No Dev Diary 8th of January

[Groogy]

Yo! So people are returning from the holidays and I hope all of you had a great Yuletide and New Years. Me and the Team have now recharged and as one of the vows for the new years I've made that this year is going to be the Year of EU4. But since it is the start of the year we do not have much to say at this point.

Not everyone is back yet and me and Jake still need to have a sit down and plan the year ahead on what we should talk about in the dev diaries. We've talked about we are doing a big push on tech debt and quality of life. In my Quality of Life document, or The Pet Peeves Master Document as I would call it, where I've been gathering stuff from the team, the forums, reddit, wherever I've seen something, I've recorded about 100 pet peeves, bunch are my own as well. They range from the smallest "Take-as-much-money-as-possible-without-exceeding-warscore" to "Naval combat suxx".

Therefore we yet do not have plans written down on what dev diaries we will be doing going forward. This is a great place and time to put down your own suggestions for what you would like to know in a Dev Diary from us. Be the team, our development or the lifetime of a feature. Drop a post in the thread and me and Jake will consider it.

 

[RMS Oceanic]

"Take-as-much-money-as-possible-without-exceeding-warscore"

Yay!

I suppose the first actual dev diary I'd like would be a loose schedule of when/how you plan to introduce the QOL stuff. I know in the past it's always come with major updates, but maybe smaller patches that are QOL/Bugfixes only while you plan Pax Europa or whatever it's called, and you can line up what you're tackling.

 

[ruzen]

“Our infallible fate is to be deceived in everything we attempt. I make brilliant plans in the morning, then fool around all day,”

 

[Metz]

QoL - regulate how colonial nations expand so they don’t carve into other colonial regions and cause border gore. If they do then those provinces should form the respective colonial nation of that colonial region.

 

[grandadmiralbob]

When I play wars are almost always fought to 100%WS. If this is what you guys want, no harm no foul. I think that wars are not expensive and costly enough.
And my personal opinion, get rid of ALL I mean ALL "click fix buttons." The only ones I feel should not give an insta-bonus are when you tech up. Maybe have accepting a culture use something similiar to Harmonizing, except much faster, except when time goes by. Buttons that instantly get rid of WE, or increase stability could be replaced by a mechanic that you invest the same monarch points in, but tick up over time.
And welcome back, I hope you guys had a relaxing vacation.

 

[lolada]

You could give us bits and pieces of what are you planning to do in following weeks - some specific changes that may have a bit more to it. If you intend to reduce micro and what are you planning to do.

We can come with feedback:
- like introduce "core all button"
- reduce number of clicks of "grant province" button - or change that damn mechanic to something sensible
- auto convert button.. from fastest to slowest
- edicts activated notification and others..

Or tooltips fixing - there are many tooltips wrong - including some very important like ships trade power calculations. People could post tons of these so you don't miss out on them.

 

[Ixal]

What I want to see in a DD

- Long term vision / how does the dev team see EU4 and what game do you want it to be
- Vision and viability of tall play in EU4. How much tall play do you as devs want in EU4
- Plans how to interconnect mechanics. Because of the many DLCs EU4 has a lot of small mechanics existing next to each other but at best only indirectly affecting each other. Any plans to connect some of those mechanics directly?

 

[Thaif]

I remember there being a plan about Attrition and it's rework/rewrite. That would be very interesting from a technical and gameplay side since Attrition right now is...somewhat flat as a mechanic and doesn't do justice to how straining large campaigns were during EU4:s time period.

 

[rho]

Will you ever share the Pet Peeves Master Document with us? Obviously, it would have to come with all sorts of giant disclaimers about how you aren't guaranteeing that everything on it will end up getting fixed, but even so, it would be useful to know what was on your radar already so we know they arent things we need to bring up in the suggestions forum. (And also to know if there was anything that we might believe was obvious but which you had somehow managed to miss for one reason or another.)

 

[navaluiki]

Please, make playing tall better and more entertaining. I don't want every game to become map-painting.
Add internal administration to the realm or something.

 

[Groogy]

Will you ever share the Pet Peeves Master Document with us?

No sorry probably won't, got a lot of secrets in there since also team members write in it. If you have something you really hate, just write a suggestion thread or complain loudly on Reddit. If we already got it written up it is just an indicator of the urgency and it should be more prioritized.

 

[JacobMH]

I hope I am allowed to link to a few different forum posts, I find it easier to link already compiled lists than make my own. I may however tomorrow when I wake up.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/bugs-complaints-and-qol-wishes.1143101/

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/canomers-bug-list-of-demo.706610/

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/bugs-and-issues-in-patch-1-28.1140776/

 

[rho]

No sorry probably won't, got a lot of secrets in there since also team members write in it. If you have something you really hate, just write a suggestion thread or complain loudly on Reddit. If we already got it written up it is just an indicator of the urgency and it should be more prioritized.

That's fair. Thanks for the relpy.

 

[navaluiki]

Consider also adding custom start rules to the game, like CK2.
That can lead to more replayability while also pleasing a larger group of fans, instead of alienating them with rules they don't like.

 

[Groogy]

I am asking for suggestions on future dev diaries, I am already parsing the forum for issues and wishes. No point in posting them here as well.

 

[Malatesta]

Happy new years! My humble suggestions

1. Specific units for each country and other generic ones, for example, Spanish tercio for iberia and generic tercio for others.
   
2. Mercenary system like in the ck2
3. Country guanche in Tenerife, because in all the games Portugal occupies Tenerife. Also in Tenerife the Spaniards had one of the greatest colonial defeats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Acentejo
4. More trade goods like potatoes in America, rice in Asia, ...
   

 

[Blobhemian]

When I play wars are almost always fought to 100%WS. If this is what you guys want, no harm no foul. I think that wars are not expensive and costly enough.
And my personal opinion, get rid of ALL I mean ALL "click fix buttons." The only ones I feel should not give an insta-bonus are when you tech up. Maybe have accepting a culture use something similiar to Harmonizing, except much faster, except when time goes by. Buttons that instantly get rid of WE, or increase stability could be replaced by a mechanic that you invest the same monarch points in, but tick up over time.

This, this so much. In the early modern age long wars were often ruinous even for the winning side, even when directly affecting only a small part of the populace, as they were simply incredibly costly. Many people obviously like the map painting aspect of the game, but WE, large debt and also unjustified demands should be something you actually have to take into consideration. Now it would certainly not be a good idea just to make those things more punishing out of the blue, that wouldn't really make the game more fun and would inevitably anger a lot of players, so at the same time it would be wise and perhaps game-changing to revisit existing CBs, introduce new ones (e. g. dynastic claims, vassalization options) and make it rewarding to expand or gain power by actually using proper CBs instead of just fabricating on some random province and then taking 100% worth of warscore without any issues. I'm not saying the strict CK2 system should directly serve as a model here, because peace conferences and post-war negotiations were incredibly important during the time period, often moreso than the military outcome itself, but it would be nice to find some middle ground between the CK and EU implementations.

How many players actually know about the benefits of claims? How AE is deducted from unjustified demands? How peace cost is calculated? I dare say just a tiny minority cares about those, and most of them probably just for roleplay reasons. In fact, there is no need to know how all of this works, because the impact of those mechanics is so tiny in comparison to direct province grabbing.

I also agree heavily on the issue of the cheap buttons that make problems magically go away (from strenghtening government through development to even disinheriting), but the problem is that many of those are actually part of DLCs and would be thus harder to remove or rework. But especially the development, now that it is free, and inflation/WE reduction should be looked at, as all of them are now baseline and are also most striking.

 

[j02sh123]

I would like to see some kind of schedule or road map. Something like:
we plan to make our first qol-patch in March, the second in July and the major patch in November. In March we will focus on...and so on

That would be nice and it's complementary with your planning of the year

 

[navaluiki]

Development ideas, map changes and new mechanics should be announced before they are implemented ingame, so there's enough time to discuss them and change them before it's too late. I think you should also explain why you do change something or not (like new provinces, trade goods, mechanics...)

 

[RhoxOS]

Can you tell us when the next patch will go live? We know you already solved some problems internally(vasco event, trade company stutter) but we don't know when it'll go live.

By telling it we can decide whether to play it with bug or wait for next patch.