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EU4 - Development Diary - 10th March 2016

Hello everyone, and welcome to another development diary for Europa Univeralis IV. Today, we focus on many of the core aspects of Mare Nostrum, our next expansion.

First, we have completely changed how naval missions work, introducing a unified system that includes settings for when your ships should return to port for repairs and how aggressive the fleets should be.

Naval Missions are selected from the new mission interface, and each mission targets either a sea/coastal region or a trade node. The old missions to Protect Trade, privateer, Hunt Pirates and Explore are available (depending on which expansions you currently own), just as before, but Mare Nostrum adds three new naval missions.
  • Hunt Enemy Fleets - Your ships will automatically try to hunt down weaker enemy fleets in the region to sink them.
  • Blockade Enemy Ports - This divides your fleet, and attempts to blockade as many ports as possible in the region.
  • Intercept Transports - Your ships will protect coastlines in region and prioritize attacks on any transport fleet.
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The Detach Damaged feature for Ships has gotten a huge boost in Mare Nostrum. Now, ships that are detached from a fleet will a automatically rejoin their original fleet when they have been repaired.

In 1.16, naval leaders will also get siege pips. Each of those pips will increase blockade efficiency by 10%. If you have Mare Nostrum, you’ll now also able to reassign naval leaders while fleets are at sea, as long as they are within supply range.

Some people have complained about how blockades are not really visible. Now there is also a thick red line on the coastlines where you are blockaded, and a purple one is shown where you blockade.
cLuCFtl.jpg


Naval Combat has gotten a complete overhaul as well. First of all, we removed the positioning mechanic, as it was not terribly useful, and players couldn’t really affect it anyway.

Now, there is a restriction in how many ships can fire at a single time in a naval combat. 20 ships is the baseline, 10% more ships can fire in coastline, and there is a variation of 10% more or less based on the differences between the maneuver ability of each fleet’s commander..

Also, Morale Damage is inflicted on all ships still floating whenever a ship is sunk, with up to 2% damage.

A ship being sunk has a chance of being captured instead of sunk, which depends on the enemy commanders maneuver value. If a fleet retreats, all its captured ships are immediately scuttled.

Stay tuned, because next week, we’ll tell you all about condottieri !
 
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I really like the new blockade enemy ports mission. It was always somewhat tedious to manually split navies to blockade several ports in the most efficient way, but no more!

Wonderful job as always! :^)
 
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Interesting new additions!
 
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Can we please get a checkmark option for "dont capture enemy ships ever" ? My OCD triggers every time I have 100 heavies and 1 captured transport in a fleet.
 
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Given that it sounds like admirals are going to be far more important than previously is there going to be any increase/way of increasing the number of military leaders available?

Possibly including a separation of naval and land military commanders?
 
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This is great stuff =)
I love playing around with fleets and the changes you're going to implement will make it pretty sweet!
 
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How does one cancel or change the blockade mission? By selecting all the blockading fleets and gathering them up somewhere or is it possible, for example, to just change mission of the original fleet and have all the the little fleets that split from it to automatically gather up?

EDIT: Also, is it still possible to manually order fleets around?
 
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Sound like it makes fleets a lot more autonomous in a fun way.
Color coding blockades looks cool but I worry that it'll be lost wasted on red/purple nations
 
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In 1.16, naval leaders will also get siege pips. Each of those pips will increase blockade efficiency by 10%.

For a second, I was overcome with joy, thinking fleets were able to siege...

Sadly no, and this option does not seem very useful. When I'm blockading, I don't have a leader for each small fleet and I let my admiral in the main stack who is big enough to blockade at 100% by itself.
 
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Naval Blockade Icon can be confused with land battle. I think It needs a different Icon. To be different, Naval themed.
Crossed swords are a naval land battle symbol. Naval blockade is shown by an extra red border on the seashore. It's hardly noticable at all, but technically it can hardly be confused with anything.

Edit: typo
 
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Do siege pips for admirals only effect blockades or do they actually help out during sieges?(not counting the old boost from blockading.)

and will admirals finally be separated from generals into their own pool in the diplo category? As long as they are in the same pool as generals, generals are almost always the better option.




and imo, having the ability to assign admirals at sea is... an odd feature for a dlc.
 
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so you are saying that crossed swords are not for incoming land battle?
That's exactly what that icon means. But it has nothing to do with the blockade like your original post implies.

Edit: I accidentaly a typo. Of course I meant to say crossed swords are for the land battle and naval blockade is shown by red border. I meant to correct you on technicality and made a mistake of my own.
 
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Are there any plans to change the "exploration feature" which was added in El Dorado? (iirc). Because it is boring and 100% ahistorical to see ALL the land and sea regions in the world discovered by 1550. With the old system, you had at least to wait until 1600/1650, which, even if not accurate, was better. I think exploration voyages should cost a good amoutn of money. That way players wont simply click, click and clikc unitl everything they can discover thanks to their trade range is discovered.
 
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Given that it sounds like admirals are going to be far more important than previously is there going to be any increase/way of increasing the number of military leaders available?

Possibly including a separation of naval and land military commanders?

I think having a sufficient amount of coastal provinces (or perhaps coastal development rather, since for example Italian states don't hold much territory but many of them were still important naval powers in the mediterranean) could give you an extra leader.

Or the mentioned split of naval and land leaders.
 
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Have you given any thought to abstracting fleet management even more? For instance by merging sea zones to trade node-size and creating an interception mechanic. This could also free up the UI heavily because you would only have to have like three buttons to toggle: pirate, offensive and defensive and the rest could be fixed by direct interaction with the map instead of the UI. If you also got rid of the ridiculous notion of having dedicated troop transports (WW2 called and would like their ships back! :p) I really think the naval game would be more tactical, less fiddly and much easier on the AI.

/Just my 2 cents
 
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In 1.16, naval leaders will also get siege pips. Each of those pips will increase blockade efficiency by 10%.
Why the nerf? Now some of the pips one could get from high tradition will go to a useless stat and I bet that there is an idea that increases it in the Naval or Maritime group.
 
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