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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.
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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.
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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.
 
Next DD should be fun.
This one will be a button that I will mostly forget about like the Iberian religious orders.
Yes, hopefully it will be good. I should hope it won't be like that joke suggestion as I believe the consolidate development DD said "subjects" which would include CNs to begin with.
 
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In the rather early days of the dev diaries for the upcoming patch, I was saying that you guys can still improve core gameplay mechanics such as reinforcements and warfare in general or a more sensible loan/banking system and so forth; also saying that I'm not supporting this immediate yet another big expansion policy. However, people were seemingly disagreeing with me mostly, they were happy for still getting some content for this game after all those years. Well, enjoy your buttons.

Most people think, by supporting the infamously greedy Pdx DLC policy no matter what, they are helping with their favorite games. Actually, this is far from the truth.

I'll eventually buy this DLC too someday, to experience the game as a "complete" experience. The very thing Pdx always exploits to extreme levels with their DLC policy. But I doubt I'll fall for that again. I'm waiting for the complete package before evaluating the game for Pdx games after the EU4 experience. That is also why I haven't still bought the other GSGs or DLCs mostly despite the fact that I pretty much have an interest in them. You are even lacking some convenient bundles and huge discounts that should at least come after some time to make the game more affordable. So maybe I'll not bother buying them at all.

These are more of a marketing thing though, I'm not necessarily blaming Johan for this. And I believe recently people were a bit unfair towards him. Imperator was a failure at launch but he embraced the mistakes and started the very bold moves that end up as 2.0 today before us. Also do not forget the work he has done in the past. That past still not too far distant.
But I'm blaming him for not continuing the 1.30 patch spirit. You could still improve the base game without not being overly ambitious. There is still some room for that. Yes, people at Pdx are not used to not making money for a very long time that caused by the long development time for 1.30 Emperor. However, considering your player base always supported this game through all those years with buying all those DLCs despite them being overpriced or bad mostly.
I think the right move was to focus on improving this game as much as you can do before being done with it.
 
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Knowingly or unknowingly majority of the Paradox player base do this imo. You can even draw this conclusion by looking at the actions including the sales.
In this thread does not equal to the playerbase. If you have been here for some years you will realize that you always see the same faces, the people in this forum and by extension in this thread are a small handful of players and mostly the commited ones who actually voice their more critical opinions as well.
 
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Knowingly or unknowingly majority of the Paradox player base do this imo. You can even draw this conclusion by looking at the actions including the sales.
That's a little different than saying "you people" in reference to people reading the thread, imo. I mean if they're following along with the thread they already know Johan said they can't change things too wildly because EU4 makes enough that it needs to play it safe. IE: More buyers translates to safer routes of development.
 
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In this thread does not equal to the playerbase. If you have been here for some years you will realize that you always see the same faces, the people in this forum and by extension in this thread are a small handful of players and mostly the commited ones who actually voice their more critical opinions as well.
I'm very well aware of that. My words are for all the people including people who just vote for the posts, not being a forum member but being a Pdx fan and visiting forums and all. Yes considering all of this, the majority are behaving as I described.
@IndigoRage As I said above, don't think this forum only includes those who are rather vocal.
 
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This is why I think Paradox should do semi-public betas for their complex grand strategy game updates. I think the community would soundly reject the new centralizing a State button.
 
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I was expecting the button to have the opposite effect, an increase of the government cost of a state and you get +taxes, -dev cost, and possibly other bonuses for that state like increase conversion speed.
 
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I was expecting the button to have the opposite effect, an increase of the government cost of a state and you get +taxes, -dev cost, and possibly other bonuses for that state like increase conversion speed.
Exactly, if you play tall, you want to spend that surplus government capacity to make your few states more profitable.
 
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Okay now we know you don't understand your own game. Because spending reform progress on expanding governing cap is already in game. Why are you trying to sell us stuff that is already in game?

Every "tall" play feature announced has either been useless for tall or utterly useless besides. This is classic Paradox packaging a bunch of poorly-though-out-bloat with a few cool things because they need to fill out the dlc to offer it at full price.
 
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I don't think you should be criticizing the dev team for being responsive, of all things. They rewrote large portions of their original hegemony concept and made a second dev diary later that day after the first diary on hegemonies was roundly criticized. Ridiculing them for admitting to a mistake and offering no constructive commentary doesn't make a persuasive case in favor of better communication on their part.
 
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I don't think you should be criticizing the dev team for being responsive, of all things. They rewrote large portions of their original hegemony concept and made a second dev diary later that day after the first diary on hegemonies was roundly criticized. Ridiculing them for admitting to a mistake and offering no constructive commentary doesn't make a persuasive case in favor of better communication on their part.
While I agree we shouldn't be too hard on the devs themselves, I would say that this thread has actually had quite a bit of constructive discussion outside all of that.
 
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While I agree we shouldn't be too hard on the devs themselves, I would say that this thread has actually had quite a bit of constructive discussion outside all of that.
I was referring specifically to the post directly above mine. You're right; most of the criticism in the thread has had at least a modicum of substance, and quite a bit has been thoughtful, constructive, and fair.
 
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I don't think you should be criticizing the dev team for being responsive, of all things. They rewrote large portions of their original hegemony concept and made a second dev diary later that day after the first diary on hegemonies was roundly criticized. Ridiculing them for admitting to a mistake and offering no constructive commentary doesn't make a persuasive case in favor of better communication on their part.
1.30 RNGesus hates Florry is Groogy on discord for those who are not aware

Turns out my tinfoil hat conspiracy was right:
View attachment 543181
The first Hegemon diary was a trick
 
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I don't think you should be criticizing the dev team for being responsive, of all things. They rewrote large portions of their original hegemony concept and made a second dev diary later that day after the first diary on hegemonies was roundly criticized. Ridiculing them for admitting to a mistake and offering no constructive commentary doesn't make a persuasive case in favor of better communication on their part.

You are out of the loop, buddy. The first Hegemony diary was an experiment to see how the community would react. Long story short, they weren't expecting a backlash of that proportion and had to do damage control ASAP.

To this day Hegemony left a bad impression on the community, both because of its context (1.29 EU IV was in a terrible spot and we were being kept in the dark when the next DLC/patch would come out) and how absurd some of the numbers were.
 
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The problem is that there is so many underlying mechanics in eu4 that any new systems that we add, adds enormously to complexity for performance, AI and new users. A button is easier to handle for all those things.

Ideally I'd want to rip out lots of systems in EU4, and rework them, but with how things are, its not really feasible, not for the scope of this game.
It sounds to me like it really is time to move on to EU5.

What the players are asking for (new dynamic mechanics) vs. what the developers can feasibly add (new variations on spending points) are now living in completely different worlds, blocked off from each other by the overgrown superstructure of EU4 code, with all of its outdated design and layers upon layers of interdependencies. The intricacy of EU4 has become the obstruction to its own further development (although I would love to see more DLCs fleshing out regional details). And, as Johan mentioned, he is hemmed in by the large fanbase from taking big gambles by overhauling the system.

When your own success is snarling you from going further, that is a sign to rebuild on a newer foundation. As I mentioned earlier, Imperator Rome is already pointing the way. Many of its mechanics represent substantial refinements of the ones we see in EU4.
 
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