Dev Diary 2019-01-18

Welcome to our first of two dev diaries for 3.8.6, due out this Friday,January 25th. This release will be one of our lightest as it was mostly worked on around the holidays and as such we've only got this diary and next Wednesday's diary before release. If you noticed there haven't been diaries for the past several releases, I'm trying to get back to the habit of keeping players informed of what we're up to.

Much of this release went into missions and balance adjustments so nothing to exciting or sexy this time around.

Missions in Ireland
A short mission branch for the Irish minors gives them all at least something and keeps the pattern we've had of slowly moving many of the nation formations decisions into missions instead. Ulster was exempted from these as its primary culture is not Irish; they'll get attention in a later release (mission branch or tree coupled with events for the Burke Civil War that broke out shortly after our timeline starts).



Of course, no one wants to play an Irish minor just for a tiny 4-mission branch so Ireland proper has received it's own mission tree; basically the generic stuff you'd expect in terms of fortifying Ireland, building a fleet to challenge England, and then taking the British Isles for yourself before trying for Britain's piece of the colonial pie. Noticeably absent from the mission tree are options for the Scots-Irish Confederacy or Celtic Nation formables; I'd generally like to keep theoretical or mutually exclusive formables off the mission trees. As decisions, someone who doesn't want the formable can silence the decision and move on whereas missions you don't want to take have no such option which means you'd lose the handy alert banner.



Missions in Mali
Totally unrelated to the missions above, but as we cover more of Europe with missions it's time to try stepping out and spreading the missions around a bit more and Mali seemed a natural choice given its potentially dominant position in East Africa in 1309.



The areas in that region were also redrawn in part to make the missions more manageable and in the continued quest to make all areas 3-5 provinces.



That's all for today, next week we'll take a look at missions in the Netherlands and some general balance changes before Friday's release.