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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.
eu4_26.png


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.
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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.
 
Given the general nature of EU4's gameplay,
internal politics is a thing large countries should have more of than small countries.

After all a country with 200 provinces, 20 disparate cultures, and five religions has far more scope for internal politics than one with 10 provinces, two closely linked cultures, and one or two religions.

For sure. An improved focus on internal politics would be something for both tall and wide play, and would wind up having a larger effect on how wide players games went. But at the same time, it's something that I think tall players need more because the biggest thing tall play lacks is just engaging content to keep the player entertained outside of war.
 
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I think the potential change for this is that centralize could be like concentrate development within a state.

So you move development to a “state capital” and doing this adds a provincial modifier in just that province that reduces its GC cost. Then you have choices between concentrating everything in your nations capital or having multiple centralized state capitals.

The choices you look at then is
What trade goods do you prioritize, trade nodes to focus development in etc where the basic “playing tall” feature is lovering the development and therefor development cost in most of your provinces.

It also reflects different rp approaches for what you country’s administration looks like.
 
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So you move development to a “state capital” and doing this adds a provincial modifier in just that province that reduces its GC cost. Then you have choices between concentrating everything in your nations capital or having multiple centralized state capitals.
I like this. Having multiple "capitals" could have both advantages and disadvantages: advantages, for instance, they contribute more to your economy/manpower etc; disadvantages, they have higher unrest or are harder to convert.
 
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Quite true. I would personally love to see some more content packs (I would have paid just for the new content announced for SE Asia, Oceania and North America; some more content for pre-Columbian South and Central America and for Africa would be very nice, and among the Tier 1 countries from the October 3rd 2012 dev diary for the base game - the countries that are supposed to be most flavourful, content-heavy and important for the game - Sweden of all countries stands out as the one that has never been the focus of a DLC or flavour pack).
They could release those flavour packs along with free patches that include a few QoL improvements (like the never mothball thing announced today) and, a bit more importantly, bugfixes, fundamental improvements to the AI and (provided those don't break the AI again!) a rebalance of the economy that makes it less easy to swim in money after a certain point.
EU4 is already a very good game, and Paradox would do its legacy a lot more favours if they refrain from adding pointless buttons to sell DLCs or other bloat and just fix the things that are right now wrong/not ideal with the game and flesh out the few areas of the map that are still comparatively weak in content for a well-polished final version. CK2 is quite a good model to emulate in that respect.
Maybe Western NA needs another look as well. (as well as one proper final look at colonization and colonial nations, but we'll see what next week holds) I've been very happy with the work the Content Design team has been doing lately, and I would be perfectly fine if they took the lead in terms of what DLC consist of while the rest of the team fixes the game's jank. I know there's financial motive to pushing useful mechanics behind paywalls, but I feel it's about time to start wrapping EU4 up in the next 2 years.
 
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Actual 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.
Canals do need expansion from time to time, specially when Ships increase in tonnage
 
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the centralizing thing seems really unnecessary? isn't it either worse or better than "expand administration"?(i dont know the math) or is the only reason for the centralizing thing to exist, that expanding administration gets more expensive with time? idk just seems unnecessary overall. centralization would be a better fit for some form of absolutism-modifier...
 
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Canals do need expansion from time to time, specially when Ships increase in tonnage
I got it mate, it's not something that never happened. I mean it's not something on such a scale that we would need a mechanic for this to Eu4.
First of all, none of the canals were actually built in the timescope of the game, how come they can be also upgraded 3 times?
Also these modern improvements to canals are happening in a very different world. There are more than 8 billion people on the earth now, compared to less than 1 billion in eu4 times, and back than globalism and international trade happened on a much smaller scale, hence it seems really strange that we are digging canals for 20th century tankerships in the 1700's.
 
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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.
Solid argument.
You just gave me a great idea that would really help in this regard, as well as completely facelifting another fundamental aspect of the game, going to post it in the suggestions.
 
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Eider Canal is just a narrower Kiel Canal that follows half of the same path and was built in the game's timeframe.
Yes you already wrote it, yet that's not exactly the Kiel canal. Actually there was one more in the timescope, a much bigger, Canal du Midi in France.

But none of these were navigable for bigger ships, only smaller trading vessels.

This is the Eider Canal:
urban-canal-in-friedrichstadt-eider-schleswig-holstein-germany-europe-J9D78D.jpg


I don't think we can get our 50 heavys through this :D
 
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Hi Johan, I love EU4 and appreciate everyone's hard work on it. One thing I noticed scrolling through your responses is that EU4 is limited in what you can do with it (and there is a lot that you would like to do but can't). It really seems to me like it might be better in the future to work on EU5 as opposed to keep creating DLC for EU4. What are your thoughts on this?
 
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Yes you already wrote it, yet that's not exactly the Kiel canal. Actually there was one more in the timescope, a much bigger, Canal du Midi in France.

But none of these were navigable for bigger ships, only smaller trading vessels.

This is the Eider Canal:
urban-canal-in-friedrichstadt-eider-schleswig-holstein-germany-europe-J9D78D.jpg


I don't think we can get our 50 heavys through this :D
You underestimate my power.
 
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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.
I thought people were being too harsh on the "Consolidate Development" feature announced last week (I stand by that) but I'm struggling to figure out under what circumstances any human being would ever use this.
How much would you have had to Expand Administration that this is a better option than that? 100 Government Reform Progress is a LOT, for not much savings in admin cap.
 
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I thought people were being too harsh on the "Consolidate Development" feature announced last week (I stand by that) but I'm struggling to figure out under what circumstances any human being would ever use this.
How much would you have had to Expand Administration that this is a better option than that? 100 Government Reform Progress is a LOT, for not much savings in admin cap.
People did the math and it's like 20 times. But yeah I also think Consolidate Development is fine.
 
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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.

Ideally I'd want to rip out lots of systems in EU4, and rework them, but with how things are, its not really feasible, not for the scope of this game.


If this is the case, and you admit that EU4 is not workable to add any real changes, why milk out another DLC and not just announce EU5?

I mean I and many others will probably still buy it, so I completely understand from a business perspective, but creatively?

I’d rather have the type of content such as the work in South-East Asia, which is creative and immersive, than some meaningless buttons that are only added for the sake of adding something.
 
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So they're basically offering you a treat but only if they kick you in the shins, and then following up by selling shin-bruise cream

Oh my, you're taking this way too seriously. We haven't even tried the mechanics yet so maybe we should wait and see how these changes actually play out? No need to be so melodramatic.
 
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If this is the case, and you admit that EU4 is not workable to add any real changes, why milk out another DLC and not just announce EU5?

I mean I and many others will probably still buy it, so I completely understand from a business perspective, but creatively?

I’d rather have the type of content such as the work in South-East Asia, which is creative and immersive, than some meaningless buttons that are only added for the sake of adding something.

So much this! This kind of situation, where devs *pretend* to listen to the playerbase is the worst. But hey, it's the same as with GOlden Century - they'll tell us: you wanted tall play? You wanted immersion for Iberia? We did it, case closed, moving on to next DLC!
 
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