Hello and Welcome to another development diary for Europa Universalis IV. As it is another one written by me, it might be a bit shorter than you’d like, but I hope the information is interesting enough.

One of the things we wanted to focus on with Leviathan was to strengthen the ability to play “tall”,or in other words, how to become more powerful without necessarily expanding all the time. We talked in an earlier diary about the first of three new features regarding playing tall, Expand Infrastructure, which allowed you to stack multiple manufactories in the same province.

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Today we’ll be talking about the second of the ‘play tall’ features for Leviathan, as we delve into Concentrate Development.

Concentrate Development is an interaction that is done to either one of your territories or to one of your subjects states or territories.

This will reduce the development in that area by an amount comparable to a horde razing it, and then that development will be distributed to your country.

Fifty percent of that development will be going directly to your capital, while thirty percent will be distributed randomly among stated provinces, while the final twenty percent is lost.

There is a cooldown of 50 years for how often you can do this in an area.

Doing this to one of your subjects will upset them and also increase their liberty desire, so be careful.

There are also two government reforms that makes this loss less painful, as it removes the twenty percent lost, and instead adds that development to the capital.

• The Mandala Reform, available to the chinese techgroup and either dharmic, eastern or muslim religions.
• Siamese Absolutism - which is given from some missions.

Speaking of the Mandala Reform, it's a first tier reform, that besides giving you free development concentration also grants the following.

• +15% Vassal Income
• +1 Vassal Force Limit Bonus
• -33% Governing Capacity

Connected to this, is a new peace treaty called Pillage Capital!
As sometimes you want to grow your power, and weaken your enemy, but you do not want to take on more territory. In that case, just use the new “Pillage Capital”(™) peace treaty, which will concentrate development on their capital state, benefiting you!


Stay tuned for next week, when we will talk more about playing tall, and maybe something about canals.

 

[EarlKonrad]

So just to juggle around some numbers. Assuming i am a rather well developed european country sitting in ... lets say the english channel. I eat my way through west africa - south africa - beachhead india. India has how many provinces? Like 200-something? So with some heavy absolutism i go about and eat those 200-ish provinces at, let's assume, 10 dev average. If i were to concentrate development on those that's 6 dev lowered per province, 3 go to my capital, 1 to a random state and 2 are lost. Per province. That's 600 development for my capital alone, followed by throwing all of india into a trade company, build manufactory+city hall and forget about it.

But why stop at india, when china is right around the corner?

Don't know about you, but coming leviathan, i will be concentrating a stairway to heaven.

*Bonus question, can you concentrate before having a territorial core in said province? Asking for a friend ....

Good thing your capital region has reduced GC and edict cost so by concentrating development you can sav on GC, edicts and get the most out of buildings while at the same time saving ducats by not building as many buildings. You will also inflate the trade value and your trade share on your home node, meaning that Great Britain or anyone else that naturally controls The Channel with get even more trade money in the sixteen hundreds.

You will also be able to develop for institutions much easier as you can get some good lands, make them territories (if they aren't already), concentrate development so their Dev cost plummet, get some prosperity going, edict and Dev it. Bonus point if you manage to Dev for institution a province adjacent to your capital so your capital with passively get the institution in no time and, because your capital represents a big share of your nation's development, it will be much easier to embrace the institution.

I mean, this mechanics sounds awesome and so easily exploitable, which can be fun. But I can't see it benefiting "tall" play at all.

 

[JCommander]

There are also two government reforms that makes this loss less painful, as it removes the twenty percent lost, and instead adds that development to the capital.

• The Mandala Reform, available to the chinese techgroup and either dharmic, eastern or muslim religions.
• Siamese Absolutism - which is given from some missions.

Speaking of the Mandala Reform, it's a first tier reform, that besides giving you free development concentration also grants the following.

• +15% Vassal Income
• +1 Vassal Force Limit Bonus
• -33% Governing Capacity

Is this where the Chakravarti reform comes in? The Mandala reform but without the hit to governing cap?

 

[KaiserCorn]

The problem with playing tall isn't that its to weak, it's that its not fun. When you play tall there is nothing to do but sit around and wait for your points to go up so you can dev more.

 

[Jochen_Mongolia]

Stay tuned for next week, when we will talk more about playing tall, and maybe something about canals.

French canal, Chinese Grand canal.. maybe great rivers could become economically important zones?

Maybe it's time for another Dharma like rework on China and Central Asia. Indian sub-continent is greatly improved in terms of details, but China is too simplified, Mandate of Heaven not enough to fully display the Great Chinese complex and vast mainland extended to Central Asia.

 

[DominusNovus]

Honestly, these features sound like they'd work so much better if EU had a POP system...

 

[Bandua_of_Gallaecia]

I believe the game might be a bit too focused in development as the only way to make tall play more viable.

There is only so much development that seems realistic for a small nation to have, it becomes a little silly when a country the size of the Netherlands can field 500k armies because they have all their provinces at 30+ development.

I think an interesting way to make playing tall more viable without bloating development even more, is with the effect of buildings in the military.
Just like active forts give yearly army tradition, there could be similar mechanics for Naval Tradition and Professionalism.

For example: You would gain yearly Naval Tradition or Army Drill modifiers based onf the percentage of your provinces with Drydocks and Trainning Fields.
So if you have 80 provinces with 40 Trainning fields, you would get a +50% Army drill modifier. (maximum +100% at Training Fields in all provinces)
If you have 30 coastal provinces with 20 Drydocks, you would gain +0.66 Yearly Naval Tradition.
Naturally it would be much easier for a tall player to build these buildings everywhere, than it would for a wide player. So it would give tall a soft edge without further bloating the map with development.
Not only would this be a welcome addition to the tall player, but it would also make those buildings less useless (Drydocks is probably the least valuable building in the entire game right now)

I would also change the tradition gain from active forts from 1 fort per each 50 development to 1 fort per each 5 provinces.
Makes no sense that If I'm playing tall Britanny I need to build 4 or 5 forts to get the full Tradition from active forts, when literally all i need is a single fort in Vannetais to cover the entire country under its ZoC.
Province number is a far more significant to dictate the number of forts you should have than development is.

Still doesn't quite adress the isse that the main problem of playing tall: "not having interesting things to do" but at least it would be something more than just developing.

 

[Vaximillian]

Sounds like a lot of yikes. Instead of pasting on fig leaves, it could be worthwhile to trim the extra instead.

 

[Battlex]

Why exactly is it not OK for the Iberians and OK for everyone else?
What's up with this double standard?
Why is it that when Spain does it to the Dutch and Italians it's "bad", but when England does it to the Scottish it's just a "duh moment"?
Why is ok for the Irish to go extinct exactly (which has nothing to do with religion, England can be Protestant or Catholic, it doesn't interfere at all with this)?
If an Italian conquers, say, France and get themselves a colony somehow, is it really OK to ship the entire French population to the new world?
Or the Dutch? Or the Norwegians? Anyone at all?
How is it authentic to ship an entire province's population to the new world?

But you don't have to answer to any of that, it was all rethorical.
Fact of the matter is, the mechanic was changed for a reason, you may disagree with it or not, but that fact remains.

Because it matters far more for game balance, Naples and low countries are high dev, Scots and Irish aren't, so being unable to release the latter doesn't matter

 

[Battlex]

Hopefully, but I'll wait and see.

That said, does this restriction also apply to TCs?
If not, we might also see India and Indonesia looking like Siberia by the endgame...

The post mughal pre British era is called The Anarchy for a reason

 

[Battlex]

And that's the meaning of a tall play, isn't it?
You waged 30+ wars to pillage everyone in the HRE for 200+ yrs (consider truces). But the country is still the same size as before

Then Russia came and pillage Wien. LOL.

Wait till these people hear about the mega cities of IR

 

[BrokenSky]

There is a cooldown of 50 years for how often you can do this in an area.

Does this actually benefit tall play more than wide if the more areas you own the more frequently you can do it?

I feel like it would be worth considering the pros and cons of putting it on an empire wide cooldown (though naturally much shorter) instead?

 

[mysticdueler]

@Johan Does using the “Pillage Capital” peace treaty also cause devastation? (Perhaps a faster way to get a certain achievement?)

 

[Hallon]

So playing tall would still require external conquest ...

 

[sprites]

this can be abused in sooo many ways....
is there a power cost? money cost?

 

[KuwabaraTheMan]

The problem with playing tall isn't that its to weak, it's that its not fun. When you play tall there is nothing to do but sit around and wait for your points to go up so you can dev more.

Yes, I think what needs to be done to improve playing tall isn't adding more buttons to be pressed, but adding more internal politics to nations and having more flavorful events that can keep things interesting without needing to constantly be going to war.

 

[Less2]

So, let's say I play Russia. Let's say I only state my capital. Lets say I spam concentrate development on all my territory. Let's say I conquer 2000 dev worth of provinces. I now have 1600 dev in my capital. wut? I'm also paying only half as much to core the land (rest is moved to capital) and I only have to build my buildings in a single state, so all of that dev is operating at like 200% efficiency with no investment.

This is utterly, completely, 100% fucking broken if implemented as stated. The ideal strategy for every nation will be to have thousands of dev in their capital state.

 

[Bandua_of_Gallaecia]

but adding more internal politics to nations

Ideally, this would be something that could be either micromanaged to peak efficiency, or set to a more automated and streamlined fashion.

So tall players could be keept busy going over every small detail, dealing with it on province to province (something like internal trade where provinces with different resources could supply eachother for different effects, or maybe Estate interactions on a province-level basis, just spitballing), while the wide player would just automate it and bother with more pressing issues such as conquest.

 

[Cosmonaut15]

Wait till these people hear about the mega cities of IR

Yeah. People will always find a way to create an exploited, non-historic, mega city, god-like nation no matter how hard the dev put limitation into the game.

But sure, the dev should not create a new mechanics that could potentially ruin an already intertwined code and make the game less fun for normal players. So, balancing is more important than ever.

 

[D.Knight]

I still don't see the reason to buy this expansion tbh. Fingers crossed for feature #3.

 

[Tiax]

Remember when the ability to spend monarch points on development was first added, and OPMs in Europe would have like 250 development because they didn't have anything else to spend it on? This seems like a repeat of that mistake.