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I can't help but wonder if it'll be possible to set up a glorious aztec republic.
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Feb 6, 2013 10:17
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i poo poo trains posted:I'd imagine if the Soviets would have established a firm grip on the Middle East, avoided invasions of, say, Afghanistan, and didn't pour money out of the civilian sector into the military one they could have very easily avoided a collapse if not eventually emerged as the victors of the Cold War. They spent up to 40% of GDP on their loving military to keep up with the USA while completely mismanaging the civilian sector. There's absolutely no way to avoid collapse.
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Feb 6, 2013 10:44
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I'm playing MiscMods EU3's Peace of God campaign. Started as Jerusalem, had missions to conquer Hejaz but because of my allies I could only vassalise it. Then I realised I couldn't even diplo-annex them because we have different religions. And every other neighbour is way too powerful. Man that was stupid.
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Feb 6, 2013 11:18
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My first HoI3 run after a couple of months of not touching it was going nicely until it crashed and burned yesterday. I started a custom game as Italy to mess about with some of their peculiarities (comparatively little research and IC) and totally changed their starting forces with a heavy focus on carrier aviation and special forces. Cue 1940-42 where I do leapfrogging amphib ops all the way from Basra to Bristol. Then I made the mistake of calling puppet Romania to arms in Barbarossa and they proceeded to get stomped, with AI Germany not knowing how to handle it. I was able to push the Sovs from the Danube to Kharkiv/Rostov with around ten corps' worth of (motorized) infantry, marines and mountaineers. When Hearts of Iron is good, it doesn't get much better than this, bottling up hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops and smashing the gently caress out of them. Now the front has stabilized again and I'm looking at stuff to do: cleaning up the Middle east or invade the Caucasus or something. Good old Germany kept doing lovely things in my sector of the Eastern front though, like not holding the line and retreating northwards away from my forces. Cue me looking at their situation and stats in late '42/early '43.... Turns out that after reaching lake Ladoga and taking Leningrad they somehow hit a snag: they hadn't called the Finns to arms so the little strip of land from Viborg northeast was being blocked by a dogged Soviet resistance one province deep and wide. With ample room for maneuver further up north, what does the AI do? Transfer a total of around 300 brigades of troops as an expeditionary force to neutral Finland and fail to have them join the war. Even reloading as the Finns and declaring on the SU doesn't fix the massive fuckup the AI has created for itself without doing half of Barbarossa as another country and seeing Italy's hard-fought accomplishments being squandered away 
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Feb 6, 2013 11:24
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Strudel Man posted:Yeah, the prospect I worry about with EvW is that it will be too deterministic, with the Soviet Union doomed either to collapse or to 'reform' into liberal democratic capitalism. Like the old Crisis in the Kremlin game. And for me, that doesn't really appeal at all - for it to be a decent game at all, either side should have a decent shot at winning. That does imply that there should be events for an American collapse. Riso posted:They spent up to 40% of GDP on their loving military to keep up with the USA while completely mismanaging the civilian sector. There's absolutely no way to avoid collapse.
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Feb 6, 2013 11:47
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Riso posted:They spent up to 40% of GDP on their loving military to keep up with the USA while completely mismanaging the civilian sector. There's absolutely no way to avoid collapse.
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Feb 6, 2013 11:53
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Koesj posted:Turns out that after reaching lake Ladoga and taking Leningrad they somehow hit a snag: they hadn't called the Finns to arms so the little strip of land from Viborg northeast was being blocked by a dogged Soviet resistance one province deep and wide. With ample room for maneuver further up north, what does the AI do? Transfer a total of around 300 brigades of troops as an expeditionary force to neutral Finland and fail to have them join the war. The idea of a million German men marching around Finland is hilarious. Looking back the population of Finland was ~4 million, so a 25% increase in population purely from the army just standing around. I can't even begin to imagine the logistics.
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Feb 6, 2013 11:55
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I don't remember where I got the number from, but no, in HOI terms you wouldn't be able to change poo poo because.. THE MILITARY BUDGET WAS A SECRET TO THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE ITSELF. Oh and agriculture sucked because of Lysenkoism. Riso fucked around with this message at 12:00 on Feb 6, 2013 |
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Feb 6, 2013 11:57
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Riso posted:I don't remember where I got the number from, but no, in HOI terms you wouldn't be able to change poo poo because.. THE MILITARY BUDGET WAS A SECRET TO THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE ITSELF. Like A Buttery Pastry said, what's the point of a Cold War game where the Soviets are doomed to fail?
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Feb 6, 2013 12:40
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You might as well ask what the point of WW2 games is where the Germans are doomed to fail.
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Feb 6, 2013 12:50
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Jabarto posted:Do you know of any other good alt-history ideas? I'm kind of intrigued by the genre (both in EU3, now that I've tried some modded scenarios, and in general) but it seems like most of them are basically "What if Hitler/Churchill/Stalin got hit by a bus/had never been born/autoerotically asphyxiated himself?". I'd like to see some that are actually well thought-out (and I'd loving love it if they didn't involve either of the World Wars in some way). I don't know if this counts, exactly, since it isn't quite the usual "What if things had happened slightly differently?" sort of alt-history. But I've always had a soft spot for the "1632" series since finding out about them in high school. The basic premise goes like this: "What would happen if we transplanted a modern West Virginian town smack-dab in the middle of Germany during the 30 Years War?" The series as a whole does a pretty good job of working through all the implications of such an event throughout the Europe, including things like King Charles getting his hands on history books relating to the English Civil War, or how the arrival of the Americans throws a gigantic monkey wrench into Richelieu's plans. Downside, though, is that the author seems, to me, a little too optimistic and gung-ho about how well modern American values would be accepted by 17th century Germans. He's also got some literary tics which are charmingly enthusiastic at first, but which quickly become grating as hell after you've run into them for the twentieth time. Not to mention that despite professing not to like the "great man" theory of history, he's got one particular character who's some kind of lovechild of every great American leader, Jesus, and Machiavelli. Fortunately, he likes to work with co-authors, some of who are capable of reining in his wilder bursts of idealism and giving the series a more solid grounding. Do not under any circumstances look into "The Dreeson Incident", though. That one was largely co-written by someone who isn't, apparently, a professional author and is basically an enormous, wooden redneck soap opera.
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Feb 6, 2013 12:52
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Riso posted:They spent up to 40% of GDP on their loving military to keep up with the USA while completely mismanaging the civilian sector. There's absolutely no way to avoid collapse. Well you could try not spending 40% of GDP on the military for starters. The USSR had the resources to "win" the cold war, they just didn't use them right. Riso posted:You might as well ask what the point of WW2 games is where the Germans are doomed to fail. Except Germany is anything but doomed to fail in HOI.
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Feb 6, 2013 13:01
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Riso posted:I don't remember where I got the number from, but no, in HOI terms you wouldn't be able to change poo poo because.. THE MILITARY BUDGET WAS A SECRET TO THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE ITSELF. And a player controlling them in a videogame could never chose differently because
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Feb 6, 2013 13:07
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Rudi Starnberg posted:Well you could try not spending 40% of GDP on the military for starters. The USSR had the resources to "win" the cold war, they just didn't use them right. That's a real nice way to be removed from power, and in your place the military installs someone who does want to spend 40%. I mean, it could be an interesting mechanic, trying to rein in spending while appeasing the hawks, but it sure shouldn't be pulling a slider back and your economy roars past the US in a year.
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Feb 6, 2013 13:12
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Jabarto posted:Do you know of any other good alt-history ideas? I'm kind of intrigued by the genre (both in EU3, now that I've tried some modded scenarios, and in general) but it seems like most of them are basically "What if Hitler/Churchill/Stalin got hit by a bus/had never been born/autoerotically asphyxiated himself?". I'd like to see some that are actually well thought-out (and I'd loving love it if they didn't involve either of the World Wars in some way). One of my favourite books, period, is For Want of A Nail. The divergance point is that the British general Burgoyne defeats the American commander Gates at the battle of Saratoga, which ultimately leads to a British victory in the American Revolutionary War, the creation of the Confederation of North America (a sort of canada-style dominion covering all of British North America) and the more radical founding fathers running off to Texas, taking over Mexico and creating the United States of Mexico, a weird quasi-caste-system sort-of segregationist slaveholding republic/empire that hates the guts of the CNA. But the real thing about the book is that the only indication that the book is a work of fiction is the front cover. It's written like a college textbook throughout, with a fake foreward and afterward, a massive reference section referring to completely non-existant works, and table after table about things like GDP, changing demographics, election results and more. It's as if a textbook from the world the book describes has fallen through a dimensional portal into your hands.
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Feb 6, 2013 13:20
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meatbag posted:That's a real nice way to be removed from power, and in your place the military installs someone who does want to spend 40%. Well yeah, I wasn't really trying to imply that it should be as easy as changing a few sliders, I was just reaching for a quick-and-dirty analogy that if 40% military spending sunk the USSR, then why shouldn't the player have the ability to dial it down, with whatever trials and tribulations that such a dialing down would entail.
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Feb 6, 2013 13:26
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Yeah if Russia can't "win" it sort of makes the whole exercise pointless. Even Hearts of Iron which is more on rails than most paradox games allows you to correct mistakes made, such as making Nazi Germany stop before it overreaches like it did in real life. In Paradox games we accept that not everyone is on equal ground, that's not really the point, but its not much of a game if one of two major powers is doomed to fail every time.
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Feb 6, 2013 14:03
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Rudi Starnberg posted:Well you could try not spending 40% of GDP on the military for starters. The USSR had the resources to "win" the cold war, they just didn't use them right. Except the Soviet Union never actually spent anywhere near 40% of its GDP on the military. They spent at most 15-17% in the '80s, while the US was spending 7%. Hell, North Korea spends only around a third of its GDP on the military. a bad enough dude fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Feb 6, 2013 |
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Feb 6, 2013 14:25
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Coolodile posted:Well I used to read Harry Turtledove books, they don't all have to do with the world wars (some involve the US Civil War for instance Harry Turtledove... is not that great. He is usually only pointed out because he is one of the few writers actually involved in alternate history. I would not recommend a vast majority of his books. Guns of the South is interesting but I wouldn't advise going farther in the series than that. The story about JFK is The Winterberry. John F. Kennedy survives his famous assassination with severe brain damage and becomes a manchild. Kennedy knows something is wrong, but he lacks the mental capacity to put the pieces together. As good as it is, I would classify it less as alternate history and more conspiracy fiction. I would recommend the following pieces of alternate history: Protect and Survive- Taking inspiration from the Protect and Survive PSAs created by the British government in the 1980s as well as The Road, the timeline follows an eruption in hostilities between the Warsaw Pact and NATO and its immediate aftermath. It focuses mainly on the British Isles, with occasional updates on other parts of the globe. The Queen commits suicide in her bunker and the largest city left in North America is Cleveland, Ohio. The Cuban Missile War- Exactly what you would expect it to be. The United States and USSR go to war over Cuba. A World of Laughter, A World of Tears- General Eisenhower suffers a mild heart attack early in his campaign. While the incident does not have any serious impact on him, it does aggrevate the pre-existing questions regarding his health. Eisenhower drops out of the race very early on. To cash in on some simple publicity, the Republican Party nominates Walt Disney instead. This ends poorly. Fear, Loathing, and Gumbo on the Campaign Trail 72'- John Julian McKeithen, popular former Governor of Louisiana, decides to campaign for the Democratic Nomination in 1972 as he was expected to. He's a more moderate figure than McGovern and can appeal to a wider audience, and crucially also comes from a political background that has acquainted him quite as much with dirty tricks as Nixon. He wins the candidacy. Rather than step out of the ring, George McGovern decides to run as a third party under the 'Peace' ticket. This in turn prompts George Wallace to stay in the race. 1972 brings about a hung electoral college and discusses the consequences of that.
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Feb 6, 2013 14:28
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QuoProQuid posted:Harry Turtledove... is not that great. He is usually only pointed out because he is one of the few writers actually involved in alternate history. I would not recommend a vast majority of his books. Guns of the South is interesting but I wouldn't advise going farther in the series than that. My favorite anecdote about Turtledove involves the one time I was five pages past the climax of the book and a nuclear war before I realized that I had just passed the climax and a nuclear war. A massive amount of build-up for something world-shattering that just went "sput" when it came to it.
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Feb 6, 2013 15:03
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I do think East vs West is going to be a pretty bad game, and Twilight Struggle is still going to feel more 'cold war' like despite its much greater abstraction. Kind of like a lot of the Paradox games trying to be 'everything' games, increasing a game's scope tends to make it worse both in history and as a game. A game about the Napoleonic Wars from 1805-1815 can have unique mechanics that don't make sense in other eras that make it a better game and better history than a "Everything about the world from 1795-1901" game.
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Feb 6, 2013 15:04
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The Soviet Union falling because of mismanagement is literally the best argument for a what if scenario where it isn't. They weren't born to fail nor was their doom written on the wall after the death of Stalin. A lot of things could've been different and i hope this game shows that. Had the Soviet Union been as aggressive at toppling down regimes like the U.S. the geopolitical world would've been much different, much so if they refused to payback the loans and credits obtained during the 70's to the west. What would happen if Khrushchev stayed in power? What if Gorbachev rose to power earlier and was more moderate in his changes? What if Andropov wasn't a zombie when he came to power? What if Nixon or Eisenhower nuked Korea or Vietnam? What if India or Egypt allied themselves with the S.U.? There are so many what ifs during the cold war that a game with a dinamic and non-deterministic world could be amazing (Like Bulgaria taking over Europe). Riso posted:You might as well ask what the point of WW2 games is where the Germans are doomed to fail. Should Portugal and Spain also be doomed to fail in EU3 because they hosed up hilariously in real life? Same with France and Holland? If EU3 isn't "The deterministic rise of glorious Britain" then why should any other game be exactly that?
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Feb 6, 2013 15:20
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PleasingFungus posted:Interesting to see that Paradox has been having essentially the same discussion this thread did. (The Hungarian Problem being essentially the Migration Period problem writ small.) I'm very excited to see what they do to solve it! The Hungarians, "Scourge of Europe, ravaging from Poland to Spain!" has always been an appealing image to me, because it's so incongruous in context of their later history. (It's especially an amusing contrast to the Hungarian lords huddled in their castles as the Mongols pillage their lands.) If they can figure out how to do this right, then there's nothing keeping them from stretching this back to the Dark Ages so we can run with the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, et al.
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Feb 6, 2013 15:39
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I just found this interesting thread on the EU4 forums with some discussion about planned EU4 multiplayer features. It sounds really exciting and should massively broaden the appeal of the multiplayer game compared to previous Paradox efforts.
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Feb 6, 2013 15:49
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Thanks for all of the alt-history ideas. I guess there are some good ones out there (especially the Tupac one).
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Feb 6, 2013 15:59
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Tomn posted:My favorite anecdote about Turtledove involves the one time I was five pages past the climax of the book and a nuclear war before I realized that I had just passed the climax and a nuclear war. A massive amount of build-up for something world-shattering that just went "sput" when it came to it.  ) were threatening to leak into my everyday speak, and all the sex scenes just felt awkward for how descriptive they were.The one thing I will say about him is that in his "What if the Japanese did a land invasion of Pearl Harbor" duology, the comfort women and forced labor subplots were appropriately uncomfortable to read. Panzeh posted:I do think East vs West is going to be a pretty bad game, and Twilight Struggle is still going to feel more 'cold war' like despite its much greater abstraction. 
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Feb 6, 2013 16:15
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RabidWeasel posted:I just found this interesting thread on the EU4 forums with some discussion about planned EU4 multiplayer features. It sounds really exciting and should massively broaden the appeal of the multiplayer game compared to previous Paradox efforts. Personally, biggest multiplayer feature I'm keeping an eye out on is cheats. Let the host be able to decide his game is a cheating game (and with options for "Host only console" or "Everyone can use console") and then flag the game as a console-enabled game, have it show up when you're browsing games that this game has the console enabled, and add a filter to hide or only show games with console enabled. I'd primarily play Paradox games multiplayer in a local game with a small group of friends, and sometimes things happen like an AI nation took over as warleader, and we have dealt the enemy a crippling blow but we are too weak to really capitalize on it but the warleader AI won't end the war (particularly big issue in V2, could possibly come up in EUIV) and it would be nice to just tag over and make the AI send an acceptable peace offer. burnishedfume fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Feb 6, 2013 |
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Feb 6, 2013 16:17
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gradenko_2000 posted:I had to stop reading Turtledove after finishing the USA vs CSA World War I series because all the racial epithets (damnyankees is one word I liked his "CSA wins the Civil War" series up through WWI, but in the last book of the WWI trilogy, there's a Confederate artillery soldier who bitterly blames the nation's black population on the loss of WWI and writes a memoir of his service and his thoughts on race while in the trenches. I thought "oh no, Turtledove, I've liked the series so far, don't be this intellectually bankrupt" but sure enough, I looked it up on Wikipedia and the interwar and WW2 series are just "OTL WW2 but with 'CSA' instead of 'Germany' and 'blacks' instead of 'Jews.'"  I like Robert Conroy's stuff, too, but they're basically all military fiction and doesn't really go very far into how society would change if Japan hadn't surrendered after the atom bombs or Germany had invaded the US in 1901 to force America to give up its recently acquired overseas colony or whatever. If you like Clancy-style military fiction with an alt-history flavor they're pretty decent, though. More on-topic, I hope there's a lot of alt-history possibilities in March of the Eagles. By which I basically just mean I hope I can lead the Grande Armee to glorious victory.  I'll just have to make sure to leave Russia alone in the winter.
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Feb 6, 2013 18:00
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So my HoI3 custom game as Italy just ended on april 20th 1944. Why? Well, since I had to reload as Finland for a bit to get half of the OKH that was sent their way as an expeditionary force in play, the war with the Soviet Union apparently ended on their terms. Yes, after an epic two year long slog through the Caucasus and leapfrogging from the Danube to the Don for my part, having the Germans poised to take Archangelsk and the Hungarians of all people marching into Moscow on the 19th of april... Finland retakes their cores and everything else reverts to how it was pre-Barbarossa 
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Feb 6, 2013 19:39
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http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...=1#post14980467Johan posted:Why would we denigrate our game by making it into a tbs? The worst thing Johan has ever said.  Can't breathe.
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Feb 6, 2013 19:56
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 Turn-based play is a legacy design model inherited from board and card games, where it is a necessary limitation. When you have a computer available, a dynamic pausing model is almost always a much more flexible and generally superior approach. Turn-based play for video games is only useful in the face of special requirements such as PBEM / asynchronous multiplayer, and even then it's not always optimal since the computer allows for design improvements like simultaneous turns (think Frozen Synapse).
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Feb 6, 2013 20:23
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Fintilgin posted:http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...=1#post14980467 Well to be fair english is presumably not his first language, I assume he means degrade.
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Feb 6, 2013 20:33
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It's funny because all of Paradox's games are technically turn based.Fintilgin posted:http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...=1#post14980467 Are you seriously taking offense to the word denigrate? It's never been used in racial context before and it isn't racial in origin, and I've never heard of anyone else ever taking offense to the word before.
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Feb 6, 2013 20:36
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:It's funny because all of Paradox's games are technically turn based. I'm pretty sure that it's hyperbole, but the funniest part about it was that it was a response to a guy asking for PBEM capability with EUIV, by allowing you to switch between 1-day turns and 1-month/3-month turns. Now, I don't have any sort of formal programming experience, but that sounds a little difficult to implement.
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Feb 6, 2013 20:44
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Effectronica posted:I'm pretty sure that it's hyperbole, but the funniest part about it was that it was a response to a guy asking for PBEM capability with EUIV, by allowing you to switch between 1-day turns and 1-month/3-month turns. Now, I don't have any sort of formal programming experience, but that sounds a little difficult to implement. You'd have to redo half the game.
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Feb 6, 2013 20:45
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:It's funny because all of Paradox's games are technically turn based. Wait, why would denigrate imply rascism? Or is it just because everyone knows Paradox are white supremacist Swedes? I thought he was just annoyed becasue Johan was using complicated words without knowing what they mean.
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Feb 6, 2013 20:56
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Fintilgin posted:quote:Denigrate? DENIGRATE? You, sir, are no gentleman. in the PPlaza thread, so let's assume he was taking offence at the suggestion that TBS isn't all that great and let's avoid any vocabulary derails, please.
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Feb 6, 2013 21:03
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Rudi Starnberg posted:Wait, why would denigrate imply rascism? Or is it just because everyone knows Paradox are white supremacist Swedes? I don't know. I guess I misread Fintilgin's post, and due to the common "paradox is racist" mentality here, I jumped the gun. My bad, let's pretend this never happened.
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Feb 6, 2013 21:07
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Jabarto posted:Do you know of any other good alt-history ideas? I'm kind of intrigued by the genre (both in EU3, now that I've tried some modded scenarios, and in general) but it seems like most of them are basically "What if Hitler/Churchill/Stalin got hit by a bus/had never been born/autoerotically asphyxiated himself?". I'd like to see some that are actually well thought-out (and I'd loving love it if they didn't involve either of the World Wars in some way). It's an actual history book and not an alt-history fiction, but Stephen Cohen's Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives basically covers the entire period of East v West and points out all the internal conflicts and possible sources of reform/radicalism within the Soviet political system that would have/almost did change the Soviet trajectory. It's a pretty good counter to the "40% GDP! Collapse inevitable!  " rhetoric.
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Feb 6, 2013 21:09
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NihilCredo posted:Fintilgin posted: That's all I meant.  Nobody degenerates turn based strategy on my watch. NihilCredo posted:
I refute you thusly, sir: Civilization Alpha Centauri XCOM Colonization Master of Orion Master of Magic ETC ETC AD NAUSEUM Seriously, it's fun, and there's something to be said for a human comprehensible, board game like mechanical simplicity. EDIT: I'm not suggesting Paradox games should go turn based, they'd be totally different games. But an equally ambition turn-based game based in the same period would be ~awesome~. EDIT EDIT: Since I never take ANY action in a Paradox game without first pausing, they're functionally turn based already, with variable length turns. Or, well... that's what I like to tell myself Fintilgin fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Feb 6, 2013 |
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Feb 6, 2013 21:21
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