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Sunday, September 01, 2013

Sandbox mod for Europa Universalis 4

Play time! by JPGR1965 from flickr (CC-NC)

I complain a lot about things I don't like, but I also do something about them. Here's the followup to my EU4 review which complained that it's too railroaded.

I did just these two major changes:
  • Deleting Burgundy succession crisis event that made France and Austria instantly superpowers
  • Minimum manpower recovery speed increased from 100/month to 250/month. This has absolutely drastic effect of slowing down every single blob in game. A coalition of OPMs is no longer a total pushover. You get faster than 250/month recovery only if your total manpower is over 30k, so you need to be pretty big to get more manpower recovery than an OPM, but mid and big sized countries still get all other benefits (like better generals, higher force limits, bigger manpower reserve pools).
And these relatively minor ones, since they annoyed me a bit too much:


  • All culture unions deleted. If you want to accept cultures, work on it. (I'm totally fine with some decision that restores culture unions at admin level 20 or something, feel free to send me the code). In practice France accepts Cosmopolitaine and Occitain but no minor cultures, Spain accepts Castilian, Catalan, and Andalusian, but not Galician (or Basque obviously), Italy will probably accept all its 3 cultures. etc. Germany is probably most screwed by this decision, but then it was already really overpowered anyway.
  • That probably makes the least difference but I reduced minimum culture % to become accepted from 20% to 15% to help multicultural mid-sized countries a bit. It loses accepted when it goes under 10% just like in vanilla.
The mod is for 1.1.1c, but it should work with more recent versions as well hopefully (if not, I'll release an update soon).

I ran one game in observe mode until 1500 with this mod, with no lucky nations or other bonuses. There was very little blobbing.
  • Hundred Years War continues every time truce breaks, with either side winning a province sometimes.
  • Everyone ganged up upon Burgundy - France, England, Emperor, variety of HRE minors (who are now stronger), and Dutch rebels - until it disappeared completely in 1490s. Maybe it should become part of HRE like in EU3? 
  • If keeping it alive long term was the goal, then it still failed, but at least without any scripted events.
  • Poland got into (random, but likely) scripted union with Lithuania and they expanded a bit, but nothing extreme.
  • Ottomans got beaten by Orthodox minors somehow almost completely out of Europe, with Byzantine Greece recovering (probably mostly thanks to rebels).
  • Vijayanagar is the closest to good old blob, I don't really know how it compared to vanilla EU4 since I never played in India.
  • France, Castille, and England are doing pretty well. Not superblob well, but they're very formidable. The mod didn't break any major country (other than Burgundy).
  • Timurids blobbed, then half of their lands seceded via rebels.
  • Many one-two province minors became mid-sized powers, especially in HRE.
  • Some big countries like France, England, and Denmark are close to being tech leaders, but others like Castile and Austria fell behind, so I'm not sure what exactly is going on here.
Overall I'm pretty happy with this, and I'll give it a try in a real campaign.

Anyway, here's download link.

Feel free to do anything you want with the code, my changes are pretty trivial. If you have any other ideas how enhance the sandbox spirit of EU3 in EU4, please comment or message me.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Shouldn't cultures give less penalty now to reflect the change to the Cultural unions?


What do you think about changing the starting date to the 1399/1356, I kinda thought those were more fun, don't know why.


taw said...

BladezOfFuture: Wrong culture penalty is only really significant for non-accepted cultures in different culture groups, and culture unions don't affect that.

Culture unions are really not a huge deal either way, it just annoyed me that they kept throwing bonuses at France for no good reason. With the mod France will get -15% tax and manpower penalty to about 1/4-1/3 of its provinces (all minor French cultures except Cosmopolitan and Occitan, unless it expands in unusual direction), or about 4-5% total penalty.

It matters a lot more if you're united Germany since they have so many minor German cultures you can easily end up with more than half of your country not accepted culture, and maybe as much as -10% tax and manpower penalty (but then probably less than that). I doubt that kind of penalties would stop unified Germany from dominating.

I'd bet pretty large amount of money they'll release DLC moving start date back by a few decades at some point.