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Hello everybody, and welcome to the first development diary for Europa Universalis IV. We've been working on this project for quite a long time, with the first design dicussions starting not long after Divine Wind was released. During last year we spent a lot of time working on the design concepts, and late in 2011, the core team was assembled, and actual development started.

Earlier this month, we announced the game at Gamescom, and showed a minor subset of the features for the game. Today we start a series of weekly development diaries where we'll go into detail about the game. Our goal is to release an entry each friday, with breaks for holidays.

The subject of todays diary is 'Why do Europa Universalis IV and what is our goal with the game?'.

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Why are we working on a sequel to Europa Universalis?

Well, first of all, the team we are all major fans of this series, with me personally being the core guy behind the original game, back in the late 90's, and the others being involved for quite a lot of time on it. We are a group who love playing Europa Universalis (EU), both in singleplayer and in multiplayer together, so you could definitely say it is the favorite series for the people working on Europa Universalis IV.

Originally EU1 started development in 1997, EU2 in 2001, EU3 started in 2005, so we were overdue a new take on the genre. During those years we've accumulated quite a lot of ideas, and discarded far more. We've come to understand what Europa Universalis is about for a lot of people, and what it means for ourselves.

One important thing though, is that while we had lots of cool and interesting ideas for EU, we simply couldn't just add them all in, as the game would become an unwieldly mass. EU has a complexity level we do not want to dramatically increase and while improving the interface can reduce it a fair bit, it is a very fine balance when it comes to designing a game.

So we took a step back and looked at what Europa Universalis was and what we wanted to do, and since its a new game, we had quite a large amount of flexibility. We could rewrite entire systems from scratch, and do some paradigm shifts. One such example is the complete removal of the old trade system with centers of trade, which was replaced with a new trade system with dynamic flow of trade. This flexibility has been a great benefit when it comes to designing the game.


So then, what is our goal with Europa Universalis IV?

In all our games we aim to have believable mechanics. When playing a Grand Strategy game it should be about immersion and suspension of disbelief. You should feel like you are playing a country in the time period. This is something all our EU games have managed to achieve, and it is very important that EU4 will have that same feeling.

The game should, as we mentioned earlier, not increase its complexity levels dramatically. We are happy with the level of complexity the Eu-series has, and want to keep it at this level.

One of the most important aspects of EU4 is to make an interface that is both easier to get into, and less hassle for an expert user. This a fine line to balance, and we are rather happy with the interfaces we have done so far for EU4.

We also want to make sure that players feel that this is a new game, that this is worth paying money for, and this comes from new mechanics and better interfaces. With detailed dev-diaries every week until release, we are rather confident that you'll all be excited about it when its finally ready.

So, now we've just talked about history and visions, I'll try to clarify a confusion about sandbox, historical events and plausibility. Europa Universalis have always been about historically plausible outcomes, as I mentioned over six years ago , and EU4 is no different in that regard. No determenism or full sandbox will ever be in the EU series. In EU3 we scrapped historical events and added lots and lots of system and mechanics to create more plausible gameplay. While we are continuing on that concept and keep making more plausible mechanics, we are in EU4 doing something new...

We'e adding in Dynamic Historical Events. We'll have more of those than we had historical in EU2, and together with a fair amount of other planned features, this is creating an even more immersive type of gameplay, where countries feel far more unique than they did in any previous game in the series. A 'dynamic historical event', or DHE for short, is an event that has some rather rigid triggers that they feel plausible to happen with, ie, no Spanish Bankruptcy just because its a certain date, but events that tie into mechanics rather heavily.

The example I want to talk about is War of the Roses for England. At any point of time, before 1500, if England lacks an heir, then the chain for War of the Roses can start, which creates a lot of interesting situations for the player, as well as giving unique historical immersion.

Next week we'll talk more about the map, so enjoy for now!


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I would really like to see a pool with three options, what would people prefer 1.Deterministic game, similar to EU2 2.Sandbox 3.Something in between
Why? The game is already in Alpha and you cannot just change the design philosophy halfway through the process. I'm not sure what such a poll would achieve. What I've understood from Johan's posts it will be something like 1.80 between your 1 & 2.
 
I though that I would be happier with nations having more DHE than others if the Devs could spare the time to guarantee at least one DHE for all nations. But then I checked the history of Ulm... The only event with any importance for the Era is the Truce of Ulm, which was between a war leader (France) and a non-leader (Bavaria), and the truce lasted less than one year...
 
Why? The game is already in Alpha and you cannot just change the design philosophy halfway through the process. I'm not sure what such a poll would achieve. What I've understood from Johan's posts it will be something like 1.80 between your 1 & 2.
Oh no I never expected that pool would influence the game too much, I just said I would like to see something like that.
 
I though that I would be happier with nations having more DHE than others if the Devs could spare the time to guarantee at least one DHE for all nations. But then I checked the history of Ulm... The only event with any importance for the Era is the Truce of Ulm, which was between a war leader (France) and a non-leader (Bavaria), and the truce lasted less than one year...

I read this story of Ulm, and apparently, Ulm should clearly have some bonuses when accumulating vassals.
 
So you do not disagree that there should be a 'form Russia' decision, you just disagree with how it was done in EU3?
Correct.

I think a decision to form a nation should be available to all countries that control enough, but there should be negative consequences if your country is not the same culture. Imagine Denmark controlling enough to form Germany, surely that could be seen as a setback for Denmark, as Germans are not keen on a Danish leader (or Denmark itself adopting another culture's pan-nationalism).
There wasn't really that much nationalism in this time period IIRC, but I generally agree with what you are saying.
 
Is EU2 worth buying?
If you're considering EU2 I'd look at For the Glory instead (3rd-party-developed game based on EU2 code and published by Paradox).

While EU2 was great I couldn't go back to it from EU3.
 
That was how events worked in EU2 - not in EU4. Though we use a lot of ideas from EU2 all events have completely new triggers and effects. These events are meant to give you some national flavor - not alter your game.

I think people have missed what I meant.

If we start with the triggers and so forth already in place in 1444 Burgundy, how likely are we to end up facing the Partition 30 years later? How inevitable is the partition given how close we start to it?

You could have just read the original post, of course.

I did read the original post. My concern isn't that there's an event coded for 1477 that divides Burgundy. My concern is that we may not be able to avert the partition due to the event chain either being effectively inevitable thanks to the initial setup, or that it may not be feasible to divert the chain given we only have 30 years between game start and the (historic) trigger date, which I assume is being used as a rough guide to when the event should happen or be avoided. (Similarly with the War of the Roses having an end date for the start of the chain of 1500.)

And yes some are not concerned but happy that history at least has a seat at the table. The DHE are just what EU needs to keep historical flavor while not pigeonholing you into reliving it. I want to feel like i'm playing that country I picked at the start. If i wanted to play a country in name only I could just as easily play Civilization with it's super randomness. (I like Civ games btw, but EU4 should not be as random and sandbox as Civ5)

When you take away the motivations, the ambitions, or even the history of a country, the only thing left is it's name and an ai. Why did history happen the way it did? We need to at least make sure the answer to that question is represented in the game regardless if it never plays out exactly like it did in history.
Again, I am not concerned about history having a seat at the table. I am concerned about the possibilities that either the DHEs are coded with the wrong trigger, thus making them appear ahistorically (Henry VI did have an heir, so the "if there is no heir" part of the announced trigger is wrong); the DHE triggers are already in place at game start and may ruin some nations (if Burgundy already starts with one foot on the chain, can we get off of it in time before the chain finishes?); or may otherwise be implausible for the alternate history that is being played out.

I would also prefer that the effort spent on these instead went to generic versions of the events that can target anyone who fits the criteria - any country that is half in and half out of the HRE and has no heir could be partitioned like Burgundy was historically; any country that has a throne that was usurped by another branch of the royal family could have a war of the roses type scenario; any country that has a strongly catholic king when the country is majority protestant, and is (at least theoretically) a constitutional monarchy could have a civil war or have a chain where the king is effectively deposed by parliament if he flees the country. None of these need to be tied to a particular tag or culture, just to seem "more historical" when plausibly these could have happened anywhere.

In general history happened the way it did because of many factors, several of which cannot be factored into the game. Some can, and in general should. My point is that we seem to be talking about England being the only nation that can get the particular type of civil war that was the war of the roses, when those factors could have arisen anywhere. The motivations of York could have been shared by an equivalent Duc d'Orleans in an alt-history France, or a cousin of the Castillian king whose father or grandfather had seized the throne, thus depriving the cousin of his "rightful" throne. Potentially the Laird of the Isles in Scotland could have been in a similar position.

And before we get a response of "But that's not what happened", I'd like to firmly plant my flag for "plausible" not "historic".
 
Regarding events, Burgundy or rather Charles the Bold did have a heir, his daughter Mary the Rich. In almost all Burgundian possessions she could inherit legitimately and the status of Burgundy proper was disputed (according to the king of France it was like an appanage, according to the dukes of Burgundy it wasn't). Anyway it was more that the king of France took advantage of the situation in the Burgundian Lands after the death of Charles the Bold. Furthermore there were a number of treaties until the final settlement and after that no one was really happy either, for instance the Habsburgs (and later the Spanish Bourbons as heirs of the Spanish Habsburgs) kept using the title duke of Burgundy.
 
The problem with generic event, it's that they lack flavor. Their text, their option choices, and the subsidiary events in the chain, all have to be generic and flavorless to fit all possible countries.

An English-Specific event, on the other hand, allow for a great deal more flavor, reference to the actual specific incidents that were part of it, and, oh, yeah, it allow the event to use the name war of the rose. For other countries, you're simply likely to have pretenders rising and the like.

And for the rest, it's verisimilitude vs historic. Historic would be straddling the War of the Rose with strict triggers that accurately reflect history; verisimilitude means using generic triggers that feel appropriate so the War of the Rose is not restricted to happening one game out of a hundred, while still feeling relatively appropriate to the situation in your country when it happens (eg, no civil war over the throne when there is a clear legitimate line of succession).

(And verisimilitude is better than plausible. Plausible worry its ugly little head about what historian says, even if the resulting game feel all kinds of wrong, while verisimilitude worry about making the game feel real to the vast majority of the audience, who are not historians)
 
Many of the objections to DHE's seem to come from people who never played EUII. That game was more "deterministic" than EUIV seem shaking up, at least in the hard-coded monarchs you got. Nevertheless, you could, and we all did, reverse history of just the sort being brought up here. I tend to be a role-playing style, and thus do not get such wild results as others, nevertheless, I did all the following:

Avert the fall of the Ming dynasty.
Avoid the English Civil War.
Avoid the union of Spain and Portugal.
Become Emperor as Sweden. Under Gustavus.
Make Byzantium into the world's leading power.

Most of those came with mods which were even more deterministic than vanilla. And that's just off the top of my head. I confess I never tried Burgundy, but that sort of thing is entirely avoidable in EUII, and I see no reason for the panic about EUIV. The most DHE's are likely to do, is make life a bit tougher when you reverse history, that is, make the game more challenging.

And that's a bad thing?
 
Yep. Vanilla had an option in the Burgundy event to refuse the claims of both Austria and France and keep playing. There were some penalties to doing so (iirc a loss of stability), but you were perfectly allowed, as the human player, to defy history and take it in whichever directions you wanted.
 
Many of the objections to DHE's seem to come from people who never played EUII. That game was more "deterministic" than EUIV seem shaking up, at least in the hard-coded monarchs you got. Nevertheless, you could, and we all did, reverse history of just the sort being brought up here. I tend to be a role-playing style, and thus do not get such wild results as others, nevertheless, I did all the following:

Avert the fall of the Ming dynasty.
Avoid the English Civil War.
Avoid the union of Spain and Portugal.
Become Emperor as Sweden. Under Gustavus.
Make Byzantium into the world's leading power.

Most of those came with mods which were even more deterministic than vanilla. And that's just off the top of my head. I confess I never tried Burgundy, but that sort of thing is entirely avoidable in EUII, and I see no reason for the panic about EUIV. The most DHE's are likely to do, is make life a bit tougher when you reverse history, that is, make the game more challenging.

And that's a bad thing?

I did play EU1 and EU2 a lot. DHE's don't seem to be entirely bad, as they indeed give flavour and help to model initial few decades more realistically. As long as they will be 'giving flavor while not altering the game' like Captain Gars said, that would be ok. Because real 'guts' of the game should be generic mechanics and events - much more versatile and elastic. It would be immersion killer for me if DHE's would launch after 100-200 years of gameplay, to artificially create Netherlands or starting English Civil War. Netherlands could arise if united by some Dutch minor, or after revolt, not because of specific event. ECW may happen but due to generic Civil War mechanics, not because of specific event for ENG.

Main concern comes from a danger that theoretically paradox wasted their resources to create these, quite obsolete IMO, DHE's instead of developing generic mechanics and events. Though, Captain Gars words that DHE's would be just for flavor makes this fear to be misplaced. I think that you guys may be actually disappointed to find out that this game won't be quite EU2-ish as you would like. ;)
 
The problem with generic event, it's that they lack flavor. Their text, their option choices, and the subsidiary events in the chain, all have to be generic and flavorless to fit all possible countries.

An English-Specific event, on the other hand, allow for a great deal more flavor, reference to the actual specific incidents that were part of it, and, oh, yeah, it allow the event to use the name war of the rose. For other countries, you're simply likely to have pretenders rising and the like.

And for the rest, it's verisimilitude vs historic. Historic would be straddling the War of the Rose with strict triggers that accurately reflect history; verisimilitude means using generic triggers that feel appropriate so the War of the Rose is not restricted to happening one game out of a hundred, while still feeling relatively appropriate to the situation in your country when it happens (eg, no civil war over the throne when there is a clear legitimate line of succession).

(And verisimilitude is better than plausible. Plausible worry its ugly little head about what historian says, even if the resulting game feel all kinds of wrong, while verisimilitude worry about making the game feel real to the vast majority of the audience, who are not historians)

A generic event does not necessarily imply a lack of flavour. Yes, you won't have "The Duke of York has raised troops and attacked at Newark!", but you can have "The Duke of $Province_Name$ has raised troops at $Province_Name$" which would look similar. It also has the advantage of being flexible enough that you don't need to worry about the pre-written script having the rebel Duke turning up in a province that isn't controlled by the country in question...

So, in the event that another country gets into the same situation that would trigger the war of the roses in England there should just be a boring, normal pretender revolt? Not another member of the dynasty (or a related one as in the split in England) leading it? Not an interesting and (at least theoretically flexible) event chain that gives you the opportunity to avoid it? Hmmmm. Somehow I don't see this being "interesting", non-generic, and flavoursome for the other countries. After all, generic pretender revolts that have no apparent reason are always better than ones that you can tell why they happened.

Again, it would also help if the triggers were right for these historical events, rather than fantastical nonsense that ignores the historic situation.

In addition, implausible is easier to spell... :p

Many of the objections to DHE's seem to come from people who never played EUII. That game was more "deterministic" than EUIV seem shaking up, at least in the hard-coded monarchs you got. Nevertheless, you could, and we all did, reverse history of just the sort being brought up here. I tend to be a role-playing style, and thus do not get such wild results as others, nevertheless, I did all the following:

Avert the fall of the Ming dynasty.
Avoid the English Civil War.
Avoid the union of Spain and Portugal.
Become Emperor as Sweden. Under Gustavus.
Make Byzantium into the world's leading power.

Most of those came with mods which were even more deterministic than vanilla. And that's just off the top of my head. I confess I never tried Burgundy, but that sort of thing is entirely avoidable in EUII, and I see no reason for the panic about EUIV. The most DHE's are likely to do, is make life a bit tougher when you reverse history, that is, make the game more challenging.

And that's a bad thing?

Congratulations. Now, how often did the AI fall prey to implausible (but historical) happenings? I'm not talking about solely whether the player can get out of the situation, but whether the AI will get hit with incorrect triggers, causing historical but implausible results.
I'm also concerned that we could get situations where early DHEs are essentially locked in by the starting situation, thus making some event chains unavoidable, and thus some countries really bad, or really good choices (Inherit half of Burgundy for free? I think I will thanks!).

Yep. Vanilla had an option in the Burgundy event to refuse the claims of both Austria and France and keep playing. There were some penalties to doing so (iirc a loss of stability), but you were perfectly allowed, as the human player, to defy history and take it in whichever directions you wanted.

Again, did the AI ever refuse?
 
Yep, EU2 was deterministic to the extreme. And I don't believe EU4 will come even near those levels, because if I did I would not even consider buying it.

In fact, this is a nudge war: I will be satisfied anyway (probably), but my favourite way would be one of less intervention possible by means of events and hard-triggered mechanics. The worse it could happen is I buy this, and pass the first two days commenting out DHE - and it would require something quite invasive and deterministic for me to do it. But if most mechanics are plausible, and we don't end seeing a Brandenburg-Prussia ten times out of ten, that's fine for me.
 
Now, how often did the AI fall prey to implausible (but historical) happenings? I'm not talking about solely whether the player can get out of the situation, but whether the AI will get hit with incorrect triggers, causing historical but implausible results.

"implausible but historical" is an oxymoron. That which actually happened is by definition plausible. I do not want a so-called historical game in which what actually happened can't do so in the game.
 
Yep, EU2 was deterministic to the extreme. And I don't believe EU4 will come even near those levels, because if I did I would not even consider buying it.

In fact, this is a nudge war: I will be satisfied anyway (probably), but my favourite way would be one of less intervention possible by means of events and hard-triggered mechanics. The worse it could happen is I buy this, and pass the first two days commenting out DHE - and it would require something quite invasive and deterministic for me to do it. But if most mechanics are plausible, and we don't end seeing a Brandenburg-Prussia ten times out of ten, that's fine for me.

EU2 was not as much deterministic, but highly context-insensitive for its nice flavourful historical events. EU3 skipped the flavour for better context-sensitivity. EU4's DHE seem to be aimed to combine the best of both worlds.
 
"implausible but historical" is an oxymoron. That which actually happened is by definition plausible. I do not want a so-called historical game in which what actually happened can't do so in the game.

Not neccessarily. Plausible relates to whether it is reasonable and makes sense for the event to happen given the situation in place at the time, rather than whether the event happened in our history.
Burgundy being partitioned between France and the HRE when there is a strong male heir and Burgundy is the dominant power in France is implausible, even though it was the historical result. It is implausible because the circumstances relevant to the historical situation do not apply.
The Spanish bankrupcy is implausible if Spain has plenty of money coming in, no debts and good trade, resulting in income exceeding expenditure by a decent amount. It was however the historical result.
Russia forming is implausible if the area is divided between a dozen different nations.
The English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, although great historical landmarks in English/British history are implausible (and impossible!) if England/GB is a republic rather than a monarchy.
The Spanish War of Succession would not have reason to happen if the situation with the thrones of Europe were different, and the contenders for the throne had not been linked to rival countries.


I am not saying that historical events should not be able to happen, just that they should not happen in the event that the situation does not allow for them to happen. I am also not happy with the concept of the early period DHEs always firing.
 
A generic event does not necessarily imply a lack of flavour. Yes, you won't have "The Duke of York has raised troops and attacked at Newark!", but you can have "The Duke of $Province_Name$ has raised troops at $Province_Name$" which would look similar. It also has the advantage of being flexible enough that you don't need to worry about the pre-written script having the rebel Duke turning up in a province that isn't controlled by the country in question...

So, in the event that another country gets into the same situation that would trigger the war of the roses in England there should just be a boring, normal pretender revolt? Not another member of the dynasty (or a related one as in the split in England) leading it? Not an interesting and (at least theoretically flexible) event chain that gives you the opportunity to avoid it? Hmmmm. Somehow I don't see this being "interesting", non-generic, and flavoursome for the other countries. After all, generic pretender revolts that have no apparent reason are always better than ones that you can tell why they happened.

Again, it would also help if the triggers were right for these historical events, rather than fantastical nonsense that ignores the historic situation.

In addition, implausible is easier to spell... :p



Congratulations. Now, how often did the AI fall prey to implausible (but historical) happenings? I'm not talking about solely whether the player can get out of the situation, but whether the AI will get hit with incorrect triggers, causing historical but implausible results.
I'm also concerned that we could get situations where early DHEs are essentially locked in by the starting situation, thus making some event chains unavoidable, and thus some countries really bad, or really good choices (Inherit half of Burgundy for free? I think I will thanks!).



Again, did the AI ever refuse?

1. I was just pointing out that this sort of thing happened in EUII all the time. It wasn't anything remotely like the predetermined case you seem to see. What DID happen in the way of implausibility (and this was in mods, not the vanilla version) was down-and-out AI countries coming back and causing you all sorts of problems. EP did, admittedly with some forcing, cause the Dutch onslaught on the Portuguese empire to be serious. That doesn't happen in EUIII. Once you've gotten yourself established in the East, you are guaranteed to keep it all, and just can rise continually.

Frankly, I don't see how anyone can play through a GC with one country, unless you've taken one of the "Ryukyu" type challenges, and even then, why do it more than once? I want a game which will reward many replays. As it is, I find about 50-75 years with one country is all it takes; then it's time to change to someone else. And that fun is enhanced when I can see that "this is a good time to see if I can keep Ming alive".

2. Re: your reply to Guillaume HJ. In EUII, the default % for AI decisions was 85/15, IIRC. With the new event system, this can be made better. But definitely, Burgundy can thrive with DHE's.

One bottom line fact: Since it will remain a game, the entire notion of any game's history following a predefined path is a chimaera. I don't see why people seem to assert it.
 
1. I was just pointing out that this sort of thing happened in EUII all the time. It wasn't anything remotely like the predetermined case you seem to see. What DID happen in the way of implausibility (and this was in mods, not the vanilla version) was down-and-out AI countries coming back and causing you all sorts of problems. EP did, admittedly with some forcing, cause the Dutch onslaught on the Portuguese empire to be serious. That doesn't happen in EUIII.
But in history, the Dutch onslaught arises because of the Personal Union with Spain, which brings Portugal into the Spanish wars. In the revolution, Portugal had to make some serious concessions to the British to be recognised and to stop hostilities.