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YF-23 posted:I hate to be that guy, all the more so because I would actually prefer it if these things could be more accurately represented, but it is called ~ * ~ E u r o p a ~ * ~ Universalis. It is impossible to properly represent, in a fun way, the ways China and Europe worked, and when there is a compromise to be made with reality, then scale will tip in favour of Europe. At some point you have to accept that the Paradox games we know and love are to a greater or lesser degree blatantly Eurocentric. This stopped being a legitimate excuse the moment Paradox devs began justifying game play mechanics based on a warped understanding of history. Sure every once in a while you get genuine nutters like Steppe Wolf or those various obscure Balkan nationality nationalists and Paradox is right in those instances but things like a Ming China that's more economically and military backwards than Europe at 1500 or the negligible speed bumps the American Indian nations are... Is just laughably ignorant when there are so many possible fixes within the game engine as is. I'm not trying to be confrontational, I did a goony thing that plenty of others have done. That is to make fun of paradox for a poor design decision and it continues to be worth making fun of because they keep justifying it right here right now. Heck even if you go with "Paradox first responsibility is to make a good game." I would completely and absolutely agree with you!!! But this just simply isn't the case. Ming, the rest of the world, factions, Japan, Africa, the Americas, and the interactions between Europe and them and more, all of it. It's concerning to me because it casts grave doubts on the development on EU4 and whether they will make the right design choices. I'll probably end up heavily modifying or editing the game for my group's purposes when it gets there, which is a shame as a game should be able to stand up on its own merits and not on the merits of modders. e: quote:Honestly, the idea of being blocked from certain actions and having to balance sliders and events was fine. The part where Paradox hosed up was not making faction influence static, but rather constantly dropping/rising similarly to how relations work in EU. That meant the events thet popped up giving +5 influence to a faction had absolutely no meaning (stalling the inevitable domination of a given faction for a month, tops) and the only way to play it was to get sliders into equilibirum and just push that +0.01 influence towards what you wanted to achieve. I disagree, I don't think you should ever meaningfully restrict player choice when it comes down to the core mechanics of the game; especially when in competitive play it's enough to decide things then and there. Maybe make it more expensive a bit, and tie the AI files to it if we're still thinking up ways to nerf the AI. But a player shouldn't be meaningfully restricted arbitrarily, but instead you need better ways of reflecting the difficulties of managing a large populated empire like Ming. But I definitely agree that the non-static properties of the FS was probably the most terrible aspect of it, that once you got one faction in power it stayed more or less there at all times and you couldn't switch out without massive effort; an effort that generally was entirely slider-wise, counter productive to the much more important goal of Westernizing, which have to be a certain way. Though I really don't get the concerns of Ming "crawling to the Urals", its not like it makes Ming more powerful, if anything their tech rate slows to an even slower crawl and they implode from rebellions and curbstomped by Russia when it finally makes it that far east if e2: Dr Video Games has the right of it. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 07:08 on Jan 29, 2013 |
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Jan 29, 2013 06:59
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Can't wait for that promo picture finally being complete... announcing some kind of BATTLE POPE VS HEATHENS DLC.
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Jan 29, 2013 07:53
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Gorgo Primus posted:Still insisting that the name is not an excuse, and that the board game doesn't really give a poo poo about anything outside Europe. You're still missing the point; it's not the name that makes the game Eurocentric, it's the game itself. But if you don't consider that the name is a not-so-subtle hint to that then I don't know. I'm basically saying what you're saying about the board game, EU "doesn't really give a poo poo about anything outside Europe". Of course, that's entirely fair and accurate since effort has been put there, but what I've been saying is that EU is eurocentric and I don't know what you're trying to do with taking that up with me (maybe trying to tell me that EU isn't eurocentric???). Raenir Salazar posted:This stopped being a legitimate excuse the moment Paradox devs began justifying game play mechanics based on a warped understanding of history. Sure every once in a while you get genuine nutters like Steppe Wolf or those various obscure Balkan nationality nationalists and Paradox is right in those instances but things like a Ming China that's more economically and military backwards than Europe at 1500 or the negligible speed bumps the American Indian nations are... Is just laughably ignorant when there are so many possible fixes within the game engine as is.
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Jan 29, 2013 11:30
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Raenir Salazar posted:I'm not trying to be confrontational, I did a goony thing that plenty of others have done. That is to make fun of paradox for a poor design decision and it continues to be worth making fun of because they keep justifying it right here right now. Since I've been the only dev posting anything vaguely related to Ming, do you mean me? Because I have said literally nothing to justify the faction system/Ming here, I don't think it worked very well. If not me, then what are you talking about?
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Jan 29, 2013 12:35
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YF-23 posted:You're still missing the point; it's not the name that makes the game Eurocentric, it's the game itself. But if you don't consider that the name is a not-so-subtle hint to that then I don't know. I'm basically saying what you're saying about the board game, EU "doesn't really give a poo poo about anything outside Europe". Of course, that's entirely fair and accurate since effort has been put there, but what I've been saying is that EU is eurocentric and I don't know what you're trying to do with taking that up with me (maybe trying to tell me that EU isn't eurocentric???). I'm just saying that you shouldn't use EU's name as an excuse to shrug your shoulders when people complain about how Divine Wind - the expansion that was billed as "the ROTW expansion" - mostly dealt with European features and made Japan and China both a lot less fun to play. There is plenty of room to argue, both about the merits both of EU3's portrayal of Asia and the merits of even attempting to do so, without resorting to that kind of intellectually dishonest reasoning.
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Jan 29, 2013 12:42
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Dear Paradox employees, what's the studio stance on putting one of your games artwork, for example settlement models from Sengoku (demo) into a Crusader Kings 2 mod?
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Jan 29, 2013 12:56
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Gorgo Primus posted:I'm just saying that you shouldn't use EU's name as an excuse to shrug your shoulders when people complain about how Divine Wind - the expansion that was billed as "the ROTW expansion" - mostly dealt with European features and made Japan and China both a lot less fun to play. There is plenty of room to argue, both about the merits both of EU3's portrayal of Asia and the merits of even attempting to do so, without resorting to that kind of intellectually dishonest reasoning. Of course. Like I said, the name is a reflection of the fact that the game is blatantly Eurocentric, not that it is the cause of it. That's what I've been saying from the start: the game is Eurocentric, so when a compromise with reality has to be made, the solution picked will be the one that will ultimately benefit playing in Europe with the rest of the world as an afterthought. Do not think that I am not disappointed with how the DW mechanics turned out, I am just saying that in light of that it makes sense that playing a European OPM will ultimately grant you a great many opportunities and possibly even potential that playing Ming will not; the game is made with Europe in mind first and foremost.
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Jan 29, 2013 13:23
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I think everyone in this thread just needs to take a deep breath and relax. We're all riled up for some reason.
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Jan 29, 2013 13:29
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Riso posted:Dear Paradox employees, I know I'm not a paradox dev but pretty much every game company in history allows assets from the demos because they're easily accessible. If you use stuff only available in Sengoku though you'd probably need to make your mod require the actual game.
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Jan 29, 2013 13:31
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Okay, so I'll bite. If the factions system was so terrible, how do you stop a vast country like Ming from just exploding across all of the world?
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Jan 29, 2013 13:42
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Gort posted:Okay, so I'll bite. If the factions system was so terrible, how do you stop a vast country like Ming from just exploding across all of the world? Paradox could force an always-online-DRM and recruit a small army of players educated in Chinese history to control Ming over the internet.
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Jan 29, 2013 13:48
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Gort posted:Okay, so I'll bite. If the factions system was so terrible, how do you stop a vast country like Ming from just exploding across all of the world? *Which would be part of a general overhaul of peace-time gameplay. A Buttery Pastry fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Jan 29, 2013 |
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Jan 29, 2013 14:05
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The fifth Victoria 2 clue is posted https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151655543149816.610612.284210044815&type=1&l=5fd335e15d and the only thing you talk about is Eu3, shame on you all!
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Jan 29, 2013 14:18
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Gort posted:Okay, so I'll bite. If the factions system was so terrible, how do you stop a vast country like Ming from just exploding across all of the world? With a good factions system! I'd like to see a faction in control of every country (in the court, parliament, congress, or whatever). If you're a OPM this might just affect relations with your neighbors or something trivial, but bigger countries get more factions and more important internal politics. Satisfying influential factions can lead to bonuses, but if you give a faction too much of what they want, they will wield a lot of control over your country. On the flip side, unhappy influential factions can give maluses, and can even flower into revolts. This could be integrated with all the other elements of the game. Factions might be political, religious, ethnic, regional, noble, or whatever. For an economic power like Holland, a cozy relationship with the merchants would give the country new opportunities and shape gameplay. There would be hooks for events, so you could have all sorts of flavor events with factions. Factions would tie into military strategy and city improvements, succession and Westernization, internal and international politics. They're sort of a bridge from the character-based politics of the early game to the mass politics of the very late game; you'd see an evolution of factions from small interest groups to proto-political parties. None of this would be easy to implement or balance, and I don't think we'll see anything this radical for EUIV - at least there's no sign of it in the alpha we've seen. But I think a system like this would go a long way toward two important goals: making peaceful politics rich and interesting, and making for a more complex, challenging experience of playing a giant empire like Ming or later France. For a lot of players like me, the fun of Paradox games is rooted in the pseudo-historical narrative that the game and the player create together - how cool would it be if your game could organically come up with something like the Tennis Court Oath? Vivian Darkbloom fucked around with this message at 14:43 on Jan 29, 2013 |
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Jan 29, 2013 14:27
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Unique factions in every country gives me bad Magna Mundi vibes.
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Jan 29, 2013 14:42
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RagnarokAngel posted:Unique factions in every country gives me bad Magna Mundi vibes. Do you think it was really that feature that caused MM's implosion?
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Jan 29, 2013 14:45
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Factions was the best idea Magna Mundi ever had.
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Jan 29, 2013 14:47
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:Do you think it was really that feature that caused MM's implosion?
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Jan 29, 2013 14:50
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You either focus your game on internal politics or external politics (to the extent that the game is about politics). CK2 and Vicky have an internal politics focus. EU and HOI have an external politics focus. If you try to do both systems in detail then you end up with something that's either too complicated for players to grapple with or creates ridiculous results(versions of HOI3 where other nations have more influence over your internal politics than you do).
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Jan 29, 2013 14:53
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Well it's not factions exactly, I already said I approve of it for China. It's the fact that Magna Mundi tried to make every nation different, which while a noble goal was impossible to balance or even program.
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Jan 29, 2013 14:54
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:I think everyone in this thread just needs to take a deep breath and relax. We're all riled up for some reason. I loving HATE WHEN THE KING OF THE COUNTRY I'M ABOUT TO SEIZE DIES AND I HAVE TO START ALL OVER IN CK2  But I love delicious heavy infantry  Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:Factions was the best idea Magna Mundi ever had. In actuality I really liked their NI system, it had a lot of (now squandered) potential Beamed fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Jan 29, 2013 |
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Jan 29, 2013 15:18
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Alchenar posted:You either focus your game on internal politics or external politics (to the extent that the game is about politics). RagnarokAngel posted:Well it's not factions exactly, I already said I approve of it for China. It's the fact that Magna Mundi tried to make every nation different, which while a noble goal was impossible to balance or even program.
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Jan 29, 2013 15:18
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Alchenar posted:You either focus your game on internal politics or external politics (to the extent that the game is about politics). Seems to me that the system I described is less complex than politics in Vicky II. If you're not modeling democracy, you don't need to keep track of all those POPs and their ideas. And HoI3 is a pretty weak counterexample, when so much of that game was broken. Probably you'd want to make it difficult for external powers to meddle too much with your country's factions, though.
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Jan 29, 2013 15:24
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Fister Roboto posted:4) The player should be able to say "gently caress this faction poo poo we're changing government forms to something reasonable" like literally every other country on the planet is able to. This is really only required in a situation where the Factions system is so bad that you want an opt-out option. If Factions was more like certain actions have hefty penalties instead of being completely impossible, and certain other actions had hefty bonuses, I think it'd be more comfortable to work with. As Ming, your eventual goal would be to unify into China, which removes the Factions altogether and THEN the steamrolling begins in earnest  . The "opt-out" would then be if you were to play any of the smaller Chinese states, which don't have Factions, but are correspondingly much smaller. Giving Ming the opt-out right off the bat would just encourage players to always take it and play Ming like a "normal" nation instead of learning how to deal with Factions.
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Jan 29, 2013 16:04
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Pooned posted:The fifth Victoria 2 clue is posted https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151655543149816.610612.284210044815&type=1&l=5fd335e15d and the only thing you talk about is Eu3, shame on you all! Some kind of empire decay mechanic for Vicky 2?
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Jan 29, 2013 18:01
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I don't think the rebel controlled provinces are a coincidence either. So maybe a better system for revolts and revolutions. Either way, fix the AI a little and I'll pay whatever it takes for it.
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Jan 29, 2013 18:39
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Pooned posted:I don't think the rebel controlled provinces are a coincidence either. So maybe a better system for revolts and revolutions. Either way, fix the AI a little and I'll pay whatever it takes for it. I'm betting either this is a revolution thing and clues 2 and 4 are talking about pops/provinces/other factions/foreign nations/etc joining the rebellion and how close the government/rebellion is to giving up respectively, or it may be a World War system and image 2 is a nation deciding which side to sign up for and image 4 is how close one alliance bloc is to collapse. I'm hoping for a revolution thing because I am still holding out for a way to play as rebels because that would be loving awesome but I'd also be happy with a World War expansion.
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Jan 29, 2013 19:40
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Cowcatcher posted:Some kind of empire decay mechanic for Vicky 2? I'm willing to bet this new expansion is focused on the First World War and such. Wars which involve multiple Great Powers beating the crap out of each other.
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Jan 29, 2013 20:12
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V2 is my favourite Paradox game. I hope there is a V3 and more V2 DLC. I will buy any V2 DLC.
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Jan 29, 2013 20:24
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EightDeer posted:I'm willing to bet this new expansion is focused on the First World War and such. Wars which involve multiple Great Powers beating the crap out of each other. Holy poo poo. Paradox could not take my money fast enough for a "Great War" expansion. WWI is my favorite history topic and the fact that it seemed to be overlooked in V2 was seriously disappointing.
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Jan 29, 2013 21:11
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Brillo_Pad posted:Holy poo poo. Paradox could not take my money fast enough for a "Great War" expansion. WWI is my favorite history topic and the fact that it seemed to be overlooked in V2 was seriously disappointing. I've always seen WW1 as a natural expansion for HOI rather than Vicky, for all the obvious reasons.
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Jan 29, 2013 21:15
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In all my games of Victoria I don't think I've had a good proper Great War. Granted I play as the US a lot but in Vicky or Vicky 2 are they actually fun or are they just lovely cascading alliances like in EU3?
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Jan 29, 2013 21:42
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Alchenar posted:I've always seen WW1 as a natural expansion for HOI rather than Vicky, for all the obvious reasons. Militarily, sure, but there's no game (potentially) better than Vicky for modeling the social change that the Great War caused.
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Jan 29, 2013 22:05
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Jakse posted:In all my games of Victoria I don't think I've had a good proper Great War. Granted I play as the US a lot but in Vicky or Vicky 2 are they actually fun or are they just lovely cascading alliances like in EU3? I had a pretty good one as Italy, where myself, France, Hungary, and Russia were fighting against Mega-Germany, westernized China, and the UK. It was a horrible slog where I lost a ton of men, so pretty accurate.
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Jan 29, 2013 22:06
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Jakse posted:In all my games of Victoria I don't think I've had a good proper Great War. Granted I play as the US a lot but in Vicky or Vicky 2 are they actually fun or are they just lovely cascading alliances like in EU3? I like playing as the USA in V2 to get used to the game when I haven't picked it up in a while, but they are sort of too easy mode, like you could be constantly loving up and I'm not sure that you would notice anything bad happen so long as your income remains positive. Personally I enjoy Canada, New England, and the CSA a lot more for that type of strong safe nation where you aren't on death's door for the most part, but you can't just wave your dick in Europe's face and expect nothing to happen. There are no cascading alliances, but there are two things that happen; 1) Great Powers tend to ally together so wars that involve Prussia tend to also involve a second Great Power, which kinda makes it hard to go up against them properly. 2) If a nation is losing a war to a GP, another GP can swoop in to protect that nation. There are some things though; the only demand the side with the intervening GP can make is to enforce the Status Quo, the intervening GP cannot call allies, and the AI is kinda random about it, so Britain may intervene if the USA is crushing Mexico, France may get involved if the USA goes after Morocco, but when I played the CSA uniting everything Mexico and south under my rule, nobody really cared and so most of South and Central America was under CSA control no problem.
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Jan 29, 2013 22:53
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Pakled posted:Militarily, sure, but there's no game (potentially) better than Vicky for modeling the social change that the Great War caused. Exactly, that's why I get excited about it. WWI is fascinating to me not because of the technological advances and tactical blunders, but because of the social, political, cultural, and economic factors that influenced the powers involved, and would forever change the face of modern Europe as we know it. Honestly though, I think it's a bit optimistic to expect Victoria 2 to ever get that far - they have a lot of work to do first with balancing economies, making industrialization not bite you in the rear end, etc.
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Jan 29, 2013 23:00
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DrProsek posted:I like playing as the USA in V2 to get used to the game when I haven't picked it up in a while, but they are sort of too easy mode, like you could be constantly loving up and I'm not sure that you would notice anything bad happen so long as your income remains positive. Personally I enjoy Canada, New England, and the CSA a lot more for that type of strong safe nation where you aren't on death's door for the most part, but you can't just wave your dick in Europe's face and expect nothing to happen. See, the diplomacy seems more interesting in Vicky 2 than Vicky 1 but then I try and play Prussia and let it stay as Laissez Faire (which never hindered my industrializing in Vicky) then France out industrializes England and I end up doing gently caress all besides trying to outclick Austria on the sphere screen.
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Jan 29, 2013 23:05
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Jakse posted:In all my games of Victoria I don't think I've had a good proper Great War. Granted I play as the US a lot but in Vicky or Vicky 2 are they actually fun or are they just lovely cascading alliances like in EU3? My last game had an amazing one between a bloc of mostly-fascist countries consisting of France, Italy, and Belgium with their colonial empires and minor allies fighting a bloc of Communist and Socialist countries consisting of the North German Federation, Russia, and the Near East Popular Union (Ottoman Empire after a Communist revolution) and their minor allies and colonial empires. They pulled in a bunch of other nations around the world as a result of alliances, including myself as the USCA - I wanted to bite off Spain and France's colonial holdings in the Carribean. The communists ended up eventually winning and extracting loving huge reparations from the losers, so as of 1936 there's a bunch of extremely pissed-off, reactionary, revanchist sore losers in Western Europe about to take over their respective countries and presumably whining about a stab in the back from some minority ethnic group or other. This is also the first game I've ever seen the anarcho-liberals gain control of a major country - Carlist Spain fell to an anarcho-liberal revolution and they reorganized the country into a capitalist dictatorship in the name of safeguarding liberty and free enterprise.
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Jan 30, 2013 03:22
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My game of V2's going pretty well so far. I've almost got Poland's interwar blob border down, just need to stab my Austrian allies in the back  .If anyone is curious how this happened, I got lucky and Austria and Prussia formed an alliance, so with my sphere master being Austria, when I called them to arms with my 3 wars with Russia, I got an early Prussian-Austrian alliance block VS Russia so I managed to swiftly restore Poland and do Jeszcze Polska Nie Zginela and then later go to war with Prussia when Anarcho-Liberals overran them to reclaim some more cores. Anarcho-liberals also took over in Poland but thankfully that just ended up putting my fantastic Liberal Party in power. NOT PICTURED: The Polish colony of Northern Srjbia. E: Northern Serbia is now 9.2% Polish. Over 60% of the population are Separatists but that hasn't amounted to anything yet. I'm kind of trying to see if it's possible for me to render Northern Serbia Polish but I'm just wondering what must be going on in the region of Austria-Hungary between Poland and Northern Serbia, are there just masses of Polish colonists arriving in Serbia or are we doing an underground railroad or what. burnishedfume fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Jan 30, 2013 |
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Jan 30, 2013 04:39
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You must take East Prussia, then liberate Lithuania to restore the Commonwealth.  On a different note, I'm a bit lost in Darkest Hour. I'm pretty sure I understand the mechanics, but I'm still not sure of what I should be producing at a given time how I should be splitting my IC between production and upgrading. For example, as Germany starting in 1936, should I start producing infantry, tanks and planes right away? Or should I be waiting for more modern techs so I don't have to upgrade in the future? And how often should I be upgrading my troops? Should I fund production and upgrading equally, or go whole hog upgrades until they're done, then switch to production?
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