Dei Gratia (1.30)

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Author: nguyenforthewin13

Last revision: 9 Nov, 2021 at 17:43 UTC (6)

File size: 291.15 MB

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Description:

Version 1.16 for EUIV Version 1.30.6

After a year of work, I am happy to finally release Dei Gratia, a total overhaul mod for Europa Universalis IV. Its original iteration was Important Political Events, a balance mod for version 1.29 of the game, which did not significantly alter the map but introduced many of the events and features which are now used once again.

The mod overhauls many aspects of the game with the specific aim of making it far more historical. However, the mod does not railroad the game, and simply makes it far more possible to achieve historical outcomes with various countries. These outcomes can be achieved by AI, and you will see hundreds of additional immersion events not present in vanilla. Dei Gratia also has a dynamic development system; development will grow organically according to local factors such as terrain and dev clicks will only increase the rate at which development grows. Devastation will decrease development, which means that war-torn countries will be rapidly depopulated. Plagues will ravage the New World’s development relentlessly.

The map for Dei Gratia has been taken from Historical Additions: Borders+, and since then has been thoroughly reworked to fix inaccuracies and improve balance. As a result, Dei Gratia has hundreds more provinces than HAB+ did, especially in regions like China and India.

One of the most notable features of Dei Gratia is that development is intended to roughly scale with the historical population of countries in the time period, meaning that Ming has an astounding 6.7k development, while India has as much development as Europe. Of course, many changes have been introduced to the mod to ensure that the world is still balanced with such lopsided distribution of development. Institutions and reworked Corruption serve to balance this new, non-Eurocentric world.

National idea sets and governments have been rebalanced almost universally to make more countries fun to play and as strong as they were historically. No longer will a nation like Venice have the worst ideas in all of EUIV.

Several disasters have been heavily reworked, with some new ones being added. In the future, I seek to rework all the vanilla disasters, but for now only some are changed, including staples such as the War of the Roses and the Frecnh Wars of Religion. Dozens of dynastic events serve to model family politics and the rise and fall of empires throughout the world.

The map of Dei Gratia is finally complete with its North America update having come to fruition. The mod will hopefully be soon updated to 1.32, which has fixed many of the critical balance issues and bugs in 1.31 that forestalled an update of Dei Gratia.

Why do I only see four Idea Group slots?
In Dei Gratia, Idea Group slots are unlocked in pairs, which means that two Idea Groups are unlocked at Administrative Technology 5, two more are unlocked at Administrative Technology 10, and so on. Furthermore, you now need four Ideas filled out to get access to a single National Idea.

This change was made because EUIV’s Idea system functions poorly from an opportunity cost standpoint. In multiplayer, taking a non-Military Idea group first practically means death. Dei Gratia partially alleviates this problem by allowing non-Military Ideas to be immediately paired with Military ones.

The Idea Groups themselves have also been extensively rebalanced, meaning that Quantity-Economic is no longer king. In particular, the rebalance has also aimed to nerf Ideas that are overpowered because of excessive stacking of modifiers, particularly Trade. AI countries are coded to take Idea set combinations that provide decent Policy bonuses, and will also always pair a Military Idea with a non-Military Idea. This, accompanied with other changes, makes the AI far more formidable of an opponent than in vanilla.

Why is combat in Dei Gratia so different?
In Dei Gratia, Fire and Shock phases of combat each only last one day, compared to three days in vanilla. This means that a different dice roll happens on every day of combat, lowering the impact of RNG on the outcome of wars. Furthermore, abridging the Fire phase improves the viability of Cavalry, as Cavalry will no longer suffer through three days of Fire damage before engaging in combat during the Shock phase.

Perhaps even more importantly though, troops in the reserves of the battlefield no longer suffer any morale losses whatsoever. This change means that reinforce meta is no longer relevant in Dei Gratia, and that you can send all of your troops immediately into a single battle without any additional micromanagement. I have always viewed the reinforce meta as cancerous in that it causes players to micromanage too much, and furthermore it is a bad meta simply because AI does not know how to reinforce. This change will allow AI to fight far more evenly with human players.

Does AI get bonuses in this mod?
In this mod, AI gets absolutely no bonuses that the player does not get. The only "bonus" the AI gets is an extra diplomat, which exists in vanilla EUIV because AI needs it for short-term actions in case all its normal Diplomats are occupied doing other interactions. This means AI no longer gets an extra Free Leader (in fact, the player now gets it too, negating it as an AI-exclusive bonus), Lucky Nations no longer exist in any form, and AI does not get additional Sailors (the amount of Sailors nations get as a base has been tremendously increased for everyone). Revanchism has also been removed from the game.

To compensate, AI will take good Idea groups, it is far less aggressive (AI dies frequently when it is overly aggressive), and it will manage its units more optimally thanks to additional coding with unit pathing. Its script to construct buildings, manage estates, select policies, and perform other internal aspects of nation management have also been improved thanks to Spirit’s Difficulty & AI mod, whose content has been mostly incorporated into DG.


For further information, please visit either the mod Discord for DG at: https://discord.gg/Rn2fgjWmD6

Or the Ides of April Discord, where I play multiplayer EUIV regularly at: https://discord.gg/tY4fkpk


Special thanks to the developers of:
– Lux in Tenebris
– Historical Additions: Borders+
– MEIOU & Taxes
– Iaponia Universalis
– Better Urban Terrain Pictures
– Graphical Map Improvements
– Muscovite Civil War
– Difficulty & AI
And many others for inspiration or otherwise developing the content that is included in this mod.