Gunpowder Changes

Nations with Sub Saharan, North American, Mesoamerican and South American units will not start the game with access to gunpowder.

They can acquire access to gunpowder through one of the following:
(advanced nation here refers to Western, Eastern, Ottoman, or any Reformed Technology Group nation that can build modern artillery)

1. If an advanced nation is trading in a trade node that they are also trading in (meaning both countries have a merchant in the same trade node) and the advanced nation has a favorable opinion of the other nation
2. An advanced nation owns a province within a certain distance of one of your provinces. This varies a bit place by place and is based on the game's regions. If you have a province in the North China Region and a European has a province in Indonesia then this qualifies. The advanced nation must have a favorable view of you.
3. Alliance with a more advanced nation
4. Subject of a more advanced nation
5. You are the overlord of a more advanced nation
6. If you win a war against a more advanced nation
7. Reform your technology group

Artillery Changes

Nations with Sub Saharan, North American, Mesoamerican and South American units will not start the game with access to artillery. Muslim, Chinese and Indian nations have basic artillery but no advanced artillery.

To gain access to imported artillery:

1. An advanced nation is trading in a trade node that you are also trading in (meaning both countries have a merchant in the same trade node) and the advanced nation has a favorable opinion of the your nation
2. An advanced nation owns a province within a certain distance of one of your provinces. This varies a bit place by place and is based on the game's regions. If you have a province in the North China Region and a European has a province in Indonesia then this qualifies. The advanced nation must have a favorable view of you.
3. Alliance with a more advanced nation
4. Subject of a more advanced nation
5. You are the overlord of a more advanced nation

To gain access to fully modern artillery you must reform your Technology Group

Matchlock vs Flintlock weapon penalty

Before going any further please take 2 minutes to scan these two wiki pages so that you understand something about Matchlock, Flintlock and associated technologies.

Matchlock[en.wikipedia.org]
Flintlock[en.wikipedia.org]

Now that we have some background, consider the below table which shows the Infantry Fire variable present at different military technology levels.

My contention is that this variable is most closely tied to the effectiveness of the infantry weapons employed.
The changes here scale roughly with this timeline I've constructed of firearms advances.


I tweak the rough scaling a little bit and create a new Infantry Fire table that better reflects the advances in weapons technology as I understand it.


The wheellock advance is dealt with via a seperate event. When originally introduced, the wheellock presented significant advantages over the matchlock, but was prohibitively expensive, limiting its use on the battlefield.

This is fine and everything works out if a nation is European and experiences firearms improvements according to this timeline.

However, this is not really what happened elsewhere. Asian nations did not replace matchlock technology until much later when it was introduced by Europeans.

So what I wanted to do is find a way to reflect this.

The idea way would be to have seperate Infantry Fire variable for different Technology Groups.
However, this is not possible because of the way the variable is introduced in the game. It must apply to everyone equally at the same level.

As I reviewed the equations that drive combat in the game I realized I had a possible solution.

Please take a look here and pay attention to the equations for combat casualties in the section "Casualties"
wiki[www.eu4wiki.com]

Based on these equations, the Attacking unit modifier (Infantry Fire) and Attacking unit Combat Ability (in our case Infantry Combat Power) only come into play as factors which are multiplied together to get a product.

This means that although we cannot modify Infantry Fire, we can effectively modulate the effects of this variable by changing Infantry Combat Power.

I used this equation to calcuate the difference in the final product (casualties caused by the unit) with different values for Infantry Fire. I then calculated a corresponding Infantry Combat Power penalty to offset the changes in Infantry Fire past the point of matchlock technology.
Unfortunatly, Infantry Combat Power is a variable that affects not only Fire, but Shock as well. So I settled on having the penalty offset the 1/3 of the difference.

Brief example:
Chinese nation has mil tech 19. That means they have Infantry Fire variable of 1.9 in Armies Reworked.
I apply a penalty that offsets the final casualty figure to make give it a value as if Chinese nation had an Infantry Fire variable of 0.55