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EU4 - Development Diary - 19th of January 2021

Hello and Welcome to another Europa Universalis IV development diary. 2020 was an interesting year to say the least, but now we are in 2021, and the Tinto team is now fully up to speed with working on the new expansion. Today we’ll focus on some new aspects related to Heirs, Regencies and Estates.

First of all, one change for heirs and their legitimacy is that it will start a fair bit lower on average, and slowly increase over time as the heir grows older. Having high prestige increases it faster. Please note that corruption in your court increases it, as there is nothing screaming legitimate future King as much as a few sacks of gold in your pocket.

Secondly, with this new expansion, we have removed the regency councils, and instead replaced them by Estate Regencies.

Instead, a Regent will be generated from your most powerful estate. This will further increase the power of that estate, which might also give you a specific benefit or not.

eu4_18.png

Please note however that this does not replace consort regencies - consorts will still take priority over an estate-led regency

Thirdly, we are adding the option for extending a regency. Extending a regency reduces legitimacy by 10, and extends the current regency with another 5 years. Of course, the claim of the heir continues to increase. While a regency has some drawbacks, this can be very beneficial, if your heir is an imbecile, and your regency council is not entire incompetent.

Lest we forget, we have also changed so that you are no longer constantly losing legitimacy the longer you have a regency, but instead its an increase in stability cost.

We are also adding a fair bit more interesting events that occur when you are in a regency, all to add more interesting flavor to the experience, not to mention interesting situations.

As you may have noticed, this is one of the shorter development diaries, even if it gives you some new features, but next week, we’ll return to an interesting look at some more american nations and their content.
 
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I like the refinement of existing mechanics by making them interact with other mechanics. And perhaps making them make more sense and historical.

they will most likely be primary culture, and state religion, as the estates themselves do not know anything else.


EDIT: talked to the programmer, we'll add that it will pick religion/culture from a random province you have with the christian religion group for the dhimmi

Don't forget about the Brahmin and other religiously oriented estates.

It would be kind of awkward if the Brahmin leader was Sunni.
 
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As you may have noticed, this is one of the shorter development diaries, even if it gives you some new features, but next week, we’ll return to an interesting look at some more american nations and their content.

When have you guys checked the Pontic Steppe region last time? Huge territories occupied by hordes are so poorly depicted that even Arabian and Sub-Saharan desert regions have much smaller provinces and better province layout in general. For example Astrakhan province alone is roughly as large as whole Ireland.
IMO Pontic Steppes' provinces should be roughly as large as Hungarian, Polish or Muscovite ones.

P.S. I'm not asking to increase development, 1/1/1 would do, even something like 0/0/1 might've been introduced.
 
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This has the potential of being a really great and immersive feature if it is fleshed out properly or a feature noone will like or use much if fleshed out poorly.

To work it needs as much as possible of the following things. The first ones are all quite easily done with limiting and weighting:
- Not only considering estates but also advisors for regents.
- Civil wars over the regency between estates of similar power (think pretender rebels that install a regent on success)
- Regents stats being dependant on the respective estate/advisor slot they come from
- Regents trying to usurp, more likely the more the regency is extended
- Remove the ability to remove privileges from the regents estate
- Include events that give privileges or crown land to the regents estate
- Give the regents estate a ticking influence bonus

This probably requires more work but could still be worth it:
- Chose regents culture and religion by the respective dev distribution, weighted for primary culture, accepted culture, culture group culture and foreign culture for culture and tolerance for religion. This means that if 30% of your manpower dev is of a specific culture your nobility regent has a 30% chance to be of that culture, before applying modifiers. For estates where a specific dev type cant be associated (tribes for example) total dev can be used


But most importantly, to make this not only a good feature but a great one:
- Have regents from different estates play differently, for example allow/disallow some options for each estate. Noble estate regents could be able to declare war while others can not, Burghers regents can create trade conpanies and charter companies, others can not, Church regents can use the respective religious mechanics, others can not etc.
 
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Enrique de Trastamara

vs

a 6/6/6 regency council ?

Also (which happened IRL IIRC) I suppose that consort regencies might also be possible to extend?
 
@Johan Just chiming in to say I love the vibe I get from this dev diary and from you being active in the comments. Reading about your intentions and thoughts on player feedback is extremely valuable. Also I dig the fact that many old mechanics are tidied up these days and tend to give player more agency.
 
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What about for countries with parliaments? It seems weird that England, for example, will have regents from the clergy or burghers when most of England’s historical regents were nobles, many of whom were members of parliament.
Well, the nominal head of government isn't always actually in power, and there's no reason the clergy or merchants couldn't use a noble as a figurehead to help push their interests.
 
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Hopefully EU5 in ... 2025? AHH Just take my money now.

Dynastic warfare was so important and it's sad to see it not happen.

Think of all the events that can't really happen because you really only ever get one heir...

  1. Glorious Revolution in England
  2. Every Ottoman civil war - though we have mechanics to help simulate it
  3. Stuarts taking over England
  4. The Hasburgs controlling Spain and Austria
  5. Spanish Succession
  6. Henry VIII and his kids
  7. etc

I would especially love to see better version of Glorious Revolution! It is one of the most consequential events in British constitutional history besides the English Civil Wars and such. It was from this event that the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy/sovereignty was finally established as a fact. The sole event directly connected with this historical event was "The Immortal Seven" which was a Dutch flavor event, which was particularly disappointing as I'd like to see it expanded a bit more.

Inflation
Advisor cost * year
Corruption * dev
Drilling * force limit
Loan * dev
Production * dip or arm tech

What other forms of inflation are there?

Why, balloon inflation, of course! ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

What about for countries with parliaments? It seems weird that England, for example, will have regents from the clergy or burghers when most of England’s historical regents were nobles, many of whom were members of parliament.

Would it be possible to repurpose the “seat of powerful nobles” mechanic from domestic consorts to represent this? If crownland is high enough compared to the influence of any estate (say, 50% the influence or more), a “noble” from parliament would be generated as regent, assigned a province as his seat, and use flavor events associated with noble regencies.

This. Isn't nobles faction also disabled with Constitutional Monarchy as well? I believe Great Britain have that form of government in later history bookmarks, though to my knowledge, only once historically had there been a regency since 1707 Act of Union, as described below.

One other issue is that there has been cases where the ruler fell ill for a prolonged period and their heir took over as the regent. Classic example of this is George III of the United Kingdom whose eldest son, later reigning as George IV, was appointed the Prince-Regent (hence the period known as Regency, often in context of architecture and fashion during that time) through an Act of Parliament. But that was not the only case of heir taking over as the regent when the ruler fell ill for a prolonged period of time, as I believe Denmark-Norway also had a prince-regent during the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars.

I am not aware of any events currently in EU4 that make the heir a regent in case of ruler falling ill so, in the absence, I would suggest adding them. A slightly modified version may also be made if Parliament exists (particularly in the context of parliamentary supremacy as established in post-1688 Britain) to denote the appointment via an Act of Parliament. Speaking of which, though, albeit off-topic, there need to be a better representation of parliamentary supremacy in relation to low Absolutism somehow. Hope we will eventually get a better, much improved Parliament mechanic.
 
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The strange thing is the fact that new mechanics were teased in one of the very first dev diaries - there was supposed to be some new mechanic that some missions were suppposed to be tied to and there was supposed to be some new looting system.
 
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I always appreciate you EU4 dev team's hard work. Always thanks.

BTW again, here are my suggestions for next patch.
@Johan , I want to know how you think about my those suggestions. Please read below and comment your thinking.


To make naval units versatile, there are REALLY necessary things to do!
Navies should be able to support land battle more actively
& able to damage m~~uch more toward enemies' economy.

hrtq4et4r3.jpg

Read further: More roles, more abilities, more meanings to have Naval Units】


② In Shogunate mechanism, there are several problems .

A Shogunate can hold 'infinite Daimyo swarm', without any reasonable limitation, thus discoraging forming Japan tag.
Japan is completely united, but treated as if 'not yet completely united' ...What the heck?
On the other hand, even if Japan is rather 'divided', Japan is United! ...What's the ****?

Is_Japan_really_united_096835435.png
Yeah, even in this situation, you can execute 'Japan is United!' decision.
These weird things in Shogunate system, must be fixed.

Read further: 【Improvements for Shogunate & Daimyos】


③ Ryukyu Islands

I think the time has come to add more contents about Ryukyu islands.

Adding Ryukyuan culture (which belongs to Japanese group),
Adding more islands other than Okinawa, to create 'the Ryukyus' area,
Adding new Ryukyuan tags, NIs...
Ryukyu_4provinces_r09231u4.jpg


Read further: 【The Ryukyu Islands】
 
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Would love to see a mechanic where there are multiple heirs. Nothing says WTF like when your 50 year old heir dies and your 75 year old monarch and his wife can't reproduce. Did the dead heir really not have any siblings? Did he not have kids of his own?

Would also be interesting to see multiple heirs with similar legitimacy competing for the throne when pops dies. Lower stability increases the chance that there will be a civil war for the crown.
 
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I could swear there was an event in EU3 (possible Death and Taxes) for a competent regency seizing power. I hope there is something like that. That was fun.
 
When have you guys checked the Pontic Steppe region last time? Huge territories occupied by hordes are so poorly depicted that even Arabian and Sub-Saharan desert regions have much smaller provinces and better province layout in general. For example Astrakhan province alone is roughly as large as whole Ireland.
IMO Pontic Steppes' provinces should be roughly as large as Hungarian, Polish or Muscovite ones.

P.S. I'm not asking to increase development, 1/1/1 would do, even something like 0/0/1 might've been introduced.

This. I would love much higher province density around the globe, especially if total dev can be kept relatively the same. It makes tall/regional RP playstyles much more viable when you can have like 20 provinces in a small area that you could dev to the moon vs having to cover land area equivalent to the entirety of Siberia just to get to 20.
 
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Enrique de Trastamara

vs

a 6/6/6 regency council ?

Well considering Enrique always seems to have a tragic “accident” on November 11, 1444 when I play Castille he is not an issue.

But more broadly I would pretty much always take the 0/0/0 with wars over the 6/6/6 regency council. Especially since I have probably already spent a significant time at peace under the regency council burning off AE and recovering manpower. The only obvious case I might extend is if the regency started when the heir was like 14 and I had massive AE and no manpower so five years of peace is likely anyway.
 
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Well considering Enrique always seems to have a tragic “accident” on November 11, 1444 when I play Castille he is not an issue.

But more broadly I would pretty much always take the 0/0/0 with wars over the 6/6/6 regency council. Especially since I have probably already spent a significant time at peace under the regency council burning off AE and recovering manpower. The only obvious case I might extend is if the regency started when the heir was like 14 and I had massive AE and no manpower so five years of peace is likely anyway.

But with a 6/6/6 no wars council that would allow for so much development, assuming you're already up to date in tech / ideas. Personally I would much rather have even 15 years of not being able to declare wars and develop/catch up in tech than lagging behind, unable to core the newly conquered land. Plus you can just bait the ai into declaring on you by deleting your army so it's not too much of an issue imo.
 
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