Fun and Balance mod for EU4 1.7.0

The new patch is in, and the new version of my mod to fix everything about it follows!

Full list of changes this mod does with brief explanations follows. For more extensive discussion refer to posts for older versions.

You can download it here. (link updated, original release missed one election event and it was giving vanilla republican tradition penalty)

Features

Expansion

• Truces last 5 years period.
• Coring time independent of size
• Bad events due to OE scale with OE instead of hard cliff at 101% OE

War

• Can't reduce WE while at war
• WE affects defensiveness and morale like it used to
• AE decay restored to 4/year
• No naval attrition due to time at sea, since AI already doesn't get any. You still get some from being at open sea.

Diplomacy

• Claim and core expiration times doubled
• Foreign rebel support increased from +4 RR to +6 RR
• Improve relations mission gives meaningful rewards, not just 3 prestige

Vassals

• No hard base tax max for diplovassalization, just regular squared penalty
• Baseline free diplomatic relations doubled from 4 to 8
• All ideas giving +1 diplomatic relations increased to +2
• Emperor diplomatic relations bonus increased from +1 to +2
• Annexed vassal penalty capped at -100 to avoid creating eternally unannexable vassals
• Diploannexation cost lower to 1/bt since it's the last thing we want is making everything rely on monarch points more than it already does
• Vassals can fabricate claims
• Vassals willing to go up to 50% OE buying provinces they want, just like other AI countries
• No protectorates ever

Religion

• CK2-style holy sites system - if someone of your religion holds its holy site, you get +0.2% missionary strength modifier. It's extra +1% missionary strength and +1 prestige/year if all 5 sites are in hands of countries of your religion. You can conquest mission on holy sites if they're hold by your neighbour or if you have religious ideas.
• Religious conversion rates rebalanced into flat +2% heretic, +1% heathens, +4% pagans instead of really complex systems that make it easier to turn Catholics into Sunni than Shiites into Sunni and was generally awful.
• 50% discount on enemy core creation on pagans restored
• Cleansing of heresy CB gives 25% cost for forced conversion so you can convert country of any size with 100% warscore, but it no longer any discounts on taking provinces
• Religious center down from -5% to -2% missionary strength
• Religious conversions allowed between all branches of Christianity, all branches of Islam, all branches of Eastern, and cross-group between Hindu and Buddhist (you can chain Sikh-Hindu-Buddhist-Shinto if you really want to). As in vanilla Muslim conversions cost stability, others just prestige.
• Missionary strength bonus from stability increased from 0.5% to 0.7%
• RR due to lack of religious increased from +2 to +5, scaled proportionally

Culture

• Culture gain/loss threshold both at 10% instead of 20% gain/10% gain, so it's more predictable
• Non-accepted culture revolt risk increased from +2 RR to +4 RR
• Culture conversion cost reduced from 25/bt to 10/bt

HRE

• Imperial Ban CB lowers AE to 10% for imperial provinces
• HRE members converting to and from emperor's religion affect IA

Burgundy

• "Ruler of Burgundy dies" nonsense killed completely
• Burgundy capital moved so it starts in HRE like it did in EU3 and real history, and doesn't get crushed by France immediately every campaign

Muscovy

• Muscovy no longer gets free colonists from national ideas, they need to take expansion or exploration for it

Republics

It tested well with previous EU4 versions where republics were ridiculously weak, I'm not sure if this plus 1.7 / Res Publica changes won't make republics a bit too powerful.

• Republican annexations cost only -3 tradition not -10
• EU3 style elections - random instead of fixed candidates, reelections don't give any stat boost, but only cost -3 instead of -10 tradition.

Hordes

• Steppe horde bonuses increased to +100% manpower, +100% force limits, -50% land maintenance (it sounds like much but they still lose hard most of the time, since they never get new units, tech slowly, and have massive succession problems)
• Manchu can form Qing, Timurids can form Mughals, and hordes with correct culture can form Persia even if tribal - then they become despotic monarchy
• Other hordes can reform government without any idea groups (since AI is hardcoded not to take them ever, so basically AI never reformed horde government). Stability 3 requirement lowered to stability 2 at admit tech 8.

Rest of the World

• Westernization time does not depend on country size
• Advisor cost increases 0.5%/year not 1%/year, it was too brutal for non-Western countries
• Partial Westernization decision - you can go Muslim tech if you neighbour Muslim or higher tech nation, and have stability 3 (or stability 2 at admin tech 8+), at cost of 10 years of Western influences, -5 stability, and -250 of each monarch point.

UI

• Potential policies are displayed when (UI only change)

Choose your own destiny

• If you want to form Byzantine empire as Ottomans, or HRE, the game will no longer stop you

Country management

• Policies don't cost monarch points and you can have up to 10 of them active, to make them more relevant and to help AI which picks them at random.
• Moving trade port reduced from 300 to 100 dip since many countries start with trade ports in wrong places
• Peasant war trigger conditions made more meaningful
• Level 1-4 buildings are not destroyed on conquests

Monarch points

• Monarch power pools increased to 1500 to reduce micromanagement around ahead of time penalty

Everything is optional

As much as possible, each change in the mod is independent from everything else, so if you like you can cherrypick changes you want while keeping vanilla values, or values of your own choosing otherwise.

Fun and Balance mod for EU4 1.6.2

Here's the new update. You can download it directly here.

For full list of changes read 1.6.1 (b) and 1.6.1 (a) release notes.

Philosophy of this mod is to move focus towards mechanics which lead to fun gameplay without requiring overly gamey tricks from the player, and to restore balance by helping the too weak, more than nerfing the too strong.

Other than taking away Muscovy's free settler (which isn't even a huge deal, since AI Muscovy takes exploration ideas first), there aren't really any outright nerfs included.

Helping Burgundy

Burgundy starts in extremely perilous position between hostile HRE and extremely powerful France, and even with event that magically split it between France and the emperor (at 0 AE, free cores etc.) removed, it still rarely succeeds.

To give it better chance, the mod now moves Burgundy's capital to Franche-Comte, so it's a legal HRE member.

Historical situation is somewhat ambiguous here as feudal relations were complex, but making Burgundy HRE member as it vas in EU3 should greatly increases its chances of early survival against the Big Blue Blob without making it too powerful.

Helping Republics

Integrating a vassal no longer costs any republican tradition, only legitimacy. Tradition is extremely hard to get compared with legitimacy, penalties for it start as soon as you go below 100% (instead of only below 50%), and republics are really weak even with the mod reversing the most extreme nerfs, so there's no reason to punish them in another way by making significant vassal annexations impossible.

Helping AI

Advisor cost increase by year cut in half. It was extremely brutal, especially to non-Western tech countries, as incomes increase with tech level not with time, and not that fast even then. Even relatively sizeable non-player Western-tech countries had trouble paying for advisors, so only players with their vast and optimized empires were able to afford good advisors.

And now it's possible to have up to 10 active policies (instead of up to 5), and they no longer cost any monarch points. That's mostly here to help AI, as most policies are borderline worthless (-1 dip/month for -10% shipbuilding time etc.) and AI picks them basically at random, but it makes sense to reward different combinations of idea groups instead of making policies so expensive (in terms of most important resource - monarch points) that they'd almost never see any gameplay.

Deemphasize Unfun Mechanics

The mod uses 1.6.1's AE decay values (4/year), not 1.6.2's (2/year). It's easy to get very high AE levels now that vassalization generates huge amounts of AE, but at least decay was quite fast, so it balanced out somewhat.

With high AE from vassalizations with slow decay the game would end up with permanent global coalition against the player like it did in many previous patches, and that's not a fun place to be.

Emphasize Religion

Negative consequences of less than full religious unity increased from +2% revolt risk to +5% (+100% stability cost remains where it was), scaled proportionally. Conversion is usually (not for everyone) slightly easier in this mod due to missionary strength rebalance, and in recent patches there are many ways to increase religious unity even without conversion, so it's much easier to achieve high religious unity than it used to. In my experience religious unity is one of more fun mechanics, and its vanilla values are just too low, so it deserves a big boost.

And to give player more control over their destiny, more religious conversions are possible. Orthodox and Coptic can convert to and from all other Christian denominations. Eastern religions (Shinto, Confucianism, Buddhism) can convert to each other, and additionally Hinduism and Buddhism can convert to each other crossing religious group divide (so you can build a chain Sikhism-Hinduism-Buddhism-Shinto if you really want to).

Muslims can also now convert to each other, except the cost is -100 piety and -2 stability instead of -100 prestige, in line with already existing decisions to flip between Shia and Sunni (which has unnecessarily difficult preconditions).

Pretty much all the conversions enabled here happened multiple times historically, and they just give more gameplay options without breaking balance.

I tried to make sure that religion-specific country modifiers which ought to clear do clear, but it's very likely that I missed some of them. If you see a country modifier remaining which should be gone after conversion, just report it as a bug.

Emphasize Other Fun and Underused Mechanics

Mechanics which lead to interesting gameplay but don't see much action got emphasized.

War Exhaustion now reduce morale and defensiveness as it did before pre-1.6. In vanilla 1.6 War Exhaustion has no military significance whatsoever, it's basically just revolt risk increase, and that makes its offensive use basically pointless.

Culture conversion cost is lowered to 5/bt from previous values of 10/bt (which was still too high) and vanilla's completely insane 25/bt. I still don't expect it to be used much.

Improve relations mission gives 10 prestige and 25 diplo instead of just worthless 3 prestige. It might be a little much, but then insult rival mission is way easier and gives similar amounts, and a mission without meaningful rewards is just wasting mission slot - you should always have 3 meaningful missions to choose from.

Other Tweaks and Fixes

Vassal annexation relationship penalty capped at -100, as it led to far too many ridiculous situations at -200, where vassals became pretty much permanently unannexable and had to be released from vassalage , annexed, and released as new vassals if you ever wanted to annex them.

Various bugs in tribal government reforms should now be fixed.

Everything is optional

I isolated each change as much as possible, so you can pick whichever parts of it you like and skip the rest. Pretty much the only part that's a bit harder to isolate is rebalancing missionary strength, but even that is not that hard.

The mod is not tested for compatibility with any other mod. It should work with UI-only modes, but it will probably require manual fixing for anything more complex.