[2022] New Year, New Dev Diary

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

Greetings, and Happy New Year to everyone! Today we’re coming back to EUIV DD’s, after taking a couple of months’ break from them (unfortunately not due to long Spanish holidays, as some on the forums have suggested :p). What we’ve been doing in that time was already mentioned by Johan in the last DD: working on 1.32.1 and 1.32.2 patches, and then moving on to the next one, 1.33, that will be live later this quarter.

As Origins and 1.32.2 release have been mostly well praised (and we're very happy about that!), we thought that we wanted to move on 3 main points for the upcoming 1.33 patch:

1) Fixing most of the remaining bugs from 1.32/Origins.
2) Balancing some mechanics that had been on our list for a while.
3) Continue working to improve AI performance, as some issues appeared in 1.32.

Today I’ll be focusing on the game balance changes that we’ve been working on, as we still have some room for making changes before releasing the patch (although not new content, as we may be adding more in the next immersion pack we will be working on after this patch), and we want to receive some feedback on them from you, the community.

With Origins release, we’ve been able to revamp the setup and balance of Africa, and we’re pretty happy with it, in general terms. So, we thought of moving back to the Far East, as there were some balance issues that were not fully resolved by Leviathan although focusing in part on the SEA region. Regarding that, we were aware of the big discussion on Ming balance in the forums, thus it would be a good idea to tackle it for this patch.

Ming and the Emperor of China is a really hard tag and mechanics to balance out. It starts as the strongest country in the world, and MingBlob was not a desired outcome in past patches, as it hindered Eastern Asia gameplay (even affecting India super-region, as others have said). So, because of that Mingplosion being a regular outcome was useful for gameplay purposes, although Qing and other successors are not usually so successful when it comes to reuniting the EoC, being honest. For players, it's true that it's not the most challenging/rewarding tag to play with it, because it may be not too compelling to handle the disaster if you advance on Mandate of Heaven reforms, while at the same time it won't be a very challenging playtime, if you reach some snowball point early on (which is pretty doable by experienced players).

So, we’ve come with the following changes to Ming/EoC to try to balance it a bit better:

- The Celestial Empire now has a sixth reform available which allows vassalizing your own tributaries at the cost of Mandate.
- Confucianism has been buffed:
- All the modifiers from harmonized religions have been standardized in their power compared to other religions.
- Reduced the base Yearly Harmony from 1 to 0.25.
- Increased the Harmony cost of harmonizing a religion from 3 per year to 3.25.
- Religious Unity now gives +1 Yearly Harmony at 100% Religious Unity (can not go above that).
- Positive Harmony now gives: +3 Tolerance of the True Faith, -10% Development Cost, +1 Meritocracy, +0.5 Legitimacy, +1 Devotion, -0.5 Yearly Corruption, +50% Harmonization Speed.
- Negative Harmony now gives: +1 Yearly Corruption, +20% Stability Cost, -1 Legitimacy, -2 Meritocracy, -2 Devotion.
- Negative Stability now decreases Yearly Harmony by 0.25 per missing stability.
- Eastern Denominations religions harmonized now unlock monuments requiring it.
- The new Holder of the Mandate gains the following bonuses atop of their +0.05 Mandate: +12 Force Limit, -10% Land Maintenance, +15% Manpower Recovery Speed.
- The events of the Ming Crisis disaster now allow you to swap your country with one of the Chinese warlords you release in the event.
- Force Tributary CB (along with other CB’s with a specific purpose, as Restoration of Union and Subjugation) don’t allow taking of provinces any more.

The Idea of the Harmonization Speed increase at high Harmony is to encourage alternating between harmonizing a new religion and accumulating Harmony. It should be possible for you to be just as fast with harmonizing religions as somebody who is chain harmonizing all the time.

Apart from that, we’re doing the following changes to other countries on the Far East neighborhood:

- Manchuria Overhaul with the addition of Nivkh culture, Korchin having a vassal, redistribution of provinces and addition of the Amur Estuary (mostly following this thread in the Suggestions subforum, as we think it was really well thought: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/manchuria-again.1505121/).
- Moved the Vietnamese culture out of the Chinese culture group
- Added "Sinicize our Culture" for the Vietnamese and Korean cultures, allowing you to move with your culture into the Chinese culture group. The decision requires you to have a Chinese cultural majority in your country or being the Emperor of China
- Korea's starting heir has been buffed by +1/+1/+1. (The reason being to buff Korea a little bit, while Hyang is a little bit more average of a monarch than the game might suggest. Sickness shortened his life quite a lot, which played a huge factor for us to give him the benefit of doubt and increase his stats a little bit).
- Hanseong gained +15 Development as it was quite the big city in 1444 and comparable to the many big Chinese cities.
- Shinto countries now can use Buddhist monuments.

Finally, we’ve been also doing some changes regarding Portugal, Indian estates, a combat pips rework, and other stuff:
- The Castilian/Spanish mission "Recover Portugal" has been moved. Now it requires the completion of the missions "Subjugate Navarra" and "Reclaim Andalucia". The Restoration of Union CB has been moved accordingly too and is only available to Spain if both missions are completed. This change will make Portugal not so easily PU’d by Castile, as we were seeing this a lot in our nightly AI tests in the first 20 years of the game
- Portuguese ideas have been buffed, as we felt that they were a bit lackluster compared to other Tier 1 countries, and that Portugal was having a rough time in early game against Castile and other powers:
- Traditions: +10% Infantry Combat Ability instead of current +15% Trade Efficiency (to give Portugal a bit of punch in early game).
- Legacy of the Navigator: +10 Naval Morale instead of current -33% Morale hit when losing a ship (on par with Danish NI's).
- Encourage the Bandeirantes: +15% Trade Efficiency instead of +1 Merchant (basically reshuffling the older tradition into here).
- Royal Academy of Fortification, Artillery and Drawing: +1 Artillery instead of +10% Artillery Combat Capacity (so it gives some land punch in early-mid game while diminishing in late game, and extra naval punch, which is WAD).
- The Indian Estates now have access to their versions of powerful estate privileges such as "Strong Duchies", "Religious Diplomats", "Religious Culture" and "Nobility Integration Policy".
- Added a new decision for Muslim Indian countries, which allow you to replace the Brahmins with the Dhimmi if you own any province outside the Muslim or Dharmic religion groups.
- Added events for Alcheringa nations, which allow them to unlock their cults without the need to complete their missions. The events, however, have the same requirements to trigger as their mission counterparts.
- Forming Rome will now convert all provinces of your culture group to Roman.
- Ottoman missions are now available to Rûm.
- Regiments’ fire and shock pips now also count toward morale damage in their respective phases. Many of you will know that morale pips have been superior to fire and shock pips. This change will make the pips more equal in value, although morale pips may still be the better pick most of the time. To preserve the overall flow of battles, we’re thinking not to apply this to artillery protection from backrow, as it is asymmetrical.

So, after most of these changes being implemented, and some still WIP, this is what we’re seeing in our nightlies AI tests:









In some games Portugal is performing really well, while in others Spain is still a top dog in the Iberian Peninsula and America. Regarding China, you can see that Ming sometimes manage to stay stable, while Mingplossion still happens regularly, and even some of the successor states are able to blob a bit after it, recovering MoH.

This is all for today. We’re open to feedback and suggestions given by you to further improve the balance for 1.33, if possible; just remember to have civil discussions about them, as there were some hot-heated ones a couple months ago (basically regarding Ming balance), and we don't want that to be repeated.

Next week my fellow colleague @Gnivomwill talk about the changes made to AI in the upcoming 1.33 patch (and yes, he will be tackling the AI deleting forts issue, among others). Hope you enjoy the DD!