Posts Tagged Europa Universalis

11 results.
Oct09

Uncommon Changes

by Rindis on October 9, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the sixth in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Europa Universalis IV. See the previous reviews here:
Europa Universalis IV: A Fantastic Point of View
Wealth of Nations: National Trade
Res Publica: A Tradition of the People
Art of War: Reform-Minded Patch
El Dorado: Expansion of Gold

The sixth expansion for EU IV concentrated on government forms, and administering a country, while the patch introduced major changes to the basic stats of provinces, buildings, and sieges. Common Sense was released on June 9th 2015 alongside patch 1.12. Some general tweaks to the new systems came in patch 1.13 (which is the version I’m reviewing) in late August.

New Developments

In the original two games, each province tracked population, which fed into tax and manpower numbers. By EU IV, this had been abstracted into each province having a base tax, a production amount (which generated money, and value for the trade system), and an amount of manpower. Now all three of these were unified into one system where the total of everything added up to its development.

With the new system, each base tax generates one ducat (yearly) and 1% local spy defense (this was changed to taking over the recruitment bonus of manpower later). Each point of production generates 0.2 trade goods per month, and reduces shipbuilding time. And each point of manpower adds 250 to the nation’s manpower pool, reduces recruitment time, and promotes the growth of fortification garrisons.

The total development in a province has a number of effects: Each point generates provincial trade power, raises the supply limit, adds to the national land and naval force limits, and reduces missionary strength (making prosperous provinces harder to convert). Also, development determines a province’s cost in a peace, the amount of overextension it generates, and other similar things.

As with the old system, you can get events that will add to, or otherwise change around development points, with the expansion, you can also buy development with the appropriate monarch points. The base cost is 50/development, but that is increased by some terrain types, and it gets more expensive as development goes over 10. However, a major part of the idea is for small countries to be able to ‘grow tall’, pumping spare monarch power into the provinces they do have, and making them rich.

Building Forts

With development as a new thing to manage, the building system that had carried over from Divine Wind was done away with for one with fewer buildings, and more choices to be made. Instead of the six categories with six levels each, plus manufactories, plus various unique buildings, there are now 10 separate buildings, most of which have two levels (forts have four levels, trade buildings have three, and universities have a single level), plus five types of manufactory.

More importantly, each province can now have a limited number of buildings at all, and forts count against this. The base is one slot (for having a city; i.e., not being a colony), with bonuses for good terrain (farmlands add two slots), and an extra slot for every 10 development in the province, so only the very richest provinces can even have all the possible buildings.

Forts got a very important change, that reworks how wars work overall. It had always been the case that each province would have a fort, with the level going up as technology unlocked more types, and money was available to upgrade them. Now, the limited building slots mean there just isn’t room, and forts are now expensive.

Maintaining a fort now costs 1 ducat per month per level. Putting a basic fort in every province would wreck the economy of the wealthiest nations. However, forts now protect all friendly provinces adjacent to them, as well as their own province. Moreover, they have a zone of control, which keeps enemy troops from marching through any province adjacent to it.

So instead of wandering around the countryside, seeking out an enemy army to defeat, and sending out lots of small detachments to individually siege every province, movement is constrained by uncaptured forts. Once adjacent to an enemy fort, your only movement choices are to move out of range (or the country as a whole), or to the fortress province itself. Once in a province with an enemy fort, you can only exit out of the country (if it’s on a border), or back to where the army entered the province from.

You still besiege non-fort provinces, and they will fall to you after one month (/siege cycle), but if you have not taken or besieged any adjacent enemy fortresses, it will revert back to the enemy one month after you leave.

Since there’s fewer of them, sieges are now much bigger operations, needing three times as many troops as before. Also, each ‘building level’ generates two ‘fort levels’ in terms of the bonuses against siege rolls. Every capital gets one free fort level, even if there’s no building there (so even the tiniest, poorest, country has a +1 fort in its capital), which gives capitals all the in-between ‘odd’ levels.

The siege rolls changed slightly in that rolling a ‘1’ never generates progress, and instead kills 5% of the besieging army from disease. Also, ‘obsolete’ fortresses have a penalty, making them quicker to siege, as do fortresses that have less than half of their garrison. Overall, sieges tend to take a bit less time than they used to when a military is well-equipped for them; but the higher fort levels (especially in a capital) also lead to some very long and expensive campaigns.

An existing fort can also be mothballed, giving it half maintenance cost and no garrison. This is a great way to have defenses, and a good peacetime budget. However, if war breaks out the fort may need to be reactivated, and it will take time for the garrison to grow back to full, allowing a swift-moving enemy to get the bonus for it being under half strength.

A smaller change also had a big effect on wars: Armies and navies are now locked into going to a province once they are halfway there. That prevents a lot of fiddling around, and ‘faking’ going to a province, and makes actual interception of forces possible, as you might not get there ahead of an army, but you can get there before he can leave again.

Rate My Government

A smaller change to the overall game was that all nations now have a rank, as a duchy, kingdom, or empire. This has nothing to do with governmental forms, but purely with how large and powerful it is. This system exists without the expansion, but is seriously downplayed as changing ranks is generally disabled.

Generally, being a higher rank makes it less likely to be made a vassal (for the AI), and adds to the number of diplomats and military leaders available. Some forms of governments also get scaling bonuses, where it gets better with a higher rank, and the tribal governments generally ease their penalties at higher rank.

Only a handful of countries start as empires (including Byzantium, which is appropriate, as you generally don’t go down in rank). Small duchies can become kingdoms once they have 300 total development, and kingdoms can become empires at 1000 development. There’s a few extra wrinkles thrown in, such as member states of the HRE are always duchies, with electors capable of becoming kingdoms.

It’s a fairly small change to things, but there’s enough wrinkles to it all to make it a fairly neat passive subsystem. Large countries get a little more diplomatic weight, an extra leader to go with all those armies (and fronts), and the AI is protected from predatory vassaling players.

Free Cities

The patch introduced a new unique government type for the HRE, the free city. They get bonuses to trade and development, and in return increase imperial authority and revenue. The city also gets extra protection from the Emperor (attacking one isn’t advised). And, being a free city, once one gets a second province, it stops being a free city, and reverts to an oligarchic republic.

Mostly, this is an attempt to re-work the internal forces of the HRE. Since they get extra protection from the emperor, and they provide money and authority to him, there’s a lot more motivation to keep the member states small, instead of slowly growing to a small number of larger states.

Along with this, the main workings of imperial authority was also redone, to have more monthly changes instead of big events. Having more member states in the HRE, and having more free cities and electors was rewarded. However, as having ‘heretic’ princes lowers authority, it means that reform of the empire is much harder once the Reformation gets going (…which seems like a good side effect).

So You Say You Want a Constitution

The expansion included a new feature for some government types. The late game Constitutional Republic and Constitutional Monarchy, now have parliaments, along with the unique English Monarchy government (only available with the expansion).

Any government with a parliament will regularly have debates (well, you don’t have to, but it costs legitimacy to ignore it). There’s a large number of different possible subjects for debate, most of which will generate a bonus for the next decade, and a few can generate stability, or extra base tax.

When one is proposed, it is debated with a 0% chance of passing. To get it to pass, one must bribe a number of seats in the parliament, which are each attached to a particular province. Each seat gets a bonus to taxes, production, and manpower, but the more seats there are, the more of them need to be bribed for a decent chance of winning a debate. The bribes are varied, and what each seat asks for will depend on the province, but it can run from gold, monarch power, army tradition, to more specialized things like fervor (the Reformed religion special mechanic), to imperial authority (for the Emperor of the HRE).

Since it grants extra bonuses, it is rather like the ‘extra powers’ that some religions get through various expansions. At the same time, its a nice touch for England, as it does give it an extra dose of early flavor, like the other unique governments earlier expansions had added. And it does come with a cost, as a failed debate costs prestige, and winning a debate not only costs the bribes mentioned above, but as the debate goes on, there will be a number of events popping up for further bribes to the seat (almost always money), or lose support.

In the Name of God

When EU III came up with the governmental type system, theocracies were an off-branch for a few governments, with the papacy being a special form. Now that monarchies and republics each had their own mechanic (legitimacy and tradition), theocracies got devotion as an equivalent in the expansion.

This doesn’t generally slowly move up and down a little every month as with other two (it will with positive or negative stability, but other effects are more rare), but there are events that will shift things. Unlike the others, devotion has no effect on unrest or stability, but it does affect taxes and prestige, as well as papal influence (if Catholic) or church power (if Protestant).

Also with the expansion, most theocracies get an event to choose an heir (it’s normally just a random new ruler at the former’s death without it). This can be a fairly long list, and it’s really just a choice between different immediate bonus and penalties (money, prestige, devotion, ect), with the heir’s abilities being decided after the decision.

More Religion

Paradox continued to add nuance to religions, adding Tengri to central Asia (replacing some of the shamanist area), and adding Zoroastrian for one province (and possible CK II conversions). Buddhism was split up into Vajrayana, Mahayana and Theravada branches. All three versions get increased tolerance of heretics, but differ on giving bonuses to morale, advisors, or ideas.

The expansion also gives all three versions of Buddhism a new mechanic, karma. This is a 0 to 100 slider, like several other scales in the game, but the general goal is to balance it in the middle instead of just running it up to max. At low karma, you gain discipline and lose diplomatic reputation, while high karma is the opposite, and balanced karma gives a stronger bonus to both. The reason for splitting Buddhism up was that each version gets its own events, or its own choices for the same event, so that each one interacts with karma and the world differently.

At the same time, the Protestant religion got a new mechanic with the expansion. Church power accumulates, a bit like fervor does for Reformed, and allows purchase of church aspects. Power grows at rate equal to one tenth the total monarch power generation of the country, multiplied by the nation’s religious unity percentage, so a large country split between competing religions will have a hard time getting anywhere until things get under better control, while a one- or two-province minor can generate power quite fast.

Instead of the Reformed mechanic of using power to keep a bonus active, it’s technically a one-time purchase. But there are twelve possible aspects, each with its own bonus, and only three can be active at a time, so once there are three, they can be slowly changed out for other bonuses as more church power accumulates.

Conclusion

Originally, you needed this expansion to be able to manually increase development in a province, which made this very much a ‘must get’ for anyone. The game was just as playable as before, but there were too many references to increasing development to not feel some aggravation over not being able to do it. However, patch 1.28 moved this ability to the main game, so this expansion is no longer needed for that.

That leaves the major reasons for purchase as the new government and religion mechanics. As such, it makes a great companion expansion to Wealth of Nations, as they both enhance India and surrounds and the Reformation religions. Parliaments are a little limited in scope as they belong to later mid-game governments, though they’re a great addition if you wish to play England (which is a good country to play as).

Government ranks (and changing them) are a tiny feature, but if you’re playing to expand from a small start, being told you’ve ‘ranked up’ is at least as good as the actual reward. And finally, there’s the theocracy mechanic, which I feel should be in the main game (though it comes up rarely enough), alongside legitimacy and tradition. Overall, there’s a bunch of smaller things here, and I don’t see this as a meaningful expansion for a new or occasional player. But if a couple of the features strike your fancy, there are some good ones here still (and keep in mind that the ‘national focus’ feature from Res Publica comes with this expansion as well, if you don’t have that).

On the patch side of things, this was another major shakeup of how the game is played. The new siege and committed movement systems make a big difference in war. In some ways, it’s quite easy to miss the more free-wheeling movement and countermarches of any of Paradox’s games until this point, but there are compensations. You really need to think about how your forts ensure the protection of your realm, and how to take apart an enemy’s defense line.

Wars on land are a little more sedate now, though there’s still scope for more mobile warfare away from congested Europe. Coupled with some minor interface changes that made a lot of on-map things more visible, it was a great update to the game.

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Aug18

Expansion of Gold

by Rindis on August 18, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the fifth in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Europa Universalis IV. See the previous reviews here:
Europa Universalis IV: A Fantastic Point of View
Wealth of Nations: National Trade
Res Publica: A Tradition of the People
Art of War: Reform-Minded Patch

Paradox went back to the New World for the fifth expansion to EU IV. Instead of the North American focus of Conquest of Paradise, the new one, El Dorado, would focus on Mesoamerica and South America, and it would re-work exploration instead of settlement.

It was released on February 26th, 2015, alongside patch 1.10, and patch 1.11 followed on March 8, along with the free “Women in History” DLC.

Exploration

With a focus on the New World, exploration mechanics were re-worked for the expansion. Without El Dorado, it still works the same; get Quest for the New World, hire explorers and conquistadors (instead of admirals and generals), and have them command forces that can slowly uncover new areas.

With the expansion, you never ‘explore’ just by walking into terra incognita (outside of ways that everyone can always do it; notably marching around the interior of a country you’re at war with). Instead, you assign explorers and conquistadors to exploration missions.

An explorer will get options to explore the ‘waters of x’, which will send out his fleet to uncover all the sea zones of a region. Once at least some of these are known, he can ‘chart the coast’ of that region, which will uncover all the coastal provinces there.

These require a fleet of at least three light or heavy warships to do, and once one of these missions is started, it cannot be recalled (you do get a notice when it comes back home). So a lot of control is taken away, and as these only work within your colonial range, it might be difficult to target the area you want. But it takes a lot of micromanagement out, and the ships do not suffer attrition while on these missions (unless the explorer dies, at which point there might be very high attrition on a fleet a long way from home).

Conquistadors can go exploring on their own, which works pretty much like the usual auto-explore command in any game, though the army will halt to rest and replenish troops if too many are lost to combat against native populations.

And finally, explorers can attempt to circumnavigate the world. This takes a slightly higher tech level, and the fleet will take normal attrition. However, the first nation to complete the mission gets 100 prestige, with other nations getting 10 if they do it later.

All of these missions have extra events attached to them, especially the conquistadors. Their auto-explore is actually hunting for the seven cities of gold, and in addition to to the normal dealing with the natives, getting lost, and other exploration events, they may find clues and actually try to find one of the legends of the New World, with a (small) chance of succeeding.

A final note is that a country that builds up a colonial nation first gets a ‘claim’ on all the provinces of that region. Well, assuming you’re Catholic, and only other Catholic nations will care. It’s meant to represent the effects of the Treaty of Tordesillas. Generally, the AI will abide by these claims, and violating them causes relations penalties; though conquering territory from native nations is still fair game.

Religion

With more attention on the New World, three new religions were added: Nahuatl, Mayan, and Inti, displacing some of the generic Animist religion that had been used. They have bonuses roughly similar to Animism, and that’s it.

Unless you have El Dorado, in which case they all have similar enhanced mechanics. Notably, they all have five reforms they can pass for fairly good bonuses. Passing one is difficult, and resets everything that was needed to pass it. For instance, a Nahuatl country needs five vassals, and positive stability to pass a reform, but doing so lowers stability and releases all the vassals. Once all five are passed, the religion as a whole can be reformed (if there’s a Western nation on its border), which will basically ‘Westernize’ the country, bringing its tech level up as is done for other methods. Each one also has a unique extra mechanic:

Nahuatl has Doom, representing the Aztec belief in a series of sacrifices to empower the gods to keep the world from ending. Doom is a counter that slowly goes up, technologies and ideas become more expensive, and at 100, the royal family is sacrificed, eliminating the current ruler and heir in favor of a new 0/0/0 monarch. Large battles and sacrificing monarchs can reduce Doom.

Mayans don’t have an overt mechanic, but have to (directly) control 20 provinces to pass a reform. Doing so splits up the country, releasing nations, or transferring provinces to other bordering nations.

Inti has Authority, representing the current power of the Sapa Inca worshiped as a god. Authority is gained from having a large, prosperous nation, and decreases stability cost and unrest. Once it hits 100, a reform can be passed… which lowers Authority to 0, and starts a civil war with pretender rebels.

All three are neat ideas, and are guaranteed to cause instability in the region, especially in Mesoamerica, where the competing states won’t just conquer each other as they specifically need vassals. And naturally, someone has to lose, and since each Nahuatl nation has its own Doom counter (a universal one might be a little more reasonable), sacrifices of reigning monarchs are common.

Liberty Desire

The colonial nations introduced with Conquest of Paradise had a new stat, liberty desire. As of patch 1.10, all vassal nations now use this. Originally, it was just to allow for colonial revolutions, but now any sufficiently unhappy vassal state can rebel. Since one of of the modifiers for this score is just how powerful all the subjects of a nation are (taken together), it’s also a serious brake on just establishing a handful of powerful vassals, who will then act as a buffer against all the other powers, while you concentrate on one or two things.

Below 50% liberty desire, a vassal is loyal, and will act as vassal states always have in the series; always joining wars with the leading nation, and being a good little servant. Over 50%, and they are disloyal, which causes them to stop paying taxes, and only defend themselves in wars. Also, other countries can promise to support their independence. At 100%, the nation is rebellious, and will actively seek opportunities to successfully rebel.

Trade & Treasure Fleets

Trade came in for another round of tweaks, with some general rework of inland trade power. Also, colonial nations now generate an extra merchant for their parent country if they’re large enough (10 provinces). These can be used anywhere, but the obvious intent is to put them into New World trade centers to steer the trade to your own European trade centers for collection.

With the expansion, treasure fleets were added to the game. Sort of. Colonial nations with gold-producing provinces now store up gold and send it home as one big lump sum. It technically travels down the trade routes to the overlord’s trade capital, and it can be intercepted by privateers, who will whittle away at the amount of gold depending on their trade power in the nodes it goes through.

Once it arrives, the receiving nation gets the money, and inflation, as if they’d gotten it in a peace deal. With them coming in regularly, it can really start causing real inflation problems, instead of the more usual modest problems from gold provinces. Overall, it’s a neat idea, and the use of privateers is good, but it’s not obvious to anyone but the receiving nation that anything’s happening. And of course, since it’s not really on the map, they can’t be directly captured or disrupted by an enemy nation in a war.

Nation Designer

Another addition of the expansion is a custom nation designer. You choose a capital province, and then build out a nation from there, including the territory, culture, religion, traditions, etc. This all uses up a budget of points, which can be set to nearly any level. There’s achievements connected with it that all have a set budget to use, but more usefully, everyone in a multiplayer game can be set to get the same number of points, and then create ‘equivalent’ nations to play with.

I haven’t really used it, but the interface for it is pretty good.

Women in History

This was a free DLC that automatically gets downloaded as part of the Steam copy of EU IV, though it could be disabled in the launcher. Mostly, it adds events for countries to get historically prominent women as possible advisors. This also means that female portraits for all advisor types were also added, and they can, very occasionally, show up without the specific events.

It’s a nice bit of adding a bit of awareness of how much women have added to history, and not even so much in the background. I’m not quite sure why Paradox did it as a DLC instead of adding it straight to the game files; presumably so it would be easier to talk about the fact that they did do it. At any rate, I will say it feels a little odd, because its mostly fixed people at a fixed time, which gets back to the acting out history style of the first two games of the series.

Conclusion

For some, the Nation Designer is the headline feature, and reason enough to get the expansion. I don’t care for things like that (if I had a particular alternate-history to explore, maybe, but then I’d need to adjust more than one nation), so I pretty much ignore it.

As far as filling out the New World, I like it a lot better than CoP. The new religion mechanics are interesting (well, Maya not so much), and make the dynamics of the Aztecs in particular much more in line with history. Exploration is a mixed bag, seemingly taking some of the wonder out as explorers do things on their own, but taking micromanagement out with it, with all the attrition-watching that was needed, is overall worth it. If you get lots of colonial nations the number of extra merchants gets out of hand, but a few extras are a great boon for steering trade from your colonies to your home port.

The main patch is mostly notable for the rework of vassal relations, which gives that system a lot more character, and I think it was really needed. On the other hand, it saw the second rework of inland trade nodes, and this one was way too heavy handed with a flat extra 50 trade power or not.

Overall, the game improved again, and the free Women in History DLC is a nice addition. Assuming you’re not interested in the Nation Designer, I give El Dorado a limited recommendation: it won’t do much if you’re not exploring, and it’s a good, but not essential, addition if you are.

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Jun11

Reform-Minded Patch

by Rindis on June 11, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the fourth in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Europa Universalis IV. See the previous reviews here:
Europa Universalis IV: A Fantastic Point of View
Wealth of Nations: National Trade
Res Publica: A Tradition of the People

After Res Publica, a fairly small update and expansion, Paradox scheduled a larger expansion, and the biggest overhaul to EU IV yet. Art of War concentrated on warfare, with new events and mechanics for the Thirty Years War and the Napoleonic period. It was released with patch 1.8 on October 30, 2014, which included some massive overhauls of major mechanics in the game.

Patch 1.9 was a major patch with no accompanying expansion (this every-other major patch pattern became the general procedure for EU IV) that was released on December 19th, and did more re-works of the game. This review looks at both patches and the expansion.

Country Update

While different, the EU IV world map was naturally based on EU III’s, and was more detailed in Europe than anywhere else. Patch 1.8 increased the number of provinces by about half, and added a large number of new nations in all corners of the world. Some of these are only ‘potential’ countries; ones that can exist only by revolt or being released by a larger country, but many represent smaller nations that couldn’t be represented on the old map, or just better research on an area.

In addition, a number of new tradition sets were created, mostly for sets of these new countries, but overall the variety and individuality increased substantially. Finally, more dynamic historical events were added for all sorts of countries, enhancing that system overall.

Patch 1.9 then added the idea of disasters. There were a number of large-scale bad events that could affect a country, seemingly randomly. Now, they were surfaced to the user, making the game a bit more controllable, and feeding into the feel of this iteration being a game. Generally, all countries are eligible for the ‘peasant revolt’ (low manpower and stability) and ‘civil war’ (low legitimacy), while some countries have special ones (England can have the War of the Roses and the English Civil War disasters).

When the preconditions for a disaster are met, the clock starts ticking down to it. If the conditions go away, then the disaster stops, otherwise it fires once the clock ends. Peasant Wars have always been a more common one (especially for the AI), and as an example, force stability to -3, cause additional unrest, make stability more expensive, and creates a couple peasant armies for an immediate problem while the unrest and negative stability cause more.

This is one place where I feel too much is being surfaced to the user, as these are the types of events that, at best, are only obvious in retrospect. That said, getting stuck in a poor position, and watching the clock tick to an even bigger problem certainly does add its own brand of tension to the game.

Revolt & Unrest

Speaking of revolts, those changed too. The province-by-province check for revolts every month, that had existed since the original game was replaced by unrest. This is pretty much figured the exact same way, but it does not cause revolts in itself.

Instead, the province’s prominent revolt type is figured (independence, religious, pretender king, etc.), and all the provinces with a positive unrest towards that particular type add together for a chance of progressing a revolt. Then that is checked each month, and when it does come up, that revolt gets 10% progress, which is displayed in a few places. Once progress hits 100%, then an actual revolt happens with a decent army or two.

This makes revolts something of a ‘mini-disaster’, where you can see the problem coming from some time off. The listing of factions will even tell you, on average, how long it will take a revolt to occur based on current unrest and progress. If an in-progress revolt loses all support (i.e., the respective provinces go to negative unrest), it will lose 10% progress each month until it goes away, so solving a problem for a month or two will set it back, but not instantly get rid of it.

A final adjustment is that revolts that start on an island have been a very small problem as they can’t spread, and take control of more territory. Now a revolt that has control of everything it can reach will automatically try to move to a non-connected nearby province, without needing sea movement or anything, just a decent amount of time.

Autonomy and Clients

One of the things revolt risk did was cause lower taxes and recruiting, as the population was resisting the government’s efforts. This did not get taken over by unrest, and instead these factors are now reduced by autonomy.

Autonomy is a new measure of how much attention a province is paying to the central government expressed as a percentage; manpower and income from the province are both reduced by the amount of autonomy, which generally goes down a little each month while the country is at peace, and the later government forms tend to have bonuses to autonomy reduction.

Naturally, newly conquered territory will have fairly high autonomy to start with, though reconquering core areas and inheriting in a union will result in minimal, if any, autonomy. The big thing is that you can also raise or lower autonomy in an area, which will lower or raise unrest in the province. So, take a new province, raise autonomy, which reduces unrest, and then peace will eventually bring autonomy back down again. Or, lower autonomy to exploit a rich province, and garrison the area to put down any revolts that crop up.

Also, releasing independent nations has always been a way of splitting off troublesome areas, or creating a buffer. But, it requires an appropriate possible nation in the area, and that may include areas you don’t wish to let go of. With AoW active, custom client states become possible in the late game (emulating Napoleon’s many reorganizations of the map of Europe). They’re set to be fairly loyal, and get their own traditions, in addition to their territory and name being entirely at the whim of the creating nation (well, the territory has to be contiguous).

Wars of Reformation

The Reformation came in for its own major overhaul. Generally, events would fire to randomly convert provinces to Protestant or Reformed, causing chaos and potentially making conversion a smart idea for smaller central European states.

With the new patch, instead there would be centers of reformation that would actively try to convert other provinces nearby, going for more of a proselytizing model. This makes the entire process much less random, and ensures that anyone near one of these centers will have to deal with the problem for some time to come.

Generally, three centers show up for the Protestants, and then another three for Reformed (with the first of each as an event, and the other two being ‘rewards’ for the first countries to convert to the new religion). The process can be stopped, by conquering the province and converting it (which will destroy the center), but that’s not easy either.

AoW also introduced religious leagues. These are coalitions that form to enforce, or change, the religion of the Holy Roman Empire. To start with, the Emperor must be Catholic; but there’s no restrictions on the electors, and if one of them goes Protestant, then he automatically forms the Protestant League, which can declare war on the emperor to force the official religion of the HRE to change. Once started, anyone (regardless of religion) can join the leagues, but religious tension is what starts them.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

Along with the Thirty Years War, the French Revolution came in for some serious attention. The Revolution was of course one of the major points of events in the original two games, In III, there had been the separate Revolutionary Republic and Empire government types, which had event chains as pre-requisites for them, and some very powerful bonuses, along with plenty of events to make sure that such a government would end up at war with most of the rest of Europe.

Now, a Revolution disaster was added which could happen to any European country that was in dire straights in the late 18th Century, making them the revolutionary target (France gets a customized French Revolution disaster). The lead ‘unhappy’ country gets to be the target of the events that bring about the revolution, changing the government to Revolutionary Republic, and changing the national symbol to a tricolor (many countries have the colors defined, and the rest get random colors picked for them).

Of course, all the relations problems of the old system are kept here, with the Revolutionary government getting a casus belli to ‘spread the revolution’, while everyone else gets reactionary modifiers to put the anti-monarchist upstarts down.

Naval Affairs

Art of War had a few tweaks for the military, the biggest one being the ability to just upgrade ships to modern types with a single click. You still pay the standard construction cost, and the ships are reset to minimum morale and durability, but it’s instant, and saves all the trouble of retiring old ships to stay under your naval limit while building the new ones.

Even better (and really needed), the expansion allows the ability to mothball fleets. Generally, it was common to set naval maintenance to minimum during peacetime in previous EU games. This can save a fair amount of money, and you don’t generally need the morale while at peace. Except now, trade protection with light ships suffers with lower maintenance, so mercantile nations can’t afford to do that (and possibly still can’t afford a regular fleet). Mothballing basically sets maintenance to minimum for selected fleets, so your light ships can still do their thing (along with any anti-pirate patrols you end up needing), allowing big ship and galley navies to not strangle the economy any more.

A final option is the ability to sell surplus ships to other powers, though I’ll admit I haven’t played around with it, and don’t know how eager the AI is to take your old castoffs. Also, as part of the big map expansion, trade was reworked with a more stable pricing scheme, and three new trade items were added.

A final naval convenience is that transporting armies was made simpler in the expansion. If you give an army an order to march across a body of water, the game will now ask if you want to use your transports automatically. And then it will send them out, pick up your troops (automatically dividing the army if it’s bigger than the transport fleet), and ferry them over. It’s not perfect, as it’ll try to do this when the waters are contested, and you need to ‘sneak’ across away from patrolling enemy fleets, but it’s a big convenience when it can be used.

Conclusion

Just in terms of the patch, 1.8 was a great improvement for EU IV. The new Reformation mechanics feel a lot more natural, and let you see whether or not you’re likely to be in the path of religious controversy. The new revolt mechanics aren’t as dramatic, but affect you no matter when/where you play the game as, and was just the beginning of PDS re-thinking core mechanics that had been there from the beginning. EU IV changed a lot of things in the interests of a better game, and this showed that the process hadn’t stopped.

The new map of course added a lot of content. If you’re stuck in Western Europe, you won’t see the changes, but everywhere else saw some major changes, and loads of new nations (and potential nations), adding even more life away from the ‘bright center’ of the game’s roots. The amount of work to update the timeline files for all the extra provinces and counties must have been massive. As much as I say I’m not a fan of patch 1.9’s disasters, they are in line with the rest of the features of EU IV, and I can’t really complain.

The expansion is also big, with a lot of nice things in it, though the out-of-expansion changes are still big enough to get all the top billing. Much of it is paying for convenience, and despite the features, nothing is really essential. It certainly makes you happy to be able to just automatically ferry troops, or any of a half-dozen other things. Content-wise there’s also a lot in the events, but they’re hard to pick up on. So there’s no one ‘get this now’ feature, and I only recommend this to dedicated players.

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Apr10

A Tradition of the People

by Rindis on April 10, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the third in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Europa Universalis IV. See the previous reviews here:
Europa Universalis IV: A Fantastic Point of View
Wealth of Nations: National Trade

During development of Wealth of Nations, PDS had mentioned merchant republics as being too small and vulnerable, even though they tended to be fairly small and long-lived in history. So the next project was considered a ‘mini-expansion’ and focused on republics in general. Res Publica was released on July 16th, 2014, alongside patch 1.7 for a minimal $5 (most expansions are $15, and ‘small’ ones are $10).

Getting Ahead in the World

One important patch change was a reverse in direction. Like in previous games, being behind your neighbors (or just other members of your tech group) in technology grants a bonus to your progress. Whereas before it had been a bonus to budgetary investment per country and tech, in EU IV it is a reduction in power cost from the most advanced neighbor you have.

This was initially a 5% (30 power) decrease in cost per level, but in patch 1.6 this was decreased to 2.5%. In patch 1.7, it was changed back to 5%, the maximum possible bonus was increased (though it’s really hard to get past the old limit), and the worst tech group penalties were removed. Various Far Eastern and African groups actually had penalties to power generation, effectively lowering their base 3 power per group, and these were removed to give everyone the same overall power generation, though non-Western countries still pay more for technology.

The idea had been to discourage lagging behind in technology for the cost bonus by reducing that, but now, they rewarded staying on top of technology. Any time the next Administrative or Diplomatic technology would be ‘ahead of time’ (each level has a target year, and it is more expensive before that point), you get a +20% to production or trade efficiency, giving a nice boost to income for keeping up with your studies.

An extra addition to the patch were three new idea groups (one per category). This also meant adding new policies for all the new combinations, and brought the number of choices up to seven per category.

Focus, Pinkie, Focus

The most useful expansion feature isn’t republic related: With the expansion, you gain the ability to set a national focus. This is done from the main Monarch Power display on the government tab. Activating one gives you two extra power points per month in the chosen field, while you gain one less in the other two.

It’s a nice bit of flexibility, and kind of a shame that it’s not in the base game, as there are times when one area is starved for points (especially Administration), while the others are doing well. The cost is that it can only be done every 20 years, but some countries will start focused, and are ready to change or remove focus from the start.

Factions

The idea of the faction system for Ming China from EU III: Divine Wind had been retained, but the principles changed a bunch. There were still three factions, and now they were tied directly to the three power types of the government. However, factions no longer prevented you from being able to do things. Instead, they each give two bonuses and one penalty.

Unlike before, faction influence isn’t subject to large shifts due to ruler ability and domestic policies (which no longer exist), but the military faction gains influence from army tradition, and the diplomatic faction gains influence from navy tradition, while the administrative faction gains influence from stability. In addition, you can spend monarch power to give influence to a particular faction.

Patch 1.7 reworked this so that factions are associated with particular government types (for modding purposes), and added factions to merchant republics. These are of course different from China’s factions, granting bonuses around goods, and trade instead of extra advisors and diplomatic reputation.

Republics

As briefly mentioned in the main review, republics have republican tradition. This is a measure of confidence in the government, and replaces legitimacy for monarchies. It is a more limited mechanic, with fewer things affecting it (though there are a number of events that directly touch it), and only a couple things that it affects.

The primary effect is that not being at full legitimacy increases stability cost. High tradition also reduces overall revolt risk, with the same maximum of legitimacy (-2%), but at minimum tradition, there is only an elimination of that bonus, instead of it swinging all the way to the +2% penalty that a monarchy has to deal with.

Republics generally elect (player choice) a new president every four years, with the base stats being one point each in two categories, and four in the one that he focuses in. Re-electing the previous president boosts him by +1 in each category (e.g., becomes 5/2/2 depending on his initial focus), but reduces tradition by 10. Tradition generally increases by +1 per year, so constantly increasing the stats of one president leads to an erosion of six points per election.…

There are, of course, events that give a choice between tradition, and losing money and the like, so the path of a stable democracy can be rocky. On the other hand, there can be stability-boosting events at a cost of tradition, and that’s a pretty good deal if you can afford it.

If tradition gets and stays very low, a republic can turn into a Despotic Monarchy. With the Res Publica expansion, this will instead be the unique Republican Dictatorship government, which will last until the current dictator dies. At that point, it’ll either go over to Despotic Monarchy, or if tradition is back up (probably through events, as it doesn’t raise on its own at this point) it goes back to the previous republic form.

Merchant Republics

An extra bonus for Merchant Republics in the expansion is that they can now create trade posts. These generate a bonus to trade power and naval force limits, with a limit of one per trade node, but must be ‘built’ in an owned province that isn’t in the country’s main node. However, despite what it seems, it’s not considered a building, and only costs Administration power (no money) to build, and is buried away in the trade section of the main province interface (though the existence of one does show up in the trade map mode with all the other modifiers).

This gives merchant republics a reason to develop a network of far-flung territories. Better yet, they continue working if the governmental form changes, but of course, there can’t be any new ones at that point.

Dutch Republic

As something of a follow up to the previous expansion, the Netherlands got more customization with this one. They can now choose (through event) to take the unique Dutch republic government form.

This gives them a slider, showing the relative power of the Statists and the Orangists. This shifts with every election (and, of course, events), and with the Orangists in power, the ruler rules for life, but doesn’t cause the republic to fall (though it will cause tradition to stop growing), and there is another election on his death (and events might kick them out of power). Statists act like a normal republic, though the Netherlands can always have royal marriages with other countries no matter who is in charge.

The primary government bonuses are to trade and heavy ships, the Statists will boost naval capacity and trade power, while the Orangists boost army capacity and stability.

As with most of the unique governments, it’s a fairly flexible form, and the bonuses are certainly good compared to early-game governments, and competitive with later ones.

Elective Monarchy

In 1444, Poland is leaderless, with a 0/0/0 interregnum, that can be solved in a few ways. The easy (and historical) one is to form a personal union with Lithuania, becoming the leading partner with Lithuania’s Kasimierez Jagiellon as the head of the monarchy. With the expansion, this will then fire an event to change the government type to the unique elective monarchy.

On the surface, this is a fairly good government, with bonuses to manpower, revolt risk, and vassals (which Poland starts with two of, plus Lithuania). On the other hand, the succession gets… complicated.

As the nobles vote for who succeeds to the throne, they are vulnerable to outside influences. Other countries can use a diplomat to canvas for a successor from their dynasty. Each month the diplomat is kept on the job there is a small chance of picking up a vote for that country’s candidate. You can spend legitimacy to gain votes for the Polish candidate, which should make it fairly easy to guarantee a native king given the scale of the voting, but there are events that seem to fire fairly often that will reduce his votes.

As a country that successfully supports its candidate, you get prestige, very good relations with Poland (a temporary +100 boost, as well as the normal +25 ‘same dynasty’ modifier), and a good amount of monarch power in all three categories. And once this happens to Poland they lose one diplomat (that hurts) and have a higher than normal cost to reduce inflation or war exhaustion until it can find a way out of the elective monarchy.

Finally, there’s a number of historical events that will fire related to this government, that tend to curtail power. Poland is given lots of possibilities with the setup of Poland-Lithuania, but there’s a lot of challenges too.

Conclusion

It’s hard not to recommend anything this cheap (and 50% off sales are fairly frequent), but… there may not be a lot here. National focus is the big ‘useful to everyone’ feature, and generally worth the money by itself… but it is also available through the later Common Sense expansion, so if you go for that big one, there’s no point getting this just for the focus.

On the other hand, if you want to play as any of the merchant republics, the trade posts are handy, and the extra mechanics for the Dutch are nice, and the electoral monarchy is also interesting, so there lots of good small reasons to buy this small expansion.

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Mar06

National Trade

by Rindis on March 6, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the second in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Europa Universalis IV. See the previous review here:
Europa Universalis IV: A Fantastic Point of View

After taking a look at the New World in Conquest of Paradise, the EU IV team next decided to enhance the new trade system, and provide more gameplay options as opposed to the pure… ‘set up’ focus of CoP. The second expansion, Wealth of Nations, was announced in January 2014, and was released on May 29th, along with patch 1.6, which featured a new launcher to manage DLC and mods the same way on all systems.

Religion

Religion got two upgrades: Chrisianity and Islam each got a third at-start branch (Coptic and Ibadi, each with one nation of that religion) as part of the free patch, along with Sikhism appearing around 1500 in India.

Reformed (Lutheran) Christianity and Hiduism also got enhancements with the expansion. PDS felt that many players in Western Europe were sticking with Catholicism or Protestantism, and just clearing out the second wave of Reformed Christianity, so they got an extra mechanic on top of the regular religion bonus (and as the Dutch were the primary Reformed power, as well as a trading powerhouse, they figured it was appropriate for the expansion). Reformed countries produce fervor, and can then spend their fervor points on trade, war, or stability bonuses. All of this is on a per-month basis, and generally activating a bonus will drain points faster than they come in, but its easy to turn them on and off, and once a Reformed state gets going with high prestige, they can maintain one while occasionally turning on a second bonus.

With the expansion, Hindu states have no native religion bonus at all. Instead, each ruler, after he takes the throne, can pick one of six gods to follow, each of which has its own religion bonus. This makes a Hindu state nicely flexible, as it can concentrate on what looks to be needed for the next couple decades depending on which god is chosen.

Rivals

A new diplomatic concept in base EU IV is that of rivals. Each country can declare up to three other countries as rivals, which will give you permanently poor relations, but you get more prestige for fighting rivals, demanding their territory is easier, and other rivals of the country will be friendlier to you.

Rivals must be approximately the same power as each other, so decisively beating a country can remove it as a valid rival, and doing so several times certainly will. They also have to be relatively close, though as the power of the nation goes up, so does the distance of allowable rivals.

Patch 1.6 added power projection to this to give countries a better reason for declaring rivals. Power projection ranges from 0-100, and increases military morale and trade power in proportion; at 25 it also enables an extra military leader without military power upkeep, and at 50 or above grants one extra monarch power point each month in all three categories. Just having all three rivals will tend to make power projection float at about 30, while declaring wars, taking provinces, and other means of proving that your country is superior will temporarily push it up, while the opposite will push it down.

The concept of rivals was a good step forward for the diplomatic system (especially as the AI was made aware of ‘historical’ rivalries, and tends to emulate them, bending the game in traditional power-politics directions without hard-scripting), and the addition of power projection nicely turned it into something that can’t just be ignored. The bonuses aren’t game-breaking, but they are a nice combination of handy boosts.

National Policy

Idea groups also got a boost in this patch. Every pair of idea groups not in the same category has an associated policy now. For instance, offensive ideas and expansion ideas unlock the ‘pioneer policy’, which causes you to automatically discover every province adjacent to one of your colonies, allowing for much faster or easier discovery of the interior of a continent.

The first catch is that this only becomes available after every idea in both idea groups are purchased. The second, and bigger, catch is that enacting a policy costs one monarch point per month from a particular category. Most of them provide a general, reasonably powerful modifier, unlike the more situational bonus mentioned above.

This makes them very much a late-game enhancement. It will take a while just to have a policy available, and of course taking the bonus will slow down development in other ways. But once idea slots are filling up, one of the bigger needs for monarch points is winding down, and policies become more attractive.

Trade Practices

As a ‘trade’ expansion, its bigger features do center around that. The biggest feature is trade companies. As a non-Asian (and non-African) country, you can start one of these in any coastal trade node region in Asia (or Africa) that you have provinces in. Generally, there are penalties to such provinces so that you won’t get much tax or manpower from them, and forming a trade company guarantees this, but increases trade power (which is the main thing you do get). If you can dominate trade in the node, you even get an extra merchant. At the same time, trade companies increase goods production for all the native-controlled provinces, making the node more valuable overall.

Note that despite the somewhat independent status of the operations of such companies in history, these are not independent states like the colonial nations. These act purely as as a modifier on the node and your territories in it, leaving all wars and trade patrols under your control.

The other interesting option opened up in the expansion is to use privateers. Slightly oddly (in that it makes sense from a game perspective), this doesn’t involve hiring civilian ships, but is another separate mission for light ships. It’s the opposite of the protect trade mission, in fact. Instead of giving you trade power, privateers give trade power to a ‘pirate’ faction (at an increased power rate), effectively taking market share, and money, away from other countries. This makes it something to do when you can’t get any traction of your own, or maybe when someone is making a killing in a node that you can’t get anything out of (possibly by being downstream of you).

Conclusion

As a patch, 1.6 included a number of definite improvements to the UI, and other features that made it a nice incremental step forward.

As an expansion, Wealth of Nations is much more limited. The little additions to two religions were nice, but it feels odd that just two should get this treatment. This would change in the future, and now it feels odd that you have to get a number of unrelated expansions to get enhanced mechanics for everything. Given that they didn’t know where it would end up, it’s understandable, but still annoying.

Trade companies are the biggest expansion feature, and an interesting counterpart to the colonial nations in the free part of 1.5. I don’t think I can recommend this expansion to any but a completist, but the features are nice when playing in Europe with an interest in going East. A final nice note, is that the AI does a good job using all of these features.

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Sep20

A Fantastic Point of View

by Rindis on September 20, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the eighteenth in a series of reviews of Paradox’s empire management games. See the earlier reviews here:
Europa Universalis II: A Tale of Two Europas
Hearts of Iron: Europa of Iron
Victoria: Nineteenth Century Essay
Crusader Kings: A Dynastic Adventure
Hearts of Iron II: Return Engagement
Europa Universalis III: A Whole New World
Europa Universalis: Rome: Make a Desert and Call it a Game
Hearts of Iron III: One Plus Two Equals Three
EU III: Heir to the Throne: Not Done Yet
Victoria II: Same But Different
EU III: Divine Wind: Winds of Change
Sengoku: Shogun: Only War
V II: A House Divided: Limited Expansion
Crusader Kings II: The Second Crusade
HoI III: Their Finest Hour: A Final Polish
March of the Eagles: A Minor EU
V II: Heart of Darkness: Darkest Victoria

With the new level of presentation (and success) of Crusader Kings II, as well as a new development model, it became obvious that Paradox’s two most successful empire-management games were in need of a refresh. Europa Universalis IV was announced in August 2012, along with a ‘spread the word’ campaign to get fans talking about it and drive the news outward.

Europa Universalis IV was released for Steam with PC, Mac, and Linux versions in August 2013. Unlike CK II before it, it only existed in a Steam version (with Steam keys available through other stores), which allowed a couple new features, like achievements, and ironman mode, which forces you to keep one save file which updates itself. There were some problems with excessive saving slowing down the game (alleviated later), but it forces a very different play style as you cannot ‘save scum’ and reload if, say, a war you started turns out to be much tougher than you thought. Like with my CK II review, this about the game as it was early in its release life, namely as of patch 1.5.1. At this point, there had been one expansion, Conquest of Paradise, which will also be discussed.

Game vs Simulation

Parallel to my discussion in my EU III review, a new game in the series saw a new philosophy. It’s still largely the same grand strategy empire-management game running from 1444 to 1820, but there was a redesign at a fundamental level. In this case, Paradox seems to have tried to apply solid game design principles to the series.

Systems were pared back to reduce complexity, and with an eye towards interesting decisions instead of having a pure simulation feel to them. EU IV is still a complex game, and probably no easier for a new player to get into, but it does have a somewhat reduced set of things going on, that more tightly integrate with other systems.

As such, the entire ‘domestic policies’ system was gotten rid of, trade was scrapped for an all-new system, all the ‘envoys’ (merchants, diplomats, colonists, etc.) were simplified to a completely new system, and magistrates were gotten rid of entirely. Government types were simplified, technologies were simplified, and the entire budgetary sliders system scrapped.

In fact, the budget was nicely simplified. It used to be that you got one big lump sum of taxes at the beginning of the year, and then each month there was a budget for investing into technology and stability, which would generally run a small negative (to pay for army maintenance, among other things), leading to a cycle of a lot of money at the start of the year, and having to keep an eye on things so as not to run out before the end of the year, and be forced to take loans.

Now, the entire budget is done purely on a monthly basis. If you’re spending too much on a wrecked army, or expensive advisers, you’ll lose money, otherwise you gain it. No having to say, ‘I need this much for the next three months, so can’t actually afford that new cavalry unit.’

Monarch Points

At the same time, while money is still needed, it’s no longer the central currency of the game. That is now monarch points. Like in previous titles, each ruler is rated for administration, diplomacy, and military, and these are now the categories of development for the nation. In each, you get three points, plus the monarch’s rating, plus the ability of the your advisor for that category every month.

These points get used almost everywhere, but the main thing is for purchasing technology levels. Technology has been simplified from the five fields of earlier games to three (matching the categories of monarch points), and they now all have the same number of levels (33) instead of the military techs being more finely sliced than the others. Military only covers land military, while administration unlocks new government types, many different province improvement buildings, and most importantly, ideas. Diplomacy feels more like a ‘catch all’ from a lack of better ideas, and most notably is where naval military advancements are found, along with improvements to trade and colonies.

Advisors are about the same as in previous games, with seven different types available in each category (for 21 types compared to the old 36 as of EU III: HttT). But before, you could get a higher-quality advisor for an increase in their bonus while all bonuses are flat in EU IV. They still have a ranking, up to 3 (instead of 6), but the bonus for a higher-quality advisor is purely getting more monarch points each month.

Worker Placement

As mentioned before, the entire envoy system was changed. In earlier games, you would receive one of these, should it be a diplomat, colonist, merchant, or whatever, once every so many months, with a maximum limit on how many you could ‘store’ without doing anything with them.

Now, you have a set number. For instance, you generally always have one or two missionaries (depending on religion; various things can also increase this number). If you send him out to convert a province, you still have him, he’s just occupied, and you can recall him before his job is done so you can do something else with him instead.

Also, the nature of how envoys work was largely changed. For example, Missionaries would be sent out, and have a small chance of successfully converting a province each year, and that chance would be checked periodically until it worked or the missionary was recalled for whatever reason (like the province being conquered by someone else). In EU IV, it just takes a certain amount of time. Various factors can speed up or slow down progress (including making it impossible to convert the province at all), but the percentage progress will tick up in the sidebar outliner until it is done, and then the missionary will then automatically return to being available (possibly after some delay for travel time).

Diplomacy

In the essentials, diplomacy works as it did in EU III, with a robust range of options that can be taken. With the new system, came some changes though. First, separate opinion ratings for each direction in a relationship (A thinks B is -100 does not automatically mean B thinks that of A, and may have a -10 opinion, or even better) was taken from CK II.

Before, you could offer a gift to another country, and that was about the only way to directly raise their opinion of you. Now, you can assign a diplomat to improve relations with another country, and he’ll stay there constantly driving up the opinion of that country, to a maximum of a +100 bonus. Once that’s been done, there is an automatic message telling you that you might want to bring the diplomat home, but it can be done at any time. Once the diplomat leaves, this bonus will slowly go away, but you can always send the diplomat back to push it back up later.

This makes getting good alliances easier, since you can drive up the opinion of a few possible countries to try and get them to accept. On the other hand, there is now an imposed limit on how many countries you can have ties to at one time. Alliances, royal marriages, having a vassal, and a few other things all count for this (once for each country, no matter how many types of relations you have with them), and relations over the limit cost one diplomatic power per month (effectively slowing your generation of diplomatic power).

An interesting extra wrinkle to AI negotiations, is that along with the -100 to +100 relationship score, countries have attitudes towards each other now. This can be neutral (for a country far from its borders), to friendly (for countries nearby with good relations, and possibly a hidden historical friend modifier making this attitude more likely), to threatened (for a larger country next door), or hostile or rivalry (for obvious reasons). These attitudes can change with circumstances (allying and improving relations can shift a country from threatened to friendly), and modify AI behavior. For instance, a friendly country will probably not join in a war against you, even if they like the country requesting they join in more than they like you.

Ideas

National ideas also return from the third game, but get a thorough overhaul into a very different system. As before, there are idea slots that are opened up with advancing administration technology. Idea groups are chosen for those slots as they become available, with six different ones for each monarch point category (for a total of 19, as there’s an extra in military with two being mutually exclusive based on government type; there are eight possible slots).

The reason that the idea groups are separated by type, is that taking the group does not confer a bonus, but instead comes with a group of seven ideas that are then purchased sequentially with the appropriate type of monarch points. This is related to how ideas worked in March of the Eagles, crossed with the choose-your-own nature of ideas of EU III, with the addition of purchasing all seven in the group also grants an extra bonus for the group as a whole. Ideas are the second most expensive power purchase in the game (after technology), so figuring out what category of group you can afford to take is an important consideration.

In addition to that, all countries have traditions. These come in three parts: First, there are two bonuses that the country gets at the beginning of the game. Then there is a set of seven bonuses that are unlocked during the game, similar to the ideas from the groups; however these are unlocked for free (in sequence) for every three ideas purchased in the normal groups (so buying every idea in three groups would unlock everything). Finally, there is another automatic bonus that kicks in when the full group of seven is active.

This means all countries are encouraged to play something like their historical counterpart, as the bonuses generally reward, or make easier, such behavior (e.g., Russia gets a colonist from its traditions so it can colonize Siberia without being forced to take a colonization idea). Also, the two step process and expense causes lots of long-term planning and angst with lots of room for different strategies.

Naturally, not every country in the game has a unique set of traditions, but it comes close. As of patch 1.5, there were 71 separate ones for particular counties (including formable countries such as Spain and Russia), another 18 for various ‘groups’ of countries, like the minor German states, another 8 for use with the Crusader Kings II save converter, and a default one.

Limits of Growth

Another major new system is overextension. This acts as a brake on expanding powers, as any territory outside its acknowledged area (not ‘core’ territory) generates overextention as a percentage of its wealth compared to the main area of the country. Being overextended increases revolt risk, stability costs (in administration points), reduces trade and diplomatic power, and some other effects. At low values, this is not too noticeable, but it can add up, and adding one or two prosperous provinces to your empire can have a surprisingly big impact on overextension. Worst of all, at over 100%, some extremely nasty events are likely to go off, ensuring that the country will get the percentage down… or pay the price for growing too fast.

It used to be that failing all else, a province would become part of your ‘core’ territory after fifty years of possession. EU IV makes this much easier, as any province can immediately be assigned to become a core province. However, it still takes around three years for this to be accomplished, and costs administration power to do. If the problem is more immediate, then a vassal state could potentially be broken off, which should automatically have the region as a ‘core’ (or else they can’t form there…), or provinces could even be sold off to neighboring countries.

In all, this system is both more dynamic and more painful (in the good, ‘interesting decision’ way), as absorbing a new area taken in a war may bring things to a halt with a heavy load in administration power. And while you may be glad to have pried it off your rival’s hands, you may find a tech level or idea more important than administering it properly….

Trade

EU’s trade system had stayed fairly stable over three games, with EU III adding the ability to create new trade nodes that might out-compete older ones replacing the scheduled shifts of the first game. Here it was scrapped almost down to first principles.

Each province still generates a trade good, and each one belongs to a particular trade node. However, each node now connects to particular other nodes in a one-way trade network, and each province generates trade value and trade power in its node.

Each node gains value from its provinces, and from nodes upstream in the network (as the value gets passed on from one node to another). Each country gets power from its provinces in the node, from light warships protecting trade (a new mission for them), and from nodes downstream from it. That is, power in one node pushes up the stream to affect the previous node(s) in the network. The power of all nations involved in the node is totaled up to figure out how much influence each one has in the node.

The node that the national capital belongs to is the primary trade node for that country, and it will automatically attempt to take value out of that node (and the trade network altogether) based on its power there, to turn into trade income. All countries where that isn’t true will attempt to forward that trade into downstream nodes (so that more trade goes to the primary node to be collected). Merchants are sent out to either collect trade directly in a node (which also reduces power there, but can be handy if you have a bunch of provinces that belong to a node that doesn’t flow into the capital region), or steer trade in a particular direction (instead of going to all downstream nodes equally).

Countries don’t affect nodes they don’t know about, so at the beginning of the game, pretty much all the trade in the southern parts of the East flows into Alexandria, and then into Venice and Genoa (which are end points, so all trade is collected there), but as southern Africa is discovered and settled, trade will start steering around Africa to Seville where Spain and Portugal collect it.

It’s a really interesting system, and gets rid of the insane amount of micromanagement the old one would produce, making it a vast improvement right there. However, I have two problems with it: First, it’s an extremely opaque system, even with all the numbers surfaced in the UI, you generally can’t figure out what’s going on by observing it in game, and it is hard to figure out how much effect your meddling has. Second, it is an extremely static system. While the flow of trade will change over the course of the game, the fact that the nodes never change, and there are fixed origin and end nodes means there is no way to seriously derail the historical flow of trade with the most powerful of empires; you can only exploit it.

Military

On the other hand, plenty of things stayed roughly the same as EU III. Combat itself is the same as before, but the unit types from III are simplified down a bit, and all the little bonuses to combat that have existed since the beginning are vastly simplified (no more tiny changes every tech level) and displayed much more effectively.

Armies were made a bit safer in defeat, as one that retreats with low morale does a shattered retreat, which will force it to try to retreat to a high-value province currently controlled by the owner, which could be some distance away. This should be a relatively safe place, and the army gets a speed bonus during the retreat to get it some distance from pursuing armies. On the other hand, the AI was taught to sometimes create ‘hunter’ armies that chase after these formations to defeat them again before they can recover men and morale.

Sieges are actually the same as before, but the new interface shows all the things that were hidden before, so it feels brand new. Sieges progress every month or so, and exactly when that happens is shown on the siege view, and on the main map where a little meter (near the one that shows the army’s health) shows how long to the next siege roll.

All the modifiers to the roll are clearly displayed, and a hoverover shows the percentage chance of each possible result of the next roll. These are the same statuses that would happen before (‘food shortage’, ‘defenders desert’, etc), and these add to a siege progress modifier that is now displayed.

It turns out the monthly roll is a d14(!?), and it takes a modified 20 or better to force a fort to surrender. One thing not shown is very high rolls (a 14 by default) cause a breach, which adds a +3 modifier apart from the progress modifier (which maxes out at +12, so with a breach the maximum modifier is +15). A modified 4 or less does nothing, and the level of the fort is a negative modifier, so that’s why sieges don’t do much at the beginning and pick up steam as they go along; early rolls tend to do nothing, but as progress is made, the odds of further progress becomes greater.

Same Stuff, Different Game

Past the subjects already gone through, there are a lot of other things that still operate about the same as in EU III. Most notably, the new building system from EU III: Divine Wind was retained (without the magistrates), though a new interface was added where you could see all the places where a particular building was eligible to be built, and what its effect on the province would be.

Governmental forms were simplified down a bit to go with the streamlined technology system, but still operate the same, with administration tech opening up new forms with different bonuses. The heir system, legitimacy, and regencies from EU III: Heir to the Throne were retained, along with the reform system for the Holy Roman Empire. At the same time, republican governments got republican tradition as a replacement for legitimacy to measure just how robust their institutions are.

Decisions retained their large place in the game, along with events. As part of the re-focus towards a game, events shifted slightly back towards the EU II model. Many countries got dynamic historical events, which allow situations similar to history to cause events from history. This includes things like the Italian Wars, Muscovy Trade Company, the Dacke Feud, and many others. They’re generally less specific than the ‘acting out history’ events from EU II, but an interesting attempt to bridge the biggest gap between the previous two games, and a lot more options were built in than EU II ever had.

Conquest of Paradise

The first expansion for EU IV came out in January 2014, and focused on the New World, with the headline feature being a ‘random New World’ setting, so that an exploring player doesn’t know where everything is. This is more than sufficient reason for explorers to get it, but it took a while to get the rough edges off.

The system changed later, but at this point, it procedurally generates a New World, and reuses all the old province and nation names in a blender. All of them, including things like Lake Superior in the middle of the ocean. It also adds a bit of a delay to loading a game, as the altered world must be loaded after you pick the save game (understandable, but not the best marked thing in the interface).

The expansion also tries to make the Native American tribes more interesting to play (with or without a random New World). They are still largely in an impossible situation, with minimal technology, and high advancement costs. But they get a number of small buildings that can help out, and access to a set of 15 ideas (5 in each category) separate from the normal ideas that help overcome major problems, and if all of them are taken, the tribe can reform, losing all the buildings and ideas they’ve built up in return for gaining most of the current technology of a neighboring European country, changing to a monarchy and getting the ability to ‘westernize’, changing the technology progression to something less onerous. Finally, the one-province nations can migrate, abandoning their province for a neighboring one, either farther from or closer to something else.

The free patch that came with it introduced a new feature: colonial nations. The New World was split up into a bunch of regions, and any time you have five or more adjacent colonies in a region, they automatically convert into this new type of vassal state (that doesn’t take up a diplomatic slot). This does make colonization easier to manage, as a lot of them will start managing their own affairs, and colonizing further on their own, and of course, if they start getting unhappy with the parent country (and there’s some mechanics around that) they’ll revolt in a block, instead of an army in one province that would be simpler to crush.

Overall, they’re a big plus for the game, but you can’t see where the regions are, so it can be hard to know what you need to get a split off to happen, especially on the random New World.

Conclusion

Europa Universalis has always been my favorite series from Paradox, and IV is definitely the best of the lot (though Stellaris has since given it a run for its money as my favorite game from them; it has an unfair advantage of a genre that I’ve been enjoying for decades). Once again, it doesn’t entirely replace the previous games, as it does have its own philosophy, and I like simulation-style games enough to still really enjoy III on its own merits.

However, Paradox really paid attention to the overall mechanics of the central parts of the game, and it really shows that they sat down and thought hard about what the game was doing, and how it should work. At the same time, presentation was polished even further than in CK II, with even more numbers and modifiers surfaced in the tool-tips (including how fast temporary modifiers are decaying). And it didn’t stop here, Paradox has completely re-done a number of systems in the game since patch 1.5.1.

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Aug20

Winds of Change

by Rindis on August 20, 2018 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the eleventh in a series of reviews of Paradox’s empire management games. See the earlier reviews here:
Europa Universalis II: A Tale of Two Europas
Hearts of Iron: Europa of Iron
Victoria: Nineteenth Century Essay
Crusader Kings: A Dynastic Adventure
Hearts of Iron II: Return Engagement
Europa Universalis III: A Whole New World
Europa Universalis: Rome: Make a Desert and Call it a Game
Hearts of Iron III: One Plus Two Equals Three
EU III: Heir to the Throne: Not Done Yet
Victoria II: Same But Different

A year after Heir to the Throne, another poll from Paradox returned more EU III as still the leading desire among fans. This time the proposal was to concentrate on ‘the rest of the world’ (than Europe) though all the attention went into the Orient.

What would become the last expansion (and the second past what Paradox had originally expected to do) for EU III came out for PC in December 2010, and a new bundle, EU III: Chronicles, with all the expansions was released the following March, along with the Mac version of the expansion. This review is just of Divine Wind, so you may want to read/review my EU III and HttT reviews listed above for basic details before reading this.

The World

The most readily apparent thing about the new expansion was that the graphics had gotten a major overhaul. This caught EU III up with the other Clausewitz games graphically, and did away with the overly-muted colors it had been using. The jagged-looking province borders are still there, but they’re better smoothed in some of the larger zoom levels.

The result was still a bit flat, especially compared to how their games would look very soon, but comparatively, it was quite good. There are some other important improvements, including the ability to zoom out much further than before.

Additionally, the number of different map modes generally available about doubled, with views of relative tech levels, number of buildings in a province, and so on being added. In addition, there was a new map mode linked to the peace process. As you go through the list, selecting provinces to change hands, they light up; the area of new nation to be released as a vassal changes color etc. In addition, there’s shading to show what’s currently possible to take in a peace, and the map will shift areas when a selected province is far away, also making it handy for wide-ranging wars.

Japan

In EU III, Japan is a minor power, stuck, like the rest of the east, with a poor technology group and troop types. But, it has the population and riches to be able to do quite a bit in its arena. Left to itself, the AI usually muddles around, winning and losing wars. But given a lucky break or two, it is not uncommon for a Europe-based player to get to the east, and find that Japan is carving up a mighty empire for itself.

In Divine Wind, a lot of detail was added to Japan. First, the map of Japan itself was expanded from 18 provinces to about 40. Second, it was split up into four factions (daimyos) all under one emperor. The rest of the world deals with Japan as a whole through the emperor, for alliances, wars, and the like.

Internally, the daimyos treat with each other as normal, but have no diplomatic options to deal with nations outside of Japan. Typically, one daimyo will be shogun (at the start of any game, the Minamoto will be shogun), and the strength of his rule is shown in a panel that gives the shogun’s influence. This represents his ability to keep control of what the other nominally independent daimyos are up to. At lower levels of influence, the other daimyos can declare war or ally with each other; at moderately high levels, the shogun can declare wars on the other daimyos; and at very high levels, he can declare wars on other countries on behalf of all Japan.

Influence changes on a monthly basis according to the shogun’s current prestige and his relations with the other daimyos. He has a couple of decisions that can be made as shogun, but there’s no series of reforms like in the HRE, so the actions he can take are all limited. At low influence, the daimyos may declare war, and if one can gain enough power, may be made shogun instead. Additionally, if the other daimyos can be eliminated, then the shogun can take full power and become the full Japanese nation, instead of just a clan under the emperor.

Underneath it all, the daimyos are still normal feudal monarchy governments, and can change forms at will. It is instead some hard-coded relationships that make up the differences. It is also possible for an external country to conquer ‘Japan’ (take the one-province nation of the emperor), and cut the daimyos loose that way.

This is still obviously fairly abstracted from the actual situation, which Paradox felt does not fit into EU III’s large-scale model with dozens of clans and fairly rapid shifts of power, but it certainly is closer than just a single unified nation.

China

China (or more properly at the start of the game, the Ming Dynasty) is a large nation that did not do a whole lot during the period of Europa Universalis. As such, it always presents a problem for the developers, as it’s hard to keep such a large and populous country chained to an inward-looking set of goals. (In fact, there was an early AAR on the forums that came to the conclusion that Ming was the easiest country to do a world conquest game with.)

Typically, EUIII hands Ming a number of large problems, such as being in one of the slowest-developing tech groups (Chinese, 40% of the normal rate, with a further limitation on anything past level 7), and a lot of rebellion events to keep attention off of the outside. This often works with the AI (but not always…), but a determined player can still do quite a bit.

Divine Wind gives Ming China a new government form, Celestial Empire, which comes with three factions. The abilities of the current monarch, and the current domestic policy sliders determine the month-to-month support of each faction. There are also events and cultural decisions that can directly influence the current support (which will then slowly slide back into balance according to the monthly support). The factions truly are about a third of a government apiece, as at any time you can only do the third of the functions allowed by that faction.

The Eunuch Faction is supported by Diplomatic ability, Free Trade and Naval policy, and allows the placing of merchants, exploration, the placing of colonies, and building new naval units.

The Temple Faction is supported by Military ability, narrow minded and large army policies, and allows the declaration of wars and the placement of missionaries.

The Bureaucrat Faction is supported by Administrative ability, aristocracy and serfdom, and allows the construction of buildings and army units past the current support limit (which, being China, is already quite large).

It would seem the faction influences were not written into the timeline, as a game will always begin with the Eunuch Faction at 100%, but the policy sliders will make sure it is soon overtaken by the Bureaucrats (with the Temple getting second place). The Celestial Empire is otherwise a fairly simple government with no special bonuses, and a time to domestic policy changes that is fairly good for the beginning government types. But it does come with an extra bonus: the Mandate of Heaven national modifier that reduces revolt risk, stability cost, and gives a monthly bonus contribution to stability progress. (However, going below 0 stability or 60 legitimacy gives the Mandate of Heaven Lost modifier that makes stability much harder to get, along with other nasty effects and events.)

All of this makes the Ming Dynasty ship of state one that is hard to steer, and certainly does its job of keeping it constrained. But while there is some interest in the idea of working the factions against each other, it is more an exercise in frustration for anyone not prepared to be very patient.

However, the factions only exist (and limit the Ming) if there’s no major changes. Westernizing the Ming at all will get rid of the factions (and the Mandate of Heaven, which only applies while you have factions), while fully Westernizing the country allows the government form to be changed. Also, in 1644 or later, the Ming can possibly take the decision Form Chinese Nation (meant to represent the Qing Dynasty) if the Manchu are no longer around, and this changes the formal nation tag, and shifts the government to a Despotic Monarchy (which also gets rid of the factions and Mandate of Heaven).

The Steppe

Lastly, the fluid tribal governments of central Asia got a very interesting rework in Divine Wind. They’re considered to automatically be at war with all their non-steppe horde neighbors all the time. They can be defeated, and a peace imposed, but as soon as the 10-year truce is over, the war starts again.

Not only that, but there is no way to trade territory in a treaty. If a horde occupies a province long enough it automatically goes over to it. Conversely, a ‘settled’ country can colonize any province that they hold from a horde. Like with a normal colony, if it gets to 1000 people, it becomes a regular province of the country. However, these ‘colonies’ develop much faster than normal, taking about 4 years to settle the province if nothing further is done instead of the roughly 18 years of a fast-developing normal colony.

The only ways for the horde to escape from this is to reform the government away from a tribal structure (which is difficult), or to form the Mugal Empire, either of which will turn it into a despotic monarchy.

The good news is that this really does lend central Asia an appropriately fluid feel, and the nearby settled countries must always be wary of what’s going on beyond their border. But since a war with a horde country doesn’t count as a ‘normal’ war for war exhaustion, degrading cultural tradition, etc, the first time they have a problem (such as the usual succession crisis of all tribal governments), it isn’t hard to just occupy everything, put down any rebellions, keep them from ever generating a new army, and just colonize the entire country. An occupied province will have an ever-mounting revolt risk, but as long as there’s troops to keep a lid on while colonization proceeds, not a huge problem. This isn’t too far off of the sudden collapse of these societies in history, but it can happen much earlier than it should by being a bit gamey.

Building Out

One of the interesting ideas introduced in HttT was that of an extended set of provincial decisions, which in conjunction with national focus and magistrates turned into a separate way to improve provinces.

DW did away with much of that system and the province improvement buildings that had been around since the original game. Instead, there are now six categories of buildings (Government, Army, Navy, Production, Trade, Fort), each with six levels. Naturally, at the beginning of the game, very little of this is available, and the levels of buildings unlock as technology progresses through the game. The magistrates from HttT were retained, and now each building costs money and a magistrate, which at least keeps a large country from just saving money and spamming every province with a new building as soon as it becomes available.

An extra wrinkle is that in the late game you must choose to specialize your provinces. No province may have more than one building of level five or higher. (Note that this also means powerful fortifications now come at the cost of other things.) Short of this, it’s still a lot like the older system, but with a lot more steps along the way (6×4+2 = 26 buildings, compared to the 17—including 6 fort levels—of the old system).

Manufactories still exist as a one-off expensive buildings that improve local resource production, and give a bonus to technology investment as before. But there is now also a set of eight ‘Unique Buildings’, which each can be built once in the country. These aren’t as expensive as Manufactories, but overall tend to have higher tech level requirements, making many of them late-game improvements.

Conclusion

Every expansion for EU III saw new features introduced to the main feature set originally presented. Most would find their way into EU IV, but the main exceptions are in Divine Wind. They’re generally all good ideas, but the hard-coded relationships in Japan, the separate government type and factions of China, and the more fluid tribal nations did not work well in practice, and were dropped.

But the interface improvements were a big help, and was something that Paradox continued to work on through further games. The overall look of EU III was still slightly behind the times with DW, but it was a big step forward for the game, and doubtlessly helped it continue to do well as Paradox’s attention was occupied elsewhere for the next couple of years.

For a new player of EU III, going straight to the Chronicles version is fairly easy to recommend. Unlike HttT, which was a mixed recommendation due to all the extra complexity it introduced, most of the new features are in places where a new player probably won’t see them until they are well acquainted with the main parts of the game. The rest of the new features are definite improvements, and will help, rather than hurt, a new player.

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Jan20

Not Done Yet

by Rindis on January 20, 2015 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the ninth in a series of reviews of Paradox’s empire management games. See the earlier reviews here:
Europa Universalis II: A Tale of Two Europas
Hearts of Iron: Europa of Iron
Victoria: Nineteenth Century Essay
Crusader Kings: A Dynastic Adventure
Hearts of Iron II: Return Engagement
Europa Universalis III: A Whole New World
Europa Universalis: Rome: Make a Desert and Call it a Game
Hearts of Iron III: One Plus Two Equals Three

While Paradox planned for two expansions to Europa Universalis III, they figured the game was finished after that. There were a number of small ‘sprite pack’ DLC and the like offered, but the game was done, and it was time to turn to other projects after releasing EUIII: Complete.

However, when they polled the fans on their forum for what to do next, more EU III content was the most popular request. And so, Europa Universalis III: Heir to the Throne was released as the third expansion at the end of 2009. This is a review of just the expansion, so you may want to look over my original EU III review (listed above) to better understand this one.

Putting ‘Grand’ in Strategy

I’ve talked about the map in previous reviews in this series (notably the EU III review). One problem the Clausewitz map had is that at a far remove it lost all details. It’s still useful, the political mode shows all the countries, and so on, but it’s just functional.

However, now we get something that has defined Paradox’s maps ever since: In the large zoom-outs, country names sprawl across the map, looking by turns magnificent and intimidating. This is made possible with code that adjusts the size and orientation of the words as the size and shape of the countries change. We’ve technically seen this before (during the HoI III review), but it was only introduced to that game with the later Semper Fi expansion. This is where the idea first shows up.

That said, the map is still less than impressive. The colors are muted, names (provinces or nations) are in a faded gray, and borders still have a number of odd glitches.

Whose Throne is it Anyway?

The new feature for which the expansion is named possibly has the least direct importance, but is an interesting tightening up of the model of pre/early-Modern politics. Any monarchical government has a succession, and the current heir is listed. The current and future rulers have legitimacy scores. The current legitimacy can give bonuses or penalties to stability, revolt risk, and religious tolerance. The successor’s legitimacy is based on the strength of his claim, and will normally be quite high. But ‘pretender’ rebels and civil wars are still possible, and if they win, will establish a new dynasty, which will start with a low legitimacy.

Since the age of the successor is now tracked, there can be a long regency that lasts until he gains majority (age 15). A regency council limits the diplomatic actions a country can take, and causes legitimacy to fall.

Finally, there is a chance for other countries that have a royal marriage to inherit the country. This might be a personal union, which is effectively a special form of vassalage, or a more direct inheritance. It is also possible to claim a throne in a disputed succession (which is whenever the legitimacy of the heir is too low), and the game has an alert listing all the countries currently subject to the problem.

Merchants, and Spam

The trade system got expanded with trade leagues and trade rights. Both of these are diplomatic options only available to merchant republic governments, and allow them to extend the reach of their Centers of Trade.

Trade leagues are like a special kind of alliance where all the members agree to send their trade to the leader’s trade center. In return, everyone in the league gets to use the best possible modifiers for trade and merchant activity available in the league. Trade rights get countries outside of the league to send certain goods to the trade center. This greatly expands the reach of certain trade centers, and boosts the money flowing through them, to the profit of the host merchant republic.

For some reason, these actions are set to pop-up message windows instead of just being noted in the log by default. With four leagues in action at the beginning of the game, this creates a lot of extra messages that are not meaningful for most players, especially since there seems to be a lot of churn in league membership amongst AI powers.

Not Holy, Not Roman, But Perhaps an Empire

One of the oddities of history that the EU series has always tackled is the Holy Roman Empire. It is depicted as a collection of separate states with a nominal head (the current emperor), that is, at best, first among equals. With its position in central Europe, what’s going on within the HRE is always important, but the Empire itself only has a light touch on the course of the game.

This was expanded upon somewhat from EU II to III, but it was still a fair amount of motion without a whole lot of effect. Generally speaking, there are a set of countries defined as electors, who choose the new Emperor every time the current one dies, and the Emperor always has the ability to march troops through the various territories of the Empire (normally this takes diplomacy to arrange), and has some freedom to intervene in wars among its members. (This is not a bad model of history.)

Now, there are a series of reforms that can be initiated. Assuming the Emperor can garner enough authority, the government of the HRE can gradually be strengthened. This is effectively a list of decisions available to the Emperor, that must be triggered one after another, that affect all the countries in the HRE. The member states also have to accept these reforms, which is part of what imperial authority does, and takes time and effort to build up to. The final reform, Renovatio Imperii, turns the entire HRE into a single big super-state controlled by the Emperor.

Ministry of Culture

The idea of army and naval tradition as a score that was used to create military leaders was introduced to the EU series from Victoria in III. Now, HttT has introduced cultural tradition, which allows you to create advisors.

In the original EU III there was a system of randomly generated advisors which you could hire to generate bonuses in particular fields. The advisors are still the same, and there is still a pool of available random ones, but now cultural tradition allows you to create one of the type you want/need—and there are 36 different types. They also come in different degrees of capability, and a high cultural tradition allows you to create more capable advisors.

In general, cultural tradition goes up during peacetime, and down during wartime. However, there are now also ministers, who can be used to boost cultural tradition; but this is merely the cheapest of their abilities. Ministers are like the colonists, merchants and diplomats that have been in the EU series from the beginning. Depending on the exact form of government you have, you get a certain number per year, which can then be ‘spent’ on various tasks.

EU III introduced provincial decisions along with the concept of decisions in general, and they have now been modified and expanded in HttT. Most provincial decisions were local trade-offs between two statistics, and for me, usually an unattractive tradeoff. Now there’s a more extensive list of them, including some that are minor upgrades to the province, kind of like the buildings that EU has always had. However, the ‘upgrades’ can only be done near the national focus, an area that you have decreed will receive bureaucratic attention, and that can only be moved every few decades. All the provincial decisions require different numbers of ministers to enact (up to 5 for some, which is the maximum number you can have at one time), forcing you to ‘budget’ your activities.

Why Are We at War Again?

The most important addition to the game is the Casus Belli system. The EU series has always had a robust diplomatic system to handle peace talks, but once at war, it didn’t matter if you started it, or were attacked, if you had a claim on some of that nation’s territory, or a different religion, the peace process was the same.

Now, it matters.

The new system defines different reasons (causes) for war, such as ‘alliance’ (your ally is at war with them), ‘trade war’ (someone has embargoed your merchant republic), ‘reconquest’ (someone else controls what your country considers to be home territory), or any of a couple dozen other reasons, some of which are granted by random events. These are meant to define the goals of a war, and will affect the prestige and infamy gained from the peace.

This ends up changing how the game generally works. It used to be that the punishment for declaring a war was a loss of stability, but with all these goals it is now easily avoidable. Instead, a new statistic is listed at the top of the main screen, infamy, and the game is much more about managing that number instead of stability.

Badboy was a concept added way back during patching of the original game in the series, and has slowly become more visible over time, and was renamed infamy either in EU II or III (not quite sure anymore…). The main idea was that taking territory increased this rating, and it would then slowly subside over time. If it went over a certain limit, the AI players would all start attacking that country in an attempt to keep it from running away with the game. The idea has gotten more nuanced through various iterations, and now the AI is responds better to shifts in infamy, up and down, including in other AI players. Any country that goes over its limit (which varies depending on the ruler and policy settings) now becomes eligible for the “Dishonorable Scum” casus belli from everyone else.

The amount of infamy gained from taking territory has increased from previous versions, but some war goals lower the amount again. However, defensive wars don’t (usually) have a goal, so taking territory when attacked is expensive, and the declared goal only applies to the country you declared war on, so taking territory from allies instead of the main target is also expensive.

Conclusion

Paradox had good reason to consider EU III complete after releasing In Nomine, but Heir to the Throne is a solid improvement. Most of the features came from suggestions from users on the forums, and Paradox managed to choose some very good ones, and implement them well. In addition, the interface does make a few things clearer than before. Most notably, Military technology has always slightly improved a number of combat modifiers, and these are now made visible in the military tab of the UI.

It is an expansion made up of feature creep, so I wonder if a new person would want to start without it, but then, the complications in HttT are largely lost in the vast sea of complexity that the EU series has always had. Certainly any fan of EU III Complete will find HttT an improvement.

However, I do need to mention one last flaw in the ointment: For some reason, the EU III: Heir to the Throne crashes upon exit on my Windows 7 machine. This isn’t really a problem, as there are no problems while playing or saving the game, and this occurs as the game is finishing its exit, but it does always give an error.

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Dec02

A Whole New World

by Rindis on December 2, 2013 at 2:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the sixth in a series of reviews of Paradox’s empire management games. See the earlier reviews here:
Europa Universalis II: A Tale of Two Europas
Hearts of Iron: Europa of Iron
Victoria: Nineteenth Century Essay
Crusader Kings: A Dynastic Adventure
Hearts of Iron II: Return Engagement

Paradox Interactive returned to their original empire management series at the beginning of 2007, with the release of Europa Universalis III for PC and Mac. It was a completely re-done game, with plenty of new features, but the scope was reduced back to about three centuries (1453 to 1789). Fairly quickly, two planned expansions were released: Napoleon’s Ambition in late 2007 (which extended the timeframe to 1822) and In Nomine in 2008, which moved the starting date to 1399.

Paradox then released a combined edition called EU III Complete in late 2008, little realizing that fan insistence would later prompt the release of two more expansions. This version covers 423 years, which is the largest scope of any Paradox game yet (no, wait, Crusader Kings II with The Old Gods expansion would be longer). I’ve only played Complete, so this review will purely be about it.

Clausewitz

At the time Hearts of Iron came out in 2001, it was obvious that the game had much the same feel as the preceding two Europa Universalis games, but it was mentioned by Paradox that almost no code had carried over, and they weren’t really the same ‘engine’. I haven’t seen anything about the later games, but I can only assume that as time went on, they got better at doing code that could be re-used in each later game.

In the mid-2000s, they began work on an actual game engine that would be written from the ground up to be expandable and to support all further games they did. This project was named Clausewitz, and has formed the basis of every new game from Paradox since 2007.

The centerpiece of all of Paradox’s games is the map, and the Clausewitz engine featured an all new 3D-rendered map. While it would later become fairly spectacular, it was less than stellar on its first outing. The oddest part is that the provincial borders managed to feel very arbitrary, since they consist of a bunch of straight lines (there is actually a grid pattern that the borders are defined by) that occasionally have odd, meaningless detours, and don’t match any easily discernible boundaries (for instance, none of them follow the courses of rivers visible on the map).

The map is easily zoomable with the mouse scroll-wheel, and while it can zoom in to the point where you are only looking at a couple of provinces, you can’t even see all of Europe at the furthest zoom out. At the closest levels, small trees become visible, while at the further levels even the province names become invisible. Color-coded map modes are still the preferred way to easily display information, and this is improved over the previous games with a striping effect for things like showing that someone has captured a province. Also, there are now color-coded tool tips in many places that let you know what effects are bad (red numbers) and which are good (green).

The general structure of the engine is that every game first brings up a launcher window, from which new updates can be detected and downloaded. Typically, there are no intro movies when the game starts, and as the game loads, instead of a single loading image with a progress bar, a number of paintings go by before bringing up the main menu.

One of the most impressive features of the new game, shared by most of the other games on the Clausewitz engine, is the ability to start at any point in the period the game covers. There are still specific scenarios, but these are just ‘bookmarks’ to particular dates; you can change the date and the year, and watch history unfold in the country selection map.

Simulation vs Recreation

In my review of EU II, I mentioned that much of the game, and especially the events, were built around a sense of ‘acting out’ history. This general idea was followed in most of the rest of their games, but came to an end here.

These events helped generate the feeling of actual historical context, and helped with a ‘living world’ experience… when they worked right. The random bits of history that happen because of events and people outside the scope of the game still happen. However, it was too easy for things to go off the rails, and for these events to never happen, or worse, happen when they were entirely inappropriate to what was actually going on in the game.

In EU III, most of these events were taken out of the game entirely. Also, the old system of getting certain monarchs and leaders on a fixed schedule was scrapped, with new monarchs becoming a random event with random abilities. This removed a certain level of historical interest, but made the game more internally consistent.

Decisions, Decisions

Possibly the biggest new feature in EU III was decisions, which only grew in importance from the initial release to In Nomine. Generally, any nation will see a large list of options available to them, that will offer bonuses and penalties. To be able to take any particular decision, you need to achieve certain prerequisites, and all of this is spelled out clearly in tool-tips for each one.

Decisions exist in three different forms, in three different places in the game. National decisions have their own tab/window in the main interface (shared with missions, below), and can affect most everything in the game. Religious decisions are similarly national in scope, and are listed in the religion tab, while provincial decisions naturally exist in the provincial UI (though there is an alert and ledger page that tells you when there are provincial decisions available).

Many decisions are trade-offs, increased stability for decreased revenue and the like, but others are more straightforward, rewards for achieving certain preconditions. They are a good extra system of ‘customizing’ a country to specific needs, that does not require any continuing input by the player.

Finally, there are a number of nations familiar to us in the twenty-first century that had not fully formed in the fifteenth. Traditionally, EU had events that could form Russia, or turn the Iberian kingdoms into Spain, and that was carried through in EU III. But in In Nomine, these events were turned into decisions. As events, they went off randomly after the (not-visible) requirements had been met. As decisions, they are visible to any country that can qualify for them. These events were turned from a random occurance into something that could be planned for, and implemented at the player’s choosing, instead of waiting for it.

Government

While you technically play as a country in a Europa Universalis game, the government itself was not much of a concept in the original, with lists of historical rulers with abilities judged on historical performance who reign during their historical times being about the limit of definition in the original, and the addition of eight policy sliders in EU II allowed some player personalization.

EU III introduced governmental forms, and the random changeover of rulers. Monarchies and despotisms generally have rulers who serve for life, and the age at which the monarch dies is random, as are the abilities of his heir. Republics have an event every few years that elects a new ruler with a choice between candidates which emphasize each of the primary ruler characteristics.

Initially, there were thirteen different forms of government, these could affect policy changes, how often rulers change, and a few specific bonuses. In Nomine increased the main set to fourteen, and added some special groupings that only interact with the main set through decisions.

Three ‘tribal’ government types which represent the last vestiges of pre-Medieval culture in the world of EU have some policy restrictions, and increased costs to develop technologically. This last is on top of the fact that countries with this government type already belong to a culture that has slower technological advancement. On the other end, a late-game country can undergo a revolution to become a Revolutionary Republic, which gets plenty of powerful events to help out, while also forcing wars with much of Europe.

The policy sliders mentioned above from EU II have stayed the same, but most of the time, you can only adjust them at an even slower rate than the once-per-decade of EU II, as only the most flexible governments can manage that rate. And several governments have restrictions on the slider settings. You aren’t prevented from going past the limits, but revolt risk starts rising sharply if they do.

Another feature added ‘people’ to the government with three advisor slots. Advisors have a lifespan just like rulers, and there is a general pool of available advisors, but when a new one appears, he is only available to one country for a year, and then he will join the general pool, if he has not already been hired. There is a large number of different types of advisors, and each one has an effect on a different part of the government (taxes, technology research, stability, missionary conversions, colonization…). They also have ratings from one to six, and the higher the rating, the higher the hiring cost and monthly salary, but the stronger the effect.

Ideas

The big addition to countries didn’t involve people, but did involve personalization. As government technology increases, idea slots are opened. Ideas are considered fundamental policy decisions, that generally give a bonus to one of the multitude of national statistics.

The number of ideas that a country can have goes up throughout the game, as governmental technology slowly unlocks more slots, up to a maximum of twelve. At the same time, the number of available ideas grows, as they are unlocked by advancing the relevant technology. There are forty ideas in the game, spread across five fields of naval, land, exploration, state, and culture.

Military

Combat still has the same sequence as the original games: alternating fire and shock phases, and each military tech level slightly adjusts the effectiveness of troops in those phases, with fire being useless at the beginning of the game, and slowly overtaking shock effectiveness as the decades roll by.

A lot of other things did change. Troops are no longer just lumped into pools of each type that are attritioned away and replaced with fresh men, but are hired in discrete 1000-man units like every game from Hearts of Iron on. These units are more expensive, but reinforcements are sent to them every month if they are understrength at a rate that depends on the unit’s current situation and the military budget.

Each unit also has a type with its own modifiers for damage and morale in shock and fire combat, with better types becoming available as the game goes on. Each cultural or technological group has its own formations available, so for example, Western cavalry is the best in the early game (late medieval), and late game (Napoleonic), but substandard for much of the rest of the game. The actual performance of a unit is dependent on its type as well as the overall modifier from your current tech level.

The large structural change to combat was the introduction of combat width, but while it was graphically represented, it was never clear nor well explained. In general, the idea is to limit the utility of super-stacks. The width is the maximum frontage (units) an army can put on the line. The two forces line up, and attack their counterparts (only) on the other side until destroyed or forced out of line. Cavalry units (with higher mobility) generally go on the flanks, and if unopposed, are allowed to attack a unit on the other side in the flank, causing it to take more damage than if engaged by just its counterpart. There is a second line behind the main line of each side, and artillery will line up there and and its firepower to the unit in front of it as it attacks its counterpart. A larger army should beat a smaller army, as it will have more units to cycle through the line until the smaller army breaks, but smaller army with superior units and/or leadership only has to take on force of about its own size, and can defeat the parts that can get at it in turn.

Sieges work much the same way as the original games, but instead of mountains and other rough terrain giving a bonus to the defense that makes it harder for the siege to get going, it adds to the defensiveness rating. This rating (which can get national modifiers), causes the amount of time between each siege check to go up, lengthening the entire process that way.

Finally, in the earlier games leaders had also followed a set schedule with statistics based on history. EU III acts a bit more like Victoria, and introduces the concept of Army (and Naval) Tradition, which can be gained through fighting battles, exploration, and a few other activities, but then declines over time. Leaders can then be recruited as desired/needed, and their level of ability depend on the current military tradition.

Rebellions

Like in the original games, one of the major internal pressures on a countries are armed rebellions that can spring up depending on a number of factors. This turns into a monthly chance of a rebellion starting in a particular province, which then must be put down.

And that’s about where it ended originally. When a rebellion happens in EU III, the rebels have a type, which defines their goals, should they not be stopped. The most common types are patriots and nationalists, who either want to join a nearby country, or found a new one, as determined by culture types. But there are peasants who want lower taxes and liberties, zealots who want to change the official religion of the state, and a few other variations.

A final rebel type are pretenders. They have a leader that they want to see on the throne instead of the current ruler, and tribal governments tend get a lot of them (in a succession crisis) every time the ruler changes.

Colonization

As with everything else, EU III both maintains much the same colonization system as the earlier games, and brings new features to it. A very important new feature is that uncolonized provinces have no resource at all. Previously, every province’s trade resource was fixed; now, it is only decided when a colony grows to size 3, and it is randomly chosen from a list of resources appropriate to the region.

The trade post system was dropped, leaving only regular colonies in the game, which operated much the same. In Nomine reworked things a bit. The idea of colonial range was added; the distance from the home country that new colonies could be founded, to keep European powers from grabbing all of Asia too early.

Being able to colonize at all was made dependent on a few national ideas, especially Quest for the New World, which allows exploration, and Colonial Ventures grants a colonist each year (state religion can also generate colonists). In addition to sending out explorers, just owning a province adjacent to terra incognita will eventually reveal the adjacent areas, so countries like Russia can expand across Asia without needing to take the idea.

Conclusion

Europa Universalis III is a sequel game that does not entirely replace the former entry to the series. The shift in philosophy causes a few things to be lost, but in all, this is a much improved game. The graphics are lackluster, and lose some artistic charm, but EU II wasn’t that great looking, and graphics are not at all the point of the game.

Releasing a game with two expansions already planed for within the next year raised some ire and accusations of paying for beta-testing. To a certain extent, this is true. But, I have found that some of the best games are those that go through an intense period of revision with guidance from a large audience. EU III got that in it’s first year, and I think the wide audience feedback allowed In Nomine to be an expansion that really made the game much better than it already was.

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Apr30

Europa Universalis IV Shilling

by Rindis on April 30, 2013 at 9:33 pm
Posted In: Computer games

Okay, I normally don’t do this, but it’s just too tempting:

As you may have noticed, I really like Paradox’s grand strategy titles. I mean, I’ve even started writing a series of reviews of them, that I hope will manage to note just where certain ideas crop up, and trace them through later games. (The Victoria review should be up in just a few days.)

Late last year, Paradox announced the latest game in the series that launched it all: Europa Universalis IV. Right now, they’re launching a ‘spread the word’ campaign, where you get bonuses for getting people to sign up to their newsletter, where they announce upcoming games, and have occasional special deals (I’ve gotten a couple free games through it, though that has dropped off.) Since I’m a sucker for special forum icons, I’ve decided to take part.

So, if you’re one of the 0.375 people who actually read this blog, and have any interest in computer strategy games, go here, and sign up for their monthly newsletter.

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