Some examples are:

Migration traditions

Smoke Ceremonies

Tribal Adoptions

It’s Friday again! Time for another developer diary (and the traditional Friday beers of course).Last week I talked a little about what we’ve done with the tribes and the map of North America. This week I’m going to talk a little bit about what you can do with them.One of the central ideas of Europa Universalis has been that you can take on the role of any country in the world. However, we are making a game that covers a specific 400+ years of history - a time when some nations, mostly European, leapt from feudal states to early modern proto-industrial, states, and that, in the process, formed empires that spanned the globe. It’s not surprising that when you want to squeeze all the nations in the world into this model you have to make a few compromises. One of those big compromises is that while you can play as any country in the world, some of them are much less fun to play than others. However, expansions allow us to take another look on these things and try to address them. This is not new to Europa Universalis IV – the Divine Wind expansion for Europa Universalis III let us try some new things with major Asian countries, for example.My biggest problems with playing Native Americans, until now, was always that the gameplay choices that make Europa Universalis IV great were too few and too far between for the North American natives. They had fewer diplomatic options; no real tech possibilities… things didn’t get to be really interesting for the North American states until the Europeans showed up. And then you were just lucky to stay alive.But, for example, the technology pacing needed to be that slow since the difference between Administrative technology 1 and Admin tech 2 is the difference between a tribal state and a feudal monarchy.The idea we came up with was giving Native Americans their own tech progression, sort of in between the regular technology steps. First of all, we added the concept of native advancements. These are sort of like technologies or national ideas that are connected to a specific government type. They are grouped exactly like technologies, one for each power type, and you buy them with power points only they are much cheaper than the regular technologies. It has not been very easy finding the sorts of advancements we want but we are starting to find a good mix.Gives decreased build costs since buildings don’t really follow when you move. (We’ll talk about migration in an upcoming diary, but this is a neat new option for small North American states.)Increases diplomatic reputation, and with more native states, diplomacy is importantIncreases army size, which is obviously very important because the Huron keep looking at us funny.I mentioned buildings earlier, and another thing we’ve added to the Native Americans is their own unique building track so Native American tribes get access to cheaper buildings like the ceremonial fire pit or irrigation, for example. These buildings represent your tribe’s progress from a completely nomadic lifestyle to a more sedentary people.These changes to technology and development, as well as other changes we’ll talk about soon, will allow your tribe to progress and advance until the point where you can (by maxing out the native advancements) transform your tribe into a more modern society and after that perhaps even creating a global empire of your own. Playing a Native American nation will still present a very big challenge, but it will be much more fun since you will have more to do – you will have to weigh the value of monarch points just like the Europeans do, and not just sit and wait for Armageddon to land on your shores.And just in case you missed it, here are the livestream hightlights:[video=youtube;WvktvCQqwk4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvktvCQqwk4[/video] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvktvCQqwk4



P s. Europa Universalis IV 1.3.2 Hotfix released - checksum d2a0