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EU4 - Development Diary - 12th of September 2017

Welcome all to another fine Tuesday and its accompanying EU4 Dev Diary. In last week's diary we mentioned that we would take a look at changes to Islam in the upcoming expansion which will be released alongside update 1.23. As we have made clear, we're giving a lot of love to the Muslim world in 1.23 and as such let's look at changes we've made to Islam and Piety.

We'll start with looking at the Piety bar. As a mechanic, it has remained fairly untouched for EU4's existence. Few would doubt that the Piety bonuses are strong, but they can't be called the most engaging of the game's content. In 1.23, we've visually spruced up the Piety bar, introducing terms for both ends of the spectrum, with low Piety being called Mysticism and high piety being depicted as devotion towards Legalism. Additionally, Piety events have been rewritten to reflect different the types of piety (Mystic vs Legalistic) rather than trying to measure "how pious" a ruler was. We have also taken this opportunity to weed out some of the older events that were not up to our current standards, with book burning no longer being a Pious action.

piety bar.jpg


Additionally, for expansion owners your passive Piety bonus can be passed up in favour of one-off effects depending on your Pious leanings. At -75 piety or lower, you can call on Religious Followers to bolster your manpower, gaining 2 years' of manpower growth. At 75 or greater Piety, you are able to Enforce Faithful Adherence for an immediate loss of 2 corruption. These actions will push your piety back towards the centre by 50, so consider carefully if the one-time action is worth foregoing the Pious effect you have built up.

Additionally, each Islamic nation will follow one Muslim School of Law. The School that your nation adheres to is predetermined and cannot be changed, or for new nations/converts, chosen at your spawning/conversion. Each School grants its own bonus and has a relationship with each other school, ranging between Respect, Ambivalent and Hate. While Ambivalence grants no particular effect, nations from Schools with a mutual respect or hatered will find relations and diplomatic acceptance strengthened or shakier respectively. The relationships between schools are harmed by large scale and prolonged wars between larger nations of those schools, and conversely can be improved by longstanding, trusting alliances between them.

schools.jpg


Schools and their bonuses are as follows:

religious_schools = {
#Sunnis
hanafi_school = {
technology_cost = -0.05
}
hanbali_school = {
ae_impact = -0.1
}
maliki_school = {
development_cost = -0.1
}
shafii_school = {
merchants = 1
}
#Shias
ismaili_school = {
horde_unity = 1
legitimacy = 1
republican_tradition = 0.5
devotion = 1
}
jafari_school = {
shock_damage = 0.1
}
zaidi_school = {
shock_damage_received = -0.1
}
}

relations degrade.jpg


So while your own School is set in stone, we allow Islamic nations to Invite Scholars from other Schools. Assuming an alliance and high relations with another nation, you will be able to spend 50 Admin points to invite a Scholar who will give you an extra effect in addition to your own School's for 20 years.

invite scholar.jpg


Inviting a scholar from an opposing faith's School (Such as a Sunni nation trying to invite a Zaidi Scholar) will require low piety, although the Ibadis are exempt from this.

Additionally, as I like to do, let's have a look at Another region of the world and how trade goods have changed. In fact, let's just grab all of western/Central Europe!

W europe trade goods .jpg


With Piety and Muslim Schools covered today, we shall spend the next week sheepishly looking at two nations in particular who had a profound effect on the Middle East in the 15th Century.
 
The dev's idea of an Ottoman nerf is raising the development in their starting capital so moving to Constantinople isn't as big of a boost.
I would so meme that
 
Yeah some manufactured goods are a bit common for 1444, glass and cloth mostly, then again salt shouldn't be a very common good either, it was very valuable back in the day.
Provinces represent the largest settlement in the area, so rare goods being common just means that the largest cities in a particular part of the world traded/produced those goods.

There might be a lot of salt-producing provinces, but that doesn't necessarily mean that salt was plentiful. It just means that there were cities where salt was the primary and/or most profitable export.

It should also be mentioned that every province in EU4 produces grain and livestock. The ones that have it as their trade goods are either ones that were known for their grain exports or simply don't have more valuable goods despite being notable enough to deserve provinces.
 
This might have been asked a thousand times before, but do we have an estimated time as to when this new version of EU4 will drop ?
 
So far I've only read estimations from board members. November/end of the year.
 
This might have been asked a thousand times before, but do we have an estimated time as to when this new version of EU4 will drop ?
Give it around, mid October and the next expansion for early next year.
 
3) The author is one of the leading historians/financial historians in the world and uses a broad array of sources from different perspectives/origins.
Niall Ferguson is famously biased and controversial as a historian, in no way can he and his arguments be taken at face value especially regarding the premodern period (before 1800), which is not his field of expertise. His position as a famous writer and political commentator makes his work veer sharply toward politically-motivated pop-history.
 
Niall Ferguson is famously biased and controversial as a historian, in no way can he and his arguments be taken at face value especially regarding the premodern period (before 1800), which is not his field of expertise. His position as a famous writer and political commentator makes his work veer sharply toward politically-motivated pop-history.
Indeed. Also, just pointing out that everyone is biased; it's figuring out just how and in what way it affects their statements/actions that makes one a good historian.
 
Excited for Mamluks and Ottomans next week! Or I presume, at least.

Nope, going to be AQ, the horde of White Sheep and QQ, the horde of Black Sheep
 
I'm surprised nobody commented on the gems in the baltic. I forsee the wars between nord, german, pole & russian getting even more heated over those.
 
Took two seconds to search for posts by Trin and Jake in this forum concerning the Ottomans, and it's the first hit (relevant paragraph is about 2/3rds of the way down).

Thank you.

Yeah the tech bonus is still a tiny buff to MP usage even if they actually did something else. It doesn't read as a nerf more of a balance adjustment. In the same sense as moving 10% morale in Spanish up front in NI.

So I will hold off on any declaration of "OPNess".
 
Shia that vassalizes Haasa seems to just be freakishly OP. 5% morale, 10% shock damage, 10% shock damage reduction, and 10% more morale if you go high piety?

The previously most powerful religion in the game was Protestant with 5% morale 2.5% discipline 10% manpower recovery (with ability to flip to more utilitarian needs.)

It wasn't like Shia was exactly weak either, it played pretty much on par with Protestant due to it's ability to obtain 15% morale and fort defense.

The whacky paradox math that makes discipline the must-have stat for mid-late game PvP will always stand, but with those buffs Shia will just brute force out a larger advantage than even Hindu.
 
Indeed. Also, just pointing out that everyone is biased; it's figuring out just how and in what way it affects their statements/actions that makes one a good historian.

My problem with bias is that it can be enough to suggest someone is biased in some way in order to wrongly discredit that person and their views. In identifying biases one may only being reflecting one's own biases and assumptions and not the reality of how biases are playing out, outside of your perception. So one man's good historian could be another man's bad historian.

I mean it can be hard or impossible to prove that biases are at play if we are talking about people's subjective view of thing. If the facts blatantly contradict someone that it is easy. Then there is alternative facts.



Here's for hoping for a brain in a vat or matrix type scenario.

Edit: Arguments on the internet are some of the most stupidest things I have ever seen. Thank the gods for moderators, they keep the stupidity at bay.
 
Im just seeing buffs here.

Also why were the book burning events removed?

Feels like we got some historical sanitizing going on.

The issue so far as it's presented here seems to be not that book burning didn't happen, but that book burning wasn't necessarily a pious action, and as an event that gave people piety it was inappropriate.
 
Really liking the idea of Islamic schools. It's getting me thinking though: I think it could be interesting to extend similar mechanics to the "Protestant"/Reformed faiths, since the accuracy of that distinction is not very good (Reformed Christians are Protestants, etc) and doesn't capture the diversity of views and practices and disputes of the EU4 time period among the "magisterial" or state-run/state-aligned Protestant churches.

Some more-detailed thoughts about this:

During the 16th and 17th centuries especially, there were some disputes about church governance (polity) within magisterial Protestantism, and different states made different decisions, while certain factions didn't immediately die out and continued to lobby for state support for quite a while (like in England, with the Puritan faction of the Church of England). These polity disputes were about how church hierarchies should be. Should individual congregations be governed by a hierarchy of individual bishops? Or by a hierarchy of councils (of presbyters)? Or should they be autonomous enough to decide everything for themselves, electing their own preachers, etc? These are episcopalism, presbyterianism, and congregationalism, respectively.

Examples: There were factions in the Church of England (traditionally episcopal) which wanted presbyterianism or congregationalism--the latter were the Puritans. In the HRE, the Reformers (like Luther, Calvin, Zwingli) were trying to figure out what polity to follow and would come to different solutions. Lutherans typically were episcopal, while Calvinists/Reformed were typically presbyterian. In Scotland, presbyterian polity was followed, hence the "Presbyterian" denomination that stems from the Church of Scotland. In the New England colonies, the Puritans (who were in the Church of England) established congregationalist polity. These were disputes that ultimately would have involved secular powers, as they tended to involve state churches. If there won't be specific "Lutheran" or "Anglican" or similar religions in EU4 added (and I can understand that), you could instead maybe use the current Islamic madhab pattern to give flavor to a combined Protestant/Reformed religion that you can just call "Protestantism"--which is accurate. Maybe accepting a certain polity will have the same effects as current Reformed religion or something. You guys can figure that out.

Another dispute important for the magisterial (state-run or state-aligned) churches as well as Protestantism generally was the issue of soteriology (namely: Calvinism, Arminianism, Lutheranism), which, to put it simply, is the dispute about how exactly people get saved (stuff like predestination, etc). Just from how a lot of the spotlight early on fell on questions of soteriology, it would make some sense to consider it as an alternative to, or even another aspect besides polity to implement with the Protestant state churches. The Puritans, once again, lobbied for more overt Calvinism in the Church of England. The Dutch Remonstrants under Arminius tried to get their Arminianism to become the norm for the existing Dutch Calvinist churches. I'm also aware of disputes about soteriology inside Lutheranism during the EU4 period, including charges that some factions were "crypto-Calvinists".

Obviously there are other disputes but polity and soteriology (or maybe just one of the two) would probably be enough flavor for EU4, especially if the more radical Protestants with little influence in the secular sphere during EU4 times (Anabaptists, Quakers, Baptists, etc) will at most stay as tags for certain religious rebels.

I like that other religions are getting more flavor to them and I just think doing this with the Protestants would be in line with the present direction of EU4 development.
 
Burning books that are viewed as heretical wouldn't be considered pious?

Depends on each person's definition of what's heretical and what's not. Some scholars may consider Sufi literature heretical and want to burn it, while others don't. It's not like the Catholic Church wherein there was a central authority to define doctrine and explicitly ban certain specific books. The event text says "Their definition of what is heretical seems to be very broad, and looters are even now approaching several public libraries" yet supporting this movement is a "pious" act.

That being said, I think it's not the best possible example - there are tons of events in the game right now about things which would absolutely not be considered pious or would only be considered pious by extreme fringe groups, such as expelling non-believers and force-convering people. It's my hope that all of those are going to be replaced.
 
Depends on each person's definition of what's heretical and what's not. Some scholars may consider Sufi literature heretical and want to burn it, while others don't. It's not like the Catholic Church wherein there was a central authority to define doctrine and explicitly ban certain specific books. The event text says "Their definition of what is heretical seems to be very broad, and looters are even now approaching several public libraries" yet supporting this movement is a "pious" act.

That being said, I think it's not the best possible example - there are tons of events in the game right now about things which would absolutely not be considered pious or would only be considered pious by extreme fringe groups, such as expelling non-believers and force-convering people. It's my hope that all of those are going to be replaced.

Do you have examples of those actions being condemned as being impious?

Cause as I said earlier this feels like playing up the christians intolerant and Islam accepting.

Which is as silly as the opposite assertion