Hello Everyone and Welcome to another Happy Wednesday where we tell you more about Europa Universalis V.

Earlier today we released the 1.1.6 beta, but we still have some issues we want to sort out before releasing the final version, so expect at least 1 more update after this. We had some interesting times last week, as the storm just before the carnival blew over a large tree outside the office, ripping our fiber optic internet cable apart. It took a while to get technicians to fit new cables, so we had to rely on old-fashioned emergency wifi/4g.

So far, for the next update of the beta, we have fixed river connections in Europe and most of Africa, and are working on further updates there. Here you have some screenshots of the process:

Old and new versions of the rivers mapmode across Europe.

Because it may be a bit difficult to notice some of the differences, let’s take a look at a close-up to river Po, so it can be compared with last week’s TT screenshot:

River Po and its affluents are now properly connected, and it also passes through locations you’d expect it to, such as Firenzuola. Note: This is on our internal development mapmode, which we plan to release along with the 1.2 update, as we still need to polish it a bit more.

And something else that we’ve also added: the Havel-Spree river system! Besides being very demanded by the community, we’ve checked our GIS data, and it was actually an overlook, as this river system covers the minimum length and width we set for rivers to appear - but the data was not sorted out correctly, so we’ve now corrected this for 1.1.7!

We also fixed an issue with navies not being able to gather food, and we have nerfed combined arms from being insanely overpowered at giving a total of 60% power down to a mere +18% in Age of Revolutions.

We are still tweaking the starting economy, to ease the learning cliff somewhat. We are also working on the bug that makes the tax base and economical base fluctuate dramatically the first few months.

Next week is Tinto Talks #100, maybe it's a boring one…