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Thursday, July 17, 2014

Fun and Balance mod for EU4 1.7.0

~Cookiecat Green Eyes~ by ~Sage~ from flickr (CC-NC-ND)
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.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Excellent.

Anonymous said...

Thank you man, It's really cool mod, the one I wanted!

T.W. said...

Wow, you're trying to do the impossible - and it looks you're doing it pretty well! I'll give this a try, and try to remember to let you know and give some feedback. Thanks for attempting to make EUIV fun. : )
Good luck!

Anonymous said...

Hello, i have a problem with the mod - the policies i select STILL cost monarch power when i look into gains/loses for my monarch points by hovering over the monarch points.

taw said...

Anonymous: The tooltip is broken and unfixable, it will claim you're paying -1 per policy no matter what you actually pay.

When you look at totals (in the tooltip or what actually happens), policies are free.

Tooltips in EU4 have a lot of bugs, even in vanilla (like "desires your provinces" is capped at -200 in tooltip but can go to -1000 or whatever).