Paradox Studio Thread

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I don't know if this image was posted here yet but uh, what the fuck Paradox? Not even the most intoxicated alternate history writer could come up with this.

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I don't know if this image was posted here yet but uh, what the fuck Paradox? Not even the most intoxicated alternate history writer could come up with this.

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It's almost like the AI just does everything randomly, this looks more like an election map than anything close to a plausible ACW. I think that since this is a big mainline title, Paradox will either put a shitload of patches and DLC to fix the game or will just go full Stellaris and remake the game every update in a bid to actually make it actually functional.

I don't really see them giving it the Imperator treatment though since it would look too bad on their part to just ditch one of their big mainline games like that and Imperator was an experiment on their end they could patch a few times and ditch once the player count dwindled.
 
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I don't know if this image was posted here yet but uh, what the fuck Paradox? Not even the most intoxicated alternate history writer could come up with this.

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Ready to autistic rage
That's worse than what it would spawn in original vanilla Vicky II right out of the box. In that one it had to be slave states so at a minimum it would only gain all the West. If this is supposed to be an abolitionist secession then it shouldn't have the slave states and they shouldn't give it all the same stuff.

I feel kind of self-conscious, rightly, about posting these fan fic dev diaries all over a lolcow forum, but at the same time if anybody reads much here they know what they get when they click on one of my spoilers. The Paradox Studios Thread is also genuinely better than the whole Paradox Forums.

So in Victoria II and 3 both the CSA comes in dynamically, don't know so much about how it goes in 3 but in II you'd get cores that would spread and the cores would all revolt, and the war starts instantly.

I think there's a better way to script the start while allowing several interesting alternate history scenarios without necessarily going on a state-by-state basis, which tends to result in fuckery like this. Basically, as I see it the rebel states can be separated into several categories:
Secession before Fort Sumter, all of the Deep South basically
Secession after Fort Sumter (that is, secession in response to Lincoln's call to arms), most of the Upper South
Divided government (had Confederate pretender or Union pretender governments), some of the Upper South
Never seceded at all (Maryland, Delaware does'nt really count since it was part of Pennsylvania/New Jersey's cultural world and the slavery there was just an artifact)

Additionally, you have the Unionist activity in Nickajack, cases where the state broke geographically (Virginia, Arizona), and other parts of the South where Unionist activity could have been stronger (Cajun Country, Texas Hill Country) or parts of the North that could have been more Confederate (the Ohio River Valley, New York City, Southern California).

War was not at all guaranteed, many Northerners were not opposed to secession, so in a scenario where Lincoln/Lincon's analogue wins (in Victoria 3 terms, an IG with an Abolitionist ideology forms a government, or forms one without a pro-slavery ideology also in it), by default the Deep South leaves. That's a minimum, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas is the core secession unit.

Then, this starts a Fort Sumter event chain (and since SC always leaves, which is realistic, it can be Fort Sumter by name), with three possible outcomes. If the North retreats, they lose their claims to the Confederacy; basically, the Deep South alone gets negotiated secession. if the Confederates attack first (historical), they get the Upper South but the North rallies in war support. If the Union attacks first, the Confederacy gets all of the South, NYC, guerilla war in the Ohio River Valley and SoCal, and Appalachia stays loyal. I can't really think of a way to make it more of a Confederate-screw and have stronger Unionists.

Additionally, there's an Election of 1864 (or the appropriate year for whenever the war takes place in-game) event chain. If the Peace candidate wins, you get negotiated secession, though they'll never accept the Confederates conquering unwilling states and they may keep chunks of Unionist areas (like West Virginia, or hypothetical Nickajack) that they occupy. Think of this like how the exceptional circumstances of Guadalupe Hidalgo and Santa Anna's capture by the Texans are rendered iN Victoria II by event. However, the Radical Republicans can launch a military coup to overturn the election, which sparks a rebellion of the Central Confederacy and Mormons. (There's no real life military putsch thing I'm basing that on, it's just an excuse to have Vallandigham as a plausible thing.)

For an abolitionist-caused civil war, the most plausible story I can tell is it being caused by a much more politically strong South imposing Southern violations of civil rights on the North, like mail censorship, conscription into slave patrols, and even importation of slaves into technically free states due to Dred Scott. In this case it all goes kind of the same, but the "core" secession is New England and Upstate New York, the "we start it" secession is New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the West Coast, and the maximalist secession is the entire free USA.

The system also needs to have flags for potential ahistorical conquests, I think pretty much any filibuster target would probably by its nature have extremely militant Fire-Eaters in control.

The hypothetical Anglo-French intervention was handled well in PDM, where the game had a whole system of head of government traits and heads of government with bad traits could blow the Trent Affair up into war. The big thing is, sure intervention is not totally implausible, but it shouldn't be something you can just rely on, as the British really were not that into backing the Confederates, it was very unpopular. I think if you had somebody like Seward in charge, who was rabidly militaristic and anti-Anglo, then you'd get a war one way or another. i think the Anglo intervention should function more like a separate war Britain opens, not a cobelligerent in hte Civil War.

I think this would make a nice Victoria II mod. Of course a person can just play Grand Tactician, but it doesn't let you wargame it on a global scale, make very big changes long in the past (though it is really nice it lets you have filibuster states), or play out the rest of your alternate timeline.


Edit: Something I forgot to say was the neutrality of Kentucky. Historically, Kentucky declared neutrality, but the Confederacy violated it first.

I think it'd have to be a real in-depth mod to model something that petty, but you could imagine a tag splitting off for a border state (it's worth noting that Kentucky, while geographically divided, was less so than Missouri and more so than Maryland) with a decision to invade it, the trade-off being that invading first means you might capture it but you effectively turn it into hostile territory.

I also thought of suspension of habeus corpus being some sort of mechanic where you can basically pre-empt secessionism in a state, but you do have to choose the state.
 
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Lets speculate a bit about what deer feeder did in eu4 in the downtime. my guess is he played tall sweden.
He probably united Italy for like 10th time.

What do thread goers think about Anbennar mod? I played Grey orcs recently and I wasn't that impressed. Lore seems cool but its all over the place. Missions were fun. I need to try it one more time. Maybe inside the empire this time or playing something undead. Overall I wasn't that impressed.
 
What do thread goers think about Anbennar mod?
Personally I'm a big fan, but I'm kinda unusual in that I basically only got into EU4 to play Anbennar.
Maybe inside the empire this time or playing something undead.
If you're going undead I'd highly recommend trying to form the Black Demesne. 10/10 skelly gameplay, would spoop Cannor again.
 
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What do thread goers think about Anbennar mod?
Pretty much the only reason I boot up EU4 these days. Vanilla's fine, but I find the new setting, lore, and added mechanics to be more varied and enjoyable, personally (except when you get decimated by an enemy War Wizard).

It being made piece-meal by many different people all collaborating on Discord does mean that there's a lot of variance in-between the different nations, both in terms of how much content they have (some important ones like Lorent or Wex basically having been untouched for ages, while newly updated nations have much more) and in terms of the overall quality (playing Pelodar or whatever in the corner of Aelantir was fun, but there were quite a few bugs that I and others reported to the contributor in charge). It's pretty much the definition of a mixed-bag, but I think the overall project is fairly well-made.

I like kobolds, so I often go back to playing in the Dragon Coast, even if it's practically an exercise in masochism. Still, managing to survive and then crush two neighboring great powers is a wonderful feeling. It's similar to the amount of progression you get from nations like Jaddari, which is quite fun to play. If you want an undead focus, pick up Order of the Iron Scepter (which forms Esthil), an adventuring band in Escann. Their whole shtick is being lead by a necromancer who wants to bring about a land of unrestrained magic, along with using the dead as cheap and populous labor (necronomics). The vampires in places like Corvoria can also be fun if you're going more for an espionage route of infiltrating/dismantling the Empire.

My biggest complaint is probably just my gripe with EU4 as a whole: there's not really much incentive to continue past a certain year or into the later ages beyond just map painting. Some Anbennar mission trees (like the notRomanEmpire of Castonath) are huge enough to give you things to do, but it mostly just boils down to conquering the world. Anbennar does include a feature to give the AI a chance to get a Great/Mythic Conquerer as a ruler, which helps consolidate power blocs later in the game, but it still just turns into endless waves of manpower smashing into each other.
 
Paradox is hell bent on making every game into a Eu4 clone.
No, I beleive they are making every game a hoi4 clone where you can go on a wacky alt-history path which does nothing, except give you some op modifiers (numbers on a screen) and change your name and flag. And you have to do five 70 day focuses to get to it. Paradox games are literal skinner boxes nowadays where you press button and get neuron activasion. Because when you can't have a proper historical simulator (because the ai is shit and eats rocks and can't fight wars or manage their countries properly), the best thing to do is add unrelated shit in it so the player goes soyface over it and forgets how shit the game is.
 
No, I beleive they are making every game a hoi4 clone where you can go on a wacky alt-history path which does nothing, except give you some op modifiers (numbers on a screen) and change your name and flag. And you have to do five 70 day focuses to get to it. Paradox games are literal skinner boxes nowadays where you press button and get neuron activasion. Because when you can't have a proper historical simulator (because the ai is shit and eats rocks and can't fight wars or manage their countries properly), the best thing to do is add unrelated shit in it so the player goes soyface over it and forgets how shit the game is.
It's a good example for how modern lefties view politics though. In Victoria II the pops dictated government policy, in Victoria III government policy dictates the pops
 
Just watched a lot of pread videos for vicky 3 a bunch of heckin' wholesome communist revolutions:
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fuck paradox for appeasing their retarded fanbase.
 
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Oddly enough one random ship was still navigating the galaxy after I hit continue.
It may have been Reinforcements in Transit or a Science Ship doing the warp thingy, I've only nuked the Universe once but I know it is intended for shielded worlds to survive so there may be other edge cases they make survive.
 
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