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Hello again, Europa Universalis Enthusiasts! Since our first Mod Spotlight for Europa Expanded, 8 months have passed and a lot of new modding changes have happened, and so did Europa Expanded accordingly! That is why today we’re very excited to present our brand new 1.12.1 “UI” update, and all the fancy UIs and mechanics that came with it! From a complete rework of the “Caliphate” originally introduced in our 1.12 “Caliphate” update, to automatic Advisor re-hiring, a Mission Preview System and more! We will both present these features, as well as talk about the process behind creating them for those who are eager to learn! So, without further ado, let’s get started!Court of Advisors
To start off with a very simple but very useful mechanic, we’re delving into our “Court of Advisors” menu, which you can toggle on or off in order to hire a specific level 3 advisor of your faith and culture at a 100% hiring cost markup, rather than having to wait for the right one to appear in the advisor pool! In the future, we also plan to expand on this using government reforms or mission rewards.



Mission Tree Previews
Something that long-time fans of Europa Expanded know is that our old system of choosing a mission tree through an event that fires 1 day after game start was rather…imperfect. In order to make the whole thing not only easier to understand for new players, but also to make it more streamlined and enjoyable to use overall, we’ve developed a system that allows for previewing the entire mission tree before choosing whether you’d like to play with the EE or the PDX one!


Expanded Vanilla Menus
With scripted UI finally giving us the opportunity to tweak mechanics that were previously rather hardcoded, we’ve decided to give some vanilla menus a new coat of paint; and sometimes even intertwined them with mechanics from previous EE updates! The first of these reworks is that of the Government Screen; The window for Government Mechanics has doubled in size (assuming sufficient screen space is available for it) to make using multiple mechanics concurrently more comfortable, and Absolutism has received its own dedicated window, similar to the Disasters window!







The Caliphate Window
But the above uses do not yet showcase the full potential of the scripted UI introduced with 1.36! Behold! The Caliphate Window, a highly requested feature by many, finally made possible, a testament of what is possible.


- genuine Authority mechanics with scaling modifiers
- Jihad targets just like a Crusade target
QoL Improvements
But folks, that is STILL not everything! In our quest to improve the game even further, we’ve decided to visit some of our EU4 pet-peeves and create Quality of Life solutions for them! So let’s not beat around the bush for long, and get started right with the likely most popular one; Automatic Colonization!








UI Creation
Part 1: Court of Advisors
For the Court of Advisors, we needed to fit every kind of advisor into the same approximate space that is usually used to show maybe 4 advisors simultaneously at best; so we had to shrink down all the information about an advisor down into much smaller area:
Part 2: Mission Previews
In the vanilla branching mission preview system, redeeming rewards is blocked by the mission requirements themselves, but of course this was not an option for previewing entire trees; we would have had to modify every single mission tree extensively, making compatibility and maintenance extremely difficult. Thus, we came up with a little trick based on EU4s transparency handling:
Part 3: The Caliphate
For our Caliphate Window, we used inspirations from several different Windows present in vanilla; the Papacy, the HRE, the Coptic Holy Sites, and even the Empire of China! We wanted to make sure that despite being new and unique, nothing feels foreign, so a lot of the elements are based on what these other Windows already employed!