Europa Universalis 4

[KevinC]

Wow… today’s dev diary contains some pretty massive changes to fortresses, among some other things.

Connecting a bit to the previous reveal of our change to how building works, we have overhauled the fortress system.

There are now four different forts, one available each century, providing 1, 3, 5 and 7 fort-levels each. A newer fort makes the previous obsolete, so you only have 1 fort in each province. Each fortress also provides 5000 garrison per fort level, so besieging a fortress now requires a large investment.

Forts now also require maintenance to be paid each month, which currently costs about 1.5 ducats for a level 1 fort per month in 1444. Luckily, you can mothball a fortress which makes it drop to just 10 men defending it, and won’t cost you anything in upkeep.

Garrison growth for a fort is also a fair amount slower than before, so after you have taken a fort, you may want to stick around to protect it for a bit.

What is most important to know though, is that forts now have a Zone of Control. First of all, they will automatically take control of any adjacent province that does not have any forts that is adjacent and hostile to them. If two fortress compete over the same province, then the one with highest fort-level wins and in case of a tie, control goes to the owner of the province. Secondly, you can not walk past a fortress and its zone of control, as you have to siege down the blocking fort first.

Each capital have a free fort-level, but that fort will not have any ZoC, as most minor nations can not afford a major fortress.

[CraigM]

Whaaaaa?

Wow, some big things in there.

The commited forces bit? That’ll make luring enemy armies easier, as well as lowering micro.

‘Hey I’m here in the Alps here. Nice small army and all. Oh noes, you have your entire stack marching across that river into this mountain to attack me. Whoops, sorry, that 5 stack is going to be met by my 25 stack sitting next door 2 days after you arrive. Have fun eating that’

I dream of that.

Also WTF Burgundy? They just got blasted. While I appreciate them making Burgundy far less likely to survive, that just seems to me to be a buff to France. Now goes their biggest immediate check on expansion. Damnable BBB.

[meeper]

Wow… today’s dev diary contains some pretty massive changes to fortresses, among some other things.

Those are some pretty substantial changes. No more chasing armies half way across your opponents nation to corner them.

[meeper]

The commited forces bit? That’ll make luring enemy armies easier, as well as lowering micro.

‘Hey I’m here in the Alps here. Nice small army and all. Oh noes, you have your entire stack marching across that river into this mountain to attack me. Whoops, sorry, that 5 stack is going to be met by my 25 stack sitting next door 2 days after you arrive. Have fun eating that’

I dream of that.

Yeah, I’m a little concerned whether the AI will be able to handle those changes without getting gamed every time.

[KevinC]

Yeah, I’m a little concerned whether the AI will be able to handle those changes without getting gamed every time.

An impetuous for the change was the AI. Wiz had mentioned in the past that the #1 pain in the ass issue when coding the AI is that it can’t be sure where enemy armies are. They could be 98% of the way to some distant Siberian province so it rushes reinforcements over, only to have that army erase a month of marching and teleport back to the original location, now attacking in a completely different direction. This gives the AI a concrete rule to understand.

EDIT: Autocorrect and clarity.

[Scotten]

So I’m pretty new to EU4 (but I like it a lot) but the Committed Forces sounds like a good idea. I was in a war with the Mamluks, and he and I would go through a feint/react/withdraw dance for the last year of our war. And it seemed very unrealistic.

Now if you could pair this change with fog of war on enemy army sizes (IE you do not know if the army moving on you is 2000 men or 20,000) then it could create some interesting tactical situations.

[pg1]

These changes seem likely to make rich nations even stronger as they will be the only one able to make and operate lots of forts. Hard to say how it all works out. I’m hyped to try it however. War has been too simple in EU4. I actually thought AoW expansion was going to have various war changes like these. I was disappointed when it didn’t.

Strategic provinces which have many province borders will be great to put forts in as it could auto control many provinces when wars start. This will slow down armies and create chokepoints. If anything it might actually make blobs much stronger as they will be the only ones with lots of forts and it’ll make invaders limited in their movement so the blobs larger armies can catch them easier. It will slow down blob invasions as well but I’m not sure it’ll matter much for them.

Burgundy might be harder to conquer now if all those small nations are under them via PU or vassals. It should actually boost their FL significantly and put forts in each capital. Will also add more nations to the HRE which is nice.

[KevinC]

Looks like Protestant and Buddhist religions will be getting unique mechanics.

Each protestant church will have their own name in the interface, like Church of England and so on. You can then customise the benefits of your church, and also change it over time whenever you need. To change the aspect of your church, you have to spend Church Power.

…

A Church can have up to 3 different aspects, and there are 12 different ones to pick from. Some of these include.

Holy Sacraments: +2.5% Discipline
Individual Creeds: -5% Idea Costs
Adult Baptism: +1% Missionary Strength.

Should be noted that the passive -10% idea cost for Protestant is no longer there.

In terms of Buddhism, it’s about balancing Karma.

The Buddhist Faith gained the concept of Karma. Karma needs to be balanced, because if it goes too positive or negative, you end up with penalties. If you go too positive you end up with penalties to your diplomatic abilities, and if you go too negative, you end up with penalties to your military abilities.

However, If you keep a balanced karma, you gain bonuses to both diplomatic and military abilities.

Some examples on how you gain Karma include: Starting wars decrease Karma, while honoring defensive alliances increase Karma.

[pg1]

I’m pretty sick of everything getting +/- small bonuses. It is at the point where it doesn’t add much to the game anymore. I’m not saying these changes are bad but I think EU4 needs changes more inline with how forts change how warfare works not add a +/- to it.

[KevinC]

Sounds like they’re providing both. In the case of Protestantism, it was distinctly lacking any sort of mechanic compared to the other Christian faiths, so I can see why they’re fleshing it out. Granted, if this were “the Religion DLC” I’d find it a little disappointing, but as a small bullet point I think it’s great.

Speaking of “the religion DLC”, I still am unsure what the theme of this DLC is (let alone the name). So far, it seems like it has quite the variety of additions. The change to province development and fortresses are both going to be game-changing, IMO!

[pg1]

Some fairly major 1444 start changes incoming:

[CraigM]

Interesting… So basically another Frankfurt.

[Pod]

For those of us who haven’t memorised the map: What’s the difference?

[CraigM]

For those of us who haven’t memorised the map: What’s the difference?

So to start with my comment:

Ravensburg is not currently in the game. It was an Imperial Free City, much like Frankfurt. So that is a new addition (probably coupled with some province adjustments to create a new province). It is not pictured.

Other things:

Some territory borders have been adjusted. In particular look at the territories named Halicz and Przlymcl those are currenty 1 province, named Ruthenia. That has been split in 2, with some territory shaved from Marmoros given to them. Various territories are renamed, such as Tighina. Volyhina has been split in to two.

Going north to the Teutonic Knights that has been massively split up. As in more than doubled. Just in general the province density is much higher in this region. Just at a quick glance I see 15-20 new territories, and many provinces having more ‘authentic’ names (Serbia to Srbija for one).

[KevinC]

Not a huge dev diary, but this week’s discusses changes to sueing for peace.

[CraigM]

Has there been any official word on WTF is going on with Burgundy yet?

[KevinC]

All I heard was the northern provinces are vassals/PUs now.

[CraigM]

Yeah, I’d gathered as much. To me this strikes me as one of THE biggest territory changes I’ve seen so far. I was just hoping for a little more information as to what and why.

[KevinC]

The new DLC now has a title: EU4: Common Sense. It has a release date of June 9th and is priced at $14.99.

[KevinC]

So Johan dropped a HRE dev diary today. I like how he drops this before he gets started:

Sadly we can’t yet talk about the big feature of Common Sense, Subject Interaction… As we are completely redoing the interface for it, so it has to wait until next week.

Between province development and the complete rework of the fort system, this was already one of my most anticipated DLCs. I hadn’t realized the biggest feature was yet to be announced, now I’m really intrigued.