Recently I had thepleasure of having a nice casual chat with ?gigau?, one of the leaders of themuch anticipated MEIOU and Taxes mod for Europa Universalis IV whichcombines the teams of MEIOU and Death and Taxes for a new cooperative onParadox's latest EU installment.

MEIOU and Taxes By MEIOU and Taxes team Gigau and the rest of the MEIOU and Taxes team have barely left any part of EU4 untouched, reworking some parts, completely replacing others. 4,000 provinces, over 920 nations, new religious and trade systems, updated graphics and even a new musical score – it’s massive. Today I'd like to talk some about the biggest mod in EU4, Meiou and taxes, what I think is good about it, and what I find less amusing about it. I can actually feel like religion exists as an entity in the game, being able to choose between being secularized or being more fanatic about it. MEIOU and Taxes will be launching on Saturday the 19th October, 2pm BST / 3pm CEST / 9am EDT We will be celebrating the launch with a live multiplayer game, featuring loads of players including all the developers. Europa Universalis III delves deeply into the areas of exploration, trade, warfare and diplomacy. This epic strategy game lets players take control of a nation and guide it. Ms Frontpage download free. full Version Welcome to MEIOU and Taxes, the quintessential overhaul mod for EUIV v.1.25.x. Brought to you with love by Lukew, Gigau, Myzael, Dharper, Sun.

James: First of all,I wanted to thank you for agreeing to talk today. A lot of us are very excitedfor the upcoming MEIOU and Taxes mod for EUIV and we know that it's a lot ofwork so thank you for taking time out of your schedule to answer a fewquestions.

gigau: Mypleasure.

James: Maybe we canbegin with a simple overview of what MEIOU and Taxes is for those who have notyet become familiar with MEIOU or Death and Taxes for EUIII. What kind of modis this going to be for EUIV, and what would you say is the mission you andyour partners on the team consider yourselves to be undertaking with this mod?

gigau: MEIOU and Taxes is a Content Extension Modwith, so to speak, two 'parents'. I think ?lukew?, myself and theother team members all love the EU series, otherwise we wouldn't considermodding it; at the same time we are aware of some 'shortcomings', or at leastthings we believe can be improved. But most of all we want to use the game as abackbone, to increase the experience we can get from the game.

The developers havelimitations, I guess, as they have to make a game that will work on as manycustomer machines as possible while we modders don't have the same limitations.Basically, the mod will use the modding capabilities of EUIV to change the map,add many provinces (about 800 new provinces; adding many possible nations;religions; tradegoods etc.). We are going to push the engine to add features,though we are not entirely sure exactly what the features will be yet,especially because of the changes between EUIII and EUIV. However, I feelconfident about adding some features like Revolutions, Trading Posts, Newformable nations, and so on. We are lucky enough to have ?Dharper? working onimplementing his work while he works on ?Dei Gratia? as a stand-alone modmaking me feel that we will have a more polished religious feature in M&Tthan we had in the MEIOU for EUIII.

James: When I firstheard of MEIOU and Death and Taxes working together for a new project in EUIV,the idea of a modding all star team came to mind immediately. Aside from ?Dharper?,who has been quite famous for his religion work in many mods in the past, andyourself for making gorgeous maps, what other expertise can we be expecting tosee when release time comes?

gigau: ?lukew? will be head of the project with me; ?Sun_Wu?will head the Asia department, with a revamp of China and Japan; ?EOOQE? isresponsible for the eye-candy part of the map, adding the Rock of Gibraltar,the White Cliffs of Dover, and lots of other fancy things; ?the_hdk? is takingcare of flags; ?ltm6942?, who already did graphic mods for EUIII, will betaking on the part about the user interface; ?Blxz?, after doing it for MEIOU,takes back the mantle of unit balancing; we have a team working on otheraspects to have a historical setup, national ideas specific for every nations(or at least for cultures); and ?Clonefusion? is working on trade.

James: Are thereaspects from the Death and Taxes mod that you're happy will be carried over andincorporated in this joint venture?

gigau: Well, to be perfectly honest, there are manyaspects of the mod I still have to learn about. Death and Taxes emphasized alot of flavor decisions, and that is something that might have been lacking inMEIOU since we worked, possibly, more on map and events. Plus ?lukew? has beenvery good, if I?ll be honest, at having a mod that was more polished thanMEIOU. I've always focused on adding stuff getting over-enthusiastic, andshould have tried to take some time for some more polish.

James: I waspersonally very pleased when I heard the news: it sounded like that the twomods in many ways complemented each other and now, being in a 'dynastic union,'there is a lot of hope that these two charisms can synergize well. How did youand ?lukew? first get the idea to combine efforts? Had you two discussed itmonths in advance or was it an accidental romance?

gigau: Love at first sight ? Haha. More seriously, ithappened not long before release. We were chatting about things regarding EUIVand sharing information we knew, things we expected to come with EUIV. It'sbeen something we already did together for the Divine Wind release. I've alwaystried to collaborate with other modders form other teams (did it with ?Ubik?, ?Hafte-whatshisname?and ?17blue17? to state just a few). It helped all of us adapt faster. At thatpoint ?lukew? offered a collaboration. Both of us have spent most of our EUIIImodding years working alone while getting help at times, and I think we wereboth a bit tired about it. We felt we wanted to form a 'binome' (althoughI know this is probably not an English word), we wanted to form a working pairand neither would quit. It so happens that we formed a Franco-British duo.

James: You mentionedthat you and ?lukew? would speak about EUIV. What are your impressions of thismost recent offering in the EU franchise?

gigau: Well, much like EUIII, it has its ups and itsdowns. The new trading feature, although it has its shortcomings, is a greataddition. Except possibly for the colonists the new officials are awesome. Thenew map and the way it works seems more stable and much better. One aspect thatmakes me really sad is that they didn't pick up on the MEIOU aspect of creatingtrading posts in Asia in provinces owned by someone else. Given the importanceof that aspect of colonization during the time period of the game, it's sadthat they haven't made it an internal feature.

James: Is thatsomething you'll definitely be carrying over from MEIOU for EUIII?

gigau: I sure will work on it, yes. I'm not sure yethow close to the MEIOU feature it will be, but it's one of my plans.

James: What otherimportant features are going to get carried over or adapted from MEIOU forEUIII?

gigau: The two forms of revolutions that I added thisyear into MEIOU, along with some siecle des lumière flavor events; theformable nations, along with the way they worked in MEIOU (along with a mergewith the way they worked in D&T); the hundred years' war feature; theappanages in France; and the declining Lithuania demanding the union of Lublinfor the creation of the Commonwealth.

James: Is thereanything you and ?lukew? are excited to implement that fans of either mod maynot be expecting? Something of a secret weapon you two might be concocting?

gigau: Well for now we have our hands full withplanning the release and porting our features, but you can trust that, when thedust settles down we will come up with something new, especially when we masterthe game better.

James: Do you twohave any pipe dreams at least? Things you wish you could add some day to themod even if you can't see your way doing it any time soon?

gigau: I don't know about ?lukew? but for me one ofthem would be to do something about the in game trade despite all the vanillalimitations. I'd also like to do something less ambitious - I'd really love toget around to make a War of the Roses feature.

James: One thingI've noticed about EUIV is that it has ample hints and help for newer playerswho may not have ever touched an EU game before. Will ?MEIOU and Taxes? haveany kind of tutorial or built in manual involved, or will knowledge of thevanilla game be sufficient in working our way around the new mod?

gigau: Well, I haven't studied that aspect yet so Idon't know how much we can use it to our needs, but if we can use the hintsfeature to shed light on some stuff I'd really like to use it. For example, inthe nation formation decisions we have quite a few variables, and if we couldexplain in the hints what they are it'd be awesome.

James: What kind ofsupport does Paradox offer for modders? Have they done anything to incentivizethe kind of work you and the others on the team do?

gigau: First and foremost there are all the moddingcapabilities built in. I mean, most other games I've seen, you need either abuilt-in modding feature of the game, or special programs or skills.

With the EU games, allyou need are notepad(++) and Gimp or Photoshop and you can mod just aboutanything. With EUIV they have improved the scripts for modding events etc,making things more sensible (although we need to retrain a bit). Beyond that,speaking for myself (but I think I might have been somewhat privileged to havecontact with Paradox), I've managed to report some things. For example, acouple of versions back there were glitches that made map modding complicatedand caused crashes. It didn't cause any problems to the vanilla game, just tous modders. Same with script codes that didn't work, but didn't affect vanilla.One of the things I love is when a feature from my mod gets added in vanilla(like the crops/unknown tradegoods in uncolonised provinces).

James: So you expectmodding and updating the mod for EUIV to not only go smoother but perhapsfaster than with the previous versions of EU?

gigau: I think so, yes... although only time willtell.

James: Would you saythat fans of MEIOU for EUIII will find a better experience in MEIOU and Taxesfor EUIV and should follow through with a migration, or do you imagine MEIOUfor EUIII and MEIOU and Taxes as concurrent 'sister' mods?

gigau: Not sure yet actually. I would like it to be amigration but I think it would depend on how EUIV fares and the limitations, ornot, to what we can do.

James: Speaking oflimitations, what would you say has been your greatest challenge so far workingon this mod?

gigau: Are we talking MEIOU or M&T?

James: Let's sayboth.

gigau: Well, if it's both I guess I'll go for M&Tfirst as it'll be quicker. For the moment I guess the limitation is the changesin script codes will take me some time to get used to, but otherwise it's a bittoo early to tell. For MEIOU, there have been several choke points. One of themwas map instability or, to be more precise, a 'frailty'?

James: Ahh, it was adelicate engine, you mean ?

gigau: Yeah, a delicate engine that possibly wasn'tas able to cope with some of the graphics (map and all else) as much as thedevs hoped. It didn't take much for a modification of a map file to cause acrash, and there was also an issue with some gfx files.

James: Would you saythat M&T is going to the Pièce de Résistance of your modding career, or areyou expecting this only to be a stepping stone into other mods or continuing itonto a possible EUV in the future?

gigau: No way to tell. I mean, I don't know whereI'll be in a few years. No way to know where Paradox Interactive will turn up.Maybe EUV will be a mess or on the contrary will not need any modding, but myhope would be to have an EUV mod that would be the continuation and improvementof M&T if at all possible.

James: Withoutdisparaging at all all the wonderful mods that there will be for EUIV, my finalquestion for you today is I'd like to know what you think or hope will be theaspect or aspects that will set MEIOU and Taxes apart from other mods that willbe released for EUIV?

gigau: At the very least, comparing to the modscurrently released, I would say that we are back to the first thing I saidabout MEIOU and Taxes: it's a Content Extension Mod. Whereas current modsimprove one aspect (the map, a specific area, etc.), M&T will try toimprove the world overall. I know this sounds ambitious, and it probably is,but it's the truth. We are changing the map, the graphics, and we will addfeatures to improve the balance and the flavor. Not only of France and England,where ?lukew? and I come from, but also everywhere, which will allow anyone toreally play any nation, hopefully having as much fun playing a small nascentMing in 1356 as playing Denmark, or the Ottomans, trying to carve their historyin Europe and Middle East. So our features may not equal the ?Act of Union? modfor gameplay in England, or the ?Asian Improvement Mod? for Asia, but overallthe world will be balanced everywhere.

James: Thank you somuch again for agreeing to sit down and talk. It's been a wonderful exchangeand I'm really looking forward to the release of this mod.

gigau: I hope we won't disappoint.

?MEIOU and Taxes?will be releasing their first implementation sometime in September 2013 andmore features will continue to roll out in the coming months. Expect a reviewand updates of this mod in the future. If you want more information about?MEIOU? or ?Death and Taxes? you can find ?gigau? and? lukew? in theirrespective mod niches on the Europa Universalis IV section of the ParadoxForums or meiouandtaxes.com.

Screenshots courtesyof the ?MEIOU and Taxes? Facebook page. (click on image for full size version)

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