Welcome to the 40th developer diary of Europa Universalis IV, and this week we’’ just talk about some more mechanics. Nothing super serious or important, since we’ve covered so much over the last 40 weeks. But, since you may want to know…In Europa Universalis III missions tended to be used to get around game mechanics and often gave rewards that were too big to say no to. For the first century or so, you’d be a fool for not having an active mission.In Europa Universalis IV we have moved more towards missions being used as suggestions of actions that the player might want to pursue. They are nudges in the direction of history, and then just general pokes to keep things moving forward. Yes, there are still rewards, and some of them are quite nice. But they aren’t necessarily game changers all the time.Missions are no longer randomly assigned. You now have three missions to choose from, often with one connected to each monarch power.We have also added a target list of provinces to missions, so when choosing a historical conquer mission we can dynamically tag which province should be part of the mission instead of having to rely on pre-scripted victory conditions.We merged all decision lists to a single menu list in EU4. We also made a large overhaul of many of the decisions you might recall from EU3, rebalancing a lot of the common decisions, and pruning others entirely. Important decisions like Forming Spain (or Russia, or Hindustan, or Scandinavia) have been given another color so that they stand out from he list more clearly.EU4 will ship with 50 different achievements, all using the Steam achievements mechanics. Some are easy to do like signing a royal marriage, and some are slightly harder to do like dismantling the HRE. However, achievements can only be done in Ironman mode – you will need to earn them. What is Ironman mode, you ask?The purpose of Ironman mode is to help the single player gamer to resist the urges to correct mistakes and change decisions already made. It is the ultimate challenge for you to ride out history’s waves and tumults.In practice this means that EU4 itself will save the game at various points using only one and the same save game, thus removing the option to save the game, experiment with a course of action and then reload when your plans blow up in your face.Playing an Ironman game is meant to be a bit of a challenge so some other game settings will be disabled or locked and of course _NO_ cheating is allowed. Not that any of you would cheat.We’ve got cloud saves as an option for EU4, so if you play on multiple machines, you don't have to move your saves manually between computers, or be afraid to lose them if you have to reinstall for some reason.Steam workshop is also fully integrated in the game, and makes it easy to view and download mods without any technical hassle.And just in case you missed these, here are the Europa Universalis IV Hands-on gameplay videos by Quill18!Europa Universalis IV - England - Part 1Europa Universalis IV - England - Part 2Europa Universalis IV - England - Part 3Europa Universalis IV - England - Part 4[video=youtube;Ja4GQTiknrA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja4GQTiknrA[/video]