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Hello EU4 fans! The team have now all returned them their vacations and resumed work, so it's time to get going with the development diaries once more. Because this week has been a busy one, today's diary will be a bit short but should address a topic that people have asked a lot of questions about:

Future Improvements to the Nation Designer

The Nation Designer is, as has been previously mentioned, probably the biggest feature added to EU4 since launch. It's proven quite popular, with custom nations consistently beating out every historical nation as the most popular choice of country to play. It's also received a number of updates, adding things such as the ability to name your own ideas and improved interface support.

However, much as how it is with EU4 itself, with a feature like the nation designer you never feel quite 'done'. There's always more you can add, things to improve and tweak, and we frequently receive requests for updates and improvements to the nation designer, as well as questions about when previously suggested improvements might surface. As such, today's DD is going to be about updates to the Nation Designer: Specifically which ones we either have already done (internally) or are planning to add in the not distant future. So without further ado, here are the planned changes coming to the Nation Designer:

Saving Custom Nation Templates
Probably the most requested feature for the Nation Designer has been the ability to save your custom nations for later use. This has now been implemented and will be available in 1.14. What it means is that while designing your nation, there are now two buttons called 'Save' and 'Load'. Save will save a copy of your Custom Nation (minus the provinces it currently holds) to your hard drive, and Load will load up that copy, replacing the current Custom Nation you are designing with the saved one (again, minus its provinces). This allows you to, for example, quickly re-use a particular setup of ideas or a flag and color combination that you enjoy.

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Choosing Government Rank
This is really more of a fix than an addition, as it was something left out of 1.12/1.13 due to time constraints and will be added in 1.14. When designing a custom nation, you will be able to choose your government rank, with Duchy rank being free, Kingdom rank costing 10 points, and Empire rank costing 30 points.

Improved Color Picking
This is something that is not yet done, but we hope to have done for 1.14. In addition to picking from a list of preset colors, I want to add the ability to choose your country's color from an in-game RGB picker, allowing for true color customization.

More Patterns and Emblems
As above, this is something we hope to have done for 1.14. We want to add support for more texture files for country flag patterns and emblems, so that we can create more options for flag customization.

Better Random Setup
While not fully part of the Nation Designer, the random setup option that fills the world with randomly generated countries is nonetheless a feature that we want to improve on. Right now, it suffers a bit from being 'samey': You'll generally always end up with a couple megablobs, a number of medium sized countries, and a general feeling of lack of plausibility on behalf of the generated world. We want to add more options for controlling the size of the countries generated, as well as better country naming (being able to name countries after regions rather than capitals, for example) and better random idea generation. We're also considering adding options such as different tech group distribution and different uncolonized parts of the world.

Achievements
Though the Nation Designer supports Ironman, there are currently no achievements that are able to be unlocked while playing a Custom Nation. In the future, we plan to add some Nation Designer-specific achievements that will require particular point limits to be followed, and may as an example require you to start as a Norse Custom Nation and conquer Northern Europe.


If you have other improvements you'd like to see, feel free to bring them up in this thread and I will do my best to answer as to whether they are likely to ever happen. Note that I will not discuss ETAs on when patches containing these changes may show up.
 
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There is a thing that I want to request, even if probably could be considered a less incentive to create a custom nation, but I think could be cool and fun have the possibility to create our own scenarios with ability of choosing and use also the historical tags, with their decisions, ideas and events.

For example is a like the idea to create a scenario with an Afghan empire, instead to create a custom one I want to use the historical tag.

I'll add another important thing, actually if I create a custom nation with the same name of an historical one the game say that is not possible, and I feel this very limiting.
 
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There is a thing that I want to request, even if probably could be considered a less incentive to create a custom nation, but I think could be cool and fun have the possibility to create our own scenarios with ability of choosing and use also the historical tags, with their decisions, ideas and events.

For example is a like the idea to create a scenario with an Afghan empire, instead to create a custom one I want to use the historical tag.

I'll add another important thing, actually if I create a custom nation with the same name of an historical one the game say that is not possible, and I feel this very limiting.
 
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As above, this is something we hope to have done for 1.14. We want to add support for more texture files for country flag patterns and emblems, so that we can create more options for flag customization.
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Will we be able to import our own TGA files for this feature ? Right now we can change a country flag quite easily by swapping the TGA, but i don't think we're able to change the flag of a custom nation (best would be to be able to add our own patterns/emblems to the flag designer in game+ )
 
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Darkath said:
Will we be able to import our own TGA files for this feature ? Right now we can change a country flag quite easily by swapping the TGA, but i don't think we're able to change the flag of a custom nation (best would be to be able to add our own patterns/emblems to the flag designer in game+ )
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The problem might lie in MP games, where every player might end having different set of flags. Unless they were attached to save file.
 
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The major reason for me to not play Custom Nations is the lack of "historical flavor" at the start and during the game. In the historical start many nations start with cores held by other countries, share dynasties with other countries, special events (Iberian wedding, PLC formation), special modifiers (for instance historical friends), etc. I would love to see such cores/dynasties/events randomly mixed in, to give the randomly set up game more flavor.
 
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I notice that, at least in my games, the little flags that appear on map for a custom nation's territory never seem to have the emblem on them, just the flag pattern you select. For example, I pick the Wheel of Mainz (#32) for an emblem, with a St. George's cross for the background. When I zoom in on the map and look at my custom nation's flag, I only see the St. George's cross.
Is this something just on my end?
 
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Welcome back, I look forward to these modifications!
 
SonOfStig said:
Could it be possible to play a nation that is not available at a specific start but exists already as a tag ?

Eg) Playing as Persia in 1444
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You can play as Persia in 1444 already: start as the Timurids (or Tabarestan or Qara Qoyonlu for a much more difficult start) and release Persia + tick "play as released vassal". You're now playing as Persia in 1444.
 
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This might come across as really, really daft, but I'd like the ability to make the national ideas negative instead of positive, so they're bad instead of good.

I tend to make a load of custom nations for a single game, based either on someone else's fiction or on my own fiction with concepts tying into the lore and history of the nations I'm making, and I find myself always wanting a negative national idea to better portray the nation I'm creating. Outside of roleplay reasons like this, I'd imagine it would allow players to create unique challenges, increasing the difficulty of the game or even doing their own psuedo-balancing outside of modding, for example making navies more expensive, and then you could couple this with something like having less durability, which would make you much more concerned about and protective of your fleet. Nerfing your own nation's national spy defense through your national ideas would make AIs with espionage more of a threat and might even make you specially target them, as another example. I'm sure there's players that are always interested in more of a challenge, and the ability to make your own nation give you the challenge you want appeals greatly to me, not just for roleplay purposes, but also for the interesting challenges it could bring. For the normal nations, I don't think having strict paths that nerf alternative paths is a good idea (you go for loads of men as russia because russia lets you have lots of men, but it doesn't force you to shy away from having good quality men or make having quality a must-have in order to balance out your national ideas), but since it's a custom nation and up to the player, I think it would be amazing.
Mind you, I don't even know if it's possible to have negative national ideas.

Also, the ability to have two benefits for single national ideas, like how the first three ideas Austria have do two things instead of one(imp authority & diplo annex cost, fort maintenance & national garrison growth, yearly inflation reduction & interest per annum). There'd be some sort of cost to balance it out, but I've come across a desire for this feature many times when constructing nations. Combined with the earlier idea of negative national ideas, it would be really awesome to have a negative and a positive in one idea, like soldiers that fight better, but also now cost more, or something like less advisors that are cheaper, less missionaries but more merchants, better production but worse taxes, more chance for an heir but less yearly legitimacy and so on, which would allow for some interesting ideas for nations and greater roleplay ability with your nation. The royal family in your nation is less picky about its heirs, but gets less legitimacy because of it, for example.

The save features sounds amazing by the way. As someone who has literally spent four hours straight making custom nations in one save, under the constant threat of the pc crashing, I am very hyped for a save feature!
 
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