I think Sea "States" might be a feature they put in just in case they make any content that could use it, and they never did. It's a common thing in programming.
@@LemonCake101 The sea is called the Baltic sea. On land we have names for districts, cities, towns, provinces, areas, regions, subcontinents, superregions and continents. We have similar naming for waters. If you try zooming in and out you will sea for yourself how this just makes it a better experience as a player. Also some parts of the sea have purpose for naval missions, like hunting enemy fleets.
@@LemonCake101 I am somewhat inclined to doubt it. I haven't read Clausewitz's source code but I am working on a Clausewitz-ish engine and in it (where a Tile is equivalent to a Clausewitz Province and a Zone is equivalent to a Clausewitz State) a Tile is a Tile whether it's land or sea, and a Zone is a Zone whether it's land or sea, and the only added work is simply to add a bool is_land to each class and restrict adding land Tiles to sea Zones and vice versa. Which is dead simple. There's no separate class needed. Things which a sea tile wouldn't have, which a land tile would, like pops and factories, are just left empty in the sea tiles. I can't imagine Paradox would have done it in a less efficient manner. I don't know if Paradox has an in-engine editor (in mine you just drag the mouse on the map to "paint" Zone membership for Tiles) but even if they're sitting there manually typing province IDs into their sea states it probably didn't take long to fill it in.
9:28 Possible explanation for this could be the trade zone. As when you perform naval missions connected with trade it checks the sea state linked to the trade zone.
I was along the exploration line, where it gives the navy a random set of accessible sea tiles from the state that (ocean/sea) you want to explore. It's probably also useful for revealing coastal provinces in that sea tile
It could also be conmected to the naval mission hunt enemies which doesn't map to trade like hunt pirates and the ability to steal maps of a land area if you have a ship in the same sub region like if I have a ship in the channel I can steal maps of Britain
If I remember correctly there's is a fun little fact that Galapagos, Falklands, Bermuda and Greenland are only provinces that aren't part of either the colonial regions or trade company charters
4:45 If a country picks exploration it will take expansion even when it's a subject. In expansion condition for subject there is NOT = { has_idea_group = exploration_ideas } it's enough to wait for explo before PU
The Canaries/Azores used to be part of Europe, Iberia to be specific, and was very frustrating when you were gunning to form Rome and in your war with Spain or Portugal you'd forget to take those islands in the peace deal. Shunting them to the Maghreb, where you only needed to own Fez before the 1.36 update, was a relief.
Adding to this, in the old mission trees before modern ones, you couldn't get far away claims, only subjugating a neighboor, and it was really annoying as it only counted land provinces, so getting the province was even harder.
One comment for point 3: Subjects can take Expansion ideas just fine, provided they have either Exploration ideas unlocked, border an uncolonized province, or are a colonial nations.
The ai will never form rome. but if they have the decision to form rome, then they will set all the provinces necessary to form rome as being of vital interest.
My guess would be for sharing and stealing maps, like asking for the baltic sea or stealing the map of carribean sea. You need a clickable button with name of it in the diplomatic screen to do that.
I believe sea states are just a result of similar coding between land and sea provinces. Every province *needs* to belong to one areas, and each area to one region, or else game crashes can occur. I don't *think* sea areas are ever used for anything in vanilla (boats protecting trade just travel around sea tiles adjacent to that trade node iirc) but I might be wrong. Sea Regions are though, they're used for exploration and also for requesting/stealing maps.
It probably is a scripting issue. IIRC you can scope to area scope from any province scope, so every province needs to belong to some area, else ... undefined behavior things. Possibly a crash? Since they can't control what's done in scripts, they have to harden their data structure against it.
Naval missions use the sea regions, which are made up of the sea "states". Besides that, you can also see the sea areas on the area map mode, which i personally think is a neat addition that adds to all the other geography you can learn in EU4. In my opinion the whole thing is similar to wasteland provinces having a name. It doesn't add any functionality to the game, but also isn't a lot of work to add since province names (and grouping provinces into areas) are already a feature in the game, so it's just a bit of flavor for the map
Yeah it used to be common knowledge but in fairness I have been talking to a lot of people and the video was actually inspired by how many people didn’t know that one specifically: and then I just presented 4 others I knew that I thought where obscure
Regarding the whole subject8ng nation after tech 7 to let them colonize, i'm not sure if aomething is changed in the code, but i have seen and done so myself a Portgual who only unlocked Exploration ideas, got subjected and still took Expansion as second i think i even have save files of a current mp game with friends where this also happened. Also another interesting thing about the Canary islands is that they're a part of the Sevilla trade node for some reason
@@LemonCake101 I have watched all your videos since day 1, and every new video you do is instantly suggested on my feed The achktualy joke got me, I am subbed now!
I would have assumed the states are for sea missions, like protect trade and exploration. What I really wonder is why this video showed up when I searched for what nations in Europe is worth vassalizing. I was considering taking Riga, Livonian order and Teutonic order as Norway.
Oh grab Riga, I won't bother with the other two, and get yourself a pet Pomerania you feed the Provinces for it to form Prussia. Otherwise I don't know how RU-vid search works. I checked my stats once and found someone clicked on one of my videos after googling 'mr beast real age'
Only one I knew off hand was the "no colonial ideas taken by subjects" thing, since that was posted on pdoxplaza many years back and has been the case from the start or very close to it. When you full/annex release the nations usually have their "historical" ideas...usually :). You can get colonists out of some TAGs that have it in NI at least, though even that's more trivia than game-changing.
Fair enough. I think it used to be pretty common knowledge, but I am around the community more then I am willing to admit, and that one fact tends to be the most surprising I find, especially among new players.
When I first started playing EU4 I was a Portugal main thanks to the video channel Call Me Ezekiel. As such, I figured out pretty quickly the Azores, Madeira, and the Canary Islands were technically in Europe. As such, by watching guides on Iberian nations and rules for colonizing, I also learned subject nations will not colonize unless they already have said ideas. A nice case study for this rule is Asturias which have a colonist embedded in their national ideas. Another example that does exist as a subject at the 1444 start date is Norway. Keep them around for long enough and they will start colonizing for you. What I did not know is why Subject nations do not take colonial ideas; thank you so much for showing me the source code showing how Paradox made this so.
Last time i olayed castile i was so incredibly ,,lucky" that the bloody potrugal as first idea group took *drums* infrastructure ideas. I couldn't believe my eyes
For me weirdest thing with Castile is their army movement. They do not move troops from New World either if their capital being sieged. The most hilarious example was Galicia being released after Castile lost war with Navarra, then conquering them and forming Spain, while Castile migrating to Morocco. Immediately after former Galicia becomes Spain our relations turned hostile from friendly and all wars in Europe stopped for glorious Galician Colonisation Program to began, with all three iberian nations competing for Oceania. It was very surprising experience, as Malacca, to fight back castilian and spanish and portugese simultaneously...
The AI priorities for armies are a mess, that I will conceed. It's a hard balancing act for Castille to both maintain a large enough presence in the new world to fight natives/rebellions and also maintain a decent army back home.
My best guest for the sea states is that they were meaningful in some early build of EU4, the use case got removed at some point but the concept of "sea states" was already implemented in the engine, and removing it took more efford than simply adding provinces to sea statesm
There are actually a hanful of missions that refer to the sea areas. And other systems that use it also exist. Might be as simple as "every province needs to be assigned to an area" rule and instead of making whole separate system for sea tiles, they just used that. Might be something for AI. Or it could be part of scraped concept, maybe similar to what they are doing in EU5, I mean in Project Ceaser.
I think the sea states are there so that they could more easily add things using the scopes "all_neighbor_province" and "any_neighbor_province" (and/or other scopes). This way they could interact with all or random provinces on the coast of a given sea without having to add every province id every time.
i think the sea states things is because states are also areas, so the sea states are sea areas assigned to certain missions and naval mechanics, without being a proper state
In real life the canaries are very often classified as part of europe. Canarians themselves will usually self-id as european, and they are part of the EU. Geographically yes they are part of the african plate, but it’s one of those weird edge cases where it’s not 100% clear where one continent starts and the other begins
Regarding sea "states" - I think it's for naval missions, but not necessarily ones related to trade. More things like exploration, and also hunting/intercepting enemy fleets etc.
For the "AI will never form Rome" A youtuber playing as Mughals gave Ulm the provinces to form the Roman Empire. Then it conquered it. This spawned a "lost culture" in Ulm and gave a 5% discipline through the Diwan special mechanic. So maybe it did that for avoiding giving a extra 5% discipline to the player during a Mughals world conquest.
To add to the "there is no hard limit for provinces in a state but it's usually no more than 5" part For the longest time I thought that the minimum for a state was 3 provinces until I tried to play as Ainu and saw that Sakhalin (in the Manchuria region) has only 2 provinces I haven't seen a state this small before, and I don't know if there are other 2 province states
3:51 there was a patch with bugged imperial authority/joining countries when AI was forming HRE. At a very distant past AI had fully deterministic idea groups and then it was changed to weighted. With mismatched areas, I think Paradox are just bad at it. It only makes sense to do with regions/trade nodes to encourage AI to expand (to consolidate 1 type then another and so on)
I could imagine that the sea states are actually related to trade nodes and define where ships go when you send them to protect trade, but I haven't checked whether that works out. Also I think I had a Portugal PU as Castile take Exploration in 1.36. I have not since tried to reproduce this behavior and I am not sure if it is intended, but I explicitly tried to prevent them from colonizing and it did not work. Maybe the domination DLC made an exception for Portugal?
@@doomdrake123 nope, its x1000 for Portugal (and Cas+Spain) but x1000 x x0 is 0 if they are a subject. I know I prevented it before myself, and well I checked the code literally for making the video.
@@LemonCake101 Well, I know for sure that if Portugal has Explo and you PU it it will take Expansion as well... if it was not changed in the recent patches :D Edit: I'll test it in console game Saturday to be sure.
I think the sea states thing is just to make programming easier. Just reusing the same class. Wasteland are also probably “provinces” as well, even if they’re untraversable by land units
Maybe the sea states are for exploration? Like you set your explorer to explore the Baltic Sea and the ai explorer goes through all sea tiles in the Baltic Sea?
@BobbiusRossius I consider event holding an exploit personally but yeah that seems like a pretty comprehensive list. Aztecs are pseudo formable, in the sense you can get their missions/ideas but not a tag switch I believe.
On the topic of ai choosing ideas, the ai will never pick Mercenary Ideas. The idea set has an ai_will_do factor of 0. I'd guess that it's because the ai doesn't know how to handle mercenaries, either not using them enough, or using them too much. I think in 1.30 there was an issue with the ai debt spiraling because they bought too many mercs.
I can't remember if the sea areas do anything directly, but areas are all assigned to regions, and sea regions are used for exploration and stealing maps, and the regions are all assigned to subcontinents, and the AI tries to keep at least one fleet in every sea subcontinent.
A few patches ago budgetmonk mentioned that the event where your heir falls ill and you either pray for their life or pay for a medic, lies to you. Both options have the same chance, so you should just pray for their life. Don't know if this has been patched, would be interested to find out.
The sea tile thing is probably because it can get buggy if a province (which sea tiles are in code) is not assigned to an area. I’ve had bugs where a province I added didn’t have an area (or something like that) and it crashed the game
i think the AI weight for forming rome is 0, because AI is actually programmed to follow the Path to possible formables. This can mostly be seen on Brandenburg, which upon Age of Reformation will instantly mark all of Königsberg/Danzig as provinces of interest, since they are required provinces. I assume that there is no weight on the decision so AI isnt inspired to desire all roman provinces as soon as it takes rome (which shows the decision to form the empire).
I checked on paradox wiki and didn't found anything prohibiting you forming new world end-tag as Viti or Hawai'i. Is it possible to form, for example, Brazil as France by becoming Viti?
it was I think a pretty Reddit memed bug at the time - I remember watching Arumba form it to try and form into Mughals, but the endgame flag issue Viti has being there
Ackchyually, comments can boost engagement, so I'll make pointless ones anyway. Also, IIRC, I think the Canary Islands being European was something to do with old castillian events around the reconquista that were long since replaced, back when we had the original release mission system. Side effects of this game being over 10 years old.
Take a shot every time this guy says “well” in the middle of his sentences and you will die of alcohol poisoning (Ok don’t want to be too mean: this was a very interesting video and I’m subscribing now)
Sth has changed recently? France surprisingly was not an end game tag, at least I remember very well using France temporary in Navarra, Savoy and some other games before switching to Spain Italy or whatever. If any of patches made France an end-game tag, it is great from balance perspective. It was very unfair having France not end-game and Mali end-game.
Do subject nations have another modifier regarding colonization? Because i had an England run, where Ireland took Expansion as 5th idea group though it was always my subject from the missions. I was really surprised as suddenly they had colonies next to mine. I had no mods installed.
It can sometimes take expansion if it has uncolonised provinces it borders, but at a reduced weight (and also I believed that still required exploration?)
I don't think the thing about Explo-Expansion is correct. Exploration will never be chosen by a subject but a subject that has already taken Exploration will take Expansion. That's what Portugal does most of the time if I PU them right after they take Exploration. Also subjects can take Expansion but I'm not sure if that only works with releasing them (I've had Bashgyria and Kazan pick Expansion as their third idea and colonize Siberia as vassals, Kazan was released and I think they automatically picked and filled it but I think I vassalized an existing Bashgyria that didn't have Expansion)
Yes: if you have already taken explo, you can take expansion as an AI subject. Subjects can also take expansion if they can 'access' an uncolonized province.
it's such a shame about the rome thing. there's a quite a few decisions through out the game that are like that, such as england forming the angevin kingdom :(
Yeah, I guess it prevents the AI aiming for it at least, so you don't see weird AI expansions on Britain because they are gunning for the Angevin Empire
End game tags should be removed from Ironman, it's ridiculous that you can't form whoever you want in single player. They only added them in the first place because someone was doing a bunch of tag switching in a dev clash but it should only ever have been a toggleable option for multiplayer, never mandated for Ironman
I mean you can remove endtag from ironman, and still have ironman, just no achievements. I think the issue was things like Ming Mughals making life way too easy.
@@LemonCake101 I meant achievements Most of them really don't benefit from multi-tag switching anyway (even ones like one faith don't really need it), and it just makes the game less fun. I'm fine with end tags being an option for multiplayer but it shouldn't be required for achievements.
@@psychic_beth Yeah I see it, but end of the day Paradox has to make a cut of somewhere on what is allowed and what isn't, and clearly this is where that cutoff was made.
Um actually I have been playing for 5 years and I still don’t know how to play this game I can’t fucking remember to chose the correct cb 75%of the time
i dont know. but i played aragon few days ago and pu'ed portugal before they took first idea. after i pu them they took offensive first and never took exploration or expansion for the rest of the game. forgot what else they took but it was something stupid. im 100% sure they would take exploration if i did not pu them
@@LemonCake101 I agree, but I just wanted to point out, that we already have this problem as humanity, because after 80 years of being sunk at the bottom of Baltic, they started leaking, and Baltic is a shallow sea with small water exchange with the ocean. ;p
3:00 Rome isn't the only one, they did the same thing to Yuan, Byzantium and some countries a few years ago - I think 1.31 without any patch notes. I tried to get it removed a few times by starting threads on the forum or commenting in dev diaries but with no success :( For some time it was possible but when it was changed Mughal Diwan lost access to 5% discipline. In single-player AI forming such powerful nations could be done only with the aid of the player so why block it?
