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EU4 - Development Diary - 22nd of November 2016

Good day all. Over the weekend, the team and indeed, the entire company was away conquering Malta. Great times were had and I'm sure there will be many pictures and tales of the occasion making the rounds but now Tuesday is upon us and I want to talk about feedback on our updates.

While we have our in-house QA team and a closed group of Betas who provide valuable feedback, sometimes we want to get a wider playerbase to try out our game builds by way of an Open Beta. A prime reason for this is to try out a large core change to the game where we want to get a lot of feedback from the community. In this case, we wanted to get feedback on a new area-based fort system.

For reference, we are fairly happy with how the 1.18 fort system works. It blocks movement, forces some sieges without requiring carpet sieging and, especially with the terrain bonuses, adds a good amount of strategic mid-long term planning for your nation. However there were some undeniable issues with the system in lack of clarity and overlapping Zones of Control. We wanted to try a new system out and hear what you had to think

It didn't take long for the feedback to mount up. The new system was unclear, forts blocked nothing on their own, small and mid sized nations struggled to offer much movement blocking, Military access rules became messy. The following week we decided as a team to revert to the 1.18 fort system.

Of course, there were some who liked and even loved the beta version's area-based fort system, and reverting was a disappointment to them. You're never going to make everyone happy, no matter what you change but I would like to thank everyone who played and continues to play with the 1.19 beta, as your contributions help make it a better update.

Of course, forts were not the only things on the cards for 1.19. There were plenty of changes to the Scandinavian experience, map changes and such which were well received. Nothing warmed my cockles quite like seeing screenshots on various platforms of beautiful resurgent Golden Hordes though!

Soon™ 1.19 will be out of beta and released for all to play, with additional fixes for bugs found during the beta period. This is another great part of the Open Beta process. Your bug reports have been appreciated, as well as the crash reports that get sent in, leading to dozens of additional bugfixes for 1.19, including the particularly nasty subject integration bug.

Since we've shown off most of 1.19 and we've been talking about forts anyway, how about seeing the Paradox Fort in Malta, complete with Garrison:

IMG-20161117-WA0009.jpg


Inside which the army draws up plans to occupy the rest of the island

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See you again next week where we will talk about how we see EU4 moving forward and our goals for what we want to do with the game.

If that's simply too long for you, be sure to tune in for the EU4 Developer Multiplayer, where the world shall be lit in flames at 1500 CET www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive
 
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Any further thoughts on the future of forts? (Can you try saying that 3 times fast on the livestream?)
 
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I liked the new area based system a lot although there were flaws, movement felt so smooth!
Completely understand the revert though; the fort spam and small nations getting a little shafted were big problems.
Aaand the fort system is a gordium-knot level conundrum to solve. It just is but in essence its good ;).

All in all it was very cool to try something radically different and I hope you haven't completely binned area fort mechanics yet. I feel like it has great potential.

Hope you had a good time in malta and can't wait to meet you guys at the fan gathering :D


edit: furthermore I am of the opinion we need a fort forcelimit
 
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In this case, we wanted to get feedback on a new area-based fort system.

For reference, we are fairly happy with how the 1.18 fort system works. It blocks movement, forces some sieges without requiring carpet sieging and, especially with the terrain bonuses, adds a good amount of strategic mid-long term planning for your nation. However there were some undeniable issues with the system in lack of clarity and overlapping Zones of Control. We wanted to try a new system out and hear what you had to think

It didn't take long for the feedback to mount up. The new system was unclear, forts blocked nothing on their own, small and mid sized nations struggled to offer much movement blocking, Military access rules became messy. The following week we decided as a team to revert to the 1.18 fort system.

Of course, there were some who liked and even loved the beta version's area-based fort system, and reverting was a disappointment to them. You're never going to make everyone happy, no matter what you change but I would like to thank everyone who played and continues to play with the 1.19 beta, as your contributions help make it a better update.
NOOO! Why the hell would you go back to the opaque system we had before the area based one seemed great. I don't care how bad it was it can't be worse than the 1.8 ZoC system! Removing fort altogether is better than the old ZoC system.

I actually think the 1.18 fort system works really well and maybe I've been lucky but I've never had issues of the AI seaming to ignore ZoC
Well how nice for you, but the old ZoC system is a nightmare there is no way to know what's what and it makes no sense whatsoever.
 
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So question on the fort system, then. If you are sticking with the "current system" does that mean that you're leaving it totally as is, or will there be fixes to it's most annoying problems? The biggest ones: AI getting free border forts, the cost of forts in general, forts being tied to army tradition. Fixing ZOC issues would be great, too. I don't understand why, if I occupy a fort, I can occupy EVERY surrounding area that it covers, regardless of whether their is an opposing fort or not. Also on ZOC, a neighboring country's fort should have NO BEARING on whether I can pass since that fort would have no control over another country's land. This would be true whether they were allies or not.
 
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Since this DD is about improvements of some controversial mechanics, let's talk about some other ones in this thread! :)

For example what does @DDRJake think about:
  • Hostile Core Creation mechanics
  • Current balance of military NIs and policies
 
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I was one of those who really liked the area fort system (though it needed changes, like not needing double areas). Something needs to be done about forts, whether it by making assaults via breeches actually viable or changing late game forts to be more realistic in that they should last half a year at most if you bring artillery, like during the Napoleonic Wars.
 
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NOOO! Why the hell would you go back to the opaque system we had before the area based one seemed great. I don't care how bad it was it can't be worse than the 1.8 ZoC system! Removing fort altogether is better than the old ZoC system.


Well how nice for you, but the old ZoC system is a nightmare there is no way to know what's what and it makes no sense whatsoever.

2 cases.
1. ZoC in isolation : so a fort gives a ZoC to all neighbouring provinces owned by that nation(or there allies in a war as the AI check for only two allegiances, both sides in the war) and once you enter the Zoc you can either retreat or go for the fort (like spokes on a wheel). Also enemy Zoc doesn't affect your movements in your own territory .

2. Overlapping enemy ZoC
these are a harder to get but you can just hover over a province with units selected and it will tell you which fort that province is being protected by (in my experience it's mostly defended by the fort furthest away but don't have any code to back that up

What specifically is the issues you find with ZoC in your games ?
 
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And not a peep about the horrible colonist change.

Here's my suggestion for the colonist change: In stead of making him get worse at his job over time, how about you reduce the starting power to 7-10%, and make it increase over time?

It would display the colonist getting better at his job, and getting better at convincing natives to join the colony/convincing his ruler to send more people to help finish the colony.

That, or just get rid of the change altogether.
 
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Forts that block movement are seemingly always going to have to many problems to solve IMO. Why not make it so that forts ZoC makes hostile units move much slower (such as 50% or what ever) and also give hostile units increased attrition when within the ZoC.

These numbers could scale with era/tech and building level and could work with either adjacency or area setup.

Still offers help to small/med nations by making it easier to outmanoeuvre the enemy on the defensive and large nations can get time to move units from one end of the nation to the other while the enemy are slowed by the forts ZoC.
 
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