Europa Universalis 4

[KevinC]

Is this expansion slated for release before the end of the year?

They haven’t said, but even though this seems to be larger than their previous expansions, I would be very surprised if it doesn’t ship this year.

EDIT: The Paradox web store has the release date listed as 2014.

[kedaha]

Are the expansions ever on sale?

[CraigM]

Yes, often in conjunction with the base game or a new expansion release.

[pg1]

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?800644-EU4-Art-of-War-Dev-Diary-4-Army-Builder-Rebel-Relocation-and-China

New dev diary. Man looks good. The features which cut down on micromanagement are a huge plus in my book. I’m liking the new map more and more. There was also some stream pictures that I can’t find now which showed Central America and North Africa being reworked with more nations.

And this quote from Wiz -

AE will be tied to base tax in AoW.

EDIT: Images -

[pg1]

DDRJake has conquered the world a few times as Ryukyu but how does he fare as Genoa (and allies) vs France/Castile early game?

http://youtu.be/bKua_MWzEOA?t=17m42s - war starts
http://youtu.be/F6DpdULyBMI - war ends

Happens to the best of us.

[KevinC]

Another Friday, another Dev Diary! This one talks about Diplomatic enhancements as well as the Catholic/Curia overhaul.

Diplomacy enhancements include the ability to declare in support of rebels in other countries, fighting for your subjects’ claims, demanding war reparations, and selling ships.

They’re also completely revamping the Curia. I’ll just copy and paste it here:

We’ve removed the subgame of investing papal influence to gain cardinals. It wasn’t interesting, and though automating the spending of influence to dominate the curia made things easier, it did nothing to address the underlying problems with the system.

Cardinals are no longer just a person. They are a title permanently tied to one Catholic province. The game will generate new cardinals until there are 49, so you could have a cardinal in Paris or Vienna. These cardinals give benefits to whomever controls their province, as long as that province is still Catholic. If there are less than 49 cardinals, such as at the beginning of the game or when they start converting to new religions, a new one will be spawned each year, with rich European provinces being most likely to be chosen.

There is still papal influence, and this is generated by the number of cardinals in your territory, so there is some randomness you will have to deal with. Your relation with the Papacy also has an effect, as do events and other game decisions. You can store up to 100 papal influence points.

The Curia controller is now determined when a new Pope is elected and the controller will remain in charge until the Pope dies. At any point during the game, you can spend papal influence in an effort to strengthen your chance of a friendly candidate winning the next election. If France spends 70 total papal influence, Poland 40, and Spain 30, then France has 50% chance of winning the next Papal election and controlling the Curia.

You can now also spend your papal influence on other actions in the Papacy View. For example, you can spend papal influence to increase your monarch’s legitimacy (a handy blessing from the Pope for rulers with tenuous claims), or to persuade the Pope to send you money.

This expansion keeps looking better and better. As much as I love it I can’t play EU4 in it’s existing form right now, there’s just too many enhancements they’ve announced for me to get into the current game!

[KevinC]

This week’s Dev Diary focuses on Client States, which are custom-made vassals you can create after diplomatic tech 22.

As is often the case, Napoleon was an inspiration here. We have added the concept that the great Emperor introduced to so many places in Europe, creating countries with new identities and flags out of territories he liberated from the decadent monarchies of Europe.

Once you have reached Diplomatic Tech 22 in Art of War (about the 1690s in game-time, for Western European powers), you get the ability to create Client States. You do this by designating a capital province on the map, and then pressing the client state button in the province interface. When creating a new Client State, you can edit its name, its flag and map color, and decide which symbol should be on its flag. Then you can add any adjacent province to that new country at any time. There is no upper limit to the size of these new vassals. When created, a Client State is treated as a very loyal vassal.

Allies can also now use your transport ships (and vice versa), which you can toggle on and off.

[pg1]

And they haven’t even started talking yet about the core focus of the expansion!

[KevinC]

And they haven’t even started talking yet about the core focus of the expansion!

No kidding! They’ve said in a few streams that this is the largest expansion they’ve done, not just for EU4 but for any of their other products. I believe it, because even by the first couple dev diaries they had outlined significant improvements and additions to the game. Meanwhile, they just keep rolling out the new features. An awesome game is about to get a whole lot more awesomer.

[CraigM]

This is honestly the expansion I most look forward to on any of their games. Well aside from the one that added Norse pagans to CK2, but it’s hard to beat enlightening people about Odin. So many refinements going right for what I want from EU4.

[jpinard]

Shouold I wait until this expansion comes out before trying my hand at EU IV? I’m a total newb who is in love with CK2.

[KevinC]

Shouold I wait until this expansion comes out before trying my hand at EU IV? I’m a total newb who is in love with CK2.

The game is quite good as-is. The expansion is adding all kinds of nice features but it’s not a case where they’re fixing game-breaking issues with the current version or anything like that.

[KevinC]

Wow, that came much sooner than I was expecting. Art of War is out on October 30th. They also have a new Dev Diary out which, as usual, contains some changes I’m looking forward to. You can now have your fort garrisons sortie to attempt to break a siege, you can abandon idea groups, abandon cores you don’t want, and they’re throwing out the old province terrain system, where each province had a % chance for various terrain types to be used during the battle.

We’ve decided that the terrain system in EU4, while interesting, was difficult for the player to understand and plan their battles around. In the free patch accompanying Art of War, each province has one dominant terrain type that will always be the one used for battles as opposed to having a percentage breakdown of possible terrain types. We’ve also improved the terrain information overall by fleshing out terrain tooltips and adding river indicators & tooltips that will show you which provinces have rivers flowing between them.

And, finally, something I’ve been wanting since EU4 came out yet never would have expected to see it in the Art of War expansion: They’re revamping trade good pricing!

Another new thing in the free patch accompanying Art of War is an overhaul of the trade goods price mechanics. The old, confusing and unwieldy system of supply and demand is now gone, replaced with a system of fixed prices that are influenced by important events. For example, the base price of slaves may be fairly low, but when the Europeans start colonizing the New World in earnest, the ‘Triangle Trade’ event will fire and greatly increase the value of the slave trade… at least until the abolitionists get going a few centuries later.

[CraigM]

they’re throwing out the old province terrain system, where each province had a % chance for various terrain types to be used during the battle.

See this is the one change so far I’m not too keen on. Basically because I see it vastly depreciating maneuver as a stat for generals. Right now maneuver basically impacts supply levels and combat terrain. By neutering half of that equation it goes from ‘less important but still useful’ to ‘nearly worthless’. I get it, I’ve in this very thread had to explain the terrain system, but like all of the combat system it’s fairly obscure to anyone who doesn’t dig into the guts of the system. It was a bit of depth to the system, and really it wasn’t that hard to understand. Just not immediately obvious if you didn’t know where you were looking.

Still on balance this expansion looks great. Really keen on the overhauling of religious leagues creating room for dynamic 30 Years War scenarios.

[KevinC]

I guess maneuver still has a nice impact on an army’s movement speed, so a high maneuver general is able to get to a province faster and therefore have the good terrain. That’s something at least. Honestly, though, I was never even sure if general Maneuver worked as the wiki described. The terrain I got was so random that it just felt like a total crapshoot anyway, leaving Maneuver as a stat I already mostly ignored. I would love to see it be made on par with Fire and Shock, though!

[pg1]

Yeah, the terrain change is one I don’t like either. High maneuver generals were useful and you could count on them to consistently fight on the most favorable terrain. I hope to compensate they’ve given them more speed in army movement around the map or some other advantages.

They are also posting new national ideas on the forums (two are already up for Provence and Mogadishu). They said they’d post one a day until release (not sure if that counts non-work days). So we should be getting at least 15+ new national ideas.

I actually thought they were changing up combat substantially but now I’m not so sure. Sorties from forts however will have a huge impact since it seems you could have more troops in your forts than your force limit especially early game. It’ll also encourage investing in forts and stop somewhat lame play where you carpet siege a nation with 2k stacks of men.

I’m mostly looking forward to AI changes and improvements but those are more general stuff so I doubt they’ll go into them in depth.

[KevinC]

BTW, for those worried about Maneuver stat being nerfed by the terrain changes, it sounds like it’ll be getting some other effects in the expansion. No specifics were given as of yet.

Maneuver will have additional effects to compensate for loss of utility in AOW.

[KevinC]

The tenth and final dev diary has been posted. There’s some miscellaneous changes to trade nodes and diplomatic annexation that sound pretty nice, but this was the one that stood out to me. No more alliance cascades!

A source of confusion in the past has been the way war leaders change during wars. You’ll declare war on Poland, who calls their ally Russia, only to find that Russia takes over the war and calls their ally France… with no indication in the declare war screen that this would happen.

The system of declaring wars and choosing the war leader changes has been majorly altered in the upcoming 1.8 patch. War leader changes will now only happen under exceptional circumstances - mainly, when a subject calls in their overlord. Since this allows you to get around some thorny alliances by declaring on small allies, we’ve introduced a penalty for taking things from allies in a war. Vassalizing, taking provinces, releasing nations etc on allies now costs double the warscore, since they are not the formal target of the war.

However, you can get around this penalty by declaring the ally of an enemy a ‘co-belligerent’ when declaring war on that enemy. When you have declared an enemy a co-belligerent, you can take things from them at the normal cost, BUT they will be able to call their own allies into the war (as normal allies). So, in the situation above, Russia will only be able to call France if you declare Russia a co-belligerent in your war against Poland. If you don’t, you won’t have to fight France… but declaring war on Poland to try and take things from Russia becomes very inefficient.

Additionally, to give small nations with large allies a degree of protection, you will no longer be able to gain 100% warscore just from occupying the warleader unless the war has been going on for at least five years. This means that if you attack Ulm and they call in France, you can’t end the war in a couple months by assaulting and annexing Ulm.

Finally there’s also been some improvements to the declare war screen where you can now see if enemy allies are expected to join or not, and various fixes of situations where it would display your own allies as willing to join but they’d end up dishonoring or joining the other side.

Yes!! That was my last thorny little issue with EU4 (which was already a big improvement from EU3 in this particular regard). I sooo cannot wait for this expansion next week.

EDIT: There were a couple other tidbits that caught my eye.

• Units pips have been rebalanced again so that the different tech groups are now almost completely equal, but still peak at different times.
• You can no longer join or stay in coalitions against countries you have a truce with.

[Ginger_Yellow]

So basically I have a week to burn out on Beyond Earth before EUIV returns to sucking up all my gaming time.

[CraigM]

The tenth and final dev diary has been posted. There’s some miscellaneous changes to trade nodes and diplomatic annexation that sound pretty nice, but this was the one that stood out to me. No more alliance cascades!

Yes!! That was my last thorny little issue with EU4 (which was already a big improvement from EU3 in this particular regard). I sooo cannot wait for this expansion next week.

EDIT: There were a couple other tidbits that caught my eye.

Holy cow, that’s amazing. A decent give and take IMO. No longer exploit by creating a war meant to take down an ally, but also makes it easier to avoid insane dogpiles. Really these changes are huge, love it.

The unit pip balance is… I dunno. I’d need to see it in action. Sorry but a non-westernized Native American unit should never be equal to a gunpowder based European one, but tech penalties do enforce that to a degree.