Paradox Studio Thread

Favorite Paradox Game?


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What would you imagine a thoughtful representation of slaves would look like?
Fleshed out mechanics that represent one of the most remarkable mass migrations in history and its full impact on Africa and the New World.

My biggest grievance is that there's no representation of slave cultures emerging, If we're building something up from scratch a starting point might be to have an actual Slave Market mechanic where there is a pool of slaves that Europeans have shares in based on their investment in Africa (colonies, trading posts, merchant marine operating in the proper zones, relationships with each other and with the African states), and that Africans contribute to through a natural trickle and, more significantly, war and devastation. The Africans generate huge stacks of cash destroying each other's economies and the Europeans get access to much cheaper development in the New World. This development could be something like a reduction in Base Production development cost.

But, develop the slave industries too high and a slave culture emerges (Afro-American, Afro-Tejano, Afro-Louisiana, etc.). This slave culture cannot be assimilated, if outsiders conquer it it can only be assimilated to their own slave culture. If the slave culture revolts it creates Not-Haiti. The slave culture can also spread by itself into provinces you take, perhaps faster if it's not sugar/malarial areas. I don't know how vanilla estates work anymore, but a Planter/Hacendado estate would make sense to go with this. Slave culture zones, as long as they still have slavery, get a production efficiency bonus.

By the late game the North was already moving to gradual emancipation and it's reasonable to allow for the possibility that a nation might be a few decades ahead in that social development, so there should be a representation of abolitionism, specifically gradual emancipation as a decision that burns cash, pisses off the planters a bit, and so on. Similarly, a Royal Navy taskforce would be another mission that reduces the flow of the slave trade for Prestige or some shit. On the other side of it, it was a willful choice of the Europeans to allow slavery in the colonies. See Sepulvedas vs Bartolome de los Casas. It should be possible to play (albeit perhaps at great personal cost, like having to fight a revolution far earlier on) with a ban on slavery. If I remember right, Martin Pizarro actually lead a Peruvian revolution way, WAY back because the King said he couldn't treat his Inca serfs like shit (Pizarro lost but the crown never did actually protect the Indians).

The Africa side of things matters a lot. Slave war casus belli, an interaction to raze provinces for slavery. Ability to negotiate special treaties, or arm the Africans with weapons, for a bigger share. Africa basically destroyed itself over this.

That's quite simple (I have much more to say about slavery within a full Victoria 3), but it's all it needs to represent slavery's role in world history at EU4's scale. Africa slaughtered itself to fuel the massive growth of certain colonies, some of which then went down in flames by the end of the game.
 
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Shouldn't this have come with the other machine focused DLC? WTF? What's Synthetic Dawn for then?
Yeah it sucks that an old DLC is entirely subsumed into a new one, there's now no reason to buy it. I doubt anyone will make too much of a fuss about it, although they could make it better by saying if you've already bought SD then you get a discount.
after reinstalling stellaris after years, i am greeted with hideous ass human portraits
the fuck happened?
I'm not sure why but they decided to 'update' the human portrait, but people got upset and they decided to add the original back, it should be next to the regular one. You might be out of luck if you wanted to play the UNE/COM preset empires. It's a bit of a worry too because most of the new portraits they've added are total dogshit.
 
Yeah it sucks that an old DLC is entirely subsumed into a new one, there's now no reason to buy it. I doubt anyone will make too much of a fuss about it, although they could make it better by saying if you've already bought SD then you get a discount.

I'm not sure why but they decided to 'update' the human portrait, but people got upset and they decided to add the original back, it should be next to the regular one. You might be out of luck if you wanted to play the UNE/COM preset empires. It's a bit of a worry too because most of the new portraits they've added are total dogshit.
all the women look like butch dykes
this progressive shit just loops back into being close-minded
 
Shame the UI looks like shit, otherwise it is really exciting.
Looks just like the shitty Vic 3 UI, I want to be optimistic for EU5 but I just can't find it in me thanks to their years-long streak of shitty releases and DLCs
What do you mean you don't like having menus reset position and scrolling for hours every time you click something???
Pops raises the question of slaves and we know they won’t do any sort of thoughtful representation of slaves.
It was okay in Imperator, in that they were your "producers". It made no sense, them being your taxpayers, but as an abstraction of economics it worked fine to represent slavery being the underpinning of ancient agriculture in most places. That gives me a little confidence, especially with the pop system, that we might see some actual representation beyond EU4's slave trade good. I think it hinges a lot on whether they want to offend Muslims/blue hairs; if they are going to be accurate, the vast majority of the population of southern Iraq and farmers in Egypt will be enslaved black Africans and that's no bueno, but Vicky 3 got away with it...
What would you imagine a thoughtful representation of slaves would look like?
What are your thoughts on this reddit thread discussing how they may/should change the name of EU5 to be less "eurocentric"?

If they do decide to change the name and/or make a statement on being less "eurocentric" will you not be following development?
The way this is written makes me think you're a hack journo for Kotaku looking for quote mines.
 
The way this is written makes me think you're a hack journo for Kotaku looking for quote mines.
holy fucking shit spot on
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Did they turn Imperator into something good or is it still trash?
It's good. Just dead in terms of development. They got it to a decent point and then lied by saying they might, maybe, one day come back to it.

Don't support them with your money for that game, but don't miss it either.
 
Hard to get excited considering Paradox seem hell-bent on making every new game a shittier version of the one that came before it. So EU5 will be a shittier version of EU4 with less features, more predatory DLC (and that is really saying something) and a slicker UI.
Missing features from the previous iteration, just like was the case CK3 and Vic 3, is now a feature of their games, so that they can put in less effort and then reintroduce it in a completely inferior way for a more expensive price.
 
I will never understand the left wing segment of the Paradox GS fanbase. If you hate war and conquest and history, play something else.
 
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I will never understand the left wing segment of the Paradox GS fanbase. If you hate war and conquest and history, play something else.
Bet you 95% of them play the "lesser" nations to simulate their KANGZ dreams of conquering the whiteoids. They don't hate war or conquest; they just want to be the one to do it.
 
Is that really accurate to EU time?

Mass slavery, not really. The Arab slave trade dwarfed the European's because they castrated the men and had to continually go back for more instead of breeding them. Slaves for farming and such was actually minor because of slave revolts after Muhammad's time.
 
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Having fun taking over South America as Argentina, with Hitler in charge of course. US is embroiled in a huge war with the Soviets in Europe so it's looking pretty feasible to blow my way up through Central America into the US.
 
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Shouldn't this have come with the other machine focused DLC? WTF? What's Synthetic Dawn for then?
According to the lead dev, "Synthetic Dawn still has Machine Worlds, Resource Consolidation, Rogue Servitors, Determined Exterminators, Driven Assimilators, several Advisor voices, and the Machine Uprising. Probably some more things I can't think of now", so basically all the good and fun stuff of being a machine remain locked behind it.
 
Thought I might do a little post about the Dies Irae Gotterdamerung DLC for HoI3 as it got brought up in the TNO thread and I feel this mod gets very little love. HoI3 is also 75% off at the moment and this is probably a good chance to give this DLC some love and show off the... whacky part of old Paradox war games.

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Dies Irae and her sisters (Stars and Stripes, Secret Weapons of WW2) are flavor packs made by modders and released as DLC back when Paradox gave a shit about their community before East vs West was killed. They add events, decisions, some techs and unique units, etc. Dies Irae and Stars and Stripes are more substantive than Secret Weapons, the latter largely being relegated to units rather than a total flavor pack for either Germany and the USA. Do not get this confused for the Dies Irae scenario for HoI3, this is game-length DLC and not just a scenario set in 1944.
Please note that these DLCs will only work with their respective countries, but Secret Weapons will work for all and is largely better than the base-version of Semper Fi.
Please note you may not have Secret Weapons if you bought or will buy HoI3 recently; it's currently off the Steam store page and I have no idea why.

So, the first part is the hardest. HoI3 is not well known for working on Windows 10. Windows 7 was the last platform Paradox updated it to. This mod is also made for a specific version of HoI3 (back when Paradox released iterative updates and DLC as expansions that built on the previous version, and not divergent DLCs). This will only run stable on the Semper Fi DLC release. On Steam, it's pretty simple if you have the HoI3 Collection;
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Just navigate to the DLC manager and select only Semper Fi, Dies Irae, Stars and Stripes, and Secret Weapons.
Open the game as normal once the updater finalizes. Start the game in default mode, navigate to the settings menu, get everything sorted. Close the game and re-open it to make sure the setting work, close it again.
Finally, open the launcher a final time and select whichever DLC you want to use. Obviously, for our purposes, we're using Dies Irae.
If that doesn't work, try and scour the forums; there is a patch to make the game work with For The Motherland and potentially Their Finest Hour, however this reverts the map textures to vanilla and is not stable, even with the Large Address Aware .exe.

Good question. Ultimately, if you just want to enjoy HoI3 for what it is, I'd argue Dies Irae is the best version. Whilst Their Finest Hour is largely remembered by the "hardcore" Hearts of Iron fans as the peak of the series, DI is far more focused on a meaningful and diverse Germany experience. HoI3 has a standard tech-tree across all countries outside of these DLCs and outside of a handful of decisions, there ultimately is not much flavor. The images for units are universal, the techs are all the same, and while it has amazing gameplay, there's very little room for alternative scenarios. As an example, one of my most memorable HoI3 games was succeeding in a coup d'etat in the United States before they entered the war; whilst a sudden reversal of fortunes, it was ultimately meaningless because it required such a great investment of Leadership (HoI3's tech/spying/diplo mana) that I had a military that was well behind and losing on all fronts by 1940. To see how dynamic a game in DI can be, I booted it up and was immediately given an alt-hist path (none of what comes ahead is possible in vanilla HoI3);
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A few weeks into the game, and France has decided (with the backing of Britain) to actually do something about Hitler in the Rhineland. Now the game gives you a choice; the second removes the Rhineland decision from the game (which takes away neutrality, increasing your industrial mobilisation), but if you want to proceed France will get a casus belli. Of course, no sensible man avoids war, and so off we go, another general war in Europe in February 1936. Note above that Italy is torquoise; they are an ally but not in the Axis (HoI3 treats alliances and power blocs differently to the other games, including HoI2 and HoI4). Italy will not be joining us here as they are busy enough in Ethiopia and their European forces would not be enough even to hold against France's meagre forces on the Alpine front.
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Isn't it wonderful having a political map which accurately shows the terrain underneath as well?
This also lets us show off the AI control of forces in HoI3 which is actually better than HoI4's, for how much Paradox lauded that they took away control to make it superior. HoI3 lets you give the AI control down to the Corps level; in this case, I've set it at the HQ level, and allowed the AI to distribute and edit the Order of Battle as it pleases. Most of the time it does so by giving Air and Naval units to the Theatre Command, and then creating infantry armies seperate to cav/armor/motor armies, which works well enough.
If you look closely, you'll see a black dotted line at the front and Paris selected by the army; you are able to set fronts to focus on specific countries this way. You are also able to set the stance of the forces; Blitzing (attack at all costs), Attacking (a stable advance where possible), Preparing (largely defensive with small attacks to gain better positions as your forces rest to regain organisation) Defensive, and finally Withdraw. These are all set for Army, Navy, and Air forces seperately, so you can pursue a strategy of defending against France on land, bombing the Maginot to smitherines, and sinking convoys in the Atlantic at the same time, which is exactly what I did above, resulting in pushing into Metz in February...
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...and a complete breakdown of the French lines by March. Unfortunately Poland also oppurtunistically joined into the war; at this time, Germany has about 300,000 troops, of which 250,000 are arrayed against France. I was not hopeful that, even if France fell, it would be before the Poles could get beyond the Oder. Even if we transfered half the army to Poland, it would take significant time and give the French the ability to stabilise the lines and we'd lose the long war of attrition.
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France sees the error of their ways and we get a three-pronged decision; refuse terms and continue the war, with the Czechs and Low Countries joining in to stop the aggression of Hitler (and likely to leading to a Wehrmacht coup); we can push a risky request for war reparations, non-aggression pacts, and increased neutrality for the Entente (pretty good); or we can accept a white peace. We choose reperations, which are accepted. Whilst not ideal, we can't afford a war on two fronts, let alone three or four, nor a long war. We remilitarised our western borders, proved our superiority over the west and guaranteed a free hand in the east. Now we can fix the error of Versailles.
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Poland takes advantage of our temporary weakness and almost gets control over East Prussia; as the Poles force their way through the forests and effect a short-lived siege on Konigsberg they shatter and capture the remnants of VII. Armeekorps, with I. Armeekorps forced back to the Baltic Sea.
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Fortunately we link up with 3. Armee in East Prussia by May, and in June 1936 we have agreed to a negotiated settlement; Poland remains nominally independent and Germany retains control of the Danzig corridor. Germany, in the span of six months, went from pariah state at siege to the pre-eminent power on mainland Europe. We have changed history forever.

Now something quite nice about the mod is the sexy artwork designed for it. All German units have accurate cards to represent the unit, even for unique one-offs;
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Infanterie, Panzertruppe, Volkssturm, Feldgendarms, etc.
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We also get a chance to recruit Goering's vanity piece, which of course we can't reject. This unit was originally a police brigade created out of NSDAP lackies, transformed into an AA brigade of the Luftwaffe, and then grew into a Fallschirmjager division, then a Parachute-Panzer division, and then finally a Parachute-Panzer corps when it was finally destroyed as all things were on the Eastern Front.
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The map also gets an update; the terrain features are far more noticeable under the poltical map than in any other version of HoI3, though the weather map (yes HoI once had weather that matterered) is harder. Additionally, the oceans are divided into Kriegsmarine sector tables. Doesn't affect gameplay, but it's nice and definitely makes the game feel more true-to-life. Older Paradox games post-HoI2, pre-CK2 definitely had the feeling of being paper-based maps you were staring at in a basement under a chancellery somewhere. I'll drop a couple of shots of the terrain map below because, boy, Paradox has never looked as good as this before or since;
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Ah, brings a tear to your eye...
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There's also some unique techs for Germany now. These are largely focused on the different types of U-Boots (coastal, fleet, and ocean-going), where vanillia HoI3 only has the one type of submarine. It actually is quite nice to develop a mixed force of Baltic coastal subs, Atlantic mainstay type VIIs, and then long-range subs for hunting off India and the Americas without needing to rush down all the techs and build max-tech boats all the time.
There is now also a unique tech-page for "operations", seen above. It's really just direct bonuses or new units for reaching certain criteria (eg: a certain date with a certain number of units, capturing a certain province, etc) but it adds some nice things. The Russian winter in this one actually matters, and researching the right tech will give you a better chance at surviving, though not without losing a lot of mobility for your forces.
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There's also a lot more events to go through, especially for economics and foreign policy. The four year plan is an event tree where you can get Goering in charge of the economy (not good) for some bonuses, but you have to get rid of Schacht as your economic advisor. Basically trading short term industrial/agricultural/money/ores bonuses versus long term industry growth.

There honestly isn't really too much bad with HoI3. Yes, it's unstable at the best of times, but it really is a perfectly easy game to get into if you use the AI control features and take longer than 5 secs to learn it. Dies Irae is probably the best to learn on because of the enforced Germany playthrough; you need to learn production, intelligence, diplomacy, etc, and can let the AI fight like in HoI4. It's not without it's issues though, and Dies Irae cannot fix HoI3's innate problems, of which it has it's fair share. What you'll see below is not so much a problem gameplay wise as it just odd.
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Whacky north Finland/Karelia
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Very whacky Balkans and Middle East. Yes, the Greek islands don't exist. Yes, the Caucasus has had some embiggening around the chest section. Yes, Transjordan and Palestine are wider than they are tall. Yes, Turkey has a tumor on it's north coast.
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No idea how they thought Ethiopia looked good. Djibouti is only two tiles, and yet almost as big as Eritrea or Somaliland.

What you aren't seeing is what I can't show you; constant crashes. Whilst I have not experienced this today thankfully, Semper Fi was not stable on the platform it was designed for, and Windows 10 will get it serious problems. Be warned. Make sure autosave is set to monthly at minimum.

If you still aren't interested, maybe I can win your hearts and minds with this old beauty;
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Yes, she's not as good as you remember her from EU3, HoI2, Vicky, or even the early days of EU4, but by God does Square Memel completely missing the actual river not just hit you in all the right places. Unfortunately she, and all the other map issues, were patched out in Their Finest Hour, never to be seen again.

So yeah, great game, great mod, it's like $2 right now for HoI3 on Steam, $20 for the entire collection. If you just want to try Dies Irae, it's $5 for HoI3, Semper Fi, and DI, but the whole thing is worth a spin. You won't regret it.
 
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