Peace - what is it good for?
Every expansion we make tends to be a mix of new cool things that could be added to the game and improvements to already existing features. This week I'll tell you about one of the latter.
War and Peace is an integral part of the Europa Universalis gameplay. You will either be at war or preparing to fight a war. How war is declared and ended has gotten a couple of upgrades over the last few expansions, most notably the new casus belli's that give the player specific aims with the war and that limit what is considered acceptable to demand in peace. Together with the war goals came a new interface for declaring war that made very clear what your goals were and the cost of declaring war. However when peace came the interface have been more or less the same since Eu3 1.0 so the time had come to take a look at that.
The peace view of old had a couple of problems, mostly to do with geography. If you are France and go to war with England at the start of the game, odds are you know exactly what you want and exactly where the province of Gascogne is. However, if you are a global French empire and go to war with the world's other global superpower and try to match your demands to the results on the ground, well you can laugh at me but I can't tell you at a moment's notice where Wallis is on the map or exactly how many provinces I would lose if I offer to release Provence. To alleviate this problem a bit we had a smaller version of the map in the old peace view but it was never as useful as we could have hoped and when empires went global it fell apart. So, what do do?
Well, we thought about it bit and realized that using a small map was pretty silly when we have a big one. So, our team went to work and completely redid the peace interface so that it was small enough not to hide the game map. After that we recolored the game map when the peace interface was open, green for the side set to gain from the deal and red for the other. When you select, for example provinces that you wish to demand, these will be colored differently so that you can see exactly what you are getting. Naturally, you can zoom and scroll the map just as if you didn't have the peace interface open, giving you the great overview of the situation that you need. I also mentioned earlier my tendency not to remember exactly which provinces would go to Provence if I released them. Well, as you can see from the screenshot, that will no longer be a handicap for me
So, now we're back to the quest of making Europa Universalis 3 an even better game than it already was. Stay tuned for next weeks dev diary.
Thomas Johansson
Associate Producer and Project Lead on Europa Universalis III: Divine Wind
Every expansion we make tends to be a mix of new cool things that could be added to the game and improvements to already existing features. This week I'll tell you about one of the latter.
War and Peace is an integral part of the Europa Universalis gameplay. You will either be at war or preparing to fight a war. How war is declared and ended has gotten a couple of upgrades over the last few expansions, most notably the new casus belli's that give the player specific aims with the war and that limit what is considered acceptable to demand in peace. Together with the war goals came a new interface for declaring war that made very clear what your goals were and the cost of declaring war. However when peace came the interface have been more or less the same since Eu3 1.0 so the time had come to take a look at that.
The peace view of old had a couple of problems, mostly to do with geography. If you are France and go to war with England at the start of the game, odds are you know exactly what you want and exactly where the province of Gascogne is. However, if you are a global French empire and go to war with the world's other global superpower and try to match your demands to the results on the ground, well you can laugh at me but I can't tell you at a moment's notice where Wallis is on the map or exactly how many provinces I would lose if I offer to release Provence. To alleviate this problem a bit we had a smaller version of the map in the old peace view but it was never as useful as we could have hoped and when empires went global it fell apart. So, what do do?
Well, we thought about it bit and realized that using a small map was pretty silly when we have a big one. So, our team went to work and completely redid the peace interface so that it was small enough not to hide the game map. After that we recolored the game map when the peace interface was open, green for the side set to gain from the deal and red for the other. When you select, for example provinces that you wish to demand, these will be colored differently so that you can see exactly what you are getting. Naturally, you can zoom and scroll the map just as if you didn't have the peace interface open, giving you the great overview of the situation that you need. I also mentioned earlier my tendency not to remember exactly which provinces would go to Provence if I released them. Well, as you can see from the screenshot, that will no longer be a handicap for me
So, now we're back to the quest of making Europa Universalis 3 an even better game than it already was. Stay tuned for next weeks dev diary.
Thomas Johansson
Associate Producer and Project Lead on Europa Universalis III: Divine Wind
