User Guide

43
country’s ports are cur-
rently blockaded by hos-
tile fleets.
On January 1
st
of each
year you will also receive
a large, lump sum amount
of per capita tax which
should be thought of as
a tithe. The per capita tax
is not displayed in the
budget and is deposited
directly into your treas-
ury. If you have any vas-
sals, their monthly pay-
ments will be included in
the tax income line of the
budget. Europa Universa-
lis III uses “ducats” as the
term for money, so the to-
tal shown at the bottom of
the income summary is the number of ducats
that your country’s economy is generating on a
monthly basis.
Budget Allocation Sliders
Below the income summary, you will see an
“investments” amount, and then a series of fixed
monthly expenses. These are deducted from
your monthly income and any remaining bal-
ance is deposited to your treasury. The amount
shown in the “investments” line is determined
by the settings of the seven “budget allocation”
sliders on the right side of the interface. Let’s
take some time to look at these, and then we’ll
return to the subject of your fixed monthly ex-
penses.
You will usually devote a large portion of
your monthly income towards researching new
technologies that will benefit your realm in the
future. The first five sliders control the portion
of your income devoted to new research in the
fields of government, production, trade, naval,
and land technologies. The sixth slider allows
you to allocate an amount to be returned di-
rectly to your population. Doing so will result
in less income for you, but will make your sub-
jects happier and thus
improve your country’s
stability. The final slider
controls how much of
your income is taken in
cash. This is the money
you will use to pay your
fixed monthly expenses,
after which the balance
will be deposited to your
nation’s treasury.
Technology
Investment
In Europa Universalis
III, technology is a very
abstracted concept. Re-
search is divided into five
primary fields of inter-
est, and each field has as
many as 60 successive levels of achievement. At
the beginning of the game, you will be a “level
0” in most (if not all) fields. As you invest some
of your income in each area, you will slowly
gain new levels of advancement. This will slow-
ly improve your nation’s economy, enable new
province improvements and forms of govern-
ment, and greatly increase the quality and com-
bat effectiveness of your military forces. Let’s
look at each of these five disciplines:
• Government:
technologies will gradually
make new province improvements available
and will unlock new forms of government
that will help improve your stability, diplo-
macy, and income. Even more importantly,
you must usually achieve government level
1 before you will be able to choose your first
“national idea”; successively higher levels of
technology will allow you to adopt up to an
additional nine national ideas. We’ll talk
about these when we look at the Domestic
Government screen of the Domestic Inter-
face later in this chapter.
• Production:
technologies also lead to sev-
eral new province improvements, but their
greatest impact is to gradually increase the