Hello again! It’s time for another developer diary for Europa Universalis IV: Conquest of Paradise - the last one before Christmas. After this one there will be no dev diaries for two weeks until Friday the 10th of January.Since I wrote the last dev diary, we have had time to do our very first live stream of the office multiplayer game. Despite a minor glitch towards the end of the live stream it went really well. If you didn’t manage to catch it you can see it here: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...0-Developer-Multiplayer-Live-Sessions-Archive It’s a long running tradition here at the PDS office to have ongoing office MPs of one of the games we currently developing. It’s a great way to get new people to learn the games and also to really stress-test the features. There is no better way to find exploits than to let certain people play the game in MPThe new Observe Mode feature is one of the free things that will come in the 1.4 patch. It will allow you to join an MP game as an observer and click around and see what all the other players are seeing. It can be used for watching your mates play if you don’t want to do it yourself, but it can be also be used for streams I you saw an example of earlier. Our plan is to continue streaming these office MPs in the future and let you guys take part in the conspiracies and backstabbing that is the reality of working at the Paradox towerNow, on to some of the new features that are coming with Conquest of Paradise. Last week, I talked about Colonial diplomacy, now it’s time to talk about how colonies can break free of the mother country.All colonies have a value called “liberty desire”. This is a value that tends to go up over the course of a game. Different types of events , refusing the colony the right to name their own governor or increasing tariffs are some of the things that will have an effect on liberty desire. Tariffs are the most important one, since managing tariffs is a big part of the colonial game now. They remain the primary way you earn direct income from your colonies. A colony starts with a certain tariff value, but by using administrative power, you can push up the tariff rate – increasing the profitability of your colony. This also increases liberty desire. So, in the Conquest of Paradise expansion it’s up to you how much you want to squeeze your colonials, but you might have to struggle to keep them even if you treat them fairly.As liberty desire increases your hold over your colony becomes more uncertain. When liberty desire tops 50% your colony may declare war on you. The higher liberty desire gets, the more the colony manpower increases and its maintenance costs decreases. So, the longer the game runs, and the more you squeeze the colonials the stronger they get. They will get better at spreading your empire across their own continent but that power might be turned against you.When colony decides to break free, this triggers a liberation war. The colony will be practically independent and, of course, at war with you. To win, they need to force you to recognize their independence. Quite often this can feel like a rather one sided struggle; a world spanning empire against a few colonials. To help even things out a bit, we took inspiration from history where French aid was essential in helping the USA become independent. One of the new features for all countries is a diplomatic option called support independence. This is basically a contingent alliance that lets the colony (or vassal or other subject for that matter) call on the supporter when the liberation war begins. This allows nations to conspire with other nation’s subjects to aid them in breaking free.Should you, as the overlord, win the war though, you get to keep your tariff value and liberty desire gets cut to more manageable level. Liberty desire will slowly increase towards the tariff value but you will have bought yourself some time where you can continue to manage your empire in peace.That’s it for today. May you have great holidays with many hours of gaming!And here is our Holiday gift from all of us to all of you - Paradox Yuletide CarolThe Paradox Yuletide Carol is also available as a free DLC on Steam for all owners of Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV:If you mised theDeveloper Multiplayer Session - here are the EU4: Conquest of Paradise Highlights Video![video=youtube;mzU8mpd6ltQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzU8mpd6ltQ[/video]