Gamers will also have to deal with new local powers

Sep 23, 2014 23:15 GMT  ·  By

The Art of War expansion for Europa Universalis IV aims to fundamentally change the way the map of the game world looks, with the team at Paradox Development Studio aiming to introduce a number of new provinces and change the way various political entities evolve over time.

The area around Indochina and Indonesia is one which has been poorly represented up until now, and the company says that they want gamers to see how the various factions increased their power or were destroyed as Vietnam, Siam or Burma emerged.

The company explains in an official forum post that “You will find big Lan Xang and divided Shan in the grand campaign. If you change the start date, you will see how the Taungu dynasty expands their territory, or how Vietnamese Trinh and Nguyen war lords appear. More provinces and revised borders have enabled us to represent these historic changes in the political borders more precisely.”

The aim was to make sure that Indochina was more balanced in Art of War, with the various powers in the area all able to conquer the others, based on the new distribution of tax values, manpower, cultures, religions and trade goods.

Indonesia is more open to colonization

Europa Universalis IV, as the name implies, is focused on the big powers of the continent and their ability to create colonies all over the world to project their power.

Paradox needs to strike a balance between the ability of the likes of Spain, France or England to spread colonists in the areas where they did so historically and the gamer’s ability to choose one of the nations that exist there already and fight back.

For Indonesia, but also for Australia and Polynesia, the company was faced with some tough choices.

They explain that “some provinces should be colonizable, even though local sultanates or tribes governed there. This is a problem we face in many parts of the world; you don’t want to say that nobody lived in Massachusetts or Timor or Namibia, but you do want to give Europe the historical openings it had; modeling history is a great saga of compromises.”

Aceh, Java and Borneo were removed to make way for Ternate and Tidore.

In Europa Universalis IV – Art of War, all of Papua New Guinea, Australia and New Zealand are open to colonization.

The expansion is set to arrive on the PC before the end of the year.