Happy Wednesday, today we're glad to say Patch 1.2.4 is out now. It primarily gives some buffs to population growth, fixes for unit morale which should hopefully lead to less frustrating stack wipes, and more. In addition to these changes, we have also made some minor tweaks that we hope will positively impact performance. Performance improvements are an ongoing effort that we intend to carry through the beta period on 1.3, please do let us know if you have seen any changes to performance in this patch!
Checksum: e02d
Date: May 20, 2026
Previous Patch: 1.2.3
Rebalanced complacency drivers: halved passive gain from idle rival slots, and doubled the swing from average control.
Fixed ruler title not updating after forming a country.
Increased pop growth modifiers from available land and cheap food.
Fixed an issue that caused white peaces in particular to have a 20-year truce.
Changed truces to properly scale with the war score used to end the war, instead of the war score the war ended with.
Changed the combat overrun ratio to use each side's true nominal strength as the numerator, so a 0-morale army can no longer be auto-overrun by a much smaller opponent. Morale collapse still gates resistance, preserving the intended overrun mechanic at a genuine 10x size advantage.
Changed cores gained from script (events, etc.) or lost to other countries to remain for a period of 100 years, after which they disappear if the dominant culture of the location is not the same as the culture of the core's country.
Added City Walls to Thessaloniki at the start of the game.
Added missing (Orthodox) Cathedral buildings in the setup across Greece and the Balkans, mirroring the design for the rest of Europe.
Reassigned the locations of Ikaria and Samos from Genoa to Byzantium at game start, and updated the "Reconquest of the Eastern Aegean" (flavor_gen.16) and "The Genoese Have Taken Chios" (flavor_gen.51) events to reflect the new starting ownership.
Set the country rank of Patras to Duchy.
Rebalanced the new conditions of the "Reform Society" disaster to make it less tedious to achieve once again; the subject location contribution was changed from 0.75 to 0.25, and the monthly push towards centralization from 0.2 to 0.33. The approximate effect is that for a player with 24 direct locations and 120 subject locations, the target drops from 114 to 54, requiring annexing roughly half of subjects instead of almost all.
Fixed another instance that caused the Percy and Mortimer rebel armies not to spawn when choosing the historical option A of "The Tripartite Indenture" (flavor_eng.95).
Fixed the Byzantine event "A Brilliant Center of Learning" (flavor_byz.13) granting an "Art School" or "Arts Academy" at Mystras when it is not the capital, which caused the building to be immediately removed. When Mystras is not the capital, option A now applies a permanent "Center of Learning" location modifier.
Fixed Percy and Mortimer rebel armies not spawning reliably and with too few soldiers when choosing the historical option A of "The Tripartite Indenture" (flavor_eng.95).
Fixed the "Sack and Destruction of Venice" event (flavor_byz.1) firing when Byzantium acquired Venice through peaceful diplomatic annexation (e.g. annexing a Venetian Pronoia subject). The event trigger now also requires that the new venice_acquired_peacefully_variable, set in on_diplomatic_annex when a BYZ-tagged country diplomatically annexes a subject that owns Venice, is absent.
Fixed the event "Controversial Texts from [target_location]" (town_rights_events.16) option B applying an unbounded satisfaction penalty, by adding a proper division by 100 to the formula.
Fixed the Wallachian "Vlad the Impaler" event (flavor_wal.1) not appearing in the Content list or Events window for Wallachia.
Prevented castrated/eunuch rulers from triggering dynastic heir events that give bastard sons.
Improved the text of "The Non-Possessor Movement" event (orthodox_flavor.1).
Fixed missing localization in Byzantium DHEs in the event viewer.
Fixed Great Britain and Spain formables not appearing in the lobby Content Viewer.
Tweaked the formation of Rome as Byzantium so it also integrates the "Marittima" province (Rome, Terracina, Velletri) upon formation, avoiding some issues caused by moving the capital to the Rome location.
Fixed the "Kephalai" bureaucracy being available from game start instead of requiring winning the "Fate of the Phoenix" disaster, matching the behaviour of the "Allelengyon" bureaucracy.
Fixed the "Latin Empire" (LAT_f) formable not appearing in the Age of Reformation, due to an inconsistent age requirement in the potential block.
Added an exception to not Call In Overlord for the subjects of the Latin Empire when using the "Latin Reconquest" CB, so the overlord doesn't automatically get in and take over as the War Lead, potentially forcing a peace deal without the effects of the CB.
Changed forming Byzantium or the Roman Empire to unlock the "Restore Roman Borders" casus belli, gated on the Fate of the Phoenix DLC.
Fixed the "Empower the Eunuchs" government reform not granting may_hire_eunuch_advisors, so the Middle Kingdom can now hire eunuch courtiers as intended after the "The Eunuchs of [Country]" (flavor_chi.44) event.
Fixed the broken Upper Bergregal hyperlink in the Bergordnung policy tooltip.
Changed the "Scholai Privileges" urban right to require a university and 20 development instead of a low-literacy check.
Improved the "Grant a Triumph" Hellenic action reward from 10 to 20 Prestige, and added a tooltip showing the "Triumphant" trait modifiers also granted by the action in the effects section of the action tooltip.
Made Hellenism religious aspect pairs that share a defining modifier (canonization, omen_strength, omens_offered) mutually exclusive, so the player cannot fill both slots with the same effect.
Fixed the tooltip added to show the "Triumphant" trait modifier granted by the "Grant a Triumph" action not appearing correctly.
Set Latin culture to start with kindred opinion of Greek, and vice versa.
Fixed Shinto AI countries committing Seppuku excessively.
Fixed the Loan Icon interaction being usable on icons already borrowed from another country.
Fixed the "Restore Roman Borders" CB showing on subjects when the overlord owned Roman land.
Changed the Castrate and Blind interactions to exclude a character from being eligible as a pretender in a Succession Crisis; the two actions can also no longer be used against Heads of Cabinet.
Changed the "Restore Roman Borders" casus belli to also consider subject neighbors as potential targets.
Removed the DLC lock for the new Age-2-to-Age-6 Varangian units, as their creation was intended as a fix to the base game Age 1 Varangian unit not working properly per its original design intention, and not as a "Fate of the Phoenix" DLC content addition.
Changed Cataphract and Akritai location triggers to require the "Roman" culture group (greek_group) instead of just the "Greek" culture (greek_culture).
Changed Cataphract advances and units to require the "Roman" culture group (greek_group) instead of just the "Greek" culture (greek_culture).
Fixed the "Iberian Caravel" not being able to upgrade to the Square-Rigged Caravel, fixed the wrong costs of the latter, and increased some of its stats.
Rebalanced the Byzantine "Restoring the Varangians" event chain (flavor_byz.1400-flavor_byz.1403): 1. Moved the event window from 1450-1500 to 1380-1430 so it fires earlier. 2. Reduced the gold transfer from 0.5 to 0.25 yearly income to better match comparable events. 3. Accepting it now permanently grants +1 Varangian unit capacity via a new country modifier.
Changed the task "Found a Town" under "Infrastructure Efforts" to take into account the Megalopolis rank.
Fixed 9 Balkanic advances showing generic icons instead of their dedicated unique icons.
Fixed 7 Frankokratia advances showing generic icons instead of their dedicated unique icons.
Fixed the Ohmućević dynasty COA to match the Korenić-Neorić Armorial reference.
Added AI score for the land morale modifier.
Fixed an issue where AI would never stop to recover morale if they didn't have food, regardless of whether their morale recovery would be positive.
Increased AI army size targets, leading to fewer, larger stacks as opposed to many smaller stacks.
Fixed an issue where large countries would often not be able to buy mercenaries due to problems with checking recruitment locations.
Fixed an issue where AI navies could get stuck in a friendly transport objective.
Fixed an issue where AI didn't factor in hired mercenaries when evaluating country strength for each side in ongoing wars.
Fixed the "move_capital_event_effect" showing development changes as 0 when forming countries that move the capital.
Updated the hire mercenary effect tooltip to show contract length in months.
Added a religion data mapmode shown when mousing over a religion in the UI, which more clearly shows the situation of a religion per location.
Changed mousing over a Religion in the UI to display its Holy Sites on the map as icons.
Changed the "Offered Omens" tile in the religion panel to show the country's actual cap on simultaneously offered omens (e.g. +3 as Hellenism) instead of the total number of omens defined across the religion's gods (e.g. 0/60).
Fixed the War of the Roses disaster so it can no longer get stuck on empty rebels.
Differentiated same-religion no-CB war cost from cross-religion.
Capped 100% peace deal truce at 15 years.
Fixed city_illustration_trigger causing error spam on some mods.
Fixed the "Grant Latin Merchant Privileges" message so it now properly shows Italian instead of $italian_language$.
Fixed Romanian -escu patronymic suffixes to be suffixes instead of prefixes.
Fixed a crash related to the host losing their country.
Fixed an issue with fort defenses not calculating properly when loading a save.
Fixed trade orders resetting Market Automation after the first Trades-tab open after load.
Changed separatist rebels to rise up with 0 war exhaustion.
Prevented players from assigning their Head of the Cabinet as the ruler in a newly released location- or building-based subject.
Fixed a crash to desktop when a new, different country was elected Emperor while constructing an Imperial Armory.
Fixed the add_morale script effect so it now correctly accumulates onto existing subunit morale instead of overwriting it with the raw delta value.
Fixed the colonial charter so it once again converts tribal pops (not non-tribal) when flipping a location, restoring native_subjugation enslave_tribals, native_integration make_tribals_peasants, and expel_tribals policies.
Fixed a crash when a location with town rights was abandoned from an event.
Fixed a crash related to updating a religious or cultural movement.
As usual, here is a list of handy EU5 links:
Be Ambitious!