Paradox Studio Thread

[Jarolleon]

In Vic 2 most routes are favourable except Liberalism/Ancap.

Don't you have to fight the game's mechanics to go reactionary, since the pops get more left wing as their living standards improve?

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Don't you have to fight the game's mechanics to go reactionary, since the pops get more left wing as their living standards improve?

Consciousness is the game's way of representing Marxist class consciousness or, more generally, an abstraction of how politically engaged a population is. Basically, a population could be educated, have the suffrage, be wealthy, etc. and still have no, how you put it, political awakening. Those things, though - education, wealth, free press - will raise consciousness over time, and then consciousness in turn makes the population much more sensitive and clever (more likely to adopt modern ideologies, touchier to militancy, more likely to organize a movement instead of just chimping out as a knee-jerk peasant revolt, more bitchy in general).

Because of that, the actions you would normally need to take to modernize your economy and stay ahead in technology (educate the workforce) are also the same things that would undermine your Reactionary regime's popular support, as the only social classes that have any natural affinity for Reaction are the Aristocrats, Clergy, and Officers. (Unlike Victoria 3, Victoria II had class/ideology interactions be represented by Pops naturally drifting towards an ideology if it matched their interests; Artisans, for example, liked socialism, Craftsmen liked Communism, farmers were natural conservatives, etc.) Some countries will also have a worse time of it than others. The United States in particular gets constant Consciousness-raising spam events (Great Awakenings and slavery debate being the big ones).

I liked the concept quite a bit, thought it was a good way of reflecting the difference between a society where raising taxes causes a peasant revolt and a society where raising taxes causes a capital-R Revolution.

 

[Midwit]

Bit jarring for a "historically-accurate" game to just fully subscribe to the trope of medieval battles being tidal waves of peasants, straight out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, re-enacting Enemy at the Gates.

CK3 is for redditors who want to RP in Game of Thrones with child murder and whacky incestuous hijinks, anything that would make it more of a simulator would go against the fantasy.

Something else I've been thinking about is how Victoria 3 has roads that are directly visible on the map itself*, yet for some reason aren't mechanically relevant whatsoever when they could be a reasonable middle-ground solution to the game's sorry excuse for a war system. To elaborate; the roads (and railways) would be avenues by which supplies would be transferred to armies so long as they have an unbroken connection to a supply depot which has stockpiled goods, which means that the AI controlling your armies will advance in a somewhat reasonable manner and when they engage an enemy it won't be a situation where the you have 200,000 troops on each side but only 4-6000 are allowed to fight. This would mean that armies do physically exist on the map, of course, but automated in a way that the AI should be able to handle before technologies allow them to go full HoI4 with frontlines.

This frontline system would work by allowing the units of an army to split into several detachments, the limits of which will be determined by various technologies, to allow for armies to properly cover large frontlines. This would also require a return to the combat width system used in Victoria 2 wherein it decreases with technology and the smaller of the two is used, though this could be addressed by having a priority for various combat widths to allow it to increase with some of the earlier techs but then decrease with the later ones. A system that can properly represent the changes in warfare in the 19th and 20th centuries, not just filter everything through a shitty pseudo-WW1 that doesn't even properly emulate WW1.

Spoiler: *Pic related

Really I just want a logistics system since that would fix most of the game's fundamental issues, but it'd filter the casuals and nuParadox doesn't want that.

 

[Cringe newfag]

And CK3 adding Knights in sounded cool, but I don't know. I dont' know if solo combat to resolve battles existed as a thing in the Middle Ages, but that could have been more interesting (button you press, assign a character to fight, enemy can accept the challenge or not).

I don't know about in the West, but duels were a tradition in the East. I know because the Muslim Conquests involved the running joke of "Persian/Roman commander challenges Arab to a duel. He dies, his men are demoralised, then they lose."

The battle still usually happened afterwards though, it just gave one side or the other a prestige/morale advantage.

 

[Agarathium1066]

Yeah, I was just being smug. Bit jarring for a "historically-accurate" game to just fully subscribe to the trope of medieval battles being tidal waves of peasants, straight out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, re-enacting Enemy at the Gates. Doubly so when they went from doing it right to doing it wrong.

The fact that they specify that its precisely this and have utterly reduced levied troops feels so strange. They even specify in many cases that their current 'light infantry' are meant to be skirmishers rather than just basically equipped troops. I feel like the retinues/MaA as they are in 3 are okayish. You get some cultural options mixed in and some uniqueness to tactics. But you mean to tell me that calling up a bunch've tribesmen in the steppe means they're all pitchfork pushers?

Bullshit. Lazy bullshit.

They don't even bother having models on the map that aren't basic infantry. Playing a culture known for their cavalry? Nah eat shit you're pounding sand.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Doesn't HOI (been a long time since I played) have a basic functional supply system? Something where it is basically supply limit like in the past, but it can disperse over an area with sufficient infrastructure as long as you pour your trains and trucks into it.

It shouldn't be that hard to just port over the HOI supply and naval mechanics. But from what I hear Victoria 3 is completely fucked on every level. And the transportation is especially frustrating because it was one of the main reasons why I even felt Victoria 2 needed a sequel (so trade had economic foundations instead of being based on Prestige sorting), but the way they implemented it doesn't really do that, it's more like some weird national pool of infrastructure.

Why are Paradox so lazy? You’d think that a game studio like that would attract people interested in their own work.

 

[Midwit]

Why are Paradox so lazy? You’d think that a game studio like that would attract people interested in their own work.

I think it's a combination of the fact that the guys who made the older, better games aren't around anymore and that the newer devs have a completely warped view of what their games should be from how youtubers play it so it just turns into a pseudo-historical memefest. And in regards to the transport it's a resource that gets produced by railways and consumed by pretty much everyone, it's just this fucking meme but without the faintest hint of irony.

 

[AnonymousKot]

Edit: Rewrote this post because I thought it was worded in a confusing, rambling way.
I liked CK2's land warfare (aside from sieges, which lacked the weightiness to them that you would expect from the Castle Age), but the biggest flaw in it for me was that BUILDING an army didn't feel fun because while buildings did clearly state what they would add, the rewards felt insignificant next to the cost (do you really want to spend all that gold on a few dozen more soldiers, or would you rather conquer a province with it that has hundreds of soldiers?) and it just seemed like a huge effort and not clear how to tweak the unit to be what i want, in contrast to Victoria, Imperator, and HOI allowing you to just make the unit you want.

I think one way it could have been done differently that would have helped would have been if it started off the assumption that Light Infantry (assumed to be stereotypical peasant spearman trash) form 100% of the levy, then the base values are tweaked based on your culture (like Scots have schiltrons so more Pikemen, English have a strong archery tradition, etc.), and then when you build buildings you raise either the total army size or the percentage share of a specific unit type, at the expense of Light Infantry.

That also kind of lends it to specialization while still keeping cultural differences, because you can't have more special unit buildings than the base required amount of Light Infantry (maybe 0%, maybe higher if we say that culture's fighting style or social structure demands having LI), but your maximum ability to specialize a province, to try to do something goofy like have an all-HC fighting force, is limited by your culture (if you start with 25% Archers, then at most 75% of the rest of your force can be assigned to something else) and by your technology (do I want to go ahead and develop a building to upgrade my LI to something better right now, or do I wait until I can unlock the next branch of the unit type I really want).

For Hordes, obviously Light Cavalry/Horse Archers/Camel Cavalry should be the basic unit, not Light Infantry. Also add some laws where you can change the composition a bit (like England having its law requiring peasants to drill with bows). I really wanted Paradox to eventually add laws that were aimed at governing the peasants (rather than constitutional stuff about internobility relations), but it never happened.

And CK3 adding Knights in sounded cool, but I don't know. I dont' know if solo combat to resolve battles existed as a thing in the Middle Ages, but that could have been more interesting (button you press, assign a character to fight, enemy can accept the challenge or not).

Maybe I'm just bitching aimlessly, I think the economy in CK2 was balanced badly where buildings were never a sound financial investment compared to laying down an entirely new holding or buying more mercs.

The demense limit and marshal are the reasons to build up, because there's a limit to how much land you can have and vassals that are reliable, that and many of the kings in the early game are going to have immediate conflicts, like saxony v charlamenge and rome v alp arslan, you need to get as many soldiers either by building up or extorting others and pray the ai takes enough attrition that you can win, its kinda realistic in that you can't predict how to improve your armies, you just build what you can with whatever you can muster and hope for the best and improve during peace time for the next war

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

I think one way it could have been done differently that would have helped would have been if it started off the assumption that Light Infantry (assumed to be stereotypical peasant spearman trash) form 100% of the levy, then the base values are tweaked based on your culture (like Scots have schiltrons so more Pikemen, English have a strong archery tradition, etc.), and then when you build buildings you raise either the total army size or the percentage share of a specific unit type, at the expense of Light Infantry

This is kind of what the first Crusader Kings did. Different cultures had different base modifiers for what units they got, like for instance the Baltic would have little but light infantry and archers but France and the Holy Roman Empire would have plenty of heavy cavalry. It could be altered to a degree by allocating power to a different social group, but that had a cooldown, added revolt risk, and messed with taxes.

Doesn't HOI (been a long time since I played) have a basic functional supply system? Something where it is basically supply limit like in the past, but it can disperse over an area with sufficient infrastructure as long as you pour your trains and trucks into it.

HOI3 did. Supplies are shipped from your capital and alloted to each province that needs them (where your soldiers are), but since supplies cost more supplies to move down infrastructure, so does each province along the route. It can be bombed/damaged in combat to temporarily reduce supplies but for some reason you can't capture supplies outside of the capital.

It's a good system in theory, but in practice was kind of screwy. If you're USSR trying to invade Manchuria with the historic number of troops, you will burn insane amounts of fuel because it has to be transported across Siberia. You can fight your way to the Rhine no problem and your oil will be constantly maxed out, but if you don't win in Manchuria fast you'll run out of fuel because of this game mechanic. And yes, I'm aware the IRL Soviet campaign in Manchuria was horribly overextended logistically by the time the Japanese surrendered but this is your national stockpile of oil. There's no option to build resource dumps in Siberia since it's all automated. All you can do is research techs for slightly better modifiers.

 

[Snekposter]

HOI3 did. Supplies are shipped from your capital and alloted to each province that needs them (where your soldiers are), but since supplies cost more supplies to move down infrastructure, so does each province along the route. It can be bombed/damaged in combat to temporarily reduce supplies but for some reason you can't capture supplies outside of the capital.

It's a good system in theory, but in practice was kind of screwy. If you're USSR trying to invade Manchuria with the historic number of troops, you will burn insane amounts of fuel because it has to be transported across Siberia. You can fight your way to the Rhine no problem and your oil will be constantly maxed out, but if you don't win in Manchuria fast you'll run out of fuel because of this game mechanic. And yes, I'm aware the IRL Soviet campaign in Manchuria was horribly overextended logistically by the time the Japanese surrendered but this is your national stockpile of oil. There's no option to build resource dumps in Siberia since it's all automated. All you can do is research techs for slightly better modifiers.

They improved it with a HoI IV update and the ability to build depots but they still have the problem of supplies coming to said depots from only your capital. You can't build factories in say, Vladivostok that manufacture ammo for your guys in Manchuria, which is something that's missing from the system.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

They improved it with a HoI IV update and the ability to build depots but they still have the problem of supplies coming to said depots from only your capital. You can't build factories in say, Vladivostok that manufacture ammo for your guys in Manchuria, which is something that's missing from the system.

Yeah, that’s what I had meant.
It also has a shitty rule that you can only deploy in territory contiguous to the capital. I found that out as Kaiserreich MacArthur, I made the mistake of moving my capital to San Francisco and then found that it meant I couldn’t deploy troops in the Eastern Seaboard at all. I get what they intended there, but it was idiotic all the same.

 

[Sister Miriam Godwinson]

And CK3 adding Knights in sounded cool, but I don't know. I dont' know if solo combat to resolve battles existed as a thing in the Middle Ages, but that could have been more interesting (button you press, assign a character to fight, enemy can accept the challenge or not).

CK3 at this point is basically Sims Medieval, putting all emphasis on individual characters and adding actual game mechanics as an afterthought. Game is what, three years old now? Four? And is shallow as a puddle with expansions adding nothing aside from questionable flavor.

Last month their forum polled the players asking if the next addon should expand on the gameplay effects of tyranny or seduction. Not epidemics, trade, merchant republics, peasant rebellions, religious strife, no. You will be getting 50 more wacky events about seduction hijinks, pleb, buy it and like it.

 

[Agarathium1066]

CK3 at this point is basically Sims Medieval, putting all emphasis on individual characters and adding actual game mechanics as an afterthought. Game is what, three years old now? Four? And is shallow as a puddle with expansions adding nothing aside from questionable flavor.

Last month their forum polled the players asking if the next addon should expand on the gameplay effects of tyranny or seduction. Not epidemics, trade, merchant republics, peasant rebellions, religious strife, no. You will be getting 50 more wacky events about seduction hijinks, pleb, buy it and like it.

Sad thing is they've not even bothered spamming a lot of expansions. Content wise its sparse and the only one that adds any significant systems is the Court one. The rest is just slight flavor. Even the Iberian conflict is just a very simple set of rules and conditions.

 

[Cringe newfag]

This is kind of what the first Crusader Kings did. Different cultures had different base modifiers for what units they got, like for instance the Baltic would have little but light infantry and archers but France and the Holy Roman Empire would have plenty of heavy cavalry. It could be altered to a degree by allocating power to a different social group, but that had a cooldown, added revolt risk, and messed with taxes.

HOI3 did. Supplies are shipped from your capital and alloted to each province that needs them (where your soldiers are), but since supplies cost more supplies to move down infrastructure, so does each province along the route. It can be bombed/damaged in combat to temporarily reduce supplies but for some reason you can't capture supplies outside of the capital.

It's a good system in theory, but in practice was kind of screwy. If you're USSR trying to invade Manchuria with the historic number of troops, you will burn insane amounts of fuel because it has to be transported across Siberia. You can fight your way to the Rhine no problem and your oil will be constantly maxed out, but if you don't win in Manchuria fast you'll run out of fuel because of this game mechanic. And yes, I'm aware the IRL Soviet campaign in Manchuria was horribly overextended logistically by the time the Japanese surrendered but this is your national stockpile of oil. There's no option to build resource dumps in Siberia since it's all automated. All you can do is research techs for slightly better modifiers.

It was really funny in 1.0 Hearts of Iron III. You could supply your men by sea, but the supply system would automatically default to a more "efficient" and "safer" overland route when one became available. So if Japan has conquered China and is invading Burma, they will be getting supplies from Rangoon harbour, which is very close by. But if they reach the Himalayas/Burma Road, the system flips what source it draws on - because you've now "opened" a "better", "direct" land route to a national core state.

In this case, Shanghai. So the supplies come all the way across China's wasteland of low infrastructure and then across the literal Himalayan mountains.

Thankfully they fixed it in latter expansions, but it was pretty funny at the time.

 

[Knud Lavard]

You will be getting 50 more wacky events about seduction hijinks, pleb, buy it and like it.

Erhm achktually, the 50 whacky events are going to be about children, not seduction hijinks.
I'm particularly looking forward to the event that is just "random dice roll to see if your ward/child instantly dies".

Sad thing is they've not even bothered spamming a lot of expansions. Content wise its sparse and the only one that adds any significant systems is the Court one. The rest is just slight flavor. Even the Iberian conflict is just a very simple set of rules and conditions.

If I was told that the post-release CKIII team is just a single guy paralyzed from the neck down using a stick in his mouth to type with, I'd be inclined to believe it.

 

[Agarathium1066]

Erhm achktually, the 50 whacky events are going to be about children, not seduction hijinks.
I'm particularly looking forward to the event that is just "random dice roll to see if your ward/child instantly dies".

Yeah I do recall the climbing a tree or a tower event in CK2 where its a tiny chance that your kid will just snap their neck on the spot or immediately be branded a craven for their whole ass life.

Edit: Its also 2023 for all we know there will also be romantic events between ward and mentor. So forward thinking!

 

[Elwin Ransom]

CK3 is for redditors who want to RP in Game of Thrones with child murder and whacky incestuous hijinks, anything that would make it more of a simulator would go against the fantasy.

Something else I've been thinking about is how Victoria 3 has roads that are directly visible on the map itself*, yet for some reason aren't mechanically relevant whatsoever when they could be a reasonable middle-ground solution to the game's sorry excuse for a war system. To elaborate; the roads (and railways) would be avenues by which supplies would be transferred to armies so long as they have an unbroken connection to a supply depot which has stockpiled goods, which means that the AI controlling your armies will advance in a somewhat reasonable manner and when they engage an enemy it won't be a situation where the you have 200,000 troops on each side but only 4-6000 are allowed to fight. This would mean that armies do physically exist on the map, of course, but automated in a way that the AI should be able to handle before technologies allow them to go full HoI4 with frontlines.

This frontline system would work by allowing the units of an army to split into several detachments, the limits of which will be determined by various technologies, to allow for armies to properly cover large frontlines. This would also require a return to the combat width system used in Victoria 2 wherein it decreases with technology and the smaller of the two is used, though this could be addressed by having a priority for various combat widths to allow it to increase with some of the earlier techs but then decrease with the later ones. A system that can properly represent the changes in warfare in the 19th and 20th centuries, not just filter everything through a shitty pseudo-WW1 that doesn't even properly emulate WW1.

Spoiler: *Pic related

View attachment 4491438

Really I just want a logistics system since that would fix most of the game's fundamental issues, but it'd filter the casuals and nuParadox doesn't want that.

Yeah, I was a tentative defender of changing up the basic PDX warfare model for something a bit more logistics-based and abstract that could portray things like the 20,000 man British expeditionary force beating China in the Opium War, or the American invasion of the Philippines. Instead the new system has all the unrealism of the old one, plus some (at least China can't teleport their entire army to your theater in EU3 or VIC2.)

What the Vic3 model needs to do is make armies state-based, with the size of the army required based off the infrastructure/logistics available (so a few regiments are all that can fit on the Khalkin Gol state, but you can have giant armies operating on the Alsace state.)

Also a big missed opportunity to make internal politics play a big role in the viability of fighting wars, for example the British public was much more pro-Prussian in the Franco-Prussian War. For that reason (among others) the British did not intervene.

Overall realistic tech progression, diplomacy, and warfare is never going to happen for Vic3, as otherwise you couldn't take the heckin wholesome Zulu and turn them into a regional superpower with an industrial base that sub-Saharan Africa doesn't have today, let alone in 1936.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Yeah, I was a tentative defender of changing up the basic PDX warfare model for something a bit more logistics-based and abstract that could portray things like the 20,000 man British expeditionary force beating China in the Opium War, or the American invasion of the Philippines. Instead the new system has all the unrealism of the old one, plus some (at least China can't teleport their entire army to your theater in EU3 or VIC2.)

What the Vic3 model needs to do is make armies state-based, with the size of the army required based off the infrastructure/logistics available (so a few regiments are all that can fit on the Khalkin Gol state, but you can have giant armies operating on the Alsace state.)

Also a big missed opportunity to make internal politics play a big role in the viability of fighting wars, for example the British public was much more pro-Prussian in the Franco-Prussian War. For that reason (among others) the British did not intervene.

Overall realistic tech progression, diplomacy, and warfare is never going to happen for Vic3, as otherwise you couldn't take the heckin wholesome Zulu and turn them into a regional superpower with an industrial base that sub-Saharan Africa doesn't have today, let alone in 1936.

Britain might be another example of the need for riverine warfare. Didn't the Opium War (I don't remember which one) basically consist of the British Navy going right up the river (I don't remember which one) and dropping down on the Summer Palace, bypassing any resistance?

The Prussian thing is also another example of diplomatic ideology. The biggest diplomatic ideology, surprised I forgot it, in this period is probably British abolitionism. Prime example of a nation becoming absolutely obsessed with, for no strategic reason and to their own detriment, serving another group's interests (kidnap your own citizens and force them, under the lash, to serve on ships so they can stop other ships from kidnapping people and lashing them).

 

[Radola Gajda]

Britain might be another example of the need for riverine warfare. Didn't the Opium War (I don't remember which one) basically consist of the British Navy going right up the river (I don't remember which one) and dropping down on the Summer Palace, bypassing any resistance?

Yeah it was called gunboat diplomacy.

In case of CK3 there was vote what event pack will be next DLC , becauce this is what game needs more generic events.

Wards & Warden
Take a deep dive into what being a child in the Middle Ages was actually like, and explore what guardianship meant in practical terms. Wards & Wardens would feature events revolving around childhood, being a guardian, children at court, and more

Love & Lust
Let your love life take the reins! While lovers and spouses take on a larger role in Love & Lust, explore events related to more intimate relationships, expanded seduction, married life, and more

Villains & Vagabonds
Leverage your fearsome reputation and learn what it truly means to be dreaded. Villains & Vagabonds will feature events embracing the consequences and opportunities of being a tyrant, while considering contrasting themes of fairness and honor

Suprisingly wards and wardens won.

Edit: I can't quote posts, becauce farms are acting gay again.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

How would a gunboat diplomacy mechanic work for a game? For a player to want to cave when faced with it there has to be some repercussion to not, either very painful damage or a political thing. I'm not real familiar with the history of shelling harbors to secure compliance, just that it did happen (frequently).

I've mentioned before that something that could make these a lot better at getting realistic results is an escalation mechanic, in which conflict and maneuvers are limited by theater and type and you choose to escalate them which is like adding wargoals in terms of political and diplomatic costs of mission creep. A war can be purely colonial, purely naval, purely air (bombing a nation with no troops on the ground), can be confined to small territories like the HOI border conflicts.

Escalation can apply to troop size too. A population is willing to dispatch an expeditionary force to deal with something, but they don't consider it worth mobilizing, conscription, sending in the full army. If your game just has logistical constraints, then even then the US will always curbstomp the Sioux, the British will always curbstomp the Boers, an Opium War will always turn into a massive million man war, and so on. But if total troop deployments into an area bear a political cost or restriction, you can make it that a player wants to hold back and try to fight smartly instead of just flooding in the area, even to the extent that they may (gasp) loose. After all, was it a lack of logistics that lost the United States thing like Vietnam and Afghanistan, or was it an unwillingness to wage total war?