Europa Universalis IV

[Mikeal]

 

[Theodora]

Every week I hope they'll have fixed the stupid AI debt bug that made playing after 1.30 pointless, and every week I'm disappointed.

It's been two and a half months lol. u.u

 

[Sergiu64]

I was just doing Uncommonwealth and honestly - Just having 160-170% cav combat ability is enough to see the combat performance I'm seeing in that video if you use other bonuses.

 

[Theodora]

Every week I hope they'll have fixed the stupid AI debt bug that made playing after 1.30 pointless, and every week I'm disappointed.

It's been two and a half months lol. u.u

Supposedly a patch for AI problems including this should be in testing this week ... so they might just escape the third month.

 

[Theodora]

Apparently there is a beta patch (and has been since a few hours after my last post, lol), I guess it'll launch early next week?

• AI evaluation for Holy Order placement no longer gets locked in mana spending decision making
• Fixed the too many tags mod ctd
• AI - Economy: Fixed bug causing AI to evaluate prio to pay back loans to zero if they had too many loans
• AI - Economy: AI now better on calculating ROI when comparing loans and buildings

Available as "1.30.4_public_beta" on steam

Apparently also some performance updates, because the EU4 team can't do patch notes properly. People say there's still passivity and debt issues, but at least it's no longer a permanent fixture.

Also, a video looking at why this happened:


Am I actually going to play this, only months later?! Finally able to play 1.30 and I forget who I planned on playing lol.

 

[Mortmal]

Apparently there is a beta patch (and has been since a few hours after my last post, lol), I guess it'll launch early next week?

• AI evaluation for Holy Order placement no longer gets locked in mana spending decision making
• Fixed the too many tags mod ctd
• AI - Economy: Fixed bug causing AI to evaluate prio to pay back loans to zero if they had too many loans
• AI - Economy: AI now better on calculating ROI when comparing loans and buildings

Available as "1.30.4_public_beta" on steam

Apparently also some performance updates, because the EU4 team can't do patch notes properly. People say there's still passivity and debt issues, but at least it's no longer a permanent fixture.

Also, a video looking at why this happened:


Am I actually going to play this, only months later?! Finally able to play 1.30 and I forget who I planned on playing lol.

THanks to us lobbbying unrelentelessly on forums , finally seen the devs posting there after sending a nice email. 2 months they completely ignored the issues.

 

[Theodora]

To be fair, one of those months were when they were on summer holidays; but that's management's stupidity for launching the biggest update/DLC to EU4 I know of with barely any time for the inevitable hotfixes because the codebase is an eldritch mess (not helped by the DLC hell — one huuuuuuge benefit to Imperator's development without DLC paywalling basic features).

And sadly it's always the low paid PR staff who deal with the anger created by the higher ups.

 

[Mortmal]

Yes they were on holiday,ok , but everyone gone for 2 months ? No way . Its not acceptable to release a DLC at 25 euros with not so many new features, most of them broken and just go away leaving it in that state. You can do that in any business of course but when you come back your stuff is in some carboard box in front of the office.
Hre mechanism were completely broken at release, absurdly overpowered then it got nerfed to nothing .Such thing cant possibly pass a QA , 5 min playing austria, the focus of latest update, and you see its very wrong. Then he AI debt spiral was critical and only got fixed (i hope) in the beta patch .In this day and age you can get 100 games for 1 euro then 3.99 a month .
To add the insult to the injury they started locking threads or just deleting posts for "trolling".

 

[Theodora]

Yes they were on holiday,ok , but everyone gone for 2 months ? No way . Its not acceptable to release a DLC at 25 euros with not so many new features, most of them broken and just go away leaving it in that state. You can do that in any business of course but when you come back your stuff is in some carboard box in front of the office.

Nah, I'm not saying it was okay.

It's fair to not repeat those questions at staff members who are nothing to do with that kind of work, but the problem is they didn't offer any alternative nad maintained effective radio silence for months, yeah.

 

[Mortmal]

Oh and horde not getting gold for razing cities, not mentioned still.

 

[Theodora]

Haven't been posting recent dev diaries because I'm more interested in mechanics than spoiling myself on the details of events and mission trees for SEA. But today's was something pretty different:

So we decided to redo all of these mechanics that came with Conquest of Paradise from the ground up and just make North America a lot more vibrant and fun to play in. This of course will still be part of the Conquest of Paradise DLC so it’s a semi-free change

Spoiler

Hey everyone! So there’s been quite a few development diaries from @neondt now on South East Asia telling you about the new content we’ll be adding to it, a region that had gotten a bit missed by us over the years and which very much needed some love from us. I am going to do the exact same, but an entirely different region that I have always wanted to do better than how it currently is.



I have always as a player liked playing the under dogs and as such the Americas have always been some of my favorite places to play in, to fight against the invasion of the Europeans and establishing your own nation in your own image. But the last time we really touched on the North American tribes were in Conquest of Paradise and these mechanics haven’t aged… well. If I would sum up the mechanics today of how it is to play a Migratory tribe it is to “wait”. You wait to migrate, you wait for Europeans, you wait, you wait you wait. So we decided to redo all of these mechanics that came with Conquest of Paradise from the ground up and just make North America a lot more vibrant and fun to play in. This of course will still be part of the Conquest of Paradise DLC so it’s a semi-free change

In the coming dev diaries you are going to be getting a lot of work in progress interfaces, so stay with me as my ux skills are not the best. We got a lot to cover so let's get started with the mechanics of how I’ve changed the migratory tribes.







So one thing that did bother me was how we portrayed the migration, the various people of north america didn’t usually migrate from the Appalachian to the Rockies every other decade or so. They had a concept of land that they used and seasonally migrated between, but they did consider it to “belong to them” in some manner. Now we can’t have seasonal migration as it doesn't fit how the game flows but these changes should make it more fun and meaningful to interact with.

First there's tribal ownership of land, this is sort of a semi ownership of the province, it belongs to the tribe but its resources are not being currently fully exploited. People can move in and out of these provinces freely and Europeans can even colonize them. One of the reasons why we haven’t populated the eastern seaboard much has been because it would block European colonization but with this change it allows us to actually fill out North America a bit more. Like let’s say introducing the Mississippi civilizations.



A province can be made into your tribal land by adding it at a cost for 100 Administrative Monarch Power, it also requires you to have migrated to it. If you try to integrate a province that is not connected to your already defined territory it will abandon the previous and start a new home for you at that province.



Coupled with this the migration is no longer a thing that is locked to a cooldown that you press every now and then in order to get some extra mana. Instead the feature has been reworked into something you need to do in order to keep growing as your tribe keeps depleting the natural resources of the current province you are in.

You can migrate to any province that is not directly owned by anyone, that includes into other tribes territories. Migrating currently as I’m writing this costs 50 military monarch points but it’s still up for balance tweaks. For each step though you migrate outside of your territory the cost will double. You can still migrate away to wherever you want and set up a new territory to live there instead but as you won’t be limited by a timer anymore you’ll still be limited by your monarch points.



So why would you want to migrate through? While you stay in a single province the tribe will be causing devastation in that province, until it eventually reaches a 100%. In addition to this each tribe has a tribal development that grows each month little by little as long as the province hasn't reached 100% devastation. The larger the tribe is, the faster the devastation goes up to simulate their increased consumption.

Part of appealing to the fantasy I talked previously about we’ve also redone how reformation works and integrated it into the Government Reform system instead. We’ll talk more about that in a later development diary, but the first step will be to settle your tribe which will enable you to settle your tribal development into several provinces letting you expand and grow stronger. The goal is to also have it possible for you to continue reforming your tribe without settling which will have a unique reward at the end of the tree.



How you gain reform progress is going to be different and something we are currently working on. We won’t be relying on the average autonomy as that won’t make sense and right now we have it mainly comes from buildings (that migrate with you mind you) but as always I am keen to listen to community suggestions

Native Tribes will have a new set of CB’s available to them to fit with their new way to fight wars. The migratory peace treaty has been remade to be focused around your tribal territory, you will force out any other migratory tribe that has moved into your land and make them either return home or to any border province of yours. There is also a feud CB against bordering tribes to try and take their territory away from them. And then last a CB that lets you fight off Europeans colonising in your home which will burn their colonies. (Tribes can’t use the burn colony interaction anymore and must use the CB now)



This does it for this development diary. We’ll continue to cover the new ways the native americans work next week. Cya then!

Incidentally, it also looks like Australia / Papua New Guinea is no longer animist but another religion.

 

[Xamenos]

Coupled with this the migration is no longer a thing that is locked to a cooldown that you press every now and then in order to get some extra mana.

So even the Paradox guys are now admitting the game is based on stupid mana. Interesting. I can't be the only one who remembers the backlash to the term when it first started getting used back at the game's release.

 

[thesecret1]

I can't be the only one who remembers the backlash to the term when it first started getting used back at the game's release.

I think it was Johan who got assblasted over it because all of his "grand" designs rely on it (see: Imperator and its mana galore) and consequently banned the word from everywhere. I think the guys who are left to keep the project running afterwards while he moves his stink elsewhere then slowly pick up the pieces and try remove the worst of the cancer. Remember when buildings cost you mana to build? Ridiculous.

 

[Xamenos]

I think it was Johan who got assblasted over it because all of his "grand" designs rely on it (see: Imperator and its mana galore) and consequently banned the word from everywhere. I think the guys who are left to keep the project running afterwards while he moves his stink elsewhere then slowly pick up the pieces and try remove the worst of the cancer. Remember when buildings cost you mana to build? Ridiculous.

Yeah, Johan is definitely at the center of this cancer. It's good to see the new guys willing to admit past mistakes and even fix old DLC. But I don't believe they can fix the game in any meaningful sense. Just about everything is still tied to mana, after all. It'd take a rework perhaps more comprehensive than the one Stellaris got, and I doubt they'll get the budget to do it.

 

[thesecret1]

Yeah, Johan is definitely at the center of this cancer. It's good to see the new guys willing to admit past mistakes and even fix old DLC. But I don't believe they can fix the game in any meaningful sense. Just about everything is still tied to mana, after all. It'd take a rework perhaps more comprehensive than the one Stellaris got, and I doubt they'll get the budget to do it.

Yeah, mana is easily EU4s greatest flaw. They try to mitigate it by making stuff less dependent on mana, and by giving you more ways to amass it, but it's such a cornerstone of the whole design that they cannot actually remove it. They also don't do enough to address other faults of the game, or even introduce cancer. "Use mana to raise province development" is such an incredibly retarded idea. It's why I only ever play MEIOU nowadays, which does away with such shit, has province development be its own, very detailed mechanic, and pretty much only has mana for technology and ideas (since there's just no easy way around those).

 

[BING XI LAO]

Never played eu3 but its sliders sound like a much better mechanic than mana.

 

[fantadomat]

Never played eu3 but its sliders sound like a much better mechanic than mana.

It is,tho EU3 hasn't aged well.

 

[thesecret1]

Never played eu3 but its sliders sound like a much better mechanic than mana.

They were awesome. Money was EVERYTHING and everything mattered because of it. You didn't have a manapool ready to magically wipe your inflation or advance your tech levels. I still remember the fun I've had with it, couldn't have been older than 15, maybe less, and since there was little in the way of tutorial or tooltips, I had to discover everything on my own. I still remember that legendary game where I formed HRE and seemed to be on a good run... but unfortunately relied on minting money to make up for my deficits. I didn't even know inflation was a mechanic, it was just a tiny number stashed somewhere down in the UI, I thought the only adverse effect would be having less to spend on research. Well, obviously, I was wrong – at some point, in a completely non-scripted, simulationist way, my empire entered an inflation spiral and the prices of everything started growing at an insane rate. I couldn't do any research because the price of that also skyrocketed, so my funding made next to no progress. I did still have a massive army whose military ability was unaffected, but it was rapidly becoming obsolete. I recall entering massive, genocidal warfare with Kanem Bornu, a literal subsaharan nigger state that blobbed to be the main power holder in central Africa and attacked me relentlessly. My army was so backwater that we were actually even – massive massacres of massive stacks, peace deals usually only gaining one province at a time, or were even white peaces. All the while my sick empire looked with mounting dread at its european neighbours with their up to date armies. That session really taught me to stop using the minting slider, no matter how alluring it seems.

It was incredibly fun and had many situations that just cannot happen in EU4 – seriously, is it even possible to get struck down by inflation, for example? Just spend some mana to wave it away (while in EU3, after a certain point, you were simply FUCKED and rebounding from a runoff inflation was a truly herculean task). The AI also seemed better. Not in combat tactics, but it sensed when you're weak and loved to dogpile. That shitholestan you beat up and swallowed half of? It cannot dream to beat you on its own, but the moment you enter war with France, you can bet your ass it's going to declare war and try bumrushing you. Along with the other shitholestans you border. Clearly, it was actually programmed to try pouncing on you when you're weak and have something it wants (such as its cores) even when massively outnumbered, but that's not the case in EU4 anymore.

It aged rather poorly, it's true, and the barrier of entry is much higher than in EU4, but if you can get past that, it's definitely worth a playthrough. There is a lot less content and polish, but the mechanics are great, and it is a great shame that EU4 threw them out the window.

 

[BING XI LAO]

Most eu4 content seems like dogshit at this point, gimme mechanics! Will have to play eu3 sometime.

 

[Xamenos]

I don't really agree that EU3 has aged poorly. The interface is not that much worse than 4's, its mechanics are leaps and bounds better, and who the fuck cares about graphics when you spend 99% of the time looking at a map and menus? Yes it has less content than EU4 (events and the like) but what it has is so much more engaging.

 

[Theodora]

I don't really agree that EU3 has aged poorly. The interface is not that much worse than 4's, its mechanics are leaps and bounds better, and who the fuck cares about graphics when you spend 99% of the time looking at a map and menus? Yes it has less content than EU4 (events and the like) but what it has is so much more engaging.

It aged rather poorly, it's true, and the barrier of entry is much higher than in EU4, but if you can get past that, it's definitely worth a playthrough. There is a lot less content and polish, but the mechanics are great, and it is a great shame that EU4 threw them out the window.

Which are your favourite starts in EU3? (Also which start date, haha.)

 

[AwesomeButton]

Yeah, mana is easily EU4s greatest flaw. They try to mitigate it by making stuff less dependent on mana, and by giving you more ways to amass it, but it's such a cornerstone of the whole design that they cannot actually remove it. They also don't do enough to address other faults of the game, or even introduce cancer. "Use mana to raise province development" is such an incredibly retarded idea. It's why I only ever play MEIOU nowadays, which does away with such shit, has province development be its own, very detailed mechanic, and pretty much only has mana for technology and ideas (since there's just no easy way around those).

I played very little EU3 but lots of EU2 with the mod that later became the For The Glory game. The mana is the main reason I've stopped playing EUIV. Back when money was the chief resource, the game was more interesting and the limitations more plausible. It was also more scripted and less sandbox, which I also prefer.

 

[thesecret1]

Which are your favourite starts in EU3? (Also which start date, haha.)

I liked playing in HRE and trying to be the "good emperor" that actually protects the empire's borders, doesn't annex within the empire, frees states and breaks up any blobbing within the empire. Was a pretty challenging and interesting experience. Playing BYZ and trying to survive is a classic, of course, and there was also a famous challenge run where you were supposed to try conquering the world as Ryukyu (an animist shithole in Okinawa), which served as universal bragging rights (showing that you really knew the game very well). Playing next to a horde may also be pretty interesting, as they worked entirely different – you couldn't take provinces from them in a peace deal, you had to colonize them during the war itself (and they of course could burn your colony in progress to the ground).

 

[fantadomat]

Which are your favourite starts in EU3? (Also which start date, haha.)

I liked playing in HRE and trying to be the "good emperor" that actually protects the empire's borders, doesn't annex within the empire, frees states and breaks up any blobbing within the empire. Was a pretty challenging and interesting experience. Playing BYZ and trying to survive is a classic, of course, and there was also a famous challenge run where you were supposed to try conquering the world as Ryukyu (an animist shithole in Okinawa), which served as universal bragging rights (showing that you really knew the game very well). Playing next to a horde may also be pretty interesting, as they worked entirely different – you couldn't take provinces from them in a peace deal, you had to colonize them during the war itself (and they of course could burn your colony in progress to the ground).

So the same as EU4.

 

[Xamenos]

Which are your favourite starts in EU3? (Also which start date, haha.)

Restoring Byzantium is a classic, as thesecret1 said. But my absolute favorite start has to be Muscovy. It has a nice progression from regional nobody to world power, a series of enemies that have to be dealt with carefully (Golden Horde -> Lithuania -> Sweden) lest they prevent you from ever becoming a Great Power, and it puts you in the first line of the fight against the savage hordes and lets you spread civilization eastwards, one barbarian province at the time. I also quite like Brandenburg, eating up the HRE from the inside like a cancer. And both of them suit me in that I dislike fiddling with fleets and overseas colonies.

Date is, of course, always the earliest possible.