Hello everyone and welcome back to yet another development diary for Europa Universalis 4. The release of the Cossacks and patch 1.14 is almost on us, so I thought I'd use the last dev diary before then to revisit the Random New World rework coming in 1.14 and explaining what exactly you'll be getting out of all the possibilities we discussed back in July.
Random New World Rework (Update to Conquest of Paradise feature)
As was mentioned in the July dev diary, the way we ended up reworking the Random New World was by replacing the completely procedural world generation with a system of 'tiles', which is our name for handcrafted landmasses ranging from tiny islands to supercontinents. These tiles are randomly distributed to make up the new world, with certain weighting rules such as the RNW always spawning at least one tile marked as a continent, so that there's always a larger landmass to colonize. Because the tiles are handcrafted, we are also able to support various features such as being able to place estuaries, natural harbors and even some unique resource modifiers in the tiles, making for a far more interesting and natural-looking trade setup in the new world. You can also name specific provinces and set whether tiles are allowed to be rotated, and make it so certain tiles will only appear in the edges of the map, allowing us to create true continents that connect to the poles.
Provinces and Scenarios
In addition to the tile rework, the way the RNW distributes countries, culture, religion and development was completely reworked. The old RNW tended to keep whatever the had previously, creating weird patches of culture and religion that bore no resemblance to what a real alternative new world might look like. It also tended to put every province at roughly the same development, with frozen wastelands that could be on par with fertile European plains. The province development was reworked to take into account far more factors such as terrain, climate, coasts and trade centers, creating a logical distribution of development that should be on par with that found in the old New World (worth noting is that North America got a development boost in 1.14, as we feel it was rather overnerfed in 1.12).
To handle the distribution of religion, culture and countries, we put the region and areas system mentioned in this dev diary to good use. Each region is given one of the culture groups from the old new world, and cultures within that group are distributed in clusters of connected areas, resulting in more natural-looking cultural borders. For countries and religion, we developed a whole new system called 'Random New World Scenarios'. These scenarios are scripted setups that apply to a single region, and might look something like: 'Create 5-20 Totemist Native Councils and spread them out, while making the rest of the area have Totemist religion and highly aggressive natives'. Scenarios can be highly customized, and in addition to the things you might expect to normally find in the New World we've also added a number of rare 'fantasy' scenarios, ranging from highly advanced High American Empires to finding Vinland or a lost Templar fleet. There is a new option that lets you toggle fantasy scenarios and tiles off, if you prefer your New World to be more on the regular side.
Dynamic Trade Nodes
To further the dynamic nature of the new RNW, we also decided to create a new system for setting up trade nodes. Instead of reusing the old trade nodes and trying to place them geographically where they are in the old new world (which frequently ended up completely bonkers), we decided to generate trade nodes roughly based on regions, with dynamically generated connections that flow to Europe, Africa and Asia based on what makes sense geographically - so an island off the coast of West Africa will naturally connect to the Ivory coast, while any landmass appearing near Australia will be able to send trade down under.
Dynamic Naming
Another thing we wanted to avoid with the new RNW is the sense of disconnect you would get from the re-using of names. Finding California just off the coast of Iceland, with Manhattan as a landlocked mountain province in which the Aztecs live will do strange things to your brain, and helped foster a sense of implausibility over the whole thing. As such, we've decided to go with a fully dynamic naming approach, creating a database of thousands of random names divided into land, sea and lake names. The regions, colonial regions and trade nodes take their names from the randomly named provinces (with for example trade nodes tending to be named after important centers of trade), and countries have their own name lists defined in the Scenarios and use randomly generated flags and ideas, so that you're never encountering the same old countries from history.
The Random New World rework will launch with about 90 tiles, a bit short of our original goal of 100, but we'll be adding more with future patches and the whole RNW has been made almost completely moddable so that modders can easily create their own tiles and scenarios. Something worth noting (because we previously said it wouldn't) is that changing the RNW *will* change your checksum, as trying to make it not so simply did not end up working in multiplayer. Note that just PLAYING WITH the RNW will not change your checksum, it's only if you add more tiles or modify existing scenarios, etc.
As a final note for this dev diary, I'd like to thank all the betas and map modders who contributed tiles, with a special thanks to CK2 QA RageaiR who made more than 30 tiles, many of which were created on his own free time.
Random New World Rework (Update to Conquest of Paradise feature)
As was mentioned in the July dev diary, the way we ended up reworking the Random New World was by replacing the completely procedural world generation with a system of 'tiles', which is our name for handcrafted landmasses ranging from tiny islands to supercontinents. These tiles are randomly distributed to make up the new world, with certain weighting rules such as the RNW always spawning at least one tile marked as a continent, so that there's always a larger landmass to colonize. Because the tiles are handcrafted, we are also able to support various features such as being able to place estuaries, natural harbors and even some unique resource modifiers in the tiles, making for a far more interesting and natural-looking trade setup in the new world. You can also name specific provinces and set whether tiles are allowed to be rotated, and make it so certain tiles will only appear in the edges of the map, allowing us to create true continents that connect to the poles.
Provinces and Scenarios
In addition to the tile rework, the way the RNW distributes countries, culture, religion and development was completely reworked. The old RNW tended to keep whatever the had previously, creating weird patches of culture and religion that bore no resemblance to what a real alternative new world might look like. It also tended to put every province at roughly the same development, with frozen wastelands that could be on par with fertile European plains. The province development was reworked to take into account far more factors such as terrain, climate, coasts and trade centers, creating a logical distribution of development that should be on par with that found in the old New World (worth noting is that North America got a development boost in 1.14, as we feel it was rather overnerfed in 1.12).
To handle the distribution of religion, culture and countries, we put the region and areas system mentioned in this dev diary to good use. Each region is given one of the culture groups from the old new world, and cultures within that group are distributed in clusters of connected areas, resulting in more natural-looking cultural borders. For countries and religion, we developed a whole new system called 'Random New World Scenarios'. These scenarios are scripted setups that apply to a single region, and might look something like: 'Create 5-20 Totemist Native Councils and spread them out, while making the rest of the area have Totemist religion and highly aggressive natives'. Scenarios can be highly customized, and in addition to the things you might expect to normally find in the New World we've also added a number of rare 'fantasy' scenarios, ranging from highly advanced High American Empires to finding Vinland or a lost Templar fleet. There is a new option that lets you toggle fantasy scenarios and tiles off, if you prefer your New World to be more on the regular side.
Dynamic Trade Nodes
To further the dynamic nature of the new RNW, we also decided to create a new system for setting up trade nodes. Instead of reusing the old trade nodes and trying to place them geographically where they are in the old new world (which frequently ended up completely bonkers), we decided to generate trade nodes roughly based on regions, with dynamically generated connections that flow to Europe, Africa and Asia based on what makes sense geographically - so an island off the coast of West Africa will naturally connect to the Ivory coast, while any landmass appearing near Australia will be able to send trade down under.
Dynamic Naming
Another thing we wanted to avoid with the new RNW is the sense of disconnect you would get from the re-using of names. Finding California just off the coast of Iceland, with Manhattan as a landlocked mountain province in which the Aztecs live will do strange things to your brain, and helped foster a sense of implausibility over the whole thing. As such, we've decided to go with a fully dynamic naming approach, creating a database of thousands of random names divided into land, sea and lake names. The regions, colonial regions and trade nodes take their names from the randomly named provinces (with for example trade nodes tending to be named after important centers of trade), and countries have their own name lists defined in the Scenarios and use randomly generated flags and ideas, so that you're never encountering the same old countries from history.
The Random New World rework will launch with about 90 tiles, a bit short of our original goal of 100, but we'll be adding more with future patches and the whole RNW has been made almost completely moddable so that modders can easily create their own tiles and scenarios. Something worth noting (because we previously said it wouldn't) is that changing the RNW *will* change your checksum, as trying to make it not so simply did not end up working in multiplayer. Note that just PLAYING WITH the RNW will not change your checksum, it's only if you add more tiles or modify existing scenarios, etc.
As a final note for this dev diary, I'd like to thank all the betas and map modders who contributed tiles, with a special thanks to CK2 QA RageaiR who made more than 30 tiles, many of which were created on his own free time.
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