Today's Dev Diary by Groogy
Remember remember, the fifth of November... Fitting today's dev diary is on a date like this considering we have the EU4 Lan Party at Moszna castle just around the corner! Which will most likely be filled with intrigue, honest intentions and so much fun. We will be present at and streaming the entire event just like last year so be sure to catch it starting on Thursday at Paradox Interactive's Twitch Channel. But let's actually get to the development diary. Today we will be talking quite a bit about some of the Quality of Life things we've done. These ranges from the smallest of fixes to whole new features. The first thing we'll be talking about is the big work put into making every single states interaction be doable in the Macrobuilder. Heavy Placeholder art warning!
We've worked on giving you a tool to easily get a quick overview of how you are administering your empire, managing the states of it, greatly reducing the tedium of using the states interface. But of course just making some land a state or a territory is not the only feature the state interface encompases. We also have the various DLC features that has been added over time.
If you have Mandate of Heaven you can assign state edicts through the macro builder which also feature an easy way to see and sort what states have had what edict for how long. The next thing is a tab that collectively deals with all of the ways to "delegate" the administration of a state. Pashas, Metropolis and the Holy Orders.

And last is the Trade Company Investments that you will now be able to just point and click on the map to build instead of jumping around between provinces trying to figure out if something was built or not.
You might be now wondering though, what about the special units that you can build through the states? Also what about the Estate specific units you used to build through estates? How will all of that work now? Well as we worked on making States a bit easier to manage we also made sure to streamline these so they sort of are built like any other troop. This has meant though we've had to be a little bit inventive and change a bit of the mechanics. Banners are no longer "stuck" to their states, instead the states increase a national level of how many banners you can have. Janissaries is similar but instead of Manchu culture it is of course any heathen provinces. Cossacks and Rajputs can be recruited in a similar way by giving their estates privileges. Streltzy is still stuck working as before as they are a defining part of the Russian government.

Next is demanding money from your opponents where the tooltip always ends up in the way of if the AI will accept the deal or not. What we did here were to add some new shortcuts here where the game will instead just set the demanded amount of money to be exactly what the AI will accept taking into consideration anything else you've demanded so you don't need to "feel" the AI out.
Another thing when it comes to demanding things in a peace deal that we have improved is that giving provinces to your subjects through a peace will now reduce the liberty desire just as if you had granted them manually. Removing that extra step for you.
And after you've demanded those provinces it is now also a lot easier to see how long until they will stop hating you. The tooltip for opinion modifiers between two nations will now summarize the yearly change of opinion that you have, so you can see at a glance if the opinion is growing or shrinking and how fast.
For last, technically not a Quality of Life sort of feature but it sort of is for me. Switzerlands as a nation has been made to be a lot more mercenary. Is mercenary an adjective? Anyway we've made them integrate more with the new mercenary mechanics giving them a quite unique play style. Besides changes to their ideas they are getting unique government, even unique mercenary companies.
Mercenary Manpower works like Available Mercenaries did before and will increase the amount Switzerland can send as condottieri to other countries as well. That's quite a few changes but we have a lot more in the pipeline and I want to give some honorable mentions of real cool features coming for the 1.30 patch.

• When building regiments in unit view, it will always show your FL even if you can't build
• When using automatic transport the general will always go with the first batch now
• Haven't been fixed yet but the truce timer inconsistency is something we are aware of and will fix
• The "outraged countries" field for the diplomat macro builder has been made a bit smarter to try and avoid coalitions.
• Any interface where you should be clicking on map for provinces should do that now only. Example is fabricating claim interface, peace view(clicking on a map element will not make you leave peace deal mode) This also applies on interfaces like Grant land to Subject, Grant Core/Claim to Subject, Threathen War, and so on.
• Alert for when you can use a Piety action as a muslim
• Grant Free City has been added to the Diplo Macro Builder
• When selecting a leader it will now show if he is drilling or not
• Hinted about it in thread of previous dev diary but we now will highlight when your chance to get innovativeness from technology is about to expire.
• Generals/Admirals now have their own age and Kings being made Generals no longer suffer the double death chance check

Now to a bit of a meta topic of our development diaries, the development diaries themselves. We do not want to produce filler development diaries and we know you want to hear about cool features whenever we write one. So we will be slowing down the pace at which we are writing these. We will be doing them monthly going forward meaning the next one won't be until 3rd of December where I will be sure to give you something to sink your teeth into. I haven't decided yet what feature we'll be talking about but thanks to reducing to this pace you can be sure it's going to be something big, new and exciting! So until then! o/