Since this is announcement week for Europa Universalis IV: Conquest of Paradise, I have a treat for you. Two developer diaries in one week
From this point forward, Fridays will be the regular dev diary day up until the release of the expansion on December 11th.
Exploring a new world
One of the most exciting things for me, about playing Europa Universalis IV is exploration - going for Conquest of the New World Idea early, recruiting an explorer, detaching some of your precious few ships and sending them out across the seas. When you find land, you need to build a base to extend your range and keep going, slowly mapping the potential borders of your new empire.
With the Europa Universalis IV:Conquest of Paradise expansion, we are adding a new dimension to the exploration aspect, namely the fact that you will no longer know exactly what you are going to find. This will add true exploration to the game as well as a new challenge to those players that have optimized their strategies by knowing exactly where the New World is and where you need to base yourself to optimize colonial range.
The random new world is completely optional
First off; the random new world feature is a completely optional expansion feature that is activated from the country selection screen. If you want your safe old (new) world, just don’t activate it.
However, once activated, the world is randomized when you start the game. This, of course, means that half of the world will not look like it does in the country selection screen.
The borders of your brave new world
To keep the balance of the game reasonable, we have to make impose limitations, so only North and South America will be randomized. Technically the area is decided by a rectangle on the map that covers the Americas and Greenland, but not the Azores. To still be able give you the proper Europa Universalis IV feeling, we are also limiting random the new world to 1444-starts and you won’t be able to have a random new world using the Crusader King II save game converter. As the random new world generator gets more polished,we’ll see if something can be changed, but right now we can´t promise that it will ever happen.
Generating a new world map
So, you start the game. The first thing that happens under the hood is the game will generate continents and mountains. Continents will be fairly random (no tectonic plates, sorry!), and most of the time you will have plenty of areas to colonize, but odd things may happen.
Provinces will be allocated and assigned to trade nodes/continents etc. We are using the real world province names and trying to keep provinces that are close in the real world close in the random world as well. Our trade node network is fairly well balanced right now and needs to be kept constant, so the nodes and their incoming and outgoing links are the same, but the nodes are spread out across the world, and early playtests indicate that this works well. Then, of course the native tribes are spaced out so the New World gets some population. Currently, we have most stuff done for the New World, but it’s the kind of thing that you could, in theory, polish forever. The screens you see are not final.
A brand new strategy in Multiplayer
The Random New World will definitely introduce a new factor for Europa Universalis IV games, especially for multiplayer. No longer can you optimize your strategy based on the knowledge of exactly how much colonial range you need and where your stepping stones are going to be. I’m really looking forward to when we can restart our office multiplayer game with a random new world
Have a lovely weekend!
) i am not sure if having a randomized new world cultures option will in the long run be a good change in practical terms, given that in mods it will either be useless, OR it will have fantasy orientation (eg a lost world, subterranean world etc). So a good idea, but the mods themselves will show if it will work well...
