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!

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Idea Group Additions and Rebalance

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!