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- Apr 19, 2019
Just give it some time, Rome wasn't patched in a day.
Paradox Studio Thread
- Thread starter Payday
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🔧 Actively working on site again.
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- Jan 24, 2018
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- May 19, 2018
I think it's because the mana is basically the whole game at this point. There's none of the RPG elements of CK2, the trade system is closer to a Total War game than anything we expect from Paradox, and way too many things are just "click the button."
I know he's not a terribly popular guy 'round these parts, but in Arch Warhammer's video, he makes the point that abstracting too many elements to mana and button clicks lowers opportunity costs to the point where decision-making is almost casual: I need to save up 200 rolling pin mana to do [Thing A], but if something crops up in the meantime that requires rolling pin mana more urgently, I can just click that button instead of the one I intended. Everyone who's played CK2 knows that the RNG can be your best friend, worst enemy, or both at the same time, since even outside of the character stuff, things like converting provinces, fabricating claims, and so on have a big randomness element involved, and their connection to your council seats forces decisions and planning ahead. You want your steward fabricating claims, that can't be milking the locals for extra tax, and you don't know how long they're going to be tied up on the job. In I:R, you just... save up the mana and click a button.
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- Jul 12, 2015
I:R is Johan’s baby. He basically wanted to make E.U. Rome once again, but better. Well it’s certainly more playable than E.U. Rome, but the Johanisms stick out more now compared to other titles. I do think it could have used another six months to improve, but the question is if Johan would have further Johan’d it.
Adolf Von Merkel
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 18, 2017
I think that Paradox is having a generational shift right now.
Leiper-Ritchie, Dan Lind, Martin Anward,Daniel Moregård and other are slowy becoming big names within the company(with Anward being the most important one) while Chris King,Johan and Fåhraeus are doing their own stuff they like without giving a fuck.
It doesn't surprise me that Johan is acting like that because he knows that if it is continue like that he will lose influence and will turn into a more simbolic figure in Paradox.
Leiper-Ritchie, Dan Lind, Martin Anward,Daniel Moregård and other are slowy becoming big names within the company(with Anward being the most important one) while Chris King,Johan and Fåhraeus are doing their own stuff they like without giving a fuck.
It doesn't surprise me that Johan is acting like that because he knows that if it is continue like that he will lose influence and will turn into a more simbolic figure in Paradox.
AnAccount
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 25, 2018
there's essentially two parties with Imperator rome I heavily agree with one, and heavily disagree with the other.
The first is, The use of Mana, and other not so well received Paradox elements severely hamper and restrict the enjoyment of the game for a lot of people, and stop a lot of the elements and mechanics in the game in feeling important. Rimmy downunder has a good video on this.
The other half is the like, "There isn't enough content" Or "The game was misleading" I heavily disagree with this. Imperator was like the most Transparently advertised game in a long time, if you purchased it and are angry because you thought it was something else, you're probably retarded. It also has plenty of content, in line with modern Paradox games and seems fairly meaty. I do agree they do seem to have launched in a sorta early access state, with how they're gonna be adding stuff in the coming update. But with that stuff added, the game looks like probably the biggest Paradox Base game in recent history. That arch warhammer dude is where I've seen a lot of this POV
Don't confuse me for a shill, I have like no intention of playing Imperator Rome for the reasons outlined in the first para and more, I just think the people from the second camp are being pretty disingenuous. Imperator was always marketed as a sequal to EU rome at least in spirit. and to me it seems to hit that mark and more in terms of content. But I'm always open to someone changing my mind.
The first is, The use of Mana, and other not so well received Paradox elements severely hamper and restrict the enjoyment of the game for a lot of people, and stop a lot of the elements and mechanics in the game in feeling important. Rimmy downunder has a good video on this.
The other half is the like, "There isn't enough content" Or "The game was misleading" I heavily disagree with this. Imperator was like the most Transparently advertised game in a long time, if you purchased it and are angry because you thought it was something else, you're probably retarded. It also has plenty of content, in line with modern Paradox games and seems fairly meaty. I do agree they do seem to have launched in a sorta early access state, with how they're gonna be adding stuff in the coming update. But with that stuff added, the game looks like probably the biggest Paradox Base game in recent history. That arch warhammer dude is where I've seen a lot of this POV
Don't confuse me for a shill, I have like no intention of playing Imperator Rome for the reasons outlined in the first para and more, I just think the people from the second camp are being pretty disingenuous. Imperator was always marketed as a sequal to EU rome at least in spirit. and to me it seems to hit that mark and more in terms of content. But I'm always open to someone changing my mind.
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- Joined
- Oct 21, 2018
they streamed like 100 hours themself + weekly updates + alot of keys going out to the typical LPers. they did everything to make its clear what in the game.
Arch isnt good at games like this.
you should get the game after the first good sale. It does alot of stuff realy well. Sure you could play EU4 instead, but that gets boring from time to time.
also what are you gonna buy instead? a civ clone with the complexity of a mobile game?
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- Jul 18, 2017
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- May 19, 2018
Are you going for the White Hun cheevo? There's only one start for that, Count of Mohadavasaka in 769.
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- May 14, 2019
Paradox are just such fucking shit compared to their modding teams. I would honestly cheer a little if they got Allahu Akbared, being that they're Swedes and all. The only thing that makes their games worth touching is the amazing work the modders do, but they regularly ban me over stupid shit*, so half the time I can't get my mods working right.
The work the modders do is amazing, especially MEIOU and Taxes. They took a shitty map-painter and turned it into a world simulator, complete with climate models, surprisingly accurate demographics data, and an incredibly simple but profound, interconnected political and economics model that's so good that you can use it's ideas to model the real world (and is based on real science).
If MEIOU and Taxes was a separate product from EU4, I would - no exaggeration - pay up to $100 for MEIOU and Taxes, but no more than $10 for EU4 (complete).
*The last time was because, when they did that dev diary about Imperator: Rome's AMAZING naval system (one ship type only), I left a comment saying, "I'm not surprised we're getting such a lazy system." I got banned for "trolling."
- Joined
- May 5, 2019
Honestly it seems like most game devs get completely fucking mogged by modders, which is why I can't really respect them.
How the fuck does some Russian 15 year old working for free manage to deliver content so much better than a paid worker.
This is especially prevalent with Mojang, where all the actual content in the update is about a week of mod work, and it takes them half a decade to add incredibly simple high demand stuff people could get in mods.
It doesn't help that Johan loves sniffing his own farts and destroys the games with his shitty mana fetish and seems to hold active contempt for paradox's fanbase.
If MEIOU was an actual independent game I would buy it in a heartbeat, they would never go independent bless their hearts, I feel bad for them because they have to deal with Paradox's shitty forum (Did you just say Kebab? ALLAHU AKB&) it's not like Paradox holds a copyright on history itself. Also part of me feels like if MEIOU was actual EU4 the game would be a LOT more successful. Most reasons to dislike EU4 come back to one thing, the fucking mana, newbies are scared of EU4's button spam when it's all just different ways to cast mana. The old players just hate mana itself, mana appeals to literally no one but Johan.
Also do you ever notice that Sweden is always OP in their games?
EU4 Sweden has Prussia tier ideas despite being irrelevant for every year between the beginning of the universe to 1630 and then again for every year between 1721 to the end of fucking time. Denmark is more relevant than Sweden.
I avoided Imperator because I was well aware from the start it was just more of Johan jacking himself off with the mana, seriously can we stop with the fucking mana.
- Joined
- Apr 10, 2019
never heard of MEIOU but looks rad. can you suggest any CK2 mods worth checking out?
Just Some Other Guy
kiwifarms.net
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- Mar 25, 2018
Had to look up what this "mana" stuff was since I only played up to CK2, wow sounds like some bullshit. Why do you need some sort of abstract points just to issue military orders?
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- May 5, 2019
Not him but HIP is basically CK2's MEIOU.
- Joined
- May 14, 2019
It's supposed to be an abstraction of the state's limited administrative resources, but they got carried away with the idea and started applying it to everything. I think Paradox likes it because it streamlines their design, but it's shitty from a standpoint of simulating history. I want my history simulators to be hardcore.
CK+ is very good for a mechanics overhaul. The faction system is way better (factions are like political parties, instead of just spamming rebellions), the map is way more realistic and detailed, and it adds lots of little flavor and more start dates. It doesn't really add anything major, but it improves so many little things that you'll never want to use Vanilla again.
After the End Fan Fork is a really good total conversion mod for CK2. It's set in a post-apocalyptic North America where the cultures are based on real-world regional cultures and it has an interesting set-up of religions, both real and fictional. For example, you can play as "Riverlanders" (Upper Southern people) who follow a religion which worships the Burning Bush, Serpent, and other figures from the Bible as separate gods in a pagan pantheon, or as Founding Father-worshipping tribal savages in Florida, or vicious neo-Norse Vikings from Minnesota, or cowboy horse nomads from the Great Plains, or a million other things. It's a real labor of love. The only downside is that it doesn't have any of the CK+ features.
MEIOU and Taxes is amazing. It's main feature is a population system (inspired by Vicky) where instead of Base Manpower, Base Tax, and Base Production, you have Rural, Urban, and Upper Class Population. Population grows on its own following an ecological model. Every province has a natural carrying capacity, and the growth rate decreases the closer you get to the carrying capacity of the land. Cities, likewise, have a natural size (Urban Gravity) representing their natural population, and that's increased by constructing buildings. Urban Population makes way more money than Rural Population, so you want to urbanize.
Politically, estates are assigned land automatically based on the features of the province, and they can't be revoked. Estates collect most of the wealth of the province and reinvest it, so the economy naturally grows by itself, like in Victoria II. Estates also demand "privileges," which are usually maluses on the player. The more powerful an estate is, the more aggressively it will demand privileges, and likewise for the less privileges it has. However, the more privileges there are, the higher your equilibrium rate of Corruption is. So, Corruption is something you get not from arbitrary sources, but from actually having a corrupt society (interest groups dominating your government), and you have to decide how much corruption you can live with, since fighting your estates on it will destabilize the government.
Plagues and famines are a major part of the game. In more recent versions (which I can't access, on account of the Forum faggotry), your population will build up resistance when hit by plagues, but they lose resistance over time. Plagues tend to occur in generational pulses, spread along trade routes/other logical ways, and are a major limiting factor on population growth. You can fight back with different medical measures, but they're a serious danger no matter what. Famines are more tied into the climate system, where the game actually simulates how much rainfall (and other agricultural factors) provinces get; with rainfall, you can even have disastrous floods, like China historically suffered from. Plagues and famines are more likely to occur when you're overpopulated, acting again as a balancing factor.
The map is also extremely detailed and realistic (EU4 Vanilla looks like a cartoon compared to it), has an amazing amount of historical flavor, and starts in 1356 after the Black Death. The change of start date makes so many things so much better. Instead of the Kebab Blob ruling the Middle East and the Yellow Devil in China, Turkey is fractured into many Seljuk successor states, and China is in the middle of the Red Turban Rebellion. So, you can play an Ottoman or Ming game while starting as a small power, and it all flows much more dynamically.
If you play any Victoria II, I recommend PDM (Pop Demand Mod, now called Pop of Darkness). It does rebalance the economy, but I mostly like it because it adds a lot of historical flavor that fill out the otherwise empty world, with one of the best features being a reworked infamy system and Great Wars. Great Wars actually proceed like the historical Great War, in that you get cascading alliances and the losers get completely dismantled. It can even simulate individual nations on the winning side getting knocked out and dismantled, like what happened to Russia. You're basically guaranteed to get a World War I, it's just a matter of what the alliances are and who wins and loses. The Infamy Wars are kind of like Napoleon, in that if you run your Infamy up too high, all the big powers that want to will combine into one huge coalition and attempt to dismantle you. Regardless of the outcome, your Infamy drops down below the threshhold so that everybody fucks off until you act up again. Oh, and there's the brilliant China and Japan mechanics. Paradox just ignored Asian history for Vicky II, but PDM adds in the Taiping Rebellion (although there's no way in-game to simulate the rise of Taiping Christianity) as a sort of ACW for China, the Boxers, and the Warlord Era, while Japan gets stuff like the individual daimyos, the Boshin War...
Concert of Europe is a pretty good expansion for PDM which pushes the start date back to 1821, allowing you to play through events like the Greek War of Independence and, more importantly to me, a wide range of Latin American countries. It gives you a lot of alternate history challenges. Do you want to preserve the Empire of Mexico when it still controlled Central America? Preserve Gran Colombia as Simon Bolivar? Preserve the Peru-Bolivia Confederation? How about Portugal-Brazil? Or reconquer Latin America as Spain, crushing the revolutions before they ever win?
I'm cumming myself writing all this.
- Joined
- Apr 10, 2019
currently reinstalling EU4 because this sounds fantastic.
tbh I've not gone deep enough into Paradox games to enter the mod scene yet so I was under the misconception the biggest projects were just pop culture total conversion stuff like CK2 game of thrones (since that's all I've seen covered by gaming "media"). this all sounds more ambitious in a better way.
- Joined
- May 14, 2019
The media is made up of geeks who don't care about anything unless it has a wizard or a zombie in it. I'd venture to say that Paradox's modding scene is at least as rich as Bethesda's, scaling for the different sizes of their fanbases. I just listed the ones I personally play.
CK2, for example, also has a total conversion mod for the Dark Ages, starting from the time of the Lombard invasion of Western Rome, complete with dynamic events for the emergence of Islam (which can turn out differently depending on what happens).
All of the games also have major alternate history mods. CK2's big one is probably a Middle Ages mod where Christianity never really took off and the Roman Empire still exists as a rump state; I think it's called Sol Invicta. EU4, I'm not sure about. Vicky II has "Divergences of Darkness" (there's a custom of changing the mod name to signal which expansion it's for; Vicky II is on the old system where each expansion is needed for the next one to work). Hearts of Iron IV has Kaiserreich, which is a very well-thought out one where Germany won WW1, and it's basically a celebration of the obscurities of history, as people like Baron von Ungern-Sternberg and Huey Long, and failed ideologies like Syndicalism, all get to shine.
Alternate history mods work especially well because the devs have the freedom to base things around what they think would be creative or make for good gameplay, instead of being strictly beholden to history.
If I ever got into the modding scene, I would probably work on a Vicky II mod to flesh out the United States or a Native Americans submod for MEIOU and Taxes. The one thing MEIOU and Taxes handles very poorly, at the moment, is native tribes and colonization in general. I would love it if they (correctly) portrayed the Mississippians as being a large, organized civilization which breaks down into many small, extremely backwards tribes. The one problem is that for Indian tribes, their style of warfare makes no sense to depict in game as regiments, so you'd have to build an entire event-based system to simulate guerrilla warfare to get it to work well with the population issue. The game really ought to depict colonization not as being filling in empty land, but instead having colonies which independently develop huge networks of Indian alliances, and them using the Indians in proxy wars against other colonies. I want to roleplay the founding of the Cherokee Republic or the Iroquois expansion in the Beaver Wars, but you can't really do either, and the map is inaccurate to start with.
Also, if you get into MEIOU and Taxes, just remember that the economy plays itself. As a ruler, you're not expected to micromanage everything, like in Vanilla. You just choose the broad decisions to make and let it play itself out, micromanaging only as much as you want to. However, you can't expect to do things like go on a world conquest. Since the countries have realistic population differences, little nations can only take on other little nations.
Interesting mods:
Gameplay Overhauls
- CK+ (CK2) General improvements
- HIP (CK2) Historical accuracy
- MEIOU and Taxes (EU4) Extreme historical accuracy, basically remakes the entire game
- PDM or POD (V2) Historical flavor, gameplay improvements
Total Conversions
- After the End (CK2) Post-apocalyptic North America
- When the World Stopped Making Sense (CK2) Dark Ages
- Tianxia (CK2) China expansion
- Umbra Spherae (CK2) Entire Old World expansion (but the regions are way less detailed than in vanilla)
- Crisis of the Confederation (CK2) Space opera (humans only)
- Imperium Universalis (EU4) Ancient times (begins way earlier than Imperator: Rome, has the whole Old World, and has some ideas from MEIOU)
- Divergences of Darkness (V2) Alternate history
- New World Order (V2) Cold War and modern day, but it plays like shit since Vicky wasn't built for modern warfare
- Kaiserreich (HOI4) Alternate history (German WW1 vicotry)
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