Paradox Grand Strategy: From the Carnival of Lust to the Enlightened Times

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Paradox Grand Strategy: From the Carnival of Lust to the Enlightened Times

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Democrazy: Oct 16, 2008; If you're not willing to lick the boot, then really why are you in politics lol? Everything is a cycle of just getting stomped on so why do you want to lose to it over and over, just submit like me, I'm very intelligent.

If Crusader Kings 2 keeps on extending the game life indefinitely, as seems to be the Paradox plan, then Rome 2 just might be a Paradox expansion.

But really if they're going to do Charlemange, a Fall Of Rome DLC would be sick.

# ? Aug 15, 2014 19:46

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# ? Jun 4, 2024 20:45

Phlegmish: Jul 2, 2011

GrossMurpel posted:

Did the USA just die spectuacularly in that run or are they way more underpowered in Ricky compared to V2?
Either way, poor Murrika

I don't know what happened to them, but I did somehow win the Spanish-American War. I wish I could say it was due to my tactical genius, but I just parked three divisions in Havana and watched as the Americans kept landing waves of troops there that all got slaughtered. It's a great game, but the AI is not always that smart.

It's France that always sucks in Ricky, I think it's because they have state capitalism and they don't know how to make good use of it. Paris still had an Experimental Railroad by the end of the game.

# ? Aug 15, 2014 19:59

GrossMurpel: Apr 8, 2011

Phlegmish posted:

I just parked three divisions in Havana and watched as the Americans kept landing waves of troops there that all got slaughtered.

Some things never change :allears:

# ? Aug 15, 2014 20:01

Apoffys: Sep 5, 2011

Ricky = Victoria 1? Is it good enough that I ought to try it? I haven't played any Paradox games older than EU3/V2.

# ? Aug 15, 2014 20:19

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

quote:

Gameplay Enhancements: Build entire armies in one click

Fuuuuuuuuuuck they had better backport this into Victoria 2

Apoffys posted:

Ricky = Victoria 1? Is it good enough that I ought to try it? I haven't played any Paradox games older than EU3/V2.

If you enjoyed Victoria 2 I think it's worth taking a look at. Up until Heart of Darkness I would have said it was still better than its sequel.

# ? Aug 15, 2014 20:26

Super Jay Mann: Nov 6, 2008

That expansions seems to be fixing everything that's wrong with the warfare mechanics in EU4 on a logistical level which is so on-point it almost seems too good to be true.

Being able to transfer occupations between your allies alone was something that needed to be addressed in EU3, much less this game.

Maybe they'll fix coalitions too. :colbert:

# ? Aug 15, 2014 21:19

binge crotching: Apr 2, 2010

Apoffys posted:

Ricky = Victoria 1? Is it good enough that I ought to try it? I haven't played any Paradox games older than EU3/V2.

If you can figure out the abysmal interface, it's supposed to be a fun game. I've never made it that far though.

# ? Aug 15, 2014 21:21

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

I only hope that there are some serious performance enhancements cause otherwise all those new provinces are going to murder my laptop.

# ? Aug 15, 2014 21:22

Beamed: Nov 26, 2010; Then you have a responsibility that no man has ever faced. You have your fear which could become reality, and you have Godzilla, which is reality.

Fuligin posted:

I only hope that there are some serious performance enhancements cause otherwise all those new provinces are going to murder my laptop.

They've said this is the case.

# ? Aug 15, 2014 21:26

GenderSelectScreen: Mar 7, 2010; I DON'T KNOW EITHER DON'T ASK ME; College Slice

Fuligin posted:

I only hope that there are some serious performance enhancements cause otherwise all those new provinces are going to murder my laptop.

Considering there's a giant wasteland blob in Arabia I figure we're going to have a couple more to keep the province count low.

# ? Aug 15, 2014 22:35

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

Super Jay Mann posted:

That expansions seems to be fixing everything that's wrong with the warfare mechanics in EU4 on a logistical level which is so on-point it almost seems too good to be true.

Being able to transfer occupations between your allies alone was something that needed to be addressed in EU3, much less this game.

Maybe they'll fix coalitions too.

It's almost like someone who spent years modding trying to implement these sorts of more sophisticated AI-player interaction systems was hired by Paradox a while ago.

This is basically the goon wishlist, there's no way Wiz wasn't a large influence on a lot of these changes.

# ? Aug 15, 2014 22:46

YF-23: Feb 17, 2011; My god, it's full of cat!

Hitlers Gay Secret posted:

Considering there's a giant wasteland blob in Arabia I figure we're going to have a couple more to keep the province count low.

I... don't see how that follows, given that the wasteland really only eliminates one or two giant provinces.

Regardless, they're doing optimisation, and I trust EU4 won't be rendered unplayable in terms of processing power. If there's anything to worry about it's RAM usage, because, well, you can't really do much to reduce the amount of extra data you need for the extra provinces. Save files will also probably be substantially larger.

# ? Aug 15, 2014 23:00

Darkrenown: Jul 18, 2012; please give me anything to talk about besides the fact that democrats are allowing millions of americans to be evicted from their homes

Reveilled posted:

It also really looks like Scotland is labelled "Northern Ireland" in the Europe picture. Which would be somewhat accurate for Glasgow perhaps, but I'm sure they'll fix that by release.

The pic is from the Strategic Regions mapmode, the region is called "Scotland and Northern Ireland", but you can't see the whole thing.

Drone posted:

The fanbase is what you'd expect. They lay out a good buffet though.

Darkrenown is chatting up a woman with pink hair, and podcat and Frederik Wester are talking to some dude by the food.

Edit: free beer

She was the designer for the Cities game! And CIM1/2.

mmtt posted:

Streams aren't exactly the best to showcase a complex WWII strategy games but whatever. Also stop showing Germany invading Poland, Paradox you looks like a bunch of nazis to the press.

But...that's how WWII started, you're going to be seeing it a lot in a WWII game. Besides, invading Poland is a popular pastime for Sweden.

Jazerus posted:

This is basically the goon wishlist, there's no way Wiz wasn't a large influence on a lot of these changes.

Wiz does do a fair bit of design for RP and AoW.

# ? Aug 16, 2014 00:12

Dibujante: Jul 27, 2004

YF-23 posted:

I... don't see how that follows, given that the wasteland really only eliminates one or two giant provinces.

Regardless, they're doing optimisation, and I trust EU4 won't be rendered unplayable in terms of processing power. If there's anything to worry about it's RAM usage, because, well, you can't really do much to reduce the amount of extra data you need for the extra provinces. Save files will also probably be substantially larger.

Save files are packed with these massive empty matrices for some reason. They could probably be simplified; that said, Paradox should just start compressing save files prior to multiplayer send just about always. They shrink by 92.5%!

# ? Aug 16, 2014 00:16

wargames: Mar 16, 2008; official yospos cat censor

Darkrenown posted:

She was the designer for the Cities game! And CIM1/2.

Cities in Motion 1 was a good game don't know about 2.

# ? Aug 16, 2014 00:21

Palleon: Aug 11, 2003; I've got a hot deal on a bridge to the Pegasus Galaxy!; Grimey Drawer

wargames posted:

Cities in Motion 1 was a good game don't know about 2.

Cities in Motion 1 was a lot of fun, I tried playing 2, but I couldn't get into it, it felt like they took all the soul away from it. Also, they for whatever reason (maybe balance) made metros a pain in the rear end, in the first game, you had a ton of options for making them, and the interface was pretty intuitive, but in 2, I could never figure out how to lay them down, and you had significantly fewer options to make them work. It was kind of a huge disappointment, I was expecting a major leap forward and instead just went back to 1 after a few hours.

# ? Aug 16, 2014 00:58

Agean90: Jun 28, 2008

For whatever reason I cant get into modern city builders because I miss Sim city 3's awesome sountrack.

# ? Aug 16, 2014 01:18

fermun: Nov 4, 2009

wargames posted:

Cities in Motion 1 was a good game don't know about 2.

Cities in Motion 2 they tried to make much more of a dynamic thing, so if you build a road, pretty soon it will have buildings pop up on it, and that will change traffic patterns. The resulting game felt a lot more generic, a city didn't have it's own unique feel like the first did with the pre-made maps. I can see how they could get to a full city-building game off of the ideas from cities in motion 2 with more tools added.

# ? Aug 16, 2014 01:21

BogMod: Jun 21, 2014

Agean90 posted:

For whatever reason I cant get into modern city builders because I miss Sim city 3's awesome sountrack.

For similar reasons I seem to only play the Tropico series of games in terms of city builders these days.

# ? Aug 16, 2014 01:55

bUm: Jan 11, 2011

Dibujante posted:

Save files are packed with these massive empty matrices for some reason. They could probably be simplified; that said, Paradox should just start compressing save files prior to multiplayer send just about always. They shrink by 92.5%!

Chiming in to agree with this, and not just for multiplayer save transfer. It's frustrating to find myself freeing up several GBs worth of HD space when cleaning out old Paradox saves after playing for a few dozen hours when a simple WinRAR compression (from old save files I wanted to keep around) makes saves ~5% of the size they are by default. Being able to store 20 times as many saves in the same space: I'd only have to manually clean Paradox saves every few years instead of every few months. :v:

Can save compression by default be on the wishlist for HoI IV? This is especially problematic with the newer Paradox titles insisting on saving to my User folder on my OS drive (small SSD) instead of the game install directory (on my TB HDD).

Simplification wouldn't hurt either. The rare occasions I feel it's necessary to edit saves are frustrating because Notepad struggles to run them (and WordPad struggles more; Word just crashes). Is there something better for editing them? (Keeping in mind that some changes are not ones the community-made editors are capable of.)

On other things: the EU4 expansion sounds pretty solid. It's sad that SimCity4 is still perhaps the best city builder game over a decade after release. I hope Cities: Skyline is good enough to challenge it, but my CiM2 experience was mediocre so they've definitely got some work ahead.

# ? Aug 16, 2014 02:38

Bel Monte: Oct 9, 2012

bUm posted:

Simplification wouldn't hurt either. The rare occasions I feel it's necessary to edit saves are frustrating because Notepad struggles to run them (and WordPad struggles more; Word just crashes). Is there something better for editing them? (Keeping in mind that some changes are not ones the community-made editors are capable of.)

YES.
Notepad++.
Get it, it's what professionals even use (my old job made sure every computer for web development had notepad++ installed at a minimum).

You can do some great things with it including: find/replace things across multiple files at once, regular expressions (which allow you to, say, find any instance that starts with X and ends with Y with anything in between and replace that, or insert newlines, etc), and more.

It also doesn't struggle like notepad to open large files and it won't mess with formatting like word or wordpad will.

Also convenient? Spellcheck!

Edit: I've used it to create bizarro worlds from save files before, including switching all civilized/uncivilized countries in Victoria 2, Rearranging religions in EU3/4, and more. And it didn't take long at all. Could even be faster than trying to figure out how to create a scenario file.

Bel Monte fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Aug 16, 2014

# ? Aug 16, 2014 02:46

bUm: Jan 11, 2011

Bel Monte posted:

YES.
Notepad++.
Get it, it's what professionals even use (my old job made sure every computer for web development had notepad++ installed at a minimum).

I was just coming to edit that out because I had a thought after posting it: I have Eclipse installed which should probably handle that pretty easily and sure enough it does. The random V2 save I opened comes in at a cool 2,257,760 lines of code. :commissar:

Might grab Notepad++ anyway since it's probably a safe assumption it is more lightweight; thanks.

# ? Aug 16, 2014 02:55

grancheater: May 1, 2013; Wine'em, dine'em, 69'em

Bel Monte posted:

YES.
Notepad++.
Get it, it's what professionals even use (my old job made sure every computer for web development had notepad++ installed at a minimum).

Also convenient? Collapsible blocks :pcgaming:

Also a custom language file for CK2, I'm using it on a Vicky 2 save file :anarchists:

# ? Aug 16, 2014 04:08

Kersch: Aug 22, 2004; I like this internet

Can they just keep extending the CK2 end-date forward until the next logical expansion is Crusader Kings 2: Victoria 3?

# ? Aug 16, 2014 04:24

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Kersch posted:

Can they just keep extending the CK2 end-date forward until the next logical expansion is Crusader Kings 2: Victoria 3?

Crusader Presidents 2: East Vs West. :ussr:

# ? Aug 16, 2014 05:27

Ms Adequate: Oct 30, 2011; Baby even when I'm dead and gone
You will always be my only one, my only one
When the night is calling
No matter who I become
You will always be my only one, my only one, my only one
When the night is calling

DrSunshine posted:

Crusader Presidents 2: East Vs West.

LBJ claims he would be a better Spymaster than Hoover, and petitions that he should be given the title Spymaster of the Republic of America!

# ? Aug 16, 2014 05:56

Super Jay Mann: Nov 6, 2008

DrSunshine posted:

Crusader Presidents 2: East Vs West.

President Bill Clinton: A young female secretary catches your eye.

X Invite her to a 'tour' of your office
X I'm too busy to worry about such things

# ? Aug 16, 2014 05:56

Dr. Video Games 0031: Jul 17, 2004

Mister Adequate posted:

LBJ claims he would be a better Spymaster than Hoover, and petitions that he should be given the title Spymaster of the Republic of America!

Now I really want to see a modern day CK2 scenario for the insanity that would ensue.

# ? Aug 16, 2014 05:57

podcat: Jun 21, 2012

Bel Monte posted:

YES.
Notepad++.
Get it, it's what professionals even use (my old job made sure every computer for web development had notepad++ installed at a minimum).

You can do some great things with it including: find/replace things across multiple files at once, regular expressions (which allow you to, say, find any instance that starts with X and ends with Y with anything in between and replace that, or insert newlines, etc), and more.

It also doesn't struggle like notepad to open large files and it won't mess with formatting like word or wordpad will.

Also convenient? Spellcheck!

Edit: I've used it to create bizarro worlds from save files before, including switching all civilized/uncivilized countries in Victoria 2, Rearranging religions in EU3/4, and more. And it didn't take long at all. Could even be faster than trying to figure out how to create a scenario file.

A lot of us have swapped to Sublime for scripting etc. Its super nice and works on all platforms

# ? Aug 16, 2014 09:51

YF-23: Feb 17, 2011; My god, it's full of cat!

grancheater posted:

Also a custom language file for CK2, I'm using it on a Vicky 2 save file

How can you say that and not share? My god.

podcat posted:

A lot of us have swapped to Sublime for scripting etc. Its super nice and works on all platforms

Sublime's not freeware though, right?

# ? Aug 16, 2014 11:54

mmtt: May 8, 2009

Darkrenown posted:

But...that's how WWII started, you're going to be seeing it a lot in a WWII game. Besides, invading Poland is a popular pastime for Sweden.

I agree with you from a technical standpoint and for most of your playerbase that's fine. But for your average gaming "journalist" and for marketing purposes, starting with something he is more familiar with ie D-Day or Pearl Harbor might be more effective and appear less grognardy.
D-Day has ships, planes and land forces so you can show all types of warfare and is pretty iconic of WWII. I'm pretty sure German general names are pretty obscure to most people but Patton and Ike most certainly will be recognized and are "good guys" to boot.

# ? Aug 16, 2014 12:13

GrossMurpel: Apr 8, 2011

YF-23 posted:

Sublime's not freeware though, right?

It's not freeware in the same way WinRar is not freeware, you just click the notice away and forget about it.
It has some text-editing features that Notepad++ only gets with addons.

bUm posted:

(Keeping in mind that some changes are not ones the community-made editors are capable of.)

What changes could you possibly need Word for?

# ? Aug 16, 2014 12:13

Gort: Aug 18, 2003; Good day what ho cup of tea

mmtt posted:

I agree with you from a technical standpoint and for most of your playerbase that's fine. But for your average gaming "journalist" and for marketing purposes, starting with something he is more familiar with ie D-Day or Pearl Harbor might be more effective and appear less grognardy.
D-Day has ships, planes and land forces so you can show all types of warfare and is pretty iconic of WWII. I'm pretty sure German general names are pretty obscure to most people but Patton and Ike most certainly will be recognized and are "good guys" to boot.

There are countries that are not America.

# ? Aug 16, 2014 12:18

YF-23: Feb 17, 2011; My god, it's full of cat!

mmtt posted:

I agree with you from a technical standpoint and for most of your playerbase that's fine. But for your average gaming "journalist" and for marketing purposes, starting with something he is more familiar with ie D-Day or Pearl Harbor might be more effective and appear less grognardy.
D-Day has ships, planes and land forces so you can show all types of warfare and is pretty iconic of WWII. I'm pretty sure German general names are pretty obscure to most people but Patton and Ike most certainly will be recognized and are "good guys" to boot.

God forbid there's iconic WWII battles in which the USA wasn't involved.

GrossMurpel posted:

It's not freeware in the same way WinRar is not freeware, you just click the notice away and forget about it.
It has some text-editing features that Notepad++ only gets with addons.

Ah I see, thanks.

# ? Aug 16, 2014 12:20

Kavak: Aug 23, 2009

He does have a point that invading Poland shows very little naval and air combat. Maybe an overview of the Battle of Britain would help?

# ? Aug 16, 2014 12:39

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

You could show naval warfare in the Pacific, and then the USSR causing the Japanese surrender with their invasion of Manchuria. That way the general public would not have to be introduced to obscure actors like the Germans.

# ? Aug 16, 2014 13:03

Phlegmish: Jul 2, 2011

Rommel? Who the hell is that? And what's this Stalingrad everyone keeps talking about, everyone knows the Americans single-handedly defeated Hitler.

# ? Aug 16, 2014 13:14

Funky Valentine: Feb 26, 2014; Dojyaa~an

Doesn't everyone know that Stalingrad was the only battle of WWII that mattered and that the British, French, and Americans did nothing to help beat up Hitler?

# ? Aug 16, 2014 13:23

Phlegmish: Jul 2, 2011

Going to play another Ricky game as Sweden, will the Norwegian independence event happen no matter what or can I avert it?

# ? Aug 16, 2014 13:25

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# ? Jun 4, 2024 20:45

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

Kavak posted:

He does have a point that invading Poland shows very little naval and air combat. Maybe an overview of the Battle of Britain would help?

Only if you want it to. Poland could conceivably show a lot of air combat as the Luftwaffe wipes out the Polish Air Force and practices CAS for the Blitzkrieg, while there's at least naval bombardment of Danzig even if you don't want to show Uboats sinking Poland's small merchant marine

# ? Aug 16, 2014 13:49

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