Hello everyone, and welcome to another EUIV Dev Diary! Today we’ll be talking about more changes we’ve been doing for the 1.33 ‘France’ patch, one new concept that we’ve implemented called ‘Script Debt’, and the workflow behind bugfixing. So let's get started with my colleague @Ogele talking about the balance changes!
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Greetings everyone!
As you all are aware we have no precise, official “regional focus” for this patch unlike the other free patches such as 1.29 “Manchuria Update” or 1.27 “Poland Update”. While it means we haven’t created mission trees for a region, this at least allows us to concentrate on balancing existing content, adding Quality of Life changes and fine tuning some other areas of the world.
Starting with China, we received your feedback and implemented some changes which makes the unification of China a less tedious process for the non-horde Chinese tags. One of them is the addition of the following government reform for every Confucian Chinese which gets released by the Celestial Empire:
One huge problem with the released countries in China was that they tend to create hugboxes around them which prevented them from actually unifying China. In order to prevent this all the Chinese Kingdoms have a -100 Opinion penalty for fellow Confucian countries. At the same time, they also gain access to the Unify China casus belli, which received a substantial buff:
We were experimenting with giving every Chinese tag cores over the whole region, but this resulted in really awkward situations where a province had cores of like 8 different tags + these cores were too much of a freebie. By gaining the cores through occupation the process of conquering China feels more natural.
Here are some of the nightly results:
A natural occurring Qing, which we wanted to see too, sadly did not happen yet. However, we are pleased to see that a unified China is now more likely to happen.
Even if it happens through means we did not expect…
Apparently, in this timeline there was a Bengali dynasty in China…
Other changes we introduced is the inability for the Celestial Empire AI to make countries their tributaries, which have their capital in China, as it felt very immersion breaking to us when the Celestial Emperor blocked themselves in such a fashion.
We also made a small change to Korea too:
1. The Gyeongbok Palace no longer gives tech cost reduction. Instead, it now has the following modifiers:
2 .Their national idea “The Hangeul Alphabet” now gives -10% Tech Cost instead of -5%
3. The estate privilege “Inwards Perfection” gives now the following penalties / benefits:
It also ensures that the Korean AI is a diplomat or an administrator unless another nation holds one of their cores. This way you have an AI Korea which actually plays tall instead of blobbing into Manchuria, which wasn’t really liked by the community.
While we’re at the estate privileges: all privileges, which have modifiers scaling with the Crownland owned by the estate, now exempt the estate from the “Seize Land” action. This change allows you to have a little more control over who you seize the Crownland + makes these estate privileges a little bit more useful. Also, the “Increased Levies' ' estate privilege has been slightly buffed, giving now 33% increased Manpower Modifier at 100% Crownland instead of 25%.
One final balance change I want to address are the “Expand Infrastructure” and “Centralize State” features from Leviathan. Their goals were to enhance playing tall. While the idea was neat, we felt like these two buttons didn’t have the punch needed to be worth the attention. The issue with “Expand Infrastructure” was the relation of governing cost and manufactory slots: manufactories are useful in low dev provinces as they give a flat bonus, but a governing cost increase means a province is more expensive to hold which is why you don’t waste it for a benefit which could be accomplished by holding one additional 3 dev province with a manufactory. So the times where you would use this button would be if you want a province to have something like a rampart, which is a very niche situation at best. Because of that we have decided to give “Expand Infrastructure” some more power, which makes their cost worthwhile:
I want to point out that this is NOT the final version. We will take the Beta feedback into consideration for adjusting this feature.
Next point is the “Centralize State” button, which has one big issue: it competes with much more useful and global “Expand Administration” button from the government tab. To make “Centralize State” more viable, we have decided to change its identity a little bit by changing the governing cost from a flat reduction to a percentage reduction. We also added some other bonuses to the centralized state:
Here are a few other balance changes we have done for 1.33:
-Winter Palace’s modifiers have been reworked as they didn’t feel right for Russia and the seat of Peter the Great. Now it gives at level 3 the following modifiers:
-Tibetan (just like Vietnamese and Korean) can now sinicize their culture and adopt a culture of the Chinese culture group. It should be noted here: we are using the Manchu way of doing this as the engine is way too outdated for dynamic culture groups unfortunately.
-Syncretic religions now give the bonuses of the monuments of the secondary faith. Example: Oirat which has Sunni as Syncretic religion will be able to benefit from the Hagia Sophia.
-Feudal Theocracies have access to the Divine Ideas Group instead of the Aristocracy ideas.
-Muslim subjects will no longer enact “Guaranteed Dhimmi Autonomy” if their Muslim overlord has religious ideas.
-Roman Empire’s ideas have been buffed to bring them on par with the ideas of the HRE.
-Selling Crownland now requires you to actually have the 10% to sell.
-Manpower, Sailors and Forcelimit granted by colonies are reduced by 25%.
That was all from my side! I wish you a nice week, and we will see you in the next DD!
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Alright, now @Pavía again in charge, into the workflow for this patch. When tackling 1.33 fixes, we obviously gave priority to bugs being reported after the 1.32.2 patch was released, and those that didn’t make the cut owing to not being implemented in time. In the Content Design Team we also addressed and discussed some balance changes we wanted to make for this patch, specifically for the Eastern Asia regions, as @Ogele has just pointed out. But we found that as the bugfixing process was going well, as the ‘Songhai’ patch had been much less troubling than the previous ‘Majapahit’ one, we had some development time at our disposal to go back, and try to fix even older script-related issues.
That is what we called ‘Script Debt’, following the ‘Tech Debt’ concept that was also addressed in older versions of EUIV (for 1.30 patch there were a lot of issues addressed this way, if you recall). So we focused for a few weeks on cleaning up all these older issues that for one or other reason hadn’t been solved yet, and trying to have as few remaining legacy problems from older versions as possible. We also cleaned and simplified some scripts that were a bit convoluted, something that we’ll continue doing in future versions when possible (because for the next patch we’ll be more focused on creating new content, as previously said).
What are the actual results of this work? So we've solved around 40 older script issues for this patch. And regarding all the bug fixes done, I’ll show you some pictures and metrics, as they may speak better of it than I:
Here you can see that we’ve solved over 400 reported bugs, reducing the total count by at least 100 bugs and issues for this patch alone, which puts the EUIV bug-count lower than any GSG game has been in the last decade, according to our metrics (yay!).
So, what can you expect from the team in the next months regarding this topic? Apart from developing new content, we’ll continue addressing Tech Debt, Script Debt, and QoL improvements; you can help us by posting this kind of problems in the Bug Reports subforum, as we keep a regular track of it. And if you have any suggestions for improving the state of the game that are not bugs, we will continue tracking the Suggestions subforum in that regard. Listening to the voices of players is important for the Tinto Team at this point of the development of EUIV, as we’re trying to polish the game as much as possible.
To finish, when can you expect the 1.33 patch to be released? Well, the good news is that we’re pushing it as an open beta this evening! We’ll keep it open for a couple weeks, and then we will release the full patch later in Q1, after the testing is done, and we’re sure that we’ve solved all the issues appearing in the open beta.
By the way, we noticed that we have an issue regarding the Linux version of the game that we’re already trying to fix, so those users should NOT opt-in into this open beta.
You’ll be able to take a look on the changelog along with the release of the open beta. See you, and we will be answering issues raised in this thread during the week!