Today is thursday, the day of the God of Thunder, so what is a more appropriate way to celebrate than with a development diary for Europa Univeralis IV. We’ve talked about development and politics the last few weeks, so now its time to talk a bit more about warfare again, before going back to more peacetime-related activities.All of this mentioned in this development diary will be in the free update accompanying the next expansion.Connecting a bit to the previous reveal of our change to how building works, we have overhauled the fortress system.There are now four different forts, one available each century, providing 1, 3, 5 and 7 fort-levels each. A newer fort makes the previous obsolete, so you only have 1 fort in each province. Each fortress also provides 5000 garrison per fort level, so besieging a fortress now requires a large investment.Forts now also require maintenance to be paid each month, which currently costs about 1.5 ducats for a level 1 fort per month in 1444. Luckily, you can mothball a fortress which makes it drop to just 10 men defending it, and won’t cost you anything in upkeep.Garrison growth for a fort is also a fair amount slower than before, so after you have taken a fort, you may want to stick around to protect it for a bit.What is most important to know though, is that forts now have a Zone of Control. First of all, they will automatically take control of any adjacent province that does not have any forts that is adjacent and hostile to them. If two fortress compete over the same province, then the one with highest fort-level wins and in case of a tie, control goes to the owner of the province. Secondly, you can not walk past a fortress and its zone of control, as you have to siege down the blocking fort first.Each capital have a free fort-level, but that fort will not have any ZoC, as most minor nations can not afford a major fortress.As we promised, we have now completely revised how looting works. Now there is a “pile” of possible loot in a province, which is directly tied to have developed the province is.At the end of each month, all hostile units in a province attempt to loot, and the amount they loot depend on how many regiments you have there, and what types they are, where cavalry is by far the best. Some ideas and governments increase the amount you loot each month, where for example Steppe Hordes gains a nice boost.A province starts recovering from being looted when 6 months have passed since last loot, and it takes up to a year until it has fully recovered.Of course, the penalty on a province from being looted is still there until it has fully recovered, but it is scaled on how much have been looted.One of the major complaints we have had on the combat in Eu4, has been the fact that you can fully abort your movement whenever you liked. This have been changed, and now you can’t abort your movement if you have already moved 50% of the way. After all, its just common sense that a unit that have already moved halfway between the centers of two provinces is already in the second one.We felt that the calculations of forcelimits where far too hidden from the player, Players saw stuff like “+25.87 from Provinces”, which based based on projections of base-tax amongst other things, and sometimes those dropped for no obvious reasons.Now you will be able to see in each province how much it provides to your forcelimits, and we have cleaned up the logic.Each level of development gives 0.1 land and naval forcelimit.Overseas will provide -2 land and -2 naval forcelimitInland provinces will not provide any naval forcelimit.However, a province will never be able to provide negative forcelimits.A nation also have a base value of +3 land and +2 naval force limit, and there are some other ways to get direct forcelimit increased, that are not just percentage increases.Next week, we'll be back and talk more about The Devout.