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

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.

 

[IndigoRage]

Yes and my point was it was bad for Iberia but not others. Ireland goes protestant if England does rather than staying Catholic so they might as well go extinct

See, I don't get where you're coming from here. I would think of this as an argument for multi-religious states to be more accurately represented. Not as one to flippantly go "eh, it's fine that the AI consistently does complete ethnic cleansing every game with little variation". Even in CK I turn culture shift to the slowest setting possible to avoid this always happening in cases like the Byzantines.

 

[Nicked Name]

So just to juggle around some numbers. Assuming i am a rather well developed european country sitting in ... lets say the english channel. I eat my way through west africa - south africa - beachhead india. India has how many provinces? Like 200-something? So with some heavy absolutism i go about and eat those 200-ish provinces at, let's assume, 10 dev average. If i were to concentrate development on those that's 6 dev lowered per province, 3 go to my capital, 1 to a random state and 2 are lost. Per province. That's 600 development for my capital alone, followed by throwing all of india into a trade company, build manufactory+city hall and forget about it.

But why stop at india, when china is right around the corner?

Don't know about you, but coming leviathan, i will be concentrating a stairway to heaven.

*Bonus question, can you concentrate before having a territorial core in said province? Asking for a friend ....

 

[Wegenbartho]

Wow.

I really love this, it sounds like Free Cities now have an actual goal in the game.

 

[forceofhabit]

Will Pillage Capital be available in limited CBs like Humiliate Rival, Diplomatic Insult, Trade Conflict etc?

 

[Cosmonaut15]

Just to answer many questions about the historical context between the Mandala system and Concentrating Development.

Excerpt from Wikipedia: Mandala (political model)

"It is employed to denote traditional Southeast Asian political formations, such as federation of kingdoms or vassalized polity under a center of domination. It was adopted by 20th century European historians from ancient Indian political discourse as a means of avoiding the term "state" in the conventional sense. Not only did Southeast Asian polities except Vietnam not conform to classical Chinese and European views of a territorially defined state with fixed borders and a bureaucratic apparatus, but they diverged considerably in the opposite direction: the polity was defined by its centre rather than its boundaries, and it could be composed of numerous other tributary polities without undergoing administrative integration"

I think that's why the dev gives the new mechanics bonus to the Mandala govt reform.

 

[Vohen]

Yes and my point was it was bad for Iberia but not others. Ireland goes protestant if England does rather than staying Catholic so they might as well go extinct

Why exactly is it not OK for the Iberians and OK for everyone else?
What's up with this double standard?
Why is it that when Spain does it to the Dutch and Italians it's "bad", but when England does it to the Scottish it's just a "duh moment"?
Why is ok for the Irish to go extinct exactly (which has nothing to do with religion, England can be Protestant or Catholic, it doesn't interfere at all with this)?
If an Italian conquers, say, France and get themselves a colony somehow, is it really OK to ship the entire French population to the new world?
Or the Dutch? Or the Norwegians? Anyone at all?
How is it authentic to ship an entire province's population to the new world?

But you don't have to answer to any of that, it was all rethorical.
Fact of the matter is, the mechanic was changed for a reason, you may disagree with it or not, but that fact remains.

 

[Pandrea]

Everyone is freaking out about Pillaging the Capital CB even when you guys do not even know how much dev impact on the enemy's capital?
Or we can just assume it's the same as Concentrating Development?

It's a reduction for sure. Even if it's just 1-1-1, regions like HRE can be systematically razed by Austria or other German major. I'd not like seeing a +100 Wien in a 1-1-1 Germany

 

[Cosmonaut15]

It's a reduction for sure. Even if it's just 1-1-1, regions like HRE can be systematically razed by Austria or other German major. I'd not like seeing a +100 Wien in a 1-1-1 Germany

And that's the meaning of a tall play, isn't it?
You waged 30+ wars to pillage everyone in the HRE for 200+ yrs (consider truces). But the country is still the same size as before

Then Russia came and pillage Wien. LOL.

 

[wingren013]

I don't see how this is useful for tall play. You'd want to use it on territories, but a tall nation shouldn't have a lot of territories. So really this is just a feature for wide play, where you save adm on coring state provinces but lose some of the dev you conquered.

Unless the intended gameplay loop is to conquer territory, press the button, then return the territory???

Also I can't wait for the AI to spam this and destroy all the dev everywhere.

 

[Cosmonaut15]

I don't see how this is useful for tall play. You'd want to use it on territories, but a tall nation shouldn't have a lot of territories. So really this is just a feature for wide play, where you save adm on coring state provinces but lose some of the dev you conquered.

Unless the intended gameplay loop is to conquer territory, press the button, then return the territory???

Also I can't wait for the AI to spam this and destroy all the dev everywhere.

I think it's a feature for Mandala play. All countries in the SEA got a ton of vassals to plunder. And historically, got plundered.
But yes. I'm concerned about the AI too.

 

[Pandrea]

And that's the meaning of a tall play, isn't it?
You waged 30+ wars to pillage everyone in the HRE for 200+ yrs (consider truces). But the country is still the same size as before

Then Russia came and pillage Wien. LOL.

You're right ofc. It's just Europa Universalis no more. I'd call it EuRisk Universalis

 

[Gio_Miro]

To pillage the capital in the peae treaty you'll have to occupy the capital of the other country i'll suppose?

 

[priamossz]

Stay tuned for next week, when we will talk more about playing tall, and maybe something about canals.

I have a couple relatively simple addition suggestion if the focus is on playing tall.

1, attach a bonus and negative based on your manpower. I think of something like goods produced. If you have lets say 100% of your max manpower then you should be getting 10% extra goods produced (As the non conscrited guys would be working on the fields and factories). If you are tapped on manpower then it's minus 10% goods produced as there are not enough hands on the fields. 50% is where you would have no bonuses or penalties.

2, make manpower more spendable during peace. If you are playing tall then you are most likely will be at 100% manpower most of the time. Maybe give some options of spending a % of manpower to dev up or give temporarly bonuses like building cost reduction (it's meant to further demonstrate how nations sometimes uses their military for construction projects besides the events we already have)

3. increase the chance of getting deving up events while at peace. Also create a chance to lose dev in provinces that are occupied (devastation is a good mechanic but it's not really having any trully lasting effect when in history a devastated land could take over a hundred year to recover)

 

[Bandua_of_Gallaecia]

The fact that it drains total development off the map and can lead to wars absolutely devastating territories that they'd need to use mana on to regain is a good thing in itself.

I agree with this.

I feel like the total development in the map is getting a little bloated all around, there are many sources of development and development cost reduction, but it is incredibly rare for a place to actually lose development.
Places that are continuously invaded and occupied by foreign enemies or under the oppresive boot of another power should naturally decline in development.

My only concern is that single cities might reach unbelievably high levels.

 

[SebasR]

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

this benefits big countries, they can dev in cheep provinces and move dev to a their capital and dev again very cheep. also they have more states so they can do it more frequently.
If you want to benefit small countrys rather biggones, the cooldown should be for country, instead the area. I don't like it anyway insted off a cooldown i recomend a modifire like X nacional unrest every time you move dev, this malus will be easy to manege for small countrys.

 

[Bignucciox]

Does Pillage Capital benefit from The Mandala Reform and Siamese Absolutism like Concentrate Development?

 

[PAnZuRiEL]

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.

Uhh ... did you??? I can't find any mention of this in earlier diaries.

 

[Nboaram]

The Concentrate and Pillage Capital mechanics sound on paper amazing. But I have some concerns about how they might actually end up creating exactly the opposite of the intended effect of helping tall nations.

1. In your post it states you have a cooldown every 50 years "in an area.", which means that WIDER nations will have more ability to use this than Smaller taller nations.
I'd suggest that maybe the cooldown should be shorter but be on a national level.

2. The details on this aren't clear, but it might be the case that Pillage Development will "scale" based on the dev of your opponents capital. And I hope this isn't the case, because if your opponent is a wide country and uses it on you they'll gain alot. But if you use it on their 10 dev capital, you'd get a lot less. So I'd hope that wouldn't be the case.

All in all though, I love the idea, and it could make for some amazing "jewel of the world" free city games.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

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

Ideally it's less AE than taking land and probably less than vassalization, otherwise the incentive to use it will be minimal.

 

[Itchel]

Finally a way to reduce the development of other countries capitals. I always throw up a bit in my mouth when i see 2 super capitals in the middle of the nepalese himalayas