Paradox Studio Thread

[TrulyMan]

Is there a more cucked, censored, community than that of Pdx?
Their CEO bitches about their already decimated membership being too harsh to programmers for them to visit the forums, their mods are literal reddit trannies, their games are eternal moneypits that truly have mastered the "Im too invested to stop" category of consumer unfriendly business practices and half of the stuff they release barely works, the other half gets shut down before its released.

I guess its a factor of an extremely devoted community "with nowhere else to go" and the way they have completely tied in the modding effort to their own intranet that any attempt to break off seems futile.
But by God, if there's one company and one cascade of products that would benefit from some reverse-engineering other than in the are of MMORPGs where its common its here.

Already you can pirate all their stuff for singleplayer use, but if some madlad would just set up a site on a Russian server, with all DLCs, mods and everything and then open up servers for online play...
The Russians have legalized piracy so they dont have the gamers revolting, lol.

Russia Reportedly Legalizes Piracy of Games, Movies, and More - IGN

Russia has reportedly taken steps to counteract Western sanctions by legalizing piracy of movies, games, and more, as well as potentially unblocking a popular torrent site.

www.ign.com

The time is now.

 

[Dojima's Dragon]

Is this game good for my autism

 

[Cringe newfag]

Is this game good for my autism

Which game

 

[Dojima's Dragon]

Which game

Europa universalis IV

 

[Blackstar]

Europa universalis IV

It's okay as a sandbox but don't expect realism. The only thing that makes it worth it imo are the mods, only purchase the DLCs if on sale or on HumbleBundle

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Europa universalis IV

Play it with MEIOU and Taxes if you are a simulationist. I don't know if 3.0 works properly (the last I was able to play it was on 2.0), but it adds a self-developing and integrated population, market, and political model. I don't really know how 3.0 works - seems like they wasted a lot of effort reinventing the wheel - but 2.0 had a three-fold division of population into Rural, Urban, and Elite (instead of Tax, Production, and Manpower) with the conceit that population/agricultural output grows according to an ecological S-curve. Farmers support themselves, and any excess population (population not necessary to support the population farming) moves into the cities up to the Urban Gravity limit (city buildings basically raise the equilibrium level of urbanization) and then into less productive rural production. Specific famous industries (like delftware, Venetian glass, Meissner porcelain, Toledo steel) can emerge in particularly productive cities. The Estates are political entities which earn the profits of their industries (you don't assign them, them dynamically emerge from the land) and lobby for "Privileges" that raise the equilibrium Corruption level and have other effects. Turning down their demands for Privileges carries a risk of destabilizing the nation, and they lobby more aggressively the less Privileges they have, so there's a pressure to find an acceptable level of corruption instead of trying to reign them in all the time. The Estates also keep their own armies, in the early game you usually rely on cashing in their loyalty for levies and loans to fight/fund your wars. It is a VASTLY better game than EU4 and at this point a start date in 1821 would make a better Victoria 3 too.

The game also had way more detail in the map (flavor like historical industries and bodies of water and such being marked on the map), detailed Reformation system (which I might use a bit in my research), institutions are things that can emerge in different places, and the start date is pushed back to right after the Black Death, which means you can play as the rise of Ming and Ottomans instead of having to start as a blob.

It has droughts, floods, famines, and plagues, too. Plagues have their own model where populations build up immunity and plagues spread along trade routes from city to city, so they naturally emerge in pulses in sensible ways. Famines have a risk of happening when agriculture/distribution systems are under stress (like flooded farms, farms under drought, wartime devastation, etc.). The disasters are a big part of the game.

I was disappointed that Paradox never attempted adding more depth to ruling in CK2 (just more flavor), MEIOU and Taxes 2.0 would have been a very good way to do it. It's nice because the game can play itself with no problems, but you can directly intervene in it if you really want to, and the model is very simple but gets realistic results.

 

[Midwit]

When it was just CK2 Paradox actually got tons of praise

CK3 has one real dlc and two flavour packs, at the same point in CK2's lifespan they'd already released 4 DLCs including the merchant republics who are still unplayable in CK3.

 

[Fastest Hand In The East]

Yes, we deliberately traded 226 heavy bombers and their crews for a mere 100 pilots, simply because we could make good on those losses and the Germans could not. Its almost like the Willow Run plant shat out a B-24 every hour with crews bunking there at the factory waiting for their planes to come off the line or something...

Yes, I know, my point was- if you shoot down bombers AND intercept the bombings themselves then its just a useless ordeal for the USA/UK. I was talking about the game mostly.

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!

Works mostly fine for me. BICE is the only mod 101% worth playing in HoI 4, fight me. This is what the game should have been. Or at least closer to it.
Just as example I run two lines of small arms- one unmodifed cheap guns of the previous generation and one of the upgraded modified newer guns. Because you can upgrade almost everything using XP like you could planes and tanks in vanilla before DLCs. And the upgrades arent linear like in vanilla- its a balancing act.

 

[Lerias]

Decided to play some C:S again today. Realized all my cities (including several 100k+) in C:S broke after the November update. I've never managed to get them to work normally again, even with that helpful broken mod replacement list. They're fucked up in some way or another, like broken roads and all that stuff. Why do these niggers manage to break every single mod with few exceptions each update? And hell no, you can't make a realistic-looking city with only stock assets/mods.

I'm just an autist who just wants a modern city builder that doesn't break every so often. Or isn't modern SimCity.

 

[JJLiautaud]

Decided to play some C:S again today. Realized all my cities (including several 100k+) in C:S broke after the November update. I've never managed to get them to work normally again, even with that helpful broken mod replacement list. They're fucked up in some way or another, like broken roads and all that stuff. Why do these niggers manage to break every single mod with few exceptions each update? And hell no, you can't make a realistic-looking city with only stock assets/mods.

I'm just an autist who just wants a modern city builder that doesn't break every so often. Or isn't modern SimCity.

Sim city 4- can't break mods if you never get updates thinkingblackman.gif.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

Sim city 4- can't break mods if you never get updates thinkingblackman.gif.

SimCity 4 is a better city builder than S anyways.

 

[Blackstar]

Something interesting has begun, Spudgun has made a video proposing an open source recreation of Victoria 2, since Vic 3 is so shit. (For those who don't know Spudgun is disliked by other pdx communities due to being edgier, which makes me more hopeful about this).He mentions several projects similar to Vic 2 in the making as well as a remake that was previously worked on. A discord for the project has been made with Spudgun in charge and discussion on how it will be done has begun. Although it is discord, I really hope that this succeeds because Vic 2 is my favourite pdx game and Vic 3 has been a disappointment, as well as that, the project being open source would make modding alot easier, with that being more difficult in Vic 2 since it's almost 13 years old.

 

[JJLiautaud]

Something interesting has begun, Spudgun has made a video proposing an open source recreation of Victoria 2, since Vic 3 is so shit. (For those who don't know Spudgun is disliked by other pdx communities due to being edgier, which makes me more hopeful about this).He mentions several projects similar to Vic 2 in the making as well as a remake that was previously worked on. A discord for the project has been made with Spudgun in charge and discussion on how it will be done has begun. Although it is discord, I really hope that this succeeds because Vic 2 is my favourite pdx game and Vic 3 has been a disappointment, as well as that, the project being open source would make modding alot easier, with that being more difficult in Vic 2 since it's almost 13 years old.

Sweet Vicky 2: the Second it's exactly what I wanted in the first place.

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

I'm not super optimistic about it panning out, given the other attempt(s?) to remake Vicky2, but if there's any group autistically dedicated enough to actually see it through, it's the MP guys still making mods and shit for the game.

 

[Blackstar]

Sweet Vicky 2: the Second it's exactly what I wanted in the first place.

I'm not super optimistic about it panning out, given the other attempt(s?) to remake Vicky2, but if there's any group autistically dedicated enough to actually see it through, it's the MP guys still making mods and shit for the game.

We've gotta belive bros......

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Vicky II's basic foundations are bad. Someone would get further building entirely from scratch.

 

[HeyYou]

CK3 has one real dlc and two flavour packs, at the same point in CK2's lifespan they'd already released 4 DLCs including the merchant republics who are still unplayable in CK3.

The first two of those DLCs just consisted of adding things that were in CK3 from the start, and the third was a literal meme DLC in Sunset Invasion. And now that I'm going over CK2's expansions CK3 actually does have a lot of mechanics that were introduced in those expansions as part of the base game which is surprising from Paradox. The game does desperately need playable merchant republics, anti-popes/cardinals and a Byzantine rework though.

 

[Knud Lavard]

The first two of those DLCs just consisted of adding things that were in CK3 from the start

Sword of Islam used "more than 100 Muslim-specific events" as a selling point. CKIII, by contrast, has only 137 code references to 'islam_religion' in its events folder (*). Most of these are stuff like the ability to name your horse something else, or the game deciding which blurb to use when hearing news about the Crusades. This is after Fate of Iberia, whose raison d'être was muslim/christian events, in a game that is based on character events.

While it's true that most of Legacy of Rome is in basegame CKIII, the reasons for that content being there is different. Retinues were added to CKII because people in the same culture with the same buildings got the same levies. Since all normal unit types were present in your levies, your retinue was a way to shift the numbers and ratios to capitalize on strengths or exploit weaknesses. With CKIII levies being historically-accurate peasant chaff instead of 50% light infantry, 25% bowmen, etc. etc., you now need to recreate the relatively rounded levies of CKII yourself, using your retinue - and if you're lucky, you have a slot or two left over for fun stuff! The retinue of CKIII is just the levy of CKII with a few extra buttons attached, and therefore I would argue that CKIII is just where CKII was before Legacy of Rome.

Sunset Invasion

I still chuckle at the righteous bollocking Paradox recieved for it. If only modern Paradox fans would call out their favourite 'small indie company' in the same way...

Playable merchant republics, anti-popes/cardinals and a Byzantine rework though.

While all of these are high on my list, I think culture and religion specific events are #1 for me. Just some normal boring-ass mundane flavour events that help characters stand out from one another on an axis seperate from personality.

(*) It's just a quick-and-dirty way of looking at it, as I couldn't find a list of events online. I also don't have the event pack they released some months ago, but I'll bet good money on there, at most, being 2-3 muslim-specific events.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

CK3 has one real dlc and two flavour packs, at the same point in CK2's lifespan they'd already released 4 DLCs including the merchant republics who are still unplayable in CK3.

The fact that they removed republics (which I never enjoyed playing, but believe they could have been better if they were better designed*) and nomads (which also had problems, but I did enjoy playing for the specific goal of committing farmcuck genocide), and still didn't bother adding decent imperial administration or naval warfare, killed any interest I would have had.




*My biggest two problems with republics were that it had deterministic elections where you could tell exactly how much to offer in bribes to win and families going into death spirals. I would have had elections be based on percentage chances and had republics have, based on republican development and patrician family wealth, a minimum level of wealth that's necessary or the family basically gets demoted to courtier status, their properties partitioned between rival families, a new family, and liquidated, and a new family emerges that's some ways beyond the minimum standard. That way, families could never fall too far behind. Playing in republics wasn't interesting because the other families were never credible threats. I think the republican game could also have been a lot more engaging if CK2 had ever had naval warfare (it really wouldn't be that hard, I had a mechanic written out that would have added naval warfare by just making it an extension of how land warfare works plus the levies/loaded up troops) and something involving setting up merchant marines.

Spoiler: Naval

Have naval combat be split into Volley, Ramming, and Boarding like land is Skirmish, Melee, Pursuit. Have general traits that apply specifically to naval warfare. Ship levies are automatically Transports, but if you load units into them they become Heavy Infantry Ships, Archer Ships, etc., with advantages in the appropriate phases (like Archers for Volley). Possibly have some sort of naval terrain, but limit naval movement to coastal provinces. Add special ship retinues or special ship buildings for appropriate cultures. Cultural tactics as appropriate.

Specific special ship mechanics I had in mind were official navy ships for republics (high ramming/boarding), Viking longboats going up rivers and into deep sea (but no combat in deep sea), late-game galleons with deep sea movement and very high Volley, and Greek fire ships for the Byzantine emperor with very high Ramming. Possibly something special for Barbary Pirates as well, but I don't know anything in particular about their fighting.

For the player that doesn't specifically play a faction with a special naval heritage, it is just an extension of land warfare into the sea, no need to build special ships or have special mechanics or such. For the Vikings, it's just a special movement option that also lets them be more unpredictable in their raiding. For Byzantines and republics, it's just an option of very elite troops that give naval supremacy.

Nomads' biggest problem that annoyed me were that it was too easy for nomadic clans, and their cultures, to be completely wiped from the map, which then made it so the steppe became very homogeneous very quickly instead of their real-life characteristic of being very diverse. I think there should have been something where hordes could absorb a clan (instead of just making it a tributary) into their horde and where clans could have an internal breakdown of religions and cultures.

My only gripe with empires was that since viceroyalties were restricted to the ducal and kingly levels, your choices of who to give them to were pretty much restricted to the counts in those duchies, since otherwise the viceroy would just get run out anyways. I think there should have been something like patrician families for empires, say 10 noble families that have Barony-level palace holdings and the ability maybe to own Castles (as personal estates) but the county-level posts would have been state appointments. It's kind of ridiculous how little Paradox paid attention to modeling the main great power of the Middle Ages, especially considering the Byzaboo shit all over their forums.

 

[Slap47]

I have crippling autism and like steam achievements.

It is a shame that Paradox is shifting to most of their achievements being obscenely hard and silly stuff for obscure countries.