Europa Universalis IV News

Hello there!

After the summer break, I am honored to present what the new content will be about!

But first, let me introduce myself as it is my very first time to write in the official forums instead of just lurking here.
I am Ogele, a content designer from Germany, who joined around the time of the release of Leviathan, and as such I got directly thrown into a lot of script bug fixing. Prior to joining, I was (and still am) a modder for EU4 - the one or other might know me already as Comrade Flan on Steam. Oh, and if somebody wants to complain about the bugfix of Fars' color: that was me - so to all the fans of Yellow Fars, I am sorry for your loss.

With that said, it's time to move to the actually exciting new stuff for the new Content Pack which will be focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa.

Today I start with the presentation of one of the famous realms of Africa - Mali



Before diving into the mission tree I want to say that this is all still work in progress. As such, everything still is subject to change.

Mali is a realm which has outlived its time of glory, and is spiraling into irrelevance during the timeframe of EU4. Starting prior to 1444 with the death of Mansa Suleyman Keita, the brother of the famous Mansa Musa, Mali has been facing civil wars and poor leadership. As such, Mali has not a good time starting in the game as they will have to face the Disaster Decline of Mali.

Icon and event picture are not final.

While the modifiers themselves are not the end of the world, Mali will have to face a series of events:


There are a few more disaster related events, but I think these will suffice.

Now the question is: how do you end this disaster? Well, the mission tree has the solution



The mission tree is split into three parts: Reconquest of your former borders, dealing with the Disaster and a little bit of colonization. The most right side of the tree is the one you will focus the most in the early game as its rewards remove some of the disaster events, making the Decline much more bearable. They will remove the Pretender rebels spawning on every new monarch, make the estates loyal for your cause and remove the estate rebellions and will finally ensure that provinces, which are core of other nations, remain loyal to you instead of revolting. At the same time, the missions in the middle part will push you into conquering former territory back, giving permanent claims over Macina, Jenné, Timbuktu and Songhai. An additional bonus of the missions is that each conquest of a new territory will grant you +1 Stability as long you have the disaster active. Also, while you conquer after your heart's desire you will fire these events through the mission tree:



With the Restore the Empire mission you can finally retake your status as an Empire, and if you also finish the mission Handle the Kaabu you can finally put an end to the Decline as you have clearly proven that Mali has recovered from the disaster. Restore Mali Authority will end the disaster and gives you -15% Stability cost and -0.05 Monthly Autonomy. After dealing with the disaster, it is time to step into Mansa Musa's footsteps and try to outperform his generosity. But first you will need to get the income for that, and because of that the missions following handling the inner troubles will focus on developing the main sources of income, which are Gold and Ivory. Completing the mission Gold and Ivory will allow you to use a brand new estate privilege and will fire an event, which is beneficial for every owner of ivory provinces:



Now that the gold question has been solved you can now relive the history and make a pilgrimage to Mecca. By ensuring that the owners of Ankara, Kairo and Mecca have the "Sent Gift" opinion modifier, you can complete the mission Show Generosity and get an event which allows you to invest into Mecca, either adding a Great Mosque and making your own Ulema happy or adding a Counting House and making your own Dhimmi happy.

Finally, it wouldn't be a Mansa Musa experience if you don't crash the economy of a whole country. With the final mission Dominate Europe's Trade, which requires you to have a strong trade presence in either of the European trade nodes and having 15,000 Ducats without any loan will, you can unleash the sheer amount of gold you have hoarded upon Europe!



If you wonder what the result will look like... well... here you go. Poor Genoa will never financially recover from this



While I am at it: I want to point out that this effect is still in balancing phase, and that it has only 10% of the effect for player countries and their subjects. While I like to add rewards which make you feel good, I don't want them to be an auto-win against other players. Of course you can argue that it is an auto-win against the AI, but it must be considered that you have to be a economical behemoth already to get this mission done. Also, it is very satisfying to see the pop-ups coming over the year of AI trade countries declaring bankruptcy.

Now to some other smaller highlights for Mali:

• The colonization missions are based on the legend of Abu Bakr. Because we didn't find many evidences for the existence of his journey to the new world, these missions will describe him more as a legend then as a discrete fact. The missions will revolve about travelling west and founding an own colony in South America
  
• The mission Connection to Maghreb enables a decision which allows you to purchase a province in Europe for 2000 Ducats. You have a choice of 5 provinces here, which are all near Italy or Iberia
  
• The mission Choose Direction will enable a mission which is either focused on converting your land or on tolerating the traditions

That's all for today! There are a lot more things I would love to talk about, but I think I am stretching that dev diary more than enough already. With that said, next week we will take a closer look at Songhai. Until then, have a nice week!

Hello and welcome to another Europa Universalis IV development diary. We’ve not had one since the start of the summer. Mostly because the team has been on holidays, and there is only so many times you can write “we are busy fixing bugs”. From September though, we’ll be able to start with development diaries for new missions and other content that the content designers are working on.

Two weeks ago we celebrated 8 years since the release of EU4, and it is about 11 years since we started working on the design. It has been a long journey, since me, [USER]@Besuchov[/USER] and [USER]@King[/USER] had our first brainstorming discussions, on how we could build upon EU3. Our goal was to take all that was in EU3 with all expansions, remove the bad features & make a polished game. It is kind of interesting to see how it turned out, and also fun for me personally to see how many people have been working on the game during the last decade.

[h2]Metrics[/h2]

As we tend to do for our games at times, when we do not have much new content to talk about, we like to delve into metrics of the game, on what is most popular and how you guys are playing the game.

First of all, what type of games do you people play every day?

By the amount of games played in a single day, 51% are regular single player games, 44% are ironman games, and 5% are multiplayer games. However, this does not tell the entire story, as one of the game-types include a fair bit more players. On any given day, about 13.7% of all players play multiplayer games, about 39,7% play an ironman game, and 62.3% play a normal single player game. This of course adds up to far more than 100%, but many people play more than 1 game mode in a single day.

Secondly, what nations do people play?
Here are the top 20 most played nations, by the fraction of users who play them in a given day. As you can see, some formable nations like Russia, Prussia, Spain and Great Britain are rather popular to continue playing as..

England 11.17%
Ottomans 9.65%
France 9.58%
Castille 7.91%
Byzantium 6.60%
Austria 6.43%
Custom Nation 6.41%
Brandenburg 5.81%
Ming 4.93%
Muscowy 4.78%
Portugal 4.62%
Poland 3.83%
Spain 3.71%
Prussia 3.44%
Great Britain 3.29%
Russia 3.24%
Sweden 3.24%
Venice 2.38%
Holland 2.10%
Timurids 2.06%


Thirdly, what are the most popular modifications for the game?

While, here are the top 10 most popular modifications, how many of the total users that use these mods in any given day. About 52% of all players use a mod at any point during a week.

Graphical Map Improvements 11.8%
Chinese Language Mod for 1.31 11.3%
Extended Timeline 6.4%
Missions Expanded 4.3%
The Great Exhibition 3.5%
Governments Expanded 1.31 3.4%
EU4 Russian localisation LITE by GEKS 3.3%
Anbennar: A Fantasy Total Conversion Mod 2.8%
Flavour and Events Expanded 2.7%
Ages and Splendor Expanded 2.4%


As we can see, chinese and russian localisations are popular, and if we had known, we probably should hadlocalised the game from the start, as we did with later games. It is also great to see an overhaul mod like Anbennar get into the top 10.

[h2]State of the game[/h2]
When we left in June with 1.31.5, we felt that we were in a pretty decent situation when coming to functionality and had taken Leviathan to a decent enough state (except for concentrate development). As we mentioned earlier, back in April, one of the goals with this new studio was to change how we handle bugs longterm for our projects and focus on addressing older issues, and fixing problems that had been hanging around for years. Back then as a team had reduced the open bug count by over 600 bugs. Now I can proudly say that those numbers have further improved, even after fixing all new Leviathan bugs we had introduced, and now the total amount of open bugs has been reduced by a total of 1083 since September 1st, and we have fixed a total of 2117 bugs in that time period.



We still have over 500 open bugs to work with for EU4, but that is by far the best shape the project has ever been. With this progress we hope to be even lower when we release 1.32



The team at Tinto has also grown, with lots of people hired straight from the community to work as programmers, artists, qa, content designers and in other roles. We still need some more people…
https://career.paradoxplaza.com/jobs/1289640-2d-artist https://career.paradoxplaza.com/jobs/1289608-ui-developer https://career.paradoxplaza.com/jobs/1049816-engine-programmer

[h2]Roadmap[/h2]
To repeat what I said in April on how Tinto will handle further development of EU4.

Paid Features should be standalone, and easy to maintain.
No major feature reworks while we still have lots of bugs
Reducing the bug-count as much as possible.
Add more content, like missions, graphics and music
Flesh out the parts of the map that have not gotten attention the last few years.


What does that mean for us right now? Well, we’ll soon be talking about the missions that will come in the next paid update. Speaking of that, the next paid update will be missions, graphics and music, while the coders will be spending their time fixing bugs, doing quality of life improvements, balancing and improving the AI.

Speaking of balance, we will rework Concentrate Development for 1.32, and we will have more information on how later this autumn.

The next patch that comes, 1.31.6, will only be a compatibility patch that we need to release, and 1.32 with all further bug fixes, balance changes is planned to be released in the last quarter of this year.

For eight years, millions of empires have risen (and fallen) in Europa Universalis IV. Now the history of the world's empire's is put in your hands.

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