• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

Europa Universalis IV - Development Diary 20th of September 2022 - Post Release & Norse Easter Egg

Hello everyone!

It's been a week since we released EUIV: Lions of the North and 1.34 'Sweden' update, and I'll start by saying that the entire team involved in it wants to thank the community for their great support. The feedback we have received so far has been very positive and we greatly appreciate the passion with which players have embraced this release. The teams that have worked on this project at Paradox Tinto and Paradox Interactive have put in a lot of effort, and we feel very rewarded to see this great reception. So let me say on behalf of us, thank you very much!

But even if the release has been really good from our point of view, there will always be issues appearing, and our goal is to continue to improve the state of EUIV. Therefore, we’re currently working on the first hotfix of the update, version 1.34.3, which will fix a bunch of issues reported since last week. Stay tuned, as it will be released in the next few days.

Apart from that, we also want to address today some content that was not previously revealed but was planned since we started designing Lions of the North: the Norse Easter Egg we included in it.

First question: Why was this content made secret? We had a couple of reasons behind this. The first is that even if we wanted to create some Norse-focused content, we also wanted to keep LotN’s focus on what we thought was its core content, the new deep, branching mission trees we were creating for the countries in the Baltic region. So we were a bit afraid about the new Norse content hijacking the LotN discussions and negatively affecting the general opinion on the other content (which was the main focus of the Immersion Pack, at the end of the day). On the other hand, we also thought that it would be interesting to create some secret content, as usually EUIV has not used so many ‘easter eggs’ compared to other GSGs; but it would also be a challenge, if created under certain conditions. So we went ahead with this overall design, even if we had to tackle some critics during the development process, especially in the dev diary devoted to Norway; at the time we were so adamant about adding more Norse content, because we had already added it to our development version, and we didn’t want to mess that up!

Second question: How do you become Norse? We know that many of you probably know the ways from the guides that this community has made, but we figured out it would be nice to give an official answer to this question, so that’s what we’re going to do with the help of my fellow colleague @Ogele , under a spoiler, as maybe some of you may not want to know the details about this.

There are two different ways of changing your religion to Norse: one is based on a lot of luck, the other is a lot more technically doable, but less flavorful.

Let’s start with the more flavorful way first. If you have the following conditions complete then the the event “A Wave of Curiosity” will fire:
  • Your Primary Culture is either Danish, Swedish, Norwegian or Icelandic
  • The current age is the Age of Discovery
  • You are Catholic
  • You are independent
  • You are either excommunicated or you declared Statute in Restraint of Appeals
  • Your ruler is either a 5/5/5 or is a Scholar or is a Sinner
  • You own the province of Bergslagen
  • You have a lot of luck, as the event has a Mean Time to Happen of 100 years. This can be at least halved if you are excommunicated despite also having Religious Ideas
norse_event_1.png

If you select the first option then your ruler will start to rethink his life choices and to question the purpose of the Catholic Church. This triggers a chain of events with each event having roughly ~2 years of time to happen:

norse_event_2.png


norse_event_3.png


norse_event_4.png

Keep in mind that the event chain is immediately broken if you ever take the second option or if your ruler dies during his journey. And you also can get this event chain only once per campaign.

For those who are worried that the stars align and the AI gets the event: the AI will always pick the second option, immediately ending this event. So a Norse AI Scandinavia is impossible to see without player shenanigans.

However, luck is not always on one’s side. For those who want to become Norse without having to… get unfortunate “crashes” every 5 minutes, there is another way to achieve your goal. If you fulfill the following conditions the event “The Awakening of the Norse Faith” can fire with a Mean Time to Happen of 24 months:
  • Your religion group is NOT Pagan
  • Your primary is either Danish, Swedish, Norwegian or Icelandic
  • Any owned province in Scandinavia is Animist and has animist rebels active
  • The current age is the Age of Reformation
norse_event_5.png

From there onwards you just use the normal rebels to get yourself force converted to Norse.

Some of you might be aware of a supposed third way of becoming Norse, which is through the Norwegian mission “The Colony of Greenland” and the event “The Lost Greenland Settlement”:

norse_event_6.png


norse_event_7.png

In the current game files, this event has been commented out (and this even rather early during development). While we did our research for the old Norse faith we had to accept that Iceland and Greenland had a much closer tie to the Church than mainland Scandinavia, which is why our first iteration of getting access to Norse had to be scrapped - it just wouldn’t have felt natural enough. So if you want to become Norse right now then doing the Norwegian Greenland mission won’t be your best bet. However, we’re always open to suggestions from the community, so maybe you can change our minds on this…

And that’s all for today. In the following weeks, we’ll have a more irregular Dev Diary schedule, as we’ll be focusing mostly on the Post Release Support, and we also need to take some rest after showing new content for 4 months. The team will let you know when we have new content ready to be shared, probably aiming for the 1.35 update. Until then, see you!
 
  • 82Like
  • 30Love
  • 11
  • 3
  • 2
Reactions:
It is still so anoying to switch to pagan religion as non pagan?
If system still works as in 1.32. To switch to Norse without RNG . You will have to snake to get animist province. Spawn animist Zealots let them convert province in Scandinavia and wait for event to Spawn Norse zealots. Let Norse zealots convert few provinces. Kill them, Spawn new animist rebels let them convert your state religion to animismus and only after that you can spawn Norse zealots to convert to Norse.
 
  • 2
Reactions:
Apart from that, we also want to address today some content that was not previously revealed but was planned since we started designing Lions of the North: the Norse Easter Egg we included in it.
Well, will the Norse religion have a Fylkir? (similar to Caliph)
 
  • 1Haha
  • 1Like
Reactions:
There is a lot of wonky English in these events, based on the screenshots in this dev diary, and I've noticed an increase in errors in newer content compared to pre-Leviathan. Could the dev team please have an editor proofread their text before it goes into the game? I'm really enjoying the content since Leviathan's release, but it sometimes stands out in a bad way compared to the older events, descriptions, and tooltips, which rarely had any errors.
Have to agree, I went through one of the DDs that showcased a lot of text pointing out all of the parts that do not read well in English if at all and there were quite a few examples.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
Brilliant release, seems to be tested really well! Quick heads up, you might want to change the user defined tags on Steam, they are... Questionable. Other than that, thanks for the cool Easter egg and on to 1.35!

I do think we should be able to turn Norse by the Greenland event, that's my vote!
I agree, it would be a nice and reliable way to turn Norse, especially as the othet two methods are much more problematic.
 
  • 3
Reactions:
I was vocally against including Norse, but I think you guys did a good job of putting some pretty hard restrictions on it. It's a well-hidden event that you must go out of your way to get, and not just an "OK we're norse now"-switch you can flick at the end of a mission branch. I do still think it could be a bit more restricted so that you can't really plan around it (stat/trait requirement on ruler AND being excommunicated/having Statute in place would be nice, and how I originally thought the event worked), but I'm quite happy with how it was implemented.

... Now hurry up and do the same for Zoroastrianism in Persia. :p
 
Last edited:
  • 6
  • 2Haha
  • 2
  • 1Like
Reactions:
Quick heads up, you might want to change the user defined tags on Steam, they are... Questionable.
Nothing questionable about them. We all know in our heart of hearts that leaning back in your chair and beholding the name of ULM draped across all of Europe is positively erotic.
 
  • 9Haha
Reactions:
It is still so anoying to switch to pagan religion as non pagan?
If system still works as in 1.32. To switch to Norse without RNG . You will have to snake to get animist province. Spawn animist Zealots let them convert province in Scandinavia and wait for event to Spawn Norse zealots. Let Norse zealots convert few provinces. Kill them, Spawn new animist rebels let them convert your state religion to animismus and only after that you can spawn Norse zealots to convert to Norse.
Norse zealots could already convert non-pagans in previous versions(if the religion was dominant). And in 1.34 alcheringa, fetishist, tengri and totemist zealots got the same ability(now they need to be the dominant religion even when converting other pagans)
 
  • 3
Reactions:
I was wary against including norse paganism because I feared you would make it too easy, but this seems rather nice and flavourful. I like that there is some consequences. Would be cool if the christian neighbours reacted to this reversion with outrage too.

I understand the reasoning of not having norse colonies in Greenland, but in a way you could argue that whoever led that colony at some point could have had a crisis of faith just like the swedish king in your example here. I'm fine with it either way.

I do wonder though why exactly Bergslagen has to be owned? There are many runestones all over Scandinavia. Is the one in Bergslagen very significant? Just seem kinda tilted in Sweden's favour.
 
  • 5
  • 1Like
Reactions:
Regarding future Norse content, There are no current plans to tweak anything Norse-related.
It's been an absolute blast seeing people play through as Norse, and it's certainly something the team is glad to have in the game as it is now. It's just likely to stay as it is now. It's something that was meant as a fun little hidden path/easter egg, though I suppose we shouldn't be that surprised so many are engrossed in cool Norse content. (I mean after all, cool Vikings go brrr).

Ergo I don't want to get anyone's hopes up for a future Norse mission tree or Norse region conversion stuff being added down the line :p
Of course, please do feel free to discuss and speculate on it though! Just wanted to clear things up <3
 
Last edited:
  • 6
  • 1Like
  • 1Love
Reactions:
Regarding the Norse content, There are no current plans to tweak anything Norse-related.
It's been an absolute blast seeing people play through as Norse, and it's certainly something the team is glad to have in the game as it is now. It's just likely to stay as it is now. It's something that was meant as a fun little hidden path/easter egg, though I suppose we shouldn't be that surprised so many are engrossed in cool Norse content. (I mean after all, cool Vikings go brrr).

Ergo I don't want to get anyone's hopes up for a future Norse mission tree or Norse region conversion stuff being added down the line :p
Of course, please do feel free to discuss and speculate on it though! Just wanted to clear things up <3
What about a possibility of adding Romuva for the Balts (Lithuania and Latgalia)? The religion was still practiced by the countryside people in 1444 and beyond that, especially in Samogitia.

I made a suggestion about it some time ago.
 
  • 4
Reactions:
What about a possibility of adding Romuva for the Balts (Lithuania and Latgalia)? The religion was still practiced by the countryside people in 1444 and beyond that, especially in Samogitia.

I made a suggestion about it some time ago.
Thank you for the suggestion! Won't really comment on the likelihood of Romuva in specific though.

But in general suggestions like these are always greatly appreciated even if the content itself doesn't get implemented as exactly how suggested. It can be a great way to kickstart thought processes for content that does get implemented.
 
  • 10Like
  • 1Love
Reactions:
... Now hurry up and do the same for Zoroastrianism in Persia. :p
Zoroastrianism has been alive continuously all the way up to today it's not the same as Norse which was dead for centuries by game start

even worse; since events fired from missions is bugged and always have the same rng seed, then it is literally impossible to get anything other than the top option right now.
sadly this might not be a bug since in HOI4 the same change was an intentional one to remove save scumming, seems like an anti fun measure tbh. Rather there be a way to negate rng in most cases than it being gated behind a seed.
 
  • 3
Reactions:
To all the disbelievers in the comment section, i said that 1.34 will have a way to convert to Norse (apart from RNW) and you people disliked my comment….. today i say hahaha may the wrath of Thor Odinson fall upon you
 
  • 4Haha
  • 1Like
Reactions:
Thank you for the suggestion! Won't really comment on the likelihood of Romuva in specific though.

But in general suggestions like these are always greatly appreciated even if the content itself doesn't get implemented as exactly how suggested. It can be a great way to kickstart thought processes for content that does get implemented.
That's great to hear that there's at least some hope that the religion could be added sometime in the future.
 
Can you nerf some manpower national ideas, in line with the idea group manpower nerfs? Some countries have huge manpower bonuses in addition to quality, e.g Russia, Prussia, Siam etc. 20% or 25% manpower ideas are also very common. Either that or buff quantity to 33% manpower and force limit, as was originally planned.
 
  • 2
Reactions:
Hi! Could you elaborate on this @Pavía ? I've seen this event pop in some youtube video the other day (with Norse settlement in Greenland). I also checked the files and I don't see anything of sort.
If you're referring to Ludi et Historia, it's because he is faking his "guides" using debug_achievements console command. There are multiple examples of this.
 
  • 2
  • 1Like
  • 1Haha
  • 1
Reactions:
What do you call a Norse god who doesn't draw much attention to themselves?
Low Key

What if Erik the Red had been Erik the Green?
Well... that would be a Norse of a different color.
 
  • 4Haha
  • 2Like
Reactions:
Zoroastrianism has been alive continuously all the way up to today it's not the same as Norse which was dead for centuries by game start
Which is precisely why I think there should be a way to revive it that isn't incumbent on collapsing to rebels or starting as Yazd. I'm well aware it's still one of the larger religions globally.
 
  • 7
  • 1
Reactions: