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EU4 - Development Diary - 16th of April 2019

Good day and welcome to this week's Development Diary for EU4. Last week, programming maestro and wine connoisseur @MatRopert gave some insight into the technical debt that we have been and continue to be working on for EU4. Today, I'm going to continue probing at some quality of life suggestions.

Quality of Life will be a large focus of our expansion and update this year. In a couple of previous dev diaries, I talked about some of the QoL suggestions from the forums here. Today, I want to share some that have come up internally. Many people here at PDX HQ play EU4 regularly, and as you've surely seen, many compete in our in-house dev clash. As such, when it was heard that the EU4 team were going to be tackling QoL issues in a big way, many came forward with their own suggestions.

As has been said before, issues being listed here is not a guarantee that that they will be in the upcoming release.

"Take-as-much-money-as-possible-without-exceeding-warscore"

It fills my heart with glee that one of the first things we got internally was a demand to make taking all of someone's money easier. I think we've all been there when you've defeated your opponent, draw up the land you wish to take, then ask for a generous amount of their money, but the money you ask is too much, so begins the dainty process of clicking the - button on money. It doesn't help that the tooltip covers the acceptance chance.

We could well add a button for "as much as possible" where it takes money up to the point where it will still be accepted, or add a ctrl-click function for this. Either way, the frustration here is clear to see and remove, and since it's about taking money, it speaks dearly to me.

"Fully annex country option in peacedeals"

Another peace deal suggestion internally, and I'm sure it's been mentioned on the forums as well. Back in the day, the full annex option was the only way to annex a nation. Since then, the rules for taking land in a peace deal have been eased up, but it means that if you wish to annex a 20 province nation in the late game, that's a lot of clicking. Restoring the ability to 1-click select all provinces would be a welcome break to many mice.

"Core all button"

Speaks for itself. Much as the action of slamming that coring button for every province is empowering, a core-all button in the stability tab would be a welcome addition.

"Fix the Truce Timers not following their tooltips. Truces frequently end months before advertised, or claim they are over when you still get a stab hit for DOWing"

This strays into the realm of a bug, but none the less it lowers the quality of one's life. There's likely a bit of elbow grease needed in making the truces more robust so that you can have confidence in the tooltipped date for when they end, but it's high on the priority list to look into.

"Make age visible on Generals/Admirals"

EUIV is a game about nations rather than individuals, leading to the focus being on instruments of state over fleshing out people. To that end, generals themselves are purposely void in humanizing properties. With that said, it is very easy to forget which general and admiral was hired when, as their potential imminent death is definitely of importance to the player. Some general indicate of age, length of service or even death likelihood as advisors have is a reasonable addition.

"Click on core of a country in a province -> highlight all their cores"

Figuring out which nation to subjugate and which lands to take can often come down to who still stakes a firm core on them, including annexed nations. The highlighting feature on provinces was introduced alongside Rule Britannia, and this is a prime candidate for where we can add such a thing.


These QoL features (and many more) stand alongside those that we have been receiving from the forums, and remain a strong focus of this year's expansion and accompanying update. once our lengthy period of tech debt work is done and dusted, we look forward to sharing with you what we develop, as it comes. I know many are disappointed that we aren't showing off new features, map work and the like for the upcoming expansion and update, but the tech debt that we take care of today, paves the way for said development.
 
Can you make cavaleri usefull in the game?
I have some idea for that :
Create a pursuite phase after end batlle where cav can kill defeat army (like in real world ) and kill a lot of soldier.
make the flank capacity work :cav should have priority over infantrie for be at range for attac
Cav should have the capacity to break a infantrie unity and make it out of combat even if this infantry is full moral if a suceful charge is lauch but if it fail cav should be out of combat
a army with not cav should a malus like the malus for too many infantry
cav should have more shock valus
 
One QoL change I wouldn't mind, would it be possible for a ruler who is a general not to have a double death roll? Particularly when you start the game in 1444 with a ruler general.
 
Are you planning to add new script capabilities to this year's expansion/update?
More specifically, I am thinking about scripted functions with effect... it would be a great boon to modders.
 
Not really QoL, but colonial migration is probably something to take a look at. There wasn't perhaps very much migration during the time period in general, so Victoria-like pope's would probably be redundant, but one area that suffers from this is colonization.

As you establish a colony, it has a population counter that goes up to 1000 before it becomes self sustaining. This is fine, but once it's self sustaining, that's the end of it. New Spain doesn't continue to get Spanish migrants, increasing its development or resulting in Spanish majorities in provinces.

The only way for a colonial nation to increase development or to change more of their country to their culture is through manual development and culture conversion, which is not particularly engaging if you're playing as one, and the AI doesn't do it either.
 
I will add one more.

When building cathedrals display religion instead of goods produce.

And while we are at it.

When innovation bonus is displayed, make it progress bar so that you can see that you have 15 days to claim innovation bonus for being ahead in tech.

Make possible to exploit production development of inland provinces (right now it's impossible due to inland provinces giving no sailors).
 
Make troops disembark when you shift-click transports into a port but want the fleet to sail somewhere else right away. That the troops stay on board in this case has annoyed me for the last 5 years.
 
I play the HRE game frequently, and it would be great to have the option in the auto-diplomacy interface to assign a diplomat to improve relations with 1) electors only, and 2) all HRE members.
 
Holy orders could be a state, colonial or missionary mechanic and works like reform focus, spreading religion and culture in America.

Expell minorities needs to be reworked, maybe could flee to wherever they want, including a neighbour kingdom (Morocco increases development with moriscos), example: if you conquest Tanger, has no sense they flee to America instead Fez.
 
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Can you address primitive status, culture conversion with harmonised/syncretised religions, and the whole can of worms that got opened when you nerfed the frick out of asia by making TCs so strong while simultaneously near-removing capital movement between continents?
 
I play the HRE game frequently, and it would be great to have the option in the auto-diplomacy interface to assign a diplomat to improve relations with 1) electors only, and 2) all HRE members.

+ on top of that, being notified by popup/message "The elector of X is now supporting your claim to the imperial throne!" "The elector of X is no longer supporting your claim to the imperial throne, they now support the treacherous Y" would be a nice addition imo.
 
Please add consistency in the various 'Province List' menus where clicking on the province name centres the map on the province. Example: The building or development builder, or the Religion screen when selecting where the missionaries will go.
 
I would like to suggest two more things.

First, the ability to unassign generals/admirals directly from the army's interface. It would greatly reduce the amount of clicking one has to make every game.

And second, the possibility to queue-up conversion orders for missionaries. I find assigning them every 7 months or so quite tedious.

Thanks for reading.
 
I love these QoL changes! Thank you so much!

A few ones that I have mentioned:
  • have a Peace Deals Archives. It seems like, on the dev clash, you're always struggling to figure what was the peace deal two players just signed. Most of the time you try to guess or have to ask the players themselves. Why not make the peace deals available in the ledger, archived and accessible for everyone? And you know, QoL improvements that improve the commentators' life (including DDRJake and Groogy's life) are the best, right?
  • make the "this information is not available in multiplayer" (regarding troops and casualties in a war) optional. Some multiplayer gamers want these information transparent as they are in single player runs, other don't.
  • show allies' AE too when negotiating a peace deal; currently it only shows the player's projected AE, but as we can grant provinces to our allies...
  • a few other minors suggestions here, if you got the time...
Thank you for listening to the community (and your own devs) by making this game more enjoyable :D
 
Thank you guys for all of the hard work in making this great game as polished as you can.

I would like to suggest a QoL change as well: please allow us to specify where on the screen we'd like popup messages to appear. While playing MP and trying to avoid pausing, getting a popup (or quite often, several popups) right in the middle of the screen can hinder our ability to reinforce a battle, chase down a retreating army, or retreat from a battle quickly. Allowing us to indicate that we'd like our popups to the left or bottom left of the screen could allow us to avoid having to click past a bunch of popups that appear right in the center of the action.
 
hello,i am a large fan of paradox and especially of EU 4 so much so i have finally made an account to post of these forums . i also seem to be a large fan of Austria so could we possibly ever see the addition of Austria-Hungray formable nation?