It’s another Happy Wednesday! Bring out your spreadsheets and YouTube guides, this week we have some economy to talk about. To give us the rundown on what the economy looks like in 1.4 I’m passing this week’s baton to my good friend Jorge, who is our resident Econ enjoyer and a UX Designer here at Paradox Tinto.
Hello there! I am @Jorge, one of the UX designers working in Europa Universalis V. You might have seen me around before as an internal QA of studio Tinto, but I was ([s]d̶e̶)
[/s]promoted to UX Designer almost a year ago, so today I have the immeasurable honor to be presenting you one of the beefy-est UX undertakings coming for 1.4: the reworking of the infamous Trade UI.[/p]
In the old system, back in release days, Trade was either completely manual or completely automated. However, the old manual system, where you had to set up individual Trades between 2 Markets, never really worked. The economy of EUV being too granular and rapidly-changing, very often your manual Trades would become unprofitable or unavailable the day after they were created (and the old UI didn’t help much, to put it lightly).
We introduced Trade Orders in 1.2/1.3 as a first attempt at creating a middle layer of player interaction between full automation and full micromanagement, where the player could pick a Good to be imported/exported, and the AI would figure out the details. It was a fine start, but we knew the feature needed some extra work to reach its full potential.
Our aim with this redesign has been to allow players to focus on the goals they want to achieve, while having the AI do the busy work for them. At the same time, we wanted Trade to remain “optional complexity”, enriching the background of your game without forcing you to dive into its depths. We know that not everyone wants to get their hands dirty with the nitty gritty details of supply and demand, and even the same player might want to get more or less involved with Trade depending on the type of game they are playing. Trade is likely to be a more prominent feature for a tall Holland, than for a wide Horde of the steppes. And that’s fine.
With Trade Orders in 1.4 we have put in place a system that lets you transition seamlessly and gradually from full automation, to some involvement, up to full control, at your discretion. This creates a sort of “involvement ladder”: Depending on how far up the ladder you want to go, you may ignore Trade completely; or just give a few instructions and let the automation take care of the rest; or assume direct control of ALL Trade going on in your Market.
Let’s climb up that ladder.
“Down with the spreadsheets! I will pay the iron price”
By default, Trade is completely automated in all your Markets, just as before. New players, or the more bellicosely minded, don’t need to interact with the Trading panel at all if they don’t want to. Trade stays within the realm of optional complexity: you enter it at your own peril, when and if you want to play the merchant.
By default, this is what the new Trading panel looks like. All Trade Capacity is controlled by the regular automation, and you can see the Trades created by the automation at the bottom. Same old behavior, just a bit less noise.
“Pls gimme Gold, my Governors are poor”
The great advantage of Trade Orders is that they allow you to casually override the working Automation with specific instructions. Now, in 1.4 adding a few strategic Trade Orders on top of the regular Automation has become easier and clearer than before, while allowing a much greater degree of control.
First of all, the list of Trade Orders acts now as a priority queue: Trade Orders on top will receive Trade Capacity first, and any remaining not used by a Trade Order will trickle down to the next one, all the way down to the regular automation.
You can add as many Trade Orders as you want, even above your Trade Capacity. They will stay inactive until they get any Trade Capacity to work with, effectively acting as fallbacks. As Trade Capacity becomes available, the Trade Orders below will use it automatically, without you needing to go back to adjust it.
You can also choose to allocate a flat amount of Trade Capacity to an Order, or a percentage of your Total in a Market. That is a maximum: the Trade order will use up to the allocated capacity, so a 100% means “Use all TC you can to satisfy this Order, before considering the next one”.
The first Trade Order is set to import Gold with 20 Trade Capacity. The second goes “use all TC you can to export Cloth and Fine Cloth at a minimum profit of 0.25”. All Trade Capacity left is used by the Automation. In the list of Trades below, the blue cog signals the Trades that belong to a Trade Order.
As you can see, each Trade Order can now contain multiple Goods. We have also added some dynamic Trade Order Presets that will consider multiple goods at once. For example:
“Any Export” will consider all available Goods and find the most profitable exports
“Any Pop need” will import any Good your Pops are missing in this Market
“Any construction need” will import any Good your Constructions are missing
A simple setup using 2 of the dynamic Presets from the right menu and 1 custom Order. This is how it reads: (1) first, address my construction shortages, if there are any; (2) then, use 20 TC to get me Gold; (3) then, find the most profitable exports with any remaining Trade Capacity. Since there are no construction shortages atm, the Order stays dormant and all Trade Capacity goes down to the next Order. If I were to start building 200 Libraries it would activate and start importing Books like crazy.
“I have become Trade, destroyer of Markets”
Trade Orders are now much more powerful than they used to be, allowing you to do virtually anything with your Trade. Every Trade Order can now be edited in full detail. You can define the minimum profit and the target Markets. You can make it prioritise Profit, Food, or fixing existing shortages. This makes Trade Orders a total replacement of the old system: any specific Trade you wanted to do before you can do now with a much greater degree of control, but without the constant babysitting it used to require.
This is the UI for creating or editing a Trade Order. Any Trade Order will contain a list of Goods, and a prioritization focus: profit, food, or addressing shortages.
With the big Market buttons above you can manually target specific Markets, or use a dynamic designation that will update over time, like “All Owned Markets”, or “All Colonial Markets”.
Looking to flood all Iberian Markets with my more competitive wares.
In practice, this means a player can tailor the precise conditions for all their Trade to operate if they so choose, and stop using the generic automation altogether. You want to send cannons to your pal in multiplayer? Send manufactured goods to your colonies? Quickstart the spice Trade by force-feeding neighboring Markets? The possibilities are endless.
Now let us see some examples of using Orders in a real game.
The good old manual Trade
If you want to move a Good from one specific place to another, you can do a custom Order with no minimum profit and a single target Market. This will make sure the Good is moved, even at a loss.
The fastest way to do this is by clicking on “Export Good” from a Market where you have Trade Capacity. The old UI is gone, and this will directly take you to the Custom Trade Order UI, with that Good already added to the list. Ready to ship!
By default it has “Any Market” as target, and a minimum profit per TC of 0.25. But you can of course modify that if you want to target a specific Market, like when sending Gold to your pal during MP.
Trading ducats for institutions
Another strategic choice you can make now is using Trade to get Institutions faster. You can set your Orders to maximise trading with those Markets where the institution you want is present, even at a loss.
All my Trade is set to occur with Italy, so their cool Renaissance spreads to my Market center. Of course, this means my Trade profits will be severely reduced for a while.
The mercantilist approach: Increasing Tax Base with Trade
Instead of seeking to earn money from Trade, you can use Trade Orders to export your main Tax Base contributors, even if that means lower Trade profits. Exports will increase prices in your Markets, which increase the Tax Base you generate. Different countries, different tactics.
Here I am only exporting those manufactured Goods I produce myself, to keep prices high and buildings profitable.
Below you can check out my setup as a mercantilist England. After making sure my shortages are dealt with, all my Trade capacity is devoted to exports:
I’ve been using Trade to maximise my Tax Base, hence the focus on Exports. Fine Cloth is in a separate Order from the rest of manufactured goods because I’m exporting it at a loss in order to kill competition.
An example of a middle Market: (1) import Spices from all Asian Markets; (2) export Spices to all European Markets.
By the way, specific Trade Orders can be pinned to the Outliner. So you can keep an eye on the ones that are most important to your strategy, or quickly edit them.
Aaand hovering pinned Trade Orders shows their Trade routes on the map.
Along with the reworked Trade Orders, in 1.4 we have added yet another tool to manipulate the flux of Trade: Tariffs and Subventions. While Trade Orders serve to manipulate your OWN Trade, Tariffs serve to steer the flow of FOREIGN Trade in your Markets (on top of being an additional source of revenue).
Tariffs can be set by Market Owners to all Goods, and will affect all foreign Trade occurring in their owned Markets. An Export Tariff will make all foreign Trades pay a premium when Trading that Good out of your Market, thus disincentivizing all foreign exports of that Good. A negative Tariff, aka a Subvention, will instead reduce its price, thus incentivizing Exports. Same story for Imports.
Here you have the new Tariffs panel in all its glory, where Market Owners can set the Tariff level for each Good:
Export and Import Tariffs are set separately, and the maximum value the Owner can set depends on many factors, including Advances, Laws, or the Free Trade vs Mercantilism Societal Value.
A 6% Tariff to the import of Amber is yielding some profit, although it comes with some diplomatic consequences. The impact scales with the volume of Trade.
To help you navigate the complex network of Trade, Tariffs and Subventions, we have put extra effort in giving you as many UX tools as possible to access all this information.
As with all Economy panels, the Tariffs panel can be filtered by Market. The piecharts on top show the top Goods in volume of imports and exports respectively. You can click on them to filter the list below. When a single Good is filtered, you can see the existing Trades for that Good directly from this panel.
Trade routes on the map dynamically reflect the Goods you have filtered, helping to see which parts of the world you are trading with for each Good.
The controls above allow you to mass-change all FILTERED Goods below with a single click:
We have also improved the Trade arrows on the map. They will now appear dynamically in many relevant panels, and will react to your filtering.
Behold! The tentacles of the English exports!
In any Good list that includes Trade information we have added small icons that inform you that a Tariff/Subvention is in effect:
Individual Trades also show a little Tariff icon when they are affected by any Tariff:
You can now right click any Good icon to open a new and shiny Context menu, from where you can start a Trade Order or set the Tariffs/Subventions for your Markets:
Please no foreign Cloth in my London Market, thank you. I produce it myself, and I want its price as high as possible.
We have also added a few shortcuts in the Market panel to a few economy-related diplomatic interactions:
Notice the new “Lift Tariff” diplomatic interaction, which, well, lifts Tariffs for the selected countries.
Another new addition to the economic toolset in 1.4 is the Promote Industry action. Together with Town Rights and Productivity bonuses, Promote Industries are a tool to specialize your production in a specific Industry, giving you a competitive edge against your rivals.
Promote industry is a powerful action that is bestowed on a whole Area and it has a double effect: on the Area level, all Locations within the Area get a Productivity boost for the selected industry. On the national level, all your Pops in your Country see their demands of the affected Goods increase. This helps you keep prices high and buildings profitable, allowing you to keep expanding your selected industries beyond what your Market would normally tolerate.
Promote Industries are very limited though: by default all Countries have access to one slot at any given time, with Kingdoms and Empires having 2 and 3 respectively. Of course, Promote industry is best used in combination with Town Rights, RGO bonuses, and bespoke Location modifier, so different countries will benefit from different promotions, further increasing economic specialization throughout the world.
I’m Promoting the Textile Industries in those English Areas where the Wool RGO abounds, to maximise the synergy.
To help with this specialization drive, we added 9 early versions of the specialization Urban Rights that you can upgrade later to the ones in Age of Discovery. These will be available from game start, so you can start planning your Cities and their production chains right from the beginning. Here is the full list. Remember values are not final:
Tooling Charter: +15% tools output
Jewelry Charter: +10% jewelry, +5 jewelry guild building levels
Naval Supplies Charter: +15% naval supplies/tar output
Textile Charter: +10% cloth/fine cloth/dyes
Weaponry Charter: +10% weaponry/firearms/cannons
Printing Charter: +10% paper/books/dyes
Artisan Charter: +10% furniture/pottery/leather
Spirituous Charter: +10% liquor/beer/wine
Masonry Charter: +12% masonry/glass
Staple Ports and Market Rights received early versions as well:
Market Charter: +10% Market Access, +3 Marketplace levels, +25% Burghers Trade Capacity
Staple Port: +50% Burghers power, +10% Maritime Presence, +5 Marketplace levels, +20% Harbor Capacity
Also worth mentioning that the Marketplace building levels bonus now properly applies to all buildings of the Marketplace chain, not only to the Marketplace proper.
All these tools combined mean you can now specialize your country in producing a small subset of Goods at very high efficiency, and using Trade and Tariffs to maximize their performance, instead of trying to produce a bit of everything.
In this example run as England, I focused heavily on textiles, since England starts with a lot of Wool RGOs, and also some bespoke bonuses in a few Locations. Around 1500 I managed to achieve quite high levels of Efficiency for all textile industries:
Leicester has the Promote Industries bonus, combined with the Town Right, plus the RGO bonus, and the bespoke Yorkshire Cloth industry Location bonus. Stonks!
My Trade strategy during the whole game was based on the Exporting of Fine Cloth. Even at a loss. I did this to keep the price of Fine Cloth as high as possible, and sustain my monstrous textile industry.
Force-feeding Fine cloth to other Markets has allowed me to keep expanding all textile industries while keeping them profitable. This Trade Order is a net loss, sure, but it serves to increase the profits of all my Fine Cloth industries.
I’m also using Tariffs to protect my Market against foreign Cloth. This makes it harder for foreign Merchants to profit from my artificially high price in textile.
As a result of all this combined strategy, all 3 textile industries are listed among my top Tax Base contributing Goods:
Trade Orders and Tariffs are keeping my huge Fine Cloth industries afloat, while they in turn make the rest of the Textile chain even more profitable. This synergy was a lot of fun to put in place.
Before we part ways, let me add for your perusal a list of extra miscellaneous changes that are coming to the economy of 1.4:
A new “Default on Creditor” action lets you repudiate every loan held by a chosen lender, at a hit to your creditworthiness and diplomatic opinion with all lenders. The former creditor receives a Casus Belli against you.
Manufactories became more pop-efficient; textile mills reach the mill output curve
Discounted all 21 Absolutism manufactory advances: 16 industry-entry unlocks at -50%, 5 same-industry follow-ons at -75% to match Revolutions mills
Buffed coal output advances +33%→+75% (Absolutism) and +50%→+100% (Revolutions) so tier-3+ heavy industry stops starving on coal
Free Trade push is now scaled by foreign Markets with Merchants
You can now destroy markets with temporary demand, they shift to the new center
RGO initial level now accounts for Tribesmen/Slaves, not just Peasants
Source foreign building pops from the capital's area, not just the capital
Big thanks to Jorge for guiding through all these awesome changes! If you have any questions, comments or feedback, we'd welcome them below and @Jorge may be around to answer some. Next Tinto Talk, @Pavía will be returning to Tinto Talks! To give you some more details on Crusades & Jihads, Cardinals, and Religious Orders (including a sneak peek for some of the Across the Pillars content around these topics).
But before that... we actually have a roadmap update on Tuesday the 22nd, and we'll be hosting a live text Q&A immediately after that over on our Discord! This is an ideal opportunity for you to ask about anything you've seen in 1.4 so far, or really anything that's on your mind. And yes, you'll probably have more on your mind after our roadmap.