Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy is the indicator of the administrative control that the state has on its provinces. Bureaucracy helps to stabilize autonomy by preventing the "Insufficient Bureaucracy" modifier from happening. Do not worry if an attempt to change your bureaucracy does not immediately show results; it can take up to 6 months to change.

Insufficient Bureaucracy
The "Insufficient Bureaucracy" modifier is added when the Current Governance indicator is lower than the Required Governance indicator. These indicators can be shown in the Decisions panel of EU4 (Information: Government values). The modifier makes autonomy increase by 0.15 each month in the outermost provinces that are not at 100% autonomy.

Required Governance
Required governance is created by the need for the state to manage land. It is calculated per province and added up. In general, required governance is higher the less the province is controlled by groups other than the crown.

The range a province can add to required bureaucracy is from 0 to the province's development divided by 6. So if you have a 10 development province, it cannot add more than 1.66 to required bureaucracy.

In order to figure out exactly how much a province adds, there are three components:

First, does the province have a encomienda (some colonies)?


 * Then add development/10 to required governance, and ignore the rest of this.

Second, how much land is crown-owned (not owned by anyone else)?


 * E.g. if there's 40% owned by nobles and 20% by the church, 40% is crown-owned.

Finally, How much land is "crown-controlled", that is, owned by nobles if there isn't serfdom, and owned by citizens?


 * E.g. if no serfdom, 20% owned by the church, 20% owned by citizens, and 20% nobles, 40% is crown-controlled.

Then add up (if no encomienda):


 * (% crown-owned)*development/12


 * (% crown-controlled)*(100%-(% autonomy))*development/12


 * If crown-owned land is 60% or 80%, add development/24. If crown-owned land is 100%, instead add development/12.

This gives how much a province can add to required governance. The maximum (in relation to development) is development/6, in a province with no church, noble, or citizen land. The minimum (in relation to development) is 0, if 100% of the land is owned by the church/nobles with serfdom, or 100% autonomy and no crown-owned land.

Current Governance
In general, the current governance is calculate as a modifier on your admin tech squared multiplied by a factor based on meritocracy (increasing rapidly with 50+ meritocracy), with a few other bonuses.

The Current Governance is calculated as such: ((0.25 * Admin tech)2 + 5 + additive bonus) * (multiplicative bonus) * Merit bonus = Current Governance

Additive bonuses:


 * 10 for having the Janissaries modifier.


 * 25 for being the Emperor of China.

Multiplicative bonus:


 * 1.2 for running the 'sale of offices' policy.

Meritocracy bonus:


 * Merit of 1 - 50 gives you a bonus of (1 + (Merit / 100)) so ranging from 1 to 1.5.


 * Merit of 51 - 100 gives you a bonus of (1.5 + ((Merit-50) / 50))) so ranging from 1.5 to 3.5.

Meritocracy and Corruption
In general, keep your corruption very low in order to grow your merit, and if you get too high, your merit won't just not grow, it will decrease. Maintaining a high meritocracy value is very difficult. Getting to 100 is practically impossible.

Meritocracy grows by 1 every 5 years up to the growth cap (, and will be decreased if the hard cap drops below the current meritocracy value.

The growth cap is 100 - (corruption*2). The hard cap is 100 - corruption.

Here's an example:

If your corruption is 25, your meritocracy can grow up to 50, and is hard capped at 75. Let's say your merit does grow to 50. Now, if a few years later corruption rises to 40, the growth cap will fall to 20. With a merit of 50 and a growth cap of only 20, merit will not grow. It also won't decrease, because the hard cap is still 60, greater than 50. However, if corruption later rises to 55, not only will your merit not grow, it will decrease to the new hard cap of 45.

Managing Bureaucracy
To get rid of the modifier, the player must have the Required Governance indicator smaller than the Current Governance indicator.

In order to do this, the player has a few choices:


 * Improve administrative technology.


 * Give some land to Nobles, Citizens or Clergy (option within the Land Management panel in the Realm Management menu or cultural estate menu).


 * Raise autonomy or wait for autonomy to rise on its own due to the modifier in provinces that have citizens, or nobles and no serfdom.

To help prevent the modifier from firing at all, the player can take the "Decentralization" policy, which removes the natural monthly autonomy decrease provided by VeF, and/or try to increase meritocracy (done by having low corruption as shown above).