Europa Universalis IV - Development Diary 14th of June 2022

[Ogele]

Welcome to our next Development Diary for Europa Universalis IV! Today we dive into the last starting Kingdom in Scandinavia, which has not been covered yet: Norway.

As for Denmark and Sweden, the History of Norway in the Modern Age directly depended on the fate of the Kalmar Union. After the accession of the House of Oldenburg to the Danish throne in 1448, the Danish kings increasingly centralized government, even if a Norwegian Council of State formally governed the country. In fact, Norwegian landed nobles and merchants prospered under this system, as they were effectively the middlemen between the Crown and the commoners. Although some rebellions arose, such as that of Knut Alvsson, the conflicts with the Danish crown were of much less intensity compared to Sweden. This changed with the Reformation, as Frederick I and Christian III's adherence to Protestantism sparked a revolt led by the Norwegian Church. However, it was defeated in the decade of the 1530s, so Denmark and Norway remained Tvillingerigerne (Twin Realms) until 1814.

Although Norway’s history is intertwined with that of Denmark throughout the EU4 time period, we have decided to reflect in the new mission tree for Norway the potential ambitions and challenges it would have faced had it broken free with the end of the Kalmar Union.

Keep in mind: Norway’s mission tree was created before the mission trees of the Teutonic and Livonian Order. As such, the mission tree for Norway is a lot less “what if” even though they were historically no winner either. With that being said, let’s get a look at the details of the tree.

The missions of Norway are split into three themes: gain independence from Denmark and place your own Monarch on the Danish throne, Colonization and internal missions.

Starting with the independence missions, the mission “Norwegian Allies” can be completed by having two rivals or enemies of Denmark have 100 opinion of Norway. As a reward you can request their support through the following event:

Note: Although you are asking Denmark’s rivals/enemies for support in the first three options, you still get a flat reward so the war against Denmark/Sweden will be easier to handle even if the rivals refuse to support you.​

Choosing one of the the first three option will of course trigger an event for Denmark’s rivals:

“Liberty for Norway!” will restore the stability loss and get you 30 Legitimacy while “Win Our Independence!” grants you a Restoration of Union cb against Denmark, allowing you to reverse the historical roles of Denmark and Sweden.

With the mission “Norway-Denmark” you no longer require an admin tech of 20 to form Scandinavia and you get the following event when you have Denmark as your personal union:

Note: It also makes you and Denmark historical friends too if you lose this status during the Restoration of Personal Union war.​

While the main missions are all about reversing the flow of history and subjugating Denmark, there is also a reference to the Scottish Sinclar clan which swore loyalty to the Norwegian crown with the mission “The Claims of Orkney”. Completing it by conquering Scotland will fire this event:

These were the conquest missions for Norway. The rest of the tree is focusing on flavor and colonization, though one of these missions is of particular importance forNorway: “Expel Danish Nobility”.

As you can see, Norway was especially badly affected by the Black Death and lost the majority of its Norwegian nobility and royalty to the plague. As such, it was easier for the Danish nobility to replace them after the Kalmar Union. This is represented by the two starting privileges of Norway which are designed to be mildly annoying to have:

Note: while these privileges are active the Norwegian AI is more inclined to accept the Danish King as their monarch during the Kalmar Succession events.​

While not really too harmful, these privileges prevent you from completing the mission “Norway-Denmark” and “An Absolute Kingdom”, the latter one being a mission which will give +20 Max Absolutism and -20% Autonomy Change Cooldown permanently.

Moving on to the colonial missions, although the Norwegian ideas “The Call of our Forefathers” and “Pioneer Spirits” are not exactly accurate at capturing the spirit of Norway during the 15th century and onwards, but they at least enabled a unique play style for Norway where they are “Budget Britain”. As Sweden is busy with the affairs of Europe mostly and Denmark is focusing on trade in the Old World, it was only fitting for Norway to be more about the colonization of the New World.

The mission “Colonial Ambitions” will give you a head start on exploration as it will fire the following event for you:

Speaking of Greenland, the mission “The Colony of Greenland” will require you to send troops to Greenland in order to see what happened to the former viking colony. Historically, the last written record of the Nordic Greenlanders documents a marriage in 1408. After that there was no contact with the people living there anymore.

By placing 3 regiments of infantry in either of Greenland provinces (under the assumption that they are uncolonized that is) you can complete the mission and get the following event:

The second option is the safe option where you always get the Greenland colony while the first is a gamble. 90% of the time you will get the following event when you try to look for the lost settlement:

However, if you are lucky you get this event instead:

The rest of the colonial missions focus naturally on the colonization of North America as well as expanding a little bit into South America too. They are in general quite self-explanatory, though one mission is a little bit special. “Navigation Mastery” is actually not about colonization but about circumnavigating the world!

Now let’s take a closer look at the internal missions. There are three small branches of them: trade, development of Norway, and religion.

The trade missions on the most left side of the mission tree are about completing Burgher Agendas, construct markets and, of course, dominating the trade of the North Sea and Lübeck. Highlights here are the permanent +20% Loyalty Bonus for Burghers with the mission “Monopolize the North Sea” and the new Burgher Estate privilege “Mountain Expansion” from the mission “Please the Burghers”.

The religious missions are also branching missions for Norway just like it is the case for Sweden and Denmark. However, Norway is focusing more on expanding the Heddal Stave Church in Bratsberg and keeping a stable country.

The final branch I want to talk about is the one regarding developing Norway - which also contains two missions regarding the military identity of Norway. While Denmark uses mercenaries for their wars and Sweden has its Caroleans, it was only fair that we would also give some love to Norway too.

The mission “Restore the Leidang” is about re-establishing the medieval Leidang conscription. Although ahistorical, it is an interesting way to make the military of Norway distinguishable from Sweden and Denmark as this mission will unlock the following Nobility privilege:

“Expand the Royal Navy” will further improve your naval and marine gameplay as it gives permanently -10% Shock Damage Received for your Marines, completely nullifying their drawback, and unlocking an upgraded version of your Naval Doctrine too.

Note: Numbers and modifiers are still work in progress.​

The other missions of the branch are more about actually developing Norway. “Restore the Infrastructure” will request you to develop Trondelag, Ostlandet and Vestlandet so that every owned province in these areas has 10 development. As a reward you get the following event:

Note: This event is one of the flavor events Norway already has. However, now you can trigger it on your own and don’t have to wait for it.​

Over the duration of this modifier you get the chance to get the following events if you own the necessary provinces:

Note: we have decided to not touch the Vanilla Silver event. We might consider making this province into a gold province or not - depending on your feedback.​

Finally, the mission “Norwegian Great Power” requires you to be one of the great powers with at least 600 development and gives the following rewards:

And that was it for the content for Norway. Before we continue with the additions to the free update, let’s talk about the Caroleans. The last Development Diary has showcased the Caroleans and we have received a lot of constructive feedback from you.

We are still not finished with the balancing of the Caroleans, but I want to share our progress with you so far so we can get an idea if we are moving into a direction the community likes to see or not.

First thing, the Allotment System government reform has been rebalanced so that it reduces your force limit.

The units themselves have received a nerf. They now deal +10% Shock Damage and have -15% Morale Damage Received instead.

Note: Background of the unit is still work in progress. We need to find the right tone of blue so it is distinguishable from Rajputs, Marines and Cawa units.​

And finally the privilege “Carolean March” increases the discipline of Caroleans by 5% instead of 10%.

Now let us take a look at the changes for the government reforms, which are part of the free update.

We have been working on revamping the government reforms available to the player and for today I want to showcase what we have so far for monarchies. Keep in mind: numbers and mechanics are still work in progress and what you see here is not final.

With that being said, I will go through every single tier and show the finished reforms of each tier:

Tier 2:

Tier 3:

Note regarding Tier 4: this government tier gets shared with the Republics and Theocracies, which means most of the reforms here are available to the other governments too. The reforms of Tier 4 focus on the religious and clerical matters of your state, and as such Tier 4 has 3 Clergy reforms and 14 government reforms depending on your own religion. Here are some examples of the religious government reforms:

Note: From left to right, the reforms are available for Catholics (minus the Pope), Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists.​

These are the remaining Tier 4 reforms:

Tier 5 (only one new reform, the rest are Vanilla)

Tier 6 is at this point of time unchanged, but we will address these reforms and make them more interesting to select.

Tier 7 is another common tier shared with Republics and Theocracies and handles the Burghers and all the economical matters of your country.

Tier 8, which is a completely new tier for Monarchies, and the reforms for Tier 9 are still work in progress, so they will have to wait for next week’s Development Diary.

That was it for this week! For next week we will finally get to know more about this one special tag:

Until then I wish you all a nice week!

 

[Ogele]

There is quite the heated discussion going on here, so I figured I should answer to some of the present concerns here at this late hour.

With the addition of more generic gov. reforms, will you fix the bug which causes the game to crash if there are more than 8 reforms per tier? This could cause a lot of issues for mods which add a lot of tag-specific gov. reforms for all tiers (including my mod). Thank you!

Well... we actually tried to fix it, but then we realized that the code for how government reforms are shown is... suboptimal at best. As such, it is not possible to have it dynamic and let the modder have an infinite amount of new reforms unforunately.
We did expand the amounts of possible reforms from 8 to 16 and modders now get an error message in their log if they have more reforms than the UI is allowed to show. It's not a great solution, but it is a bandaid for now.

Decentralized Bureaucracy seems awful. Also, I feel like recent updates have been way too liberal with estate loyalty and influence modifiers. It can already be hard to revoke privileges when estate influence hovers above 80%, all the influence modifiers of 15% or more from new government reforms and estate privileges make that even worse.

Almost all of the new management reforms have the drawback of absolutism. I did not like this situation. In my opinion, monarchies are not preferable to republics and theocracies.

Norway sounds interesting.

Not too keen on most of the new government reforms though. - maximum absolutism is just too punishing. Unless the default max absolutism is now much higher so you can throw some away and still get 100% pretty easily, stuff like +15% manpower or + 25% trade power and institution spread are just not worth it!

Oh and "does no longer" just sounds weird. "no longer requires" etc. would be better.

The economic reform from Tier 7 that gives 10 production efficiency seems a bit lackluster compared to 10 goods produced or -5 dev efficiency reduction, from a playing tall perspective. Maybe add some construction cost reduction or something like that

I like the philosophy behind each reform being more directly involved with managing the estates. Makes it harder for there to be an objectively correct choice depending on what you decide. And the rewarding of/removal of absolutism might encourage a more active use of swapping out reforms in the later game, unlike today where most decisions are "set it and forget it".

"Might" encourage this, however. If the single player meta is still to start Court and Country in 1610, we may not have the spare reform progress to do a lot of swapping around. Under the present balancing I can reach the full reform branch as a monarchy by 1585 and maybe swap out one reform for more absolutism. If I haven't completed reforms I'm less inclined to do that. You've compensated for this with the reforms having various absolutism boons, but maybe some consideration to having more sources of reform progress wouldn't be the worst idea. Hopefully it feels good to play with!

I mentioned it in the Dev Diary, but I think I should repeat myself here: numbers and mechanics are not final here at all.
What you see here is a demonstration of ideas we have for the reforms.
Regarding the Absolutism modifiers: the idea behind that was that certain government reforms are about separating power from the court to other parts of your governments or revoking power from states so they can be focused at the court again. In a way, they were meant as an additional way of immersion as you had to make the choice of delegating your power in your governmental strucutre for current benefits or not.

After the feedback from the forums and several content creators this approach will be reconsidered for monarchies and theocracies. I will make an update on this matter with next week's dev diary.

Very nice! Some suggestions to improve reform names.

Maintain Nobility's Status Quo --> Seek a Compromise with the Nobility
Nobility in Military Command --> Noble Officer Corps
Regional Council --> Regional Councils
Meritocratic Government --> Royal Favoritism
Additional Brahmins' Rights --> Expand Brahmin Privileges
Curtail Clergy Privileges --> Curtail Clerical Privileges (to follow Curtail Noble Privileges)

Decentralized Bureaucracy and Regional Council seem too weak to sacrifice absolutism for.

Also, shouldn't there be a Tier 7 Privilege that increases Burgher Loyalty? There are already very few ways to increase it compared to Clergy Loyalty. One to improve diplomacy or the navy (which are the burghers' other focuses) would be welcome as well.

I remember these suggestions from the Riga Dev Diary. Anyway, the names will be adjusted with your suggestions in mind. Thank you!

this all looks great!
That said, the +33% colonial range from "great navigators of the north" seems redundant by the time you can circumnavigate.

Kinda yes and no. There are cases where these 33% Colonial Range are still quite useful even if you manage to get a circumnavigation - even if at this point these situations are a lot more niche (like for example trying to core some really remote provinces).

The new reforms for monarchies look interesting. There's almost certainly going to be certain picks that are almost always better than others, but at least there's more options now which is something.

That is the nature of games and choices. Players will eventually always find a strategy or the tools which maximize their gains.
With that being said, our goal is to make at least the gaps between these tools smaller yet impactful so that there are several different uses for all the reforms.

Very noice to see extra reforms being added in. Even though these are early depictions I still have few questions

1. T2 Nobles' Electorate, will this give the mechanic of Polish elective monarchy
2. T3 Regional Council, so will this give age-based edicts that already exist (feudal de jure etc.) without spending splendor or will we see more age-based edicts added in to the game?
3. T7 Embrace Free Trade, having no requirement (other than a merchant present) to use Improve Land Routes seems a bit op

1. No. We might consider it though.
2. These are new and unique state edicts. With each Age this one gets replaced with something else

Age of Discovery

Age of Reformation

Age of Absolutism

Age of Revolution

Again, values and modifiers are not final.

I think the drawback suggested in the last thread, a malus to mapower recovery, works much better than a force limit malus. As mentioned Sweden had a huge army for its size but had trouble recovering from losses.

Wow, carolean units got gutted

Is the Balance team over at PDX run by Danes? If i get this correctly Caroleans can only be recruited in provinces with Swedish/Finnish Culture 1 regiment for every 20 Dev from these 2 cultures? a massive -33 Force limit modifier another -25% on Carloeans with one privilege enabled. so in practice i get a - 33Force limit for having 10% shock /15% moraledmgtaken+5 Discipline on what? 2 regiments drilling in Stockholm? yiikes I rather not even Click on that mission and keep my 33% force limit.

The Caroleans you see here are not set in stone. What I presented was more the idea of changing the balance of the unit as right now there were many (justified) arguments that the whole Swedish army should be Caroleans than them being a special unit per se.
For example, right at this moment, the Allotment System and the Carolean look like this:

+ 1 Carolean Regiment per 10 Dev (though this idea is a little bit on thin ice)

Personally, I am a firm believer that good game development comes from an open dialogue from the players and the developers, so I am more than open to hear suggestions, constructive crticism and ideas for balancing them.

Next week there will be another (hopefully final) update regarding the Carolean status and what appraoch we will keep for them.

Dear paradox team, Can you make special units moddable? A lot of content comes out for us modders.

No. The engine just straight up does not allow it.

Also, now we've had all the Scandinavian countries and the Balkans, are we going to finally get a release date next week? Also super keen to see the achievements.

Nope.

 

[Ogele]

@Ogele First, thank you for this new heavy DD.

I had a question: Are any new Tier 1 Government Reforms planed?

Currently, when you are reforming from a Tribal Government to anything else, you will lose the special flavor some TAGs have acquired patches after patches. Those who come immediately to my mind are:
- Tribal Federations (Aq & Qara Qoyunlu, Yas) you can still go for a horde, I know.
- Gond Kingdoms (Central India)
- Polynesian Tribes & Polynesian Kingdoms (Samoa, Tonga and others around)
- Matrilineal System (Nubian TAGs)
- Other tribal reforms added with Origins DLC

Would it be possible to create simples T1 Government Reforms for these TAGs encompassing their past flavor?

No, we will not add new Tier 1 government reforms for 1.34 - at least no new generic ones.

While I don't like to @ devs I didn't see anything about Agder > Christiansand in there @Ogele.

It's been such a gripe for me for so long, and I'll be so sad if it's not fixed in this update. Won't someone think of the poor Christiansanders? I don't think they want their love for rectangular streets to be confused with the fascination with hermetical herring we have up our way!

If @Pavía approves then sure.

I hope non-standard estates were taken into consideration while adding these new government reforms. It would be disappointing if Indian nations couldn't select most of these because they have the Vaisyas/Jains replacing Burghers and Rajputs/Marathas replacing Nobility.

Yes, they have been taken in account too.

I like Decentralized Bureaucracy for playing very wide with lots of territories. Territory has -75% governing cost and with this reform it would have -85% governing cost - that's equal to extra 66% gov capacity if counting only territories. TC has 50% and with reform 40% and with courthouse it's reduced to 15%.

Of course it's weak for states but decentralized suggests you aren't using states. I think there will be situations when it will be useful midgame before townhalls allows to TC everything without using gov capacity


Does refund in Centralized Bureaucracy mean i get admin and reformprogress back or refund is just dev increase? If I get points back I can centralize every state 4 times in 20 years and don't need gov capacity at all

With "refund" I mean you get the admin and reform progress back. Though, this bonus is not set in stone.

Hey @Ogele nice gov. reforms you guys put. Can't wait to try them out. Suggestion, it would be realy cool if you guys would add more unique gov. reforms for EoC that could play into Confucianism or being an EoC. And perhaps more unique Qing missions . As for this DD nice work guys keep up.

The new reforms will focus on all the generic matters first. This means for 1.34 there will be no special reforms for the Emperor of China (or other interesting regions like the HRE or the Middle East). We would like to expand these reforms with future updates though.

Instead of the next Dev Diary being about Scandinavia, it's actually going to be about Pskov. You heard it here first!

How did you know which nation I used to form Scandinavia for the teaser?

Just here to pitch in my two cents about a potential "gold" mine in Sandsvær: Yes, please, and thank you.

Would love for it to be its own province, but as I well know, that's not an option. Still, the change to gold would makes sense given the importance of the mine. The current tax buff I would argue doesn't really do it justice when compared to how important it was, and with just a flat tax modifier there isn't any potential for player-controlled mining expansion. More agency please.

Would also love some kind of trade value buff for Hålogaland, to simulate the importance of the fishing industry, and the export of stockfish.

Note: this will NOT resolve the Bullion Famine - mentioning it here because I think somebody in this thread asked about it.
Regarding Hålogaland I won't make any promises yet as we will have to do some research for this suggestion first.

Again, seeing as Devs have replied, why are the Faroe Islands part of Gaeldom?

Did you honestly not know what they are or what.

Also, about the only tag that could conceivably be Norse would be either Iceland via event or maybe you could have Greenland do it (though I'd prefer them having Inuit culture tbh)

I like the Gaeldom march mission from the new Norwegian content, but not sure about Faroe Islands being part of this.

Orkney and Shetland don't make much sense as part of Gaeldom either

And Iceland too, not shown in the event picture, but the event was also trying to give Iceland away too in the script. The event is not supposed to give the islands away (with the exception of Orkney as the event is a reference to the Sinclair clan after all) and it is fixed now:

@Ogele I second this one! It would really make sense for Switzerland imo. Nice thinking @Camel Turkish Blend

Hmm... maybe

People who play this game clearly want the ability to convert to norse religion. You already allow other dead religions to be reformed, so I fail to understand why you are so against the idea. Give your fanbase what they want. Also the nerf to Carolean infantry just made them not worth it. I'm not giving up 33% of my force pool for 10% shock damage and -15% morale damage received. Insane.

Regarding the Caroleans (and the government reforms for that matter): we are currently rebalancing them anyway.
At the risk of repeating myself: the values you see are NOT final. I will no longer go into any detail regarding the Caroleans or the reforms until next week's dev diary, but be assured that we want to release the reforms and the new units in a balanced yet usable and fun state.

 

[Pavía]

Maybe far too late to ask about this, but... will Norway (and other updated countries) get an updated prologue at the start of the game? If I remember correctly Norway didn't have a unique one like Denmark and Sweden, just a more general prologue (I've since turned them off). Would be nice to see these updated.

Also, regarding events: will Sigurd Jonsson be made cheaper to employ? Currently he kinda tanks all of Norway's income at the start, even if you manage to do a lot of early upgrades, leaving me at maybe +0,40 income every month at best. I only ever hire him if I have a particularly good income and I'm roleplaying. Maybe he should be made into a rank 1 advisor? Or, if it isn't too powerful leave him as a rank 2, but made even cheaper. Unless the new changes to Norway will help the economy a lot, in which case never mind.

Yes, we will update the starting screens of most of the countries receiving new content in the upcoming DLC.

We will take a look over the Sigurd Jonsson event, as maybe with the new mission tree it is not required to fix the cost.