Paradox Studio Thread

[Bobbobson]

I hope they don't actually add China on the map. The game already runs like shit. When you play with imperial administration government it basically chokes to death when you grow too large even on decent PCs. Let's fix it by adding even more to the map.

Also I don't believe China will interact properly with the rest of the world as per CK tradition. If anything, India and most Africa should be removed from the game since they add nothing except for fucking lag

 

[Radola Gajda]

Do you mean that as in "you can play in China" or as in "Chinese Empire system like in CK2"? SS

There was only teaser so far and Dev diary is supposed to come out tomorow. So we will see. But I think it will be map expansion.

 

[Computer God Autism]

People whinging about China was annoying enough in CK2, a genuine map expansion into China in CK3 is the point of no return on any chance of it being salvaged as an even decent title.

 

[Snekposter]

One can only hope...

 

[Chieftain Coke Peanut]

People whinging about China was annoying enough in CK2, a genuine map expansion into China in CK3 is the point of no return on any chance of it being salvaged as an even decent title.

I have been huffing my strongest copium for the past few hours, and I have a theory.

Paradox has said they want to increase the dev speed for Ck3 because it has been downright glacial. Problem probably is Paradox has pulled off a good portion of their employees to work on EU5. But! They must know from the modding community there is a large Asian player base who will throw another $60 in the toilet to LARP as an emperor. Fools and their money are soon parted so Paradox will make out like bandits after releasing a severely undercooked Asian expansion. Now they have the cash to hire a new team for Ck3 to start pumping out content faster.

I mean lets be real, what's more likely, a company sees easy money and goes for it, or a company does a multi step plan to make a product better?

 

[East_Clintwood]

But! They must know from the modding community there is a large Asian player base who will throw another $60 in the toilet to LARP as an emperor. Fools and their money are soon parted so Paradox will make out like bandits after releasing a severely undercooked Asian expansion.

Not gonna lie, this being their business plan, only for HoI 4 to likely ruin it at the last second with GOE being so bad it simultaneously massively pissed off both the people who normally lap up all of Paradox's DLC slop and basically the entire continent of asia.

 

[Snekposter]

Not gonna lie, this being their business plan, only for HoI 4 to likely ruin it at the last second with GOE being so bad it simultaneously massively pissed off both the people who normally lap up all of Paradox's DLC slop and basically the entire continent of asia.

I'm still mad at how much chink shit has landed on the various Total War Workshop pages as a result of CA pandering hard to those fuckers.

 

[Blackstar]

Problem probably is Paradox has pulled off a good portion of their employees to work on EU5

EU5 is being worked on by Paradox Tinto, a studio headed by Johan down in Spain.

 

[HeyYou]

I don't in theory hate the idea of expanding to China because tweaking the Imperial administration system could work for them and there was a lot going on with them historically in this period, including their relationship with Europe thanks to the Silk Road, but yeah, it's absurd to add them to the map before DLCs focusing on the European nations and chink pandering always ends up with them infesting everything.

 

[Chieftain Coke Peanut]

it's absurd to add them to the map before DLCs focusing on the European nations and chink pandering always ends up with them infesting everything

China should have been the capstone, the final piece once they had finished everything else. Adding it before republics, papal mechanics, trade, and European flavor is just absurd. How in the hell is China going to be anything but absolute ass without those mechanics? We already know it's going to be a steaming pile of dogshit. At most a reskin of the byzantine mechanics which was a whole lot of fluff and not a lot of depth.

 

[Pieberry]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3486700/Crusader_Kings_III_Chapter_IV/

>The map grows 30% larger with All Under Heaven
It's worse, it also adds Japan and Southeast Asia to the map.

 

[LovisXVI]

I hope they don't actually add China on the map. The game already runs like shit. When you play with imperial administration government it basically chokes to death when you grow too large even on decent PCs. Let's fix it by adding even more to the map.

People whinging about China was annoying enough in CK2, a genuine map expansion into China in CK3 is the point of no return on any chance of it being salvaged as an even decent title.

China should have been the capstone, the final piece once they had finished everything else. Adding it before republics, papal mechanics, trade, and European flavor is just absurd. How in the hell is China going to be anything but absolute ass without those mechanics? We already know it's going to be a steaming pile of dogshit. At most a reskin of the byzantine mechanics which was a whole lot of fluff and not a lot of depth.

Abandon all hope ye who play CK3 and want it to be good. My prediction: will run like shit and they won't actually backport any gameplay additions to Europe or Middle East. My biggest problem increasingly is that nothing feels substantively different, especially governments, with "Clan", Tribal and Feudal alike all feeling exactly the same, and no granularity or reform over time. Curia NEVER, HRE mechanics NEVER, navies NEVER, economies NEVER and so forth.

In contrast, in Tinto land, talk about how the economy works, reforms to their pop system to add more stuff meaningfully. Responding to the community? Adding stuff requested? Simplifying where sensible? Madness I say. I remain optimistic about Johanreich.

 

[Chieftain Coke Peanut]

I'm not a Chinese historian, but I feel like China would be better suited to Imperator Rome mechanics, where you play a nation through its characters instead of characters through their nation like Ck3. Its just a massive misstep to add China at this point.

 

[Fig Kommandant]

I'm not a Chinese historian, but I feel like China would be better suited to Imperator Rome mechanics, where you play a nation through its characters instead of characters through their nation like Ck3. Its just a massive misstep to add China at this point.

China should have its own game, but I think something like CK where instead you do court intrigues only would be more fun, an entire game set inside the imperial palace where you can play the emperor or a eunuch.

 

[Blackstar]

In contrast, in Tinto land, talk about how the economy works, reforms to their pop system to add more stuff meaningfully. Responding to the community? Adding stuff requested? Simplifying where sensible? Madness I say. I remain optimistic about Johanreich.

This is a massive dev diary. I'm really glad Johan decided to start them so early in order to get much needed feedback.

Spoiler: Changes made in the last year of development

Economy:

• Split spices into 3 separate goods to represent the distribution of different types across the world, merged dates into fruits and soybeans into legumes and added beeswax, pottery and furniture
• "Added in a soft building cap, where every town can support 25 building levels, every city 100 building levels and each development point in a location adds another building level. Each level above the cap increases building costs in that location by 10%. This, besides making you want to diversify your cities, makes the decisions to go from guilds to manufactories to mills something you want to strive for. It has the added benefits of adding some minor diminishing returns for investments for the very rich, and adding another incentive to get cities where possible."
• "Every single level of a building adds another +1% production efficiency. This serves to represent economies of scale, so if you have a town with a level 8 Brewery, you produce +8% more beer than having 8 towns with a level 1 brewery in each."
• "Added a mechanic that we have used in previous games, and added benefits to having raw materials produced locally. If you have access to the input goods in the same province as a building is in, you can now get up to 10% more production efficiency for the building."
• "Halved the base amount of levels of RGO you can have in a location, which were tied heavily to population and development, and then gave rural locations a +100% boost to RGO levels. This naturally makes the choice of where you build your towns and cities more interesting."
• Reworked the minting and inflation mechanics to be more tied into the production of precious metals. "First of all, the amount of gold and silver that you produce has an impact on the income you get from minting new coins (ie, more actual metals used for coins instead of lost in “transactions”).
  Secondly, the production of gold and silver as a percentage of your total goods production of your economy will increase inflation.
  Finally, minting requires access to gold and silver, and if a country can’t get it from their market, then they can’t produce more money."

Pops:

• One thing we noticed through testing was how the entire Raw Materials economy could basically ignore deaths as long as you had enough peasants around, because living peasants would just instantly fill the vacancies created by deaths. We decided to change that by splitting peasants into three different pops: Laborers, Soldiers and Peasants. Laborers and Soldiers are still lowerclass pops, and belong to the same estates, but they need to be promoted from peasants to fill vacancies in RGOs and buildings..
  
  Peasants now represent the common people over whom we rule. Most of them live on subsistence farming, or in our villages.
  
  Laborers represent the people who work manual labour in our town, cities and rural locations. They work the land to create, harvest and gather the raw materials that are the backbone of the country, or work as unskilled labour in mills.
  
  Soldiers represent the common people that provide the manpower for our armies and garrisons, as well as sailors for our navies.
  
  
• Promotion has been reworked as well, where not all types of pops promote as quickly. Pops promoting to clergy and nobles promote at 10% of the promotion speed, while pops promoting to Burghers promote at 50% of the speed. Pops becoming Laborers though, promote at 150% of the speed.
  
  
• Changed how pop demands work, and made the demands scale by development of a location, so pops in more advanced parts of the world will now demand far more goods. This creates a constant growth.
• Changed a bit on how the economy works for pops and estates, and pops are now no longer getting their goods entirely for free, but instead the estates will now pay for the goods that the pops need, with the money they have left after taxes. The amount they spend per pop scales by control of the location, so it is balanced compared to the income they get. This severely limits the snowball effect of having rich estates invest in making themselves and the country richer.
• "Another problem that was identified through testing was that basing the distribution of income in a location on the political power of the estates was that in almost all cases the commoners got nothing and the nobles got everything, which meant that you never wanted to tax your commoners but wanted to squeeze everything out from the nobles. While being an admirable goal, it does not reflect historical reality as much, so how to solve this?
  
  Well, before we added the cossacks, tribes and dhimmi estates from feedback there was a 1-to-1 direct connection between a specific poptype and which estate they belonged to, so the estates could get exactly the amount of money their pops were generating. And since we did not want to do something performance crippling -like splitting pops into 1 per building- we went with pooling all income in a location and distributing it by political power. Now though, that has changed and we instead distribute it per a fixed fraction per pop in the estates, so commoners and burghers get money you want to tax from their work."

Next week TT will be changes that have been done to Politics, Proximity & Societal Values.

 

[Bobbobson]

It's even worse than I thought. It's the whole Asia they're adding. And while China is at least getting some unique mechanics, whether they will work or not is another issue. The rest of Asia will get a "unique content" aka "Proclaim (some historical or alt history name) empire" decision to create some empire title to do nothing or "do (some local culture thing" to get 500 prestige or piety. And your character will hunt monkey instead of fox when sent on a hunt (all the choices and descriptions of the hunt will stay the same). If you liked playing in Ireland, Eastern Europe, Germany or France you will fucking love playing in the Asian regions because it will be exactly the same style of playing the game's interpretation of feudal kingdom.

CK3 is really baffling to me even for a Paradox game. While other games tend to improve over time with DLCs (misfires like Graveyard of the Empires or Leviathan aside), most of the directions CK takes are bad ones. While vanilla release wasn't amazing, it was probably the best Paradox premiere in 10 years. It was decent base for future development.

And then it was thrown away. Barebones traveling system where if you performed activity once you've seen 80% of all things that can happen during it (and it was a "major mechanic" update). Event expansions (3 of them) that will spam you with endless walls of texts which you'll stop reading after an hour and just start picking one with more green numbers in descriptions. Court mechanics where they spent resources to model a 3d chamber where you go once in a few years to click 3 out of like 20 repetitive events.

Even the ideas that sound good on paper are falling short when you realize that the few sentences they used in steam store description was not a brief summary of the mechanics to give you a vague idea what it is, but the complete and comprehensive description of a new feature. Stuff like imperial administration looks fun at the start until you play with it for some time and realize how bare bones it is.

The only DLC I think is overall decent is the Viking stuff. You get fun tools to fuck around and sow chaos but have to find a way to modernize or you'll get left behind. Having Vikings for a neighbors can be a bit frustrating but they make for a good early game challenge and it's satisfying to establish yourself and start wiping raiding parties headed your way.

I wish Paradox went with 90% of DLC from vanilla release being regional flavor for the existing locations rather than spamming shitty half assed mechanics that are exactly the same no matter where you choose to play.

 

[Blackstar]

 

[HeyYou]

CK3 is really baffling to me even for a Paradox game. While other games tend to improve over time with DLCs (misfires like Graveyard of the Empires or Leviathan aside), most of the directions CK takes are bad ones. While vanilla release wasn't amazing, it was probably the best Paradox premiere in 10 years. It was decent base for future development.

Sadly it's still better than Vicky 3.

 

[why42]

Yeah it's kinda disappointing that they decided to go to a whole another part of world and add new mechanics instead of improving the base game. Feudal governments need a real rework. The majority of asia outside of mongol tribes, China and maybe Japan are going to be fleshed out. The rest of Asia is going to be dlc heavy while the base game mechanics are still going to be shit and dlc mechanics still are shallow.

 

[Computer God Autism]

The thing I hate the most about a full Asia expansion is not that it's finally gratifying the most annoying demographic of the CK2 Paradoxplaza forums, but that it effectively kills any chance of Paradox ever revisiting Sengoku.