Paradox Studio Thread

[East_Clintwood]

There were less than 10k players at the peak this weekend

Holy shit, I knew Vic 3 was doing badly, but already having dropped below 1/2 the player count of the other Paradox games is something special.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Speaking of Crusader Kings, that’s the only one I haven’t seen someone try to make a knock of yet. Possibly because CK2 doesn’t feel like it has any major deficiency that needs a total overhaul to address, but it’s not like the game couldn’t be expanded on by a better developer. I always wanted Paradox to add more content about ruling but they only ever added more role playing and interpersonal stuff.

 

[Snekposter]

Holy shit, I knew Vic 3 was doing badly, but already having dropped below 1/2 the player count of the other Paradox games is something special.

There's literally no depth to it. Its one of the shallowest numbers-go-up games ever.

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

Speaking of Crusader Kings, that’s the only one I haven’t seen someone try to make a knock of yet. Possibly because CK2 doesn’t feel like it has any major deficiency that needs a total overhaul to address, but it’s not like the game couldn’t be expanded on by a better developer. I always wanted Paradox to add more content about ruling but they only ever added more role playing and interpersonal stuff.

There are a couple titles like Star Dynasties (Crusader Kings...in spaaace!) and Knights of Honor 2: Sovereign (Total War-esque real-time battles blended with CK-esque character management), but yeah, I haven't seen a take on it in the same way you see takes on stuff like Europa Universalis or Hearts of Iron 4. I wouldn't mind seeing more attempts at it, maybe with something like a Dune IP or a wholly original fantasy setting.

 

[Figger Naggot]

There's literally no depth to it. Its one of the shallowest numbers-go-up games ever.

It's the same with CKIII. Both games feel completely hollow and don't get any better no matter how many mods I add to them.

Sure a lot of their mid 2010s releases have problems, but at least I can still have fun with CS, HoiIV, EuIV, and Stellaris. I am considering trying out Distant Worlds 2 to see if that can replace Stellaris as my spacey themed game of choice.

 

[Snekposter]

I am considering trying out Distant Worlds 2 to see if that can replace Stellaris as my spacey themed game of choice.

Let me know how that works out. Stellaris has just gotten more and more complicated yet more and more shallow.

 

[The Demon Pimp of Razgriz]

Let me know how that works out. Stellaris has just gotten more and more complicated yet more and more shallow.

How does that happen?

 

[Snekposter]

How does that happen?

Complicated and deep aren't synonyms. Managing stuff has gotten more difficult but the underlying base gameplay systems haven't changed a bit.

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

How does that happen?

For me, it was the addition of stuff like the Galactic Council, which sounds cool in theory, but ultimately does very little for most of the game other than some insignificant bonuses/maluses to things like how much resources a miner pop makes or how many consumer goods are used up, while not expanding the barebones diplomacy between empies. Or the DLCs focusing on adding fuck-huge ships that can blow up a planet or act like a mobile fortress, but the underlying system of claiming systems and war just being uninteresting and all-or-nothing, compared to stuff like EU4's claims and peace deals, or even HOI4's peace conferences.

If they had expansions alongside patches which improved these systems and allowed for more interesting strategy, they'd be great, but instead it's mostly just flashy "Oh, look, you can be the Crisis!" bits that feel bolted on the sides of the game, rather than connecting in a complementary way. I mean, archeology digs are just investigations that take longer, and you've already seen them all after a single game.

I don't hate Stellaris as a whole, but Paradox really had no idea where they wanted to take it, revamped it again and again, but seemingly still aren't sure what it should be.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

How much have you paid out as Paradox's pay piggy?
I went through and tallied up all my Steam purchases over my entire life. I generally bought on really good sales, but not always. I'm shocked at how much I nickle and dimed myself, especially for how petty some of my kneejerk refunds were and how cheap some of the best games I've ever played (usually little indie arcade-style games) were. American Dream DLC that adds a few events I don't even see playing mods = as valuable as Hotline Miami, apparently.

Overall, of their core six (IR, CK2, EU4, V2, HOI4, Stellaris), it averages to $65 a game, actually spot on a normal game price (but keeping in mind I don't own ANY HOI, IR, or Stellaris DLC). As for EU4, I'd say pretty much none of that DLC was worth the asking price (like, I would seriously consider trading in the DLC for its cash value right now). Frankly CK2 DLC probably isn't worth it in the sense that any modder could have added it for free, better, in a tenth the time, but that game gave itself in advantage in that it sold being able to play as different parts of the map (which I really do care about, I like Muslims, Indians, Hordes, and Norse), which I guess in some way makes me the same as those retards who'll pay big moolah just to fly their special plane or sail their special battleship in one of those free-to-play WW2 games. (I'll consider buying in, if I have to, to get my submarine in World of Warships, but I'm not paying out just so my ship can say "Yamato" instead of "Iowa").

Specific ones:
IR = $10 (and haven't played yet)
CK2 = $175 (kill me; I'm only missing the last few)
EU4 = $110 (there came a point when I ragequit buying)
V2 = $40 (never actually played that much of it)
HOI4 = $20 (the only one I'd seriously consider getting in La Resistance)
Stellaris = $40 (and it wasn't worth it)

If somebody was offering me these deals, upfront, all or nothing, I'd say CK2 would be worth it, but EU4? Not for the vanilla game.
CK2 always was the most engaging to play on account of its characters.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Something crucially important to the time frame of our wholesome big chungus wakanderino national gardening sim that isn't in is more complexity to the nature of alliances. (For what it's worth, it didn't occur to me until much later that Paradox never did really talk about the balance of power being a major focus, not that it would have mattered if it was.)

In the Concert of Europe - probably in general throughout history, but I know slightly more about the Concert of Europe from reading a very boring, thick book (The Struggle for Mastery in Europe) ten years ago - alliances were not some general thing where two parties agreed to be each other's special buddy in everything. Instead, they tended to have specific clauses. A typical alliance structure might look like this:

[STATE A] is in an [SECRET/OFFICIAL] [OFFENSIVE/DEFENSIVE/BOTH] alliance with [STATE B] directed against [STATE C]

There's three key components here I want to draw attention to.

Point 1: An alliance generally has a target. Great powers wanted to maintain a balance of power, which meant that they wanted to back up weak powers who they felt aligned in some way with their interests. That was not the same as a carte blanche to back up the other guy in any bullshit war they get themselves into. Historically, an example would be something like the French and Russians being allies against the Germans specifically.

Point 2: Building on Point 1, an alliance is usually defensive in nature, but it could be offensive. Read the terms of your contract carefully! Drawing a distinction also makes more incentive to attempt to sucker your rival into chimping out and initiating hostilities first. An additional level might be to distinguish between immediate defensive (YOU are the target, so I'm defending you) and cascading defensive (your ally was attacked so you got called in so now you've called me in).

Point 3: Lastly, secret alliances (which includes secret to your voting public) were a big deal and partially responsible for the cascading alliances of WW1. Reveal your alliance (or have it found out) and you have a tool of intimidation, but don't reveal it and you may catch an enemy unaware (surprise vs brinksmanship).

Diplomacy should be conceived (as it is in real life) as Treaties that are formed as contracts between sovereign states. Multiple alliances with the same nation are equivalent to having additional clauses, as you may have for example treaties with the same nation (of varying combinations of secret and official, offensive and defensive and both) against different nations, potentially with conditional criteria built in to the negotiations or differing expiration dates. This I think would have given a lot of depth.

By the way, Paradox's big brain Diplomatic Plays are just V2 Crises, but shoehorned into everything to where you can't have surprise wars or active interventions or even multi-sided wars.

Spoiler: Little thing about Gilded Destiny qualities, related to diplomacy

If Gilded Destiny uses qualities more like ideologies like I want (which some of their qualities shown, Confucianism and Manifest Destiny, are), it could be a really nice way to implement the political aspect of diplomacy. Something none of these games have ever really tried to do, probably because it's really hard, is reflect that governments are under political pressure to implement certain diplomatic policies when those diplomatic policies become politicized. Most notably is when a population cleaves along other ideological or sectarian lines as to who to back, when two great powers play into the same country trying to control it, and when a population gets irrationally obsessed with protecting some other population. Victoria has a spectrum of Pacifism to Jingoism, but it only deals with "are you a warmonger, yes/no."

The biggest examples I have come from American history. Initially, Yankee Federalists (Reactionaries, sort of?) backed Britain, Dixie and Western Democratic-Republicans (Liberals) backed France. Later, Dixie Democrats backed Manifest Destiny and tended to be Anglophiles, Yankee Republicans were anti-Manifest Destiny (implicitly pro-Civilized Tribes and pro-Mexico) but Anglophobic. In the modern day, Zionism looms large in American politics (associated primarily with Evangelical Republicans) and has even started to be exported as part of Evangelicalism into Latin America, like Bolsonaro.

Another example would be the irrational pro-Greek bent of the British and French in the Greek War of Independence. Then, of course there are always the pressures of nationalists and pan-nationalists as a force demanding expansion or protection (like Russia as Protector of Slavs, Russia making Serbia it's little buddy).

I don't think you can make it work smoothly dynamically (other than have political factions like being friendly to governments ideologically, culturally, religiously similar to them and hostile to ones that aren't. But where specific diplomatic ideologies can be seen it makes sense, and I think in a modern day setting Zionism is so important that it deserves to be modeled somehow even if you have to introduce a special mechanic just for it alone, being that the US stupidly attached itself to a lightning rod of all the Middle East's hate for all time just because rednecks thought muh Chosen People needed their fucking Holy Land.

 

[JJLiautaud]

Re Yankee Republicans and being anti manifest destiny, i know lincoln was anti mexican american war, but to conclude that afterward the CW they were anti manifest destiny doesnt make much sense.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Re Yankee Republicans and being anti manifest destiny, i know lincoln was anti mexican american war, but to conclude that afterward the CW they were anti manifest destiny doesnt make much sense.

By the end of the Civil War the US has already filled in its borders. But to go into more detail, there was an implicit sectarian interest in it that Republicans supported expansionism but only where Northerners were the ones settling (further north on the Plains, saber-rattling at Britain for Oregon Country; Hawaii was also basically the same story as Texas but with Yankee merchants and the missionaries as the fifth column). Even then, they tended to panic about expansionist wars because they thought the land would wind up slave land, which was in large part the intention, though clearly the South got screwed over massively on California.

Mechanically, the ideology might come down to baking this stuff into the slavery-relevant ideologies: Manifest Destiny is generic and supports any American expansion/Indian policing, Fire-Eaters support expansion into the Golden Circle, Abolitionists flip their shit over expansion into the Golden Circle.

A similar later conflict comes up with the Spanish-American War ramifications (imperialism vs liberation vs isolationism). There's also a big difference these sort of things tend to not represent between being actively imperialist in your own region and isolationist outside of it. I've thought at times that Great Power mechanics should probably be restricted or given another tier where you can only sphere within your home continent. (Something that might be neat is having Great Power status directly tied into winning/losing wars, similar to recognition wars in V3. US beats Spain, steals its Great Power. Japanese beat Russians, don't steal their Great Power in that case, but upgrade to Great Power. Prestige already results in this, but for as jarring and discrete as a change like suddenly gaining or losing a suite of diplomatic options, tying it to a jarring, dramatic, discrete event like a catastrophic military defeat makes sense.)


Edit: By the way, speak of Golden Circle, filibusters are pretty much 19th Century adventurers from CK2, and they weren't the only instance of non-state actors invading a country from another country; the Jameson Raid was a shameful one of South Africa trying to conquer the Boers, and the US allowed Fenians to repeatedly invade Canada from its territory. Most of those operations were pathetic failures, but there was at least one that succeeded temporarily, when William Walker conquered Nicaragua for the South and then got thrown out by an intervention backed by Cornelius Vanderbilt. It would be cool if armies could form like that, with player involvement (shut that nonsense down, leave it alone, back it up).

 

[Snekposter]

By the end of the Civil War the US has already filled in its borders. But to go into more detail, there was an implicit sectarian interest in it that Republicans supported expansionism but only where Northerners were the ones settling (further north on the Plains, saber-rattling at Britain for Oregon Country; Hawaii was also basically the same story as Texas but with Yankee merchants and the missionaries as the fifth column). Even then, they tended to panic about expansionist wars because they thought the land would wind up slave land, which was in large part the intention, though clearly the South got screwed over massively on California.

Mechanically, the ideology might come down to baking this stuff into the slavery-relevant ideologies: Manifest Destiny is generic and supports any American expansion/Indian policing, Fire-Eaters support expansion into the Golden Circle, Abolitionists flip their shit over expansion into the Golden Circle.

A similar later conflict comes up with the Spanish-American War ramifications (imperialism vs liberation vs isolationism). There's also a big difference these sort of things tend to not represent between being actively imperialist in your own region and isolationist outside of it. I've thought at times that Great Power mechanics should probably be restricted or given another tier where you can only sphere within your home continent. (Something that might be neat is having Great Power status directly tied into winning/losing wars, similar to recognition wars in V3. US beats Spain, steals its Great Power. Japanese beat Russians, don't steal their Great Power in that case, but upgrade to Great Power. Prestige already results in this, but for as jarring and discrete as a change like suddenly gaining or losing a suite of diplomatic options, tying it to a jarring, dramatic, discrete event like a catastrophic military defeat makes sense.)

Arguably the USA shouldn't be a great power until you start making moves and building up, simply because of how concerned we were with tending to our own business in North America. We didn't colonize anywhere outside of there until the late 1890's. Hell, Hawaii was bargained and treatied with as a sovereign nation until its conquest, and certainly not in the same way we or anyone else bargained with native tribes. Our diplomatic relations with the European powers were all about trade and territorial adjustments in our own areas, and frankly we were happy with Europe doing whatever as long as they didn't fuck with the money with made through trade.

 

[Crex Crex]

There's literally no depth to it. Its one of the shallowest numbers-go-up games ever.

The paradox strategy of releasing a barebones game and pumping it with DLCs post-release failed spectacularly. No one will still play vic3 by the time it resembles an actual fleshed out game, and the fact that it is being worked on by the people behind Imperator was ringing alarm bells as soon as the game got announced

 

[Wood]

I am considering trying out Distant Worlds 2 to see if that can replace Stellaris as my spacey themed game of choice.

DW2 is quite different from Stellaris in that it's a straightforward 4X and there is not much scripting/events or rp.

 

[Radola Gajda]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/europa-universalis-iv-development-diary-24th-of-january-2023.1565995/page-16#posts.

Oh great Ottoman rework that will make them fun to play for game or two, but even more pain in the ass if you are not playing them. Last game 90 years into the game AI Ottomans had standing army of over 500 000 men and Ottomans have strongest units until late game, by default.

Now give them power creep of eu4 dlcs and it will be no fun to play against them at all. Few examples of pc. Artillery in 1444 (tech that is unlocked in 1480s) , Mamluks (second largest country at the game start) will become Ottoman loyal vassal if Ottomans take their capital. Ottomans will have access to money printer: raiding.
But dont worry there is this disaster that will stop them from getting out of hand oh wait...

 

[Kane Lives]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/europa-universalis-iv-development-diary-24th-of-january-2023.1565995/page-16#posts.

Oh great Ottoman rework that will make them fun to play for game or two, but even more pain in the ass if you are not playing them. Last game 90 years into the game AI Ottomans had standing army of over 500 000 men and Ottomans have strongest units until late game, by default.

Now give them power creep of eu4 dlcs and it will be no fun to play against them at all. Few examples of pc. Artillery in 1444 (tech that is unlocked in 1480s) , Mamluks (second largest country at the game start) will become Ottoman loyal vassal if Ottomans take their capital. Ottomans will have access to money printer: raiding.
But dont worry there is this disaster that will stop them from getting out of hand oh wait...
View attachment 4357633

I really love to see the rationale behind buffing the Big Green Blob even more. Is it not enough that they start in an immensely favourable position with only weak, heretic/heathen nations to conquer, and gets cores on Mamluks through their national missions?

 

[Cringe newfag]

I really love to see the rationale behind buffing the Big Green Blob even more. Is it not enough that they start in an immensely favourable position with only weak, heretic/heathen nations to conquer, and gets cores on Mamluks through their national missions?

They're Muslims and white people are bad. By definition the Ottoman Empire is a hero because they attack whites. Buffing them makes the game better because it reduces the amount of worlds where the Europeans take over the world.

 

[Zarzar2]

Roadmap and idea groups changes for 1.35
Unit Pip Rebalance https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/236850/view/5702151139909492911
and Ming getting something too https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/236850/view/5132448321932570878

I'm getting the strong impression playing EU3 will be more and more a better idea