, it's claimable with 500 forcelimit too, it's just bad concept.

 

[montajo]

I usually don't comment on dev diaries, but this one seems out of scope.

1. I think this mechanic will end MP campaigns earlier, instead of offering interesting lategame. If the gang fails, the round will be over and only one guy had fun.
2. For SP it's just a win more mechanic with no drawback. Realistically in SP, a player doesn't lose a war.

So I hope this mechanic will not be implemented at all. After all the devs and especially Johan said: "We are going to actively listen to the community."

 

[PrimeYuri]

So the biggest problems is that it doesn't do what it supposed to do which I believe Johan tried to explain as: be a country everyone else wants to gang up on in late game when you grow big.

My suggestions:
-Have the hegemony have the same status as rival to all other great powers automatically.
-Disable allies
-Disable AE reduction over time

bonus
-decrease warscore cost
-decrease extra the cost to vassalize the enemy
-increase amount of diplo relations (for more vassals and client states)

 

[mkmc]

I like the idea for this mechanic and I see how this can make late MP games more interesting, i.e. "flex muscles to gain more power projection, score, etc – but risk being dogpiled". The requirements and modifiers need tweaking for sure. Maybe enable coalitions against hegemons, e.g. for neighboring nations or some other criteria?