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Hello and Welcome to another development diary for Europa Universalis IV. As it is another one written by me, it might be a bit shorter than you’d like, but I hope the information is interesting enough.

One of the things we wanted to focus on with Leviathan was to strengthen the ability to play “tall”,or in other words, how to become more powerful without necessarily expanding all the time. We talked in an earlier diary about the first of three new features regarding playing tall, Expand Infrastructure, which allowed you to stack multiple manufactories in the same province.

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Today we’ll be talking about the second of the ‘play tall’ features for Leviathan, as we delve into Concentrate Development.

Concentrate Development is an interaction that is done to either one of your territories or to one of your subjects states or territories.

This will reduce the development in that area by an amount comparable to a horde razing it, and then that development will be distributed to your country.

Fifty percent of that development will be going directly to your capital, while thirty percent will be distributed randomly among stated provinces, while the final twenty percent is lost.

There is a cooldown of 50 years for how often you can do this in an area.

Doing this to one of your subjects will upset them and also increase their liberty desire, so be careful.

There are also two government reforms that makes this loss less painful, as it removes the twenty percent lost, and instead adds that development to the capital.
  • The Mandala Reform, available to the chinese techgroup and either dharmic, eastern or muslim religions.
  • Siamese Absolutism - which is given from some missions.

Speaking of the Mandala Reform, it's a first tier reform, that besides giving you free development concentration also grants the following.
  • +15% Vassal Income
  • +1 Vassal Force Limit Bonus
  • -33% Governing Capacity

eu4_21.png


Connected to this, is a new peace treaty called Pillage Capital!
As sometimes you want to grow your power, and weaken your enemy, but you do not want to take on more territory. In that case, just use the new “Pillage Capital”(™) peace treaty, which will concentrate development on their capital state, benefiting you!


Stay tuned for next week, when we will talk more about playing tall, and maybe something about canals.
 
What I like about the treaty is it's a way of getting stronger at the expense of someone you're not in a position to take land from, like an OPM in the HRE.

General assumptions I'm making:
- You have to control the capital fort to ask for this
- War score will scale with the cost of conquering the capital state, but won't be 1 to 1
- AE will also scale and not be 1 to 1. Like how it's less AE to vassalize someone
 
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So how will the 4.8 Development (16*0.3) you would get from the concentrate development in the picture be spread over all of France?

I hope this mechanic will not have weird interactions with the virtual development of American natives.
 
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Yet another "click-button and number goes up" mechanic, If you wanted to make playing tall fun and engaging, for the love of god give us something to do beside cliking button, give us realm management ! not "wait-to-click-button-and-number-go-up simulator" !

But at this point I don't you will ever do that, since you know, you can't even fix broken mechanics like cavalry.
 
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This honestly sounds amazing! The first thing I'm going to do is start a new campaign as England; consolidate all the mainland territory before selling it off, and then pillage the entirety of Europe. Never mind the AE; what are they gonna do, invade me? :p

I usually reach some point in every campaign where I'm content with my borders (typically quite early, to be honest), so this mechanic gives a great incentive to keep waging wars!
Yeah, this seems really great for people who don't want to be left behind and inactive (IE not just stuck sitting around in peacetime) just because they've got their borders to a place they like. I like playing world police more than blobbing anyway.

Would be nice if there were peacetime mechanics though.
 
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Imagine France bringing home the English population like slaves with chains after "pillaging" London. I really don't get it.
Well, we know dev definitely isn't just population, so that can't be it. If I had to guess it represents some vague idea of taking some set amount of spoils to be invested in your capital region. Ideally this would be represented by taking money during the peace deal, but we can't use that either because money doesn't directly translate to dev. The closest thing would be taking a ton of spoils in the peace deal and then spending it on upgrading an advisor or using a colonist to dev.
 
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If pillage capital will create AE, it will hardly be worth using over just taking the land. Maybe as a separate treaty.

Losing 20 percent of your development will likely make it not worth consolidating, except for perhaps lowering governing capacity cost, and making vassals somewhat easier to integrate. Still 50 years is quite the cool down for a feature that has a penalty attached to it to begin with.
 
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Well, we know dev definitely isn't just population, so that can't be it. If I had to guess it's some vague idea of taking some set amount of spoils to be invested in your capital region. Ideally this would be represented by taking money during the peace deal, but we can't use that either because money doesn't directly translate to dev. The closest thing would be taking a ton of spoils in the peace deal and then spending it on upgrading an advisor or using a colonist to dev.
Lets be honest, there is no real world equivalent to it, Paradox just wanted another button
 
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Will this work on PUs and colonial nations? Will this incur penalties to liberty desire of subjects?
 
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Yet another "click-button and number goes up" mechanic, If you wanted to make playing tall fun and engaging, for the love of god give us something to do beside cliking button, give us realm management ! not "wait-to-click-button-and-number-go-up simulator" !

But at this point I don't you will ever do that, since you know, you can't even fix broken mechanics like cavalry.
I share your preference but also believe eu4 has reached the age where this style of gameplay is too entrenched. Until we get a sequel, all I hope for is that we get buttons that do interesting things that accomplish something different from before (I think this mechanic fits that criteria), while also accurately representing some historical element, even if very abstracted.

On that note: Is this concentration of development something that happened in reality? If there are some examples of things that inspired this mechanic, that's the kind of thing I would also love to read about in a dev diary. The fact they put a bonus for it on the mandala reform suggests they saw something similar happening there?
 
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If pillage capital will create AE, it will hardly be worth using over just taking the land. Maybe as a separate treaty.

Losing 20 percent of your development will likely make it not worth consolidating, except for perhaps lowering governing capacity cost, and making vassals somewhat easier to integrate. Still 50 years is quite the cool down for a feature that has a penalty attached to it to begin with.
Your capital state will not generate much governing cost anyway. If this can be done in territories, this is win-win situation
 
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Pillage capital seems really weird. There is already a peace term for that not take land purpose: Humiliate or even Show Strength. Also it is being a peace term extra weird. We have sack events already, that is also another weird thing. Finally, I can't imagine this represents what exactly. It's exactly like razing but nations that do raze already have that ability. Everyone is a semi-horde now? Imagine France bringing home the English population like slaves with chains after "pillaging" London. I really don't get it.

On the other hand, I actually liked the consolidate development feature. But it looks like a useful tool for wide play :) Or I'm missing some things.

Agreed, I can see it actually being way more useful for wide play: you can use it to move development from your outlying territories to your capital state, where it won‘t require any governing capacity, which should greatly help in your expansion.
As a tall player, you should have limited land and will usually want all of it to be high development, so why you would want to move it from non-capital states to your capital state (that is cheaper to dev anyways) is beyond me...
 
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How is the dev removed? As in if an area has 20 tax, 20 production and 30 manpower; will the manpower be drained more in absolute term or is it a flat 33% decrease rounding up?

How does it affect shared areas, as in an area that you have 2 provinces in, your two vassals have 1 each. Would doing it on my province interface affect my vassal or would i need to do it 3 times.

In the same example above would liberty desire and other effect be a flat increase for vassals or it would be relative to the dev lost or even the number of provinces they have in the area?
 
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Connected to this, is a new peace treaty called Pillage Capital!
As sometimes you want to grow your power, and weaken your enemy, but you do not want to take on more territory. In that case, just use the new “Pillage Capital”(™) peace treaty, which will concentrate development on their capital state, benefiting you!
Will the AI be using this frequently?
 
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Concentrate Development is an interaction that is done to either one of your territories or to one of your subjects states or territories.

This will reduce the development in that area by an amount comparable to a horde razing it, and then that development will be distributed to your country.
Will this have any impact on institution spread, such as transferring some of it to your capital?