The HRE system, which is largely unchanged from EU3 needs to evolve

Make Catholicism and the Pope feel like a force to be reckoned with, rather than just another colour of Christianity and country

Good day and welcome to this week's EU4 Dev Diary. Last week we briefly covered Custom Nation desires. Let's go through some of the feedback on it here:So what do we have today? A bit of a smorgasbord as it happens. First of all, back in January we talked a bit about 4K support / scalable UI for EU4. It's currently not the prettiest of games when played on a 4K screen, and we've been investigating it lately.Here is the EU4 experience on a 4K monitor at 100% UI scale:and up to 150%:and now for 175%:We have some kinks to iron out, but we're onto a winner here for making EU4 more timeless for the every growing % of players who have upgraded beyond the traditional batting grounds of 1080pI want to talk about a couple other aspirations we have for the upcoming European expansion. In the giant end of year dev diary, there were a couple things that we said we wanted to address, namely:Let's take the HRE first. The Holy Roman Empire has not really beenchange, leading to it's relative state of persistence for so long. It functions well as an entity for keeping such a historically fractured region jumbled and offers an interesting challenge on expansion with varied approaches on dealing with it, so for all intents and purposes it has a job and it does it without huge complaint.The caveat here however is that this has been a satisfactory situation for a while, but as we have enriched much of the world around it, the HRE has become less interesting in comparison. When we wrote up pillars for what we want to do in the upcoming expansion and update, we came up with the following:Does it feel this way right now? Not to the point that we are currently satisfied with. As a member state, becoming Emperor is a cool aspiration, but as Emperor, aside from some cool strengths you get, it doesn't feel like you have much in the way of interesting choices to make to run the Empire as you envision. Granted in such a decentralized mass, not all should be so keen to follow your law, but we want to open up the Holy Roman experience to allow for more meaningful and dynamic situations. The Emperor should have some sway in the Burgundian Situation. A powerful Pope should lead to meaningful conflict between Empire and Italy beyond the Shadow Kingdom event. The formation and consolidation of the powerful Prussian state should be a matter of concern for the Emperor and Princes. What if Switzerland wish to abandon the HRE?These are the occurrences that we aspire to model as dynamically as we can within the HRE, and are dabbling with good ways to simulate this in the game.Another evident issue with HRE play, one that can be seen by playing as Emperor or talking to anyone who has, is that the final reform feels like a trap. An army of HRE subjects to unleash on your foes and carve up the map as you see fit? Now that's an enjoyable reward for reigning in the Empire, however smashing that final reform, absorbing the entire empire and losing all the effects you've built up, considerably less so. While we don't have the exact details, we see this as something that should be split: where there is a clear path for reform in the HRE, either towards decentralized power or all land under one ruler, so that players don't feel the need to purposefully hold back on completing the HRE reform path.Regarding Catholicism, both the religion and the head of the faith are in need of attention, and the attention is two-fold, both gameplay and flavour.In terms of gameplay, Catholicism is widely considered a poor choice of religion. If you are not the Curia Controller, it is a very weak religion, and if you are the Curia Controller, then it's a strange state where you actually want there to be as few other Catholics as possible so that you can hoard this power for yourself. Add to this the fact that the Pope himself is, by and large, just treated as another country, and not the mighty head of a faith that he deserves to be (as I have been masterfully lectured by @Duplo When it comes to flavour, Catholicism has far been left in the lurch in terms of interesting content when compared to pretty much all other forms of Christianity.Catholicism is one of the main focuses, fittingly for this European expansion and update. In a nutshell we want to empower Catholicism against the already tantalizing Protestantism, such that union between the Catholic faith adds to its strength, where the Pope and/or Curia Controller himself can take action in favour of the entire faith (or potentially lining their own filthy pockets) and take action in response to the growing threat posed by the reformation. Currently, Reform Desire does little outside of igniting the reformation, we would like to make the mechanic more engaging for Pope and Catholics alike, such that they are incentivized to combat or grant concessions against the rift.These are our aspirations at least, with regards to HRE and Catholicism. How do you feel about them in the game currently and what would you most like to see?Now, we've been talking about design, quality of life and content aspirations for a few months now, which has been very much our goal and quite fun from our end, but I think we all are keen to get to some content. This will be our last week of such aspiration dev diaries: from next week onwards, we'll start showing off map work, content work and features/fixes/QoL for our upcoming European Update and Expansion.Let's tease as I so often like to do, with a cheeky preview screenshot for next week: