Paradox Studio Thread

Favorite Paradox Game?

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Computer God Autism said:
I can't remember all who originally discussed this (I think @Ughubughughughughughghlug was part of it) but it was brought up that artisans, and technical classes in general, should be providing most of your tech points early on in games like these - and not only do I agree with this, I think going one step further would be better so that *all* middle class pops - artisans, intellectuals/clergy, bureaucrats, officers and clerks - should provide some research points. Intellectuals would still provide the largest single bonus, but every professional class should contribute (I'll probably nerf the Great/Secondary power tech point bonus to compensate). The offset to this would be that entirety of the middle class will be literacy locked; artisans and intellectuals at 20%, bureaucrats and officers at 35% and clerks at 50% (note this doesn't affect starting pops). Industrialization and a professional class don't necessarily go hand-in-hand; you can turn India into a sweatshop but a sudden influx of disposable income isn't going to suddenly make the brahmin accepting of dalits, or the dalits capable of being brahmin. On the topic of disposable income I plan on rebranding capitalists to the more accurate financiers, and lit-locking them to 25%; some aristocrats did become successful industrialists but that doesn't mean every mandarin is suddenly going to be interested in or understand how to run the new factories, nor does planning your economy get rid of people profiting from it. Financiers will not provide research points, however.
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Video games tend to portray it as though science drives technology, but before the Second Industrial Revolution (source of idea, but I think it's clear once pointed out, is How Innovation Works) it was actually usually the other way around: a technological advancement would occur through trial-and-error tinkering on the part of craftsmen, and then that advancement would pose some kind of mystery that science would attempt to solve. Additionally, you could argue that the paradigms of each scientific discipline were so wildly inaccurate that it's hard to credit them with any success until recently: medical doctors were much less reliable than herbalists, the former based on state-of-the-art and largely worthless medical theory, the latter on experience of thousands of years.

Nobody needed breakthroughs in chemistry to invent steel and gunpowder; nobody needed breakthroughs in physics to invent a trebuchet or vaulting in cathedrals. The application came first, the theory second. This is something that games and I think even pop history really misunderstands, but it's like, did Aristotle and Newton sit around inventing better weaving looms and grist mills?

What changes is just that technology eventually gets so complicated, and organizational forms in society (corporations, intellectual property) emerge that can make research and development a realistic practice. So by the Second IR (1870 - 1920 ish) you start to get actual research teams, laboratories, patents begin to genuinely matter, and the state's sponsorship of science starts to actually pay off in practical ways.

So, Old World (and I think Victoria II did it to some slight extent) is correct, whether or not any of this was on the dev's minds, to portray science as coming primarily from the artisan class with academia being a productivity multiplier through its role as an aggregator, refiner and distributor of ideas, and (more importantly, really) the meeting place for this mechanical elite to exchange with each other. Literacy mattered more than anything; crazy high literacy in some societies (like Scotland and Japan) laid the basis for their booms.

For a game like Victoria there'd really ideally be (from a realism standpoint, how it is is fine) different science points for different categories, but in this case I think it would maybe be overkill. Something you may consider, if you want to go down this route, is seeing if it's possible to mod in different types of education buildings (as Factories or province improvements) with different sorts of effects. One of the interesting things about education in this era is that the university system begins to differentiate in interesting ways. If originally there was universities (promoting philosophy), seminaries, medical schools and law colleges (often housed under the same roof), at some point in the late Enlightenment (I think) you start to get colleges of agriculture and mining, business colleges (invented in the US; I think it's portrayed as an invention in base Victoria), grade schools and high schools. Grade schools were primarily used to groom children for industrial work as part of the creation of a reliable proletariat and promote state propaganda; the more unstable countries were, the more they invested in basic education (consciousness up, but militancy down?). High schools in America as we know them grew out of Great Plains farming communities where everyone had roughly the same educational needs. Different educational buildings with different emphases could be interesting.
ex:
Liberal arts = Scientific theory, philosophy, arts
- Arts academies as subtype
- Seminaries: Victoria basically ignores religion as a subject in itself, which it really shouldn't, it's as relevant to its time as anywhere else
Law colleges = Political philosophy, business organization, other bureaucratic sort of technologies
Medical schools = Medical technology
Military colleges = Military science (doctrine, applied technology)
Colleges of agriculture and mines = Applied technology (economic), more useful for corporate farmers and planters?
Business colleges = Economics, business organization
Grade schools = General population indoctrination and basic literacy
High schools = General purpose economic (applied tech and business organization), more useful for the rural peasantry/petite-bourgeoisie?
Boarding schools = Elite population indoctrination and solidarity, prestige


ex. To give an example of how this can shape a society, the North IRL basically specced into all of that, while the South built heavily of law colleges, military colleges, ag and mines and boarding schools (often the very rich would actually send theirs overseas) and not so much the rest (beyond a token amount). It's a product of the economic system but it in turn constrains what the economic system can become.
 
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Tinto Flavor on Byzzies is now out, next week will have a new post from monday to friday, a map feedback, 2 flavor diaries, the dev diary, and another video.
factual.webp
First reply to the thread lol
 
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Slur Generator said:
How the hell is HoI so popular? It might just be the worst game on the list.
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hawkisnight said:
It puzzles me too. It must be the multiplayer and mods. I was done with the game after trying all the majors players. It was years ago so I maybe they made the game more fun?
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HOI4 was peak prior to the naval rework, it was at that point that it became really bloated. The ground combat was the centerpiece of the game, rather than the focus trees. It was the first paradox game I got into which introduced me to the rest of the genre (for better or for worse). There really isn't a way for HOI4 to continue in any meaningful way (combat updates, focusing on balance and AI) so they make focus trees for South America and Pakistan. The modding community, much like other modding communities on paradox, but in gaming as a whole, have been co-opted by troons and thus petty politicking. There is a series on Substack about the rise and fall of HOI4 which was really good:

I can't find a post on how to spoiler things and I'm a newfag poster, but here is the link:

https://open.substack.com/pub/wolli...=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
 
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Tyrant_1 said:
>HoI Sisters really are a special breed.
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Might is :optimistic:
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Different educational buildings with different emphases could be interesting.
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I originally considered this in the planning phase, but scrapped it. TGC (The Grand Combination, HFM/GFM's more autistic younger brother) actually does have universities as an additional state building, but from the way the code works it can only really increase research points/edu eff in a flat bonus and the changes to the UI to accommodate it aren't particularly elegant, and that's just for one linear chain. I would like to do this as the tech school system, but the bigger problem is that Vicky 2 doesn't give bonuses to researching specific branches in a tree, only the tree itself. So if I had my way something like Military-Industrial Complex would only give benefits to the technical branches of the military tree, but not the ones related to doctrine, but Vicky 2 afaik doesn't allow for that. Which honestly defeats a big part of the benefit of having a tech tree. Maybe a compromise where you have to pick a structure for you academia than a specialization for it, but that might create more combos/decisions that could be strictly necessary. Granted that might be easier to do with NVs than tech schools.

For consciousness, that actually was a big thing I retooled in the culture tree. Most mods stick with the current scheme where all the inventions that affect consciousness are in the political thought tree and those inventions bounce back in forth in what they give (e.g. one tech will have an invention to increase it and then another to decrease it, and this repeats to the point where there's no clear gain or loss), but I've tried to make it so that they're spaced out and clearly defined in the branches. Social Thought and Philosophy have an invention every tech to increase consciousness, Political Thought has an invention every teach to decrease it, and Aesthetics have an invention every two techs to decrease militancy. It'll be a net gain of consciousness if you go down the whole tree, but the population will be more literate and easier to gaslight manage if you can meet their demands (as consciousness increases needs).
 
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Computer God Autism said:
For consciousness, that actually was a big thing I retooled in the culture tree. Most mods stick with the current scheme where all the inventions that affect consciousness are in the political thought tree and those inventions bounce back in forth in what they give (e.g. one tech will have an invention to increase it and then another to decrease it, and this repeats to the point where there's no clear gain or loss), but I've tried to make it so that they're spaced out and clearly defined in the branches. Social Thought and Philosophy have an invention every tech to increase consciousness, Political Thought has an invention every teach to decrease it, and Aesthetics have an invention every two techs to decrease militancy. It'll be a net gain of consciousness if you go down the whole tree, but the population will be more literate and easier to gaslight manage if you can meet their demands (as consciousness increases needs).
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That's an interesting idea of how to tackle it. Maybe Consciousness is, really, a sort of source of power that comes from the population's political awareness (I take it that nobody in this thread really cares about using it in its narrow Marxist sense, although Vicky is a Marxist game). But what is power, it's some force that can cause transformative change, but whether that is good or bad, a threat to state power (EU4 with MEIOU and Taxes is basically a game about building state power) or a tool to build it, depends on whether that power is controllable, and so in raising a population's Consciousness you also raise the potential to direct it. Like you said, gaslighting them.

Would propaganda work on a non-Conscious public? Could you manipulate hordes of Americans into slaughtering themselves at Antietam, and then getting up again and fighting on for another four years, without a highly politically engaged population? Could you get millions of men to volunteer to charge machine gun nests over and over again because Lord Kitchener points at them and says "I WANT YOU" without them already having developed some sense of self that happens to align with the country?

Game already does this in how, if you have reforms that are genuinely useful that you want to pass, you need to build Consciousness to build the political support to overcome your own government.

Does Vicky have something (I bet it does) where Consciousness juices nationalist movements really bad?

I've thought about this a lot and probably rambled about it somewhere here, but Vicky is especially a good setting to portray different forms of militaries. Most Paradox games have some representation of conscription vs professionalization as a concept: CK2 has the levy (conscript), mercenary and retinue (professional). EU4 has the mercenary and standing army and, with MEIOU and Taxes, levies. V2 has mobilization as a mechanic. HOI4 really just has conscription be "how much manpower do you want."

What I've kind of wanted is a game that lets me distinguish between the use of conscription to maintain a standing army as well as the fact that armies often swell with volunteers for temporary upscaling in peacetime. I think of it like a Nolan chart. On one axis, is this unit permanent or does it have to be mobilized, sort of called out of mobile. On the other axis, is this unit a volunteer force or a conscript force, or to what extent is it either. What is a mercenary? That's surprisingly vague; really I think the best you can say is that mercenaries are to militaries what contractors are to business. They can go off elsewhere. Otherwise, it's just some sort of vague and arbitrary value judgment.

Permanent conscripts would be like janissaries and streltsy. Reserve volunteers would be like the war tradition of America, a little confusing as it didn't really matter whether a man was in that state militia by choice or not.

I'd like to basically be able to build my shadow reserve army in advance, maybe with different templates to auto-activate forces for different circumstances, rather than the all-or-nothing mobilization Victoria II had.

One big thing, though, is that volunteering + reserves as a concept can be used to interact interestingly with diplomacy. If the public can have diplomatic preferences (something I remember writing about way back when), their willingness to volunteer (or tolerate conscription) for a war can vary dramatically with the target. Historically, three examples from America:
1) Mass New England (bitch Yankee) resistance to 1812 and Mexico
2) Union does implement conscription, but volunteerism was so high it basically made no difference (I was shocked when I learned this, I took it for granted that the majority of both armies were conscripts)
3) Then, in WW1, despite a huge propaganda blitz, the state finds so few volunteers that it has to implement large scale conscription (70%!!!!)


Post below was added before I actually red Computer God Autism's reply:

Thought to add to my post: Victoria II actually DOES, kind of, portray the different types of academia... it's just that instead of you building a Military College instead of an Art Academy on a province, your nation has a military-industrial complex academic system instead of an arts system. I don't remember every group, but I do remember how you could change it over the course of a game (constrained by reasonable prerequisites), and some of the notable ones were the Germans of course specializing in industry and land warfare, the Americans having business schools for commerce and industry, and the French being art specialists.

So it had the idea, but it was made generic for the entire nation: America isn't advanced in developing new economic theory and business organization because it has more business schools than art academies, it's advanced because it's a Business Nation (TM) and not an Art Nation (TM).

And art itself goes back to the point that real change comes from the bottom, not the academy. Actually Official Art Academies (read that with full gravitas) are never where new movements crop up. They're conservative by nature. So America, for example, when it finally boomed as the new world center of culture, didn't do so because its academies started becoming more innovative, but because of a wide range of sketchy hillbillies and shifty poor Black people doing weird stuff. I'm not just talking music, take literature as an example. Who's usually considered the father of American novels? Mark Twain. But in his own day he was snubbed, at least initially. I remember reading about this 1877 event (some Centennial thing?) and they had a big thing on novelists, but it was basically all Northern Yankees, maybe like one Westerner and one Southerner as tokens, and Mark Twain wasn't invited.

Cultural change comes from the bottom, at least in the era of mass culture. What's trashy one day will be classy, serious stuff worth teaching bored kids in the classroom tomorrow. I would legit kill someone for a grand strategy game (or a Total War: Renaissance) that seriously digs into art history as a topic to study as deeply as these things usually do religion.
 
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