Happy Bonus Dev Diary Wednesday everyone! Now that we’ve wrapped up the 1.14 Open Beta and are in the process of integrating it into 1.15, I wanted to post a dev diary to briefly summarize the more significant changes we ended up implementing in 1.14 that will be first experienced in 1.15 for those of you who did not participate in the Open Beta.
Some of these changes were already explained in Dev Diary #185 so I won’t go into too much detail here but rather focus on what if anything ended up changing from the implementation as described in the first Open Beta version. So without further ado, let’s get to the changes:
War Support Rework & War Goal Flipping
These are headline changes from the first Open Beta and were extensively described in DD#185. Ultimately, both of these features landed pretty much as described, though we had to do a lot of balancing and tweaks along the way as the rework naturally created all sorts of bugs and edge cases.
The one major change that we did to the system in the final Open Beta was to try out automatic dropping of uncontrolled war goals (intended to fix the problem of the AI capitulating war goals the enemy had no way to really contest), but with the feedback for this clearly showing it was the wrong solution for the problem, we’ve reverted that change and instead focused on alternative and less drastic approaches.
Release Country Wargoal Changes
Tangentially related to the war goal rework, the Release Country war goal was changed in 1.15 so that it now requires a minority movement with at least 50% activism, meaning you can no longer simply release Occitania infamy-free unless there’s some Occitans that actually want to be independent. During the Open Beta this also had a popular support requirement, but that turned out too restrictive and has been dropped.
To ensure you can still carve up countries for the sake of naked imperialism, we have added a new war goal called ‘Release as Subject’, which works exactly like Release Country except it turns the new country into the holder’s autonomous subject. Unlike Release Country however, this war goal generates significant infamy given the whole naked imperialism angle.
You can still “liberate” Occitania, though the infamy incurred from kneecapping France might make you think twice about doing so
Hiring & Wage Tooltips
This was also described in DD#185 and based on the feedback seems to work as it should, so it ended up fully unaltered from the first Open Beta version.
Infamy Rebalancing
The infamy costs of war goals were overhauled from the ground up by grounding everything in a ‘State Infamy Cost’ that is primarily based on the state’s share of global GDP and population. Infamy costs were generally drastically lowered for low-value states and drastically increased for high-value ones.
Taking the Home Counties from Britain is now a major international incident, while seizing an unpopulated and undeveloped island should elicit little reaction. Infamy cost reductions were added to the psychology line of technologies so that you have a more free hand in the late game.
A game rule was also added which lets you adjust the base infamy values up or down based on how much map-painting you want your campaigns to contain.
The new State Infamy map mode shows the base infamy costs of all states from the perspective of a prospective conquering country. Differences in infamy cost can now be quite drastic.
AI Territorial Ambitions
This was described in DD#185 and implemented as stated, but has naturally been the subject of extensive iteration over the Open Beta on what the AI should consider a target of conquest. The final Open Beta ended on the ‘too aggressive’ end of the scale, so we’re in the process of reigning it in before release (ie, no more France wanting to conquer the entire British Isles because you closed Gibraltar).
AI Regional Stances
Regional stances (the strategy that the AI wants to pursue in a particular strategic region) is something we added in 1.13 but which were rather underutilized up until now. In 1.14 we have made these much more important in driving AI behavior. They now act as a genuine limiter, so the AI will not pursue territorial expansion in regions where it does not have a Conquest-oriented regional stance, for example.
The AI also now has regional goals against specific countries that spring from regional stances - for example, the Protect stance can result in a goal to defend a specific country in that region which makes it much more likely to intervene on behalf of the target country if it’s under attack.
The region stance tooltip now provides quite a bit more information - we’re still planning to add exact information regarding who the United States is Currying Favor with here.
Military Pathfinding Rewrite
The travel network that armies and fleets use to find their way around the map was rebuilt from the ground up to be fully province-based. Most of this is invisible, but it means units now follow the actual geography far more closely, and pathfinding should be much more consistent and much less buggy.
Naval Transportation Improvements
Naval transport missions and invasions got a thorough round of fixes in the Open Beta:
Armies that are split up to fit onto transports now join back together once they land.
If a transport is cancelled, interrupted or the fleet is given a new mission partway through, the troops left behind regroup at their headquarters instead of idling in a port.
Orders that would cancel a transport now ask for confirmation first, so a misclick on the map no longer derails an entire operation.
You can now also decide what a fleet does once it has delivered its troops: sail home or stay where it is. All this comes along with a bundle of smaller fixes so that the overall naval transportation experience should be much more reliable and much less frustrating.
On a related note, we also added a new ship class called ‘Early Troopship’, which is available from the very earliest naval tech and gives you a decent option for transporting large numbers of troops in the era of sail.
The new transportation popup, with more options and better information
Stationing in Subjects
A long-requested feature, stationing in subjects, was also implemented during the Open Beta. Put simply, you can now station armies and fleets in your subjects even during peace time.
Naval Combat Rework
Naval combat got a significant balance pass during the Open Beta, to try to make sure that every ship class is useful in its niche:
Capital ships now have a higher firing rate to make them the best damage-dealers, but take far more damage if unscreened, relative to their vulnerability score.
Screening is now much more important due to the vulnerability-adjusted damage, so having an adequate number of cruisers to protect your capital ships is vital.
Torpedo ships are now key to exploiting holes in enemy screening and taking down capital ships that open themselves to hostile fire.
Utility modules were also rebalanced try and ensure that no single module is best in every situation. Finally, ships are now more eager to retreat when damaged or facing hopeless odds rather than fighting on to the last sailor.
AI Fleet Management
The AI's approach to organising its navy was overhauled in the Open Beta, so it now builds and fields fleets with a clear purpose:
The AI keeps one to two battle fleets and light squadrons for patrol/raiding duties instead of spreading its ships across many similar fleets.
In general the AI groups far more of its ships into the battle fleets so that it can be a serious threat to player fleets.
Coastal defense ships, monitors and submarines are grouped into special fleets of only their own ship category (coastal defense+monitor or submarine) and only undertake missions they are genuinely suited for.
Power Projection Rework
Naval power projection was reworked in the Open Beta so that you no longer need the entire British navy out on the high seas to generate interest. Small squadrons of light ships are now sufficient, though the cap for how much involvement you can get from navy power projection was cut in half.
Naval Interface Improvements
The interfaces for some of the naval features from 1.13 were in serious need of improvement, so our UI team used the Open Beta as an opportunity to make considerable improvements to various naval interfaces such as naval mission information and information about sailors/crewing.
AI Ship Selling
The AI is now far more engaged with the ship transfer treaty article. In addition to having a much better idea of which ships it actually wants to buy, it also creates ships-for-cash treaties where it tries to sell off its obsolete ships to countries that might be able to use them, at discount rates.
AI Strait Handling
The Open Beta introduced extensive changes to how the AI handles the straits from 1.13:
The AI now measures how much each country depends on a strait, for both trade and naval access. They look at the impact a strait closure would have on them both in terms of being fully blocked and creating the need for long detours.
Closing a strait or charging high tolls now lowers relations with the countries that depend on it over time.The degree to which relations are damaged and how low they fall depend on the severity of the closure/tolls and the degree of dependence the country has on the strait.
The AI can now start diplomatic plays to enforce strait treaties, such as demanding a toll exemption if your tolls are hurting them.
The AI now looks at the potential diplomatic fallout closing a strait or raising a toll would cause before deciding whether to do it.
Prussia now gets a little upset with a Sweden that locks them into the Baltic
Trade Route Adjustments
Before, all trade between two world market hubs would always flow along the same route. This was changed in the Open Beta to make the flow of trade in the world feel more realistic:
Trade between world market hubs now spreads across sea routes of similar length. For example, trade between China and Europe now flows through both Malacca and Sumatra straits.
Toll re-routing was tweaked so a small toll increase similarly will not cause all trade to take an alternative route. Large toll increases may still collapse trade through a strait completely when there are viable alternatives.
Subject Rebellions
Subjects now have both the will and the means to backstab their overlord if it’s in their perceived interest to do so:
A subject with high Liberty Desire can now attack its overlord in the middle of a conflict where said subject is not a target of the enemy war goals. Doing so will automatically pull it out of all the overlord’s plays/wars and start its own play for independence or autonomy. This option is available to both player and AI subjects, and AI subjects will use it when they see an opportunity for victory.
When an overlord faces a revolution, its subjects no longer automatically side with the government, but can choose to side with the rebels if they feel it’s in their interest to do so. Autonomous subjects can even sit out the civil war entirely.
AI Economy Improvements
A number of changes were made to boost the AI’s economic performance in the Open Beta:
Numerous bugs in the hiring logic were fixed, resulting in stronger overall economic growth for players and AI alike.
The AI now actively manages its government and military wage levels based on factors such as budget, reserves, radicals and civil war risk.
The AI logic for decrees is now much more sensible. For example, it will place agriculture-boosting decrees in its most agriculturally productive states, and education decrees where illiteracy actually affects the most people.
The AI no longer overrates demand for local goods, fixing one of the causes of the infamous infinite railway spam bug.
Several issues causing the AI to be unable to reduce its military spending were fixed, addressing one of the causes of AI cyclic bankruptcy.
The AI now expands construction much more aggressively when its construction capacity is insufficient to tap its investment pool.
On top of these changes, we are also actively looking into the outstanding points on AI Trade & Production that did not get done in time for the last Open Beta, so there will likely be a few more improvements here in the full 1.15 update.
Multiple World Market Hubs
Last but not least, this is a change coming to 1.15 that did not make it into the Open Beta but was made possible due to some backend changes made when improving AI strait handling: Multiple World Market Hubs per Market Area. Since the earlier teaser got a few people confused, it’s worth pointing out that this is not submarkets but rather just an extension to an existing mechanic.
So what is then? Put simply, it is the ability for a single Market Area to trade with the world market through more than a single port. A Market Area, for those not familiar with the term, is a single chunk of contiguous land in a Market where all states are connected by land borders or crossings. For example, the British Market is divided into many such Market Areas like the British Isles, India, Canada and so on, while all of Russia (except Alaska) makes up just a single Market Area since it’s all land connected.
Since each Market Area has a single World Market Hub which trades through a single port, this means that the entirety of Russia handles all of its imports and exports through St. Petersburg, which not only feels bizarre but also makes its Black Sea ports and the Strait of Bosporus far less important than they actually were historically.
Enter Multiple World Market Hubs. Market Areas that are either sufficiently large, or which border different ‘sea basins’ (the piece of internal architecture I alluded to above, which divides the world’s seas into chunks separated by straits), can now have up to four World Market Hubs, each with its own corresponding trade port. Hubs can be created and destroyed dynamically as conditions in a Market Area change, but are usually quite stable. For a new hub to be created, the chunk of states that it would be assigned must contain at least one Trade Center and one port, so as to avoid creating pointless splits. This is the reason the Russian Far East does not start with its own hub at the very beginning of the game.
At the start of the game, the Russian Market Area is split into the hubs of Ingria, Kherson and Arkhangelsk.
States within the Market Area will be allocated the nearest hub as their default hub, and Trade Centers will usually trade through said default hub. However, if the default hub’s world market access is reduced, for example as a result of a blockade or a strait closure, it is possible for a state to fall back to trading through another hub. A state that uses a fallback hub in this way will suffer a world market access penalty based on how distant the fallback hub is. Effectively, states will use whichever hub gives them the best world market access, and usually this will be their default hub.
The Bosporus is no longer devoid of trade in 1836
Besides trade, this system also impacts port connections - overseas territories will connect to the nearest World Market Hub of the capital market area, so a United States with a west coast hub does not need to route a theoretical Hawaiian port connection all the way around Cape Horn before the Panama canal is built.
Though it’s all the same ‘sea basin’, the United States is nonetheless large enough to be split into multiple hubs and Louisiana is now the proper center of cotton exports.
There are of course many tweaks, changes and bug fixes in the Open Beta that did not make this list but which will be rolled into the 1.15 change log. Before I end this dev diary, I just want to take a moment to properly thank all the Open Beta participants for all the testing, feedback and bug reporting - you guys have been incredible and have really let us get a lot of things done in a relatively short amount of time. Thank you very much, and I hope we can find the time to do another update like this in the future!
The Open Beta branch will remain available on Steam until around a week before the release of 1.15, and before we put a proper wrap on things I will go through all outstanding feedback and bug reports to see what we want to look into addressing in the future.
That’s all for today, but join us again tomorrow for Victoria’s Dev Diary covering the narrative content coming to some of the non-Russian countries and cultures featured in State and Revolution.