EU4 Dev Diary 21st March 2017 - Diplomatic Macro Builder

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DDRJake

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Feb 4, 2011
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Good day all, the time has come at last to talk in depth about the much-teased feature that has our players not wanting to go back to 1.19 for fear of playing without it. Today the spotlight is on Mandate of Heaven's new Diplomatic Macro Builder.

Owners of Mandate of Heaven will have access to a new Macro Builder designed to truly make your diplomats work for their meager salaries. The Diplo Macro will allow you to do almost all diplomatic actions from the Macro menu without having to click from nation to nation.

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Nations who would accept your diplomatic offer are shown on the map in green. Those who would not accept are shown in red while those who are completely ineligible to be asked are in grey. Hovering over a nation will give you a breakdown of the reasons for and against agreeing to your offer. You can use either the map or the list on the Macro Builder to check this information and click on either to confirm the diplomatic action.

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Diplo actions included are Alliance, Influence, Dynastic, Economic, Papal, Emperor and Great Power actions. Gone are the days of desperately searching for who will marry you or who you can kindly ask the Pope to excommunicate.

But we're overlooking one tab here. What's that on the far left?

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Improve Relations is our Leftmost tab and allows for the automation of improving relations via your diplomats. There are 5 rules which you can assign diplomats to work themselves to the bone over.

  • Target Neighbouring Countries
  • Target your own Subjects
  • Target nations who have Aggressive Expansion towards you
  • Target Allies
  • Target Threatening nations
Once assigned to a task, your diplomats will work to boost relations with relevant nations. Once they raise a nation to +100 improved relations, they will automatically move on to another. they won't return to improve relations with an already-improved nation unless it falls below +80 improved relations unless they have nothing better to do.

The automated diplomats also have some logic of their own for who they target. They will recognize "hopeless" attempts to improve relations with nations who already have irredeemably low opinion of your nation and will judge nations based on strength and distance from you when placating threatening nations.

Clicking on a diplomat will stop them from their improve relations mission while right clicking will simply cancel the automation and they will continue to improve relations with the nation they are already active in.

The Diplomatic Macro Builder will be part of the Mandate of Heaven Expansion, which releases for $19.99 on April 6th 2017. The day of release is fast approaching and in next week's diary we'll be covering a variety of miscellaneous additions and changes.

Until then though, it's time to get ready for the Dev Clash Multiplayer session. Chris and I must resist grabbing the blue paint and saltire. See you then!
 
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So happy to see that improve relations thing. Is something similar in the pipeline for espionage? Building spy networks is something I'd love the option to automate in more or less the same fashion.
 
As someone who is terrible at micromanaging diplomats, I love this feature already. Where do I sign?
 
I often want to do things like targeting the electors in the HRE and there appears to be no automation for that - so I hope (won't assume) that the 'old' interface is still available?
 
I often want to do things like targeting the electors in the HRE and there appears to be no automation for that - so I hope (won't assume) that the 'old' interface is still available?

There will be nothing restricting the tried and true method of targeting individual nations for improving relations or diplomatic actions.
 
This is awesome! Probably the best quality of life improvement ever.

Shame about Florence stll always being hated be the Pope.
 
Really looking forward to this. It will make a lot of things flow significantly more smoothly. I would love having a "Holy Roman Electors" option for the auto relationship improvement as well, though.
 
In the end this expansion seems to change surprisingly little of the game.
- There's a lot of flavor for east asia.
- There's the macro builder which seems like a decent ease of life mechanic.

But for the majority of your game the only thing you will notice is the age systems and prosperity, as well as privincial edicts.

Seems like this expansion went for a few big features rather than many small (which I guess could be a good thing, just that in this case the big features are tied to a small part of the world). I guess it's kinda similar to how most of El Dorado were tied to America and the Nation designer.


Also: It would be nice if you could tie a Diplomat to a selected few countries. Most of the times what you want them to do kinda overlaps with some category, but not really. This way you could feel more sure that you actually get what you want.