Europa Universalis IV - Mod Spotlight - Extended Timeline 2023

  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

Ryagi

Community Ambassador - EU4
Community Ambassador
147 Badges
Mar 11, 2017
67
815
  • Crusader Kings II: Legacy of Rome
  • Crusader Kings II: The Republic
  • Crusader Kings II: Sunset Invasion
  • Crusader Kings II: Sword of Islam
  • Sword of the Stars
  • King Arthur II
  • Knights of Pen and Paper +1 Edition
  • The Kings Crusade
  • Cities: Skylines Deluxe Edition
  • Majesty 2
  • Majesty 2 Collection
  • March of the Eagles
  • Crusader Kings II: Way of Life
  • Cities: Skylines
  • Rome Gold
  • Semper Fi
  • Sengoku
  • Ship Simulator Extremes
  • Hearts of Iron III: Their Finest Hour
  • Sword of the Stars II
  • Supreme Ruler 2020
  • Teleglitch: Die More Edition
  • Victoria 2
  • Magicka 2: Ice, Death and Fury
  • Warlock 2: Wrath of the Nagas
  • Rome: Vae Victis
  • Warlock: Master of the Arcane
  • Warlock 2: The Exiled
  • Divine Wind
  • Ancient Space
  • Arsenal of Democracy
  • Cities in Motion
  • Cities in Motion 2
  • Crusader Kings II: Reapers Due
  • Europa Universalis IV: Common Sense
  • Europa Universalis IV: El Dorado
  • Hearts of Iron IV: No Step Back
  • Stellaris: Galaxy Edition
  • Magicka 2
  • Europa Universalis III
  • Impire
  • Europa Universalis IV
  • Knights of Pen and Paper 2
  • Crusader Kings II: Horse Lords
  • Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword
  • Crusader Kings II: Conclave
  • For The Glory
  • For the Motherland
  • Magicka: Wizard Wars Founder Wizard
  • A Game of Dwarves
Hello everyone!

@Ryagi here again with another Mod spotlight, this time covering one of the most subscribed to mods for Europa Universalis 4, Extended Timeline. It's likely this mod needs no introduction, but you may be less familiar with the mod author, Qweytr. We hope you enjoy their showcase today! For those of you who may not be familiar, you are in for a treat.



Hi, I'm @qweyt , the developer of the Extended Timeline mod. If you are interested enough in EU4 mods to be reading this, you most likely have already heard of it, but just in case you are not, the basic idea of Extended Timeline is to allow you to start at any date you like and play for as long as you like. Due to limits of the game engine, any date in this case covers only dates after 2AD though, but that is already more than enough work for one person.

It was between 12 and 14 years ago, after my first full playthrough of EU3 was cut short by the 1820 end date that I knew I had to improve things. After that is has been a lot of work, though sometimes with breaks of several months, but at other times working on the mod every waking hour for a month straight. And thanks to that work the mod has had a very accurate starting setup for a good while now, with 800 new tags, all with historically accurate borders and rulers for every single day. It's not perfect of course, but neither is vanilla EU4, which is the level of historical accuracy I have aimed for and mostly reached and in certain aspects even surpassed.

World_1206.png

Eurasia at the 1206 start date

The start dates are all well and good, but this is a game after all, so what happens after you unpause. For a long time, the answer was unfortunately not enough. Although I have made hundreds of events and decisions covering many important points of history like spread of Christianity, fall of Rome and rise of Islam, spread out over such a long timespan these events have to some felt quite sparse.

events.png

A couple examples of the many events I have made, belonging to the event chains to decentralize Japan and the rise of Islam


It is of course inevitable that the vanilla period, which has a whole team of professionals adding content for a much shorter timespan would have more flavor than the parts I have added. It is simply not possible for one man to match Paradox in that aspect. But I never thought I would be doing Extended Timeline alone from start to finish. I always dreamed that once the basic fundamentals are in place, people interested in certain regions or time periods would contribute to the mod and help me flesh those parts out. And recently this dream has been closer to becoming true than ever before.

By far the biggest recent addition was the integration of More Missions: Extended Timeline REDUX sub-mod by World's Smuggest Detective into the main mod, adding a total of 29 new mission trees, 5 great projects, 3 disasters and some other smaller additions. Below are a few examples of the recently added mission trees.

missions_ayyubid.png

missions_funan.png

missions_sassanid.png

missions_vandals.png

Another recent addition is a new religion called Ecclesia Unita, which represents a form of Christianity reformed to prevent the Great Schism. This represents a kind of content I would not make myself, as I focus on things that happened historically, but since this was all done by LimonenZitrone I had no problems with adding it to the mod. He also made a new decision to form Germany for the medieval kingdom of Germany. Previously the vanilla decision was available already in the middle ages, even though it was clearly meant to represent the forming of modern Germany.

EcclesiaUnita.png

The decision to create the Ecclesia Unita religion

Next we have events for Ostsiedlung, meaning Germans settling down in the Slavic lands in the eastern edges of the Holy Roman Empire. They were made by Jey the Count as the first taste of the more comprehensive additions he is planning for medieval Europe.

ostsiedlung.png

A couple events from the Ostsiedlung event chain

The most recent of all the contributions was a new main theme by Utopia, which you can also listen to on YouTube. It was added to the mod just two weeks ago along with a minor addition by Terkaza to the Zunist religion.


Those were all of the biggest contributions to the mod over the past two months. I want to specially thank not only the people mentioned above, but everyone who has contributed to the mod in the past. Extended Timeline would not be where it is today without the awesome community around it.

You can get Extended Timeline on the ParadoxPlaza or Paradox Mods. And if you wish to join the community, whether to contribute something yourself or just to chat about the mod or anything else with the fans of Extended Timeline, you can join our Discord. That's all for this mod showcase. Have a nice day.



And we the whole EU4 team want to thank Qweytr for their years of hard work and dedication towards Extended Timeline as well as the EU4 modding community as a whole.

That wraps up today's spotlight. Though relatively short we hope you enjoyed it! Feel free to ask any questions about Extended Timeline and do let us know if you have any suggestions for future mod spotlights.
 

Attachments

  • ostsiedlung.png
    ostsiedlung.png
    3,2 MB · Views: 0
Last edited:
  • 8Like
  • 1Love
Reactions:
Stuff like this, at least to me, embodies one of the key components of modding. It does stuff that some people would like, but that the devs probably wouldn't be able to do due to time and resource constraints.
 
Does extended timeline do anything to rebalance the speed of (player) expansion and the stability of large empires? Or do you basically have enough time to conquer the world ten times over?
I believe there is both a tweaked governing capacity from vanilla, as well as triggered modifiers based on technology level, to try and mitigate this a little.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
Hi,
We love the mod. But in the past, it was quite unstable in the MP.
Has this been improved in the meantime?
We have run multiplayer games among the people on our Discord every now and then for years now and there has never been stability issues big enough to prevent us from playing. Only some infrequent crashes and desyncs that I think sometimes happen in vanilla too.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
Please help, I've been trying but I am dumb and I don't know how to install mods or if there are additional mods to another mod that I have to install first. My main purpose is to install a "no-end" mod and this one seems like a really good contender. Again, I am a total noob in this manner but I would really appreaciate it. Thank you
 
  • 1
Reactions:
Please help, I've been trying but I am dumb and I don't know how to install mods or if there are additional mods to another mod that I have to install first. My main purpose is to install a "no-end" mod and this one seems like a really good contender. Again, I am a total noob in this manner but I would really appreaciate it. Thank you

If you are playing EUIV through Steam it's as simple as subscribing to a mod via the Steam workshop and then enabling them via the playsets tab in the launcher. Once activated in a playset, be sure to select that playset from the launcher before hitting Play. :)

Through Paradox Plaza you have to be signed in on both the launcher and Paradox Plaza, click the green "Add" button and the mods will appear in the same playset tab described above.

Alternatively, you can manually install mods by downloading their .mod file via the Plaza and placing it into your mod folder,
located under ~\Documents\Paradox Interactive\Europa Universalis IV\mod\

If you are having any technical issues with the process or the launcher feel free to use our tech support forums
 
  • 1Like
Reactions: