Welcome to another Europa Universalis IV development diary. Everything is going fine with the development of Leviathan, as we are working on polishing content at the moment.

We have talked about some major improvements to playing tall in previous diaries, with possibilities of stacking manufactories and concentrating development. Today we will talk about something that synergies nicely with both these features.

Centralizing a State

The final new Playing-Tall option is the ability to Centralize a State. This action reduces the administrative cost of a state by as much as the value of 20 development points.

Centralizing States costs 100 Government Reform Progress points and takes five years to complete.

This interaction is available both through the state interface and through the macrobuilder.

Never Mothball
A small thing that might make the top 3 of some peoples requested lists, and may be completely ignored by others is a small toggle for individual forts to never mothball.

We are adding a small checkbox in the province interface that if enabled, that fort will never mothball when you mothball every fort in your country from the military screen. This is something you may want to use when you may want to save money on lots of forts, but never risk it with the important forts next to France.

Canal changes
With the new monument mechanics, we moved the old great projects system to be using the new monument code internally as well, which gives a few benefits, in that you can upgrade them as well. Each upgrade takes about 10 years further, and about 1000 gold each. We are also making the canals available from an earlier technology as well, from admin tech 26 to admin tech 22.

Previously the canals, besides opening the paths, gave a +20 trade power to the location, now instead they are giving these.

• Tier 0 +10 Trade Power to Location, and +1% Trade Power to the Controller.
• Tier 1 +20 Trade Power to Location, and +2% Trade Power to the Controller.
• Tier 2 +30 Trade Power to Location, and +3% Trade Power to the Controller.
• Tier 3 +50 Trade Power to Location, and +5% Trade Power to the Controller.

Next week we’ll be back and talk about colonial nations.

 

[Johan]

No you need to change your design philosophy from adding buttoms to adding mechanics.
AKA what Imperator team did after Your departure (no offense intended).

My design-philosophy is "believable worlds", and I much prefer making games like HoI3 and Victoria 2, which are games on top of simulation mechanics. EU4 philosophy was to have some sort of central limitation mechanic which became known as Mana, and that was just too succesful.

However, to clarify...

I did lots of the mechanic stuff changes at Imperator after release, and also approved the design plans for everything up to 2.0. I would love to do things like that for EU4, but its just not possible.

The things below are some of things I did for Imperator post release.

Stability, Warexhaustion, Legitimacy rework with increases being over time instead of a button press.
Pops changing over time, and not by direct interaction.
Removal of Mana
Logistics for armies

 

[BluarkDE]

To be fair I don't really know how much coding that would require, but I would really appreciate if it would it possible to build canals in places that aren't historical. Players may go significantly different paths in their games, making different connections viable.

As a genereral rule I think a canal should be constructable in any one province that lies between two sea tiles which don't border each other and isn't mountainous or hilly. You'd have to limit the upgrade possiblity for these of course (ideally based on the distance of the connected sea tiles), given their difference in "shortcut value".

This would allow for new connections parallel to the Panama Canal (many of which were actual historical plans and just as viable as the real Panama canal was). It could also allow for connections between the Baltic and the White sea through the lakes in the region, or from the Indian ocean to Malacca without going through the straits.

Also some more longer historical canals that other people mentioned would add a lot of flavor. Realistcally many canals connected inland trade routes with trade ports. I feel like those could be represented.

 

[MateuszNH]

I don't know guys you better start implementing something useful. Most of tools in recent year aren't even real flavours. Seriously start analysing your things and maybe spend more time on making ideas WITH association to knowledge how your own game works (which i hope u still have but have my own doubts as guy familiar with this stuff better than yours somethimes even misleading paradoxwikis)

About this stuff in dev diary, it should be totally reworked again, but if u keep it as it is I think you should change gov reform points spent to just admin points. It will make nice line between wide and tall, u pick to core or to reduce penalties from having too much development in smaller number of provinces. What i propose is not good at all, but atleast makes sense and is probably very easy to reimplement.
Another idea is to decrease dev cost penalties over 20 dev after using this centralize state, but it's just some quick brainchild. I'm not your worker so i won't make entire game for you
But seriously rethink stuff u are making, it's better to not make stuff at all than to make it bad, sloppy and casually. I'm also not here to take out stress from work or anything but to help make this game better with this flick.

 

[sprites]

i'm not sure , does it take a building spot? but 100 reform for 20 gov capacity is kinda poor , you get better than that with regular expanding, unless you've done it quite a few times...

 

[Borgratz]

Not trying to be mean, but could we get someone else to write the dev diaries about the new mechanics, like we go in IR? This type of diary, in my opinion, should have the highest amount of actually commentary in them and, because they are your job and you always right in a very short and matter of fact style (something I appreciate a lot in other situations), they always leave me quite confused.

I dont need a whole bunch of explanations to why you decided to add a mission tree to a new nation, so its fine, when those are just a list of what changes we will be getting. But when you introduce new mechanics, I would really like to hear about the details on how they work, the reasons they were added, the bigger design philosophy behind them and so on. Its called a dev diary after all, not a dev feature list.

The last 2 diaries have actively lowered my desire to buy the game, because it seems like the team is adding buttons for the sake of adding buttons again.

And while I'm sure that you, Johan, are a great team leader and your short and decisive messages are great at calming down the forums, when something is on fire, I think there is probably better dev diary writer in your team who can write up a couple of commentary style paragraphs every time a new mechanic is mentioned. Just like most of the other dev teams at paradox do it.

 

[Twoflower]

In all fairness,i'm pretty sure that's because of the engine limitations,just like CK2 had before,so what we can hope is that EU5 come sooner than later.

What engine limitations? Holy Fury, the final expansion for CK2 added creative new features that gave you deeper and fun ways to play, like warrior lodges, bloodlines and several new succession types and governments.
Johan has said that pops - possibly a decent way to add internal management - are out of the question for EU4. I would argue that this is not because the game engine cannot theoretically handle it - Victoria 1 could -, but because he is unwilling to implement such a fundamental change to the game mechanics that late in the development cycle of the game. Which is a fair point.
One problem with meaningful mechanics for tall play is that economic management right now in the game is uninteresting because a player will always drown in money after some point - and that the AI is already so bad at handling its economy that its really hard to implement any changes that make money less plentiful. This is a problem that would need to be solved before adding any features that would make economic management more interesting and intricate.
Even failing that, tall play could be promoted by giving more diplomatic and political options.

If the devs are truly out of interesting ideas to improve the game, then it might indeed be preferable to end its development cycle rather than tacking on meaningless, uninspired button-clicks like "centralize government" in order to sell DLCs. Which would in my opinion be a shame because I very much like the new content for Southeast Asia, North America and Oceania that has been announced and I would love to see deeper content for South America and subsaharan Africa.

 

[Nwaij]

@Johan will we finally be able to, you know, DENY OUR ENEMIES TO USE OUR CHANNELS?

 

[magriboy0750]

What engine limitations? Holy Fury, the final expansion for CK2 added creative new features that gave you deeper and fun ways to play, like warrior lodges, bloodlines and several new succession types and governments.

However,most of the mechanics added by Holy Fury was pretty much 'Some CK3 mechanics adapted for the CK2 gameplay'.And CK2 also had engine limitations,see Jade Dragon and the offmap China as an example.As for Vicky 1,this game has not been supported for 7 years like EU4 had.A natural thing that will happen in software programming is that sooner or later,you will have spaghetti code.I'm not a programmer myself but that's what i have read on some books on this subject.

 

[gronak]

I would love to be able to stack manufactories! Please at least allow us to mod it to be like this if it won't make it to vanilla.

The canal change is one I like, I rarely get to admin 26 before starting a new campaign so it is a welcomed change. Like others have said though, we should be able to prevent nations from passing through. Could make the canal a new type of province (we have land and sea provinces), so the ships can only pass if we give access (or someone else occupies it). Would also be great if there were some extra canals added - one going from Ayr to Lothian would be realistic and nice for trying to catch up to another fleet sailing around Britain. There will be plenty more canal possibilities but that is just the one I know of.

The never mothball feature is so great. I usually end up not upgrading my internal forts because it gets annoying needing to manually mothball, because like you said, can't risk a surprise invasion by those damn French.

The centralisation thing seems a bit expensive. If I understood right then it is talking about reducing the development limit before penalties occur? If its talking about reducing the state maintenance of the equivalent of 20 dev then I think it is still too expensive, I never feel the state maintenance cost when I play as it is. I do like the idea of it though, but think the numbers need tweaked.

And I am eager to find out about colonial nation changes! I'd love to see their cultures merging together to create a melting pot. Perhaps we can choose if they become a melting pot or to be intolerant?

 

[riadach]

I always thought something that allowed countries to deal with ever expanding populations would help with the tall/wide divide.

But what if we we had something to represent friction from rising populations maybe like manpower but called "excess population". It then becomes essential to either expand infrastructure in home provinces or channel that friction to either create colonies abroad, resettle populations elsewhere (culture change?) or even go to war. Maybe it could involve an expanded role for the colonist?

 

[Jordedude1234]

@Johan will we finally be able to, you know, DENY OUR ENEMIES TO USE OUR CHANNELS?

Yes the ability to deny access to your canal for your rivals would make sense.

 

[noldorin]

You are not providing enough content for the weekly development journal. Why are you extending the arrival of 1.31 patch so much? I think development logs should now be once a month. Current content falls short of people's expectations. Earning reform points is already extremely difficult. It makes more sense to get management capacity with increasing scores. it needs a regulation regarding management capacity. trading companies should not participate in the general autonomy of the country. These are my ideas, I don't know if you agree or not.

 

[Valourous]

Hi Johan,

Excited about the Canals but I feel these can be juiced up a bit with the upgrades. They're obviously important for trade but if they should geographically hamper your enemies if they try and use them. How about adding an aspect where if you are at war and an enemy navy passes through the canal they would lose x % of the fleet, while it is under your control:

Level 1 Canal - 5%
Level 2 Canal - 10%
Level 3 Canal - 15%
Additonal 5% casualites if coastal battery and up to date fort is present (obviously numbers are just preliminary).

This would put so much emphasis on capturing canals as an essential late game war feature and force players to think before sending massive navies (as they would have at that stage of the game) through them.

There are a lot of comments added regarding centralizing states already, but i feel there needs to be some interaction with absoloutism/dev cost reduction to make this more viable.

If you are going to keep the cost at 100 I would absolutely suggest adding an interaction to gain corruption for extra reform points (two years worth, based on current autonomy, would fit in nicely and prevent spam as base autonomy would go up according to corruption). This gives tall players some interaction with corruption, which they are very unlikely to run into unless they're expanding heavily out of necessity.

My agenda is so this would also buff theocracies which take forever to complete their specific governing trees and make use of them (ie tier 7) before imperialism etc kicks in

 

[Bandua_of_Gallaecia]

Colonists have a way to be used for non colonising. They can be put in a province to increase dev over time. The problem is it is unreliable and unaffected by stuff like settler chance or additional population effects. So taking expansion ideas for a tall country is still bad. If they adjusted that mechanic and gave a similar use for other characters like missionaries it would actually benefit tall play without being a boon for wide. Wide players would continue to use them for colonising and converting but tall would now get something out of them too.

Yes, Colonists have another purpose, which is great, but the rest don't.

As long as there are neighbours around Diplomats always have a use, so they are not a problem.

Merchants are wildly variable, since the need for them depends on your geographical layout and their availability is the most variable of all emissaries.

Missionaries on the other hand, these are the ones most frequently idle doing nothing. It would be really helpful if you could have them do something else other than converting, perhaps related to whatever religious mechanic you have? (Have them work, which would cost maintainance ofc, to gain more church power/fervor/papal influence etc...)

 

[reivaj89]

Yes the ability to deny access to your canal for your rivals would make sense.

Or for everyone that doesn't actively ask for your permission actually, after all it's your canal. At the same time, other countries could also force you to give them permission to use your canal for a set amount of time via war (similar to how now you can force other countries to transfer 50% of their trade power to you).

 

[petertju]

This.

A dramatic design change for eu4 would be insanely risky right now from both a codebase and a player perspective. If you have basically no players, like we did with Imperator after release, you can take huge gambles.

I understand this reasoning and actually believe it. The thing is, the EU4 player base(and especially the hard core one that is on this forum), are expecting dramatic design changes. They are expecting it on the base of the previous DLC's and patches. I believe that you are trying to communicate and try to create realistic expectations, like you did with the message after the announcement of Leviathan. You spoke of what Leviathan would contain, but by the vagueness that we experienced since the release of Emperor, people don't have realistic expectations anymore. I think it took 15 dev diaries before you even said that a DLC was coming, and not a free patch or a Immersion Pack.

So I will repeat what this forum is screaming since Golden Century, just communicate and share the plan that you have for EU4. You can keep going to create massive expectations like you are doing right now, but it will keep biting you in the butt like what is happening right now.

 

[Bandua_of_Gallaecia]

So, we need to rebalance some numbers?

Yes, but ideally you would also add "other numbers" that give this mechanic another purpose distinct from just expanding administration.

 

[Reaperdamo]

My design-philosophy is "believable worlds", and I much prefer making games like HoI3 and Victoria 2, which are games on top of simulation mechanics. EU4 philosophy was to have some sort of central limitation mechanic which became known as Mana, and that was just too succesful.

However, to clarify...

I did lots of the mechanic stuff changes at Imperator after release, and also approved the design plans for everything up to 2.0. I would love to do things like that for EU4, but its just not possible.

The things below are some of things I did for Imperator post release.

Stability, Warexhaustion, Legitimacy rework with increases being over time instead of a button press.
Pops changing over time, and not by direct interaction.
Removal of Mana
Logistics for armies

I think herein lies the problem. When a game or a company becomes very successful and is no longer driven by making games solely, but by making a steady income stream then risk becomes less desirable. Of course money is king i know that as i work in sales, but I think its sad to see game designers become constrained by their own success. Imperator being a financial success, but a playerbase failure has allowed Paradox to relax the reins and you can see that in the passion and love the team have put into the game, but also in their dev diaries. This latest dev diary reminds me of having to do my monthly report at work.....a bit of a chore.

 

[st360]

I would love to do things like that for EU4, but its just not possible.

Not everyone is demanding huge realism reworks. People want slightly different playstyles reworks. Like for example trade cities and trade leagues, tributaries, republican elections, Coptic religion or horde razing. Most of those unique, relatively simple mechanics where implemented 5 years ago so similar new mechanics should be possible now.

I'm honestly asking without judgement: is the current developer philosophy that if trade leagues or hordes didn't exist in EU 4 the game would be too old to try and introduce such bold mechanics today?




Warexhaustion

Lets start small. War exhaustion over time modifiers already exist in the game. Its just a matter of rebalancing 3-4 numbers. Instant click reducing could even be kept for some specialized strategies, and locked behind specific idea groups (plutocracy-distribute grain to the peasants for -2 war exhaustion). If its not too ambitious, there could also be a huge -exhaustion modifier tied to prosperity, so a Russia with 90% of provinces prospering wouldn't even notice its in a war. It would also make navies more relevant since pirates and blockades lowering prosperity would be a bigger deal.

I am totally uneducated on programing, but this rework sounds about the same work as 2-3 dev diaries worth of Leviathans content. Stability and legitimacy are similar and could be next. Could logistics ever be reworked? Maybe partially or maybe its honestly a bad idea and should stay like this. But there is plenty of not-1-button-click things that change playstyles that could be reworked before we get to logistics.

 

[orangutang]

There has to be a mistake with numbers clearly. 20 reform progress for 100 gc reduction would make more sense.
However the whole Idea of giving tall players some extra gc is unclear. Generally speaking, if you don't expand, you don't care about gc anyway, so what's the point?