Build Directly to Army/Navy (Expansion Feature)

Construct in Subjects (Expansion Feature)

Country View Improvements (Free Feature)

Macrobuilder Improvements (Free Feature)

Hello everyone and welcome back to yet another development diary for Europa Universalis 4. Today's topic is a couple of smaller features in The Cossacks expansion that aren't going to radically alter the game, but are nice from a convenience standpoint. We're also going to discuss some free interface improvements coming in the 1.14 patch.As the name implies, build directly to army/navy is a convenience feature that lets you easily add new regiments to an army or navy directly from the unit interface. Let's say, for example, that your army of 20,000 infantry and 10,000 cannons was badly mauled in the last war and you've consolidated it down to 12,000 infantry and 8,000 cannons. Instead of having to setup a template for the specific amount of troops missing, or recruit and merge each regiment individually, you now simply click the 'build infantry' and 'build artillery' buttons the desired amount of times and the units will automatically build, travel to your army, and merge with it. You can also do this with trade/privateer/pirate hunting fleets, and the new light ships will automatically begin to patrol the same trade node with the same mission as their parent fleet.Construct in Subjects, once again, is precisely what it says on the tin: It lets you build armies and navies in your subjects' provinces, quite useful if for instance you want to raise an army in the new world but only have Colonial Nations there. Your subject is not able to cancel these constructions, and when finished, the army or ship will belong to you. You cannot construct units in a subject whose liberty desire is over 50%. Constructing units in your subjects takes slightly longer time than doing so in your own provinces.For patch 1.14, we've focused on improving some parts of the interface that we felt had become too cluttered or otherwise lacked badly needed usability features. The country view (the part of the interface you access when you click your country shield) in particular has gotten quite a bit of work. By reworking its layout and decor, we were able to create more space in the interface and use that space to unclutter and polish the interface. We also fixed some often complained about issues such as the mothball/unmothball all forts button not appearing in smaller resolutions.Also related is a new addition to the country military interface: An 'automatically raise maintenance at war' checkbox. If enabled, your country will automatically raise army and navy maintenance and unmothball all forts when it joins a new war. This will only be done once per war, so if you immediately lower maintenance afterwards it won't raise it again unless you get dragged into yet another war.Another interface that received some work is the macrobuilder interface. Similarly to the country view, it was widened and improved, with many of its tabs now displaying additional relevant information. The development macrobuilder in particular was substantially improved with the addition of coloring for the different development types that shows you the general effectiveness of raising that type of development in that particular province, taking into account factors such as local tax/production/manpower efficiency, value of trade goods (for production) and local autonomy. All columns have also been made sortable where it is relevant.That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about espionage and the distribution of spoils in war.