EU board game - Development Diary #8 - 3rd of May 2019

  • 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.

eivindv

Sergeant
1 Badges
Sep 21, 2018
98
153
www.aegirgames.com
  • Victoria 3 Sign Up
EU_dev_diary8.jpg


It is about time for a new Development Diary. We have talked a little about Actions in previous diary entries, but mainly about Action Cards. This time we want to talk about the Basic Actions. Those are the Actions that you can always perform, without the need of any cards.

Basic Actions
The Basic Actions are, in the same way as the Action Cards, divided into the three types of Monarch Power – there are Administrative Actions, Diplomatic Actions and Military Actions. They normally cost either Administrative Power (AP), Diplomatic Power (DP) or Military Power (MP). But there are also some Special Actions and Free Actions that are not tied to any of these in particular.

Free Actions
Free Actions are Actions that you can performed alongside another Action during your Turn or, in some cases, even during another player’s Turn.

Declare War
By Declaring War, you go to a War against the target Realm. If you have no justification for doing so, no Casus Belli, you will suffer a –2 Stability drop. Most of the time a Casus Belli involves a Claim on some of the target’s Provinces.

Hire Advisor or Leader
Pay the recruitment cost to hire a new Advisor (Square portrait) or Leader (Circular portrait) from the cards in your hand. Advisors cost Ducats and provide extra Monarch Points in the area of their expertise, while Leaders cost Military Power and provide bonuses in Battles.

Take/Repay Loan
Take a Loan Tile and 5 Ducats from the general supply. You must pay an interest of 1 Ducat every Round until the loan has been repaid. You can take a loan at any time as long as you don’t already 5 active loans.

Special Actions
Special Actions are not necessarily linked to a particular type of Monarch Power, and don’t always cost Monarch Points to perform. They do however take up a whole player Turn.

Research Ideas
You may spend the Monarch Point cost stated on an Idea, to activate this Idea and claim the bonuses it provides.

Change National Focus
May only be done once per Round. Perform either or both of the two options below.
  • Discard any 3 Action Cards from your hand and draw 2 new cards of your choice. Alternatively discard 2 cards and draw 1 new.
  • Increase one type of Monarch Power by two tokens, while decreasing the two others by one token each.
Change State Religion
From Age II onwards it is possible to change State Religion from Catholic to Protestant (or from Protestant to Catholic) by taking this action. Changing to or from other Religions can only happen as a consequence of War or Rebellion.

Explore
Pay 1 DP and 1 MP to move a Fleet or an Army into unchartered territory on one of the Exploration Maps. Requires “Quest for the New World” Idea.

6-final1-1024x465.jpg
Christopher Columbus discovers America. Illustration: Olly Lawson


Administrative Actions

Increase Stability

You may spend 6 AP, modified by your current Stability value, to increase your Stability by 1 step. (Stability ranges from –3 to +3.)

Convert Area
Pay 3 Ap and 3 Ducats to Convert the Religion to your State Religion in an Area where you own all the Provinces. Roll a number of Rebel Dice for the Area you convert equal to half the Tax Income of the Provinces.

Colonize
Spend 1 AP per Colonist token to Colonize any unoccupied Colony Space which you have Explored, and placed a Claim on. 5 Colonists are required to complete a Colony, an thus replacing it with a regular Province.


Diplomatic Actions

Influence

Pay 1 DP or 3 Ducats per token, to place Influence tokens in, or adjacent to, any Areas where you own at least one Province or already have one or more Influence Tokens.

Trade
Pay 1 DP to draw 3 Trade Cards and choose one of the cards that has a Trade Node where you have, or can move, a Merchant that has not already been activated this Round. Discard the remaining cards. All players with a Merchant in the chosen Trade Node will now collect Trade Income from the Node according to their Trade Power.

Fabricate Claim
Spend 1 DP per Claim, to place Claim tokens on Provinces in Areas adjacent to your Realm.


Military Actions

Activate Army/Fleet

You may spend 1 MP to activate an Army (or a single Land Unit) or make a Naval Activation. An activated Army or a single Land Unit may then either Move or Siege. When Land Units enter an Area containing enemy Units, a Battle will be fought immediately.

A Naval Activation will let you move any number of Ships on the board to a single destination (Sea Zone or Port). Fleets and Ships may move a maximum of 2 spaces (Sea Zones). They must stop and fight if they enter a Sea Zone containing enemy Ships.

4-final1-1024x465.jpg

Getting ready for battle. Illustration: Olly Lawson

Recruit Military Units
Pay 1 MP, and the required amount of Ducats, to recruit as many Military Units from your Manpower Pool as you desire or can afford. Hire Mercenary Units from the general supply when your Manpower runs out. Build up to one Ship per Port you own.

Refresh Manpower
Pay 1 MP per 2 Units, to Replenish as many Exhausted Units in your Manpower Pool as you desire. These Units are moved from the Exhausted area to the Available area, and are ready to be Recruited.

Handle Rebels
Pay 1 MP per Unrest that you want to remove from your Provinces.

New Illustrations
As you might have noticed we have got some new illustrations this time around. That’s because we have Olly Lawson working on the cards for the game. He is a UK based illustrator and in his portfolio you can see that he is the perfect guy for the job. He’s got other historical games, such as the cards for Pandemic: Fall of Rome, already under his belt, and he’s even a fan of Europa Universalis!

All the illustrations in this Development Diary are of his doing, and there is a lot more to come!

9-final2-1024x465.jpg

Olly’s illustration admiring the paragraph I wrote about him


Read the previous Development Diary chapters here:

Development Diary #1 - 12th of October 2018 (Map Board)
Development Diary #2 - 2nd of November 2018 (Box Art and Monarch Power)
Development Diary #3 - 26th of November 2018 (Actions, Action Cards and France)
Development Diary #4 - 19th of December 2018 (Set-up, Sequence of Play and Castile/Spain)
Development Diary #5 - 21st of January 2019 (Diplomatic Relations)
Development Diary #6 - 12th of February 2019 (Warfare and Ottoman Empire)
Development Diary #7 - 22nd of March 2019 (Non-Player Realms)

Newsletter Sign-up
For more news about the upcoming Kickstarter, how to sign up as a play tester, and reminders about Development Diaries, sign up to our Europa Universalis newsletter.
 
Last edited:
Hi, I hope you followed the Crusader Kings board game on kickstarter and you learn from its mistakes... it was due to November, now I hope I will get my game in May, communication was awful, 1st rulebook was horrible (I hope its better now), etc. Please start the kickstarter campaign only when you are sure that you can deliver in 6-7-8 months!
 
Looks great, thank you.

And thanks for your regular communication and replies. :)
 
Mine is just an opinion based on the available material, but while I understand that this game is meant to reproduce the videogame experience, it does not sound that appealing: videogames and board games are different beasts and right now the EU board game sounds just like an over-complex resource management game where you spend more time looking at the rules than properly playing it (in a sort of updated version of the old Avalon Hill war-games).

I backed Crusader King because it reworked its ideas around fun player interaction and silly bag rummaging to create memorable narrative moments... This game instead seems based on an obsolete "view", and all the complexity of the world cannot compensate uninteresting mechanics. Honestly out there we got better strategy games that can satisfy the itch for "grandness" with more fun and streamlined mechanics.

Just my two cents
 
Mine is just an opinion based on the available material, but while I understand that this game is meant to reproduce the videogame experience, it does not sound that appealing: videogames and board games are different beasts and right now the EU board game sounds just like an over-complex resource management game where you spend more time looking at the rules than properly playing it (in a sort of updated version of the old Avalon Hill war-games).

I backed Crusader King because it reworked its ideas around fun player interaction and silly bag rummaging to create memorable narrative moments... This game instead seems based on an obsolete "view", and all the complexity of the world cannot compensate uninteresting mechanics. Honestly out there we got better strategy games that can satisfy the itch for "grandness" with more fun and streamlined mechanics.

Just my two cents

I disagree. I think the mechanics in place that we have seen so far seem to do a great job at streamlining a complex computer game, while still feeling like Europa Universalis. I honestly was expecting this to be a lot more complicated than it sounds. The most complicated thing about this game that we have heard so far are the basic actions and how many there are. And when you look at it, there really arent that many considering the game being adapted here. Most of them seem intuitive to EU4 players.

I think the quality of this game will be decided on the number of ideas and different ways to play your nation, which we havent really seen the DD's touch on much. If players have a wide array of play styles (e.g. military conquest, diplomatic relations, colonization, etc) that can lead to victory combined with a similar number of idea groups to the PC game, then there should be a very large amount of replayability and depth to the strategy of this game. If players are sort of pigeon-holed into a single strategy based on their nation or the scenario, then this game might not be what we are hoping for.

The top game on Board Game Geek right now is Gloomhaven, and if you have played it, you know that the rulebook is 50+ pages and can be really, really complicated (especially the rules for how the monster AI works). However, these complexities dont keep Gloomhaven from being an excellent game. From what I have read about Europa Universalis: The Board Game, though, is that it seems to be on the right track. EU4 is a complicated game with a ton of systems and, so far, I think this team has done a good job at creating a balance between streamlining those complex systems but not making the game too simple that it bores more advanced board gamers.

Of course, its impossible to tell if the game will be fun until we get a chance to test it ourselves, but so far I am liking what I see and I am hoping that we will get a chance to help test it soon and offer our feedback!
 
Gloomhaven is a really good example: another title heavily inspired by videogames that heavy depends on the "more is better" trope that plagues BoardGameGeek rankings. The game itself is a glorified Hero Quest (or a scaled down Pen and Paper RPG if you prefer) and it is nearly unplayable without the companion app... BUT if you peel away all this you got a Core Mechanic that's both neat and clever in its simplicity: pick two action cards and choose which side to play. In this simple decision there's everything: resource management, risk vs reward, situational awareness, strategic consideration, player synergy... It's maddening how it is effective and engaging.

EU seems another kind of beast: between the action cards and free actions, three different resource pools (+money as the 4th +armies, navies and commerce) it paints a very complex decision tree that however seems to produce a quite standard result: expand (military or economically) or lose. I don't know how much of this comes from the inherent problems with EU4 (where your only options are to blob or do nothing) but if the videogame is engaging because it forces you to react to all the things beyond your control (the maddening scenarios produced by the AI) the board game got nothing of it so you are back to find the most effective point strategy using really overcomplex but shallow mechanics.

If we are talking about 4X the gold standard is still Twilight Imperium: not only for the things you can achieve and the decisions you have to make, but also for the mechanics you must use to do so. Compared to that, EU seems really too "vanilla".

See also: