Dev Diary 2018-10-31

Welcome to our fourth and final dev diary for 3.8, due out this Friday, November 2 to the public and on early access now. Today's diary is to wrap up the "everything else" that's coming in 3.8 with a couple balance adjustments, few new tags, and one quality of life addition.

Peace View
This seemingly minor change has resulted in a lot less aggravation (at least for me personally) since it was made. I swapped around the GUI elements (and redrew parts of the background) for the offer and demand peace windows. Before, the tooltip for adding/reducing the amount of gold you were demanding was always in the way of seeing the indicator, forcing you to add a couple levels of gold then move the cursor to see if the AI was still gonna take the deal or not. With the re-arranged GUI, you can see the indicator while changing your gold demands so you always know exactly where to stop.



Forts
This is a big balance adjustment that I've added in 3.8 but will likely continue to be tweaked as we go forward. We reduced the base days for a siege cycle from 30 to 20; all sieges will now take less time across the board. At the counterbalance, we've added a level of defensiveness bonus to core provinces of 50% (meaning core provinces still take the same amount of time that they used to) making your core territory inherently more defensible than non-core; another defensive advantage for smaller nations against expanding states. Fort buildings (except for the Basic Fortifications) now all give a defensive bonus at 10% per fort level added making higher level forts take longer to siege and not just require more manpower.

Crusader States
In addition to the previously available decisions to release Egypt, Jerusalem, and Antioch as crusader states (decisions available to Catholic nations who conquered the requisite territory in the Levant and were not themselves crusader states like Cyprus or Achaea) we've added ones for Tripoli and Edessa as well as given Antioch a better flag (the crescent moon flag from the Syria tag didn't make much sense). You still have the same options to run them as a personal union, as vassals, or let them loose as independent states.

In the screenshot below, Naples has conquered the requisite territory and released all five states as personal unions; each crusader state has the full extent of their freely available cores.



Other

 * Replaced the tag for Halych (from KAL to HLC) which will avoid conflicts with unit dlc that could cause elephant-mounted soldiers roaming around Ruthenia.
 * The horde enforcer modifier is now a triggered modifier and requires you keep the trust of the Golden Horde of your nation above 50 (meaning you have to keep paying tribute to get the benefits).