Today one of EUIV's most impressive mods makes a return into the light, Europa Expanded. Europa Expanded has had plenty of room to grow with the new modding tools added by 1.36. Join as Stiopa, Lia and LordVarangian share their most recent work on User Interface and quality-of-life updates to the mod. Enjoy!
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Hello again, Europa Universalis Enthusiasts!
Since our first Mod Spotlight for Europa Expanded, 8 months have passed and a lot of new modding changes have happened, and so did Europa Expanded accordingly!
That is why today we’re very excited to present our brand new 1.12.1 “UI” update, and all the fancy UIs and mechanics that came with it! From a complete rework of the “Caliphate” originally introduced in our 1.12 “Caliphate” update, to automatic Advisor re-hiring, a Mission Preview System and more! We will both present these features, as well as talk about the process behind creating them for those who are eager to learn!
So, without further ado, let’s get started!
Court of Advisors
To start off with a very simple but very useful mechanic, we’re delving into our “Court of Advisors” menu, which you can toggle on or off in order to hire a specific level 3 advisor of your faith and culture at a 100% hiring cost markup, rather than having to wait for the right one to appear in the advisor pool! In the future, we also plan to expand on this using government reforms or mission rewards.
Furthermore, you now have the ability to automatically re-hire advisors based on their profession and skill; meaning if your level 1 Natural Scientist dies, the game will automatically hire a new level 1 Natural Scientist!
Mission Tree Previews
Something that long-time fans of Europa Expanded know is that our old system of choosing a mission tree through an event that fires 1 day after game start was rather…imperfect.
In order to make the whole thing not only easier to understand for new players, but also to make it more streamlined and enjoyable to use overall, we’ve developed a system that allows for previewing the entire mission tree before choosing whether you’d like to play with the EE or the PDX one!
Of course, while in this preview mode you will not be able to redeem any rewards, but the requirements and rewards of each mission will still be visible to you; how we accomplished this is explained in the UI Creation section down below~!
Expanded Vanilla Menus
With scripted UI finally giving us the opportunity to tweak mechanics that were previously rather hardcoded, we’ve decided to give some vanilla menus a new coat of paint; and sometimes even intertwined them with mechanics from previous EE updates!
The first of these reworks is that of the Government Screen;
The window for Government Mechanics has doubled in size (assuming sufficient screen space is available for it) to make using multiple mechanics concurrently more comfortable, and Absolutism has received its own dedicated window, similar to the Disasters window!
Ever since the introduction of Absolutism, we’ve felt that there was never any interactions created specifically for it. It has been inserted into Increase Stability, Harsh Treatment, Strengthen Government and Decrease Autonomy, all 4 of which you can exhaust if you have a stable and prosperous country. As such we have decided to add Conduct Public Executions, allowing you to always expend a portion of your military power at a competitive, albeit quickly-increasing price. Another interaction we have added is Appoint Absolutist Ministers inspired by ministers like Richelieu, Buckingham and Pombal. This toggle has two use-cases: a source of Max Absolutism for nations with Max Absolutism above 100 and a source of Yearly Absolutism with Statesman advisor for rich nations looking for a source of passive increase.
Lastly, nations that are willing to conduct many executions (a rather risky enterprise!) in a short period of time may enter into period of Reign of Terror, a state in which they may benefit from extra Harsh Treatment Cost and Max Absolutism, though entering the state may be difficult without the L’etat c’est moi Government Reform that reduces the threshold.
Absolutism isn’t the only such example of a gameplay element we’d like to further expand.
In similar fashion, we’d like to add & rework interactions for economy, and we have plans here underway, concerning Inflation & Mercantilism.
The second rework we’ve done is that of the decentralized HRE;
The release of the “Emperor” DLC added some much needed choices within the Holy Roman Empire, allowing you to either Centralize or Decentralize. The former however had always been the strongest choice, with the latter not offering much in terms of internal management and roleplaying ability. This is a problem, as the entire mechanic should not be something you forget after you pass all reforms.
In our update of Austria, it was possible for the Austrians to unlock special imperial titles in case of fully decentralizing the HRE, which could be handed out to princes in order to provide them with strong benefits.
Now, we have turned it into a universal mechanic included in the “Reichskrieg” reform of the HRE, and gave it a wonderful UI for it as well!
These Imperial Titles can either be assigned by the Emperor through a Diplomatic Action, or be requested by a member clicking one of the unoccupied positions if they match the needed criteria, and each title provides buffs relevant to their focus - Economy, Military or Religion!
Let’s say that you’re Austria, and you have a very strong Prussian ally that has been fighting wars against Poland and been successful, granting them the “Imperial Marshal” title would not only benefit them to win harder, but also grant you Imperial Authority per battle Prussia wins.
Imperial Princes themselves may wish to request some of these titles for themselves, as they grant really strong bonuses should you be granted one of them. Whilst not implemented yet, bribing or using favors against the Emperor to claim these would give the player even more reasons to stay in friendly relations, besides worrying about Unlawful Territory and sometimes using their armies for your own wars.
Freedom is the core tenet of our design philosophy, which is why in the future we plan to make it so the Emperor can claim all of these titles if they so wish, but at the cost of significant support from the Princes and the Electors. Allowing the player the choice to do that would also add a risky yet rewarding way to use this feature, gaining strong bonuses at the cost of your Emperorship if you do not find a way to justify your unjust actions, either through bribery or maintaining a high opinion and diplomatic reputation.
The Caliphate Window
But the above uses do not yet showcase the full potential of the scripted UI introduced with 1.36!
Behold! The Caliphate Window, a highly requested feature by many, finally made possible, a testament of what is possible.
Now, any muslim country may claim and seize the title of the Caliph, gaining access to Fatwas - religious rulings granting bonuses to the Caliph and all muslims of their denomination!
We wanted these Fatwas to be different than for example EoC decrees, in that they shouldn’t only benefit a select group, but the entire faith - additionally, we wanted them to be somewhat based on historical precedents, such as “Permit Taqiyya” for example being based on the Oran Fatwa that permitted the muslims in post-reconquista iberia to preach their religion in secret to save them from prosecution!
And to keep it balanced, they carry a cost of 20 Authority with them, meaning that while you gain the benefits of the Fatwa, it’s not a no-brainer “get buffs” button, as in the process you lose the benefits of having a high Authority.
”Unify Islam” is also no longer a decision that Muslim nations can take, but rather is now a button within the Caliphate Window, with multiple ways you can become the uncontested leader of Islam! You may either simply collect all the Holy Sites of Islam like it was required of the vanilla decision, or you can maximize your Authority to get away with only owning most of them.
This especially allows for much better roleplay, since as an Ottoman Caliph you will no longer have to blob all the way into central asia or Yemen in order to Unite Islam, and can instead stay within the boundaries of the Roman Empire!
And this new Caliphate Window doesn’t just show these glimpses, but it also offers:
- genuine Authority mechanics with scaling modifiers
- Jihad targets just like a Crusade target
With some additional information on how we created it down in the UI Creation section!
QoL Improvements
But folks, that is STILL not everything! In our quest to improve the game even further, we’ve decided to visit some of our EU4 pet-peeves and create Quality of Life solutions for them!
So let’s not beat around the bush for long, and get started right with the likely most popular one; Automatic Colonization!
This window, opened through a “Colonial Policy” button next to the Native Policies, allows you to assign a set number of autonomous colonists to any available region.
We designed the Region list to resemble the Trade Interface, with Regions instead of Trade Nodes, as we felt that this was a good match, trade and colonization being intertwined and all, with the Autonomous Colonists field being based on the Autonomous Missionaries field!
Since there is no effect to send a colonist, we chose to simply establish 10 settler colonies as if you sent a colonist and immediately recalled them.
You can assign any number of them, even above your colonist limit, which is a design decision we made due to successful colonizers often being able to afford the cost penalty of having more colonies than colonists, even if it does technically allow a player to quickly bankrupt themselves by establishing 50 colonies at once!
This also means that once you assign the number of colonies you want to maintain at any given time, the micromanagement part will cease as the colonists will keep colonizing until there is nothing left, while you will be able to engage in more involved gameplay!
Furthermore, without changing too much of the inherent functionality of the vanilla versions, we’ve also reworked estate decisions into being part of the Estates Window.
To fit into the Estate Window as a natural element, we’ve chosen to make it look similar to the individual estates with their privileges, representing each Estate Interaction with the icon used in the privilege that unlocks it!
The most difficult part in creating this wasn’t the design process itself, either, but rather processing all the estate privileges, decisions and localization from their original form into these scripted buttons.
We’ve even ended up creating a script in Python that automatically parses the game files into this form, because doing it by hand is simply very tedious; manually defining the matching privilege icons for each estate decision, putting the triggers and effects into the buttons as dozens of if-elses for each estate, figuring out which estate should be jumped to upon pressing the “next” or “previous” buttons, result in thousands of lines total, after all!
And we’ve added a Macrobuilder for Trade Company Investments within the Trade Node Window!
There is not much here to explain regarding design; we’ve simply taken the click-based vanilla TC Investment macrobuilder window, and added it here, with each click building as much as possible!
Lastly, here’s a few more buttons we’ve added you think you should see, including a button to request control of a province from an ally! We’ve also added a button to toggle colorization of your subjects, something we know many players would like as a core feature!
But, as this is not a Dev Diary, now we’re getting to the really juicy part!
UI Creation
Part 1: Court of Advisors
For the Court of Advisors, we needed to fit every kind of advisor into the same approximate space that is usually used to show maybe 4 advisors simultaneously at best; so we had to shrink down all the information about an advisor down into much smaller area:
During this design process, we still had to make sure that it captured the vanilla essence as well, so we retained all the same elements in the same style; just smaller! Luckily, since our advisors would all be created with a random name, at a random age (usually around 30), and be technically from the capital, we were able to leave out the age and birthplace information, and substituted the name field for the profession!
Now, for the re-hiring toggle, we simply used the vanilla promotion button as a base, added a refresh symbol to it and positioned it below the firing button; this way it fit perfectly into the vanilla aesthetic without seeming out of place.
Part 2: Mission Previews
In the vanilla branching mission preview system, redeeming rewards is blocked by the mission requirements themselves, but of course this was not an option for previewing entire trees; we would have had to modify every single mission tree extensively, making compatibility and maintenance extremely difficult.
Thus, we came up with a little trick based on EU4s transparency handling:
The buttons we use for the preview choices themselves are also based directly on the branching mission preview system from vanilla in order to feel natural and not stand out.
Part 3: The Caliphate
For our Caliphate Window, we used inspirations from several different Windows present in vanilla; the Papacy, the HRE, the Coptic Holy Sites, and even the Empire of China!
We wanted to make sure that despite being new and unique, nothing feels foreign, so a lot of the elements are based on what these other Windows already employed!
That is where we’ll conclude today’s Spotlight. Showcasing our new shiny content, as well as explaining the design and creation process behind them was really fun, as we hope that in the future other modders will be able to utilize this UI to the extent we did for 1.12.1!
Now, we hope you are as thrilled about the mod as we are!
If you are interested in checking the UI out live, do so by downloading the mod:
If you have any questions for us, join us on our Discord Server.
Have a cheery Friday!
