Were you in a war where you weren't war leader? The war leader can give away your provinces in a peace deal. Happens a lot with England vs. France and England will peace out with France and as part of the peace it will give your provinces back to Morocco.

There is an option to not allow the AI to give away your provinces in peace. There is a box in the upper right of the window for the war, you can enable/disable the war leader negotiating for you.



ALMOST TIME

I am excite.

Of course as soon as it is released I have to go to work for 9 hours but whatever.

Updates from the demo:

Day 1 Ironman Random Country. Do it.

so i played a portugal game to about completion, and i think i have a better feel for how trade works. a lot of this is my theory and interpretation, so it may be proven wrong, but...

so, trade nodes that effect me
seville
mauretian coast
ivory coast
brazil

seville:
I have a merchant extracting money from trade here, this is also where i have my light ships patrol. the main players here are myself, spain, and morocco, who are all extracting trade. seville has multiple routes feeding into it, and only one out to bordeaux. the trade value at this node is about 7. This is from myself, morocco, and spain having provinces generating about 4-5 trade, incoming trade routes for 2-3, and the trade route to bordeaux taking about .5

mauretian coast:
this node has one route in from ivory coast and one route out to seville. the only two countries with trade power here are myself and spain. however neither of us are extracting. because neither of us are extracting, all the trade coming in from ivory coast and spain and I's provinces in the mauretian coast trade node, flows directly up to seville. if either of us started extracting there, or a third party did, this node would get some value, as some trade is extracted at this point. however, as no trade is coming out, and its all flowing to seville, i don't put a merchant or light ship fleet there.

ivory coast:
ivory coast has several routes coming in (including brazil) and two going out, one to mauretian coast, one to somewhere in Africa. this node does have some value, as some of the smaller african nations are collecting there. This node has about 1 ducat worth of trade coming in, 3 trade being generated by provinces in the area, and about 1 getting sent up to mauretian coast. this means that 3 trade is being extracted from the node by local provinces (value in + trade generated - value out = node value). I decide to send a merchant here to transfer trade. the more trade i transfer from here to mauretian coast will then get passed on up to seville, where i am collecting. This would also be a place i could send a trade fleet.

Brazil:
This node has only one trade route and thats out to ivory coast. I'm the only country in south america, so even though my trade power is low in the brazil trade node, i have 100% control of trade. The trade value of this node is zero. i'm the only one with trade power, however i'm not extracting any, so value in from my brazil provinces = value out, sent to ivory coast. I'm fine with this, as ivory coast trade flows via mauretian coast to seville. now it is possible at some point, as trade generated by my brazil provinces grows, that i want to either extract trade directly at brazil, or try to increase my trade power in ivory coast so more of it is being sent up to seville instead of being extracted by African nations.

overall, i think this is a much more interesting and fun way to play trade than just autosending out merchants.

Re: Colonization
much better in my opinion. in EU3, i would only take provinces to get a base for ship repair and to increase trade range. mauretian/ivory coast provinces were a pain to settle because of natives, so I'd tray to get as few as possible. but now, provinces generate trade power, so having a couple provinces in a key trade node is helpful. Using the game above, if i can pick up a couple more provinces in the ivory coast area, i'll up my trade power and more of the trade will get sent up to seville instead of extracted by african nations.
The process of colonizing is better too. I had 1 or 2 colonists most the game. so you send a colonist to a province. he stays there until recalled or the province becomes a city. you can recall him at any time. once a colony is formed, it has its own growth. you can leave teh colonist there to help its growth, or move him to a new area to colonize. colonist range isn't as big of an issue since you can core places like cape verde quicker, however i thought the colonizing speed had a nice balance, as you can actually only send out two colonists at once, and there is still colony maintenance.

so those are my quick thoughts on colonizing and trade. quick question.
i have my main fleet patrolling for pirates between brazil, cape verde (island off west african coast) and fernando po (island off ivory coast). this fleet takes attrition when crossing the atlantic, and even if i tell them to stop in the ports at any of these places, they dont repair. Is there a way to make ships repair automatically when on patrol, or do i need to break into two fleets, having one patrol africa and one brazil?

well played paradox

Paradox is streaming

http://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive

Currently in 1780 as Great Britain, USA has seceded

10 mins to launch

this leader points system is interesting, i like it.
after just one game, i'm already starting to view things in leader points.
event pops up, lose 1 stability or lose 35 admin 35 diplo 35 mil points. instead of judging losing 35 each of those vs stab, i'm now judging that as losing 35 each of those vs losing 100 admin to regain stability.

I think this system is going to make republics very very good as it will make it much easier to direct which points you are getting. i think with events etc, it isn't as hard to balance leader pts as i thought. it also makes for some interesting decisions. as portugal, i had exploration and expansion idea groups, as well as diplo techs being important. There were multiple situations similar to where i had enough diplo pts to either getting explorers & conquistadors, new trade tech which increased colonization range from 100 to 115, or get another colonist. all useful. but you start the portugal demo with a conquistador and an explorer already, so i didn't really need those yet, but what if they died before i made it to new world? while the trade tech would let me colonize another african country right now, the idea after explorers/conquistadors was for 50% colony range boost, so maybe its better to take the explorers conquistadors i dont really need right now and pass the immediate small boost for the longer term big boost. stuff like that where you have 3 decisions that help you, and trying to judge which helps you most is what makes the game fun

just me or is stability not quite as important? in eu3, in almost every game the first thing i do is get to stab 3. in my port game, i waited until i converted the two provinces i had in north africa. the 100% religious unity made it so going from 0 to 3 stab was a total of 60 admin pts cheaper after conversion than if i had done it as soon as possible.

Itshappening.gif

Got my remaining Call to Arms DLC, Steam is remotely downloading Eu4



Now I have to decide whether to be "sick" this afternoon...

IT'S HERE!!!!

Ironman Muscovy! Time to reunite the Motherland!

Ironman is a go

ironman looks like it autosaves after everything you do, really really annoying

Lol king of Burgundy died in battle within the first year of the game leading to an event where Austria/France split his ****. So much for 1444 start being different geopolitical setup, wanted to see how Burgundy would do

Found a change not in the patch notes, techs are now 600 base cost, i think demo was 500. So 100 more for tech, makes ideas more attractive now

Its also impossible to integrate a country with more provinces than you, although you still have a 6-10% chance to inherit on death of king. Kind of screws Denmark, which needs to get 5+ provinces to integrate norway or sweden.

I really like the new diplomat system, but how do you increase total number of diplomats?

Embassy building at diplomatic tech 6 gives u another diplomat

Good news concerning ideas v tech debate earlier, as Denmark I took trade as 1st idea and just noticed that I am ahead of time in mil tech in 1480, so I took a mil idea as 2nd idea. So if a land based country spends everything on tech until they reach the ahead of time wall they can just switch to spending on military ideas and still have enough to get the next tech level once they are no longer ahead of time.

the only reason im not starting ironman is im scared of bugs :\

why cant i download/install the game that I prepaid? :'(

says I already own it but cant download or PLAY NOW

ah finally working gogogo

Bad news is that I had to take the afternoon off because I was sick.

Good news is that now that I am home I feel remarkably better.

Let us EU4

What's Ironman?

autosaves but no saved game that you can reload

I see that but I'm not sure how I feel about it. The part MEIOU is bringing to the combined mod is the map and the reason I didn't play MEIOU for Eu3 is because I thought the map was terrible.

Played up to 1492 as denmark and its funny how all of our opinions on ideas v tech stuff were based on the demo start date. At 1492 I've got 8/6/8 in techs and 3 trade and 2 offensive ideas. So a lot of tech and 5 ideas ahead of where we started in demo.

I agree, MEIOU had a terrible map. No clue why they would join up considering they had 2 radically different approaches.

For my first game, I have selected a country that I have never played in a full game before, but rather enjoyed in the demo: the merchant republic of Venice. (thumbnails link to hi-res pics where applicable)



Our goals this game will be:
- To build the most dominant navy the Mediterranean will ever see, for the protection of our trade and to control the seas in every war we fight
- To unify the states of Italy under one kingdom
- To make DAT CASH with merchants errywhere
- To resist the dominant powers that may interfere with our plans - Austria, neighbor to the north and Holy Roman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, who surely has designs on our vassals of Naxos and Corfu, as well as our Croatian territory of Dalmatia.

This game will be played on IronMAN mode.

Opening moves

With regards to the last goal, we quickly request alliances with two nations that are in a strong position to help us resist both the Ottomans and Austria:



Out of our initial choices of missions, knowing how difficult it is to expand into the Holy Roman Empire, we choose the mission that will give us some more territory in the Adriatic and help expand our naval forcelimits.



With 4 naval forcelimits to spare (so awesome that this is now shown on the production interface for you), we get to work amending that. There will be galleys. Receiving a bonus of 2x damage against any non-galley ship while fighting in an inland sea (like, idk, the Mediterranean), they will by far be the most cost-efficient ship available for a long time to come. I will eventually want to add a few heavy ships so that I can stand toe to toe with the major naval powers in my area like France/Spain/Ottomans, but for now these galleys will be just fine.



The game inexplicably starts me with a merchant in Wien, doing ****-all for me:



He is quickly sent to Ragusa, where my trade fleet will (not right away, but eventually) be able to leverage that merchant much better. For now, my trade fleet will be sent to Alexandria, where there is more $$ available to steer towards Venice.



My neighborhood as the calendar turns to 1445.



Time to go work for way too long and prob not even have time to play this tonight.

I don't really get trade still. Steering is confusing and I don't really know what merchants do in general. Is there a handy guide somewhere?