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Hello and welcome back to another EU4 dev diary! Today, as promised, we’re going to be talking about our design process.


Originally, Johan was the sole designer on EU4, taking design input from team members but ultimately making the design decisions himself. Those of you who have been paying attention during the last year may have noticed both that EU4 has gotten more popular, and that the design process has changed somewhat since the start of Res Publica, being more of a divided responsibility between Johan and Martin (Wiz).

Johan has had a funny role in the project as he is technically not part of the team, but has been working as lead designer, writing a majority of the design for the expansions, and have also programmed a fair bit on the project. So far, 17,5 years of EU development, and he won’t let it go just yet.

While Johan still makes the big decisions, Martin handles the day-to-day design decisions such as feature implementation, numbers tweaking and handling the input from the team. The rest of the team currently includes 3 experienced programmers and 1 scripter, and a QA team of 4 QA that give great input on the design. We also get a great deal of design input from our beta testers, several of which have experience going back all the way to EU3 and earlier. We also have an internal email group where we get feedback from the various people at the office that play the game religiously.

Though we accept a great deal of input from the team, from beta testers and from the community, EU4 design is not by committee. There is a clear hierarchy, with Johan at the top having final say. Nonetheless, there is a great deal of trust and flexibility in the team, with Johan trusting that Martin will follow the spirit of his design vision, and Martin in turn trusting developers to do the same. More often than not, if a developer raises concerns with a design while they are working on it, that design will then change, as it is impossible to consider all problems and angles when you’re writing a design document. A number of features have radically changed during development because a developer said ‘This won’t work’ or QA said ‘This isn’t fun’, and entire features have simply been cut when they didn’t work out quite as planned.

Design is mostly written in two-man meetings between Martin & Johan, where we tend to throw all sorts of ideas around to see what sticks. Of the two, Johan tends to be the visionary who comes up with the sweeping ideas, while Martin does the majority of the work refining said ideas into the final design that ends up in the game. These meetings tend to spawn a lot of ideas for future expansions, and we also use them as a means of solving balance problems in the game (‘let’s sit down for 10 minutes and figure out how to fix the economy’). Even when we don’t achieve everything we want during the meeting, it usually sets the gears in motion, and if we notice we’re not getting anywhere we’ll just stop the meeting… and usually, 15 minutes later, one of us runs over to the other with the solution to the problem.

We try to set a concept or setting for each expansion a long time in advance, and then design features from that concept. Common Sense, for example, was nicknamed the “religion & government” expansion, while Art of War obviously was a “war expansion”. At present, we have such outlines for a further 5 expansions, and no shortage of ideas even beyond that.

We keep a document of how the features for an update (expansion+free patch) should work, and we keep this up to date during the development, as we focus on having short and clear design documents. These documents are sometimes made years in advance, as we add ideas and features we come up with in our creative meetings.

Finally, and this is where we think a lot of game designers go wrong, we actually play our own game. Both Johan and Martin play EU4 in their free time, with thousands of hours of playtime between them, and QA plays even more, with Jake (DDRJake) and Carsten (ForzaA) currently having a bit of a race to 100% achievement completion (which ForzaA is currently winning).

As to where we get our ideas, there is no single answer, so to top this dev diary off, here’s a few examples of features in the game and how they evolved. Hopefully it will give you an idea of how we get from idea to implementation.

Fortresses and Zone of Control - This started as a post in the beta forum, with the usual complaints about carpet sieging, and how forts should be more important. At the same time there was a thread in the public forum about how good the March of the Eagles combat with forts were, which basically had forts. From there, Johan wrote the design. Though a lot of details had to be tweaked (garrison sizes, ZoC functionality, etc) the design originally envisioned was pretty much the same as what eventually got released in 1.12.

Government Ranks - This idea originally came out of an EU3 mod, and is something Martin has been wanting in the game for a long time. When Common Sense was being designed, we needed a few more features (we have a ‘value’ breakdown for each expansion to ensure that the number of features in the expansion match the price point), and Martin threw together a quick pitch that was added to the design.

Development - This was something we debated on quite a lot, as Johan came up with it as a way to let players build tall, but Martin had problems with combining the development system with the old buildings system (as you’d then have two competing ways to develop with monarch points) , and suggested a completely different development design whereby you’d develop building slots instead of bt/production/manpower. After a lot of discussions, Johan combined the two into a final design that tied building slots to development, ending up with a design that (in our view) was better than either of the original proposals alone.

Nation Designer - This is an idea that a number of people have proposed since the release of the CK2 character designer, but the actual outline for the design was spawned late one tuesday night at a Gyros place, when Martin and Henrik (Groogy) from CK2 were getting some post Tuesday beers food before going home. Martin suddenly had the idea of a nation designer where you created your borders by clicking on the map. From there, he bounced a number of ideas off Henrik, and sat down the next morning to write a design that was later accepted by Johan. The actual implementation then fell to Rickard (r_lazer), the senior programmer on the team, who spent more than a month on it in continuous discussion with both Martin and Johan.

1.8 Map Expansion - The massive map expansion for the 1.8 patch accompanying Art of War came about when Johan came out from his office and said ‘I want 1000 new provinces in the rest of the world’. This was partly due to the experience of playing competitive multiplayer as Ming, and finding the experience there more dull when it came to actually fighting wars compared to the maneuvers in Europe. From there, it was a massive project involving Johan, Martin, Henrik (Trin Tragula) and at least a dozen betas. Martin was originally a bit skeptic to the idea of adding so many provinces, but Johan did the optimization work needed to make it work, and Henrik (who was hired mid development) played a crucial role directing the work of the betas, who did most of the heavy lifting on the actual map.

So! That was a lot of words about making EU4 design. I hope it’s been enlightening as to how we work, and if you have further questions, don’t hesitate to ask in the dev diary forums thread.

(If anyone is wondering about the third person perspective, it's because me and Johan co-wrote the post)
 
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This is what I love about your design of EU4. I see so many suggestions people make about making the game more historically accurate, and most of them would make the game unbelievably complicated and not fun at all. It's good to know that you and your team have a firm grasp on what matters when making a game: for it to be fun.
There are plenty of simple 4x games out there like civ and the total war series. I like the complex stuff it's what makes paradox games diffrent.
 
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Damn - I think same about 2 yerars ago, but I change my mind. EU4 much deeper than CK2 and lot & lot harder. A lot of work with
thousands events, and community create this events too. After 200 hours played in CK2 you will see ALL events and mechanics. In EU4 you will find new experience in every country.

CK2 is great game - but you can control everything, and you can not lose if you know how to play...
True ck2 need more... chaos. Problem is the game doesn't handle very well under pressure, as soon as you're not controlling everything it becomes so unpredictable that it's nearly unplayable.

Eu4 is much more stable in how the game works which means that it can be more fluid with what the players encounter. That said EU4 is on it's fourth game while CK2 only on it's second. I think that ck2 dynastic mechanics may one day be the flagship of paradox.
 
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There are plenty of dumb simple 4x games out there like civ and the total war series. I like the complex stuff it's what makes paradox games diffrent.
There is room for games more complex than Civ and TW but less complex than Vickyropa Kingversalis 742.
 
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There are plenty of dumb simple 4x games out there like civ and the total war series. I like the complex stuff it's what makes paradox games diffrent.
No, what makes Paradox games different and great is that the complex stuff actually leads to good gameplay which is very much the exception.

Back when I first stumbled on HoI series a decade ago I was astounded to see a game with that many options and things to deal with actually being playable much less good. Sadly HoI3 while a vast improvement in a lot of things didn't do it (for me) as well as HoI2 did. So I ended up moving to EU(and later CK too) which I found simpler -though still way more complex than most games- but as great as.
 
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No, what makes Paradox games different and great is that the complex stuff actually leads to good gameplay which is very much the exception.

Back when I first stumbled on HoI series a decade ago I was astounded to see a game with that many options and things to deal with actually being playable much less good. Sadly HoI3 while a vast improvement in a lot of things didn't do it (for me) as well as HoI2 did. So I ended up moving to EU(and later CK too) which I found simpler -though still way more complex than most games- but as great as.
Myself i found some of the great complexity of victoria missing from ck2 and eu4 and hope they're getting there.
 
There is room for games more complex than Civ and TW but less complex than Vickyropa Kingversalis 742.
Perhaps but some of us want to play Vickyropa Kingversalis 742. And paradox seems the likliest to be able to pull that off.
 
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Let me guess ... your civ experience never got above Monarch level? much less into Multiplayer?
Done both, still simple, sure difficult but difficult and simple are not opposites. Warcraft 3 is a difficult game to play in multiplayer it's not a complex game. A game can have deep strategies and all that but it doesn't mean it's complex as a game. Chess is a simple game, (most ten year old know the rules) still it takes skill to play. Easy to learn hard to master, so to speak. But paradox gaems aren't easy to learn hard to master they're hard to learn. And like I said there are very few 4x games like that.

Also pretty sure there is no monarch level in civ5. Think you mean king level?
 
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Meh... Anytime someone equates "different" with "dumb" or "simple," they're simply trying to be provocative, maybe "edgy." It's really not worth discussion.
Nothing wrong with simple, tetris is simple and it's one of the most sold games of all times. The point is that that market nieche is already occupied. More realistic and complex history simmulators however are much further between.

Granted I don't like simple, (which is probably why I used the word dumb, which in hindsight probably wasn't fair) I never could stand tetris and wasnt to fond of the multiplayer enviroment of warcraft/starcraft or the civ5 or chess for that matter (excellent example of a simple game with deep strategy). I never got the whole play to win mentality, when playing single player civ5 games I usually drag them out forever becuase once I win the beautiful world I have created is gone.
 
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Nothing wrong with simple, tetris is simple and it's one of the most sold games of all times. The point is that that market nieche is already occupied. More realistic and complex history simmulators however are much further between.

Granted I don't like simple, (which is probably why I used the word dumb, which in hindsight probably wasn't fair) I never could stand tetris and wasnt to fond of the multiplayer enviroment of warcraft/starcraft or the civ5 or chess for that matter (excellent example of a simple game with deep strategy). I never got the whole play to win mentality, when playing single player civ5 games I usually drag them out forever becuase once I win the beautiful world I have created is gone.
Wait wait wait, people buy Tetris? But it's free in so many places...
 
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Wait wait wait, people buy Tetris? But it's free in so many places...
People bought tetris. ;) That's why it became famous and is now available for free.
 
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Reading you refer to yourself in the third-person unnecessarily freaked me out a bit, but this was nonetheless informative. Thanks!
 
Cheers for the DD and the insight :). It sounds like a great way to do things, and it deffo sounds like it's a good idea to keep that culture for as long as you can. So many businesses don't understand the importance of culture, when culture (the way people relate to each other, and work with each other) is, in many cases, the single most important element to a functioning organisation. May PDS continue for many decades to come making many more great strategy titles (and, if we're lucky and you want to, have another crack at Runemaster or something similar someday :)).

I can say with a 99% certainty that they will focus on adding features to the game.

lolololol, it's posts like this that make me want this forum to have a 'lol' button :).
 
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No ... i mean Civ IV ... i happily forgot that Civ5 exists as it IMO never managed to evolve beyond 'trainwreck'
Who's being elitist now? :p
 
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