Tinto Talk 115 + Patch 1.3 Feature Video

Happy Wednesday everyone! I’m Ryagi, community manager, and it's time for another Tinto Talk. We have a short one this time, as we’re deep in preparation for 1.3 to hit live branches. And similar to last week, this touches on the things that most impact stable players.

That means this time we're focusing mostly on what update 1.3 entails, and next week, we'll be holding a retrospective on the beta process as a whole.

First and formost:

I’m happy to say 1.3 will hit stable branches Thursday July 9th (At the time of writing, that's tomorrow!)

This release wouldn't have been possible without the help of all those who particpated in the open beta. So thank you for those of you that did!

If you're looking to get caught up on what 1.3 changed, we have just released our 1.3 feature video here:

Mid Beta Institution Tweaks

One of the things we changed during the beta process itself was institution spread. So I want to touch on that quickly here:

To catch everyone up to speed, we collected a lot of feedback especially from the thread Institutions Player Feedback, And made the following changes to institutions:

• Changed Foster Institutions to accelerate spread instead of bootstrapping.

• Added a game rule to lock institution could-have-spawned spread.

• Institution spread through trade now favors markets closely connected to the embraced world rather than those plugged into large but distant trade networks; a market doing most of its trade with nearby institution-carriers spreads faster than one with a thin trickle from a far-off giant market.

After implementing these changes, many open beta participants found institutions did not spread in a satisfactory way, so we made the following adjustments in the follow up patch below:

• Institutions now spread from the birth location to the market center at a base of +1% each month.

• Increased the friendly-neighbor institution spread rate (0.020/0.010/0.005 → 0.040/0.030/0.020).

• Stopped blocking achievements when Could-Have-Spawned Spread is enabled.

Performance in 1.3

One of our goals we set out for in 1.3 was to improve the tickspeed, and here are the results based on the testing:

Steam post image 1.3.10 is in orange, 1.2.5 is in blue

As you can see from the graph, 1.3 does make a consistent improvement compared to 1.2.5. We have a couple of machines running our latest code each night, afterwhich we store the simulation time data and use for comparisons. Tickspeed (And any performance related topic) is very machine dependant. Which is why we also use data from you the community to try and help us determine if true performance improvements are made. And in this case, the general cross platform indications have been "It's slightly better". Which seems to be in line with our graphs.

We're happy 1.3 is an improvement, but game performance is always a constant effort, and even now we're testing and tweaking performance for 1.4 and beyond. So we'll continue to chip away at this!

What's on our Radar

Before we wrap up today's Tinto Talk, I also wanted to address some of the currently known issues, this is by no means exhaustive, (This is 4 out of thousands!) nor does it touch on specific bugs, but rather some of the biggest underlying problems we've not yet solved in 1.3 but are very much on our radar!

Merc Spam.

We talked about this in a prior TT, and the issue is threefold:

• There are simply too many mercs around

During the beta, we did reduce the amount of total mercenaries in the world to less than 10% of before, and they now always reduce pops in the countries they are recruited from.

• The AI has a tendancy to hoard gold and spends it all at once at mercs

1.3 made the ai better at building up their economy. The result of this means mid game AIs will have more money laying around... which means more mercs.

• The AI cannot differentiate bewtween a war for survival and a war for gains, it goes all out everytime and that includes merc buying.

If you're coming from 1.2.5, there should be some noticeable improvements here in the early game particularly, however it's still not in a place we're happy with. Currently we're investigating both short term and long term sollutions, we thank you for the patience with that.

Over Urbanization & Food Balance

We've seen good behavior on the AI side of things when it comes to urbinzation, but when it comes to the player behavior, players are often incenstived to urbanize to excessive degrees. Most of this has to do with the games food systems. We're making some adjustments coming in 1.4, and we'll likely be sharing more details on this again in the future, especially as it becomes less work in progress. But in the meantime, here are some of the intended changes:

• We want large cities and harsh winters to sharply reduce local food production, and this should scale by settlement size.

• Population growth should come from real food surplus rather than hoarded stockpiles

• Spare land should not drastically speed pop growth on it's own; food surplus should be the driving factor.

• We're adding a village granary, a rural food store buildable without the need for a town

Numbers and art not final!

Confusion around Trade Automation

Trade automation in 1.3 has been a topic players have frequently expressed confusion over. When you automate trade, the automation system does a lot of steps to get your economy rolling, such as fulfilling needs. Throughout this constant process, it will sometimes swing your economy (and trades) up and down, leading to the player often wondering what it's doing and why. Oftentimes it can be "Correct" in the long term, but lead to a short term income shortages.

We'll continue to monitor the feedback around this topic, since regardless of this systems function, if it's frustrating from the player POV, it's worth looking into adjustments to help compensate.

What's Next?

Now that the 1.3 beta is coming to a close, we are setting more resources on update 1.4! Though before 1.4 comes, we can still expect a patch or two in 1.3 soon.

Later this month, we'll be sharing the vision of update 1.4, what we're planning, what's changed since we last spoke about it, and share a forcast for what Tinto Talks are coming when. Our Grand Voyage roadmap is also in need of updating, so keep your eyes peeled for that in the coming month or two.

Once we've established the vision, we'll dive straight into the meat and potatoes of what is coming in the free update, and once that has concluded (At which point 1.4 will go into open beta testing), then we can start talking about Across the Pillars. EU5's first Chronicle Pack which focuses on Morroco, Castille, and Granada. Both of these we're super excited to share! Many devs here at the studio have expressed they have a hard time going back to 1.3 after playing singleplayer 1.4

That's all for now though, For the Tinto Talk next we'll give 1.3 a much deserved retrospective. Remember to check out our 1.3 feature video, and thanks for sticking with us. Until then!

• PDX Ryagi

As usual, here is a list of handy EU5 links:

Be Ambitious!