Europa Universalis V confirmed

[Josephus]

One other thing I'm just now finding frustrating in my Castille game, which is around 1620.

I have a bunch of colonies in the Caribbean. I just saw I'm at war with somethign called the Conquistadors of Lesser Antilles. Apparently they are not  a nation, but what appear to be a bunch of marauding soldiers, who number some 5000. Now I tried to send 10, 000 regulars from Castille to the Windward Islands, (which took about three trips across the Atlantic) and my entire transport fleet got destroyed from attrition. So now these 5000 soldiers are taking on the might of Castille, especially since all my colonies arent' doing anything. sigh.

I've also noticed, navies seem to have a mind of their own. As I returned to the game after typing the above I also saw I lost a lot of galleys to attrition; galleys that seemed to cross the Atlantic with my transport fleet, even though I never asked them to.  This little conquistador has destroyed almost my entire navy

[Syt]

I like the idea of Cortez going full Col. Kurtz

[Syt]

Johan is asking for YOUR feedback ...

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/what-do-you-think-are-the-biggest-issues-right-now.1891147/

We have been reading through feedback in various ways, and identified the following major common complaints. We are not talking about "AI needs to do X better", or "this UI could use some QoL features" here..

AI Aggressiveness

A lot of the AI work in the last weeks before launch and the weeks after was to make it more aggressive as some of the biggest complaints pre-release was that "the AI does not do anything, it does not expand".

Now for 1.0.10 there is a part of the community that thinks it has gone too far. Particularly with two aspects. The AI is doing too many no-cb wars, and the HRE before the Papal Bull is basically free real estate.

For 1.1, we will be adding an AI-Agressiveness game rule, where we will have at least 3 settings, a rule with AI never doing no-cb wars, to a less aggressive version of now, and a final setting for even more aggressive than 1.0.10.

A rule for AI will not use no-cb wars on HRE is something we are considering as well.

We are also looking into making no-cb wars a bit more costly in general.

AI Subject Assimilation Bug
This is something we are looking into fixing, very likely to be possible to get into an 1.0.11 or so in mid January.

Levy, Mercenaries, Regulars
Reducing the ability of the levies while also making the recovery functional has made the game less fun for a lot of people in the first hundred years in particular.

We are not happy with levies being this bad, nor are we happy with the fact that mercenaries are something you are hardly ever using.

What we are looking at for 1.1 is to severely reduce the cost of hiring mercenaries, so that they are a valid choice to bolster your armies.

We are also rebalancing (again) levies vs regulars, to reduce the power difference between them further.

When we are more satisfied with the new balance, we'll do an in-depth explanation of how it will work.

Nobles Marrying problem
The removal of being able to marry anyone you wanted to anyone else you wanted is a complaint raised by quite a few in the community, as in many cases you ran out of characters.

The design is that the game should maintain about 1 non-royal dynasty per cabinet position, and make sure every one of those dynasties have at least 2 married males alive at any time. This should create on average 4-5 adult males per dynasty on average, which together with making sure the royal house is huge, should provide lots and lots of characters.

HOWEVER... There are not enough females, nor are enough produced to support this design, as whenever a character is generated, you end up with the same situation repeated, dynasties never surviving.

For 1.1 we are reworking this, and giving newly created characters (both at start or when randomly generated), both a wife and a daughter.


River Map Mode
It was not obvious to us how many were using this semi-broken debug mapmode, but we have now been working on making a new non-debug mapmode for rivers for 1.1.

Rival Mechanics
Yeah, the rival mechanics in EU5 is basically EU4 without the power projection benefits, and it's not something anyone is happy with. We have a new design that is partially implemented now, and will be ready for 1.1, where we have removed the prestige hit from not having rivals, and eased up restrictions on who you can put as a rival dramatically.

However, we have a new calculation that identifies if another country is a threat to you, and for every rival you have that is a threat to you, you will get a bonus that is currently giving you prestige and diplomatic reputation.

We have also added a new casus belli you can manufacture on anyone that has set you as a rival, that gives a superiority wargoal, and we are also looking into adding a new casus belli that can be used on any rival that is a threat, which makes it cheaper to conquer things than the Humiliate Rival CB does.

Slavery Systems
The problem with slavery in the game is that we don't have an intra-market slave distribution system. So unless you can ship slaves back and forth between your market and another, you will not be able to fill buildings and/or rgo's that needs slaves unless you get a constant flow of new slaves to the market.

For 1.1 we are looking into a slave-"migration" system, where surplus slaves will move about inside markets, if laws allow it.

Naval Pain Points/Bugs
Naval Combat is not in a state anyone is 100% happy with right now. The 1.0.4 stackwiping was removed for 1.0.10 beta in favor of ticking damage on fleeing ships and a high capture chance at "what was going to be stackwipes" did not work out great, as ships only fled a single location almost all times. For 1.1 we will move back to that design more, but also make probabilities of critical hits sinking damaged ships higher, and if it was going to be a stackwipe, what would be left of the fleet would make a shattered retreat. The goal here is to make naval engagements more decisive.

There are also complaints about navies moving too quickly, which we will investigate further, but in general the design idea is for ships to move at historical speeds around the map.

The Patrol the Seas naval objective will also try to keep ships at port if there is normal or severe winter in the sea.

Gamespeeds are not ideal for Multiplayer
Particularly speed 3 feels too slow and speed 4 feels too fast when playing. We are working on a system for 1.1, to have 7 different game speeds, with a speed half-way between 3 and 4, and make 2 slower and add another one between 2 and 3.

Setup in China
There has been a lot of feedback about the setup in China, particularly around cultures and harbor setup, and we are doing an overhaul there for the 1.1 update.

Now you are saying, why is this not already in a patch coming to us. Well, I will explain in a post later these holidays how the process works on developing things, and how things work for us, and how we adapted it to what you want as well.

We will also post a detailed roadmap for what we are doing in 1.1 (soon).

Anyway, what other things do you guys think are a huge pain point at the moment?

[Norgy]

I am thinking this game was better on release than after these patches.
Incomprehensible, yes, but at least stable.

Anyone taking bets on what the first DLC will be? HRE? Byz reborn?

[Solmyr]

You can see next year's DLC in the Premium upgrade: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3698980/Europa_Universalis_V_Premium_Upgrade/

First one is Byz, second one is Castile/Morocco, third one is France/Scotland.

[Tamas]

Ok so... in a game with individual bloody pops, separate court language settings etc., why is the solution to the unhistorical HRE thunderdome is to force the AI not to gobble it up when it could? Shouldn't we be trying to introduce the same constraints that existed historically?

Also I cannot for the life of me understand why the whole levy thing has to be so god damn complicated. To me it seems so simple: for every unit type, the regular version of it, as opposed to the levy one, should have bonus to discipline and maybe morale. DONE. You then tweak that to get the balance you want. Not these super-convoluted mega-mechanics of incremental cross-influencing modifiers. Gawd.

I am not very eager to return to the game to be honest. My next Paradox play will be Vicky 3.

[Syt]

I hear you. I was excited for a game's release, enjoyed the launch and then just felt continuously pushed away by pretty much every step they took post launch.

Meanwhile, Stellaris seems to be struggling since its 4.0 release and HoI4's DLC doesn't seem to be doing too hot, either - maybe time to move on and sunset them?

CK3's DLCs last year were medium to bad (coronations), though the Asia expansion doesn't seem to be the dumpsterfire I expected (in fact it seems quite all right). For next year they said the focus will be mechanical depth, with a housekeeping/balancing patch before the new DLC cycle (they seem to make this a habit, which I approve). But time will tell.

Vic3 is maybe their only title where the DLC they delivered all year has been pretty much a success across the board, adding new mechanics and tying them all into each other. And even the flavor packs have come with cool mechanical additions in their free patches. Currently, I trust the Vic team the most.

[Syt]

Meanwhile, the 1.1 roadmap. https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/the-roadmap-to-1-1-rossbach.1892687/

The 1.1 "Rossbach" update is planned for sometime early February 2026. Besides containing a lot of balance changes and fixes elsewhere, we are also aiming to improve gameplay, content, UI and art as well. We will go into more details and explain new features every Wednesday of 2026 until it releases.

Gameplay

New diplomatic abilities to transfer one of your subjects to another country, ways to destroy defensive leagues and transferring territories between two of your subjects.

Annexation speeds will now depend on your diplomatic spending, and countries can now reject Hegemony demands.

The Code systems for Religion has been reworked so you can now reform away from doom.

Colonial Charters will be reworked so instead of going to a certain percentage of your dominant culture/religion of pops, it now keeps track of how many pops you have sent etc, so you can get minorities in your colonies.

Abilities to provoke rebels to start an uprising now, and ability to change your cultures opinion of other cultures on your own. Speaking of rebels, "tiny" revolts will no longer form a new country and start an entire war, but instead impact the location they would have spawned in, when they reach 100%.

The game will also allow countries to get bonuses (or penalties) to how they are impacted by proximity in certain topographies. Ie, Austria gets some mountain/hills/plateau bonuses.

We added Coin Laws that impact what metals you use for coins and get inflation from. And of course Sweden can make copper coins which absolutely never will be a bad idea.

As mentioned in the 22nd of December post, we are reworking rivals, fixing levies/merc/regulars balance and much more.

We are also working on a complacency mechanic, reworking expeditions from being a purely script system to being a code system and adding in a slavery market distribution system.

Content Design

We will add a new disaster for Brandenburg, and add new unique advances and policies to some German countries.

A lot of focus on Japan and China mechanics have been done here, including Sengoku Jidai and Red Turbans Rebellions. Manchuria is also getting a fair bit of improvements, and the Tengri religion has been getting some gods.

In the Americas we have reworked the area in Brazil and improved the resource and food setup for both the Andes and Mesoamerica regions.

The Holy Roman Empire has seen a fair amount of attention as well.

We are also working with improvements to other situations like Western Schism and Council of Trent.


User Interface
We have added an "army/navy template" builder just like EU4 has, and also added in a nicer End of War dialog showing losses like eu4. We have also added rally points for raising levies, and recruiting mercenaries have quite a lot of less clicking for the average player.

There are now more settings when it comes to music and we have added in a music player so you can control which songs you want to listen to.

Alerts can be "permanently" discarded now, and you can restore them from a special UI if needed. The game will no longer reset filters to what the game thinks is best when opening a screen again, but you can now pin which filters you want in each screen.

We have added more abilities to manage the formation of a unit, and have a toggle for units to always autobalance for those who want it that way.

The Unit UI will no longer obscure half the screen for multiple units, and you can have a condensed version of the UI as well. We have also added lots and lots of other smaller quality of life things to the UI.

We have mentioned the new river mapmode, but we have also improved the road mapmodes and added several other new mapmodes, like coalitions, maximum control and many more.

Art
We have added a new loading screen for 1.1, which we will show off before release, and added some European 18th century hats, wigs and clothes, not to mention many icons for new advances and modifiers and more..

Enjoy, and have fun! Let's see what next year will bring.

[Syt]

Another stickied post from Johan: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/htt-3-30-12-2025-where-do-we-stand-on-the-railroad-debate-for-eu5.1892558/

As a background, I've been making historical GSG since the end of the last millennium, and for almost all of those, the goal has always been for the games to try to guide and follow historical paths. I can only recall one time we actually wanted to have the game mechanics be an entirely emergent narrative and that was for EU3, where we literally removed the historical events we had in EU2.

Sometimes in the Hearts of Iron series, we tried to make the simulation be guided entirely by mechanics and the AI should reason out optimal tactics. However, we always had to direct the AI in that game with "cripple scripts", as the players wanted WW2 to play out the same way almost all the time.

How did we do the railroading in EU4? Well, first of all, we had lucky nations to make sure some countries had special bonuses so they always performed better. Also the AI was very good at conquering what it has claims on. Related to that, was a heavy use of Dynamic Historical Events, giving out claims and also creating things like Iberian Union. The EU4 AI was also very great at unifying its culture group, so we had to stop it at times with historical friend mechanics.

What about eu5?

Our goal was to create an even more detailed narrative, with Situations, creating "railroaded" mechanics that forces a certain narrative on game. Some of them work in this regard, like Rise of the Turks and the 100 years War, some of them do not work great like the War of Religions..

The AI has not been good enough to expand and grow countries until 1.0.10, where it became semi-decent at it.

Now what? Well, besides the fact that the AI is a tad bit too aggressive, we do not get the narratives we desire yet.

Our narrative goals for the game includes the following, and this is what we will constantly try to improve.

• The Holy Roman Empire should not get gobbled up immediately, but keep being fragmented until the last age.
• Hordes should fall apart and disappear by the mid game.
• The Ottoman Empire that grows deep into the Balkans and Levant, creating a France-level-threat in the south east.
• Russia should unite and go towards Siberia.
• Western European powers should build strong colonial empires.
• Europe should grow more advanced and powerful than the rest of the world as ages go by.

Other important historical narratives are things we want to see, but it's not something we view as mandatory to happen as often as the above.

• Forming of Spain and Poland-Lithuania
• Emergence of the Netherlands & Prussia

Cheers, tomorrow I'll post the 1.1 roadmap.

[Josephus]

A lot of the above would be more likely to happen with a later start date.

Yes, this is a hill I'll die on.