Paradox Studio Thread

[Midwit]

The Age of Blood might have been fun to see, but again, I couldn't because someone else teched up first.

I got the Age of Heroes in one game and the unique techs meant that I couldn't get scribes for another two ages, though that was also the first game where I wasn't sandwiched between two other factions so I actually had breathing room and some ability to catch up. The Humankind comparison is apt since the game has some issues with snowballing, nowhere near as bad as Humankind did but it's still pretty annoying. Are you supposed to build wide in these games?

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

Are you supposed to build wide in these games?

I'm not really sure, because the vassal system seems only partially worth it. I mean, it's better to have them than not, but looking at the numbers of per turn income, it's fractions of fractions. The amount of tribute they give each turn is fairly small, and what really confuses me is how you can't manually build any improvements in their territory for resources or have them send those resources to a city (at least as far as I could tell.) It seems like that would make perfect sense for a minor settlement versus your main cities, but instead you're stuck relying on the AI to build up all of your towns, rather than just an optional governor system, which feels extremely backwards. It's not exactly micromanagement to choose what a city should build over the next 10 turns.

I went kingdom in one game and imperial in the other, and the latter seemed better to me, allowing you to turn your capital into a tall powerhouse. Turning multiple vassals into regions really saps the hell out of your culture production, which I guess is the main limit (the unrest penalty is a joke), so if you're focusing on lots of temples or whatever, I guess wide would be more viable.

Warfare also feels very punishing, since not only do you deal with the increasing unrest in every settlement every turn, but taking a city effectively ruins it (halved pop and every improvement destroyed, along with militia having to rebuild), and gives you a bunch of chaos. Which isn't just a one time increase, due to how the system treats every increase as a boost in number immediately and per turn. (Thinking about it, I do wonder if it would be possible to effectively ruin an opponent's country by being in perpetual war with them so they had to keep dealing with the unrest and posting guards, so long as you can manage your own more efficiently.)

Some of the chaos stuff just feels totally untested and unbalanced, too. One event has groups of barbarians spawn for every region for every player. Another has a mild increase in unrest or a small decrease in food. Fun fact: if you go Khan as an ideal and make all barbarians non-hostile, then the chaos events that spawn them won't have them rush at your cities or raze your stuff. But their presence still increases unrest and acts as besieging your towns if they get adjacent! So I got to spend like 20 turns slowly mopping them all up because instead of suiciding on my walls, they just sat their making all my regions 80% efficient. I guess you could use that as a way to train your troops.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

So is there good planet automation settings, or a mod that makes it good? Because I tried it out and it seemed pretty shit.

Or is it like HoI4 front line AI that almost feels like a trap to get you to fuck up.

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

 

[Snekposter]

Oh boy...SotS...there's a blast from the past.

I liked my flicker drive ships

Oh yeah, SotS 1 with all of the expansions was a great game that was by 4x standards easy to learn and play, yet had a shocking amount of depth.

SotS 2 was the devs adding a ton of complexity to everything for no apparent reason, and as a result absolutely nothing worked right or comprehensibly even when the code wasn't shitting itself. What's sad is the changes they did to ship design and combat mechanics were actually great with things like armor layers and damage zones and fit great with the existing combat-heavy gameplay of SotS1, but nobody asked them to turn the strat map into Vicky 3, horrible UI and all.

 

[Google.com]

So Millennia has managed to drag itself up to Mixed, with 65% positive reviews, bu then I actually read them and remember why gamers deserve companies shitting all over them:
View attachment 5859551
looks like shit, key features are missing and/or wonky, but still recommended?

It makes more sense if you play it, it's kind of hard to decide between recommending or not.

It has a bunch of pretty unique features, I think the building system is done very well, economy, general progression seems pretty steady and well done. Ages is a gimmick but kind of cool. But then it is missing really random features like proper new world settings, multiplayer, and other just really basic and weird shit.

I mean I pirated it so I don't give a fuck but I can see how some might be on the fence even with the glaring issues.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

So playing a fanatical purifier race in Stellaris and i gotta say. tons of fun. It's kind of refreshing being able to tell the diplomacy shit to fuck off, it's purging time.

Yeah probably an opinion that gets mentioned tons of time. but eh. Whatever.

 

[Slap47]

So playing a fanatical purifier race in Stellaris and i gotta say. tons of fun. It's kind of refreshing being able to tell the diplomacy shit to fuck off, it's purging time.

Yeah probably an opinion that gets mentioned tons of time. but eh. Whatever.

The downside is that you are so comically overpowered by the mid-game that is just tedious. The +40% firepower to determined exterminator bots is especially cheesy.

 

[Shadfan666xxx000]

Warfare also feels very punishing, since not only do you deal with the increasing unrest in every settlement every turn, but taking a city effectively ruins it (halved pop and every improvement destroyed, along with militia having to rebuild), and gives you a bunch of chaos. Which isn't just a one time increase, due to how the system treats every increase as a boost in number immediately and per turn. (Thinking about it, I do wonder if it would be possible to effectively ruin an opponent's country by being in perpetual war with them so they had to keep dealing with the unrest and posting guards, so long as you can manage your own more efficiently.)

This sounds like base Civ 5 but somehow worse at letting you go wide.

 

[Breadbassket]

7 months after release and it is announced Star Trek: Infinite will get no more updates.

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

Can development for Imperator Rome resume again?

 

[East_Clintwood]

7 months after release and it is announced Star Trek: Infinite will get no more updates.

Already covered a couple of pages back, when it happened.

Can development for Imperator Rome resume again?

Can it? Theoretically. Will it? Hell no. No way they spend resources on a basically already dead game when there's so much other shit they could have those devs do instead (DLC for games that are still around, more hands on EU5 etc)

 

[General Emílio Médici]

The latest Dev Diary for Project Caesar went into more detail about internal management of a realm with more specifics about estates and how the autonomy system (now called Effective Control) and how it impacts the game.

We also had many interesting comments by Johan explaining more things people are speculating. Yes control can reach zero in a province and this can cause it to defect to a different tag or become a new nation but it seems like it isn't certain and likely having 0 control is not a automatic loss. Slaves are represented as pops, which means it is very likely we will see some harsh realities shown off about Arab slave trade here. The pop system also takes into account food, meaning that not every province is a town/city but in fact most of the map is made of smaller villages and small towns so you can keep people fed and if you fuck that up good luck.

He mentions that the pop system means that you will see a few pagan pops in Europe to represent the last remnants of these religions. He also points out that roads are now a thing you can build and having a road system is necessary to increase Effective Control. You don't have to worry about build slots anymore however as those are infinite (but given the comments about food this also means building every possible building in every possible province isn't viable or good). A interesting mention is how you can increase Effective Control by trading off some of the wealth to local nobility which shows how the estates are shaping up to work.

 

[Snekposter]

The latest Dev Diary for Project Caesar went into more detail about internal management of a realm with more specifics about estates and how the autonomy system (now called Effective Control) and how it impacts the game.

We also had many interesting comments by Johan explaining more things people are speculating. Yes control can reach zero in a province and this can cause it to defect to a different tag or become a new nation but it seems like it isn't certain and likely having 0 control is not a automatic loss. Slaves are represented as pops, which means it is very likely we will see some harsh realities shown off about Arab slave trade here. The pop system also takes into account food, meaning that not every province is a town/city but in fact most of the map is made of smaller villages and small towns so you can keep people fed and if you fuck that up good luck.

He mentions that the pop system means that you will see a few pagan pops in Europe to represent the last remnants of these religions. He also points out that roads are now a thing you can build and having a road system is necessary to increase Effective Control. You don't have to worry about build slots anymore however as those are infinite (but given the comments about food this also means building every possible building in every possible province isn't viable or good). A interesting mention is how you can increase Effective Control by trading off some of the wealth to local nobility which shows how the estates are shaping up to work.

Slap me in the face, hard, because I'm getting some hopes up and we can't have that with Paradox these days.

 

[thefreshmaker]

Can development for Imperator Rome resume again?

Apparently there may be a small patch coming soon, but in terms of actual development, I doubt it.

The recent community hype of the game was nice, but it's not sales figures. If you want further development, you need to convince the actuaries that it will be cost effective - you need to show that you'll get back $X for every $Y spent on development, where $X = profit + minimum profit to make up for the opportunity cost of developing Imperator and not, say, continuing on HoI4. It means a lot of time just analyzing the code and getting people up to speed on the game so development can even begin, then a game plan to develop a DLC that functions and is popular and won't just be useless tat.

It's sort of like trying to convince Ford to restart Model T production using the recent start of an enthusiasts club. Sure, it's a relatively large and highly vocal group, but they've already got Model T's and the cost of retooling and selling them will likely mean a loss. They might do it for reputation and goodwill, but that means getting big wig approval higher up. Maybe Johan has some sway, but good luck convincing share holders now.

If something happens with Imperator it will be useless shit, eg: a focus tree, some fancy schmancy graphics they got off Fiverr, or whatever else. You won't see major development work, major bug fixes, etc. That would require the shit DLC be released to great success and great praise.

 

[Bobbobson]

Invictus mod has Paradox's unofficial blessing to continue Imperator Rome so I wouldn't expect any new content for the game from Paradox. One of the devs even commented on the upcoming patch that one of the main reasons behind it is to make Invictus team's life easier.

On that note, Invictus is a really solid mod that I would reccomend to everyone. It has new tags, formables, missions and events (rise of Parthians, Mauryan collapse etc.) that add a lot of historical flavour. It also has better balance than the original game. With the beta patch released by Paradox some time ago enabled you can even earn the achievements. Invictus updates are on par with an EUIV DLC content wise but free.

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

Invictus mod has Paradox's unofficial blessing to continue Imperator Rome so I wouldn't expect any new content for the game from Paradox. One of the devs even commented on the upcoming patch that one of the main reasons behind it is to make Invictus team's life easier.

On that note, Invictus is a really solid mod that I would reccomend to everyone. It has new tags, formables, missions and events (rise of Parthians, Mauryan collapse etc.) that add a lot of historical flavour. It also has better balance than the original game. With the beta patch released by Paradox some time ago enabled you can even earn the achievements. Invictus updates are on par with an EUIV DLC content wise but free.

Sounds cool, I might check that out.

 

[JJLiautaud]

Speaking of mods. I really hate how CotC for CK2 never got finished. It was a cool mod that showed in an interesting way how the Neo-feudal SF setting can come about.

 

[Teghern]

Speaking of mods. I really hate how CotC for CK2 never got finished. It was a cool mod that showed in an interesting way how the Neo-feudal SF setting can come about.

So many lost to time, Prince and the Thane update never ever.
The DLC release cycle really ruined so many projects, sure there's HIP for the map autists and Elder Kings and ATE got final updates but so many others just got smothered in the cradle because the shitty release policy made the megamods of the past impossible.
Not all parakikes fault though, the modderfags achieved nothing for TWO FUCKING YEARS between northern lords/royal court leaving a complete desert of content during what should have been a golden era thanks to covid indooring but I suppose sperging about HRT and the wonders of mobaification took priority.

 

[JJLiautaud]

So many lost to time, Prince and the Thane update never ever.
The DLC release cycle really ruined so many projects, sure there's HIP for the map autists and Elder Kings and ATE got final updates but so many others just got smothered in the cradle because the shitty release policy made the megamods of the past impossible.
Not all parakikes fault though, the modderfags achieved nothing for TWO FUCKING YEARS between northern lords/royal court leaving a complete desert of content during what should have been a golden era thanks to covid indooring but I suppose sperging about HRT and the wonders of mobaification took priority.

The Faerun mod is pretty fun and still getting updates but its shocking how quickly modders moved on to the newest Game esp. when CK3 just isn't very good.