#europa miniversalis

[tanadrin]

EUMini: Techs, Units, Institutions, Ages

I think one of the best things they added to EU4 was the Institution system, since institutions can begin to mimic the way real technologies gradually disseminate through the world based on the actual material and political circumstances of different states and cultures; and one of these days, I’d like to try to mod EU4 so that the Institutions system supported the entire tech tree, instead of just being one supporting part of it.

Today, for better or worse, is not that day.

The mod has fifteen basic tech levels (using the standard linear tech system), and all nations--which all belong to the same tech group--start at level zero in all three categories. The on-time dates for each tech fall every 25 years, starting in 1175.

The goal with the modded technologies is that each should be fairly consequential. For almost every admin tech, for instance, you get, at minimum, a building and an idea group. The major techs will last you to 1425, which is nearly 400 years. After that, there are eleven “repeatable” techs that give small generic bonuses and have generic names.

You can see the repeatable techs in the way the land morale bonuses are distributed here--they become small and crop up at every tech level starting at tech 16.

The repeatable techs are to enable you to play past 1450 or so if you like; the mod’s end date is 2000.1.1, but I consider the actual “historical” period it covers to be 1062 to 1450 or so.

As all countries belong to the same tech group, all countries naturally have access to the same units. As in base EU4, the time period being covered marks the introduction of early firearms to the development of more sophisticated ones, while at the same time earlier martial (and especially noble-equestrian) military traditions are in decline, under the pressure of an expanding infantry-based army.

I think one of the major weaknesses of EU4 is the inability to deploy diverse unit types at the same time; you’re limited to one infantry regiment type, one cavalry regiment type, and one artillery regiment type, which means you can’t switch between (say) defensive and offensive units as the tactical situation warrants. That’s one reason I haven’t put too much effort into diversifying the unit types; instead, they just tend to accumulate more pips as your military technology improves.

(There are new ship types, too, but no neat in-game way of displaying them. There are only 4 tiers of ship, and their stats are essentially equivalent to the last 4 ships of each type in the base game, though.)

Institutions function in the same way as the base game, though I have altered and goosed the modifiers associated with each age. There are five institutions now--Sovereignty & Autocracy, which starts spawned in the northwest; Religious Law, which will spawn about 1080; Urbanization, which can spawn after 1170; Natural Philosophy, which can spawn from 1250; and Imperialism, which can spawn from 1350. The last three are each associated with the beginning of a new Age.

^ That’s the starting distribution of the first institution.

The four ages are the Age of Invasions (starting), the Age of Princes, the Age of Invention, and the Age of Strife. Most salient is the fact that no age has country-specific abilities; any country can acquire all 11 abilities, and like the base game, each age has a strong theme to it. The Age of Invasions is based on small-scale warfare and consolidation, and inherits a few of the Age of Discovery’s age abilities (stealing vassals and claims-on-claims); the Age of Princes is based on diplomacy and economic development; the Age of Invention is based on technological dynamism and government flexibility; and the Age of Strife is based on large-scale empire building and land warfare. Unlike the base game, Absolutism never kicks in: because the map is so small, having massive late-game blob potential would, well, end the game rather abruptly, I think. Instead, the Age of Strife primarily boosts army size and manpower recovery speed, meaning you can stay in the fight longer, or get back in it sooner.

Here’s a view of the first Age screen, whose art, as I’m sure you can tell, I’ve lavished an enormous amount of time and attention on:

[tanadrin]

EUMini: The Map

Map modding is my favorite part of EU4 modding (except positions.txt, uuuughhh), so I’m going to talk about the map for a bit. Here’s a zoomed-out view of the whole thing:

It’s flat, of course; and EU4 doesn’t properly support flat maps (contrast CK2 or Imperator, which don’t support round ones), so I get around this the same way Voltaire’s Nightmare does: a big empty province of nothin’ to the right of the main map, and judiciously placed decorate border pieces. Currently there’s also an isolated section of ocean to the northeast, which the AI does not handle well (indeed, at all), but since a state that extends across all of Adwera to touch both regions should be a rare event, this does not worry me yet. It’s something I may have to deal with in the future.

A note on terminology: Rezana is the continent to the southwest. Adwera is the northern/northeastern continent. The large islands in the middle are Khairun (north) and Bescura (south). The archipelagic region between Bescura and Adwera is Furayqa.

Here’s a zoomed-out view of the regions, and of the areas/states:

The states almost all have exactly five provinces in them. That probably won’t be true if I go back and revise parts of the map, which I’m planning on doing at some point, but for now I think the area setup works pretty well. The default number of starting states is much lower, and only slightly affected by technology, which I think is appropriate for the much smaller map.

Hidvera, the northernmost region of Adwera, is urban and highly developed. The province of Shyuri is home to the largest city on the continent, the City of Kings, which is the symbolic throne of the paramount Nurhani monarchs.

On the other side of the Twin Gulfs we have Shushtar, a large, dry region that’s nevertheless home to some large cities along the great rivers that run from the Ghattari Mountains down to the Ororan Coast. Oror, to the southwest of Shushtar, is another fairly urbanized region, home to numerous small states.

The coast of Rezana, in the southwest, is the least-developed region. This isn’t true for the entire continent--southern Rezana is in fact home to the Issarans, a major power that would invade Adwera a few centuries from the time represented here--but northern Rezana has always been heavily forested, thinly populated, and underdeveloped. Nonetheless, there are trade goods here not present anywhere else on the map, and the trade routes going both directions around Khairun start here, so if you’re keen on building a mercantile empire, it may well be worth your while to snap up some of the real estate in this region.

The northern trade routes have their end node in Hidvera, in the City of Kings node. The southern routes end here, in the seas around the island of Ogidar. Ogidar and Mashgal (the purple region directly east) are pretty well-developed, like Oror, and the inland trade that comes down from Ghattari and Shushtar to Oror can also be diverted south to this node. This is a great home region for mercantile empires, and more than a few of the starting tags in this region are merchant republics or plutocracies.

And here’s the image file I used to plan the distribution of trade goods:

Dyes, naval supplies (i.e., old growth forest), spices, fur, and tea are primarily found in the southwest, especially Rezana. Chinaware and silk are produced in the Theisei region of Khairun. Cloth is a major export of Mashgal, central Oror, and Ogidar, and wine is produced in Hidvera, and western Shushtar. Copper, iron, and gold are mostly found in mountainous regions like Ghattari and Akkil, and tropical wood is found only in southern Bescura (but even then, that’s probably too far north).

This is the base image I used to plan things like country layouts, religion, culture, and trade nodes:

I include it because it gives a good overview of the size and shape of all 458 occupied land provinces (dark gray is impassable mountains). It also shows some points where I’d like to revise the map in future: Hidvera, Oror, and Shushtar in particular could use some more small provinces, and some of the islands in the Furayq Sea are annoyingly small.

While my goal was not to closely replicate gameplay in Europe (Adwera is, if anything, culturally and historically inspired by William Dalrymple’s books on India), I do like the way features like the elaborate Mediterranean coastline, the proximity between Europe and Africa, and the tradenode setup in the base game translate into gameplay, and I chose this part of my conworld in particular as the basis for the map because it gave me the opportunity to try to replicate those. Still on the fence about adding an HRE-analogue though. It’s great gameplay, and I love the systems EU4 has for representing polycentric power structures. Maybe an unholy combination of the daimyos/HRE/Emperor of China mechanics all stacked on top of each other? We’ll see.

[tanadrin]

EUMini: Religion

The name of this mod is “Europa Miniversalis”: a microcosm of EU mechanics, in a limited playing space that is (or should be!) nevertheless varied and interesting. I chose as a basis for the map my conworld Sogant Raha, and the subcontinent of Adwera.

Adwera is a little like Europe or India: it is a subcontinent that divides two seas, separated from the rest of its landmass by rugged mountains. It’s located in a middle latitude, and while the southern coast and the insular regions get plenty of rain--supplied by the warm, wet air from the Taikun Sea in the west and the equatorial oceans to the southeast--the middle of the continent is surrounded by high mountains, and so is fairly dry.

Human civilization on Sogant Raha is old--at the time this mod is set, more than fifty thousand years old. So Adwera, like the rest of the planet, has a lot of history, with many ups and downs, technological revolutions and devastating, civilization-destroying catastrophes. At the time this mod is set (the year 1062 by the local calendar), things are definitely starting to look up. Major urban centers exist in Khairun (that’s the large central island), the Ororan coast (the central littoral region),and Hidvera (the northwest). Prosperous states are even found throughout dry Shushtar, along the great rivers that sustain life in the deserts, and in mountainous Akkil to the east.

But today I am going to talk about religion, because I’ve just finished adding religion mechanics. Adwera has four major religions: Nurhankaya, Adwerkaya, Rezankaya, and the Mosheri.

In Adwera, “kaya” simply means a belief system. “Adwerkaya” represents the default polytheism of the subcontinent, the result of many different peoples and many different faiths stewing in close quarters for millennia. Adwerkaya has no set doctrine, no central religious hierarchy, and no (or many, depending on how you look at it) holy text. What it does have are powerful religious organizations that tend to control a lot of land: the temples. Temples are important political sites in Adwera, and the upkeep and patronage of temples, and the dedication of new ones, are an important part of the state’s duties. Therefore, Adwerkaya uses Orthodox mechanics: Patriarch Authority is instead named Temple Authority; the “Consecrate Metropolitan” feature instead represents using state funds to promote a new site of pilgrimage (important for bringing in money from the rural provinces!), and instead of icons, you can dedicate idols to an Adweran deity for a long-lasting bonus.

The northeast, in the Ghattari Mountains, is the refuge of the Mosheri tribes. Long ago, the faith of Mosher was powerful and prestigious; now, it’s quite marginal. All the Ghattari nations have highly defensively-oriented ideas, since they’ve been struggling for centuries to resist attempts by Shushtari and Akkilan princes to extend their domain to the northern coast, but they remember a time when the Wheel of Mosher was held sacred across much of the subcontinent, and they hope, perhaps, one day to restore the faith to greatness. Mosheri uses the Coptic Holy Site mechanic, and each of the available Blessings (here called Doctrines) that come from capturing old Mosheri holy sites provide powerful offensive bonuses. If you can capture all five Mosheri holy sites, you will be well-situated to dominate all of Adwera.

“Rezankaya” is an exonym for the religious practices of the Rezanan peoples. Compared to Khairun or Bescura to the north and east, Rezana is poor and underdeveloped. Its states, if they can be called that, are weak and mostly tribal in nature. The Rezanans, like the Adwerans, are polytheists, but their priestly bureaucracies aren’t nearly as complicated as those of the Adwerkaya. Rezankaya uses the Norse or Hindu personal deity mechanic. The five deities represented are the Rezanan god of the forest (defensive bonuses), the god of the sea (trade and institution bonuses), the god of fire (improved heir chance and reduced unrest), the god of the sky (improved conversion), and the god of stone (improved tax income and legitimacy).

Finally, there is Nurhankaya. Nurhankaya is a very recent arrival to the region--indeed, currently at the 1062 start date, there are no Nurhankaya provinces. The Nurhani faith was the religion of the exiles of Unnurhan, from far away across the Taikun Sea. For generations they sought a new homeland before, under their general Butuo, they crossed the Thattai mountains and conquered large portions of Hidvera and western Shushtar. After Butuo’s death, her realm collapsed, and the Nurhankaya rulers have already begun to assimilate to the local languages and cultures, but their religion remains strong. They use somewhat-upgraded versions of the Reformed Fervor mechanic, and it is planned to have several different events and other tools for the Nurhani to spread their faith further.

The three northern religions all belong to the same group, Adweran, reflecting the fact that--in the internal history of Sogant Raha--they eventually were closely culturally affiliated. This principally means that the Nurhani and the Adwerkayans see each other as heretics, not heathens. They can marry and form personal unions with one another. Rezankaya is kept distinct, due to that continent’s historic lack of close cultural connections with the lands to the north.

[tanadrin]

New EU4 mod project. The map is only 512x512--about the size of Western Europe in the base game. The idea is something that runs faster and suitable for multiplayer, where nobody will be farting around on the opposite side of the world for 200 years before they have to deal with any other humans.

I drew the map entirely by hand this time; it’s based on my main conworld project, on the northern subcontinent of Adwera. I may extend the map a little in the future, especially to the east, but the goal is not at all a “full” world map.

[tanadrin]

EUMini: Subjects

I’ve extensively modded the base subject types for this project, because, frankly, the base subject types in EU4 bore me. A vassal is usually nothing more than a delayed part of your realm, and I’ve rarely found a use for a march unless I’m deliberately not blobbing because I’m imposing particular gameplay restrictions on myself.

Subjects now have a clear hierarchy: it goes tributary > vassal > feudatory (a new subject type) > march or substate (also new).

Tributaries function as in the base game. You can acquire them diplomatically or via war; the only difference is that they now take up a diplomatic relation slot, because it isn’t expected that you will play like the Emperor of China, and have a zillion tributaries to ensure you get that sweet ticking Mandate. Vassals now function more like Daimyos: they can war amongst themselves, and contract marriages between each other and your Feudatories. Feudatories function more like vassals: they’re more dependent on you directly. Marches are the same as in the base game; while Substates are almost entirely integrated into your nation, and have reduced independence desire (and income and forcelimit) as a result.

If your country is stable, prosperous, and well-ruled, you can get events that move your subjects rightward along the subject hierarchy; after Feudatory, you can choose whether or not they become Marches (which can now be larger--up to 40% of your development) or Substates. Substates can eventually be integrated by event.

Naturally, though, if your country is unstable, if your ruler is incompetent, or if you’re up to your eyeballs in debt and war exhaustion, it can go the other way. Subjects become less closely integrated, and tributaries break free. Tributaries will also sometimes have a chance to end the tributary relationship on the death of their ruler with no diplomatic penalty; these were, after all, often historically unstable relationships, which could lapse if the suzerain party neglected to maintain its authority.

I have added two new estate disasters as well: the Scholars disaster functions like the regular estate disasters--penalties to your government until you rein the Scholars in--but the Free Knights disaster is a little different. Like the Cossacks or the Dhimmis, the Free Knights have no ambition to take over your government--if they get too powerful, they will simply declare themselves independent, as a Chivalric Order.

Speaking of your minor Khairunese nobles: there’s another event I’ve added that I’m quite pleased about, although it may still need some balance tweaks.

While EU4 gives an impression of neat national borders and clear sovereignty, the period of history it represents wasn’t actually like that, especially in its earlier parts. The history of Adwera is no different, and in Khairun especially, beneath the clear delineations of sovereign realms, there is a riot of petty nobility, complex inheritance and property law (freehold versus allodial title and so forth), a real administrative mess. For the most part, this is all lumped together in-game under “autonomy” and similar modifiers, but occasionally, these conflicts become geopolitically important.

To represent that, there’s a small chance for a province in your realm to suddenly be inherited by the lords of a different realm. A new OPM tag will gain a core, independence, and become a vassal of a neighboring country--if you wish to prevent this, you’ll have to go to war to stop it. Of course, if you do contest the inheritance, they might back down and give back the province without a fight--you can choose to do the same if you’re the inheriting party. But the AI will prefer to fight for what’s theirs. For balance reasons, this takes the form of the inheriting party declaring war on the party losing territory: I think it would kind of suck to have to choose between losing land and the AI and all their allies suddenly jumping you. This way, at least, you’ll be guaranteed to be able to call your allies to support you in defense of your realm.

[tanadrin]

EUMini: Governments & Estates

Besides culture/religion appropriate titles, I’ve added several new government types to the mod, based on Adweran history. The first two are found primarily in Oror, and are a result of that region’s historic prosperity and relatively high degree of urbanization. These are the Free City, and the Scholar’s Republic.

The Ororan Free City is the result, as in the historic Holy Roman Empire, of populous municipalities throwing off the domination of nearby hereditary overlords. In Oror, however, there’s no overall emperor to protect their independence; the leaders of the Free Cities must depend on their diplomatic skill and the strength of their citizenry’s patrotism to keep from falling under the dominion of neighboring powers again. Free Cities are republican governments that start with very strong defensive ideas, and (once I deal with war mechanics) the idea is that you won’t be able to annex them (and they won’t be able to take land) in a normal fashion. But they can be vassalized, and potentially integrated later. Free Cities are fixed to Duchy rank.

The other Ororan government form is the Scholar’s Republic, seen here:

In Oror, the development of philosophical schools coalesced around teaching lineages and temples, and, as in medieval Europe, many universities have their origin as monastic institutions, which were often endowed with land to enable them to have independent revenues. But in Adwera, this trend continued to an extreme: several such institutions became de facto independent, and the scholars who governed them found themselves in charge, not only of administering their fellow academics, but administering nascent states as well. As you might imagine, Scholar’s Republics focus on technology and innovativeness bonuses; although they are perhaps not as enlightened and forward-thinking as they would like to think they are, they still recruit students from all over the continent to join their ranks, and therefore are a rich melting pot of different ideas and traditions. Scholar’s Republics are fixed to Duchy rank.

Scholar’s Republics have an additional estate: the Scholars, representing the administrative and academic hierarchy crucial to their operation. Happy scholars will reduce monarch point costs for most actions, representing a content and smoothly functioning bureaucracy. Unhappy scholars will slightly increase them.

In Adwera, like in many ancient and medieval societies of our own history, there has long been a class of aristocratic soldier-knights, the result of the need for warlords to reward their best fighters with land and wealth to secure their loyalty, the high expense of equipping heavy cavalry, and the subsequent ossification of these social strata into sophisticated institutions. In Khairun, however, this institution has become far more elaborated than elsewhere in the region. The result is a cultural obsession with knighthood and chivalry, not rivaled in our own history until the High Middle Ages.

All Khairuni government forms get an additional estate: the Free Knights. Free Knights represent petty landed nobility who form the backbone of Khairuni cavalry formations. Unlike the higher nobility, these individuals probably can’t hope to achieve high station at court, or marry into a royal family, but they do jealously guard their independence. If kept happy, and given land, they make great guardians of your kingdom’s frontier.

The basic monarchy government reform in Khairun is Khairuni Feudalism, which gives considerable bonuses to recruiting cavalry and deploying them on the battlefield. Khairuni Feudal ideas are based on diplomacy between nobles and the ideals of chivalric conduct (which in practice, of course, actual cavalry soldiers often fall short of).

When the petty nobility bands together and throws off the chains of more powerful monarchs, they form a Chivalric Order. These are secular orders of knighthood that give common purpose to their members, and which govern their territory as a confederation of semi-independent minor nobles. Leadership is hereditary, and the bonuses and ideas are similar to Khairuni Feudalism. Because they are of the minor nobility, they are fixed at Duchy rank.

Lastly, there is a Khairuni republican government, the Khairuni Peasant Republic. These are, like Ororan Free Cities, states that managed to resist domination by feudal lords. However, they actually represent the original form of government in Khairun: the island was settled from Oror centuries ago by individuals fleeing the centralizing states of the north, and, like the Icelandic Commonwealth, for many years they governed themselves via general assemblies of landholders. Infighting and feuding eventually destabilized that form of government on most of the island, allowing the emergence of a dominant aristocratic class, but pockets of the old ways remain, now organized around towns and small cities.

Adwera is also home to religious orders: the Landed Order represents the local flavor of theocracy. Landed Orders are a little like the tariqats eventually instrumental in the formation of the Safavid state: religious warrior-societies with their own mystical doctrines. However, they have formed in Adwera around cult-centers of specific gods, and exist to forward some mission which is closely theologically associated with that deity. Naturally, they don’t do very well integrating other religions. Almost all the Landed Orders are found in mountainous Akkil, in the east. They are fixed at Duchy rank.

The Amarsi Monarchy is a form of monarchy associated with Nurhankaya states. “Amarsi” is the term for the class of Nurhankaya aristocrat that emerged after the Nurhani conquest, professing the Nurhani faith but tending to be assimilated into the local culture. Amarsi Monarchies have bonuses and ideas that reflect their philosophical openness and religious syncretism, but also their tendency toward absolutism: Amarsi Monarchies are prevented from adopting parliamentary government reforms, for instance.

Finally, there is a local flavor of Plutocracy, which are the monarchies of Mashgal and Oror clever enough to notice that seagoing trade, and not revenues from land, is the primary source of wealth in their kingdoms. These are very similar to Indian Plutocracies in the base game, although they have their own idea set.

[tanadrin]

Mod progress: every country now has a flag (placeholder procedurally generated flags, most of ‘em look like shit); new technologies, institutions, units, and tech groups have been created; cultural titles have been added; the diplomatic setup for the starting bookmark has been completed; and the bare minimum of localizations have been provided for all of the above.

Still to do: idea groups for, at minimum, each culture (but I want some nations to have unique ideas; Kalchana already does); primary tags for each culture, formable tags for certain regions and culture groups, and formation decisions for those tags; actual mechanics for the four religions; ages and age abilities; new government types/government reforms; and at least a few age/religion/culture-appropriate events to provide a little flavor to the world.

I will resist the urge to revise bits of the map at least until all that’s done, because when all of the above is complete then all the basic work for the mod will be finished, and it will make sense to go back and start testing & refining things.

Right now there are sixteen major tech levels, with another 11 generic repeating techs. I have tried to make each tech level feel a little more consequential than they do in the base game. Institutions also now come with significantly bigger bonuses. I always thought they should make all tech in EU4 work like institutions do, spreading to provinces based on geographic and political criteria, but I’m not yet at the point where I’m going to attempt to wedge the entire tech tree into the institutions mechanic.

The mod should, when it’s done, play reasonably like the base game. There won’t be any rapid blobbing in the later part of the game--no absolutism, no more administrative efficiency than present in the current version of EU4--but it wouldn’t make sense to have that on such a small map. I’m even considering bumping up the base coring cost, or greatly increasing average province development, or both. I’ve already reduced the base number of states to 3, and the starting number of promoted culture slots to 0. I suppose also I could do something with separatism and AE, but those feel more like fuck-you mechanics.

I’m still undecided on whether to add Protestant Reformation/Religious League/HRE-type mechanics. If I do end up going that route, I have some ideas for how to do it.

[tanadrin]

I’ve also put Europa Miniversalis up on the workshop. I have a lot of ambitions regarding flavor events, missions, formable countries, etc., that haven’t made it in (and also trade routes aren’t visible for some reason I can’t figure out), but feedback on the mod as it stands so far would also be welcome.