Europa Universalis IV - Development Diary 25th of January 2022

[please add multithreading]

Nice. Will we also cover cavalry being dead weight once units are out of its flanking range one day?

 

[Gnivom]

About the artillery retreating from back row:
- (EDIT: this is only true for strength, not morale) Note that artillery would previously stop firing after reaching 0 morale, so it would just stand there.
- Previously the main reason for having artillery was to make sure your inf and cav didn't go into the backrow. Now they won't do that anyway, so the main reason is the firepower they bring
- If it turns out people burn through artillery too fast now, we could introduce a define that lowers the damage to backrow

 

[Gnivom]

Can you elaborate? I assume you mean that artillery will retreat due to reaching 0 morale?

Exactly. Because artillery can now retreat, you will want to have reserve artillery as well, if you're fighting a long battle.

 

[Vin55]

Pls nerf force limit and manpower gain through colonial nations plus their own force limit (would also help the game if mexico did not have over 200k in late game).

 

[Gnivom]

Lots of Great AI improvements... can't wait until to try it out and observe the AI!

I have a question though.

In the patch notes you mention chinese AI focusing to conquer nanjing, beijing etc.
As far as I know, the implementation of those penalties is based around triggered modifiers that penalize the mandate holder if they don't control those provinces. Does that mean the AI takes the triggered modifiers into account or perhaps it is a a hardcoded feature (would be unfortunate for mods that change the target provinces)?

Great question!
I added ai_weight to all triggered_modifiers. In script it looks like this:

Spoiler: script

ai_wants_chinese_capitals = {
potential = {
ai = yes
OR = {
owns = 1816
owns = 1821
owns = 667
}
has_dlc = "Mandate of Heaven"
capital_scope = {
superregion = china_superregion
}
}
trigger = {
owns = 1816
owns = 1821
owns = 667
}

ai_weight = {
factor = 100 # Makes AI try to conquer the cities
}
}

lost_control_of_beijing = {
potential = {
has_reform = celestial_empire
has_dlc = "Mandate of Heaven"
}

trigger = {
OR = {
NOT = { owns = 1816 }
NOT = { controls = 1816 }
}
}

ai_weight = {
factor = -1000 # Do what you can to avoid this modifier
}

imperial_mandate = -0.05
}

 

[Parmelion]

With so many great changes coming in 1.33, would it be possible to open up the game a bit more for the modders? There is a lot of stuff that is either hardcoded or can be only changed globally, such as some religious mechanics which can't be replicated with new effects for a new religion, special units, just to name a few.

Would it be possible to change it in the future?

 

[Gnivom]

@Gnivom wht about perfomance and all that strategy to make the game similary to 1.30 perfomance?

We're still working on performance. Not quite happy with where we are atm, but will try to make it better before release.

 

[Gnivom]

Thank you very much for these wonderful changes. was the AI behaviour fixed when instead of fighting against you face to face and defending his lands, AI just simply taking his armies to Siberia or somewhere else but not fighting you?

Not really. If the AI doesn't think it stands a chance, it won't suicide attack, nor will it stand its ground if that means getting killed. I personally don't see this as an AI issue really, but more an issue with military access and (lack of) attrition.

 

[Pavía]

@Gnivom @Pavía I have a question that's not conected with this DD. Would you guys consider in the future to rework Qing missions and add more unique missions and eliminate generic ones?

We'd like to do some rework of Ming, Qing and Chinese overlords mission trees, yes, but we've got other priorities to focus first content-wise. After this patch is released, you'll see in which region we'll be working for the next DLC.

 

[Gnivom]

Has the AI learned to embark/disembark troops from transports when going to/from its own provinces yet instead of doing a laborious naval landing to them?

Yes. I believe that was done for 1.32. But anyway, now they do that most of the time (though sometimes they do an amphibious landing to an enemy province when they could just disembark the province next to it)

 

[Gnivom]

While the New AI changes look good, theres 2 questions I have.

1) When building forts, shouldn't the AI try to establish ZoC's along their borders, instead of spamming forts next to eachother like shown in the picture (saves money on maintenance)

2) Does the AI now consider when it should or shouldn't establish tributary states? (Eg: Emperor of China establishing tributaries out of the Chinese warlords instead of conquering them)

1) You're right. And the AI does think about spreading out forts. It also thinks about putting forts on the border, which it probably overestimates right now. But the picture of the PLC-Muscovite border is quite an extreme case of that, and it usually happens in the very late game when the AI can afford that many forts. Maybe it'll have to be tuned a bit.
2) This is something I want to spend more time on. But specifically for China, we've made some script changes that make the AI in practice conquer them more often instead.

 

[Pavía]

Have you noticed that unreasonableness?

I do not have possession of crownland but I can still sell it. Will AI able to exploit it as guileful humans?

Take a look at https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/sell-non-existent-crownland-bug.1504890/

Already fixed it.

 

[Bandua_of_Gallaecia]

Other areas where the AI sometimes didn't spend enough include colonists and missionaries. Colonial Nations and AIs with Colonialist personality in particular will spend a larger amount on colonization. One neat addition is that Colonial Nation subjects will now direct all received subsidies towards colonization, in addition to what they would otherwise have spent, unless they have loans. This lets their overlord (or anyone else ) make sure they put their colonists to work.

Does this mean colonization is going to be even faster now than it used to be?

Any chance to reduce settler growth increase from tech, or slow down colonization in some way?

Also, settler growth should be somewhat connected to the total development of your primary culture, since you colonize with people from the primary culture, and clearly a nation of 100k would never be able to colonize as fast as one of 10M.

 

[varunbelly456]

About the artillery retreating from back row:
- Note that artillery would previously stop firing after reaching 0 morale, so it would just stand there.
- Previously the main reason for having artillery was to make sure your inf and cav didn't go into the backrow. Now they won't do that anyway, so the main reason is the firepower they bring
- If it turns out people burn through artillery too fast now, we could introduce a define that lowers the damage to backrow

allright i did 20 minutes of testing just in response to this statement of
"Art stop firing at 0 morale"
and attaching below are the proofs for it
basis of test
ai disabled, combat die fixed to 5
took a random nation from one of my saves, no general and the test is done twice on the same battle against the same enemy army, no ideas and after doing the test with full morale cannons i reload and do same scenario except i now change cannon type twice (to ensure its the same cannon, but on low morale, 0.5 exactly)
things such as tech group, etc do not matter as it is the exact same army doing the battle against the exact same enemy only with cannon morale changing




as it can be seen whether cannon starts at almost full morale or almost 0 morale, the causalities are exactly the same, which suggests cannons do in fact do damage at 0 morale
This test is real easy to do by yourself so anyone can crosscheck by themselves as well


now i hope this piece of evidence sheds light and i beg you to reconsider the new art change or at least allow a define that lowers the damage to backrow

i really do like the other changes and i hope this one thing wont hold back an otherwise nice sounding patch
thank you and have a nice day

 

[Gnivom]

Hyped about these changes! Also please add an image to this dev log, any really, because otherwise it might fly under the radar for people randomly scrolling throughout the website.

Thank you! It's my first time posing a DD, and I'm having technical issues . We should get a feature for it too...

 

[Gnivom]

Also, I've been reading the comments about the combat changes.
First, I was misreading the code when I said that artillery doesn't fire when it's out of morale. I have updated my comment, sorry about the confusion that caused.

Although it's true that MP meta will change in unpredictable ways with these changes, I think there are significant advantages still. We will go through with the changes for the beta, but if people in general don't like playing with it, we could either tweak it further or revert it. The main tweak I'm thinking of is introducing a define that scales morale damage taken by backrow, and set it to something like 0.2-0.6, but we're open to more suggestions.

 

[Jarvin]

Exactly. Because artillery can now retreat, you will want to have reserve artillery as well, if you're fighting a long battle.

It sounds like this will make artillery functionally useless in battles beside
a) sieges and
b) some single stacks to snipe vulnerable enemy's stacks

I like the other changes, but unless there are some major other changes to the combat system, this one will have a very poor impact on the game in my opinion. I think you could consider rethinking it

 

[Dunderscore]

• An army of 2x combat width infantry is now superior to an army of 1x combat width infantry. Previously they were roughly equal.

Also I wish yall would stop freaking out about him posting this. Literally all hes saying is that because infantry/cav no longer deploy in the backrow, bringing more than your combat width of front line regiments will automatically, correctly, put them as reserves and fill them in the same as they would if you were timing your reinforcements.
This is no different than using a 80/0/40 stack in the late game, and will only change your gameplay prior to fielding a full backrow of artillery.

No one is saying doomstacking is king now, and the mechanics dont reflect that. Read the changes and dont just take the word of the dev who just learned how combat works yesterday from one guy that wrote an AI mod.

 

[John Stahlhelm]

- Previously the main reason for having artillery was to make sure your inf and cav didn't go into the backrow

lmao