Paradox seems to really like the idea of Ottomans being a "boss fight," but it doesn't really work since their peace system doesn't allow large shifts of land (to the point it prevents most historical treaties), so any blob you fight becomes a sequence of many wars to chip away at them, and the Ottomans may have been the big dog in their time, but that time was well over by 1800 even if they still lingered on as a Great Power. You could just as well and just as arbitrarily argue that Spain should become the big blob.
I'd rather the Revolution create Not-Napoleonic Wars as a bossfight (brilliant leadership + massive fanatical army), but the one time I was playing vanilla and a Revolution happened I crushed it instantly. Revolutionary France versus the world was the defining fight that ended the period.
It would be such a pain in the ass to implement because realistically, many rivers would be inaccessible some or most of the year, or inaccessible past a certain point during some seasons, etc.
This is worth implementing anyways. People have complained for ages that the Baltic in these things doesn't ice over, with the obvious strategic implications (no urgency for Russian warm-water ports) that entails. The big problem is the same as the problem with having separate fleets on disconnected bodies of water: the human player might be able to make a judgment of how much it's worth putting into it, but an AI would probably struggle greatly with planning around it.
Hell, it would be appropriate for army maneuvers too (mountain passes as a "strait" through a wasteland that opens and closes at certain times of year).
It's the same modifier and free claims bullshit that's been there for ages. EU4 has the same problem as HOI4, it's just flavored events that give you bonuses and mission trees that when completed give you bonuses. A unique samurai unit is pretty cool I guess.
In grand scheme of things this will not matter, becauce
A) While player can unify Japan in 30-40 years easily. AI will need much more time.
B) AI is still shit with naval invasions especially if opponent can fight back. So even if Japan unites, they will still sit on their Island doing nothing
Currently 75% off on the Humble Bundle store for another few days. Get that and then CreamAPI for the DLC, because fuck Paradox and their nickel and dime DLC bullshit
Currently 75% off on the Humble Bundle store for another few days. Get that and then CreamAPI for the DLC, because fuck Paradox and their nickel and dime DLC bullshit
So with decline of playerbase of V3.
Pdx came with great news .
They are going to release next patch, remaining players will have to wait only another month and half for release.
Hello and welcome! Today we'll be covering several topics relating to Update 1.2: Open 1.2 Beta Feature Overview Anticipated 1.2 Release Date As mentioned in our last dev diary, 1.2 is a big update with some far-reaching changes, and we don't...
Bros, I hate to admit it, but after having praised it for ages I finally booted up MEIOU and Taxes 3.0 and I hate this. It has finally overdeveloped itself to the point where the UI is broken, the fine economic system that was simple but elegant like a real model has been replaced with some convoluted shit and you can't even just build buildings, it seems like they've decided to make it into a treasury planning simulator.
Bros, I hate to admit it, but after having praised it for ages I finally booted up MEIOU and Taxes 3.0 and I hate this. It has finally overdeveloped itself to the point where the UI is broken, the fine economic system that was simple but elegant like a real model has been replaced with some convoluted shit and you can't even just build buildings, it seems like they've decided to make it into a treasury planning simulator.
So I'm not the only one! Yeah, I had no idea what was going on when I booted it up but thought it was just me being a dumb-dumb. Yeah, the economy and all that is just unfathomable, and dealing with the estates seems designed to be an exercise in frustration.
Well, I toughed it out and looked some more, and it's not all bad. They've even added some really cool interaction between estates and advisors where a new regime can align with a faction, force through a state centralizing agenda, or remain neutral, with corresponding influence/loyalty shifts and access to a docket of cheap incompetent toadie advisors. The advisors all have faction identities on top of culture and religion, so their appointment is a political consideration, and there seems to be more variety now in what types there are (my Portuguese cabinet has an merchant gentleman astronomer, a merchant lord proprietor who I'll RP as being the colonizer of the Canaries, and a
I also got all the expansions I didn't have for very cheap on Humble Bundle, so there's a dizzying array of new useless shit that I can't tell if it was added by Paradox or the mod team, probably Paradox when it's empty fluff (set a trade policy! set a naval doctrine!).
And the map customization would be brilliant, IF it worked properly, which so far it seems like I can't get anything to actually load in the way I want, and you kind of need that because all of the actually important information is buried in modifiers instead of vanilla systems, and some absolute mongoloid decided to use an abstract "development" system instead of just leaving the old Rural-Urban-Elite split alone, so now you can't just go into the Development map mode or just see at a glance in the ledger how populous a country is.
If there's a way to downgrade back to MEIOU and Taxes 2.52 that would be better, the problem was that Paradox would regular do an epic Windows 11 move and sneak force an update that couldn't be rolled back and broke all the mods. It also kills me that they never bother doing anything with American Indians, at this point I might have to learn how to mod to make a submod. I've thought about trying to launch a New World total conversion for Imperator anyways. I don't think there's anything fundamentally different about American Indians that they couldn't be represented in a way that fits into the rest of the game. Economically they were hordes (hunting instead of herding) or they were agriculturalists, the biggest complexity is representing mass migrations (which should be an issue for Old World hordes anyways), the fact that a population with core towns could hunt over what in-game is many provinces*, and event chains/decision system that replaces the estate conflicts with managing struggles between individual strongmen.
A simple ecological model of hunting/whaling/other nomadic occupations may go something like this. You have discrete choices of land in which to hunt, which may possibly have a fixed cost associated with choosing to hunt there. There is a stock of animals that grows at a certain rate, and based on the stock there is a certain productivity to harvesting them, which of course would be a death rate for that animal. Then, it may be that there is a certain spread of labor over different lands which equalizes productivity between them. In what I think of as a joint economic-ecological equilibrium, the animal population is stable and the market clears.
In game sense, there could be pools (over regions) of huntable animals available to the tag as a resource (kind of like forests are implemented in the game) which can be drawn on, perhaps weighted by distance, by the provinces. For Eastern Indians, hunting was not a primary source of food but was more significant as a source of valuable trade goods, what I don't think there is any way to really handle a mass movement deep inland, but decisions that just allow a mass relocation and making the AI intentionally stomp weak neighbors to do that to escape encroachment would be a start. The big thing here is that if you want Indians to behave properly, it needs to be the case that:
1) Indians in the East have core towns that they actually live in, and then vast hunting grounds they fight over. The Cherokee farmed in Appalachia, hunted in Tennessee. The Iroquois farmed in New York, hunted in the Great Lakes. Etc. The core is where the property and population is, the hunting ground is just a place for deer to walk around.
2) If Indians are not sufficiently civilized (as the Mesoamericans and Andeans were), conquering them should just mean they move off deeper inland. Whoop-de-do, you conquered an empty nothing. In EU4 the best way to colonize, and this was really messed up, was to make a beeline to wipe out all the natives right off the bat so you could use the redmen for tax purposes.
Colonialism is interesting BECAUSE of the web of relations with the natives, and also the social experiments done in many colonies (ranging from Quaker Pennsylvania to Jesuit Paraguay). That's something these games are lacking in and it's boring, but all they do is just add more very specific content to little European principalities.
So I'm not the only one! Yeah, I had no idea what was going on when I booted it up but thought it was just me being a dumb-dumb. Yeah, the economy and all that is just unfathomable, and dealing with the estates seems designed to be an exercise in frustration.
The UI is absolutely abysmal. It's a huge step backwards from what was a clean UI in 2.0. Important things like the actual buildings ("Property") and population and religion are all buried behind several clicks (holding down the mouse over something is equivalent to a click) and nothing is labelled. The economy is also wholly lacking in flavor, I get what they were going for with having goods like "Fiber" where specific goods are substitutable for each other (doesn't really matter if it's cotton or flax or wool or leather, it's all fiber), but I can't see where to find what exactly is being made. In old MEIOU you just had generic goods being made, but then you could easily see on the map where a Steel or Glassware or whatever else industry had emerged.
And it's much less discretized now, too. Continuous variables are good for modeling, discrete variables are better for games. Having 3292.242 units of infrastructure does not mean something to a person as much as "I built a new road!"
Edit: I'm going to throw another complaint on there, it seems like all the wonderful flavor modifiers describing geographical features and historical information have been stripped out too. And apparently Portugal can't even conduct diplomacy with the Papal States because of dIpLoMaTiC dIsTaNcE (hella historical).
I do like that it apparently has a mechanic for representing escalation of unrest/rebellion (Paradox games have never been very good at that, they're very binary about it) with popular satisfaction based around a mix of standards of living, political satisfaction, religious propaganda, amenities, and so on.
King's Orders is a simplified historical strategy game with an important innovation. You command thy armies by sending letters with orders. Messengers with letters travel the land and can be lost or intercepted. Generals execute orders once received and send you reports the same dangerous way.
store.steampowered.com
This is what Paradox's new goyslop should have been like. Some of the concepts in this aren't novel at all (order delay is built into Grand Tactician: Civil War, for example, at both a tactical and strategic level), but the point being that while the game looks like a gameplay gimmick game, that sort of gameplay - you lead by choosing carefully what your set of instructions is to your commander, like a program that can go to shit - is what autonomous Victoria 3 generals could have been like in the hands of a competent developer.
Edit: Imperfect information is something that's very interesting and underused in these strategy games. There's sort of two big problems of a ruler that often don't come up, what might be called a delegation problem (like King's Orders) which includes principal-agent problems but can also include other things (like the agent just misinterpreting your orders, order delay, incompetence, etc.), and the other imperfect information. We tend to see imperfect information implemented in the form of fog of war and terra incognita, but not applied to other things. A premodern ruler had very little knowledge of their realm; the mere act of ordering a census was a significant undertaking, which brought King David into conflict with YHWH and gave us the Domesday Book (our main reference for understanding Norman England). I've thought a lot already about imperfect information in exploration, systems where you learn more about land over time instead of it revealing itself immediately, and where information can become out of date. But this applies just as much to a domestic front, too, when a ruler really can't do anything but eyeball what his manpower reserves are, what the standard of living is in a province, how upset the peasants are about it, how much tax there is to squeeze. When a ruler has the misfortune to liquidate all of their critics to where only toadies are left, none of their feedback is meaningful (see Germany, Putin's Russia, any Communist regime ever).
Imperfect information also links up with principal-agent problems when that information is asymmetrical. I assume that the way Opinion effects levy size in CK2 is an abstraction of disloyal vassals finding ways to cheat on their feudal obligations. When an agent knows what their resources are but a principal doesn't, then that gives the agent the ability to embezzle or to embezzle by other means (failing to honor a contract).
The biggest issue with modern Paradox is that their DLC content has to be extreneous to the base game otherwise it becomes a de-facto requirement for the player, which means that no additional content can substancially alter the base gameplay experience no matter how bare-bones that experience may be, and thus it results in lacklustre DLCs that gate mechanics that sound cool in theory but in practice it's just something lame like Corporate/Overlord holdings in Stellaris which are just a semi-decent buildings that can be placed on another Empire's planet but don't substantially alter your playstyle in any way. Other posts have gone into it but the main reason that Paradox's later games don't work is because they try to cover everything in the shallowest way possible and fill it in later with DLC content that in almost every case does nowhere near enough to justify its price tag and doesn't actually change any of the fundamental issues that they claim to fix.
CK2's levies were far more accurate to the era, since the "peasant chaff" as you call it would've been the light Infantry that makes up the backbone of pretty much every army in the game.
Edit: Imperfect information is something that's very interesting and underused in these strategy games. There's sort of two big problems of a ruler that often don't come up, what might be called a delegation problem (like King's Orders) which includes principal-agent problems but can also include other things (like the agent just misinterpreting your orders, order delay, incompetence, etc.), and the other imperfect information. We tend to see imperfect information implemented in the form of fog of war and terra incognita, but not applied to other things. A premodern ruler had very little knowledge of their realm; the mere act of ordering a census was a significant undertaking, which brought King David into conflict with YHWH and gave us the Domesday Book (our main reference for understanding Norman England). I've thought a lot already about imperfect information in exploration, systems where you learn more about land over time instead of it revealing itself immediately, and where information can become out of date. But this applies just as much to a domestic front, too, when a ruler really can't do anything but eyeball what his manpower reserves are, what the standard of living is in a province, how upset the peasants are about it, how much tax there is to squeeze. When a ruler has the misfortune to liquidate all of their critics to where only toadies are left, none of their feedback is meaningful (see Germany, Putin's Russia, any Communist regime ever).
CK2's levies were far more accurate to the era, since the "peasant chaff" as you call it would've been the light Infantry that makes up the backbone of pretty much every army in the game.
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.
Yeah; I’m disgusted. For some reason paradox spergs are obsessed with globes (which really are irrelevant unless your game takes place late enough for missile launches or submarines over the Arctic to matter) and tiles (which sound like a huge pain in the ass that ruin the visual design and would remove the personality of getting to know individual provinces).
Yeah; I’m disgusted. For some reason paradox spergs are obsessed with globes (which really are irrelevant unless your game takes place late enough for missile launches or submarines over the Arctic to matter) and tiles (which sound like a huge pain in the ass that ruin the visual design and would remove the personality of getting to know individual provinces).
Really don't know why they don't at leas try to smooth the jagged hexes a bit. Something like civ5 terrain would at least make it not hurt to look at. Ideally you would just have procedurally generated provinces in the approximate size of a tile fitted to terrain, but I get that would be hard.
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.
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.
