Good morning everyone. Today I’ll be shifting the focus from maps to missions. I’ll be offering a retrospective on the history of the mission system, some insight into our design philosophy, and speculating about future mission trees.Here we see a relic of the past, the old mission system as seen prior to the 1.25 patch. Practically identical to the mission system of EU3, it was long due for a change. Chief among the reasons for transitioning into a new system was the desire for missions to be impactful and immersive rather than forgettable and generic. While the old system still has a few ardent defenders, we consider the redesign of missions to be a great success both in terms of improving the game and in terms of community reception.The mission redesign was rolled out in patch 1.25, alongside the release of the Rule Britannia immersion pack. This first round of mission updates was highly experimental. Much of the work involved translating as many of the ‘unique’ old missions as possible into the new system, taking the opportunity to improve many of them and find interesting ways of linking them together to create some semblance of narrative. Examples of this process include the current French, Burgundian, Ottoman, and Swedish trees.Notably, most of these adapted trees contain only simple ‘Conquer [place]’ style missions. These kinds of missions certainly have a place, but we quickly recognized that we could do so much more with this new system. Cue the impressive English/British mission tree:The British mission tree is extensive and covers nearly everything you might want to do while playing as England and Great Britain. We simply don’t have the time or resources to make something of this scale for every nation, but it was certainly fitting for Rule Britannia, and opened our eyes to the possibilities both in terms of extent and design.Mission tree design evolved further over the course of the ‘Mughals’ (Dharma), ‘Poland’, and ‘Spain’ (Golden Century) updates. While we had plenty of unique mission trees in Dharma, we also create a ‘generic Indian’ tree for those nations without them, as well as for players without the Dharma DLC. We found generic missions both inherently more difficult and more time-consuming to design, and less fun to play through than even shorter mission trees that were unique to a country. In the future we’ll be less likely to take this approach, instead adding smaller but more immersive missions for minor nations. Navarra, for instance, received a small but interesting mission tree in the 1.28 ‘Spain’ patch that contained high risk/high reward options for the plucky OPM as well as a colonial branch allows them to bypass the usual restrictions and move their capital to the New World.So how do we design a mission tree? First we need to establish design goals by asking ourselves some key questions - how large will the tree be? Will it be free or part of a DLC? Will the theme be conquest, colonization, trade, etc? How far to we want to incorporate existing content such as events? I’m currently in the process of drafting a new mission tree for the nation of Burgundy. As an example, some design goals for Burgundy include: a) concerned with elevating rank to kingdom and eventually empire, potentially incorporating a tag switch to Lotharingia, b) interacting with and potentially joining and leading the HRE, and c) clashing with France, possibly through interaction with a restored French vassal swarm (inspired by the League of Public Weal). When we have a clear idea of what we want to achieve, we hit the books and start researching. Research can include not only looking through books, maps, and academic articles, but also reading through community suggestions and seeking inspiration from mods. When we feel like we have a solid set of ideas for missions, we create a first draft. Personally I like to do this with good old pen and paper, but others sometimes use fancy computer software.Drafts usually have to go through many iterations as we discover that our original plans don’t even fit into the interface, or we need to rethink positioning because we had a great idea for a mission that needs to be squeezed in further up the chain. It’s at this stage that we start to get an idea of how each mission will work mechanically. After all this, it’s finally time for implementation into the game using our scripting language. This can be a time-consuming process - we need to make sure that we always have fallbacks in place in case the player does something unexpected like converting to Shinto as Gujarat, we need to make sure that highlighting functions correctly and is intuitive, and of course we need to iron out as many potential bugs as possible before QA get their hands on it.What can you expect from the mission trees in the Q4 European update? It should come as no surprise at this point that Burgundy is on the cards. We’re planning to bring a mix of large and small, paid and free missions to nations across our focus areas (Germany, France, Italy, and the Balkans). Some other strong contenders for larger mission trees include France, Austria, and the Papal State. There’s a great deal of space, both historical and fantastical, to create content for these nations, and they’re consistently popular among players. Serbia, Provence, and Saxony are good candidates for mid-sized mission trees, while Ulm and Hesse may receive minor additions.As always, we’re eager to hear your thoughts on which nations are most deserving of a brand new mission tree, and we welcome your ideas for what kinds of missions these trees could contain. Next week I’ll be taking a break from writing dev diaries. Instead I’ll hand you over to Jake, who’ll be discussing our future ambitions for more mechanical aspects of the game