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Europa Universalis IV - Development Diary 20th of December 2022 - Unit Pips Rebalance

Hello and welcome to another EUIV DD!

Today we will be talking about the rebalance of the Unit Pips we're working on for the upcoming 1.35 update. This task has been led by our QA Team, which was reinforced throughout the year, and that has been key to the release of Lions of the North, as the new members that have joined the Team credit over 5,000 hours of gameplay on EUIV. But apart from testing the game, they are also involved in the game design process, a classic at Paradox, which usually relies on close cooperation between the different teams. Therefore, this is the proposal we'll be testing in the following weeks, taking also into account the feedback we receive in this DD, of course!



Hello everyone, I'm @Pintu , one of the Embedded QA’s working at Tinto.

I want to show you the rework we are doing on the Unit Pips of the different Techgroups, one of the Systems that saw very few changes since the Release of EU4. As we implemented changes to the Combat calculations in the 1.34 update, we think now it’s a good moment to address this rebalance.

First I want to quickly outline what the Unit Pips do in what parts of combat they matter, for those not as experienced in the game. In each combat phase, Strength Damage is dealt depending on the Offensive Damage Pips of the Units, while Morale Damage is dealt based on Offensive Damage and Offensive Morale Pips. Defending works the same way with the Defensive Pips of the Unit, but half of the Defensive Pips (rounded down) of the Backrow Units is added on top of that. That means that over the course of the game, the priority of pips shifts from having a strong Shock Phase to a strong Fire Phase with a focus on defensive Pips, especially for Infantry.

With this rebalance of Unit Pips we mainly want to focus on Infantry Units that are clear strong or weak outliers on their Tech level and the introduction of more choices in Artillery Units beyond the first Technologies when they become available. As always, these are by no means final numbers and will be under close observation during our Testing, apart from the feedback we are receiving in this DD, so there are good chances these will change until the release of the patch.

One of the swiftly explained changes is that related to Aboriginal and Polynesian Units: both got their total amount of pips reduced, to be in line with the American and African Unit Groups. These changes make them preserve some of their strengths, while not being an outlier over other units.

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Now onwards to a change that influences other groups as well, which means they have to get adjusted together. The Anatolian group has a very big advantage with their early Units with their Offensive Moral Damage. We decided to tune that down a little in their Unit Options on technologies 5 and 9. Unfortunately, this affects Muslim Unit groups, which should not have an advantage over Anatolians at that point, which in turn affects Indian Units. That's why we had to tune them down as well.

The Anatolian Group will keep one of their big Spikes in Pips on Tech 12, which will let them be a threat to the groups around them. This is also partly because their Unit will stay around until Tech 18, significantly later than other groups get new units.

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Speaking of the Muslims, let's take a look at the changes the group got independently from other groups. The Muslim Unit on Tech 23 suffered from both very poor Offensive and Defensive Fire Pips. They do have great Morale and Shock Pips to make up for it, but with the importance of Fire Phase in the later stages of the game, we decided to help them out a little by buffing their defensive Fire on the cost of their defensive Shock.

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The Chinese Group has one outlier in their Unit selection, which is situated on Tech 19, with both 3 offensive and 3 defensive Fire Pips, in addition to 3 Offensive Morale. The one drawback with that Unit is that its successor becomes available only on Tech 25, later than most other groups. Since they have an edge with that against most of their neighboring groups, the solution for this is that they lose one offensive Morale.

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On the same Techlevel, the Nomadic Group has a very solid, while not great, Infantry Unit, that would do with a small Nerf to fit their theme of military decline more.

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The African Groups (this includes Central, East, and West African), got a small reshuffle of Pips, to make their Last Unit on Tech 30 an actual upgrade over the previous version.

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Last but not least a small change to the High American Group, where their Unit from Tech 18 gets a small bump in Pips. Before this Unit had the same amount of total Pips as the previous unit level.

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Let's now move on to the Changes to Artillery. These mainly focus on the Introduction of one new Alternative per Unit, which focuses more on a defensive style, where Artillery is used to push half of their defensive Pips towards the frontline while sacrificing their damage output with lower Offensive Fire and Morale Pips. There will also be a small Adjustment on Tech 13, with making one of the Options a defensive one.

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You may notice that for the new types of Artillery we've just named them the 'Defensive' version of each level. This is not definitive, as it's mainly a placeholder; so, we will accept suggestions for naming each of the unit types.

And this will conclude the Dev Diary for this week and this year. Just like the Idea Group rebalance of last week, we are very eager to read your feedback and suggestions on this topic to improve it as much as possible.

See you at the next DD, on January 10th!
 

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in many prdx games is the problem wrong, unrealistic terrain modifiers, something for them to look into when developling a hoi5 and eu5 than there is much work to develop a proper defend and attack sequence on such provinces like eg. mountain or alps
-3 on mountain should be the minimum. Even in Victoria 2 where rifles dominate mountain is a -3 modifier and heavy width reduction. In the age of melee weapon attacking mountain should be absolute cancer to deal with.
 
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-3 on mountain should be the minimum. Even in Victoria 2 where rifles dominate mountain is a -3 modifier and heavy width reduction. In the age of melee weapon attacking mountain should be absolute cancer to deal with.

Agree. Just sharing my view on where a possible bottleneck is in this game design: a tiny force versus a large force in this kind of situation should not expect to hold out on long when being sieged or defending.
But.. a small well equipped to medium size force can wreck havoc on a larger foe. This is what calculation doesn't take in account as such in next game design i hope to find a force denominator, like with vic3 you are small nation medium etc etc. This way new calculations can be added.

I sincerely hope the community is not looking for blunt stack vs stack but more intelligent forms of battles with realistic (sincere try accepted) population numbers where the losses are from substracted.

Happy new year.
 
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Deserts aren't actually all that helpful, especially with them removing the "at home" mechanic for nations whose capital is in an arid/tropical area. You suffer nearly as much as the defender in desert provinces as the attacker and get no benefit from it for combat.
you get bonus defending on mountains, which is quite something
 
Morocco is also in a similar situation, with mountains in their area. But the AI seems to not bother on trying to defend it or even build ramparts, resulting in them being annexed by either Portugal or Spain most of the time. Maybe let the AI build some ramparts (but this might result in a slower gameplay) or improve their army stacking capabilities.

Also if morale is the issue, I could argue in giving the Muslims (or only the North African nations) high offensive morale pips to counter the high morale from their Catholic neighbors.
the pips wont do much, the morale dmg from european high morale armies will win anyway. when an european has 2 more morale points, there isnt any amount of troops that you can bring as ottomans to beat that, your artillery retreats super fast because of this and barely does anything even reinforcing, even more so since now it is 2 a day, when you finish reinforcing the full line, your artillery already started retreating again
 
Combat witdh should change from terrain to terrain. In the mountains default combat witdh should be half of the normal but attacker gets another %10 penalty. Defensive ideas could further increase that penalty making it somewhat useful. Take Albania as an example. They were able to fight huge Ottoman armies using mountains as their bases or in the Battle of Agincourt French Army got annihilated because they were unable to use their numbers due to small pass battle took place in.
 
Combat witdh should change from terrain to terrain.
It used to, but that feature was deliberately removed for some reason that was never adequately explained. (I imagine AI complexity was involved.)

In the mountains default combat witdh should be half of the normal but attacker gets another %10 penalty.
I can see the logic, but I don't think it's a good idea.

(Agincourt's a poor example here, because the whole encounter reeks of blithering tactical incompetence, not operational incompetence, on the part of the French commander. That French force, on that day, on that site, could have won if they'd been better commanded.)
 
This is a bit late, but since we're rebalancing all the military stuff I think it's a good idea to ask this. Why doesn't Army Professionalism affect Army Tradition at all? It doesn't need to be too powerful, maybe just a little bit less army tradition decay (-1% maybe?) at max Professionalism; it's more that it just doesn't make sense logically. If you're drilling hundreds of thousands or even millions of troops for years and years, how can your Army Tradition decay at the same rate as a country that doesn't have any army at all? Just for flavor's sake, I'd like this little interaction added to the bonuses you get from high Professionalism
 
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Hi there! It looks like we're dealing in this DD with some controversial topics, not only related to the Unit Pips themselves. It's fine for us to discuss them, as we in PDX Tinto have been working on being more open to the community since Leviathan; but please stay civil and kind with the Team, as we also deserve respect for our work, and this is a red line not to cross when discussing issues.

And these are the kind of posts that are very, very close to the red line I mentioned. Do you want to drag our attention to the imbalances of the current MP meta? That's fair, and as I also said, we can discuss it. What it's not fair is stating this so aggressively. Our intention as devs is to drive the game in the right direction, and we're putting a lot of effort into it. We also play regular MP games, even if we don't broadcast Dev Clashes as before (mainly because of infrastructure issues attached to the setup of the new studio). And we run regression tests regularly, too, run by people with a lot of hours poured into the game. So, again, and I don't want to repeat this anymore, we deserve respect for our work.

A few years ago, there was a controversy when Paradox decided to jump into politics in regards to something in CK3. Debate on the subject nor even mentioning it was strictly verboten and led to very quick bans. I decided then and there I was done being a Paradox customer. Speaking of which... I wonder, are you even allowed to show support for a particular Swedish political party that is boosting Sweden's present government? Or, is that strictly verboten too?

Anyways, something happened after my vow to stop being a Paradox customer. CK3 was released, had great reviews, and I decided to give it a shot because I've always liked Paradox games. Water under the bridge, right? In addition, less than two weeks ago, I made a post asking about which DLCs I should pick up during the Steam Winter Sale. I hadn't bought a DLC since the referenced incident, yet had a recent urge to return to EUIV. I wound up buying two new DLC packs... plus Lions of the North, which I had already bought about a month ago. That's $40 worth of new content based on the sales price. Would I have bought any of it had I seen this post first? Probably not.

As a meteorologist, I am in a profession criticized more than almost any other. So, I understand the frustration when people question your work. But, I also have thick skin and realize people have a right to their opinions, even if they are very critical. I don't know how we got to a point in society where everyone must be liked by everyone else or it just ruins a person's entire day. Can't you just shrug it off and simply become more determined to make an even better product? I didn't even know about the new stack wiping logic, and if it's how it sounds, I can understand some being frustrated. I personally plan on fully exploiting this during my next single player game with no "regerts." Yet myself and everyone else in this thread are your customer base and you should remember that rather than throwing out overly sensitive red lines.
 
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I wonder, are you even allowed to show support for a particular Swedish political party that is boosting Sweden's present government?
Showing support for any Swedish political party is off-topic for Paradox's game-specific forums, because none of them are set in 2022 Sweden :)
 
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Showing support for any Swedish political party is off-topic for Paradox's game-specific forums, because none of them are set in 2022 Sweden :)
I was referring more to their off-topic forum where bashing a certain American politician was more than green lit and supporting a certain Swedish party was highly frowned upon, if not bannable. Though I certainly was not clear on that.
 
Hi there! It looks like we're dealing in this DD with some controversial topics, not only related to the Unit Pips themselves. It's fine for us to discuss them, as we in PDX Tinto have been working on being more open to the community since Leviathan; but please stay civil and kind with the Team, as we also deserve respect for our work, and this is a red line not to cross when discussing issues.

I also want to say to stress that we read and take into account all the comments, even if we don't reply to all, or if it takes some time for us, so be sure that we will be thinking about everything commented on the DD (being the main reason for showing these changes early in the development cycle!). This is also something for those of you that are not so noisy, but usually nice in your posts: again, we're reading you, and your posts are very helpful to us.





As Johan has already pointed out, what we want is not to outright nerf the Ottomans, but to try to better balance them. It's a difficult task, as they're a very central country in the game, and we've got to cover a bunch of different scenarios (SP, MP, AI...), so take this is a first step, not a final one.



And these are the kind of posts that are very, very close to the red line I mentioned. Do you want to drag our attention to the imbalances of the current MP meta? That's fair, and as I also said, we can discuss it. What it's not fair is stating this so aggressively. Our intention as devs is to drive the game in the right direction, and we're putting a lot of effort into it. We also play regular MP games, even if we don't broadcast Dev Clashes as before (mainly because of infrastructure issues attached to the setup of the new studio). And we run regression tests regularly, too, run by people with a lot of hours poured into the game. So, again, and I don't want to repeat this anymore, we deserve respect for our work.

That said, going into the topic, we may want to make some tweaks to the new combat system. In this case, the more detailed feedback and proposals you give to us, the better for everybody, as it would be easier for us to adjust the changes. It looks like one of those could be precisely to change again the stackwiping rules, to numbers more fitting gameplay not based on doomstacking. Any other suggestions that you may think would help with this?

Regarding game performance, this is something we've been working on in the last few months. We already improved it in 1.34, but it's true that we have a lot of lag and spikes in the late game, which is also the hardest to tackle; we'll try to do our best on this, although we can't promise anything, as this is a very complex issue.

And this is an example of a well-driven criticism, so thanks for it. We're going to think about this, as we're aiming for a general rebalance, not regional, with these changes, so we will take what you are saying into account in the further tests and rebalance we'll be doing.


Yes, each of our Embedded QAs has more than 5,000 hours at the game individually, and there are other members of the Team with those figures as well.
Agree a lot with @WunderPuma being a player of mainly outside europe countries, i know was absurd at the beggining it was europa universalis, and there was no content for other regions but you made a huge work making them fun to play and i loved it. most of my 3600h have been spent playing mali, ethiopia, korea, majapahit, ayuthaya, inca, Maya etc ps (aztecs, mayans and incans need content and something like the more inner centered like korean mission trees as u depend a lot on europeans to do something can be boring so playing needs to make governing fun and maybe make colonies more challenging for inca or maya).
Anyway as i was saying i loved the content but always thought it was unfair, what historically happened was that europe advanced more tecnologicaly in terms of military so no matter how i managed to do it also i would still be weaker and feels quite unfair. also makes playing in other places that are already a challenge because of institutions so people would play less in there also because of pips no matter if u overcame the challenges u would still be weak. and about institutions which are not a good way to represent tecnological progression, because i mean what does have the reinasance of clasical greek and roman culture has to do with anything in beijing, ayuthaya, or delhi. i would try something there but dont really know what to do to make it feel more historical and to make it have sense.

another thing about outside europe, i would forbid to any kind of native to increase developement in any way possible. that would solve natives in america having more developement than hamburg or toledo or any european big city by a nomadic tribe which makes colonising quite boring to my likings at least. and allow them to devlope after they have embraced institutions, so with no dev they wouldnt be able to spam institutions, so its a win win. this could be aplied also to the southeners meso americans and andines but i would rather not do it as they were urban civilizations and were actually developing, not wandering tribes (not to dissrespect wandering tribes, in case of a wandering tribesman reading). hope u read it like it and take it into consideration specially this last bit would be gamechanging for good.
 
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Agree a lot with @WunderPuma being a player of mainly outside europe countries, i know was absurd at the beggining it was europa universalis, and there was no content for other regions but you made a huge work making them fun to play and i loved it. most of my 3600h have been spent playing mali, ethiopia, korea, majapahit, ayuthaya, inca, Maya etc ps (aztecs, mayans and incans need content and something like the more inner centered like korean mission trees as u depend a lot on europeans to do something can be boring so playing needs to make governing fun and maybe make colonies more challenging for inca or maya).
Anyway as i was saying i loved the content but always thought it was unfair, what historically happened was that europe advanced more tecnologicaly in terms of military so no matter how i managed to do it also i would still be weaker and feels quite unfair. also makes playing in other places that are already a challenge because of institutions so people would play less in there also because of pips no matter if u overcame the challenges u would still be weak. and about institutions which are not a good way to represent tecnological progression, because i mean what does have the reinasance of clasical greek and roman culture has to do with anything in beijing, ayuthaya, or delhi. i would try something there but dont really know what to do to make it feel more historical and to make it have sense.

another thing about outside europe, i would forbid to any kind of native to increase developement in any way possible. that would solve natives in america having more developement than hamburg or toledo or any european big city by a nomadic tribe which makes colonising quite boring to my likings at least. and allow them to devlope after they have embraced institutions, so with no dev they wouldnt be able to spam institutions, so its a win win. this could be aplied also to the southeners meso americans and andines but i would rather not do it as they were urban civilizations and were actually developing, not wandering tribes (not to dissrespect wandering tribes, in case of a wandering tribesman reading). hope u read it like it and take it into consideration specially this last bit would be gamechanging for good.
actually ive just thought about a new sistem with the institutions with some friends that would actually make a lot of sense what if, what if, what if the institutions instead of being a nerf, were a buff. it would still be the same yess, but u keep the same overtime cost changes and advanced years cost so still wouldnt be logical to pay for a tech 3-4 years ahead but here is the thing having europeans institutions afect only some technologies like they do nowdays, and only to european countries? so if u dont have it u pay the basic cost, but if u have embraced it u pay less, u would make a more advanced europe, but wouldnt penalise the player by being far away. so it would allow for more sandbox a more alternative history where a malian empire rebborn wouldnt be lagging behind if having good advisors and some good monarchs. but still would be much easier to be up to date in technology if u were in europe. and would make it only for europe so if u are playing as ming only global trade would afect you but not reinassance or printing press (as u already invented it quite some years ago) so i would take out at least reinassance, printing press and enlightment for the rest of the world and just make them an european buff and would think about colonization and feudalism.
 
It used to, but that feature was deliberately removed for some reason that was never adequately explained. (I imagine AI complexity was involved.)


I can see the logic, but I don't think it's a good idea.

(Agincourt's a poor example here, because the whole encounter reeks of blithering tactical incompetence, not operational incompetence, on the part of the French commander. That French force, on that day, on that site, could have won if they'd been better commanded.)
as far as I see it reducing combat width would result in longer battles and allowing to retreat 0morale stacks to reinforce them while battle progresses. plus it makes you adapt to the terrain you are going to attack which seems a bit imposible since you may fight on mountains and in 5 months on woods, etc
 
Hello there everybody! Quick update: today there won't be a new Dev Diary, we will come back to them next Tuesday, January 17th.

I'll come back later today or maybe tomorrow to this DD, and reply to the comments, as this is something pending for a few weeks.

For those curious, the reason for these delays is basically the Christmas break, and now the catch-up phase after it; we decided to be extra sure about the quality of the new content to present before starting the new DD cycle (which will last a few months).
 
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Hello there everybody! Quick update: today there won't be a new Dev Diary, we will come back to them next Tuesday, January 20th.

I'll come back later today or maybe tomorrow to this DD, and reply to the comments, as this is something pending for a few weeks.

For those curious, the reason for these delays is basically the Christmas break, and now the catch-up phase after it; we decided to be extra sure about the quality of the new content to present before starting the new DD cycle (which will last a few months).
Love that you guys are being are open and transparent about this process and communicating with the fans about DD cycle. Little things like this go a long way in building (or rebuilding) trust between the fans and devs.
 
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