[2021] EU4 - Development Diary 24th of August 2021

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. We’ve not had one since the start of the summer. Mostly because the team has been on holidays, and there is only so many times you can write “we are busy fixing bugs”. From September though, we’ll be able to start with development diaries for new missions and other content that the content designers are working on.

Two weeks ago we celebrated 8 years since the release of EU4, and it is about 11 years since we started working on the design. It has been a long journey, since me, [USER=1559]@Besuchov[/user] and [USER=6723]@King[/user] had our first brainstorming discussions, on how we could build upon EU3. Our goal was to take all that was in EU3 with all expansions, remove the bad features & make a polished game. It is kind of interesting to see how it turned out, and also fun for me personally to see how many people have been working on the game during the last decade.

Metrics
As we tend to do for our games at times, when we do not have much new content to talk about, we like to delve into metrics of the game, on what is most popular and how you guys are playing the game.

First of all, what type of games do you people play every day?

By the amount of games played in a single day, 51% are regular single player games, 44% are ironman games, and 5% are multiplayer games. However, this does not tell the entire story, as one of the game-types include a fair bit more players. On any given day, about 13.7% of all players play multiplayer games, about 39,7% play an ironman game, and 62.3% play a normal single player game. This of course adds up to far more than 100%, but many people play more than 1 game mode in a single day.

Secondly, what nations do people play?
Here are the top 20 most played nations, by the fraction of users who play them in a given day. As you can see, some formable nations like Russia, Prussia, Spain and Great Britain are rather popular to continue playing as..

• England 11.17%
  
• Ottomans 9.65%
  
• France 9.58%
  
• Castille 7.91%
  
• Byzantium 6.60%
  
• Austria 6.43%
  
• Custom Nation 6.41%
  
• Brandenburg 5.81%
  
• Ming 4.93%
  
• Muscowy 4.78%
  
• Portugal 4.62%
  
• Poland 3.83%
  
• Spain 3.71%
  
• Prussia 3.44%
  
• Great Britain 3.29%
  
• Russia 3.24%
  
• Sweden 3.24%
  
• Venice 2.38%
  
• Holland 2.10%
  
• Timurids 2.06%
  
  
  Thirdly, what are the most popular modifications for the game?
  
  While, here are the top 10 most popular modifications, how many of the total users that use these mods in any given day. About 52% of all players use a mod at any point during a week.
  
  
• Graphical Map Improvements 11.8%
  
• Chinese Language Mod for 1.31 11.3%
  
• Extended Timeline 6.4%
  
• Missions Expanded 4.3%
  
• The Great Exhibition 3.5%
  
• Governments Expanded 1.31 3.4%
  
• EU4 Russian localisation LITE by GEKS 3.3%
  
• Anbennar: A Fantasy Total Conversion Mod 2.8%
  
• Flavour and Events Expanded 2.7%
  
• Ages and Splendor Expanded 2.4%
  
  
  As we can see, chinese and russian localisations are popular, and if we had known, we probably should hadlocalised the game from the start, as we did with later games. It is also great to see an overhaul mod like Anbennar get into the top 10.
  
  State of the game When we left in June with 1.31.5, we felt that we were in a pretty decent situation when coming to functionality and had taken Leviathan to a decent enough state (except for concentrate development). As we mentioned earlier, back in April, one of the goals with this new studio was to change how we handle bugs longterm for our projects and focus on addressing older issues, and fixing problems that had been hanging around for years. Back then as a team had reduced the open bug count by over 600 bugs. Now I can proudly say that those numbers have further improved, even after fixing all new Leviathan bugs we had introduced, and now the total amount of open bugs has been reduced by a total of 1083 since September 1st, and we have fixed a total of 2117 bugs in that time period.
  
  
  
  We still have over 500 open bugs to work with for EU4, but that is by far the best shape the project has ever been. With this progress we hope to be even lower when we release 1.32
  
  
  
  The team at Tinto has also grown, with lots of people hired straight from the community to work as programmers, artists, qa, content designers and in other roles. We still need some more people…
  https://career.paradoxplaza.com/jobs/1289640-2d-artist
  https://career.paradoxplaza.com/jobs/1289608-ui-developer
  https://career.paradoxplaza.com/jobs/1049816-engine-programmer
  
  Roadmap To repeat what I said in April on how Tinto will handle further development of EU4.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
  What does that mean for us right now? Well, we’ll soon be talking about the missions that will come in the next paid update. Speaking of that, the next paid update will be missions, graphics and music, while the coders will be spending their time fixing bugs, doing quality of life improvements, balancing and improving the AI.
  
  Speaking of balance, we will rework Concentrate Development for 1.32, and we will have more information on how later this autumn.
  
  The next patch that comes, 1.31.6, will only be a compatibility patch that we need to release, and 1.32 with all further bug fixes, balance changes is planned to be released in the last quarter of this year.