Hello everyone!

It's been a week since we released EUIV: Lions of the North and 1.34 'Sweden' update, and I'll start by saying that the entire team involved in it wants to thank the community for their great support. The feedback we have received so far has been very positive and we greatly appreciate the passion with which players have embraced this release. The teams that have worked on this project at Paradox Tinto and Paradox Interactive have put in a lot of effort, and we feel very rewarded to see this great reception. So let me say on behalf of us, thank you very much!

But even if the release has been really good from our point of view, there will always be issues appearing, and our goal is to continue to improve the state of EUIV. Therefore, were currently working on the first hotfix of the update, version 1.34.3, which will fix a bunch of issues reported since last week. Stay tuned, as it will be released in the next few days.

Apart from that, we also want to address today some content that was not previously revealed but was planned since we started designing Lions of the North: the Norse Easter Egg we included in it.

First question: Why was this content made secret? We had a couple of reasons behind this. The first is that even if we wanted to create some Norse-focused content, we also wanted to keep LotNs focus on what we thought was its core content, the new deep, branching mission trees we were creating for the countries in the Baltic region. So we were a bit afraid about the new Norse content hijacking the LotN discussions and negatively affecting the general opinion on the other content (which was the main focus of the Immersion Pack, at the end of the day). On the other hand, we also thought that it would be interesting to create some secret content, as usually EUIV has not used so many easter eggs compared to other GSGs; but it would also be a challenge, if created under certain conditions. So we went ahead with this overall design, even if we had to tackle some critics during the development process, especially in the dev diary devoted to Norway; at the time we were so adamant about adding more Norse content, because we had already added it to our development version, and we didnt want to mess that up!

Second question: How do you become Norse? We know that many of you probably know the ways from the guides that this community has made, but we figured out it would be nice to give an official answer to this question, so thats what were going to do with the help of my fellow colleague Ogele. For those of you who may not want to have this content revealed to you go no further!


There are two different ways of changing your religion to Norse: one is based on a lot of luck, the other is a lot more technically doable, but less flavorful.

Lets start with the more flavorful way first. If you have the following conditions complete then the the event A Wave of Curiosity will fire:

• Your Primary Culture is either Danish, Swedish, Norwegian or Icelandic
  
• The current age is the Age of Discovery
  
• You are Catholic
  
• You are independent
  
• You are either excommunicated or you declared Statute in Restraint of Appeals
  
• Your ruler is either a 5/5/5 or is a Scholar or is a Sinner
  
• You own the province of Bergslagen
  
• You have a lot of luck, as the event has a Mean Time to Happen of 100 years. This can be at least halved if you are excommunicated despite also having Religious Ideas
  

• Your religion group is NOT Pagan
  
• Your primary is either Danish, Swedish, Norwegian or Icelandic
  
• Any owned province in Scandinavia is Animist and has animist rebels active
  
• The current age is the Age of Reformation