Paradox Studio Thread

Favorite Paradox Game?


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have they done anything with say America or Britain yet?
A bunch of Commie Swedes will never be able to give the USA or UK the justice they deserve. It took several patches for them to finally add in smallholding as an ownership type for farms and plantations, and the American and British political systems and climates had nothing in common with the rest of the world at that time. 99% of the world was an authoritarian monarchy at game start, with actual representative government the outlier, and the USA and the UK wound up going in completely different directions from the rest of the world as a result of our early adoption.

They'd also be forced to address their dogshit migration and assimilation systems to reflect actual reality where repression encourages assimilation instead of tolerance doing that, but then that wouldn't be very Current Year of them.

Take for example, HoI IV. In their USA tree update you need to wait until the 1936 election to swap to Alf Landon and then pay 150 pp as part of the Return to the Gold Standard focus while receiving nothing in compensation in order to do anything remotely right wing, and naturally you do so under the wings of what was basically the 1930's version of Mitt Romney.
Alfred Mossman Landon (September 9, 1887 – October 12, 1987) was an American oilman and politician who served as the 26th governor of Kansas from 1933 to 1937. A member of the Republican Party, he was the party's nominee in the 1936 presidential election, and was defeated in a landslide by incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Born in West Middlesex, Pennsylvania, Landon spent most of his childhood in Marietta, Ohio, before moving to Kansas. After graduating from the University of Kansas, he became an independent oil producer in Lawrence, Kansas. His business made him a millionaire, and he became a leader of the liberal Republicans in Kansas. Landon won election as Governor of Kansas in 1932 and sought to reduce taxes and balance the budget in the midst of the Great Depression. He supported many components of the New Deal but criticized some aspects that he found inefficient.

The 1936 Republican National Convention selected Landon as the Republican Party's presidential nominee. He proved to be an ineffective campaigner and carried just two states in the election. After the election, he left office as governor and never sought public office again. Later in life, he supported the Marshall Plan and President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society programs. He gave the first in a series of lectures, now known as the Landon Lecture Series, at Kansas State University. Landon lived to the age of 100 and died in Topeka, Kansas, in 1987. His daughter, Nancy Kassebaum, represented Kansas in the United States Senate from 1978 to 1997.
 
RIP Victoria killed by casuals
No need to worry, I've posted several times about the Open Source Vic 2 remakes and both are progressing well.

OpenVic, the Paradox approved project is working on data loading of Vic 2 files, meanwhile Project Alice which is based off of an older attempt at remaking Vic 2 has already released several playable alpha builds. Not all the features of Vic 2 are present but most are and it's insanely fast in comparison to the original, you can finish a campaign in half an hour at max speed.

The future is bright for Vic 2 fans.
 
It took several patches for them to finally add in smallholding as an ownership type for farms and plantations,
I still really fucking hate how ownership methods cant be a mix of various methods like in one state its a 15/85 mix of Planter's and Smallholders in another state its a 75/25 mix of small holders to coops etc. That would be cool and not a this "lmao i picked a different option now all you aristocrats better start tying your wivesto the plow you've got to get your new 40 acre allotment plowed."
 
I still really fucking hate how ownership methods cant be a mix of various methods like in one state its a 15/85 mix of Planter's and Smallholders in another state its a 75/25 mix of small holders to coops etc. That would be cool and not a this "lmao i picked a different option now all you aristocrats better start tying your wivesto the plow you've got to get your new 40 acre allotment plowed."
Yeah, its almost like the devs were obsessive about production methods to the point they neglected an actual game. There's no real ability to conduct actual diplomacy and balance of power politics with smaller nations playing larger ones off against each other, larger nations making all sorts of alliances and agreements to carve up the world. The military side is even worse, despite this being a very bloody time what with the multiple wars and revolutions, and the economic side is based around Marx being correct, so it bears about fuck-all resemblance to anything sane.

In short, its a goddamn economic micromanagement sim pretending its a game of conquest and intrigue, and its a very shitty economic micromanagement sim.
 
I think a good Victoria game should have spheres of influence be represented by influence being a resource you use to compel NPC factions to pass laws you want, and visually convey it on the map as shading of who has the most influence (invested and uninvested) relative to some sort of measurement of self-control.

Victoria especially didn’t do a good job with China, where the point was it was everyone’s sphereling. They implemented the substates (badly, which PDM then used properly by giving them to Japan to represent Daimyo) to allow for individual spheres, but it still sucked.
 
Cities Skylines 2 is being shit on, currently at 51% positive reviews on steam. It runs like shit even on the best specs. They didn't bother optimising it at all.

It renders all this shit, the fucking teeth, without any LODs

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Even the Youtubers aren't reviewing it positively

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That is amazing. Who gives a single shit about the civs outside seeing number go up? Who thought that was a good expenditure of resources? You know on top of that the pajeets they hired to do the grunt work were gunna make that compounding issue even worse.
 
Cities Skylines 2 is being shit on, currently at 51% positive reviews on steam. It runs like shit even on the best specs. They didn't bother optimising it at all.

It renders all this shit, the fucking teeth, without any LODs
I'm actually starting to wonder if they shipped a game full of store-bought assets that they had as placeholders or something. This kind of nonsense is what'd you see in shitty Unity horror games that buy 10 gorillion polygon houses and then run at 4 fps because the person making it never worked on a single model themselves, let alone learned what LOD is.
 
Additionally, CS2 will not have Steam Workshop support, you can instead get them from paradox's site, where they claim ownership over anything uploaded, isn't that great!

I spoke with a guy who knows some law and he said that this wouldn't hold up in EU courts, so who knows maybe they'll get an additional gunting?
 
The new Stellaris DLC is being outsourced. Is that a first for a Paradox first-party title? Seems the rumours about PDX giving up on Stellaris might be true.

Also I wasn't impressed by the dev diary on Steam. It's another late-game focused expansion. I was initially optimistic when they talked about late-game exploration, expanding in the early game is one of the most fun parts of the game and losing it by mid-game is one of the reasons I lose interest in my playthroughs, but instead of new bits of space to actively explore and colonise (like the galactic core and the L-Cluster) it just looks like jumped-up archaeology sites and some new resources to harvest. Boring.

Also the new HOI4 DLC is probably the most unbalanced yet. All the Scandinavian countries are ludicrously overpowered. Iceland gets an adviser that gets you 20% non-core manpower so once you acquire new territory (you can get Denmark as a puppet without a fight if you go fascist and integrate it easily) you can do a world conquest despite having a population of about 100,000. I haven't seen the AI Soviets beat the Finns once since the updates.

The international market makes the USA ludicrously overpowered. You have hordes of civ factories at the beginning of the game and access to the biggest world market, so you can just buy all the equipment you need and use focuses to increase your conscription law and get a gigantic army by about 1938 - in my last playthrough I was able to declare war on Japan straight after the Panay incident and just obliterate them. And of course going to war early gives you The Giant Wakes way before you should get it, at which point your economy goes completely insane and you're basically unstoppable. You can just spam Agricultural Subsidies to get Congress on your side as 5% consumer goods doesn't make a dent in it. Did they playtest this at all? The MIOs make the Germans even stronger too, because they let you convert PP into research speed buffs - get the two advisers who get you extra PP and you suddenly have a counter to the Germans' relative lack of research slots. Then there's that focus that gets you an extra PP per day once you conquer Paris and London and it's motherfucking Wunderwaffe time.

The market and MIOs are fun to play around with, and the latest patch does cut late-game lag quite a bit, so it's not all bad. I hope they balance it a bit better though.
 
instead of new bits of space to actively explore and colonise (like the galactic core and the L-Cluster) it just looks like jumped-up archaeology sites and some new resources to harvest. Boring.
It basically sounds like just having anomalies pop up in the mid-game, but you need a tech to check them, and you get some RNG CYOA junk on top, which means you basically get to gamble with either having your scientist die or you getting some relic to activate. My first impression is that it's more of a "time-waster" type of thing than any actual exploration, so I agree, it sounds pretty dull. Even if the events are written well, who reads those through after the first one or two playthroughs, anyway? It would be great if they had some kind of actual "subspace" or The Shroud acting as a secondary map layer that you gain access to later on, with different effects that can bleed over. Maybe something like the hyperspace stuff in StarSector, where navigating is dangerous, with patches of stability and oceans of volatility. But that's a lot more work than just writing more events. I think in-depth and intereting mechanics are just beyond the "custodial" teams they have working on shit now.
 
Cities Skylines 2 is being shit on, currently at 51% positive reviews on steam. It runs like shit even on the best specs. They didn't bother optimising it at all.

It renders all this shit, the fucking teeth, without any LODs

View attachment 5444345

Even the Youtubers aren't reviewing it positively

View attachment 5444346
Glad to see YandereDev found a new game to work on, people all laughed at his game assets with a million polygons that runs like shit, little did they knew this would be the industry standard in 2023, man truly was a visionary.
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