EU4 - Dev Diary - October 29th 2015

[hwoosh]

Honestly, I don't think the devs should have wasted precious development time on the "build to army/navy" feature at all.

It has every sign of being another "automatic fleet transport"—a quality of life feature conceived with the best of intentions, but ultimately buggy as hell because it hands control of player units over to the AI, and in the final analysis, adds more inconvenience than it takes away.

 

[Republic of Mercury]

Honestly, I don't think the devs should have wasted precious development time on the "build to army/navy" feature at all.

It has every sign of being another "automatic fleet transport"—a quality of life feature conceived with the best of intentions, but ultimately buggy as hell because it hands control of player units over to the AI, and in the final analysis, adds more inconvenience than it takes away.

You haven't played the Cossacks. Naval transport and land transport are two very different kettles of fish. I don't see any indication that there'll be anything wrong with these feature.

 

[ChildeR]

It has every sign of being another "automatic fleet transport"—a quality of life feature conceived with the best of intentions, but ultimately buggy as hell because it hands control of player units over to the AI, and in the final analysis, adds more inconvenience than it takes away.

While I agree that fleet transport is not very useful, the template builder, which also relies on "AI" pathing, works very well. Let's hope this feature is more like the latter.

 

[SolSys]

Personally, I don't think anything should be free. Being a developer myself, I know for a fact that quality of life improvements actually take more out of the developer's life than actual new features. Writing something new is always easier than adding/modifying existing code.

And we should be thankful to Paradox that they are actually still adding new material to EU IV after 2 years of the first release. Tell me any other developer adding major new content to their game without asking you to buy a totally new version? That is why these days we end up with huge number of games never realizing their full potential.

Thank you! I actually tried creating a thread on this very point.

There is an incredible entitlement attitude among many critical comments in this thread.

Constructive criticism involves actually making relevant observations and suggestions, not whining and complaining about a company trying to earn income in an honest fashion.

That's not even the most annoying part.

For some reason whenever a new expansion is mentioned, there are people who complain and keep bringing WoW as a valid comparison.
Those people say there are too many DLCs/expansions and Paradox should bundle everything released just before the new expansion and sell it for the base price just as Blizzard does.

Somehow those people mange to conveniently leave out the fact that beside the sale of a almost-complete-bundle Blizzard ALSO charges you as part of monthly SUBSCRIPTION.
Well then, I always wondered why they never suggested Paradox to adopt THAT part from Blizzard as well -_-

 

[londoner247]

While I agree that fleet transport is not very useful, the template builder, which also relies on "AI" pathing, works very well. Let's hope this feature is more like the latter.

I think we must be using different templates then! In my experience, the template will build units far too close to the enemy and then march through enemy lines. This is not smart!

It works fine at peacetime but not during war.

But the fleet builder is even worse. Let the AI do it and it will take twice as long and half the new fleet will be sunk en route to the rally point.

 

[ChildeR]

I think we must be using different templates then! In my experience, the template will build units far too close to the enemy and then march through enemy lines. This is not smart!

It uses the closest provinces, you can easily choose the approximate location where you want your army constructed.

I'm not saying it couldn't be better, but I'd rather it be easy to figure out what it will do rather than have too much logic that will occasionally fail anyway. E.g. add a hover effect that tells which provinces will be used so I can decide where to click better.

But the fleet builder is even worse. Let the AI do it and it will take twice as long and half the new fleet will be sunk en route to the rally point.

That one's even easier to make use of: just build all your shipyards in the X adjacent provinces you choose, then always build your templates in the same location.

 

[Yeekim]

Never used "automatic transport" or "building template", but then that's just me...

 

[hwoosh]

You haven't played the Cossacks. Naval transport and land transport are two very different kettles of fish. I don't see any indication that there'll be anything wrong with these feature.

You haven't played it either, and there isn't any indication that there will be anything right with the feature. When has a feature that hands over player units to AI control ever worked out well? How about automatic rebel suppression, does anyone still actually use that? What about the "feature" that hands over your country to AI control if your connection drops in a multiplayer game? (I don't play MP so I've never had to deal with this personally—not even sure if it's still in the game, in fact—but I've never heard anything good about it.)

Features like the macro-builder, that make player micromanagement easier, are great. Features that attempt to sidestep the micromanagement completely... well, with those Paradox tends to put its foot in its mouth.

 

[grommile]

You haven't played it either, and there isn't any indication that there will be anything right with the feature. When has a feature that hands over player units to AI control ever worked out well? How about automatic rebel suppression, does anyone still actually use that?

Some people do, sometimes.

I don't bother, but that's because I generally prefer to play in ways that either don't give me revolts, or let me get my armies into position to be attacked by the rebels instead of attacking the rebels.

As far as "add regiments to army" goes, I fully expect to mostly use that during peacetime, when I will, for the most part, not care about how the troops are being routed. During wartime, my desires regarding where the newly spawned regiments go are likely to diverge from even what a good implementation of the feature would expect.

 

[Republic of Mercury]

You haven't played it either, and there isn't any indication that there will be anything right with the feature. When has a feature that hands over player units to AI control ever worked out well? How about automatic rebel suppression, does anyone still actually use that? What about the "feature" that hands over your country to AI control if your connection drops in a multiplayer game? (I don't play MP so I've never had to deal with this personally—not even sure if it's still in the game, in fact—but I've never heard anything good about it.)

Features like the macro-builder, that make player micromanagement easier, are great. Features that attempt to sidestep the micromanagement completely... well, with those Paradox tends to put its foot in its mouth.

I'm not saying that the feature will or won't work. The burden of proof is on you. I use automatic rebel supression quite frequently, it works fine for me. And I also don't play Multiplayer either, but there's a bit of a difference between the AI controlling your entire country and the AI making a regiment path to your army which you can interrupt whenever you want, which is exactly how the army template systems, which I have no complaints with for land units.

 

[hwoosh]

I'm not saying that the feature will or won't work. The burden of proof is on you.

No, the burden of proof is not on me. I'm not trying to prove anything.

All I did was observe that PDS has, at this point, a consistent pattern of designing "quality of life" automation features that sound good on paper but end up being not that great, or even (in the case of automatic fleet transport) make the functionality worse; and then I expressed my regret that they were spending time and effort on yet another such feature. I don't know that this feature is going to be bad, and I never asserted that, as you claim.

 

[Soranya]

No, the burden of proof is not on me. I'm not trying to prove anything.

All I did was observe that PDS has, at this point, a consistent pattern of designing "quality of life" automation features that sound good on paper but end up being not that great, or even (in the case of automatic fleet transport) make the functionality worse; and then I expressed my regret that they were spending time and effort on yet another such feature. I don't know that this feature is going to be bad, and I never asserted that, as you claim.

Only QoL feature that comes to mind is Fleet Transport - albeit said its horrible uneffective and even dangerous to use during War time, but it in its basics does what is says. A few greatly needed improvements to the Naval AI could easily fix the most anoying failures of this feature and make it actually usefull.

What other Automatation features are bad in your mind?

EDIT:
You seem to be a pesemitic person That makes me sad.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

You haven't played it either, and there isn't any indication that there will be anything right with the feature. When has a feature that hands over player units to AI control ever worked out well? How about automatic rebel suppression, does anyone still actually use that? What about the "feature" that hands over your country to AI control if your connection drops in a multiplayer game? (I don't play MP so I've never had to deal with this personally—not even sure if it's still in the game, in fact—but I've never heard anything good about it.)

Features like the macro-builder, that make player micromanagement easier, are great. Features that attempt to sidestep the micromanagement completely... well, with those Paradox tends to put its foot in its mouth.

The macro builder for unit templates is an example of something done right IMO (autonomy and a few others could be improved, but aren't harmful to use like fleet transport), I don't see how that one can be improved, in contrast with "automatic fleet transport" which has done everything from blocking legit land movements to selecting fleets from across the world when an eligible fleet nearby would suffice to crashing the game if attempted under some circumstances (especially lots of single transport units).

I suspect we'll see something in between with "add to this stack", since it'll probably just take the closest eligible province that's not building something, build it, and have it chase/merge that stack. In contrast with early fleet transport, at least, it's unlikely that the game will pop-up prompt you to do this in the middle of a war in nonsensical fashion. If it works well, great, but at least it won't actively hinder gameplay if you ignore it so that's a plus.

Removing buildings from the ledger was a pretty big QoL too unfortunately.

The only time I use much auto rebel suppression is when the micro of it all wears on me too much, or in the new world because the CN babysitting is tiresome compared to self-micro and the benefit of self micro there is marginal. Auto suppression in pan-Asian type empires is just awful...it functions best when you leave stacks at the most centralized location you can find, which necessarily means that you'll leave lots of provinces occupied a while but eventually it gets too hard to care.

 

[SolSys]

You seem to be a pessimistic person That makes me sad.

What's wrong with being a pessimistic person? I'm proud to be pessimistic.

EDIT: I'm not happy about it, but what you gonna do; life's sh*t -_-

 

[Chief of Staff]

I can see a use for "build to army" feature... since template builder won't let you to consider future like adding artillery to an army in 1444 in event it becomes available (forcing you to delete old template when artillery is finally available so you could add that to new template), I could use that button to add artillery to units that don't have it yet when it becomes available.

 

[OHgamer]

Construct in Subjects

(Expansion Feature)
Construct in Subjects, once again, is precisely what it says on the tin: It lets you build armies and navies in your subjects' provinces, quite useful if for instance you want to raise an army in the new world but only have Colonial Nations there. Your subject is not able to cancel these constructions, and when finished, the army or ship will belong to you. You cannot construct units in a subject whose liberty desire is over 50%. Constructing units in your subjects takes slightly longer time than doing so in your own provinces.

This..is...BRILLIANT. One question though, who pays for upkeep once the unit is created, myself or my colony? Either way though this is an idea that hopefully will be used in later-era games as well such as upcoming HoI4 and (fingers crossed, salt over shoulder, sacrifices to every known deity) a future version of Victoria, because it would model very nicely the way colonial armies were raised during the era of the Second Imperialism.

 

[ahhheygao]

This..is...BRILLIANT. One question though, who pays for upkeep once the unit is created, myself or my colony? Either way though this is an idea that hopefully will be used in later-era games as well such as upcoming HoI4 and (fingers crossed, salt over shoulder, sacrifices to every known deity) a future version of Victoria, because it would model very nicely the way colonial armies were raised during the era of the Second Imperialism.

Yourself. The unit is yours--you front the manpower and cost, just that you get to create the unit on subjects' land at a slower speed.

 

[OHgamer]

Yourself. The unit is yours--you front the manpower and cost, just that you get to create the unit on subjects' land at a slower speed.

ah ok good

 

[Shatterfury]

I hope there is a way to disable or mod out "Construct in subjects".

 

[hwoosh]

Only QoL feature that comes to mind is Fleet Transport - albeit said its horrible uneffective and even dangerous to use during War time, but it in its basics does what is says. A few greatly needed improvements to the Naval AI could easily fix the most anoying failures of this feature and make it actually usefull.

What other Automatation features are bad in your mind?

Automatic rebel suppression, as already mentioned. It's pretty much useless if you care one iota about playing efficiently.

Another great example is CK2's automatic title distribution feature, which ruined many a person's game and was apparently designed with the same mindset.

EDIT:
You seem to be a pesemitic person That makes me sad.

I celebrate the things Paradox does well, and grumble about the things they do poorly. I'm not going to celebrate in advance about a feature that seems similar to things they've done poorly in the past. If it does turn out a great, smoothly-functioning feature, then I'll be pleasantly surprised—but I'm not holding my breath.

If that makes me a pessimist, then thank goodness I'm not an optimist.