Posted on Jan 18, 2008 in Games PR

Europa Universalis Rome – Developers Diary – Part 1

Armchair General

Developers Diary

Part 1 by Johan Andersson, Head of development
Paradox Interactive

Weâ€™ve been working hard the last couples of weeks, wrapping up the features and heading into the bug fixing and balancing part of the development cycle. The 3d-city view was finalised, and you can now select view on any city of the world, get a big screen and see what that city looks like. Of course, that view is not automatically shown every time you select a province. We have also spent a lot of time with the last remaining parts of the game, like tutorials, various city views, a proper front-end, and finalising historical databases. From now on, weâ€™re feature complete and focusing most of our time on testing and balancing the game.

Diplomacy and Culture groups

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One very important aspect of Rome is the way diplomacy is conducted. To negotiate with another nation, you need to send a character off to do the actual negotiation. This carries certain risk, as recipients may send back only his headâ€¦

Culture-groups completely define how names are generated for that group of people, and a lot of keywords can be used to create names. Culture-groups also contain names of potential barbarians and specify which sub-cultures they contain as well as a link to what graphical style they should use.

Civilization and Colonisation

Every province has a civilisation value which describes how civilised it is. This value increases over time if its neighbor or its trading province is more civilized. Over time, civilisation will spread from the Mediterranean into the Barbarian hinterlands. A wealthy ruler may decide to raise epic monuments to their rule, boosting the civilisation value of the capital. Civilisation value acts as a multiplier on research generation. So youâ€™ll find that research goes a little slower if you are a barbarian. The civilisation value of the Capital also acts as a restriction on what inventions you can get. You will need a minimum civilisation value to gain access to the inventions that boost the effectiveness of heavy infantry, a barbarian country that raises Roman style heavy infantry will not be as good as the real thing, they just donâ€™t get it.

Civilisation value also influences colonisation. If the civilisation value over the frontier increases and the barbarians are too weak, then the other side of the frontier looks more attractive to settle in. A strong military governor and defensive structures will boost this attractiveness. New colonies will start to appear. Eventually the province will become civilised enough that the Barbarians will be absorbed and become your people and the process will continue. Although another way of looking at it is that regular expeditions to keep the barbarians on the frontier in check will eventually lead to the advancement of your frontier.

We have a new system of calling events that is triggered directly from the code as an action happens with the correct scope.