Paradox Studio Thread

[Blackstar]

Todays Tinto Talks gave us every single Trade Good in EU5

In other news, the OpenVic team gave us a dev diary updating everyone on their progress in 2024:
tl;dr: Dataloading mostly finished, now they're working on reverse engineering the Vic 2 simulation and have been also working on optimising their code.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

They actually did a really interesting thing in EU4 to try and simulate the end of the Ottomans and their decline in the 1700s, which would lead them to be the sick man of Europe in the 1800s. However the EU4 AI is just too stupid to manage it and they fall apart almost as soon as the 1600s hit and end up in a death spiral. I have seen them manage it in one game by breaking down and turning into a Iqta government, which broke the events and turned it into a weaker nation but one which didn't have to deal with the game breaking shit from Decadence.

Similarly the Eyelet system tried to better show off the nature of the Ottoman blob in the game, with the idea being that you would make Egypt a de-facto subject nation and not really a integral part of your realm like the Anatolian provinces, and the same for the Tunis/North Africa ones. As a way to better simulate how the power was divided.

I think that these mechanics were actually a test drives for what they wanna try and plan in the future games. If you read some of the stuff about how control and administration is going to work in EU5 you can see some shades of thing like these being better modeled as they can now go directly into the source code and build the entire game with the thing in mind already and with code taking it into account instead of what was done in EU4 where each DLC paywalled a feature to the point it's pointless to try and play without a single DLC or the game breaks, or the fact it sometimes took years for different parts of the world to have their content updated to take into account new mechanics and systems originally shipped in DLCs focused on other regions.

Todays Tinto Talks gave us every single Trade Good in EU5

Still feels like a few things are missing, like spices being a single good is a slight step down and it would be nice to see cloves come back from EU4. I also find myself disliking the icons for Gold, Silver and Glass. The EU4 icon for glass is a lot more intuitive and the Gold/Silver icons look too much like modern bars instead of the older stuff from the period. They should use instead use old timey coins and such like imperial thalers or spanish Reals.

Do like how they split the types of grain and legumes, will allow better simulation based on weather and location. Also nice to see pearls split from gems.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I am (very slightly) curious if they'll remember to simulate the Columbian Exchange.
By default the New World is all maize OR potatoes. Later on there should be rice in the Lowcountry and Louisiana (nowadays in Arkansas), potatoes and wheat in the North, potatoes in Europe of course, but maize remains the dominant crop in the South.

Paradox has always completely sucked at both simulating realistic trade and even the inaccurate trade theories of its time. I don't care about their games anymore so I haven't paid any attention to how it's supposed to be done now, but EU4's particularly bad decision was living in a bizarro world of reverse-mercantilism where wealth is created only by importing and trade just kind of flows to designated areas without any reason.

What is a lot more realistic, mercantilism or no (and mercantilism is what a player will naturally tend towards anyways if they're powergaming, I think of EU4 - MEIOU and Taxes - as being about the story of state formation), is representing trade as binary exchange where trade value goes up the more variety of scarce things you bring the other party. Like a diminishing return for each unit they have (from both you and deomstic production).

EU4 is also a golden age for "triangular trades," where you build a more profitable trade route by having it loop on itself in such a way that every transaction is part of a series of swaps that lets you keep your cargo hold full (maximum efficiency) while accumulating value. Like manufactures --> furs --> porcelains (New England --> Pacific Northwest --> China) or manufactures --> slaves --> sugar (Europe --> Africa --> Caribbean). Some other trades I'm pretty familiar with are things like the Indian fur/deerskin trades. Indians were integrated into the global economy as producers of furs and slaves that were basically dependent on the outside world for everything else (that wasn't shitty stone tools).

This is the kind of thing that would make trade much more interesting than the current garbage.

For EU4's time period I think it's fine for it to focus more on exotic luxury goods.

 

[LovisXVI]

By default the New World is all maize OR potatoes. Later on there should be rice in the Lowcountry and Louisiana (nowadays in Arkansas), potatoes and wheat in the North, potatoes in Europe of course, but maize remains the dominant crop in the South.

Probably. At least some places according to Johan. I hope it is at least semi dynamic, where I can intentionally move to adopt a crop in a province instead of another, like the efforts to introduce the potato to farmers.

 

[Breadbassket]

Someone did a video on why "grand strategy" as a genre is taking over the strategy video game market.

 

[Computer God Autism]

EU4 is the sole PDX game where the most common gameplay criticism is that there's nothing to do when not at war.

There's not really anything to do while at war either.

EU4 is probably the worst Paradox game of the last decade for the simple fact it fails to provide meaningful depth to any of its mechanics past the first century or so and can't even adequately capture the feel of that first century. It's an overglorified Risk mechanically hamstrung by a haphazard DLC policy, constant changes in creative direction and no real interplay between any of its systems virtue of monarch mana.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

And I love it anyway.

Also saying "the worst Paradox game of the last decade" is pretty funny since it is the literal oldest game by that metric. In fact I think it might be closer to 11 than 10 years old now.

 

[Computer God Autism]

And I love it anyway.

Also saying "the worst Paradox game of the last decade" is pretty funny since it is the literal oldest game by that metric. In fact I think it might be closer to 11 than 10 years old now.

No? Vicky 2 released at the start of the last decade, 2010, with CK2 releasing a year earlier than EU4 in 2012.

I've enjoyed EU4 - it took up a lot of my teenage years - but to me it's aged like milk. There's plenty of other older strategy games I've been able to go back to and find new things to appreciate but every time I've picked up EU4 in the past few years I've just found more things to criticize.

Someone did a video on why "grand strategy" as a genre is taking over the strategy video game market.

Apologies for the doublepost but him saying that 'it's a well known fact that big nations are not as popular in paradox games' is just flat out wrong. Paradox has released the most popular tags in EU4 multiple years in their dev diaries and the top 10 are almost invariably the historical major powers plus Byzantium. Playing small and obscure tags as challenge runs are very popular amongst a very vocal rung of Paradox's userbase but those were a minority even before Paradox started casualizing their games and have only become more so - which is also one of the major keys to Paradox's recent success; newer entries are just less demanding and easier to access. HoI4 is a visual novel with a WW2-themed strategy interface and Vicky 3 just outright removed player interactivity in core parts of what most people consider the most engaging parts of a strategy game.

 

[thefreshmaker]

and Vicky 3 just outright removed player interactivity in core parts of what most people consider the most engaging parts of a strategy game.

Yeah but you can zoom in and look at the trains, they even have a steam whistle noise!

 

[General Emílio Médici]

No? Vicky 2 released at the start of the last decade, 2010, with CK2 releasing a year earlier than EU4 in 2012.

Slight misunderstanding. You meant last decade as in 2010/2020 while I meant literally the last 10 years so 2014/5 2024/5.

 

[East_Clintwood]

Still feels like a few things are missing, like spices being a single good is a slight step down and it would be nice to see cloves come back from EU4.

Dev replies said they originally trialed multiple spice types but consolidated them down as the game play effect was minimal, but it did have a slight performance impact. I don't necessarily hate that decision but it definitely feels weird in context of some of their other decisions.
If we're consolidating down some of the most important trade goods that drove the whole colonization thing that's a central part of this time period why not other stuff? Gems/pearls/amber seems a tad unnecessary since the descriptions make it clear they're all basically used for the same thing (the gems description literally mentions pearls) Do dates/fruit and to a lesser extent olives need to be 3 separate goods if they're all gonna have the same cost + production anyway?
There's other weird stuff as well like they're not bothering with pottery since they say it's abstracted by the existence of basic clay, so why not the same for stone/masonry? or naval goods whose description is literally just a list of other, existing trade goods?

I don't mind if they wanna go full Vic 3 with a ton of trade stuff, and equally I wouldn't mind if they abstracted a bit more out in the name of simplicity + performance. it just feels like they've chosen the weirdest possible mid-ground.

 

[thefreshmaker]

or naval goods whose description is literally just a list of other, existing trade goods?

To be fair with naval goods, it's less the goods and more the local industry. Naval timber is very different to normal wood sources, and required intensive labor during growth to ensure it grew properly, likewise ropes were typically formed from flax or other materials on site, then later at a ropery. Naval quality standards were perhaps the first instance historically of institutionalised quality control. Still, would be better represented by local economics rather than as a "trade good", because these goods were not traded, they were used on site during ship construction or sent down river to a more commercial port which would still be the same tile distance wise in game.

For all the other goods, I can only say Eurocentrism. It's important to have amber for the Baltic if you live in Sweden, but a global view would say no.

 

[Computer God Autism]

Still, would be better represented by local economics rather than as a "trade good", because these goods were not traded, they were used on site during ship construction or sent down river to a more commercial port which would still be the same tile distance wise in game.

That was the case in some areas, but not all. British shipyards were notoriously reliant on the Baltic and later New England for their timber supplies.

 

[Snekposter]

That was the case in some areas, but not all. British shipyards were notoriously reliant on the Baltic and later New England for their timber supplies.

Yeah, the British wound up with a dire shortage of quality wood on their island by the early 1700's as a result of the Royal Navy's incessant hunger for building materials. The shift to using iron in their vessels in the mid-1800's is because those alternative wood supplies were themselves becoming untenable.

 

[thefreshmaker]

That was the case in some areas, but not all. British shipyards were notoriously reliant on the Baltic and later New England for their timber supplies.

Certainly, but not entirely, and not early on - once building got to extreme levels in the early modern period they did. Either way, this is represented by timber already, so it just makes the trade good for naval supplies pointless. It's better represented by having natural harbor tiles which can be upgraded or start with a naval factory that requires X iron ore, heavy timber, and flax/hemp which is then modified to increase based on player navy building to represent local construction for trade and fisheries and then state-induced war construction. They can even keep a role for naval supplies by having two timbers - light for heating and heavy for construction, with populations requiring X light timber as a base level depending on size.

What I'm saying is that EU5 should basically take over Victoria and be the game we should have got.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

"Heart of Oak" isn't just a cool sounding set of words, it's a big fucking deal when building ships out of wood as it refers to the hardest wood out of a oak which takes decades for the trees to produce meaning you need to watch out and care for a forest for decades, more often centuries to ensure you get those planks in shape. Otherwise you will have a ship whose hull will get waterlogged, rotten and fall apart.

I agree EUV needs to be Vicky levels of autismo.

 

[Verpa Teutonica Ingens]

Yeah, the British wound up with a dire shortage of quality wood on their island by the early 1700's as a result of the Royal Navy's incessant hunger for building materials. The shift to using iron in their vessels in the mid-1800's is because those alternative wood supplies were themselves becoming untenable.

Tangentially related, but the same thing happened in Ancient Greece: Athenian naval construction turned out to be an ecological catastrophe that much of Greece still hasn't recovered from.

 

[Tri-Tachyon'sClown]

I'd prefer purging over slavery in Stellaris. Easier on my PC, that's quite literally the only reason.

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

HOI4 board game edition

 

[Stoneheart]

EU4 is the sole PDX game where the most common gameplay criticism is that there's nothing to do when not at war.

thats a retarded criticism. Eu4 has more than enough other gameplay to fill the short periods between war. its so much bs, they should take out all those not at war flags...