Europa Universalis IV crownland and negative absolutism bug

This bug can really mess up a campaign, but it's pretty much unknown to the community, as it's hiding behind a few layers of obfuscation.

Land shares

The system is conceptually very simple. Every estate, as well as the crown, have some amount of land.

When new land is conquered, it's distributed to everyone proportionally to their influence. For each estate, its influence is displayed directly. For the crown, influence is 60% + absolutism.

So here's an example. You have 200 dev, distributed as:

• crown 30% - 60dev
• nobles 35% - 70dev
• clergy 20% - 40dev
• burghers 15% - 30dev

Now you conquer 100dev worth of land, it's one of the first two eras, and let's say influence is 60% for clergy, 40% for nobles, and 40% for burghers. New numbers should be:

• crown - 60dev + 30dev = 90dev = 30% (+0.0%)
• nobles - 70dev + 20dev = 90dev = 30% (-5.0%)
• clergy - 40dev + 30dev = 70dev = 23.3% (+3.3%)
• burghers - 30dev + 20dev = 50dev = 16.6% (+1.6%)

In theory, it's all very straightforward.

It means it's very difficult to have high crownland share before age of absolutism, and countries with more estates have worse crownland situation, but that's just how the system works.

Also in-game tooltip "Crownland can be gained when: Conquer Land when having less than 60% total influence of all Estates" is a complete lie. This isn't even remotely how it works. It is baffling why they put such completely false information in the tooltip, as the real system is very straightforward.

The Bug

Anyway, the bug. Crown influence is 60% + absolutism, so before age of absolutism it should be just 60%. However it is not. The game still keeps track of absolutism in earlier eras, and it can be negative.

If you engage with the estate system, and give away a lot of privileges, you can spend the first two eras at massively negative absolutism, and all the crownland calculations will be broken.

Let's start as Venice - just doing the bare minimum of 3 mana privileges, and Religious Diplomats.

This brings your Max Absolutism to -56.12, so crown influence instead of 60% will be just 3.88%, and you'll get almost zero crownland from conquests.

It gets a lot worse if you get your max absolutism below -60. Then your crown influence becomes negative, and not only the estates get all the newly conquered land, but also whenever you conquer any land, you give them some of your existing lands as well. This is extremely pathological, but for example Venice gets there with just one more privilege.

There's one more complication, as the game recalculates absolutism only if you perform some absolutism affecting action (most commonly changing local autonomy), and the check (vs 0 or vs max absolutism) seems to depend on that action being absolutism increasing or decreasing.

At least you can recover from that if you increase your Max Absolutism, and then do an appropriate absolutism-affecting action, but there's no easy way to see if it worked in the game (in the save game file, it's "absolutism=XXX" line).

If you're at war, and choose peace terms that would gain you some land, you can see land share changes in the tooltip, and from it you can see if it's broken or not.

Play workaround

If you play a monarchy, and don't grant many privileges, you probably won't be affected, as your Max Absolutism should remain positive.

If you play a republic (planning to go monarchy before age of absolutism), or grant a lot of privileges (planning to revoke them before age of absolutism), this will mess up your game due to the bug. If you do both, it will mess up your game even worse due to negative crownland influence.

So the best way to play is by being extremely careful with Max Absolutism. You can view it in Government tab, in Country Modifiers. It's fine if it's just +0, as long as it never goes negative.

The obvious strategy of "just give all privileges on game start, then conquer something to regain crownland" only works for monarchies. If you try it as a republic (or as a monarchy that granted a lot of privileges) you'll get nothing out of it. And if you get to negative crown influence, you won't be able to even recover by seizing land, as every conquest will mean crownland giveaway.

If you go negative Max Absolutism for a while, but then recover (either to positive, or to less negative value), you'll need to do some kind of recovery by absolutism-affecting action. If you're at risk, verify in peace deal tooltip that land share changes are what they should be.

Mod workaround

Mods can work around this issue by giving all countries +1000% max absolutism in the first two ages with a triggered modifier. This was Max Absolutism will never be negative, until you get to the age where it matters. This way players can play the game normally as if the bug wasn't there, and it won't affect anything else.

I didn't test if the bug is still there in the last two ages, but usually at that point you'd try to have high Max Absolutism anyway.

What Paradox should do

They should make negative absolutism impossible, and that would fix the whole issue.