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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

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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.
 
How is concentrate development a tall play feature if it can only be used on territories or subjects? What is someone playing tall gonna do, sell those provinces and release subjects after using it?
You can increase dev without increasing your player territory too much
Concentrate Dev can be useful as well for getting stuff within gov capacity, as your capital area uses far less gov capacity. But this could deffo be a buff to mughals who can now go even further with their designs
 
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.

Exactly.

With wide play, you get a lot of things to do. Wars, colonization, diplomacy, rebellions, looting and so on keep you occupied. Peacetime exists only as a break.

With tall play, you have nothing to do other than sit around at speed 5 waiting for mana to accumulate. No internal stuff to maintain (not even by event chains, they're rare anyway). Just diplomacy, maybe a few wars here and there helping out allies, some temporary modifiers that don't affect much, and that's it. You never face any internal difficulty.

This new sacking feature doesn't change that pre-existing "tall experience" much either, other than making your development rate faster via warfare. Tall would still remain fairly boring without things to do in peacetime. Its just another boring "press button, get points" mechanic.

And - just my personal subjective opinion here - that can likely be fixed and simulated well with internal issues, intrigue and management driven by detailed, very frequent event chains (that tie into every other part of a nation like corruption, stability, prestige, legitimacy/equivalent, disasters, civil wars etc.). That's as far as you can go introducing deep internal management without having to implement entirely new features.

In the end, a new feature is a new feature. As long as it is carefully tested and balanced (and has some sort of valid drawback), I'm kinda fine with it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
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Err... The peace deal is really a terrible idea. It is simply a bad mechanic.

Unless it costs a lot of diplo mana, it will be just free dev. No need for coring, no need for diplo annexing. One can get crazy amounts of dev just destroying capitals around. Imagine the war lear in the Religious Wars reducing the best cities in HRE to ashes through separate peace deals.
 
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Not related to the content of the Diary. But why isn't this Dev Dairy and CK3's dev diary in the Featured Content in the forum? I don't want to have to check Steam to know that a new Diary has been released. It's a minor issue I know but when some weeks it's in Featured Content and other weeks it isn't is frustrating. And don't get me started on CK3 putting their latest Dev Diary on their own website and not the forum.
 
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Err... The peace deal is really a terrible idea. It is simply a bad mechanic.

Unless it costs a lot of diplo mana, it will be just free dev. No need for coring, no need for diplo annexing. One can get crazy amounts of dev just destroying capitals around. Imagine the war lear in the Religious Wars reducing the best cities in HRE to ashes through separate peace deals.
Uh... is fighting and winning a war not a valid cost for you?

As for such wars, I'd wait and see how they turn out to happen in game, surely there will be plenty of testing and such a thing will not regularly happen.
 
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Concentrate Development seems like a net gain for any empire using it.
You're essentially deleting 70% of the governing capacity of a province, since your capital state is free, for pulling development out of wrong-religion wrong-culture provinces in territories (which give basically no money outside of trade anyway).
 
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And they are inherently quite superior than siphoning a bit of dev.
Directly-conquered full-core dev costs (before discounts) 10 ADM/dev, and passes into your hands (a) with decades of separatism (b) at 40-50% autonomy minimum (unless you had core on it, obviously).

Development transferred to your capital becomes yours at zero autonomy (because your capital always has zero autonomy), with zero separatism.
 
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Err... The peace deal is really a terrible idea. It is simply a bad mechanic.

Unless it costs a lot of diplo mana, it will be just free dev. No need for coring, no need for diplo annexing. One can get crazy amounts of dev just destroying capitals around. Imagine the war lear in the Religious Wars reducing the best cities in HRE to ashes through separate peace deals.

When you conquer land you have to spend ADM coring it, then there is the risk of revolt, high autonomy, wrong culture/religion. This means that newly adquired land is, most often than not, a net negative for a few decades (not taking into account the inherent advantages of having more development like bigger loans).

With the new transfer Dev you will get development added directly into your best estate -- your capital. It costs you no ADM, no revolt risk, no wrong culture/religion and no autonomy whatsoever.

Imagine having your capital city on a gold province and both sacking your own territory and your opponent's territory on peace deals. It won't matter if the gold mine will deplet or not, you will make ducats over fist exceptionally quickly.
 
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I don't know, this honestly seems redundant with "Sack of..." events. Weren't they representing basically the same historical incidents?

Those sack events are along the lines of soldiers stealing stuff that isn't nailed down while this pillaging is the state pulling out the nails and stealing the really good loot. Kinda like why there's a lot of Byzantine bling in Venice.
 
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How would this impact the Daimyos at war? It could speed up unification in Japan by having one Daimyo keep stacking up development and then going for a final annexation round later on once the weakened Daimyos have been absorbed by others.
 
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I'm sorry, but from a description concentrate development sounds like very bad idea.

I'm not sure how is this is playing "tall" when it clearly incentivizes expanding into trade company regions and making a lot of TC's.

Adding to this it's another press the button mechanic with supposed instant reward. Pressing a button doesn't make a mechanic engaging, even if there is a pile of rewards behind it.

This is also sounds immersion breaking for some pll along the lines of Razing and endless complaints about Magic Loans. So even if it's good and viable numbers wise there is chance that players will start ignoring it shortly after introduction. Or if it's too good it will become mandatory part of game for minmax type of players.
 
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