Welcome to another Europa Universalis IV development diary. Everything is going fine with the development of Leviathan, as we are working on polishing content at the moment.

We have talked about some major improvements to playing tall in previous diaries, with possibilities of stacking manufactories and concentrating development. Today we will talk about something that synergies nicely with both these features.

Centralizing a State

The final new Playing-Tall option is the ability to Centralize a State. This action reduces the administrative cost of a state by as much as the value of 20 development points.

Centralizing States costs 100 Government Reform Progress points and takes five years to complete.

This interaction is available both through the state interface and through the macrobuilder.

Never Mothball
A small thing that might make the top 3 of some peoples requested lists, and may be completely ignored by others is a small toggle for individual forts to never mothball.

We are adding a small checkbox in the province interface that if enabled, that fort will never mothball when you mothball every fort in your country from the military screen. This is something you may want to use when you may want to save money on lots of forts, but never risk it with the important forts next to France.

Canal changes
With the new monument mechanics, we moved the old great projects system to be using the new monument code internally as well, which gives a few benefits, in that you can upgrade them as well. Each upgrade takes about 10 years further, and about 1000 gold each. We are also making the canals available from an earlier technology as well, from admin tech 26 to admin tech 22.

Previously the canals, besides opening the paths, gave a +20 trade power to the location, now instead they are giving these.

• Tier 0 +10 Trade Power to Location, and +1% Trade Power to the Controller.
• Tier 1 +20 Trade Power to Location, and +2% Trade Power to the Controller.
• Tier 2 +30 Trade Power to Location, and +3% Trade Power to the Controller.
• Tier 3 +50 Trade Power to Location, and +5% Trade Power to the Controller.

Next week we’ll be back and talk about colonial nations.

 

[Vohen]

Canal changes
With the new monument mechanics, we moved the old great projects system to be using the new monument code internally as well, which gives a few benefits, in that you can upgrade them as well. Each upgrade takes about 10 years further, and about 1000 gold each. We are also making the canals available from an earlier technology as well, from admin tech 26 to admin tech 22.

Previously the canals, besides opening the paths, gave a +20 trade power to the location, now instead they are giving these.

• Tier 0 +10 Trade Power to Location, and +1% Trade Power to the Controller.
• Tier 1 +20 Trade Power to Location, and +2% Trade Power to the Controller.
• Tier 2 +30 Trade Power to Location, and +3% Trade Power to the Controller.
• Tier 3 +50 Trade Power to Location, and +5% Trade Power to the Controller.

I assume canals will work as they do now without the DLC, correct?

 

[frolix42]

God I hope the CN changes are worth the wait, I've been wanting some for ages.

I really want a colonial rework too, they desperately need it, but I'm only tracking that NA natives are getting reworked.

Where was there official mention of colonial improvements?

 

[Johan]

So if it is all about performance then I guess you made a "deal" - adding tags and provinces in Oceania instead of new mechanics? (that was sarcastic)
The whole talking about performance is absurd, it was proven many times in Stellaris, CK2 and Imperator that with proper optimatization new mechanics can be implemented easily, often together with patch that increased the performance of the game.

We also spent years and years optimising the game already.

 

[Johan]

I assume canals will work as they do now without the DLC, correct?

Canals will get the new update mechanics.

Its just that Canals are locked to Wealth of Nations

 

[reivaj89]

So if it is all about performance then I guess you made a "deal" - adding tags and provinces in Oceania instead of new mechanics? (that was sarcastic)

The number of tags barely have an impact performance though, this has been discussed widely in the past. The number of troops and fleets does though.

 

[TheSleep3r]

I really hope that alongside the content and DLC features there is bugfixing and gamebalancing effort going on. Awaiting things like state centralization when the Americas are fully colonized by 1700, the African tribes are fully technologically advanced in 1800 and the reformation begins in 1490 is simply absurd.

 

[reivaj89]

I like the idea of Tall players being able to use reform progress as currency since they will generally generate far more than Wide players. However, reducing Governing Capacity is not, in my opinion, the move. Tall Players rarely, if ever, struggle with Governing Capacity. That's besides the fact that you can already spend Reform Progress on increasing your Governing Capacity. So I like the idea of using Reform Progress as a currency for Tall players, but I think you should look at other bonuses. Increase the trade value of the provinces in the state, or open up another building slot in each province. I just don't see this as being a trade-off that a Tall player will particularly care about.

Completely agree. I think if this same mechanic lowered dev cost, for instance (which would actually benefit tall players), instead of what Expand Administration already does there would have been much less of a backlash.

 

[IndigoRage]

I really want a colonial rework too, they desperately need it, but I'm only tracking that NA natives are getting reworked.

Where was there official mention of colonial improvements?

It's on the feature list post and Johan mentions it at the end of the OP.

 

[Bandua_of_Gallaecia]

Expand administration works just fine for the purpose of spending reform progress for gov cap purposes, so increase centralisation should have nothing to do with governing capacity

I disagree.

Yes, expand administration works just fine for the purpose of spending reform progress for wide players who need gov capacity.

But Tall players, who are even more likely to be ahead of goverment reform, have no useful place to spend this gov reform progress surplus.

This is a textbook example of the proverb "The gods send nuts to those who have no teeth"

Therefore, I'm very happy this mechanic costs goverment reform progress, however i believe it should give you something else (ideally something useful for tall players, so they would sink their surplus here instead).

 

[The Scarlet Pimpernel]

Will we hear more about the south eastern tribes? And will all the 5 civilized tribes get missions and not just the Cherokee? Also the Chickasaw ideas need a rework like the Czech last update to drop the hostile core cost.

 

[Willem IV]

We also spent years and years optimising the game already.

yet, the game becomes slower and slower. especially the mac version.

 

[lambda x.x]

We also spent years and years optimising the game already.

one technical thing that I was confused by that I recall is that on 1.30.2 or 1.30.3 (I forgot), you guys ninja added daily government reform checks, which I can't help but imagine does more harm than good.
First of all on the performance aspect, I imagine checking the validity of every government reform for every nation every day can be somewhat demanding, and in the gameplay aspect, it broke the Japanese daimyo->independent daimyo event chain. On the positive side, it fixed a few illegal government reform stacking that imo doesn't break the game anyway, since it's either so hard to do or just not rewarding, it's mainly for memes.
And yes, we already made a post on the bug report about it; I just gave up on it being addressed, until I remembered about it now.

 

[ItsJustMyShadow]

The number of tags barely have an impact performance though, this has been discussed widely in the past. The number of troops and fleets does though.

And in your opinion number of tags has nothing to do with number of troops and fleets?
Also, the most performance heavy aspect of the game is war, aka AI commanding troops. More tags=more wars, more armies, more navies, more naval calculations-invasions.
1 tag won't make a difference, 1 prov wont make a difference but overhauling the whole area makes a difference.
I'm not against new tags in Oceania, btw.

 

[EarlKonrad]

If you want to make playing tall more interesting there are two fundamental principles you need to follow:

1. Progression: goals to achieve and obstacles to overcome.

2. Decisions and consequences: risk vs reward, tradeoffs, short term vs long term gain etc.

I think the main reason playing tall is not interesting is because there are no obstacles. Nothing is actively working against you, trying to prevent you from getting your development up or decreasing autonomy or whatever. You just click buttons and then wait until you can click again. Compare this to playing wide, where you have other countries, rebels, disloyal subjects, aggressive expansion and overextension all getting in your way or actively working to ruin your day. Overcoming them is very satisfying.

It's not enough to simply add more things for the tall player to do. You have to add more things for them to beat.

Another way of making Tall more interesting is to make the AI a more competent adversary. It is understandable that most AI nations will never threaten wide players because they are big and strong, but if you play tall and barely any country can stand against you, then what is the point in even playing the game if there is no danger to your survival? If kind of defeats the whole point of playing tall instead of wide.

 

[Arthrodira]

Actually the whole reform progress is badly balanced and flat. It should simpy be stretched out until the lategame, so we can't just finish them by 1600, rendering reform progress pointless.
Rather we get a boring mechanism that doesen't serve anything else besides spending the badly balanced reform progress points. It doesen't really help tall play, and doesen't give flavour to the game, just as others said, one more button that will 1. either be farmed every X years OR 2. never used by most players.

Let me help you out there understanding that sentence:

How much examples can you give when a Canal was "improved" after it was done? Not one but three times? Canals don't have to be faster, deeper and wider, these does not scale with their usefulness.

Hope it helps and now you get it.

I said the same thing when they first released government reforms - speaking to the choir.

As for canals, they get improvements as often as the Taj Mahal does haha. For both, never and all the time (depending on what you see them as). Just pretend it’s as simple as adding a toll booth or something. Doesn’t really matter, this one is clearly a gameified abstraction to a fantasy construction anyway. If you’re going to go down the historicity route, then canals shouldn’t exist anyway.

 

[IndigoRage]

And in your opinion number of tags has nothing to do with number of troops and fleets?
Also, the most performance heavy aspect of the game is war, aka AI commanding troops. More tags=more wars, more armies, more navies, more naval calculations-invasions.
1 tag won't make a difference, 1 prov wont make a difference but overhauling the whole area makes a difference.
I'm not against new tags in Oceania, btw.

Eh, I feel like the actual impact is greatly exaggerated. I see no significant change in performance at all from number of tags, while lategame giant consolidated blobs are when it turns into lag hell.

 

[Logist]

The problem is that there is so many underlying mechanics in eu4 that any new systems that we add, adds enormously to complexity for performance, AI and new users. A button is easier to handle for all those things.

Doesn’t all this point to it being time for EUV? That EUIV is essentially a completed game and it’s time to move on?

 

[EarlKonrad]

Why not go through with it and actually rip out these systems? Will be a neat newspost and advert for EU4 v2.0. EU4 is collapsing under the layers of band-aids that keep piling on with every update, band-aids that keep getting applied seemingly haphazardly and without much thought as to integrating them with already existing mechanics. Buttons and half-baked mechanics get invented to pad the expansions’ feature lists’ bullet point counts and then are thrown to the wayside and forgotten forever.

Why not take some time and perform a surgery? It’s easy to talk the talk.

Pretty much this. Why keep on adding band-aids instead of either making a drastic change or be done with the game and move onto EU V?

We all know the answer.

 

[Skyfus]

When I inevitably buy this on release I hope the developers realise it's because I want wonders, south-east Asia and permanent mothball forts (which shouldn't be paid content but hey, you need Art Of War for a little plus icon to recruit units to an existing army) and not for this completely vacuous, flaccid attempt at pretending to appeal to tall players

 

[nyetflix]

I can't imagine what the levels are meaning for canals. How would you describe the difference between a lvl1 and a lvl2 canal?

Actually I can probably see this. Egypt is currently or recently upgraded the Suez canal in real life haha. You know, they added another lane, made it wider, added more infrastructure, that sort of thing.