[2022] Developer Diary - 1.35 Unit Pip Rebalance

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

Hello and welcome to another EUIV DD!

Today we will be talking about the rebalance of the Unit Pips we're working on for the upcoming 1.35 update. This task has been led by our QA Team, which was reinforced throughout the year, and that has been key to the release of Lions of the North, as the new members that have joined the Team credit over 5,000 hours of gameplay on EUIV. But apart from testing the game, they are also involved in the game design process, a classic at Paradox, which usually relies on close cooperation between the different teams. Therefore, this is the proposal we'll be testing in the following weeks, taking also into account the feedback we receive in this DD, of course!

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Hello everyone, I'm Pintu, one of the Embedded QA’s working at Tinto.

I want to show you the rework we are doing on the Unit Pips of the different Techgroups, one of the Systems that saw very few changes since the Release of EU4. As we implemented changes to the Combat calculations in the 1.34 update, we think now it’s a good moment to address this rebalance.

First I want to quickly outline what the Unit Pips do in what parts of combat they matter, for those not as experienced in the game. In each combat phase, Strength Damage is dealt depending on the Offensive Damage Pips of the Units, while Morale Damage is dealt based on Offensive Damage and Offensive Morale Pips. Defending works the same way with the Defensive Pips of the Unit, but half of the Defensive Pips (rounded down) of the Backrow Units is added on top of that. That means that over the course of the game, the priority of pips shifts from having a strong Shock Phase to a strong Fire Phase with a focus on defensive Pips, especially for Infantry.

With this rebalance of Unit Pips we mainly want to focus on Infantry Units that are clear strong or weak outliers on their Tech level and the introduction of more choices in Artillery Units beyond the first Technologies when they become available. As always, these are by no means final numbers and will be under close observation during our Testing, apart from the feedback we are receiving in this DD, so there are good chances these will change until the release of the patch.

One of the swiftly explained changes is that related to Aboriginal and Polynesian Units: both got their total amount of pips reduced, to be in line with the American and African Unit Groups. These changes make them preserve some of their strengths, while not being an outlier over other units.

Now onwards to a change that influences other groups as well, which means they have to get adjusted together. The Anatolian group has a very big advantage with their early Units with their Offensive Moral Damage. We decided to tune that down a little in their Unit Options on technologies 5 and 9. Unfortunately, this affects Muslim Unit groups, which should not have an advantage over Anatolians at that point, which in turn affects Indian Units. That's why we had to tune them down as well.

The Anatolian Group will keep one of their big Spikes in Pips on Tech 12, which will let them be a threat to the groups around them. This is also partly because their Unit will stay around until Tech 18, significantly later than other groups get new units.

Speaking of the Muslims, let's take a look at the changes the group got independently from other groups. The Muslim Unit on Tech 23 suffered from both very poor Offensive and Defensive Fire Pips. They do have great Morale and Shock Pips to make up for it, but with the importance of Fire Phase in the later stages of the game, we decided to help them out a little by buffing their defensive Fire on the cost of their defensive Shock.

The Chinese Group has one outlier in their Unit selection, which is situated on Tech 19, with both 3 offensive and 3 defensive Fire Pips, in addition to 3 Offensive Morale. The one drawback with that Unit is that its successor becomes available only on Tech 25, later than most other groups. Since they have an edge with that against most of their neighboring groups, the solution for this is that they lose one offensive Morale.

On the same Techlevel, the Nomadic Group has a very solid, while not great, Infantry Unit, that would do with a small Nerf to fit their theme of military decline more.

The African Groups (this includes Central, East, and West African), got a small reshuffle of Pips, to make their Last Unit on Tech 30 an actual upgrade over the previous version.

Last but not least a small change to the High American Group, where their Unit from Tech 18 gets a small bump in Pips. Before this Unit had the same amount of total Pips as the previous unit level.

Let's now move on to the Changes to Artillery. These mainly focus on the Introduction of one new Alternative per Unit, which focuses more on a defensive style, where Artillery is used to push half of their defensive Pips towards the frontline while sacrificing their damage output with lower Offensive Fire and Morale Pips. There will also be a small Adjustment on Tech 13, with making one of the Options a defensive one.


You may notice that for the new types of Artillery we've just named them the 'Defensive' version of each level. This is not definitive, as it's mainly a placeholder; so, we will accept suggestions for naming each of the unit types.

And this will conclude the Dev Diary for this week and this year. Just like the Idea Group rebalance of last week, we are very eager to read your feedback and suggestions on this topic to improve it as much as possible.

See you at the next DD, on January 10th!