Tinto Talks #111 - 1.3 Open Beta Info & News

Hello everyone! Happy Wednesday, and welcome to Tinto Talks 111. I’m Ryagi, Community Manager at Paradox Tinto. Today I wanted to give you a short rundown on what’s in store for 1.3, our plans for feedback collection in the Open Beta, as well as a brief overview of how we handle feedback in general.

So what’s in update 1.3? 

Update 1.3 has a key focus on Italy, and the Italian Renaissance, with reworks to the 2 major Italian Situations, Italian Wars, and Guelphs and Ghibellines.The first step in these reworks was collecting your feedback, which we did primarily through posts such as this one. After feedback was processed, Two Strike Teams were put together. One for each situation; Both with the goal to improve and overhaul the current situation-related gameplay based on that collected feedback. Some of the baseline improvements include: adding new actions,  options,  and content,  fixing,  tweaking,  and rebalancing the existing content,  and also looking for UI and Art-related visual improvements.

Guelphs and Ghibellines:

The most common pattern among feedback we received on the Guelphs and Ghibellines was that the situation could be ignored entirely, lacked interactivity, and essentially functioned as a free CB generator and not much more. One of the primary aims here was to make the situation more interactive along with delivering a UI that gives the player the tools they need to engage with the situation.

New Guelphs and Ghibellines Situation Panel in 1.3

I asked our Content Designer on Guelphs and Ghibelines to talk a briefly about the vision behind Guelphs and Ghibellines: 

Our vision for the Guelphs and Ghibellines was and remains, to be not solely about direct acquisition of land, but to play with the factional International Organizations and an opportunistic switching of allegiances when necessary. 

We want the Situation to provide plenty of opportunity to go to war with the Force Faction Casus Belli, and bolster their faction's progress with that. Of course direct conquest should not be fully discouraged and is an important part of the Italian gameplay as well. With our changes to the Guelphs and Ghibellines in 1.3, we want to introduce more consequences of acting both in your faction's favor and against it. Conflict within a faction should come to the detriment of your shared goals, while acting against common foes will speed up your progress to victory. In addition to that, we also wanted to breathe more life into the factional allegiance around players and create a good pace for AI countries to switch sides and re-draw the factional lines within Italy. 

And last but not least, becoming the Leader of either the Guelphs or the Ghibellines should come with a lasting impact and reward on the country itself, instead of only affecting the membership within the Holy Roman Empire.

Italian Wars:

Italian wars received a major facelift in 1.3, and it’s something our Content Designers were passionate about. The baseline feedback was sourced once again from you the community, primarily through this post on the forums, this post on Reddit, and this post on Discord.

Some of the first bits of feedback via Discord on Italian Wars

Perhaps not so surprisingly, some of the feedback we got had similar patterns to feedback on Guelphs or the Ghibellines, specifically to do with interactivity. We also heard from you generally that AI interaction was not guaranteed, and the situation didn’t feel like it offered enough rewards or incentive for the player. 

As with Guelphs and Ghibilines, I asked the Content Designer who worked on this to give an overview:

The Italian Wars rework was built around a few clear goals: add interactivity, make the situation fun to play through, give the AI a stronger read of what's going on, and introduce a new Tension mechanic. Tension works as both a narrative driver, conveying a region sliding into conflict, and as a gameplay lever that unlocks new actions and effects, raises the prices of military-adjacent goods across Italy, enables military intervention at a grander scale, and even annuls truces when it reaches its maximum point. The rewards themselves are now meaningfully powerful, giving the player a real sense of pursuit and accomplishment as they progress. Finally, the UI now surfaces the detailed information players need to engage with the situation, and is intended to set the baseline standard for every new and reworked situation going forward.

A quick preview of the new italian wars panel

Italian Wars is something we felt is best shown in motion, so rather than going into more depth discussing it here, we opted to go for a video + livestream instead, specifically dedicated to showing off the new Italian Wars! Of course you’ll be able to play it yourself in the beta just as soon, but we’ll be using the livestream as a platform to take your questions about the situation, and jumpstart another cycle of feedback on the new Italian Wars. 

If you want to join us for that showcase, we’ll be premiering live Today June 4th, 16:00 CEST/10:00 EST over on the Official Europa Universalis YouTube. If you can’t make it don’t worry! The showcase itself will be available to watch anytime (But of course we can’t take questions on stream from the future) 

These 2 situations are the big ones, but we also have a plethora of new general systems, QOL, Balance and things that we felt the gameplay loop would benefit from.

 Other Features in 1.3:

• Great Power System — Reworked to area-dominance model; new Regional Power tier at 15 points (half GP bonuses); 30 points for full GP status.
• Province Capital Lock — Permanently designate a Province Capital, which will prevent the Shift from population shifts
• Estate Interactions — 8 new actions (levies, taxes, clergy loans, parliament sessions) you can use at the cost of satisfaction
• Coastal/Inland/River Combat Bonuses — Unit types gain or lose effectiveness based on geography in the battles location
• Auto-Expand Buildings & RGOs — Toggle-based automation that upgrades buildings and raw material sites when conditions are met.
• Unified Artist Court — Artists are now  characters with passive modifiers;  
• Cabinet Automation Split — Separated the automation for hiring cabinet members and assigning cabinet actions
• Reformation Spread Rework — Reformation now uses the movement spread system spreading differently through pop-types
• Rebel Negotiations — Buy off or accept rebel demands before they revolt.
• Fort Loyalty & Reduced Rebel Garrisons — Forts roll for loyalty on revolt; rebel garrisons heavily penalized by revolt type.
• Automated Diplomats — Fine-tune which diplomatic actions the AI handles and reserve slots for manual use.
• Chivalric Orders Database — Orders are now defined as self-contained moddable entries.
• Creditworthiness — 0–100 score affecting loan interest rates based on borrowing history.
• Lend Unit to Ally — Send armies to fight under an ally's command until the shared war ends.
• *Imperial Circles — New HRE governance layer with elected Circle Leaders and satisfaction tracking. *[implemented but with content coming, see section on differences between beta/release]
• Independent Operations — Assign armies to AI control for the duration of a war.
• Government Bonds — New debt instrument for countries with the Central Bank advance
• Cost-to-Efficiency Conversion — ~30 modifiers converted to diminishing-returns efficiency with a 50% cost floor. 

1.3 comes with many balance changes to the Economy, Pop Demands, Navy, Military Orders. We expect these balance changes to have a ripple effect through to other systems (for example, mercenaries) so we’re very eager to see how players feel with new games in the 1.3 Open Beta. 

Johan went into a little more detail on some of these miscellaneous additions coming in our Previous Tinto Talk. If you’re curious for more info do check that post out, ask any questions you have here, or dive straight in and see for yourself Today!

One last thing: Starting in 1.3, Achievements will be able to be unlocked in any single-player game, including non-Ironman saves and modded/launch-option games, aligning EU5 with other Paradox Titles such as Imperator/CK3/Victoria 3. We’re confident in making this change due to a majority of player feedback since release. That being said, we're aware this is not something the community is fully unified on, so we’d invite you to express your thoughts on it as you always have.

This shift is unfortunately not as easy as flicking a switch, so you can expect to see this only partially implemented in 1.3 Beta, with full implementation during the beta period, and certainly by the time we have full release. 

When is 1.3 Open Beta?​

1.3 Open beta will be available to opt into starting June 4th. We plan to have the open beta open for around a month, after which 1.3 will be fully released onto the default branches.

How is the open beta different from the release?​

The 1.3 Open Beta is a chance for us to share and test the features in 1.3, while collecting feedback on them from you. This means that while this beta is largely “feature complete”, there are still bugs to be fixed and balance changes to be made. Many of these balance tweaks will be based on the feedback we receive from you, the Community.

We plan on pushing weekly updates to the open beta, and it’s likely the first couple of these updates will be the bigger ones. However, we may do quicker updates for hotfixes if we find game breaking issues.

While this is by no means a complete “Known issues” list, here are some of the bits of the open beta that for now are rather rough around the edges:

• Localization[list]
• We aim to have 1.3 fully localized into the supported non english languages by the time it exits open beta, but until then, languages other than english will have extensive amounts of work in progress localization.

Performance

• Performance in the beta of 1.3 has, based on our testing, been relatively equal to or better than 1.2.5, which is promising, but it does not reflect what we hope to achieve by the time 1.3 releases. If performance is something you have been struggling with, please let us know how your system fairs with the 1.3 Open Beta!

Imperial Circles

• Imperial circle actions for the Emperor, circle leaders and members are very work in progress and will be expanded upon later in the beta.
• Balance is being actively tuned, especially with circle satisfaction, which will be heavily impacted by the addition of the actions mentioned above.

Balance (Especially with new or reworked features such as Italian Wars)

• This point perhaps goes without saying, but numbers as presented in the beta are not final, and are subject to change based on your feedback throughout the beta process

Achievements

• As mentioned in the section above, the shift from Achievements being fully vanilla, iron man only, to non ironman and modded has partial implementation in 1.3 Open Beta, with full implementation by the time beta is over.

How can I post feedback on the 1.3 Open Beta?​

For 1.1 Open Beta we heavily utilized a single Megathread, and this we feel went fairly smoothly. However, this time we are going to try a slightly different method to feedback collection on the forums, which should hopefully give us more specific and up to date feedback.

If you’re on Forums:
Throughout the 1.3 Open Beta, we will be hosting daily feedback threads (Mon - Fri) to collect your feedback on various particular aspects of 1.3, including the open beta process itself. The first of these will be held on Beta Launch Day, June 4th.

If you’re on Steam:
We’re sticking to the same method as our 1.1 Rossbach open beta. 1.3 Open beta will have a dedicated subforum which can be found here. All feedback posted here will be taken as feedback based on the open beta!

Here is where Open Beta Feedback will be taken on Steam

If you’re on Discord:

Similar to steam, we’re using the same methods we used for 1.1. Which in this case is the 1.3 Beta Feedback Forum, with various tags to best describe your feedback.

Here is where Open Beta feedback will be taken on Discord

If you’re on Other Platforms:

Your feedback will still be taken into account, but be sure when posting that you specifically mention that it’s related to the 1.3 Open Beta, as a majority of players use live versions, so outside specific community spaces dedicated to 1.3, the default is for us to assume players are discussing the live version.

How is feedback processed at Tinto?​

Feedback processing is an interesting and complex topic I think has room to potentially be explained even more in depth through a future dedicated Tinto Talk, but I wanted to touch on the basics of the process here since it’s very relevant right now to questions you have, and to the 1.3 Open Beta. The difference between a bug and a piece of feedback is sometimes not as clear cut as one might think. And just because something is working as we designed it, doesn’t always mean that design is immovable.

Oftentimes, we will see bugs turn into feedback, or feedback turn into bugs. With that in mind, let’s separate the discussion into bugs/feedback.

Bugs:
Bugs are reported, Investigated by a human QA to confirm validity, after which they are logged in our choice of issue tracking software, Jira. After they are logged, these bugs are then triaged by a lead for the appropriate department (Content, Art, UI, etc) for priority.

In terms of resources, we split our development team so that work is done in parallel. While some might be fixing UI Bugs and working on QoL, Others are improving AI behavior, Performance etc. Of course we can’t assign artists to work on Performance, or the Community Team to work on UI (Or at least, that’s probably not a very good idea…) so departments are always communicating on prioritization and scope when it comes to both feedback and bugs.

Feedback:
For the sake of presentation, I’ll boil down feedback processing into 4 steps:

• Collection
• Internal Discussion
• Development
• Release

Feedback collection loop vizualized

You’ll notice the distinction between Internal Discussion and Development (Development itself could arguably be split into even more detailed sections but… maybe for a next time). Most if not all direct feedback is discussed by the team internally here before it properly begins its development journey. This can be as simple as “Hey this post describes X or Y thing and I think it’s 100% on the mark, should we do something about it?” “Yes, Make a Jira”. Or as complex as month(s) long discussion on pros and cons, as well as potential solutions. Usually, it’s somewhere in between. When it comes to longer discussions, it’s very common that this isn’t one single discussion but multiple repeated ones that can tie into one another.

After these discussions, feedback is logged similarly to bugs, and a Jira is created and tasked out by our Studio Leads. In some cases for larger batches of feedback, the Community Team assists by collecting data driven feedback reports that dev strike teams then use to tackle said feedback. This was the case for both Italian Wars and Guelphs and Ghibellines, as showcased earlier in the TT.

Once a feature or solution is actually developed, it of course has to be tested on our development branches (And/or if we’re feeling very confident and believe the risk is low enough, Beta Branches) . After this testing, features are slotted into a release candidate branch, and eventually go live to you! And thus begins a new cycle, as new feedback on the implemented solution/feature is collected and the process repeats in parallel with other feedback cycles.

Closing Thoughts and Summary​

We hope you have enjoyed this Tinto Talk! Some final recaps:

• Reminder, 1.3 Open Beta is live later today with patch notes![list]
• Opting in is as easy as selecting a new branch on steam, detailed opt in instructions will be shared in the posts there.

If you are interested in our two upcoming Q&As, you can find info about them here.

If you want to hear more about the Italian Wars, check out our showcase today 16:00 CEST on the Official YouTube

That’s all for now. Next week we’ll check in on the 1.3 Open Beta and talk about what progress we’ve made by then.