EUIV - Development Diary - 14th of January 2020

[Howl]

About naval attrition.. blockading naval fortresses looks like no-go anyway. you can't sit there long if enemy has fleet - because you'll get killed once enemy engages. Blockading GB.. i bet its quite impossible.. maybe with naval and maritime ideas. I think they already said it wouldn't stack.

I don't have a fleet besides tranports anyway until late game...
But what about this?
Put one of these babies into Luebeck, declare on Denmark and watch their entire navy turn to toothpicks as they try to defend their homewaters?
I see this mainly useful for straits.
Sure, you as a player will always return to a friendly port on month tick (oh the micro horror!), but will the AI?

 

[Cassilda]

The papacy will no longer get stuck at kingdom level like the other theocracies with this update?

 

[Amtep]

Ternate new strongest country in the game.

Finally the devs have broken the overpowered majesty of ULM

 

[Jesus was a communist]

Most disappointing dev diary in ages.

I would put eu4 as probably my favourite strategy game of all time but it seems that in recent years the devs have really lost their way. I'm happy about the missionary changes. Apart from that and a few cool government reforms I see nothing to be excited about.

Republics will still be ridiculously nerf compareded to other government types.
Marines see like a cool addition but the huge nerf to combat makes them pointless, the whole point of them seems to be that transporting them from one continent to the other will be less painful compareded to regular troops but why would a player do that when you can just colonize a provinces and build a stack there?

The worst is trade companies, in seems to me that the devs have finally realised that trade companies are op and that the nerf to moving capital made nations in Asia underpowered compareded to the rest of the world.
To fix, after presumably after a few months of development they had the "good idea" to make trade companies available to everyone. Unfortunately it only took the community to figure out that this means that if you have a direct land connection between your capital and the trade companies you can have them anymore. Sorry russia, ottomans, Mumluks or any other semi large empire you can have trade companies, but GB and Japan can go crazy..... or you can just more your capital to some random 3 dev island and be fine.
The Muslims conversion mechanic will be cool to. Get a good trade company going. Start converting, oh no all your provinces are leaving that trade company because they're of your religion now :0....

I'm not going to mention the new state mechanics because they seem like a thing you really need to play a game with to really get and opinion on.

I was hopefully that when Johan returned he would fix some of the stupid mechanics that had been introduced in his absence but it seems like they're lust going to remove bad mechanics with worse ones...

Hoping I'm wrong. Sorry about the rant.

 

[Howl]

Finally the devs have broken the overpowered majesty of ULM

Actually no.
As Ulm you become either Emperor or Shogun and Conquer the world with you swarm of vassals.
Having inumerous vassals of unlimited size is the new way to play.

 

[covya]

So provinces that you colonise in south africa or the spice islands (which get your religion as long as there are few enough natives) won't be able to be added to TCs?

 

[Twoflower]

After reading the Dev Diary further and coming across the Naval Combat section, I don't know what to say. Am I further disappointed? Is the change any good? Concerning marines in particular and the +5 naval attrition building.

Basically if Britain transports, troops from London to Sydney, regular troops, during peace, that has the potential to wipe out their entire manpower pool? Am I reading this right. So the only logical way to ferry troops is none, ferry marines instead, and if you want to ferry marines then enjoy taking more Shock Damage, it's like you're purposely setting yourself into a Horde like shock phase. Someone please tell me I am reading it wrong. I see no reason why a journey from say California to Sydney of 40,000 regular troops should result in more casualties than troops available.

You might tell me to use marines as spearheads and then building troops on the newly acquired overseas territory after the war. Cool say my forcelimit is 60k, 40k regulars, 20k marines. I manage to claim Sri Lanka as Britain using my marines, all good I saved my manpower by avoiding the ferrying the regulars into the cesspit of manpower. Now I have Sri Lanka in my control, how am I supposed to send my regulars across? Do I build new regulars? I am forcelimit constrained. Do I disband the troops at home? More manpower loss? Someone please explain to me what's going on here.

And with naval attrition buildings so France will lose ships in the channel if Wessex has naval attrition buildings? Do they stack so 5 buildings in 5 provinces in one naval tile, 5x5 = 25 naval attrition???

Well, it has been a common criticism of the game that it should not be possible or at least much less feasible to have 50.000 European regular troops roaming around North America, Australia or India in the 16th or 17th century.
Transporting troops over large distances was a nightmare in the EU4 period, and there is a reason why for example the American rebels did not have to defeat Britain's whole army.

There are certainly valid arguments against/concerns about this change, namely:
1. whether this historical inaccuracy needed to be amended when the game as a whole isn't historically accurate
2. you actually need to ferry huge armies to India, Indonesia or East Africa in order to win wars there as a European when historically European colonizers (Portugal, Netherlands, England/Great Britain, France) were able to occupy land there with small contingents.
3. the AI's ability to deal with it

What cannot really be disputed is that there is a reason why a naval transport of 20.000 men in 1500 across the Atlantic Ocean would kill a large portion of that army.

 

[Tomatenfisch]

View attachment 538893

View attachment 538894

Did you split the Channel Trade Node? The colours look different and Trade Company regions are based on Trade Nodes. Or did I muss something else?

 

[Xephe]

This is so good, def gonna play more Theocracies and try some Monastic orders

 

[klingonadmiral]

Did you split the Channel Trade Node? The colours look different and Trade Company regions are based on Trade Nodes. Or did I muss something else?

These specific TCs are held by Qing. They hold southern England and Normandy, while the Low Countries and northern England are not part of any TC.

 

[AlazkanAssassin]

2) if you hug coasts, its not a problem, as its the same 1% attrition as before.

Can you make the ship pathing more likely to hug coasts then?

Specifically, if a fleet has transports, and those transports are loaded with soldiers that take attrition ( i.e. not marines), it should take the route that results in the fewest total expected casualties due to attrition.

 

[Telesra]

I don't understand why you are removing corruption from territories mechanic because it was annoying to deal with, and then adding a new mechanic that's even more annoying. Coalitions are not fun to fight, and have never been a fun mechanic. This is literally a mechanic to make the bad ai band together against the player, for a lack of a better mechanic - literally a band-aid. Why are they being promoted and not reworked instead?

In turn I would rather see an expansion where you guys would remove the focus of monarch points in technology. It is silly that my Monarch is in the laboratory and developing muskets before everyone else's ruler because he rolled a 6 in military instead of 0 when born...

 

[swagmeister]

Most disappointing dev diary in ages.

I would put eu4 as probably my favourite strategy game of all time but it seems that in recent years the devs have really lost their way. I'm happy about the missionary changes. Apart from that and a few cool government reforms I see nothing to be excited about.

Republics will still be ridiculously nerf compareded to other government types.
Marines see like a cool addition but the huge nerf to combat makes them pointless, the whole point of them seems to be that transporting them from one continent to the other will be less painful compareded to regular troops but why would a player do that when you can just colonize a provinces and build a stack there?

The worst is trade companies, in seems to me that the devs have finally realised that trade companies are op and that the nerf to moving capital made nations in Asia underpowered compareded to the rest of the world.
To fix, after presumably after a few months of development they had the "good idea" to make trade companies available to everyone. Unfortunately it only took the community to figure out that this means that if you have a direct land connection between your capital and the trade companies you can have them anymore. Sorry russia, ottomans, Mumluks or any other semi large empire you can have trade companies, but GB and Japan can go crazy..... or you can just more your capital to some random 3 dev island and be fine.
The Muslims conversion mechanic will be cool to. Get a good trade company going. Start converting, oh no all your provinces are leaving that trade company because they're of your religion now :0....

I'm not going to mention the new state mechanics because they seem like a thing you really need to play a game with to really get and opinion on.

I was hopefully that when Johan returned he would fix some of the stupid mechanics that had been introduced in his absence but it seems like they're lust going to remove bad mechanics with worse ones...

Hoping I'm wrong. Sorry about the rant.

No you don't need to play a game to understand how a triple whammy of increased AE, relations over time and a decrease in admin efficiency will do to a blobbing campaign. It will stop you dead in your tracks. You piss off everyone faster with more AE, you can't fix the problem with the penalty to improved relations, and you take another AE hit from the decreased admin efficiency that you spent valuable resources to raise. And since they haven't said there was a cap on it you will run into the issues if you are at a tipping point for OE you will now need to calculate if the increased new cap of bad will tip you over the 100% threshold for the stupid pulsing events that happen if you dare go above 100%.

 

[Twoflower]

I don't know if this has been answered already or not but.

Going over the limit has a scaling penalty which at 100% over the limit is:

• +100% Stability Cost Modifier
• +50% AE Impact
• -50% Improve Relations
• -5% Administrative Efficiency

Why is this a thing? You're effectively making the whole game play tall.

Right now, there is a pretty hard cap on expansion with the hard state limit and territory corruption. Paradox is replacing this with the mentioned soft cap (where numbers aren't final). Groogy said that you should be able to reach a cap of 3500 (equivalent to 3500 development fully stated) by the end of the game without special bonuses or buildings. 3500 dev is not tall by any reasonable standard, it is actually very wide.
300 dev as a kingdom in the early stages of the game is not very wide, but it doesn't constrain you to an ultra-tall playstyle either - exceeding the cap a little should not kill you, and picking administrative as a first or second idea group has always been a go-to strategy for expansionist strategies anyway.

Also, why are you making it so you cannot have TC land that is your religion?

They did explain that one - because they do not want the Mameluks to have trade companies in Arabia. Personally, I am not sure if this is actually enough of a problem to justify the restriction - I would usually want to fully state the Arabian peninsula as Mamluks anyway and I don't see why e.g. Oman should not be able to have TCs in India and East Africa.

 

[Pbhuh]

That would allow Mamluks to have Trade Companies in Arabia.

Maybe base it off Superregions instead of Continents?

https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Regions#Super-regions

Seems to be mostly fine.

With the exception of Europe, but works better for Asia and Africa manyfold.

Mamluks not being able to put a trade company in Kilwa or Madagascar but Arabia being fine lol.

 

[Kerham]

I don't want the game to become some sort of fantasy map painting. I played and paid for it exactly for a decent dose of realism. It's okay if world conquest is nearly impossible. It never happened in history. It's rare, it's supposed to be hard to achieve, manage your own expectations and deal with it.

As for trashing the devs by some random kid with no life or work experience, I would be curious if respective person managed at any point in own life any kind of project save for cutting own nails. There's infrastructure and there's a range of player expectations which devs must reach to a reasonable common denominator. They are humans too, control your language and tone, tyvm.

Other than that, any kind of release term, even if vague? With all these changes, I am avoiding playing in Europe for half year now and is getting boring

 

[Andrzej I]

Instead there are now a special unit type any country can build if they pick Naval ideas, called Marines. These do not take attrition at sea, they use sailors, they have +200% Disembarking Speed and ignore crossing penalties. However they do take +25% more shock damage.

Something that has puzzled me since the Christmas mini-DD but I don't think was ever fully addressed: why do marines take 25% more shock damage? Neither cossack nor rajput units have any malus, so it isn't that special units need to have maluses. Even if they did, hypothetically, taking extra shock damage seems curious to me. I'd sooner see something along the lines of the janissary "malus" where marines might be costlier to reinforce, or perhaps have a higher maintenance cost. Anyhow, would love to hear the rational behind this decision for the marine unit malus.

Edit: Also, @Johan , in case he would be willing to answer! Thank you to either who does!

 

[PurpulaPhoenixum53]

Dang this is huge.

This just made theocracies much more fun to play.

 

[lolada]

This AE thing is annoying for some time already - people learned to play around it. Basically you either don't disover new land.. of if you do then you just ignore coalitions and kill everyone. Like DDRJake going ham on whole europe in his Prome campaign thats active now. So once you start conquering religious group its just accept coalitions and kill everyone crap anyway. And then you game coalition war by giving up your allies land or some useless vassals or something like that.

The thing is there's really no going back with AE in this game unless you intend to stop playing for 40 years. Once you get a bit over 50 its perma coalitions or kill those nations.
I am more annoyed with +100% stab cost increased.. its way too much. +33% is plenty enough.

*** Florryworry had that nice idea to win coalition war and force coalition members to accept your conquests and forget AE. ***
The idea was to give a point to coalition wars for player at least.. otherwise player will just game the system every time.

 

[BoomKidneyShot]

I suppose the Propagate Religion trade policy will now skip over owned TC provinces?