Europa Universalis IV News

Hello and welcome to the 2nd Dev Diary for the content of the Sub-Saharan region. Today we will continue with West Africa and take a look at Songhai.

Songhai is the militaristic powerhouse, which will replace Mali as the dominant power of West Africa until its end through infightings for the throne and at the hands of the Moroccans invading from the North. As a result of that, the mission tree of Songhai focuses on militaristic advancement, the conquest of West Africa and the expansion into Maghreb (basically turning the tables on the Moroccans).


The second and third columns are classic conquest missions. Although I like to avoid pure conquest missions, they are inevitable for a country which is famous for its militaristic expansion.

With that said, the second column focuses on the conquest of the western territories of West Africa until you knock at Mali’s doorstep. The mission “Take the Empire Title” requires you to be a stronger power than Mali by having a bigger military, more prestige, higher stability and more Power Projection than Mali. As a reward you gain the Empire title and a permanent claim on every province owned by Mali or its subjects.

The third column focuses more on the “miscellaneous” conquest targets such as the tribe of Air, the Maghrebi of the North or the important Center of Trade Jenné (I call them Jenné here for consistency sake with the game). Speaking of which, if you are at war with Jenné and siege their capital down they get an event asking them to try for a white peace through a marriage. If they decide so, you as Songhai get the following event:



This event is a reference to the peace Jenné gained through the marriage of Sonni Ali with the widow of the deceased ruler of Jenné. Songhai would also get a consort if they have not the Iqta reform active too.

With the mission "Contact with Maghreb" you gain the first claims on Maghreb and over the course of the two following missions you will conquer Maghreb.

Someone might now wonder why the fourth column looks so empty though, and there is a good explanation for it. If you finish the mission "Eliminate the Mossi Threat" you get the following event:



You have the choice of either converting the traditional people of your country or tolerating them for who they are, and even become their protector. Either choice will unlock a different set of missions you can pursue. Unlocking the religious missions gives you access to these ones:


The highlight of the religious missions is the mission "Invite Scholars" as it requests you to have invited any religious school scholar. The reward is that the invited scholar becomes a "resident of your country", which means you can always invite the scholar without having the need of a diplomatic relation with a country of the scholar's school (that was quite the mouthful...). "Convert West Africa" is quite self explanatory which is converting all of the provinces of the Sahel, Niger and Guinea regions (you are NOT required to convert uncolonized provinces though). The reward is a little bit unusual: every country, who has the "Same Religion" opinion modifier of Songhai will now also get a permanent increased +25 (value might change) opinion of Songhai - as long Songhai is in the Muslim religious group. Additionally, it gives permanent +1 Tolerance of the True Faith.

Meanwhile, the path of tolerance has these missions for you:


While the religious missions are quite self explanatory, the tolerance missions are a little bit different, but at their core they mirror the religious path. With "Guarantee the Old Traditions" your Dhimmi estate will get a new estate privilege, which replaces the privileges "Guaranteed Dhimmi Autonomy" and "Guaranteed Religious Minority" with "Guaranteed Traditions", a stronger combination of these two privileges before:



Completing "Pagan Alliances" will permanently increase the opinion of all Fetishist countries of you by +25 (value might change). "Unite the Tribes" is the final tolerance mission. You must ensure that at least 35 owned provinces are Fetishistic and that you have a stable and tolerant empire (so basically, have stability, no rebels, +3 Tolerance of Heathens). Completing it will give you the following event:


This concludes the alternative missions.

A few other highlights of the mission tree and for Songhai:

• The right most column will focus on the economical part of Songhai. As Songhai replaces Mali, it is only fitting that they have also gold and trade related missions (the rewards are however not as explosive as Mali's used to be)
  
• The left most column focuses on the modernization of Songhai, with the first mission giving you support for Feudalism in your capital + random province.
  
• "Embrace the Glory of Battle" enables a decision, which at a price of 200 Mil Power, which reduces your Global Manpower Modifier by 15% and Manpower Recovery Modifier by -10%, but increases Discipline by 2.5%, Yearly Army Professionalism by 0.5 and Army Tradition by 0.5. This modifier is active as long your ruler lives and can be renewed with every new ruler.
  
• "Modernize Songhai" disables the event "Comet Sighted" as your people will finally live in a more enlightened time.
  

Now one last thing before finishing the Dev Diary. In my very first Dev Diary (in which I made a lot of rookie mistakes, I admit it) I presented the content for Mali. Over the week it has seen some changes I think you all might like.

1. Mali has discovered Fezzan, Mamluks and the path to Mecca (see image below)


2. Mali's privilege "Controlled Gold Mining" has seen some rebalancing (btw, in the code the modifier already affected Goods Produced and not Production Efficiency. Just the tooltip was messed up last week and I didn't notice it.... so yeah, sorry about the misunderstandings). Again, the values are nowhere near final but it is getting there.


3. Mali previous "Abu Bakr" missions have seen a rebranding, changing the name to Ko Mamadi, the Madinke (Mali) version of Muhammad ibn Qu. (Abu Bakr was originally used because of consistency with the achievement name. In hindsight, this was a dumb decision of mine)


4. The final Mali mission with the 15k Ducats requirement and its reward have been completely replaced. Now it only requires you to have 3 Level 3 Advisors and Monthly Income of 50 Ducats.
The reward is the following event


I would like to talk more about it in this Dev Diary, but I think it is bloated enough already. The pilgrimage summed up is recreating the pilgrimage Mansa Musa did a century ago, but this time you have the choice to go on an alternative route, which goes through Europe. The pilgrimage takes around 5 years to complete and every ~100 days your travelling group visits a region where you enjoy the hospitality of the local people there. You can decide to leave a donation or move on. If you decide to make a big gift, the greatest nation of the region will receive this:


The rate of inflation has been lowered significantly and the AI is more inclined to refuse if the event would put them over 15 Inflation. The ducats you get are currently 1 year of Mali's Income and the Inflation scales with the Percentage of trade income compared to your total income (values might change later). Although I will miss the bankruptcy pop-ups, I have to admit that this design is much healthier for the game overall, and that a total crash of a continent does not belong in the base game.

That's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the Dev Diary. Next week we will explore the Horn of Africa. Until then I wish you all a good time!

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