Advanced Change Culture (Expansion Feature)

Name Your Heir (Expansion Feature)

Mercenary Rework (Free Feature)

Blocking Canals (Free Feature)

Hello everyone and welcome back to yet another development diary for Europa Universalis 4. Today's dev diary will be about two of the new features coming in the (as yet unannounced) expansion that we're working on, as well as a few additional goodies coming in the patch. So, without further ado:Currently, the change culture feature for EU4 is a bit limited. It only allows you to change a province to your primary culture, and does not care if that province is right next to your core lands, or way off on the other side of Siberia. The new expansion expands on this feature by giving you more options in what culture you want to change a province to. The options you have to choose from are as follows:* Primary Culture: As before, you can choose to change a province to your primary culture. This is made 25% cheaper if the province borders any province of your primary culture.* Adjacent Owned Culture: Instead of changing a province to your primary culture, you may choose to spread any adjacent owned culture there, whether that culture is accepted or not. For example, if you are playing as England and want to expand the Gascon culture so that it is easier to keep it as accepted, you could choose to replace the Basques in Labourd with Gascons instead of replacing them with Englishmen. This is 25% cheaper than a normal conversion (same as spreading adjacency primary culture).* Original Culture: If a province has already been culture converted, and you want to bring the original culture of the province, you can now always do so (for example, restoring the Basques to Labourd after the Gascons forced them out in our example above). This is 50% cheaper than a normal culture conversion.Those without the expansion will still only be able to change provinces to their primary culture, but will get the 25% adjacency discount.Ever gotten that 0/0/0 heir and wished you could give him or her a suitably insulting name? With the new expansion, now you can! Whenever you get an heir whose name is not predefined by an event ('I shall name him Johan' etc), you will now get the option to name that heir. Of course, if you aren't feeling creative, there is a pre-selected name that you can simply choose instead of making up your own. But where's the fun in that?Another change coming in the 1.14 patch is a change to mercenary support limits. The previous system had a 'mercenary pool' which would have a chance to replentish every day based on the size of your country, your available mercenaries modifier and your current number of mercenaries. This was a confusing and opaque system that was also made worse by the randomness of which type of mercenaries you'd get. This has now been scrapped and replaced with a much simpler system whereby each country has a mercenary support limit equal to 20 + 30% of their land forcelimit. The mercenary support limit simply determines how many mercenary regiments you can have under arms at any given time and is affected by the 'Available Mercenaries' modifier (which has been appropriately rebalanced). These mercenaries can be of any type and can all be recruited at once instead of having to wait for the pool to refill. Additionally, the Army Planner available to those with the Art of War expansion has been reworked to fit the new mechanics, replacing the 'Build All Mercenaries' button with the ability to put mercenary regiments into your templates.Ever since we added canals in patch 1.6, we've had requests for the ability to restrict access to canals: After all, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that you'd just let an enemy fleet sail right through your canal so that they can land troops in your colonies. Free in the 1.14 patch is a change to canals that will prevent anyone who is at war with the owner of the canal from moving their ships through it.Well, that's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about the treatment of native populations and colonial warfare, but before I leave you I wanted to share some teasers from the reworked Random New World that I've been posting on my twitter , for those of you who might have missed them: