EU4 - Development Diary 24th of August 2021

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Hello and welcome to another Europa Universalis IV development diary. We’ve not had one since the start of the summer. Mostly because the team has been on holidays, and there is only so many times you can write “we are busy fixing bugs”. From September though, we’ll be able to start with development diaries for new missions and other content that the content designers are working on.

Two weeks ago we celebrated 8 years since the release of EU4, and it is about 11 years since we started working on the design. It has been a long journey, since me, @Besuchov and @King had our first brainstorming discussions, on how we could build upon EU3. Our goal was to take all that was in EU3 with all expansions, remove the bad features & make a polished game. It is kind of interesting to see how it turned out, and also fun for me personally to see how many people have been working on the game during the last decade.

Metrics​


As we tend to do for our games at times, when we do not have much new content to talk about, we like to delve into metrics of the game, on what is most popular and how you guys are playing the game.

First of all, what type of games do you people play every day?

By the amount of games played in a single day, 51% are regular single player games, 44% are ironman games, and 5% are multiplayer games. However, this does not tell the entire story, as one of the game-types include a fair bit more players. On any given day, about 13.7% of all players play multiplayer games, about 39,7% play an ironman game, and 62.3% play a normal single player game. This of course adds up to far more than 100%, but many people play more than 1 game mode in a single day.

Secondly, what nations do people play?
Here are the top 20 most played nations, by the fraction of users who play them in a given day. As you can see, some formable nations like Russia, Prussia, Spain and Great Britain are rather popular to continue playing as..

  1. England 11.17%
  2. Ottomans 9.65%
  3. France 9.58%
  4. Castille 7.91%
  5. Byzantium 6.60%
  6. Austria 6.43%
  7. Custom Nation 6.41%
  8. Brandenburg 5.81%
  9. Ming 4.93%
  10. Muscowy 4.78%
  11. Portugal 4.62%
  12. Poland 3.83%
  13. Spain 3.71%
  14. Prussia 3.44%
  15. Great Britain 3.29%
  16. Russia 3.24%
  17. Sweden 3.24%
  18. Venice 2.38%
  19. Holland 2.10%
  20. Timurids 2.06%


Thirdly, what are the most popular modifications for the game?

While, here are the top 10 most popular modifications, how many of the total users that use these mods in any given day. About 52% of all players use a mod at any point during a week.

  1. Graphical Map Improvements 11.8%
  2. Chinese Language Mod for 1.31 11.3%
  3. Extended Timeline 6.4%
  4. Missions Expanded 4.3%
  5. The Great Exhibition 3.5%
  6. Governments Expanded 1.31 3.4%
  7. EU4 Russian localisation LITE by GEKS 3.3%
  8. Anbennar: A Fantasy Total Conversion Mod 2.8%
  9. Flavour and Events Expanded 2.7%
  10. Ages and Splendor Expanded 2.4%

As we can see, chinese and russian localisations are popular, and if we had known, we probably should hadlocalised the game from the start, as we did with later games. It is also great to see an overhaul mod like Anbennar get into the top 10.

State of the game​

When we left in June with 1.31.5, we felt that we were in a pretty decent situation when coming to functionality and had taken Leviathan to a decent enough state (except for concentrate development). As we mentioned earlier, back in April, one of the goals with this new studio was to change how we handle bugs longterm for our projects and focus on addressing older issues, and fixing problems that had been hanging around for years. Back then as a team had reduced the open bug count by over 600 bugs. Now I can proudly say that those numbers have further improved, even after fixing all new Leviathan bugs we had introduced, and now the total amount of open bugs has been reduced by a total of 1083 since September 1st, and we have fixed a total of 2117 bugs in that time period.

eu4_bugs_aug23.png


We still have over 500 open bugs to work with for EU4, but that is by far the best shape the project has ever been. With this progress we hope to be even lower when we release 1.32

eu4_2000_days.png


The team at Tinto has also grown, with lots of people hired straight from the community to work as programmers, artists, qa, content designers and in other roles. We still need some more people…
https://career.paradoxplaza.com/jobs/1289640-2d-artist
https://career.paradoxplaza.com/jobs/1289608-ui-developer
https://career.paradoxplaza.com/jobs/1049816-engine-programmer

Roadmap​

To repeat what I said in April on how Tinto will handle further development of EU4.

  • Paid Features should be standalone, and easy to maintain.
  • No major feature reworks while we still have lots of bugs
  • Reducing the bug-count as much as possible.
  • Add more content, like missions, graphics and music
  • Flesh out the parts of the map that have not gotten attention the last few years.


What does that mean for us right now? Well, we’ll soon be talking about the missions that will come in the next paid update. Speaking of that, the next paid update will be missions, graphics and music, while the coders will be spending their time fixing bugs, doing quality of life improvements, balancing and improving the AI.

Speaking of balance, we will rework Concentrate Development for 1.32, and we will have more information on how later this autumn.

The next patch that comes, 1.31.6, will only be a compatibility patch that we need to release, and 1.32 with all further bug fixes, balance changes is planned to be released in the last quarter of this year.
 
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Have you given any thought to reworking the currying favor mechanics?

Currying favors currently ruins the old favor system where favors grow (inversely) proportional to ally size. The curry favor mechanic grows them at almost the same rate for any ally. Thus, even OPMs can now call Ottomans into wars every 5 years or so.
 
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  1. England 11.17%
  2. Turkey 9.65%
  3. France 9.58%
  4. Castille 7.91%
  5. Byzantium 6.60%
  6. Austria 6.43%
  7. Custom Nation 6.41%
  8. Brandenburg 5.81%
  9. Ming 4.93%
  10. Muscowy 4.78%
  11. Portugal 4.62%
  12. Poland 3.83%
  13. Spain 3.71%
  14. Prussia 3.44%
  15. Great Britain 3.29%
  16. Russia 3.24%
  17. Sweden 3.24%
  18. Venice 2.38%
  19. Holland 2.10%
  20. Timurids 2.06%

Apparently I'm a hipster.
 
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Have you given any thought specifically to reworking the mechanics from Leviathan i.e. currying favors, pillage capital, or concentrate development?
They said in the post that Concentrate Development is getting reworked:
Speaking of balance, we will rework Concentrate Development for 1.32, and we will have more information on how later this autumn.
Personally, the main thing I'm curious about is whether one of the bugs that is getting fixed is the way your trade companies are disbanded when you move your capital via decision or mission, even when the movement doesn't make the trade companies invalid. This is a huge pain when playing Muscovy -> Russia, because it means you either need to eat a penalty for five years when you move the capital to St. Petersburg (and why wouldn't you, it's free development and easier to defend) or just avoid making trade companies until then.
 
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I think it's a good idea tuning down a bit on new features for the sake of fixing bugs. I hope the community doesn't rip them apart like older Immersion Packs. That being said it kind of sounds like the idea of free updates like the Manchu patch has been dropped which I find kind of sad. But as long as we get new content that makes regions more interesting to play (looking at you Scandinavia) I'm all in for it.
 
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Dev diary before September? A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one.

EDIT: Read the post. Like the fact that next patch will focus on bugfixes and new missions. We will watch your roadmap with great interest
 
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I hope that the peace treaties will also be revised.

Please let me as emperor of the HRE with 100 vassals if I wage war against the Spanish / Portuguese Empire no more 1000 possible combinations see how my subjects can plunder the capitals of his subjects. o_O
 
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Thank you to the team for receiving feedback and addressing fan criticism, fixing bugs and not letting this game die yet. I like the roadmap, and I still hope for more content and flavor in certain regions like South America, Africa and colonization.

I'd like EUIV to be the best it can be before moving to its next generation, it's the only way I will keep trusting the brand.
 
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Are performance issues considered bugs? I mentioned as a side in a bug report that speed 5 1445.1.1 - 1446.1.1 gave me a 2x slowdown w/ speed 5 from 1.30.6 to 1.31.5.2, but I'm not sure how this could be decomposed into tickets/bugs for your end. I personally feel that a 2x slowdown (which was also confirmed by a few others who I asked to repeat this experiment with) is unjustifiable and should be considered a high priority item to investigate, so I was a bit taken back when I didn't see this mentioned in the post.
 
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Does the statistics mean that out of the 11% that start as England 3,3% form Britain?
Speaking of that, the next paid update will be missions, graphics and music,
No mechanics. That makes me think its going to be a revisit of an area that already had an expansion. Meso- and South America or the Middle East come to mind.

Good to know that Concentrate Development will be rebalanced. Maybe I will consider buying L after this.
 
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Hello and welcome to another Europa Universalis IV development diary. We’ve not had one since the start of the summer. Mostly because the team has been on holidays, and there is only so many times you can write “we are busy fixing bugs”. From September though, we’ll be able to start with development diaries for new missions and other content that the content designers are working on.

Two weeks ago we celebrated 8 years since the release of EU4, and it is about 11 years since we started working on the design. It has been a long journey, since me, @Besuchov and @King had our first brainstorming discussions, on how we could build upon EU3. Our goal was to take all that was in EU3 with all expansions, remove the bad features & make a polished game. It is kind of interesting to see how it turned out, and also fun for me personally to see how many people have been working on the game during the last decade.

Metrics​


As we tend to do for our games at times, when we do not have much new content to talk about, we like to delve into metrics of the game, on what is most popular and how you guys are playing the game.

First of all, what type of games do you people play every day?

By the amount of games played in a single day, 51% are regular single player games, 44% are ironman games, and 5% are multiplayer games. However, this does not tell the entire story, as one of the game-types include a fair bit more players. On any given day, about 13.7% of all players play multiplayer games, about 39,7% play an ironman game, and 62.3% play a normal single player game. This of course adds up to far more than 100%, but many people play more than 1 game mode in a single day.

Secondly, what nations do people play?
Here are the top 20 most played nations, by the fraction of users who play them in a given day. As you can see, some formable nations like Russia, Prussia, Spain and Great Britain are rather popular to continue playing as..

  1. England 11.17%
  2. Turkey 9.65%
  3. France 9.58%
  4. Castille 7.91%
  5. Byzantium 6.60%
  6. Austria 6.43%
  7. Custom Nation 6.41%
  8. Brandenburg 5.81%
  9. Ming 4.93%
  10. Muscowy 4.78%
  11. Portugal 4.62%
  12. Poland 3.83%
  13. Spain 3.71%
  14. Prussia 3.44%
  15. Great Britain 3.29%
  16. Russia 3.24%
  17. Sweden 3.24%
  18. Venice 2.38%
  19. Holland 2.10%
  20. Timurids 2.06%


Thirdly, what are the most popular modifications for the game?

While, here are the top 10 most popular modifications, how many of the total users that use these mods in any given day. About 52% of all players use a mod at any point during a week.

  1. Graphical Map Improvements 11.8%
  2. Chinese Language Mod for 1.31 11.3%
  3. Extended Timeline 6.4%
  4. Missions Expanded 4.3%
  5. The Great Exhibition 3.5%
  6. Governments Expanded 1.31 3.4%
  7. EU4 Russian localisation LITE by GEKS 3.3%
  8. Anbennar: A Fantasy Total Conversion Mod 2.8%
  9. Flavour and Events Expanded 2.7%
  10. Ages and Splendor Expanded 2.4%

As we can see, chinese and russian localisations are popular, and if we had known, we probably should hadlocalised the game from the start, as we did with later games. It is also great to see an overhaul mod like Anbennar get into the top 10.

State of the game​

When we left in June with 1.31.5, we felt that we were in a pretty decent situation when coming to functionality and had taken Leviathan to a decent enough state (except for concentrate development). As we mentioned earlier, back in April, one of the goals with this new studio was to change how we handle bugs longterm for our projects and focus on addressing older issues, and fixing problems that had been hanging around for years. Back then as a team had reduced the open bug count by over 600 bugs. Now I can proudly say that those numbers have further improved, even after fixing all new Leviathan bugs we had introduced, and now the total amount of open bugs has been reduced by a total of 1083 since September 1st, and we have fixed a total of 2117 bugs in that time period.

View attachment 750403

We still have over 500 open bugs to work with for EU4, but that is by far the best shape the project has ever been. With this progress we hope to be even lower when we release 1.32

The team at Tinto has also grown, with lots of people hired straight from the community to work as programmers, artists, qa, content designers and in other roles. We still need some more people…
https://career.paradoxplaza.com/jobs/1289640-2d-artist
https://career.paradoxplaza.com/jobs/1289608-ui-developer
https://career.paradoxplaza.com/jobs/1049816-engine-programmer

Roadmap​

To repeat what I said in April on how Tinto will handle further development of EU4.

  • Paid Features should be standalone, and easy to maintain.
  • No major feature reworks while we still have lots of bugs
  • Reducing the bug-count as much as possible.
  • Add more content, like missions, graphics and music
  • Flesh out the parts of the map that have not gotten attention the last few years.


What does that mean for us right now? Well, we’ll soon be talking about the missions that will come in the next paid update. Speaking of that, the next paid update will be missions, graphics and music, while the coders will be spending their time fixing bugs, doing quality of life improvements, balancing and improving the AI.

Speaking of balance, we will rework Concentrate Development for 1.32, and we will have more information on how later this autumn.

The next patch that comes, 1.31.6, will only be a compatibility patch that we need to release, and 1.32 with all further bug fixes, balance changes is planned to be released in the last quarter of this year.
Will the tribes owning the East American Coast be fixed in the next update? I haven't seen a game where no coloniser has colonised North America because Canada and Central East North America was occupied by the Cherokee/Iroquois etc.

And any more monuments?
 
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Well if concentrate development is reworked then also capital pillaging and tribal development seem to be similar issues. At the moment they all add dev to the capital or the capital area. Perhaps a single solution that spreads development a bit more in the nearby provinces too could solve the issues and significantly reduce the development of capitals.
 
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Has anyone at pdx tried playing after 1650? You can't play with the blue state flag icon, and even if you disable it, there is a 1 second stutter every 3 seconds...
I always play my games until 1821 without problems. Perhaps you should post your setup (both machine and patch+mods) in a bug entry as it could be different from the one they use to playtest
 
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