Europa Universalis IV News

Hello everyone, and welcome to another EUIV Dev Diary! Today we’ll be talking about more changes we’ve been doing for the 1.33 ‘France’ patch, one new concept that we’ve implemented called ‘Script Debt’, and the workflow behind bugfixing. So let's get started with my colleague @Ogele talking about the balance changes!

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Greetings everyone!

As you all are aware we have no precise, official “regional focus” for this patch unlike the other free patches such as 1.29 “Manchuria Update” or 1.27 “Poland Update”. While it means we haven’t created mission trees for a region, this at least allows us to concentrate on balancing existing content, adding Quality of Life changes and fine tuning some other areas of the world.

Starting with China, we received your feedback and implemented some changes which makes the unification of China a less tedious process for the non-horde Chinese tags. One of them is the addition of the following government reform for every Confucian Chinese which gets released by the Celestial Empire:



One huge problem with the released countries in China was that they tend to create hugboxes around them which prevented them from actually unifying China. In order to prevent this all the Chinese Kingdoms have a -100 Opinion penalty for fellow Confucian countries. At the same time, they also gain access to the Unify China casus belli, which received a substantial buff:



We were experimenting with giving every Chinese tag cores over the whole region, but this resulted in really awkward situations where a province had cores of like 8 different tags + these cores were too much of a freebie. By gaining the cores through occupation the process of conquering China feels more natural.

Here are some of the nightly results:





A natural occurring Qing, which we wanted to see too, sadly did not happen yet. However, we are pleased to see that a unified China is now more likely to happen.

Even if it happens through means we did not expect…



Apparently, in this timeline there was a Bengali dynasty in China…

Other changes we introduced is the inability for the Celestial Empire AI to make countries their tributaries, which have their capital in China, as it felt very immersion breaking to us when the Celestial Emperor blocked themselves in such a fashion.

We also made a small change to Korea too:

1. The Gyeongbok Palace no longer gives tech cost reduction. Instead, it now has the following modifiers:



2 .Their national idea “The Hangeul Alphabet” now gives -10% Tech Cost instead of -5%

3. The estate privilege “Inwards Perfection” gives now the following penalties / benefits:



It also ensures that the Korean AI is a diplomat or an administrator unless another nation holds one of their cores. This way you have an AI Korea which actually plays tall instead of blobbing into Manchuria, which wasn’t really liked by the community.

While we’re at the estate privileges: all privileges, which have modifiers scaling with the Crownland owned by the estate, now exempt the estate from the “Seize Land” action. This change allows you to have a little more control over who you seize the Crownland + makes these estate privileges a little bit more useful. Also, the “Increased Levies' ' estate privilege has been slightly buffed, giving now 33% increased Manpower Modifier at 100% Crownland instead of 25%.

One final balance change I want to address are the “Expand Infrastructure” and “Centralize State” features from Leviathan. Their goals were to enhance playing tall. While the idea was neat, we felt like these two buttons didn’t have the punch needed to be worth the attention. The issue with “Expand Infrastructure” was the relation of governing cost and manufactory slots: manufactories are useful in low dev provinces as they give a flat bonus, but a governing cost increase means a province is more expensive to hold which is why you don’t waste it for a benefit which could be accomplished by holding one additional 3 dev province with a manufactory. So the times where you would use this button would be if you want a province to have something like a rampart, which is a very niche situation at best. Because of that we have decided to give “Expand Infrastructure” some more power, which makes their cost worthwhile:



I want to point out that this is NOT the final version. We will take the Beta feedback into consideration for adjusting this feature.

Next point is the “Centralize State” button, which has one big issue: it competes with much more useful and global “Expand Administration” button from the government tab. To make “Centralize State” more viable, we have decided to change its identity a little bit by changing the governing cost from a flat reduction to a percentage reduction. We also added some other bonuses to the centralized state:



Here are a few other balance changes we have done for 1.33:

-Winter Palace’s modifiers have been reworked as they didn’t feel right for Russia and the seat of Peter the Great. Now it gives at level 3 the following modifiers:

-Tibetan (just like Vietnamese and Korean) can now sinicize their culture and adopt a culture of the Chinese culture group. It should be noted here: we are using the Manchu way of doing this as the engine is way too outdated for dynamic culture groups unfortunately.
-Syncretic religions now give the bonuses of the monuments of the secondary faith. Example: Oirat which has Sunni as Syncretic religion will be able to benefit from the Hagia Sophia.
-Feudal Theocracies have access to the Divine Ideas Group instead of the Aristocracy ideas.
-Muslim subjects will no longer enact “Guaranteed Dhimmi Autonomy” if their Muslim overlord has religious ideas.
-Roman Empire’s ideas have been buffed to bring them on par with the ideas of the HRE.
-Selling Crownland now requires you to actually have the 10% to sell.
-Manpower, Sailors and Forcelimit granted by colonies are reduced by 25%.

That was all from my side! I wish you a nice week, and we will see you in the next DD!

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Alright, now @Pavía again in charge, into the workflow for this patch. When tackling 1.33 fixes, we obviously gave priority to bugs being reported after the 1.32.2 patch was released, and those that didn’t make the cut owing to not being implemented in time. In the Content Design Team we also addressed and discussed some balance changes we wanted to make for this patch, specifically for the Eastern Asia regions, as @Ogele has just pointed out. But we found that as the bugfixing process was going well, as the ‘Songhai’ patch had been much less troubling than the previous ‘Majapahit’ one, we had some development time at our disposal to go back, and try to fix even older script-related issues.

That is what we called ‘Script Debt’, following the ‘Tech Debt’ concept that was also addressed in older versions of EUIV (for 1.30 patch there were a lot of issues addressed this way, if you recall). So we focused for a few weeks on cleaning up all these older issues that for one or other reason hadn’t been solved yet, and trying to have as few remaining legacy problems from older versions as possible. We also cleaned and simplified some scripts that were a bit convoluted, something that we’ll continue doing in future versions when possible (because for the next patch we’ll be more focused on creating new content, as previously said).

What are the actual results of this work? So we've solved around 40 older script issues for this patch. And regarding all the bug fixes done, I’ll show you some pictures and metrics, as they may speak better of it than I:





Here you can see that we’ve solved over 400 reported bugs, reducing the total count by at least 100 bugs and issues for this patch alone, which puts the EUIV bug-count lower than any GSG game has been in the last decade, according to our metrics (yay!).

So, what can you expect from the team in the next months regarding this topic? Apart from developing new content, we’ll continue addressing Tech Debt, Script Debt, and QoL improvements; you can help us by posting this kind of problems in the Bug Reports subforum, as we keep a regular track of it. And if you have any suggestions for improving the state of the game that are not bugs, we will continue tracking the Suggestions subforum in that regard. Listening to the voices of players is important for the Tinto Team at this point of the development of EUIV, as we’re trying to polish the game as much as possible.

To finish, when can you expect the 1.33 patch to be released? Well, the good news is that we’re pushing it as an open beta this evening! We’ll keep it open for a couple weeks, and then we will release the full patch later in Q1, after the testing is done, and we’re sure that we’ve solved all the issues appearing in the open beta.

By the way, we noticed that we have an issue regarding the Linux version of the game that we’re already trying to fix, so those users should NOT opt-in into this open beta.

You’ll be able to take a look on the changelog along with the release of the open beta. See you, and we will be answering issues raised in this thread during the week!

Hello folks, Gnivom here.

Today I’ll talk about some of the many AI updates coming in the next patch, 1.33. At the end I’ll also mention some minor but impactful changes to the rules of land combat.

Our last major update, we shipped some AI improvements, but a few new issues slipped through as well. Two of those in particular (advisors and forts) were too complex to make it into any of the hotfixes. For 1.33, we have not only addressed those issues, but done a range of further AI fixes/improvements as well. Because of the large number of changes, some new AI issues will probably slip through this time as well. Our goal is to have a public beta for 1.33, which could help a lot with early feedback and time to address it before the final release.

Forts
The issue introduced (or at least worsened) in 1.32 was that the AI deletes many of its forts, and seldom builds new. This was likely triggered by changes we did to tighten the AI’s budget, as it had had serious budget issues for a number of versions before that. Clearly we couldn't just revert the changes blindly. Instead I wanted to dig deeper and fix underlying issues with the AI's handling of forts.

For example, there has for a long time been a bug that caused large countries to only build level 2 forts. In simplified terms: When the AI "defense minister" considered upgrading a fort, it wanted to make sure it could afford upgrading all its forts to the same level, or it would only upgrade to a lower level. So it asked the AI "finance minister" if it can afford maintaining e.g. 10 level 4 forts, but the finance minister says no, reasoning that "you shouldn't need this much money for building one fort". So the AI was in a stalemate, where it could only build the lowest level of forts.

Another issue was fort mothballing. The AI would often mothball forts in a way that allowed players to blitz them.

The result after spending some time with this is an AI that seldom deletes any forts, often upgrades forts to higher levels, sometimes builds new forts (especially in strategic locations with good terrain), and is much more careful/intelligent with mothballing. Of course, the AI will still delete forts it really can't afford (such as QQ at game start), and it doesn't have human-level tactical or strategic understanding of fort positioning. But overall, I hope you will find it a big improvement :).


(All of these are level 8 forts, in an 1821 AI-only game. Maybe it’s a bit front-heavy…)

Advisors
In 1.32 the AI rarely hires advisors, and often fires them as soon as they're at war. This too was the result of code intended to tighten the budget. Like with forts though, it turned out that there were other issues worsening the problem.

One such bug was that when deciding which mana it needed the most, two of them could tie for first place - causing the AI to pick the third (worst) type instead. This made the AI hire diplo advisors way too often. Another obscure bug was that if it took the AI too long to save up the money for the initial advisor cost, it could lose track of it, making the money "earmarked" but ever used.

In 1.33, the AI will usually keep a reasonable amount of advisors, often prioritizing military or admin. A reworked threshold system makes it not hire-and-fire advisors frivolously. AIs with Meritocracy will realize the importance of having enough advisors to keep it growing. With these improvements, and considering how it stacks with some Monuments and Estate Privileges, we've decided to remove the -20% Advisor Cost modifier for Lucky Nations. Most of them are doing more than fine.

Other budgeting
Other areas where the AI sometimes didn't spend enough include colonists and missionaries. Colonial Nations and AIs with Colonialist personality in particular will spend a larger amount on colonization. One neat addition is that Colonial Nation subjects will now direct all received subsidies towards colonization, in addition to what they would otherwise have spent, unless they have loans. This lets their overlord (or anyone else ;)) make sure they put their colonists to work.

Peace-time armies are now also a greater priority for small nations, especially for those without powerful allies/guarantors. You should find for example uniting Ireland to be more challenging.

Now of course you may wonder, if all these things get more spending, won't the AI go into debt spirals again? It turns out there were a couple of places where spending could be cut:
- Drilling armies: The AI now only does this only if it has a large budget surplus
- Corruption: Sometimes it makes sense to get "free money" for corruption, but the AI overused that, and then found itself rooting it out at several times the cost.
- Navy Force Limit: It makes sense for some AIs to go above Naval FL, but this has been reduced somewhat.
- Consolidate Regiments: When the AI finds itself with troops it doesn't need at the moment, usually after a war or a battle with rebels, it will consolidate regiments.
- Fort maintenance: Wait, didn't I say the AI is better at maintaining, building and upgrading forts? Sure. But in some cases, in particular poor OPMs with an expensive capital fort, mothballing it really can be worth it.
- Inflation: By giving a higher prio to reducing inflation, many AIs reduce all expenses by several percent.

If these measures are not enough, when the AI goes into longterm deficits and debt, it will implement progressive austerity measures. Firing advisors, reducing army size, and even deleting forts. As far as I've observed, this only happens during/after severe crises, and works fairly well.

The budget is also significantly helped by increased crownland, which we'll get to later.



(16’th century Ethiopian budget, recouping after an expensive war. They’ll soon lower army maintenance and mothball a couple of forts to get a better surplus)

Monarch Power (mana)
At release of 1.32, there was a major issue with AI mana spending, causing the AI to often fall behind in tech and/or ideas. This was made worse by how it interacted with the new institution tech cost, and by the issues with advisors mentioned above. Although a hotfix was issued including a fix to the main issue, we've spent more time looking at the AI's mana economy. The AI now:
- better understands when to buy tech vs. ideas vs. other things.
- uses more advisors (as mentioned before).
- uses Estate Privileges for free mana.
- better understands when to prioritize a certain mana, in terms of National Focus, Advisors, and Estate Privileges.

It also turns out that if you play a Republic, and especially with Plutocratic ideas, choosing randomly between the event options of those events can cause you to spend a majority of your ADM on boosting stability. We've gone through many of the events affecting Stability and/or Republican Tradition, and made the AI pick the better/safer option.
Estates

When the Estates system was last redesigned, AI was written to interact with it. But that AI wasn't necessarily written/tested too carefully, and years of design changes and lack of proper attention have made it worse.
It turns out that by making the AI play a fairly simple estates meta, but play it consistently, it gets quite a nice set of bonuses; from tax income and autonomy reduction, to mana; at very small cost.
The AI will:
- Seize Land even when it causes revolts (but only after maintaining troops and forts)
- Occasionally Call Diet to temporarily increase Loyalty, although it doesn't usually try to complete it
- Prioritize Privileges that give loyalty and mana
- Sell Titles only when crownland is high and/or the money is badly needed

Naval Invasions
1.32 saw some fixes in this area. 1.33 will have a couple of further small improvements/fixes that should reduce friction for multi-continent empires in particular. For example:
- Armies that have nothing to do are less likely to refuse an invasion mission
- Invasions will no longer wait for faraway ships to help out, unless they are necessary

In one game, I actually saw AI Portugal conquering a third of India by 1700 or so, while also having colonies in the Americas and Africa. But in fairness, that is not a common sight. AI naval invasions will remain an Achilles’ heel.

Army Quality
This is a major one. And huge thanks to [USER]@Tempscire[/USER], who has helped me with running simulations, with mathematical analysis, and schooling me on how EU4 land combat actually works.

The question the AI is trying to answer here is whether to start a battle, or even a war. To do so, it must estimate the quality of troops. Basically: how many Swedish soldiers does it take to equal 1 Prussian soldier? Until 1.32, the AI did this by applying a series of modifiers, based on Discipline, Morale, etc., that were tuned on gut feeling. From 1.33 (and somewhat already from 1.32) we have proper math and simulations to back them up.

The AI now appreciates the value of morale more than before. It understands how a general’s impact on a battle depends on the terrain. It understands the interplay between e.g. Infantry Fire, Fire Pips of the Unit Type, Fire Damage, and Infantry Combat Ability. It also understands combat width and flanking, but it doesn’t yet understand army composition between infantry/cavalry/artillery. That is definitely something to continue working on.

With this improved confidence in its understanding of army strength, the AI’s safety margin for starting attacks has been reduced somewhat. It has also been made more aware of nearby armies on both sides. You will find the AI starting more winning battles, and hopefully fewer losing battles. Although the reduced safety margin combined with bad understanding of army composition can make the AI fail in this regard.

Changes to Land Combat
The thought that went into the army quality AI made us realize (again, with @tempscire’s guidance) we should change some things about how combat works. As mentioned in last week’s DD; Unit Type Fire and Shock pips now affect morale damage as well strength damage. This makes the choice between Unit Types less imbalanced. Contrary to what was said last week, and in part because of feedback on that post, this will also apply to morale defense from backrow. The fact that this makes artillery more powerful and battles longer is counteracted by some more important changes we decided to do:

• Infantry and Cavalry can no longer deploy/reinforce to the backrow.
  
• Backrow regiments will now retreat when reaching 0% morale (same as frontrow regiments).
  
• Constant 0.03 morale damage per day is now only applied to reserves, and not to regiments on the battlefield.
  

I’m sure many of you (just as myself not too long ago) do not understand how this affects the combat meta in practice. Without making this DD much longer than it already is, some important effects are:

• It’s no longer critically important to have a full combat width of artillery in the battle on day 1.
  
• An army of 2x combat width infantry is now superior to an army of 1x combat width infantry. Previously they were roughly equal.
  
• You’ll need more artillery than just the combat width to last a long battle.
  

That’s it for this week, hope you’re as excited for 1.33 as I am!
Next week @pavia will make a Dev Diary on the subject of “Script Debt”.

Thanks again to @Tempscire, but also to @xorme whose AI mod inspired some of the improvements. And thanks to everyone who provides great feedback on this forum and elsewhere!

Oh, and here is a full list of AI-related changes from the in-progress changelog:

*** AI Changelog in 1.33 *** 
 
  - Fixed Celestial Emperor advisor budgeting issue.
  - Rewrote AI savings logic.
  - Colonial nations spend more money on colonists.
  - Increased AI minimum colonization budget.
  - Reworked AI fort mothballing forts.
  - Fixed issue that AIs in debt didn't convert provinces.
  - Made AI consider flanking.
  - AI better understands importance of generals' pips.
  - AI now considers units' drill before starting a battle.
  - Fixed bug where AI thought 'coordinated attack' and instead sent individual armies to die.
  - Fixed multiple issues with scripted ai_army, one of which made it not work at all. It can now also be debugged with the 'mapmode armyeval' command.
  - The AI now makes smarter decisions regarding Patriarchal Authority in events.
  - AI better at consolidating regiments before battle.
  - AI can now declare wars when overextension is up to 50% (previously 25%), but only if already coring everything.
  - AI considers nearby units more when considering a battle.
  - AI will now seize land from estates more often, but raise army/fort maintenance.
  - Added AI priority to a few conquest missions of France and the Ottomans in order to ensure them prioritizing their missions.
  - Better at taking home troops overseas (instead of disbanding).
  - Build a bit more universities.
  - Made AI Care about beijing, nanjing, canton for mandate.
  - Made AI Care about corruption for mandate.
  - Celestial Emperor more aggressive towards countries that refuse to pay tribute.
  - Colonial Nations without debt are now likely to spend all subsidies they get on colonists.
  - Colonial subjects will care more about wars against countries in their colonial region.
  - Coordinated offensives will now focus on committed sieges.
  - Fixed AI army ignoring terrain for some threat evaluation.
  - Fixed bug that AI sometimes ignored armies with insufficient troops for siege.
  - Fixed bug that caused exiled armies to behave erratically.
  - Fixed bug that made AI less afraid of non-rebel armies, when it should be rebel armies.
  - Fixed bug that made AI not declare easy wars as often.
  - Fixed bug that made colonial nations not colonize islands in their own colonial region.
  - Fixed issue where armies would refuse to do things nearby, because it was assigned to a region far away.
  - Fixed issue with colonists not being recalled when they should be.
  - Fixed issues sometimes preventing AI upgrading forts to higher level.
  - Fixed issues with colonial budgeting (causing bankruptcy spirals).
  - Fixed that autonomous sieging could go back and forth between provinces that were flipped back by a fort.
  - Improved AI understanding of native uprising risks (less africans getting stackwiped taking a shortcut).
  - Improved AI handling of estate privileges.
  - Improved army quality calculations.
  - Improved handling of corruption.
  - Improved handling of inflation.
  - Improved logic for where to build forts.
  - Improved national focus (mana) handling.
  - Improved the AI decision making for Orthodox events.
  - Increased budget priority for saving money.
  - Made AI less eager to demand return core treaty unless it likes the benefactor.
  - Made AI less eager to go over naval forcelimit.
  - Made AI less likely to mothball forts when risky.
  - Lowered AI priority on building great projects over other buildings.
  - Lowered AI safety margin when attacking to compensate for other fixes.
  - Made AI aware of risk of rebels spawning in a province.
  - Made AI chase your small armies in more cases.
  - Made all chinese countries want to conquer the 3 Mandate cities, if they have 1 already.
  - Made AI armies which are afraid of enemies, prefer safe terrain even more.
  - Made AI more likely to enforce rebel demands (peace treaty) in the rare case that it can do so.
  - Made AI more likely to promote cultures (with large development).
  - Reduced maximum budget for subsidies to 10% of income.
  - Several fixes and improvements regarding advisors.
  - Somewhat more competent at naval invasions for large empires.
  - Subjects with loans will keep a standing army again (although it will be small).
  - The Ethopian AI will no longer move its capital while being at war.
  - Tweaked AI siege priorities.
  - Very small countries with scary neighbors will now keep a larger army when at peace.
  - Made AI less likely to split armies in threatening places.
  - Made AI more happy to hunt nearby armies.
  - Army AI only takes its own armies on fleets.
  - Fixed small AIs militarizing also when Rights of Man DLC disabled.
  - Improved Strong Duchies AI.
  - AI can handle reassigning merchants.
  - AI no longer sells provinces to charter cheaply, and added new malus for presence of great projects in the province too.
  - AI no longer uses pillage capital state when it has nothing to gain from it.

Greetings, and Happy New Year to everyone! Today we’re coming back to EUIV DD’s, after taking a couple of months’ break from them (unfortunately not due to long Spanish holidays, as some on the forums have suggested :p). What we’ve been doing in that time was already mentioned by Johan in the last DD: working on 1.32.1 and 1.32.2 patches, and then moving on to the next one, 1.33, that will be live later this quarter.

As Origins and 1.32.2 release have been mostly well praised (and we're very happy about that!), we thought that we wanted to move on 3 main points for the upcoming 1.33 patch:

1) Fixing most of the remaining bugs from 1.32/Origins.
2) Balancing some mechanics that had been on our list for a while.
3) Continue working to improve AI performance, as some issues appeared in 1.32.

Today I’ll be focusing on the game balance changes that we’ve been working on, as we still have some room for making changes before releasing the patch (although not new content, as we may be adding more in the next immersion pack we will be working on after this patch), and we want to receive some feedback on them from you, the community.

With Origins release, we’ve been able to revamp the setup and balance of Africa, and we’re pretty happy with it, in general terms. So, we thought of moving back to the Far East, as there were some balance issues that were not fully resolved by Leviathan although focusing in part on the SEA region. Regarding that, we were aware of the big discussion on Ming balance in the forums, thus it would be a good idea to tackle it for this patch.

Ming and the Emperor of China is a really hard tag and mechanics to balance out. It starts as the strongest country in the world, and MingBlob was not a desired outcome in past patches, as it hindered Eastern Asia gameplay (even affecting India super-region, as others have said). So, because of that Mingplosion being a regular outcome was useful for gameplay purposes, although Qing and other successors are not usually so successful when it comes to reuniting the EoC, being honest. For players, it's true that it's not the most challenging/rewarding tag to play with it, because it may be not too compelling to handle the disaster if you advance on Mandate of Heaven reforms, while at the same time it won't be a very challenging playtime, if you reach some snowball point early on (which is pretty doable by experienced players).

So, we’ve come with the following changes to Ming/EoC to try to balance it a bit better:

- The Celestial Empire now has a sixth reform available which allows vassalizing your own tributaries at the cost of Mandate.
- Confucianism has been buffed:
- All the modifiers from harmonized religions have been standardized in their power compared to other religions.
- Reduced the base Yearly Harmony from 1 to 0.25.
- Increased the Harmony cost of harmonizing a religion from 3 per year to 3.25.
- Religious Unity now gives +1 Yearly Harmony at 100% Religious Unity (can not go above that).
- Positive Harmony now gives: +3 Tolerance of the True Faith, -10% Development Cost, +1 Meritocracy, +0.5 Legitimacy, +1 Devotion, -0.5 Yearly Corruption, +50% Harmonization Speed.
- Negative Harmony now gives: +1 Yearly Corruption, +20% Stability Cost, -1 Legitimacy, -2 Meritocracy, -2 Devotion.
- Negative Stability now decreases Yearly Harmony by 0.25 per missing stability.
- Eastern Denominations religions harmonized now unlock monuments requiring it.
- The new Holder of the Mandate gains the following bonuses atop of their +0.05 Mandate: +12 Force Limit, -10% Land Maintenance, +15% Manpower Recovery Speed.
- The events of the Ming Crisis disaster now allow you to swap your country with one of the Chinese warlords you release in the event.
- Force Tributary CB (along with other CB’s with a specific purpose, as Restoration of Union and Subjugation) don’t allow taking of provinces any more.

The Idea of the Harmonization Speed increase at high Harmony is to encourage alternating between harmonizing a new religion and accumulating Harmony. It should be possible for you to be just as fast with harmonizing religions as somebody who is chain harmonizing all the time.

Apart from that, we’re doing the following changes to other countries on the Far East neighborhood:

- Manchuria Overhaul with the addition of Nivkh culture, Korchin having a vassal, redistribution of provinces and addition of the Amur Estuary (mostly following this thread in the Suggestions subforum, as we think it was really well thought: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/manchuria-again.1505121/).
- Moved the Vietnamese culture out of the Chinese culture group
- Added "Sinicize our Culture" for the Vietnamese and Korean cultures, allowing you to move with your culture into the Chinese culture group. The decision requires you to have a Chinese cultural majority in your country or being the Emperor of China
- Korea's starting heir has been buffed by +1/+1/+1. (The reason being to buff Korea a little bit, while Hyang is a little bit more average of a monarch than the game might suggest. Sickness shortened his life quite a lot, which played a huge factor for us to give him the benefit of doubt and increase his stats a little bit).
- Hanseong gained +15 Development as it was quite the big city in 1444 and comparable to the many big Chinese cities.
- Shinto countries now can use Buddhist monuments.

Finally, we’ve been also doing some changes regarding Portugal, Indian estates, a combat pips rework, and other stuff:
- The Castilian/Spanish mission "Recover Portugal" has been moved. Now it requires the completion of the missions "Subjugate Navarra" and "Reclaim Andalucia". The Restoration of Union CB has been moved accordingly too and is only available to Spain if both missions are completed. This change will make Portugal not so easily PU’d by Castile, as we were seeing this a lot in our nightly AI tests in the first 20 years of the game
- Portuguese ideas have been buffed, as we felt that they were a bit lackluster compared to other Tier 1 countries, and that Portugal was having a rough time in early game against Castile and other powers:
- Traditions: +10% Infantry Combat Ability instead of current +15% Trade Efficiency (to give Portugal a bit of punch in early game).
- Legacy of the Navigator: +10 Naval Morale instead of current -33% Morale hit when losing a ship (on par with Danish NI's).
- Encourage the Bandeirantes: +15% Trade Efficiency instead of +1 Merchant (basically reshuffling the older tradition into here).
- Royal Academy of Fortification, Artillery and Drawing: +1 Artillery instead of +10% Artillery Combat Capacity (so it gives some land punch in early-mid game while diminishing in late game, and extra naval punch, which is WAD).
- The Indian Estates now have access to their versions of powerful estate privileges such as "Strong Duchies", "Religious Diplomats", "Religious Culture" and "Nobility Integration Policy".
- Added a new decision for Muslim Indian countries, which allow you to replace the Brahmins with the Dhimmi if you own any province outside the Muslim or Dharmic religion groups.
- Added events for Alcheringa nations, which allow them to unlock their cults without the need to complete their missions. The events, however, have the same requirements to trigger as their mission counterparts.
- Forming Rome will now convert all provinces of your culture group to Roman.
- Ottoman missions are now available to Rûm.
- Regiments’ fire and shock pips now also count toward morale damage in their respective phases. Many of you will know that morale pips have been superior to fire and shock pips. This change will make the pips more equal in value, although morale pips may still be the better pick most of the time. To preserve the overall flow of battles, we’re thinking not to apply this to artillery protection from backrow, as it is asymmetrical.

So, after most of these changes being implemented, and some still WIP, this is what we’re seeing in our nightlies AI tests:









In some games Portugal is performing really well, while in others Spain is still a top dog in the Iberian Peninsula and America. Regarding China, you can see that Ming sometimes manage to stay stable, while Mingplossion still happens regularly, and even some of the successor states are able to blob a bit after it, recovering MoH.

This is all for today. We’re open to feedback and suggestions given by you to further improve the balance for 1.33, if possible; just remember to have civil discussions about them, as there were some hot-heated ones a couple months ago (basically regarding Ming balance), and we don't want that to be repeated.

Next week my fellow colleague @Gnivomwill talk about the changes made to AI in the upcoming 1.33 patch (and yes, he will be tackling the AI deleting forts issue, among others). Hope you enjoy the DD!

One of the highlights of the year for the Europa Universalis IV team returns soon, with the Grandest Virtual Party taking place on 11-12 December. 21 teams of three, including an official Paradox team, go head to head in a multiplayer extravaganza that emphasizes role-playing as much as it does game skill.

Check out all special offers on Steam for Europa Universalis IV for this event!

You can follow along with the event and cheer on your favorite council of conquerors by watching the stream live on twitch.tv/ParadoxInteractive and join your fellow community members in the official Discord to offer your own commentary and insight as strangers become allies and allies become traitors.



You can check out the Official Website for the event here - for more information.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/236850/Europa_Universalis_IV/

Greetings!

Following almost a week of public testing we are now releasing 1.32.2 for everyone!

You can read what the patch contain below. You may also find some updates to how the subscription service behaves in-game. We are continuing experimentation with the subscription to improve the experience for both old and new players, meaning some of you might see some changes over the coming months - for example, we have removed the widget for all players that already own all the DLC

As always, please report any issues in our bug report forum or submit a support ticket. Thank you!

Saves should be compatible between all 1.32.x version although we can never guarantee it! Our tests indicate there are no problems however.

*** 1.32.2 Patchnotes ***

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# Script
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# Achievements
- The achievement "Knights of the Caribbean" will now ask for the entirety of Sardinia.
- The achievement "One nation to rule them all" now correctly checks if your subjects are vassals.
- Fixed a script issue regarding the global unrest for the achievement "This is Fine".
- Fixed an issue which made the achievement "Fugger Banking" impossible.
- The achievement "Prestor John" can now be completed even after forming Aksum as Ethiopia.

# Decisions
- The decision "Build the Third Temple" will be now hidden if you have the event "The Third Temple" open.
- The Mamluks can no longer form Israel.
- Reforming Bulgaria will now update the mission tree.
- Forming Kurland now allows you to be Anglican or Hussite too.
- The "Form Italian Nation" decision will no longer tell you twice that you leave the HRE when you form Italy.
- Forming Somalia will now colonize the provinces Dawa and Ewaso Ngiro.

# Events
- Re-added the Institution message event. This changes everything...
- Added a goto button for the event "Growth of the business of ".
- Added a goto button for the event "Stagnation and Drought in ".
- Added a goto button for the event "Mysore Revolts!".
- Fixed issues related to the event "Where the Legend Begins".
- Fixed event target issues for the event "Pirate Stronghold in Angoche".
- The event "The Great Mosque of Djenné" now has a goto option.
- The event which end the "Decline of Mali" disaster now gives +100 ADM, +100 DIP and +100 MIL as the +1 Stability was most of the time not needed at this point anymore.
- The event "Isabella of Castille" now has a mean time to happen of 200 months instead of 1000 months.
- The explorer from the event "Unexpected Explorer" is now always a female explorer with 10 Tradition.
- Reformed events will now properly check that the country has the Reformed religion too, and not only the Fervor mechanic.
- Muslim School events will now properly check that the country has a Muslim religion too, and not only the School mechanic.
- Orthodox events will now properly check that the country has the Orthodox religion too, and not only the Patriach Authority mechanic.

# Ideas
- The Plains Native Ideas no longer conflict with the Southeastern Woodlands Ideas.

# Missions
- The mission "Gideon's Revolt" now checks if you actually own the provinces of Semien.
- The mission "Destroy Majapahit" now highlights the Surabaya area even if Majapahit is already dead.
- The Songhain mission "Develop Salt and Cloth" no longer has the awkward custom tooltip in the triggers.
- The modifier "Expansion into the Cape" from the mission "Expand Kilwa" now has a duration of 50 years instead of 30 years.
- The Kilwan mission "Expand Kilwa" can now be completed if the monument in Kilwa has tier 3 too.
- The Songhain mission "Reform the Army" no longer requests you to be ahead in military tech compared to all other countries in the western tech group.
- The Kongolese mission "Unite the Congo Tribes" now counts provinces owned by your subjects too and does no longer request you to have cores on them. This means creating colonies will no longer make the mission impossible.
- The progress for the mission "Temples of Stone" no longer gets reset if you switch your tag.
- The Dithmarscher mission "The Peasants' War" will now properly check for the victory of the Peasants' War.
- The Papal mission "New St. Peter's Basilica" now gives +2 Base Tax to Rome if the monument is already on Tier 3.

# Setup
- The province Zacatecas is now guaranteed to have gold.
- Bunyoro now starts with the Acholi culture as an accepted culture.
- The primary culture of Darfur is now Tunjur.
- Ogaadeen now has cores on the provinces Degehabur and Werder.
- The provinces Korofan, Medwa and Kobbe have now the Tunjur culture.
- The country Geledi has now cores on the Ajuuraan provinces Afgooye, Bardera and Gedo.
- Changed the name of the province Kosti to Waylula.

# Modifiers
- The modifier "The Third Temple is built" now gives normal missionary strength instead of missionary strength against Heretics.
- The modifier "Expansion into the Cape" from Kilwa's mission tree now also increases Global Settler Increase by +25.
- The modifier "Adalan-Ethiopian War" now gives +0.1 Monthly Piety instead +1. Also fixed the tooltip issue with it, showing the wrong number.
- The modifier "Prime Herding Rights" from the privilege now gives +25% Local Manpower Modifier instead of 100%.
- The modifier "Authority Asserted" now increases max absolutism instead of reducing it.
- Fixed an issue where the modifier "Hegemon of Southern Africa" affected the West African culture group instead of the Southern African culture group.
- The modifier "Hegemon of Southern Africa" now gives +33% Sailor Modifier instead of 0.33 Sailors.

# Other
- Added missing dynamic, Greek names for a few provinces.
- Removed the Razing Power Gain modifier from the Buryat Band merc company.
- The estates have now learned to check if you can build manufactories in the first place before giving you the task to build manufactories.
- The estate privilege "Embrace Singular Cult" will no longer add a stability when the regency dies.
- The Malbork Castle Monument now has its garrison size modifier in the correct global modifiers scope.
- The Great Walls of China Monument now has its garrison size modifier in the correct global modifiers scope.
- The Heddal Stave Church Monument now requires the owner to be Christian too in order to have access to its modifiers.
- The estate privilege "Religious Society" now also affects syncretic and harmonized religions.

The original post on our official forum can be found here!