Paradox Studio Thread

[Big Green]

sorry I criticised your little game though,

Never played stellaris. I only really like the games with historical settings.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Terra Invicta feels like a bait and switch: I was sold a 4X grand strategy XCOM game about aliens n sheeit, but instead I get to manage secret societies/globbohomo groups fighting each other trying to control countries, the IMF (among other random orgs), and country’s resources.

The devs definitely have middling Reddit-tier geopolitical knowledge because an early meta is the “European blue banana” where you force the UK to rejoin the EU ASAP (lol), along with Ukraine if it survives the Russian invasion (which is pre-programmed into the game). The resources from this political entity are more than all of North America, so I think the devs have an obvious worldview biasing the gameplay. It does make it amusing though seeing YouTubers accidentally talk geopolitics when playing the game.

From what I've been reading (trying to learn the game), the game seems to have a strong bias towards creating Star Trek-like faggot world where everybody is educated, rich, democratic, and fused into a single state. The assumption underlying it (with regards to how priorities effect variables and how those variables effect other things) mostly make sense, but in some way it feels very off when total war generally sees a push towards collectivism. It could be fine to have it be that the cliche unified Earth is a natural consequence of the gameplay - the whole thing is like an original story to any generic spacefaring setting where humanity has already become a faction in space - but I don't think it's believable that the global conspiracy to save the Earth isn't going to be an authoritarian nightmare.

 

[Kane Lives]

Stellaris and all it's DLC is on GOG so you can easily pirate it from gog-games. Also like with most parado$h games; look into creamapi if you have the basegame. It unlocks all the DLC for you if you slap in the files. Or with stellaris- just pirate it

Agreed. I think Stellaris in its current state cannot be recommended to anyone in good conscience. At a steep discount at best, and pirate the DLC if you want to experience the brokeness.

 

[Cringe newfag]

From what I've been reading (trying to learn the game), the game seems to have a strong bias towards creating Star Trek-like faggot world where everybody is educated, rich, democratic, and fused into a single state. The assumption underlying it (with regards to how priorities effect variables and how those variables effect other things) mostly make sense, but in some way it feels very off when total war generally sees a push towards collectivism. It could be fine to have it be that the cliche unified Earth is a natural consequence of the gameplay - the whole thing is like an original story to any generic spacefaring setting where humanity has already become a faction in space - but I don't think it's believable that the global conspiracy to save the Earth isn't going to be an authoritarian nightmare.

Unification is a tradeoff. 10 countries individually might produce 20 points of output, but combined together they will only produce 15 or something. Or even more extreme diminishing returns the larger you go. Plus, newly merged nations trend towards a natural resting point of extremely low national unity and some other characteristics.

So it's a sort of prisoners dilemma. The Human race in general would be more effective if every nation just stayed independent. That would maximise the resources of Earth. But merging nations allows YOU to keep control of more resources then you otherwise would have, since you need to invest the limited time and effort of your operatives to maintaining control. Maybe Humanity loses those 5 points by merging a bunch of nations, but if they were seperate, you'd only be able to hold on to 10 and someone else would get the other 10.

I think it's a cool dynamic.

 

[Slap47]

Stellaris and all it's DLC is on GOG so you can easily pirate it from gog-games. Also like with most parado$h games; look into creamapi if you have the basegame. It unlocks all the DLC for you if you slap in the files. Or with stellaris- just pirate it

Buy a subscription for the DLC via Steam for 1 dollar and write dozens of Steam reviews
telling people how to pirate DLC.

 

[TheGuntinator]

Recently I tried fucking around with Millennium Dawn because I wanted to make a really stupid mod. I ran into some issues though and had to seek out some documentation. Lo and behold the only way to get support was to read up on their Discord server, so I said whatever and bit the bullet by making a burner account. This apparently still wasn't enough because those fuckers wanted a phone number to even read the channels so I had to go ahead and find some free Romanian number to use on the account. When I finally got into the damn server it was filled to the brim with trannies and literal mouth breathers. You'd expect a community centered around a game where you do shit like create a Holy European Empire, make the Soviet States of America or conquer the middle east as Nazi Bulgaria to have people from all over the place in there, but apparently not.
It was all just trannies and fags arguing about contemporary politics with more delusional stances than even Reddit. I'd expect some weird turk nationalist or some commie sovietboo would be there but I didn't even see anyone who deviated from the tranny approved political stances. Fags probably banned anyone who didn't agree with them.
I hate the Internet and everyone on it.

I joined their forums to try and get earlier news on my games and check latest threads and the first thing that pops up is a Donald Trump thread about the bad bad horrible man. Didn't see a single comment that disagreed so I assume they just ban anyone who negrates the post (made by a moderator of course) like a niggerfaggotturbocunt.

Funnily enough, their forums are less active than the kiwi farms, I've noticed.

It was worth it.

Oddly enough one random ship was still navigating the galaxy after I hit continue.

I've had the prethoryns show up after i detonated the Aesthetic Engine to a dead, barren galaxy. Just imagine the look on their faces as the galaxy they've spent untold years traveling to blinks out of existence 20 years before they land, and now they have to find fuel to keep fleeing from their pursuers.

 

[CaptainAutism69]

Stellaris and all it's DLC is on GOG so you can easily pirate it from gog-games. Also like with most parado$h games; look into creamapi if you have the basegame. It unlocks all the DLC for you if you slap in the files. Or with stellaris- just pirate it

Have they always been money grabbing cunts or did they start off ok like Creative Assembly, before raping the corpse of their franchises?

 

[East_Clintwood]

Have they always been money grabbing cunts or did they start off ok like Creative Assembly, before raping the corpse of their franchises?

From what I've seen they've always been kinda jewey, but they've taken it to a whole new level in the last few years. Honestly I think after doubling the price of 2 year old DLC (that was already an iffy value proposition) have moved them to being the kings of money grabbing cunts, even over the likes of CA.

 

[Snekposter]

From what I've seen they've always been kinda jewey, but they've taken it to a whole new level in the last few years. Honestly I think after doubling the price of 2 year old DLC (that was already an iffy value proposition) have moved them to being the kings of money grabbing cunts, even over the likes of CA.

Well, near as I can tell it all started going downhill when Common Sense for EUIV got released that straight-up broke the game for anyone who didn't buy it, but things have definitely accelerated since then.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

When it was just CK2 Paradox actually got tons of praise for its very fair DLC.

EU4 was when it started to go bad.

 

[ATandTism]

Have they always been money grabbing cunts or did they start off ok like Creative Assembly, before raping the corpse of their franchises?

Semi-recently; they also started buying up former indie IPs like Prison Architect and shitting them up with their turbo-jew DLC policies

 

[CaptainAutism69]

Semi-recently; they also started buying up former indie IPs like Prison Architect and shitting them up with their turbo-jew DLC policies

Ahhhhh that explains why PA went to shit

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Unification is a tradeoff. 10 countries individually might produce 20 points of output, but combined together they will only produce 15 or something. Or even more extreme diminishing returns the larger you go. Plus, newly merged nations trend towards a natural resting point of extremely low national unity and some other characteristics.

So it's a sort of prisoners dilemma. The Human race in general would be more effective if every nation just stayed independent. That would maximise the resources of Earth. But merging nations allows YOU to keep control of more resources then you otherwise would have, since you need to invest the limited time and effort of your operatives to maintaining control. Maybe Humanity loses those 5 points by merging a bunch of nations, but if they were seperate, you'd only be able to hold on to 10 and someone else would get the other 10.

I think it's a cool dynamic.

Thank you, that makes a lot of sense.

 

[jspit2.0]

I joined their forums to try and get earlier news on my games and check latest threads and the first thing that pops up is a Donald Trump thread about the bad bad horrible man. Didn't see a single comment that disagreed so I assume they just ban anyone who negrates the post (made by a moderator of course) like a niggerfaggotturbocunt.

Funnily enough, their forums are less active than the kiwi farms, I've noticed.

I've had the prethoryns show up after i detonated the Aesthetic Engine to a dead, barren galaxy. Just imagine the look on their faces as the galaxy they've spent untold years traveling to blinks out of existence 20 years before they land, and now they have to find fuel to keep fleeing from their pursuers.

The problem is, that's fine to feel in your hug box.

But from a gameplay perspective, those moral/political judgments kill creativity. It's how you have broken historical games and scenarios.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I've been playing Anno 1800 and it has 100% confirmed my belief that Anno fans got their dream come true in Victoria 3.

Anno is not a series I ever played before, and I went in just knowing it was a Victorian city-builder. It turns out that it's really basically its own subgenre, it's definitely not a realistic Victorian city builder even to the extent that Tropico is a dictatorship city-builder or Cities Skylines is an urban planning game. What it is is a mixture of light city-building, very light naval combat, and logistics knitting together islands. All the complexity is loaded up into the need to run trade routes between economies that are in isolation simple perpetual production machines. There's no construction time, no real need to zone anything, buildings can be relocated instantaneously for free, and the economic model is that production costs money but citizens make money from your production, so (which, as a simulation, would be very fucked up) you expand your economy by expanding the workforce even if there's widespread unemployment.

These things don't make the game bad, though it does leave me wishing that there WAS a Victorian Cities: Skylines where you manage cholera outbreaks from sewer water and class war. But I can see exactly how this style of casual play would appeal. It's a command economy based, very snappy and fast, based around setting up production lines and trade routes and expanding them. The game world has this over-the-top cheerful cartoony tone (quite the opposite of a Dickensian world, but consistent as I understand with Anno) that feels celebratory, like Victoria 3's "yay let's go build the modern world!!!!!" And the aesthetic is just straight up the same, the character portraits are a lot like Victoria character portraits and the artwork is the same. Which is also beautiful, I really like how Anno 1800 looks, I'm just saying that Paradox totally ripped it off.

So yeah, I think Paradox really did take strong senses of what their game should feel like from Anno 1800.

 

[Zaryiu2]

I've been playing Anno 1800 and it has 100% confirmed my belief that Anno fans got their dream come true in Victoria 3.

Anno is not a series I ever played before, and I went in just knowing it was a Victorian city-builder. It turns out that it's really basically its own subgenre, it's definitely not a realistic Victorian city builder even to the extent that Tropico is a dictatorship city-builder or Cities Skylines is an urban planning game. What it is is a mixture of light city-building, very light naval combat, and logistics knitting together islands. All the complexity is loaded up into the need to run trade routes between economies that are in isolation simple perpetual production machines. There's no construction time, no real need to zone anything, buildings can be relocated instantaneously for free, and the economic model is that production costs money but citizens make money from your production, so (which, as a simulation, would be very fucked up) you expand your economy by expanding the workforce even if there's widespread unemployment.

These things don't make the game bad, though it does leave me wishing that there WAS a Victorian Cities: Skylines where you manage cholera outbreaks from sewer water and class war. But I can see exactly how this style of casual play would appeal. It's a command economy based, very snappy and fast, based around setting up production lines and trade routes and expanding them. The game world has this over-the-top cheerful cartoony tone (quite the opposite of a Dickensian world, but consistent as I understand with Anno) that feels celebratory, like Victoria 3's "yay let's go build the modern world!!!!!" And the aesthetic is just straight up the same, the character portraits are a lot like Victoria character portraits and the artwork is the same. Which is also beautiful, I really like how Anno 1800 looks, I'm just saying that Paradox totally ripped it off.

So yeah, I think Paradox really did take strong senses of what their game should feel like from Anno 1800.

I haven't played an Anno game yet but I wonder if the pre-Ubisoft ones are like that or not?

 

[Kane Lives]

I haven't played an Anno game yet but I wonder if the pre-Ubisoft ones are like that or not?

Like what? In the sense they're made for casual logistics chain management? Believe so, though "modern" Anno were already developed under the hand of Ubisoft since 2007, which resulted in the excellent Anno 1404 as its first game. (You can easily grab a non DRM version off GOG).

 

[LOWERCASE LETTERS]

I also highly suggest playing Black Ice- basically doubles game content- playing without feels like foreplay without sex. Just your basic infantry division requires about 8 types of equipment to be produced (MGs, mortarts, infatnry guns, atrillery etc.).
I also highly suggest Fallout mod- they went as far as putting new mechanics into the game- trade routes and money. Its clunky and crude, but it works.

Why would you do this to people? BICE belongs in the trash can, because the sheer amount of crap the game has to keep track of with the needlessly autistic production system leads to massive lag.

 

[Figger Naggot]

Why would you do this to people? BICE belongs in the trash can, because the sheer amount of crap the game has to keep track of with the needlessly autistic production system leads to massive lag.

The mod completely ignores the limitations of HOI4 and bloats itself to extreme levels to the point where the game strains itself to the engine's limit. You could point fingers at paradox for making a game that has limited capabilities when it comes to utilizing powerful hardware, but these mod developers should know better than to push the envelope to the point of it being so slow the game would take hours longer than it should just because of how much is going on in the background.

Meiou and taxes also has this issue!

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Modders have a habit of feature creep. Wars of Liberty for AoE3 is one of the best examples of that, it started as a Latin America mod with limited scope and a few unique features (espionage agents, religion, and immigration). Over time they kept adding junk and making each new faction into more and more of a special snowflake even while the AI stayed broken, until the game became a complete mess.

I haven't played an Anno game yet but I wonder if the pre-Ubisoft ones are like that or not?

I think so, but that’s not a failing of the game series or anything, it’s the series core identity.

I’ve reached the point in the campaign now where I’ve settled some minor islands and am engaging in diplomacy and realized that’s the point of the game, dealing with creating maritime trade networks and gunboat diplomacy, not city-level logistics or economics. How can I get a chain of trade set up that will enable me to meet the requirements for X project, and how cheaply can I starve my colonial workforce while doing it. There also seems to be an element of collection with hunting down special tools and elite workers/advisors, artifacts, and rare specimens for productivity/display buildings.