EU4 - Development Diary - 8th of November 2016

[Johan]

Hello, and welcome to another week, and another Europa Universalis development diary. This week we’re focusing on the interface improvements of our ‘Denmark’(1.19) update.

First of all, we’ve added more options to the player. You can now specify the ledger to be limited in multiplayer games, where detail data about other nations are hidden, but you can still use the ledger to keep track of your own nation.

Another cool new option is the ability to disable the rule that you can not stack ideagroups. Now it is possible for those that want, to go all military ideas in their games.

The Custom-Nation-Designer have gotten two new addition in 1.19. First of all, you can now choose to start without an heir, and secondly, for those that also have the Rights of Man expansion, it is now possible to define your consort.

We also added two new things to the province view. Besides the possibility to fabricate claims on that province directly from the province interface, there is now an icon for hostile attrition that is shown whenever a province provides it.

The religious UI have also been upgraded, and you can now see missionary strength in the interface, so you can plan better for the future. Another important aspect is the addition of another column in list of provinces to convert, detailing of how much that particular province impacts the religious unity.

A previous patch added a “skip to next song” button. This has now been replaced with a button that opens up a full interface to select which songs are allowed to play, and to select a song to play with.

There is now also an alert for high naval attrition that triggers for fleets that are taking more than 5% attrition and have a ship with hull strength less than 50%.

And for those of you playing with Rights of Man & Common Sense, and with lots of subjects and vast colonial empires, we added a checkbox to hide subjects in the development macrobuilder.

Some important information for those of you that mod EU4.

Republican Tradition refactored to be 0-100 like Legitimacy, Horde Unity and Devotion, so remember to go through your scripts when you update to support 1.19.

We also merged the 'relations_decay_of_me' modifier into 'improve_relation_modifier'. They were basically the same functionality, and this makes the game easier to understand.



Next week, we’ll let the artists take to the podium to talk about the new graphics in 1.19!

 

[Trin Tragula]

Looks good. Are the impassable regions coloured by geography (brown in the desert, white in arctic areas)? That Nubia looks different from the Norwegian Alp impassable region.

It's an option for unowned land in general. Coloring by surrounding owners is also still an option for wastelands

 

[Johan]

fixed screenshot

 

[Trin Tragula]

Jüllich is a perfect example of a province that'd be great to have but really does not fit without seriously impairing the clickability of what's already in the region.
That part of the map has the highest concentration of the smallest provinces in the game already.

 

[Trin Tragula]

Yes there is

 

[Trin Tragula]

Wouldn't it be worth consideration to have Jülich replace Aachen, then? Aachen obviously was an important-ish Imperial city, but its glory days were pretty much over in the EU4 era, and the Dukes of Jülich even had the Schirmvogtei (protective bailiwick???) over Aachen since 1269, i.e. despite it being a free Imperial city, there was some degree of feudal suzerainty of Jülich over Aachen.

Jülich was quite a wealthy and strategically important territory (the United Duchies were usually called Jülich-Kleve-Berg for a reason) and I believe it warrants representation quite a bit more than several provinces and independent countries that have been included within the HRE.

Aachen probably exists mostly because of the need to have one free city in that region, however there are other Imperial cities in somewhat less crowded parts of Northwestern Germany (Dortmund would come to mind, or possibly Goslar, and the most important Imperial City in the whole region by a far cry would be Cologne, though I'm not sure if it would fit a whole lot better than Aachen).

You make good points but we are unlikely to remove existing playable tags from the game. The current setup in this area dates to eu3 which had a very peculiar map projection where it all fit a lot better. When eu4 was made the eu3 German setup was adopted with some effort to fit the map we now have and the current tiny provinces are a result of that.
Had we started with a clean slate I imagine some calls would've been different in regards to tags here but now that Aachen is in the game it's here to stay.
That's the current thinking anyway, I do agree it would be very nice to see Jullich in the game in some way at some point.

 

[Trin Tragula]

Get your point, but then why mods with even smaller provinces like VEF or MEIOU are such successful?

As s former EU map modder myself I consider both of these as fine pieces of work. The base game has a different set of demands placed upon it than mods do however and needs to cater to a much larger audience. What is a good size or shape for one mods province is not necessarily so for the base game.

Over the years the eu4 map has expanded greatly in detail and I fully agree Jullich is sorely missed in this region. Hopefully we can at some point find a way to incorporate it.
That said there are some things that vanilla will never do, not because it has no merit but because it would not fit vanilla. Mods are of course free to make different decisions and the modding community is a great asset to this game