Paradox Studio Thread

[Mr.Miyagi]

This made me have an epiphany for why I find CK3 so frustrating to "play".

Most of Paradox's series consist of having a goal, and then sitting through speed 5 to get to the next task to accomplish that goal, pausing to review, then going back to speed 5.

CK3 you attempt to do that and encounter 50 meaningless A) B) C) D) choices, usually giving -10 gold, +50 stress, -50 opinion, +250 piety. That's fine in isolation, but not when it turns a 5 second wait into several minutes. Especially when a lot of the time it's a chain event, like feasts or hunting. Just cut to the chase and give me all the bonuses or negatives, don't draw it out into a million pop ups the pause the game and then have zero pop ups for important diplomatic events, like calls to war.

Royal Court is the king of the "pointless choices" spam, especially because they decided you'd have to sit there and go through petitioners all in a row rather than simply spread them out organically over time. But Tours and Tournaments is something I hate even more due to how they handle that shit, like you say. If I click the "host feast" button, why do I need an event telling me I'm doing it? Why do I get an event when I start traveling and stop traveling, when I can see for myself that I'm doing it? Tournaments are the absolute fucking worst, because they hijack your screen and replace it with the tournament view, but at least you can click out, right? Except when a contest ends, and then you're stuck watching a goddamn "cutscene" of a png being zoomed out! Try to click out of that and take care of something, and then when you click back in, you get to watch it all over again. Good luck organizing your troops for a sudden war declaration while you're stuck sitting there being told about how King Asshole beat King Shithead in a poetry contest. And you have to watch it every single time.

It sucks, because both DLCs are interesting conceptually, but the development team behind CK3 obviously has no idea how to do mechanical work or create interesting systems that aren't underpinned by just tossing 60 events at the player. Hence things like recycling the Struggle mechanic, rather than making something new. That's what makes the Tours part of T&T so funny: you're sitting there trying to design a route and hire guards just so you don't get events!

 

[General Emílio Médici]

Project Caesar is almost certainly EUV. I am somewhat scared of what it will end up looking like given what we have seen from CK3 and VIC3 but I shall refrain from trashing it until I have a demo or some sort of actual gameplay to look at. There is a lot of potential for a EUV to provide a lot of content by simply taking what we already have in EUIV and updating the engine so that many of the features are built into the game from the very core up instead of the mess you have with interactions between DLC content and stuff like having to tackle systems on top of systems designed years apart.

 

[buying gf]

It looks like they're adding Machine Cults to Stellaris:

 

[JJLiautaud]

It looks like they're adding Machine Cults to Stellaris:

I genuinely hope they get the composer who did this sound track to do the extra music for this DLC.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

It is starting to look like next EU IV dlc will be last. And sequel will be announced soon (tm).
From dev diaries they released so far they will focus on:
Mexican + South American natives.
Central Asia
Central Europe.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/europa-universalis-iv-development-diary-27th-of-february-roadmap-to-1-37.1625239/

As for potential EU V. There is this.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/tinto-talks-2-march-6th-2024.1626415/

They are working on some "secret" project Caesar.
And in this dev diary they mostly talk about how provinces in Caesar will work and more importantly how sea travel will work. There are mentions of sea currents "sea wastelands"and other things.

Yeah, that's clearly EU5. And a much better idea for it.
Personally, I think they need to represent naval warfare with something that's more like HOI. What HOI gets right is it portrays the hunt that's involved. It allows for things like, I don't know, actually having privateering/convoy raiding with a numerical inferior but more maneuverable force. The only thing that needs to be tweaked is the way reinforcements work, before radio these fleets are effectively on their own. All the player needs to be actively doing is just setting up their orders where the fleet is operating. It is the kind of thing that SHOULD be much more hands-off, unlike them making armies so hands-off in Victoria 3.

I don't know if there were every pitched naval battles in the deep sea. Could have been. Seems to me like it was pretty much all fought in coastal waters. How the fuck do you find anyone in the middle of nowhere? I'd be fine with having these sort of transits be for all purpose uninteractable, just travel time. Think like how in Empire Total War the map is carved up and there are spots you sail to to emerge in the other continents' maps. I'd just have to see the final map, though. This already looks like an improvement. I like the idea of trade winds being used as actual traversable sea.

All of this is purely theoretical, because Paradox is shit and is going to make a shit game.

 

[Snekposter]

It looks like they're adding Machine Cults to Stellaris:

Ah, thank God at least some parts of the Internet retain their quality...

 

[thefreshmaker]

Spoiler: Store Page

Latest HoI4 expansion released at 41% positive. They just can't catch a break.

Most reviews imply that there is a free mod on the store that is higher quality, covers more countries, and even has focuses stolen from it for the DLC.

 

[Breadbassket]

Spoiler: Store Page

View attachment 5797707

Latest HoI4 expansion released at 41% positive. They just can't catch a break.

Most reviews imply that there is a free mod on the store that is higher quality, covers more countries, and even has focuses stolen from it for the DLC.

There is a good chance the reviews are referencing this mod.

 

[East_Clintwood]

Spoiler: Store Page

View attachment 5797707

Latest HoI4 expansion released at 41% positive. They just can't catch a break.

Most reviews imply that there is a free mod on the store that is higher quality, covers more countries, and even has focuses stolen from it for the DLC.

I don't get the reviews complaining about the lack of new mechanics, given Paradox has at least been upfront since day one that this was gonna be just a country pack, not a proper expansion. It also doesn't surprise me that, given it's just focus trees, that free mods already do a better job. Especially because as usual Paradox padded the shit out of the trees with a bunch of useless shit. I mean seriously why do we still have 70 day focuses just to get +15xp and a couple of doctrine research bonuses and the like?

Played a game earlier as Argentina, with historical focuses off, which meant the German civil war happened and Hitler lost, so I can theoretically get him. Managed to help the nationalists win the Spanish Civil War, for which I got to request Equatorial Guinea as recompense (why the fuck anyone would want that shithole IDK). Conquered Uruguay in about 5 seconds, puppeted Chile and Paraguay, who had both gone fascist anyway, and started a war against Brazil in early '40 and then promptly quit because I forgot what utter fucking absolute ass cancer fighting in South America is.

 

[thefreshmaker]

I don't get the reviews complaining about the lack of new mechanics, given Paradox has at least been upfront since day one that this was gonna be just a country pack, not a proper expansion.

I think it's because, even if you announce that ahead of time, it doesn't make up for the glacial development time and the cost of the product, especially when the DLC is broken on release and the previous DLCs are still broken.

Arms Against Tyranny released October 10, 2023. That's almost 22 weeks, or close to half a year, just for three focus trees for countries nobody plays and have no impact on the game. At the same time, the previous DLC for Scandinavia still has a broken Norway that will never be updated, and the Commonwealth countries still have multiple 70 day focuses each just to get x1 industry research discounts or x1 infrastructure.

If Paradox wants to charge $15 for a DLC that has no redeeming features over a mod, then yeah, people will expect more for that money, even if you announce otherwise.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

Glad I grab the DLC for free.

1st time booting up HoI4 in probably 6 years because I was bored. Nice to know cream still works just fine with it.

*Edit* Looking at most popular mods on steam. Opinions on Road to 56?

 

[Breadbassket]

Glad I grab the DLC for free.

1st time booting up HoI4 in probably 6 years because I was bored. Nice to know cream still works just fine with it.

*Edit* Looking at most popular mods on steam. Opinions on Road to 56?

Think of it like a Vanilla+ mod since it's not a total conversion or alternate history scenario. If you're just looking for national focus trees for tons of countries around the world it's a good mod for that.

 

[Snekposter]

Think of it like a Vanilla+ mod since it's not a total conversion or alternate history scenario. If you're just looking for national focus trees for tons of countries around the world it's a good mod for that.

Also as the name implies it expands techs by a few years to 1956, and was actually just that before the devs started adding focus trees to make it a general expansion mod.

 

[Radola Gajda]

Played a game earlier as Argentina, with historical focuses off, which meant the German civil war happened and Hitler lost, so I can theoretically get him. Managed to help the nationalists win the Spanish Civil War, for which I got to request Equatorial Guinea as recompense (why the fuck anyone would want that shithole IDK). Conquered Uruguay in about 5 seconds, puppeted Chile and Paraguay, who had both gone fascist anyway, and started a war against Brazil in early '40 and then promptly quit because I forgot what utter fucking absolute ass cancer fighting in South America is.

To get him you have to get really lucky. To get him you have to flip fascist before German military junta takes Berlin. And with how things are set up at the moment you can do it at the earliest in early 1937 . And at that point German civil war is usually over.

As for dlc It feels unfinished . For example Bolivia has events, national spirits, but no focus tree.
Fighting in South America is as "fun" as ever. So my prediction is after intial excitment dies down it will be once again pretty much ignored region by most playerbase.

 

[NvII iS 8ulLt f0R 88C]

after intial excitment dies down it will be once again pretty much ignored region by most playerbase.

But the new states added will still affect game performance. And they indeed added so many useless states that have literally the size of one or two provinces.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Here's another thought nibbas about sea

There ought to be, at least for functionality for people to play with in mods, provinces that have limited movement (not automatically bilateral) and provinces that only certain unit types can move through.

For example, at sea only the Europeans and Polynesians really had any ability to go into deep water, out of sight of shore. Obviously that's not completely literally true, but for all practical purposes all these other cultures, with their navigation abilities AND sailing technologies, clung to local waters and didn't do dick to go further out. The game kind of reflects this as is through Exploration being gated off behind tech, but it's done in a really retarded way.

Then you also have issues like trade winds. As I understand one of the reasons why European/Mediterranean civilization and Sahelian civilization took so long to make contact by sea was that you could easily get to the Sahel, but you couldn't get back. They had to figure out the trade winds first. You have routes where you just aren't, practically speaking, going to be able to go both directions, or not without an incredibly stiff movement speed penalty (reflecting average wind patterns).

I think it can be interesting and tactically and strategically meaningful if the trade winds matter. Your direction of travel matters. If you've played Sid Meier's Pirates or Nantucket you know how it effects your planning as a single ship, this is important for entire fleets. On land, things like this could make sense with things like a culture that has unique skills at navigating a harsh environment or unique animals (camels). Or a culture that has a sort of doctrine or LACK of things to encumber them. Camelry crossing the Sahara Desert, Indians of the West having much more strategic range than Europeans, and Indians of the East being able to operate across the Appalachians or through thick forest without worrying about wagons and formations and shit like that. A reverse of that would be something like Hannibal's Crossing, an absolute fiasco, known for crossing with his elephants but the punchline was that most of them died.

Something EU4 really butchered (and no, I have no hope for EU5 doing any better) was having this fucked up trade system that made no sense economically and was (ironically for Paradox going so woke) Eurocentric, and contradicted the main ideas of the era's dominant economic theory (mercantilism). A game of this era needs to be based not around setting up a trade flow back to the homeland but setting up triangular trades, networks that move in a circular flow where you increase value by finding more opportunities to trade along the way (always have something in your hold for the next port, have as many stops as possible) and you capture more of that by enforcing favorable terms, controlling key infrastructure, etc. (this EU4 represents reasonably well). Everyone knows THE Triangular Trade, but there were others in this era and V2, one of the interesting ones between a triangular trade of New England manufactures for Pacific Northwest furs for Chinese luxuries. Or American silver for Chinese luxuries for European manufactures.

I wish merchant marines were a statistic, too. Them and pirates, in a way. You build shipbuilding infrastructure, it raises your total number of ships that you distribute among your trade routes, and in wartime you can convert merchant marine to privateering vessels equipped with Letters of Marque against specific nations (British, Barbary Pirates, Nassau and a few others can do it to everyone all the time). Named pirates can emerge like HOI aces (in a way) and when patrolling routes these privateers can manifest as battles for flavor. That'd be a million times better than the way it is now.

 

[thefreshmaker]

Oh no HoI bros!

Now Mostly Negative with 34% of the reviews being positive versus 41% two days ago. Wonder if it will hit overwhelmingly negative by the end of the week? Paradox just can't catch a break. I hate to see it, but I really can't see this changing. You'd think people would have learned back in 2016, or 2017, or 2019, or 2020, or...

At a certain point this is just for good of the customer base. I'm not a customer anymore, I haven't been for a long time, and I assume most here are the same. The customer base now are the types of people who will see a queue forming to pay $5 to get punched in the face, get upset they got punched, and the return to the back of the queue. At least Paradox isn't malicious in their milking, they spend six months, ask for $30 for nothing, and do it again in six months. A company like Activision will do it daily and then hide the fact that you have to pay extra to get a five finger and not a three finger punch.

It truly is a sight to behold.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

View attachment 5805372
Oh no HoI bros!

Now Mostly Negative with 34% of the reviews being positive versus 41% two days ago. Wonder if it will hit overwhelmingly negative by the end of the week? Paradox just can't catch a break. I hate to see it, but I really can't see this changing. You'd think people would have learned back in 2016, or 2017, or 2019, or 2020, or...

At a certain point this is just for good of the customer base. I'm not a customer anymore, I haven't been for a long time, and I assume most here are the same. The customer base now are the types of people who will see a queue forming to pay $5 to get punched in the face, get upset they got punched, and the return to the back of the queue. At least Paradox isn't malicious in their milking, they spend six months, ask for $30 for nothing, and do it again in six months. A company like Activision will do it daily and then hide the fact that you have to pay extra to get a five finger and not a three finger punch.

It truly is a sight to behold.

Yep. They'll just keep buying it. Or even subscribe for it.

And then when you say "you could at least get it for free" they spaz out like you just suggested they could sacrifice their firstborn.

 

[JJLiautaud]

View attachment 5805372
Oh no HoI bros!

Now Mostly Negative with 34% of the reviews being positive versus 41% two days ago. Wonder if it will hit overwhelmingly negative by the end of the week? Paradox just can't catch a break. I hate to see it, but I really can't see this changing. You'd think people would have learned back in 2016, or 2017, or 2019, or 2020, or...

At a certain point this is just for good of the customer base. I'm not a customer anymore, I haven't been for a long time, and I assume most here are the same. The customer base now are the types of people who will see a queue forming to pay $5 to get punched in the face, get upset they got punched, and the return to the back of the queue. At least Paradox isn't malicious in their milking, they spend six months, ask for $30 for nothing, and do it again in six months. A company like Activision will do it daily and then hide the fact that you have to pay extra to get a five finger and not a three finger punch.

It truly is a sight to behold.

Its so bad even isp didn't cover it at launch and niether did the danish rat.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

Oh yeah I didn't notice it but it's true ISP didn't even make a video on it. That has to be a first. When even ISP can't make your HoI4 slop entertaining that is a sign of a failure.