What's the state of the Random New World? (2024)

I know there have been various periods in the life of EU4 where this feature has shifted back and forth from being completely broken to working decently and anywhere in between. I haven't played with it in years - what is it's current state? Does it make for interesting worlds and play throughs?

Would be nice to see some screen shots if anyone has played a random new world game recently.

Valladolid said:

Yeah, the province density that it gives is in no way comparable to the actual combined North and South America. It's kind of like if you got rid of the Americas and replaced them with a funky shaped Australia most of the time.

However, there are some ridiculous and rare "fantasy" options like a giant vertical "wall" and other oddities for your amusem*nt.

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I always assumed they took the total dev and prov counter of standard Western hem and applied that in a jumbled way. Would make sense since then a nation isn't at a loss from a tiny RNW but you can still get 3 independent continents vs the usual 1

TeutonicTortoise said:

I always assumed they took the total dev and prov counter of standard Western hem and applied that in a jumbled way. Would make sense since then a nation isn't at a loss from a tiny RNW but you can still get 3 independent continents vs the usual 1

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The RNW (post-rework) uses a number of pre-generated tiles which are drawn and placed basically at random with sea filling the gaps. There are, I believe, some limits on the defines to try to promote things like getting at least one "continent" tile.

(Personally I just have a mod which promotes a few large continent tiles I like to very high odds of appearing though)

Broken, if you have colonial interests.

To be more specific, trade nodes generate without visible routes, meaning you can never ever change where your merchants, randomly assigned, steer trade to.
If you're lucky, it will be generated in a way that it somehow leads to your capital port. If you're not, it goes all to the other side of the world, and there's nothing you can do except set up a second collection port.

This is my current random new world, bit hard with colonial nations I must say.

Alblaka said:

Broken, if you have colonial interests.

To be more specific, trade nodes generate without visible routes, meaning you can never ever change where your merchants, randomly assigned, steer trade to.
If you're lucky, it will be generated in a way that it somehow leads to your capital port. If you're not, it goes all to the other side of the world, and there's nothing you can do except set up a second collection port.

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Didn't they fix the trade node bug in 1.31?

Valladolid said:

Man I forgot this was even a thing. That really was a whacky addition.

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Don't even get me started on the possibility of having a random world map (nations, not geography).

Though admittedly that one's quite fun, especially with custom nations.

I love RNW and always use it. I realize that I’m probably in the minority. The problem with historical games is that you can’t unknow what you know. I like the uncertainty of RNW - I know it’s there but have no idea what is where or what the trade routes look like. That makes colonization in the new world with each game a new set of problems.

I don’t know if the missing trade route will be fixed in Leviathan. I’m not playing with it yet. But there is an easy way to understand the trade routes. Every node shows incoming and outgoing trade nodes and the amount of trade.

hayseed said:

I love RNW and always use it.

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I agree insofar with your points that I really want to love RNW and would use it almost all the time, and I honestly think you could make RNW a lot better with relatively little work, but unfortunately, at this point of EU4's lifecycle and given the lack of work on it in many years, I don't think we can expect any more official work on RNW

Alblaka said:

Broken, if you have colonial interests.

To be more specific, trade nodes generate without visible routes, meaning you can never ever change where your merchants, randomly assigned, steer trade to.
If you're lucky, it will be generated in a way that it somehow leads to your capital port. If you're not, it goes all to the other side of the world, and there's nothing you can do except set up a second collection port.

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The 1.31 patch notes said they fixed that.

hayseed said:

I love RNW and always use it. I realize that I’m probably in the minority. The problem with historical games is that you can’t unknow what you know. I like the uncertainty of RNW - I know it’s there but have no idea what is where or what the trade routes look like. That makes colonization in the new world with each game a new set of problems.

I don’t know if the missing trade route will be fixed in Leviathan. I’m not playing with it yet. But there is an easy way to understand the trade routes. Every node shows incoming and outgoing trade nodes and the amount of trade.

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I just had to reply (look at my signature).

I haven't played too much with RNW though, but that's primarily because I want to convert my saves to Vic 2.

What I can say is that I really lucked out last time I played with it. I was a custom Iceland, and the RNW had a really big "Greenland" (it was even green!) plus a whole continent just south of it. Didn't play to completion though, so I never saw the rest of it.