Europa Universalis IV News

Hello, and welcome to the last dev diary before we release Origins and the 1.32 update! We’re very excited about the upcoming release, and we hope that it meets your expectations, both the Immersion Pack and the free update.

Today different members of our team will be showing you a lot of different stuff. First, the new achievements. Then, the complete list of new monuments (although someone has already posted it here in the forums, for what I’ve seen). Finally, we’ll talk about how we handle tests and analysis of the game, how that has helped us with the 1.32 update, and specifically about the Tribal Development rework. Let’s go!

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Hello everybody!
My name is Raúl Trullenque (@RaulTrullenque in the forums), I am a new Content Designer working here at Tinto. Before joining this team I was not a regular forum denizen, just part of the silent majority of Paradox GSG players. Nonetheless I’ll do my best to be on par with my colleagues @Aldaron, @Ogele and @Pavía , and answer your questions as best as I can. Wish me luck. :)

First and most important, as many of you already know, sadly this past September Ivo passed away after a hard fought battle against leukemia. To the community he was known as Atwix, he was a streamer, a forum legend and one of the most experienced and knowledgeable EU4 players. His passing has been deeply felt both in the community and in the studio. From Tinto we want to send our condolences to his family and we would like to make sure that his name will be forever intertwined with EU4.



Atwix Legacy

Have 10 personal unions at the same time.

The description is short and to the point, as there is nothing that I could say that would improve on what the PU master explained already, so I would just link his famous guide here and encourage you to read it, as his wise words would help you a lot to get this achievement.

Now on a lighter note, I would like to showcase some of the new achievements that will be available with Origins, then we'll follow with the entire list:



Imposter Syndrome

As Sus, have three countries hostile to you (less than 0 opinion of you) after they discovered your spy.

- “I promise, it wasn’t me, I am sure that 100k rebellion raised itself.” Oh!, you found a Sus diplomat giving away weapons on the streets?. Mmm, no, it doesn’t ring any bells. I am sure it was Morocco's fault. We should vote on it!”



Ultimate Military

As Songhai, have Prussia and Nepal as Marches!

If you have been following the dev diaries you should know by now that Origins Songhai is very different from vanilla Songhai, it is now an even stronger Stronghai. To challenge this new strength we have created this new achievement that puts the player on the path to create the mightiest military in history.



Where are the penguins?

As a Malagasy country, unite all of Madagascar and hold all the most southern provinces of the world.

This achievement encourages a different way of playing the game, not focusing on development or big wars, but on a quest, a difficult quest to find a quartet of very elusive birds that are anywhere but in Madagascar. No penguins were harmed in the making of this achievement.



Golden Wind

As Air, make at least 50 ducats profit per month and have 50% of your income made through gold provinces.

And to close this DD down we present to you a very plain and boring achievement without any possible second readings, with an icon that it’s only a random whirl of air and a name that is just a pun on Air and gold. It is totally not a reference to anything. ;)

The entire list of new achievements:


Mansa Musa - As Mali, give at least 10k Ducats away to another great power without having a single loan or being bankrupt.



Fugger Banking - As Augsburg, subsidize 3 Great Powers at least 20% of their income while having less than 20 provinces



This is fine - Have at least +10 Global Unrest and be in a winning coalition war, which was targeted against you.



KHAAAAAAN - Restore the Mongol Empire before the Age of Absolutism.



Knights of the Caribbean - As the Knights, own all of the Caribbean and every island in the Mediterranean Sea. (Colonies are NOT allowed)



Australia - Hungary - Starting as an Australian tribe unite Australia and subjugate Hungary



Shemot is Not - As a Jewish nation, convert all of Egypt to Jewish while having the Jewish Community Aspect active.



One Nation to rule them all - As Saruhan, have at least 9 loyal vassals with at least 100 development each.



Swahili Persuasion - As Kilwa, convert all of the Moluccas and Indonesia.



I don't like sand - Have the most development of all countries while owning no province with terrain other than desert or coastal desert.



Surfing USA - Form the USA as Hawaii.

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Now, I (@Pavía) will be presenting the new monument list.

Take into account a couple things: yes, we’ve already noticed some bugs that people have pointed out, and that didn’t get into 1.32 release version for stability reasons, but that will be already fixed in the first hotfix we deliver; the other is that yes, some monuments will be stronger, other weaker, and we will be taking charge of that as you play with them and report your impressions, as we did in 1.31 patches (and we’ve even done some more extra monuments fixes for 1.32, as you could already see in the changelog). Please notice that we've come through 3 different iterations of the new monuments during its development, and that 3 separate teams (dev team, QA, and betatesters) have been testing the monuments in the past weeks; however, we couldn't post this list until having the number tweaked for the release version of 1.32, and then you, players, aren't posting your feedback, we lack a lot of information about their balance.

So, I really hope that you enjoy most of the new monuments, and I’ll be reading with attention your suggestions in the monouments thread

See the monuments in full here (check the spoiler); Paradox Forums

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Finally, hello, my name is Kuba, here known as @Rossarness, and I’m the Release Engineer here at Tinto. Today I’d like to tell you how we are testing and analyzing the game, and I’ll also talk a bit about the upcoming changes to the American Native Tribes.

I did write testing however I meant the automated nightly runs that I’m in charge of. Every night we run automated runs using the latest code of our game. That gives us an opportunity to analyze how our changes affect the game. This is especially useful when we are doing some balancing changes (e.g. latest changes to the Protestants and Orthodox).

Usually in the morning I check all the nightlies for potential issues, if there are no crashes I can proceed to analyzing the game state.
With each run we get a diplomatic mode map attached to the report so I can decide which runs might require in-depth analysis.

Here’s an example of interesting run:


As you can see the standard Ottoblob was destroyed by the Mamluks, so it’s quite an unusual outcome. If such a situation would be common, this would mean for us that we nerfed some mechanic too much or made it OP.

That’s how I noticed the problems with the Protestants and Orthodox countries. After implementing changes to the Catholics I saw that across almost all runs, Europe is united as Catholics. Basically after loading the game each run looked similar to this one:


Usually only the Ottomans were strong enough to resist the Catholic crusade. So together with our Content Designers we analyzed key countries which could oppose them (like in the screenshot above Russia ceased to exist - which was very common at this point). Then we buffed the Protestant religions and observed how it affected the game.

I also kept Russia under observation which helped us to find that AI had problems with getting and maintaining high Patriarch Authority and couldn’t be a real counterbalance to the Ottomans. Of course our automation also saves the game at regular intervals, so we can analyze various variables that led to the end result, or to check our changes mid-game. Like, one of the religions might become almost one-faith in the end, as long as in the mid-game it looks balanced when in conflict with others, and that it doesn’t happen in every run. A screenshot below with AI getting high PA as Russia now, after doing some AI fixes.


After changes done to the guarantee system, we can also now observe interesting alt-history outcomes, like an independent Revolutionary Catalonia allied to France:


And Switzerland with access to the sea as a bonus. :)

Last aspect of our automation which is very important are the performance metrics, with each run we gather statistics on how long it takes to make a daily or monthly tick on average. Results are calculated from the finished game, this allows us to check possible performance improvements or detect degradation just a day after we merge in changes that might cause it. So worry not, I'm now guarding the performance of the game and we are looking forward to improving it. For 1.32 the performance is better than in 1.31, and although we’re not at 1.30.6, as Johan already announced, our objective is to keep working to reach at least that point.

Below some good (and interesting) overnight results:


Strong Spain which started to eat France (and of course Ottoblob).


Strong France which caused most of the colonies to go independent. Also some people were worried that African countries would be eaten by the European Powers. As you can see mostly they survive, sometimes even thrive, so don’t worry.


Strong Russia with nice France and Spain, also in Africa you can see Great Zimbabwe formed. Also Ottomans are not that powerful, with Persia being formed. :)

So the last thing I want to talk about are the Tribal balance changes. I know there were many issues with them, so I made it my personal mission to improve them. So again I used the nightlies to analyze the tribal countries, and found that they created megacities in the Amazon forest (250+ development) on every run. Then I found that as the Tribal Development cost increase is linear, that allowed them to freely accumulate the development over the course of the game. So now the development growth will decrease exponentially, making it almost impossible to reach such high values. The amount of Tribal Development gained is divided by the current development if it’s above 1. That means if you reach 10, the further growth will be reduced by the factor of ten. It’s not perfect but still better than the current system and I look forward to improving it further - I had to prepare so many other things related to the release, TBH.


Here is the list of provinces sorted by development. You can see that end game results are back to sane levels and there are no provinces from the Americas in the top list, the highest was 37 owned by the USA.

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So, that’s all for today! We really expect that you might have liked the content we’ve just shown to you. We will be talking more about the new content and the 1.32 changelog tomorrow, in the Paradox Twitch Stream, at 17h (CET), with @BjornB and @Mordred Viking. And as the release is in a couple days, we really hope you enjoy both the Origins Immersion Pack and the Songhai Update, and give us feedback about it as soon as you start playing. See you!

Ey folks!:D

Happy to be back! As most of you know… WE ARE A WEEK AWAY FROM THE RELEASE OF ORIGINS.

It’s crazy how fast time goes by, but I’m really proud of the work that the Dev Team has put into the Immersion Pack over the past couple of months.

You have been reading a lot of interesting Dev Diaries about Origins content, but as my colleague Pavía said in his last DD, it’s time to talk about the 1.32 update.

I want to emphasize how important this update is, since we have done more than +450 fixes, I mean it’s awesome.

Well like I said before, I’m so proud of our team, but as the saying goes, a changelog says a thousand words :)

Thanks for your attention, cheers!

You can find the patch notes here; Patch Notes

Welcome to this week’s dev diary. I’m David Horler, the Art Lead at Tinto, and I’m very excited to show you what the art team has been cooking up in recent months.

In the last year the art team at our Barcelona studio has exploded, rapidly expanding to the 9 talented artists that we have today—including every discipline from 3D character artist to UI developer. We have so much interesting stuff planned for the future, but for now I’ll introduce to you some of the work we’ve already done for Origins.

So what is the process for making art in one of our immersion packs? The first thing that happens is the brief, in this case Johan asked us to prepare 16 unit models and 2 missionaries for sub-Saharan Africa, a hugely underrepresented area in terms of previous art DLCs.

We opened up the game to see which cultures are missing art, and while East and West Africa already had unit models, we noticed a large area of southern Africa that was not already covered by unit packs.



Our artists started doing research for interesting and unique types of clothing historically worn by people in this area. Historical authenticity is very important in this kind of game so we were careful with our references. However, we permitted ourselves a little bit more creativity in later tiers, to create “what-if?” unit models, rewarding players who pull off amazing feats of technological progress.

After the research, concept artist Irene and 2D artist Ruben set to work making concepts for these characters. The goal was to start with simple warriors, and then as the ages progress they become increasingly complex in their appearance—eventually evoking the disciplined regiments of Napoleonic Europe but with a distinctive African twist.

Since these units would be used across many different countries, we needed to figure out where the country colours would go at this stage as well; in this case red is primary, yellow is secondary, and blue is tertiary.



The first ideas are rarely the best, so the artists explore many iterations as we try to find the right shapes and colours, as you can see with our work on the Coptic missionary here:



Over the next few months we worked together with our friends at N-iX Game & VR Studio to turn these concepts into 3D models that are both functional and look great. To start with we make a very high resolution model in ZBrush with all the cloth folds and surface details that we want. This is made with a combination of digital clay sculpting and cloth simulation, both of which are essential processes in modelling characters for modern video games.



It looks beautiful, but with this many polygons it is impractical for realtime rendering, so the next step is to bake all those details into a normal map texture that is wrapped around a low-poly model.

Once baked, we start the texturing process. In EU4’s past, we have laboured over dozens of layers in Photoshop, but recently we have adapted our workflow to use Substance 3D Painter, which is an incredibly powerful tool much better suited to texturing models.



When the textures are finalised, the models are rigged to a skeleton and finally imported into the game. In the case of the missionaries, we got to make brand new animations as well. We then implement it, its testing is managed by our internal QA coordinator and carried out by external QA teams.

For some context of how long this sort of unit pack takes to make, the entire process began in early April and was finished in September. And here are the final products! Let us know what you think of them.



As well as new mission tree icons and the monuments you saw in October, we have also been busying our 2D artists with more advisor portraits in forgotten parts of the world.

Since Leviathan released with so much flavour for Aboriginal Australians, Southeast Asians, and Polynesians, the advisor portraits for those cultures have been high on our art request list. So for Origins we have made a full set of male and female advisor portraits for each of those regions that will add even further to the immersion of playing there.



And of course, a release wouldn’t be complete without a new loading screen. We present Nzingha Mbande of Ndongo, a fascinating queen from Angola who resisted Portuguese colonisation, protecting her people from the Atlantic slave trade. A shrewd diplomat and accomplished tactician, she is remembered as one of the great inspirational women in African history, and was previously featured in our free Women in History DLC.

The loading screen will of course be included in the 1.32 patch; we will drop more info on the free update very soon!



Come join us at the Paradox Stream, on Wednesday the 3rd and 10th of November at 5pm CET for the first showcase of Origins! Mordred and Bjorn will be joined by Content Designer Álvaro (Pavía) for the stream, and will be able to answer any questions you may have.

I hope you enjoyed this dev diary, and I can’t wait to see what you think of Origins when it releases in just over a week’s time!

Hello everyone, and be welcomed! In today’s DD we are going to take a look at different topics of the Origins Immersion Pack, and 1.32 patch: the new Judaism mechanics, more new mission trees all along Africa, and the setup changes we’ve done to the region. So, it will be content-heavy, then.

Let’s start with the new Judaism mechanics. It was one major religion lacking mechanics at this point of the game, so we thought that now it would be a good moment to handle it. Semien is the only country that can spawn with Judaism early game, while it can also be adopted by one of the most important countries in Origins, Ethiopia. And, on a side note, as it was VERY requested by you in the previous DD, and that reassured us on the ongoing work over it!

How we have designed it, Judaism works very similar to Protestantism, as it has 3 slots for Torah Aspects, each one costing 100 points of Faith Power. Those points are gained at a rate of 10% of your monarch points per month, minus a modifier depending on your religious unity.



Torah Aspects are split into three categories (Administrative, Diplomatic, and Military), and each category have 3 slots to chose upon, giving your country some benefits and modifiers, that are fully shown in a tooltip if you hover the click button over it:

ADM Aspects unlock the use of the ‘Celebrate Festival’ button, which has different effects depending on the ADM Aspect you have chosen. The ‘Celebrate Festival’ action costs 200 Faith Power. The three aspects give you following modifiers:
-2 National Unrest modifier, and using ‘Celebrate Festival’ gives +1 Stability.
-5% Technology Cost modifier, and using ‘Celebrate Festival’ gives +20 Reform Progress, +5 Legitimacy (or equivalent), and +5 Claim Strength of Heir.
-0.5 Interest Per Annum modifier, and using ‘Celebrate Festival’ gives 0.3 Years of Income, and reduces Inflation by 1.



DIP Aspects manipulate the relations your people have with the Abrahamic religions and vice versa. Each aspect gives a passive bonus additionally to their modifiers:
+2 Tolerance of the True Faith, all Jewish Provinces have no culture penalties.
+2 Tolerance of Heathens, all Christian and Muslim provinces have no effect on the Religious Unity of your country.
-10% Development Cost, all Non-Theocratic Christian and Muslim countries gain +35 Opinion of you.



MIL Aspects modify the military strength of the country and affect the generation of Faith Power. The modifiers are the following:
-15% Land Attrition, during war you get +10% (20% in defensive wars) Manpower Recovery Speed and +5% (10% in defensive wars) Faith Power
+25% Fort Defense, gain +2 Siege Progress if you siege your own fallen forts, gain +15 Faith Power for every occupied enemy fort
+5% Land and Navy Morale, winning battles decreases War Exhaustion by 0.05, winning wars gives +50 Faith Power



On top of that, we have created a set of new flavor events for Jewish countries. Some of their topics are the reconstruction of the Third Temple, making the ruler choose some things during Sabbath, Abrahamic religions converting to Judaism, and about the figure of the Messiah as their topics. Others are centered around the celebrations, so you can have a proper Bar Mitzvah for your heir, and 3 celebrations around the year: Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot.





Now let’s take a look at the setup changes we’ve done for 1.32, along with some more new mission trees. Here we’ve got 4 new regional mission trees (West Africa, Central Africa, Horn of Africa, and East Africa), so every country in Sub-Saharan Africa will have at least one specific or one of those, and we’ve also added 5 more ‘minor’ mission trees (Jolof, Mossi, Hausa, Oyo and Adal), as we had some extra development time, and we decided that more content would be best. So, let’s go region by region, then.



In West Africa we’ve made a few changes. From west to east, Macina is no longer a starting country. However, it can spawn as a revolter after Fulani culture expands to the provinces of Termes, Wagadu and Baghena (at game start, in northern Mali and SW Timbuktu), and it can be also formed by a country with Fulani culture (Great Fulo, for instance). Then we have divided the former Mossi tag into three new ones: Yatenga, Wagadugu and Fada N’Gourma. We could have created more, but we decided to use the same criteria as for Hausan countries, to not have too many OPM’s in the region. Finally, we have created the Wadai Emirate at the east of Lake Chad and Yao. Our intention here is to have a continuum of inhabited provinces from the Atlantic to the Indic Oceans, after both Great Fulo and Funj spawns by event, portraying the traditional trade route of Darfur corridor.

All countries in this region without a specific mission tree will have a new, generic one. It has 3 different paths, a military one, other economic, and the third one religious. The first two interact among themselves, and have as their main objective to assert your country as the powerhouse in West Africa. Meanwhile, the third mission set is in reality two, as Islamic and Fetishist countries will have different paths; Muslims will aim to impose their faith as the only one in the region, while Fetishists will aim to establish a syncretic traditional religion in their country.



Now let’s take a look at the minor mission trees we added in this region. The first one is for Jolof. The first two columns are about pushing Mali out of West Africa, replacing them and establishing an empire in West Africa. Additionally, you also aim to contact the Europeans and make a deal with them. Apart from that, we wanted to portray their specific government form, with Jolof being ‘primus inter pares’ of some smaller kingdoms. Because of that, they now have a unique government reform to represent the kingdom confederacy Jolof used to be, so now these ‘petty kingdoms’ are three ‘estate privileges', which represent the decentralization of Jolof. The thirds column in the mission tree requests you to centralize by taking certain privileges. Centralizing the state requires you to have at least 2 stability and a lot of estate loyalty with the chieftains. If you centralize you will automatically lose one stab and a good chunk of estates loyalty.




For the Mossi, we have a common mission tree for the three countries, but also for that tag if each of those are able to form it by decision. Their mission focus is pretty straight forward: Conquer West Africa! The "Invade" missions will immediately loot important cities and give you all of its gold.



Forming Mossi will trigger one event later on and add two missions to your tree about their government form. Unlike Jolof's Confederacy, the Mossi Confederal Kingdom is more beneficial. It gives you access to the Tribal Federation mechanic if you have Cradle of Civilization and unlocks a bunch of new decisions for you too. The effects of the decisions are not instant however, as they will always take about 6 months before being in effect. In addition, you have to ‘pay’ in legitimacy and local autonomy. Finally, completing the ‘Centralize the Confederacy’ mission allows you to break out of this government reform or reinforce it even more through an event choice.



Hausan missions also have the same scope as the Mossi ones, so you can have them as one of their starting countries, or if you form the Hausa tag. They are about the conquest of the other Hausa states. Then, ‘Unite the Cities’ requires you to be either Hausa or Sokoto. To help the early phase out you can request militaristic aid from allies through the mission ‘Form Alliances"’. Hausa's mission ‘Develop the Cities’ revolves around the 7 cities which were founded by the 7 different Hausa rulers. Completing this mission will give every one of these 7 cities a unique province modifier for 10 years, reflecting the history and role of these cities. ‘Resolve Internal Issues’ will enable a decision for you, which allows you to get these bonuses for these 7 cities every 20 years again. ‘Contact with the Fulani’ triggers an event for you, which makes Fulani into an accepted culture for you. Through this you are allowed to form Sokoto, and then it will replace the fourth column with three missions, which are about the Jihad in West Africa. The last reward for converting all the provinces to Islam is a permanent +2 Tolerance of True Faith and -0.5% Prestige Decay.



Finally we have the Oyo mission tree. First column is about their historical usage of cavalry. As such you are emphasized to trade with the Muslims. After that you unlock a special mercenary company for them. The mission ‘Chaaaarge!!’ will disable the Army Professionalism cost from this cavalry merc company. The remaining columns are about pushing the Muslims out of West Africa and becoming the dominant power of West Africa. Oyo is also the defender of the Fetishistic faith (though not really a defender, but you get the idea). As such, the province Ife has gained a specific bonus. Oyo's missions are also special in their requirements, as they allow progress through tributaries too! It’s done through a special government reform, which allows you to do that. Then, the mission ‘Reform the Government’ will unlock an estate privilege which allows tributaries even if they are no longer a tribal country. It should be noted that if you revoke the privilege at any time your tributaries will break free, so use this one with caution.



Now let’s move to Congo and Central Africa. Here we felt comfortable with the setup, as it allows a diverse gameplay with different countries, with Kongo as the main powerhouse, as you already know. What we’ve done is adding a new mission tree for the other countries in both regions. They are mainly in three branches. In the war/economic branch, you start preparing for war, and the idea is that at first it’s used to boost your economy, through raiding. This is represented with a mission requiring you to have multiple war reparations. Once you are able to maintain and train a proper army you start expanding to the point of becoming the military power of the region (with a mission requiring you to have the biggest army around), and then you can go up to become an empire. The second branch is the diplomatic, that starts by getting strong allies to secure your position (the mission actually requires for them to be strong, or being either Kongo, Kilwa or Mutapa), then gaining the trust of the allies, then once your position is secure you turn to aggressive diplomacy with the missions requiring you to have vassals and then (tied to the war path too) going to a point of inflicting a crushing blow to a rival to humiliate them (which is in itself a requirement for becoming an empire). The third branch is the religious one, with you first starting as a fetishist gathering pokem... I mean, cults, and then the idea is that you get in contact with the Muslim countries (tied to the alliances missions of the diplomacy branch), from whom you can get valuable info, and then it's just expanding your religion, first by waring against any country that borders you but is not your religion, and then by having to convert province.



Then we have the Horn of Africa. Here we have added another new tag, Ogadeen, portraying the Somali clans that inhabit that space. This regional mission tree revolves around religious clashes. Your aim is to conquer and convert the heathens, uniting the tags of your faith, and become the main power of the region. After completing the final mission of those branches, ‘Save the Horn’, you will get the permanent modifier ‘The Holy Horn’, giving you +50% Religious Unity in reward for your efforts. In parallel to that, you’ve got some missions with an economic scope, that aims at your country being the main trade power in the Indian Ocean.



In the same region we have the last ‘minor’ mission tree, that of Adal. Their missions are mostly focused on giving Ethiopia a real fight to deal with. This is especially emphasized by a mission reward early on, ‘Restore the Old Mosque’, that is about the mosque Masjid al-Qiblatayn in Zeila, one of the oldest mosques in Africa; so, developing Zeila will give you a great Mosque there. ‘Reach the Turks’ is about establishing relations with the Ottomans. This mission can be completed by having any kind of regiment at the coast of the Mediterranean or in a province held by a Turkish country. It will trigger an event chain, not limited to the Ottomans, as it will seek out for the strongest Turkish power in Anatolia, that will eventually give some Janissary mercenaries; should there be no Turkish power at all in Anatolia in the rare occasion that the wet dream of a Byzantophile comes true, then Adal will ask Mamluks for help instead, unlocking the Mamluks mercs instead of the Janissaries. The rest of the mission tree is pretty straight-forward: unite the Somali clans, eliminate Ethiopia, convert the Horn of Africa, and get a connection to West Africa.



Let’s finish with the East Africa mission tree. Here we have focused on trade, regional expansion and strategic one in trade ports as main focuses. The objective is, obviously, becoming a great power (who would have noticed that regarding EU4!). However, one of the last missions of the tree is a funny one, as you’ll be aiming at reversing the trade visit that Zheng He made to the region a few decades ago, establishing a strong trade presence in the Chinese region trade ports.





So that’s all for today, which I think is a lot, as we covered a bunch of very different content all across the continent. Actually, this is the last DD delivered from CD Team, as the next DD’s before release will be focusing on the new Art in Origins Immersion Pack, the new Achievements we’ve created, and the changelog (be prepared for it, as it will have hundreds of fixes that will go live with 1.32 patch, literally!). As always, your feedback will be appreciated; just be civil, and take into account that some numbers may be tweaked before release. See you!