Europa Universalis IV - Mod Spotlight 17th of March 2023 - Europa Expanded

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Ryagi

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Hello and welcome to our first-ever EU4 mod spotlight!

We consider mods and their communities a core pillar of our EUIV ecosystem, to showcase some of the amazing creations you the community have fostered we want to make this a semi-regular series giving modders a chance to show off their work.

For our pioneer feature, we’ll be looking at Europa Expanded. Without further ado, we'll let @Stiopa866 and @LordVarangian introduce themselves and their work on EE.



Hello Europa Universalis Enthusiasts!

We are the Europa Expanded team and since 2018 we’ve been working on expanding your Europa Universalis Experience. With years of content design experience, in our mod, we strive to create a player-made update for each subsequent area that we work on. Our goal is to enrich your gameplay while also keeping the experience familiar to what you are already used to. It is natural then, that some of our scripts have even made it into vanilla.

In this post, we will present just a glimpse of what our mod has to offer and what direction we are heading in. So, to give you an idea of what our mod is about, let us look closer into what our latest update has brought forth.

Our latest update, The Caliphate, added over a thousand unique missions for 30+ nations, giving much love to the entire Muslim world, which has not seen any updates since Cradle of Civilization in 2017.

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To present our mission trees would take a while, so here’s a roster containing just a few of the newer ones for your viewing pleasure:

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Our mission trees are not just any mission trees, for along with them, we are also making innovations in content creation, introducing Incident Mission Trees, Subject-Oriented Mission Trees, Preview System for Branching Missions.

And then there are the countless mechanics in the mod….We have made dozens upon dozens of mechanics for the mod. All of them seek to bring flavour to regions, nations, and even dynasties. Our latest and more glamorous additions are the:


Abbasid Caliphate Mechanic
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allowing you to serve as the puppet master of the Abbasid Caliph, exerting his influence over the Muslim World for your own gain, later being able to claim the Caliphate for yourself.


Timurid Legitimacy:
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a measure of how legitimate is your Timurid dynasty. Your key to gaining support for founding a new nation.


Spoils of War:
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The conquest frenzy of the Timurid Hordes. The more you win, conquer and raze, the more buffs you'll get. But inactivity will over time render it useless.

Trade Outposts:
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Expanding your trade empire through diplomacy. Not through the sword, but through the pen. It has been used for several nations, from Hormuz, the Hansa, Mughals and it will only find more uses in the future.​


That is not to say the rest of the mechanics are lacking. Japan itself has the Onin War mechanic, the struggle between the Hosokawa and Yamana clan, in which you can choose a side to support similarly to the League War. And lastly, the prestigious Habsburg dynasty has access to the Habsburg Glory mechanic, allowing you to either spread your dynasty, or to establish loyal allies.

You’d be mistaken if you thought that missions and mechanics is all that we do - our commitments lie far beyond that. We also add hundreds of new events, dozens of decisions and so on
Below is a selection of other components that we touch upon, including, but not limited to:

Government Reforms. While we have always had some commitment to adding new government reforms, we have recently decided to expand our horizons and are planning to add an increasing amount of government reforms.
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We’re also adding new estates. 1.12 “The Caliphate” itself has added two new Estates, the Berber Tribes for Maghrebi nations, and the Turkic Tribes for Aq and Qara Qoyunlu. We also have some older estates and are itching to add more of them, as we go on.

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Our focus doesn’t lie just in adding more estates. We are also interested in adding more variety in privileges for the default estates. Here’s but a small selection of new estate privileges from our latest patch.
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We are also committed to updating old content. In “The Caliphate”, we have gone through most of muslim events, making the options more balanced, trying to add more choice to your average event and making mysticism options more viable.


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But flavour isn't necessarily all full of sunshine. There's plenty of pitfalls and disasters that you may found yourself spiralling towards. Whether it be you, or the AI, you will certainly feel the impact of the disasters showcased below.
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We do, of course, add much more than that, but I’d like to keep the rest as a mystery for the people that do choose to explore this mod themselves, which I highly encourage to do so. ;)

And for the people who are wishing to play the mod, here's a map of all the nations we've touched as of now, to a greater or lesser degree:

Starting Nations
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Endgame formables
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Cultural Formables

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We also have bookmarks designed specifically to serve as a guide for finding flavorful tags, so make clever use of those!

If you are interested in following our work more closely, we post weekly Developer Diaries on Stiopa's Reddit Account. Currently, the developer diaries stopped, but they will resume as soon as we are ready to showcase 1.13.

If you want to experience the mod second-hand, check out the following videos:

Now, I sure hope that I peaked your interest. If you are not yet familiar with the mod, you can find it on the:
That would be it for this mod showcase. I wish you all a cheery & lovely Friday!
 

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Nice to see Paradox highlighting small mods now. Cant wait to see new extensive mission trees for small, but highly underrated nations such as Meißen. Or Meißen!
 
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Very nice to see this, especially when mods like these can improve EU4 so much, great to see an endorsement from the team!

Lord V's trees are just nuts. I love em, and Stiopa's work is consistently interesting and flavourful, so I'm happy to see what they've done being promoted.
 
Good to know devs are aware of such nice mods and modders' hard work.
Literally half of us in the Content Designer Team were modders and Paradox have been in contact/collaborated with the biggest mods' leaders for many years.

Speaking now not as an employee but as a previously modder/consumer, Paradox giving visibility to mods is real and truly encouraged; it is not just an advertisement campaign as many people might be tempted to think. Modders can become candidates to work in our company after all, so it is a win-win situation for everyone.
 
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I like how this mod recently added the Flavor Universalis mission tree for Byzantium. On the other hand I'm also curious on their own touch on an Byzantine Mission Tree if they ever decide to make one. Thanks for highlighting this!