Hello, and welcome to the last dev diary before we release Origins and the 1.32 update! We’re very excited about the upcoming release, and we hope that it meets your expectations, both the Immersion Pack and the free update.
Today different members of our team will be showing you a lot of different stuff. First, the new achievements. Then, the complete list of new monuments (although someone has already posted it here in the forums, for what I’ve seen). Finally, we’ll talk about how we handle tests and analysis of the game, how that has helped us with the 1.32 update, and specifically about the Tribal Development rework. Let’s go!
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Hello everybody!
My name is Raúl Trullenque (@RaulTrullenque in the forums), I am a new Content Designer working here at Tinto. Before joining this team I was not a regular forum denizen, just part of the silent majority of Paradox GSG players. Nonetheless I’ll do my best to be on par with my colleagues @Aldaron, @Ogele and @Pavía , and answer your questions as best as I can. Wish me luck. :)
First and most important, as many of you already know, sadly this past September Ivo passed away after a hard fought battle against leukemia. To the community he was known as Atwix, he was a streamer, a forum legend and one of the most experienced and knowledgeable EU4 players. His passing has been deeply felt both in the community and in the studio. From Tinto we want to send our condolences to his family and we would like to make sure that his name will be forever intertwined with EU4.
Atwix Legacy
Have 10 personal unions at the same time.
The description is short and to the point, as there is nothing that I could say that would improve on what the PU master explained already, so I would just link his famous guide here and encourage you to read it, as his wise words would help you a lot to get this achievement.
Now on a lighter note, I would like to showcase some of the new achievements that will be available with Origins, then we'll follow with the entire list:
Imposter Syndrome
As Sus, have three countries hostile to you (less than 0 opinion of you) after they discovered your spy.
- “I promise, it wasn’t me, I am sure that 100k rebellion raised itself.” Oh!, you found a Sus diplomat giving away weapons on the streets?. Mmm, no, it doesn’t ring any bells. I am sure it was Morocco's fault. We should vote on it!”
Ultimate Military
As Songhai, have Prussia and Nepal as Marches!
If you have been following the dev diaries you should know by now that Origins Songhai is very different from vanilla Songhai, it is now an even stronger Stronghai. To challenge this new strength we have created this new achievement that puts the player on the path to create the mightiest military in history.
Where are the penguins?
As a Malagasy country, unite all of Madagascar and hold all the most southern provinces of the world.
This achievement encourages a different way of playing the game, not focusing on development or big wars, but on a quest, a difficult quest to find a quartet of very elusive birds that are anywhere but in Madagascar. No penguins were harmed in the making of this achievement.
Golden Wind
As Air, make at least 50 ducats profit per month and have 50% of your income made through gold provinces.
And to close this DD down we present to you a very plain and boring achievement without any possible second readings, with an icon that it’s only a random whirl of air and a name that is just a pun on Air and gold. It is totally not a reference to anything. ;)
The entire list of new achievements:
Mansa Musa - As Mali, give at least 10k Ducats away to another great power without having a single loan or being bankrupt.
Fugger Banking - As Augsburg, subsidize 3 Great Powers at least 20% of their income while having less than 20 provinces
This is fine - Have at least +10 Global Unrest and be in a winning coalition war, which was targeted against you.
KHAAAAAAN - Restore the Mongol Empire before the Age of Absolutism.
Knights of the Caribbean - As the Knights, own all of the Caribbean and every island in the Mediterranean Sea. (Colonies are NOT allowed)
Australia - Hungary - Starting as an Australian tribe unite Australia and subjugate Hungary
Shemot is Not - As a Jewish nation, convert all of Egypt to Jewish while having the Jewish Community Aspect active.
One Nation to rule them all - As Saruhan, have at least 9 loyal vassals with at least 100 development each.
Swahili Persuasion - As Kilwa, convert all of the Moluccas and Indonesia.
I don't like sand - Have the most development of all countries while owning no province with terrain other than desert or coastal desert.
Surfing USA - Form the USA as Hawaii.
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Now, I (@Pavía) will be presenting the new monument list.
Take into account a couple things: yes, we’ve already noticed some bugs that people have pointed out, and that didn’t get into 1.32 release version for stability reasons, but that will be already fixed in the first hotfix we deliver; the other is that yes, some monuments will be stronger, other weaker, and we will be taking charge of that as you play with them and report your impressions, as we did in 1.31 patches (and we’ve even done some more extra monuments fixes for 1.32, as you could already see in the changelog). Please notice that we've come through 3 different iterations of the new monuments during its development, and that 3 separate teams (dev team, QA, and betatesters) have been testing the monuments in the past weeks; however, we couldn't post this list until having the number tweaked for the release version of 1.32, and then you, players, aren't posting your feedback, we lack a lot of information about their balance.
So, I really hope that you enjoy most of the new monuments, and I’ll be reading with attention your suggestions in the monouments thread
See the monuments in full here (check the spoiler); Paradox Forums
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Finally, hello, my name is Kuba, here known as @Rossarness, and I’m the Release Engineer here at Tinto. Today I’d like to tell you how we are testing and analyzing the game, and I’ll also talk a bit about the upcoming changes to the American Native Tribes.
I did write testing however I meant the automated nightly runs that I’m in charge of. Every night we run automated runs using the latest code of our game. That gives us an opportunity to analyze how our changes affect the game. This is especially useful when we are doing some balancing changes (e.g. latest changes to the Protestants and Orthodox).
Usually in the morning I check all the nightlies for potential issues, if there are no crashes I can proceed to analyzing the game state.
With each run we get a diplomatic mode map attached to the report so I can decide which runs might require in-depth analysis.
Here’s an example of interesting run:
As you can see the standard Ottoblob was destroyed by the Mamluks, so it’s quite an unusual outcome. If such a situation would be common, this would mean for us that we nerfed some mechanic too much or made it OP.
That’s how I noticed the problems with the Protestants and Orthodox countries. After implementing changes to the Catholics I saw that across almost all runs, Europe is united as Catholics. Basically after loading the game each run looked similar to this one:
Usually only the Ottomans were strong enough to resist the Catholic crusade. So together with our Content Designers we analyzed key countries which could oppose them (like in the screenshot above Russia ceased to exist - which was very common at this point). Then we buffed the Protestant religions and observed how it affected the game.
I also kept Russia under observation which helped us to find that AI had problems with getting and maintaining high Patriarch Authority and couldn’t be a real counterbalance to the Ottomans. Of course our automation also saves the game at regular intervals, so we can analyze various variables that led to the end result, or to check our changes mid-game. Like, one of the religions might become almost one-faith in the end, as long as in the mid-game it looks balanced when in conflict with others, and that it doesn’t happen in every run. A screenshot below with AI getting high PA as Russia now, after doing some AI fixes.
After changes done to the guarantee system, we can also now observe interesting alt-history outcomes, like an independent Revolutionary Catalonia allied to France:
And Switzerland with access to the sea as a bonus. :)
Last aspect of our automation which is very important are the performance metrics, with each run we gather statistics on how long it takes to make a daily or monthly tick on average. Results are calculated from the finished game, this allows us to check possible performance improvements or detect degradation just a day after we merge in changes that might cause it. So worry not, I'm now guarding the performance of the game and we are looking forward to improving it. For 1.32 the performance is better than in 1.31, and although we’re not at 1.30.6, as Johan already announced, our objective is to keep working to reach at least that point.
Below some good (and interesting) overnight results:
Strong Spain which started to eat France (and of course Ottoblob).
Strong France which caused most of the colonies to go independent. Also some people were worried that African countries would be eaten by the European Powers. As you can see mostly they survive, sometimes even thrive, so don’t worry.
Strong Russia with nice France and Spain, also in Africa you can see Great Zimbabwe formed. Also Ottomans are not that powerful, with Persia being formed. :)
So the last thing I want to talk about are the Tribal balance changes. I know there were many issues with them, so I made it my personal mission to improve them. So again I used the nightlies to analyze the tribal countries, and found that they created megacities in the Amazon forest (250+ development) on every run. Then I found that as the Tribal Development cost increase is linear, that allowed them to freely accumulate the development over the course of the game. So now the development growth will decrease exponentially, making it almost impossible to reach such high values. The amount of Tribal Development gained is divided by the current development if it’s above 1. That means if you reach 10, the further growth will be reduced by the factor of ten. It’s not perfect but still better than the current system and I look forward to improving it further - I had to prepare so many other things related to the release, TBH.
Here is the list of provinces sorted by development. You can see that end game results are back to sane levels and there are no provinces from the Americas in the top list, the highest was 37 owned by the USA.
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So, that’s all for today! We really expect that you might have liked the content we’ve just shown to you. We will be talking more about the new content and the 1.32 changelog tomorrow, in the Paradox Twitch Stream, at 17h (CET), with @BjornB and @Mordred Viking. And as the release is in a couple days, we really hope you enjoy both the Origins Immersion Pack and the Songhai Update, and give us feedback about it as soon as you start playing. See you!