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July 4 at 9:06 AM
A few weeks ago u/pure_anger completed what is arguably one of the s..ingle toughest achievements ever achieved in EU4.Can we get a 馃憦 for this World conquest - all at Mil Tech 3!See More
July 2 at 10:10 AM
Did you miss the Stream last night? Catch up on all the best parts before tonight's episode right!July 2 at 4:05 AM
Patch Announcement and Content Teases! Today's Dev Diary announces.. the post-summer free patch and dives into some juicy teases about Content for the European Expansion! Read all about it: https://pdxint.at/306j0R0See More
聽 “What we’re trying to do is strengthen trading nations, because here is the problem for all the trading nations in the game: you don’t have any depth,” Thomas Johansson, design lead on Europa Universalis 4, explained. “You don’t have any manpower. We’re trying to strengthen that play style to a certain extent to give benefits to being a trading nation.”
That’s the overriding goal of the upcoming Wealth of Nations expansion to the superb Europa Universalis 4. While EU4 already refined its approach to the economy quite a bit, it did not go far enough to re-create the dynamics that gave rise to powerful trade empires like Great Britain, the Dutch, and Venice. Now, with Wealth of Nations, Johansson wants to give them more tools to become powerful, but also steer them into long and bloody trade wars.
Johansson explains that the most recent EU4 expansion, Conquest of Paradise, was “big picture” improvements and changes. Wealth of Nations, by contrast, is a comprehensive series of refinements. By tweaking just about every aspect of trade and diplomacy to promote more conflict and competition for trade, Johansson hopes to leave players shocked at how differently EU4 will play in Wealth of Nations.
The biggest new feature in Wealth of Nations is the national trade company, like the British or Dutch East India Companies. They will, Johansson argues, paint a much more realistic portrait of colonial expansion than EU4 does at the moment.
“Colonial nations …have lots of colonists they send over. They form colonial states. They mind their own business, but what they do and how you manage them can blow up in your face in one form or another,” Johansson says. “But trading in the Indian Ocean was more like taking control over the trade routes in an area rather than just conquering large swaths of territory.”
Enter the East India Companies. Unlike traditional colonies, they don’t contribute taxes and manpower. But if you assign them provinces, they provide huge bonuses to local trade power, giving the mother nation a greater slice of the pie in a given region and more ability to steer trade. They also don’t require the same kind of investment that a regular colony does. Where typical colonies often necessitate full-scale invasion and occupation, trade companies can cherry-pick a bit more and accomplish their mission without pulling their sponsor into a major colonial effort.
While the getting is good
It’s a cool twist on the colonial model, but both Fraser Brown and I admitted we were disappointed that East India Companies can not get out of control the way they did historically. The British East India Company, for instance, basically started conquering India by itself, presenting the British government with a fait accompli. The Company and their mistreated Indian army also sparked the 1857 Mutiny.
We asked Johansson about this, and he understood why we were so fascinated by the idea. But it’s also a simulational element that might be more at home in a game like Victoria 2 than EU4, which is more about giving players control of historical forces. This is a trade-off Paradox Development Studio often face: when does something make for a more interesting model of the world, but a less fun game? With trade companies, they remain tools in the hands of players, and not independent operators.
Still, because they are so dependent on their parent nation, trade companies should give rise to more conflict. A trade-company dominated region is effectively unguarded and open to predation by any other power, meaning that they require active defense and protection from the homeland. That should pull more countries into conflict as they prey on one another’s trade provinces.
Local trade domination is also more important. “Colonizing by trade empire is going to be more surgical. You take that [province], that one, and that one. …We’re dividing Asia into areas just like we did with colonial regions. So, you’re going to have Indian, Indonesian, and Chinese [trade regions]. If you dominate the trade, or if your trading company dominates trade within a certain area, then that’s going to give you an extra merchant.”
Johansson really wants trading nations to be spending more time fighting and thriving than they did in the base release of EU4. Trade wars, for instance, have been set up to last generations and invite recurring conflict between trade nations.
“We’re going to change around how [the trade dispute] war goal works because now it just expires after the truce expires. [With Wealth of Nations], you’re stuck in this peace deal if you lose the war,” Johansson explained.
Cycle of violence
So if you pick a trade fight with another power and lose, your peace settlement is much more open-ended. You are stuck transferring trade power to the winner until you eventually say, “enough is enough” and break the deal. But the moment you do that, your adversary gets a new casus belli that lets them renew the war. It could be a very vicious circle.
“So if you lose the trade conflict, you actually have to become stronger and then be able to stand up to yourself,” Johansson says. “We’re trying to get to a point where we’re trying to create more layered conflicts. We want multiple wars. …Trading powers should fight each other. Major powers should fight each other.”
The one group that might find life gets a little easier in the new expansion is merchant republics. Johansson points out that Venice, which was one of the most powerful Renaissance trade powers, is basically a sitting-duck for Austrian conquest. That’s both somewhat ahistorical, and not really how a merchant republic should be handled within the game. So Wealth of Nations is refining their role.
“We want to give an incentive regarding more interesting play in the merchant republics,” Johansson says. “We also want to give an incentive to preserve them so that, if you have a merchant republic trading in a trade node, their strength in trade power is going to translate into bonuses for production for all the other nations living there.”
Taken separately, these may all sound like small changes. But they could have huge ramifications for how Europa Universalis IV works, as the trade, colonization, and militarist strategies become more intertwined. When Wealth of Nations comes out this spring, every great power will ignore the trade game at its peril.
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Paradox Interactive had set the starting game at Nov 11, 1444 because it is the end of the Varna crusade, and it ended at January 2, 1821 due to Napoleon’s death. As we all know, there are interesting histories before and after this time interval. And many of players wanted to play within these time period.
Just open up the Europa Universalis IVcommondefines.lua with a text editor software if you want to time travel. Have a backup file if you want to do something big. Be creative of the time you want to go, but don’t go to wild because Paradox doesn’t have all the data in human history. Within 50 years before 1444 should have the most fun when playing European, Asian and North African nations.
Past
We can mod the starting date to whenever we want. But Paradox doesn’t have all of the data of pre-1444 rulers and boundaries. And not all nations in the 1444 existed in pre 1444 eras. For example, Ming doesn’t exist and doesn’t have a ruler in 1350. But Ming will still appear in the game but with no fixed ruler, and the system will generate a random ruler for Ming. (Even the ruler existed in history, they still need to be in Paradox’s historical ruler file)
If played well, player can alter the history being set at 1444.
Witnessing Dai Viet rebell against Zhu Di
Zoom in at the independent Sicily
The limit of how far we can time travel
Trivial Question: answer this in the comment, who was the ruler of Morocco in 1370? Person answer this correctly can add the ruler in the history file in their EU4 folder.
Nations with “no historical ruler” in Paradox documents
Random ruler
Takes forever to raise tech level because we are in 116 years ahead
Future
In the late game, Paradox apparently slacked off even more. Late nations like Bukhara’s national idea turned into general national ideas. But hey, who’s going to play the little Bukhara in the 1800s anyway? There won’t be achievement, and playing Uzbek in 1444 is definitely more fun! Not like any blogger is going to have time to talk about it too.
Of course, James Monroe wasn’t in office for that long, nor the Spanish occupied the same parts of Mexico for that long. The late games are less dynamic than early games, especially after 1820. So playing 1830 is not going to be much different from playing in 1840, only the amount of times left for the game will be different.
Dec 26, 2018 - Here's the fastest way to get Windows 10 installed on a new gaming rig. But things have changed since the optical drive era, and installing Windows 10. Running an unactivated version of Windows if you install without the. Jun 2, 2017 - I get it. I disconnected my DVD drive about 4 years ago, and when changed cases this past year I opted for the Fractal Design Define S, which. Install windows 10 free. I have a Windows 10 Installation Disc but my new computer (yet to be built) has no optical drive nor the optical drive bay. Am I able to download. Apr 2, 2019 - Create a Windows Installation Disk to Reinstall Windows 10. This method is. Use a Recovery Drive to Reinstall Windows 10 Without CD. My sister has windows 10 on he laptop. Is it possible to make an iso from that then put it on a usb and just buy the windows 10 disc kit and use the product key. How to install windows 10 home DVD without an optical drive?
Windows Media Player 11 enhances your experience of digital media with a new interface for organizing your audio and video files. Windows longhorn sound pack. An ultimate level of performance is provided so that the operating system consumes lesser system resources and provides the power to do everything.A user-friendly interface is there for the better understanding of the user along with Windows AERO. AERO was for the first time introduced in Microsoft Longhorn so the user-interface become more appealing and attractive. Windows Defender with an enhanced firewall provides a secure environment with real-time protection.
In game, nations in 1840 is like in 1820. Qing still doesn’t have global trade in 1840. Europe is still in 31,31,31 and the rest of the world are behind of Europe. In addition, most of the historical events should be fired and it will be a very boring game.
Even technology is fixed, no global trade even in 1840
Using consoles to make Qing the most advance nation in the world
List of historical rulers in EU4 (Please enlighten me, EU4, what are those Qing rulers in the 1400s?)
Not sure if Paradox loves Kedah in the 1100s and the Daimyos in the 1300s, or they just simply using them for testing. But they are the earliest recorded rulers in the historical ruler list. In the same time, there are still many Japanese rulers beyond 1821.
Bonus: Play the Timurids in 1370 for an awesome 6,6,6,2 Khan
Late game rulers
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The next expansion for Europa Universalis 4 is taking the grand strategy game into a particularly high-stakes part of history. Golden Century is set to expand on the naval aspect of the game, building on the Spanish Reconquista and a broad focus on the Iberian peninsula. Where there’s mountains of stolen Aztec gold, there’s opportunity, and the chance to tussle with or even play as entire pirate nations. You’ve got until December 11th to whittle your perfect peg-leg or pick out the perfect plumage for your Spanish helm. The announcement trailer shines below.
This new expansion focuses on a notably dark and violent time in history (aren’t they all?), so my eyebrow may have been elevated a bit by the cheerful announcement of ‘minority expulsion’ as a feature. Hard to argue that it wasn’t an important historical force, but perhaps not the best phrased in the official announcement. Still, in-game it will allow you to force out minorities from your homelands, and shuffle them off to your outer colonies or subject territories. Iberia will also be able to appoint clerics as governors to accelerate conversion and bring the pious in line.
There’s a focus on missions for Iberia and Northwest Africa, giving the Spanish empire plenty to do. To aid in these goals, there’s a bunch of new naval units and mechanics, including flagships and naval sieges, pummelling forts with cannon-fire. I’m curious how pirate nations will play – presumably working on a much smaller scale than others, but with similarly minor goals to plunder and stay afloat as long as possible. I’m just hoping Paradox slip in some easter eggs into this too, or else this expansion might be forever in the shadow of Crusader Kings 2’s animal kingdoms.
Europa Universalis 4: Golden Century launches on December 11th. You can find it on Steam and Paradox Plaza, and will cost £7.19/$9.99.
Fun and Balance is the most fun and the most balanced way to play Europa Universalis IV.- Fun and Balance for EU4 1.11.4 - Download.
- Fun and Balance for EU4 1.11.4 and Shattered Europe (latest Steam Workshop version) - Download.
- Fun and Balance for EU4 1.11.4 and Extended Timeline (0.12.3 version) - Download.
Goals of the mod are Fun and Balance
The primary goal of the mod is to let you choose your own adventure, and play in whichever way you want. It removes tons of arbitrary restrictions and forced historical railroading, and adds new options not available in vanilla.The second goal of the mod is to balance things out - players in any game will inherently tend to gravitate towards things which are more powerful, even if they're having less fun this way. By helping many of currently underpowered options the space of viable strategies expands, and players are more likely to find one they like without constantly being pressured by the game to abandon it and doing more powerful thing.
The mod with extreme prejudice doesn't want to do any of:
- being more 'historical' or 'realistic'
- caring about multiplayer in any way whatsoever
- preventing 'exploits' if it significantly hits legitimate strategies
- force delay by overuse of artificial restrictions like points and timeouts
Technology behind the mod
Fun and Balance also happens to be using the most advanced modding technology out there - nothing whatsoever is done by editing text files, all code is treated as data, which allows many kinds of transformations which would be extremely tedious or close to impossible otherwise.
If you're interested in modding Europa Universalis IV and other Paradox games, you can access all tools I use on github.
If you're interested in modding Europa Universalis IV and other Paradox games, you can access all tools I use on github
Fun and Balance has menu accessible from decision system which allows you to turn some of the more intrusive features on/off to customize your campaign.
Not everything can be modified this way, fortunately changes in Fun and Balance are independent from each other as much as possible, so they should be straightforward to change manually.
- You can form Merchant Republic or Noble Republic regardless of your size
- You can become Theocracy by decision if you complete Religious ideas and fulfill a few other criteria
- You can take decision to change to religion of your capital at cost of stability, even to another religious groups
- Arbitrary prohibition from Ottomans forming Byzantium removed (if they manage to be Greek and Orthodox)
- Ottomans can do decision to move capital to Constantinople regardless of their religion and culture
- For most cultures in game which didn't have such option, primary country of their culture is now formable. Decision requires having given culture as primary, every province of given culture, and admin tech 10. (can be disabled from config menu)
- EU3 style partial westernization is now available - it allows any worse than Muslim tech country to pay a lot of points, stability and unrest to go to Muslim tech level (can be disabled from config menu)
Base diplomatic relations limit is doubled, as well as most relations bonuses, so everyone can now engage in interesting diplomacy instead of saving their every last precious slots for necessary vassals and one blob ally, with nothing left over.
Resulting dense network of alliances, marriages, and guarantees makes diplomacy much more challenging, and brute expansion much more difficult.
Bonus for heir chance from number of royal marriages is reduced from +5% to +3% to ensure similar rate of succession crises.
Marches were extremely underpowered, so decision to revoke march now only costs -100 relations for 10 years instead of -200 relations pretty much indefinitely. They are still fairly underpowered, but thanks to higher limit on relations you're not basically wasting precious relation slot forever on some tiny bonuses, so they're somewhat closer to legitimate strategy.
Diploannexations cost only 1/bt (as restoring it to pre-nerf system where they only cost diplomat time is not possible), but annexation is only possible after 20 years of vassalage. Autonomy at diploannexation is set to 50%, same as with conquests. Opinion penalty for annexing vassals is capped at -100.
Diplovassalization's hard cap of 40 base tax removed, but with quadratic penalty for base tax nations are very unlikely to accept vassalization unless you're really huge, and even then only for a few bt over 40.
Diplovassalization's hard cap of 40 base tax removed, but with quadratic penalty for base tax nations are very unlikely to accept vassalization unless you're really huge, and even then only for a few bt over 40.
Protectorates are completely removed from game.
There are no scaled truces, they're all uniformly 5 years.
AI is somewhat less stubborn about sticking in wars forever, with length of war penalty to willingness reduced by 1/3. Penalty for overly long war is the same.
Minimum time to get 100% warscore for fully occupying war leader decreased from 5 to 2 years. This feature was added as exploit prevention, but 5 year timeout was mostly getting in a way of legitimate strategy and just forced player to come up with other exploits. 2 years is a good balance between giving enemies' allies chance to intervene and avoiding pointlessly prolonging wars years after they're over.
There are no scaled truces, they're all uniformly 5 years.
AI is somewhat less stubborn about sticking in wars forever, with length of war penalty to willingness reduced by 1/3. Penalty for overly long war is the same.
Minimum time to get 100% warscore for fully occupying war leader decreased from 5 to 2 years. This feature was added as exploit prevention, but 5 year timeout was mostly getting in a way of legitimate strategy and just forced player to come up with other exploits. 2 years is a good balance between giving enemies' allies chance to intervene and avoiding pointlessly prolonging wars years after they're over.
Power projection numbers are mostly reasonable when they happen, but they decay too quickly, making bonuses like declaring war on rival disappear often before the war even ends. Many such bonuses and penalties now decay two times slower.
Bonus for eclipsing your rival increased from 5 to 30. It made no sense that it was basically a penalty (as you lost more in long term rival bonus than you gained from eclipsing bonus), and with no way to stop the game from arbitrarily making the same countries unrivalable and then rivalable again, it's a reasonable workaround.
Rival selection range increased from 150 to 250, giving most countries wider choice of rivals, and no longer forcing you to rival 3 closest similar sized countries regardless of your plans.
League Wars were a fun idea, but making Orthodox HRE restoration impossible is unacceptable.
The system got changed to much more dynamic one, where any heretic elector can start league for their chosen heresy (Protestant and Reformed only after 1550, Orthodox and Coptic any any time), which can then proceed to .
Due to limitations of the system, once league for given religion triggers, the only possible outcomes are victory of Catholicism, victory of given religion, or peace of Westphalia - other heresies are locked out. In normal game without player involvement Protestant league will trigger overwhelming majority of the time, with occasional Reformed league instead, but with player involvement or custom setup anything is possible.
The mod returns to EU4 1.8-1.10 system where league victory replaced official religion, but didn't immediately lock it, so multiple league wars are possible.
Minor HRE change is that emperor's CB to take imperial territory from non-members now gives only 10% AE.
Missions in Fun and Balance are a lot more fun.The system got changed to much more dynamic one, where any heretic elector can start league for their chosen heresy (Protestant and Reformed only after 1550, Orthodox and Coptic any any time), which can then proceed to .
Due to limitations of the system, once league for given religion triggers, the only possible outcomes are victory of Catholicism, victory of given religion, or peace of Westphalia - other heresies are locked out. In normal game without player involvement Protestant league will trigger overwhelming majority of the time, with occasional Reformed league instead, but with player involvement or custom setup anything is possible.
The mod returns to EU4 1.8-1.10 system where league victory replaced official religion, but didn't immediately lock it, so multiple league wars are possible.
Minor HRE change is that emperor's CB to take imperial territory from non-members now gives only 10% AE.
- Missions with awful rewards (like 5 prestige) have been changed to give something more meaningful, usually a bunch of appropriate monarch points.
- Most tag-specific decisions are now available to other countries in similar geographic situation if their original country doesn't exist any more. If your Netherlands holds Paris and France is eliminated, you can get French missions. This will dynamically change your mission pool as game progresses. And if you're HRE and hold Rome and Constantinople you can even try restoring the Roman Empire. (can be disabled from config menu; in a few cases mission descriptions are going to sound a bit weird, but missions reused this way are generally sensible)
- Cancelling or failing any mission will reduce its weight for next 25 years, so you're very unlikely to get it again (unless there are no other missions in given category). This makes it far more likely that you'll have access to at least some meaningful missions at any given time.
Nation Designers Enhancements
Nation Designer now adds missing bonuses, bonus levels up to +10 (at steeply increasing cost, so only really available in easy / very easy mode), missing government types, and increases minimum distance between provinces from 200 to 1000 so you can create nation shaped like Genoa if you want.It also fixes default monarch/heir stats from 2/2/2 to 3/3/3, which correspond to actual average monarch stats, so custom nations don't suffer from -1/-1/-1 penalty for their first two monarchs.
All penalties for having too many ideas from same category are removed.
Holy Sites System
The mod adds optional (can be turned off from menu) CK2 inspired system of Holy Sites. Most religions get 5 holy sites, and small bonuses if country of their religion holds them, with much largest bonus for the whole set.Countries can also get missions to conquer holy sites - either ones controlled by their neighbours, or anywhere in the world if they complete religious ideas.
War Exhaustion is real
War Exhaustion now represents actual exhaustion from the war, and isn't just a meaningless dump for monarch points.It is not possible to pay to reduce War Exhaustion while at war, AI willingness to peace out based on war exhaustion is significantly higher, and high war exhaustion results in penalties to morale and defensiveness.
EU3 style republican elections
Eu4 Most Fun Nations In Africa
The mod restores EU3 style republican elections, with choice of 3 random candidates, and no stat gain on reelection. Tradition loss due to reelection is lower (scaled -3 instead of -10).It can be disabled from menu, restoring vanilla system.
Missionary rebalance
It made no sense that it's drastically easier to turn Catholics or Hindus into Sunnis than Ibadis into Sunnis. EU4 had a lot of local missionary bonuses to reduce certain conversions, but they never worked very well.All of them are thrown away, and replaced by base 2% for converting heretics, and base 1% for converting heathens, and base 4% for converting pagans. This leads to much more sensible and symmetric dynamic at all religious boundaries.
Missionary strength penalty for religious centers is reduced from completely unreasonable -5% to more reasonable -2%.
- Burgundy's capital moved to within HRE, and Burgundian Succession Crisis event disabled (can be reenabled from menu). This opens a lot more possibilities instead of invariably screwing them. Burgundy is still unlikely to succeed between France, emperor, and Dutch rebels event.
- Naval attrition from time at sea removed from game - it was only applied to player and AI was completely immune to it, so it was creating unfair advantage and mostly just forced excessive micromanagement without creating any interesting strategy
- Hordes get somewhat higher bonuses to make them a real threat early game, and they have much easier time reforming, without needing any idea groups (at which point they lose those bonuses). Special decision to form Manchu, Qing, Mughals, and Persia changed to align it with this system.
- Buildings are no longer destroyed on conquest. Monarch point cost for buildings is reduced from 10 to 5.
- Core loss time is doubled from 150 to 300 for same culture group, and 50 to 100 otherwise, to make sure there are plenty of releasable countries mid game.
- Capital and trade port move cost reduces to 100 each.
- Distant overseas minimum is increased from 150 to 400 to make Mediterranean countries able to expand on both sides.
- No restriction on how many idea groups from same category you can take.
- Random lucky nations is somewhat more random.
- Max monarch points stored increased from 999 to 1500 (and proportionally for other tech groups), mostly to decrease micromanagement and avoid wasting monarch points due to lack of alert on overflow.
- Accepted culture thresholds 10% for both gaining and losing accepted culture, instead of 20% to gain, 10% to lose, so order in which you acquire land no longer matters and it's more predictable.
- Culture conversion cost reduced from 25/bt to 10/bt as it was really overcosted relative to very limited benefit.
- Bad events from overextension increase more smoothly with overextension instread of having cliff at 100%. You'll have somewhat fewer at OE a bit over 100% but a lot more at very high OE.
- Advisor cost increase per year reduced from 1%/year to 0.5%/year. As income increases with tech, costs should too - and for military units and buildings they increase with tech level. Advisor cost increased by calendar year instead, and that was a huge unnecessary penalty to non-western countries which got much higher costs without corresponding increases in incomes.
- Penalty for techs ahead of time reduced from very high 10%/year to more modest 5%/year.
- Westernization speed does not depend on base tax.
- Rebel support increased from +4 unrest to +6 unrest.
- Policies no longer cost monarch points, as that made 90% of them completely worthless. Instead you can just choose up to 5 policies you want the most, and you're paying in opportunity cost. (tooltip still shows them costing points, but it works correctly)
Mod versions
Versions of the mod for vanilla and for Shattered Europe have same features.Version for Extended Timeline has many features disabled as they wouldn't necessarily make sense in every era. It has one extra feature in that after 1900 you can buy manpower for money by decision, as mercenaries are currently broken in that era.
Enjoy the game.