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EUIV - Development Diary - 12th of May 2020

Good afternoon! I’m back again with another content-driven dev diary. Today we’ll be taking a look at two of the new mission trees coming with the Emperor expansion: Germany and Lübeck.

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The German mission tree takes a lot of inspiration, as you might expect, from Imperial Germany and the accomplishments of Bismarck. Although very much outside of the period, we felt that it was an appropriate way to go given the ahistorical nature of a united Germany within our timeframe.

The conquest branch of the mission tree begins with Blood and Iron, which requires you to own at least 50 provinces across the North Germany or South Germany regions, essentially completing your early German unification. This mission rewards perhaps the most extensive set of permanent claims of any single mission in the game: the Low Countries, Italy, France, and Poland will all simultaneously become your next targets. This is pretty extreme for a single mission, but given the requirements not only of the mission but also of forming Germany in the first place, the player is likely already in a very dominant position by the time that they unlock this mission tree. Completing the Annex Poland mission gives even further permanent claims, this time on the Baltic, Scandinavia, and Carpathia regions.

Next we have an economic branch of the mission tree. You are charged with building manufactories to Industrialize the Rhineland, permanently improving local goods produced in applicable provinces by 15%. You must also Promote Urbanization by reaching at least 30 development in 10 German provinces, and achieve Protected Markets by reaching 75% trade share in all German trade nodes. Completing these missions unlocks the Dominant Economy mission, which requires you to have the highest income of any European nation as well as 10,000 ducats with no loans.

Next up, Germany has a branch of its mission tree dedicated to overseas expansion, beginning of course with the construction of an Imperial Navy. After building 30 heavy ships, you must Burn the Wooden Wall by ensuring that no British country has more than 5 heavy ships. Achieving this will grant you +10% naval morale for the rest of the game, as well as a permanent claim on London. Scramble for Africa and Overseas Empire see you building an empire in Africa and Asia respectively.

Germany and the Holy Roman Empire share a large portion of their missions trees, but each of them have a unique branch available only to them. The German unique branch focuses on state-building, for instance hiring skilled advisors, gaining Crown Land, constructing universities, and gaining absolutism.

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This is the Holy Roman Empire’s unique branch of the mission tree. It has been said that the HRE was neither Holy, Roman, nor an empire, but you have the chance to change that. You must become Defender of the Faith (giving you an opportunity to launch a final crusade for Jerusalem), become Papal Controller (if Catholic), and finally centralize the disparate states of Germany into a single nation. Completing the Roman Resolution mission as a Catholic nation fires the following event, representing victory of the Emperor in the dispute between Church and Emperor:

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Hi I’m @Alfray Stryke , a new addition on the EUIV team. Currently working as QA, although I have assisted with the design and implementation of Lübeck’s mission tree in the Emperor DLC.

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The four paths for their missions are:
  • End the Sound Toll, By forcing or convincing Denmark to end the toll and increasing your trade in the Lübeck trade node, you continue to increase your trade in the Baltic. This leads to gaining claims on the Jutland peninsula and then Norway (subjugation if Norway is independent, permanent claims if they are not).
  • Ties with England requires either strengthening relations with England or Lübeckian merchants or privateers having at least 25% of the trade power in the English Channel. Completing this will strengthen Lübeckian traders in the British Isles, granting claims in order to form trading cities in London, Edinburgh and Ayr. Setting up trade cities in Edinburgh and Ayr will lead to dominating the North Sea trade and recruiting an explorer to settle Newfoundland (giving a Center of Trade there) and founding the American colony of Neulübeck.
    • The London Steelyard was historically the main trading base of the Hanseatic League during the 15th and 16th centuries, thus either owning London directly or indirectly via a member of your trade league will grant you a substantial boost to trade.
  • Defend the City, although Lübeck starts as a relatively wealthy but militarily lacking nation, their first goal should be to ensure they have a standing army capable of holding their own against any neighbours inside the HRE. Complete this via your own soldier or recruiting mercenary companies and you will gain claims on the rest of the Mecklenburg area. After building up your own strength, it is time to return the cities of Visby and Novgorod to the Hanseatic League by either owning them directly or indirectly.
  • The Merchant Navy, by building up your merchant navy and increasing your coffers, you are then led to formalising bookkeeping and building the Lübeck Krantor (replacing the old decision). After increasing your ship building industry, commissioning the Adler von Lübeck (for owners of Golden Century, the decision now requires a flagship), and asserting naval dominance over the North and Baltic Seas Lübeck can be declared the Queen of the Hanseatic League. This rewards you with increased diplomatic reputation and decreased advisor cost.


The culmination of their mission tree after increasing the reach of the Hanseatic League is to unite the league into a solidified political entity - making any members of the trade league that own historically important trade cities into vassals, with a boost to their diplomatic relations in order to compensate for this. Then using the same system for the Kingdom of God and the Caliphate renaming you are rightfully termed the Hanseatic League!

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And that’s all for today! Join us next week for the last in our series of content-focused dev diaries.
 
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I don't have the courage to entirely rewrite why I fundamentally disagree with the German and HRE mission trees since my post was deleted by this strange bug.

They are totally disconected from the game timeline and from the political entities they try to call to mind. Germany and HRE inherit the Third Reich conquest spirit, and HRE with all those promising new mecanichs ends up with 3 unique missions as a reward. There is a real lack of imagination here after a year of development. The main focus for a united Kingdom of Germany should be Baltic area, rivalry with other european great powers (not annexing them) and economy, while HRE should focus in internal politics, France, Italy and those damn Holy Lands in Greece and Levant.

Scramble for Africa? Weird... And out of the scope of the timeline. But if so, why is this not also in French and British mission trees when they were the two main actors of this era? (Speaking about french mission tree, we have a mission called "France Antarctique" for a colony in Brazil that totally failed, but nothing about french Guyana that still exists, and same for his dutch counterpart; now independant. But for whatever reason, Austria have to colonize Australia..)

Oversimplification and memes has won the last months of development.
 
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According to your reasoning, part of the HRE mission tree is the complete antithesis of the HRE...
There's a difference between unifying the HRE by integrating vassals, and going around conquering all of them. That's the difference I'm getting at. If you conquer practically everyone in the HRE, quite clearly that's not compatible with staying in the HRE, as opposed to diplomatically integrating them.
 
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Considering Germany's mission tree is inspired more by the late 19th century formation of Imperial Germany, is there a chance we could see something like an option for Austria-Hungarian Empire to be formed?

Could of course have it be something where it happens because of unrest and revolts within an Austrian ruled Hungary.
 
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culmination of their mission tree after increasing the reach of the Hanseatic League is to unite the league into a solidified political entity
That's a nice fantasy... but that would mean in some cases, where trading cities were very strong and almost independent of the country they did belong to, that they should rather seperate from such countries (Poland defo, not sure what about other nations) and be a seperate entity - it could have happend that all Scandinavia would happily follow some few coastal but strong commercial cities... but I can't see a king or a queen giving up their power to some merchants and splitting up my country :)
 
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There's a difference between unifying the HRE by integrating vassals, and going around conquering all of them. That's the difference I'm getting at. If you conquer practically everyone in the HRE, quite clearly that's not compatible with staying in the HRE, as opposed to diplomatically integrating them.

Then I guess Swabia, Franconia, Lotharingia, or any of those formable tags in the HRE must all be incompatible with the HRE.

In fact, there is no rule dictating that the HRE "must" work in this way or another. I don't recall any game mechanic that automatically kicks out a member of the HRE if they conquer too much inside.

That said, there is nothing in the formation decision of Germany that requires the land to be conquered directly. You are quite free to integrate them all as vassals if you like.
 
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If Germany weren't given immediate claims upon its neighbours, that would make it better. The Kaiserreich never historically wanted to conquer all of Poland, France, the Netherlands, and any other neighours (excluding Luxembourg). In fact, with regards to Poland, when there was a chance to conquer it, it was seen as more beneficial with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to establish a new, independent Kingdom. A mission to conquer Alsace-Lorraine would be more in line with German interests, and a mission to take Greater Poland, which was the historical Prussian portion of the Partition of Poland after 1812, could be implemented instead. Perhaps even the territories of Poland given to Prussia in 1794 could do. The only parts of the Low Countries that were considered German after Dutch independence from Spain and the HRE were Luxembourg and Limburg. The mission tree isn't bad because it isn't interesting. It's bad because it uses more anachronistic ideas and is frankly rather stupid if one looks at the historical foreign policy in Europe of the German Empire throughout its existence. Also, a Scramble for Africa in the 1700s-1820s (as that's probably when Germany would be formed by a typical player and/AI) would be even more costly and wasteful than it was for the historical German Empire.
 
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Remember when Paradox games at least had a veneer of semi-plausible history content?
Yeah this mission tree is none of that. I could almost stand the lazy Prussia pandering , even if a Rhenish or Bavarian formed Germany would be far less militaristic.
But this mixture of Bismarck and the third Reich is almost low-key racist in it's "da evil Germans want to always take over Europe" content.
It's not like finding resources on late medieval and renaissance Germany would be difficult, but I guess anachronistically pandering to Wehraboo's and Kaiserboos is more profitable nowadays.
 
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Remember when Paradox games at least had a veneer of semi-plausible history content?
Yeah this mission tree is none of that. I could almost stand the lazy Prussia pandering , even if a Rhenish or Bavarian formed Germany would be far less militaristic.
But this mixture of Bismarck and the third Reich is almost low-key racist in it's "da evil Germans want to always take over Europe" content.
It's not like finding resources on late medieval and renaissance Germany would be difficult, but I guess anachronistically pandering to Wehraboo's and Kaiserboos is more profitable nowadays.

Would giving them 25% CCR be better?
 
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How are special units recruited now ? Either from estate or from special government.
Do you have access to "areas specific" estate, like rajputs and cossaks if you control their "home" provinces ?
 
I don't have the courage to entirely rewrite why I fundamentally disagree with the German and HRE mission trees since my post was deleted by this strange bug.

They are totally disconected from the game timeline and from the political entities they try to call to mind. Germany and HRE inherit the Third Reich conquest spirit, and HRE with all those promising new mecanichs ends up with 3 unique missions as a reward. There is a real lack of imagination here after a year of development. The main focus for a united Kingdom of Germany should be Baltic area, rivalry with other european great powers (not annexing them) and economy, while HRE should focus in internal politics, France, Italy and those damn Holy Lands in Greece and Levant.

Scramble for Africa? Weird... And out of the scope of the timeline. But if so, why is this not also in French and British mission trees when they were the two main actors of this era? (Speaking about french mission tree, we have a mission called "France Antarctique" for a colony in Brazil that totally failed, but nothing about french Guyana that still exists, and same for his dutch counterpart; now independant. But for whatever reason, Austria have to colonize Australia..)

Oversimplification and memes has won the last months of development.

I'm glad I'm not the only one with this opinion.

Meme history unfortunately panders a bigger audience.
 
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I agree the German one is bad but do not mind the Hansa one, because it avoids the incredibly boring and badly-designed gameplay of the redesigned republics. I would rather conquer land than have to deal with the atrocious trade league mechanics that were added
 
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Would it be a fair assessment to say that people here don't want the end game made easier, but simply challenging? That wouldn't include throwing in hegemonies that would either be useless or exploited, tons of free claims through missions etc.

I'm looking forward to the DLC, but I really hope the next dev diaries will delve deeper into more incidents as I don't think we've seen all of them yet and some questions might still really warrant an answer, like some nation (Hungary?) getting a mission to get a PU over Poland. Will that still be possible despite it probably being an elective monarchy? Will French subjects have French cores or not etc. I'm sure we could all think of quite a few questions we'd love answered before the DLC is released, but again, looking forward to it.
 
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Loving the new Missions for Lubeck. Nice combination of aggression with trade and diplomacy, so we don't have 30 different missions that are basically variations of "conquer X".
The new German Missions, however...eh.
Here's my take on the new German missions (if anyone cares, that is):
- I don't think it's really fair to chalk the ahistoricity of the German/HRE Missions up to a fairly simplistic "Hurr durr stupid memes" rationale, which is what I personally feel some of us have been doing. One of the focuses of this DLC has been to address longstanding complaints from experienced players that the late game is too easy because of powercreep. It would seem to me that the devs rationalized that, since forming Germany is difficult anyway and makes whoever does it very powerful, it would make sense to give a united Germany some really difficult, crazy Missions to provide a challenge for high-level players (I feel a similar line of thinking exists with the new Italian Missions). Essentially, this is a gameplay decision, rather than a marketing decision.
- As far as a more historical German Mission Tree, I don't really have many suggestions for this; AFAIK the idea of a secular, united Germany didn't even really exist until the late 1700s anyway.
- As for the HRE Mission Tree, I think that it should focus more on restoring the old Carolingian/Ottonain state, rather than on the 19th-century Kaiserreich. Missions could be along the lines of retaking northern Italy, conquering or vassalizing France, leading a crusade against the Ottomans, etc. Keep the new Missions dealing with Papal relations though.
 
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@Alfray Stryke, I am really happy with your decision of Lubuck to include End Sound Toll. I urge you to please consider creating a mission relating to crushing Holland and bring them into its spread of influence. Thank you for your consideration. I think it is a major contributor to the collapse of Hanseatic League power.
Just like the new world discovery, really really reducing the Ottoman's monopoly power of Silk Road [Spice Trade] and destroy its middleman way of collect toll and control price. Thank you.

"A major economic advantage for the Hansa was its control of the shipbuilding market, mainly in Lübeck and in Danzig. The Hansa sold ships everywhere in Europe, including Italy. They drove out the Dutch, because Holland wanted to favour Bruges as a huge staple market at the end of a trade route. When the Dutch started to become competitors of the Hansa in shipbuilding, the Hansa tried to stop the flow of shipbuilding technology from Hanseatic towns to Holland. Danzig, a trading partner of Amsterdam, attempted to forestall the decision. Dutch ships sailed to Danzig to take grain from the city directly, to the dismay of Lübeck. Hollanders also circumvented the Hanseatic towns by trading directly with north German princes in non-Hanseatic towns. Dutch freight costs were much lower than those of the Hansa, and the Hansa were excluded as middlemen. "

"When Bruges, Antwerp and Holland all became part of the Duchy of Burgundy they actively tried to take over the monopoly of trade from the Hansa, and the staples market from Bruges was transferred to Amsterdam. The Dutch merchants aggressively challenged the Hansa and met with much success. "
 
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