Hello Everyone and Welcome to a Happy Wednesday, the day where we talk about what is happening to Europa Universalis V. As we mentioned in a Tinto Talks last year, the EU5 team is at any given time working in one of 3 different tracks. We have people working on new DLC, we have people fixing bugs and problems that need to be fixed immediately, and we have a group of people working on a bit more long-term issues with the game, similar to the Custodian team on Stellaris, providing bigger fixes and updates to the patches. Of course, if a developer has been busy making stuff for a new update as part of custodians, they are then supporting that with bugfixes until all is clean and fine, it's not handing off to someone else. While @SaintDaveUK has been handling Fate of the Phoenix, our studio manager and game director has been handling the development of the accompanying patch.

So, what has been the focus then for this patch? Well, from me it's been economy, military and diplomacy, while also improving the UI to bring content more visible, as you saw some of last week. We have also been working hard on improving immersion, both in AI behaviour, and in how the world is set up. Let's talk then today, about all the economy related changes that are coming to 1.2.

Urban Rights​

Urban rights are legal privileges you can grant to individual towns, cities, and megalopolises within your realm. Each right shapes that location's role in your economy: ‘Royal Textile Rights’ might boost cloth and dye output at the cost of general production efficiency, while a ‘Staple Port’ grants trade monopoly status and boosts maritime presence. Many starting rights in 1337 are tied to your country's culture or region: German territories can access the Magdeburg or Nuremberg Rights that encourage migration and merchant growth, Iberian rulers have access to the various Fueros, and Scandinavian rulers can grant Bergslag or Fishing Privileges to their ports and mines.

Slightly worse at producing things in the town, but you can have far more cloth and trade more.

Granting an urban right costs 5 government power (legitimacy, republican tradition, etc), but revoking one is far more painful, as it costs 10 stability and will deeply anger the burghers who lived under those privileges. Most rights are also lost when a location is conquered, so enemy rulers cannot simply inherit your carefully built legal framework. Some rights are mutually exclusive with others in the same location, so you'll need to choose which economic identity suits each city best. Managing your urban rights is a core part of shaping your realm's economic specialization and regional identity over time. A Town can have 1 urban right, while a city can get 2 urban rights, and capitals have 1 more available.

During the Age of Discovery, you also get access to many new urban rights that allow you to diversify your economy significantly.

These are some of the selections available in a later part of the game..

Trade Orders​

Trade Orders let you tell the AI exactly which goods to import or export from a market, without micromanaging individual trade routes.

When you set an Import Order, you allocate some of your Merchant Capacity to automatically bring that good into your market, the AI finds the cheapest available source each day. An Export Order works the same way, directing the AI to push your surplus goods out to the most profitable destination it can find.

Orders are fulfilled first before any remaining Merchant Capacity is used for general automated trading, so they act as standing priorities. You can set multiple orders across different goods, and if there isn't enough Merchant Capacity to cover all of them, orders higher in the list get served first. You can always change around the priority of your trade orders.

Each order shows you which trade route the AI has currently assigned to it, along with the profit it's making. If the AI can't find a profitable route on a given day, the order will keep trying, it won't simply disappear. You can cancel any order at any time, which returns its Merchant Capacity back to the general automation pool.

The UI will list the 5 biggest import needs not with orders and 5 biggest export possibilities, so you can quickly set up your own…

Megalopolis​

Megalopolis is a new pinnacle city rank sitting above City, reserved for the true giants of the Medieval and Early Modern world. Only your capital can reach this status, and only if it has already grown to at least 400,000 inhabitants and functions as a market center, requirements that make it a late-game achievement rather than a routine upgrade.

The five-year construction project demands four times the glass, masonry, and lumber of a standard city upgrade, but the payoff is substantial: doubled population capacity, doubled free building levels, a second concurrent construction slot, and dramatically higher pop attractiveness across all strata.

Megalopolises do carry real drawbacks, integrating newly conquered territory into their area is significantly slower, and the sheer weight of the city makes it harder for armies to move through, reflecting the logistical reality of managing an enormous urban center. At the start, only Constantinople, Cairo, and Beijing start at this rank, giving you a sense of just how rare and historically significant these cities were.

Due to the high cost and high requirements, only a small handful of cities will ever be able to become Megalopolises throughout the game, keeping it reserved for only the most special locations in the world.

Thats a big city eh?

Court Cost Change​

Court upkeep used to be a simple fixed percentage of your Economic Base, and modifiers changed that with a straight + or - percentage, which made each thing impacting it insanely harsh or beneficial.

Now it anchors at a firm 10% of your Economic Base, and a whole ecosystem of modifiers, advances, government reforms, laws, and inflation, push that percentage up or down rather than replacing it outright. This makes the base cost predictable and readable: you always know the starting point, and you can see exactly what each modifier is doing to it.

Inflation is one of the more punishing contributors, scaling court costs upward alongside diplomatic spending and fort maintenance, so letting prices spiral has compounding effects on your administration. The 10% floor cannot be reduced to zero, ensuring your court always demands a slice of your economy, regardless of how efficiently you govern.

Now we know why they had the revolution..

Buildings​

Colonizing nations can now erect a Colonial Administration in their overseas territories, converting distant possessions into genuine trade assets. Back home, a new line of urban buildings traces the arc of early modernity, from Renaissance learning through the Age of Discovery to Absolutist governance, steadily concentrating control and crown power in your hands.

And for the first time, war carries a sharper economic bite: select buildings can now be torched, letting occupying armies or rebellious populations leave lasting scars on the land.

Useful? Hell yes..

Expanding RGO's​

Expanding an RGO now costs more if the good it produces is highly valuable, a grain field is cheap to grow, while a spice plantation demands serious investment. The cost scales with the good's default market price, meaning high-value luxuries like silk or ivory will require significantly more ducats to expand than basic staples. This makes early-game RGO expansion more accessible for common agricultural goods, while creating a meaningful economic decision around whether the revenue from a lucrative RGO justifies the steeper up-front cost.

The expansion cost breakdown tooltip now shows exactly how much the good's market price is contributing to the cost, so you can see at a glance why one RGO is more expensive to scale than another.

Yes, I still want to expand it..

Starting World​

Starting a new game, major cities in the world now have a production profile reflecting what made them historically famous in the 14th century. Venice dominates glass and naval production, Florence is the cloth and dyeing capital of Europe, Damascus produces unrivalled weapons and fine silk, and Samarkand anchors the Silk Road with its paper and luxury textiles, to name just a few. Rather than every Italian or German city being identical, major trade hubs like Bruges, Lübeck, Córdoba, and Novgorod each have distinct economic identities that create real regional specialization from the start. These differences mean that controlling, trading with, or conquering these cities carries tangible economic meaning tied to their real historical role.

Regional cities across the world now better reflect their documented 14th-century economic identities. England's towns produce more cloth and leather, Iberian cities are renowned for fine merino wool and Córdoba leather, and the Lowlands double down on the dyes that made Flemish cloth the luxury fabric of Northern Europe. The Levant is now a center of bladesmithing and silk weaving rather than a generic trade hub, while Korean cities finally produce the celadon porcelain that Chinese contemporaries considered the finest in the world. India's glass production has been corrected from an absurd level to a historically accurate low. India imported glass, not exported it. Distilled spirits have been quietly removed from Russian, Polish, Balkan, and Baltic towns where vodka and rakia simply didn't exist yet in the 1330s.

When you load into your starting bookmark, estates across your realm will now already have a meaningful number of estate buildings constructed, nobles will have their manors, clergy their monasteries, and burghers their trade posts. The amount built is proportional to each estate's balance, so wealthy estates in prosperous countries will show the most development. On top of that, most rural locations throughout the world now spawn with a village at start, giving a much more lived-in feel to the map from day one. Together, these changes mean less micro-management in the opening years and a more historically grounded starting economy.

Goods Changes​

Precious goods are now less dominant. Gold dropped from 10 to 8 ducats, silver from 8 to 6, and elephants from 10 to 5, these were simply too powerful as economic anchors, crowding out other trade goods.

Glass now has a more meaningful role. Its base price rose from 2 to 3, and nobles, burghers, and clergy now actively demand it, making glassmaking a more viable industry rather than a niche luxury curiosity.

Books became cheaper. The base price fell from 5 to 3, better reflecting that book production is a mid-tier manufactured good rather than a premium export.

Raw materials are cheaper to move. Transport costs for iron, copper, tin, lead, and lumber were halved (from 2 to 1), and stone dropped from 5 to 2, meaning inland producers of these bulk goods are less penalized by distance to market.

Unemployed peasants now contribute to raw material markets. Stone, clay, sand, and lumber each receive 0.01 base production per unemployed peasant, giving underdeveloped regions a small economic floor even without dedicated production buildings.

The demand for key trade goods now shifts meaningfully as history progresses. In the early game, spirits, tobacco, coffee, and tea are barely known outside their regions of origin, your distilleries and plantations will find limited markets, and prices reflect that scarcity. As the Ages turn, the world wakes up to these goods: coffee houses spread from Istanbul to Amsterdam, tobacco becomes a colonial obsession, sugar transitions from an exotic spice to a near-staple, and tea goes from a Chinese curiosity to the backbone of British colonial trade. By the Age of Revolutions, demand for all five goods has roughly doubled or tripled from their medieval baseline, making late-game plantation colonies and trade routes far more profitable than they would have been in the 14th century. The age tooltip now shows these demand shifts in their own dedicated section, so you can plan your economy around what the world will want next.

New Goods Tab in Location View​

The location view now has a dedicated Goods tab, together with the infrastructure, military and demographics tab, giving you a production analytics view for that specific province at a glance. For each good produced at the location, you can see which buildings are generating it, their combined production efficiency (factoring in both country-wide and local modifier), and the total output volume that flows into the market.

Production efficiency is surfaced as the key metric, expressed as a percentage, so you can immediately spot where investment or policy changes would have the most impact. Market prices are shown alongside a trend indicator, letting you judge at a glance whether a good is currently undersupplied or oversupplied in the market the location belongs to. The tab also breaks output down into the wealth and income it generates, giving you the economic story behind each commodity rather than just raw production numbers. Buildings are displayed as small icon cards directly on each goods row, and if more than two buildings contribute, you get an expandable count, so tracing exactly where production comes from is a single hover away.

Every column is sortable, so you can rank goods by efficiency, output, price, wealth, or income, depending on what question you're trying to answer. All values are backed by full breakdown tooltips, meaning the Goods tab doubles as a diagnostic tool when you're trying to understand why a province is underperforming economically.

Fine Cloth rules the world.. And the fish is not all that bad in Venice. However, we got lots of potential in the glass here..

Population​

One of the most fundamental changes in this update is how populations grow and evolve in Europa Universalis V. Previously, all population growth was entirely on peasants, and getting other pop types was driven entirely by promotion, pops moving up the social ladder from one type to another. We've now given each pop type its own organic growth rate, meaning peasants, burghers, nobles, clergy, and tribespeople all reproduce and expand naturally over time, independent of promotion. Slaves are the exception, they remain a coerced population whose numbers are determined entirely by the slave trade and forced migration, not by natural increase. There are different reforms, and other things that impact the growth of specific types of pops.

Yes, clergy will grow as well for catholics...

Because pops now grow organically, promotion has been dramatically scaled back, the rate at which pops change type is now one-tenth of what it was before. This means the composition of your population will feel much more stable and historically grounded; you won't see your peasantry rapidly converting into burghers simply because you built a market. Speaking of burghers, we've rebalanced their relationship with urban buildings: burgher-dependent structures now require roughly half as many burghers to staff, but in exchange, those burghers now wield double the political power and contribute a larger share of tax revenue. This makes a smaller, well-established merchant class genuinely impactful rather than requiring you to pack every city with tens of thousands of tradespeople before buildings become meaningful.

We've also connected labor markets more directly to social mobility. When a region has a Surplus of Work, more jobs available than workers to fill them, enfranchisement can now increase by up to 20%, reflecting the historical reality that labor scarcity gives common people leverage to demand rights and freedoms.

Finally, food consumption modifiers are now correctly wired into the food storage system: effects that alter how much food your population consumes will properly influence the food storage bonus to pop growth, meaning efficient agricultural policy and trade in foodstuffs will have a real, visible payoff in population expansion over the decades.

Trade System Overhaul​

The trade system has received its most comprehensive rework yet, touching everything from how routes are costed to how capacity is consumed and how automation behaves. The biggest architectural shift was replacing the old hard/soft range cap with a continuous cost curve: routes no longer get hard-blocked at a certain distance, but instead accrue a scaling path-cost penalty the further they stretch, giving players a meaningful economic tradeoff rather than an arbitrary wall. Alongside that, we've wired Maritime Presence directly into path cost calculations, a strong naval presence along a route now reduces its transport cost, making sea-power feel genuinely useful for trade rather than just a defensive stat.

We definitely need better trade range.. OR maritime presence in the Red Sea, Hormuz, etc..

To complete the maritime loop, navies now contribute Maritime Presence upward to their overlord, so colonial powers and subject-holding empires benefit from the sea control their subjects maintain. This makes building a distributed naval empire feel rewarding in a way that the older system didn't support. We also halved the distance penalty for sea routes specifically, reflecting the historical reality that pre-modern bulk goods moved far more cheaply by ship than by land.

Venetian Fleet helps its subjects be able to collect taxes! Win-Win!

Trade capacity costs were reduced globally, which gives players more room to operate a diversified trade network without immediately hitting the ceiling, a change that should make the mid-game feel less punishing while the player is still building their burgher infrastructure. The Sound Toll's income was reined in to bring it in line with other strategic chokepoints, since it had become an outsized source of revenue that distorted game balance around controlling that single location.

On the production side, the produced_in_market modifier has been removed from production efficiency entirely. It was a hidden penalty that made local production less attractive in markets with active trade, working against the intuitive expectation that a well-connected market should be a good place to produce goods, and its removal simplifies an already complex calculation.

Several longstanding bugs were addressed. The trade detail panel was showing stale cached values rather than live data, which made it hard to trust the numbers you were reading. Trade automation had reliability problems where orders were being incorrectly cancelled or not created at all, undermining the whole point of the automation system. The precious metal export ban was also accidentally blocking legitimate domestic inter-market transfers, a critical fix since gold and silver movements underpin the entire monetary economy.

The local goods demand tooltip now surfaces a breakdown of how many pops of each type are wealthy enough to demand a good, giving players much better visibility into why a market is or isn't consuming a particular commodity. This kind of granular feedback is especially valuable when tuning town setups or deciding where to build production.

Yeah, not even the byzantine nobles are rich enough to afford fine cloth. Time to reduce their taxes or the prices of goods they want?
The old Trade Efficiency modifier has been retired and replaced by three direction-specific modifiers that more accurately model what actually happens in a trade transaction. Selling Efficiencyis the direct successor, it multiplies the sell price for all trades regardless of direction, and is what most generic Burgher bonuses, trade-focused laws, and commercial culture advances now grant.

Export Efficiency specifically reduces the buying cost on export trades (goods leaving your market to a foreign one), making it the natural home for bonuses tied to outward commercial reach, things like trade company privileges, certain naval laws, and advances for historically export-oriented cultures.

Import Efficiency instead reduces the buying cost on cross-market imports, and is used for penalties and bonuses that reflect how well a country absorbs foreign goods, tariff-like auto-modifiers, being an isolated economy, or conversely having a strong mercantile infrastructure that lowers procurement costs. The roughly two hundred script sources that previously used trade_efficiency were each audited and reassigned to whichever of the three modifiers best matched their thematic intent, rather than being mechanically split evenly, so the distinction carries real design meaning rather than being a cosmetic rename.

Burgher Trades​

The market summary panel now shows a dedicated Burgher Trade Capacity figure with a full breakdown tooltip, so you can see exactly how many trades your burghers in that market are generating and what is contributing to that number. The tooltip correctly scopes to the player country when viewing a foreign market, giving you your own burghers' contribution rather than the market aggregate.

The local tradesper burgher bonus on the Marketplace building chain has been dramatically increased, the base Marketplace goes from 0.2 to 1, Merchants Quarters from 0.3 to 1.5, Grand Marketplace from 0.4 to 2, and Commerce Center from 0.8 to 4, making investment in trade buildings feel meaningfully impactful rather than marginal. The Port Authority also received a smaller bump, from 0.1 to 0.25. The Ledger's markets tab now includes a burghers trading column so you can compare your burgher trade output across all your markets at a glance.

Of course they want fine cloth…

AI & Economy​

Some of the changes we have made to the economic AI include that the AI trade and economy system has received a number of improvements to make it behave more sensibly over time. Markets should no longer swing wildly between glut and scarcity, as price trends and surplus signals now work together to keep supply stable. AI rulers now weigh their people's welfare when making trade decisions rather than chasing raw profit, and will actively seek out goods their craftsmen need as building inputs. Colonial powers should better recognise the export value of plantation goods, and slave workforce shortages are now treated as a welfare signal that prompts importing labour.
We have also fixed a significant amount of bugs related to the economy system in the game, including three rather important changes that could be described as bugs, exploits or design flaws.

First of all, temporary demands added by events or other effects are consumed last after everything else, instead of first, so this does not cripple economies, but instead drives up prices as intended.

Secondly, while bankruptcy destroyed armies, deleted buildings and did other bad things to your country, it never touched any construction queue you had. Now though, when you go bankrupt, your construction queues are erased.

Finally, only the constructions at the top of a queue that could progress will add their demands to the market.

Stay tuned, next week we will be back with some discussions on improvements to the military system, logistics, and some new concepts we are bringing in for 1.2 and Fate of the Phoenix…