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EU4 - Development Diary - 1st of November 2016

Hi everyone, and welcome to another development diary for Europa Universalis IV. This time its rather meaty and is about major gameplay changes for the 1.19 patch.

While we were reasonably happy with how Fort and Zone of Control has played out since introduced over a year ago, it has had one major drawback. The rules have so many cases to keep track of that it was practically impossible to make all cases clear to the player. This causes much confusion amongst players, who also had an experience that was not as great as they had hoped while playing.

So now Zone of Control have changed completely. Instead of affecting a province and sometimes blocking passage in adjacent provinces, Zone of Control rules are now area based.

Areas = The same map division that States/Territories are organsied around. And which 1.19 will show thicker borders around.


A Forts is:
  • hostile if it is controlled by someone you are at war with.
  • friendly if it is controlled by you, or by someone on your side in any war, unless you are at war with them (should not happen).
  • neutral otherwise.


An area is:
  • friendly if it has at least one friendly fort and no hostile fort.
  • hostile if it has at least one hostile fort and no friendly fort.
  • contested if it has at least one hostile fort and at least one friendly fort.
  • neutral otherwise.

Zone of Control blocks an army to move between two adjacent provinces if they belong to different areas, one of which is hostile and the other being either hostile or contested.

(Note that movement within areas is never blocked by Zone of Control)

An occupied province without a fort will flip back to its owner's control if there is in the area at least one non-besieged fort controlled by him but no hostile forts.

To ensure an army can always reach the fort that is blocking it from moving and then come back after sieging it down, all armies can ignore Military Access in all non-neutral areas

Rebels never impact hostile rules, and yes, Capital Forts now work like all other forts.

In order to stop the enemy from reaching the interior of your country, you will often need to have one fort in every area.. Even without that though, forts can force the enemy to make detours unless they first siege down some forts.

While doing this, an average country ends up with more forts than before, so maintenance have been halved.

While doing these changes, we have tweaked the map dramatically, adding in lots of wastelands to give natural borders, and also made a big revision to the area setup, so now areas are pretty much all between 3-5 provinces, giving a more even balance.

eu4_131.png





We have added a new peace treaty as well in 1.19, called “End Rivalry”. This peace option force the enemy to remove one of their Rivals. The removed Rival cannot be added again until 15 years after removed.


We play the game quite a lot every week, and read far more on what issues you as players have. So we keep balancing and changing things to make for a greater player experience. In 1.19 we have some rather important changes to how you play the game.

Combat has been changed a bit as well in this patch, as we removed the combat width penalties from terrain, as it made battles last way too long, and was a double defensive bonus combined with diceroll penalties.

Sieging units will no longer get a rivercrossing penalty if a relieving force engages them, even if they did cross a river a few days, months or years earlier.

We have changed the chance to increase colonysize from colonist being placed to instead being a lower the bigger the colony becomes. Previously it was pretty much a no-brainer to keep it as long as possible, as it became better the bigger the colony is. Now íts more of a choice..

Another complaint was the fixed levels of liberty desire that got applied to vassals and marches as they grew past certain arbitrary limits. Now it is scaling by development of the subject so you can always judge impact of their growth.

For those of you that care about score, Great Powers are now likelier to be getting score each month, as they have a default +5 rating in each category. Also maintaining enough forts is now an impact on your military score gain.

Corruption is now not entirely 100% bad, as a country with 100 corruption will now get -20 unrest in their realm.

Courthouse & Town Halls no longer affect unrest but instead reduce state maintainance by 25% and 50% respectively, while their building costs have been halved.

The Casus Belli from Expansion and Exploration Ideagroups did not really work as great as before with the new technology system, so in 1.19 they are getting changed. The Casus Belli themselves are gone..

Exploration Finisher now allows you to fabricate claim on another continent that is in your capital in a colonial region. (Colonial Subjects can do it everywhere in a colonial region.)

Expansion Finisher now allows you to fabricate claims inside any trade company region that is on another continent than your capital. (Without Wealth of Nations, it is any overseas port not in a colonial region, and not in europe.)

At the same time, distance impact on building spy networks have been dropped to 1/10th of before.

For those of you that have Rights of Man, we are now adding even more things. In 1.19, Trade Goods will have a local impact. A Grain Province gives +0.5 Land Force Limit, Iron gives 20% Faster Building Construction & Ivory gives 20% cheaper state maintenance.

We have also improved the “trading in good” - bonus, where some are almost twice as powerful as before, and some have changed completely.

Next week we'll be back talking about all interface improvements for 1.19.
 
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WOO! Now all I need is for you to make it so that I don't have to constantly resend my diplomats every time they get caught spying! :p
 
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Nice! Love that you've cleared the Zone of Control madness.
 
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That's... Quite a lot! The only thing I'm not sure I like is removing the combat width penalty per terrain, but I'll wait and see how it plays. Great job!
 
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Interesting. I like that areas are being more and more integrated in the game. We'll see how intuitive the new fort system is, but I'm cautiously optimistic.
 
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While doing this, an average country ends up with more forts than before, so maintenance have been halved.
Does the AI still get some forts for free?
Exploration Finisher now allows you to fabricate claim on another continent that is in your capital in a colonial region.
I'm not sure what this means, but it seems to be saying something along the lines of needing to move my capital to a colonial region in order to use the ability to fabricate claims there, which makes no sense.
 
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Absolutely mind blowing! Can't wait for it to come out.

Wouldn't the removal of combat width penalty prevent what little use of choke-points (specifically mountains) that was in the game? Without it, there's no way for a smaller force to hold a larger one off.
 
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Zone of Control blocks an army to move between two adjacent provinces if they belong to different areas, one of which is hostile and the other being either hostile or contested.

So, if I understand this correctly, a two-area deep line of forts is necessary to prevent the enemy from just walkling all over your territory? - i.e. if forts are put only in the border-areas, and there are no fort in the adjecent area deeper within your territory, then this area is neutral and the enemy can freely walk past your fort and deeper into your territory?

I am not particularly critical here, just want to make sure my understanding is correct. In fact, I think the ZOC-change sounds great! The new rules sounds much more transparent (of course, you would be hard pressed to come up with less transparent rules than the old ones), and iIt seems that it is no longer actively bad to have two forts next to each other,
 
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Wouldn't the removal of combat width penalty prevent what little use of choke-points (specifically mountains) that was in the game? Without it, there's no way for a smaller force to hold a larger one off.
There still isn't. There never will be.

To hold off an army merely 2x your size you need Prussia vs. an enemy with no combat modifiers, defending in good terrain. Anything beyond that is basically going full mil ideas versus someone with none.

We will never see defenses because it's WAY too easy to stack huge amounts of troops in to a battle with the removal of in-combat attrition. Every battle will continue to be "pile in your entire standing army" until battles are made much quicker.
 
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While doing this, an average country ends up with more forts than before, so maintenance have been halved.

Hm, does this mean that we are back to extremely long wars, like before forts were introduced? For instance, now Ottomans have 4 forts at start, are they going to have 8 or more now that maintenance is halved?
 
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Hm, does this mean that we are back to extremely long wars, like before forts were introduced? For instance, now Ottomans have 4 forts at start, are they going to have 8 or more now that maintenance is halved?
I really hope they nerf forts if that change goes through. Each fort is going to require 1-2 offensive battles followed by attrition ticks and general pain. Going through 8 forts is gong to be hell and back.
 
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I like the clarity of the new fort system. But what about if you have a fort in a choke point in the mountains and in the same area behind that there are some farmlands. Then you can park the sieging army in the mountain but the army that is defending that army in the farmlands. This makes the mountain fort useless as when you want to relieve the siege you are defending in the farmlands instead of the mountain where you build the fort.
 
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There still isn't. There never will be.

To hold off an army merely 2x your size you need Prussia vs. an enemy with no combat modifiers, defending in good terrain. Anything beyond that is basically going full mil ideas versus someone with none.

We will never see defenses because it's WAY too easy to stack huge amounts of troops in to a battle with the removal of in-combat attrition. Every battle will continue to be "pile in your entire standing army" until battles are made much quicker.

Well, I've done it in the past, many times. Not every war is a late-game meat grinder with hundreds of thousands of troops.
The game has changed a lot since, though. 1.18 already leaves me with the impression that terrain matters very little, and I think that's unfortunate.

Either way, we'll see when the patch comes out. Perhaps it works great this way.
 
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Nice changes in general, but there are two things that raise some questions.

Firstly the new fort rules, do they mean that e. g. France, if she decides to invade Aragon, can freely move through the chokepoint in Rousillon even if it has a fort, park its forces in hilly Gerona or even Urgell (those are still part of the same area accoring to the published screenshot), park their forces there hiding the sieging army in Rousillon and effectively becoming the defender, using the new wasteland and fort rules to its advantage? I guess the same situation can happen in Caucasus as well.

Secondly the new way of getting CB in colonies, will it just simly give you the conquest CB? Even now the peace provincial cost in let's say Indonesia is quite restricting and you cannot take some of the larger islands in one war, will this mean that expansion in those regions will be much slower now? This doesn't make much sense to me, for historical as well as gameplay reasons. The Europeans managed to expand in colonies much faster than we can currently in the game, which of course would be a bit OP if replicated, but nerfing it even further will result in countless boring and unengaging wars in colonies, which i cannot imagine as a fun element.
 
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