Europa Universalis III Divine Wind Changing Things Up

I consider Europa Universalis III to be the best game Paradox has ever made. Paradox knows this as they have announced a fourth expansion called Divine Wind four years since the release of EU3(that's one expansion per year). What really impresses me is that Divine Wind will not merely be a feature adding expansion like the previous ones but will also rework some old mechanics in EU3. Their latest developer diary explains the changes they will be introducing to buildings and provincial decisions. 

Buildings have always been part of the EU gameplay, as the game progress you build tax collectors and cathedrals to improve each of your provinces to give you things like more tax, improved stability and lower revolt risk. Later we added the province decisions where you used magistrates to improve your decisions further with things like population censuses, grain depots and monuments. What we ended up with was a collection of lots of cool things you could do with your country but we started to see to many of them where overlapping and quite a few of them were no brainier decisions to take and you found yourself clicking some of them way to often. The time had come for some consolidation.

This is true, some of the provincial decisions just ended up being things you clicked on all the time. There was no real reason to not do them(like census provincial decision).

Then we looked over all the effects of buildings and province decisions and tried to get rid of overlapping and useless effects. After this was done we ended up with 56 different buildings. It become clear that if we wanted to keep the interface and the clicking of buttons on a manageable level we needed to do further refinements. 

They are dividing buildings into three types. Regular buildings, one per country special buildings, and manifacturies. Streamlining the whole affair into a more manageable, more meaningful decision making process. It's good to see them further polish a four year old game. I'll be keeping a close eye on this expansion.