Paradox Studio Thread

[Second Sun]

So many things in Stellaris only exist for show, or there's only one correct way to do them so they might as well not exist. Factions, espionage, trade, admin cap, etc.

The game always boils down to whoever does the most research while staying alive though, so what they really need to is make distinct research trees so there's more options for play styles.

 

[Vodyanik]

So many things in Stellaris only exist for show, or there's only one correct way to do them so they might as well not exist. Factions, espionage, trade, admin cap, etc.

The game always boils down to whoever does the most research while staying alive though, so what they really need to is make distinct research trees so there's more options for play styles.

Stellaris basically just tricks you into thinking you're playing a deep game while it's as deep as a puddle. The fact that they totally overhauled the games multiple times instead of building on what's there didn't help. There was a time when the AI was completely broken and the other empires basically stopped playing the game midway through and barely anyone noticed.

 

[Blackhole]

So many things in Stellaris only exist for show, or there's only one correct way to do them so they might as well not exist. Factions, espionage, trade, admin cap, etc.

The game always boils down to whoever does the most research while staying alive though, so what they really need to is make distinct research trees so there's more options for play styles.

modding the shit out of stellaris is the best way to play tbh. mods that actually flesh out game systems are great.

 

[Big Green]

Is it just me or is Victoria 2 kind of boring? I feel like I'm playing Europa, but have way less to do while I wait for the next war.

 

[The Demon Pimp of Razgriz]

Is it just me or is Victoria 2 kind of boring? I feel like I'm playing Europa, but have way less to do while I wait for the next war.

If your hands off with your economy, like a good free marketer, then yeah, there can be precious little to do between wars, while waiting for infamy to cool down/casus belli's to be valid. The Pop Demand Mod adds a whole lot of extra events that fire for many of the most popular countries, and is a must have for anyone playing Vic 2. It also makes other changes, such as making creating Greater Germany a little more difficult, even for Prussia, and making creating an Uber Germany, containing the entirety of Austria Hungary, actually dangerous and extremely hard to pull off. Also, America annexing Canada (with cores!) for the win!

 

[highlighter_shitposting]

modding the shit out of stellaris is the best way to play tbh. mods that actually flesh out game systems are great.

Absolutely. I can't go back to vanilla after I discovered ethics and civics mod

 

[Slap47]

Stellaris basically just tricks you into thinking you're playing a deep game while it's as deep as a puddle. The fact that they totally overhauled the games multiple times instead of building on what's there didn't help. There was a time when the AI was completely broken and the other empires basically stopped playing the game midway through and barely anyone noticed.

What really sucks about Paradox is that they had in-depth population mechanics back in the day.

EU:Rome:



I stacked population growth, but have a very liberal society that allows freemen to citizens, I have low manpower, but insanely high research as a result. However, slaves also become freemen and citizens so I need a constant stream of slaves just to have income.

Stellaris, and Vicky2 just have you going in one direction by trying to have as many people as possible, and as many literate people as possible. This game actually punished you for it. Imagine if Vicky2 slowed population growth as your literacy went up and actually made public healthcare obscenely expensive, or if the game actually factored in stuff like the age of your population. They have the resources to add depth, but they just don't seem willing to go beyond just having you click stuff for instant bonuses and maluses.

I played the game the opposite way and still had fun. Instead of annihilating the Seleucids with a couple super elite armies I just used manpower to attack them on multiple fronts. The game has genuine choice of playstyle where both are optimal. Shame the game has antiquated diplomacy, a lack of mods that still work and only one good nation to really play.

 

[Vodyanik]

Stellaris has at least two additional problems when it comes to pops that other Paradox games don't.

First, there's no pre-defined world. In a normal Paradox games, your growth is kept in check by the geography and your neighbors. In Stellaris, you're incentivized to snowball as hard as possible by colonizing as many empty worlds as possible, and then shitting out habitats and ringworlds when your research gets there. Haven't played in a while but I assume Highly Adaptable and Rapid Breeders are still the default traits everyone wants to have. It makes the game highly linear, unless you want to roleplay or play in a different way just to have variety.

Then there's species. Turns out shoving an additional variable into an existing system can make things clunky. If you're playing a xenophobic ethnostate, as you should, the system works close to intended. If you want to have some fun and play a slaver empire things get a little more bothersome because you have to keep species AND social class in mind for slaves, which is clunky because there is only one organic growth slot per planet, which is the main issue here. If you're playing a faggy open borders refugees welcome libtard empire, you basically accept that species just doesn't play a role anymore and you just hope the system assigns pops with beneficial traits. The fact that there is a perk that allows species to mix to create even more templates to clog up the growth slot makes things so much worse. Robots are another thing, because in addition to the organic pop growth slot there is a robot one, so you're heavily incentivized to have at least some level of robotics going because not using that slot just means you're leaving pop growth on the table.

Also I wanna add that as much as I shit on Stellaris, it can still be a nice game to play once in a while. It's just a low engagement podcast game, which is imo not what it presents itself as. My favourite way to play is to get mods that make the planets more interesting and then lower the amount of habitable worlds to the minimum, so planets are rarer and more valuable. That way I can end up with a galaxy where I actually give a shit about individual worlds, instead of one with a million blips I can't be bothered to micromanage.

 

[Mary the Goldsmith]

Just here to sperg about my experience with Vic 2

Spoiler: Drunken ramblings

I played as Mexico, the idea was a "what if, Mexico became the superpower instead of the US?" Bad idea as Mexico starts the game at war with Texas and will shortly after be invaded by them Gringoes for the Mexican-American War, not the ideal scenario for your first playthrough, a few tutorials later I learned its actually quite easy to reannex Texas before the US intervenes and you can sort of avoid the Mex-Us war, one thing I found really annoying are the rebels they're constantly rising up and the only way I could get rid of them was to cheat and lower my militancy and even then they came back shortly after.
Anyway here's what the map looked like at the end in 1936:

I considered making a LP in here inspired by the Vic I and Europa Universalis ones, but the truth is I suck at this game, the above took me several tries and some slight cheating, stuff that wouldn't make for a good LP.

 

[The Demon Pimp of Razgriz]

you can sort of avoid the Mex-Us war

Funnily enough, that is one of the things the Pop Demand Mod makes impossible, as the U.S. will always gain cores on Mexico via decision and (I believe) automatically declare war on them, making it impossible to avoid the Mexican American War. As a trade off, its no long possible to avoid the American Civil War in the mod, either.

 

[Agarathium1066]

Just here to sperg about my experience with Vic 2

Assuming all the light green is Mexican holdings you blobbed the shit out of it. I was under the impression consuming that much land was difficult in Vicky 2 but that might be the modded versions. Have to ask though .. why the hell did you take a chunk of northern siberia?

 

[Blackhole]

how do you manually install 3.22 stellaris mods? i cannot find a up to date guide and it's hurting my retard brain

 

[Rebel Wilson]

Isn't the filepath

%USERPROFILE%\Documents\Paradox Interactive\Stellaris\mod\

extracted with the .mod file and matching folder? Has Tardox changed it now?

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

If your hands off with your economy, like a good free marketer, then yeah, there can be precious little to do between wars, while waiting for infamy to cool down/casus belli's to be valid. The Pop Demand Mod adds a whole lot of extra events that fire for many of the most popular countries, and is a must have for anyone playing Vic 2. It also makes other changes, such as making creating Greater Germany a little more difficult, even for Prussia, and making creating an Uber Germany, containing the entirety of Austria Hungary, actually dangerous and extremely hard to pull off. Also, America annexing Canada (with cores!) for the win!

It's still really easy to make Greater Germany in that mod, you just need to keep your infamy level low before and after that event fires and it gives you the rest of the Habsburg Empire (the parts which aren't Austria/Slovenia/Czech) as puppet states which is great until Hungary inevitably gets to be the #8 great power because they're riding the coattails of your success. Even then they'll probably still want to be your ally and are harmless if they don't.

Just here to sperg about my experience with Vic 2

Spoiler: Drunken ramblings

I played as Mexico, the idea was a "what if, Mexico became the superpower instead of the US?" Bad idea as Mexico starts the game at war with Texas and will shortly after be invaded by them Gringoes for the Mexican-American War, not the ideal scenario for your first playthrough, a few tutorials later I learned its actually quite easy to reannex Texas before the US intervenes and you can sort of avoid the Mex-Us war, one thing I found really annoying are the rebels they're constantly rising up and the only way I could get rid of them was to cheat and lower my militancy and even then they came back shortly after.
Anyway here's what the map looked like at the end in 1936:
View attachment 2889096
I considered making a LP in here inspired by the Vic I and Europa Universalis ones, but the truth is I suck at this game, the above took me several tries and some slight cheating, stuff that wouldn't make for a good LP.

The rebels are there to deter exactly what you're doing by taking over the world.

Funnily enough, that is one of the things the Pop Demand Mod makes impossible, as the U.S. will always gain cores on Mexico via decision and (I believe) automatically declare war on them, making it impossible to avoid the Mexican American War. As a trade off, its no long possible to avoid the American Civil War in the mod, either.

It also makes playing Mexico a pain in the ass the first 15 years since there's a bunch of other rebellions that go on in Mexico alongside Texas.

 

[AnAccount]

I think stellaris is kinda borked because the game was always a weird experimental game that they didn't put a huge amount of effort, truth is they should have just made a Stellaris 2 after the big update that changed FTL, because they clearly have been trying to Rejigg a game into something that works how they want but the fundamental base just isn't there.

 

[Mary the Goldsmith]

Funnily enough, that is one of the things the Pop Demand Mod makes impossible, as the U.S. will always gain cores on Mexico via decision and (I believe) automatically declare war on them, making it impossible to avoid the Mexican American War. As a trade off, its no long possible to avoid the American Civil War in the mod, either.

I didn't mention it but i also prevented the US Civil War because I stupidly decided to invade the US thinking I could take them, and was counting on the Civil War weakening them bu tit never happened, we can say that I gave them a common enemy.

Assuming all the light green is Mexican holdings you blobbed the shit out of it. I was under the impression consuming that much land was difficult in Vicky 2 but that might be the modded versions. Have to ask though .. why the hell did you take a chunk of northern siberia?

Yeah the light green is my glorious latino empire, like I said this wasn't a legit playthrough I used cheats, mainly one that allows me to add as many war goals as a I want, meaning I can almost take over a country in one go assuming I have the man power to overwhelm them. I sent a detachment to Africa very early on thinking I could colonize before everyone else but learned that you can't really start colonizing until 1850 (I think, there is a year where the super powers start colonizing Africa), so I annexed Sokovo and when the colonizing time came I did have a headstart but ended going to war with the british over the territories, and thanks to my large african territories I imported a lot of buck legions and was able to take on the british and the French, I wanted to take on Germany but the constant rebel uprisings in the late game made this impossible.
As for why take a portion of Siberia is because I'm an imbecile, I thought I was taking the part that covers the Bering Strait...

 

[Fuck Y'all]

Isn't the filepath

%USERPROFILE%\Documents\Paradox Interactive\Stellaris\mod\

extracted with the .mod file and matching folder? Has Tardox changed it now?

nothing has changed, only their launcher tends to have stroke from time to time

 

[Figger Naggot]

Either use Irony mod manager or manually edit the dlc_load.json file in your "\Documents\Paradox Interactive\*insertgamehere*" folder. Don't even bother with shitty Paradox launcher.

 

[The Demon Pimp of Razgriz]

until Hungary inevitably gets to be the #8 great power because they're riding the coattails of your success. Even then they'll probably still want to be your ally and are harmless if they don't.

Can be avoided any number of ways in the Pop Demand Mod: releasing a bunch of Eastern European states from Russia, namely the United Baltic Duchy, Ukraine, and Transcaucasia, as one of those states will probably attain it before Hungary; unifying Scandinavia, which, despite its relative weakness, is always a Great Power for some reason, allowing Japan to attain Great Power status, releasing Occitania from France (better if you briefly take over France and have them do it on their own, as France loses the cores if they do it voluntarily, thus preventing Occitania from having a constant rebel problem and preventing France from launching constant wars to retake the country), forcing Hungary to release Slovakia, etc.

It also makes playing Mexico a pain in the ass the first 15 years since there's a bunch of other rebellions that go on in Mexico alongside Texas.

Just like real life.

 

[Slap47]

So many things in Stellaris only exist for show, or there's only one correct way to do them so they might as well not exist. Factions, espionage, trade, admin cap, etc.

The game always boils down to whoever does the most research while staying alive though, so what they really need to is make distinct research trees so there's more options for play styles.

To be fair, I don't think any Civ-like game has been able to escape this.