Europe in Conflict v2.0 Previews: Advanced Diplomacy, Disease, Manpower&Supply.
Introduction
As some of you may know, Europe in Conflict v2.0(or EiC) the biggest EiC relase to date has been under development for a while and everyday the team turned a new corner, updates were made, bugs were fixed, old features were refined and new modding tools were available. Europe in Conflict also began to utilize new scripting possibilities never before seen in other mods, these new features take a lot longer to prepare, thus a release is a long way off, however, the EiC team is proud to present to you some previews of the new features that will be included in Europe in Conflict .2.0
Advanced Diplomacy
Part 1, Buildings
Small Embassy House:
Diplomacy has existed as an art for millennia and the Napoleonic age is no different. But in these modern times, diplomats are expected to be treated as royalty; after all, the monarchs representative should be treated just as the monarch would be. Building an Embassy House allows just this. Simple diplomacy can be conducted very easily - a fleeting visit from a diplomat can often secure a trade agreement or secure peace agreements for a few months. But to maintain long term friendships, to conduct complicated agreements, to secure peace for all future generations, something more permanent is required. An Embassy House is the first rung on the long diplomatic ladder.
Historically, the Napoleonic Wars disrupted the standard process of diplomacy. Bonaparte was famous for throwing out the rule book, and this even extended to diplomacy. He refused to recognise the concept of diplomatic immunity and had many British diplomats imprisoned on charges of spying against France.
Details
The Diplomatic building chain will add many new features to EiC v2.0 that have never been seen before. The first of these is how it affects basic diplomacy itself. Without at least a "Small Embassy House" your diplomatic options will be severely restricted - you will only be able to make the simplest of diplomatic offers to other factions in game. But building one of these opens up the route to a whole world of possibilities. This building allows for more complex diplomatic negotiation; as you progress up the building chain and your diplomatic facilities improve you will gain access to more advanced features - after all, who could expect a diplomat to commit his country to war with an enemy of his allies when operating out of the most basic of facilities?
The more advanced buildings in this chain will also allow for another feature brand new to EiC - allied unit recruitment. If you are allied to a faction you will now be able to request that they send you troops, in aid of your struggle against Napoleon. At first you will only be able to receive a very small number of elite units (for only the best can represent abroad), but when trust is built up between the two nations you will gain access to a greater range of units - perhaps even a small allied army at your disposal.
Part 2, Diplomatic Scripts
Diplomacy in EiC v2.0 also features another ground-breaking feature. We have modified the game so that the coalition is now much more stable - 100% more stable in fact. This means that any two coalition factions will no longer declare war on one another when they are simultaneously allied and at war with France. However, this is an AI-only restriction - the player is free to declare war as often and as recklessly as s/he wants
This restriction has been achieved via complex scripting, which means that as long as the conditions mentioned above are in place the script will never fail! We would also like to stress that this script does not lock the coalition factions into an alliance/non-agression pact for the entire game. The alliances can still be broken by conventional means, and the restriction will be lifted as soon as the alliance and/or the state of war with France ends.
Disease
Part 1
In recent TW games disease played a crucial role - we all remember the dread we felt when the announcement slid down the side of our screens, telling us how the plague was sweeping across our regions. This feature was, unfortunately, omitted from Empire and Napoleon. This seems mainly because 1.) Empire had many of it's intended features omitted and 2.) Because some would argue that diseases played no true role in the Napoleonic Wars. Well that's a slight mistruth. For example, Typhus killed more of Napoleon's men on retreat from Russia than Russian soldiers did. Smallpox killed 400,000 Europeans each year (quite a large figure when you consider the population of the day). The disease feature that we have introduced won't be quite so lethal as in previous games, or won't have quite such strong effects as it has in real life. This is mainly because it would be very difficult to cause dynamic casualties, almost impossible. But what we do have is a system that still challenges and effects the player.
Here you can see the notification when a region gets a disease, and below it the notification when a region recovers from a disease. The main effects that diseases will have are: 1.) Virtually disabling unit replenishment in the given region, 2.) Causing a reasonable amount of unrest in the region.
Next you can see how we're enabling the player to keep track of disease. The region details info page updates itself according to the status of the region, with tooltips so the player doesn't get confused:
Now for the really interesting part
Not only have we added disease and disease related effects, but we have designed a mechanism that allows disease to spread to neighbouring regions. This will mean that if a region contracts a disease, it's neighbours will have a significantly higher chance of also getting it. One can very clearly imagine the issues that this would cause if disease were to spread along the front lines during a war, or the trouble it would cause in a newly conquered region. If you read on you will see a FAQ about disease which will help you understand a little more about how it will work.
F.A.Q:
Will disease be frequent?
No. It won't be something annoying you every turn, but there is a good chance that when a region contracts it, it will stay in the area for a while. We may add events such as disease epidemics, it is something we are looking in to.
Will disease affect characters?
As of yet, no. It is possible to do it but we have a long list of other things to do and we feel that this would be a lot of work for a relatively small gain (or loss as it would be)
How will I get rid of a disease?
There will be preventative measures such as technologies, buildings and events. E.g you may be asked to fund extra staff in a cities hospital - you will have the choice to do so or not though. More info on these will come at a later date.
How does all of this work?
It's almost entirely scripted, so not just anyone can pick it up and use it, or integrate it into a mod. The final version may well be compiled to increase performance time (though the sources will most likely be included). If any mod leader would like to integrate this into their mod, pm us and we will see what we can do Even better again, it can be ported back to Empire and forward to Shogun 2!
Manpower&Supply
So how will manpower and supply work in EiC, you ask. Well, very simply. Every faction starts off with a "bank" of supply points. A certain amount of these supply points are used up by the starting armies, and there are some points left over to recruit more troops. Every troop takes up one supply point, and when you are out of supply points you can no longer recruit any units. But this bank does not simply grow of it's own accord - no interest here! In order to gain more supply points the player will have to conquer more regions. The larger the region, the more supply points. There will also be technologies and possibly events that allow for an increase in the available supply points. In order to keep the calculations simple, we are using a simple formula for supply points:
Quote:
Total Population divided by 4000 (The 4000 will most likely be changed, depending on testing)
This is approximately 250 soldiers per 1 million people. Now you may say this is a totally unrealistic figure, you may say it's a little off, or you may say it's the best thing since sliced bread. Well it's none of those - it's practical. These are the calculations that lends themselves best to the game, ergo they lend themselves best to us. We have to keep a lid on things, seeing as an EiC stack is ~ 4000 men it wouldn't make much sense allowing the player or AI 500,000 men. While we are on the subject of practicality, it should be mentioned that there is a catch here. Every unit you recruit uses up supply points, but when you have all your supply points used up you only loose the ability to recruit home region units. This is mainly due to the way the system is built, but the player must also look at it from this perspective - "You capture a region. The region then ships supplies to your home regions, as any conquered territory would. You recruit units from home, and they use up these supplies. You are now low on military supplies in your home regions. So to recruit units you must now recruit soldiers from conquered territories, which use locally sourced supplies and equipment used in the service of their former masters."
Of course one might say that is a total cheat, based on how the AoR currently works. Well, the AoR system in 2.0 is very different. AoR units are nowhere near as abundant as they were before(so much so that you will need to keep your manpower balanced), but you will have to wait until the release to see the full working of this system.
So next you will surely ask "how ever is the player to keep on top of things?". Well, we've got a few solutions for that too.
The first sceenshot shows where the total manpower figures are displayed, and the relevant tooltips.
And the next ones show you how you can tell the exact value of each region.
You can see that we've replaced the prestige information, but we feel that this feature is much more relevant to the player than prestige. And there is still a whole UI page dedicated to prestige, so it's not too many clicks away for the player to access
The larger AI factions will also be affected by these limits, but we've seen no evidence to indicate it hampers the AI over the previously used limitation system of db unit limits (which were totally inflexible and as such disproportionate to the size of the country). However, the minor nations will still use db limits, but this isn't so much of an issue for them as they generally don't expand too much.
What you see here is pretty much how the feature will be released in v2.0. Depending on how it is received and how it works, we may make it more comprehensive. So in the future you may see it factor in things such as industry, agricultural output etc. We are aware of possible ways to make the manpower system cover all units types but these would be quite time consuming. Our priority now is getting something out there, we haven't had a public release since last November and are well aware of it! Though this feature has loads of potential, so it's very likely to have more time devoted to it in the future.
This feature has also been built as a giant plug-in; it is designed to work with any mod, and is built separate to the other EiC scripting framework. As such, it only takes a small amount of tweaking to work with different mods and we will gladly share it after the release of v2.0. If anyone is interested in using it, just send me a pm. All going well, the manpower system may even be released as a stand alone mod.
So that's it for now, if you want to know even more about EiC I suggest visiting the hosted forum on Twcenter.net http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=1579. The next big news coming from the team will be the release date, which we hope to announce soon.
Hope you enjoyed it - feel free to post your thoughts and suggestions!
