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

If you select the first option then your ruler will start to rethink his life choices and to question the purpose of the Catholic Church. This triggers a chain of events with each event having roughly ~2 years of time to happen:


Keep in mind that the event chain is immediately broken if you ever take the second option or if your ruler dies during his journey. And you also can get this event chain only once per campaign. For those who are worried that the stars align and the AI gets the event: the AI will always pick the second option, immediately ending this event. So a Norse AI Scandinavia is impossible to see without player shenanigans. However, luck is not always on ones side. For those who want to become Norse without having to get unfortunate crashes every 5 minutes, there is another way to achieve your goal. If you fulfill the following conditions the event The Awakening of the Norse Faith can fire with a Mean Time to Happen of 24 months:

• 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

From there oonwards you just use the normal rebels to get yourself force converted to Norse. Some of you might be aware of a supposed third way of becoming Norse, which is through the Norwegian mission The Colony of Greenland and the event The Lost Greenland Settlement:

In the current game files, this event has been commented out (and this even rather early during development). While we did our research for the old Norse faith we had to accept that Iceland and Greenland had a much closer tie to the Church than mainland Scandinavia, which is why our first iteration of getting access to Norse had to be scrapped - it just wouldnt have felt natural enough. So if you want to become Norse right now then doing the Norwegian Greenland mission wont be your best bet. However, were always open to suggestions from the community, so maybe you can change our minds on this And thats all for today. In the following weeks, well have a more irregular Dev Diary schedule, as well be focusing mostly on the Post Release Support, and we also need to take some rest after showing new content for 4 months. The team will let you know when we have new content ready to be shared, probably aiming for the 1.35 update. Until then, see you!