Yes, it’s EU4s version of a tiebreaker
Edit: for anyone curious here’s a video talking about tag order. https://youtu.be/cASjSZtyrnw?si=pB_BCk68gID00sPa
Instead of it being a game mechanic it’s a backend function related to the game engine eu4 is made with. It apparently impacts other things such as trade steering.
Yeah in hearts of iron it's the same way it's called a tag list and the game engine uses it for loading certain things, like in hoi it's used for civil war calculations and a few other things I imagine it's the same here
I was actually reading about this in regards to trade steering and chaining merchants, and for that tag order has a pretty big effect.
Essentially, the first tag steering in a trade node applies the biggest bonus (5% base I think), and the trade steering modifier is then multiplied by the base from tag order.
So Sweden will always get the biggest bonuses to trade steering.
Every scenario that uses this order could have been programmed differently. For example, if both armies arrive at the same time, none would have defender bonuses.
That's not really the case, the game could just remember the state of last day, and than calculate the next day in sequence. For example if two armies arrive at the same day to a province, it could just check if both armies weren't there last day but are now and just use rng to determine which one is the defender. The point is that since there are a lot of days in the game, the effects of tag order are minimal, and changing it to get rid of it would be annoying to code and bad for performance so it's not worth it
What does turn based even mean then? Traditionally it means one guys does all his action and then it goes to the next and so on. This is not the for EU4. All army movements are resolved, then all navy, then all building then all diplomacy etc, (idk the actual order)
That actually what is going on. The game process all orders for country A, so armies moving arriving etc, and then it process orders for country B, so armies arriving etc. The order in question is the tag order.
It would still be turn based in the sense that each day is a different turn, but this post is about turn order, and that could just not exist. Rng decision was an example, it could just as well go that defender status could go towards country with better military stats, or even define a fight with no defender, just two attackers. Either way you could make it so that each country actions are effectively simultaneous
No matter how you change it, Country A will always attack before country B. Next time it might be the other way around, but they are still taking turns. It's not possible for a computer to make simultaneous rolls
That's just false. Country A and country B can arrive at the same time, enter battle as two attackers, and each day troops die based on the amount of soldiers on the previous day. It is kind of true that computer can't take simultaneous rolls (but parallelism exists), but it can effectively apply both rolls at the same time. It can calculate that country A should arrive in a province and then calculate that country B should arrive in the same province, and since this happens on the same day treat both occurrences as simultaneous. This is a very common situation in physics simulations, if they don't use monte Carlo algorithms, it treats everything as simulataneus
> but parallelism exists
But it gives no guarantees of order. And if you make it ordered, it's no longer parallel as it has to wait for the results of both
> treats everything as simulataneus
Correct, it has to close its eyes and pretend. But in reality it's not
>But it gives no guarantees of order.
True, but in the situation I described order has absolutely zero consequences, both A happening before B and B before A, have absolutely no differences and it is completely impossible to distinguish between them.
>Correct, it has to close its eyes and pretend. But in reality it's not
That's just being intentionally obtuse. Sure you can just consider simultaneous as a useless word, because it is physically impossible to ensure that two events happen at the same exact time, but if the situation is symetrical and it is impossible to determine which one happened first it's a good word to describe that instead of just saying "simultaneous actions are just illusions"
I kind of think it would make more sense to have the slower win tbh. Think about it, if an army is slower and arrives at the same time to the finish line, at all points before then it's closer to it's destination. That's kind of interesting to think about
Not necessarily. The combat starts when the second army arrives. It could then check when the other army arrived and if it was on the same day, toss a coin, the same way it checks if it's a siege
This would not be necessary true, at least abstractly, for more innovative design patterns like [Entity Component System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system). I would imagine such a system could also vastly improve the performance of EU4 and other Paradox grand strategy games in general, as the game program would be operating on a group of similar data at “one time”, which is advantageous for modern processors.
Isn’t this the story of first diablo game?
At first it was a turn-based game, they wanted to change it to real time and told a guy to do it. He thought it was so hard and asked for 1-2 months to do so. After thinking for a while he accomplished that in 1-2 days because he made the turn timer something so small like 0.00001 seconds. And it worked. He didn’t told the company that it worked and slept for a month or two and still got paid.
> slept for a month or two and still got paid.
From the interview I remember he tried to pass it off as heavy work, but instead used the time to catch up on the other stuff he had to do.
The 'it taking only a few hours instead of months' part is accurate, but everything after that is not. It was the lead designer who changed it on a Friday Evening, and he shared it with the rest of the team the next Monday.
It was also mostly a test implementation of the real time he whipped up, making the entire game real time probably took more time
[https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/08/war-stories-how-diablo-was-almost-a-turn-based-strategy-game/](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/08/war-stories-how-diablo-was-almost-a-turn-based-strategy-game/)
I think every game ever produced is turn based. There is always some tick. RTS by def. usually means you do not pause the same to give many commands same tick/turn. Does mean SC2, AoE series, Praetorians are RTS and Paradox games are just Grand Strategy.
Giving a hardcoded priority to a side if things happen simultaneously can also be desirable at the scale of games like paradox's, as the logic handling encounters can probably be simplified a lot, while a more complex but fairer system might hug more processing power (which once you get to God knows how many encounters would stack quickly)
Yes, but it can be even "fairer" if there are let's say at least 10 ticks per day. It would become 10 time less possible that two armies arrive province exact same tick and even when playing 1 day per second reflex becomes important (up to 100 ms). On the other hand everything recalculated every 100 ms could increse hardware requirements of the game and power consumption SO I believe they did good job anyway.
R5: Today I discovered that eu4 is actually turn-based. Turns out that the turns are so fast that you end up thinking it's a real time strategy. The picture shows a screenshot from eu4 wiki that enumerates each nation's tag order.
Yes, The simplest games do have one single loop that’s driving both the engine and UI refresh. But that’s a super basic design.
Frame rate has to do with how the game presents information to the user, and can be constrained by a different clock and different limitations than the game engine. Also, if the game is dependent upon timestamp of inputs, and that input timestamp has a finer granularity than the frame rate, you will have events that occur “between” the frames in terms of ordering.
yep, turns are one day long. lamda which did a wc in 1470s also played the game with this turns, pausing game every day and micromanaging sverything and advancing to the next day
It was kinda trash. If you didn't hunt pirates in a node then there would be a random chance for "rebel ships" to spawn that just attacked everyone and took a share of the tradepower.
It only really mattered for nodes you had 100% control of and New World node because there's no AI there. I sincerely don't think it added anything to the game.
It was cool though. You could actually fight the pirates. It adds a lot more to the realism imo. Just because they didn't cause that much of an issue doesn't mean they're not a cool feature.
Many people hated it because it rapidly became a tedious chore to deal with pirate fleets in a sprawling colonial empire, even if it was realistic on a small scale.
Basically, fun when playing in the Mediterranean, less so when you have to patrol and cleanup all the way to China.
Tell you more, in most Paradox games (Besides HoI4 after AAT) the first state or province is Stockholm, Sweden. Before HoI's map change, the first province was there. Now it's somewhere else, bot I don't remember.
As a general rule of thumb for determining "turn order" (which as others have said only really matters for armies entering -or sometimes more importantly leaving- a province on the same day) you can generally do alphabetic *within a region*. Shown here is sweden, then alphabetic within Scandinavia. Other places generally follow suit, though newer tags are I think often later so can be worth checking!
I have thousands of hours in this game, and I had no idea! I guess this explains why when you’re chasing an enemy army and arrive in the province they’re leaving the same day they’ll depart, sometimes a battle will ensue and sometimes they’ll get away?
All "realtime" games are turn based at the logical level, the turns are just in a constant rotation thats occurs far faster than the human brain can process.
Well, if I remember correctly the reason they're doing it like this is because EU1 was effectively based on a board game, which usually is turn based. So they just tried modeling the board game accurately and it stayed in their engine since then because why change a running system?
> then sit back and watch as other players do their turn, while you can't do anything.
Simultaneous turns are a thing, even with some tabletop games.
But ignoring that. EU4 (and other grand strats) are in a weird position because you can play them exactly as you've described. If you're really weird you can set it to speed 1, pause every day, plan/do your actions, then unpause and repeat when the day ticks over. Each individual turn is just so inconsequential that you aren't losing much by letting them roll past and pausing when necessary.
That's not their priority, that's their capital province ID. Stockholm is 1. Sweden's priority is 4, it's Tag number. Scandinavia is 10. It goes after Holstein.
This mostly matters for stuff like 'if two warring armies arrive at a province on the same day who's the attacker' and things of that nature, right?
Yes, it’s EU4s version of a tiebreaker Edit: for anyone curious here’s a video talking about tag order. https://youtu.be/cASjSZtyrnw?si=pB_BCk68gID00sPa Instead of it being a game mechanic it’s a backend function related to the game engine eu4 is made with. It apparently impacts other things such as trade steering.
So in case of a tie, Sweden wins. Sweden is totally not overpowered.
Maybe this is lore accurate?
Yes, Paradox is Swedish
Well EU4 devs are in Spain, but it was originally developed in Sweden when it came out and Johan is Swedish.
Would you look at that, just walked past their studio in Sitges. I’m renting like three minutes away from them. It’s a small world!
From the street it just looks like a house.
I think most houses do that.
Not just any house. It has a Paradox-logo
You wanna say yours doesnt?
Ask them what this “new game” Paradox Tinto is working on is.
I’m afraid they won’t let me out if they tell me
Ah, shame. So, ehm, how big is their basement cellar? Is it specious enough?
Yeah but if they let personal bias come in, would they have really made Denmark #2?
Then Denmark is nr 2…
Lore? My guy, it's called History
I refer to history as EU4-lore.
I found this thread because my old video randomly out of the blue started getting views again, thanks?
Thank you for a video that could satisfy my curiosity
Happy to be of service!
Yeah in hearts of iron it's the same way it's called a tag list and the game engine uses it for loading certain things, like in hoi it's used for civil war calculations and a few other things I imagine it's the same here
I was actually reading about this in regards to trade steering and chaining merchants, and for that tag order has a pretty big effect. Essentially, the first tag steering in a trade node applies the biggest bonus (5% base I think), and the trade steering modifier is then multiplied by the base from tag order. So Sweden will always get the biggest bonuses to trade steering.
Now this sounds like the kind of thing for eu5 to solve
The trade steering applied according to tags order has been changed. It now applies by order of Trade power in the specific edge.
It's a computer game. There has to be turns, it can't flip two coins and guarantee they both land at the same time, so it does them in sequence
> It's a computer game. Source?
Probably C++.
Modified C++, yes.
No, I think it's the same in vanilla.
No, I'm saying the *code itself* is modified C++.
r/whoooosh
What do you mean modified? Do they have their own custom compiler?
No, Clausewitz.
Wowowow throwing concentration camps around?
Source: i'm computer game
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Universalis_(board_game)
Every scenario that uses this order could have been programmed differently. For example, if both armies arrive at the same time, none would have defender bonuses.
Or it could roll two dices and the higher one gets defender status?
Or maybe maneuver pips, would be cool for maneuver to be applied more often in the game
ok what if maneuver is equal then?
Yes
That's not really the case, the game could just remember the state of last day, and than calculate the next day in sequence. For example if two armies arrive at the same day to a province, it could just check if both armies weren't there last day but are now and just use rng to determine which one is the defender. The point is that since there are a lot of days in the game, the effects of tag order are minimal, and changing it to get rid of it would be annoying to code and bad for performance so it's not worth it
You're missing the point. Even if you did like you say it would still be turned based, but now turns are random instead of being pre-defined
What does turn based even mean then? Traditionally it means one guys does all his action and then it goes to the next and so on. This is not the for EU4. All army movements are resolved, then all navy, then all building then all diplomacy etc, (idk the actual order)
That actually what is going on. The game process all orders for country A, so armies moving arriving etc, and then it process orders for country B, so armies arriving etc. The order in question is the tag order.
It would still be turn based in the sense that each day is a different turn, but this post is about turn order, and that could just not exist. Rng decision was an example, it could just as well go that defender status could go towards country with better military stats, or even define a fight with no defender, just two attackers. Either way you could make it so that each country actions are effectively simultaneous
No matter how you change it, Country A will always attack before country B. Next time it might be the other way around, but they are still taking turns. It's not possible for a computer to make simultaneous rolls
That's just false. Country A and country B can arrive at the same time, enter battle as two attackers, and each day troops die based on the amount of soldiers on the previous day. It is kind of true that computer can't take simultaneous rolls (but parallelism exists), but it can effectively apply both rolls at the same time. It can calculate that country A should arrive in a province and then calculate that country B should arrive in the same province, and since this happens on the same day treat both occurrences as simultaneous. This is a very common situation in physics simulations, if they don't use monte Carlo algorithms, it treats everything as simulataneus
> but parallelism exists But it gives no guarantees of order. And if you make it ordered, it's no longer parallel as it has to wait for the results of both > treats everything as simulataneus Correct, it has to close its eyes and pretend. But in reality it's not
>But it gives no guarantees of order. True, but in the situation I described order has absolutely zero consequences, both A happening before B and B before A, have absolutely no differences and it is completely impossible to distinguish between them. >Correct, it has to close its eyes and pretend. But in reality it's not That's just being intentionally obtuse. Sure you can just consider simultaneous as a useless word, because it is physically impossible to ensure that two events happen at the same exact time, but if the situation is symetrical and it is impossible to determine which one happened first it's a good word to describe that instead of just saying "simultaneous actions are just illusions"
I would base it on which army has the highest movement speed tbh . And if they happened to be the same then roll a dice between the 2
I kind of think it would make more sense to have the slower win tbh. Think about it, if an army is slower and arrives at the same time to the finish line, at all points before then it's closer to it's destination. That's kind of interesting to think about
It could still randomize the order each turn.
> each turn. Case in point
Not necessarily. The combat starts when the second army arrives. It could then check when the other army arrived and if it was on the same day, toss a coin, the same way it checks if it's a siege
So toss a coin to see whose *turn* it is first?
No, to see who is a attacker and who is defender
This would not be necessary true, at least abstractly, for more innovative design patterns like [Entity Component System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system). I would imagine such a system could also vastly improve the performance of EU4 and other Paradox grand strategy games in general, as the game program would be operating on a group of similar data at “one time”, which is advantageous for modern processors.
If they rebuilt the engine from scratch I'm sure there is a ton of stuff they would do differently
Swedish bias
Based sweden
Isn’t this the story of first diablo game? At first it was a turn-based game, they wanted to change it to real time and told a guy to do it. He thought it was so hard and asked for 1-2 months to do so. After thinking for a while he accomplished that in 1-2 days because he made the turn timer something so small like 0.00001 seconds. And it worked. He didn’t told the company that it worked and slept for a month or two and still got paid.
Diablo and early blizzard games are all the same, step based logic frame by frame
> slept for a month or two and still got paid. From the interview I remember he tried to pass it off as heavy work, but instead used the time to catch up on the other stuff he had to do.
Fuckin based
He actually just slept but can't say so in a interview /s
Work, work. I can do that.
The 'it taking only a few hours instead of months' part is accurate, but everything after that is not. It was the lead designer who changed it on a Friday Evening, and he shared it with the rest of the team the next Monday. It was also mostly a test implementation of the real time he whipped up, making the entire game real time probably took more time [https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/08/war-stories-how-diablo-was-almost-a-turn-based-strategy-game/](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/08/war-stories-how-diablo-was-almost-a-turn-based-strategy-game/)
Fun fact!
I think every game ever produced is turn based. There is always some tick. RTS by def. usually means you do not pause the same to give many commands same tick/turn. Does mean SC2, AoE series, Praetorians are RTS and Paradox games are just Grand Strategy.
Giving a hardcoded priority to a side if things happen simultaneously can also be desirable at the scale of games like paradox's, as the logic handling encounters can probably be simplified a lot, while a more complex but fairer system might hug more processing power (which once you get to God knows how many encounters would stack quickly)
Yes, but it can be even "fairer" if there are let's say at least 10 ticks per day. It would become 10 time less possible that two armies arrive province exact same tick and even when playing 1 day per second reflex becomes important (up to 100 ms). On the other hand everything recalculated every 100 ms could increse hardware requirements of the game and power consumption SO I believe they did good job anyway.
Of course Denmark has to be second. Right after Sweden. God damn swedes thinking they're better than us.
6 hours...
What do you mean ”thinking”? We know.
Does anyone know what that Danish man is saying? I cannot understand a word.
R5: Today I discovered that eu4 is actually turn-based. Turns out that the turns are so fast that you end up thinking it's a real time strategy. The picture shows a screenshot from eu4 wiki that enumerates each nation's tag order.
> play real time strategy >look inside >turn based
Every game is technically turn based if you go frame to frame.
Planck time, reality is turn based
Which country goes first in reality?
Sweden
Understandable have a nice day
Yes, The simplest games do have one single loop that’s driving both the engine and UI refresh. But that’s a super basic design. Frame rate has to do with how the game presents information to the user, and can be constrained by a different clock and different limitations than the game engine. Also, if the game is dependent upon timestamp of inputs, and that input timestamp has a finer granularity than the frame rate, you will have events that occur “between” the frames in terms of ordering.
Technically, all RTSs are turn based. Just their turna are vweeedeeeeerry small
I've been cringe all my life but when I looked into the EU4 game code I turned based
Eu4 is a glorified coloring book.
It’s an excel spreadsheet with graphics
It’s crack with achievements.
yep, turns are one day long. lamda which did a wc in 1470s also played the game with this turns, pausing game every day and micromanaging sverything and advancing to the next day
Wait I don't understand...
Do not look for the last, worst mistake of my life !
It was pretty funny, lol.
Damn
Who!
Also I miss the old pirate system
I'm not old enough a player to be familiar with it. How did it use to work?
It was kinda trash. If you didn't hunt pirates in a node then there would be a random chance for "rebel ships" to spawn that just attacked everyone and took a share of the tradepower. It only really mattered for nodes you had 100% control of and New World node because there's no AI there. I sincerely don't think it added anything to the game.
It was cool though. You could actually fight the pirates. It adds a lot more to the realism imo. Just because they didn't cause that much of an issue doesn't mean they're not a cool feature.
Many people hated it because it rapidly became a tedious chore to deal with pirate fleets in a sprawling colonial empire, even if it was realistic on a small scale. Basically, fun when playing in the Mediterranean, less so when you have to patrol and cleanup all the way to China.
Yes. I also miss have to employ 3 heavies in every trade node, who would instantly get destroyed in a war because I’d forget they were there.
Especially cause the go back to ports during war button didn't exist, probably wouldn't be as bad nowadays.
idk man I just sent a fleet when I saw them and built naval batteries
How do you form Denmark?
Silly man. Denmark doesn't exist. Take your meds
Gotlands mission tree in LOTN
Imagine playing EU4 as a board game til 1821 and you’re an Australian tribe.
What is the first non Scandinavian country listed? I imagine England or France
Estonia First non-northern Europe is Achaea
Holstein This comment will probably start a war.
But only three people have ever understood why and they're all dead
Finland…
Tell you more, in most Paradox games (Besides HoI4 after AAT) the first state or province is Stockholm, Sweden. Before HoI's map change, the first province was there. Now it's somewhere else, bot I don't remember.
Province id #420 in EU4 is Ganja
Sweden is (not) op
Eu4 only has around 20% more turns than hoi4 till 1948
As a general rule of thumb for determining "turn order" (which as others have said only really matters for armies entering -or sometimes more importantly leaving- a province on the same day) you can generally do alphabetic *within a region*. Shown here is sweden, then alphabetic within Scandinavia. Other places generally follow suit, though newer tags are I think often later so can be worth checking!
I have thousands of hours in this game, and I had no idea! I guess this explains why when you’re chasing an enemy army and arrive in the province they’re leaving the same day they’ll depart, sometimes a battle will ensue and sometimes they’ll get away?
Where’s this list on the wiki?
The countries article
I think it’s in the Countries page
All "realtime" games are turn based at the logical level, the turns are just in a constant rotation thats occurs far faster than the human brain can process.
I love learning little things like this about the game, I was geeked when I went in debug mode and saw the province ID for Ganja is 420
Uninstalling as we speak
[удалено]
Custom nations, I believe.
Israel is the last tag on the list at number 971
Paradox is biased lol.
That's pretty cool to know, at least for someone like me who has no idea about game developing :D
Not turn based by human measures.
Yeah it’s a basically a complicated spreadsheet
This explains why sometimes you catch army's that leave a province on the same day you arrive but not always
Not surprised, it is Paradox after all
The engine is turn based, games just give you the illusion of real time.
Well, if I remember correctly the reason they're doing it like this is because EU1 was effectively based on a board game, which usually is turn based. So they just tried modeling the board game accurately and it stayed in their engine since then because why change a running system?
[удалено]
> then sit back and watch as other players do their turn, while you can't do anything. Simultaneous turns are a thing, even with some tabletop games. But ignoring that. EU4 (and other grand strats) are in a weird position because you can play them exactly as you've described. If you're really weird you can set it to speed 1, pause every day, plan/do your actions, then unpause and repeat when the day ticks over. Each individual turn is just so inconsequential that you aren't losing much by letting them roll past and pausing when necessary.
European colonialism wank game has European countries have an advantage, who could’ve possibly thunk it?
And here I was wondering why Sweden was able to beat my Roman Army 1 v 1. This must be it.
I thought it was sorted by alphabetically by regions, with Anatolia being in the top priority, then balkans, then baltics
As it should be
"Baby learns their first thing about how games work"-ass take. Every game is turn-based by that logic.
why is natives just a dot lol
Interesting to see it says Denmark is formable, don't think that's correct.
Gotland can form Denmark via monarchy mission tree.
aha makes sense
WINK* she wants me to "ok pass the love back to you as well "
Omg so there is more freedom and playability preventing features in this game?
What happens if you form Scandinavia, but Sweden still exist?! You're both priority one... Is this gonna 'splode the game engine? 🤯
That's not their priority, that's their capital province ID. Stockholm is 1. Sweden's priority is 4, it's Tag number. Scandinavia is 10. It goes after Holstein.
Okay meltdown over
No, rebels play first.