• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

EU4 - Development Diary - 23rd of April 2019

Good day all. Today's a fairly brief Dev Diary, even by recent standards, as two of the five previous workdays were swallowed whole by Sweden's love for public holidays. To that end, I hope a good Easter day was had by all.

Last week I went over some Quality of Life suggestions that came up internally, and today I want to touch on one in particular detail. Again, these are not iron-clad promises of things to come. They are certainly improvements that we desire to make for the game, but or not that translates to being in our upcoming European Expansion and its accompanying update is for reality to dictate.

I mentioned at the end-of-year dev diary before that improving Custom Nation options was something we would like to achieve in said European release. Now a question that may come to mind is why this would be on the radar for our European expansion. Well Custom Nations remain one of the most popular choice for players. It has spent plenty of time as the number one choice in the past, although in the past months it has been playing second fiddle to France, see our handy nations chart:

Played Nations.jpg

No huge surprises here, except perhaps that England have fallen from grace, as they used to consistently be near the very top. These are most fun to observe when a release is done for a certain area, such as Rule Britannia, where England spiked like crazy.

What we see is that custom nations (D00 here) continue to stand the test of time, despite being added to the game with El Dorado back in February 2015. We have updated the designer with features as they have appeared, such as Consorts and ruler personalities, and updated the custom National Ideas as new modifiers have been added, but we feel there is still more that we can do.

In particular, myself and @Groogy have been looking at what we can do to boost the functionality of the custom nations feature, and something we both find lacking is that, while we have hundreds of sweet-looking unit models, there is no way to specify which ones your custom nation uses, leading to a fairly generic visual experience in battles. We may be dipping a bit into the HoI4 inspiration well with their way of previewing units for this.

unit previewer.jpg


In addition to a way to customize your unit models for your nation, I'd say we're due another pass of the available National Ideas for said custom nations. To the custom nation players out there, what would you really like to be able to tweak in your customized experience?

For those champing at the bit to see us move forward with development of the upcoming expansion, know that we are wrapping up this long period of tech debt. We have a couple more aspirations dev diaries to come, before we're likely going to return to our more regular dev diaries of showing off ongoing development.
 
I'll also take this post to reply to a few questions from the last DD.

What about more control over how colonies expand?

This is something that comes up internally too: it would be nice as a colonial overlord to stop, say, Colonial California from expanding into Colonial Mexico.

All suggestions in thread are great, please also consider having raid map mode, where we can see:
-which places are available to raid
-when those places will be available again (if its already raided)

Raiding is something we would like to improve. I'm not sure it'll make it into our update this year, but we have ambitions there, and it would be beyond mapmodes, I think it needs to be made less of an action to do every time you move seazone.

And what about the culture mapmode for the starting screen? Could you add it?

I don't see why not. Cultural map-painting is the patrician choice of expansion.

Just showing chance of leaders’ death would be better than showing their age.

The death chance is the mechanical side of what needs to be shared, but for framing and flavour, their ages/time of service are relevant.

Put the "Diplomatic Macro-Builder" (of the "Mandate-of-Heaven"-DLC) into the base-game and extend it ...
For Example: In the HRE-tab, why is there no "Grant Free City Status", altough there's already the option to "Revoke Free City Status" ?

While the Diplo Macrobuilder will likely remain a MoH feature, there are certainly improvements like these to be made, I agree.

I'm rejoicing with glee, seeing that my suggestion from 3 years ago has made it into closer consideration :3

It's one of those times where a suggestion is read and the thought is simply "it just makes sense"

@DDRJake Any indication on how many weeks you guys still have to work on tech-debt?

Tech debt work never truly ends, but our focus on it shall be drawing to a close over the coming week or two.

One idea - "go to province" button for events.

We'd need to figure out the precise implementation of this, but rest assured we want it too.

how about 4k resolution support / UI scale slider?

We have talked about 4K support briefly before. In short: it's something we want and are actively looking into.
 
It honestly surprises me that custom nations are that popular. I thought it was pretty fun to poke around with a little, but you miss a whole lot of specific nation flavor (like events) when you use them.
 
Religion based bonuses such as +2 papal authority etc should be one section that gives a scaling bonus relative to all religions, or atleast one option for each religion group.
 
Another idea: how about giving custom nations access to custom national mission trees? I guess letting you actually design a mission tree sounds like a work for a medium-sized expansion itself.
 
In-game options when devs?

I will keep asking this as part of my duty to get it through to devs that us players desperately want this so we can customize our playthroughs.
 
It baffles me how France has such a high playrate. Dosen't it get boring starting so strong?

Also Ming, which literally defeats the purpose of playing.
 
Sometimes when designing a costum nation, I wish I could set claims on a couple of provinces. I like starting as an OPM and finding my place in the world, but since costum nations only have generic missions, the claims would help emulating my countries rise back to power.

Edit: Costum religion, mission tree, government reforms and units would be damn cool as well!
 
It would be nice if you were able to select an existing country and then change it using the custom nation tool, for example chosing Portugal and then changing their ideas of taking more provinces.
 
English monarchy and steppe horde are broken with custom nations in random nations settings. The reason is in the government reform file the reform is set to appear if the country already has the reform when it should be set to appear if it has ever had the reform.
 
I like the idea of using the unit models from unit packs.
Maybe it will be cool to also decide what kind of horse unit the nation uses. For example elephants or horses.
(With that point maybe artillery and ships too)

It will be also cool if we could implement this feature for client states too.

I love my Aztec empire with Aztec unit models. Right now there a 3 nations with Aztec unit models.

Maybe there would be space for some vikingish unit models for the Norse religion.
 
as two of the five previous workdays were swallowed whole by Sweden's love for public holidays
You're saying that Sweden doesn't have Maundy Thursday as a holiday anymore? For shame, Sweden. I think I'll revoke your Nordic membership card for such deeds. Calls yourself holiday loving and then only have two weekdays off for Easter when us Danes have three.:p


Anyway, happy Easter to all.



For custom units could it then potentially be possible to e.g. change things like colour, for the sprites supporting dynamic colour at least? Perhaps even mixing between uniforms/hats, though not sure that's possible without redoing the sprites altogether which obviously is a no starter.
 
Something that I would really like (but don't expect) is to be able to choose tech group & unit type independently in the nation designer (they're already separate entities, with tech group only impacting estates and mission trees at this point, IIRC)

I really like having the high american missions, for example, but I hate having their OP units.
 
I'd like to see more improvements for the 'random nation setup' in addition to the custom nation improvements.

Steal some of the things from the CK2 random world.

Let us set the density of nations, from many small to a few large.

Let random pagan religions and heresies from the CK2 conversion have a chance of spawning, so maybe Scandinavia is Norse and Iberia is Cathar.

Ideally, add a 'random world' feature like RNW, so that the entire world is made of random tiles, not just the Americas. A few mods tried this but they were buggy and crash-prone.

More RNW features, improvements, and tiles would be nice too.

It honestly surprises me that custom nations are that popular. I thought it was pretty fun to poke around with a little, but you miss a whole lot of specific nation flavor (like events) when you use them.

Don't forget you can do some goofy stuff, and still get the nation flavor and events.

Make a custom state called 'Albion' with all the national ideas you want and your 6/6/6 starting ruler. When the game starts you can immediately form England and get their events.
Make a custom state called 'Lazy Byzantines' that starts with the provinces needed to 'Restore the Byzantine Empire' and do so immediately on starting the game. All the events, none of the restarts.
Make a daiymo with custom ideas that owns everything but Kyoto. Annex on starting, form Japan in in the first weeks of the game.

etc etc
 
Please, for the love of all that is holy, add the converter religions into the nation designer. I am perfectly happy for them to ONLY be available to custom nations if you don't feel like they are fleshed out enough to add them as actual religions via the existing heretic rebels
 
While we are on the topic of custom nations....I'd really like to see a way to design formable nations (e.g. great Britain, Germany Spain etc) & colonial nations... not with national ideas but the aesthetics. I know ck2 let's us do that with most titles and w. Dynasty