Update on the current status of 1.32

[Miganto]

My Mali game crashed around this time...ruined my campaign I spent my whole day playing.

Bjorn, I don't see any mention of the bug or feature? of the emperor demanding unlawful territory while the player is at war? In previous patches the emperor would/could not send demand unlawful territory while you were at war after taking HRE territory in a different war. This is stopping me from playing in Europe in itself. Is this intended or will it be fixed in the hotfix?

EDIT: TO add, it also appears to happen while allied to the emperor. I don't see a big stink about it here in the forums, just 2 posts (1 from me) but there are quite a bit on reddit.

Demanding unlawful territory when someone is at war sounds like the perfect time to do so. If someone was holding my land unlawfully and were then fighting England, i'd definitely take that opportunity to pounce. Sounds like a good change to me and i hope it stays, makes you be sure you are strong enough to counter it before trying to take over the HRE!

 

[iMonstrosity]

Demanding unlawful territory when someone is at war sounds like the perfect time to do so. If someone was holding my land unlawfully and were then fighting England, i'd definitely take that opportunity to pounce. Sounds like a good change to me and i hope it stays, makes you be sure you are strong enough to counter it before trying to take over the HRE!

It's not in the patch notes, and I definitely would not expect it to be sent to allies.

This makes it incredibly tedious and unavoidable to micromanage expansion in the HRE as a -25 opinion to everyone means youre just SOL for a while.

 

[freedavebrown]

It's not in the patch notes, and I definitely would not expect it to be sent to allies.

This makes it incredibly tedious and unavoidable to micromanage expansion in the HRE as a -25 opinion to everyone means youre just SOL for a while.

The emperor has occasionally demanded UT from allies for a while now.

 

[Miganto]

It's not in the patch notes, and I definitely would not expect it to be sent to allies.

This makes it incredibly tedious and unavoidable to micromanage expansion in the HRE as a -25 opinion to everyone means youre just SOL for a while.

mm, I think the only thing mentioned was in relation to sending demands to overlords.

Definitely harder, just personally the idea makes sense to me thematically and realistically.

Found this in 1.24 - Fixed estimation of relative strength of alliances (Fixes Demand Unlawful Territory, Threaten War and various AI strategy issues)
Maybe that?

 

[freedavebrown]

I don't mean to belittle people's problems or saying that it's okay for a bug like the PU thing to slip through - but if you believe that we don't test our releases beforehand you're just wrong. The amount of test cases that needs to be checked with a game of this complexity is enormous and some things are likely to slip through. We can't test the game by playing a full campaign with every nation available in the game - performing every single possible action and alternative for each, also testing it with every possible combination of DLC. I'm sure you can understand that.

And again, yes. The PU thing should have been noticed earlier - we can only admit to that mistake and try to rectify it as soon as we can. We are truly sorry it made it into the release.

Nobody thinks you don’t test the releases. But things like the PU “bug” raise obvious questions about the choices the team is making in terms of how to test and what to test.
It seems pretty elementary that you should not introduce changes that you don’t test. If you thought the AE from PUs was too low (probably true) and wanted to increase it then fine. But to do that and then not play ONE game as Austria for 15 minutes to see if the change made any sense raises some questions about the testing process.
It seems from the dev diary that a lot of the testing on balance issues is done by observing the AI play. Maybe that needs to be looked at.

Again, I’m not claiming you don’t spend 100s or 1000s of hours testing the game. But when every release contains a handful of bugs that seemingly should have been detected then maybe it’s time to rethink how you spend the testing time.

You say that the amount of test cases needed to be checked is enormous and that’s certainly true.

But it seems like the current process for deciding which cases to test consistently misses obvious ones that should have been tested.

 

[crismac]

It was intended to be raised, but it got raised too much. The response made on Twitter was a bit premature and I take responsibility for that. I don't know the exact numbers that was supposed to be there, but for some reason it was the wrong ones at release.

Great communication from BjornB today. I know it is hard to do this constantly, but we sure do appreciate it when we get it.

 

[BjornB]

Nobody thinks you don’t test the releases. But things like the PU “bug” raise obvious questions about the choices the team is making in terms of how to test and what to test.
It seems pretty elementary that you should not introduce changes that you don’t test. If you thought the AE from PUs was too low (probably true) and wanted to increase it then fine. But to do that and then not play ONE game as Austria for 15 minutes to see if the change made any sense raises some questions about the testing process.
It seems from the dev diary that a lot of the testing on balance issues is done by observing the AI play. Maybe that needs to be looked at.

Again, I’m not claiming you don’t spend 100s or 1000s of hours testing the game. But when every release contains a handful of bugs that seemingly should have been detected then maybe it’s time to rethink how you spend the testing time.

You say that the amount of test cases needed to be checked is enormous and that’s certainly true.

But it seems like the current process for deciding which cases to test consistently misses obvious ones that should have been tested.

Most issues seem like they shouldn't be let through in hindsight. All we can do however is look into how it happened and take measures to prevent it in the future. I honestly don't know how this could happen in the code. But sometimes new changes have unexpected results on other parts of the game - parts that might already have been tested and approved.

I don't know if that is the case in this particular instance - but that is one of many things that can go wrong. There are so many dependencies in a code like this that you can't always predict what will happen

 

[adin85]

This game is broken half the time. I don't see the point in playing it anymore.

I did not start any campaign and I dont complain

 

[neheri]

Sadly there was a note of fixing the way AI handles the rebels. Please restore it to the previous state... I've attached an image where countries have rebels. After 50 years, it looks identical (none of the rebels are dealt with).

Basically now AI is not capable of dealing with rebels stacks that are 15k+

 

[Kanem Bornu]

Has there been any thought to tweaking the Mali disaster they basically start in? It's pretty brutal with stab hits every 3-4 years until you can work your way through a large chunk of the mission tree, which took me about 40 in game years to do (most of the time at 0 manpower and -3 stability). I can't imagine we'll ever see a sucessful Mali AI with it being so punishing.

Love the update overall and the communication, by the way.

 

[Steam: Edrik]

When you conquer Prague the monument disappears, will this be fixed or is it intentional?

 

[Franconian]

When you conquer Prague the monument disappears, will this be fixed or is it intentional?

Seems to be fixed in the beta patch for the hotfix, according to its change logs.

 

[iMonstrosity]

Has there been any thought to tweaking the Mali disaster they basically start in? It's pretty brutal with stab hits every 3-4 years until you can work your way through a large chunk of the mission tree, which took me about 40 in game years to do (most of the time at 0 manpower and -3 stability). I can't imagine we'll ever see a sucessful Mali AI with it being so punishing.

Love the update overall and the communication, by the way.

It's supposed to be tough. On my third run, I actually got +3 stab while disaster was active. You can get the first 2 missions done on right side of tree (which directly affect the disaster) before you unpause so that helps. I think its good, although the rebel spawn events may be just a tad bit too often. ..but still manageable.

 

[Kanem Bornu]

It's supposed to be tough. On my third run, I actually got +3 stab while disaster was active. You can get the first 2 missions done on right side of tree (which directly affect the disaster) before you unpause so that helps. I think its good, although the rebel spawn events may be just a tad bit too often. ..but still manageable.

Yes I'm sure if I did it again (now that I know how it works) I would do much better with it, but it's still a pain. I can't imagine the AI being able to handle it at all.

 

[iMonstrosity]

Yes I'm sure if I did it again (now that I know how it works) I would do much better with it, but it's still a pain. I can't imagine the AI being able to handle it at all.

Yeah they probably get rekt. It seems after I finished the disaster, I ran out of things to do but wait though as I steamrolled through every accessible nation. (then portugal said hi, u dead). So if its easier, ill get to that point faster.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Most issues seem like they shouldn't be let through in hindsight. All we can do however is look into how it happened and take measures to prevent it in the future. I honestly don't know how this could happen in the code. But sometimes new changes have unexpected results on other parts of the game - parts that might already have been tested and approved.

Sometimes mistakes happen, human beings are not built to think of everything all the time and never have a moment of weakness/inattentiveness.

However, EU 4 patches (and some other Pdox games) have a recurring problem with the sheer volume of issues introduced, and glaring things like "it is literally impossible to get this achievement we added because you have to start as a country that doesn't exist". I don't think anybody testing could have received the achievement, given the nature of those, even using cheats to create the conditions fast.

Anyway, I'm sure it's not easy. There's a lot of interacting stuff in the game now. But even going back 8+ years I get the impression that some choices being made set the team up for failure when it comes to quality of patch releases/new DLC. When you have bad process, even people who are otherwise highly competent are going to fail, repeatedly. Maybe that bad process is forced or legacy issues with the game itself prevent improving it now...I don't know. I'm not an insider. But I don't see any evidence that the dev team or QA doesn't care/isn't trying, while we still get these results. I can only conclude that something about the setup itself is making it untenable.

 

[MatthewP]

Anyway, I'm sure it's not easy. There's a lot of interacting stuff in the game now. But even going back 8+ years I get the impression that some choices being made set the team up for failure when it comes to quality of patch releases/new DLC. When you have bad process, even people who are otherwise highly competent are going to fail, repeatedly. Maybe that bad process is forced or legacy issues with the game itself prevent improving it now...I don't know. I'm not an insider. But I don't see any evidence that the dev team or QA doesn't care/isn't trying, while we still get these results. I can only conclude that something about the setup itself is making it untenable.

I think you hit the nail on the head. There's a lot of interacting stuff in the game. They made hundreds of changes in the last patch. Quite possibly some dev spent a few hours testing an AE change on their private branch after coding it, everything looked good, then they merged with a hundred other changes and things went south.

Of course, they can spend a few hours testing each change again after everything is merged. Or spend more time doing playthroughs as all major nations + all nations touched in the patch/dlc + a couple nations for each mechanic that was changed (dozens?). My guess is that they don't have the resources to be really thorough with that kind of approach. If they shift resources from development to do it, then maybe they fix 400 bugs instead of 600 (or whatever). Personally, I'm quite happy with the tradeoff of having to wait a day or two after a major patch for a hotfix but getting more fixes and improvements.

 

[The_Boominator]

I have not seen anyone else report this and I'm not sure if this problem is unique to Malwa, but there appears to be some new ruler stats (look at this dude's age) in 1.32

Edit: No, I am not running mods. Yes, I have all the DLC except some cosmetic packs.