Good day all and a Happy New Year to you too. After a somewhat extended break I have finally come back to the office and rejoined the rest of the EUIV team. Our immediate tasks at hand are checking on and potentially ironing out any remaining issues from 1.28 as well as putting our plans together for the year.
As we mentioned in the chunky end of year dev diary our focus for the year will be a large European Expansion, with a heavy focus on crushing outstanding bugs and delivering Quality of Life improvements. We will be getting going with that shortly, after taking care of a few remaining important issues which have been reported in 1.28, including the Trade Company stuttering and save file issues with Expelling minorities. Once we investigate and fix these and other issues, we'll work towards releasing a 1.28.3 Patch.
As we also indicated in last year's wrap-up dev diary, we'll be fairly light on content in these dev diaries for a while, as we take the time both to put together a 1.28.3 Patch and plan out our large end of year Expansion. Frankly put: there isn't the content in the game to be talking about right now, so instead I'll turn attention to how I invited everyone to bring forward longstanding bugs and QoL issues they would like to see taken care of in said expansion. I'll grab some interesting ones and give some thoughts on them.
I'll say ahead of time that these are just thoughts on matters, and not to be taken as firm promises of things to come.
Mothballed Armies
This is something that gets suggested frequently and on one level, it makes nice symmetric sense: One can mothball Navies, why not armies? It will continue not to be implemented however, as while navies serve a variety of roles, including piracy, anti-piracy, trade, transport and combat, your armies serve almost entirely the exclusive role of combat. The ability to mothball parts of your armies would trivialize the cost of maintaining a large army, granting large nations even further advantages.
There are other approaches to this with ideas like higher costs for far flung armies: It could/should be more expensive to operate the Dutch armies in China than in the Netherlands. Such things are not on the cards currently, but make interesting food for thought.
Mod tweaks in the Launcher
I love this idea. Giving more information and flexibility with mods in the launcher would be extremely useful in games with such extensive mod communities as ours, and is certainly something worth exploring how to do right.
Diplomatic Macro Builder
There have been various suggestions for the Diplo Macro since its debut in Mandate of Heaven, not limited to those in the linked thread. Most of them revolve around not correctly targeting who the player is intending, with users not wanting it to target nations who they will soon destroy, or other particular sets of nations such as HRE members/Electors. These were out of the scope when the feature was being made, but as we re-visit parts of the game with QoL in mind, an actual custom list that the player can make at will is an interesting solution for this.
Provide options for subjects colonising regions, to stop them from colonising provinces you want to colonise.
For the precise map painters among us, I've seen this pop up. Colonial Nation subjects currently have some strict rules on lands which their AI will colonize, but I believe there's room for improvement there, where it can be loosened up but give the overlord the ability force colonization within their Colonial Region, so that, for example, Mexico doesn't snake their way into Louisiana and the Eastern Seaboard.
In the coming weeks until we start digging into more meat of what we're planning on doing in our big expansion this year, we'll likely pick up on various other suggestions that have been coming up, as well as a so far unannounced surprise that will be coming in a couple of weeks.
As we mentioned in the chunky end of year dev diary our focus for the year will be a large European Expansion, with a heavy focus on crushing outstanding bugs and delivering Quality of Life improvements. We will be getting going with that shortly, after taking care of a few remaining important issues which have been reported in 1.28, including the Trade Company stuttering and save file issues with Expelling minorities. Once we investigate and fix these and other issues, we'll work towards releasing a 1.28.3 Patch.
As we also indicated in last year's wrap-up dev diary, we'll be fairly light on content in these dev diaries for a while, as we take the time both to put together a 1.28.3 Patch and plan out our large end of year Expansion. Frankly put: there isn't the content in the game to be talking about right now, so instead I'll turn attention to how I invited everyone to bring forward longstanding bugs and QoL issues they would like to see taken care of in said expansion. I'll grab some interesting ones and give some thoughts on them.
I'll say ahead of time that these are just thoughts on matters, and not to be taken as firm promises of things to come.
Mothballed Armies
This is something that gets suggested frequently and on one level, it makes nice symmetric sense: One can mothball Navies, why not armies? It will continue not to be implemented however, as while navies serve a variety of roles, including piracy, anti-piracy, trade, transport and combat, your armies serve almost entirely the exclusive role of combat. The ability to mothball parts of your armies would trivialize the cost of maintaining a large army, granting large nations even further advantages.
There are other approaches to this with ideas like higher costs for far flung armies: It could/should be more expensive to operate the Dutch armies in China than in the Netherlands. Such things are not on the cards currently, but make interesting food for thought.
Mod tweaks in the Launcher
I love this idea. Giving more information and flexibility with mods in the launcher would be extremely useful in games with such extensive mod communities as ours, and is certainly something worth exploring how to do right.
Diplomatic Macro Builder
There have been various suggestions for the Diplo Macro since its debut in Mandate of Heaven, not limited to those in the linked thread. Most of them revolve around not correctly targeting who the player is intending, with users not wanting it to target nations who they will soon destroy, or other particular sets of nations such as HRE members/Electors. These were out of the scope when the feature was being made, but as we re-visit parts of the game with QoL in mind, an actual custom list that the player can make at will is an interesting solution for this.
Provide options for subjects colonising regions, to stop them from colonising provinces you want to colonise.
For the precise map painters among us, I've seen this pop up. Colonial Nation subjects currently have some strict rules on lands which their AI will colonize, but I believe there's room for improvement there, where it can be loosened up but give the overlord the ability force colonization within their Colonial Region, so that, for example, Mexico doesn't snake their way into Louisiana and the Eastern Seaboard.
In the coming weeks until we start digging into more meat of what we're planning on doing in our big expansion this year, we'll likely pick up on various other suggestions that have been coming up, as well as a so far unannounced surprise that will be coming in a couple of weeks.
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