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EU4 - Development Diary - 7th of July 2020

Good afternoon! I am once again eschewing the traditional Swedish summer vacation, this time because I’d prefer to wait until I can safely travel rather than taking a dull staycation in my Stockholm apartment. What that means for you lovely people is that you get summer content dev diaries! Let’s get right into it!

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Those of you who know me even slightly will be aware that I love all things South-East Asia (SEA). After 2.5 years on the project, I finally have the opportunity to create the SEA map rework of my dreams. Shown above is Mainland SEA. Burma/Myanmar is excluded from the map rework as I feel that the treatment I gave it during the development of Dharma still holds up. There will certainly be new content for nations in that region however, including what another dev fondly described as the “Shan mission stick” when we played MP this weekend.

The country setup has not been radically altered. The only new additions to the 1444 setup are the tribes inhabiting what is today the Central Highlands of Vietnam. I have, however, added many new provinces and increased the total development of the region significantly. According to the logs, the indo_china_region now contains 64 provinces with 542 total development. Note that these numbers, like all numbers presented in dev diaries, are not final. I’m especially satisfied with how Lan Na fits into its 5-province state, bordered on its west by impassable terrain. Speaking of impassable terrain, the Annamite Range now separates Vietnam from much of Laos, making Dai Viet a drastically more defensible nation.

A design goal for Mainland SEA nations in the 1.31 update is to emphasize vassal play and the development of capital super-cities. We’ll talk about various ways that this will be achieved another time, but one prerequisite for the goal is having nations to vassalize:


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Several releasable nations now have cores on territory held in 1444 by Lan Xang and Dai Viet. These nations actually already exist in the game files, but are very rarely seen in 1.30 due to their lack of cores. Unfortunately there aren’t really any sensible ways that I’ve found to divide Ayutthaya or Khmer, though in Ayutthaya’s case Sukhothai can still serve as a vassal to which you can feed your Thai provinces.


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I’ve also taken a look at culture groups in the region. Central Thai and Northern Thai are now simply “Thai”, which belongs to the Siamese culture group that it shares with Lao and Shan. Countries in this culture group are able to form Siam, though Ayutthaya can only do so via its new mission tree. The “Indochinese” culture group is admittedly fairly arbitrary, but does serve to encompass regions of “natural” Vietnamese expansion on their “nam tiến” (southward advance). Cham has been moved to this group to reflect that we no longer equate culture and language.


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Next week we’ll take a similar look at Maritime SEA - modern Indonesia and Malaysia. In terms of scripted content you can expect plenty of historical events, mission trees, disasters, government reforms, estate privileges, and more from the 1.31 update. We’ll get to these in later weeks, but for now that’s all I have to say. Until next time, have a good week!
 
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Hi ya. I'm Thai and I just want to say Thai. The Northern Thais are not Siamese. I'm half northern myself and they would call themselves "Khon Muang" rather than "Thai" (a Siamese version of Tai). Just my humble opinion :)
 
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Hi ya. I'm Thai and I just want to say Thai. The Northern Thais are not Siamese. I'm half northern myself and they would call themselves "Khon Muang" rather than "Thai" (a Siamese version of Tai). Just my humble opinion :)

It's something I thought about for a while and I might still change my mind. The goal here was to strengthen both Ayutthaya and Lan Na by making their culture more extensive, but I appreciate that people in Northern Thailand have a different ethnic identity.
 
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@neondt my only question would be if you have interesting readings on this area and this historical period -- I was intrigued on what you said about Malacca actually asking Ming support to prevent an Ayuttayan invasion.
 
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@neondt my only question would be if you have interesting readings on this area and this historical period -- I was intrigued on what you said about Malacca actually asking Ming support to prevent an Ayuttayan invasion.

I got a lot of good information from articles published in the Journal of the Siam Society. I recommend 'PIRACY, SMUGGLING, AND TRADE IN THE RISE OF PATANI, 1490-1600' by Francis R. Bradley for example. I also trawled JSTOR for anything interesting using the names of nations from the period as keywords.
 
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Given that so many new provinces get added each update, and areas are becoming increasingly excessive in number.

Would it not be better to change the amount of provinces in one area? Currently the aim seems to be for 3-5 provinces in 1 area.

I think it ought to be 4-6 unless its something like the baleares or other areas that represent a couple of islands.

As currently many areas are getting a treatment of hyphenated names, west/east, north/south and while the governing capacity sorta solved this problem, state maintanence and edict spamming is still a thing.
Completely agree. No idea why every state has to have limited provinces. States like West/East Burgundy, West/East Sicily are both historically non-existent and practically cringy. 4-6 provinces in a state sounds like a fair number.
 
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@neondt is this going to be "your project" while PDX Tinto is setting up and recruiting or are you just laying the foundation here and then work on it together with the Tinto team after vacation/recruitment?

Can't talk specifically about production plans, but I won't be the only one working on 1.31.
 
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Welcome back and finally it's here folks!

Next week we’ll take a similar look at Maritime SEA - modern Indonesia and Malaysia. In terms of scripted content you can expect plenty of historical events, mission trees, disasters, government reforms, estate privileges, and more from the 1.31 update. We’ll get to these in later weeks, but for now that’s all I have to say. Until next time, have a good week!

Hope to see some new unit packs coming along.;)
 
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Any chance you could sneak in some pirates of the south chinese sea? Given that Ming will likely not get an update in a long time and that the pirates organised largely due to events happening in SEA, I could see quite a nice event chain here. Especially if you dare to add some more islands on the chinese coast. :)
 
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Maybe a stupid question, but seeing how the next DLC/patch/whatever will be SEA-focused, could you elaborate on the geographical width of it? SEA apparently starts at the Burmese border in the west - where are the cutoffs in the other directions? Will we see something for Australia or New Zealand or is this outside the scope?
 
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Will you consider reworking the map of China and adding more provinces and states? I'm from China and is a bit unsatisfied with the current map of China: inconsistent romanization, large chunks of provinces, weird states, LOW DEVELOPMENT, etc. If you are planning to make changes to the Chinese map I am always glad to help! There's also a mod on Steam called "Celestial empire on which the sun never sets" which contains a really good redrawn map for Ming. I do believe that the map in player mods are a bit too complex and unrealistic to implement, but it would be a good direction for a further Chinese update.
 
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Yikes! Back to my Champa RNW colonization game then! :cool: A bit sad it won't be able to form Malaya tho :( But can it form Siam? Any cultural requirements for Siam to share?