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EU4 - Development Diary - 22nd of November 2016

Good day all. Over the weekend, the team and indeed, the entire company was away conquering Malta. Great times were had and I'm sure there will be many pictures and tales of the occasion making the rounds but now Tuesday is upon us and I want to talk about feedback on our updates.

While we have our in-house QA team and a closed group of Betas who provide valuable feedback, sometimes we want to get a wider playerbase to try out our game builds by way of an Open Beta. A prime reason for this is to try out a large core change to the game where we want to get a lot of feedback from the community. In this case, we wanted to get feedback on a new area-based fort system.

For reference, we are fairly happy with how the 1.18 fort system works. It blocks movement, forces some sieges without requiring carpet sieging and, especially with the terrain bonuses, adds a good amount of strategic mid-long term planning for your nation. However there were some undeniable issues with the system in lack of clarity and overlapping Zones of Control. We wanted to try a new system out and hear what you had to think

It didn't take long for the feedback to mount up. The new system was unclear, forts blocked nothing on their own, small and mid sized nations struggled to offer much movement blocking, Military access rules became messy. The following week we decided as a team to revert to the 1.18 fort system.

Of course, there were some who liked and even loved the beta version's area-based fort system, and reverting was a disappointment to them. You're never going to make everyone happy, no matter what you change but I would like to thank everyone who played and continues to play with the 1.19 beta, as your contributions help make it a better update.

Of course, forts were not the only things on the cards for 1.19. There were plenty of changes to the Scandinavian experience, map changes and such which were well received. Nothing warmed my cockles quite like seeing screenshots on various platforms of beautiful resurgent Golden Hordes though!

Soon™ 1.19 will be out of beta and released for all to play, with additional fixes for bugs found during the beta period. This is another great part of the Open Beta process. Your bug reports have been appreciated, as well as the crash reports that get sent in, leading to dozens of additional bugfixes for 1.19, including the particularly nasty subject integration bug.

Since we've shown off most of 1.19 and we've been talking about forts anyway, how about seeing the Paradox Fort in Malta, complete with Garrison:

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Inside which the army draws up plans to occupy the rest of the island

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See you again next week where we will talk about how we see EU4 moving forward and our goals for what we want to do with the game.

If that's simply too long for you, be sure to tune in for the EU4 Developer Multiplayer, where the world shall be lit in flames at 1500 CET www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive
 
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Well, you should select your allies better! :p


Not really - it depends how many provinces an "Area" has. Many of those currently there have only 3-4 provinces, anyhow. If you're pretty "gamey" and place a fort where you own one province of an area and your rival/enemy owns all the rest, you might get fairly extensive access (unreasonably extensive, I would say, but that's just one among many of the "oddities" of the Area system).
Oddity? Gamey? Building a forward base of operations in preparation for a coming conflict? I wouldn't call that gamey I would call that strategy.
Yeah some small area will still be screwed but even the most extreme cases will not be as bad as the two provinces you can as worst with the adjacency system.
 
They get those, depending on the terrain. If you add Another defensive bonus, then attacking would be almost fruitless.

Does make me think of something: river crossing and strait crossing should not be transferred to the hostile sieging army. I have no words to describe the weird moment when you siege a fort on your continent, and suddenly someone comes out of the strait to attack you, and You would get the strait penalty, even if you have never crossed the strait. My friend had this in a recent mp game.
No I meant like they will loose terrain modifiers but get a slightly better defensive buff (cause they are in a fort)
 
Oddity? Gamey? Building a forward base of operations in preparation for a coming conflict? I wouldn't call that gamey I would call that strategy.
If the effect it has is not merely to give you a base from which to invade the local area but access to much of your enemies' territory, regardless of fortifications, then I call it gamey and an oddity. In the ZoC system a forward fort allows you to carve out a safe base in enemy territory; in the Area system, if the enemy does not also have a fort in your base area, it allows you to traipse around all of the adjacent areas, regardless of whether there are any hostile forts there or not. That's just screwy, and does not reflect military practice at all.

Yeah some small area will still be screwed but even the most extreme cases will not be as bad as the two provinces you can as worst with the adjacency system.
This is a straw man. There is hardly ever a case where you are restricted to "two provinces"; you have access to all of the provinces adjacent to your own. Even an opm is likely to have more than one. If you insist on being an opm taking on a large neighbour with only one province adjacent to you while not having friendly relations with any other neighbour (and thus the possibility of military access from them) then I would say your strategy is pretty screwed up. A little guy who surrounds himself with enemies is going to get stomped - who knew?
 
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If the effect it has is not merely to give you a base from which to invade the local area but access to much of your enemies' territory, regardless of fortifications, then I call it gamey and an oddity. In the ZoC system a forward fort allows you to carve out a safe base in enemy territory; in the Area system, if the enemy does not also have a fort in your base area, it allows you to traipse around all of the adjacent areas, regardless of whether there are any hostile forts there or not. That's just screwy, and does not reflect military practice at all.


This is a straw man. There is hardly ever a case where you are restricted to "two provinces"; you have access to all of the provinces adjacent to your own. Even an opm is likely to have more than one. If you insist on being an opm taking on a large neighbour with only one province adjacent to you while not having friendly relations with any other neighbour (and thus the possibility of military access from them) then I would say your strategy is pretty screwed up. A little guy who surrounds himself with enemies is going to get stomped - who knew?
Let's agree to disagree all I ask is that they allow us to turn of ZoC movement blocking with a game rule.
 
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Let's agree to disagree all I ask is that they allow us to turn of ZoC movement blocking with a game rule.
That is a good idea that I can support you in :)
 
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