Paradox Studio Thread

[Jemn Oopi]

A couple of years later, Haemimont stepped down from being the devs for Surviving Mars (not sure whether they did on their own or Paradox booted them), and the reins passed on to Abstraction Games

The new version has been passed back to Haemimont.

People are review bombing both games.

The original version has been review bombed from "very positive" all reviews to "mostly negative" recent reviews, but the new version is at "mostly positive".

"Now you can get the patched version if you shell out 40 bucks!"

It's only 20 dollars for owners of the original version.

 

[Need for Sped]

The original version has been review bombed from "very positive" all reviews to "mostly negative" recent reviews, but the new version is at "mostly positive".

I stand corrected. It was at "Mixed" a while ago, but since there's so little reviews yet, seems like a couple of positive ones managed to buoy it to "Mostly Positive" (72% out of 74 reviews are positive).

It's only 20 dollars for owners of the original version.

Point taken. Still, dick move on their part, especially since they've already announced $25/20 worth of additional DLCs for next year. I already got burnt by their DLCs and their Surviving Mars knockoff, Surviving the Aftermath (And its own shitty DLCs as well). Not giving them one more dime.

 

[Jarolleon]

I like Eu5, though it seems the AI hasn't adapted to the vassal swarms that the early game relies upon. It makes winning the Hundred Years' War as England pretty easy (at least in the early stages, I've only played to 1345 so far), because the vassals don't coordinate with each other and you can pick them off using your ships. I couldn't figure out how to get my own vassals to embark so I put all the British ones on scutage.

 

[Sooty Soot]

I like Eu5, though it seems the AI hasn't adapted to the vassal swarms that the early game relies upon. It makes winning the Hundred Years' War as England pretty easy (at least in the early stages, I've only played to 1345 so far), because the vassals don't coordinate with each other and you can pick them off using your ships. I couldn't figure out how to get my own vassals to embark so I put all the British ones on scutage.

And the AI loves no CB wars too, I once had England declare war on my vassal (Zeeland), and the French declare war on my PU junior partner Brabant despite me being in a defensive league with them, the gay part is I have to take a -7 stability hit just to get a single claim through the parliament system and even then I'm punished by long integration times (In vanilla) and antagonism up the ass.

As an aside, has anyone managed to figure out how control works yet?

 

[Fig Kommandant]

AI hasn't adapted to the vassal swarms that the early game relies upon. It makes winning the Hundred Years' War as England pretty easy

It also makes the Hundred Years War super easy as France. The ticking system means that any defender by default wins any war against England unless England can ship 20k units per fleet. I've seen Holland win against England because the english keep loading 100 men per fleet every other month and lose every battle once they land.

As an aside, has anyone managed to figure out how control works yet?

Have you tried building more roads?

 

[Kane Lives]

As an aside, has anyone managed to figure out how control works yet?

As a rule of thumb, max control is determined by the proximity to your capital. You can improve proximity via
a) roads
b) maritime presence
c) presence of rivers
d) certain buildings like bridges

Certain buildings also give control directly, like bailiffs, but I never found them terribly useful. Cabinet actions can also increase control if you want, but only worth it for rich RGO locations.

EDIT: To elaborate, control directly determines how much of the location income you (and your estates) collect. Therefore, you want control as high as possible to extract the most from your taxbase.

 

[SmugAutist]

I consider myself a slow player but it's still amazing that I've formed a PU with Portugal, vassalized Navarre, conquered half of Aragon, and finished the reconquista as Castile in the first 30 years of the game. I'll admit that I'm having fun, and I've only had a couple of crashes. Most stable Paradox release in years.

I'm still learning how to work the market and economic system, but it doesn't seem as complex as Vicky's is. Most of the the economy really revolves around control. Will probably move my capital to Toledo before colonization begins.

The biggest jank I've come across is Naval invasions. Gone are the days when you can just click on and enemy shore and the army automatically splits to fit the naval capacity. Now you have to do it manually. Almost killed my pops when I invaded Morocco.

 

[God of Nothing]

All is right in the world


i got a culture tech loss shortly after this so it needs more fine tuning
like fucking hell jews bring culture to civilization when one of their foremost tenants is not mixing with the "gentiles"

 

[Scale Smerch]

As a rule of thumb, max control is determined by the proximity to your capital. You can improve proximity via
a) roads
b) maritime presence
c) presence of rivers
d) certain buildings like bridges

Certain buildings also give control directly, like bailiffs, but I never found them terribly useful. Cabinet actions can also increase control if you want, but only worth it for rich RGO locations.

EDIT: To elaborate, control directly determines how much of the location income you (and your estates) collect. Therefore, you want control as high as possible to extract the most from your taxbase.

Another big one is culture. Cultural assimilation and getting a majority of your culture in a province makes it a core and that adds a 20% control floor. It's also stupidly easy right now because assimilation is easier and faster than religious conversion with no downside. Add on basic control improvements like temples and maritime presence (itself also busted by being more influenced by coastal province ownership than navy) and it's easy to start seeing ~50-60% control for distant holdings by the mid-game.

 

[Mussolini’s Merkin]

I was on the fence about buying EU5, but it sounds like it needs some time to stabilize a bit. Is now a good time to go back and play EU4? I've had the complete edition sitting on my harddrive for ages but I've never given it a go after I bounced off of Vicky 2 so hard.

Are there any decent resources for learning the basics or is the in game tutorial good enough? The ones in HOI3-4 and Stellaris sucked.

 

[Slap47]

Playing in Europe is like going to India. You *will* get raped.

The only point where you can amass a large enough retinue force to keep all of your vassals in check as a large state would be the point where you already make enough money that you win.

The meta in CK2 is to maximize money output in a core demesne asap to get a retinue army going, but you still need tech and size to actually get it 4500-6000 which is usually large enough to smash armies twice its size if you understand how CK2 combat works. But by that point your people management shouldn't be internal anyways, it should be external with the multiple kingdoms you've accumulated for your dynasty.

I disagree, retinues were good because you had to save up thousands of gold just to build up a retinue force bigger than 2000 and with balanced unit composition. Cavalry retinues which are 100-200 men alone are like 150 gold. By the time you got retinues, you could probably hire 6000+ mercs to put down any rebellion, they just cut out the tedium of putting down your levies, declaring war on some guy for one province you have a claim on, then raising them again.

You don't need enough retinues to keep them all in check, just most of them. Pre-retinue CK2 was an insane experience as every succession actually was a question and you really did need to earn vassal loyalty. Thematically it was also just annoying as standing armies are more of an early-modern thing.

Regardless, most of the DLC and new content after the addition of retinues is also good so its not like rolling back is much of an option either.

 

[LovisXVI]

I was on the fence about buying EU5, but it sounds like it needs some time to stabilize a bit. Is now a good time to go back and play EU4? I've had the complete edition sitting on my harddrive for ages but I've never given it a go after I bounced off of Vicky 2 so hard.

Are there any decent resources for learning the basics or is the in game tutorial good enough? The ones in HOI3-4 and Stellaris sucked.

If you want to play something like EU5 in the meantime, I recommend Imperator, which is a derivation thereof. It is a completed game with a very healthy modding scene and stable.

 

[Mussolini’s Merkin]

If you want to play something like EU5 in the meantime, I recommend Imperator, which is a derivation thereof. It is a completed game with a very healthy modding scene and stable.

I actually have that in my library as well, but I never played it. I shall give it a look.

 

[LovisXVI]

I actually have that in my library as well, but I never played it. I shall give it a look.

Play it with Imperator: Invictus mod, as that is the community update mod that adds a lot of content.

 

[Jarolleon]

Found an exploit, I took some cores from France and sold them to Luxembourg, and now France is waging a reconquest war against the HRE (1365). Not sure how Paradox would prevent this, make "sell location" evaluate third-party cores?

I have a theory for why AI stacks will just walk into your forces when you outnumber them 5-to-1 rather than shadow them and wait until they can dogpile. In other Paradox games the timescale is daily not hourly so battles take way longer while army movement speed is only slightly slower, so it is somewhat viable to make an attack you'd otherwise lose because there are other allies in the region to reinforce, but in Eu5 the battles resolve on a more realistic timescale so they get wrecked before anyone can respond. As England the battles are even faster because your levies get an initiative boost.

Also, how do you tech faster, is it just boost literacy, buy institutions, keep the Clergy happy, and don't be a tribe? I appreciate the tech tree goes all the way back to alphabet and iron working, surprisingly based of Paradox to show how backward half the pre-colonial world was.

 

[Blackstar]

One thing that I have found really fucking annoying is the AI somehow annexing my vassals during war. During a war against Novgorod as Poland I declared on its vassal of Estonia, only for them to get peaced out of it despite being the war goal, and when Novgorod would occupy my vassals it would fully annex them despite not having any cores/claims, and in some cases no land connection. I would get no notification about this, only randomly see it forcing me to restart from an autosave to prevent it.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

So Paradox decided to outdo themselves this time by re-releasing a game that's barely 7 years old (Surviving Mars: Relaunched), To put some context: Surviving Mars was initially released back in 2018, developed by Haemimont Games. It was a very nice game on its own, which was further improved by a pretty decent expansion (Green Mars); there was also a bunch of fluff DLCs (Radio Stations, cosmetics, minor mechanics, etc), as is the Paradox way.

A couple of years later, Haemimont stepped down from being the devs for Surviving Mars (Not sure if they did on their own or Paradox booted them), and the reins passed onto Abstraction games, which not only proceeded to release two absolutely shitty DLCs (Below and Beyond and Mars Express), but fucked up the base game through "bug fixes", so even if you didn't buy any DLCs, you got shafted.

On August, they announced "Surviving Mars: Relaunched" (Which released today):

View attachment 8152341
"Hey guys, remember those shitty DLCs that screwed up the base game and we never patched? Now you can get the patched version if you shell 40 bucks for our new, reworked version of the game we released just 7 years ago! Also, we delisted the previous version of Surviving Mars, of course"

People are understandably pissed, and are review bombing both games.

I played it a little years ago and I don't remember it being busted.
$20 actually doesn't sound bad to get everything bundled together and try it again, leaving the (potential) scuminess of its story aside.
I wish Surviving Mars had more grit/politics in it. It's utopian by choice, but I read The Martian Chronicles growing up. You'd think a game heavily based on Tropico would have had some really dystopian stuff lurking under the surface.

 

[The Count of Monte Cristo]

One thing that I have found really fucking annoying is the AI somehow annexing my vassals during war.

Probably unrelated but during my ottoman playthrough, somehow I had gained control of Constantinople during my second war against the Byzantines, who were in a noble rebellion. I dont know how I gained control of Constantinople as I wasnt the one that sieged it but for a few minutes before realizing it would take literal years. More confusingly however is that within a few months of sieging towns in the west of Greece the war ended without having sent a peace deal or accepting one and I got all the land that I had control of during their civil war. Is this a new feature or am I clueless.

Edit: Not like it matters but I got Constantinople in 1370 if you're curious

 

[Jemn Oopi]

I wish Surviving Mars had more grit/politics in it.

It appears that a political system has been added to the new version.

The Earth Council is made up of the founding faction you have chosen as a player (more on the factions later on), your sponsor, and the sponsors of the rival colonies on Mars. These are the early decision makers that will shape the early politics of your colony.

The Earth Council is useful but limited. At some point, all law options may be exhausted and it is time for the colony to have its own political system. This is done by building the new Martian Assembly spire in one of your Domes. As soon as the Assembly is completed, the Earth Council is disbanded and new Martian factions will appear on the scene.

[list of 16 factions]
You will probably meet around 3–5 of these factions in a single game (though it is possible for new factions to appear from time to time). Their demands will often clash, so you will need a lot of political acumen to keep them all in check.

Sooner or later, your sponsor will no longer be as beneficial as it was in the beginning of the mission. As the colony grows, you will get a different set of challenges to complete that eventually lead to Independence, but you will have to wait for the next Dev Diary to hear more about it.

 

[Kane Lives]

Also, how do you tech faster, is it just boost literacy, buy institutions, keep the Clergy happy, and don't be a tribe? I appreciate the tech tree goes all the way back to alphabet and iron working, surprisingly based of Paradox to show how backward half the pre-colonial world was.

Basically yeah. Literacy is the long term "tech rate", so the higher you get this, the faster your research will be. Literacy-maxxing will be something you naturally do by the time you get to the printing press anyway.

Probably unrelated but during my ottoman playthrough, somehow I had gained control of Constantinople during my second war against the Byzantines, who were in a noble rebellion. I dont know how I gained control of Constantinople as I wasnt the one that sieged it but for a few minutes before realizing it would take literal years. More confusingly however is that within a few months of sieging towns in the west of Greece the war ended without having sent a peace deal or accepting one and I got all the land that I had control of during their civil war. Is this a new feature or am I clueless.

Edit: Not like it matters but I got Constantinople in 1370 if you're curious

Probably something to do with how the game handles civil war, since in a civil war, you just gain territory by blanket sieging without needing a peace deal or anything. Definitely a bug.

Also funny you mention being Ottomans, because I just started the ERE, and aside from the rough start, alliance-maxxing really does deter the Ottoblob from ever making a move on you, giving you precious decades to get through the initial civil wars and forced instabilities. (It's also pretty funny how I pretty much ended up in a double regency like a year in, and then said regent, a no-name Italian whore of the first basileus, proceeded to simply guide the Empire through its initial instability before finally giving up the throne for her genius nephew-in-law.) Now taking a bite out of the beyliks one province at a time.

EDIT: Less good, can't fabricate claims on neighbouring islands because they aren't at my borders reeeeeee. Those are my cores, damnit.