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IMO, the biggest reason for the German bias is that during the cold war pretty much all of the east front history available in the west was written from a German point of view and was based on German archive data. For example, Paul Carell's books have always been reasonably popular and he was a literal nazi with an obviously pro-German views. Lot of the incorrect and popular WW2 myths(like clean Wehrmacht, superiority of German tanks, faceless Soviet hordes) are due to the unbalanced cold war historiography. This situation has really improved a ton during the last couple of decades since western researchers have been able to access the Soviet archives. Obfuscation fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Apr 22, 2014 |
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Apr 22, 2014 22:18
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My experience from world of tanks is that the nazi loving gamers, if not actual nazis, really really loving hate even the idea of communism/socialism and since the western allies weren't the ones pushing on Moscow 
Raskolnikov38 fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Apr 23, 2014 |
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Apr 22, 2014 22:56
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Nazi Germany as a wargame scenario is a perfect storm of a romantic underdog (see Sparta, Confederates), 'modern' and 'mobile' armies', a myth of superior quality arms, a combatant in a 'modern' war (for the century), heavy amount of offensives, breaking down more power countries while being distorted by propaganda. I don't think you could make a better wargame scenario country if you tried.
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Apr 22, 2014 23:44
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BBJoey posted:I think I am a lost cause because I think that a Papers Please-esque late-war military logistics/procurement sim would be amazing. Every morning you receive a report on what factories were destroyed in the latest raid and what there are shortages of. You need to somehow find enough old military surplus weapons to equip the growing volkssturm while at the same time trying to keep the regular forces of the Wehrmacht in something approaching good supply. Every now and then a member of the Nazi brass will wander in and demand funding and material support for his latest wunderwaffe that's totally going to turn the war around. At the same time you have to decide what to do as the Soviets close in on Berlin; will you attempt to escape with your family to British or American forces, or hold firm in the belief that things will turn around? If you choose to escape, when? Too early and the Germans will be too organised to slip past; too late and you may find yourself leaving Berlin to run straight into a Soviet soldier. Do you attempt to leak documents to the Allies in an attempt to curry favour and speed their advance through Germany, or are you too afraid that you'll be discovered? You should check out Stalin's Dilemma. It's a game where you need to manage the Soviet Union in the 15 years leading up to WW2. Your goal is to rapidly industrialize and rebuild the Red Army while not starving your entire population, just large portions of it. It's way more barebones than what you're after and lacks any plot but it's a neat little game.
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Apr 22, 2014 23:54
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Farecoal posted:Yeah, the idea of "Teutonic efficiency" was around before WWI even, and it still continues to this day with "German engineering" and things like that. Much of that stems from Prussia. They had poor farmland, no resources to speak, and so became one of the most formidable expansionist military nations in Europe. As part of that Prussia emphasized innovations like 'training their men', 'maintaining discipline', 'running down peasents in massed calvary charges', etc. Sort of what Cromwell did with the New Model Army during the English Civil Wars. I enjoyed the book Iron Kingdom for learning more about Prussia's rise and fall.
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Apr 23, 2014 00:27
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Before the rise of Prussia, the stereotypical German was a jolly fat Bavarian drinking beer in his lederhosen.
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Apr 23, 2014 02:45
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Enjoy posted:Before the rise of Prussia, the stereotypical German was a jolly fat Bavarian drinking beer in his lederhosen. Not an Austrian and his cousin-aunt-wife?
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Apr 23, 2014 03:09
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Enjoy posted:Before the rise of Prussia, the stereotypical German was a jolly fat Bavarian drinking beer in his lederhosen. Isn't it still? Actually, maybe not. When I think of "stereotypical German" I think of some serious-looking auto manufacturer/engineer guy in a gray suit.
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Apr 23, 2014 03:15
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Defeatist Elitist posted:Not an Austrian and his cousin-aunt-wife? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_I_of_Austria quote:Ferdinand was the eldest son of Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor and Maria Theresa of Naples and Sicily. As a result of his parents' genetic closeness (they were double first cousins), Ferdinand suffered from epilepsy, hydrocephalus, neurological problems, and a speech impediment. Upon his marriage to Maria Anna of Savoy, the court physician considered it unlikely that he would be able to consummate the marriage. He was educated by Joseph Kalasanz, baron Erberg, and his wife Josephine, née Gräfin von Attems.
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Apr 23, 2014 03:17
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edit: double postin!!!
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Apr 23, 2014 03:17
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You see, putting his most famous command right after a bit about his failure to consummate his marriage might have been a poor choice. I can't have been the only person to misread 'cook' and think this was some weird 19th-Century joke.
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Apr 23, 2014 03:22
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This is why I enjoyed the Weltkrieg scenario in Darkest Hour so I can just play as the AH Empire. And once I win just go play Kaiserreich and form the Danubian Federation, the ideal. Granted I did have fun run playing as Nazi Germany especially since the game plays historical audio clips to really get you immersed. Also somehow pulling off the invasion of England was pretty cool.
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Apr 23, 2014 03:39
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BBJoey posted:To me, it just seems like there are so many other gamey mechanics in the EU franchise that claiming a series has been ruined due to the addition of another one rings hollow. Things like tech groups, unit types, the catch-all "stability" are all gamist abstractions of highly complex facets of a given nation. Monarch power is quite a gamey solution, but as a representation of your ruler's abilities to govern and control the various parts of the realm I don't think it's particularly egregious. And really, monarch skills have always had an effect on your nation, even in EU3; taking that effect, making it more transparent and important doesn't seem particularly harmful from a simulation perspective. I can't say I like monarch points. Its a weird abstraction that never really works from a simulation or a game perspective. From a game perspective it makes your most important resource heavily randomized and removes alot of your ability to choose the direction of your nation which is kindof the point of the game. This is especially "off" since so much of the game was built around balance and multiplayer. Choices of spending them are also not very hard to min-max and certain choices are almost always suboptimal. From a simulation perspective, its an abstraction too far and forces weird nonsensical tradeoffs where building barracks makes you worse at military matters and you choose between military reforms and technology. The way it almost completely decoupled economy from technology is also odd. Monarch points feel like its mainly just a brake on player action. It regulates how much a player can accomplish and forces you to wait around for a bucket to fill up before doing anything rather than responding to conditions or modeling/dealing with the internal factors that actually acted as a brake on things.
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Apr 23, 2014 08:20
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I'd say that's a more general problem with Europa Universalis' particular way of modelling its period of history rather than something specific to monarch points. Monarch points are simply another expression of EU3's lots of smaller, more abstract processes filling up a bar or incrementing a counter, except back-loaded to have an instant effect.
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Apr 23, 2014 08:26
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SkySteak posted:Nazi Germany as a wargame scenario is a perfect storm of a romantic underdog (see Sparta, Confederates), 'modern' and 'mobile' armies', a myth of superior quality arms, a combatant in a 'modern' war (for the century), heavy amount of offensives, breaking down more power countries while being distorted by propaganda. Also, the Axis fundamentally works really well in a videogame/wargame structure. You have a whole series of diverse challenges that even correspond to standard videogame enemy progression: Poland->France->Great Britain->Russia/USA. Whenever I played Allied countries in HoI, it builds up to a single confrontation and then everything kindof fizzles out. The Axis doesn't have any depth to them so whenever someone beats Germany, the game is over unless you want to go crazy ahistorical. You also have to play like a complete idiot for playing as Russia or the US to be remotely challenging.
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Apr 23, 2014 08:27
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SickZip posted:I can't say I like monarch points. Its a weird abstraction that never really works from a simulation or a game perspective. From a game perspective it makes your most important resource heavily randomized and removes alot of your ability to choose the direction of your nation which is kindof the point of the game. This is especially "off" since so much of the game was built around balance and multiplayer. Choices of spending them are also not very hard to min-max and certain choices are almost always suboptimal. From a simulation perspective, its an abstraction too far and forces weird nonsensical tradeoffs where building barracks makes you worse at military matters and you choose between military reforms and technology. The way it almost completely decoupled economy from technology is also odd. "Waiting for the bucket to fill up" is pretty much the ABC of strategy gameplay, unless you think that every game with a tech system should just unlock all techs at day one so that you're not putting brakes on player actions.
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Apr 23, 2014 08:31
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SickZip posted:Also, the Axis fundamentally works really well in a videogame/wargame structure. You have a whole series of diverse challenges that even correspond to standard videogame enemy progression: Poland->France->Great Britain->Russia/USA. Whenever I played Allied countries in HoI, it builds up to a single confrontation and then everything kindof fizzles out. The Axis doesn't have any depth to them so whenever someone beats Germany, the game is over unless you want to go crazy ahistorical. You also have to play like a complete idiot for playing as Russia or the US to be remotely challenging. Yeah, this is an important point: Beating Germany as France in 1940 may be a huge challenge, but it's throwing you into the deep end of the pool right off the bat, is probably difficult enough that you might have to resort to gamey tactics to pull it off, and when you do finally do it the war is over right then and there unless you justify an Allied invasion of the Comintern in your head. Contrast this to Germany, which has a straightforward set of campaigns with a natural progression of difficulty that can (should) be overcome with just normal, intelligent play.
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Apr 23, 2014 08:35
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Wiz posted:"Waiting for the bucket to fill up" is pretty much the ABC of strategy gameplay, unless you think that every game with a tech system should just unlock all techs at day one so that you're not putting brakes on player actions. Theres plenty of different methods of making you wait and they aren't all equal and I wouldnt call them all "bucket filling". In Civ4, for example, you wait for technology and units/buildings to finish, but your waiting for your choices to play out and not waiting for your "ability to do anything" resource to trickle in. If we want to be reductionist and claim your still waiting for a bucket to fill up, it still makes a difference that theres a bunch of different buckets that are all filling at different rates and different times. You can also make choices that heavily effect the rate of progress, juggle the rate of progress of different actions, and theres plenty of actions you can undertake without waiting on a resource. In EU4, there's fundamentally 3 "do something" resources and you need to draw on them to do almost anything. Its almost all moving armies (and even generals need MP) and waiting for monarch points to arrive and theres almost nothing you can do to effect how fast they come in. I invest in a diplomatic technology and now I can't properly end a war. How does this makes sense and how is it a fun choice to make as opposed to slapping your hand and telling you to slow down? Civ4 makes actions take time, EU4 just throttles almost all of your ability to do something to a rate set by a combination of the desire of the developers and random fate. edit: Its also weird that the waiting is front-loaded on most things. I dont make choices based on my judgement of what I'll need in the future, I wait for points to come in and then receive an instant benefit when I spend them. I can stockpile military MP and instantly turn them in for better military tech if someone declares war on me rather than making a call that I need to invest in my military's technology since I have aggressive large neighbors. This is backward from how waiting and investment should work. edit2: The divide in "do-something" resources is also inferior and kinda bad. I receive 3 fairly uncontrollable stream of "do something or get better at something" resources and theres few ways to spend these resources for anything but their intended purpose. A single pool of resources, even if still as uncontrollable, would let me prioritize between army, navy, and economy. But since there's a dedicated pool of each resource, I'm mainly merely evaluating what is the best method of "better army" while the decision of "do i need a better army or should I spend my most valuable resource on something else" is out of my hands since my options of spending military MP are very limited and controlled. To refer back to Civ4, there I might make a decision to spend my science beakers on an economy tech or prioritize staying state-of-the-art in military. Thats a good decision and there are very few choices like that in EU4 as a consequence of the divide in MP uses and the RNG heavy nature of the flow. SickZip fucked around with this message at 14:25 on Apr 23, 2014 |
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Apr 23, 2014 09:01
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SickZip posted:I can't say I like monarch points. Its a weird abstraction that never really works from a simulation or a game perspective. From a game perspective it makes your most important resource heavily randomized and removes alot of your ability to choose the direction of your nation which is kindof the point of the game. This is especially "off" since so much of the game was built around balance and multiplayer. Choices of spending them are also not very hard to min-max and certain choices are almost always suboptimal. From a simulation perspective, its an abstraction too far and forces weird nonsensical tradeoffs where building barracks makes you worse at military matters and you choose between military reforms and technology. The way it almost completely decoupled economy from technology is also odd. I honestly agree, I know EU4 is technically as good as EU3 and it might be that I'm tired of EU as a whole. But I've only played two games of EU4, compared with countless of them for EU3. And the thing I can really point out that I don't find as good is monarch points. It just feels so weird to have to chose between building a grand navy or enacting cultural genocide. To me it's more abstraction than EU3, or maybe it's just that everything is put into one abstraction instead of several small. But yeah, I'd probably give EU4 a high score if I was reviewing it, but I'm unable to have that much fun with it.
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Apr 23, 2014 10:49
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It'd be nice if there was a more dynamic way of gaining and losing them, or changing the rate at which they are gained, to give it less of a feel of simply waiting around to be able to do anything.
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Apr 23, 2014 14:02
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DrSunshine posted:It'd be nice if there was a more dynamic way of gaining and losing them, or changing the rate at which they are gained, to give it less of a feel of simply waiting around to be able to do anything. When you get a bad ruler in CK2 there is stuff you can do about it. Ways to change the situation. In EUIV you are completely at the mercy of the ruler you get. At least until you can afford the better advisers (so the first 100-150 years...). I often just get the feeling of not being able to do anything for decades at a time in EUIV. There's so much more to do in the meantime when you play CK2.
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Apr 23, 2014 16:24
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Antinumeric posted:When you get a bad ruler in CK2 there is stuff you can do about it. Ways to change the situation. Yeah I spent a lot of time on EU3 but I've already given up on EU4 (besides seeing gimmicks like the randomised New World) mostly for this reason.
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Apr 23, 2014 19:02
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Enjoy posted:Yeah I spent a lot of time on EU3 but I've already given up on EU4 (besides seeing gimmicks like the randomised New World) mostly for this reason. This is why I think EU4 could bear to have an internal simulator (and a better external political simulator). There are mechanics in place specifically to keep you from being able to just perpetually fight. You'll always have substantial downtime.
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Apr 23, 2014 19:22
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I think people like Rommel so much because he was a great tactician and was not a Nazi. He was a part of one of the many plans to kill Hitler and died because of it.
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Apr 23, 2014 19:32
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:I think people like Rommel so much because he was a great tactician and was not a Nazi. He was a part of one of the many plans to kill Hitler and died because of it. He a good tactician but he was terrible at commanding anything bigger than a division. Also he was a pretty committed Nazi right up until the point where it looked like Germany was going to lose the war, at which point he suddenly realized they should probably get rid of Hitler.
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Apr 23, 2014 20:43
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Enjoy posted:Yeah I spent a lot of time on EU3 but I've already given up on EU4 (besides seeing gimmicks like the randomised New World) mostly for this reason. I'm the same way, but I find I have trouble going back to EU3 because it's hell to go back to all the places where EU4 DID improve things.
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Apr 23, 2014 20:50
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The thing about EU4 is that it feels too much like EU3. Even though everything new it added is an improvement for me (even the monarch points, while I think that they should be a bit more flexible, I generally like them), most of the other things were practically copy-pasted from EU3. CK2 is a new and much improved game in every category from CK1, while EU4 is a new and improved game in some categories from EU3. It's like more than an expansion, but less than a new game. That said, I still like it and play it occasionally, and can't really return to EU3 anymore. And I'm also happy that PDX will continue improving the game, like they did with CK2. I'm curious though, what does someone who started with EU4 and never played earlier games think of this?
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Apr 23, 2014 21:18
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SkySteak posted:Nazi Germany as a wargame scenario is a perfect storm of a romantic underdog (see Sparta, Confederates), 'modern' and 'mobile' armies', a myth of superior quality arms, a combatant in a 'modern' war (for the century), heavy amount of offensives, breaking down more power countries while being distorted by propaganda. You forgot super science  Alchenar posted:He a good tactician but he was terrible at commanding anything bigger than a division. Also he was a pretty committed Nazi right up until the point where it looked like Germany was going to lose the war, at which point he suddenly realized they should probably get rid of Hitler. I'm pretty sceptical that he was a nazi so I'm going to call you out on this. Do you have anything to back that up with? Also he was commanding quite a number of divisions in africa and I wouldnt exactly describe the effort as "terrible".
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Apr 23, 2014 21:21
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podcat posted:
He has the pretty standard German General list of sins of being compromised by taking money from Hitler, enthusiastically contributing to Nazi propaganda efforts, as well as personally overseeing Hitler Youth - Army coordination at one point. As far as being an army commander goes - he's like Patton in that people overrate him because their total lack of interest in the really important field of logistics isn't sexy enough to be important to the public. What Rommel achieved in Africa was stick his army so deep beyond his supply lines that he didn't have enough fuel to attack or retreat. The ability to win a few daring battles isn't actually very impressive if you can't translate that into operational success, which Rommel totally failed to do.
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Apr 23, 2014 21:41
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Dibujante posted:This is why I think EU4 could bear to have an internal simulator It is something I have always wanted, but I think I've worked out why Paradox'll never do it. They design their games for multiplayer, right? And time you spend wrestling with internal politics and your economy is time you're not spending interacting with other players. 
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Apr 23, 2014 21:49
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Antinumeric posted:I often just get the feeling of not being able to do anything for decades at a time in EUIV. There's so much more to do in the meantime when you play CK2. There are huge periods of sitting around doing nothing in ck2 as well, unless you've decided to conquer the known world. EU4 is a very different game, but it has about the same ratio of doing stuff to waiting as CK2 does.
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Apr 23, 2014 21:51
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Autonomous Monster posted:It is something I have always wanted, but I think I've worked out why Paradox'll never do it. They design their games for multiplayer, right? And time you spend wrestling with internal politics and your economy is time you're not spending interacting with other players. I don't think EU4 needs an internal simulator. I think having the family crap or POPs would be really dumb, I do think tweaking the monarch point mechanics to be a bit more interactive would be good, though.
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Apr 23, 2014 21:51
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SeaTard posted:There are huge periods of sitting around doing nothing in ck2 as well, unless you've decided to conquer the known world. EU4 is a very different game, but it has about the same ratio of doing stuff to waiting as CK2 does. The difference is that the break on expansion in CK2 is the internal political struggles which are a lot more interesting than waiting for cores and AE to decay.
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Apr 23, 2014 21:55
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podcat posted:I'm pretty sceptical that he was a nazi so I'm going to call you out on this. Do you have anything to back that up with? Also he was commanding quite a number of divisions in africa and I wouldnt exactly describe the effort as "terrible". Rommel's myth was consciously constructed by the British in particular for a number of reasons -- desire to separate between good Germans and evil Nazis, explaining British military defeats during the war, etc. There is a kernel of truth in it in that for example Rommel wasn't a virulent anti-Semite, but a lot of the myth doesn't hold up to scrutiny. He wasn't a Party member of course (primarily because he thought the military should stay out of politics) but he was clearly ideologically sympathetic to Nazism, e.g. in 1939 he commented that the people "need to be directed by one ideology", and as late as early 1944 he was still speaking in favour of Hitler, etc. The extent of his achievement in North Africa has also been questioned. This isn't the place to get into much more detail than that but yeah the conventional image of Rommel isn't really historically accurate.
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Apr 23, 2014 21:57
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Autonomous Monster posted:It is something I have always wanted, but I think I've worked out why Paradox'll never do it. They design their games for multiplayer, right? And time you spend wrestling with internal politics and your economy is time you're not spending interacting with other players. Multiplayer capability doesn't preclude internal state simulation. I had a perfectly good two-player game of Crusader Kings 2 where both players were in the same kingdom - one was the king and the other was his right-hand duke and we built an empire together  I'm at the point where I think every Paradox game should have characters and traits like Crusader Kings 2, including Hearts of Iron 4.
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Apr 23, 2014 21:58
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Antinumeric posted:I often just get the feeling of not being able to do anything for decades at a time in EUIV. Sometimes the RNG really hates you. I've spent 40-45 of the first 100 years in my current Granada game under various regency councils. And such great rulers/councils they were, too...  
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Apr 23, 2014 21:59
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Alchenar posted:He has the pretty standard German General list of sins of being compromised by taking money from Hitler, enthusiastically contributing to Nazi propaganda efforts, as well as personally overseeing Hitler Youth - Army coordination at one point. On the other hand, his aggressiveness/recklessness did play a large role in deciding Case Yellow. Raskolnikov38 fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Apr 23, 2014 |
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Apr 23, 2014 22:03
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Alchenar posted:He has the pretty standard German General list of sins of being compromised by taking money from Hitler, enthusiastically contributing to Nazi propaganda efforts, as well as personally overseeing Hitler Youth - Army coordination at one point. Also Rommel was simply fortunate to never be assigned to the Eastern Front. If he was I'm sure he'd have had little qualms about diving head first into the usual German brutality toward the Soviets.
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Apr 23, 2014 22:06
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Disco Infiva posted:That said, I still like it and play it occasionally, and can't really return to EU3 anymore. And I'm also happy that PDX will continue improving the game, like they did with CK2. I'm curious though, what does someone who started with EU4 and never played earlier games think of this? I really like EU4. I played a little bit of EU3, and I messed around a bit in EU2 (back when I had my old computer that couldn't stand Clausewitz). I can't comment much on EU2, but compared to EU3, the changes make EU4 a much better ride. Little things like just having monthly income instead of monthly and yearly income makes it a lot better. I like Monarch Points, but they do make me want more so I can press buttons.
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Apr 23, 2014 22:09
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SeaTard posted:There are huge periods of sitting around doing nothing in ck2 as well, unless you've decided to conquer the known world. EU4 is a very different game, but it has about the same ratio of doing stuff to waiting as CK2 does. Hmm when I'm not expanding I'm dealing with some of the hundreds of characters, teaching my children, plotting, finding grooms / brides for my family, hosting entertaining feasts for my vassals so they don't rebel, building flying machines to improve my learning and all manner of other interesting poo poo. In EUIV, I feel I have way less, it's mainly fabricating cores and building stuff. And praying that Austria doesn't come for you.
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Apr 23, 2014 22:12
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