Paradox Studio Thread

Favorite Paradox Game?


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New Tinto Talks on army automation. It's building upon Imperator with you being able to assign various objectives for your armies to fulfil such as carpet sieging, hunting down other armies, and defending your own territory. Additionally, Johan shits on Victoria 3:
Johan Army.png
 
Man, I wish they could somehow pry Johan away from EUV for just a little bit to unfuck Vicky 3.
There's no fixing Vicky 3, it's fundamental mechanics and assumptions are broken. You'd have to raze the whole thing to the ground and rebuild from the ground up, and I don't think Paradox is willing to do that.
 
There's no fixing Vicky 3, it's fundamental mechanics and assumptions are broken. You'd have to raze the whole thing to the ground and rebuild from the ground up, and I don't think Paradox is willing to do ththat.iy
Why not? They did that to stellaris and it was is in a far less dire state than vicky3 was on launch.
 
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Why not? They did that to stellaris and it was is in a far less dire state than vicky3 was on launch.
Speaking of, Stellaris did a dev diary today about 4.0, and they're once again fucking with entire game mechanics. Individual pops are getting axed: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...v-diary-366-announcing-stellaris-4-0.1726042/

Last year I mentioned that we were exploring a Pop Groups prototype, and showed you a horrifying placeholder screenshot in the last dev diary of the year. Our initial experiments have been promising, so in the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, we’re changing the way Pops fundamentally work. Pops will be grouped together into Pop Groups based on species, strata, and ethics, and these Pop Groups will produce Workforce that is used to fill (or partially fill) Jobs. As part of this change, we’re changing the overall scale of Pops - most things that previously affected or manipulated 1 Pop would now affect or manipulate 100.

These changes will significantly impact other systems, such as Pop Growth, Migration, and many others. I’ll dedicate a full dev diary to more details before the Open Beta.
 
Why not? They did that to stellaris and it was is in a far less dire state than vicky3 was on launch.
For a few reasons. The first being that Stellaris was a new IP that had no prior fanbase or expectations to disappoint or upset. Vicky 3's fundamental design was made with a repudiation of Victoria 2 and its fanbase in mind; Stellaris' reworks have not (usually) been complete 180s of its systems so much as extreme refinements of them, and Paradox didn't make Victoria 3 just to come up with the most roundabout way possible of reintroducing Victoria 2's mechanics. There's also the issue of dev ego; every single concession made mechanically is pulling teeth for Wiz and Co. who wanted to take Vicky 3 down the HoI4 branch of Paradox design, and also runs into the problem of fan expectation. Victoria 3, somehow, does have actual fans; people playing Stellaris do so with the tacit understanding that the game is a constant WIP and that Paradox can and will rework core mechanics, while Paradox would have to balance new slop appreciators in addition to the oldheads the more and more they shift away from Wiz's original vision.
 
The entire gameplay part of the game, the economy, is directly lifted from Das Kapital in terms of implementation, it isn't a 19th century imperialism simulator it's Marxist history wank.
It's not like vic2 where your capitalists are the ones doing the economizing and you, the state/player are trying to wrangle them, no everything that occurs in your people's democratic republic is because you the player are the very visible hand fisting it so up the ass of reality market forces be damned.
This is fundamental flaw because it cannot be fixed as it is all encompassing to literally everything from RGOs poroduction to factory construction to the "onwership " (ie: government regulations) of your "trade" centres. All of which is a total farce because there is no supply and demand in vicky 3 there are only "price" points which are entirely incidental to the actual supply of the product in question which is how release versions had fully functional North Korea mode mass industrializing despite massive resource shortages that should have put a stop to that ala actual; fucking reality.
Stellaris could ditch planet tiles and hitch on bloat mechanics because the core gameplay of it is the Star Trek mod space battles which have always worked fine, vic3 cannot do that as evidenced by when they added actual market forces in the form of "investment pool" it was just in the form of an extra piggy bank for you the player to smash to direct your command economy.
 
it's Marxist history wank
TBF, so is Victoria 2. Consciousness and Militancy are Marxist terms, things are measured almost exclusively in quantitative terms instead of qualitative, and capitalists are the means in how you transition from feudalism into the worker's state (as craftsmen are predisposed to voting labour). Vicky 2 just had the decency to actually read some orthodox Marxist historiography as opposed to V3 which is far more influenced by bioleninists, and it represented the actual mechanisms of capitalism well enough that the playerbase could mod around its shortcomings.
 
Being fair it is a computer game how else would measure things?
When I say quantitatively I don't mean measuring things in numbers, I mean that it only simulates mass and inevitability. E.g. your workers produce x amount of goods, but there's no representation of how good those goods are and how well the compete. Pops interactions are purely collectivized and with the government, not with each other; crime is just an obscure flavor mechanic, there is no qualitative distinction within pops (all farmers are equally disenfranchised under landed voting, for example), all religions are the same and perform the same function of keeping worker consciousness down, consciousness and militancy and even needs themselves speak little to the approval of your population or whether they feel happy, etc. Marxist historiography is fundamentally whiggish in assumption, and this is best represented in the reform track, where there is a clear and intended linear progression as to how you're supposed to shape your government and society and your pops (e.g. the game mechanics) will almost always push only in one direction.

These aren't necessarily bad things either but I think they are illustrative as to the blind spots in V2's design philosophy.
 
TBF, so is Victoria 2. Consciousness and Militancy are Marxist terms, things are measured almost exclusively in quantitative terms instead of qualitative, and capitalists are the means in how you transition from feudalism into the worker's state (as craftsmen are predisposed to voting labour). Vicky 2 just had the decency to actually read some orthodox Marxist historiography as opposed to V3 which is far more influenced by bioleninists, and it represented the actual mechanisms of capitalism well enough that the playerbase could mod around its shortcomings.
Vic2 is politically Marxist yes as evidenced by the ideal endgame being a wholesomechuingus social democracy with all reforms passed and pacifists in power, aka Real Communism (tm), which is a flaw that need mods to fix but at least the vanilla economy wasn't a total fantasy with INFINITE GOODS and INFINITE MONEY (although that was it's flaw thanks to the late game liquidity crisis, again fixable with mods, vic3 simply lacks the egg carton to be patched back together).
You can argue to infinity and byond about political perfection and that's fine but when it comes to the money despite what the pinkos may claim Morgan was right and human activity is economic activity as is perfectly well documented IRL in very clear terms, which Vic3 gets totally wrong.
 
I think what really pisses me off most about Vicky 3 is that your Petite Bourgeois will start agitating for fascism just because they can, never mind their overall financial and social circumstances. Fascism should be a response to high turmoil and/or pro-Communist radicalism among the lower classes, but if your current government doesn't have that they should be quite fine with whatever you've currently got.
 
I think what really pisses me off most about Vicky 3 is that your Petite Bourgeois will start agitating for fascism just because they can, never mind their overall financial and social circumstances. Fascism should be a response to high turmoil and/or pro-Communist radicalism among the lower classes, but if your current government doesn't have that they should be quite fine with whatever you've currently got.
Just like Marx, vicky also fails to consider religion as a factor.
The only effect from religion is certain goods being taboo in certain religions, and acceptance towards certain pops.
As an interest group the devout will always lose power over time, which is a materialist marxist view of history and ignores several big religious revivals in the 19th century.

So you'll never have a scenario where for example the Ottomans win a war against Austro Hungary with French support, occupying more territory in the Balkans, and causing a wave of religious fervor in say Russia and Italy that demands war against the muslim aggressors.

The devout never politically evolve either, so there's no scenario where the religious start advocating for socialism or fascism. Christianity is a non factor in the political struggle surrounding slavery in christian nations.
 
These aren't necessarily bad things either but I think they are illustrative as to the blind spots in V2's design philosophy.
Oh yeah I always found it weird that the game that covers the era where big business rose had no corporation mechanics or anthing it was just pure output

The devout never politically evolve either, so there's no scenario where the religious start advocating for socialism or fascism. Christianity is a non factor in the political struggle surrounding slavery in christian nations.
Also another thing that really irritates me, it really was the last time religion had a major in your face impact on history and it's completely glossed over.
 
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