Happy new 2016, everyone! With the holidays over, we now return to our regularly scheduled Thursday dev diaries. Today we'll be talking about some changes coming in the upcoming 1.15 bugfixing and balancing patch, which should come out sometime before the end of January.
Changes to Estates
The Estates feature represented a major shift in the EU4 development towards more internal mechanics. Such shifts rarely go entirely smoothly, and there was some controversy regarding the feature, with many players either loving or hating it. We consider the Estates mechanic a strong addition to the game and intend to continue to develop internal mechanics in EU4 (though it will always remain an empire building game at its core) but, as might be expected when going in an entirely new design direction, some of the Estates mechanics didn't end up working so well in practice. For this reason, Estates will be recieving a number of tweaks in 1.15 to make them more interesting and balanced.
First of all, all Estates will now be removed from provinces on conquest. This is one of those cases where it makes absolute perfect sense historically: The local nobility didn't just up and vanish when a new ruler took over, and nearly all conquerors had to depend on the same local elites that ruled in the territory before their conquest. However, gameplay wise this simply didn't work out, with players experiencing sudden Estate influence spikes they could not control or having to revoke a badly placed Estate to give the province to another Estate. The option to have Estates remain on conquest will stay for modders that want to emphasise history over gameplay.
Secondly, Loyalty is being reworked. Originally, Loyalty was all permanent effects, with the temporary modifiers added later because of the effects of interactions and the like simply ending up too strong. This however has created a bit of a weird hybrid system where it's difficult to predict where your Estates' loyalty will be in the future, and where you can get stuck at low loyalty waiting and praying for some event to fire. As such, we're going to change Loyatly to adopt a model more like prestige, where loyalty is a permanent value with no modifiers that decays slowly towards a middle point of 50, with the decay being faster the further from 50 it is. The disloyal threshold was changed to 40, while the loyal threshold remains at 60. The non-temporary modifiers for loyalty (such as high piety for the Ulema) were changed to modifiers on the decay speed, so disloyal nobles will cease being disloyal faster if the monarch has high legitimacy, for example.
Finally, the way Estates give autonomy in provinces is also being changed. While the autonomy itself isn't a problem, the fact that we changed autonomy to be multiplicative resulted in some undesirable results like Nobility provinces actually reducing manpower if the country also had quantity. For this reason, we've tweaked the different Estates to have special exceptions to their autonomy effects, which apply not only to autonomy given from the Estate but to all autonomy in the province, as follows:
In addition to these changes, there are also a number of minor tweaks, such as adjusting the province effects of Estates to work with the new autonomy exception and making it so that developing Estate provinces increases their loyalty.
Changes to Diplomatic Feedback
The second of the big two features in Cossacks, Diplomatic Feedback, suffered from some problems of its own on launch. Unlike Estates, the problem with Diplomatic Feedback was not with the feature design but rather the fact that we were a little too conservative in adapting the AI to the new system, resulting in things like one-province hordes laying claim to half of Eurasia or AI allies rivaling you at 100 trust because they had no other possible rivals to choose from. To address this, we're making the following changes:
While certainly not a Cossacks or 1.14 feature, Poland's Elective Monarchy from Res Publica has always been the source of complaints from people who do not feel that its representation of Jagellion legitimacy is, shall we say, strictly accurate. It's one of those things that has been on my personal todo list to revamp for a long time, and for 1.15 it is going to receive the following changes:
That's all for today! Next week we'll continue talking about patch 1.15, so stay tuned.
Changes to Estates
The Estates feature represented a major shift in the EU4 development towards more internal mechanics. Such shifts rarely go entirely smoothly, and there was some controversy regarding the feature, with many players either loving or hating it. We consider the Estates mechanic a strong addition to the game and intend to continue to develop internal mechanics in EU4 (though it will always remain an empire building game at its core) but, as might be expected when going in an entirely new design direction, some of the Estates mechanics didn't end up working so well in practice. For this reason, Estates will be recieving a number of tweaks in 1.15 to make them more interesting and balanced.
First of all, all Estates will now be removed from provinces on conquest. This is one of those cases where it makes absolute perfect sense historically: The local nobility didn't just up and vanish when a new ruler took over, and nearly all conquerors had to depend on the same local elites that ruled in the territory before their conquest. However, gameplay wise this simply didn't work out, with players experiencing sudden Estate influence spikes they could not control or having to revoke a badly placed Estate to give the province to another Estate. The option to have Estates remain on conquest will stay for modders that want to emphasise history over gameplay.
Secondly, Loyalty is being reworked. Originally, Loyalty was all permanent effects, with the temporary modifiers added later because of the effects of interactions and the like simply ending up too strong. This however has created a bit of a weird hybrid system where it's difficult to predict where your Estates' loyalty will be in the future, and where you can get stuck at low loyalty waiting and praying for some event to fire. As such, we're going to change Loyatly to adopt a model more like prestige, where loyalty is a permanent value with no modifiers that decays slowly towards a middle point of 50, with the decay being faster the further from 50 it is. The disloyal threshold was changed to 40, while the loyal threshold remains at 60. The non-temporary modifiers for loyalty (such as high piety for the Ulema) were changed to modifiers on the decay speed, so disloyal nobles will cease being disloyal faster if the monarch has high legitimacy, for example.
Finally, the way Estates give autonomy in provinces is also being changed. While the autonomy itself isn't a problem, the fact that we changed autonomy to be multiplicative resulted in some undesirable results like Nobility provinces actually reducing manpower if the country also had quantity. For this reason, we've tweaked the different Estates to have special exceptions to their autonomy effects, which apply not only to autonomy given from the Estate but to all autonomy in the province, as follows:
- Provinces controlled by the Clergy and Dhimmi will no longer have the effects of autonomy applied to tax income.
- Provinces controlled by the Burghers will no longer have the effects of autonomy applied to production income and trade power.
- Provinces controlled by the Nobility, Cossacks and Tribes will no longer have the effects of autonomy applied to manpower and force limit.
In addition to these changes, there are also a number of minor tweaks, such as adjusting the province effects of Estates to work with the new autonomy exception and making it so that developing Estate provinces increases their loyalty.
Changes to Diplomatic Feedback
The second of the big two features in Cossacks, Diplomatic Feedback, suffered from some problems of its own on launch. Unlike Estates, the problem with Diplomatic Feedback was not with the feature design but rather the fact that we were a little too conservative in adapting the AI to the new system, resulting in things like one-province hordes laying claim to half of Eurasia or AI allies rivaling you at 100 trust because they had no other possible rivals to choose from. To address this, we're making the following changes:
- The AI will no longer rival a country they have 80+ trust with under any circumstances.
- Trust now has a much stronger effect on whether the AI desires your provinces, and will be the primary determinor when the AI has to choose between two mutually exclusive alliances (because of rivalries etc).
- The way AI claims provinces of vital interest has been reworked to be more sensible.
- When an alliance is about to break because of mutually vital territory, the game will now warn you via an alert that this is going to happen and give you a chance to adjust your own claims.
While certainly not a Cossacks or 1.14 feature, Poland's Elective Monarchy from Res Publica has always been the source of complaints from people who do not feel that its representation of Jagellion legitimacy is, shall we say, strictly accurate. It's one of those things that has been on my personal todo list to revamp for a long time, and for 1.15 it is going to receive the following changes:
- Local heirs will now have a claim strength of 80, same as foreign heirs, meaning they will no longer start their reign with low legitimacy.
- The stat boosts for local heirs were somewhat reduced, though they still get on average higher stats than foreign heirs.
- Boosting the support of a local heir now costs prestige (10 for 5 support) instead of legitimacy.
- When a foreign monarch holds the throne, there is now a small chance that another country of that dynasty will get a CB to enforce a union on the elective monarchy. If they successfully do so, the elective monarchy is abolished and replaced with a monarchy of the same type as their new overlord.
That's all for today! Next week we'll continue talking about patch 1.15, so stay tuned.
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