As previously hinted at, Paradox Development Studio is unhappy with the randomness of the New World. The team are now remaking the entire mechanic which was introduced to Europa Universalis IV through an expansion.
This ‘remaking’ will be entirely free to owners of the Conquest of Paradise add-on. A new developer diary has been released explaining the overall new direction for RNW mechanic. It’s ”likely” to make the next big patch.
They’re going to remove landmass generation from the equation and instead use ‘World Tiles’.
”In this system, the New World is divided into an 8x9 grid, with each square in the grid being an area roughly the size of the British Isles. This grid is then filled in with ‘tiles’, which are hand-crafted pieces of terrain. Tiles can be of varying size, one tile might be a group of islands occupying a single square, while another might be a super-continent covering a 6x6 area.”
“The tiles define the shape of the landmasses and provinces, while terrain and climate is generated according to latitude - the same island tile can be either a frozen rock or a tropical paradise depending on where on the map it ends up. We plan to release this system with at least 100 different tiles, and modders familiar with map-making will easily be able to make more (without changing the checksum), so you should not lack for variation.”
While the new RNW system will take longer to initially start a fresh game, loading saves will be quicker - matching load times for regular world campaigns. ”Players will also be able to see the unique seed of their generated world and re-use that seed if they want to play in the same world again. In multiplayer, the host will send the RNW to the clients along with the save game.”
Paradox will also be addressing other issues with the current RNW system such as province and seazone names, country generation and a variation in province count.
More ambitious plans, which are by no means guaranteed, include setting special parameters like province and native density. A greater variety in what can be discovered such as the chance to find a nation that’s technologically superior to your own, and even letting Nation Designer start you off in the RNW - even starting alone on your own landmass.
Check out the EU4 - Dev Diary - July 9th for more on the remake of the Random New World.
