[2022] Dev Diar: 1.34 Roadmap

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

Hello and welcome to another Europa Universalis IV Development Diary! This week I will be presenting the Roadmap we have been preparing in the last weeks, giving a guide to some of the content that we are working on and will be showing you all in the coming months.

But first, you have probably noticed that I’m not Johan, who is traditionally in charge of doing this. That’s because I’ve been recently promoted to Content Design Coordinator here in Paradox Tinto, so, as the position speaks for itself, I’ll be coordinating the new content created. Therefore, Johan thought it would be a good idea to take some boring work out from him to delegate this task to me.

On to the Roadmap. We will be sticking to the development principles we outlined in the past year. Those are:

• Paid Features should be standalone, and easy to maintain.
  
• No major feature reworks while we still have lots of bugs.
  
• Reducing the bug-count as much as possible.
  
• Add more content, like missions, graphics and music.
  
• Flesh out the parts of the map that have not gotten attention the last few years.

At the moment, we’re quite satisfied with the current state of the game and we think it’s in a much better spot than one year ago. We’ve not only addressed a lot regarding the Leviathan issues (shivers), but have fixed a lot of legacy bugs (as we discussed on previous DDs), reducing our backlog of existing issues and starting a rebalancing of some parts of the game that were required and requested.

So, what can you expect from the next update (which will be version 1.34 of the game)? We will still be working on reducing our bug-count and improving game performance as much as possible. From a gameplay perspective, Gnivom will continue making improvements to AI, and we are already addressing the combat balance (topics that will be discussed in future DDs, so you can give us feedback about it after we’ve finished a first round of internal tests). We’re going to do some rebalancing of Idea groups (nothing groundbreaking, but trying to diversify a bit their usefulness). Also, we want to keep improving the Religion balance, making some changes to a few of them to make them attractive enough, as we have done in the last two updates.

Regarding the new content, we believe that we need to improve the state of the base game before we start introducing more major reworks. We also think that we have room to keep expanding already existing features. So, in that sense, you can expect that there will be more government reforms, more estate privileges, and a few more goodies here and there. But our main focus in this field will be to continue improving and developing mission trees and other accompanying features in regions considered a bit backwards content-wise. And, speaking of, we’ve got a clue of the area where we will be focusing from next week’s DD:



And that’s all for today! We’re very excited about the new upcoming content, and I promise you that my colleague Ogele will show you more detailed content next Tuesday. Stay tuned, see you!