Greetings everyone! EU community team member Ryagi here, today we bring you another Mod Spotlight.
Since our last mod spotlight we've had a few folks ask us to bring our previously covered mods to steam, and so today we can begin with that. We plan to post these retrospective spotlights until we're all caught up to our "live" spotlights. In addition, we'll continue to post up to date spotlights here when they are out too.
Please note this spotlights original posting was on the 17th of March 2023 and can be found on our forums here. If you've already read that spotlight, there is nothing new here. If this is the first you're seeing it, enjoy!
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Hello and welcome to our first-ever EU4 mod spotlight!
We consider mods and their communities a core pillar of our EUIV ecosystem, to showcase some of the amazing creations you the community have fostered we want to make this a semi-regular series giving modders a chance to show off their work.
For our pioneer feature, we’ll be looking at Europa Expanded. Without further ado, we'll let Stiopa and Lord Varangian introduce themselves and their work on EE.
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Hello Europa Universalis Enthusiasts!
We are the Europa Expanded team and since 2018 we’ve been working on expanding your Europa Universalis Experience. With years of content design experience, in our mod, we strive to create a player-made update for each subsequent area that we work on. Our goal is to enrich your gameplay while also keeping the experience familiar to what you are already used to. It is natural then, that some of our scripts have even made it into vanilla.
In this post, we will present just a glimpse of what our mod has to offer and what direction we are heading in. So, to give you an idea of what our mod is about, let us look closer into what our latest update has brought forth.
One of our latest major updates, The Caliphate, added over a thousand unique missions for 30+ nations, giving much love to the entire Muslim world, which has not seen any updates since Cradle of Civilization in 2017.
To present our mission trees would take a while, so here’s a roster containing just a few of the newer ones for your viewing pleasure:
Mamluks
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Granada
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Timurids
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Mughals
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Arabia
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Austria
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Malaya
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Rûm
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Our mission trees are not just any mission trees, for along with them, we are also making innovations in content creation, introducing Incident Mission Trees, Subject-Oriented Mission Trees, Preview System for Branching Missions.
And then there are the countless mechanics in the mod….We have made dozens upon dozens of mechanics for the mod. All of them seek to bring flavour to regions, nations, and even dynasties. Our latest and more glamorous additions are the:
Abbasid Caliphate Mechanic
The Abbasid caliphate mechanic allows you to serve as the puppet master of the Abbasid Caliph, exerting his influence over the Muslim World for your own gain, later being able to claim the Caliphate for yourself.
Timurid Legitimacy
a measure of how legitimate is your Timurid dynasty. Your key to gaining support for founding a new nation.
Spoils of War
The conquest frenzy of the Timurid Hordes. The more you win, conquer and raze, the more buffs you'll get. But inactivity will over time render it useless.
Trade Outposts:
Expanding your trade empire through diplomacy. Not through the sword, but through the pen. It has been used for several nations, from Hormuz, the Hansa, Mughals and it will only find more uses in the future.
That is not to say the rest of the mechanics are lacking. Japan itself has the Onin War mechanic, the struggle between the Hosokawa and Yamana clan, in which you can choose a side to support similarly to the League War. And lastly, the prestigious Habsburg dynasty has access to the Habsburg Glory mechanic, allowing you to either spread your dynasty, or to establish loyal allies.
You’d be mistaken if you thought that missions and mechanics is all that we do - our commitments lie far beyond that. We also add hundreds of new events, dozens of decisions and so on
Below is a selection of other components that we touch upon, including, but not limited to:
Government Reforms. While we have always had some commitment to adding new government reforms, we have recently decided to expand our horizons and are planning to add an increasing amount of government reforms.
We’re also adding new estates. 1.12 “The Caliphate” itself has added two new Estates, the Berber Tribes for Maghrebi nations, and the Turkic Tribes for Aq and Qara Qoyunlu. We also have some older estates and are itching to add more of them, as we go on.
Our focus doesn’t lie just in adding more estates. We are also interested in adding more variety in privileges for the default estates. Here’s but a small selection of new estate privileges from our latest patch.
We are also committed to updating old content. In “The Caliphate”, we have gone through most of muslim events, making the options more balanced, trying to add more choice to your average event and making mysticism options more viable.
But flavour isn't necessarily all full of sunshine. There's plenty of pitfalls and disasters that you may found yourself spiralling towards. Whether it be you, or the AI, you will certainly feel the impact of the disasters showcased below.
We do, of course, add much more than that, but I’d like to keep the rest as a mystery for the people that do choose to explore this mod themselves, which I highly encourage to do so. ;)
And for the people who are wishing to play the mod, here's a map of all the nations we've touched as of now, to a greater or lesser degree:
Starting Nations
Endgame formables
Cultural Formables
We also have bookmarks designed specifically to serve as a guide for finding flavorful tags, so make clever use of those!
If you are interested in following our work more closely, we post weekly Developer Diaries on Stiopa's Reddit Account. Currently, the developer diaries stopped, but they will resume as soon as we are ready to showcase 1.13.
If you want to experience the mod second-hand, check out the following videos:
- England into Angevin Empire by Laith
- Brunei into Malaya by Zlewikk
- Granada into Andalusia by Chewyshoot
- Timurids Horde by Quarbit
Now, I sure hope that I peaked your interest. If you are not yet familiar with the mod, you can find it on the workshop:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2164202838
as well as Paradox Plaza
That would be it for this mod showcase. I wish you all a cheery & lovely Friday!