EU4 - Art of War - Dev Diary 4 - Army Planner, Rebel Relocation and China

[Wudadi]

For Oirat, I think it's nothing to say. The map is suspicious. I never trust the external boundaries of the Atlas.

Moreover, by common sense, Oirat was still very strong when Russian first stepped into that area. So, if Oirat was controlling that area, Russian might face strong resist from Mongol. We all knew the history.

Nomadic/hordes cover the area around Lake Baikal all the time until the Russian come. Su wu (苏武) was arrested by huns. He lived near the Lake Baikal(Chinese call North Sea). You can Google find some maps that created by western people or Russian that show you the territory of Oirats cover the area around Lake Baikal.
I can find a lot of maps showing Mongolia control the Lake Baikal. However, In EU4 you need to colonize those territories.......

Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oirats

This picture from Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oirats#mediaviewer/File:Mongolia_XVI.png



Also I find this
[video=youtube;Yb7Menjyxus]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb7Menjyxus[/video]

 

[Tavior]

I have seen many questions about rebel crossing sea tiles but nothing about who can block them and not (naval blockade).

Consider this, If I am playing as Denmark and for some reason I declare war on county and need to naval blockade somewhere, East Frisia comes to mind which is an easy conquest, other than gotland. Will my vassals/protectare/CN etc... go and attempt to blockade them?

Edit: What if I don't want to prevent another County's rebel from cross sea but I do want to blockade their army from cross sea while at war? Example I am playing as Ireland OPM and want to go to war (with France or Spain navy help) with England. There is a *insert nasty* rebel in Meath but at the same time I need to blockade that sea tile (prevent England from landing troops). I assume rebel in Meath can cross to England proper and vice versa.

You may want to take a look at how CN handle rebels in Caribbean islands so they don't get overwhelmed if they have a province with "different culture, religion unrest". I had this problem pretty bad in my best run as Netherland taking English Canada CN provinces and feed a Dutch Canada CN. There was some province that they wouldn't or couldn't convert with high base tax.

Otherwise overall look great. I look forward to order this once it is out.

 

[DSYoungEsq]

Software development doesn't work that way. There's no guarantee that a EU4 released today would have been the current EU4 + all DLCs.
It much more likely that they had some rough ideas for improvement that weren't finished when the game was released (rough ideas = "we want to make China more detailed and we have 2 vague sketches on a whiteboard"), but the actual details - and those details matter a lot - were actually added based on on-going feedback from the community. They said for example that the maps for RotW were inspired by several mods and that they actually worked together with those modders. This kind of feedback isn't really possible before release, during a closed beta with a handful of people. You need a community: lots of players, lots of modders out of which a group of very good modders stand out.

You might have fond memories from games in the days of old, when version 1.0 was the complete game.
Sure, it was, but did you ever find out how many features they had to cut out and maybe never released?
Or did you find out about games in development for 5-7 years that never reached version 1.0 and were abandoned while they were polishing the product to perfection?
Or did you forget 1.0 version games that were unplayable on release? And I mean utterly unplayable, not "France is overpowered, HEEEELP!!!!" - crashes, major networking problems for basic functionality, etc.
EU4 might not be a shining gem of software, but it's definitely a playable - and enjoyable - game right now.

I'm not here to resurrect the old "this game was trash on release" v "this game has been boffo from the start" debate. Personally, having played EU, EU2, EU3 (which I stopped playing after three attempts at starting it produced no desire to continue) and EU4, I will say that this game was not as good "out of the box" as 1, definitely not as good as 2, but better than 3 (by "good", btw, I don't mean bug issues, I mean design). I will also say this: that if the game didn't have a random Western Hemisphere generator, I'd have played it once (my usual Portugal test game), and stopped playing it thereafter. It was not (prior to the DLC releases) particularly a good game, in my opinion (and I've played computer games since, oh, discounting "Pong", roughly 1978, on mainframe, mini-, micro-, laptop, phone, pad, watch, etc., so I have at least an informed opinion, for what it is worth).
I will also say that, my one MP experience with this game, had I not known that there were changes coming, would have been sufficient to put me off playing it MP, absent some of what I see coming in AoW. This nonsense of having click-fests without pauses, while trying to re-build armies and fleets is absurd. AND, it was absurd ab initio, and the solution is so obvious, that to have not addressed it from early on alpha testing is, IMHO, inexcusable.

Which is why I made my statement (which you mis-characterize, btw). My statement is that many of the changes/fixes in AoW, combined with the original game, would have made a very good original game. THEN, they could have released CoP (preferably getting it, you know, correct when they did), followed by WoN, etc. And had they gone about it that way, the original release, offered anywhere from 6 to 9 months later, would have been quite excellent.

Take the expanded maps, for example. The map for Western Europe in EU4 has been much more detailed than the EU2 or EU3 maps. This means they are committed to the concept of more detail in their maps. Do you really believe that, with this idea in mind, they needed the community's input and inspiration to come up with detailed maps of Asia, Africa and the Americas? If so, you need to stop drinking the Kool-Aid.

I refuse to accept the new-fangled notion that the best way under streaming dissemination to satisfy your fan base is to offer to market handicapped versions of what you want a game to be, then hammer out fixes and offer prosthetics while finishing your original design over time, along with "oh, by the way, do you have another $25 to spend now?" DLC. If that's going to be the model, they might as well just go the whole hog and have us pay a monthly subscription, then stream out new content as their hearts desire, without bothering to call it DLC, or expansion, or any other such silly words.

 

[Elfryc]

I'm not here to resurrect the old "this game was trash on release" v "this game has been boffo from the start" debate. Personally, having played EU, EU2, EU3 (which I stopped playing after three attempts at starting it produced no desire to continue) and EU4, I will say that this game was not as good "out of the box" as 1, definitely not as good as 2, but better than 3 (by "good", btw, I don't mean bug issues, I mean design). I will also say this: that if the game didn't have a random Western Hemisphere generator, I'd have played it once (my usual Portugal test game), and stopped playing it thereafter. It was not (prior to the DLC releases) particularly a good game, in my opinion (and I've played computer games since, oh, discounting "Pong", roughly 1978, on mainframe, mini-, micro-, laptop, phone, pad, watch, etc., so I have at least an informed opinion, for what it is worth).
I will also say that, my one MP experience with this game, had I not known that there were changes coming, would have been sufficient to put me off playing it MP, absent some of what I see coming in AoW. This nonsense of having click-fests without pauses, while trying to re-build armies and fleets is absurd. AND, it was absurd ab initio, and the solution is so obvious, that to have not addressed it from early on alpha testing is, IMHO, inexcusable.

Which is why I made my statement (which you mis-characterize, btw). My statement is that many of the changes/fixes in AoW, combined with the original game, would have made a very good original game. THEN, they could have released CoP (preferably getting it, you know, correct when they did), followed by WoN, etc. And had they gone about it that way, the original release, offered anywhere from 6 to 9 months later, would have been quite excellent.

Take the expanded maps, for example. The map for Western Europe in EU4 has been much more detailed than the EU2 or EU3 maps. This means they are committed to the concept of more detail in their maps. Do you really believe that, with this idea in mind, they needed the community's input and inspiration to come up with detailed maps of Asia, Africa and the Americas? If so, you need to stop drinking the Kool-Aid.

I refuse to accept the new-fangled notion that the best way under streaming dissemination to satisfy your fan base is to offer to market handicapped versions of what you want a game to be, then hammer out fixes and offer prosthetics while finishing your original design over time, along with "oh, by the way, do you have another $25 to spend now?" DLC. If that's going to be the model, they might as well just go the whole hog and have us pay a monthly subscription, then stream out new content as their hearts desire, without bothering to call it DLC, or expansion, or any other such silly words.

This post (and I well said 'post', not you as a rule, from what I saw of your last posts) -- This post seems both quite pretentious and misinformed about game creation.

Pretentious, because having played Pong since the year I'm born doesn't give you any right to judge if I had fun playing EU4 since one year ago. Sure, there was and are fails in some aspects of the game, but as said Oblio-, it was perfectly playable one year ago.

And misinformed, because I can't seriously imagine Johan saying one morning in the office, 2 years ago: 'Well, guys. I've decided the map should be improved. Besuchov, let's work on South-East Asia. Captain Gars, on Northern America. Wiz, on Africa. X on India. Y on Southern America. I want you to go to libraries for one year time, and don't want to see you before you have become experts on your parts of the map. Then we'll have to improve the interfaces, and the game will be delayed by 18 months'.

That's purely fantasy, because:
1) that's clearly the level of knowledge that these beta-guys working on the map have. And that's not something that may be done so accurately within two days reading Wikipedia;
2) that's not the way a viable enterprise works.

 

[Closet Skeleton]

And had they gone about it that way, the original release, offered anywhere from 6 to 9 months later, would have been quite excellent.

They already delayed this game by at least half a year for testing.

Do you really believe that, with this idea in mind, they needed the community's input and inspiration to come up with detailed maps of Asia, Africa and the Americas?

I don't need to 'believe' it since its obviously a fact since all the people talking about these maps in the dev diaries have not been regular employees.

I refuse to accept the new-fangled notion that the best way under streaming dissemination to satisfy your fan base is to offer to market handicapped versions of what you want a game to be, then hammer out fixes and offer prosthetics while finishing your original design over time, along with "oh, by the way, do you have another $25 to spend now?" DLC.

That's exactly how EU3 worked and only one of its expansions was a DLC. At least EU4 started with everything the fully expanded EU3 had that worked and a replacement for everything they removed. EA (or even Firaxis) would have sold an EU4 with only the base EU3 stuff and the first few expansions would been getting back to EU3 level.

If that's going to be the model, they might as well just go the whole hog and have us pay a monthly subscription, then stream out new content as their hearts desire, without bothering to call it DLC, or expansion, or any other such silly words.

That's certainly not unreasonable of itself, but most attempts by companies to offer that sort of deal under the 'season pass' label have been very controversial.

 

[derly2004]

Hey dude, we have same avatar and even our location style is similar XD

Out of all the avatars connected to China I liked the five-colour flag for its simplicity. Anyway I confess that I might have subconsciously borrowed from your location style, since it sounded cool.

For Oirat, I think it's nothing to say. The map is suspicious. I never trust the external boundaries of the Atlas.

Moreover, by common sense, Oirat was still very strong when Russian first stepped into that area. So, if Oirat was controlling that area, Russian might face strong resist from Mongol. We all knew the history.

Nomadic/hordes cover the area around Lake Baikal all the time until the Russian come. Su wu (苏武) was arrested by huns. He lived near the Lake Baikal(Chinese call North Sea). You can Google find some maps that created by western people or Russian that show you the territory of Oirats cover the area around Lake Baikal.
I can find a lot of maps showing Mongolia control the Lake Baikal. However, In EU4 you need to colonize those territories.......

Since our friend here is so persistent with the Oirats I decided to dig a bit deeper over this matter.

According to one source, "[from] 1439 to 1455 the Oirat controlled the great steppe regions from Lake Balkhash to Lake Baikal and southward to the Great Wall." (Eurasian Corridors of Interconnection: From the South China to the Caspian Sea; edited by Susan M. Walcott, Corey Johnson at page 57)

The authors cites as their source a book by one René Grousset (Grousset René (1970) The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press). In Grousset's book, he mentions on page 479 that around 1456-57, the Oirats "owned a vast territory that included the Great Altai and the Khangai Mountains from Tarbagatai and Dzungaria to the southwest shore of Lake Baikal, accross the lands of the Black Irtysh, Urungu, Kobdo, and Uliassutai, and the sources of Selenga and Kosogol".

If one were to consult a current map, you will find the places mentioned above falling around the region where the borders of Russia, Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan intersect in present day. While the sources I mentioned are in no way conclusive, they show that the Oirats covered an expansive area which might have included Lake Baikal. However, I am more skeptical of whether they controlled any territory north of Lake Baikal since the descriptions above are open to quite liberal interpretation.

Just to be clear, I find there are arguments on both sides as to the extent of the Oirats' territory. I'm just not sure changing the EU4 map in favour of enlarging the Oirats will result in any substantial benefit to the gameplay.

 

[Wudadi]

Just to be clear, I find there are arguments on both sides as to the extent of the Oirats' territory. I'm just not sure changing the EU4 map in favour of enlarging the Oirats will result in any substantial benefit to the gameplay.

For these information you have found I want to say:"Nicely done!" As you know, the Mongolia empire(Most of the nomadic empire in history) cover around the Lake Baikai. However, In EU4 Mongolia/Nomandic tribes lose those territories, it is so weird. Some of people in here do not believe Chinese history ancient recording. They would rather believe modern western guy's research. They always use just one reason that "the Communist Party change the history" to doubt all of Chinese history resources.(It is so Prejudice) However, most history resources come from ancient history books. Like Twenty-Four Histories, or 明史.......

The new map of the AoW.
You can see the Oirats' border.

 

[Kljunas]

The new map of the AoW.
You can see the Oirats' border.
View attachment 115036

Where did you find that?

 

[Te. Kenzo]

The new map of the AoW.
You can see the Oirats' border.
View attachment 115036

Seems true and nice, source?

 

[987655mm]

The new map of the AoW.
You can see the Oirats' border.
View attachment 115036

How did you get that? Is it from a live stream or did you make it yourself?

 

[oblio-]

I think it's from a livestream. There were 2 more, I think. I'll look it up on reddit.

There you go: http://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/2g6ypg/art_of_war_dev_diary_4_army_builder_rebel/ckg8ok3

 

[Sir Iain]

I'm sure it's a screenshot from the recent livestream.

 

[rayyuri]

I don't usually post much, but I would just like to drop in to congratulate the team on their excellent work in trying to improve the in-game map. While I have yet to see the impact on game balance, the new map is certainly a visual improvement, given the large area China covers.

I would like to know whether the current cultural setup in China will be changed, since it is currently quite ahistorical with the southern half of China being designated Cantonese. Hope some work will be done over there.

It has no sense to make a separate Cantonese area. Cantonese is a Chinese dialect, not a culture or ethnic group. Cantonese people are all ethnic Han. There is no reason to make Han and Cantonese as two separate culture at the same level.

I would say:

Solution 1: Make Ming a cultural union like HRE/Germany/France. Divide Han culture into subgroups based on dialects, e.g. Mandarin, Wu, Min, Hakka, Cantonese...

I don't quite like this solution because it's ahistorical. At Ming period there was no such "nationalism" based on just dialects. The empire was so centralized and all the people consider them as ethnic Han and they don't think dialect a problem.

2. Delete Cantonese and make most of Ming provinces Han culture. Some remote provinces should be changed to minor culture like Sisongbanna, which was not traditional Chinese territory but an area that Ming inherited from Yuan Empire. Some remote places were quite decentralized at that time. Actually these places were something like Manchurian provinces at that time.

Also, it maybe a good idea to have two Manchurian culture: one is Jurchen in Altaic group, one is Manchu in East Asian group (or Chinese group for solution 1). Manchurian provinces start with Jurchen culture. If Ming controls all of Manchurian provinces, or any Manchurian Nation formed Qing, then change all Jurchen provinces into Manchu culture via events. This can represent the historical assimilation of Manchurian culture into Chinese culture.

 

[Kljunas]

I think it's from a livestream. There were 2 more, I think. I'll look it up on reddit.

There you go: http://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/2g6ypg/art_of_war_dev_diary_4_army_builder_rebel/ckg8ok3

Looks like we've got a new hardcore Greek start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Theodoro

 

[Lapsed Pacifist]

Soooo...do we have any indication of a release date for Art of War? I just don't want to start a new game only to abandon it once the DLC comes out.

Also:
-North Africa looks like a rainbow now! (RIP Algiers)
-I see they've also got rid of some of those useless 1d desert provinces in the middle East. Good riddance.

Looks like we've got a new hardcore Greek start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Theodoro

...Interesting choice.

 

[Attalus]

The new map of the AoW.
You can see the Oirats' border.
View attachment 115036

According to the map I'd say that there'll be at least 4 DD left
North Africa
South-East Asia
Indonesia in peculiar
and Mesoaerica ! ( sad the Inca are still basically blocked with no neighbors )

And Gothia will be a glorious nation to play with ( Hellenecised Goths what else ? )

 

[MarkS00N]

The new map of the AoW.
You can see the Oirats' border.
View attachment 115036

This is where I curse the mini-map because it blocks precisely the region I want to see... :wacko:

But let's see...
This left us with:
- Eastern Europe
- 'Muslim Region' minus Persia
- Mesoamerica
- Central Asia
Seems enough to have a Southeast Asia DD then...
Unless they break the 'Muslim Region' into Arabia, East Africa, and North Africa which means there are enough for 10 DDs without Southeast Asia...

Unless this is still a WiP, then the regions that isn't overhauled are North America (Probably they satisfied with overhaul from CoP), South America, and South Africa...
And from screenshots in this thread, Japan also won't get any overhaul...

 

[DC123456789]

North America definitely looks changed, South America also seems to have been overhauled. They had better not be ignoring East and South Africa though...

 

[MarkS00N]

North America definitely looks changed...

Hm...
At first I also think it has been changed, but because I can't point out what has been changed, I come to conclusion I am just mistaken...
Care to point out the changes?

 

[DC123456789]

Hm...
At first I also think it has been changed, but because I can't point out what has been changed, I come to conclusion I am just mistaken...
Care to point out the changes?

Coastal Northern Quebec has become uncolonizable and the wasteland has been enlarged quite a bit, that's the main thing. If you look closely the native tribe borders definitely look different, and then of course there's Mesoamerica which is practically unrecognizable with all those new tags.