Hi everyone and welcome to another development diary for Europa Universalis IV. We’ve been working on the 1.20 patch and its accompanying unannounced expansion for a while now.We’ve reworked some internal mechanics so looted and scorched earth are no longer just binary-statuses, but instead they affect something we call devastation.A provinces’ devastation ranges from 0 to 100%, and it affects local autonomy, supply limits and how much goods are produced in the province. It also reduces the spread of institutions into that province, and increases the development cost of the province.Each time a province is looted, its devastation is increased by 5%, and a scorched earth increased it by 25%.Each year devastation is reduced by 1%, and within the zone of control of a fortification, it is reduced by 2% for each fort level each year.Unrest is also increasing the devastation of a province by the amount of unrest each year.What does this give you? Well, loot is is no longer just a strong penalty for a short period of time, but continuous conflict zones will grow far worse.A cool feature for the expansion though is the concept of Prosperity, which is a state-level bonus. Any state that has 0 devastation in all its provinces and the country is at positive stability will have a small counter tick up each month, depending on the abilities of its government. It is a random chance, but when the counter reached 100%, then the state has reached Prosperity.A state with prosperity gives -10% to development cost, and +25% to goods produced.Stay tuned, next week we’ll talk about something that will probably be the biggest feature added to the game since we started EU4.