Paradox Studio Thread

Favorite Paradox Game?

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so dear leader hearted my comment on playing eu4 to fuck that stupid little japanese kingdom.
who is in for a MP game? i have all mods and i would host a game on the weekends if enough guys are in. i will also make it our mission to make our dear sweet price to join us as ulm or what ever if enough people join.

also i will not host for more than 10 people, because that never works...
 
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I played a bit more of Victoria 3. Game was either crashing every every couple of minutes or was stable for hours. It's quite playable. Formed NGF through diplomatic means so it took longer than it should. I also didn't understand mechanics at the beginning but once I got it - smooth sailing. Not much happened on map. I played with community patch so AI wasn't completely brain dead as it in caligua version. Russia annexed Kazakhstan, Austria had big civil war and suddenly had 3 times my brigade count(what?) and british raja went ape in India... I think since they had like 50 infamy.
Cookie clicker is very good comparison. There's plenty of buttons, in tenths of menus you have to click. Constructing buildings, expanding buildings, importing stuff and watching numbers go up/down is the majority of your time spent in the game. There's some fun to be had for sure: Building correct industry in correct regions and taking care of unemployment but it's unimpressive. Internal politics are a joke. You can pass laws, suppress/promote factions and... I think that's it. I played to 1848 and haven't managed to pass a single law despite it being quite popular(60% support). It was stuck on debate since near game start. UI is a mess. I got lost so much at beginning I don't think the casual audience will fare better.
Many people discuss trade system but it's just plainly trash. It should something that work in the background and that you can influence not micro manage. Awful and almost as annoying as Imperator trade.

Compared to Victoria 2 this game is a joke. They need to automate the busy work somewhat and bring back normal war mechanics to make it at least decent.
 
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hawkisnight said:
I played a bit more of Victoria 3. Game was either crashing every every couple of minutes or was stable for hours. It's quite playable. Formed NGF through diplomatic means so it took longer than it should. I also didn't understand mechanics at the beginning but once I got it - smooth sailing. Not much happened on map. I played with community patch so AI wasn't completely brain dead as it in caligua version. Russia annexed Kazakhstan, Austria had big civil war and suddenly had 3 times my brigade count(what?) and british raja went ape in India... I think since they had like 50 infamy.
Cookie clicker is very good comparison. There's plenty of buttons, in tenths of menus you have to click. Constructing buildings, expanding buildings, importing stuff and watching numbers go up/down is the majority of your time spent in the game. There's some fun to be had for sure: Building correct industry in correct regions and taking care of unemployment but it's unimpressive. Internal politics are a joke. You can pass laws, suppress/promote factions and... I think that's it. I played to 1848 and haven't managed to pass a single law despite it being quite popular(60% support). It was stuck on debate since near game start. UI is a mess. I got lost so much at beginning I don't think the casual audience will fare better.
Many people discuss trade system but it's just plainly trash. It should something that work in the background and that you can influence not micro manage. Awful and almost as annoying as Imperator trade.

Compared to Victoria 2 this game is a joke. They need to automate the busy work somewhat and bring back normal war mechanics to make it at least decent.
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Paradox: Builds game that uniquely tries (fails, but tries) to simulate a market economy, is beloved for how accurate economy builds and manages itself

Nu-Paradox: Takes armies away, makes you build every corn farm by yourself

Are there even battles? Can you actually see two armies meet in Argonne Forest and the defender gets a forest bonus and see how many casualties there are and all that, or is it just states flipping all in one go with some casualty ticker going up?

Also, while I'm ranting, if they were going to make generals so fucking important they could have at least had a basic order of battle where you have a general staff and have big generals (like Lee or Grant) in charge of lesser generals (like Jackson and Hooker). That's something that none of these Paradox games, even HOI4, have, despite how easy it would be to add, literally just have a supreme general and then something like a head general in a theater who can give bonuses to other generals within a certain radius.

Honestly if the modders can figure out a way to build some economy autopilot and also some control over the army it'll probably be better than Victoria II. But those are both big assumptions. At this point it seems like the EU4 mod for the Victorian Era, or the Imperator mod, will be a better game, which is ridiculous.
 
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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Are there even battles? Can you actually see two armies meet in Argonne Forest and the defender gets a forest bonus and see how many casualties there are and all that, or is it just states flipping all in one go with some casualty ticker going up?
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There are battles. You can see the terrain they are fighting on, you can see how many wounded and dead there are but everything plays by itself. When you start a diplomatic play the fronts are generated, you mobilize generals with their brigades and assign them to front and tell them to defend or advance. After you assign everyone you want you sit back and watch. Overall it's pretty bad. It is like a mobile game.
The unfinished UI gets in the way all the time making it annoying to manage bigger army or larger/multiple fronts. I managed to beat Bavaria/Austria(they had almost 3 times my brigade count) but only because they were using conscripts and couldn't mobilize fully for some reason(in debt?) but if AI would have a bit more brains I don't think I would be able to beat that.

EDIT: The positives in Victoria 3 are music and loading screen art. Just beautiful. Although some of the art is a bit odd looking with out of place blacks. Like French revolution or women suffrage marches. In Antarctica expedition one I could swear the artist made one of the men look black but it might be just shadow.
 
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HeyYou said:
They literally are. Half the time there's no reason to buy the DLC because the patch that comes with it gives you everything you need.
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Eh, you still miss out on a lot of features but yeah, you can play without the patches theoretically.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Also, while I'm ranting, if they were going to make generals so fucking important they could have at least had a basic order of battle where you have a general staff and have big generals (like Lee or Grant) in charge of lesser generals (like Jackson and Hooker). That's something that none of these Paradox games, even HOI4, have, despite how easy it would be to add, literally just have a supreme general and then something like a head general in a theater who can give bonuses to other generals within a certain radius.
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HOI 3 does that to the point you'll be managing hundreds of generals if you play a major power. It also lets you do silly things like put De Gaulle in charge of France's army the minute you get him (1939 IIRC) or send all the Stalinist goons who had no fucking clue about military command off to Siberia while actually skilled generals get to deal with the Nazi invasion.
 
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Save the Loli said:
HOI 3 does that to the point you'll be managing hundreds of generals if you play a major power. It also lets you do silly things like put De Gaulle in charge of France's army the minute you get him (1939 IIRC) or send all the Stalinist goons who had no fucking clue about military command off to Siberia while actually skilled generals get to deal with the Nazi invasion.
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I just want an intermediate step where I don't have to manage headquarters and hundreds of characters but can still have different levels of generals.

HOI4's system is downright embarrassing.
 
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Speaking of Paradox games, I recently tried Surviving Mars.

5/10 would not recommend unless you're really bored. Saved only by the fact that there's little competition in this genre. Space Colony did this far better imo.
The general idea is sound. Colonise the great new frontier! The Red Planet!

Like Tropico, Haemimont Games fell into the trap of masking the simplicity of the simulation with tons of features that really matters fuck-all once you dig deeper. Traits? Interesting until you find out that most do not matter. Sponsors? Cool idea, until you realise they're just a glorified difficulty slider, and has little impact on your base-building experience. Mission profiles is just "pick your perks". Rival colonies! Until you realise they don't actually interact with you in any way beyond the occasional trade offer and as your personal resource bank.

The start will always open the same way, secure your basic resources, pull rockets to fuel your initial expansion, then build up to self-sufficiency. Doesn't matter if you're flying the AMERICAN flag, or poo-in-the-loo, your base will always start similar. The only difference is how fast you get bootstrapped. All well and good, until you realise a few things:
a) Power on Mars is fucking easy to get. Wind generators generate a constant output, and solar works 2/3 of the time. Same with O2. At least they did a better job with water, which are appropriately precious.
b) Managing resource stores in this game is fucking terrible. There's only a "I want this many resources here" slider. Not even a priority system.
c) Ditto for managing colonists.

They tried to spice up the midgame with a random "mystery", which is just code for "this is the long term quest for this run", which admittedly works alright. The endgame, however, is fucking atrocious, with the terraforming shit (DLC naturally) barely tying into the original game (it's really obvious to me), and one of the terraforming goals outright dependent on you sitting with your thumbs up your arse until a particular planetary mission pops via RNG.

tl;dr They tried, it's not Tropico in space, at least, but the design flaws all still carry over.
 
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Mike Stoklasa said:
When did Paradox become such skirts?
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Early HOI4 era, when the disappointment of Stellaris along with lingering resentment over shitty CK2/EU4 updates made the dev teams start whining and the people in charge of the official forums let them screech at players. That was when the "toxicity" rule started being applied.

I think it had already been telegraphed by the poor response to the cancellation of Magna Mundi and especially East vs West, two games made by modders given access to the engine. While Magna Mundi was led by a lolcow, East vs West seemed to have some real teeth and sparked a fans vs Paradox forum flame war. Looking back, it's the transition of Paradox from a fan-centered niche studio (who published fan games like Darkest Hour) to the major strategy game giant they are now, which was definitely not for the better.
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
I just want an intermediate step where I don't have to manage headquarters and hundreds of characters but can still have different levels of generals.
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That was my biggest problem with HOI3, where it was micromanagement hell since I knew the game rewarded you for assigning good generals to your divisions so I'd spend like 2 hours setting up before a battle whenever I played a hard country. Worse, only divisional generals get combat bonuses so if you sent a general with high max skill (like a bunch of Soviets) to army leadership immediately you're basically wasting them. Maybe this is realistic since you're promoting people beyond their skill or whatever, but someone like De Gaulle shows up in 1939 with all sorts of combat bonuses. All the major powers are buffed, even Italy whose infamously mediocre/bad leaders are somehow on par with the average Finnish general in the Winter War, but for some reason the game still has Paraguayan dictator Jose Felix Estigarribia as one of the greatest generals of all time (although to be fair, he did help Paraguay win the Chaco War).

I think the natural step would've been to handle the OOB system better, like both simplifying it and making it more meaningful and trying to have parity between countries. Managing a huge cast of generals and admirals has potential, especially when you add politicians too. Like it could give you systems like when Vlasov defected from the USSR or the Wehrmacht generals who were captured and became the founders of the DDR's military.
 
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Save the Loli said:
Early HOI4 era, when the disappointment of Stellaris along with lingering resentment over shitty CK2/EU4 updates made the dev teams start whining and the people in charge of the official forums let them screech at players. That was when the "toxicity" rule started being applied.

I think it had already been telegraphed by the poor response to the cancellation of Magna Mundi and especially East vs West, two games made by modders given access to the engine. While Magna Mundi was led by a lolcow, East vs West seemed to have some real teeth and sparked a fans vs Paradox forum flame war. Looking back, it's the transition of Paradox from a fan-centered niche studio (who published fan games like Darkest Hour) to the major strategy game giant they are now, which was definitely not for the better.
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This is why I make a point to pirate Paradox games.
 
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