Europa Universalis IV - Development Diary 24th of May 2022

 Thread starter Gnivom  Start date May 24, 2022 at 16:00

Hello everyone, Gnivom here today.

I may return for a future dev diary on the many AI improvements we’re making for 1.34, but today’s topic is Land Combat.

First a recap:

For 1.33, we decided to change some things with combat; first mentioned in this January DD and soon amended by making backrow regiments take 60% less morale damage. The core idea was to remove some weird traps that uninitiated players (I would guess a majority) and the AI (without major modifications) would easily fall for. In particular, having a large army without a full back row of artillery could be disastrous.

However, those changes also caused some unintended balance effects:

Battles last longer, sometimes a lot longer.

Morale is much less important.

Stackwipes (officially “overruns”) are much less common (though this is mostly caused by the AI accidentally exploiting the Zombie Regiments bug, by shift-consolidating troops before battle).

Tech Groups’ impact through unit pips have been amplified. This has not been addressed so I won’t mention it again in this DD.

Additionally, some of you have pointed out that what can be seen as a “noob trap” can also be a source of tactical depth in multiplayer.

Now, let's look at what's new for 1.34 and how this addresses these issues.

Passive Morale Damage

In 1.33 we made the daily 0.03 “morale damage to reserves” actually only apply to reserves, where it previously applied to deployed troops as well. The intention was to relatively penalize overstacking more as well as to be consistent with the name.

This is a major cause for the longer battles in the early game, and for morale being less important, and has now been reworked in 1.34 to as follows:

Deployed troops take a daily morale damage of 1% of max morale.

Reserves take a daily morale damage of 2% of max morale.

Only the reserves are affected by the Professionalism modifier, so it remains mostly a QoL modifier, although its absolute effect is now much bigger.

……