EU4 - Development Diary 24th of August 2021

[IndigoRage]

I don't think they should be giving much attention to nations that don't get played that often. I understand that there is an element of 'self fulfilling prophecy', but even if you factor that in, there are consistently favourite nations that people want to play.

There could be many reasons, but one is that the core mechanics and the name itself are based around Europe. Trade flowing to Venice, Genoa and the English Channel being obvious examples. But generally speaking ideas like the Reformation, Renaissance etc are European. It's not that similar did not happen in sophisticated societies in China and India, but they wouldn't have been neatly bundled up like that.

To get this right, you need a Gaia Universalis with differing secondary mechanics to account for the differences.

In addition, if you take Europe on its own, there seems to be a 'pull' towards certain nations. Brandenburg and Byzantium for instance. Both important in their own way, but for the time period of the game, no more important than Morocco, Bavaria, Milan or Denmark. It's just one of those things - they have that X factor.

I disagree on a fundamental level. Based on my and my friends own experiences, if a place has no missions we no longer have much interest in playing there. Note just about every country on the list are either a well known historical winner, a country that has a fair amount of content, or both. Beside that, the wording makes it pretty clear it's going to be a place that hasn't gotten much attention in that regard. A place that already had a truckload or three of DLC is the opposite of that. None of the others may be that popular, but using your reasoning here, a Baltic patch is certainly justified at the very least. Think of what's actually in the Baltic and hasn't gotten content, missions or otherwise before: 3 crusader states, potential for a few releasables and formables, missions and more content for Scandinavia, which so far have none aside from the vanilla missions.

 

[priamossz]

If I have to guess new expansion would be in South America as I can't even remember how many years it have been since the region got anything.

 

[earlofbrigand]

I disagree on a fundamental level. Based on my and my friends own experiences, if a place has no missions we no longer have much interest in playing there. Note just about every country on the list are either a well known historical winner, a country that has a fair amount of content, or both. Beside that, the wording makes it pretty clear it's going to be a place that hasn't gotten much attention in that regard. A place that already had a truckload or three of DLC is the opposite of that. None of the others may be that popular, but using your reasoning here, a Baltic patch is certainly justified at the very least. Think of what's actually in the Baltic and hasn't gotten content, missions or otherwise before: 3 crusader states, potential for a few releasables and formables, missions and more content for Scandinavia, which so far have none aside from the vanilla missions.

The last few patches and DLCs have added loads of large and interesting mission trees across the globe. The thing is, people still aren't playing these nations that much.

Some nations just have more glamour than others and people are drawn towards them. Byzantium is the perfect example - it was pretty much gone in real life during the EU4 period. But lots of people want to revive it.. or more ambitiously Rome itself from one of the candidate nations.

Brittany, Laos, Kongo, Malwa, Lithuania etc don't have the same appeal.

Think of poor old Wurzburg. I haven't seen any 'lets play', guides, world conquests for those guys. Players just don't want to be Wurzburg.

 

[Arizal]

Well, I probably won’t update to 1.32 either since I don’t like missions. If this is the only thing the team thinks about when they imagine new « content », I’m sorry to say they won’t have any new support from me in the foreseeable future.

Though I’m still trying to get friends to be interested by EUIV 1.30 and hope the mercenaries and the council of Trent could be fixed, mainly.

I heard they « fixed » Hegemonies, though. If they do some others, I might feel that 1.3x is good enough to try it.

Sorry if my interventions on DDs have been gloomy lately.

 

[IndigoRage]

The last few patches and DLCs have added loads of large and interesting mission trees across the globe. The thing is, people still aren't playing these nations that much.

Some nations just have more glamour than others and people are drawn towards them. Byzantium is the perfect example - it was pretty much gone in real life during the EU4 period. But lots of people want to revive it.. or more ambitiously Rome itself from one of the candidate nations.

Brittany, Laos, Kongo, Malwa, Lithuania etc don't have the same appeal.

Think of poor old Wurzburg. I haven't seen any 'lets play', guides, world conquests for those guys. Players just don't want to be Wurzburg.

Popular things are popular. That's basic sense. But you understand the logical consequence is most of the world having little to no flavor. Might as well make it like vanilla CK2 at that point.

 

[Zhetone]

According to the list:
----England = 11.17
----France = 9.58
----Great Britain = 3.29
----Castile = 7.91
----Spain = 3.71
----Portugal = 4.62
Add those together and you get 40.28%

The list shows which nations are currently being played. So the Spain and GB figures can be counted separately and there's no info on which nation they were formed out of.

I'm pretty sure it's safe to say the vast majority of GB games started as England.

 

[earlofbrigand]

Popular things are popular. That's basic sense. But you understand the logical consequence is most of the world having little to no flavor. Might as well make it like vanilla CK2 at that point.

That's true. But its a zero sum game. There is only a certain amount of dev-time (project time) on offer. How this is invested over the lifecycle of the game is important to us as players. So if it has for example, only 2000 hours of dedicated time (spread out over a few years) left before game development stops (for EU5 or something else), what do we want it to be spent on.

My thoughts are that if people keep going back to certain places, that's where the energy should go - it has a greater net utility for the community. Putting it all in places that are largely ignored may seem good at first, but won't provide that long term net benefit

 

[eva3071]

24% of all games involve England/GB and France
Add Castile/Spain and Portugal and that's 40%
Include Brandenburg/Prussia, Austria, Ottomans and Byzantium and the figure reaches 72%

In other words, almost 3/4 of all games played are Castile, England, France, Ottomans, Byzantium, Ottomans, Austria and Byzantium.

There have been DLCs focussing on all sorts of places, but ultimately people keep going back to these same nations. IMO, that's where the Roadmap should focus.

Agreed. Imagine my despair as a Byzantinophile when Paradox went over the Balkans area, and didn't give Byzantium its unique government back that they took from it in one of the earlier updates. Purple Phoenix DLc was supposed to be an regional DLC for Byzantium the way Third Rome was for Russia and Golden Century was for Spain. Yet Byzantium didn't get a unique government, it didn't even get its unique government back that they took from it, or any unique mechanics.

 

[Rule Britannia]

In terms of the plans to change concentrate development and (I hope pillage capital) I would suggest making the following simple change.

Rather than adding dev to your capital province, the monarch point cost of the pillaged or concentrated dev should be calculated based on how much it would actually cost to add that dev back to the original province and the player or AI should then get these monarch points added to their pools (possibly minus a certain penalty). This would achieve three good outcomes in my view:
1) It would stop the ridiculous practice where you can use concentrate development and pillage capitals to reach levels of development that the limits on your mana pool would otherwise make impossible.
2) It would make it far more attractive to pillage or use concentrate development on richer provinces, rather than poor. After all, pillaging one of the great cities of the world should be a lot more rewarding than some random low level province.
3) It would give the player more freedom regarding how to use the looted monarch points and leave it to the player to distribute the development looted to his provinces in whatever way he sees fit.

 

[Cosmonaut15]

That's true. But its a zero sum game. There is only a certain amount of dev-time (project time) on offer. How this is invested over the lifecycle of the game is important to us as players. So if it has for example, only 2000 hours of dedicated time (spread out over a few years) left before game development stops (for EU5 or something else), what do we want it to be spent on.
My thoughts are that if people keep going back to certain places, that's where the energy should go - it has a greater net utility for the community. Putting it all in places that are largely ignored may seem good at first, but won't provide that long term net benefit

Isn’t that more profitable to make EU4 more accessible and attractive to players in other regions and expand number of fans which ultimately purchase many more DLCs, rather than satisfying only the same fanbase just to sell only a few more immersive DLC?

We have only about 1.5 billion European / English speaker in this world, yet another 6 billion living in the rest of the world. Localized mod for Russian and Chinese in the top mod list are the prove of that.

 

[Mindel]

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.

Could we also take this opportunity to rework some parts of the map, such as South America? There's also a Golden Century DD with a careful map rework of Portugal which has been pointedly ignored for about 2 years now.

 

[Kayno]

Some interesting data and glad to hear that bugfixing is still high on the priority list for future patches.

What concerns me (like many others have pointed out in the thread) is that there is no mention of performance improvements.
The performance of the game has decreased over the last few patches but has never been in such a bad state.
Would be good if this is improved because a slow / laggy game disturbs everyone no matter what he or she wants for the future of the game.

Thanks for the hard work and the ongoing communication.

 

[Dobermann92]

I would like to see some North American tribe balance changes because they currently totally ruin colonisation for the AI, as well as a lot of bug fixes. DLC should be low on the priority after that horrible launch of the previous one, but if must I would like to see an African DLC and Animist religion buff.

 

[withche.07]

I have many threads about Ottoman mission tree, Turkish religious orders, Turkish estates, Enderun mechanic, graphical update for Anatolian architecture, some specific great projects in Anatolia etc
and overall Siberia update

Which all can be used as minor details I believe (except Siberia overhaul)

 

[Sete]

What kind of paid Graphics are we talking about?
What regions will be included?
Will Portugal get their NI fixed after 8 years?

 

[Rule Britannia]

Thats what people go back to and playing.. but when we add missions and content to a new area, people go there to try and play new things and have fun for a month or two. You need variation when you play the game, or else playing England for 1 campaign every week is not all that fun after 8 years for some people.

To be fair, I normally start a new England/GB campaign on average every two weeks and very rarely play anything other than England/GB or Brandenburg/Prussia. My vote is definitely to focus dev time on adding more content to England/GB campaigns. In terms of mission trees, it would be great for a branch that focused on acquiring the Netherlands, it is a very natural avenue of expansion for GB after PU'ing France. Other than that, a branch dealing with getting one or more of the Iberian crowns would be good.

 

[IndigoRage]

I would like to see some North American tribe balance changes because they currently totally ruin colonisation for the AI, as well as a lot of bug fixes. DLC should be low on the priority after that horrible launch of the previous one, but if must I would like to see an African DLC and Animist religion buff.

Having run many AI games, their impact was negligible on the AI until the reform progress bug was introduced. There's your problem. In games I ran before then if anything the new world was eaten faster.

 

[IndigoRage]

I have many threads about Ottoman mission tree, Turkish religious orders, Turkish estates, Enderun mechanic, graphical update for Anatolian architecture, some specific great projects in Anatolia etc
and overall Siberia update

Which all can be used as minor details I believe (except Siberia overhaul)

You may be interested that it seems they're making colonization in the old world based on native population, meaning most of Siberia will end up not flipping to Russian and Orthodox, meaning things have an opportunity to get minutely more interesting in that area if Russia has a revolt storm.

 

[Tullaris]

To be fair, I normally start a new England/GB campaign on average every two weeks and very rarely play anything other than England/GB or Brandenburg/Prussia. My vote is definitely to focus dev time on adding more content to England/GB campaigns. In terms of mission trees, it would be great for a branch that focused on acquiring the Netherlands, it is a very natural avenue of expansion for GB after PU'ing France. Other than that, a branch dealing with getting one or more of the Iberian crowns would be good.

I have never played England, GB, France or Spain. They just seem too powerful, thus quickly getting boring…

 

[earlofbrigand]

I have never played England, GB, France or Spain. They just seem too powerful, thus quickly getting boring…

Play as Wurzburg. You might be the first person to ever do so. I've put in over 5K on this game and apart from vassalizing them every now and then, have never been near them.