Europa Universalis IV News

Hey everyone, happy new year and I hope 2023 grants you health, growth and lots of love. Let’s take a look at the new content we have prepared for China! We started thinking about this one year ago, while working on the 1.33 update, but now the time has come for it!

Before we begin, the content you will see here is by no means finalized, as always your feedback is greatly appreciated and cherished!

Playing Europa Universalis is all about building up your nation, growing and expanding your borders. It’s all about the struggles and the thrills of each conquest, fighting at the edge of bankruptcy or measuring your moves carefully. However, Ming does not really suffer from these issues at the hands of a player due to the fact that it starts as the nation with the highest development and strongest economy in 1444 and until 1.35 it was regarded as a fairly relaxing experience for most players. Surely there are some minor obstacles early on, but in general the playthrough was not at all challenging and thus many players steered away from playing the Great Ming, despite it having a not-insubstantial amount of flavor in the form of events, factions and later the Mandate of Heaven mechanic, the latter of which ended up being a bit of a pain to manage. All this unrealized potential is what we seek to tackle by giving the Ming, its offshoot Chinese Warlords as well as the Jurchen tribes and the Qing lots of new missions, events and more!

The Ming will see many new additions, mechanics and cool-stuff-in-general with 1.35:

• A brand new, fully-fleshed out mission tree
  
• Accompanied by a new Estate - the Eunuchs
  
• New tough challenges as you struggle to curb the influence of the Eunuchs and prevent your (historical) collapse
  
• Over a dozen new Reforms that interact with and are complemented by various missions (yes we tweaked the gain and loss of Mandate)
  
• New Decrees that interact with and are complemented by various missions
  
• New Flavor events integrated in the mission tree - as well as independent from it
  
• Deep modability and new functions added to the Mandate mechanic
  
• A new great project that spans several provinces
  

So let’s take a look at the tree!

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(Note; Icons are a WIP!)[/center]

The Ming historically were rulers of unprecedented magnanimity, wealth and the ambition to match their huge domain. However, in 1444 the starting ruler sadly fell short to live up to his predecessor’s abilities, represented in the game as a 1/1/1. The Great Ming Empire lies stretched and continuously tormented by hordes in the North and West, waning influence with its tributaries in the South and no say in the affairs of Japan. During the game, you may also suffer from floods and earthquakes which historically kickstarted (and ended) the Ming Dynasty and will rapidly corrode the growth of the Mandate. Their impact can be alleviated by constructing certain buildings and completing a couple relevant missions.

The starting situation of the Great Ming is represented and explained in a start-up event:

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Note; missions, art and descriptions are not final![/center]

Autonomy in the provinces of the Empire will increase, at a minimum of +25%. This autonomy will persist and you will have the ability to reduce and eventually eradicate it, as you reign in the various external and internal elements that threaten the Empire. This will not be an easy task.

The second obstacle, and arguably the one that gave my colleagues the biggest pain to deal with, is the Eunuchs Estate. A powerful body of advisors near the Emperor who will gain and lose power depending on the state of internal affairs as well as the abilities of the Emperor himself.

Eunuchs will offer a vast array of very powerful Estate privileges, most of which will scale with their internal power in the form of crown land controlled as shown below:

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Note; Yes, they will start with nearly 60% crown land while you will start with only 15% to better represent the grip of power between the starting ruler of the Ming and his Eunuchs.

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Note; Icons are a work in progress!
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You won’t be able to reform your country anywhere near as fast if you do it by crushing the influence of the Eunuchs, BUT if you do lean on them too much, the accumulated cost of fighting their inevitable corruption will become overbearing, difficult to manage and you will collapse. It is up to the player to strike the perfect balance between manipulating this double-edged sword.

Moreover, I took the liberty to give this new Estate a unique disaster, unlike other Estates’ similar predicaments. This one will hurt a lot more and its solution is considerably harsher than other Estate Disasters. When other Estate Disasters require you to lower influence and enact a national decision in order to end the disaster, the Eunuch disaster will have its decision fundamentally altered. Much like other estates, it will end when the reigning estate’s influence falls low enough. However, every time you enact the national decision available during the disaster, Eunuchs will:

• Lose 1 random privilege so as to lower their influence
  
• Spawn a special large stack of rebels, every province this stack of rebels sieges will lower your mandate considerably
  
• cost you stability (which is required to enact this decision)
  

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This loop continues until the estate’s influence is either low enough or they have no privileges, so you best steer clear from the disaster!
You will also be able to interact with the estate via missions and events, unlock new privileges (that do not cost yearly corruption) etc.
Before we move on, be aware that the AI is instructed as to how it will utilize and play around with the Yearly Corruption but Ming still explodes relatively frequently as it used to!
Let’s take a look at some of the new missions, their requirements and more importantly, their rewards!


The idea behind Ming, given that it starts at the size it does, is that every single external mission (without exceptions) will offer a diplomatic path / solution. You are already plenty big and if you don’t want to conquer directly (or even indirectly in most cases) you will not be forced to do so!

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Something I wanted to implement based on feedback from 1.34 is this new “Event Insight”, a small summary of what the event is about and what its reward alludes to so as to give you some info before clicking it.
Before we move away from this mission tree, I should note that the second half of it, while largely inspired and based on the labors of Ming Emperors, is available to any Chinese Warlord who takes up the Mandate of Heaven, more details on that further down.
As mentioned earlier, 1.35 will introduce vast changes to the Mandate, so let’s tackle some of the biggest ones here:

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(Note; W I P)
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The Mandate now houses over 10 new Reforms inspired and heavily based upon actual reforms between the 15th and 19th century that the game covers.

• Most of the new reforms can be completed at random order
  
• Some are unlocked via the mission tree (that is common with the Chinese Warlords)
  
• 2 of them are mutually exclusive with each other
  
• Some may require a certain number of reforms passed (yay modability!)
  
• Some require the country to move in a certain direction ( idea groups having been picked with alternative requirement, certain missions completed etc )
  
• (Nearly) Every reform now impacts both the Emperor and their subjects, both tributaries and non-tributaries.
  
• To account for the heightened number of reforms (and decrees) we increased the rate of Mandate growth and decay
  

We wanted to explore interesting rewards with the Mandate so we took the liberty and added new and interesting bonuses to some of the reforms, such as the ability to grant New Coordinator Offices, which work much like Holy Orders: The Buzhengshi, Anchasi and Du Si:

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(Note; WIP)
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Moving on, new Decrees were also added as we can see in the picture above.
Some of my favorites:
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As with reforms, I wanted decrees to play an integral part in the gameplay around missions and events. So, decrees:

• May now be required to be active by some missions
  
• Will have their bonuses altered or increased by some missions
  
• May themselves be requirements for certain reforms and vice versa
  

All these new additions are fully scripted and we very much look forward to seeing what you come up with!



As I mentioned before, the Chinese Warlords, Jurchen tribes, Manchu and Qing will receive new content.

The various new Chinese trees for Qing-related tags are split into 3 branches

• The unique content of a nation which varies between Ming- |Qing/Jurchen/Manchu|-Chinese Warlords
  
• The Emperor of China branch which deals with internal matters and administrating China
  
• A third branch unique to the Qing only
  

[center]The Chinese Warlords, meaning the releasables of Ming will also have their own little mission tree which will help them unite the Chinese lands and take up the Mandate of Heaven, which will then unlock the ‘Emperor of China mid-section of their tree (the bottom second part of the Ming tree):
The missions are partially dynamic in terms of their requirements/rewards based on your capital's location



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The Jurchen / Manchu will have access to newly redesigned missions that will follow the historical path of the Jianzhou but will be available to all regional tribes:

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From subjugating neighbouring hordes, to knocking on the gates of the Great Ming by publishing the Seven Grievances. Along the way, powerful flavored bonuses, new cool rewards and historical immersion amount to a fun playthrough:

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Every choice will have a different impact at the ‘Reforms of Nurhaci’ event later in the game! Nurhaci’s stats are random but heavily weighted to be really really good across the board. As a general he will serve as a 3/6/5/3 with a special new unique General trait inspired by his real life title of ‘Dragon-Tiger’ granting +10% Movement Speed and +10% Cav Combat Ability (more about new traits in a future DD). Lastly, as an advisor, he’s a level 3 Discipline Advisor at -90% of the cost and will also offer a flat 100 Mil Power.

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Upon taking the Mandate of Heaven you will unlock the Emperor of China part of your mission tree which is common between all of the tags (Ming, releasables etc) upon taking up the Mandate.

Forming Qing will offer brand new and freshly reworked missions. The first branch will be inherited by your tribal days. The second branch is the common ‘Emperor of China’ part and finally the third branch contains missions exclusively available to Qing:

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Many of these missions will feature very interesting rewards as shown below:
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Some cool rewards of the Emperor of China Branch available to either Ming, Qing or any Warlord with the Mandate:
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Thank you so much for taking the time to read through 2023’s first Dev Diary! I hope you are just as excited to delve into the new content as we were while making it! We will be back next week to talk about the new content we have created for… The Ottomans! Cheers!

PS: Special thanks to the Chinese modding community for valuable research sources!

PPS: A special episode of Chapel Comic for you today!

Hello and welcome to another EUIV DD!

Today we will be talking about the rebalance of the Unit Pips we're working on for the upcoming 1.35 update. This task has been led by our QA Team, which was reinforced throughout the year, and that has been key to the release of Lions of the North, as the new members that have joined the Team credit over 5,000 hours of gameplay on EUIV. But apart from testing the game, they are also involved in the game design process, a classic at Paradox, which usually relies on close cooperation between the different teams. Therefore, this is the proposal we'll be testing in the following weeks, taking also into account the feedback we receive in this DD, of course!

[hr][/hr]

Hello everyone, I'm Pintu, one of the Embedded QA’s working at Tinto.

I want to show you the rework we are doing on the Unit Pips of the different Techgroups, one of the Systems that saw very few changes since the Release of EU4. As we implemented changes to the Combat calculations in the 1.34 update, we think now it’s a good moment to address this rebalance.

First I want to quickly outline what the Unit Pips do in what parts of combat they matter, for those not as experienced in the game. In each combat phase, Strength Damage is dealt depending on the Offensive Damage Pips of the Units, while Morale Damage is dealt based on Offensive Damage and Offensive Morale Pips. Defending works the same way with the Defensive Pips of the Unit, but half of the Defensive Pips (rounded down) of the Backrow Units is added on top of that. That means that over the course of the game, the priority of pips shifts from having a strong Shock Phase to a strong Fire Phase with a focus on defensive Pips, especially for Infantry.

With this rebalance of Unit Pips we mainly want to focus on Infantry Units that are clear strong or weak outliers on their Tech level and the introduction of more choices in Artillery Units beyond the first Technologies when they become available. As always, these are by no means final numbers and will be under close observation during our Testing, apart from the feedback we are receiving in this DD, so there are good chances these will change until the release of the patch.

One of the swiftly explained changes is that related to Aboriginal and Polynesian Units: both got their total amount of pips reduced, to be in line with the American and African Unit Groups. These changes make them preserve some of their strengths, while not being an outlier over other units.


Now onwards to a change that influences other groups as well, which means they have to get adjusted together. The Anatolian group has a very big advantage with their early Units with their Offensive Moral Damage. We decided to tune that down a little in their Unit Options on technologies 5 and 9. Unfortunately, this affects Muslim Unit groups, which should not have an advantage over Anatolians at that point, which in turn affects Indian Units. That's why we had to tune them down as well.

The Anatolian Group will keep one of their big Spikes in Pips on Tech 12, which will let them be a threat to the groups around them. This is also partly because their Unit will stay around until Tech 18, significantly later than other groups get new units.


Speaking of the Muslims, let's take a look at the changes the group got independently from other groups. The Muslim Unit on Tech 23 suffered from both very poor Offensive and Defensive Fire Pips. They do have great Morale and Shock Pips to make up for it, but with the importance of Fire Phase in the later stages of the game, we decided to help them out a little by buffing their defensive Fire on the cost of their defensive Shock.


The Chinese Group has one outlier in their Unit selection, which is situated on Tech 19, with both 3 offensive and 3 defensive Fire Pips, in addition to 3 Offensive Morale. The one drawback with that Unit is that its successor becomes available only on Tech 25, later than most other groups. Since they have an edge with that against most of their neighboring groups, the solution for this is that they lose one offensive Morale.


On the same Techlevel, the Nomadic Group has a very solid, while not great, Infantry Unit, that would do with a small Nerf to fit their theme of military decline more.


The African Groups (this includes Central, East, and West African), got a small reshuffle of Pips, to make their Last Unit on Tech 30 an actual upgrade over the previous version.


Last but not least a small change to the High American Group, where their Unit from Tech 18 gets a small bump in Pips. Before this Unit had the same amount of total Pips as the previous unit level.


Let's now move on to the Changes to Artillery. These mainly focus on the Introduction of one new Alternative per Unit, which focuses more on a defensive style, where Artillery is used to push half of their defensive Pips towards the frontline while sacrificing their damage output with lower Offensive Fire and Morale Pips. There will also be a small Adjustment on Tech 13, with making one of the Options a defensive one.

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You may notice that for the new types of Artillery we've just named them the 'Defensive' version of each level. This is not definitive, as it's mainly a placeholder; so, we will accept suggestions for naming each of the unit types.

And this will conclude the Dev Diary for this week and this year. Just like the Idea Group rebalance of last week, we are very eager to read your feedback and suggestions on this topic to improve it as much as possible.

See you at the next DD, on January 10th!

Hello and welcome back to another Europa Universalis IV Dev Diary!

It’s been a while since the last one, back in September. The main reason for this is that the Team has been quite busy during these months. In October we released the 1.34.4 update, that fixed most of the issues we wanted to cover after Lions of the North, and participated in the last edition of the Grandest Lan, which could be organized again at Moszna Castle (and that you can watch at the Paradox Grand Strategy YouTube channel!). In November, the team focused on launching EUIV on a new platform, GOG, with the 1.34.5 update; this is the fourth platform in which the game can be played, after Steam, Microsoft Store, and Epic Games.

So now comes December, and we feel it’s the proper time to give you an insight into what we’re working on and share with you a roadmap to the 1.35 update (as we won’t be releasing more patches for the 1.34 version).

First and foremost, and although we’ve already said this, we want to thank all the players that have bought and played EUIV: Lions of the North, making it one of the most successful releases in the history of this game. We think that a non-trivial part of this has been the quality of the 1.34 ‘Sweden’ free update, and we are very happy about the fact of having to patch it only two times, as we deem this version quite stable.

So, what are our plans for the future? Well, not surprisingly, we want to keep focused on continuing to reduce the bug count as much as possible; in the last couple of years, the Team has fixed between 2,000 and 3,000 backlog bugs, and we think that the state of the game is much better after this effort. However, we still have hundreds of issues in our backlog, so more effort needs to be put into it.

The good news is that now we have some extra room to rework some game mechanics. Don’t expect anything very ambitious, but some more changes that are on the line with the fixes for the AI and the new government reforms we implemented for 1.34, fleshing out features of the game that haven’t received any update in a while. We will cover two of these topics today and next week.

And when is new content going to be shown? We will get started with that in January after the Team comes back from the Christmas Holidays. We’re very excited about it, but you will have to wait a bit more to take the first look at it. And with no further words to say, let's go with the first ideas we want to share with you!



[h2]Idea Group Additions and Rebalance[/h2]

Hey everyone, PDX Big Boss here! We decided to add a few new idea groups to the game as well as a lot of new policies and new events, to accompany a general rebalance of the existing idea groups.

First things first, we wish to introduce 3 new idea groups:

• Infrastructure Ideas for the Admin Category
  
• Court Ideas for the Dip Category
  
• Mercenary Ideas for the Mil Category
  

A few notes we should mention here! This by no means reflects which will be the released version of the changes. Lions introduced a very high bar of quality and our intention is - at the very least - to meet this bar. So please keep in mind that what you see here is far from finalized, in fact, this is hot code. Having said that, I would genuinely like to encourage you all to give feedback, especially on stuff you don’t like and help shape this beautiful game together. The intention behind these new groups is not to introduce a new powerful single-line meta, but rather to spruce up the game and maybe offer more options for the player, in the interest of making your games more fun and enjoyable. Enough with the boring stuff, onto the Ideas!

The goal behind Infrastructure ideas is to give you the ability to build up your nation, by granting you the tools to speed up construction, reduce its costs, autonomy levels, and more. Let’s take a look:



For the purpose of creating this new group, we chose to separate it from Economic Ideas, which now focus exclusively on the money-making aspect of the game, directly. More on that later, when we tackle existing idea groups.



Infrastructure Ideas offer great bonuses such as construction cost and time reduction, a merchant, autonomy decay, and development cost. Let’s take a look at the Diplomatic Policies for it:

Note: Years for Personal Union Integration: -10

And a quick peek at the Policy Combination of Infrastructure + any Military Idea Group except Aristo/Plutocratic/Horde/Theocratic:



Infrastructure and Aristocratic:


Infrastructure and Plutocratic:


Infrastructure and Horde:


Infrastructure and Divine:
Note: the prestige gain here is 0.5 per Development Point

Moving to the next set of new Ideas, the goal behind Court ideas is to introduce some internal flavor, maneuverability in regards to estate manipulation, and more. Let’s take a look:



We took the decision to make some room for the Prestige here, by moving it over from Religious ideas, more on that later!

Note: an idea we’ve had is to add a unique modifier here ‘max_privilege_slots = 1’ somewhere in this set

Court Ideas + any Admin idea group policy:



Court + any Mil idea group policy:

Note: hmmm this 0.5 Yearly Army Professionalism looks a bit too strong hmm…

Court and Aristocratic:


Court and Plutocratic:


Court and Horde:


Court and Divine:


Finally, let’s look into the new Mercenary Ideas. This one is a bit deeper of a rework because one of our plans is to accompany this new Idea Group with somewhat of a rework on how Mercenaries are distributed, so as to make them a tad bit more interesting at certain points during the game.





Mercenary Ideas + any Admin Group Policies:



Mercenary Ideas + any Dip Group Policies:


Moving on, we have made some tweaks to existing idea groups, let’s look into them:

Religious Ideas

• Removed Stability Cost Modifier and replaced with Religious Unity
  

Humanist

• Removed Religious Unity and replaced with Max. Tolerance of Heathens and Heretics
  

Administrative Ideas

• Removed Merc Cost and replaced with Admin Advisor Cost
  
• Removed Merc Maintenance and replaced with Max Promoted Cultures and Promote Culture Cost
  
• Removed Interest and replaced with Religious' Stability Cost modifier
  
• Removed Merc Manpower and replaced with States Governing Cost
  

Economic Ideas

• Removed Construction Cost and replaced with -25% Monthly Gold Inflation and -25% Gold Depletion Chance reduction (This is a niche change, we would would welcome feedback on this)
  
• Increased Interest to 1 instead of 0.5 due to 0.5 being removed from Admin Ideas (this will probably get nerfed and the other half will be reintroduced elsewhere)
  
• Removed Monthly Autonomy and replaced with -25% Reduce Inflation Cost and -33% Autonomy Chance Cool down
  
• Removed Development Cost and replaced with +10% Goods Produced Modifier
  

The goal of this rework is to breathe some new life into the Idea Groups that were introduced nearly 10 years ago. On top of that, many existing groups will potentially receive new modifiers such as Humanist’s Heretic Opinion of Us (name TBD) which would increase Heretics’ opinion of your nation, due to your humanist approach towards their people.





Note: most of these Improve Relations Modifiers are Placeholders for relations with own religion/culture group and similar modifiers.

We also aim at revisiting more existing idea groups in the Diplomatic and Military Groups as well as the Events from all idea groups. Furthermore, here’s a little event you may get if your ruler has poor diplomatic skills while Court Ideas are active:



Note: shameful display!

And that’s all for today! We’ll be glad to receive your feedback regarding these changes, as we really wanted to tackle them as early as possible with the community, so we have enough time to change/rebalance the different issues that could arise from discussing them with the community.

Next week there will be another Dev Diary focused on another aspect of the game that we are working on rebalancing: Unit Pips. See you then!

Greetings!

We just released patch 1.34.5 which is a minor patch to facilitate the launch of Europa Universalis IV on GOG. The contents of this patch should have no impact on your game on Steam.

The new checksum is 2f83

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- Added integration for GOG.COM store.